Bill Dembski offers his take on three possible outcomes of the Dover Intelligent Design trial and what each portends for the future of ID:

I'm not quite as sanguine as Dembski about the consequences of 2. and 3. Whether the scientific status of ID is legally left unchallenged or ID is ruled to be unscientific it seems to me that a defeat for Dover will be conflated in the public mind with a judgment that ID is nothing more than creationism. This is the impression that the plaintiffs are working assiduously to create in the media, and a defeat for Dover will be like embedding that misimpression in cement. It'll be devilishly difficult to correct the error once the cement dries.

The Washington Post, no fan of Republicans in general nor Tom DeLay in particular, nevertheless smells a partisan hit job by Texas district attorney Ronnie Earle:

As The American Spectator observes:

Mr. Earle, of course, is not interested in such shenanigans when perpetrated by Democrats. Only when it is Republicans who may have stepped a toe over the line is his finely honed sense of justice roused from its slumbers. Mr. Earle is a political hack who is using the power of his office to destroy his political enemies. He needs to be reigned in.

Thanks to Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters for the links.

Telic Thoughts puts us on to an excellent argument made a couple of years ago by atheist Toby Wardman in defense of the argument for God based on cosmic design. Wardman argues that the universe clearly is fine-tuned and refutes several common objections against the argument from design. Even so, Wardman concludes that the argument does not lead to the existence of a creator God:

In other words, the argument from cosmic design is very strong in pointing to a a certain intentionality or purpose in the universe. Nevertheless, one cannot conclude from the argument that the source of that intention is the God of traditional theism. Whether Wardman's conclusion is correct or not, it is certainly interesting since it is precisely what Intelligent Design advocates have been saying for the last ten years and what the plaintiff's attorneys and witnesses in the Dover ID case are strenuously seeking to deny.

That the universe looks to be designed is as obvious as anything can be. The question is whether the design is real or merely apparent, i.e. is it the product of a purposeful cause or is it just coincidence. ID seeks to demonstrate that the design is real and stops there. We could go on, once that answer is reached, and ask whether the cause is the God of theism or some other entity like a world soul or cosmic mind, but, despite what the critics are at pains to demonstrate in the Dover case, ID does not formally ask those questions. It leaves them to theologians and philosophers of religion.

In short, it is possible to believe that the universe is the product of intentional design without believing that the designer is the God of Christianity. Thus it is possible to talk about ID in public school science classrooms without stepping into the domain of religion. It is not possible to have genuine design without a designer, but it is possible (at least logically) to have a designer that is not the God of theism.

That an atheist has made this point in a well-reasoned essay is something that merits attention. People interested in the argument based on the fine-tuning of the universe should read his defense. It really is well done.

Twenty two Democrats voted against John Roberts' confirmation today. What legitimate reason could they possibly have had for rejecting someone this highly qualified? If they won't vote for Roberts they won't vote for anyone that Bush is likely to pick for O'Connor's seat. He could nominate Ted Kennedy and the Dems would still vote no just because he was Bush's pick. How can anyone take them seriously?

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has posted another installment in his series on the self-defeating nature of naturalism. Carter revisits an argument made by, inter alia, C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, that one who embraces both naturalism and evolution must conclude that his reason cannot be relied upon to lead him to truth, and that logical argument leads to truth only by coincidence.

The argument is roughly as follows: If our reason is the product of blind, purposeless processes acting to promote human survival then the discovery of truth is not a function of reason, except, at best, incidentally. There's no logical connection between survival value and truth. When, then, someone argues that evolution is the explanation for the complexity of life most in tune with reason, the materialist has no grounds for thinking it therefore to be true. We cannot have any confidence in any conclusion based upon reason because the function of reason is survival, not truth, and truth is not necessarily related to survival.

Nor can we adduce any argument to justify our confidence in reason, of course, since to do so would be to beg the question. We'd be assuming that our reason is trustworthy in order to show that it is so.

Anyway, the first installment of Carter's series can be found here, the second here, and the most recent can be found here.

A reader at one of Carter's posts asks to be given an example of something which has survival value which is nevertheless not true. The reader is trying to make the point that in designing our reason to promote survival, natural selection perforce designs it simultaneously to discern truth. He is mistaken in this, though. Look at the question from the standpoint of a naturalistic materialist. Natural selection has evidently favored human belief in gods since such belief is ubiquitous in our species, and must, therefore, have survival value. Yet the naturalist considers such beliefs to be false and superstitious.

The upshot of all this is that naturalism, the belief that nature is all there is, is self-defeating. If naturalism were true then our reason would not be trustworthy and any argument we employ to defend naturalism would be suspect and probably wrong.

Christopher Hitchens brings his inestimable skills as a journalist to bear in a dissection of the organizations behind the "antiwar" rallies this past weekend in this piece in Slate.

Here are a few appetizers:

We're sure that the rallies in Washington and elsewhere attracted many good-hearted patriots who are also opponents to American policy in Iraq, but when one climbs into the sty with pigs one gets more than mud on one's shoes. If opponents of the war really want to gain a hearing for their arguments they should stop hanging out in the sty.

Anyone interested in the full story on the Tom Delay indictment should visit Michelle Malkin's site. She has lots of analysis and links. The short version is that this looks like an ugly political hit job on Delay. Whether you like the guy or not, anyone with a basic commitment to fairness should at least be skeptical of the justice of this indictment brought by District Attorney Ronnie Earle who has repeatedly used his power to harrass conservative political figures of both parties.

Earle's indictment of Delay, whether or not there's anything to it, hands the Democrats a club with which to beat the Republicans for the next several months, and they will not scruple to employ it. If Delay is guilty of an infraction then, of course, he should pay the penalty (just as Bill Clinton and Al Gore should have paid the penalty for taking illicit campaign contributions from Chinese businessmen and Buddhist nuns). But if this indictment gets thrown out of court for want of substance, as it certainly appears that it might, then Earle should be disbarred for abuse of his office.

Security Watchtower documents the degradation of enemy leadership in Iraq over the last month. Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail comments on this and notes that "in the Anbar and Diwana provinces, sixteen leaders, including six "emirs", five senior facilitators and 5 brigade or cell leaders have been killed or captured. This list excludes the Coaliton's success in dismantling the al-Ahwal brigade in the city of Hit."

Each success leads to a cascade of further successes. Every capture of enemy documents and leadership provides us with intelligence which leads to the elimination, in one way or another, of more of the enemy's leaders. The steady loss of this expertise and the constant fear of capture or sudden death must be taking a serious toll on the morale of the insurgents.

Wretchard at Belmont Club describes the difficulties the enemy is facing and concludes with this observation:

Wretchard borrows heavily from Bing West writing at Slate. Part of West's post follows:

Read the whole post. It's an interesting perspective on the day to day work of our Marines.

It's difficult to say exactly what the criticism of Michael Brown is. That he is held in contempt by members of the committee set up to investigate what went wrong in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is clear. That they have a specific complaint about what Brown should have done differently is not. Breitbart.com has this report on today's hearings:

The congresspersons are quite good at bullying and insulting. They seem less competent at actually pin-pointing problems. The article itself is an example of a bias against Brown. Every time Brown gives a reason for why FEMA didn't do what people thought it should do the reader is given the impression that he's just trying to shift the blame. It doesn't seem to matter that maybe he's correct to place the onus where he does. At least nobody on the committee seems interested in finding out. They'd much rather strut and preen before the cameras taking their kicks at their helpless victim to impress the folks back home.

The committee's "work" reminds one of the book The Lottery where citizens in a town draw lots and the loser is ritually stoned to death by everyone in the town. Michael Brown lost the lottery and the committee members, Republicans and Democrats, are determined to stone him with great relish.

PowerLine comes to a similar conclusion, but having watched the hearings, claims that Brown was the only person there who seemed to know what he was talking about. No surprise there.

By the way, we read that New Orleans police superintendent Eddie Compass is resigning. What we'd like to know is when Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco are going to do the honorable thing and step down themselves? It's too bad that government relief aid to Louisiana can't be made contingent upon the resignations of the two people whose actions and inactions did the most to insure that chaos would follow the storm.

This is the quality of argument that the Intelligent Design folks are up against in Harrisburg:

ID is not science therefore it is not science. Very compelling. And then there's this:

The release of this letter would be a strange move for people interested in arguing that ID should not be taught in science class because it's not testable and because it's inherently religious.

As we wrote the other day in Viewpoint:

The Nobel winners, by signing this letter, also signed off on a theological claim. If life is the result solely of "unguided, unplanned processes" then by teaching evolution, schools are, by implication, teaching that God has nothing to do with life on earth. To the extent that this definition for evolution will be presented to students, they will be taught that evolution makes God irrelevant. This is exactly what the Dover school board was seeking to avoid by crafting the statement to be read to students that evolution is not necessarily the truth of the matter.

The irony of this lawsuit is obvious. The plaintiffs allege that it is illicit for some people to claim that an intelligent designer, or even God, did have a role to play in the emergence of life but that it's not illicit for others to deny that any designer or God was involved. Why is the former claim considered an unacceptable conflation of church and state but the latter is not?

We hope Dover's attorneys ask these questions of the plaintiff's witnesses.

Since everyone wants to find who underperformed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina perhaps we should look at the reports put out by officials and amplified through the media. Talk about incompetence, consider this:

Between Nagin and Compass it's little wonder that New Orleans was such a mess. These guys bear a lot of responsibility for making their city look bad, and the media bears a lot of responsibility for being so willing to run with stories based on rumor with no first hand confirmation. If this is the best the media can do in reporting a disaster then maybe they should be kept out of the next one. They apparently do more harm than good.

The plaintiffs in the Dover Intelligent Design case called Brown biologist Ken Miller to the stand as an expert witness today. In the course of his testimony Miller challenged the accuracy of Of Pandas and People, the intelligent-design textbook to which Dover students are referred. Miller said the book omits discussion of what causes extinction. Since nearly all original species are extinct, he said, any intelligent design creator would not have been very intelligent.

This statement is so absurd that it's hard to believe it comes from a prominent scientist at a prestigious school. In fact, Miller's entire testimony was riddled with so many examples of sloppy thinking that it will no doubt be an everlasting embarrassment to him.

Miller's complaint that the designer must be unintelligent since its work tends to go extinct is ridiculous. It might be relevant if ID advocates claimed that the designer was an omniscient, omnipotent being, although even then it would presume an insight into that being's purposes to which Dr. Miller could hardly be privy. As it is, however, ID makes no claims about who the designer is or what its nature is. Extinction is no more evidence that the designer is unintelligent than obsolence in automobiles or computer software platforms is evidence that the engineers who designed them are not intelligent.

Miller simply assumes that God is believed by ID advocates to be the designer, but in so doing he confuses the personal beliefs of some ID advocates with the logical entailments of their theory.

By focusing on extinction Miller is simply seeking to deflect the court's attention from the much more pertinent issue of how those extinct organisms ever reached the level of sophistication and complexity they achieved in the first place.

Mike Gene and others at Telic Thoughts romp through Dr. Miller's testimony ripping it to shreds. Gene's imaginary cross-examination of Miller is especially whithering. Don't miss it.

Unfortunately, the media won't be nearly as insightful and analytic as the folks at Telic Thoughts, and Miller's claims will sound perfectly reasonable to a public which really has a very nebulous understanding of what, exactly, ID asserts.

Among the stories emerging from the rubble of Katrina is this one by Reuters:

We don't suppose that there'll be much enthusiasm for calls for stricter gun control legislation in neighborhoods like this one.

The Left-wing blogosphere is outraged by this report of prisoner abuse in Iraq, and conservative blogs are largely silent, waiting, one hopes, for more information to come in. Here are the salient facts as they've been reported so far:

There are several things to be said about this. First, our disgust with this report is based not at all on any sympathy for the detainees (at least not those who are known to be terrorists). They are low-lifes who would blow up women and children as well as American soldiers were they given the chance. We really don't feel their pain much. Second, we find it somewhat reassuring that these reports date back to the period before Abu Ghraib. Hopefully, our military brass has put out the word that this behavior will not be tolerated. Thirdly, the last paragraph suggests that it has indeed not been tolerated for some time.

Having said that, the American military is disgraced by this sort of conduct by its soldiers. We are not among those who believe that raising one's voice at a detainee constitutes inhumane treatment, nor are we convinced that some of what was done to these prisoners rises to the level of atrocity, as some would depict it. Beating people, however, even if it's these sub-humans, just to work off one's frustrations or to provide a form of recreation for bored G.I.'s, is completely reprehensible and inexcusable, not just because of the effects it has on the prisoner but even more because of the effect it has on the soldier. It dehumanizes the person who administers the beating and turns our soldiers into savages rather than professionals.

We understand that the legal status of these detainees, since they're not uniformed soldiers, is a little blurry, but that is not justification for beating them or torturing them for amusement. Such conduct belies a cruelty and viciousness in those who participated in it that has no place in a professional military. The people who did it should, if the allegations are accurate, be punished for embarrassing and shaming the United States, and we are glad to see that that appears to be what is in store for them.

We have a local talk show host who does a fine job of keeping issues of local and national interest before the listening public. On Friday he did a segment on the lawsuit against Dover Area School District's decision to have biology teachers read a statement alerting students to the fact that Neo-Darwinism is not the only game in town. The case will be heard starting tomorrow in Harrisburg, PA. I wrote an e-mail to the host in response to a couple of things I thought he said about ID on the program:

Gary,

I think it's great that you're willing to talk on your show about the intelligent design issue as much as you do, and I sympathize with the "middle of the road" position you stake out on the matter.

You said two things on Friday's show, however, that may mislead some of your listeners, and I think it's important that there not be confusion on this matter.

I might have misunderstood or not heard you clearly, but I thought you said (1) that intelligent design (ID) is a religious theory and (2) that creationism is not allowed to be taught in public schools. If you didn't say these things then please disregard this e-mail. If you did say them, then I'd like to urge you to rethink them.

Neo-Darwinian evolution is a theory that states that all of life can be explained in terms of natural, mechanistic processes acting blindly and without intentional purpose. ID is the denial of this. ID advocates make two related arguments: They argue firstly that material processes are not adequate to account for the high degree of information and the exquisite depth of complexity we find in living things. They argue secondly that whatever the role of material processes was in the emergence of living things, their obvious design bears the impress of intention and intelligence.

That is as far as ID advocates can legitimately go as scientists. They do not draw any conclusions (except in some cases in their private lives) about what this intelligence is. The universe itself may be a cosmic mind as some ancient Greeks believed, or it may be subject to a world soul or spirit as Hegel and the German idealists believed. Whatever the designer is there is no way one can deduce from ID that it's the God of the Bible or the Koran or any other sacred book. Such a step requires a leap of faith that people might make personally but which can't be justified logically. In fact, it's logically possible even to be an atheist or an agnostic and still agree that ultimate reality is mind and that the universe shows intentionality.

