One of the most enduring misunderstandings in the ID/materialistic evolution debate is that ID is simply a variant of Creationism and therefore a transparent attempt to smuggle religion into public schools. This is, of course, not the case as Krauze at Telic Thoughts illustrates. He recently sent out a questionaire to a couple of dozen anti-ID bloggers asking them to respond. Here's what he sent:

His respondents were notably uncooperative:

Of course, the reason Krauze obtained such meager results from his survey is that the anti-ID crowd, if they had answered it honestly, would have had to acknowledge that there really isn't much similarity between ID and Creationism after all, and instantly one of their handiest arguments for bamboozling the public would have gone up in smoke. Rather than admit the truth and give up an effective piece of misleading propaganda, they simply refused to answer. This is a strange response by people who otherwise claim to hold truth in such high esteem.

The liberal media are under assault from, strangely enough, .... the left. It's hard to believe, I know, but the southpaw hurlers at places like the Daily Kos are "mad as hell and not going to take it any more" from the likes of - are you sitting down? - The Washington Post and reliable lib warhorse Chris Matthews. All it takes is one little misstep, apparently, one tiny offense against orthodox doctrine, and the Taliban left will be screaming for your infidel head. John Leo has the story. Here's a snippet:

Two skirmishes are under way, one against The Washington Post and its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, the other against Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball." Howell's offense was writing that the sleazy Jack Abramoff had given money to Democrats as well as Republicans. That was inaccurate. A tide of angry and exceptionally abusive complaints flooded into the Post. Howell then corrected herself, writing that she should have said that Abramoff "directed" a considerable amount of his clients' money to Democrats, though he never gave any himself. That was correct, but vicious and amazingly obscene e-mail kept pouring in, so the Post shut down its Web site. (Not a good idea, in my opinion. It would have been better, though more expensive, to let readers vent, while editing out obscenities.)

The campaign against Chris Matthews has escalated into talk of a boycott, though the would-be boycotters prefer to call it an "appeal to advertisers." Matthews is accused of being soft on Republicans in general, and in particular, of comparing Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden. On Jan. 19, Matthews said on "Hardball" that in his new audio message, bin Laden "sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore." Matthews was citing bin Laden's mention of "the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars to the influential people and war merchants in America." The next night, Matthews suggested that bin Laden was picking up the lingo of the American anti-war left, and asked, "Why would he start to talk like Moore?" Bloggers turned quickly against Matthews, a Democrat, calling him "a broadcasting neo-con," "stupid Bush lover" and "man whore for the GOP."

Ouch. "Stupid Bush lover." I'll bet that hurt.

The lefties are right, though. It's crazy to compare Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden. Moore's probably twice as heavy as bin Laden is.

We keep hearing that President Bush's approval numbers are in the tank and that he's a weakened president. This is perhaps more wishful thinking than it is an accurate reflection of the American voter's opinion of the president's job performance. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Rasmussen, which has been very reliable in the past, has him at 50%.

It's likely that most people contacted in these polls are only responding according to their perception of a MSM-generated virtual reality. We doubt that most people who are polled have any real idea what Bush is doing or why he's doing it. They just know that the media is hammering on him relentlessly so he must be pretty bad.

Indeed, Bush can be faulted for permitting excessively high spending, something Democrats should applaud him for, actually, and an incomprehensible insouciance toward the hemmorhage of illegal immigration across our southern border. Other than those sins, though, he's doing a fine job under extremely trying circumstances.

Nevertheless, just today another journalist, this time its Tom Friedman, tells us that we can "stick a fork" in this administration if President Bush doesn't do this, that, or the other thing. Some months ago it was E.J. Dionne who used the same metaphor for concluding that Bush was finished, and numerous others have been saying the same thing in different words for at least the last three years. If Bush had as many needles sticking out of him as he has cutlery sticking in him he'd be a porcupine.

Yet Bush keeps right on chugging along, chalking up one victory after another. His critics thought his presidency was finished prior to the '04 election, but he sent John Kerry back to the political oblivion which is his proper abode. The carpers gleefully pronounced his demise after Katrina, but nobody talks much about Katrina anymore, since it's become obvious that much of the incompetence in that tragedy was wielded with stunning profligacy by the inept Democratic mayor of New Orleans and Democratic governor of Louisianna. The Democrats expected that the Valerie Plame affair would send Bush's administration spiralling down in flames, but Bush has walked away from the inferno like one of those guys in the Book of Daniel who were cast into the fiery furnace but were never even singed.

Iraq is going moderately well, the economy is perky, and just today Bush ensconced his second nominee to the Supreme Court on the Bench. He's more like the Eveready bunny than an overdone turkey, and his frustrated opponents like Al Gore and Ted Kennedy are reduced to throwing infantile tantrums - stamping their feet, pounding their fists, and holding their breath till they turn blue. It's quite a spectacle, really.

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts has a fascinating post that traces the early development of the modern Intelligent Design movement. He shows quite convincingly that its connections to Creationism were tenuous at best and that attempts to conflate ID and creationism are inapt.

You've no doubt heard the argument which claims that ID grew out of Creationism and that therefore ID is just creationism "in a cheap tuxedo." Even if it were true that ID descended from Creationism, which Gene's argument rebuts, nothing much about the nature of ID follows from that. It could be noted, for example, that the anti-IDer believes that mankind has descended from ancient microbes, but he would never think to say that mankind is just a microbe in a cheap tuxedo. It is just silly to argue that because two conceptual paradigms share a common lineage that therefore they are identical, or nearly so. If that argument were valid then chemistry would be very nearly the same as alchemy, and Darwinism would just be Lamarkism with make-up on.

And to think that this is the argument that convinced Judge Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover that ID is just Creationism and therefore not real science. It sure doesn't take much to convince someone who's eager to be convinced anyway.

The Guardian's Heather Stewart reports on the coming world oil crisis:

The Left's mantra of no blood for oil prior to the Iraq war was silly, but if Iran cuts off production, and Nigeria and Venezuela, the latter not mentioned in Stewart's article, choose to tighten up their supply just to harm the U.S., the public clamor to strike back will be irresistable. Cutting back on oil supply in the present climate would be a clear invitation to war, and the U.S. would probably not be alone in waging it.

Iran seems determined to hasten Armageddon. They are fools and madmen, but they're driving this bus, and the rest of the world has little choice but to try to stop them. Even though the cost of doing so may be nightmarishly high, the alternatives are even worse.

Is there a conservative breeze blowing across Western civilization? First George Bush defeated Al Gore in 2000 to become president of the United States. Then Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy, then Angela Merkel defeated Gerhard Schroeder in Germany and Pope Benedict was chosen to succeed John Paul II. Now Stephen Harper has defeated Paul Martin in Canada.

Perhaps the defeat of conservative Jose Aznar in Spain two years ago was a mere aberration. Perhaps there is a growing disenchantment in the West with leftist political parties and their stultifying, counterproductive economic policies and their head-in-the-sand attitudes toward the Islamist threat.

If only the same were true in South America.

FrontPage Mag has this fascinating story from Iraqi General Georges Sada, author of the forthcoming book Saddam's Secrets:

There's more on this turn of events at the link. We wonder how much play the story will receive in the MSM and suspect the answer is very little. If it turns out to be true, it would be a public relations disaster for the Democratic left which staked an enormous amount of credibility on the assumption that President Bush lied about WMD in Iraq. Fair-minded people have always assumed, of course, that it was possible that the weapons were never found because Saddam moved them to Syria or Iran, but the left has never had much inclination to be fair-minded.

If the story is true, Bush and the Republicans will get a huge boost in their favorability ratings and the Democrats will join the whale dung on the political abyssal plain. So, don't look for MSM stories on General Sada's testimony unless they're attempts to discredit it. The left will never admit that Bush was right and they were wrong.

Isn't it amazing what blind, unguided, purposeless forces can accomplish when they put their mind to it? Here's just one example of the astounding abilities of random mutation and natural selection to create marvels of complex engineering.

Free speech and freedom of religious opinion is under assault not just in the Islamic world but throughout Western civilization. The politically correct are carrying out their inquisitions and laying the wood around the stakes to which people who dare to speak their minds are bound. Read this chilling summary from Wretchard at Belmont Club:

Wretchard posts some interesting commentary at the end of this piece that you might wish to peruse.

It would, of course, be more difficult to persecute Americans in the U.S. for this sort of speech because of the protections guaranteed us by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It is unnerving, however, to reflect upon what a Supreme Court which looks to Europe for judicial guidance might do to this body armor for the mind.

This is why it is so crucial that we have people on the Court who rule according to what the Constitution says and not according to what current political fashion dictates. This is why we need more Constitutional conservatives and fewer liberals on the Bench. One shudders to think who a President Kerry would have appointed to fill the last two vacancies and how long our First Amendment protections would survive a Kerry Court.

Not everyone holds George Bush in as high esteem as we think he merits, at least in those moments when we're not thinking about our southern border, but everyone who cherishes the right to voice their opinions, no matter how unpopular, can thank God that neither John Kerry nor Al Gore made it to the White House.

Gerard Baker at the Times Online lays out the catastrophe that war with Iran would be for the world:

He then says this:

Iran simply cannot be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. As disastrous as war might be for the world, a nuclear Iran, as Baker eloquently argues, would be far worse. We must pray and hope that the Iranians can be persuaded to back down, but we must prepare for the eventuality that they won't.

Retired Major General Robert Scales discusses the military difficulties inherent in an Iraq-type war against Iran - and how he thinks an attack on Iran should be fought - in an editorial in the Washington Times here.

Christianity Today has a review of End of the Spear. We haven't yet seen the movie, but it's based on a truly amazing story. For those not familiar with it, in 1956 four young missionaries were murdered by Ecuadoran indians. After their deaths, two of the widows and a sister of another of the slain men went to live with the tribe from which the killers came. Because of the beauty of their witness, eventually much of the tribe, including the killers, was converted to Christianity.

It is very difficult to imagine the selflessness of bereaved women who might have been understandably embittered toward the murderers of their loved ones, instead going to live among the killers to win them to the Truth. It is an amazing story of love, forgiveness, redemption, and human nobility, and from all that we've heard and read the movie tells it faithfully and powerfully.

Another non-Christian, non-theist endorses the basic idea of Intelligent Design. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who describes himself as a secular humanist, said this:

So much for the canard that ID is a Christian meme and that the designer has to be the God of the Bible. David Berlinski, Michael Denton, Antony Flew, and now Kurt Vonnegut are none of them Christians nor theists. Yet they're all impressed by the evidence that life displays purpose and intention.

Is Judge Jones paying attention?

We'd like to point out that a recent poll in Pennsylvania showed Lyn Swann leading the incumbent Democratic governor Ed Rendell 46% to 44%. There are so many odd results on this poll, however, that we can't put too much confidence in Swann's lead. For just one example, Republican respondents said that they'd like to see Condaleeza Rice run for president by 46% to 32% margin, but on the previous question, when asked who their choice for president would be, Rice wasn't even mentioned in a list of nine candidates.

It's hard to say what significance a poll has at this point in the election campaign, but it does seem that Rendell is vulnerable, especially to a black opponent with the name recognition of someone like Lyn Swann.

From the website of the Brights, an organization of people who hold to a naturalistic worldview:

This may be, but if they don't feel that they're intellectually superior to the rest of us why do they call themselves "Brights"?

The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture has graciously put up two posts on our series on Judge Jones' decision in the Dover trial. The first announces the series, and the second is a very positive sampling from it. Check them out, especially the second.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters believes that the Palestinians, in bringing Hamas to power, have, for all intents and purposes, voted for war with Israel:

It's hard to find cause for optimism in the results of this election. The Palestinian people know what Hamas stands for, and, in what will probably have been an act of ethnic suicide, they pulled the lever for them. There is no people in the history of the world who have so deliberately thrown in their lot with terrorism. Any hope for peace in the Middle East has gone by the boards. Short of a miracle, war is as inevitable in Palestine as anything in human affairs can be.

The Palestinians had a chance to establish a state in Gaza and the West Bank if they would be willing to live in peace with the Israelis, but in yet another manifestation of the Islamic death wish, they loudly proclaimed in the election Wednesday that they are not so willing. They have chosen their fate, and the U.S. should, as Morrissey insists, stop subsidizing them immediately. We can not, and must not, have anything to do with a terrorist state, much less send them taxpayer money to finance their crimes. May God help the innocent Palestinians who didn't want Hamas and who will surely get caught in the middle of the coming conflict. Their government certainly won't.

UPDATE: Emanuele Ottolenghi writes that Hamas' electoral victory was not what they wanted and will be its undoing. It's a very interesting column. You can read it here.

