Well, isn't this something?

Now it turns out that not only have leading climatologists in the anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming debate conspired to freeze out dissenters, not only have they admitted that their data for the last ten years don't support the hypothesis that the earth is warming or that long-term warming is caused by human activity, not only have they admitted to massaging the data to make it conform to their theoretical stance on AGW, not only have they refused to let other researchers see their data and advised colleagues to destroy it should they be forced by Freedom of information laws to disclose it, but now it turns out that they actually have destroyed the data upon which the whole AGW thesis was based in the first place:

This revelation follows those discovered in the...

These are the people upon whose word nations are prepared to spend trillions of dollars to reduce carbon emissions to reverse a warming trend that, to the extent that it exists, has no demonstrable relation to carbon. They have, by association, ruined the reputation of tens of thousands of honest scientists and disgraced themselves by their odious behavior. They are responsible for the greatest scientific scandal perhaps in the history of science and should be banned from the profession.

Meanwhile, the lesson for the rest of us is to stop listening to people who tell us to just shut up and take the word of experts. When the "experts" are unwilling to present their data, when they appear to be promoting an ideological agenda, then we should be very skeptical indeed of whatever they tell us.

RLC

Doubtless part of the reason the death toll was so high at Fort Hood was that no one in the building where the shootings occurred was armed, except the shooter. It may seem odd that on a military base no one is allowed to carry weapons, but in 1993 one of the first things President Clinton undertook upon taking office was to sign a directive that forbade all military personnel except military police from carrying firearms on base.

The President no doubt meant well but the directive insured that any terrorist who wanted to kill American soldiers would have a pretty easy time of it by attacking them on their bases. Indeed, as someone put it, a mass killer would probably face greater risk of return fire at the local Wal-Mart than on a military base.

In fact, all the public shootings that have occurred in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where concealed handguns have been banned. Had an administrator at Columbine had access to a weapon fewer kids may have died. Had a professor at Virginia Tech had access to the means to stop the lunatic who killed so many students there the carnage may have been less. Had soldiers at Fort Hood carried sidearms, as they do every day when they are deployed, Nidal Malik Hasan would probably never even have tried to do what he did.

It's a mistake to think that we're making people more safe by taking away their ability to protect themselves. The only people who obey laws prohibiting firearms are those who obey laws. Criminals pay them no heed, and our good intentions wind up making it easier for mass murderers to carry out their horrific crimes.

We live in a society where it's impossible to prevent killers from getting guns and it's impossible for the police to protect people from them. Given those impossibilities, it makes no sense to try to solve the problem of social violence by taking away from people the means to protect themselves and those they love from the thugs and predators in our midst.

RLC

The university was once a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought, but that was a long time ago. Today the university is on the forefront of the progressive attempt to throttle free speech and thought wherever they can.

The latest instance of this movement to impose a stifling conformity upon the public has come to light at the University of Minnesota. U of M is establishing a policy whereby students applying for admission to their teacher education program will be screened to assess whether they hold the correct ideological commitments. Apparently, if you wish to be a teacher you will not be allowed to be a conservative and probably not a religious person. Such is the world the progressives would have us inhabit - a world in which freedom is something to be found only in intellectual antique markets.

Fortunately, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a free-speech activist group that fights political-correctness codes on college campuses, is on the case. You can read about this shameful attempt to impose ideological uniformity on Minnesota's public school students at Hot Air, and you can find other examples of academia's intolerance by doing a Viewpoint search for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Young people growing up in the post WWII era took their freedom to hold dissenting opinions for granted, but there are many people in the contemporary left, in universities and in government, who see that freedom as an enemy. They want to be able to dictate what you'll be able to say and, if they can, even what you think, and they're relentless in their push to get their way. If they succeed students will one day be saying the 21st century equivalent of Heil Hitler before classes each morning just as today they recite the pledge of allegiance.

It really is true, as the 19th century abolitionist Wendall Phillips once said, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

RLC

Byron linked me to an article by Lisa Miller in a recent edition of Newsweek in which Ms Miller voices a weariness with the argumentiveness of the "New Atheists." It's not that she's unimpressed with their arguments, mind you. Rather, she seems to be persuaded that the atheists have won the debate about the rationality of belief in God, that further argument is tedious and pointless, and that we need to move on and recognize that people are not going to be persuaded to believe one way or another about God by appeals to reason.

Ms Miller gives far too much credit to the work of people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens - as though their books, like a massive artillery barrage, have somehow swept the field, there's no point in continuing the shelling, and all that's left is for believers to retreat into irrelevant, isolated enclaves of nonrational, subjective faith reinforced by the beauties of poetry.

Three statements in particular bothered me in this essay. Miller writes:

"Crushed it"? In whose judgment? By what standard? All three of these men have done little beyond embarrass themselves whenever they've either written on, or debated, religion. That Miller isn't aware of this is a poor reflection on how thoroughly she knows her subject.

Move on to what? Poetry? She wants to cede the flag of rationality to the atheist when in fact the atheist has lost it everywhere but in popular culture. Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are doubtless very smart, but so are their opponents. Why does Miller give the impression that the atheists simply outshine their competition intellectually? Has she not watched the debates between Hitchens and William Lane Craig? Has she not read any of the scathing reviews of Dawkins' or Harris' books by people like Alvin Plantinga? Guess not.

This is a very odd claim. The atheist belief that he can have all those goods without the supernatural may be true - I argue that it's not - but it's possible that it is. What it's not, though, is self-evident. Miller just doesn't know what she's talking about here anymore than she did when she wrote a column sometime back on why Christians should accept gay marriage.

Her assertion that atheists can have morality without God is, I think, either trivially true or it's false. It's true that atheists can live by the same values that theists call "moral" but their choice to do so is purely subjective and arbitrary. It's not grounded in anything but their own feelings. Thus, they can be "moral" in the sense that they live by certain values that Christians also live by. But the claim to "have morality," if it means anything significant, means 1) to have grounds for making moral judgments about the behavior of others and 2) to be obligated to do one thing rather than another. Neither of these can apply to an atheist.

The atheist cannot say that others are wrong if they choose, say, to withhold charity from those who suffer, nor can he say that anyone is obligated to be charitable. What on earth could possibly obligate someone to help another? Our genes? Our shared humanity? The greater good? The most that an atheist can say is that he likes charity and wishes that others did, too, but he could just as "morally" claim to like stinginess. It makes no difference.

The shallowness of Miller's piece reminded me why I stopped reading Newsweek a long time ago, but I'm sure the article will, nevertheless, be a big hit on the cable talk shows.

RLC

This is an interesting datum - interesting for what it says about our perceptions of how Mr. Obama is doing thus far into his presidency and how those perceptions are influenced by race:

In other words, were President Obama a white man it's very doubtful that he would have held onto black support to the extent that he has. Were he white his approval numbers among blacks would probably be about what they are among whites and he'd be under 40% in his overall approval rating. That's quite a drop in the first ten months of a presidency. It's probably even "unprecedented."

That there is such a gap between how whites perceive the Obama presidency and how blacks do is unfortunate but understandable. As the first black president, he's the repository of so much of the hope and pride of black America. Blacks are heavily invested in his success and are loath to give up on him and admit that the man in whom they had placed so much confidence and optimism is showing himself unable to do the job.

Perhaps the lesson for voters of all races is that one's vote for president should not be cast for the person whose skin is the right color or for the candidate whose gender satisfies some politically correct requirement. The candidate who wins our vote should be the person we think is the best qualified to do the job, and race and gender are not, or should not be, relevant qualifications.

RLC

If teenage girls issued fatwahs John Lewinski might need round the clock police protection after writing his critique of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Lewinski lists twenty unfortunate messages young girls take home from Twilight. I haven't seen the movie so I can't say how accurate he is, but I think the twenty lessons are pretty much ubiquitous in our culture anyway, sadly. Here's Lewinski's amusing lede:

Go to the link to read the twenty lessons. If you know someone who has seen the movie you might want to share them with that person as well. The lessons could have been titled, with a nod to Laura Schlessinger, Twenty Stupid Things Girls Believe That Make a Wreck Out of Their Lives.

RLC

One of the innovative ways in which the internet is being put to use to help poor people around the globe is what might be called internet microfinance.

The way it works in a nutshell is this: You go to the website of an organization doing microfinance (providing small loans to the working poor) and view pictures and summaries of entrepreneurs from third world countries who need loans (usually a couple hundred dollars or less) to get a business going or to get over a rough spot, etc.

One such organization that works to provide loans to such people is a group called Kiva. Kiva has field partners in countries around the globe who dispense loans to small businessmen and women. You and others make a contribution to the loan (usually $25.00 or more) which, in aggregate, gives the field partner the capital he needs to secure the loan. When the loan is repaid you get your money back and can use it to fund other loans.

If you're looking for a good way to help people but feel that handouts are often counterproductive this is an excellent way to give people who are working hard a hand up. Check out the Kiva site to get a better idea of what they do.