If ID doesn't lead inevitably to the existence of the personal God of most religions then how can it be religious in any commonly understood sense? Moreover, as I wrote for a column here, ID neither entails the existence of a god nor does it prescribe worship of one. It has no church nor dogma nor trappings of a religion. Doubtless many ID adherents are religious as individuals and would like to see ID used as a means to point others to the Judeo-Christian God, but then many Darwinians are atheistic and see Darwinism as a useful tool for turning people toward materialism or naturalism.

The next time a caller calls in and says that ID is a religious theory, ask them exactly what it is about it that makes it so. I doubt that they'll be able to give a compelling answer.

You also said on your show Friday, if I heard you correctly, that creationism cannot be taught in public schools. This is not correct. The Supreme Court case that addressed this matter was Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987 which came about because the state legislature of Louisiana sought to require the teaching of creationism whenever evolution is taught. Writing for the majority, Justice Brennan (see here) said:

In other words, Louisiana teachers were free to teach those aspects of creationist theory in their classrooms that are based on scientific concepts before the creation act was passed by the legislature, and the Supreme Court took no offense at this. What the Court did, however, was say that government cannot mandate the teaching of creationism. Teachers are free to teach it if they wish provided they do so in the context of scientific investigation.

One of the questions facing the courts in the Dover case is whether local school boards have a right to determine what will be taught in their school or whether they are considered an agent of the state government, like a legislature, and thus prohibited from mandating the teaching of anything critical of evolutionary materialism.

The second question is whether the Dover policy of reading a statement to a class really constitutes teaching anything at all. You pointed out on Friday that the Dover statement certainly seems innocuous (ed: See here for a good letter on this point).

The third question, and one over which much confusion seems to exist, is whether ID is really just a form of creationism. The many critics of ID notwithstanding, it's not. Creationism is an attempt to use science to buttress a literal reading of the early chapters of the book of Genesis. However one feels about this project, that's not what ID is about. ID advocates take no stand on whether the claims in Genesis, taken literally or otherwise, are true or false. Indeed, they could all be false, and ID could still be true.

I suggest again, if you haven't done so already, that you ask a caller who makes the claim that ID is just creationism in drag to explain exactly how this is so. My hunch is that they won't be able to do it.

Keep up the good work.

Some estimate the cost of hurricane Katrina will probably end up at $200 billion dollars. Next week, we will most likely be hearing of estimates of the cost of hurricane Rita.

Added to these, we have the cost of a creative plan by Congressman Rep. Gene Taylor (r) of Mississippi who is working to rewrite the rules of the national flood insurance program to let homeowners who weren't required to buy it to purchase retroactive flood insurance coverage.

There it is folks. One more example of how some in our society believe individuals shouldn't be held accountable for their decisions. And not only that, these people apparently have no problem giving your tax dollars to these individuals. Imagine the outrage of those responsible types who purchased federal flood insurance year after year forgoing things that could otherwise have been purchased to enrich their lives. The final slap in their face will come when they realize their tax dollars will be given to the uninsured home owners too.

It's interesting to note that these dollars aren't sitting in the government's bank account waiting to be spent. They haven't even been created yet rather they will be printed by the government to pay the costs of these two natural disasters. Hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into the economy just like the hurricane waters flooded into New Orleans.

What impact is this going to have on the dollars I have in my pocket? You might ask. Well, for one thing, your dollars are being inflated. That is to say, they are losing their purchasing power and this will be evidenced in the rising cost of goods and services.

The two hurricanes are going to have another effect on our economy by contributing to inflation in another way. With the oil, gasoline, and natural gas supply suffering from the storms, the price of each of these commodities is going to go up.

In the late '70s, early '80s, during the oil embargo, gas and oil were scarce and their respective prices went up. Yet I would like for someone to explain to me how this causes inflation.

Personally, I don't believe rising prices cause inflation yet inflation was a problem then and it could very well be a problem again as a result of these storms. I suspect inflation occurs because when prices go up, the government injects more money into the economy to compensate for the higher prices. Then, after they realize they have pumped too many dollars into the system, they start to raise interest rates to slow the flow of dollars into the economy.

Whether I am correct in my thinking or not, there appears to be a consensus forming that believes inflation is on the way and they are about the business of protecting themselves. While we, as individuals, can't stop the federal government from printing dollars and diminishing our wealth, we can, at least, exercise the same defensive tactics as those who are anticipating inflation by purchasing gold.

Yes, I have been the "voice crying in the wilderness" advocating that people should have at least 10% of their portfolios in gold bullion. And since the price of gold is at a 17 year high, it appears to have been good advice. When Viewpoint first went online, gold was about $350 per ounce. This week it hit $470 (and pulled back to $463).

The fact of the matter is that ultimately, gold is the only real money. Always was and probably always will be. Despite what governments will imply (because they want you to buy into the concept of an ever inflating fiat currency) gold is a way to protect your wealth from the devastating effects of inflation. See what Alan Greenspan had to say at this link that I've posted numerous times before.

And for some entertaining reading, check out this link to see what the Mogambo Guru has to say about inflation. This guy is a hoot and I think he's worth listening to.

WSC

Well, I guess it was a successful rally, but if this photo is any indication, claims that there were a hundred thousand anti-war protestors in Washington Saturday were a bit inflated. I've seen bigger crowds at a high school football game.

Michelle Malkin has a few photos and links, but one of the more important stories regarding the rally is the tale of who's behind it. It turns out that the lead organizer is ANSWER, a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. The MSM are notably reluctant to help people make the connection, but there is a strange irony in a group which follows the thinking of Josef Stalin, who was directly responsible for the murders of over 25 million people, organizing an anti-war rally.

Investor's Business Daily invites us to imagine a pro-war rally organized by a neo-nazi group and ask ourselves whether the MSM would decline to mention it.

The "well-meaning people" are what Lenin was reputed to have referred to as "useful idiots." When one reads quotes from some of them at the rally one begins to see more clearly what Lenin meant. For example, this from the Washington Post:

Just like that. Sorry, big mistake. We're outa here. Good luck to all of you who cast your lot with us when al Zarqawi comes to settle accounts. And good luck to you all when civil war breaks out between the Shia and Sunnis and Kurds, and good luck when the Iranians seek their revenge for the 80's war, and the Syrians lop off a chunk of the western frontier, and the Turks settle up with the Kurds, and everybody in the region decides they need your oil more than you do, and, well, you'll all be a lot better off without us Americans here to build your country up, get you on your feet, and protect you from all these predators.

Right. Destroy the Baathist government, say "oops" and then leave the Iraqi people to disease, starvation, and their bloodthirsty neighbors. That's a great idea. We wonder what the average IQ of these protestors in Washington is.

And how does this differ so much from what we are doing that Mr. Pollock felt the need to make the drive down from Cecil Co. to register this opinion?

And if we pulled out there would be what? Even if Baez is correct, how would doing what she advises make things better? Does anyone who goes to these events actually think? Do they care about the consequences of what they demand? Do they care about the people of Iraq? Or do they, like ANSWER, just wish to see America lose?

Some of the smarter lefties recognize the problem posed by letting a group like ANSWER organize the rally and are voicing their disgust with the whole thing over at the Daily Kos. Bush has indeed been fortunate to have such enemies.

Two energy-related articles worth your attention:

First, as the price of oil hangs around $66 a barrel oil companies are finding it cost-effective to consider tapping into Colorado oil shale where recoverable deposits are believed to be more than three times greater than what remains in the Saudi Arabian fields. These deposits have been known about for decades but the cost of squeezing the oil out of them was always prohibitive. That no longer seems to be the case.

Second is an article by James Glassman at Tech Central Station which cites the lessons of history by way of warning against slapping a counterproductive windfall profits tax on oil companies. The answer to high prices, Glassman writes, is to increase supply and that can be done by decreasing onerous and unnecessary regulations on the industry which prevent them from drilling for known oil in the Atlantic and Alaska. Regulations also discourage the industry from increasing refining capacity which has really crippled our ability to get petroleum to market even when the supply has been adequate.

Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker argues compellingly that the Democrats who are pronouncing Bush's presidency effectively over as a result of Katrina are once again "misunderestimating" the man. Lifson maintains that Katrina (and Rita, we should add) may do more to burnish Bush's legacy and help him achieve his goals than his opponents realize or want to admit. Lifson's article is worth reading whether you're a fan of the president or an opponent.

Despite low approval ratings at the moment, it's our view that Bush may ultimately be seen as an historic president. If Iraq turns out well over the next couple of years and Afghanistan continues to make progress toward becoming a reasonably healthy state; if there are no major terrorist acts in the U.S.; if the Gulf coast has been revivified by the strategies Bush has outlined; if the economy is doing well and the deficit is not hurting us too badly; if steps have been taken to increase our energy availability; if the future of social security and illegal immigration have been addressed; if there are two more conservative Supreme Court justices, in addition to John Roberts, seated on the Court; and if North Korea and Iran are not seen as imminent nuclear threats, then Bush will be seen as perhaps one of the greatest presidents in history, the carping and cavils of his critics notwithstanding.

This is a lot of "ifs", of course, but every one of them is within reach, and it's not necessary for all of them to come to pass for history to judge him so highly.

Some on the left will be quick to point out that if these things all go south, and they certainly could, then Bush will be about the worst president in history. That's true enough, although I'm confident that those who would make this point are all sincerely hoping that every item listed (with perhaps the exception of the conservative judges) comes to pass.

Others will look at the president's approval ratings and scoff at Viewpoint's prognostication, but we shouldn't rest too much weight on approval ratings. If they had existed during the presidencies of John Adams and Abraham Lincoln they probably would have been lower than Bush's.

If what Robert Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe were being done by Israelis or white South Africans fifteen years ago the world would be apoplectic with rage. As it is, the corrupt and flaccid United Nations can scarcely muster enough enthusiasm to admonish him to play nice.

The man should be deposed. No sanctions, no diplomacy, no niceties. Some nation, preferably African, but not necessarily so, needs to go into Zimbabwe and remove him from power. He's no better than Idi Amin or any one of the other psychopaths, idiots, and buffoons who've managed to rise to power in black Africa, and there is no point in trying to remediate him.

One way or another, for the sake of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, Mugabe has to go.

The Fourth Rail has a very helpful visual that puts operations in western Iraq over the past four or five weeks into geographical perspective. Go here and click on the map.

The other day we posted a lament concerning the embezzlement of almost 1.3 billion dollars that was to be spent on weaponry and supplies to outfit the Iraqi army. Belmont Club offers some background which suggests that, although the theft is bad, it may not be quite as bad as it seems.

Pew has an interesting poll out. The questions it asks seek, among other things, to determine which countries are most favorably disposed toward Jews and Christians and which are most unfavorably disposed toward Muslims. Here is a summary of the results:

Arabs, like everyone else, prefer to line up behind the winning team. If we were to pull out of Iraq, as the left demands, and leave that country to the tender mercies of al Qaida, these numbers would reverse overnight. The Arab street is gauging our commitment. They perceive at the moment that we're resolved to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan. As long as that perception persists, most Muslims in most of the Arab world will continue to stroll across to our side of the street.

Go here to play Panda-monium, a game in which Darwinian pandas attack the redoubts of the Discovery Institute with some of their favorite cliches. The player scores points for every panda shot out of the sky. Great fun.

Mark Lilla writes winsomely in the New York Times Magazine about his journey from faith to skepticism. It is in some ways, whether he intended it or not, a very sad story, filled with a sense of loss and nostalgia. His criticisms of the faith he left behind are respectful, gentle and usually accurate, as though he were writing about a marriage which gave him many fond memories but which just didn't work out.

I did find one riff more than a little difficult to accept, however. He writes:

This claim belies a profound lack of familiarity with the astonishing amount of work being done by Christians who write serious books for audiences of both professionals and laity. Just a few of the dozens of names which come to mind are William Lane Craig, Richard Swinburne, J.P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, Mark Noll, George Marsden, William Dembski, William Alston, Jay Budzisewski, N.T. Wright, Stephen Barr, Del Ratzsch, and many, many other Christian philosophers, historians, scientists, theologians and intellectuals of all stripes.

Mr. Lilla might reply that these are not all Americans nor are they "evangelicals", but neither were many of the men on his list "evangelicals" in the contemporary sense of the term. Nor were they all Americans. To call these writers, and the dozens of others who deserve to be on the list, "half-educated evangelical gurus who either publish vacant, cheery self-help books or are politically motivated" is so far at variance with the truth as to be bizarre.

Mr. Lilla closes his otherwise artfully written essay with an interesting question: Why do religious skeptics like himself feel the need to prosyletize? Why do they care? A Christian might seek to convert a complete stranger because he believes that that person's eternal soul is at risk and because he believes he's carrying out a divine mandate by sharing the gospel with him, but an atheist believes neither of these things. Lilla admits that he has no good answer to the question:

At the risk of committing the sin of bad psychology, I wonder if part of the answer to his question doesn't lie in the fact that when others believe what we believe it reinforces and reaffirms the rightness of our beliefs. Both believers and skeptics, if they are thoughtful, live with a deep-down existential angst, a dread, a doubt. It might be that we are wrong, and it is a comfort when other people are persuaded to join us in our belief or our skepticism. For some it might almost be a relief. The angst must be particularly acute for a man who is keenly aware, because of his youthful background in the faith, that he is placing his eternal destiny on the line in his choice of commitments and that, should he be wrong, his loss could be immeasurable.

I should note a comment by Douglas LeBlanc at GetReligion.com who wonders how long it will be before the Times prints an article written by someone who makes the journey from skepticism to faith. There are lots of such stories out there, of course, but we won't be going on a fast waiting for the Times to tell us about them.

Anyway, read Lilla's essay. It's long, but it's quite good.

A left-wing website, Progressive Punch, has ranked all members of the Senate and House according to a rating which gives the member a score of 100% if they have a perfect liberal voting record. The more conservative the member is the closer is their score to zero.

I don't know whether their ranking system is reliable, but one interesting result they show is this: There is not a single Democrat in the House or Senate who scores under 50% (except Ben Nelson who scores 49.4%) and not a single Republican who scores over it. That's a pretty stark division. I wonder if a similar polarization would have been the case twenty five years ago.

It's also interesting to note that four Senate Republicans are far more liberal than the rest of their caucus, although they're still well below the fifty percent mark. See if you can guess who they are before you check out the rankings here.

When Katrina devastated the Mississippi coast earlier this month Robert Kennedy, Jr. suggested that it was God's judgment on governor Haley Barbor for having once written a memo to George Bush critical of the Kyoto Treaty.

Now another category 4 storm heads toward Galveston. No doubt the good people along the Texas coast are pleading with governor Rick Perry to fire off a memo to Washington praising the Kyoto accords and urging the president to sign them before God punishes Bush by clobbering the poor Texans along the Gulf.

Even so, we tend to agree with the near-unanimous opinion of the nation's meteorologists that these storms have nothing to do with global warming. We think instead that those people are correct who assert that the weather is God's judgment on American decadence. We were told, for example, that Katrina was punishment for the vice that infests Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, though, the hurricane destroyed almost everything in an area the size of Minnesota except the French Quarter - the heart of the city's decadence, but we're sure the denizens of this den of iniquity got the message all the same.