It appears that the vote to confirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court will take place Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. So far about 86 senators have declared their intentions, 55 saying they will vote for Alito and 31 declaring that they'll oppose him. It looks like the vote tally will come out around 58 to 42. Of the remaining fourteen votes, Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe are the two likeliest Republicans to vote nay. Among Democrats there are four who are possible yes votes: Conrad, Dorgan, Landrieu, and Pryor.

There's been talk of a filibuster, John Kerry has called for one, but it's going nowhere. To end a filibuster requires 60 votes and even some of the Democrats who intend to vote against Alito have said they will vote to stop one. With 58 senators already on record as supporting Alito and several others opposed to a filibuster it doesn't look like the Democrats will be able to pull it off. Even Harry Reid has said it won't happen.

The upshot of all this is that on Tuesday George Bush will have his second Supreme Court nominee confirmed. With three years left in his presidency he's quite likely to get yet a third opportunity. The Left, already guzzling Maalox like it was water, will be apoplectic.

In a recent column in USA Today biologist E.O. Wilson writes that evolution is a fact and there's no point in denying it. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is untestable and it's pointless to try to make it into a science:

Wilson here commits a common mistake in this debate. He assumes that ID is something which requires its own evidence, as though the evidence for design is somehow qualitatively other than the facts that can be found in any cosmology or biochemistry text. The evidence for ID is the evidence that is discovered by the scientist every day in his laboratory. That evidence belongs to everyone, not just the researchers who glean it, and the evidence is mountainous.

To suggest that the current dispute is about evidence is to misunderstand things entirely. The dispute is over how best to interpret evidence that scientists have been accumulating now for centuries. The crucial question is not which side has the most evidence but whether what we have discovered about life and the cosmos should be seen as the product of chance accident and serendipidity or whether it should be seen as the product of intention and purpose. Complaints about the lack of evidence for a designer are red herrings in this controversy.

He goes on to write that:

Oops. Where does this come from? If religion, the realm of values, should stay out of science, and vice versa, how does a scientist make a value judgment such as that we ought to save the earth's natural habitats? A Christian can certainly conclude this from the mandate we have to be stewards of the earth, but how does a scientist who, qua scientist, can say nothing of values and morals and scriptural mandates, arrive at this conclusion, much less take it for granted.

Wilson finds that he can't live consistently by the principles he espouses, and so from time to time he, and other scientists, slip off their lab coats, enter the metaphysician's study, and think no one will notice. That's fine in their personal lives but it is disingenuous of them to use their authority as scientists to pontificate on values while at the same time they try to hold up a wall of separation between the realm of facts (science) and the realm of values (religion, philosophy).

Wilson wrote a wonderful book on ants. Anything he tells me about ant behavior I will certainly accept on his authority. But as a philosopher ... well, he's a great entomologist.

So a major terrorist organization swept to victory in Palestine. Iran is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons. Bin Laden is threatening us with more death and destruction. And what are the Democrats trying to do? Get George Bush impeached for surveilling telephone calls in which one of the parties is a foreign terrorist suspect. Yesindeedee, that'll be a winner with the American people in November.

A friend passes along this observation:

We don't vouch for the accuracy of the figures, but if they're correct perhaps Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and Ted Kennedy will organize the exodus.

The New York Times treats its readers to one of the most implausible analyses of the GWOT, perhaps, that has appeared to date in any major newspaper. The editorial, titled al-Qaeda is Winning, is written by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon:

Yes, but even Islamist true-believers must know that truces are not offered, especially by Islamists, when the correlation of forces is in their favor. They are not signs of strength. They're offered when one side feels the need to regroup, reorganize, catch their breath and slow down a superior force. If Osama is using words like "truce" it's only because he sees the jittery leadership of his movement casting sidelong glances toward the skies in a worried search for predator drones, and he sees his forces in Iraq being cut to pieces, not just by Americans, but by Iraqi militias. He's losing in Iraq, he has lost in Afghanistan, and if any more of his lieutenants are visited in the middle of the night by hellfire missiles his organizational structure will begin to crumble. That's why he's calling for a truce.

How is this poll result any different than those obtained in polls after 9/11 or prior to the invasion of Iraq? Indeed, in the wake of 9/11 one could buy Osama t-shirts in the markets of almost every Muslim city, but they're considerably more scarce today than they were then. Al-Qaeda has alienated large swatches of Muslims through their attempted WMD attack in Jordan, their murderous attacks in Saudi Arabia, the attempts on the life of Pakistan's Prime minister Musharraf, and the savagery of their war on Iraqi civilians. To say that bin Laden's strategy is working seems needlessly pessimistic.

Perhaps Benjamin and Simon are a pair of twenty-somethings with short historical horizons, but the "self-starters" are not a novel development. They've been around since the 1970s. The indigenous jihad in Iraq is, even as you read this, largely occupied fighting al-Qaeda foreigners and running for political office. Those who are still engaged in trying to run the infidels out of their country find themselves more and more often confronted by competent Iraqi military units rather than Americans.

The evidence to which the authors refer exists only in their own minds. Unless they are aware of facts that have not yet been made public there's very little reason to think that the jihadists have more sympathy among their co-religionists today than they did six months or a year ago and lots of reasons, as we've outlined above, to think that they have less.

The American counter-story, for those who have been paying attention, has been the progress made by the people of Afghanistan and the purple fingers of the people in Iraq.

There's lots of outrage in the conservative blogosphere over this column by Joel Stein, and we're not really sure why. Here are some of his more provocative passages:

Frankly, we don't know what all the fuss is about. Stein is simply saying honestly and without rancor what almost every liberal Democrat thinks but doesn't have the courage to admit because it would be political and social suicide to do so. Stein's right. It makes no sense to say the war is an immoral unsupportable undertaking but that you nevertheless "support" the troops. Exactly how does one support the troops if they're perpetuating what one believes to be a great wrong?

Fault Stein for being wrong about the war. Fault him for thinking Kosovo was worth fighting for but Afghanistan and Iraq are not, but don't fault him on the one point about which he's correct. Rather fault his fellow liberals for lacking the integrity to admit that they agree with him.

Clarice Feldman of The American Thinker has a pair of posts here and here on the Damadola airstrike that sheds some light on exactly how well-planned the attack was and who was killed in it. Feldman thinks Zawahiri was among the casualties but that no one wants to say so definitively since his corpse has not been recovered.

Not counting Zawahiri, it looks like six senior al-Qaeda leaders were in the houses that were struck. Feldman quotes milblogger Dan Darling:

If the terrorists are now realizing that they can't hide forever even in a desolate place like Waziristan, if they're realizing that they're nowhere safe, it will have the effect of considerably ratcheting up the stress and weariness that must already afflict them. This in turn, one hopes, will lead to careless decisions, producing more casualties, which will lead to yet more stress, and so on in a runaway feedback loop.

The problem for the senior leadership is there's no way out. They can't surrender nor can they just quit their war and go home. To do either would be the psychological nail in the coffin of global jihad. The only path left to them is to fight and sooner or later be suddenly killed by an unseen predator drone and a hellfire missile. That realization must be extremely hard on those men and their families, but they asked for this hell in which they live and which they've created for others. They have made it clear that they are at war with the West, a fight to the death.

There's no easy way out for us either. We must either fight or, eventually, capitulate to Islamic will. Either we relentlessly pursue the al-Qaeda leadership and thoroughly demoralize those who follow them or we can look forward to a world where our granddaughters wear burkhas and our grandsons memorize the Koran. Either we defeat them or watch darkness descend over the world. There's no other alternative.

Barry Carey at withallyourmind attended a debate in Orlando between anti-IDer and philosopher of science Michael Ruse and pro-IDer theology and history of science professor Thomas Woodward. Carey is posting a series summarizing the debate. Here are his initial impressions:

His second and third posts on the debate can be found here and here.

In an otherwise unremarkable Q&A with Tufts atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett in the New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon says this:

Solomon: If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

Dennett: Isn't it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don't need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.

Viewpoint: Yes, and among those possibilities is that evolution shapes us to conform our beliefs to reality. It would be odd if natural selection molded the human species to embrace with our whole beings beliefs which were radically at odds with the way the world is. It's not impossible, of course, but it's strange that Dennett doesn't seem willing to consider the possibility.

As to his question as to why anyone should want to "take that leap" - actually more of a step than a leap - the simplest answer is that unless one does take it one must admit that there's no meaning to life, no basis for moral judgment, no hope for ultimate justice, no basis for human worth, dignity, or rights, no reason to think there is an enduring self, no hope that those we love who have died are not gone forever, and indeed, no reason for thinking that love itself is anything more than body chemistry, no reason why we should trust our reason to lead us to truth, nor any reason why we should value true beliefs over false ones.

In other words, apart from taking that "leap" human existence is nothing but a depressing tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. The rational response to a universe in which there is no God is hopelessness, despair, and nihilism. That Dennett himself doesn't wind up there suggests only that he doesn't follow his beliefs to their logical conclusions, no doubt because he couldn't live with those conclusions.

Someone may wish to "take that leap," furthermore, because they find the materialist explanation for the breathtaking fine-tuning of the physical universe and the astonishing organization and complexity of living things to be little better than a fairy tale. It may be that one takes the leap because believing that accident and coincidence, purposeless chance and unguided force, are responsible for creating structures and phenomena which even materialists describe as brilliant and ingenious, is quite literally incredible.

Solomon: I take it you do not subscribe to the idea of an everlasting soul, which is part of almost every religion.

Dennett: Ugh. I certainly don't believe in the soul as an enduring entity. Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.

Viewpoint: This is one way of looking at things, I suppose - the soul, life, emotions, and consciousness are nothing but atoms which have reached a certain critical mass and give rise to certain astounding emergent phenomena - but it's not the only way. We need not accept Dennett's dehumanizing reductionistic materialism, a view which, by the way, is thoroughly unscientific because there's no way to test it in order to grant that he might be right that there's no soul, in the classic sense, residing in persons.

It could be that the soul is not some gossamer, wraith-like entity that inhabits our body like a ghost-in-a-machine, to use Gilbert Ryle's famous metaphor. Perhaps instead we can think of it as the sum total of information which describes us as a person. It is, on this view, the totality of our history, our personality, hopes, dreams, loves, and fears. It encompasses a complete description of our physical, emotional, and moral selves. It is a comprehensive account of every aspect of our being all stored like a computer file folder in the data base that is the mind of God. As such it is eternal and indestructible unless God chooses to delete it. Even at the death of the body we have the potential to exist as long as God holds us (the information which describes us) in being in His mind. God may, if He chooses, reinstantiate us when our body gives out by downloading selected files from our folder into another suitable structure in some other reality.

Thus Dennett could be correct that we (our bodies) are comprised solely of material substance (I don't think he is, though, because I have my doubts that matter alone can fully explain consciousness) but he could still be wrong in asserting that there is no soul.

In any event, materialism of the sort that Dennett espouses is an existentially sterile view of life which people hold, not because they're compelled by science to accept it, but because it enables them to avoid having to believe in God, the concept of which they find repugnant.

The Political Teen has a video clip of a recent SNL spoof of some of our favorite Democrats. It'll make you chuckle, especially the guy who does Jesse Jackson. He sounds more like Jackson than Jackson does. Go to the link and scroll down to Download.

It's no surprise that a children's movie that doesn't feature violence, sexual innuendo, bathroom jokes, or hint at gay romance would not be well received by mainstream critics. All the more reason, we suppose, to make it a point to go see it.

In case there was any doubt as to where the allegiance of many on the American left lies one might note the reaction of author/historian William Blum to having his book receive a favorable endorsement from none other than Osama bin Laden himself. Blum responded with these words:

Of course not. It's a great privilege for such as William Blum to have his book praised by a dread enemy of the United States. The man who would gleefully and deliberately incinerate every American child, if only he could, honors Mr. Blum with his endorsement, and Mr Blum is star-struck by the praise.

In fact, we hear that Mr. Blum was reported by neighbors to have been overheard singing in his shower the words to the old Byrds/Doobie Brothers song:

Sorry. We got a little carried away.

A trio of young men of my acquaintance have started up a new blog called Insense that addresses matters of religion, music, science and whatever else strikes their fancy. They're doing a nice job with it, and it deserves a look.

Cass Sunstein laments that Robert Bork is having the last laugh. Samuel Alito, he claims, holds to a view of the Constitution indistinguishable from that of Judge Bork who was refused confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 because he believed that the document should be interpreted according to the original intention of its framers. This appalled scholarly luminaries like Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter who saw the right to an abortion going up in smoke if it had to actually have Constitutional warrant. Bork was slimed and subsequent nominees, who were loath to endorse the judicial propriety of Roe v. Wade, nevertheless were skittish about abjuring it. Thus, we got Anthony Kennedy and David Souter.