RLC

Perhaps on this Thanksgiving eve it might be well to remind ourselves of the adjuration given to the Israelites who had much to be thankful for but who, like us, often took too much for granted. This would be an appropriate reading as we sit down with our families and friends to partake of the Thanksgiving feast.

Moses says to the children of Israel (Deuteronomy 8:10-14; 17-18):

Indeed. Anyone who thinks their "wealth" isn't fragile and ephemeral need only consider the stock market and how entire fortunes, accumulated over years of effort, could be wiped out in a couple of days of market collapse. We only need think of how quickly jobs, houses, possessions, and health can all slip away from us in a mere instant.

All of life's goods hang by a thread, and we should be thankful to God for every moment that the thread doesn't break.

Have a wonderful and gratitude-filled Thanksgiving.

RLC

Fox News has a photo gallery of twenty two newly discovered species of marine creatures. Many of the photos are gorgeous. Here's an example:

Such beauty raises a host of questions. Why are we so drawn to beauty? How did our love of beauty come to be? If the Darwinians are correct, what survival value does appreciating beauty have that caused it to be selected for?

Some Darwinians argue that our delight in beauty has no particular survival value but rather evolved because it supervenes on other traits that are chosen by natural selection for their fitness. Imagine a basketball coach selecting players to play a particular position in which they must be able to get rebounds. Most such players will have large hands, because large hands supervene upon height (they often "occur together") and height is a trait which would assist in getting rebounds, the behavior being selected for.

The problem with the supervenience explanation, however, is that as a scientific hypothesis it's pretty much useless since there's no way to test it. A theory that can't be tested can't be shown either to be true or to be false and thus falls outside the bounds of science.

Our fascination with beauty - the fact that we find some things beautiful and enjoy them - is hard to explain in terms of blind, mindless forces acting randomly. It's hard to imagine that chemical reactions occurring in our brains somehow translate into the apprehension of beauty. How does such a thing happen? It's not hard to imagine at all, however, if we allow for the possibility that our sense of beauty were imparted to us by an intelligent creator who created not only our ability to discern the beautiful but also created the beauty he wishes us to enjoy.

For more of this beauty go to the link.

RLC

On the eve of the Copenhagen Summit on global climate change the credibility of the proponents of man-caused global warming (Anthropogenic Global Warming - AGW) has taken a hit from which it may not recover. Strangely (or not so strangely) the media isn't saying much of anything about this, but it would seem to be a major story. What happened is that some hackers broke into the servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit(Hadley CRU), one of the major seats of global warming research in the world, and released confidential files and emails onto the internet.

James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph comments:

What the researchers were discovered to be doing was trying to silence their academic opponents by denying them venues to get their views published and colluding to discredit those who challenge their data about AGW. Here's one of the emails laying out a strategy for suppressing dissent:

In other words, this AGW proponent is saying that they have a problem as long as their opponents have a venue for publishing their dissent, so they need to discredit the journal they publish in and then they can claim that no dissenters are scientifically credible because they're not published in legitimate scientific journals. Instead of a commitment to truth these people are committed to winning the debate even if they have to lie about the numbers and silence the opposition to do it. This isn't how real scientists operate.

Other emails talk about how researchers manipulated data to support AGW. Still others lament that they can't show evidence that the earth is actually warming:

It's quite a scandal, or should be, since it potentially changes everything with regard to global warming and the credibility of the scientists who have been warning us about it. Since the perpetrators are on the "right side" of this controversial issue, however, the media has been sluggish in looking into it. Even so, if these emails become widely circulated it'll make the AGW cause look ridiculous and consequently make it all the harder for the Obama administration to pass their climate change legislation.

I expect this story is going to explode in the next couple of days.

RLC

As the world gears up for the expected Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear weapons production facilities, two questions present themselves:

1. What role, if any, will the U.S. play in the assault?

2. If the answer to #1 is (as I expect it is) "nothing overt" then can the Israelis succeed on their own?

DEBKAfile has a piece that sheds a little light on this second question.

The Iranians were counting on the Russians to deliver S-300 missiles which would be needed to shoot down attacking aircraft, but the Russians have evidently decided to renege on the deal (due to American diplomacy?) leaving the Iranians critically exposed and defenseless against a sophisticated air assault:

Iranian strategists are trying to make do with three alternatives:

When the Israelis finally do launch their attack - or attacks - the world will scream in outrage at this intolerable aggression even as they heave a sigh of relief that the Israelis removed the threat of nuclear war, at least temporarily, from the Middle East. It'll be a shame if we don't participate in the military strike because success can only be guaranteed if we do, but it'll be a greater disgrace if we join in the hypocritical chorus of condemnation. If the Israelis pull it off everyone in the world should thank them for having the courage and skill to do what the world should have done but lacked the spine and/or the ability to do.

RLC

Jason D. writes with some questions based on our recent post titled Fading Glory which addressed the diminishing luster of Mr. Obama's presidency. Jason asks me to answer the following questions, and I thought it might be good to share the exchange:

The media are sympathetic to the President's goal of expanding the reach of government over individual lives. They share his basic values and were heavily invested in his election. He's their best hope for accomplishing what they'd like to see done in this country, and they're quite naturally slow to give up on him. We have to keep in mind that journalists today see themselves as advocates for policy, not reporters of events. Just as most talk radio hosts see their role as promoting a conservative vision of what America should be, network television and most of the print media see their primary role as promoting a liberal/progressive vision.

I can't answer this except to say that I'm glad he did. I wish that he would have been more outspoken than he was about human rights abuses, both in China and in Myanmar (Burma). I also wish he would have publicly complained about the muzzle the Chinese put on his public appearances, perhaps out of fear that the President would talk about human rights. On the other hand, I don't think human rights are Mr. Obama's priority. If they are I don't understand why he spurned a meeting with the Dalai Lama before he left for the Orient.

I think Christians are certainly called upon to pray for their leaders and the best thing conservative Christians can do is pray for God to give the Obama administration wisdom and moral integrity. At the same time, as citizens we also have to be prepared to stand against the administration when they seek to arrogate more power to themselves than is healthy for the fluorishing of a free people. Pace what the secularists maintain, all government policy is essentially moral, and this is especially true of economic policy. As such, our political life is something about which Christians should be concerned and actively trying to influence.

But, and this is crucial, we should never do to Barack Obama what was done to George Bush. We should always keep our criticism respectful and never personalize it. Bush's critics were often cruel and vulgar. Christians should eschew such tactics and express whatever opposition they have toward the President's policies and ideas in a manner free of hate, vitriol, and insults. This doesn't mean that we can't use humor or even light sarcasm. Nor does it mean we can't poke a little fun at those with whom we disagree. Rather it means that we should always be prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to our opponents, to delay judgment until we have the relevant facts, to keep our criticisms tentative pending new information coming to light, and not assume that those with whom we disagree have evil or corrupt motives until we have, and can articulate, very good reason to think that such motives are the most plausible explanation for their actions.

It is true that whereas President Bush was frequently derided for having called himself the "decider," President Obama is earning for himself the sobriquet of the "un-decider." He has had since last summer to make a decision on Afghanistan. In fact, he spoke during the campaign as if he had already thought the matter through so his inability to make up his mind now is hard to explain and justify.

It's also true that Bush was a much better president than the media give him credit for being. He kept us safe from terror attacks for over seven years, liberated 50 million people from tyranny, did more for suffering Africans than probably any other American president, and appointed two excellent supreme court jurists. His tax cuts led to six years of prosperity. He gave us a fine example of personal rectitude, courage, and magnanimity toward opponents, and, despite the best efforts of his enemies to hang one on him, his presidency was free of major scandal. Few presidents can match that record.

This is not to say that everything he did was great, but rather to say that those who attack him, including those in the succeeding administration, are often simply not being fair in their assessment of the man.

RLC

To illustrate the rank dishonesty of our political class, I offer the following tale of shame: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, Nevada) needed all sixty Democrat senators on board to begin debate on the health care reform bill. Several members of his caucus, still capable of glimmers of conscience, were balking. Among these was Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisianna. What to do? Needing her vote, Senator Reid did what any venal politician would do. He bribed her with an offer of $100 million to $300 million dollars in Medicaid.

Now, of course, he couldn't just write a check to the senator, so he had to put the bribe into the bill and make it look like it wasn't a bribe. Here's the language he inserted that won Landrieu's support. I don't expect anyone to read more than just a couple of lines of this travesty, and that's the point. I doubt if most of the senators who voted to proceed with debate Saturday night have read it either, a dereliction which seems pretty close to criminal malfeasance, given the stakes.

In case you're wondering, there's only one state to which all this gobbledygook applies: Lousianna:

Senator Landrieu beamed as she announced that she'd been bought off:

If the bill was so bad that she would have voted not to bring it to debate before she was bribed it was certainly no better after the bribe. The only thing that changed was that after the bribe Louisianna would get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. No doubt there are many other senators out there eager, like Senator Landrieu, to sell both their votes and their souls, and to sell the rest of us down the river. Open your wallets citizens. The congressional hogs are lining up at the trough and they're very hungry.