Now He appears to be sending hurricane Rita to pummel Galveston, perhaps as punishment for the sins of Las Vegas. Maybe, this is the Old Testament scapegoat principle at work, where innocent victims are made to pay the price for the sins of the wealthy.

In any event, those Las Vegans better be paying careful attention to what's happening to Galveston while they cavort in their night clubs this weekend. If they don't, the next hurricane might be aimed right at Mexico.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters is typical among conservative bloggers in his assessment that Harry Reid's public decision to vote against John Roberts makes it a lot easier to nominate another Scalia/Thomas to replace O'Connor.

The reasoning goes like this:

The favorite among the folks at ConfirmThem.com is Michael Luttig, but Michael McConnell and Edith Jones are also popular.

Read the whole post at Captain's Quarters if the looming battle for the Supreme Court interests you. It's pretty good.

Mars is getting warmer, but what else could we expect with Halliburton's friend in the White House refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty?

John Eibner and Joe Madison write a concise update on the current situation in the Sudan. It's difficult for Americans to stay focused on a region where there is no obvious national interest at stake, and it's easy to avoid thinking about the suffering of the people there when their plight gives way on the evening news to feckless murder investigations in Aruba and Cindy Sheehan's quixotic crusade in Crawford.

The absence of a manifest national interest was the argument for staying out of Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda in the nineties. It was the crux of the case for neutrality in 1940. It is not a trivial argument. Even so, power carries with it some measure of responsibility. We should not stand by and do nothing while people are starved and slaughtered if it is within our capacitites to do something to stop it that would not make matters worse. In other words, there is a moral case, even in this amoral post-modern world, for bringing our power to bear on behalf of those trapped in the third world hells that befoul our globe like so many toxic pustules.

The debate should not be whether we should intervene to help desperate people. The debate should be about how we might most effectively accomplish that goal. It should center around how we can produce the greatest amount of good with the least amount of evil.

Hopefully, moral suasion, diplomatic pressure and economic incentives will bring about a surcease of the suffering of the victims of the despots and petty tyrants who populate the third world, but sometimes, as in Bosnia and Rwanda, it might take the application of military force. That should be a last resort, but, provided it can be reasonably expected to work and produce a better result than would capitulation, it should always be an option.

It was indeed an option in Bosnia, to our credit and the credit of the Clinton administration. It evidently was not an option in Rwanda, to our and president Clinton's everlasting shame. You may, of course, disagree, but if so, at least watch the movie Hotel Rwanda and see if that doesn't cause you to rethink your opinion.

This is the sort of disheartening news that will cause the American people to drop their support of the Iraq effort quicker than anything.

Almost the entire procurement budget allocated to Iraq's defense ministry has been stolen. It amounts to 1.3 billion dollars. It's going to be awful hard for the Bush administration to ask the American taxpayer to come up with that kind of money again, but if the money is not replaced the progress of the Iraqi military toward self-sufficiency will be seriously impaired.

Americans have been generous because they believe that Iraq is on the road to being able to fend for itself. If we see our investment just disappearing down a rat-hole, enthusiasm for saving Iraq will evaporate like morning mist, and the most bitter consequences for both us and the world will ensue.

The Bush administration evidently needs to return to first principles, and the very first principle of a leader is that you surround yourself with the most competent people you can find. A good leader doesn't play patronage games with important appointments and especially not with homeland security. It is astonishing that key positions at HS seem to be doled out on the basis of nepotism and cronyism, as though the task of securing our citizens from terrorism was no more critical a post than the ambassadorship to the Solomon Islands.

Unfortunately, the Bushies, having already been scorched by the Michael Brown appointment at FEMA, seem to have learned nothing from the experience and appear to be angling for a reprise of their embarrassment in the nomination of Julie Myers to head the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the Department of Homeland Security.

Michelle Malkin can't believe this is happening and wonders what on earth the Bush people are thinking. Malkin has the relevant background on Ms Myers, and it's pretty depressing.

For our part, we wonder to what extent, if any, Bush himself was involved in this nomination. Say you didn't know, Dubya!

To discover what's really going on in Iraq one must forget the evening news and turn instead to the milblogs (military blogs) which specialize in covering military matters in general and operations in Iraq in particular. One blog that provides a perspective that you won't ever get from ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN is StrategyPage.com. Their post from last Sunday, for example, gives us some good insight into the recent upsurge in deaths among Iraqi civilians. Here's part of that post:

Follow the link to read the rest of it.

A major non-event in the American media is nevertheless a significant event for American foreign policy. Oxblog reports on it for us:

Too bad Sean Penn or Cindy Sheehan didn't show up over there. Maybe then the elections would've gotten some coverage.

Publius also has a lot more on the election here.

If you were to guess which country in the world was the most violent how would you answer? Whatever answer you give, it's probably wrong according to a United Nations study. I'm a little skeptical of the methodology of this study, but, for what its worth, its findings were surprising. The Times Online has the story:

I agree with the constable, but still..., Scotland??

E.J. Dionne thinks that the Senate should vote no on judge John Roberts, not because he doesn't think Roberts qualified, but because he doesn't think he was sufficiently forthcoming in the Senate judicial committee hearings about his "core beliefs." We should end the charade that these hearings have become, Dionne argues, by refusing to confirm those who make it such a farce.

Even if one agrees with Dionne that Roberts' beliefs about Roe v. Wade are indeed a legitimate concern, he still looks a little silly raising the matter now. He evidently wasn't too bothered that neither Sandra Day O'Connor nor Ruth Bader Ginsburg were any more forthcoming in their hearings than Roberts was in his. If those nominees didn't have to answer questions about where they stood on matters likely to come before the court why make Roberts jump over that bar? Dionne's frustration with Roberts seems more than a little partisan, being reserved, as it is, for a conservative judge who might vote to overturn Roe.

There really is only one question that Roberts should be expected to answer, and that concerns the principles which will guide him in forming his judgments about the cases he hears. How flexible in his mind is the constitution? How strictly will he interpret it? Will he seek to interpret in the light of foreign law? Will he read into it principles that are currently fashionable but not mentioned in the constitution itself? Everything else we need to know about his experience, his integrity, his judicial competence are all discovered through venues other than hearings. If no questions arise when the candidate is vetted by the FBI, if there are no hints of scandal or incompetence, then all the judiciary committee need worry about are his answers to those questions.

That would, of course, make for what the senators would consider an unacceptably short hearing, and that would not sit well with those pompous, self-important bloviators on the judiciary committee who treasure their time preening before the cameras and pampering their super-sized egos by delivering questions in the form of speeches. More than the nominees, the judiciary committee members are the reason the hearings have become a charade.

Donna Brazile managed Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 so she's no fan of George Bush, or at least she wasn't until last Thursday night. Bush always said he wanted to be a uniter, not a divider, but unfortunately his political opposition wouldn't go along. As soon as he proposed anything or tried to accomplish anything the opposition took exception to it and claimed that their disagreement with the president was proof that he was dividing the nation.

That sort of silliness is going to be hard to maintain after Thursday night, and Donna Brazile's column is a good illustration of why that is so.

As Mississippi and Louisiana are, like Lazarus, raised up from their devastation it will be hard not to remember who was primarily responsible for it. As long as the president doesn't bankrupt the nation in the doing of it, he will surely be remembered, despite the political tensions of our time, as the man who united the nation to rebuild the Gulf coast and New Orleans.

Byron Borger, a dear friend and valued critic of occasional posts on Viewpoint has taken exception to some of what I wrote here and here. His comments can be found in the Feedback forum. My reply follows with passages from Byron's critique in block quotes:

By,

Thanks for your criticisms of my view of poverty in America. I know that the opionions I express are controversial and that some will find them offensive. Nevertheless, I stand by them as I think them to be largely correct insofar as they describe the situation of a significant percentage, perhaps even a majority, of the chronically poor in this country.

Those who are poor in the U.S. have suffered from the influence of a culture that has seduced them into adopting behaviors that are guaranteed to keep them poor, a prevailing social science that has provided excuses for them to rationalize their poverty, and government policies (like some welfare programs) which have encouraged values that lead to trans-generational poverty.

You wrote that:

I do not doubt that those who dwell in such regions have few resources and job opportunities. That doesn't mean that there are no opportunities for them anywhere. In the 18th and 19th century millions of Irish in even worse situations than those in Appalachia emigrated at great hazard to themselves and their families to this country to find or create opportunities to improve their lives. During the 1930s "Dust Bowl" hundreds of thousands of "Okies" and others migrated from the mid-west to the west coast to find or make opportunities for themselves. Today one of our most serious problems and perhaps Bush's greatest failure is the problem of illegal immigration brought about by the fact that millions of poor know that there are jobs in this country that will allow them to provide for their families if only they are able to get to them and are willing to work them. And so they come.

Just because there are no jobs in one's town or neighborhood does not mean there are no jobs at all. People are faced with a trade-off. They can move, perhaps with great difficulty, to where work is or stay where they feel they have roots. It's their choice to make. One choice gives them a chance, one doesn't.

But to just blame poverty on poor choices is not matching up with my (albeit) limited experience. And it sure doesn't square with what the Bible says are the causes of poverty (personal immorality or poor choices being only one of the less mentioned causes.)

Poverty in Biblical times was not like poverty today. It was, in fact, completely different. Biblical poverty was more like what people endured in this country during the Great Depression when there really weren't any jobs. In Biblical times the masses were poor and a small minority were well off, usually because they exploited the poor. Today's poor live in the wealthiest country with the largest middle class, the greatest opportunity for socio-economic mobility, the greatest economic freedom, and one of the most just societies in the history of the world.

In terms of health care, comforts like refrigeration, air conditioning, heat, entertainment, and transportation, today's poor are rich beyond the wildest dreams of anyone living in a Biblical culture. They have access to public libraries and public schools, they are eligible for government programs that buy their groceries, pay their energy and medical bills, and subsidize their housing. To compare the causes of American poverty today to the causes of poverty in Biblical times, or even the poverty that exists in modern times throughout much of the rest of the world, is to compare apples and oranges.

You also say:

A lot of these sorts of people, though maybe not a majority of them, if they know they can speak freely and not be hooted down, would agree with what I'm saying. I've talked to people who do social work, who are police officers in poor neighborhoods, who are teachers in poor schools, and pastors who counsel poor people. Their experience has made them some of the most discouraged people I know. They do their jobs with compassion and professionalism, but they feel their task is like trying to bail the water out of the Titanic with a bucket because the culture of poverty is so ingrained in people that they will simply not make the choices they have to make to rise out of it.

You then write:

George Galloway is very far to the left, but he's not that far that he's of no consequence. You might remember that he's the British politician that somebody at Gideon's blog said he admired for his anti-war stance, and you and I had an exchange about it. Galloway is one of the most prominent critics in England of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, and has a large following. Christopher Hitchens is one of the most well-known journalists in the United States among intellectuals. They may be wild and crazy (though I wouldn't say that about Hitchens, as much as I disagree with him), but they are men of consequence and their debate was widely reported on. That's why I post such stuff.

As for whether I've ever met anyone who would say "who cares" about the people in Afghanistan (or Iraq), the answer is that I've read about lots of them and talked with a few. Almost everyone who says we need to pull out of Afghanistan (or Iraq) right now is tacitly saying "who cares about those people," we've got to look out for ourselves. Everyone who has said that our involvement there is costing too much money and that we should be spending that money at home is tacitly saying "who cares about those people."

Nice put down, By, although I don't recall making myself the issue. I simply meant to say that if leftists have been seriously critical of leftist states, other than the obligatory acknowledgments that "of course, Kim Il Sung is a despot, but..." sort of thing, it hasn't been particularly obvious. The issue is that the left sees anyone who is an enemy of the U.S. as their friend (See Paul Berman's book Terrorism and Liberalism) or at least has a hard time seeing him as an enemy. I do not dispute that the right suffers, mutatis mutandis, from a similar blindness, but the fact of the matter is, as your own examples attest, one has to go back 20 to 25 years to come up with an example of a tyrannical rightist government that conservatives were not critical of.

Perhaps if I had had my blog going 25 years ago there would have been occasion to condemn the lack of outrage at some of the atrocities committed by our Central American surrogates. As it is, you might remember from our years of discussing these things that I was very much opposed to many of the horrific rightist governments around the world and supported measures to defeat them. I opposed South African apartheid, I supported Britain's war against Argentina and Clinton's war against Milosevic as well as Clinton's and others' attempts to end fascism in Haiti. I also supported Bush '41 when he went to war against the fascist Hussein and Bush '43 when he went to war against the extremely conservative Islamo-fascist Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's socialist fascism (a sort of Arab naziism) again in 2003.

I think most conservatives, with the exception of many paleo-cons, also supported these actions. In fact, I think the conservative record against rightist tyranny is a lot stronger than the left's record against leftist tyranny, and has been ever since liberals changed their mind about Vietnam.

I think your premise is mistaken. To the extent that the left crippled American administrations and hindered them from taking strong action against communist tyrants, they encouraged them in their tyranny. Every time anti-war protestors marched or Jane Fonda called American soldiers war criminals, it gave hope and encouragement to the communists in Hanoi. The failure of the leftist dominated media to speak out strongly against Stalin's crimes and instead to apologize for them, emboldened him to commit new ones. Every time some naive leftist returned from Havana or Managua to tell the rest of us what wonderful people the Castroites and the Ortegans were and what a wonderful society they were building, it just stripped the Armando Valladares of the world, languishing in their filthy gulags, of hope.

I do not deny that conservatives have, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, found themselves in bed with unsavory people, but the fact that such things happened 25 years ago is no reason not to call to account people who are hopping into bed with unsavory people today, and today it's almost exclusively the left who is doing it. Nor do I feel that I have to qualify my criticisms of this by saying "I know that conservatives have done this in the past, too." That's the same sort of silliness that afflicts people who feel they have to preface every discussion of race by acknowledging that there's still lots of racism around to be condemned. I don't think it's necessary in addressing the difficulties of the world we face in the 21st century to revisit the arguments we had in the 1970s and 80s over whether we should have been supporting the contras and in what fashion. That argument is interminable.

If you want to cite an example from the contemporary world of how conservatives are behaving abominably and ask me why, in the interest of balance, I don't post on that I'll certainly examine it as sincerely as I can.

BTW, the one example of execrable behavior on the right that I can think of offhand was Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Hugo Chavez. I wrote several very critical posts on that. Perhaps you missed them.

Best,

Dick

Last week we noted Joe Carter's list of fifty propositions that comprise his religious creed. Evidently, some of his readers have questioned him about a couple of those theses, focusing their criticism on #38 and #39. Joe seeks to answer their concerns here.

The discussion is essentially over whether God determines or predestines who will be saved and who will be lost. Joe accepts the Calvinist view that one's eternal destiny is completely chosen by God.

I have enormous respect for those in the Reformed tradition, which embraces the Calvinist view of predestination, but even though there are verses in the Bible which support their view of predestination, I have problems reconciling that doctrine with other things that the Bible teaches about God. Let me try to explain:

The question of whether we are free to choose in the sphere of morals or religion is perplexing because for one thing it's hard to describe what a completely free choice would be like. It certainly wouldn't be an uncaused choice so if the choice is caused then we need to ask whether the cause determines or compels the choice. If not, how do explain a choice which is caused by something, say, environmental factors, but is nevertheless free.