As Sunstein observes, however, John Roberts began a reversal of this trend:

Imagine. Expecting judges to have fidelity to law represents a fundamental change in the way we confirm people for judgeships. No wonder the liberals are upset. Bush is filling the Court with people who will be faithful to the law instead of people who will be making it up. This must be why Hillary thinks this is the most incompetent administration in history.

Wretchard at Belmont Club has a fascinating discussion of the difficulties facing a rogue state which wishes to deploy small nuclear weapons ("suitcase nukes") against a Western nation like the United States. He argues that in order to bring us to our knees the aggressor nation would have to kill about one fourth of our population which means they'd have to deploy some 150 such weapons. This creates severe logistical problems that sharply raise the risk to the aggressor. Go to his site to read his rationale. Also be sure to read the comments, some of which suggest that the explosive yield Wretchard assumes a suitcase nuke to possess is too high.

Meanwhile, however, one possibility Wretchard doesn't mention that must be taken into consideration is that a rogue nation like Iran really wouldn't have to deploy so many weapons against us but rather might choose to risk a gambit something like this:

Working through terrorists such as al-Qaeda, they successfully smuggle two or three suitcase nukes across the ridiculously porous Mexican border and into selected American cities. They might then detonate one in, say, New York, or worse, Washington, D.C. They would then have the terrorists take credit and announce that there are dozens more such weapons scattered in cities all across the country, and any reprisal by Americans will result in another weapon being set off, then another, etc. They also would probably announce that unless the United States abandons the Middle East entirely, including Israel, the weapons will be exploded.

If there's skepticism or hesitation among American leaders, the terrorists could detonate a second bomb to convince us that they're not bluffing. We would have no way of knowing how many more they have, nor would it matter. The public panic would be unmanageable, and whoever was governing would have to cave to the terrorists' demands.

The real threat, therefore, is not 150 suitcase nukes. The real threat is two or three such devices at the disposal of a suicidal fanatic like the current Iranian president - or, as we've written before, a single warhead detonated high in the atmosphere whose EMP could render useless every electronic device in this country. In a split-second we'd be back in the 19th century and economic and social chaos would reign throughout the land.

These are not happy thoughts, and they lend a certain urgency to attempts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of those who despise us enough to blow up most of the world just to kill us.

Palestinians, thwarted in their obsession with killing Jews by the Israeli-built "wall," are not turning to more peaceful pursuits. Nosiree. When you've got a lust for blood you'll kill somebody even if it has to be your own wives and sisters. Sharon Lapkin writes about the sickening upsurge in "honor killings" of women in the West Bank and Gaza in 2005.

The entire article should be read, but here are just a few examples of the cultural depravity that infects Arab communities across the globe, even, Lapkin points out, in Britain:

Little wonder that the Israelis wanted to build a wall between themselves and these people. They're demonic. Read the rest of the article here.

If Satan is real and not just a metaphor for human depravity his greatest triumph must surely be in convincing people that they are acting in God's will when they do great evil.

We've posted on this little drama unfolding in Weare, New Hampshire several times in the past year. Now it appears to be working its way into the mainstream news:

And why not? Why should judges be exempted from the consequences of the decisions they foist on the rest of us? Are they gods residing on Mt. Olympus? If so, perhaps Lost Liberty should look into the development potential of that real estate.

We say, if the Lost Liberty group can get the Souter place for a hotel then let the good Justice taste for himself the bitter pill that his vote in Kelo has forced down the throats of a lot of ordinary folks. Power to the People! etc.

A University of Delaware philosophy prof seems to have rendered atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett temporarily speechless according to this account by Stephen Barr at First Things:

Scott Gilbreath at Magic Statistics finds a couple of other blunders perpetrated by the Darwinian priesthood here and here.

Some anti-IDers have been wrong so often about so much that one wonders how they can still have any credibility left among educated people, let alone refer to themselves as "brights." There must be more at issue here than just a mere scientific idea to account for why otherwise intelligent people are willing to say the silliest things in order to keep others from accepting the fundamental premise of ID - that life and the cosmos are largely the product of intention and intelligence.

Cinnamon Stillwell at The American Thinker writes a piece entitled The Passion of the left: Hating Christians in which she discusses the accelerating war against Christianity being waged by the secular left.

Even without reading Stillwell's piece it would be clear to anyone who grew up in the fifties that modern American culture and society are radically more hostile to Christian belief today than at any time in the last fifty years and probably more than at any time in the history of our nation.

The reasons for this are several, but surely one is that Christianity is seen as an impediment to the political and social agenda of the left. Were it not for American Christianity there would be clear sailing for abortion rights, gay marriage, the demise of sexual restraints in our culture, and economic socialism, among other left-wing ambitions. George Bush is hated by the left not only because he has thwarted their political ambitions but also because he is unabashedly Christian. The left despises God and hates anyone who places Him ahead of the authority of the state. They have contempt, moreover, for all those red-staters whose faith in God surpasses their faith in the wisdom of the left-wing intellectuals who deign to favor us with the fruits of their wondrous cogitations on all questions social, political, cultural, and philosophical.

Christians find themselves in a challenging position as we move deeper into the 21st century. Beset on one side by the intellectual and cultural assaults of the secular left - which are creating an inhospitable social environment for those who wish to practice their faith - and on the other by the threat of a virulent Islamism which threatens the physical existence of Christians and Christianity everywhere, Christians can no longer afford to sit back and take no interest in the affairs of the world. There's too much at stake.

I know. I shouldn't generalize about the entire Left just because so many demented and dysfunctional souls find solace on their web sites, and I'm not. But ... really....

The results of a poll at one of the biggest blogs in the nation go way beyond just differences in political ideology. They're symptomatic of an absolute, unvarnished, 100% pure moral retardedness. Anyone who would say that they despise George Bush more than Osama bin Laden is a moral thalidomide baby whose moral faculties simply never developed.

Evangelical Christians often cast common sense to the winds in their attempts to convert non-Christians to the faith. Jews, for example, often find attempts to win them to Christ alternately amusing and insulting. One Jew, Mark Oppenheimer, has written a fine piece at Slate on how some Christians are beginning to realize the counter-productiveness of efforts that fail to convey respect for the person whose soul the Christian wishes to win. It's an article every evangelical should read.

It's understandable that Christians, given what we believe about the truth of the gospel, the afterlife, and eternity, should feel an urgency to win to Christ people we care about. Yet, it seems to me that the most honorable path to accomplishing this is to act in such a way that the other individual feels that they're respected and cared about as a person and not that they're simply an object or a statistic.

This might mean that the best way to share one's faith in many circumstances is to refrain from talking about it unless the other person shows a genuine interest. If we're living the way we should, and if we're the sort of man or woman to whom others feel comfortable talking about intimate matters, then they'll be much more likely to ask and be much more open to what we say. If they don't inquire, I don't think that forcing the conversation onto religious matters does anything to make them receptive and will often simply alienate them. I think it was St. Francis who said that we should preach the gospel without ceasing and sometimes we should even use words. There's much wisdom in that.

Christopher Hitchens is optimistic about Iraq. His article at Slate concludes with this:

Reading the whole thing is worth the time.

Hillary Clinton said Monday that "This administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." The wife of the man who slept and dithered while al Qaeda plotted should be more careful about her asseverations of incompetence, but that notwithstanding, she couldn't be more wrong. If things continue on their present course in Iraq, the economy remains strong, and Bush is able to reform either social security or immigration policy, he will probably be viewed by historians as one of the most accomplished presidents since Roosevelt, and perhaps since Lincoln.

He has liberated 50 million people from oppression, successfully (so far) prevented a terrorist attack on our soil, presided over an economic recovery in very difficult circumstances (inheriting a recession, 9/11, and several very costly natural disasters), appointed two (and perhaps yet a third) extremely competent jurists to the Supreme Court, has done more for the status of minorities and women in his cabinet than anyone before him, and has done all this in the face of constant vitriolic calumnies from his political opponents, without ever returning their fire in kind. He has shown far more grace, virtue and class than have the carping, vitriolic, ankle-biters who, out of sheer hatred, attack every move he has made.

Few presidents have accomplished even a fraction of what George Bush has achieved, especially in the face of such relentless and withering opposition, and surely, pace Mrs. Clinton, his predecessor did not.

Joe Carter could never be an atheist because he finds himself incapable of believing impossible things. To see what he means go here, and be sure to check out the excellent dialogue in the comments section.

Bill has collated the series we did on Christian Belief and the Dover ID trial to make it easier to access each of them in their entirety. The links are in the left margin of this page under the somewhat pretentious heading of "Hall of Fame."

Ann Coulter summarizes the week's political news by skewering Hillary's inanity and Teddy's hypocrisy in a column carried by RealClearPolitics.com. She also praises Samuel Alito and, perhaps surprisingly, Ray Nagin. Here's the gist:

There are a couple of thoughts we might tack on to Coulter's column. Unlike some, I don't see that there was anything racially pernicious in what Hillary said about the House of Representatives being run like a plantation. Some commentators tried to turn this into some sort of racial gaffe. It wasn't. What was wrong with it was that it was dumb and completely untrue. Democrats have more rights as a minority party today than Republicans did under the Democrats until 1994 when they took control, and the Democrats enjoy those rights because the Republicans changed the rules when they came to power.

Secondly, Coulter is at least partly right in her tongue-in-cheek assessment of Nagin's clunkish remarks. The number of people who are afraid to say anything that has racial overtones, especially if the remarks can in any way be construed as disparaging to members of a minority, has soared in the past two decades. Consider the abject grovelling to which Jimmy the Greek, Al Campanis, Tom Brookshire, and Trent Lott, to name a few, were made to undergo to atone for their "insensitivity". This is as absurd as it is unwarranted. We need a racial conversation in this country, but we'll never get one as long as people are afraid of being tarred as bigots as soon as they open their mouths, and forced to do self-flagellatory penance.

Nagin's comments weren't very adroit and he can be criticized for his exclusionary vision of New Orleans, the utter blockheadedness of his vision, and his arrogation of knowledge of God's will in the matter, but his honesty and clarity are refreshing. Criticize him for being dumb, but let's not be too quick to label people racist.

Libertarian economist Bob Murphy forays into the realm of scientific/philosophical controversy to put the kibosh on some of the more common objections to Intelligent Design. He does a pretty good job and says some very interesting things along the way.

For example, he observes that:

Later he notes that those who argue against creationism by insisting that God would never create something just to have it go extinct must, if they're consistent, be atheists:

He finishes by addressing the claim, iterated and reiterated by Judge Jones in his Kitzmiller decision, that ID is just a disguised form of Christianity:

Murphy is a layman and some might scoff that he's unqualified to pass judgment on the arguments he critiques, but then Judge Jones is a layman who spent the seven years before his appointment to the federal bench as the chairman of the state liquor control board (hardly a scientific think tank), yet the anti-ID folks seem unable to praise his Solomonic wisdom highly enough.

A couple of years ago United Methodist Bishop Sprague of Chicago called the imminent U.S. overthrow of Saddam "morally lamentable" and "theologically reprehensible." In Methodist theology, we must assume, it is morally lamentable to overthrow tyrannical murderers who are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of their own countrymen.

Meanwhile, millions of Methodists, too morally untutored to appreciate the grievous wickedness of what Bush did, simply ignored their denominational leadership and voted in 2004 for the man who liberated 50 million Afghans and Iraqis from oppression.

Maybe one reason mainline protestant denominations are in decline is that the people who are supposed to be the sages of the church too often come across as shallow ideologues whose theological wisdom is pretty much informed by whatever the current liberal political fashion happens to be.

In the Midnight Hour, Mustang Sally, and a favorite of 60s college students, Land of 1000 Dances - the man who performed them all, Wilson Pickett, died today at the age of 64. There's a good obit of him here. What a voice.

The Washington Post has learned a little something about its readership - they're lefties:

Ah, yes. The champions of peace and love, tolerance and diversity are apoplectic that the Post ombudsman would have the temerity to write the truth when it undermines their hopes that the Republicans will take a major hit from the Abramoff scandal. They express their dissatisfaction in the only manner they know: invective and obscenity. Not having progressed emotionally beyond their eighth grade year they resort to forms of dialogue which appeal to the 14 year-old mind, convinced that whoever launches the most vulgar and vituperative insults wins the argument.