RLC

This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that the contemporary emphasis on "celebrating diversity" actually leads us to dehumanize those who are different from ourselves and makes it easier for us to ignore their suffering.

We are moved to want to help others primarily by a feeling of empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling when they hurt. It's much easier to persuade oneself, or one's associates, to help hungry, orphaned children in the third world if we have empathy for them than if we don't.

We have empathy for people primarily because we are able to project our responses to life's challenges onto them. We assume that the way we feel when we are insulted, when we've lost a loved one, when we are threatened, when we suffer, is very much the same as others feel in similar situations. This intuition, however, is based on the assumption we hold that others are "put together" pretty much just like us - that we all think alike, feel alike, and see life much the same way.

Since the 1960s, however, there has been an effort on the part of some to eradicate this confidence that we are all very much alike. We've been told that if we are a man we don't know what it's like to be a woman, if we're white we don't know what it's like to be black, if we're economically comfortable we don't know what it's like to be poor. We're told that others are fundamentally different from us, they see the world differently, they don't share our perspectives, values, or feelings about things, and so on.

Very well, but the problem is that from here it is but a short step to thinking that the other doesn't really feel the way I feel, doesn't really respond to the blows that life delivers the way I do.

When we start to think this way, our empathy for the other begins to evaporate and our sympathy begins to diminish. It becomes easier to turn our back on his suffering because, we rationalize, his suffering is not what we would experience were we in similar circumstances. When we reach the point where it becomes easier to minimize the other's pain in our own mind then we have essentially dehumanized him.

So far from celebrating the things that make us different we need to affirm over and over the things that make us alike. We need to celebrate not our differences but our commonalities. We should focus on strengthening the bonds of empathy that we should feel for all of God's creatures but which are weakened by the social balkanization that results from emphasizing our differences. Cultural variety is colorful and enriching. Dividing people into "us" and "them," however, is corrosive to our ability to experience empathy.

RLC

I admit that I'm baffled by the media's obsession with Sarah Palin and their determination to smack her every chance they get. You can't turn on the television without seeing some talking head snidely remarking on Palin's various alleged inadequacies. It has gotten to the point where I think Palin is almost the media's Emmanuel Goldstein toward whom the feel duty-bound to direct their daily Five Minutes Hate (see Orwell's 1984). It's like a kind of liberal Tourette's syndrome that compels them to feel contempt and blurt out disparagements whether there's any rational reason for them or not. It'd be amusing were it not so pathetic since Palin is not a candidate, she holds no elective office, she's not an "extremist," she doesn't hate anyone and yet the lefty media never pass up an opportunity to throw a pie in her face with a sneer on theirs.

Some, though, are breaking out of this apparent mob psychology and are scratching their heads wondering what on earth has precipitated the hostility and personal venom that, like a nest of spitting cobras, so many commentators direct her way.

One such is David Harsanyi of the Denver Post. writes:

There's more on the Left's Palin fixation at the link. Meanwhile, all you psychology majors out there who are looking for an idea for a research project might want to consider examining what it is about Sarah Palin that drives liberals into a frenzy that serves only to make them look simultaneously both mean and stupid.

RLC

A student of mine, a native of Beijing, offers an interesting observation regarding our post on the influx of students from China. He writes:

I wonder what goes through the mind of a student who realizes he must spend the rest of his life doing something he has no interest in whatsoever and who realizes, too, that there's no way out.

I bet prozac sales are booming in China.

Anyway, in the post I was pretty enthusiastic about having the best and the brightest from India and China come here to study. For a less sanguine view read the submission from Emily on the Feedback page.

RLC

President Obama seems to be rapidly approaching the point that Machiavelli warned rulers to avoid at all costs, i.e. the point at which the people no longer respect or fear the prince. This week, in the midst of a feckless trip to China in which he seemed more like a third world mendicant than the leader of the free world, both the President and his attorney general gave utterly incoherent and risible justifications for moving the 9/11 trials to New York. This embarrassing episode followed on the heels of plummeting approval ratings that have him under 50% for the first time in his presidency and an apparent inability to decide what he wants to do in Afghanistan despite the fact that he's had over three months since General McChrystal's request - during which time our troops have been dying and morale has declined - to mull it over. Mr. Obama has also done himself no favors by surrounding himself with a motley collection of tax cheats, Maoists, and sundry other extremists, and revealing himself, in the Gates/Crowley affair, to be rather intemperate and to hold views about race that most people in this country have found distasteful for at least two decades.

To add to this tale of woe the State Department, and thus the President whose policy it carries out, has looked foolish in its clumsy handling of the matter of Honduras; Iran proceeds merrily on its way toward procuring nuclear weapons with which to atomize Israelis; signature legislation (health care reform, cap and trade, card check) limp through Congress having engendered the antipathy of a majority of Americans; jobless numbers are at the highest level in decades; mortgage defaults are increasing alarmingly, and our debt has soared to such heights that we'll never be able to pay it off. To add insult to economic injury, the President was embarrassingly rebuffed in Copenhagen when he journeyed there to plead for the Olympics.

He and his team have appeared inept in running the Cash-for-Clunkers program, as well as in their mystifying accounting of where the stimulus money has gone, and in claiming to have "saved or created" 650,000 jobs that seem to exist nowhere but in their own imaginations. He has reneged on so many campaign promises and has said so many things that seem prima facie to be at variance with the truth that few still trust him to do or mean what he says.

It's no exaggeration to note that Mr. Obama's only accomplishment thus far has been to win a Nobel Prize that he didn't deserve.

If he doesn't quickly start turning things around, and I don't see how he can, he'll soon become a laughingstock on the television comedy shows. Once that happens his approval numbers will sink further to Nixonian depths, and the media will slowly begin to replace adulation with bitter criticism - bitter because they'll have been deply mortified by the failure of the man they touted only a few months ago as a godsend (Perhaps it has already started.). At this point congressional Democrats will begin tending to their own political futures which they'll reckon to be contingent upon putting distance between themselves and the head of their party. When this happens, and it may happen soon, Mr. Obama will be a lame duck.

All of this is astonishing given the enormous good will with which Mr. Obama was greeted by the world community upon his election, and given the extraordinary political advantages enjoyed by any president who is favored by the press and whose party controls both houses of Congress.

In light of all this one wonders what the ramifications would be, both domestically and abroad, of a severely crippled president with three years left in his tenure. It seems to me that it can never be good for the U.S. to have a weak chief executive, but, on the other hand, I believe Obama's agenda, were he able to enact it, would be quite calamitous for the nation. We thus seem to be in deep trouble regardless whether our president is weak or strong.

Perhaps our only hope is that Mr. Obama follows the example of President Clinton who moved toward the center when he found himself politically debilitated, but such a migration is not likely from Mr. Obama. Clinton was a pragmatist, Obama is an ideologue. He can no more abandon his radical vision for America than he can change his eye color. What he is now is what he will be a year from now.

And for that reason, among others, we're in for an interesting twelve-month.

RLC

Joel, a former student, sends along his thoughts on a review in the New York Times of Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth. I thought it worth putting on our Main page rather than the Feedback page. Here's what he says:

I recently finished a fine book by a professor of political science named Hunter Baker who titles his work The End of Secularism. The problem Baker addresses is the largely successful attempt in the latter part of the 20th century to purge religious sentiments from the public square and to instill in our everyday life an assumption of, or bias toward, secularism.

The main argument in his book is that politics simply cannot be separated from religion, that the secularist alternative is neither neutral nor desirable, and that it will ultimately fail. Secularism should be seen not as the only reasonable occupant of the public square but rather as one competitor among others jockeying to be heard in the marketplace of ideas.

Secularism is not to be confused with the separation of church and state. The latter refers to institutional independence. The former refers to the separation of religion from public life. Separation of church and state is a good thing for everyone involved. The separation of religion from public life is not.

Baker argues persuasively that the courts have erred in seeing the First Amendment as a prohibition of religious expression in taxpayer subsidized spaces. The establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...") was not about religious freedom at all. It was about who had jurisdiction in church/state matters. The Founders were saying that the role of religion would be a matter for the several states to resolve each for themselves, and that the federal government had no business injecting itself into what was a state matter. Each state was to be free to develop its own relationship with religion in whatever way it chose without the federal government telling it what it could or couldn't do.

Of course, that's not how our courts have chosen to interpret the Amendment. They've ruled, in effect, that the First Amendment is a mandate for secularism, which actually privileges one religious view - secularism - above all others.

Baker traces the uneasy history of church state relations from the early Roman church to the present and attributes the rise of secularism in the West to three main 19th century developments: The emergence of German higher criticism, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and the schisms wrought by the Civil War and slavery in both the nation and the church. The clincher, though, was the Scopes Trial in 1926 and its aftermath. The trial was a humiliation of Christian fundamentalism and launched secularism on a trail of victories for the next sixty years that made it seem invincible.

