Those following the mysterious tale of the assassination of the Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month may be interested in some of the latest developments. According to DEBKAfile:

Well, now. I don't know who DEBKAfile's sources are, but if this was not a Mossad operation who else would be trying to send the message that they could strike anywhere in the Middle East?

I also wonder why DEBKAfile thinks there's no real evidence of a crime if the suspects can be seen surreptitiously entering the room before the murder and leaving it afterwards, locking the body inside. That certainly seems like evidence to me.

Anyway, the TimesOnline reports that since the assassination became public young Israelis are applying for jobs with Mossad in droves.

RLC

Ramirez offers his perspective on why Republicans don't want to go along with Democrats on health care:

Pretty funny.

RLC

One of the sidebar debates in the intelligent design controversy is the clash between IDers and theistic evolutionists. Both agree that the world is intentionally designed but IDers believe that the evidence of this design can be detected in the world whereas TEers don't. TEers argue that natural forces and laws have produced the world as we see it (at least the living world) but that these laws and forces were the product of a Divine mind. Thus, TEers maintain, even though God is the primary cause of the world, we can know this only by faith not by any discovery of science.

According to TE the world appears just as it would were natural forces and laws solely responsible for it. IDers argue that, on the contrary, the world shows immense evidence of an underlying intelligence. The intelligence may not be that of the God of the Bible (though most IDers personally believe it is), but it's an intelligence all the same.

It seems like a small difference to be so exercised over but the theistic evolutionists, at least, are adamant, and sometimes even angry, in their opposition to ID, especially their opposition to treating ID as science.

A good introduction to the difference between the two positions is a debate that took place about a year ago between William Lane Craig and Francisco Ayala who addressed the question: Is Intelligent Design Viable? Craig argued for the affirmative and, as usual, pretty much dominated the event, which is interesting because Craig is a philosopher (not even a philosopher of science) and Ayala is a biologist.

Anyway, if you'd like to hear the audio you can listen to it here. There's also video of Craig's opening presentation here. The comments at the first site are also worth checking.

RLC

The critics of abstinence-only education have been nothing if not adamantine in their insistence that AE doesn't work, that kids are going to have sex no matter what we say, and that we owe it to our young people to give them information on how to protect themselves.

According to a column by Mona Charen that point of view has recently gotten much harder to sustain. Charen says that the claim that kids are going to have sex regardless of what they hear from their elders just isn't supported by recent research reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine:

Charen goes on to note that supporters of so-called "comprehensive sex ed," with its heavy emphasis on "safe sex" and condoms, have always argued that "no matter what we say, the kids are going to have sex anyway so they might as well be safe." But they never adopted that logic with, say, cigarettes. They didn't lobby for mandatory filters on the grounds that the kids were going to smoke willy-nilly.

Good point. The problem is that too many people think that, unlike smoking, the only negative consequences of youthful sexual adventures are pregnancy or disease and that if kids protect themselves against these then sex is no more problematic than soccer.

This strikes me as incredibly naive. Sex is psychoemotional nitroglycerin. It's extremely volatile and often changes everything in a relationship. When two people not related in a life-long commitment allow their relationship to go physical the change is often for the worse. I can't prove this, of course, but it seems to me to be a universal human experience. It's why the fear that a boy will no longer respect her after sex is prevalent among many girls. It's why so many relationships falter once the couple has allowed it to become sexual. It's even the impetus behind the lyrics to the 1964 Supremes song "Where Did Our Love Go?" for heaven's sake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about how the way we see a person changes once we "know" them. He wasn't talking about sex, but he easily could have been:

I know I'm coming across to a lot of people as though I'm a hopeless anachronism, but nevertheless I think it's true that if a girl wants to increase the chances that she'll have a successful marriage one thing she should do would be to make him wait.

RLC

I don't know what, if anything, will come of the Health Care Summit the President presided over yesterday, but one thing will almost certainly change. The perception, encouraged by the media, that the Republicans are simply the party of "no," that they have no plan, and that they're uninformed on health care, will no longer be tenable. I didn't watch the whole thing, but in what I did watch the Republicans seemed very well prepared, very bright, and full of ideas. Perhaps I didn't watch enough, but the Democrats seemed to base their arguments mostly on emotional appeals.

The fundamental difference between the two groups seems to be this: The Democrats are primarily concerned with extending coverage to millions of people who don't have it at present. The Republicans are primarily concerned with cutting the costs of health care for everyone which would have as one of its indirect benefits making coverage affordable for those who can't afford it now.

I don't see how extending coverage to millions of people can do other than drive the country to fiscal ruin, which is why I think the republican emphasis is the proper one. It'll do no good to have universal coverage if a third of the nation's workers are out of work.

Anyway, here's an example of why I say it'll be very hard for the media to continue to portray the GOP as inept, uninvolved in the health care issue, and simply trying to obstruct the President for none but political reasons. This is a video of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It's a little wonky, but he certainly generates confidence that he knows what he's talking about and isn't just throwing out feel-good platitudes for the tv cameras:

RLC

It seems that Planned Parenthood is in a contest with ACORN to see whose employees can most often be caught flouting the law.

This video was shot in Wisconsin where sex between an adult and a girl age 16 or under is a felony and must be reported to the authorities by any health care professional who becomes aware of it. Apparently, some PP employees don't think that applies to them:

It'll be interesting to see if Sonia is prosecuted. Any bets?

RLC

In the third and final part of our series on C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves we find Lewis sharing some scathing thoughts on the effect of women on male/male friendship. He's not writing of women in general, it must be emphasized, but of a certain kind of woman who is not interested in the things which interest the men in her ambit and who may sometimes begrudge them their friendships:

Lewis was writing in a time when there was often a much greater disparity between the education of men and women. Even so, he does have an eye for human nature. Men are much more likely to talk about things which women find boring, and vice-versa, and it's certainly true that the presence of people who are bored by a conversation is often fatal to it. This is especially so if the bored, uninformed party seeks to enter the conversation in order to change it or resents not being able to participate in it in the first place.

RLC

Senate Democrats under Harry Reid, and with the encouragement of President Obama, are expected to push health care reform through the Senate in a process called "Reconciliation" which is actually intended to be used only for budgetary measures. Under Reconciliation, which is now called "the nuclear option," a bill only needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.

The Democrats are planning to use this tactic to pass health care because they lack the 60 votes necessary in the senate to close off a Republican filibuster. If they go the route of Reconciliation they would only need 50 votes (plus the Vice-President's tie-breaker)to pass the reforms they are trying to enact.

The amusing irony is that back in 2005 the Democrats were, via filibuster, blocking a number of President Bush's judicial appointments, and the President threatened to use Reconciliation to get them through. The Democrats in the Senate were in high dudgeon. Senator Schumer accused Bush of precipitating a constitutional crisis. Then Senator Biden prayed to God that the Democrats would never do something so low. Senators Clinton and Reid decried the move as an arrogant power grab.

Here, thanks to Breitbart tv and Naked Emperor News, is the video of our august senators declaiming against the perfidy of the Bush administration in 2005:

That was then, of course, and this is now. Now these same people are all (Mrs. Clinton excepted since she's no longer in the Senate and hasn't stated her opinion on the matter) very much in favor of doing precisely what their principles impelled them to so vehemently oppose when the GOP was in power.

If we weren't as charitable as we are here at Viewpoint we might call this rank, cynical hypocrisy, but we are charitable so we'll just call it an astonishing inconsistency.

RLC

Recently Keith Olbermann of MSNBC thought he'd score a few points on his Countdown show by somewhat unctuously challenging the tea-partiers to explain why there are no minorities at their events. The Dallas Tea Party turned Mr. Olbermann's criticism rather cleverly back upon him in this ad:

The best part is the "Have you no shame, sir?" line which is one of Olbermann's favorite rhetorical cudgels. He uses it often against whomever it is he wishes to disgrace on a particular day.

RLC

Stories on the assault on Marjah in Afghanistan are reporting that it's going slower "than expected." Little wonder that that's the case when you read about another battle in Afghanistan at Ganjgal. If the situation in Marjah is like it was in Ganjgal it's a wonder that the operation is making any headway at all.

Four Marines lost their lives in Ganjgal largely because the artillery support the commanding officer requested when they were ambushed was denied because the Rules of Engagement forbade using artillery if civilians might be killed. As a result four Marines and nine Afghan soldiers died:

If you go to the link be sure to click on the video.

It is certainly proper that we do all we can to limit civilian casualties, but we should not be sending our young men into combat if we're going to be so punctilious about harming civilians that we sacrifice our sons rather than give them the support they need. If these are the Rules of Engagement our President is going to set then it is morally reprehensible of him to put Americans in the line of fire at all. He should withdraw them from Afghanistan immediately or explain why, as in the case of the battle of Ganjgal, these men were denied the cover they needed.

While he's at it he might also try to explain to the American people why anyone should join the military when the politicians are unwilling to do everything they reasonably can to insure their safety.

