Bruce Feiler reports on a story at Fox News that will disturb some and excite others depending on whether one is a Christian or a secularist. A study called The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) reveals that:

Here are some other findings of the survey:

The fact that so many people are finding traditional religion inadequate comes as no surprise, but it should serve as an alarum for organized religious institutions. They simply aren't meeting peoples' needs, especially the need of young people to be offered a belief system that seems vibrant, powerful, and relevant to their lives.

Feiler says that catering to older believers, which many churches do because the old people are the big contributors, is a recipe for failure. Younger Americans feel excluded and are tuning out. This is precisely what Mark Kinnaman documents in his book Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity.

Feiler also observes that Americans are interested in God, but they don't think existing institutions are helping them draw closer to Him. This may be true of traditional denominational religion, much of which seems to have lost its way in seeking to ingratiate itself with Modernity. Traditional denominations like the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, etc. have been slow to recognize that forms, structures, and practices that were adequate for prior to the 1970s often seem alien and bizarre to people born after 1960. Even so, what is true of "mainline" protestantism is much less true of contemporary independent churches many of which have shown an admirable flexibility and adaptibility without compromising traditional Christian faith.

The column closes with a hope and a warning:

"Americans' interest in religion has not always been stable. It dipped following the Revolution and again following Civil War. In both cases it rebounded because religious institutions adapted and found new ways of relating to everyday Americans."

They need to do the same today or "risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought."

RLC

Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast gives us a little insight into Michelle Malkin who is one of the most influential people in the blogosphere:

There's much in this piece that'll interest readers who want to see how one woman has made a difference in the way America is informed about its political leadership. It also gives a sense of the sort of vitriol the left seeks to throw in the face of anyone who challenges their dogmas and criticizes their apostles.

RLC

Telic Thoughts digs up an Uncommon Knowledge segment from a couple of years ago that's worth watching if you'd like to see a calm debate between two of the most prominent figures in the Darwinism/Intelligent Design controversy discuss the issue. The two are Massimo Pigliucci, a Darwinian, and Jonathan Wells, an IDer. The discussion is moderated by Peter Robinson who does an outstanding job of keeping the debate on track and focusing on some interesting issues. He manages to pack a lot into a twenty six minute segment. Give it a look:

RLC

Very few people, at least among conservatives, put any confidence in candidate Obama's claim that Afghanistan was the war we had to fight, that this was the "good war," a "war of necessity." Many observers thought then that he was just using this rhetoric to prepare the country for a withdrawal from Iraq and allay fears among voters that he might be capitulating in the war against Islamic terrorism. Few conservatives believed then that his heart was really in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan so few are now surprised that he seems to want to dither over General McChrystal's report that he needs 45,000 more troops to prevent defeat in that woe-begotten territory.

Columnist Ruben Navarette, who is certainly no knee-jerk Obama opponent, writes that:

Ignorance and cowardice are strong words, especially when used to describe the President of the United States, and I don't want to judge whether they apply in this case. Nor do I want to parse Navarette's reference to the dearth of strong leadership and speculate on exactly who he had in mind, but I do think that Mr. Obama has been disingenuous with the American people on the matter of his committment to Afghanistan. The President, after all, is a man of the left, the left abhors our military involvements abroad, and everyone who understands this should have known prior to the election that Mr. Obama would vacillate on Afghanistan regardless of how resolute he sounded during the campaign.

Now the President is confronted with a choice, and he can't vote "present." He must either accede to General McChrystal's request or he must pull up stakes in Afghanistan and come home. If he does the former he will surely anger his progressive base. If he does the latter he risks being judged by history as feckless and irresponsible and will be roundly punished by historians for handing Afghanistan back to al Qaeda to be used as a base for further terror operations against the U.S. and this after the loss of hundreds of American lives on that barren soil.

Moreover, if he chooses to give up in Afghanistan it will be a demoralizing blow to the American military and our intelligence agencies and will greatly strengthen the resolve of our enemies who already believe that we lack the endurance to prevail in the generational war they're waging against us. The weakness Mr. Obama will project if he withdraws will haunt this country for decades in a myriad of ways, just as did our ignominious flight from Vietnam in the 1970s.

Mr. Obama is going to have to spurn his base once again or be seen by the world as weak, wobbly, and risible. The first step in doing the right thing would be to finally, eight months into his presidency, give a nationally televised speech on Afghanistan and Iraq and dispel the growing suspicion that he simply doesn't care very much about what happens there.

RLC

Reformed leftist Ron Radosh indicts modern journalism for dereliction of duty and blames it for the rise of the hyper-partisan talk shows that afflict talk radio and both MSNBC and Fox News:

The traditional media, the big three networks, major newspapers, Time, Newsweek, etc. have two, perhaps fatal, handicaps. First, their key staff people are often committed to an ideological progressivism that induces them to suppress stories unfavorable to their committments and to run stories, like CBS did with the George Bush National Guard story, which would advance their goals were they true but which turn out to be fabrications. This sort of thing has seriously eroded their credibility.