Today, however, the picture is much different. Since the latter part of the 20th century secularism has come under intense scrutiny by "its own advocates, conservative Christians, other conservative religionists, and postmoderns." The critique of secularism includes the irony that secularists have absorbed as their own the values of our common Christian heritage even as they claim that secular thinking is actually the source of these values.

Baker spends several pages on Stanley Fish's critique of the secularist project and why it is doomed to fail. For example, "Bracketing off religion does not solve the problem of toleration. It just disadvantages one set of orthodoxies from interacting with the many secular orthodoxies roaming free in a liberal society." This is true. It also privileges the secularist orthodoxies by essentially insulating them from criticism by banning the opponents most likely to present the most powerful critiques - religious opponents - from the public square.

We must exclude religious reasons and motivations from our public discourse, the secularist argues, because we need to allow only viewpoints that are accessible to everyone and held by everyone in the public arena. The assumption, however, that secular viewpoints are somehow metaphysically neutral is a fraud. The secularist is no more disinterested than is the religious citizen and for him to claim that he should be allowed to judge what passes for legitimate discourse is like permitting a baseball pitcher the prerogative of calling the balls and strikes.

All public discourse reduces to two fundamental visions of reality. One maintains that the universe is the product of a rational, personal, and good creator and the other holds that everything is a result of chance and impersonal forces. The secularist wants to rule the former out of court and allow only the latter in the public square, but conveniently, the latter view happens to be his own. Postmodern thinkers like Fish have been particularly adept at pointing out the self-serving nature of the attempt to establish a monopoly for one's own view while maintaining the pretense of neutrality.

Baker makes the interesting observation that although secularism serves essentially the same role in the Democratic party that religion serves in the GOP, the media, though eager to report on the influence religion has among Republicans, rarely reports on the influence secularism has among Democrats. One never hears, for instance, how the Democrats have "shored up their base among the unchurched, atheists, and agnostics."

We're often reminded that schools must not teach religious values, but secularist values like environmental attitudes and fads, tolerance, opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia are all deemed perfectly legitimate topics for taxpayer-funded schools. In other words, taking Judeo-Christian religion out of the public square does not leave the square religion-free. Rather, it leaves secularism as the only religion to be allowed a voice in our public deliberations.

There's much more in Baker's relatively short (194 pages) book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Church/State issues and the role of religion in public life.

RLC

The White House blithely claims to have "created or saved" 650,000 jobs. The conservative right holds the claim in derision, and the liberal left chooses, amidst its embarrassment, to pretend this audacious bit of mendacity had not been uttered by their President. As even the sympathetic media have pointed out, the only jobs that have been created by the administration are in government, and there's absolutely no way to determine how many jobs, if any, have been saved. The assertion that jobs have been saved is utterly meaningless, but the White House stands by it notwithstanding their inability to explain how they arrive at such an extraordinary datum, especially given the current jobless numbers.

To make it even more embarrassing for the President's supporters the congressional districts that the White House claims these jobs have been created in don't even exist. If the districts are being fabricated why should anyone think the job numbers aren't? Reading about these claims one feels as if the "facts" are just being manufactured as we go along. Is there anything they tell us that we can believe?

RLC

This could be welcome news for colleges and universities desperate for students:

Why the increase?

It's also a great way to tear down walls between societies. As China grows and continues to accumulate an excess male population it will be tempted to flex its muscle in the Pacific. The more educated Chinese who have made friends in the U.S. the more hopeful we can be that tensions between us will be kept at a minimum.

The type of student that China is sending is changing as well:

Foreign students have given a welcome push to local economies:

Another advantage is that some Chinese may wish to remain in the U.S. to work and raise a family. If so, it would of mutual benefit as they contribute their native industriousness, intelligence, and virtue to our local communities.

If China and India wish to send us their best and brightest, I for one say send us all you want.

RLC

Lloyd Marcus is a black American. I mention this only because it gives context to a little piece he writes for American Thinker. It's ostensibly about Rush Limbaugh, but one could substitute "read Conservative thought" for "listen to Rush Limbaugh" and the message would be the same. Here's what Marcus says:

Actually, I think the black Americans most likely to become disenchanted with the Democrat party that Rush is so critical of are those in the black middle and upper classes. These are people who have worked hard to get where they are. They have a stake in their communities. They pay taxes and care about the quality of their schools and neighborhoods, and eventually they're going to realize that the Democrats are doing nothing to make these things better.

The Democrats have a lock, however, on many among the chronically poor, whether white, black, or brown. These people pay very little in taxes, they live off the largesse and productivity of the greater society, their poverty is often a consequence of their own bad habits and choices in life, and they tend to vote for anyone who promises them that they'll get more goodies from the government if they do.

They're entitled to vote, of course, and everyone else is entitled to take comfort and hope in the fact that they usually don't.

RLC

We recently posted a piece on the problems faced by the music industry, and a student has replied with a fairly scathing critique of our entertainment industry in general. Her response is on our Feedback Page and is worth checking out.

RLC

I admire scientists who are willing to entertain ideas that seem crazy but which just might be true. You find such people treading outside the boundary lines in every field of science - except perhaps, in evolutionary biology, which seems populated by individuals who lack the gene for being able to consider any hypothesis for apparent design that actually implies a Designer - and it's fun to speculate along with them.

Even so, I think this latest theory in physics is a bit much. According to a New York Times story, the problems besetting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which was built to recreate conditions approximating the Big Bang and which, it is hoped, will produce evidence of a sub-atomic particle called the Higgs Boson, are due to the Higgs actually traveling back in time to sabotage the LHC. The theory has it that the Higgs doesn't want to be discovered (it's not clear how a subatomic particle could actually "want" anything) and has "decided" (ditto) to travel back in time to sabotage the device that would discover it, or something.

You'll have to read about it at the link. Maybe the NYT writer can make it sound more plausible than I can. It's true that the LHC has had problems getting going, and it's true that the people who proffer this hypothesis are serious and accomplished physicists, so we shouldn't dismiss their idea out of hand, but still - intentionality among sub-atomic particles? Does this mean that they have minds?

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip on the article.

RLC

There's been a lot of fuss about the President's very odd bow to the emperor of Japan just as there was following his bow to the Saudi king. I think the bows make him look a bit like a doofus, sort of like John Cleese doing a Fawlty Towers skit, but otherwise I guess they're harmless:

I wonder, though, how he decides which world leader to whom he will bow and which with whom he'll just shake hands? If you're an important poobah and you are favored with a mere handshake from the President of the United States after the emperor of Japan has just had a perfect jacknife executed right in front of him, should you feel slighted? Has the President been insufficiently and thus insultingly deferential toward you? If bowing is deemed appropriate when greeting royalty can genuflecting be far behind? These are weighty questions for which I have no answers.

I did come across this power point presentation, however, which was smuggled out of a top secret White House meeting of aides strategizing about how to counter GOP criticism of the President's embarrassing spasms when in the presence of foreign dignitaries:

RLC

Several readers wrote to remind us that most Muslims only want peace and that we should be careful not to implicate the majority in the crimes of the minority, even if it's quite a large minority. This is true, of course, although it could've been said about Germans under the Nazis that most of them only wanted peace even as they worked to impose the will of the power-mad minority on the rest of the world.

In any event, the problem isn't just with the violent minority, it's also with a majority that doesn't raise a loud voice against the minority, but rather seeks to excuse or ignore the actions of the extremists. I'm reminded of a quote I came across recently:

The words are those of Martin Luther King and came from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. King was lamenting the failure of churches, particularly white churches, to speak out against the injustice of racial segregation. Substitute "Muslims" for "people" and I think his words perfectly fit the present situation. If Muslims are not going to demand that their co-religionists stop the madness, then it'll be difficult for them to avoid the charge of complicity and sympathy with acts of Islamic terrorism just as the white church could not escape similar charges of complicity and sympathy with the injustice of forced segregation in the 1960s.

RLC

Andy McCarthy was the prosecutor who got Sheik Abdul Rahman convicted in the first World Trade Tower bombing. He also is of the opinion that the decision to bring the 9/11 terrorists to New York is really a ploy to embarrass Bush and both destroy his legacy and the CIA. He writes:

There's more at the link where McCarthy explains that the terrorists have already confessed, they have no defense, and that the only purpose of going through a highly public trial is to produce an ideological coup against the hated Bushies and the CIA. It's pretty depressing to reflect on the possibility that a man with such antipathies occupies the highest office in the land.

RLC

Although the media hasn't done much to bring it to our attention there's a very interesting debate going on in think tanks, churches, and government agencies today over the extent and nature of the aid we send to alleviate the suffering of the poor in third-world countries. That we should in some way be helping these people few would deny. Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, has a fine book out on the moral imperative to exercise compassion toward the world's suffering poor (The book is titled The Hole in Our Gospel).