These emotional and psychological juveniles are the folks who stand as the ideological alternative to contemporary conservatism. Thank goodness the grown-ups won the last two elections.

Al Gore seems to have no qualms about disdaining the truth in his speeches and levelling the most outrageous allegations at the man who defeated him for the presidency. Gore 's bitterness has transformed him into an amusing parody, a political Elmer Gantry. For a thorough analysis of his recent speech and an examination of the charges he made against the President go here.

It's risible that the man for whom there was "no controlling legal authority" is now accusing the president of having deliberately broken the law in surveilling phone calls coming from suspected terrorists abroad. The irony is that there seems to be no consensus among legal authorities whether the president has the authority to do this or not. That uncertainty, however, doesn't prevent Mr. "No-controlling-legal-authority" from stating with absolute assurance that Bush deliberately broke the law. How does he know that? And if he doesn't know it for sure, why does he say it? Is it only to gin up hatred in others for the man that he himself despises?

Even if the president does turn out to have been in technical violation of the law, the matter is so unclear that it's absurd to say that he did it deliberately. Moreover, if it should happen that he overstepped his authority, not knowing precisely where the limits lay, isn't it better that he erred on the side of protecting the American people? After all, he didn't authorize the surveillance for political or self-serving reasons, he did it to protect our children from being blown to pieces by murderers. Doesn't anyone on the Left understand this? Or is the goal of discrediting and ultimately impeaching Bush so important that nothing else matters, not even the safety of those we love?

Al Gore has allowed his resentment at having missed out on the presidency to turn him into a vindictive, irresponsible, and pompous buffoon. He's a man listing toward lunacy. It's a shame, really.

Bill Roggio assesses the missile strike against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan:

Al-Masri was a particularly odious character. Roggio gives us his resume here, and Dan Darling has a more extensive piece on him in The Weekly Standard. The world is a much better place with al-Masri no longer a part of it.

Speaking of which, one wonders how eager the al Qaeda underlings must be to fill the vacancies that keep opening up among the leadership. On the one hand there must be an expectation of rapid advancement up the corporate ladder. On the other, with an attrition rate of one top leader per week, there doesn't seem to be much to look forward to as one of the top al-Qaedans, especially if you had been anticipating a long and pleasant retirement.

UPDATE: Tonight's news is reporting that there were four senior al-Qaeda leaders killed in the strike, not three.

The Church Report surveyed its readers to come up with the top 50 most influential Christians in America. There are some surprises on the list. For example, I know Sean Hannity is influential, and I know he's a Christian, but I was surprised that he ranked higher than Pope Benedict.

I was also taken aback that Benny Hinn was even on the list, but that's just me, I guess. It's distressing, though, to see who Christians think of when they think of influential leaders of the Church.

Joe Carter is even more depressed. Check out what he has to say about the list here.

At the recommendation of a former student I picked up The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen Carter and found it a delightful read. Carter is a very good prose writer and he's formulated an interesting mystery about a judge who seems to be a cross between Clarence Thomas (black, conservative) and Robert Bork (denied confirmation to the Supreme Court) written from the standpoint of his son. The judge dies mysteriously and his adult children, very well-to-do African-Americans, struggle to discover why so many underworld types are taking such an interest in his death.

Throughout the book the son, Talcott Garland, like Carter, a law school professor, wrestles with a collapsing marriage, racial insecurities, his own sense of inadequacy, which is at times humorous, and his apparent targetting by the shady characters that keep intruding into his life. Through it all Talcott's Christianity runs unapologetically in the background in a way that I found very refreshing in an otherwise secular novel.

Emperor has no vulgarity to speak of nor any real sex or undue violence, and it does a fine job of realistically exploring the pathos of a good man's life. It'd make an excellent read for someone looking for an entertaining and intelligent mystery.

In this our last installment in our series on the opinion of Judge John Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover we'll follow the Judge as he moves from his critique of the scientific standing of Intelligent Design to an examination of the motives of several prominent board members in trying to get ID formally mentioned in biology classes. If it can be shown that the primary movers on the board had a religious purpose in trying to accomplish their goal then, the Judge argues, their attempt would fail the Lemon test (from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971) which explicitly forbids such motivations in introducing curricular materials into schools.

Whether Lemon is good law or not, it is the law, and it does appear that the board members violated it's stipulation that there must be a secular purpose to all public school curricular materials. Highlights of the Judge's reasoning are excerpted in what follows:

It's unfortunate that Judge Jones has never read Roy Clouser's The Myth of Religious Neutrality. Clouser demonstrates in the first part of his book that the only thing that all religions share in common, and which therefore distinguishes a religion as such, is a divinity belief. By this he means that every religion holds a belief that something is unconditionally, non-dependently real and is the ultimate source of everything else. Since everyone holds that something is the non-dependent source of everything else, everyone, even the naturalist who believes the ultimate, non-dependent source is nature, or the materialist who believes it is matter, holds a religious belief.

When the Darwinian therefore claims that all of life is the product purely of natural, blind, purposeless mechanisms he is advancing a religious belief. The effect of the Judge's ruling, though he is unaware of it, was not to ban religion from the science classroom because that's an impossible task, but rather to ban a certain kind of religious claim from the classroom - the claim that matter, or the cosmos, might not be the non-dependent source of everything else.

In an astonishing contortion of justice the judge has banned the claim that the cosmos is not divine and privileged the claim that it is divine against any and all official criticism.

Judge Jones goes on to write:

This is simply untrue. As we have pointed out in earlier posts on this decision, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of biologists and other scientists who have testified in print that the theistic beliefs of their youth were extinguished precisely by their education in the theory of materialistic evolution.

It is true that evolution need not be seen as antagonistic to theism, but it is disingenuous of the plaintiffs' witnesses to say that "it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator." Indeed, the Judge regarded the assertion made by ID proponents that ID doesn't entail the existence of the God of the bible as a sham. Yet he does not see that if it is indeed a sham then certainly the claim that there is no conflict between a materialistic, naturalistic theory and a theory that suggests that theism is true is a forteriori a sham as well.

In his conclusion, the Judge states the following:

With this we are in agreement. It is exceedingly distressing that people who call themselves Christians would not act more honorably than a couple of the board members chose to act. We're all weak. We all fail in one way or another, but one wishes that Christians in such a high-profile position, Christians upon whom the eyes of a hostile secular press are focussed, would rise above the level of the rest of us and bring more credit and less disgrace to the Faith to which they claim to adhere.

It must be noted here what the Judge's decision entails. The italicized sentence above is clear that it does not prohibit ID from being mentioned or discussed by science teachers at their own discretion, nor does it prohibit those teachers from discussing problems within evolutionary theory. It merely prevents the Dover school board from requiring that any of this be done. Nor does his ruling prohibit ID from being taught in other classes besides science classes, but it is unclear whether his opinion would prevent a school board from mandating that a philosophy or social studies class, especially an elective, be set up to accomplish this.

Of one thing, though, we can be fairly confident, and that is that the shortcomings of the Judge's reasoning in support of his decision are going to leave plenty of openings for further challenges down the road. It's doubtful that we've seen the last of this issue.

Previous posts in this series can be read, in order, here, here, here, and here.

Even though most conservatives are deploring the Supreme Court's decision on the Oregon Death With Dignity Act, and even though three very bright justices dissented, I think the Court came to the right conclusion.

If the matter of choice in abortion should be thrown back to the states to decide what their laws will be, as I think it should, then it's hardly consistent to have the federal government stepping in to stop a person from choosing the time and manner of his own death. If the one is a matter for states to decide then so must the other be.

Attorney General Ashcroft was stretching his constitutional authority when he threatened to revoke prescription writing privileges of doctors who prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients who wish to end their suffering, the Court decided. Whether doctors, as a matter of professional ethics, should do this is a different question than whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to prohibit them from doing it.

Now it will be interesting to see how the six justices who voted to give states the right to decide what the law should be in such personal, private matters - matters in many respects analogous to the issue of whether a woman should have the right to kill her unborn child - will vote when the question of returning abortion law to the states comes before them.

Remember the Ents in Lord of the Rings? They were sentient tree creatures which did everything so slowly that it seemed to take days for them to just utter a sentence. We were reminded of the Ents when we read that Teddy Kennedy - who ripped Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for ties to a group that discriminates against women - said he's going to quit a club notorious for discriminating against women "as fast as I can."

He's been a member of the club for fifty two years, but now he's going to get out "as fast as he can." What's been keeping him from getting out for the last fifty two years? Did he just now become aware that the club doesn't admit women? Did he just now realize that it's pretty hypocritical to criticize others for doing what you yourself do? Did it just now dawn on him after all these years that membership in the Owl club, as it's known, is not worth the $100 a year he pays in dues because it's a lousy place to pick up chicks? Is Teddy an Ent?

Reuters informs us that Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a moderate voice in the U.S. Congress, on Tuesday became the first Senate Democrat to announce his support for conservative Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, who is expected to be confirmed later this month by the full Senate. "I have decided to vote in favor of Judge Samuel Alito," Nelson said in a statement issued by his office.

Michelle Malkin wonders whether the media will now be referring to Nelson as a "maverick" or whether that appellation is reserved only for Republicans like John McCain who endear themselves to the MSM by bucking their party.

"New Orleans should be a chocolate New Orleans." "This city will be chocolate at the end of the day." "This city will be a majority African American city." "It's the way God wants it to be." So saith the honorable mayor of New Orleans, "school bus" Ray Nagin.

God has spoken to him, evidently, and revealed that this is His will for New Orleans. Well, we're hearing that God is also speaking to white taxpayers and telling them that since this is going to be a chocolate city, He wants African-Americans to foot the bill for its reconstruction. That's what we heard, anyway.

For video of his honor the racist, bigot mayor's speech go here.

Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns writes a pair of posts in the wake of the Alito hearings that offer some interesting insight into the liberal mind. Her analysis, in my opinion, helps to explain why liberalism today is so much different from what it was in the forties and fifties:

She continues her thoughts in this post:

Liberals, it should be said, are much more likely than others to have succumbed to the contemporary fashion that there is no truth, that there are only varying "perspectives" on matters which concern us. If there is no truth, however, then there's no point in trying to persuade others to your point of view through the force of ideas. The only thing one can do is acquire and hold power so that he can compel others to abide by his point of view. Politics, for the Left, has become a struggle for power in which there are no rules. Low blows, head butts, kicking, gouging, and biting are all justified if they work, and that's why we see the sort of behavior we've witnessed from the Left in this country ever since the Robert Bork nomination. Conservatives are the enemy and if they must be lied about, smeared, slandered, and destroyed, then, well, the end of defeating the enemy justifies whatever means are necessary to bring it about.

I am reminded of words attributed to Lenin in 1920. In a speech to the Young Communist League he is alleged to have said that: "We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas...Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old...order and for uniting the proletariat."

If it works it's right. That was the view of the totalitarian Left in 1920 and it's the view of much of the liberal/Left today.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has come into possession of an al Qaeda membership application which he has posted for our consideration:

Application For al-Qaeda Membership

Quick, who said this:

Pat Robertson, you say? Well, it sounds like Pat, but if it had been Robertson there would've been wall to wall derision from the Left directed at the hapless evangelist on all the news shows. No, it wasn't Pat. The only person who could get away with saying something like this without being hooted down by the media and forced to apologize to every offended minority on this side of the Atlantic would have to be a black liberal Democrat. The media has bestowed upon BLDs a kind of immunity, an immunity that is really a form of reparations for all the sins of the past. It's an immunity that arises out out of the guilt that white liberals wallow in and that exempts BLDs from criticism when they say what anyone else would be crucified for saying.

The source of the quote? Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans.

The New York Times ran a picture on their website Saturday purporting to be a photo of the remains of a missile fired by a predator drone at poor Pakistani peasants by the CIA in a futile attempt to kill the al Qaeda second in command, al Zawahiri.

Unfortunately for what remains of the Times' credibility, they were either duped or they were complicit in a hoax. The munition in the photo, as is evident to anyone who looks at it, except, evidently, Times staffers, is obviously not a missile. It's much too bulky and heavy.

The American Thinker provides some background.

Bill Roggio has some good analysis of the attack on al-Zawahiri and al Qaeda's strategy at ThreatsWatch.Org:

The British Guardian is making much of reports that we missed Zawahiri and killed only women and children. They are calling it a "botched attack." It is deeply tragic that innocent people were killed by our missiles, but there is a sentence buried in the Guardian's report that seems odd. The report stated that the dead were reported to include four children and at least two women. Yet most accounts of the attack said that there were believed to be about 18 people in the targeted houses. Who were the other twelve? The Guardian scarcely mentions them, but it would be interesting to find out.