Second, they operate under constraints of time and space which simply don't fetter the new media. If there's a story out there newspapers can report it at best once a day and they can only devote a limited number of column inches to it. Newsmagazines can't even report it that often. If there are updates to the story they have to wait in abeyance until the next edition is published a day, or even a week, later.

Blogs are free to give as much space to a story as they wish, and they can update throughout the day. A story spreads much faster across the internet than through any other medium. The most popular blogs can also rely on an army of competent readers with expertise in a diverse array of fields to comment on technical aspects of a story and to correct mistakes. In short, many blogs present more stories on particular subjects, more thoroughly, more often, in a more entertaining way, and contrary to what traditional media people like to think, just as accurately, as any other news vehicle. It's hard to compete with that.

The traditional news venues in this country are in trouble. Part of their woes are due to the fact that they simply are not structured to compete with the newer forms of media, and part is that too many of them are simply not trusted to objectively report the news. At least in the new media you know you're getting a conservative or liberal slant and you can easily check their competitors (except in talk radio which, for some reason, has not been favorable to liberal success)to see what they have to say about a matter. This is very hard to do if one relies purely on broadcast news, newspapers and magazines.

Anyway, check out Radosh's piece. It's pretty good.

RLC

Zephyr Teachout at the Washington Post offers up a disturbing augury of the future of higher education:

Just as other dispensers of information, e.g. newspapers, are fighting an increasingly desperate battle to survive the encroachments of modern communication technologies so, too, will universities be forced to change or perish:

There's more on this sad prognostication at the link. I don't wish to sound like a Luddite, but I think what Teachout envisions would be a terrible development. The classroom is more than just a space in which knowledge is imparted. It's a place where relationships are formed, where students get the chance, if they want it, to ask spontaneous questions and pursue lines of inquiry in ways that are hard to achieve through a computer screen. Teaching is more than just putting a syllabus online and emailing tests to students. It's also communicating a love and enthusiasm for the subject matter and an interest in one's students. Moreover, a campus is more than just a place where students go to attend class, it's a community where dozens of opportunities for growth and development present themselves to young people.

It's not that students can't learn by staring at a monitor for even more hours every day than they already do, it's rather that learning in isolation is one-dimensional and impersonal.

What Teachout is predicting is essentially the dehumanization of education, an impoverishment of the intellectual life that will make us more alienated, estranged, and less human. I hope she's wrong.

RLC

According to a report at Politico.com another bit of our freedom will slide away if ObamaCare passes into law:

According to the bill currently before the Senate (Sen. Max Baucus' bill) you will be required to buy health insurance, regardless of whether you think you need it or not, and regardless of whether you want it or not. If you don't buy it you will be fined. If you don't pay the fine you will be put in jail. How's that for Hope 'n Change?

The argument is sometimes made that this is no different than requiring people to buy automobile insurance, but that argument is specious. You are not required to buy automobile insurance unless you drive. If you don't drive you don't have to buy it. Moreover, drivers are required to have coverage in the event they harm someone else in a traffic accident. If a driver could only harm himself there would be no need to require coverage.

If people wish to risk not having health coverage they should have that right, but then medical facilities should have the right, as a general principle, to decline treating those who accept that risk. Government should stay out of it.

The reason for requiring coverage, of course, is that it's hard to mandate that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions if people can wait to buy insurance until they have a problem. By forcing everyone into the system, insurers will have enough capital to cover PEC patients they'd be unable to cover under the current system. The problem is that a lot of people are too well off to qualify for medicaid but too poor to be able to afford to buy insurance or to even pay the $1900 fine. These people should be free to decide how they wish to direct their meager resources without the nanny state coercing them into buying health insurance.

The idea that health care coverage is somehow a right is, in any event, a rather recent and dubious, invention. Millions of people alive today grew up with no "right" to health care coverage and chose to risk living without it until they were able to afford it or got a job that offered it.

The Baucus bill is an attempt to take away the freedom you have to manage your own affairs and to make your own choices in life. If, as we've been told with monotonous regularity since the 70s, the government should stay out of our bedrooms, then even more should the government stay out of our decisions about how to manage our finances and our health care.

RLC

The web site Copyrights and Campaigns has an analysis of the prospects for the recent lawsuit filed by ACORN and two former employees against the two young filmmakers who videotaped employees of the group dispensing advice to a fake pimp and prostitute, as well as against Big Government, the blog that publicized the videos. The suit, which seeks monetary damages and an injunction against further broadcast of the videos, alleges that the filmmakers violated Maryland's law against surreptitious audio recording. It's unlikely, says C&C, that the suit will succeed.