RLC

While reflecting on an earlier post (see Dawkins' Non-Answer) one of my students, a fellow named Quinn, suggested I watch a video of particle physicist Brian Cox explaining the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The lecture really is very good - simple and easy to understand (as long as you've had high school level physics). Cox gives us a good primer on what particle physics is all about and the significance of the Higgs Boson which is the quarry the LHC folks are seeking.

Quinn also makes a good point about the end of the video, but watch it first and then read his comment below. Cox's lecture is worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch. Better yet, read Dawkins' Non-Answer then watch the video, and then read Quinn's thoughts.

Quinn writes:

RLC

Here are a couple more quotes from C.S. Lewis' chapter in The Four Loves devoted to Friendship:

More tomorrow. See here for Part I.

RLC

Heather watched a couple of the sessions in Professor Michael Sandel's class on Justice at Harvard and came away a little underwhelmed. She has some very perceptive comments on the vacuousness of much contemporary ethical discourse, and I thought others might appreciate what she wrote:

Heather is exactly right. What happens in so many of our ethical discussions is what philosophers call "emoting." All that happens is that people share their tastes and feelings. It's like having students get up in an auditorium and declare their preference between Coke or Pepsi. It's absolutely inane unless those opinions are grounded in some transcendent foundation, but for the modern secular student there is no such ground so all they can do is emote.

RLC

Walter Russell Mead rather colorfully, and perhaps prematurely, issues a death certificate for the late movement to reverse global climate change:

Mead goes on to place the lion's share of the blame on Al Gore:

One reason for the rapid collapse of the movement, if indeed it has collapsed, besides the obvious fraud and appalling sloppiness that's been uncovered at East Anglia and elsewhere, is that global climate change became a left-wing political cause and thus a tool with which to undermine capitalism. This came at a time when people were growing increasingly impatient with attempts to destroy the American way of life. The shame is that if climate change really is man-made and environmentally threatening, the world will have been poorly served by those who substituted ideological propaganda and deviousness for calm, disinterested science.

RLC

I recently read C.S. Lewis' Four Loves and enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought I'd share some of them with readers of Viewpoint over the next couple of days. These should get us started:

I'll have more in a day or two.

RLC

Replying to the post of 2/10 titled Root Causes which discussed Heather MacDonald's article in City Journal on the correlation between crime and other dysfunctions with fatherlessness, William writes to tell us that the importance of fatherhood was known even in the days of Caesar Augustus. He writes that Augustus:

Augustus' concern appears to have been to shame men who were not doing enough to populate the Roman empire, but perhaps there's something here that we could borrow from the Romans. Perhaps it would be a good idea to publicly ridicule not bachelors but any man who spawns children without providing a proper home and support for them. There would need to be provision for exceptional cases, of course, but by and large, the idea of humiliating those who act in socially irresponsible ways has a certain appeal to it.

Indeed, this seems to be the impetus behind MSNBC's regular airing of their "stings" of adult men who seek out sexual liaisons with teenage girls. Maybe MSNBC could be prevailed upon to start filming, and shaming, men who sire children out of wedlock and then leave the mother to raise the offspring pretty much by herself. After all, if it's appropriate to shame men for one form of child abuse it's certainly appropriate to shame them for another.

RLC

Were the recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan a result of U.S. diplomacy or increasing frustration in the Pakistani government with the brutality of the Taliban? Most likely the new cooperation from Pakistan in the war on terror is a combination of both as this WaPo article suggests. Here's an excerpt:

It's unclear how long Pakistan's assistance will last, but it must have sent shudders up the backs of the Taliban, as they cast about for some refuge to escape the relentless Americans and their predator drones, to know that now they're not safe even in Karachi.

RLC

Bethel College philosopher Chad Meister and Biola University philosopher William Lane Craig recently published a co-edited a response to the challenges posed by the "New Atheists." Taking off on Christopher Hitchens' book titled God Is Not Great, Meister and Craig put together, God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable and Responsible.

Meister talks about the book in an interview with the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Here's an excerpt:

I would add that not only is it more intellectually honest, it's more intellectually satisfying - for a host of reasons. I invite anyone who'd like to pursue that claim to read the argument outlined here.

RLC

I guess I'm missing something, but I just don't understand why Tiger Woods owes a public apology to the whole world. Sure, he needs to apologize to his friends and family and others he's hurt or embarrassed, but that should be done in private. Why does anyone think he owes you and I an apology? How did he hurt any of us? What business is it of ours what he did in his personal life, anyway? He committed no crime, he's not a public official, he's not responsible to us any more than we are responsible to him for what we do. If my neighbor cheats on his wife he certainly doesn't owe me an apology, and it would be extraordinarily pretentious and self-righteous of me to think he does.

Some have asserted that Woods' case is different because he's a celebrity, but I fail to see why that should matter. Simply because he's in the public eye gives none of us any claim on his life. Nor does it give us the right to demand that he stand before us in sackcloth and ashes and flagellate himself.

Cable tv and print media personalities assiduously dissecting his mea culpa are acting either like officious prigs, characters straight out of The Scarlet Letter, or like salacious gossips who relish the flaws and debasement of others because it somehow makes them feel a little better about their own humble station in life and their own meager moral achievements.

It's all pretty tawdry. A less vulgar culture would simply avert its eyes from Mr. Woods' private life and perhaps offer a prayer for him and his family rather than seek to exploit his shortcomings to advance their own ratings.

RLC

In response to the post on the airborne laser system we featured last Monday, Kyle sent along a link to a video that explains another aspect of anti-missile defense.

The missile shield is a layered defense. The airborne laser system is designed to attack ICBMs in the boost phase of their trajectory, i.e. shortly after they've launched and before they've deployed whatever defense systems or multiple warheads they might be carrying.

The THAAD system that's explained at the link is a kinetic energy defense designed to operate against missiles in their final approach to their target.

Give it a look. RLC

One of the possible ways of thinking of the universe is to imagine it as a vast expression of a Divine thought - an idea, as it were, in the mind of God. A world that exists in the mind of God may make questions like why it exists, where do quantum particles go when they pop out of existence, how can a particle exist in two locations simultaneously, how can two photons traveling apart at the speed of light interact with each other, etc. somewhat easier to answer.

Now, however, comes another view the ontology of the universe. This idea, which has been around for a while but just recently received some experimental support, portrays the cosmos as a vast hologram. Just as light reflected off the surface of a credit card can produce an image of a three dimensional object, so too, according to this theory, could energy reflected off the surface of the universe's boundary produce the appearance of a three-dimensional world. This world doesn't really exist, or, more precisely, doesn't exist in the solid, material way we think it does, rather it's a pattern consisting of extremely tiny pixels.

It's a very strange theory and, truth to tell, I prefer the mind of God theory, but who knows? I'm quite sure that reality, the really real, is not at all the way we imagine it to be. I have little doubt that the world of our everyday experience is a consequence of our being the size we are, having the particular senses we have - with the particular constraints they impose - and having a mind which, in addition to other limitations, is only able to conceptualize in three dimensions. Were we the size of atoms or galaxies, were we to have six or more senses or were the senses we have able to perceive stimuli over a wider range, or were our minds more expansive than they are, our experience and understanding of the world might be entirely different than what it is.

Just as a man born blind and deaf has a very attenuated concept of what the world is like, unable as he is to imagine blue or music, for instance, so we have a very limited concept of reality because the structure of our senses and minds prohibits us from experiencing its full richness and reality.

We are like an unborn child trying to imagine the world outside its mother's womb. It's not long before we run smack up against the limits imposed by the structure of our minds and bodies.

RLC

"America appears weak, compared to what it has been and should be; not, thankfully, compared to its rivals," writes Conrad Black at NRO. His article summarizes the weaknesses of our competitors and some of our strengths. About President Obama, for example, he writes this:

Indeed. Let's underscore the fiscal restraint part. Our current leadership's fiscal gluttony almost guarantees an inflated currency and/or higher taxes in the near future, and these could have devastating consequences for the economic health of millions of Americans.

RLC

Jerry Fodor, a philosopher, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, have written a book titled What Darwin Got Wrong. The authors are atheists and evolutionists, but their book is an assault on the mechanism of natural selection which they, like many other evolutionists, think to be an inadequate mechanism with which to account for the enormous amount of evolution it's called upon to explain.

Their heresy has drawn the attention of a Darwinian philosopher, Michael Ruse, who writes a rebuke in the Boston Globe taking the two deviants to task for having wandered off the Darwinian reservation. Ruse states that:

This irritates Ruse who concludes his indictment with these interesting words:

In other words, as Francis Crick once wrote, biologists must constantly remind themselves that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the miniscule biomachines they're looking at under their microscopes are not really designed but are rather the products of sheer serendipity. Nevertheless, biologists have to talk as if these structures and processes were designed because it's the language of design and purpose that best captures the complexity, beauty, and purposefulness of what they see.