The second reason it's perplexing is that the Bible in some places certainly seems to teach that our spiritual fate is predestined (eg. Rom.8:29, 30). Yet in other places it seems to strongly imply that we have freedom to choose our destiny for ourselves (Rev. 3:16). So there's a tension that has troubled philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. Let's start with a basic premise upon which all Christians can agree:

We might also agree that since we are made in God's image our concepts of both goodness and justice are similar to His and there's no conflict between them. If there were then it would make no sense for God to adjure us to love goodness and justice since we'd have no idea what exactly He was talking about and what was expected of us.

Now what follows from this? If God has predestined every choice people make in their lives, then:

1. God is responsible for our evil choices. He has predestined them to happen. It's not merely that He allows evil as a consequence of man's Fall, it's that He actually produces it Himself from before the creation of the world. Christians often attribute suffering, grief and death caused by human volition to man's wickedness, or to Satan, but if predestination is true the source of these evils is neither of those. It's God. This, however, seems impossible to reconcile with God's perfect goodness.

2. If God has predestined who will be lost and who will be saved, then God has, in effect, created some of us to live for a relative few short years, programmed us to reject Him and His plan of salvation, and then He punishes us for doing what He compelled us to do by condemning us to suffer hell forever. Imagine writing a software program for a computer which the computer runs perfectly but with which you, the programmer, are dissatisfied. Where is the fault? With the computer or with the programmer? The Calvinist says it is with the computer, and that the programmer is being completely reasonable if he destroys the computer because it did what he programmed it to do. This seems to me to be incoherent.

3. There is no real moral responsibility. Moral responsibility requires personal, metaphysical freedom. Someone who suffers from Tourette's syndrome is not at fault if he blurts out obscenities. His condition robs him of control over certain behaviors so we absolve him of blame for them. Likewise, if we are incapable of choosing to do good then we, like the Tourette's sufferer, are not really responsible for what we do choose.

Reformed theologians respond by saying that we are free to do what is right, but that because we have a corrupt nature (which, of course, we can't help), we don't make good choices. We don't chose to do what is right. We had no alternative but to be what God destined us to be, but we're nevertheless free to choose what He has destined us to choose, which is to do evil. How this constitutes genuine freedom and responsibility escapes me.

The only way I can see to reconcile God's goodness and justice with predestination is to adopt the doctrine of universal salvation which would mean that ultimately God saves everyone, no matter who they are and what they did. If no one is punished for their sin, if no one is eternally lost, then God might be just in making us to be whatever kind of person He wants us to be, since our "wickedness" would be but an infinitesimally brief period of time relative to eternity. However, since I don't think universalism is Biblical, I don't think that particular solution is open to the predestinarian.

A clay pot does not have an eternal soul, it doesn't have feelings, it's not loved by others, nor does it experience pain and suffering. It's one thing to mold clay for whatever purpose one pleases, it's something else entirely to create a human being only to have it live a few years and then be damned for an eternity. As I said, I have difficulty reconciling that with what I believe about God's goodness and justice.

The Calvinist believes that the sort of human freedom we're talking about here would somehow diminish God's sovereignty, but our freedom to choose is a gift God Himself bestows. He could revoke it if He wished. His sovereignty consists in being able to do whatever He cares to. His sovereignty is in no way subject or subordinate to our freedom.

In summary, there are two basic positions on the question of human free will and predestination: The Calvinist or Reformed view is largely the product of the work of John Calvin (1509 -1564) who believed that man is totally corrupt and cannot do anything to save himself. If he could then he would not need God and Christ's sacrifice was unnecessary. If a man could save himself, the Calvinist believes, then salvation would be based on what he did, it would not be based on faith, and the man might have something about which to "boast."

Thus God chooses some from among those He creates to work in their hearts. He changes their heart so that they are then able to accept Christ's offer of eternal life, which they will inevitably do since God has predestined them to do so.

The other view is called Arminianism after James Arminius (1560 - 1609). According to this view man is lost, as if stuck in quicksand. He's sinking and can't extricate himself. All men are in this predicament, but God reaches down and offers each a hand. Some reach up to grasp it, some refuse it. The choice is up to each. Those who take God's offer of rescue are not doing anything meritorious, any more than a drowning man can claim some sort of virtue in seizing the life preserver thrown to him. He may not recognize the seriousness of his peril, but he knows he's in trouble, so he takes hold of the hand offered to him.

Which of these two views is correct, I can't say for certain, but for the reasons I discussed above, I lean strongly toward the Arminian side. If it should turn out, though, that the Calvinist position is correct then I can hardly be blamed for not accepting it. God will have predetermined me to believe what I do, and I never really had any choice in the matter.

Carter closes with a question aimed at the Arminian Christian. He asks this:

It's a bit surprising that Joe would ask this question since he's familiar with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga and others which show that there's no genuine logical conflict between human free will and God's foreknowledge. To know in advance that a particular choice will be made is not inconsistent with the freedom of the agent to do otherwise than what God knows he will do. Viewpoint has previously discussed the problem here and here.

Another answer to Carter's question is that offered by what is called Open Theism which is discussed briefly here.

A group of 38 Nobel winners, led by Elie Wiesel (Elie Weisel?!) have written a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education asking them to keep any criticism of evolution out of the state science standards.

Thirty eight Nobel winners might sound like a powerful voice advocating on behalf of evolution, but we shouldn't be too hasty to allow ourselves to be impressed. The letter contains these words:

Thirty eight Nobel winners, 34 of them scientists, signed off on this definition. Why is this remarkable? Two reasons: The first is that this statement accurately defines Darwinian evolution, but it does not define a scientific theory. How can the claim that evolution is unguided and unplanned ever be subjected to testing? What experiments or observations would count for or against it? The answer, of course, is that there are none. These brilliant scientists are in effect calling for schools to teach metaphysics in public school science classes while at the same time demanding that a competing metaphysical theory, Intelligent Design, be banished from science classes because it can't be scientifically tested.

The second problem with this definition is that it contradicts the assurance that evolutionists keep offering to the public that there is no real conflict between evolution and religion. Evolutionists like Eugenie Scott, president of the National Council for Science Education, spend a good deal of time seeking to allay parents' concerns that their children will be given the impression in their science classes that God is either non-existent or irrelevant. If, however, The Nobel winners' definition is correct, and it certainly does define Darwinism, then the truth is out, and Scott and her accomplices must be beside themselves wondering why they need enemies with friends like these.

The evolutionists, or at least the Darwinian variety, may have thirty eight Nobel Prize winners on their side, but it doesn't seem to be helping the cause much.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about along comes this very disturbing report. We apparently face a distinct possibility this winter of an outbreak of virulent avian flu that kills 55% of the people who are infected, and we don't have any vaccine and only a limited amount of the only effective drug for treating it.

Once again we are unprepared for a natural disaster, only this one could make Katrina seem like a summer-time zephyr by comparison. At present avian flu is transmitted only through birds, but scientists fear it will mutate to a form that allows it to be transmitted from human to human. If it does it could kill a billion people worldwide and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, in the U.S.

Sleep tight.

The Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, puts ideology above competency as he delivers himself of a strange piece of constitutional reasoning:

In other words, Roberts has a deep intellect and understanding of the law and is a man of integrity, but he seems insufficiently convinced that the founding fathers really did insert a right for mothers to kill their unborn children into the constitution, so Bloomberg can't support him.

Maybe the mayor's right. We can't have people on the Supreme Court, no matter how bright, honest, and knowledgeable they are about the law, if they think their job is to determine what the constitution actually says rather than what people like Bloomberg wish it said.

Clive Davies has comments from people who were in attendance at the big debate between far, far left British politician George Galloway and just plain far left-wing British journalist Christopher Hitchens in New York the other night. Some of the commentators remarked about the crowd's responses. Unsurprisingly, some of the Galloway supporters were notable for their abominable rudeness in general and for this reaction in particular. It is as incredible as it is disgusting:

Well, of course lefties, or at least these representatives of it, don't care about the plight of real people. How else to explain the left's indifference to the atrocities committed by communist governments throughout the twentieth century that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people and the suffering of untold millions more. The misery continues today in the gulags of China, North Korea and Cuba, but if the left has ever expressed any outrage about these awful abuses the sound of their protest hasn't carried to our ears.

Another member of the audience, himself a man of the left, makes this observation:

For a more detailed report on the debate read Alex Massie's column at National Review Online. According to Massie the vitriol flowed freely between the two antagonists, making the debate a contest to see who could deliver the most cleverly devastating insult.

For example, Massie writes:

Sounds like it was a lively, if not a particularly edifying, evening.

Matt Drudge has this from the woman the left has been promoting as a typical mom and anti-war spokesperson:

"Occupied New Orleans"? We think the left should find a few more spokespersons like Ms Sheehan to champion their cause.

President Bush was magisterial last night, instructing the nation by example on the meaning of the term compassionate conservatism. Those who have been seeking to label the President a right-wing conservative will find themselves flummoxed by George Bush's FDR/LBJ style rhetoric and program. Those conservatives who fear the president has slipped over to the liberal dark side should take note of his emphasis on enterprise zones, home ownership, and the role of the private sector in rehabilitating the Gulf coast.

His critics will charge that he has completely abandoned his small government conservatism, but the allegation is baseless. In the first place, Bush has never been fiscally conservative. In the second, his conservative principles, upon which he campaigned, do not exclude the sort of projects upon which so much of his spending has been lavished. Dick Morris noted last night that George Bush's basic principle is that the federal government has essentially two major roles: To fight wars and to provide relief in disaster. He is one of the few presidents to have occasion to employ government assets in the service of both. Carrying out these functions costs money and Bush is not loath to spend it in order to insure their success. Nor is he violating his principles in so doing. Conservatives are complaining about the spending, but Bush is going to do what he thinks is right for people even if it antagonizes his base.

One of the indirect consequences of Bush's reconstruction program may well be a political realignment that lasts for a generation or longer. When minorities see exactly who their champion is, when they see that under Democratic leadership for sixty years they simply sank, like New Orleans steadily sinking deeper below sea level, deeper into poverty, there is a chance that blacks will migrate in large numbers to the Republican party and consign the Democrats to permanent political minority status. Even the most tight-fisted conservative might acknowledge that this happy outcome would be worth a decade or so of deficit spending.

Viewpoint predicts that Bush's approval ratings are going to commence a long steady rise throughout the next year, much to the chagrin of the lefties, to above 50%. Furthermore, if Iraq ratifies a constitution and appears to be holding together, and oil prices moderate, Bush may conclude his presidency at well over 60%.

The text of his speech can be found here.

A friend passes on an article (subscription may be required) by Yonce Shelton of Sojourners magazine in which he calls for a greater sense of community in the wake of Katrina, all the while implying that such community is presently deficient in the United States. It is, of course, true that we could always benefit from stronger social bonds and that there are centrifugal forces in our culture which pull us away from each other, but his article reads as if it were written in 1960 rather than in the wake of Katrina. He tells us:

We have to wonder exactly what Mr. Shelton means by that last sentence. What does he base his judgment upon when he concludes that the top leadership of the country, i.e. President Bush, seems not to understand what the common good is about? Perhaps he doesn't feel the need to explain any uncomplimentary things he might say about the Bush administration because "everybody knows" Bush only cares about his rich buddies at Halliburton.

We wish to respectfully remind Mr. Shelton, though, that to "fear, love, and respect God" also means to honor our neighbor who is trying hard to do the right thing, even if that neighbor is a Republican president. It means making sure that whatever criticism we offer of him is absolutely justified, and it means avoiding the drive-by cheap shot, especially when our neighbor is also a brother in the Lord.

Mr. Shelton goes on to note that:

Mr. Shelton's implication here - that Americans are not sharing their wealth with the less fortunate - demonstrates a stunning lack of historical perspective. Since 1965 the American people have spent over 6.5 trillion dollars on the War on Poverty. That sounds like a lot of sharing to me. No one is being deliberately left behind in our society. Indeed, New Orleans is a synedoche for the last forty years of government efforts to rescue the underclass from chronic poverty. The municipal government in New Orleans urged the people to move out, and offered assistance to those who couldn't move, but a lot of people refused to go. They were willing to take their chances and accept their fate. The mayor of New Orleans decided that he couldn't force people to save themselves so they were left to their own devices.

Similarly, over the last forty years the federal government has done virtually everything possible to raise people out of poverty, but it can't force them out. People still choose to squander their schooling, they still choose to spurn marriage even while they're having children, they still choose to emulate the most degenerate characters in our depauperate culture and scoff at the examples of those who have made their way to a better life, and they still choose to do drugs even though a multitude of voices cautions them against it. Many, if not most, people who remain poor in our society, who find themselves stuck in the underclass, have only their own choices to blame.

Mr. Shelton adds this:

Mr. Shelton's point here is not clear because he doesn't offer an explanation for why the gap between rich and poor is widening. There are perhaps two causes of the growing disparity.The rich and poor might both be growing richer, but the rich may be gaining wealth faster than are the poor; or, the poor are actually getting poorer in absolute terms while the rich are staying the same or getting even richer.

Which is it? Mr. Shelton doesn't say, but it makes a lot of difference. If the poor are getting wealthier then to complain because they're not catching the rich is not only an absurd complaint, but it is also to fall prey to the sin of envy. It is to resent that the improvement in my life is not coming as fast as it is for someone else who made better choices in his life. The poor in this country have every opportunity to improve their lot, and indeed, the poor in this country have a higher standard of living than most people in the world today and are certainly "richer" than most people who've ever lived. To complain because they're still not as rich as the very wealthiest is not going to garner them much sympathy.

Unlike 9/11 where Bush was able to point to an enemy, the enemy which caused the current calamity, Mr. Shelton suggests, is God:

In telling us that it was God who caused the devastation that was visited upon the poor and infirm along the Gulf coast, Mr. Shelton is asserting that the same God who has a special love for the poor and who insists we treat them with compassion, nevertheless demonstrates His wrath against the callous Bush administration by pretty much wiping out the very people He demands we save. What a strange theology this is that Mr. Shelton holds to. Mr. Shelton's God destroys the lives and property of poor people in order to punish the rich for not caring enough about the poor.

Perhaps wishing to avoid further embarrassment, he draws his essay to a close, but not before tossing the reader one more odd remark:

We can only conclude from this that Mr. Shelton has been living in a cave for the last three weeks. Hasn't he seen the incredible outpouring of community that followed hard upon the storm? Hasn't he seen the outpouring of compassion and generosity that has surged toward the devastated residents of the Gulf coast? Has he not heard of the citizens of Texas and other states who are welcoming millions of evacuees into their communities, or the hundreds of millions of dollars in donations made by Americans everywhere to charitable and relief organizations, or the thousands of volunteers who have rushed to the disaster area to render aid and rescue.