Here's the nut of ACORN's problem:

This is pretty ironic. ACORN employees are caught engaging in disreputable if not illegal behavior, and so ACORN sues the people who caught them doing it. That's like the burglar suing the homeowner because the homeowner shined a light in his face causing him to trip down the stairs and break his leg. To make it worse there are reports (though I don't vouch for their accuracy) that the left is scouring the internet trying to dig up dirt on the girl who played the role of the prostitute in the sting. It's not clear what, other than giving vent to their vindictiveness, they would hope to accomplish by destroying her reputation. Perhaps they simply wish to intimidate anyone who might be inclined to shine a bright light on the inner machinations of other left-wing organizations in this country.

The lawsuit may actually blow up in ACORN's face, however, since they may be forced in discovery to reveal exhaustive information about their operation. Wouldn't that be interesting.

RLC

Secular Right offers an interesting graphic which shows that the Democratic party is becoming increasingly the party of secularists whereas the Republican party is becoming increasingly the party of the religious. As secularism increases in the U.S. (from 9% in 1990 to 15% today) those without any religious affiliation are finding a home in the Democratic party:

People like Glenn Beck often insist that there's no substantive difference between the two major parties but, as this graphic illustrates, such claims are misleading.

It might be interesting to speculate on why secular folk are drawn to the Democrats and religious folk are attracted to the GOP. One reason, surely, is that the Democrat party is seen, with some justification, as the party of abortion and libertinism and the party whose supporters pose the greatest threat to religious freedom in this country.

RLC

This is Ed Schultz of MSNBC doing his best impression of a calm, reasoned, fair-minded assessment of the critics of the President's health care plan:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says: "I seem to recall that Republicans wanted to abolish the death tax, and Democrats objected. Which party wants to make money off of your dead corpse?"

Good question. Anyway, this clip is a fine example of something I mentioned yesterday. The less confident a man is in making his case the more prone he is to using this sort of ridiculous rhetoric. After all, when people have the facts on their side they'll argue the facts for the simple reason that it's the most persuasive type of argument. If they stoop to scurrilous and absurd smears, as Schultz does, that's a good indication that at some level they know they're trying to hold indefensible ground, and they try to compensate for the weakness of their position with an abundance of insults, name-calling and bluster.

RLC

Nancy Pelosi called them Swastika-sporting Nazis. Other Democrats accused them of being a racist mob. Harry Reid labeled them "evil-mongers" (Ooh, that must have hurt). They were mocked as "tea-baggers," a sleazy innuendo referring to a gay sex act. There was, we were told by gentle, peace-loving Democrats, the threat of imminent violence in their protests (despite the fact that the only violence was perpetrated by a union thug who beat up a black guy selling flags and another Obama supporter who bit off the finger of an elderly man).

Who were these disreputable individuals who posed such a serious threat to our public discourse? They were mostly retired grandfathers and grandmothers fed up with politicians who were about to foist upon them a revolutionary overhaul of American health care that most of the politicians hadn't even studied. To grind salt into the wound some Democrat politicians actually scoffed at the idea that they should read the legislation they were voting on.

When a million, more or less, of these angry but good-humored citizens descended on Washington, D.C. the other week to express their displeasure with Congress and the Obama administration they actually left the place cleaner than they found it. Nevertheless, they were maligned and deprecated by Democrats and their media allies.

Now we face another massive protest, this time by people who truly are violent and who certainly don't plan to clean up their mess before they leave. These are people who will destroy property and maim innocents who get in their way. They've done it before. But you'll hear nothing but the sound of silence from Pelosi and Reid about these people. That's because these demonstrators are seen by progressives as fellow-travelers. They're far-left anarchists and as such they incur sympathy for their cause and even, surreptitiously, perhaps, for their tactics among more main-stream leftists in our political class and media.

There will be few denunciations of these people emanating from leftist precincts this weekend when they converge on Pittsburgh to try to disrupt the G20 Summit that's convening there. No matter how much vandalism they commit, no matter what the cost to the taxpayers of their behavior, the left will be largely silent. No insults, no ridicule, no allegations of Nazism, no complaints about violence - none of the condemnations such as were directed at the obstreperous but otherwise peaceful town hall protestors and tea-partiers. What we'll hear from the Democrats in Washington will be the sound of silence.

Let me know about it if I'm not right.

RLC

The other day we talked about a couple of evolutionary puzzles - insect metamorphosis and the waggle dance of bees. Robert Deyes at Uncommon Descent offers us another: Animal migration.

Creatures as diverse as Monarch butterflies, Green sea turtles, Arctic terns, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and salmon all must coordinate a complex series of factors - body mass, time of migration, food availability, weather, global position (without benefit of landmarks for pelagic migrants) - all, in the case of young of the year, without ever having done it before. How did such astonishing abilities evolve when the costs and risks to the organism are so high and the benefits so seemingly minor? Here's Deyes:

Migration is indeed a mystery - a mystery in terms of how it's accomplished and a mystery in terms of why and how it ever evolved. Of course, if the evolution of this amazing behavior were directed by an intelligent agent a big part of the mystery, though certainly not all of it (the question of how the agent did it, for example, would still remain), would be cleared up.