Here Ruse reveals the great secret of modern naturalism and scientism. If there's nothing special about man, as Ruse avers, then there's no reason to confer upon him dignity, worth, or rights. He's just a brute like any other, suitable to be manipulated by those who are enlightened, much like a dairy farmer manipulates his herd, and if that means that there must be a culling of the herd, a slaughter, well, then, so be it. There's nothing special or superior about humans that they should be treated any differently than cows.

The naturalist often talks about the quest to liberate man from superstition, to raise him to the level of a deity, but the logic of naturalism leads invariably and repeatedly to man's dehumanization. What a comfort it must be to be an atheist.

RLC

Those readers who enjoy spy thrillers might find this video, courtesy of Hot Air, hard to turn off. A week or so ago a report out of Dubai revealed that a high ranking Hamas official who was wanted by the Israelis for the kidnap and murder in 1989 of two Israeli soldiers was himself found murdered in his hotel room. The Dubai state security immediately pieced together how the assassination was carried out, and using surveillance tapes they were able to elucidate an extremely elaborate and well-planned operation involving at least eleven people. There is no proof that the perpetrators were Israelis but the Dubai police assume that they are.

If you don't care to watch the video you can read the account of what it shows here.

There are some very strange details in this video. Here's one: The victim was found by hotel personnel dead in his room which was locked from the inside. How did the assassins leave the room locked from the inside?

RLC

The New York Times Magazine has a piece by Russell Shorto on the perennial question of how Christian were America's founders. I'm not sure that the essay really addresses that question decisively - the discussion of the founders is set in the context of the battle over what our nation's history books should include about them - but it nevertheless covers some interesting ground. It's a little long, but those interested in the role of Christianity in the history of our founding, or in the modern textbook controversies, will find it worthwhile.

At one point Shorto quotes historian Richard Brookhiser who says that, "The founders were not as Christian as [many Christians] would like them to be, though they weren't as secularist as [atheists like] Christopher Hitchens would like them to be."

That's probably true, but I think it misses the point. I don't think the question is how Christian the founders themselves were but rather to what extent were the principles upon which they based their concepts of equality, freedom, and justice informed by the Christian philosophical and theological consensus and tradition in which they were immersed.

I think it's very hard to read the early documents, or even works that come later like Tocqueville's Democracy in America, without arriving at the conclusion that whether the founders were themselves Christian, and some clearly were not, they had been deeply influenced in their thinking by people who were.

In other words, not all of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Constitution, and led us into the 19th century were Christians (although they were almost all theists), but their ideas about what a just state should be they absorbed from a Judeo-Christian tradition and culture. Those ideas, as Tocqueville suggests, would never have emerged in a society of people who did not believe in the God of the New Testament.

RLC

My friend Greg emails to offer some interesting thoughts on the current economic crisis gripping Europe. The proximate cause of the crisis is the terrible state of the Greek economy which will need to be bailed out by its partners in the European Union, but who is up to the task?

Greg writes that:

Fascinating analysis, Greg. Either Germany becomes an economic hegemon or the Euro collapses and Europe is plunged into economic chaos (which may also result in Germany becoming an economic hegemon). I wonder if the big spenders in our own government are paying attention to the lessons European socialism is offering us.

RLC

Strategy Page gives us day by day summaries of the ongoing battle in Marjah in southern Afghanistan. The media have suggested that the slow pace is due to stiff resistance, but it seems from reading this article that it's due more to the difficulty of fighting in an urban environment under our current Rules of Engagement.

If you go to the link scroll to the bottom of the page for the earliest entry and work your way back up the column.

RLC

Jason calls our attention to a column in the liberal Washington Post by University of Virginia professor of politics Gerard Alexander titled Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

Alexander observes that:

He goes on to discuss what he identifies as four major narratives about conservatives that fuel this condescension. The four are these:

Alexander makes an interesting case that liberals actually do believe these things about conservatives and that this mythology has not infrequently led to serious political setbacks.

Give the article a look. It's pretty good.

RLC

Things keep going from bad to worse for the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) enthusiasts. Now it turns out that the former head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia in England, Dr. Phil Jones, not only can't produce the data that led so many scientists to conclude that we are presently in the midst of a sharp uptick in global temperatures, but the man himself says that there's no conclusive reason to believe that global temperatures have risen since the mid 90s:

Moreover, Dr. Jones is now conceding that global temperatures may well have been elevated at several periods in the past. If that's so, claims that the current alleged "warming" must be due to human activity seem to be unwarranted.

Here's the relevant excerpt from an article in the Daily Mail Online:

Moreover, British researchers have now come to the conclusion that the data that was relied upon to show that global temperatures were trending upward was tainted by local alterations in the microclimate surrounding the measuring devices.

After almost every country in the world has spent millions of dollars to ameliorate carbon emissions, after near panic has gripped many of the governments in the West over the impending doom of climate catastrophe, it turns out that it was all based on dubious data. Now the whole AGW project seems to be coming undone. Maybe it's just time to take a deep breath and start over with a whole new team of scientists, and perhaps Al Gore should just make himself scarce for the next decade or so.

RLC

The game of "special pleading politics," which both Democrats and Republicans are playing with considerable zest nowadays, is getting more than a little tedious. The game consists in giving one's own guy a pass for doing something which was as bad or worse than what they are prepared to howl like a cage full of monkeys over when the other side's guy does it. It's one reason why so many people are disgusted with American politics.

Democrats, for example, indulged in spasms of hilarity recently when Sarah Palin was discovered to have inscribed some notes on the palm of her hand. Even the President's press secretary publicly poked fun at her for this apparent faux pas at a press conference. Yet a few weeks ago President Obama actually required the aid of a teleprompter to address a class of sixth graders, but none of the Palin bashers seemed to think this even a teensy bit bizarre. Can you imagine the liberal media reaction had Palin or George Bush done such a thing?

As wearisome as such petty attacks, like the one on Palin, are many on the political right also seem unable to resist them. Talk radio personalities like Sean Hannity, for example, make themselves look foolish and trivial when they criticize President Obama's Justice Department for mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber even though they never complained about previous terrorists being mirandized during the Bush years.

To be sure, it was a mistake to mirandize Abdul Mutullab, but it would be a far more decent strategy for conservatives to acknowledge that it was also a mistake when previous administrations did it, and to urge the current administration to change the policy rather than trying to make Obama look soft on terrorism by exploiting his decision to essentially follow the Bush precedent.

Mirandizing terrorists is indeed a bad idea. Closing Gitmo is a bad idea. Trying Khalid Sheik Mohammad in federal court in New York City is a terrible idea, but if Republicans were silent when their guys proposed or did similar things they shouldn't now be using these bad ideas as a club with which to clobber Obama. They'd be better served by pointing out why it was a bad idea (or not) in the past and why it's a bad idea now without attempting to impugn and discredit the President's commitment to keep America safe. It's simply unfair to pretend that the current policies were ushered in by the Obama people and were never in place prior to their taking office.

If conservatives make the argument that we need to avoid the mistakes of the past - and the American people voice overwhelming opposition to continuing the practice of treating terrorism as crime rather than as acts of war - but the administration nevertheless continues on its present course, then it will be appropriate to castigate them for it.

Meanwhile, we can argue for a change in policy without making it sound like so much partisan sniping. After all, the President's prosecution of the war abroad has been the most heartening aspect of his tenure. He should be encouraged to do even better at the things he's doing well rather than being condemned by Republicans for doing pretty much what his GOP predecessor did.

Not only would this elevate our political discourse it would also have the side benefit of elevating in the public esteem the credibility of our political figures.

RLC

Law professor Glenn Reynolds whose blog Instapundit was one of the first and most successful attempts to exploit the new medium of internet blogging, has an article at The Wall Street Journal recounting his experience at the tea party convention a couple of weeks ago.

What he describes is nothing like the impression one gets of these people from, say, watching Keith Olbermann for 30 seconds or more. These are serious people - light-hearted, cheerful, and enthusiastic - but serious about implementing the agenda, or at least part of it, that Barack Obama promised he'd implement but hasn't.

Here's Reynolds' lede:

If you've heard rumblings about the tea party but don't know who these people are or what they're trying to accomplish, Reynolds' column is a good place to find out.

RLC

Back in the eighties Ronald Reagan was ridiculed for proposing that we could be made safer from a nuclear missile attack by developing the technology to shoot down incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). The illuminati in the media and the scientific establishment in general enjoyed hearty guffaws at their Georgetown dinner parties at the expense of Reagan whose idea was derisively labeled the "star wars" defense.

The idea that we could essentially shoot a bullet with another bullet was exactly the sort of idea you might expect some rube like Reagan to come up with we were told in editorial after editorial. Scientists of various competencies were trotted out to declaim on the absurdity of doing what Reagan proposed, and besides, they opined, even if we could do it it would only provoke our enemies to strike first before the system was installed.