At the same time, most people agree that just sending money, goods, and food to dysfunctional states is wasteful and unproductive (It's interesting, parenthetically, that almost everyone recognizes that throwing money at third-world poverty does nothing to mitigate the misery of the poor, but some think that the answer to poverty in this country is to do exactly what we realize is futile when done for the poor in other countries). So the debate focuses on what form our aid should take, and if it would actually be more helpful to stop giving aid altogether.

Two fascinating books have been published recently on this topic. One is by Paul Collier whose book The Bottom Billion (see our discussion of it here) is an excellent analysis of why third world poverty persists despite our best efforts to eradicate it, and what has to be done to alleviate it. Another is titled Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo who argues that aid, no matter how well-intentioned, is counterproductive and should be ended.

I recommend all three books to anyone interested in how we should approach the question of what the wisest, most effective way to really do something to help people is, but if you don't have time to read you may want to catch Collier and Moyo (along with two associates) debate these issues as part of the Munk debate series. You can either watch the debate or read the transcript, but in either case I think it's interesting that Collier and Moyo seem to agree more than they disagree that, as Moyo says, "Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower."

Thanks to Byron for the link to the debate.

RLC

Those law school professors sure are a caution, aren't they? They sometimes say the zaniest things. A professor by the name of Marci Hamilton, for example, claims that the Stupak amendment to the House Healthcare Reform Bill is unconstitutional. The Stupak amendment effectively rules out the use of taxpayer money to subsidize abortions. Professor Hamilton offers the following as one reason for thinking that this measure violates the Constitution:

Set aside the dubiety of the parenthetical remark. What she says in the rest of the quote could also be said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as John Pitney reminds us at National Review Online:

Now, let's ask Ms Hamilton whether anyone in her circle of friends and colleagues thinks the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional. I doubt that she could find anyone who does, yet the logic of her objection to Stupak certainly leads to that conclusion. Pitney goes on to quote another constitutional lawyer who vigorously disagrees with the position staked out by Ms Hamilton:

This is exactly right. The lawyer who wrote it was Barack Obama.

RLC

In all of the talk that we've heard so far about what an awful decision it was to bring the 9/11 terrorists to trial in New York City - a decision which certainly baffles me - there's one concern that I haven't yet heard raised. Among the reasons for thinking that this decision was among the most inept of this administration's remarkably rich record of ineptitude are:

Parenthetically, if this last were to happen I think national outrage at Obama would be such that he would be finished as president. He would either be compelled to resign or limp along until the next election in which he would suffer the worst defeat in American presidential history. Mr. Holder assured reporters at a press conference yesterday that these men will be convicted, but I don't know how he knows that unless they plan to somehow rig the jury.

At any rate, all of the above are certainly legitimate concerns, but the question I had was who do the courts expect to get to serve on the jury? Once the trial begins it may prove very hard to keep the jurors' identities secret which means that they and their families may well be targets of terrorist reprisals. Knowing that, how can Messers Obama and Holder in good conscience put people in such a dangerous position when there's no need for it? They can promise the jurors anonymity, I suppose, but they certainly can't guarantee it. Indeed, I wonder if they've even given the matter any thought.

So why are they doing this if it's all unnecessary? The only explanation I've heard that makes any sense, alas, is that what they really want to do is use this trial to put the Bush administration and our intelligence agencies in the dock and thoroughly discredit both. If this is indeed what their goal is then they really are playing a dangerous and contemptible game. They know full well that intelligence agency personnel will be deposed on their secret intelligence gathering and interrogation methods and procedures. Not only will this mean that successful techniques will become known to those who wish to do us harm but also a lot of identities of informants and operatives will become available to the terrorists' allies around the world, which will at best cancel their usefulness and at worst place the lives of these individuals and their families in grave danger.

If the reason the administration has decided to try these men in a civilian court rather than by military tribunal is because they see a public trial as a political opportunity to destroy the people who kept us safe for eight years then the American people should be outraged. Perhaps there is some other reason that makes more sense and is a lot more noble but, if so, I haven't heard it yet.

RLC

The Times Online has an excellent article by David Sewell on the moral implications of a Darwinian worldview. It's fascinating stuff, but I'm a little surprised that it passed editorial scrutiny. Perhaps the Brits are more open-minded about such things, but I can't imagine an article like this appearing in, say, The New York Times.

Sewell starts off by noting the eerie and strangely underreported fact that overt Darwinian tropes recur among serial killers. Eric Harris wore a t-shirt that extolled natural selection as he gunned down classmates at Columbine High School, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finn, murdered his teacher and a number of his fellow students on the basis of their lack of "evolutionary fitness."

Although Darwin himself would have been appalled by such horrors, they are the logical consequence of his ideas. Sewell writes:

Not only does a Darwinian worldview lead to the conclusion that life is ultimately pointless and that morality is an illusion "fobbed off on us by our genes" as E.O. Wilson puts it, but Darwin himself believed that his ideas led to racial purification:

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man who believed neither in God nor an afterlife could "only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him". Darwinian ideas - eugenics and its corollary, eugenic euthanasia - were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions, but also by many of the educated elite in the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century. It wasn't until the ghastly crimes of the Nazis came to light in the mid-1940s that eugenics acquired a bad odor among American progressives.

Ideas have consequences, and when we no longer hold fast to the idea that man is made in the image of God then no longer will we find anything about us that has any intrinsic worth. Man thus devalues himself, losing his dignity in the process and reducing himself to a simple brute, a mass of mere protoplasm. What almost inevitably follows are genocidal holocausts such as those of the 20th century in atheistic regimes in Germany, the USSR, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Darwin's theory was a powerful impetus to the spread of atheism and a powerful justification, or rationalization, for those seeking scientific warrant for the depersonalization of their victims. The 20th century was simply Columbine High School writ large.

RLC

David Brooks at The New York Times puts his finger on a quirk of American psychology:

Indeed. One might have gotten the impression, listening to some of the commentary on this atrocity, that Nidal Hasan was an unfortunate victim of forces beyond his control. The excuses and rationalizations that were being offered for his heinous act almost made me think that the people I should be angry with in this incident were the cops that shot this poor, pathetic man.

Such are the times in which we live.

RLC

George Will weighs in on the climate change debate and observes that it is passing strange that there is such terror about the threat to our environment posed by a warming earth when, in fact, the earth's mean temperature hasn't changed in over eleven years. Such details, however, are mere nuisances to climate change true believers who, when they rise in the morning and go to bed at night, reverently recite their mantra: "Al Gore said it, I believe it, that settles it."

Will, however, holds to the peculiar view that our policy should be based on data and there simply is no data to support the eco-alarmists. To get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the Democrats' determination to save us from an environmental catastrophe for which there is scarcely any unambiguous evidence think about what Will says here:

If you're young it might be a good idea to buy stock in bicycle manufacturers. It's hard to imagine how we could meet such draconian emission standards and still maintain anything approximating a modern life-style. This is not to say that we couldn't use energy more efficiently, but to reduce our carbon footprint to the level Waxman-Markey requires would require us to abandon most of modern technology and become a third-world nation.

Who votes for these people?

RLC

I wonder if this guy is any relation to Louis "Skip" Gates. He certainly needs a lesson in how to dialogue with people with whom he disagrees, and he also needs a lesson on how to treat women:

I guess Mr. McIntyre had exhausted all of his best arguments and felt the need to press his case in a more robust and convincing fashion. I wonder if he'll keep his job. I'm fairly sure that were the races of the people involved in this ugly episode reversed he would not, but I could be wrong. If he does avoid being dismissed, though, perhaps he can claim to have been the beneficiary of black privilege.

Anyway, do you think the media will ask President Obama to comment on this altercation? If they do, do you think he'll dare venture his opinion after the mess he made of the Skip Gates affair? Do you think it's time for another beer summit at the White House?

RLC

Ralph Peters, like a lot of us, wonders why the Muslim officer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded dozens more, was promoted to major, why his radicalism wasn't uncovered before he committed the crimes, and why this administration is so afraid to use the term "Islamic terrorism."

Government authorities have punctiliously avoided mention of the killer's religion and his associations with radical Islamists in the days following the massacre at Fort Hood. President Obama admonishes us not jump to conclusions, but this sounds a little strange coming from the man who had no trouble jumping to the conclusion that Professor "Skip" Gates was the victim of "stupid" racist cops in Cambridge Massachussetts last summer.

Imagine how quick everyone would be to "jump to conclusions" had a Christian walked into an abortion clinic shooting everyone in the place while shouting "Jesus is Lord." Would President Obama be urging us to withhold judgment about the killer's motivations until "all the facts were in"? If a fundamentalist pastor walked into a gay bar and opened fire would the media recoil from calling the man a domestic terrorist? Would the President say that the killer might have "just snapped," and that we shouldn't assume that the man's religion played a role? I very much doubt it.

There would, in fact, be no end of pontificating on the alleged deep current of misogyny, hatred and bigotry running through American Christianity, but Hasan, we must understand, was a Muslim so we must tread lightly so as not to smear the millions of good Muslims in this country. We must be careful not to assume that he was in fact acting on the same motives that inspire his co-religionists around the world to kill and maim whomever and whenever they can.