RLC

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Notes writes that:

This is an interesting insight. Nothing irritates a man like having to defend what he just knows to be true, especially when the truth is obvious to him and he can't understand why it isn't obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, Darwinism is only obvious if one starts from the assumption that materialism, or naturalism, is true. If that's so then something like Darwinian evolution simply must be the case, but the problem is that it's by no means obvious that materialism is true, and there are lots of reasons to think that it's not.

The IDer who attacks Darwinism by attacking materialism is cutting to the heart of the matter. He's laying seige to fundamental core convictions and showing them to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Few approaches are more certain to arouse a man's anger than exposing the hollow pretensions of his presuppositions. Most intelligent people sense when the philosophical ice is cracking under their feet and they often seek to mask their alarm and insecurity by throwing up clouds of anger and hostility, as if huffing and puffing were an adequate substitute for rational explanation.

It's a good rule of thumb, I think, that the angrier and nastier someone gets in an argument the less sure he is of the strength of his case.

RLC

Evan Coyne Maloney at Big Government.com offers us a heuristic for understanding everything from why criticism of President Obama is seen as racist to the failure of the traditional media to investigate ACORN to the reporting on the Kanye West boorishness at the Country Music Awards. Maloney tells us that there are several rules we need to keep in mind, and once we have mastered them we will understand all else. It's sort of like finding the DaVinci Code. Anyway, here are the rules:

Maloney applies the rules in order to interpret the three stories mentioned above, but he could have cited others. The reaction to the beating given to a white student to the cheers of the black students on a school bus would have almost certainly have been much different had the races been reversed. As it was, the media, leery of violating rule #2, focused their commentary almost entirely on the kindness of the boy who stepped in to stop the assault, and the possibility of racist motivation was scarcely mentioned even though the victim was one of only a few kids on the bus who was white. If the races had been reversed there's little doubt that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been on the scene demanding justice for the victim and the media would have been amplifying their voices. Instead, because it was a white kid that got beaten by black kids, the story, like others of its kind, quietly slipped off the media radar screen.

If we really wanted to move beyond race into the post-racial promised land that we heard so much about during the presidential campaign wouldn't we start applying the same standards of judgment to everyone regardless of their skin color? Let's judge people by what they do. Let's judge them by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Here's my rule, call it rule #7: Regarding any interracial incident, ask whether the reaction to the episode would be different were the races reversed. If the answer is yes, then something is wrong with one of the two reactions.

RLC

In a book review at First Things Edward Oakes makes the following observation about atheism:

Indeed. Rare is the atheist who can bear to live consistently with his atheism. As someone once noted, atheists refute their belief everyday by how they live their lives. They live as if their lives are full of point and purpose when, in fact, in a Godless world, point and purpose are empty concepts.

The irony of this is that the atheist is often at pains to accuse the believer of living by an irrational faith when, in fact, the very essence of irrationality is refusing to accept the logical conclusions of one's presuppositions. The paradigm case of irrationality is the modern atheist who tries to inject meaning into his life by undermining belief in the only thing that could possibly make life meaningful.

Like Nietzsche, the atheist Jean Paul Sartre sees the consequences of his atheism much more clearly than do many modern skeptics:

RLC

Bill Alston died last week. That probably means very little to most readers, but if you're among those who have done some reading in the philosophy of religion and/or epistemology you've probably encountered Alston's name and works more than once. He was a giant among contemporary philosophers, and he was also, by all accounts, a wonderful man.

Tom Senor shares some personal memories of Alston at Prosblogion, and what he tells us about him might serve as a model and inspiration for any student who hopes one day to be a teacher. Alston exemplified, in Senor's account, everything that good teachers should be.

Jeremy Pierce also offers some fine reminiscences of Professor Alston here. Anyone interested in being familiar with modern philosophy should be familiar with Bill Alston and reading these two pieces is an excellent step in that direction.

RLC

In a stunning development scientists have been able to restore near-normal mobility to rats whose spinal cords have been severed from their brains. Evidently, tissue in the spinal cord is capable of taking over some of the functions of the brain:

The article concludes by pointing out that there's no reason why the same procedures couldn't work in human beings. This would be a marvelous gift to the quarter of a million people in the U.S. who have suffered severe spinal cord injury. Nearly half of all spinal cord injuries are caused by automobile accidents, and more than half of these occur among young people between 16 and 30 years old. Perhaps there is hope for these tragic cases.

RLC

Lovers of Russian literature will enjoy the essay by David Hart at First Things in which he compares the genius of Dostoyevsky to the genius of Tolstoy. I've read both but studied neither and am in no position to pronounce upon the question of which is superior, as Hart does. I will say, though, that in all my admittedly inadequate reading of the great novelists there are few passages I have come across as powerful and mesmerizing as Dostoyevsky's chapter four and five of Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov. In chapter four, titled Rebellion Dostoyevsky presents the problem of theodicy in perhaps its most powerful form in all of literature. Theodicy is the attempt to explain how one can believe in God in the face of the world's staggering evil.