Reagan, however, was convinced that the technology would work and he kept at it through all the snickers and snide remarks. Even after he was gone his successors continued to pursue testing and development. The thinking was that the less sure an aggressor could be that a missile attack would succeed the less likely they'd be to try it.

Eventually, a number of systems were developed, successfully tested, and deployed on Aegis class cruisers. Land based anti-missile missiles have also been deployed which, like the Patriot system, target incoming missiles and collide with them in the air, achieving what the liberal "brights" thought impossible.

Now, however, another giant stride has been taken with the successful test of an airborne system that shoots down missiles in their boost phase using directed energy (laser) beams. This video shows how it works:

It's hard, perhaps, for today's young people to imagine the fear of nuclear missiles that many people lived under during the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. Now with the rise of a nuclear armed Iran and North Korea the fear may well return. Fortunately, we're quickly developing the means to defend ourselves from an attack, at least an ICBM attack. The Left, which has always opposed American military might, no longer scoffs at the prospect of a missile shield. Indeed, they have no good argument against erecting one except the financial cost. Nevertheless, ideological inertia keeps them from conceding that Reagan has been vindicated. No one clings more tenaciously to the past, after all, than do progressives.

Anyway, President Obama, being the progressive's champion, has himself expressed dislike for the idea of a missile shield. Perhaps the fact that the airborne system is both more effective and cheaper than previous systems will persuade him to support it.

RLC

A week or so ago we did a post titled Root Causes which discussed Heather MacDonald's column in City Journal about urban crime. In the piece she argued that crime is not a result of poverty, but rather a result of fatherlessness.

She was invited to appear on Journal Report with Paul Gigot where she elaborates on her thesis and what the most effective short-term means of reducing crime are. It's pretty interesting, especially if you grew up in the sixties and seventies and had your mind filled with the sociological theories that she dismisses:

RLC

Theology Geek NZ lists a dozen or so statements which are, in philosopher-speak, self-referentially incoherent - i.e. they're self-refuting. If they're true they must be false. Here are a few of them:

There are more at the link. Meanwhile, here a couple of my all-time favorites:

A quote from the famous evidentialist William Clifford: "It is wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." If that's true then we shouldn't believe it for there's no evidence that warrants it.

Then there is the verification principle of the logical positivists: "Only those statements which can be empirically verified are meaningful." Since there's no way to verify this statement is it therefore meaningless?

HT: Dangerous Idea

RLC

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey discusses the latest results from a Rasmussen poll that show that overwhelming numbers from almost every demographic believe that the Obama administration must reign in spending. After showing that the President is continuing to lose ground with the American people in terms of his favorability rating. Morrissey offers this:

These polls notwithstanding Mr. Obama continues to insist we need to spend more, and then he expects us to believe him when he tells us he's not an ideologue? In the past people would scoff at the characterization of the "tax and spend liberal." This characterization was, we were told, an unfair caricature. Well, the current Congress and White House have certainly done everything they could to ensure that that "caricature" lives on in the collective memory for another fifty years or more.

RLC

Christianity Today lists their ten most redeeming films of 2009. They describe a "redeeming film" as:

One of the films they list is the The Hurt Locker, a movie that certainly deserved its nomination for Best Picture. I won't bother to summarize the story since most are probably familiar with it, but it gives an excellent insight into what war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has been like for the young men who are sent there to fight.

Perhaps the most significant point the film makes is how difficult it is for our troops to do combat under our rules of engagement. Early on a soldier sees a man holding a cell phone as his teammate is disarming an IED. Is the man an insurgent about to use the phone to trigger the explosive and kill his friend? Should he shoot? What if he's just an innocent civilian? What if he doesn't shoot and the man detonates the bomb? He has three seconds to decide what to do.

The Hurt Locker subtly poses those quandaries over and over - who are the bad guys? How can you tell? I don't see how any young man placed in those kinds of situations can be charged in a military court for making the wrong decision. Indeed, it boggles the mind that three Navy SEALs are currently on trial for simply punching a terrorist in their custody who had murdered several Americans and desecrated their bodies. Worse than getting punched happens in the midst of almost any football game on any given Autumn weekend in America. We need to hold our military to a high standard of conduct, of course, but we don't have to be fetishistic about it. Surely there are disciplines short of court martial for such breaches.

In any event, The Hurt Locker is apolitical and as realistic as a war movie gets. The realism, however, means that the language and violence are pretty raw, so I encourage anyone who has reservations about viewing such films to take a pass on this one.

RLC

In a recent interview mathematician Granville Sewell makes the following interesting point:

He's right that most people never stop to think about this. Either human minds, libraries, computer software, and jet engines are ultimately the product of an intelligent designer or they're ultimately the product of blind, purposeless forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Why is it somehow more rational to believe the latter than to believe the former? Why is it thought to take more faith to believe the former than to believe the latter? Indeed, it's more than a little ridiculous that people who believe the latter often make fun of those who believe the former.

RLC

There's a revival of interest in the work of the woman who was in many ways the philosophical fountainhead of modern libertarianism, Ayn Rand, and Cathy Young explains for a new generation who Rand was and why she's significant. Young highlights both the salutary lessons Rand has to teach we the living in this age of creeping collectivization as well as the toxic liabilities embedded in many of her ideas:

It's an interesting article and an excellent introduction, perhaps even an anthem, to a very complex and influential woman.

(My apologies to those of you familiar enough with Rand to have winced your way through this post. For some reason I just couldn't resist the temptation.)

RLC

The news brings word of an impending attack on the Afghanistan city of Marjah. The tactical template for the assault is presumed to be the battle some five years ago for the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Strategy Page explains:

The media hasn't had much to say about Afghanistan lately and very little to say about the coming operation in Marjah, but it's apparently going to kick off any day now.

RLC

Those readers with an interest in philosophy of religion and Christian apologetics will find William Lane Craig's site called Reasonable Faith an excellent resource. Craig is one of the foremost philosophers of religion in the U.S. and has appeared in numerous debates over the years defending traditional orthodox Christianity. He has also been addressing a different question submitted by readers each week and his answers are usually very lucid. There's an archive on the home page which lists the 146 questions he's addressed so far.

For those who have a graduate level interest in the subject I recommend The Prosblogion, but be advised that the material here is highly technical.

RLC

I don't like to make fun of the intelligence of other people, and am the first to lament my own intellectual deficiencies, but when people who themselves are walking around under an empty attic enjoy ridiculing others for being dim then I think their stupidity should at least be pointed out. The video below features talk show host Joy Behar and Eve Ensler, author of the play The Vagina Monologues, enjoying a good chuckle at the feeble-mindedness of - who else? - Sarah Palin and the tea partiers.

Palin and her ilk are people who "play fast and loose with facts" - as if the current administration and Congress have been the picture of probity - and, according to Ensler, they're people whose intelligence simply has yet to "evolve." These Neanderthals - fascists, Behar calls them - believe in creationism and are dubious of man-caused global warming. Ms Behar interprets Sarah Palin's advice to President Obama to be tougher on national security to mean that Palin wants to start a world war. Ms Ensler chimes in that this is a consequence of Palin being an NRA member and "shooting animals from a plane," and also, somehow, a consequence of her wish to see us develop our domestic oil resources.

Don't ask me to explain any of this. I was as mystified by it as you are, but I really look forward to hearing Ms Behar expatiate on the creation/evolution debate, or Ms Ensler explain the logical connections between hunting, drilling for oil, and wanting to precipitate a world war. That'd be a show I'd be sure not to miss.

But more to the point: however dumb Sarah and her fans may be I'll bet even the most dull-witted among them knows that earthquakes and tsunamis have nothing to do with global warming, man-caused or otherwise. Perhaps one of these benighted tea-partiers might venture to enlighten Ms Ensler about the nature of tectonic shifts and their causes:

It's pretty funny listening to two people who lack any understanding of the rudiments of either logic or geoscience deriding others for being skeptical of what people like these two believe. It's just as amusing listening to two people who shouldn't be making fun of anyone else's intelligence doing just that.

RLC

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post argues that President Obama's failure to successfully pressure Iran to stop its manufacture of nuclear weapons, and his apparent unwillingness to use the American military to destroy the production facilities, is forcing Israel to take matters into its own hands. This is very unsettling, though not unexpected. What was surprising in Goodwin's piece, though, comes in the fourth paragraph.

Goodwin writes:

There's more at the link. Meanwhile, here's the dilemma for those who believe that we should keep our own military out of this affair: Given all the awful geo-political consequences that will ensue from allowing Iran to build weapons, and all the awful consequences that will follow upon any attempt to destroy their ability to build those weapons, which is worse, an American conventional strike, or series of strikes, that destroys Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, or an Israeli nuclear strike against those facilities? Take your time. You probably have a couple of months yet to decide.