There was no reticence whatsoever among our political leaders last summer to portray angry retirees at town hall meetings as terrorists, but we dare not suggest that a Muslim mass murderer is a terrorist until every i is dotted and t crossed even if the man has just perpetrated a classic act of Islamic terrorism.

Of course we should not paint all Muslims as murderers, but we also need to realize that there are a billion Muslims around the world. If only 1% are radical extremists - a conservative figure, perhaps - that's 10 million people out there who are willing to die for the opportunity to kill you and your children. That's a startling number. It's even more startling to realize that there are millions more who, though not killers themselves, would delight to see you and your children blown to bits.

Anyway, Peters concludes that Hasan's victims were in fact victims not only of this looney Islamist, but also of an out-of-control political correctness that infects our political and military leadership as well as our media. Here's part of his column:

Hasan gave ample evidence that he was unstable and sympathetic to jihad. If an officer of his rank had said the things about blacks or gays that Hasan said about Americans in general and military personnel in particular - He told a gathering of doctors (!), for instance, that infidels (non-Muslims) should all be beheaded and have hot oil poured down their throats - he would have rightly been busted in rank and maybe even drummed out of the service. But in our politically correct age we must pretend that certain people are not what they obviously are. See no evil, hear no evil is the word of the day when a Muslim says what anyone else would be cleaning latrines for saying. Welcome to the Brave New World of Orwellian progressivism.

RLC

IowaHawk puts together a tongue-in-cheek montage spoofing liberal media analysis of the Fort Hood murders. The Left has been blaming everything for this act of terrorism except the most obvious thing - Nidal Hasan's belief that it was his religious duty to kill infidel soldiers.

American liberals seem to possess the peculiar characteristic of being able to look at the sky at noon on a clear day without seeing the sun.

RLC

Uh, oh. Now he's done it. The President gave an otherwise unremarkable speech yesterday at Fort Hood to memorialize the victims of the latest act of Islamic terrorism on our soil, but his speech contained some unfortunate theological allusions which, we've come to learn, is a no-no for American presidents. Mr. Obama actually averred that no just and loving God would condone what Nidal Hasan did in the name of Allah and that the Muslim murderer of thirteen servicemen and women would pay a terrible price for his crime in the afterlife.

What was Mr. Obama thinking? You can bet that he's going to hear about that from the secular left. Editorials will be popping up like overnight mushrooms on op-ed pages across this great secularized continent chastising the President for this unconscionable breach of the wall of separation between church and state. Commentators on the major networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC, will soon be upbraiding him for an inappropriate, unwarranted, and flagrantly unconstitutional injection of religion into our public discourse. As President, Mr. Obama should not be using his office to give support to sectarian dogmas, he'll be admonished, especially those no graduate of Harvard Law School could possibly sincerely believe.

Yes sir, he is about to feel the heat. I know this because that's exactly what happened to President Bush every time he made even the most innocuous religious reference. Once he was asked, in what seemed like a mean-spirited attempt to make him look simple-minded, who his favorite philosopher was. One could almost hear the chortles wafting from the media elites who assumed that Bush couldn't even spell "philosopher" let alone name one, but when he answered "Jesus Christ, because he changed my life," it was as if someone had thrown a snake into the primate cage at the zoo. It drove our secular sachems into a frenzy to hear someone who had risen to such prominence as had Mr. Bush actually affirm something so déclassé.

So, now it's Mr. Obama's turn to play General Custer to our secular Indians. I haven't seen any arrows launched at him just yet, but I bet they'll start flying by tomorrow. It's going to look like that scene in the movie 300 where the Persians shot so many darts at the Spartans that they darkened the sky. Mr. Obama is really in for it now.

Why do you look so skeptical? They did it to Bush, didn't they?

RLC

Dr. Scott W. Atlas is a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at the university. He's an expert on health care and is very cool to the various health care reform proposals being bandied about by congressional Democrats. To read much of the reportage on the matter one might think health care in America ranks near the bottom of the Western world. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times, however, Dr. Atlas points out that this simply isn't true:

What needs reformed is certainly not the quality of care. The problem is keeping the quality high while making it cheaper, and nothing the Democrats are proposing will accomplish that:

Atlas could also point out the exorbitant cost of medical malpractice insurance and the expense of a medical school education. Both of these are costs that get passed on to the consumer, but the Democrats' are not inclined to do anything about either. Instead Democrats, if their plan is eventually passed, will make criminals out of those who don't want insurance and choose not to buy it. Under their plan, people who, for whatever reason, don't think they need health coverage will nevertheless be forced to buy it or pay a penalty. If they don't pay the penalty they will go to jail. This is an unprecedented abridgement of individual freedom in this country, but taking a way freedom is simply what progressives do whenever they have the power to do it.

RLC

There's an interesting article on human evolution at MSNBC. The piece starts out by claiming that Neanderthals were a separate species from modern Homo sapiens, but everything in the article suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred and produced feertile offspring. Since the ability to produce fertile offspring is the distinguishing characteristic of a species the finding that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were interfertile would mean that they're really members of the same species.

Indeed, none of the alleged predecessors of modern humans are actually known to have been unable to breed successfully with H. sapiens. It's simply assumed that sexual unions between them would have been sterile because it's assumed that they were different species. And it's assumed that they were different species because it's assumed that H. sapiens is the culmination of a long evolutionary history with lots of ancestral species leading up to it. But, for all we really know, creatures like H. habilis and H. erectus could have been conspecific with H. sapiens. We simply don't know whether they were capable of producing fertile offspring or not.

Of course, if it were ever found that these members of genus Homo were all the same species it would throw modern human evolution models into a state of complete chaos, so I suppose we have to assume that they really were all distinct species.

RLC

Mark Butterworth observes that there has never been so much talent or ambition in the music world but that that world is on life support. Young and/or unknown artists, particularly writers and composers, simply lack the resources to do quality work. Here's why:

Butterworth laments that the production costs of recorded music are so high as to exclude all but the already highly successful artists and even they make little money on their albums. The value of recording them lies in the reknown they bring to the artist who can parlay that fame into sold-out concerts and other venues:

So, here are some interesting questions: Assuming he's right about all this, what is the future of music in our culture? Will we be seeing a decline in the quality of our popular music (many would argue that we already have)? Is the decline inevitable? What would it take to reverse it and is it worth reversing? Is a government bailout of the music industry on the horizon?

RLC

As part of the discussion of free will and determinism in my philosophy classes we talked about evolutionary psychology and the idea of the "selfish gene." One of the foremost popularizers of this view is Robert Wright who in the lecture below claims that human compassion and the Golden Rule are genetically based and hard wired into our biological nature by evolution.

This view is fraught with problems. For example, Wright seems to argue that because we have the genes for compassion that therefore compassion is good, but then cruelty and selfishness must also be genetic. So, why are they not good? What standard does Wright use to decide that compassion is good and cruelty is not? Unfortunately, he has none other than that he prefers one and not the other. It's a purely arbitrary judgment on his part. He likes what compassion does and dislikes what cruelty does, and so he declares compassion good, and counts on an audience steeped in the subliminal assumptions of a Judeo-Christian heritage to agree with him. He could have made the same argument, though, substituting cruelty, and it would be just as valid. If our genes program us to act cruelly, which they surely must, then cruelty is good.

The first nine minutes or so of the video are the most interesting:

How do we know that we have a "compassion gene" anyway? Such a gene has never been found and its existence is purely speculative, but it leads us to one of the interesting aspects of Wright's hypothesis. The theory that there is a gene for compassion may be testable. If Wright's correct then as we elucidate more and more of the genome we should be able to find genes that program us for compassionate behavior. If we don't the idea of a genetic basis for morality becomes much less likely to be true, and we'll have to look elsewhere for a basis for human moral sentiments.

RLC

I don't like the title on this graph, but the data it reflects are too important to ignore just because the heading is more tendentious than I'd like:

The red line is the actual unemployment rate. The other lines represent what we were promised by the Obama administration. Either these people were lying to us about the effects their massive stimulus package would have or they're just incompetent. I prefer to believe the latter explanation. It's more charitable but no more comforting.

RLC

A feminist leftist named Meryl Yourish explains why she has become a feminist conservative. In a nutshell, she realized that the Left is hostile to most of the things she believes in.

You can find the rest of her essay at the link. There really are two kinds of people. There are those who value individual liberty and will fight to keep it, and there are those who hold their liberty cheap and are eager to surrender it to a government whose design is to gain as much control over our lives as it can. Ms Yourish, evidently, belongs to the first group. Most of those in power in Washington today hope you belong to the second.

RLC

Many in America seem to think that Islam is just one religious option among many and that we need to respect and even honor both the religion and those who embrace it. What these same Americans are sometimes unaware of is the systemic violence which saturates Islam and Islamic culture.