In chapter five, titled The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky relates his famous parable of Christ's return to Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. In the parable, Christ is actually thrown in prison, not by unbelievers, but by a Cardinal of the Church. What's more surprising, perhaps, is that the rationale the Cardinal gives for this incredible act seems wholly plausible. One can imagine such a thing happening.

Both of these chapters are dialogues between the devout Alyosha and his atheistic brother Ivan. It's Ivan who carries the dialogue, challenging his beloved brother, an orthodox monk, to respond. The two chapters are unequalled, at least in my experience, by anything else in literature. They can be read by themselves without reading the rest of the book, but I commend the entire novel to anyone who has the time. It'll stay with you for the rest of your life and the two chapters I've mentioned will compel you to think about the problem of evil more deeply, perhaps, than you ever did before.

I also recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment for its portrayal of a man named Raskolnikov who tries to live consistently as a Nietzschean moral nihilist. The man who thinks himself "beyond good and evil" (the title of Nietzsche's book on the subject), as does the otherwise likeable Raskolnikov, becomes a moral monster, who can't live even with himself. His amorality, his view of himself as a Nietzschean superman, leads to insanity. Dostoyevsky's treatment of this theme is the best I've ever read.

Nevertheless, Hart thinks Tolstoy is superior and perhaps he is, but I fell in love with Dostoyevsky as a young man and recommend him every chance I get.

RLC

Insects are amazing creatures. One of the most mind-rocking discoveries about them was made by Karl von Fritsch back in the 1940s when he worked out the significance of the honeybee waggle dance. This astonishing behavior occurs inside a pitch dark hive when a bee returning from a feeding foray does a dance that signals to other bees - which feel the dancer's moves with their forelegs - which direction and how far they should fly to find food. The dance even factors in such variables as windage. It's truly astonishing and, as an article by Caroline Williams at New Scientist tells us, how and why such a behavior could have evolved is a profound mystery.

Now new research is suggesting that honey bees usually ignore the dance and rely on other methods to find food, but if the dance is irrelevant the mystery just deepens. After all, the dance is still an accurate code for finding food so the question of how and why an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of sand developed such an elaborate behavior is still unanswered. Moreover, if the dance is unnecessary or ignored then we're faced with the question as to how it evolved when it doesn't confer any particular advantage on the bees. We're also confronted with the puzzle of explaining, if the bees don't need it and don't pay much attention to it, how and why it's retained in the genome.

Since we're asking difficult questions about the evolution of insect behaviors that are excruciatingly difficult to explain in terms of purely mechanistic processes, here's another - butterfly metamorphosis. How did it come to pass that a caterpillar could build around itself a chrysalis, completely dissociate the cells and tissues of its body inside the chrysalis, and reorganize those tissues in the form of a butterfly? To think that such a process could have evolved solely by chance is not unlike thinking that a computer programmed to build motorcycles could, by randomly jostling the bits and bytes of software code, reprogram the computer to build fighter jets.

I have no problem with the notion that metamorphosis developed over time and that mutation and natural selection played a role. My problem is with believing that such a process could occur without the guidance of an intelligent mind. It takes more faith than what I can muster to believe that natural processes alone are sufficient to accomplish such miracles.

People sometimes say that Christians must check their reason at the door of the church, but no one must suspend his reason or his skepticism more often than the materialist who believes that metamorphosis evolved solely by the chance concatenation of physical forces.

RLC

Gerald Posner interviews former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for The Daily Beast and gets a real scoop. In the course of the session Brzezinski opined, believe it or not, that we should be prepared, essentially, to go to war with Israel in order to defend Iran:

This is quite startling advice. Mr. Brzezinski advocates attacking an ally who was trying to do what we should have done ourselves by taking out Iran's nuclear weapons capability. Mr. Brzezinski is suggesting here that we should actually put our airmen at risk in order to defend Iran. He thinks that we should throw our relationship with Israel away - the intelligence cooperation, the alliance with the only country in the Middle East that shares our values - in order to keep Iran safe, even though Iran has threatened numerous times to use its nukes to destroy Israel.

People can differ on exactly what should be done about Iran, but an act of war against ally seems an odd way to treat one's friends. Wouldn't some sort of diplomatic protest after the fact be wiser than going to war with a country with which we share such a close relationship? Apparently, Mr. Brzezinski doesn't think so.

It's no wonder people get the willies when they think of Democrats running our national defense.

RLC

For those of you interested in business and the stock market, David Callaway at Marketwatch.com has good news and bad news. Here's a synopsis:

So what's the take home message? It appears to be that the road ahead for investors (and businessmen and women) is going to be bumpy, but that if you just ride it out you'll be fine. I'm not an economist but I have some doubts about this. It may be that over the relatively short term things will be fairly positive, but what happens when our huge deficits start building in a year or so, and we have to pay on the debt. The only way we'll be able to do that is to impose onerous taxes on businesses or print money which will generate inflation. Either course will kill the markets. It seems inevitable that one or both of those alternatives lies in the not so distant our future, so I wonder why Calloway thinks that 2010 will be a year of recovery.