RLC

There aren't many politicians of whom we might say this, but Charlie Wilson was a great man. Wilson was a little known, hard living, skirt-chasing, party-loving former Congressman from Texas, but he was nevertheless a genuine hero. He passed away yesterday at the age of 76, an event which wouldn't be especially notable were it not for the fact that this particular Congressman, despite his many peccadilloes, was a savior to the Afghan people. He and a small coterie of CIA agents were, more than any other Americans, responsible for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late eighties. Wilson's story was made into an outstanding movie a few years ago (Charlie Wilson's War), with Tom Hanks as Wilson. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts also had starring roles.

Wilson freely confesses to his personal shortcomings, but he was truly an outstanding man. If you watch the movie you'll understand why.

RLC

ABC has a series of never before released aerial photos of the collapse of the second World Trade Tower here. They should serve as a reminder that the conflict with radical Islam may ebb and flow, but they will never stop trying to do it again. Evil is relentless.

RLC

In the spirit of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 this wonderful Knight of the Darwinian Faith intrepidly strides into bookstores and, hush now, surreptitiously moves intelligent design books from the science section and reshelves them in the religion section! Isn't that something? Don't you just admire the guy? Not only does he have the courage to do this great deed, but he proudly boasts of his mighty blows on behalf of the suppression of ideas on his blog.

It's not every day that we hear about such anti-intellectual heroics. It's not every day that people, scared to death of ideas and arguments that conflict with their own cherished convictions, manage to overcome their fears and their bigotry and actually rise up and do something to protect others from being exposed to those ideas. It's not every day that we're privileged to witness the glorious conjunction in one solitary man of a narrow mind and the impulse to extinguish uncomfortable and unacceptable ideas.

Our hats are off to today's champion of small minds everywhere, University of Montana grad student Michael D. Barton.

HT: John West at Evolution News and Views.

RLC

The author of the book C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea, is a philosophy professor by the name of Victor Reppert, who has apparently been hearing grumblings from his students about the value of studying philosophy. Everyone who teaches the subject (or any other subject, for that matter) has heard similar complaints. Philosophy students are often frustrated by the fact that philosophy seems to raise more questions than it answers and by the fact that few of the answers it does give are definitive. All of this is why I found Reppert's reply to his students very much on the mark.

He begins with this:

If you've entertained the same musings as Reppert's student, or if you're a teacher, I encourage you to read the rest of his reply. It's quite good.

His book, by the way, is an excellent treatment of Lewis' argument in Miracles that the existence of human Reason is much better understood on the assumption that there's a God than it is on any naturalistic explanation.

RLC

The internet has been abuzz the last couple of days over a mysterious billboard in Minnesota that has a picture of George W. Bush with the words "Miss Me Yet?"

Michelle Malkin manages to resist nostalgia's seductive tug and lays out nine reasons why the thought of Mr. Bush's presidency fails to fill her with yearning for the old days:

This is all true and cannot be gainsaid. At one point in his presidency I thought Mr. Bush had a chance to be a great president. Then came #1, 2, 3, 9 and his reluctance to explain and promote those of his policies which really were noble, and I gave up hope. I still think he's a classier human being than the men who preceded and succeeded him, but I'm afraid he let greatness slip through his fingers. It's really quite sad, actually.

RLC

Those concerned with the problems of our inner cities are forever talking about the "root causes" of the crime and educational failure besetting those, largely African Americans, who inhabit our urban areas. Usually, the proffered solutions involve spending money, but rarely does spending money do any good. The reason economic solutions fail, of course, is that the problem isn't really economic.

There's a column at City Journal that every person concerned about inner city poverty, educational failure, crime, illegitimacy and other dysfunctions should read. It's written by Heather MacDonald, and she puts her finger on the reason why people who are poor often remain poor, sometimes for generations. She lays the blame for crime, educational failure, and all the ills which plague the lower social classes on one single common denominator - fatherlessness.

It's an excellent article and MacDonald is very persuasive. Here are a few excerpts:

All the maladies associated with our inner cities occur everywhere and among all races wherever fatherlessness is the norm. Black crime is disproportionately high because black fatherlessness is disproportionately high. The solution to the problems of our cities isn't to throw more money at them, MacDonald argues, it is to get men of whatever color to learn to value monogamy and to be present in the home to nurture their children as they grow up. If that doesn't happen the future for the children of those who refuse to be real fathers will look increasingly violent and relentlessly bleak.

There's no quick fix for the social breakdown that has occured in our cities, but the path leading out of it is clear for anyone who wants to take it:

This is the route to the middle class taken by generations of Americans. It's the route that has resulted in generations of Americans having a better standard of living than did their parents who walked that path so that their children could benefit from their discipline.

RLC

Count me among those who were crushed:

Read the rest at the link. C&H may have been the funniest, most intelligent "cartoon" strip ever. I don't begrudge Watterson his desire to retire, but I wish he hadn't.

RLC

Margaret Wente at The Globe and Mail looks at the state of the global climate change "movement" and finds it on life support if not altogether dead. After summarizing all the scandals, shoddy science, and unseemly suppression of dissent she notes that:

The shame of this is that it seems undeniable that something is happening to the earth's climate, but the people tasked with determining what, exactly, it is have so discredited themselves that it will be very difficult to regain the trust necessary to take collective action if ever we do gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem.

Read the rest of Wentke's column. It's very good.

RLC

I don't know if the folks at Audi were intending this to be a parody of the brave new world to which modern progressivism is taking us, but they couldn't have done a better job if they were:

As funny as this spoof is I fear that there are a lot of folks who watched it and didn't see the absurdity of a "green police" force at all - and that's pretty scary.

RLC

Congressman John Murtha is dead at the age of 77. For those who don't know who Murtha was or why his passing is worth noting please read this.

Murtha represented almost everything that people find disagreeable about American politics, his name was sullied by his involvement in the Abscam scandal and he was one of the all-time champions of earmark pork (Do a Viewpoint search on John Murtha to find more on the controversies surrounding Murtha). On the other hand, he was also a man who served his country admirably, volunteering when in his thirties to serve as a combat Marine in Vietnam, winning two purple hearts and a bronze star. When he came to Congress he was perhaps the strongest advocate for the military on his side of the aisle.

His constituents loved him for the truckloads of federal largesse he brought to his district and those who campaign for virtuous husbandry of the taxpayers' money found him to be a major obstacle to their efforts.

He was a complex man in complex times. May God look favorably upon his soul.

RLC

Generations of biology students have been taught that life originated in a primordial soup of simple organic molecules that gradually combined to form amino acids, nucleic acids and ultimately proteins and DNA. The exact pathway for this miracle was never very clear which may have been because it turns out that it probably didn't happen that way in the first place.

Based on new research reported in Science Daily researchers inform us that we must now throw out the primordial soup and look instead to chemical reactions occurring around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans for the conditions under which the first life was spawned:

Well, maybe so, but isn't it a bit disconcerting that just about everything that scientists have told us over the years about evolution turns out to be either untrue or questionable? Everything from the importance of natural selection and genetic mutation, to Haeckel's phylogenetic law, to the proof provided by finch beaks and peppered moths, to the crucial importance of the gene, to the junkiness of junk DNA, to the primordial soup, to who knows what next. The only belief about evolution that's remained undiminished over the decades is the dogmatic certainty that it happened, even though at the rate we're going everything we believe about it will be proven wrong by 2020.

This is not to say that organisms haven't evolved or that life didn't begin in some warm little vent. Rather it's to say that the details of evolutionary theory are a lot less settled than the confident pronouncements of the theory's advocates would have us think. And if the premises of an argument are uncertain how can anyone be expected to have any confidence that the conclusion is assured?

RLC

The Wall Street Journal features a column by Mackubin Thomas Owens in which he makes a case against rescinding the ban on open homosexuals in the military. At one point in his column he writes:

President Obama has promised on numerous occasions that he will work with Congress to overturn the ban and the media and gay organizations are holding him to that promise. Congress, though, has to pass the legislation and it's not clear what they're hearing from their constituents. Nevertheless, they'd do well to keep in mind Owens' concluding paragraph:

Congress should think long and hard about the effects overturning the ban would have on unit cohesion and the ability of our military to carry out its mission as effectively and as efficiently as possible. That should be the overriding consideration. The decision should certainly not be based on considerations of political correctness, sociological fashion, or "equal opportunity."

RLC

Democrats, the WaPo's Charles Krauthammer observes, analyze their dismal performance in recent elections in the light of two guiding axioms:

Krauthammer goes on to put flesh on these presuppositional bones and shows, in so doing, that Democrats seem to be completely wanting in the ability to see in themselves the faults they discern so clearly in others. He writes, for instance, that:

The whole op-ed is worth reading, but let's tarry for a moment over the main implication of his column: Democrats are becoming increasingly divorced from reality. They'd sooner demonize their political opponents and disparage the intellectual abilities of the voters than to contemplate the possibility that maybe there's something wrong with themselves.