How can he say that "we must move beyond 'me' and to 'we' " as if we haven't done precisely that? The obliviousness and self-righteousness of this statement in light of what has happened in this country as millions have opened their hearts and pocketbooks makes Mr. Shelton seem completely out of touch with the America he is writing for.

He would do well, before once again taking pen in hand on this topic, to read Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post. He might wish that he had read it before writing his own unfortunate piece.

He might also keep in mind that calls to "do something" are callow and silly in the absence of solid suggestions as to specific courses of action that people and governments can follow. Mr. Shelton's essay is one long call to "do something" but he never says precisely what he has in mind for us to do.

Moreover, to the extent that a sense of community is wanting in this country it's largely the fault of race hustlers and other African-American "leaders" who, rather than express gratitude for the enormous outpouring of assistance from white America, have chosen instead to whine about how the plight of the New Orleans poor reflects the racism still extant in white America. This is the sort of offensive stupidity that only engenders resentments among the millions of whites who are trying hard, sometimes at considerable personal sacrifice, to do what they can to mitigate the suffering of the storm's victims regardless of their race.

The day when money can be extorted from white pockets by calling whites racist and trying to make them feel guilty is largely fading, except perhaps among Democratic liberals. If Shelton wants a stronger sense of community he might direct some of his chastisement toward these black "leaders" for their intemperate and addlepated remarks.

Col. H.R. McMaster gave a press briefing on the Tal Afar operation in western Baghdad that is very enlightening. He first made an opening statement and then fielded questions from the press. The whole thing is worth reading. Here are some of the main points from is his opening statement:

Go to the DoD website for the rest of the briefing. The Fourth Rail offers some analysis here.

Bush's poll numbers are sagging in the wake of high gas prices, the misperception of stagnation in Iraq, and the drubbing administered by his opponents in the wake of Katrina. A recent NBC/Wall Sreet Journal poll got these results:

Clearly, the relentless criticism of Bush is taking its toll. It makes us wonder what Americans think the purpose of electing a president is. It's rather like electing the bull which will be sacrificed to the media matadors. Presidential politics is little more than bloodsport for journalists and politicians. We put someone through a campaign wringer and whoever the people toss the bouquet toward is then set upon, as if by wild dogs, and torn to pieces until he can no longer stand. By the time he is thoroughly bloodied we're already anticipating the next round of campaigns and frenzied attacks. We are a people who has come to delight in destroying our leaders. We're little better than the Romans who cheered lustily for death and mayhem during the gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum.

Now the champ, who had been coasting along in his fifteen rounder against a host of media lightweights, appears to be staggering under their repeated blows, and the media can barely conceal its excitement. E.J. Dionne delivers himself of a fatuous column proclaiming the end of the Bush presidency, and the talking heads and media mavens all seem to be in agreement. Katrina has finished Bush.

This is, of course, all nonsense and wishful thinking. The president's critics hope that if they pronounce him TKO'd often enough and loud enough it'll come true. In fact, poll numbers are ephemeral things, based as they often are on the opinion of people who scarcely know what's going on in the world and who respond to the pollster's call by repeating whatever they've heard others say. This poll, we're told, was based on a survey of 1013 adults. We aren't told whether the respondents were voters or likely voters. The article doesn't identify their political party. If the pollsters just randomly selected a thousand people off the street in a country where almost half of the adults don't care enough to vote and can't name their own senators the results really are uninformed at best and meaningless at worst.

Consider, for a moment, the response to the question about our preparedness for a terrorist WMD attack. Seventy five percent of the respondents said they believe we're unprepared. How on earth do they know enough to answer that question? No one, not even the president or the secretary of Homeland Security, knows for sure whether we're prepared. But skepticism and cynicism always make respondents sound sophisticated so they simply give the skeptical, cynical answer without having the faintest idea whether we're prepared or not. Tim Russert then goes on the evening news tonight and solemnly intones that this lack of confidence somehow implies that in fact we really must not be prepared and that really spells trouble for Bush. Russert should know better than to draw conclusions from such polls while Bush still has three years left in his presidency.

But even if we take the results at face value, I'm not sure why Bush's political opponents would be gleeful over them. After all, only 27% said we should rescind the tax cut and only 7% said we should raise taxes. That's not a result that Democrats should find reassuring.

Here's our prediction. Katrina will be little more than a historical blip in the Bush presidency. Bush will be defined by three things: His response to 9/11, the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy, and the Supreme Court. Those like Dionne who say the Bush era is over will have lots of egg on their face, especially if Bush gets his picks, the two he has now and perhaps a third a year or two from now, seated on the Supreme Court.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas writes a column for MSNBC which is titled "How Bush Blew it." I invite anyone to read this essay and explain to me how the article supports the title. It's not that Thomas doesn't try hard enough to make Bush look bad, but, since he limits himself to the facts, it just doesn't seem to work. If it weren't for the headline a reader would not know that he or she is supposed to come away from this piece with a negative opinion of the Bush administration's handling of the Katrina crisis. It becomes more clear with every new revelation that the disaster in New Orleans was in the main a home-grown affair and that attempts to shift the responsibility onto Washington in general and Bush in particular are simply specious.

That is not to say, however, that those attempts have been futile. A large segment of the public has apparently bought the idea that Bush fiddled while Rome burned and that the president's insouciance, or racism, turned the Superdome into Hotel Rwanda. This is objectively false, of course, but that doesn't stop the Bush-haters from repeating the charges over and over until they become part of the conventional wisdom.

Truth is destined for slow extinction in a nation unwilling to go to the effort of demanding it and too willing to accept whatever flapdoodle the media talking heads and opinion writers feed them.

I finally got around to reading Michael Denton's outstanding work on design in nature called Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (1998), and I deeply regret my tardiness in getting to it. This is surely one of the most important works ever to have been written on the subject of design in the universe, and it should be studied by everyone with an interest in the topic and a background in the relevant science. It's Denton's thesis that every single aspect of the cosmos and life is precisely calibrated for the emergence of living things. He does not simply claim that there are some amazing coincidences in the structure of the cosmos but rather that every single fact of the physical world is optimally suited for the emergence of life. The case he builds in defense of this thesis is beyond impressive, it seems overwhelming.

Denton is an evolutionist who denies that evolution is a contingent phenomenon. It could not, he argues, have followed any path other than the one it did. Given the constraints imposed by the physical and chemical properties of matter, evolution inevitably led to relatively large mammals capable of technology and rational thought. In other words, human evolution is pre-planned and built into the laws and properties of the cosmos. The universe was built to accommodate us, and everything about it seems to confirm this conclusion.

In fact, one comes away from the book with this impression: It is possible to say of virtually any scientific proposition about the universe, any trait or characteristic that might be revealed by science from the microcosmic level to the macrocosmic, that it is a good thing that it has precisely the properties it does because if it did not, we could not exist. There seem to be very few, if any, completely gratuitous facts about the cosmos or about living things. Whether the universe is uniquely fit for life we can't say, but that it is supremely suited for life is undeniable.

Whether it is the age or size of the universe, the properties of the elements of the periodic table, especially carbon and oxygen, the properties of water, carbon dioxide, and bicarbonate, the geophysical structure of the earth and its location in the solar system, the type of solar system we find ourselves in, the properties of light and electricity, and on and on for four hundred pages, every aspect of the physico-chemical structure of our world is ideally suited to give rise to living things. And were any of these even minutely different than what they are human beings would never have emerged.

Denton points out that whether one accepts or rejects the design hypothesis, whether one thinks of the designer as the Greek world soul or the Hebrew God, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the world at least "looks as if it had been uniquely tailored for life: it appears to have been designed." He writes that, "All reality appears to be a vast, coherent, teleological whole with mankind as its purpose and goal." It is therefore incumbent upon the skeptic to offer a compelling reason to reject the design inference. They cannot fall back on the canard that the design hypothesis is not testable because it certainly is:

The hypothesis can be refuted by, for instance, "the discovery of some alternative liquid as fit as is water for carbon-based life, or of a means superior to DNA of constructing the genetic tape, ... or of alternatives superior to oxidation, ... proteins, ... the bilipid cell membrane, ... to the bicarbonate buffer system, ... just one clear case where a constituent of life or a law of nature is evidently not unique or ideally adapted for life, and the design hypothesis collapses."

The materialist explanation for all this evidence of design, on the other hand, is that it's a result of chance or the inevitable outcome of the existence of an infinity of worlds, but these claims cannot be tested and are impossible to refute. The design hypothesis possesses a status, therefore, that is epistemically or scientifically superior to its materialistic competitor.

Nature's Destiny is a dense read. It's packed with information, most of which is fascinating but which probably would be a little overwhelming for someone with little background or interest in science. For one who is fascinated by the debate between design and materialism, however, and who possess an interest and understanding of the relevant science, this will surely prove to be one of the top two or three most important books one could read on the subject.

Joe Carter outlines fifty theses of his religious credo at Evangelical Outpost. If you've ever wondered what it is, exactly, that evangelical Christians believe, Carter's post is an excellent summary.

You'll have to read his post to figure out what turtles have to do with it.

Michael Kinsley is no friend of this administration so when he writes a great perspective on the recriminations being levelled at the Bush administration by people who are merely trying to deflect attention from their own culpability we sit up and take notice:

There really are few people more unpleasant than armchair quarterbacks who know nothing of why a coach makes the decisons he does but who are consistently critical of him nonetheless. These people abound in our media (turn on MSNBC, for example) and they call to mind the words of Teddy Roosevelt who wrote:

Evangelical writer Hal Lindsey has a special place in my heart for reasons that need not concern us here, but I don't see how he can say this:

Well, Hal might be right, but his reasoning is unpersuasive. I'm not sure when in our history we enjoyed such supernatural protection as Lindsey suggests. Were our losses from Katrina, both economic and in terms of human life, unprecedented? Hardly. Every war we've fought from the revolution through the civil war up to the world wars of the twentieth century, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have been far costlier certainly in terms of human life and probably in economic terms as well. Numerous natural disasters and epidemics throughout our history have been far more destructive of human life than has Katrina. After all, the death toll from Katrina may not exceed a couple of thousand. It is indeed a devastating economic blow, but even at a cost of 100 billion dollars it's about the annual cost of the war in Iraq.

I'm not arguing that God hasn't blessed this nation. I'm simply saying that it's hard to point to Katrina as evidence that we've entered a unique epoch where He's stopped blessing us and is now punishing us.

Parenthetically, in the same article Lindsey describes the effects of a nuclear explosion in an American city from a terrorist suitcase bomb with the approximate yield of a Hiroshima fission bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was a 13 kiloton (the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT) airburst over a city made largely of wood. The devastation that Lindsey describes sounds cataclysmic but is highly exaggerated. I might well be wrong, but I'm skeptical that a ground explosion of a 13 kt device in a city made largely of brick and steel would produce the destruction he describes. In fact, I question whether his facts are based upon a 13 kt weapon at all. They sound more like the results of a one megaton (the equivalent of one million tons of TNT) nuclear blast. Of course, it's possible, I suppose, that a suitcase bomb could be produced with such explosive power, but the sources that Google comes up with (See here, for instance) are all pretty much in agreement that any bomb which could fit in even a large trunk would have probable yields of much less than 3 to 5 kt. and probably much less than one kiloton.

This is not to minimize the threat posed by any sized nuclear bomb, since even a small weapon would release a lot of radiation and take a lot of lives, but Lindsey's article makes the effect of such an attack seem far worse than it would probably be.

The assault on Tal Afar seems to be over. The Fourth Rail claims there were 156 terrorists killed and 246 captured. The towns of Rabiyah and Sinjar are next. As the towns are cleansed Iraqi forces will occupy them to keep the insurgents from filtering back in.

The western province of Anbar along the Syrian border had long been a haven for the insurgents since the coalition lacked the manpower to do more than launch occasional attacks on concentrations of the enemy to try to keep them off balance.

Now as the Iraqi troops are coming on line, gaining in skills and competence and increasing in confidence, the insurgents are facing a permanent loss of these towns as staging areas and refuges.

Iraq may never be completely pacified, but it is beginning to look as though the coalition's strategy of training the Iraqis to win their country for themselves and providing them with the support to do it is working.

Belmont Club's Wretchard offers some keen analysis of the effort and also an interesting discussion of where future military historians will place the tipping point of this conflict.

Jack Kelley blasts the recriminators in this column in the Post-Gazette:

In fact, Mayor Ray Nagin was asked this last question by Tim Russert on Meet the Press. His general answer was that that's one of the things that'll be debated in the weeks ahead. His more specific answer was that he didn't have drivers for the busses. That may have been true by Monday, but if the evacuation had begun on Saturday when Bush declared a disaster and the NWS was calling for a cat 5 storm to hit New Orleans directly he would have.

If we're going to point fingers, at least let's point them in the right direction. Unfortunately, the fingers of liberal journalists, like compass needles, always point in only one direction - toward the White House. It's all so puerile and pathetic.

The New York Times, having published the usual nonsense from Dowd, Krugman, Herbert and Rich, finally steps forward with two pieces from which the reader cannot escape concluding that failure to apply the talents of the Corps of Engineers to the levees around New Orleans was in substantial measure the fault of senate Democrats like Mary ("I might have to punch him (Bush) - literally") Landrieu, and that the delay in getting troops to the city was largely due to reluctance on the part of Governor Kathleen Blanco to give up her authority and her confusion over what steps were necessary for the federal government to get troops into the area.

As for the responsibility of Democrats at the state and local level for the delay in getting aid to the evacuees in the days after the flood a trio of writers from the Times notes that:

Viewpoint offers no criticism of Ms Blanco. She was in a terrible spot and may have thought she had good reasons for her delay. We only wish to point out how despicable it is of the Left which was almost obsessively scathing in its criticism of the administration in the days after the storm to have used this calamity to attack Bush politically. Not interested in waiting for the facts to be brought forward, they were determined to hang him first and have the trial later. He was called a racist, incompetent, oblivious, dangerous - every mean, hurtful adjective that mean, hateful people could put into print and some they could only put on blogs.

Now it turns out, as more sober observers were saying from the beginning, that though there may be lessons to be learned from this disaster on the federal level, the great share of the responsibility for how events unfolded in the immediate aftermath must be borne by the victims themselves, some of whom displayed atrocious behavior and very poor judgment, the administration of New Orleans, and Louisiana state officials, including Senator Mary Landrieu.

We'll be waiting in the days ahead for the apologies to start rolling in to the White House, but we won't be surprised if we have to wait for a very long time. The sorts of people that were so quick to say the contemptible things about another human being that Bush's critics were saying about him, the sorts of people who were so quick to pull the trigger on the shotgun of blame and recrimination, are not the sorts of people who have the class, the character, or the maturity to acknowledge that they were wrong.

Robert Washington at International House of Punditry takes Governor Blanco to task for a mistake we hadn't yet heard about. It appears that Mr. Washington's father is a doctor licensed in Wyoming but not in Louisiana. He and numerous other doctors went to Louisiana to render medical care to those who needed it but Governor Blanco waited several days to sign the waiver that allowed them to practice in her state. For four days after the hurricane all that medical expertise sat on its hands waiting for the Governor to act.