Those who live in Muslim societies but who are not Muslims are considered second class citizens, dhimmis, and are often persecuted and expected to pay tribute to their Muslim masters. If they don't truckle to their overlords they're often killed.

If one is gay in Islamic culture one is executed. If a girl gets romantically involved with a man of whom the father doesn't approve she is often killed.

Those who criticize or "blaspheme" the Prophet or the faith are subject to death, and those who wish to leave the faith are also subject to death. People who convert to Christianity often live in fear of their lives.

Byron forwards this article by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum which offers a glimmer of hope that some of this may be changing and that Muslims may be beginning to realize that we're no longer living in the 7th century. Here's the lede:

The glimmer of hope, obviously, comes later in the article.

It's hard for many Americans to imagine that people still think this way, but they do. To read something like this gives a deeper understanding and appreciation, perhaps, of what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid as they crafted the Constitution and the doctrine of non-interference by the government in matters of personal religion. It also gives a deeper appreciation of the words of John 8:32.

RLC

Many thanks to Beth for sending us a link to a site which features a frame by frame explanation of what's going on in the video titled Inner Life of a Cell. If you go to the link scroll down about a page or so to find the explanations.

RLC

Andrew submits a very thoughtful and perhaps provocative response to a post that appeared on Viewpoint last August titled Why No Supermarkets?. I thought it might be worthwhile to put his reply on the Home page rather than the Feedback page and invite your comments. Here are his thoughts:

Your [Viewpoint's] assessment that the lack of responsible fathers in the inner-city certainly hits on an element of the problem with inner-city populations, but I think that the largest part of the problem goes a little further. This is a tough topic for me because it raises feelings and thoughts that are hard to temper. I should point out that my observations may come off as leaning toward racist; however, I would like to state outright that for any observation I make about the inner-city population, it will almost wholly apply to certain population groups that are Caucasian. My gripe is not against any particular ethnicity, but about the sub-culture that propagates the cycle I am about to describe. Reader be warned, this could get hairy.

We can thank Lyndon Johnson for our society's current state of affairs with the inner-city population. His social programs and desire for a Great Society amounted to a Great Dependence on government for Americans everywhere. Following the lead of his predecessor, FDR, Johnson set forth and accomplished the goal of setting a precedent for the government to help "people in need." The only problem is, the system creates entire generations of people in need from their parents who were themselves people in need.

My wife is a counselor for a large organization that provides counseling for children in inner-city schools. I want to point two things out. The organization only operates in inner-city schools because that is where the kids who have government assistance go to school. Second, as a result of the former, her company does not provide services in non-inner-city schools; not because those children don't have needs but because it is not profitable to operate in a school where each individual insurance company has to approve therapy and certify the counselor. Translation, money for the state is easy to get.

Here is the great trap. No one wants to take from children. I completely understand. Children are the true victims here. But as soon as they cease to be children, they become propagators of the problem. If you get nothing else, walk away with this:

The cycle of systemic dependence hinges on the benefits paid for the continual irresponsible conception of children.

The children that my wife counsels have "diagnosed" disorders. These disorders range from ADHD to aggressive tendencies toward authority. Problem is, I would speculate that most of them are not the product of genetics or genuine medical conditions, but instead the product of being raised in an environment where the child is not nurtured and/or properly cared for.

It basically works like this. A non-working mother with a diagnosed child can get Supplemental Security Income in the amount of about $650.00 for the first child. Now, no one is going to get rich off of $650.00 per month, but a single mother who receives SSI is immediately eligible for Section 8 housing and an entire swath of other government programs from welfare and food stamps to cash assistance.

So the cycle operates like this. Woman has child (or children) before she even finishes high school. With no system of family support she cannot go to work so she goes on welfare and government assistance. Not knowing how to raise children, she treats them like [crap] because it is the only thing she has ever known. Naturally, the children are misbehaved, subsequently diagnosed [with a disorder], and she receives more money from the government. Her children follow her pattern and the cycle continues.

Now, you might be tempted to brush this off as an overly racist, broad stroke stereotype of the inner city. I will concede that, clearly, not all people in the inner city are like this, but I believe that the problem has reached critical mass and is now like a reaction that cannot be controlled... at least not in our current state of affairs. Let me throw out some real-life scenarios.

My wife has a client who has two brothers (all three receive services). The three of them have sixteen cousins from one daddy spread over seven mommies. The government is tossing money at these parents for having kids.

Children in the inner city are starving. My wife's greatest tool in positive reinforcement therapy is KFC. They eat like it's their last meal.

Women who walk their children to school typically drop them off wearing pajamas ... and pick them up six hours later wearing the same slippers and pajamas. Maybe they just work third shift, right?

The mommies who do actually get dressed look like someone you would expect to take 'cash for services'. Hey, let's not knock the hip-hop look... but let's do point out that they dress in designer clothes while their children wear what amounts to barely more than unwashed rags.

On the day before mandatory PA Act 80 half school days, every child has a big, round, bright orange sticker placed on his or her back alerting parents to the fact that the next day is a half day. When the school dismisses early there are anywhere from 50 to 100 children sitting in the hallway outside of the office. Most of them sit there until 3:00 pm.

Children get dropped off from cars with thumping bass and shiny wheels. They come to school hungry, unbathed, and with tattered clothing, [but] there's a playstation or xbox in almost every home.

Drive through any section 8 housing area and count the number of satellite dishes hanging off the side of the building.

If a woman plays her cards right and has children she can receive benefits well into her 50's if her last child is born when she is in her late 30's.

The bottom line is this. The inner city isn't producing fathers capable of raising children. Further, the inner city is systematically producing generation after generation of dependence on government programs.

I have a solution that guarantees that I'll never be elected to office. Here it goes:

For every man/woman [below the poverty line? RLC] that has a child, the government offers a $10,000.00 tax-free check (for each parent) to undergo reversible sterilization (tube-tie and snip-snip). Parents who accept government assistance will be required to be self-sufficient within 10 years. If they are not, their children are taken away. Men who father children but do not pay adequate child support are imprisoned in labor camps that produce certain resources needed for infrastructure (asphalt, etc). These aren't slave labor camps. They work 40 hours per week and receive compensation which is first dispersed to their children, then given to them. They stay in prison until their child turns 18. The 10 year period of government assistance will be accompanied by generous assistance for education or vocational training. The government will require insurance companies to pay for the reversal procedure for a person who becomes self-sufficient and wishes to have more children.

The idea here is to get the cycle below critical mass by causing a decline in the population that is misusing government funds. Only then can social programs function as they were intended. As it stands right now, a man and a woman can multiply themselves by factors of 10 or more causing the cycle of dependence to grow geometrically. By reversibly sterilizing willing participants and imprisoning men who recklessly procreate we can start to send this sub-culture into population decline.

My plan would take decades, but I think it would save money right off the bat. What do you think?

AD

You know the Democrats are in trouble when self-described liberal journalists are voting Republican. That's what Jonathan Berr did Tuesday and he explains the desperate state of affairs that has brought him to this traumatic pass here. In short, Berr, who knocked on doors for Obama in 2008, is just fed up with high taxes, corruption, inefficient big government, and nasty campaigning, but if that's so, one wonders, why is he a Democrat? Anyway, if liberals are so disaffected that they're voting Republican in deep blue states like New Jersey, the mid-term elections a year from now will be to Democrats something like what the Highway of Death was to the Iraqi army in 1991.

Here's Berr:

Read the rest at the link. It's no wonder Christie won big.

RLC

Ray Comfort is a writer who likes to engage atheists in debate. He has recently published an edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species that has thrown his opponents into a tizzy. They're not upset so much with the text of the book that he has had reprinted because that is left as Darwin wrote it, except for the omission of several chapters. Instead they're mostly up in arms over his introduction in which he quotes some of Darwin's beliefs about race and women.

Dan Gilgoff blogs at U.S. News & World Report and he's carrying a back and forth between Comfort and National Council on Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott, a stout Darwinian and atheist. Comfort's initial salvo is pretty interesting. Here he is on his provocative introduction to Darwin's famous work:

For her part Scott chastises Comfort for the aforementioned omission of several chapters and for misrepresenting evolution by overplaying the paucity of fossilized transitional forms in his Introduction. I think Scott's being a little misleading here, but read her for yourself, and let's wait for Comfort's reply to see how he answers her.

RLC

The visual titled Cell Size and Scale moved Dave Kurz to write to remind us of another fascinating video that we've featured in the past but which is worth running again. It's titled The Inner Life of the Cell (produced by Harvard University), and it's a computer sim of just a few of the processes that occur 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies.

It's simply breathtaking to see on this incredibly tiny scale such exquisite complexity and organization. Notice especially the marvelous protein transport mechanism that looks and works like a stick-figure Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.

Now that you've watched this you might need to be deprogrammed. After all, some find the temptation to think that this was all intentionally designed by an intelligent agent to be irresistable. So, to avoid falling prey to superstitious nonsense, close your eyes real tight and repeat ten times: "This all came about by chance. This all came about by chance...."