Belmont Club posts an interesting discussion on the brewing crisis over Iran and what people who contemplate such matters are thinking about today. There are a number of interesting tidbits and anecdotes strewn among the analysis. Here are a few excerpts:

Wretchard at Belmont Club cites an account from another blogger which, he avers, illustrates the "level of resolution" that results from our own forces being in contact on the ground.

Good stuff, although we're not sanguine about the chances of the tactic of pushing the mullahs over the brink actually working. It may, and we hope that it does, but there has to be a back-up plan. The world simply can't sit on its collective hands and let the madmen in Iran - men who have said that Israel would have a hard time destroying the Arab world with nuclear weapons but that one pre-emptive nuke will destroy Israel; men who have said that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth; men who have promised that if they ever had nuclear weapons they'd use them against Israel; men who have turned Iran into the world's chief state sponsor of terrorism - the world cannot allow such men to have the weapons they lust after.

Tragically, though, most of the world, especially Europe, will be perfectly content to allow Iran to acquire weapons which they will almost surely use, either themselves or through terrorist proxies.

Maybe the Democrats have a plan as to what we should do.

A deistic friend recently sent me an essay by a religious skeptic by the name of Samuel Harris and asked me to respond to this paragraph from his piece:

My friend went on to ask:

The following is my response to his questions (slightly modified):

You asked if I would respond to Harris' opening statement, and I will, but I think it would be best if I tried to reply to your other questions first.

You ask for proof that there is a personal creator, but as you know, outside of mathematics and logic there really is very little, if anything, that we can actually prove. Everything we believe is based on factors other than proof - the force of induction, intuition, how well something fits with other well-established beliefs, and so on.

I don't know for sure what I base my belief in a personal creator upon, but one argument for that belief is this:

I exist. I have consciousness, intelligence, and am a complex arrangement of integrated systems that display astonishing engineering. I also am contingent (i.e. dependent upon something else for my existence), and possess the attributes of personality.

I ask myself how I can account for the existence of such an entity, and I find I have essentially two alternatives: Either I am the product of blind, unguided, unintelligent, impersonal forces that produced me purely by accident, a possibility which I find highly implausible, or I am the intentional product of an intelligent, purposeful being which is also conscious, self-aware and which is ultimately non-contingent. Moreover, since I possess the attributes of personality, it seems reasonable to impute some kind of personality to that which has produced that quality in me as well. In other words, whatever caused me, it's reasonable to assume, probably possesses the same qualities in Itself that It created.

But this is not a proof, of course. It may be that I really am just the product of time, chance and the impersonal, but I think it's intellectually justifiable to believe that I am not. I think it reasonable to believe that the ultimate cause of me and you and the universe as a whole is purposeful, extraordinarily intelligent and powerful, non-contingent, and conscious of, and concerned about, It's creation. It's reasonable to believe, in short, that the ultimate cause of human beings is personal.

I freely admit that I want there to be such a Being because, among other reasons, the existential consequences of such a Being not existing are severe: Indeed, our existence would have no real meaning, there would be no basis for morality, there'd be no hope for justice, and man would have no special worth, dignity or rights, to name a few of the consequences of there being no personal Creator. In other words, if I am wrong about the existence of the kind of Being I'm describing, then the logical endpoint is nihilism and despair.

Since I want very much for there to be such a Being (let's call It God for the sake of discussion), and since the existence of God seems to me to be highly probable for the reasons I discussed above, I find myself accepting, or believing, or hoping, that God does, in fact, exist. I find myself living my life more or less in accord with that hope. Someone else might come to a different conclusion, and I don't think I could argue him out of it. I would just ask him whether deep down he wants, or doesn't want, there to be a God. If he does want God to exist but finds himself unable to believe that He does, then I would suggest to him that there's really no reason not to believe and ample reason to believe. If his answer is that he doesn't really want there to be a God, which for skeptics, it often is, then there's nothing more that I can say except to ask him why he's not a nihilist.

Now, none of this gets at the question of special revelation and religious conflict that Harris poses in his essay. Let me keep my promise and respond to what he says in the passage you quote above. I agree with everything in it. What he asserts is true, but his implied conclusion that all religions are bogus doesn't follow from what he says any more than the fact that different political ideologies have caused horrible conflict in the world (much worse in the 20th century than religion ever caused) leads to the conclusion that they're all wrong. You and I both agree, I think, that a system that promotes freedom, democracy, property rights, and free markets is far superior to, say, communism, socialism, or fascism. The fact that these ideologies conflict with democratic capitalism doesn't mean we should not believe in freedom.

The question for me, then, is do I have sufficient warrant to believe that Christianity is essentially true? In order to answer that question I have to ask whether I have sufficient reason to think that the Bible is basically correct in what it says, and in order to answer that question, I have to come to grips with one of the two most fundamental stumbling blocks for many moderns when they read the Bible - miracles (the other being the deity of Christ). One miracle in particular is crucial - the resurrection of Jesus.

So, setting aside all the claims of skeptics about this or that error in the Bible, and the counterclaims that defenders throw into the breach, perhaps we can agree that the only thing that really matters is whether Jesus actually and literally rose from the dead. If he did then all the arguments raised against the historical facticity of the Old Testament and the objections to stories like the virgin birth, are irrelevant. If Jesus really rose from the dead then Christianity is, in almost every respect that matters, highly credible.

Of course, we can't know with certainty that Jesus rose from the dead or that he did not. Some skeptics counter that we can indeed know that he did not because miracles are impossible, but this is a weak argument. Miracles can only be impossible if there is no chance that the laws of nature could be superceded. But we can only have confidence that the laws of nature cannot be superceded if we know that there is no God. If the existence of the kind of Being I've talked about above is possible then so must miracles be possible, and, of course, the existence of God is certainly possible.

Thus we have to look at the evidence for the resurrection to determine whether it is a credible event or not. I do this here(scroll down to VI) and invite you to read what I've written there.

It seems to me that, as fantastic as the story sounds to the modern ear, if there is a personal God who cares about His creation and loves His creatures then what the gospels record is certainly possible and to me, at least, plausible. I understand that it won't seem so to others, but I can find no reason based upon human rationality for discounting it other than an a priori belief that miracles are impossible, which, as I've argued, is only the case if atheism is true. Even a deist such as yourself believes that God performed at least one miracle when He created the universe.

Anyway, I'm sorry if this is a little long-winded, but I thought your question deserved more than just a cursory answer.

I just finished a challenging and inspirational book, Great Cloud of Witnesses by E.W. Bullinger. It is a compilation of expositional and devotional lessons based on the spiritual giants of faith from Hebrews chapter 11.

From the back cover: "Here you will come to understand faith's worship of God, faith's walk with God, faith's witness for God, faith's obedience, faith overcoming the will of the flesh and the will of man, faith waiting, faith overcoming fear, faith conquering through Christ, and faith suffering for God."

Here are a couple of passages from Great Cloud of Witnesses that contrast Abraham's "walk by faith" to the "walk by sight" of others.

Numbers chapter 14 tells us the rest of the story and that upon hearing the people crying out to go back to Egypt, Moses and Aaron fell on their faces. Joshua and Caleb who had gone with the others to search out the land rent there own cloths and said "The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land. If the Lord delight in us, then He will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the Lord neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us*: defence is departed from them, and the Lord is with us: fear them not." But all the congregation bade stone them with stones.

As you probably know, by now the Lord had had enough of the peoples' antics and was going to "smite them with pestilence, and disinherit them" but Moses appealed to the Lord that He show mercy to the people, the result being that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years and that entire adult generation eventually died (or as it is rendered in the KJV, "your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness") before the people finally entered into the land.

* manna, when out of the shade melted, though hard. Likewise the hearts of their enemies would melt away, not having Jehovah for their shadow, or defense.

You'll want to read this book...more than once.

WSC

Der Spiegel has an interesting article on the growing conflict between Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda forces in Iraq. It appears that the head-cutters have worn out their welcome and they find themselves having to fight not only the Americans but also a substantial number of hostile Sunni Iraqis.

Too bad.

The article is filled with interesting anecdotes. Give it a look.

Kudos to Senators Mikulski and DeMint for their letter to Secretary of State Rice on behalf of Robert Stethem:

To read the text of their letter go to Michael Yon's site linked above.

Philosopher of science professor Bradley Monton of the University of Kentucky has written an excellent analysis of Judge Jones' (the presiding judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover) argument that Intelligent Design is not science. Monton, it's important to note, is not an advocate of ID, but he thinks that the Judge was simply wrong to conclude the following:

Monton analyzes each of these criteria and shows that each is philosophically unsustainable. Anyone interested in the ID-isn't-science-and-therefore-shouldn't-be-taught-in-public-schools argument should read Monton's piece. One of the many interesting passages is this one where he quotes a scientist named Mark Perakh who opposes ID:

Those who exulted in Judge Jones' opinion on the unscientific status of ID are simply unaware of the depth of the controversy over this question among philosophers and scientists. Monton concludes his paper with these words:

Of course, this last assertion actually presents a problem for the anti-IDers. The reason they want ID ruled out of bounds is precisely because they know that if people are "permitted" to think that ID is science they will find the evidence for design in the cosmos and in life, pace Monton, extremely compelling, at least intuitively. Better to discredit ID a priori by declaring it non-science and short-circuit the desire on the part of interested lay-people to examine the sorts of systems ID proponents say constitute evidence for an intelligent architect of the universe. Philosophers like Monton who place a higher premium on truth than on any particular metaphysical dogma will make it increasing difficult for the anti-IDers to succeed with that strategy in the years ahead.

ABC News has a report that Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant may be, even as you read this, cavorting with his 72 virgins in Allah's retirement home for blown-to-smithereens jihadis:

It's getting harder and harder for Osama to retain good help, a fact we take some satisfaction in and encouragement from. We hope that al-Zawahiri does indeed turn out to be part of the debris that investigators have to sift through, and we hope that his last mortal act of conscious awareness was the sight of that missile speeding through his window straight toward his wide-eyed, astonished self.

One wonders what goes through the minds of some teachers. How could anyone who works with kids be so morally tone-deaf as to not realize the stupidity of an assignment like this?

Perhaps the teacher should be made to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap for a couple of hours.

Throughout the Dover ID case the book Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon came in for a lot of criticism. Not having read it we're in no position to comment on the validity of the allegations made against it, but for those who are interested in whether Pandas is as bad as alleged this site offers a vigorous defense of the text and reveals Judge Jones' bias in his evaluation of it.

The Washington Post says that Alito will be confirmed, the Democrats being unable to seriously wound him. Indeed, if anything, the category five windbags on the Senate Judiciary Committee managed only to shoot themselves in their own posteriors with their unconscionable attempts to smear a fine man and an outstanding jurist:

The Post article goes on to predict that Alito will get 60 to 70 votes on the floor of the full Senate. He needs fifty to be confirmed.

And now for the Democrats' worst nightmare: Justice John Paul Stevens is 85 and Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 72. Either, or both, of them may retire soon and Bush might get to make at least one, and possibly two, more appointments to the Supreme Court in the three years he has left in his presidency. It will drive the liberals to despair to contemplate this, but there are a lot more judges of the quality of John Roberts and Sam Alito on his depth chart. Let's just hope that he's scratched off any more Harriet Meirs-type aberrations from that chart.

George Will rightly blasts contemporary teacher training in this Newsweek column. Will writes in part:

Such schools are a joke, of course, or would be if the consequences of their politically correct fecklessness weren't so serious, but even so, even among sensible people much of the discussion about what makes a good teacher misses the point.

We tend to think that the problem with teachers is that they just don't know enough, but based upon 35 years of observing my colleagues in a public high school I submit that knowledge is only one aspect of what it takes to be a good teacher. Perhaps it should go without saying that the ability to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism," and to "break silences" about those things and "develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist community [sic] and alliances are not even on the list.

Here are the five most crucial attributes of quality teachers, listed in what I believe to be their order of importance:

1. Character: A teacher is a role model whether he/she wants to be or not. If a prospective teacher doesn't want to be a role model then that individual should seek out another career. The teacher needs to present an image to students of what a good man or woman should be. He or she must be someone any parent would want his or her child to emulate. This means, among other things, that they should be exemplary in their personal lives, have an outstanding work ethic, and strive for fairness and kindness in the classroom.

2. Desire: A quality teacher must have a strong motivation to do the best job he or she possibly can. Teachers must demonstrably love kids and enjoy being around them and they must be willing to do much more for students than what their contract obligates them to do. Teachers who are in and out with the bell send the message that they don't really enjoy what they're doing and that message detracts from their performance in the classroom in a host of subtle ways.