Here's the relevant portion of the story:

The waiver was issued four days after the storm. If FEMA had been this slow the media would be roasting them on a spit for it. Tim Russert would be calling for Chertoff's scalp. Will we hear calls for Ms Blanco to resign her office? Nah, she's a Democrat.

The Islamic jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere wrap themselves in explosives and run into the streets yelling "God is great. Death to America" as they blow themselves to kingdom come in an attempt, sometimes successful, sometimes futile, to destroy others. Here on the home front we have our own version of the suicide bomber ensconced in the editorial offices of several of our nation's major newspapers.

The Roberts nomination and the post-Katrina blame game have inspired liberal journalistic jihadis, waving their incendiary scribblings in their hands, to rush into the streets and blow to smithereens, if not themselves, then certainly any reputation for credibility, objectivity and clear thought they may have still possessed. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Robert Herbert and now Richard Cohen - it seems like a human wave of lefty scribes hurling their columns at the White House hoping to damage it with awesome blasts from their word processors. To their great disappointment, given the lameness of their efforts, they may as well be throwing firecrackers at Godzilla.

The WaPo's Richard Cohen straps on the bomb belt and sashays forth into public view with an unfortunate column in which he confesses up front that as a young man he flunked out of college. He mentions this detail as a prelude to lamenting that John Roberts has a record which is "appallingly free of failure."

Mr. Roberts' record of success means he hasn't had to struggle like common folk and thus probably doesn't understand our problems. He doesn't say why a Supreme Court Justice should be someone who understands the difficulties of the poor. He is not, after all, being nominated for Chief Pastor. Presumably, Mr. Cohen thinks that someone who has consistently demonstrated that they don't make bad decisions is manifestly unsuited for the Supreme Court.

Somehow he manages to extricate himself from the awkwardness of that argument and glides from John Roberts' nomination to the New Orleans debacle:

Somebody please send a memo to Mr. Flunked out of College: Evacuation plans and execution are the province of the local municipality, not the feds. If the city chooses not to put its plan, such as it was, into effect, the feds are hardly to be faulted for not doing it for them. This is a simple concept, but perhaps the memo should repeat it so that Mr. Cohen has a better chance of comprehending it.

Our intellectual hero, who does not shrink from labelling people trying to do the right thing in Katrina's stressful aftermath "idiots", next leaps in a single bound to the Intelligent Design controversy trying to touch all the liberal bases and weave together all of Mr. Bush's alleged faux pas into one neat tapestry:

Alchemy. Ha, ha, Good one. Well, Mr. Flunked out of College, perhaps you, being among the cognoscenti which looks with such scorn upon those dim bulbs, like the president, who think ID should be taught in school and which holds these rubes in derision at your Georgetown cocktail parties - perhaps you would like to publicly debate someone, like, oh, almost anyone in the ID movement, on the issue. How about David Berlinski, an outstanding mathematician, or Bill Dembski who has two or three PhDs? No? Are you backpedalling, sir? Science is not your field, you say? Well, you must be expert enough to feel safe in insulting those who suggest ID be taught in public schools by calling them "sluggish thinkers." Come on, Mr. Quick Thinker who has exactly no degrees, put up or shut up. You demur? You'd rather not employ your finely honed mind to show off your superior grasp of the issue? Too bad. It would've been fun to watch.

Like the columns of his colleagues, Mr. Cohen's article offers no argument. It makes no case. It's a simple screed which he should be embarrassed to publish, but as a devout journalistic jihadi, he's unmoved by his own inadequacies. His column, like those of the aforementioned writers, is an editorial page version of the suicide bomber's shout of Allahu Akbar, Death to the Great Satan Bush, just before he blows himself to bits.

Ed Morrissey at Captains' Quarters finds much else not to like in Cohen's essay.

The good news is that it turns out that all those frantic reports of sexual assaults and dead children in the Convention Center were, ah, somewhat overblown:

The bad news is that our media is so desperate for stories that they'll apparently report anything that sounds shocking based on nothing more than rumor. Among those who have lessons to learn from this hurricane are the reporters who reported that these things occured without any confirmation that they had.

Are all rappers this dumb or is it just Kanye West? He's beginning to sound almost Michael Mooreish.

When are people going to start holding these nitwits accountable for their asinine and overtly incendiary remarks?

This is a wonderful gesture on the part of the Iraqi military:

It's a bit of a clichè to say that it's the thought that counts but gifts like this remind us of how true the clichè is.

Rosa Brooks at the LA Times apparently thinks that the call for teaching both sides of a controversy over where a metaphysical truth lies is equivalent to denying that there is any truth in the first place. She draws the peculiar conclusion that advocates of Intelligent Design, because they wish to see ID taught alongside Darwinian explanations of complex structures and processes, are epistemological relativists who believe that truth is simply a cultural construct. Ms Brooks is seriously confused. Either that, or she's deliberately misrepresenting the ID side of this debate. Here are some excerpts from her column along with commentary:

This is a distortion of what ID theorists are advocating. They're not saying that there is no truth or that truth is relative. What they're saying is that the Darwinian materialist's account of biological complexity is insufficient and inadequate and that a more complete picture of the truth would include intelligent, purposive agency.

"Reality-based community" is an odd moniker to affix to those who dogmatically insist that it is a fact beyond doubt that the astonishing fitness of the universe for sustaining life is just a coincidence. It's a strange name to assign to those who believe that the fact that matter has precisely the chemical and physical properties necessary to produce complex organisms is just a brute given, that the geo-physical properties of the earth are simply fortuitous, and that the amazing complexity of life from proteins to organisms to ecosystems is explicable merely in terms of blind forces and random chance.

These "reality-based" folk, among whom Ms Brooks numbers herself, can no doubt believe a dozen impossible things each day before breakfast. Indeed, belief that Darwinian processes alone produced life is statistically similar to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airplane, to borrow Fred Hoyle's memorable metaphor. That's an interesting reality Ms Brooks is so proud to be a part of.

Nor is she correct when she equates the demand for teaching alternatives to materialism with the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth. Perhaps someone somewhere among the burgeoning population of ID supporters has made such a statement, but I've never heard it. Even so, the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth is not, pace Ms Brooks, a relativistic claim. One can agree that truth is not the exclusive possession of a single group without affirming that truth is "all relative" or without denying that there is an objective truth.

Perhaps Ms Brooks will answer a question: What is scientific or true about this proposition: No non-material, non-natural processes or forces were involved in the creation of the universe, of life, or the development of life. That statement is the crux of the controversy. Darwinians affirm it. ID'ers deny it. Neither the affirmation or the denial are scientific claims, although those who make them may be scientists and they may use the findings of science to buttress their positions. Moreover, if Ms Brooks wants to say that the statement expresses a truth I invite her to explain how she, or anyone, knows it to be true.

This assertion is a tad preposterous. Not only did evolution have nothing to do with the origin of life, scarcely anything about the origin of life has been proven. Scientists have no idea how life originated. For Ms Brooks to blithely inform her readers that it has been proven that life originated through an evolutionary process of some sort is very naughty on her part.

This statement is so dumb as to make one want to throw up his hands in despair at the state of contemporary journalism. First, for the writer to call scientists who embrace intelligent design "crackpots" is a tendentious slander. Ms Brooks is hardly qualified to make assessments of the professional qualifications of the people who are at the front of the ID "movement."

Second, she claims that teaching students that the cosmos and life bear the impress of design and that some scientists and philosophers believe this design points to an underlying teleology necessitates teaching about UFOs and Elvis sightings. How she arrives at such a weird conclusion totally escapes me. What do UFOs and Elvis have to do with the question of whether design in the cosmos is real or just an illusion?

Ms Brooks doesn't seem to understand that there are only two alternatives in this controversy. Either the universe and life are ontologically contingent upon intelligence, or they are not. That's the issue upon which the whole dispute rests. It's really that simple. So simple, in fact, that even a "crackpot" journalist should be able to comprehend it.

John Hinderaker explains the challenge Bush faces in replacing Justice Rehnquist. The pressure on the Democrats from their left-wing base to fight a conservative will be enormous. Another conservative with as meager a paper trail and as easy to confirm as Judge Roberts will be hard to find. Almost anyone Bush picks, Hinderaker predicts, will launch the political equivalent of WW III.

Maybe so, but Bush may surprise the Dems with a nomination that would please the conservative rank and file while short-circuiting the Democratic attack machine. He could do this by nominating someone out of the Senate, like, say, Sam Brownback. Brownback is widely respected, unflinchingly conservative, and, being a senator, will be harder for Senate Dems to attack as savagely as they would someone from the outside.

Even so, there is so much at stake that almost any conservative is going to find him- or herself at the center of a firestorm. The left can live with Roberts as a replacement for Rehnquist, but they will not submit to a Scalia-type conservative as a replacement for O'Connor. Such an appointment could tip the court to the right for decades, undoing much of the mischief the left has accomplished since the sixties, and blocking most of what they have planned for the next twenty years. Hence, this next nomination, Hinderaker argues, will trigger an Armageddon on Capitol Hill.

We expect that Bush won't allow that to deter him from doing what he believes is right, but it may deter wobbly Republicans from supporting his nominee. It looks like it'll be gut-check time in the Senate once Roberts is confirmed.

See here for more possibilities from the Senate as well as several women and Hispanics whose nomination would delight conservatives.

The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio continues to keep us updated on the war along the Syrian border towns which foreign fighters use as rat lines to infiltrate Iraq. The battle for Tal Afar is set to commence once the evacuation of the citizens is complete. It will not be a search and destroy mission but rather a "clear and hold" operation where the enemy is cleared out and Iraqi forces are left in place to keep them from returning. Insurgent leadership continues to suffer losses from targeted airstrikes which suggests that there is a lot of good intelligence coming from citizens on the ground.

Read Roggio's report for more information, and don't miss the analysis on Strategy Page of the effect that coalition pressure in this region is having on the insurgents' ability to find safe havens from which to mount operations.

Representatives of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, a state agency, turned away truckloads of food and other supplies that the Red Cross was trying to deliver to the Superdome and convention center after the storm passed but before the levees broke. Fox News' Major Garrett was interviewed about the story by Hugh Hewitt. Here's part of the transcript:

Garrett states that the reason the Red Cross was given for being turned away was that the authorities didn't want people staying at the Superdome or convention center, and if there was food and water there it would be harder to get them to move on.

Contrary to what the paranoid fantasists at the NYT doubtless suspect, the relief wasn't turned away because a phone call from Bush forbade the state authorities from allowing it in.

There's much more at the link.

By the way, there has been nothing about this report on MSNBC. They're still too busy blaming Bush and focussing on the body count.

Despite the best efforts of the Democrats and their associates in the MSM only 13% of the people surveyed in a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll blame President Bush for the New Orleans debacle. The 13% probably encompasses the splenetic Bush-haters who, like the poor, we will always have with us, and maybe a few others.

That all the energy, newsprint and air-time invested in pinning the post-hurricane disaster on Bush didn't yield greater rewards to those who see it as their mission in life to do everything possible to tear down this president must be extremely discouraging to the Left.

Shed a momentary tear, for example, for the disappointment that poor Bob Herbert of the New York Times must feel at this poll result. Mr. Herbert is so consumed with loathing for the president that in a column on Monday he wrote the following:

Colossal failure? Exactly what was Mr. Bush's failure? What could he have done that he didn't do that would have made a difference? Mr. Herbert chooses not to tell us, quite likely because Mr. Herbert has no idea.

Mr. Herbert seeks to drives the point home. Reciting a litany of suffering and degradation suffered by the victims of Katrina, Herbert concludes by claiming that "the president didn't seem to notice." He offers no support for his libel, but then it's a bit awkward to insist upon factual support from someone whose intent is only to assassinate someone's character and not to uncover truth.

When he senses that the stage has been set and the moment is right, Mr. Herbert dramatically trots out the venerable old warhorse named Racism:

Yes. While the black folk were suffering, Bush was no doubt traipsing gleefully around his Crawford ranch in white sheets and hood. It would not surprise us to see such an absurd claim from the pen of Mr. Herbert since in his world no evidence is necessary to justify any calumny against the president. Just saying that Bush is a racist is enough to make it so for the cerebrally-challenged, among whom Mr. Herbert must feel at home.

He ends his indictment of the president with this summation:

Well. Has it occured to Mr. Herbert to examine Mr. Bush's total tenure in order to form a judgment of the prospects for our future? Evidently not. He prefers to pick a single event, one in which the facts are as yet unclear about Mr. Bush's responsibility, and extrapolate from that to the most dire warnings about the next three years under such an incompetent bumbler.

No thought enters the hate-soaked labyrinths of Mr. Herbert's mind about Bush's response after 9/11, or his liberation of 50 million people and the toppling of one of the most evil men in modern history. Nor does Mr. Herbert deign to remind us of Mr. Bush's widely acclaimed response to the devastating hurricanes which hammered Florida last year. Nor does Mr. Herbert mention how Bush took an economy that was heading into recession when he came to office and which subsequently suffered the heavy blows of 9/11, war in the Middle-east, and sky-rocketing gas prices, and nevertheless nursed it back to a state of health that is absolutely astonishing given the obstacles that had to be overcome.

These facts are all irrelevant to Mr. Herbert. For a day too long after Katrina, Mr. Bush allegedly hesitated when he should have been doing some unspecified thing, and therefore he's the worst person imaginable to be leading us into the days ahead.

Mr. Herbert's entire case reduces to this. People suffered. Help was slow. Bush was president. Therefore Bush is an incompetent racist. Mr. Herbert displays no awareness that there may be reasons why help was slow for which Mr. Bush cannot rationally be held responsible. He displays no inclination to place any blame for the failure to get people out of the city on the mayor and governor, who, with every passing day it becomes more clear, it squarely belongs. He evinces no sign that he is aware of the governor's inexplicable 24 hour hesitation to invite the feds into the state. Indeed, he shows an abject unwillingness to actually engage in any kind of sophisticated thought or analysis at all.

In fairness, perhaps Mr. Herbert, from his exalted perch atop the Mt. Olympus that is the New York Times, is privy to information that is being withheld from us mere mortals, and which he is not at liberty to share - information that would explain exactly what Mr. Bush's fault was and why it is so damning.

Or, more likely, perhaps Mr. Herbert is simply a buffoon who believes that an argument is won by whomever can cram the largest number of unsubstantiated and outrageous allegations into the smallest number of column inches.

Maureen Dowd tries to kick George Bush in the shins with her most recent column but just winds up looking foolish, petty, and dishonest instead. Her column can be read here. Like much of her work, it's short on facts and long on baseless invective. Let's consider her more serious allegations in the order she makes them.

She alleges that money that could have gone to shoring up the levees around New Orleans has been squandered in Iraq:

The implication, of course, is that there were not enough National Guard troops at home to do the job of securing the city. This is, however, completely false. James Robbins sets forth the truth of the matter at National Review Online.