Perhaps the only thing that's going to be recovered in 2010 is the good sense of the voters who will decide to cashier the people who got us into this mess.

RLC

The folks at Strategy Page analyze Islamic terrorism and why Arab civilizations have stagnated while the rest of the world passes them by:

It's hard to overstate the importance of the religious worldview of a people in shaping their culture. Everything they value, everything they accomplish, is a consequence of what they believe about God, man, life, and nature. A worldview, for example, that inculcates the idea that our minds are gifts from God that He wants us to use to unlock the secrets of His creation will have a completely different developmental history than cultures which believe that our minds should be used only to study theology. A worldview which sees nature as the creation of a rational, loving God who gives it as a gift for our safe-keeping will imbue the people who hold it with a completely different attitude toward scientific investigation than a worldview which teaches that technological progress is somehow outside the proper concern of the truly pious.

Even many thoughtful atheists recognize that the values we have always held dear in our democracy are derivatives of our Christian heritage and can not be sustained by any other worldview. Atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, for example, has observed that:

Habermas is right, of course. The Enlightenment sought to ground the virtues of Western civilization in the exercise of human reason and wound up giving us the soul-crushing totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Modernity's rejection of God in general and Christianity in particular led to unprecedented horrors in China, Cambodia, Africa, Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere around the globe. One hundred million people were murdered in the name of reason, science, and state atheism. In the attempt to deify man the 20th century wound up dehumanizing him and grinding him into the earth everywhere but in those cultures which remained under the sway of a vibrant Christianity.

Jesus taught that truth makes us free. It will liberate us from superstition and the sort of assumptions that enchain men rather than free them. The problem with the Arab world is that they are in thrall to a worldview that locks its adherents in the chains of a mental dungeon rather than freeing them to fluorish.

RLC

Strategy Page features an interesting report on the silent war against Islamic terrorists around the globe:

It's good to know that despite the widespread view on the Left that terrorists should be treated as criminals with Miranda rights rather than as mortal enemies President Obama is pressing the fight against al Qaeda wherever they can be found. It's also good to know that we have men capable of executing such dangerous missions with skill and courage.

RLC

Steve Mirsky of Scientific American interviews cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley. Lombrozo studies why people believe what they do, specifically, why they believe what they do about evolution, intelligent design, or creationism. The entire interview is interesting and worth reading. Here's an excerpt I found particularly fascinating:

Two things are worth noting about this. First, Lombrozo is correct that the role of a public school teacher is to present students with the relevant ideas, not to indoctrinate them in those ideas. Teachers should teach students the pros and cons of evolutionary theory and let the students decide what they believe.

Second, the problem with teaching just the facts on evolution is that that, by itself, is apparently not enough to persuade students that evolution is true. The problem is not that students don't understand the concepts and therefore don't accept them, the problem is that many of them do understand the theory and find it literally incredible. The reason some Darwinists want students to be inculcated with Darwinism and don't want any criticism of Darwinism taught in the classroom is that they know intuitively that if students are made aware of the deep difficulties with naturalistic explanations of the origin of life and the inability of natural selection and random mutation to account for the enormous biological sophistication of living things, kids will simply be skeptical of the whole business.

Any theory of evolution which excludes the guidance or planning of an intelligent agent is something only a person dead set against the existence of a designer could ever believe.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

I want very much to like and respect former President Jimmy Carter, but it seems that every time he opens his mouth he says something irresponsible. This is no exception:

Like so many others who are calling any criticism of President Obama a sign of racism, Mr. Carter offers not a shred of evidence that any of Mr. Obama's critics are motivated by race let alone that the "overwhelming" number are. The charge of racism is an admission that the left has no argument. There's nothing they can say in defense of the current administration's headlong rush to bankrupt the nation and to move us toward an ever-expanding role for government in our lives, so they accuse anyone who doesn't want to go along for the ride of being a racist. They offer no evidence, no support of the accusation, they just state it as an axiomatic truth.

Liberals accept as an article of their faith that America is a deeply racist nation. If you ask them to show you an example of racism in America today they're hard put to come up with one, but that doesn't diminish the strength of their conviction. Their dogmatic certainty is just as rock solid and just as purblind as that of any stereotypical fundamentalist. Given their assumption that America is still living in the 1930s, and given their utter incomprehension that anyone could possibly oppose liberal policies on their merits, it seems obvious to them that opposition to Mr. Obama could not possibly be based on anything but his skin color.

Now, I don't have any doubt that there's racism in this country. After all, one could go here,for example, and see a school bus full of white kids hooting and hollering as a couple of their friends beat up just about the only black kid on the bus (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget), but to accuse the President's political opponents of being racially motivated without adducing even a shred of empirical evidence for the charge beyond, maybe, a couple of ambiguous signs in a protest march is not only vile, it's stupid.