When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts Democrat spokespersons were all over the airwaves claiming with straight faces and apparent sincerity that this should be seen as a signal to Democrats to put the public option back in health care reform. Brown's election against a Democrat progressive candidate was interpreted, with an astonishing indifference to common sense, as a protest against the Democrats for being too timid, for not spending enough money, for not driving the deficits even higher.

President Obama, as Krauthammer points out, assures us in the wake of electoral setbacks in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia that he's not an ideologue. Yet he insists that Democrats double down and get his agenda passed over the objections of the people no matter what the political cost. Isn't that exactly what an ideologue would do?

I'm reminded of Martin Luther's extraordinary affirmation of how, in his view, a Christian's faith should be impervious to evidence. He wrote that:

Substitute "progressive ideology" for "the Gospel" and Luther could have been talking about the modern Democratic party.

RLC

It's a matter of entrenched conviction, I suppose, that religion has no place in science, but I wonder how it can be possible that the two be separated. I can see how Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam or any specific religion can be denied any role in scientific theorizing and data gathering, but what I can't see is how religion simpliciter could be excluded without the whole enterprise collapsing.

When we think of religious belief we almost always think of a belief in some sort of supernatural being, but religious beliefs need not be limited to supernatural entities for at least two reasons:

First, the meaning of the word "supernatural" is unclear. Usually it's intended to refer to that which transcends the laws and boundaries of our space-time world, but consider this possibility: Suppose there are other universes besides our own with different laws and even different forms of life, including intelligent life. This is the state of affairs scientists and philosophers who embrace the multiverse hypothesis believe is the case. These universes, and their inhabitants, would fit the definition of supernatural, but would we regard belief in their existence to be a religious belief? If so, should the multiverse hypothesis be excluded from science? Most scientists would say no.

Second, according to one popular text in the philosophy of religion (Reason and Religious Belief, Peterson, et al.) a religion is a "set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both personal and corporate, organized around the concept of an Ultimate Reality which inspires worship or total devotion."

Based on this definition, is science itself, or at least scientific naturalism, a religion? The naturalist holds that nature is the ultimate reality and certainly many scientists are totally devoted to it.

In his Myth of Religious Neutrality, philosopher Roy Clouser identifies the crucial belief characteristic of all religions. This is the belief that there is something, some entity, that does not depend upon anything else for it's existence and upon which everything else depends. This is another way of saying that there is something which possesses necessary being. For the Christian this is God, for the materialist it's matter or the laws of nature.

But if this is true then naturalism, materialism, humanism, indeed every form of atheism found among modern scientists, is, in fact, religious, and any attempt to banish religious assumptions and influence from science would be like cutting out a vital organ. It would deprive it of its meaning and possibly entail the dissolution of science altogether. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to practice a meaningful science while somehow leaving one's total devotion to whatever constitutes one's ultimate reality at the door of the lab.

Attempts to exclude religion from science are as futile as attempts to exclude ideology from politics. Religion can no more be isolated from science than it can from morality. Indeed, the demand to banish religion from science is, in reality, an attempt to banish one kind of religion, theism, while privileging materialism and shielding it from all competition.

RLC

I remember as a boy growing up in the post-WWII years that it just seemed unthinkable and impossible that the same hatreds that led to the Holocaust would ever rear their ugly head again. How wrong I was. Mark Steyn gives us a glimpse of the recrudescence of anti-semitism that's infecting much of Europe today:

He writes:

In the United Kingdom, "Record Number Of Anti-Semitic Attacks":

Of course, hatred of Jews is rife in the Muslim world, but in Europe? Why? It seems so irrational. It's as if there's something buried deep in human DNA that programs people to hate the Jews. Like a cat which can't resist attacking a dangling string, for reasons it surely doesn't understand, human beings often seem unable to resist their compulsion to hate Jews. Why is that?

It's not irrelevant, I think, that this new wave of anti-Jewish hatred seems to be occurring in the one part of the world that, more than any other, combines a well-educated public with a determinedly secular worldview. This is significant because it suggests that prejudice is not just a function of ignorance - even the educated have their hatreds. The problem is that secular man has no particular reason to stifle his animosities toward those who are different from himself. On a continent full of people who absorbed relativism with their infant formula there's no reason to think anti-semitism is actually wrong.

Only a Judeo-Christian society has the moral and theological resources to suppress the soul's darkest impulses, and although historically Christians and Jews too often failed to live up to their calling, it's nevertheless only a Judeo-Christian society in which any minority can expect to be accorded the same rights and respect everyone else has, because it's only Christians and Jews who are under a moral obligation to treat others justly.

RLC

The other day we linked to two remembrances of the late historian Howard Zinn. One was a paen to the man's benevolent influence and the other was an acerbic dismissal of Zinn as essentially a fraud. Which you think he was will depend largely on your ideological point of view, but what cannot be gainsaid is that the man exerted great influence on several generations of American students. His People's History of the United States is the most widely used history text in American public schools and colleges, having sold over two million copies.

I wanted to bring Zinn up again because I've come across a column at National Review Online which explains in more detail why conservatives see his influence as pernicious and leftists see it as salutary. Roger Kimball argues at NRO that the People's History is filled with distortions and misstatements of fact that give a very misleading impression of the history of the United States. In Kimball's words, reading People's History is like offering to take someone on a tour of Versailles but stopping at a ramshackle shed on the outskirts and saying, "See? Pretty shabby, isn't it?"

Anyway, read Kimball's essay. It's important.

RLC

The lefty blogosphere and its media arm at MSNBC were all aflutter this past week over the results of a Daily Kos poll of Republicans that finds, astonishingly, that many of them hold views that Democrats don't. This, some commenters are saying, is proof that Republicans are, by and large, crazy extremists.

Bruce Bartlett, for example, says that, "I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."

Chris Matthews on MSNBC calls these Republicans "lunatics" and "whack jobs."

Politico's Ben Smith writes, "A new poll from Research 2000, sponsored by DailyKos more or less with the goal of making Republicans look extreme, does a pretty good job of that."

Well, maybe, but what is it, exactly, that so many of these slobbering, lunatic extremist Republicans are believing these days? Here are the poll's results:

At the risk of being called an extremist whack job myself I have to say that I don't find these numbers all that surprising.

Progressive pundits are astonished, for example, that so many Republicans think President Obama is a socialist, but why is that surprising? What more would, say, Bernie Sanders, a real live socialist, have on his agenda were he President that Mr. Obama does not? Besides, why is it goofy to think that Mr. Obama is something that a majority of Democrats regard favorably? According to a recent Gallup poll 53% of Democrats and 61% of liberals overall have a positive opinion of socialism, so why should Democrats think it somehow weird that Republicans think Mr. Obama does, too.

The pundits are shocked that Republicans would think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Mr. Obama, but that seems obvious, don't you think? Palin had administrative experience as a mayor and a governor of a state. Barack Obama brought no such experience to the White House. Unlike Mrs. Palin, he never ran a business, never met a payroll, never had to manage an administration of any sort. He never did anything that qualified him for the role he now finds himself in. He was a community organizer, a college instructor, an undistinguished state senator for a few years, and a U.S. Senator for less than two years before he began campaigning for president. What exactly was it about Mr. Obama that would lead anyone to think that he was more qualified to run the country than Governor Palin?

The pundits are dismayed that so many Republicans are unsure about where the President was born, but how can an intelligent person be anything but non-committal on the matter? No dispositive documentation of Mr. Obama's birth has been brought forward, and he refuses to allow the state of Hawaii to release the long form birth certificate that would set concerns about this matter to rest. This, despite the fact that similar questions about John McCain's status were submitted to court adjudication, and he was required to produce the necessary forms. Until Mr. Obama does likewise the most anyone can say is that they just don't know where he was born.

In any event, a couple of years back polls were showing that 61% of Democrats believed that George Bush knew ahead of time about the attacks on the World Trade Towers and nevertheless let them happen. Barack Obama even appointed a man who believed this, Van Jones, to a position in his administration. Surely, that's wackier than Republican agnosticism on Mr. Obama's place of birth.

The pundits are incredulous that so many Republicans would think that ACORN stole the last election, and, of course, that does seem a little paranoid. It also shows a failure on the part of the surveyed Republicans to draw the fine distinction between actually stealing the election and merely trying to steal the election.

The pundits are also outraged that so many Republicans think Mr. Obama wants the terrorists to win, and here I sympathize with the pundits, but, on the other hand, the numbers may reflect exasperation with the fact that Mr. Obama throughout his younger years hobnobbed socially with terrorists and seems of late to have made some very dubious decisions concerning how captured terrorists should be handled. This, of course, does not warrant saying he wants terrorists "to win," but those who say they believe he does may simply be venting their frustration with what many believe to be the President's poor judgment on the terrorism issue.

Finally, the pundits are angry that so many Republicans want President Obama to be impeached. I wonder if those who find this absurd were similarly angered by the incessant calls for the impeachment of President Bush, even from the highest echelons of the Democratic party. I doubt it.

In any event, impeachment is entirely inappropriate unless the President has been found to be engaging in illegal activity. Mr. Obama may be in over his head, but that's not yet illegal.