She goes on to imply that the Bush administration is culpable for the deaths of New Orleanians because they cut the Corps of Engineers budget request last year:

Aside from the delightful irony of seeing lefties like Ms Dowd harrumphing that the Corps of Engineers, a governmental entity absolutely loathed by the Left, did not get the funding it requested, there is another problem here. Let's suppose the Corps had received everything it asked for. Would the money have been spent on levees or on marshland reclamation? If it would have been spent on the levees would they have been upgraded by the time Katrina hit? Would the money have made any real difference by this date? If not, why mention it? Until we know the answers to these questions Dowd's complaint is meaningless.

She goes on to express amazement that Bush doesn't start metaphorically executing people willy-nilly in the wake of the calamity:

So far from being a flaw in Bush's character his reluctance to cashier his people reveals a strength. It certainly shows a vast difference between Bush and Dowd. Bush believes in sticking by his subordinates and supporting them until all the facts are in. It's one reason he inspires such fierce loyalty among his staff and cabinet. Dowd, like some Middle-East despot, believes in cutting off peoples' heads as soon as they give the appearance of having screwed up, regardless of what the ultimate facts might turn out to be. It's one reason that so many people find her repellant.

A lot of conservatives think Brown should be fired, too, but the difference between them and Dowd is that they see Bush's willingness to take heat for his people as a virtue and Dowd sees it as a vice. Actually, she sees everything Bush does as a vice.

She then shamelessly insinuates that Bush's people don't care about Katrina's victims because they're just blacks, don't you know.

A lack of empathy? How does she know what Bush and his staff were feeling and doing behind the scenes. As time goes on it's becoming clearer that much of the fault for the predicament of the people trapped in New Orleans, to the extent it wasn't their own, was the fault of their mayor and their governor. Why does she not condemn their lack of empathy? Might it be that they're Democrats (and minorities) while Bush is a white Republican male, a legitimate object of obloquy in the eyes of northeastern liberals like Dowd?

This is the most egregiously dishonest thing she says in the piece. It demonstrates her utter disregard for the truth when a lie will better serve the purpose of slipping the stiletto into Bush's ribs. First, she implies that the administration is racist, but worse, she strongly suggests that the 700 guests of the Hyatt were sent to the front of the line by the feds because the people they were butting ahead of were only poor blacks. What actually happened was this: The people from the Hyatt were tourists who were sent to the head of the line under orders by the black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

It might be worthwhile to ask Ms Dowd why she chooses not to tell her readers who was responsible for greasing the tourists' exit from town. Evidently, when you need to tarnish a man like the president it's okay at the NY Times to deceive your readers any way you can.

How long will rank and file Democrats allow themselves to be led by people who have so few scruples that they'll do something like this:

The ugly truth is that Howard Dean is a mendacious demagogue who is a disgrace to American politics. If he's going to make the claim that skin color was a factor in determining people's fate in Katrina's aftermath he should at least have the decency to offer some supporting evidence aside from the simple-minded observation that there was a large number of blacks in the Superdome.

Does Mr. Dean have information that people were denied the ability to evacuate because they were black? Were they refused helicopter rescue because they were black? Were they denied access to shelters, food, water, or medical care because they were black? Exactly how did skin color play the role that Mr. Dean alleges? Tell us, Mr. Dean, precisely how were African-Americans singled out for discriminatory treatment?

Of course, he won't answer these questions because demagogues never get down to specifics - it would enable people to see through their scam. Sadly for this country, Dean and others like him in the Democratic party will continue to set one American against another for political advantage as long as they can get away with it.

It's disgusting. It's criminal. It's Howard Dean.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail informs us here and here of preparations for a big battle at Tal Afar, an Iraqi city that has become a haven for insurgents. The coalition is evacuating the citizens in preparation for a massive combat operation along the lines of the assault on Fallujah. Already two hundred insurgents have been killed. The city is cordoned and escape is doubtful. The battle is imminent.

As you know from our announcement at the head of our posts, we've been having trouble with our server not always responding to readers' requests to access it. The problem persists for a few minutes and then seems to miraculously heal itself. Being somewhat skeptical of the doctrine of the infinite extent of God's mercy and doubting that it reaches to healing machines several times a day, we've been trying to pinpoint a more mundane cause.

We'd like to enlist the aid of our readers in the effort. If you have gotten a "web site not responding" message when trying to access Viewpoint anytime within the last four weeks you can help us by going to the Feedback button and telling us whether this has happened once or twice during this period, or if it has happened more frequently.

If the Feedback button doesn't work with your browser feel free to e-mail me at RLC74@aol.com. Bill and I appreciate your help with this.

Thanks,

Years ago scientists dredged up a primitive fish off the coast of Madagascar called a coelacanth that had been believed to have been extinct for millions of years. Such finds are called "living fossils." I thought of the coelacanth when reading an article about Muslims who killed a woman for having a romantic relationship with a Christian and then went on a rampage destroying the homes of Palestinian Christians.

In the standard view, you see, man has evolved through stages of barbarism and savagery culminating in the civilized form he takes today as "thinking man", Homo sapiens. According to this version of human evolution man had to overcome along the way cognitive abilities on the level of an imbecile and religious beliefs that require that the gods be appeased through human sacrifice - the bloodier, more terrifying, the better. Think of the thugees in Raiders of the Lost Ark sacrificing their victim by ripping his still pulsing heart out of his breast.

We've advanced beyond this primitive savagery thanks largely to the influence of Christianity on the Western world, but there are still pockets of "living fossils" found throughout the world which still function cognitively at the level of an imbecile and hold to religious beliefs that cause them to revel in bloody human sacrifice. These people belong to the genus Homo, but they can hardly be considered sapiens. One such very large pocket stretches across the vast Arab world and produces stories like this on an almost daily basis:

Well, at least the PA police prevented the destruction of the brewery by the human coelacanths. There's no word yet, however, as to how Allah views this intervention to preserve the iniquitous manufacture of the vile fluid from the expression of his righteous anger. Maybe the police can atone for thwarting Allah's will by permitting the murder of a few more women and/or Christians. That will likely satisfy his wrath.

A closing question for the moral equivalence crowd: When was the last time you read about Israelis doing anything like this?

This is good to read although given the wealth of some of these countries one hopes that this it just a first step:

These offers of aid should not be turned away, even if we don't need them. To spurn the offer of a gift is to encourage resentments. To accept the gift is to make the giver feel good, not only about himself but about the one upon whom the gift is bestowed. Acts of kindness generate kind feelings in the doer. Feelings follow actions. When people or nations act in kind ways they find themselves experiencing much more positive feelings toward the object of their beneficence than perhaps they did before. We should encourage all the acts of kindness toward the U.S. that others wish to bestow.

PowerLine does a complete smackdown of the NY Times' Paul Krugman who looks more intellectually diminutive every time he writes a column. In his latest he takes a potshot at the administration for its alleged tardiness in the wake of Katrina by citing the example of the U.S.S. Bataan:

Bad choice of stories to employ against Mr. Bush, this one. As it turns out, a simple check of the facts would have shown Mr. Krugman that he was embarking down the road to personal embarrassment by building his case upon this story, but checking facts is for right-wingers. Lefties are unconstrained by such bourgeois and infra dig considerations. Read PowerLine to find out what has really happened with the U.S.S. Bataan.

PowerLine is going to have to start picking fights with people its own size. Picking one with Krugman is analogous to dwarf-tossing.

Here's a question I've had ever since the frenetic stories of media reporters stationed at the Superdome and the Convention Center started coming in about the desperate state of people who were being victimized by thugs and rapists: Was the crime rate at these places significantly different than it is in New Orleans under normal conditions? Probably not, I thought.

Now City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas comes to a similar conclusion. She rejects Al Sharpton's feeble apologias on behalf of the looters in N.O. and proceeds to dissect the problem and apportions blame where it belongs. Her article, written before the military moved in to establish order, makes a lot of sense.

Even in the best of times Mayor Nagin ran a dysfunctional city. For him and others to blame the feds for not responding more quickly to the crisis largely created by their own lack of preparedness, seems like an act of deflecting fault that they know is their own.

Anyway, the good news is that once the cops got some reinforcements from the national guard they found a bunch of these hoodlums and terminated their activities, as well as the hoodlums themselves, in rather definitive fashion. There are reports that at least eight of these morons are permanently out of the terrorizing business.

We're waiting for the caterwauling howls of protest from the ACLU against police brutality to begin.

Most of us watch the nightly news reports from the Gulf Coast and see people, human beings, in desperate straits, but not so some of our friends on the left. They look at the footage and they see proof of white racism and oppression. They are unable to view the world except through the neo-Marxist lens of race and class.

Jack Shafer at Slate writes a somewhat confused essay about the fact that news journalists seem very reluctant to mention the race and class of the victims of the Hurricane and also of those who have exploited this calamity to rob and pillage.

Like a social bloodhound Shafer thinks himself to have caught the scent of racism in these scenes of human suffering and devastation, and he bays and sniffs avidly along the trail in avid pursuit of his quarry.

Unfortunately, he just seems to get himself tangled up in his argument, as if the source of the scent had run around in circles and then off in several different directions at once. You can read it for yourself. The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs Shafer starts us down only to turn us around and set us off in another direction when it becomes apparent that there's no prey to be found where we were almost wear us out. It's hard to tell exactly what his point is until we get to the closing paragraph which might serve as a synedoche for the whole:

It could be interpreted as racist, he admits, to make an issue of the color of the people who didn't evacuate and who looted stores, but it's evidently also racist to ignore these pertinent facts because we'd be papering over the salient point that these are black people who've been disenfranchised and victimized by a racist society that allows, even compels, these wretches to live in poverty. One almost expects Shafer to point to Katrina's furious white clouds as proof that the whole tragic disaster was a racist plot by evil white meteorologists at the National Weather Service, Bush appointees, no doubt, to make poor black folk suffer.

His final line is: "What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?' "

Well, he's not asking us, but if he were, here's the answer we'd give him, though I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like it:

The reasons blacks in New Orleans, like blacks elsewhere in America, are often poor is because large swatches of the African-American population have, for various reasons, abandoned, or never embraced, the set of values that enable people to become upwardly mobile in our society. What are these values? Here are two which are conspicuously and tragically absent in many African-American neighborhoods:

Getting married before you have kids and staying married afterward. Nothing is more likely to guarantee that children grow up poor than to have them raised by a young mother with no husband. Such children are not only very likely to be impoverished, they are also more likely to be socially dysfunctional, i.e. involved with drugs, crime and early sex, than those who grow up with their biological father. The revolution in attitudes which resulted in single motherhood becoming an accepted and acceptable condition has been hard on the white population, but it has been devastating to African-Americans. Twenty eight percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, but almost sixty nine percent of black children are born out of wedlock. This is an anchor around the necks of black kids which prevents them from climbing out of their penury and reaching higher socio-economic heights.

Valuing education. African-Americans too often fail to place the premium on education that other groups do. Black parents, for whatever reasons, tend to be less involved in their children's schools, they tend to read to them less, and to offer their children fewer enrichment activities outside of school. Critics sometimes say that inner city schools are in such a deplorable state that kids can't learn in them, but one reason they're in such bad repair is that too few parents of black kids simply care enough about their schools to demand that they be maintained, supplied, and hold to high standards of discipline.

Black kids too often suffer verbal and even physical abuse if they outperform their peers and are seen as "acting white." Young blacks are often encouraged by a depauperate culture to project images of black stupidity. Schools are charged with racism by the race hustlers if they try to teach black kids to be articulate or force them to dress in a manner that doesn't make them look like morons, with their pants at half-mast and their hats turned sideways. The peer culture in which they swim too often encourages them to emulate some "gangsta rapper" rather than a Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas or Condaleeza Rice, people who are often held in contempt by black "leaders" as Uncle Toms and sell-outs.

Children who go through school and never learn to speak articulately, to read effectively, and to do basic math are doomed. As bad as our urban schools may be, a child with a concerned family to go home to could still develop these basic skills in them. Too many African-American children don't, because they don't return to a home where learning is valued.

If Jack Shafer wants to know why there is an African-American underclass, that's the answer. Those who are chronically poor and who pass on their poverty from generation to generation place a low value on both marriage and education. So far from this being the result of a racist plot, it is much more likely to be the consequence of the disintegration of both sexual mores and academic standards that liberals applauded in the 1970s and which still plagues us today.

Just like Katrina, the liberalization of social attitudes has hit and hurt everyone, but they have hit African-Americans the hardest. If we sincerely care about ameliorating poverty in this country then we need to realize that nothing we do will have any lasting effect, and may even make the problem worse, as some forms of welfare did in the 1970s, unless we change people's attitudes about the crucial importance of marriage and education.

To the Salafi Jihadis throughout the world the deaths of over a thousand Shia during a stampede in Baghdad and the almost simultaneous destruction in America caused by Katrina is an omen that Allah is on the march against apostates and infidels. According to Walid Phares these twin tragedies are boosting jihadi confidence and spirits.

I had my doubts about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans, but having read the Islamo-fascist reaction to this calamity I've come to think that, even were there no other good reason to restore the city, it should be done anyway just to show the Wahhabists that Allah is not in the business of killing Muslim women and children and poor old folks in America just to facilitate their warped, perverted hopes for a world groaning under the stifling demands of Islamic law.

Rebuilding the city will show these nut cakes that their Allah smiles upon mercy, compassion and kindness, and holds out no blessing for those who promote hatred, ignorance, and murder. The lesson will be lost on most of them, probably, but maybe a few will be able to discern the message.

One frequently hears it said that evolution undergirds and unifies all of modern biology which would be devastated were evolution to be somehow disproved. Evolutionary theory, the thinking goes, is the sine qua non of biology.

Such claims, however, have recently come under fire. They're being criticized as at best overblown and at worst completely false. Consider, for instance, this article in The Scientist by Philip Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Skell writes:

Some writers have been so carried away in their enthusiasm for the neo-Darwinian synthesis that they've asserted it to be not only central to biology but to all of science. That always seemed to me to be a whopper of an exaggeration. In light of Skell's essay it seems not only hyperbolic but risible.

I don't often agree with Juan Cole but its hard to argue with him on this one. There were, apparently, some who had made the claim that Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for its decadence. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, huge swaths of populated land across the Gulf coast were devastated yet the most decadent section of the city of New Orleans was largely unscathed. So what conclusion is to be drawn from that? Cole says it leaves us with three alternatives:

1. God does not exist. Or:

2. God does not use natural or man-made catastrophes to punish people for moral failings. Or:

3. God does not actually object to people having a good time occasionally.

With appropriate qualifications we'll take options two and three, thanks.

Cole also posts a transcript of the conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson after 9/11 in which they interpret the huge loss of life as God's judgment on America for its secularism. The biggest flaw in their argument, of course, is that none of the groups which they accuse of having precipitated God's wrath were harmed on 9/11. The people who died were salt of the earth types, many of whom were Christians.

And who suffered from the tsunami last December? It wasn't the people who Falwell and Robertson would think deserve it: wealthy, hedonistic tourists and others. It was innocent, poor children, mostly.