RLC

Newsweek columnist George Will explains why President Obama seems to be the victim of a strange kind of inverse relationship. The more he talks the less people believe what he says. The President has played so fast and loose with so many matters involving the people's money, most lately health care reform, that people respond to his words like they respond to the guy in the bar who's always spinning yarns that everyone knows aren't true.

Here are a few excerpts from Will's incisive column:

The President is either confused about his proposals or he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people into thinking that those proposals are something that they're not. In either case, he has just about exhausted the confidence the electorate placed in him last November. If he turns out to be a one-term President it won't be because of racism, or because people misrepresented his policies, or because of congressional Democrats (although they're trying hard to ensure that the voters get fed up with the President's party). If Barack Obama fails to win the support of the electorate in 2012 it will be largely because voters simply don't believe that he knows what he's talking about or that he's telling them the truth.

RLC

Contrary to the faux heroes offered up by our celebrity culture most real heroes are people we've never heard of. Such, perhaps, was Norman Borlaug who died recently at the age of 95. Borlaug was an agronomist who won a Nobel prize in 1970 for having saved from hunger hundreds of millions of starving peasants around the world.

Guy Sorman tells his story in a piece at City Journal. The account of how Borlaug's work on developing strains of wheat and rice to relieve famine conditions in Mexico and India is fascinating in itself, and I hope you'll read it, but there's also an ideological moral to the story.

Sorman writes:

As it was with the Left in India so it is with the Left everywhere. They seem to prefer that everyone be hungry rather than see a few get wealthy. They think that collectivism and socialism can solve food shortages despite the fact that the history of the twentieth century has consistently been one of capitalist countries sending food to hungry people in socialist countries. One reason why third world nations remain mired in poverty and hunger is because they've adopted an unworkable socialist model which removes all incentives for farmers to work hard to produce a surplus. Yet we keep hearing, even from many in our country, that private property and private enterprise are great evils even as American agriculture continues to help feed the world.

Those who believe that socialism would do better might offer some indication of how many hungry children socialism fed in the 20th century.

RLC

Pat Buchanan wonders, with good reason, I think, if America is breaking up. Here's the heart of his essay:

Buchanan has a point. As we become more and more diverse, as we focus on the things which make us different rather than the things which we share in common, as fewer and fewer Americans revere our nation's history, traditions and founding documents, as fewer Americans speak a common language, we will become increasingly Balkanized. Every nation is subject to certain centrifugal forces that tend to rip it apart. What holds a people together against those forces is a dominant culture in which everyone shares. We no longer have such a culture, or it is rapidly disappearing, and what we do have diminishes its hold on the hearts and minds of Americans with every new generation.

America may well be breaking up, and that fact raises an interesting academic question: Can a democracy long endure when none of its sub-cultures is any longer dominant? In other words, can a democracy survive multiculturalism and its attendant relativism? My fear is that the answer is "no." At least it's hard to think of an historical precedent.

RLC

Several readers have written to inform me that the photo I used to accompany my post titled 9/12 Tea Party was actually taken at a different rally.

I thought when I first saw it that the scene looked too sunny to have been taken last Saturday when the northeast was pretty much soaked in a steady drizzle, but then I thought that maybe in D.C. the sun might have come out more than it did where I live.

Anyway, the pic is not of the 9/12 protest and should not be used as a guage of how many people were in D.C. last Saturday. TCS kindly sent along a link that has some info on the photo. It appears that the shot may have been taken of a Promise-Keepers rally that took place in October of 1997, an event that, coincidentally, I happened to have attended.

I was going to take the photo off the website, but since I'm in it I decided out of vanity to leave it up.

RLC

Last year Congress and President Bush agreed to suspend the ban on oil drilling on the continental shelf. Things were set to resume tapping into the oil reserves on the shelf this year, but unfortunately the Obama administration suspended the suspension by imposing a six month delay on the granting of leases needed to begin drilling.

That delay is set to expire on September 21st and the administration and Congress have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how serious they are about creating jobs, stimulating the economy, balancing the budget, and making us energy independent of the Middle East.

According to a report by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) drilling would add $8 trillion to our GDP and generate $2.2 trillion in new tax revenues. This would go a long way toward reducing the deficit that Congress and the President have burdened us with.

Allowing drilling would also, according to the AEA report, create 1.2 million jobs each year and generate $70 billion in wages. The new jobs would not be limited to just the oil industry but would be realized in a wide spectrum of industries upon which oil drilling depends. It would be a substantial boost to the economies of coastal states like California which are teetering on the brink of insolvency.

The continental shelf holds at least 80 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Since we import about 4 billion barrels a year we could cut our imports in half and have enough oil to last for at least another forty years.

More oil and lower dependency upon foreign suppliers means cheaper gas. Cheaper fuel means lower prices for everything manufactured and/or shipped in the United States. This would be a boon not only to the middle class but especially to the poor.