3. Personality: To be effective a teacher has to have a personality that students find appealing. A teacher need not, and, in fact, should not, seek to be the students' "friend," but should rather be the sort of person that students enjoy spending time with in class.

4. Discipline: A teacher who cannot maintain a good learning environment in his or her classroom is not going to be effective. All the character, desire, and personality in the world do not help a teacher teach if the classroom is in chaos.

5. Knowledge: Contrary to conventional wisdom, teachers need not come to the job with a lot of expertise, but to be a quality teacher he/she must be willing, indeed eager, to learn as much as possible, not just about the subject matter entrusted to them to convey, but about all sorts of things, just for the sake of learning them. The best teachers communicate a love of learning to their students, it enriches their classrooms and their students, and students will absorb much more if they perceive the teacher to truly love the material he's teaching. Students will be more likely to be infected themselves with a desire to learn because they sit in a classroom where knowledge and understanding are prized and where a contagious love of learning is pervasive.

The best teachers I have known excelled in each of these characteristics, and a young man or young woman who lacks any of these is going to be less effective as a teacher than he or she might otherwise be. The good news, however, is that all of these qualities, even #3, can be nurtured, developed, and improved as long as the will to do so is present.

The Darwinist totalitarians are busily at work in California. A week or so ago we noted that the Left is never content to win the battle they say they want to win. Rather, each victory leads them to on to another fight to change the culture. So it is in Bakersfield where a school district took the oponents of Intelligent Design at their word when they said that ID is appropriate for a social studies or philosophy class but not a science class.

The administrators at Frazier Mountain High School decided to offer an elective philosophy course that would compare various theories of origins including, but not limited to, ID and naturalistic evolution.

Despite the fact that the course is a philosophy course and is an elective The Americans United for the Separation of Church and State have threatened the district with litigation if they don't yank it. See here for the story.

It should be becoming clear to average Americans that the fight against ID is not merely a battle to maintain the purity of science, as if such a thing existed, rather it is a battle to determine which metaphysical worldview is going to dominate our culture, including our schools: naturalistic materialism or some form of non-naturalism.

The naturalists are desperate that our young people not be informed that there are alternatives to naturalism, and thus ID must be kept out of our schools at all costs. Whether it is seen as a scientific or philosophical alternative or a sociological phenomenon doesn't matter. Students must not be allowed to think that there is any alternative to naturalism.

The day is not far off, we predict, when it will be seriously proposed that anyone with strong religious convictions be prohibited from teaching biology for fear that their convictions will spill over into his classroom instruction and taint his teaching. The day is even closer when any teacher with strong convictions will be prima facie disqualified from proposing an elective which examines naturalistic explanations of anything because the assumption will be that the teacher must have a religious motive for wanting to teach such a course.

Of course, no one should try to deny the truth of this because, for deeply devout persons, their religion colors and influences everything they do. Their whole life is informed by their devotion to God, so they have religious motives for everything they do. If they wish to teach a course that may touch upon the naturalism vs. non-naturalism controversy, then, it will be rightly argued, there must be at least a partial religious impetus behind their proposal, and therefore they must be refused.

Despite the fact that the premises of this argument are true, the conclusion would be grossly unjust for at least two reasons.

One is that similar restraints will not apply to the teacher who embraces naturalism. That teacher will be allowed to offer whatever course he/she wants because the presumption, as false as any presumption can be, is that naturalism is religiously neutral.

The second is that no one should be discriminated against on the basis of his or her religion. Teachers should be allowed to teach any course for which they are qualified and should be denied that opportunity only if they demonstrate that they can't be trusted not to flout the relevant laws regarding what can and cannot be taught in a public school.

Despite the injustice and unconstitutionality of such proposals, however, we're quite confident that they will be seriously advanced in the not too distant future.

Senator Kennedy has been beleaguering Judge Samuel Alito over his membership in a Princeton alumni association several decades ago, some members of which expressed racist and sexist opinions in writing. It's not clear that Alito was deeply involved with the group or that he held similar opinions, but the fair-minded Senator is trying his best to establish guilt by association.

Now it turns out according to Matt Drudge that the Senator himself was a member of an all-male club which refused membership to women:

As if this rather tenuous distinction would matter were it Alito who belonged to the Owl rather than Kennedy.

We think that the attempt to discredit someone and disgrace them because of some tangential membership in a moderately questionable organization several decades ago is reprehensible, but that's all the Democrats can do to stop Alito. Besides, political assassination is a favored and important part of their skill set.

Even so, it seems that the only thing that matches Kennedy's hypocrisy is his chutzpah. Here's a man who was expelled from Harvard for cheating, a man who should be humiliated and disgraced by his responsibility for the death of a young woman in 1969, a man who at a D.C. restaurant rolled on the floor with Senator Chris Dodd, a waitress wedged betwixt them in the infamous waitress sandwich, while the Senators' dates were in the restroom. And this man nevertheless sits on a senate panel lecturing Samuel Alito on moral matters. Teddy, despite his own past associations, pillories Alito for having years ago belonged to an association, some of whose members expressed politically unfortunate sentiments not much different than those held by the organization to which Kennedy himself belonged. Why does anyone pay any attention to anything this man says?

For younger readers who may not be aware of the Senator's responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne you can read about it here. Other episodes in Kennedy's life are recorded here.

Those of you who live in central Pennsylvania might be interested in this lecture:

It should be an interesting talk.

Well, here's the judge's record. It certainly looks like that of a "right-wing fanatic" as Stuart Taylor lays it out in an article in National Journal:

No wonder liberals and moderates begged Sandra Day O'Connor to forego her retirement and stay on the bench. Trouble is, as Taylor points out, the decisions and votes listed above are not Samuel Alito's. They're Sandra Day O'Connor's.

Read the whole piece for Taylor's explanation.

CNNMoney.com lists the 100 best places to live in the United States. You can do a search at the site for your town or city to see where it ranks. I was surprised to note that our humble little hamlet ranks 95th in the nation. If that's true then a lot of Americans must be living in pretty grim surroundings.

The Daily Kos recently interviewed biologist and blogger P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota. Myers, who has a reputation as an acidulous, no-holds-barred polemicist, says this:

What professor Myers in his naivete overlooks is that man can't live without faith in something. If traditional Christianity is relegated to anthropological museums something else will surely take its place. Over the last two centuries, in the West, the substitute has been naturalistic humanism. The Bolsheviks, for example, sought to eradicate Christianity from the Soviet Union and replace it with the atheistic religion of communism, a form of humanism. People like Myers wish to eliminate Christianity and replace it with scientistic humanism, or something similar.

Unfortunately, for the secularists, naturalistic religions are not adequate to the task of investing man with meaning and purpose. Unless there is a serious hope for an afterlife this life is utterly pointless. Death annihilates everything, including meaningfulness and the recognition of the abject futility of life leads men to despair and nihilism.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority, a moral lawgiver superior to man, there is no basis whatsoever for believing that anyone ought to behave in one way rather than another. There is no right or wrong behavior, only behaviors that people prefer to others. Man can't live that way and retain his freedom. The belief that there is no basis for morality leads directly to the view that might makes right and that leads to political oppression and tyranny.

Furthermore, if we are simply a temporary collection of molecules there's no reason to think that any of us have any dignity or worth beyond what we choose to assign to ourselves and to each other. If, as professor Myers believes, we're simply flesh and bone machines, then wherein lies our dignity? And if we have no dignity as human beings then what is the basis for our human rights? Such rights are simply fictions with which we comfort ourselves but which have no objective existence.

The interviewer asked Dr. Myers what is wrong with the idea of Irreducible Complexity. He replied:

Poor Dr. Myers. So blinded is he by his certainty that he just couldn't be wrong about his atheism that he fails to see that his very example actually supports the conclusions of IC theorists like Michael Behe. It is true that stone arches are built all the time, or at least they were in an earlier era, and it's true that the builder employs a scaffolding to erect the structure, but the point that Myers elides is that it takes an intelligent engineer to contrive this process and to carry it out. Stone arches don't assemble themselves, nor is the scaffolding which allows for their construction assembled through purely natural processes. A bridge that was built up from the cementing together of stones without any input from an intelligent architect, as Dr. Myers says, would indeed be a miracle.

Stephen Hayes has a must read piece in the Weekly Standard for anyone who accepts the current anti-Bush line that the secularist Saddam would never have had any relationship with an Islamist terror organization and that Bush's claims that he was sponsoring and sheltering terrorists was a lie. Hayes' devastates that argument. He writes:

There is much, much more at the link confirming what the administration told us prior to the war about Saddam's involvement with terrorism. Those who have been calling Bush a liar over this and other issues related to Iraq would do well to moderate their rhetoric lest they wind up completely discredited and uncredible. But, of course, they won't.

Teddy Kennedy, whose family manse at Hyannis Port, we may assume, regularly hosts soirees for poor, disenfranchised African Americans, made this claim yesterday:

Senator Teddy might want to present a severance check to whomever it is in his office who's doing his research for him. The Committee For Justice lists several cases where Alito did exactly what Kennedy claims he's never done. This is not an auspicious beginning for the Democratic inquisitors as they seek to make the case as to why "Alioto" should be burned at the stake.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.

Add the name of Harry Belefonte to the list of people suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), an affliction brought on by an intense, irrational hatred for the president that causes the sufferer to say and do the most astonishingly stupid things:

Maybe Harry's advancing years are causing him to hallucinate, but I doubt that there are a million people in this country who can even spell Venezuela, find it on a map, and name its national leader, much less who also know about the socialist/communist revolution taking place there, and actually support it.

NewsMax reports that Duke Cunningham who resigned in disgrace because of a bribery scandal has been cooperating with the FBI in their investigation of Jack Abramoff's malfeasance.

There's a lot more on this story at the NewsMax link. It appears that both Republicans and Democrats are going to be implicated in this scandal and that congressional heads will be rolling fast enough to give Madame DeFarge a case of the raptures.

We say that it's all to the good. Whatever party to which the miscreants belong they should be run out of Washington in disgrace if they are truly guilty of having violated the public's trust. It'll be good riddance.

Teddy Kennedy, of all people, questions Samuel Alito's credibility in a Washington Post editorial. Senator Kennedy, whose account of what happened at the Chappaquiddick bridge several decades ago should have forever disqualified him from pronouncing upon others' credibility, closes his column with this:

In the column Kennedy gives five reasons for doubting Alito's credibility, at least three of which distill to the fact that Alito is a conservative and only one of which seems to bear any non-partisan significance.

Kennedy avers that, although Alito promised in 1990 to recuse himself in any case involving the Vanguard mutual fund (in which he was heavily invested), a few years ago (2002) he nevertheless sat on a case in which that fund was involved. This doesn't appear to have been a breach of professional ethics but rather a matter of not having kept a promise to the senators who passed on his nomination to the court of appeals in 1990. That being so, we have to ask whether the judge thought that there were circumstances which made the promise not relevant to the 2002 case.

In any event, we're sure the good senator from Massachussetts will raise the question in the hearings, and we'll be interested to hear Alito's explanation.

Joe Carter directs our attention to this year's Edge Question, a project of a group called The World Question Center. Many of the world's leading scientific thinkers were asked to write their thoughts on this topic:

Carter summarizes the results of the essays submitted by some of the 119 respondents. It is an enlightening read. If there is one theme that runs through the essays it seems to be that science demands that we must stop believing in God and accept the dreary existential consequences.

It's an interesting modern phenomena that the materialist, thinking, like some modern day Prometheus, that he's liberating himself from the shackles of intellectual tyranny when he throws God aside, is in fact committing cultural suicide. He's depriving himself and the culture which embraces his materialism of any basis for genuine meaning, morality, and human dignity. Read the excerpts Carter provides and you'll see what I mean.

An American veteran of the Afghanistan conflict took on cut-and-runners Jim Moran and John Murtha at a town meeting filmed by C-Span. Part of the exchange went like this:

One thing congressmen certainly don't appreciate is being lectured to about the war by combat veterans. It's insulting to them to be chastised by someone who knows what he's talking about. Another soldier in the audience, a retired general and veteran of Vietnam, also unloaded on the hapless congressmen. Go here and click where it says download the video.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the text and Michelle Malkin for the video links.

Hugh Thompson died yesterday at the age of 62 of cancer. Thompson was a hero at the site of one of the worst atrocities in the history of the United States military. To find out why read this AP account:

Americans should be as proud of men like Thompson and his crewmates as we are ashamed of Calley and his troops.