Make no mistake, I agree with Falwell and Robertson in their claim that the ACLU, NARAL, PAW, etc. have done great harm to the social fabric of this nation. But to state that God sends babes in arms and their poor mothers into the raging torrent because of the sins of such organizations as these entails a concept of God more compatible with Islam than Christianity. The God of Christianity doesn't kill the innocent in order to punish the guilty.

New Orleans has been largely evacuated and the long hard job of finding housing, jobs, and schools for the evacuees is ahead of us. Michelle Malkin insists that we don't want the same people handling that work who bungled the immediate storm aftermath. She singles out Michael Brown as one man who shouldn't be in the position he's in and says why.

Brown as head of FEMA certainly has a lot of questions to answer, and we don't want to pass a judgment until more of those answers come in. Likewise, with Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana. They may turn out to have done as well as could be expected given the circumstances, but their performance raises questions and needs to be scrutinized.

Much more important than fixing blame, however, is that we learn the lessons of this calamity. Without wishing to sound perverse, Katrina may have done us a favor if it forced us to address weaknesses in our emergency preparedness. We know that Muslim terrorists are trying to find a way to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city. Should they succeed, God forbid, the lessons we learn from this hurricane will be essential to responding to that disaster.

Let's hope that state and city governments across this nation have called for meetings all next week to begin the process of reviewing, assessing, and improving their plans for dealing with devastating catastrophes in their jurisdictions.

In the wake of Justice Rehnquist's passing much will be written about who his successor will be. Meanwhile, though, the folks at Democratic Underground can scarcely contain their joy that this great and good man is dead.

For those who have the stomach for it here and here can be seen the hideous face of many of the rank and file liberal activists in the Democratic party. Read it and weep for how ugly we've become.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.

William Dembski traces the steps of a scientific revolution and finds them very much the same as the stages of grief. When a person is suddenly beset by tragedy he first goes through a time of denial followed by anger, then bargaining with God, depression and, finally, resignation.

We are witnessing such a transition today in the contest between ID and materialistic Darwinism, and the materialists are deep into the anger stage. Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that a revolution is rarely completed by the older generation of scientists. They have devoted too much of their lives and reputations to the old theory to give it up. Like Kuhn, Dembski believes that the final stage will never be reached by the present generation of materialists but will be left to a younger cadre of thinkers who are not so heavily invested in the materialism of their predecessors.

It's an interesting read.

My friend Byron Borger, who is diligent in calling me to account whenever he thinks I need it (which is frequently), has a response to my recent post about how many of president Bush's critics are using the calamity in New Orleans to score political points. Byron's criticism can be found by clicking on the Feedback button.

My reply is here:

By,

You said in your e-mail that:

The media and the Dems and even some Republicans are faulting the administration for the apparent delay in getting order restored to the city. The charge seems to me to be premature, excessive, and focussed on Bush rather than FEMA and thus suspicious. Fair-minded people would be more hesitant to point fingers until the facts are in as to why it took five days to get the National Guard into the city. Questions need to be answered like whose task is it to do disaster planning? How adequate were the plans that were in place and how well executed were they? Whose decision is it to request troops? The federal response was slow compared to what? How easy is it to get troops federalized, mobilized and sent into a flood zone? That people are so quick to assume that it's all Bush's responsibility and to fault him without knowing the answers to any of these questions is more than just unwise. It suggests that there are political motives behind the charges. Imagine that Clinton were still president and the same events unfolded. Do you think these same people would have been as critical of him? I don't.

Bush has been accused of everything from dawdling at the ranch (Mayor Nagin) to racism (Rep.Elijah Cummings), to lacking the manpower to handle the crisis because he has it foolishly tied up in Iraq (Al Sharpton), and yet no one knows at this point where the breakdowns in the chain of responsibility occured or why. Would these people have said these kinds of things about Clinton? I honestly don't think any of them would, and if I'm right, then to say them about Bush suggests a purely partisan intent and a disregard for any knowledge of relevant facts.

You're right that I can't prove that conclusion in a legal sense, but it's more than just a hunch.

Bush has been accused of having failed to grant the Army Corps of Engineers the amount of money they requested to upgrade the levees as if this is proof of his culpability(see here, for example). This criticism has been made by leftists who generally disdain the corps of engineers for their environmental depradations and would be happy to see them disappear altogether. Doesn't that strike you as a little odd? Doesn't it seem irresponsible to just accept the charge at face value without asking why the funds were denied? Should we just give the corps whatever money it asks for whenever it asks for it? Even if their budgets had been approved why should we think that the work would have been completed by now? It sometimes takes years just to get such projects planned out and moving. In short, was the decision to shave the corps' funding request understandable and was the difference between the amount requested and the amount actually granted really a factor in the failure of the levees after Katrina? How can anyone start pointing fingers until these questions are answered unless they're just trying to score cheap political points?

Consider your own words in a paragraph from your e-mail:

You try here to give Mayor Nagin every benefit of the doubt, as well you should, but I think that that same fair-mindedness should be extended also to governor Blanco and the president. I have heard very little criticism of Nagin or Blanco, both democrats, but it's been heaped on Bush and Mississippi governor Haley Barbor (both Republicans). Why? Might there not have been reasons why Bush's response, like Nagin's, was not as quick as some think it should have been? Why should Bush's critics not be expected to give him the same benefit of the doubt as you give Nagin? That Bush is denied that benefit suggests to me that a significant number of his critics see a political opportunity to discredit him in this calamity and they don't want to pass it up.

You write that:

This is untrue and unfair. I have myself criticized the president in Viewpoint on a number of occasions and have cited the criticisms of others with which I disagreed, but which I thought were done respectfully and sincerely. All I ask from his opponents is the same fairness you ask for Mayor Nagin. If they don't give it then I have to ask why not. If that means impugning their motives then maybe they need to be impugned.

Parenthetically, I want to add that your words above (to ascribe the worst of partisan motives to those believe these things, and to say that their deeply held convictions are shameful just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Why do you presume something corrupt, or insincere, as if critics don't really care about this huge human suffering, but only want to sound off against Bush?) are irrelevant to my post. I didn't criticize anyone for holding views about the role of government similar to your own. I criticized people for throwing around contemptible allegations without having yet any understanding of what happened. I criticized them for being unwilling to extend the same fairness to Republicans that would be, and is, granted by them to Democrats. I criticized them for crass political opportunism in the wake of tragedy.

Decent observers who hold views like yours are not taking advantage of the emotions and suffering of those trapped and victimized by Katrina to play the blame game and to call Bush incompetent and racist. If the facts warrant it later then that will be different. As of now, however, decent people should, and will, withhold judgment on where the fault lies.

Unfortunately, the people we're hearing most from on the left are too often like the person you mentioned from Air America:

You might include in your reply that the individual who made that statement ought to get his/her facts right before sounding off so that he/she doesn't appear so dumb. Louisiana is a red state. It voted for Bush.

Best,

Darwinian atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University offers up an editorial in last Sunday's New York Times in which he probably says more than some of his anti-ID allies would have liked.

For instance, one of the claims we hear from evolutionists in the battle over the teaching of ID is that there's no reason why one can't be both an evolutionist as well as a religious believer. Darwinism is not hostile to theism, we are assured, but then Dennett lets the cat out of the bag:

True, you can still believe in God and accept evolution, Dennett informs us, but your belief in God is plainly irrational. In other words, he suggests, Darwinism renders the existence of God highly implausible and unlikely.

In his column, the Tufts philosopher accuses Intelligent Design advocates of perpetrating an "ingenious hoax" which accusation is, of course, a slander. It entails that ID scientists and philosophers know full well that intelligence was not at work in the development of life, but nonetheless deliberately deceived, and continue to deliberately deceive, the gullible masses into believing it was. This is to impute reprehensible behavior and motives to people in the ID camp, and unless Dennett can back his allegation up with some justification he ought to apologize. His reckless and insulting charge is reminiscient of Richard Dawkins' asinine claim that anyone who denies evolution is either "ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked-but I'd rather not consider that)."

Amusingly, having called ID a hoax, Dennett implies that the assurance we have of the truth of the Darwinian doctrine that natural processes are sufficient by themselves to account for the emergence of all living things is comparable to the assurance we have of the truth of both quantum physics and relativity theory.

Both quantum physics and relativity theory have been tested and confirmed many times. When has the claim that mechanistic forces are adequate by themselves to create biological information ever been tested, much less confirmed? How could it even be tested? Dennett's doctrine is a piece of metaphysical speculation, not science and his claim that it enjoys the same degree of confirmation as the theories of physics is risible.

Dennett also finds himself unable to talk about biological structures and processes without resorting to the vocabulary of purpose and intelligence that he disdains, which is an interesting admission in itself. He sprinkles his essay with terms and phrases like:

Dennett would deny any telic intent in these phrases, of course, but the fact remains that brilliance and cleverness are attributes of minds, not purposeless forces. That he feels constrained to use those words to describe biological phenomena does not help him make the case that these phenomena were not intentionally designed by an intelligent mind.

He completely misses the point when he writes that:

Surely Professor Dennett doesn't think that ID needs to explain how structures like the bacterial flagellum were designed. A tourist need not have any idea how Mt. Rushmore came into existence in order to conclude that it is the product of intelligent agency. A detective need not have any idea how a crime was committed in order to know that it was an intentional act and not an accident. The role of ID is not to explain, but to identify, intelligent purpose in biological structures.

Nor do ID'ers argue that because evolutionists haven't explained everything yet that therefore ID is true. They argue that some things haven't been explained in terms of purely natural mechanism because any such explanation that could be offered is so improbable and implausible as to render it literally incredible. They argue that it is only an apriori commitment to material explanations that prevents researchers from admitting that biological sytems and structures certainly appear to bear the impress of intelligent input in their manufacture.

Finally, in his quest to strike a fatal blow to ID he stumbles over a few hoary myths left over from the 1950s. He claims for example that:

Well, no. Michael Denton lays out the physiological rationale for the wiring of the eye's nervous system in a 1999 article that can be found here. It turns out that the eye's neural wiring itself manifests an extraordinary bit of engineering and design. Dennett will have to come up with another "accident" if he's going to use sub-optimal designs as an argument against ID.

Dennett's editorial may be compelling to those readers who may be eager to be persuaded, but as a piece of convincing argumentation it's pretty lame. It suffers itself from an intellectual sub-optimality analogous to the "accidents" he cites against the existence of an intelligent designer. There's much additional criticism of Dennett's essay here.

PowerLine is one good place to go for sanity in the midst of the criticism of the federal government for a seemingly slow response to the needs of the hurricane victims. Whatever blame is merited for the problems being experienced there must be shouldered by the local and state government whose responsibility it is to provide the planning and resources for the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The attempt to blame Bush for the delay in the delivery of rescue, security, food and shelter is driven not by any objective facts on the ground but purely by the desire to gain political advantage. It's shameful.

Yahoo has a photo of a school bus parking lot filled with school buses up to their axles in water. While New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin rants about the need for buses to move people and the lack of state and federal help these school buses were sitting in the lot since before the storm.

Michelle Malkin also has some good stuff on events in the Gulf region.

Anyone who would like to contribute to the recovery effort can do so at the Red Cross site here.

Perhaps it is becuse Jim Glassman is a white, middle-aged male that he seems to have an inordinate affinity for basing conclusions on facts rather than feelings. This is not a welcome trait among post-modern ideologues, and no doubt many such will be thrown into a snarl by this essay by Glassman at Tech Central Station. In it Glassman unfashionably and unconscionably introduces a few scientific facts into the debate among lefties over whether Katrina was the result mostly of purely natural geophysical forces with some input by George Bush, or whether it can be, as many on the left suspect, laid entirely at the feet of Bush and his anti-environmental cronies. The facts adduced by Glassman make the enviro-loonies look even more looney than usual.

He writes:

This really is a cheap polemical trick by Glassman to insert a few discordant facts into the left's otherwise highly satisfying argument: Katrina was caused by global warming, global warming is caused by American intransigence on Kyoto, America is lead by Bush. Ergo, Bush caused Katrina and should be impeached this very afternoon!

As a footnote to the left's wild suppositions and misunderstandings about the effects of global warming, Chris Matthews on Wednesday night actually suggested that it was the cause of the Indian Ocean tsunami last December. NBC science advisor, Robert Bazell, had to explain to him that the tsunami was a result of an undersea earthquake and totally unrelated to atmospheric temperatures. To his credit, Matthews seemed to comprehend, somewhat, the irrelevance of a degree or two rise in global temperature to the periodic slippage of the earth's crustal plates and was content to let the matter drop.

Here's another grateful Muslim whose fat the United States pulled out of the fire in '91, but whose memory is so short and whose gratitude so scant that he rejoices in the havoc Katrina has wrought. After we delivered his country (Kuwait) from Saddam's savage invasion and restored that country's independence we get this from one of its officials.

Evidently, Muslims aren't big on "thank yous."

I wonder if this means that there'll be no economic aid from Kuwait to help defray the cost of recovery from Katrina. And we were expecting boodles of it to be offered by all those Islamic countries we've helped in the last couple of decades, too.

Someone ought to do a study of the difference between Christian benevolence to Muslims around the world, and Muslim benevolence to Christians in need. I'm sure they'd find a rough parity.

Or maybe not.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has an interesting series of posts on the border war in Iraq and how it is evolving into a war between Iraqi tribes fighting mostly foreign jihadis, with the tribes receiving American air support. Begin with this post, and then go here and finish here.

Roggio also notes that there is almost nothing in the MSM about this conflict and its significance. If it weren't for blogs no one would know anything of importance about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's no wonder that support for the Bush's policy is eroding. Nobody knows whether we're making progress or not because the only information people get is filtered through the steady drizzle of negativism and body counts dispensed by the media.

One of the big stories that'll someday be written about this war is the ineptitude displayed by the media in reporting it. Vietnam received much more thorough coverage, such as it was, than has Iraq.

The Pew Forum On Religion and Public Life has published the results of a survey of 2000 adults conducted last July. There are many findings of interest, but here are just a few:

I think the 70% figure here is misleading. I suspect that many of the respondents really don't understand what it means to say that "life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time." I wonder how many of them thought that the only alternative to this was that man descended from an ape-like ancestor. I doubt that most people, when they think about it, would deny that variation, at least on a small scale, has occured. Fixity of species is certainly not the position of creationists, not even young earth creationists.

It would have been more illuminating, perhaps, had the Pew people framed their questions about creationism and evolution a bit differently. Instead of introducing the term "creationism," the teaching of which is not really at issue any more, it would have been helpful had they asked, for example, whether the respondent favored or opposed teaching both the evidence for and the evidence against Neo-Darwinian evolution. It would also have been interesting had they asked whether the respondents favored or opposed science teachers pointing out that there are two ways to view the scientific facts of the universe and of life: One is to see them both as products of blind, unguided chance, and the other is to see them as the products of intelligent purpose.

If the questions had been asked in that fashion, it's my guess that the answers would have been even more overwhelmingly in favor of teaching both the pros and cons of evolution and also in favor of teaching both of the metaphysical interpretations of the scientific data.

There is much else in the Pew report and the reader is encouraged to check it out.