RLC

I suppose anyone can mispronounce a word, and I only allude to the President's gaffe at a speech at the Prayer Breakfast not to nit-pick over his lack of familiarity with the word but to ask a serious question: How much sneering and derision would George Bush or Sarah Palin have had to endure had either of them pronounced "corpsman" as "corpseman," not once but three times, and how much do you suppose Mr. Obama will have to endure? Probably about the same amount as he was forced to absorb for his claim to have campaigned in "57 states with one left to go."

What's that you say? You never heard him say that? Well, you've just made my point:

I wonder if the news and entertainment media don't sometimes think that it's just a teensy bit unfair of them to laugh uproariously at Palin and Bush as though they're complete dolts while giving Obama a pass on the not infrequent occasions when he makes his educational attainments seem somewhat overrated.

RLC

I love Sarah Palin, but I'm afraid she's may be starting to sound like a politically correct speech nazi. I understand why she would not appreciate the way people use the word "retard" or "retarded," and I agree with her that "crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful." I would add that it's also often cruel, but once we start calling for public figures to be fired for using such language where does it end?

Will the use, or misuse, of words like "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile" and all their permutations be the next reason to cashier someone? What about words like "crazy," "insane," and "nuts" which also describe mental disabilities? How about "lunacy" and "lunatic" and probably dozens of others we could think of?

It reminds me a little of the Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 where the language was pared down to the absolute minimum number of words needed to communicate. Orwell said of Newspeak that it was "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." One of his characters, a man named Syme, says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the Newspeak dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Despite her personal hurt when she hears people use the word "retarded" as an insult she really needs to ask herself where the logic of her position will take us should we start heaping social opprobrium on anyone who uses words we don't like in ways we think are rude. Better, says I, to simply point out the person's shameful lack of character and class and let it go at that.

For the record, I do think it was tasteless and vulgar of Rahm Emanuel to use the word in the context he did, just as I think it's usually tasteless and vulgar to use the "n-word" and the "f-word." Even more, it's often, depending on the context, moronic.

RLC

My friend Mike comments that he recently read a quote by physicist Stephen Barr in response to Darwinians like Richard Dawkins who think that because Darwinism can explain (they believe) how things like an eye evolved that they have thus refuted the argument from design. You may recall that William Paley back in 1802 suggested that the existence of a complex device like a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker and that, by analogy, a complex device like an eye also implies an intelligent artisan.

Not so fast, says Dawkins. The processes of chemistry and physics and natural selection and genetic mutation can cooperate to produce an eye. These are, in Dawkins' famous phrase, a blind watchmaker.

Barr observes:

Quite so. Dawkins thinks he refutes Paley by pointing out that there's a fully automated watch factory (the world) that churns out watches so we need not seek an intelligent explanation for the watch. As Barr notes, however, it's at least as difficult to imagine how such a factory, capable of producing information-rich artifacts, could have sprung up as it is to imagine how a watch could have arisen by chance.

Philosopher Angus Menuge uses a different metaphor to make the same point. He observes that one has hardly explained the complex pattern woven into a carpet by pointing to the loom upon which the carpet was fashioned.

What critics of the design argument seem to ignore is that the fact, if it is a fact, that the universe is the sort of place that could produce complex life and biological information is a state of affairs which itself cries out for explanation. When a naturalist like Dawkins, however, is asked how such a thing can be he offers little more than a shrug of his shoulders.

RLC

Daniel Pipes argues that there's one way President Obama can rescue a presidency that looks everyday more like the swirling funnel of water about to descend down the drain. The move Pipes suggests would probably unite the country, unite Congress, and cause people to forget the bumbling, fumbling first year of Mr. Obama's term. It would also make the world a much safer place and forestall unimaginable future horrors.

Pipes advises that the President order the military to take out Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

Will he do it? It's an order that he would seem psychologically incapable of issuing, an order that would gain him the enmity of his most ardent supporters on the left, just as LBJ gained their enmity by going into Vietnam. Yet he just might choose to do it because the alternatives of our failing to act are so unthinkable.

Read Pipes' essay to see why he thinks Obama should give the order.

RLC

The Democrats are still determined to get health care reform passed by hook or by crook, and it's not hard to understand why. If they fail to get legislation on this they're not likely to get legislation on anything else - at least nothing else that's significant. If that happens they'll go down in history as perhaps the most ineffectual custodians of power in the history of the nation, having control of the executive and, until last month, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House and unable to do anything with it.

The problem for the Democrats is that what they want to do is make our health care system more like that of the Canadians, but those Canadians who can are fleeing their system in order to use ours, as this article at National Review Online illustrates:

If the Canadians, who theoretically have access to free care, would rather incur the expense of using our system why on earth are we trying to make our system more like theirs? Are any Democrats out there asking that question?

RLC

There's a fascinating interview with atheist writer Christopher Hitchens at The Portland Monthly. Hitchens, you will recall is the author of the book God is Not Great, an antiChristian polemic noteworthy more for its hostility toward religious faith than for its logical coherence.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the interview are the responses to Hitchens' attacks on Christian belief by the interviewer, a Unitarian minister named Marilyn Sewell. She seems to concede throughout that, well, Hitchens is right, but she's still going to be religious in some vague sense anyway, and wouldn't it just be nice if Christopher were, too.

There are several illuminating exchanges in the interview (illuminating in the sense that they show how utterly vacuous liberal Christianity can be), but this is perhaps my favorite:

Hitchens is exactly right, of course. As the interview unfolds Sewell practically trips over herself in her attempts to convince Hitchens that she's not like those benighted Christians who take the Bible seriously and who are the object of his scorn. Like someone suffering from a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome she sounds almost desperate to gain his approval. She insists that she has no real religious beliefs except that the Bible has some good stories and hopes that she will thus find favor in Mr. Hitchens' eyes.

It'd be comical were it not so sad. One wishes that The Portland Monthly had sought the services of an interviewer more willing and able to challenge Hitchens (see here, for example) and less inclined to be obsequious.

RLC

A few weeks ago we posted a report on some amazing breakthroughs in stem cell research. Reader Kyle responds to that post with a link to an article put out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that elaborates on this theme and catalogs some of the diseases that stem cells have the potential to meliorate or cure:

Here are some of them:

Kyle adds that:

I'm not one to gush about the future, but the current generation of twenty-somethings could well be looking at therapies that will within their lifetimes render many of today's most dread diseases as treatable as antibiotics rendered infection.

RLC

My friend Andy is a missionary in Haiti and has been sending us regular updates since the earthquake. Here's his latest:

If you'd like to help Andy meet the needs of these suffering people you can send a check to Andy Stump c/o Christ Lutheran Church, 126 West Main St., Dallastown, PA 17313. Our church sponsors his work.

RLC

The recent passing of far-left historian Howard Zinn reminded me, in a circuitous sort of way, of a piece Mary Eberstadt wrote a year ago for First Things. I thought it'd be worth sharing. The article was titled The Will to Disbelieve, a take-off on philosopher William James' famous essay The Will to Believe.

Eberstadt begins by reminding us of the willful imperviousness of the intellectual left (e.g. Zinn) to the evidence of the crimes of communism in the twentieth century and goes on to compare that will to disbelieve with the cultural elite's similar refusal to see the evidence of the tragic effects of the sexual revolution. She writes:

Eberstadt proceeds to lay out her case, a case which would seem to be obvious, to quote Pascal, to anyone who is not dead set against it. Here's part of her argument:

The whole essay is very much worth reading whether one is concerned about the consequences of the tectonic shift in our sexual morality since WWII or is interested in trying to understand how anyone could possibly have been sympathetic to twentieth century communism, or both.

RLC

Comes word that some atheists are in a snit because the U.S. Postal Service is going to put Mother Teresa on a stamp:

Well, that's true enough. What one does with one's life is often inseparable from what one most deeply believes, which is, I suppose, why there are no atheist charitable organizations to speak of. Nonetheless, it's asinine to think, as Ms. Gaylor evidently does, that because one is inspired by religious beliefs to live a life of altruism that that life should not be recognized simply because of the motives which inspired it.

Indeed, when Ms. Gaylor was asked why her organization didn't oppose stamps honoring Malcolm X and Martin Luther King she gave a very puzzling reply:

Perhaps the most gracious thing to do here would be to politely avert one's eyes from such a towering display of embarrassing fatuity. Surely Ms Gaylor doesn't intend to be taken seriously. Has she never read the Biography of Malcolm X and how his conversion to Islam shaped his subsequent life? Has she never read the writings of Martin Luther King, who, be it noted, was almost always referred to as "Reverend" King (not to mention that he carried the name of the great protestant reformer)? Is she oblivious to how both his sense of justice and his courage were rooted in his faith in God? If she hasn't, I urge her to pick up a copy of his I Have a Dream speech or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

But the deeper question is this: Since when do church/state considerations make it somehow illicit for the government to honor people who do great things from religious motivation? Would Ms. Gaylor have opposed the issuance of the stamp in 1948 which honored the four chaplains aboard the torpedoed USAT Dorchester - one of whom was a priest and presumably bore the honorific of "Father" - who, motivated by their mutual love for God, gave their life vests to others as the boat sank?