RLC

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and nowhere is that more true than at the United Nations. Secretary Hillary Clinton deserves praise for giving what some described as a tough statement opposing a move in the U.N. to enact an anti-defamation resolution that would be binding on all member nations. This may sound like a good thing on the face of it, but in fact such policies would restrict freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The following is from a Christianity Today report:

There's more at the link. We in the U.S. often take our freedoms for granted, but we need to realize that there are those both here and abroad who find the freedoms we treasure to be a decadent blight on society. We need to realize that the freedoms to discuss ideas and to practice whatever religion we choose are fragile and despised and could be easily lost should we cease to be vigilant.

If it ever came to pass that we allow ourselves to become apathetic about the what's going on in the world around us then we would be proven unworthy of those freedoms. Thomas Jefferson once observed that a nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. He was right, and that's why we must never think that politics and world affairs are for other people to worry about.

RLC

Bradford at Telic Thoughts points us to a provocative article in the Sydney Morning Herald on biologist Simon Conway Morris. Morris is an interesting thinker, a devout Christian and committed evolutionist whose book, Life's Solutions, makes the case that evolution is not random or blind but that it's guided by principles we do not yet understand that make the emergence of conscious intelligent beings who can understand the universe inevitable. Here's a sample:

What I remember taking from Conway Morris' book, which I read several years ago, is that he seems to endorse a kind of theistic evolution. This is the theory that God packed all of the biological potential for living things into the initial conditions of the Big Bang and that this potential unfolds according to laws established by the Creator to insure that what He wants to exist, will.

In other words, for Conway Morris, evolution is the means by which God produced the extraordinary diversity of living things. Perhaps he's correct, I don't know, I'm more inclined toward intelligent design myself, but I'm quite sure he's closer to the truth than are the materialists who hold that the marvels of living things are all just a grand coincidence produced by the blind accumulation of millions of highly improbable accidents.

RLC

The University of Utah genetics department has a fascinating illustration of the relative sizes of biological structures. To view it go here and move the slide at the bottom of the picture to the right. Notice how the size grid in the upper left corner changes as you zoom in on these tiny structures. Very cool.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

RLC

Our local paper ran a column on Sunday by Philadelphia radio talk show host Mike Smerconish that produced a few smiles at the breakfast table.

Smerconish, a Republican, I think, is of the opinion that the GOP needs to move toward the political center because polls show that only something like 20% of voters self-identify as Republicans. The party is losing membership, we're told, so the solution lies in becoming more like Democrats. The problem with Smerconish's analysis is that his cure for what ails the party is exactly what is producing the ailment. The majority of people in this country self-identify as conservatives regardless of which party they associate with, which suggests to me that, contrary to Smerconish's claim that the residuum left over from the recent exodus are not conservatives but rather people who don't much care. Many of the defectors from the GOP are conservatives who've left in disgust with a party that insists on playing the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Harlem Globetrotters.

A good recent example of this was the selection by the New York Republican poobahs of Dede Scozzafava to run in the New York 23rd congressional district. Ms Scozzafava is a Nancy Pelosi Democrat cross-dressing as a Republican, proof of which came when she dropped out of the race and promptly endorsed the liberal Democrat candidate. Conservative Republicans are completely turned off by the sort of political pragmatism that led the GOP to put Scozzafava up for election in the first place.

Perhaps Smerconish and those who share his view don't think that principles should matter in politics. Perhaps they think that being in the winning party is the only thing that's important. Most conservatives are not so concerned about Republican party success, however. In fact, many conservatives really don't much care for the party that has betrayed its principles repeatedly since George Bush senior promised he wouldn't raise taxes and then promptly did. They don't much care for a party whose leadership betrayed their principles on earmarks, as Tom DeLay did in the 90s, or which betrayed their principles with massive entitlement and bailout programs as George Bush the younger did during his tenure.

Conservatives' relationship with the GOP is strictly a marriage of convenience. They vote Republican because that's where candidates are most likely to be found who share their values of personal freedom and small government, but if the party is going to nominate people who when elected will govern no differently than the current crop of Democrats who seem determined to tax and spend us into abject bankruptcy, why should anyone who opposes this remain in the Republican party?

Smerconish insists that Republicans have to end their infatuation with the right and, astonishingly enough, he names Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch Romney as the sort of extremist ideologues the GOP should eschew. Now I ask any fair-minded Republican to explain to me what it is about these three that makes them ideologically distasteful, or puts them outside of the party mainstream. You may not like their personalities, you may not like their religious commitments, but what, exactly, is it about their ideology that Smerconish finds too extreme? He doesn't say. One wonders who Smerconish would hold aloft as an exemplar of Republicanism. Olympia Snowe? Arlen Specter?

It's always amusing to me that in a time when we're being governed by the most radical Democratic party in history - a cohort of radical progressives which controls both Houses of Congress, the White house, much of the judiciary, almost all of the entertainment industry, the educational establishment, and much of the traditional media - we're informed that it's the GOP that's too extreme. We're admonished to avoid the likes of terrifying fringies like Palin, Huckabee and Romney. Meanwhile, the extreme Left is pulling us so far to their end of the spectrum that we teeter on the brink of socialism, and Smerconish is abetting this calamity by urging Republicans to abandon their principles and jump on board the Democrats' train. Why aren't we reading hand-wringing exhortations calling upon the Democrats to at least toss a glance in the direction of the American mainstream as they undo 200 years of prosperity and 100 years of world leadership?

I'm sure Democrats are resting a little easier today knowing that the GOP is getting advice from people like Mr. Smerconish.

RLC

Tomorrow is an election day and there are three races that have garnered considerable national attention among the political punditocracy. First is the congressional race in upstate New York pitting Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens. This started out as a three party race, but liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out over the weekend. Hoffman is currently ahead by 15 points despite the fact that Scozzafava has endorsed Owens.

Another big race is the New Jersey gubernatorial contest between incumbent Democrat mega-millionaire Jon Corzine, his Republican challenger Christopher Christie, and Independent Chris Daggett. Corzine, who made his fortune on Wall Street, will have spent as much as $30 million of his own money to win this election, but Jersey politics are so soaked in the stench of corruption that on election eve Corzine and Christie are neck and neck. If Daggett weren't in the race Christie would probably win handily. President Obama has stumped for Corzine, but it's not clear yet whether that has made any difference.

The third key race is for the governorship of Virginia. Here the Republican Robert McDonnell enjoys a comfortable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds. McDonnell is a moderate, but is also pro-life and is attracting a lot of independents to his campaign. As of this writing he's up by 11 points.

So what, if anything, is the importance of these races? Perhaps their greatest significance lies in the fact that they give the lie to those who say that Republicans are in trouble if they keep running pro-lifers or fiscal conservatives. That's a myth not borne out by the facts. The shame of it is that so many Republicans seem to believe it.

RLC

It seems that a number of readers understood me to be saying in the recent post on teacher training that prospective secondary teachers should take course work only in the discipline they intended to teach. This is, however, not what I meant to say. I believe that anyone who stands in front of a classroom should have a well-rounded education and know much more than just history or just science or just math. My point was that many of the education courses in methods, theory, and techniques that education majors are required to take, to the extent that they're helpful at all, would be more meaningful to teachers after they've been in the classroom for a while.

The best way to learn to teach is to do it, and to do it under the guidance of an accomplished professional. That's why I think student teaching should be a two semester internship. Young secondary teachers need three things to be successful in the classroom: They need to have a love for what they do, they need to have a knowledge of their field, and they need to have the kind of personality that enables them to develop positive relationships with kids. The only one of those that can be taught is the second. Everything else a teacher needs to excel in his or her profession comes with experience.

RLC

Last Tuesday night the American Freedom Alliance sponsored a debate as part of its Darwin Debates series. The evening featured an exchange between David Berlinski, an anti-Darwinian agnostic and author of the book The Devil's Delusion and a prominent California atheist whose performance must have been so inept that David Klinghoffer, a journalist covering the event, chose out of kindness not to mention his name in his report. Klinghoffer is an intelligent design advocate but he was so embarrassed for the atheist presenter that he couldn't bring himself to add to the man's discomfiture by further publicizing it. Here's Klinghoffer:

The rest of Klinghoffer's account is here.

It turns out that the guy Klinghoffer's compassion would not permit him to name is no rookie to the culture war. He's a leader in the California atheist community. If you're curious you can go here to read about him.

Pretty soon it should become apparent that the problem for atheists isn't that they keep putting up second stringers against intelligent design's (or Christianity's) varsity in these debates. The problem is that these people are trying to defend a position, atheistic materialism or naturalism, that is extremely difficult to defend. When the opposition has all the best arguments even a Demosthenes would struggle to sound persuasive.

As more talented young theistic intellectuals enter the fray roiling the marketplace of ideas, and more debates like this one take place, it'll eventually dawn on the public and the media that advocating atheistic materialism is like trying to promote belief in a geocentric universe. You can try it, but you better not do it in front of an educated audience.

RLC