Our thoughts on Judge Jones' decision in the Dover ID trial continues. In this installment we continue our look at his reasoning on the question of whether or not ID is true science. In his opinion he makes this comment:

Each of the Judge's assertions is dubious.

1. Judge Jones suggests that modern science excludes non-natural causes. This is not quite accurate. It doesn't exclude them, or at least it has no business doing so, it simply seeks to explain as much as it possibly can by means of natural causes. The problem is that some scientists argue that because naturalism is methodologically useful that therefore it is metaphysically true. They glide from its usefulness as a heuristic platform to the conclusion that only naturalistic hypotheses can be admitted into science. They assume that because non-natural causes can only be inferred and not empirically discerned, that therefore they're irrelevant. When scientists draw such conclusions they have wandered beyond the bounds of science into the realm of metaphysics.

There's an irony here incidentally. The assumption that only natural causes should be considered by scientists is not itself a scientific proposition, it's a philosophical preference. Nevertheless, it's a philosophical preference to which the Judge is willing to give free reign in science class, to the exclusion of any other philosophical alternative.

2. His second assertion is strange. In a passage we'll cite below, Judge Jones separates Irreducible Complexity (IC) from ID. He asserts there that IC is testable, but that it is a distinct theory from ID and so its testability doesn't assist ID rise to the level of true science. Now here in this passage he asserts that IC is central to ID. Are we confused or is the Judge?

But that aside, what, exactly, is flawed and illogical about inferring design from irreducible complexity? The problem with IC, if it has one, is that it's difficult to demonstrate that a particular system actually is irreducibly complex. If, however, it could be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that a system is indeed irreducibly complex, should we nevertheless ignore the telic implications of that finding simply because it would suggest a non-natural provenience. Judge Jones demands that the answer be "yes." He says, in effect, that we should deny ourselves scientific knowledge because the process of acquiring that knowledge conflicts with the philosophical preference for naturalism. Only naturalistic explanations can be permitted into Judge Jones' science classroom even if they're known to be inadequate and no non-natural explanation may be admitted even if it's believed to be highly probable. In his attempt to banish philosophy from the classroom he actually allows one philosophical position to prevail over another.

3. Judge Jones is confusing a response to a challenge with a refutation of that challenge. Just because scientists suggest logically possible answers to some of the questions raised by IC doesn't mean their answers are correct, plausible, or even physically possible. Much less does it mean that they've refuted IC. Since Michael Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box and posed his challenges to the scientific community many people have tried to come up with answers to the questions he raised, but whether the answers are adequate is not a judgment Judge Jones is qualified to make. Nor can he simply rely on the testimony of those who have suggested those answers that they have sufficiently refuted Behe. The scientific community as a whole must make that determination and that takes time. As of now, the outcome is uncertain.

The Judge goes on to make several more questionable claims:

If the judge thinks this is a refutation of ID, he's mistaken. No ID theorist would disagree with it. Design is itself an inference from confirmable data. It's an explanation based upon the empirical evidence of the natural world. It would be well, though, for physics teachers who explore with their advanced students cosmogeny, string theory, and the existence of other universes, to take note that they are running afoul of the Judge's guidelines for what they are permitted to teach.

Well, no, it's not a "science stopper." Would the Judge repeat this assertion to Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Galileo, or any of dozens of other scientific worthies who continued to seek the natural causes of phenomena even while convinced that their ultimate cause was God? Of course not. All these men believed that the causes they were seeking to discern were proximal causes. The ultimate cause may be intelligence, but that is no reason to stop searching for the means by which the designer accomplished what it did.

This is incorrect. ID looks at natural phenomena such as genetic information, bio-machines, and complex biological processes and instead of accepting inadequate explanations, i.e. those which seek to explain these phenomena as just an incredible fluke of nature caused by blind, purposeless mechanisms, asks whether the ultimate explanation might not involve intention and purpose. Intelligence is not proffered as proximal causes for natural entities. Rather it's considered an ultimate explanation of phenomena for which there is no plausible naturalistic explanation.

This is philosophically naive and tendentious. Surely the Judge knows that neither science nor philosophy proves anything. To fault the concept of irreducible complexity because it falls short of being a proof is to hold it to a standard that nothing else in science must meet. Nor is the Judge's statement that "irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution" correct. Michael Behe, the chief advocate of IC, is himself an evolutionist. Irreducible complexity is an argument not against evolution but against naturalism. This point has been made so often by so many different people that it's astonishing that the Judge still hasn't grasped it. Nor are IC arguments merely negative arguments. Irreducible complexity, if it truly exists, is a powerful affirmative argument in support of the proposition that intelligence undergirds the fundamental architecture of life.

Not only does this paragraph contradict what the Judge said in the paragraph at the beginning of this post, it is simply ridiculous on its face. The argument appears to be that since IC only seeks to show that three systems are intelligently designed, and since ID argues that all of life is ultimately designed, therefore IC is not ID. If, however, only one of Behe's systems could be shown to be intelligently designed then that would confirm not only IC but also ID since it would entail that there is, in fact, an intelligent designer.

The Judge doesn't think that IC makes it's case, though, because Dr. Miller says that it doesn't:

The conclusion the Judge should draw from this is that there is serious scientific debate as to whether Behe is right. The jury is still out. Just because some people say that the flagellum might have evolved solely through unguided mechanisms and blind chance doesn't mean that they are correct. Once again, Judge Jones is content to consider a conjecture to be a refutation.

Behe said they're not good enough because he believed these articles and books failed to show that the immune system could have evolved through purely natural means. The quantity of speculation about something is not evidence of its facticity. There've been many books and articles written about the possibility of other universes. Does Judge Jones think that we should accept the existence of such universes based on the copious speculation about them? And why does he think that demanding plausible explanations is an "unreasonable burden of proof"?

Wouldn't it be incumbent upon those who believe ID is false to conduct this test? If a flagellum were to appear in a laboratory environment that was only minimally affected by the intelligent input of the researcher, it would pretty much falsify ID, at least in the minds of most people. The reason no such test is conducted is because none of the opponents of ID really thinks that such a structure could ever be produced in the laboratory by chance and physical mechanisms alone in any reasonable amount of time.

In other words, not only do ID opponents believe they can't falsify ID, they tacitly acknowledge that their own theory is untestable. If a flagellum failed to arise in whatever amount of time was spent trying to have one appear the researcher could always plead that naturalistic evolution takes more time. But no matter how much time was granted, even billions of years, if the organelle still failed to materialize, the same plea for more time could be made. Put simply, naturalistic evolution is unfalsifiable and by Judge Jones' lights should be banned from science classes.

Judge Jones repeatedly trots out the Pandas textbook in order to discredit ID, but this is a straw man argument. It's easy to find bad science in books which endorse naturalistic evolution, too, but that's not a compelling reason to reject the theory. Any fair-minded person should base his judgment not upon the worst arguments that are offered on behalf of a proposition, but upon the best.

Of course, as we've argued above, it is possible that it's neither science nor theology but rather that, just like its Darwinian alternative, it's philosophy of science. However, to make the claim that it's not science requires of the Judge that he separate IC from ID because, as he's noted, IC is testable. The attempt to affect this divorce is philosophically awkward, though, and at the very least calls for a more modest conclusion than the Judge's confident assertion that ID is not science. He may be right, but much of the reasoning that leads him to his conclusion is deeply flawed.

For previous posts in this series on the Dover trial see here, here, and here.

The Democrats' strategy to sink the Samuel Alito nomination is unfolding, and it's pretty ugly, as you might have expected. The plan is, evidently, to smear him with guilt by association. Here's what Matt Drudge has discovered about one part of the battle plan to destroy a man's reputation:

The thinking on the Left, apparently, is that if a man is clearly qualified on the basis of intellect and judicial record then he must be crucified even so by finding evidence in his past of something nefarious, even if it has to be invented. Nice people, these Democrats.

Earlier this week we linked to a site that listed the top ten best conservative movies of the last decade. If you like that sort of thing then you might want to peruse the selections by both Roy Ankar and Peter Chattaway over at Books and Culture. Ankar and Chattaway give their opinion of the top ten films of 2005. It's interesting that there's very little overlap between their lists.

I'm just back from a great week in the highlands of Costa Rica chasing after the marvelous birdlife down there. It's hard to describe to someone who is not particularly interested in the beauty of the natural world how incredibly gorgeous many of the Costa Rican species are - certainly the pictures in the field guides don't capture the richness and subtlety of the colors of many of the birds and butterflies. For those who do have an appetite for nature's beauty, Costa Rica is a wonderful place to attempt to satisfy it.

I've revelled in every moment of my time there each of my three visits (at least I have once I've been able to get clear of the San Jose airport), and if it weren't for the fact that my family is here I'd have had a hard time leaving.

Anyway, I had prepared a few things for Bill to post in my absence, and he helped fill the gap with some of his own thoughts, for which I'm grateful. I hope to have more to post tonight.

There's an expression on Wall Street that goes: "There are Bulls and there are Bears...but there ain't no Pigs." Why is that? Because their greed causes them to either go broke or, in the case that follows, be left on the sidelines.

Over the last couple of weeks I read several articles from some of the "experts" in the industry suggesting that since gold had hit its highest price for the last 24 years that gold had "gotten ahead of itself", was a little "toppy", due for a "substantial correction" or "pull back". And so they were recommending that people sell their gold and wait on the sidelines until the "correction" was over where they expected a gold price of around $450 - $460 per ounce. At that time, of course they would give the "all clear" signal that it was time to jump back in for the next leg up of the gold bull market. Imagine that, knowing exactly when to sell high and when to buy low.

Given the chart at this link, we can see where the price of gold reached about $337 not too long ago. Then, as our learned pundits declared, the price surely corrected, but only to around $496. In a dramatic "whip saw" action, the price climbed to the recent high of around $540 as quickly as it had dropped.

Now our little piglets have a problem. They sold their gold at the previous high, and seeing that they were correct in their prognostications, probably sold more of it as the price dropped. Now they're out of the market...on the sidelines waiting to get back in at around $460, but the gold price has returned to a new high. Ouch!

Sure, the gold price could have dropped further and our piggies would have cleaned up. In any event (here's where it really gets exciting) at some point, our sellers will decide to take their lumps and buy back into the market at considerably higher prices. Their greed will compel them to do so...and suppose the gold price corrects to $460 a day or week later. D'oh!

In a bull market such as we have in gold, attempting to time the market is particularly risky, especially when it's so unnecessary. A safer strategy is simply to buy and hold for the long term and perhaps make an additional purchase during those ubiquitous corrections as they occur if one is inclined to add to their portfolio. One thing is for certain, it sure is easier on the nerves.

The only other consideration I would have regards the question of how long this gold bull market will continue. While no one can say precisely, I believe I have a reasonably solid method of determining the answer to that question which is: for as long as the fundamental issues that are driving the price of gold higher continue their trend. Some of these fundamentals are:

• Increasing trade deficit
• Increasing budget deficit
• Increasing inflation / increasing cost of commodities (oil, gas, copper, silver, gold, etc.)
• Increasing Middle East tension
• Increasing demand by China and India for energy
• Increasing interest by foreign countries to diversify out of their US dollar reserves into other currencies and hard assets

I think it's safe to say that if and when these fundamentals start to slow down or decline, it might be time to reassess the portfolio. Personally, I don't see that happening anytime soon rather they continue to accelerate.

WSC

From Sweden comes word of yet another insult to Christianity and Christians:

Mr. Atldax reveals a deep ignorance of history if he thinks that Christianity has been at the root of more than a small fraction of man's chronic inhumanity to man. Perhaps he could remedy his appalling lack of knowledge by doing a little reading. For starters he might pore over Paul Johnson's Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties to get a sense of the utter devastation that secularist philosophies have wrought upon the world in just the seventy short years Johnson surveys. Then he could follow up with Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization by Alvin J. Schmidt, a book which pretty much explains what its title suggests.

Such an educational program may not make Mr. Atldax any more sympathetic to Christianity, but it'll at least help him avoid embarrassing himself in the future with the sort of dopey statements he makes in the paragraphs cited above.

RLC

The Pew Forum has a fascinating Q & A with Edward Larsen, a prominent professor of law and historian of science, who fields questions from journalists about religion in public life and particularly the conflict between evolution and ID.

RLC

Claremont Review of Books' Charles Kesler writes a provocative column explaining how secularist trends are steering us toward what Pope John Paul II called practical atheism. He says:

The secularists insist that they don't want to prevent people from expressing religious sentiments, they only wish to purge those sentiments from our public spaces. Perhaps, but when the left gains one success they usually seek to follow it up with others. Ideological victories are to them like dominoes. They say they only wish to knock down the first, but they're never content with that. If laws establishing marriage as a bond between one man and one woman ever fall to those who aspire to gay marriage, there will be hardly time to catch one's breath before the laws banning polyamory (group marriage) will come under assault. Once smoking is banned in all public places there will come efforts, indeed there already have, to ban it in the privacy of one's car and home.