Here's the irony in Ms. Gaylor's position, however: In a world in which people acted consistently with their assumptions about ultimate reality there's absolutely no reason an atheist would have for acting altruistically. On atheism acts of great personal sacrifice are utterly inexplicable. People may engage in them, as does Dr. Rieux in Camus' The Plague, but the choice to do so is non-rational. Atheism leads to an egoistic ethic. Great sacrifices for others are incomprehensible in a world without God. People like Mother Teresa, on the other hand, and the four chaplains were motivated by their love for, and gratitude to, God and the conviction that God wanted them to give of themselves for others whom He loves. Grant Ms. Gaylor her Godless world and all we're left with is a life in which no one has any reason to do anything other than look out for his own self-interest - a Hobbesian war of every man against every man.

The Postal Service would struggle in such a world, the world Ms Gaylor would have us live in, to find anyone worth honoring with a stamp.

RLC

Jason writes to urge readers who may have visited the links to the remembrances of Howard Zinn to be sure to check the Update at David Horowitz's site. Horowitz (and Jason) was afraid that readers might construe his contempt for Zinn's ideas as contempt for Zinn the man, and he clarifies his position at the Update.

Indeed, Howard Zinn was by all accounts a fine man.

RLC

Jon Stewart wearies of the relentless name-calling by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and does a masterful parody of Olby in this skit. This'll be especially funny for anyone who has ever watched Olbermann for more than five minutes:

An eager readiness to personally insult another individual is a good indicator of what sort of character a man has. In Olbermann's case his disagreements over politics often degenerate quickly into the vilest sort of attacks on his opponents' very humanity. Dehumanization has been Olbermann's hole card for a couple of years now, but his ratings may reflect that his viewers, all but the hardest core, perhaps, are getting tired of it. Certainly when entertainers like Jon Stewart, who are on Olbermann's side on just about every substantive policy matter, begin to ridicule his persona, it's time to rethink the persona.

After this edition of the Daily Show it'll be awfully hard for Olbermann to insult anyone without reminding his viewers how creepy and silly Stewart made him look, and when viewers start thinking of a public man as a joke he very quickly loses his ability to influence their opinions.

RLC

You've no doubt heard that President Obama has decided that trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City was a political albatross he didn't need hanging around his neck going into the 2010 elections and has overruled his Justice department's plans for a Manhattan media spectacle. The White House insists that KSM will still be tried in civilian rather than military court although the venue has yet to be determined. Bill Burck and Dana Perino at National Review Online give eight reasons why, on the contrary, the trial will indeed be held before a military tribunal and will be held in, of all places, Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile, it seems likely that Attorney General Eric Holder will soon "resign" from his office. Overruling his decision to hold the trial in civilian court in NYC will surely be received by him as a slap in the face and an expression of no confidence. Indeed, the man has been a constant source of distraction and embarrassment to the Obama administration since he took over the post. Burck and Perino remind us of some of his most infelicitous decisions:

To these I would add his decision to not prosecute, against the advice of top Justice officials, the New Black Party thugs who were intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place in the 2008 election. I might also add his impolitic accusation that we are a nation of cowards about race, a claim that won him few admirers among the general public.

Eric Holder is a liability to the administration and patience with his missteps and pratfalls will, I think, soon run out. The last thing the Democrats need going into November is yet another Holderism sucking up media oxygen and forcing Democrat candidates to defend the indefensible. It certainly has been difficult for the White House to project an air of competence with Eric Holder running the Justice Department.

RLC

As if the proponents of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hadn't suffered enough damage to their credibility of late, now comes word of even more bad news. You might have heard that predictions of glacial retreat in the Himalayan mountains were based on rather tenuous evidence, and had to be retracted. Now we read a new revelation in the Telegraph U.K.

Here's the lede:

Perhaps it's time for the world's climatologists to restore some respectability to their science and explain exactly what the empirical, rather than the anecdotal, data is for man-caused global warming, and exactly how that data has been attained, and precisely how they have arrived at their conclusions.

It would also be inexcusably irresponsible of us to pass any legislation, like cap and trade, that would jeopardize our economic well-being until we know exactly what's going on in the earth's atmosphere. That the glaciers are retreating seems pretty clear - I've seen it myself in Alaska. What's not at all clear is what's causing that retreat.

I know Al Gore has said that the science is settled and the debate is over, but a student's Master's thesis and a mountaineering article are not the sort of thing most people think of when they think of settled science.

RLC

A former student, Anthony, links us to an interesting promo for a class on ethical issues related to the doing of justice. The class is being offered at Harvard by Michael Sandel, and interested readers can watch any or all of Professor Sandel's classes at the link:

It looks like this would be a very stimulating class for undergraduates, but I wonder whether Prof. Sandel ever asks his students the really important questions: Why, exactly, do they hold the opinion they do on any of the matters they discuss? What is the ground of their moral opinions? Do they have one or are their opinions purely arbitrary preferences that are no more rooted in anything than is their preference for pepsi over coke?

The fundamental ethical questions are these: Do ethical judgments stand on anything or are they simply matters of personal preference? Is there moral obligation or duty and, if so, what is it that obligates us? What is it that makes an act morally right or obligatory?

Until these questions are settled talking about what's right to do in a particular situation is like speculating about whether blue is prettier than green. It's not really worth debating. Moreover, these are questions for which naturalism, at bottom, must answer: Personal preference, No and Nothing, and Nothing. If we are, after all, simply the effluvium of blind, impersonal forces then it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that, as atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse puts it, ethics is just an illusion, an evolutionary ploy to suit us for survival in the stone age.

Remember Ruse the next time you hear an atheist or secularist make a moral judgment - for example, when they insist that we have a moral duty to help the poor. What they're telling you when they say that "X is right (or wrong)" is nothing more than "I like (or don't like) X." to which the appropriate rejoinder is, "So why should anyone care?" Ethics is pretty much literal nonsense unless there is a transcendent, personal, moral authority who serves as a source of objective moral obligation. The atheist who denies the existence of such an authority is only speaking gibberish when he proclaims that "we should do X" or that "X is a moral duty."

Hopefully, Professor Sandel points all this out to his students, but since he's at Harvard I suppose I shouldn't count on it.

RLC

Howard Zinn died last week at age 87. Most readers have probably never heard of Mr. Zinn, but he was a man of some consequence in the ideological struggles of the last half century. A historian and far-left activist he had many admirers on the left and many detractors on the right. In the wake of his passing two remembrances are worth checking out. From the left there's Bob Herbert's piece in the New York Times, and from the right there's a column written by converted radical leftist David Horowitz at Front Page Mag.

Check them out and decide for yourself whether Zinn's life and work merits praise or regret.

RLC

In the course of a review in First Things (subscription only) of Richard Dawkins' latest book theologian David B. Hart tarnishes an otherwise estimable critique with an unfortunate characterization of intelligent design (ID). He writes:

It was hard for me to get past the fact that this muddled paragraph came from the same mind which penned Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, a book I deeply admire.

Let's take Hart's assertions in order:

The best argument against ID theory, when all is said and done, is that it rests on a premise - "irreducible complexity."

This is simply false. ID rests on much more than irreducible complexity. It is based upon the concept that complex specified patterns, i.e. information, fills the biosphere and yet never have we ever seen such information generated by anything other than a mind. We've certainly never seen it produced by random natural forces. ID is also based on the exquisite fine-tuning of the forces, constants, and parameters of the universe. Dozens, perhaps more, of these had to be set to values so precise that had they deviated by, in some cases, the mass of a single atom relative to the mass of the universe, the universe would not have existed much less have given rise to life. To claim that ID rests solely on irreducible complexity is to reveal a grave lack of undertstanding of the matter about which one is writing.

[ID] can never be logically demonstrated.

This is true but what of it? Science is not about logical demonstrations, it's about coming up with the most plausible explanation for the available facts. To criticize ID because it doesn't lend itself to some sort deductive proof is, by extension, to criticize virtually the entire scientific enterprise.

[T]he mere biological complexity of this or that organism can never amount to an irrefutable proof of anything other than the incalculable complexity of that organism's phylogenetic antecedents.

Hart seems to be saying that unless a scientific theory can be proven beyond any possibility of refutation it is somehow unworthy of consideration. If this were true then all of Darwinism would have to be thrown on the scrap heap. Scientists do not seek proof, they seek explanations that account for a lot of data and which can resist falsification. Proof is left to mathematicians and logicians.

I trust that since Professor Hart's article was published in FT last month a lot of people who know better have quietly informed him that in this paragraph, at least, he dabbled in matters he would have been better advised to leave alone.

RLC