The problem with religion, from the standpoint of most secularists, is not merely that its unfettered public expression imposes a form of discrimination on the dissenting citizen, the problem is that religion itself is an evil that needs to be eliminated in order for mankind to truly flourish. Attempts to scrub the public square clean of religious imagery and ideas are just the first necessary steps to ridding society of this atavistic affliction altogether. The battle between the faithful and their cultured despisers will continue as long as the courts can be counted on by the secularists to rule on their behalf.

RLC

The Pew Forum has a fascinating Q & A with Edward Larsen, a prominent professor of law and historian of science, who fields questions from journalists about religion in public life and particularly the conflict between evolution and ID.

RLC

Claremont Review of Books' Charles Kesler writes a provocative column explaining how secularist trends are steering us toward what Pope John Paul II called practical atheism. He says:

The secularists insist that they don't want to prevent people from expressing religious sentiments, they only wish to purge those sentiments from our public spaces. Perhaps, but when the left gains one success they usually seek to follow it up with others. Ideological victories are to them like dominoes. They say they only wish to knock down the first, but they're never content with that. If laws establishing marriage as a bond between one man and one woman ever fall to those who aspire to gay marriage, there will be hardly time to catch one's breath before the laws banning polyamory (group marriage) will come under assault. Once smoking is banned in all public places there will come efforts, indeed there already have, to ban it in the privacy of one's car and home.

The problem with religion, from the standpoint of most secularists, is not merely that its unfettered public expression imposes a form of discrimination on the dissenting citizen, the problem is that religion itself is an evil that needs to be eliminated in order for mankind to truly flourish. Attempts to scrub the public square clean of religious imagery and ideas are just the first necessary steps to ridding society of this atavistic affliction altogether. The battle between the faithful and their cultured despisers will continue as long as the courts can be counted on by the secularists to rule on their behalf.

RLC

Investor's Business Daily is bullish on 2006 and bullish on America:

Religious, political, and economic freedom, plus private ownership of property are the four pillars upon which this country was built and the four reasons why life here is so much better than it is anywhere else in the world where these principles are not honored. As we take our first steps into 2006 we should remind ourselves to be vigilant against those abroad who would deprive us of those four pillars by violence and those at home who would weaken and erode them through judicial activism and legislative overreaching.

RLC

Sounds to us like a wonderful show about your average Christian family that we'll want to bring the whole family together to watch. And writer Jack Kenny strikes us as a very insightful theologian, but we could be wrong. Unfortunately, I'll be dusting my bookshelves the evening of the 6th and will have to miss the premier.

Bayes' theorem is all the rage among philosophers of a certain analytic stripe nowadays and Joe Carter employs it to come up with a clever argument that a telic universe and biosphere is much more probable than one that emerged through blind, non-telic, processes.

The idea behind Bayes' theorem is that it is possible to calculate the probability of something occuring or existing given the hypothetical existence of certain other conditions. In the case of Carter's argument he seeks to employ the Bayesian formula to calculate the probability that the universe would be structured the way it is given the non-existence of an intelligent architect and compare that probability to the liklihood that the universe would be structured as it is given that such a designer does exist.

Give it a look. It's interesting.

RLC

For the final post in our series on Christian belief we'll consider the foundational event upon which all of Christendom is based, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If Jesus had only performed miracles, affirmed His deity, and died a martyr's death on the cross, He would have been promptly forgotten by time within a generation or two after his death. He would have been regarded at best as a pious dreamer and at worst a fraud and charlatan.

The Resurrection, however, authenticates everything He said and did during His life. It stamps His ministry with the words, "this must be true." Paul writes that if Christ is not raised our faith is worthless and we're still in our sins (I Cor.15:16-19). In other words, Christianity rests on the fact of the physical, historical Resurrection. When Jesus was asked for a sign to confirm His teaching about Himself He enigmatically replied that if His body is destroyed in three days it will be raised back up.

Jesus' Resurrection has always been the firmest ground for Christian belief in a life after death. Because God raised Him, Paul writes, we can have a realistic hope, indeed an assurance, that He can and will do the same for us.

But, a miracle like this is awfully hard to accept in our modern world (See here for more on the topic of miracles and the modern mind). People just don't come back to life once they are dead. What's the evidence for believing that a resurrection is really what happened?

We should start by asserting that there is nothing impossible, either logically or physically, about such an event. A revivification would only be logically impossible if there were some sort of contradiction entailed by the proposition that a dead man came back to life, but there's nothing self-contradictory about this. It would only be physically impossible if naturalism is true, that is, if there is nothing to reality but matter and energy. Yet although many people believe that naturalism is true no one can know that it is. If God exists, If God is real, miracles are possible. Since it is certainly possible that God exists it is therefore physically possible that a dead man could have been brought back to life.

Yes, the skeptic replies, but it's highly unlikely, and we should parcel out our belief according to what our experience shows is most likely. Our experience shows that any natural explanation, no matter how implausible, is still more likely than that there was an irregularity in the laws of nature because those laws are uniform and unbreakable.

This of course, begs the question, as C.S. Lewis points out in his little work On Miracles. We can only know that the laws of nature are uniform if we know that there are never any irregularities, i.e. miracles, but we can only know that there are never any miracles if we already know that the laws of nature are uniform.

Again, if there is a personal God then miracles are indeed possible and we need to consider the plausibility of an alleged instance of one based upon the evidence. In the case of the Resurrection of Jesus, the evidence, as many Christian apologists have pointed out, starts with the fact that the thing that we can be most certain of is that the tomb was empty on the first Easter morning.

How can we be sure of that? Because all that the early opponents of Christianity had to do to stamp out the nascent "heresy" in their midst was produce the corpse of the man the Christians were saying had risen from the dead, but this they never did. Moreover, a significant number of the early disciples gave their lives for their belief that Jesus was alive. This is inexplicable given the fact that no sane person sacrifices his life for something he knows is a lie. Moreover, the earliest official accounts of what happened at the tomb claimed that the disciples stole the body, but why did the authorities spread that story if the corpse was not missing?

The question, then, is not whether the tomb was empty, but rather how did it get that way?

Several theories have been placed in circulation to offer an alternative to the Biblical proclamation that Jesus was radically transformed into something much different than He had been prior to His death. We'll consider just two of the most popular.

The first, as noted above, is that the followers of Christ stole the body, but this is totally implausible. These were men and women, peasants and fishermen, cowering in hiding, afraid that the authorities were going to come to arrest them. To think that they were able to sneak past the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb, roll away a heavy stone, and steal the body without drawing notice is difficult to believe. But even if this is what happened, why weren't the disciples arrested and questioned for breaking the law and stealing the body? Again, if this is what happened why were these same men willing to suffer torture, imprisonment, hardship, and even martyrdom to proclaim to people what they knew to be false, that Jesus was alive?

The second theory is that Jesus didn't really die but merely passed out and later revived in the tomb. This is even less plausible than the first hypothesis. Consider His condition. He had been without food, water, and medical care for over two days. He had been horribly scourged, nailed to a timber, his shoulder and elbow joints would have dislocated as he hung from the cross-beam, and he had been speared in the side so deeply that bodily fluids gushed from His abdominal cavity. Even so, we are asked to believe, He somehow only passed out on the cross and revived while in the tomb. Despite His weakened state, He managed to roll away the heavy stone at the entrance, sneak past the guards, and appear to His disciples in such triumphant glory that they were convinced He had actually been brought back to life by God.

If this is what happened, of course, the disciples would have soon realized that Jesus was in bad shape and had not been raised to any genuinely new life at all. Furthermore, Jesus would eventually have died and His followers would have known that. How then do we explain the willingness of these men and women to undergo torture and execution, all the while steadfastly refusing to renounce their conviction that Jesus had overcome death?

To be sure, the implausibility of these theories is not a proof that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead. There could have been some other explanation for the empty tomb that no one knows about. But what the difficulty in explaining the empty tomb does do is give credence to the testimony of the eye-witnesses, it shows that the person who is willing to give the scriptural narrative the benefit of the doubt is not taking an irrational position. For the person who believes that God exists, there is no compelling rational argument against the claim that the Resurrection actually occurred. Indeed, the only argument against it is the skeptic's certainty that miracles don't happen.

Something, however, did happen that morning in a remote corner of the world which forever transformed history. Whatever it was changed thousands of lives in the immediate aftermath and millions more thereafter. It must have been dramatic. The Gospels tell us that it was the astonishing sight of the risen Christ, and there is no reason, other than that we just don't want it to be true, not to believe that witness.

RLC

Terry Eastland explains why he thinks Samuel Alito is going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court despite the howls of protest likely to accompany his confirmation hearings.

By the way, those hearings commence on January 9th and will likely be replete with all manner of senatorial grandstanding and other buffoonery. We hope Senator Kennedy does better getting Judge Alito's name right than he did in his futile attempt a couple of months ago to get a handle on the name of Senator Obama, which at one point he had transformed into Osama Obama.

We're looking forward to the proceedings.

RLC

I recently received my last paycheck for the year. Often, I wonder where in the world my money is going as like most of us, it seems to go out faster than it comes in. Where, I ask myself, is my money going???!!!

Well, I think I have discovered at least part of the answer to my question. First I looked at the deductions portion on the pay stub. You know, the government grab known as Federal Withholding, FICA, MEDFICA, and State. Some folks also have County and City.

That accounted for a full 30% difference between what I earned and what I took home. 30% !!! Those dollars are gone and might as well have been thrown down a rat hole for all the benefit I will ever receive from them.

But that doesn't resolve my continual confusion about why it's so difficult to save. Then I began to consider this partial list of other taxes (including the ones mentioned above) that I must spend from my earnings that have already been taxed!!!...

• Accountants Receivable Tax
• Building Permit Tax
• Capital Gains Tax ( a tax on your savings )
• CDL License Tax
• Cigarette Tax
• Corporate Income Tax
• Court Fines ( indirect taxes )
• Dog License Tax
• Federal Income Tax
• Federal Unemployment Tax
• Fishing License Tax
• Food License Tax
• Fuel Permit Tax
• Gasoline Tax
• Hunting License Tax
• Inheritance Tax Interest expense ( tax on the money )
• Inventory Tax IRS Interest Charges ( tax on top of tax )
• IRS Penalties ( tax on top of tax )
• Liquor Tax
• Local Income Tax
• Luxury Taxes
• Marriage License Tax
• Medicare Tax
• Property Tax
• Real Estate Tax
• Septic Permit Tax
• Service Charge Taxes
• Social Security Tax
• Road Usage Taxes ( Truckers )
• Sales Taxes
• Recreational Vehicle Tax
• School Tax
• State Income Tax
• State Unemployment Tax
• Telephone Federal Excise Tax
• Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
• Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
• Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
• Telephone Recurring and Non-Recurring Charges Tax
• Telephone State and Local Tax
• Telephone Usage Charge Tax
• Toll Bridge Taxes
• Toll Tunnel Taxes
• Traffic Fines ( indirect taxation )
• Trailer Registration Tax
• Vehicle License Registration Tax
• Vehicle Sales Tax
• Watercraft Registration Tax
• Well Permit Tax
• Workers Compensation Tax

None of these taxes existed 100 years go, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no debt, had the largest middle class in the world and mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What happened? Simple. America has become a liberal, socialist, welfare state.

And there's another tax that is referred to as the "hidden" tax...the insidious tax of inflation.

And another link:

It's as though you have given your check book to the government, or more accurately, they simply have taken it.

WCS

Our New Year's resolution at Viewpoint is to continue to bring our readers thoughtful and incisive commentary on the political, religious, and social issues of the day, especially where these interface with science and philosophy. If you look forward to, and enjoy, reading us even half as much as we enjoy writing for you we will consider our task here to be worthwhile.

We hope you'll continue to read us regularly throughout the year and that you'll link us frequently to your family and friends.

RLC

Don Feder at FrontPage Mag lists his top ten conservative movies of the year 2005. What's as interesting as his picks is his definition of a conservative movie:

He goes on to mention what he regards as the best conservative films of the last ten years:

Go here for his ten best of the year.

The Jerusalem Post reports that planning for a strike on Iran is well along. The twist, though, is that the Post thinks that the attack will be carried out by American forces rather than by Israelis:

Let's hope, and pray, that Iran reconsiders its nuclear ambitions and makes such an attack unnecessary.