Democrats in Congress, however, are very reluctant to go along with offshore drilling. They prefer a cap and trade system to reduce fuel consumption that would help reduce global warming. Cap and trade would raise the cost of fuel, kill job growth, make everyone poorer and reduce global temperatures a measly two tenths of a degree Celsius by 2100. It's hard to see why this is a more desirable policy than exploiting the resources we already have, and given the alternatives it's astonishing that there's any debate about which course of action we should follow.

Instead of just reiterating their refusal to allow drilling it would be helpful if the Democrats would share with us the reasons for that refusal.

[Some of the above information was gleaned from an article by Rep. Doc Hastings in the Washington Times.]

RLC

In chapter two of Seeking God in Science (See here for the first part of our discussion of the book) Brad Monton considers the question of whether ID is legitimate science and here, as in chapter one, he slays a number of hostile polemical dragons. He argues that attempts to define science have a dismal history and that, Judge Jones' decree in Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District notwithstanding, there's no good reason to think that intelligent design is not science. Monton takes on one contender after another and tosses each in turn out of the ring. His analysis of his opponents' arguments is incisive, sometimes brilliant, and the upshot is that, though he thinks ID wrong, there's no good reason for excluding it from the community of scientific theories.

The next chapter was perhaps the most interesting. He begins by saying that the important question is not whether ID is science but whether it's true, and he's exactly right about this. He thinks the arguments in its favor have some plausibility but not enough to persuade him to abandon his atheism or to accept that there is a non-theistic designer.

The problem, I think, with Monton's argument in this chapter is that he seems to make the term "somewhat plausible" synonomous with "not very likely." I don't know if this is intentional, but I do think it's misleading. For example, in considering the argument for a designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe he notes that most people simply lack the expertise to evaluate the claims that the relevant parameters must be set at precisely the values they are for life to exist and thus shouldn't make too much of the extraordinary coincidence that so many values are indeed calibrated to such fine tolerances.

That's true enough, but it's an objection one could make to any theory in science. Most philosophers and even many scientists know very little about relativity theory or quantum mechanics or string theory or even evolution. They rely on people who do know about these things, and they assume that the people who do have expertise are largely correct in their conclusions.

The fine-tuning argument has as an implied premise that the physicists who argue that the dozen or more values must be almost exactly what they are or else the universe wouldn't exist and/or life wouldn't exist, are most likely correct. If they are then an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the cosmic structure.

The argument isn't a proof in the deductive sense, but it's much more than "somewhat plausible" since the claim that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life seems to be admitted by even opponents of ID and is much more likely to be true than false.

Similarly, Monton asserts that we are not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning because we can't know what happened prior to about 10 ^ -12 seconds after the initial event. Because we can't penetrate that time horizon we're not warranted in believing that the universe began to exist. I think this is not quite correct. We may well be warranted in believing that the universe began to exist in a big bang but we're not warranted in saying that it certainly did. And if we are warranted in believing that the universe began to exist then we may well be justified in believing that it had a cause of its existence.

His most problematic objection to ID has to do with the ID argument that life itself is astronomically improbable as a product of blind, impersonal forces. He doesn't dispute this, but he does argue that the universe is spatially infinite and rather homogenous throughout. Therefore there would be an infinite number of planets like our own and no matter how small the chances of life arising naturalistically, if the probability is at all greater than zero it must have happened. Indeed, it must have happened infinite times.

I find this argument implausible. It's based on the assumption that given infinite opportunities anything that is possible to be the case will be the case. Given an infinite number of planets there would be an infinity of planets like earth and in an infinite number of planets anything which is at all possible will be actual. One problem with this argument is that its based on the assumption that the universe is infinite and that it has a fairly uniform composition throughout, but we have no more reason to think this second assumption true than we did to think that the universe had a beginning. If Monton is not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning then I don't see how he's warranted in believing that the universe is both infinite and uniform.

But even if we grant Monton these assumptions it seems to me that they actually confirm the existence of a designer. Let's stipulate that there is a non-zero probability that some part of our spatially infinite universe was designed. In other words, we're stipulating that it's possible that a designer exists. If so, then given an infinite number of parts to the universe, at least one of them (actually an infinity of them) must be designed. Thus a designer exists. This doesn't prove that the designer has designed every part of the universe but its a very short psychological step from the existence of a designer of an infinite number of parts of the universe to the existence of the entire universe.

At any rate, an argument that demonstrates the existence of a designer of even just a part of the universe seems to be a defeater of Monton's belief that no such designer exists.

The fourth chapter addresses the question whether ID should be taught in public school science classrooms. Here again Monton relentlessly punctures many of the arguments raised by those who oppose doing so.

The book is a delight to read, as much for Monton's relentless devotion to the truth and the clarity of his argumentation as it is for the interesting perspectives brought to the topic by an atheist defending intelligent design. I recommend it to anyone interested in the controversy surrounding the debate between IDers and those who oppose them.

RLC

Perhaps you've heard that ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), President Obama's former associates, are once again in the news and the news isn't good. A pair of intrepid young indy filmmakers surreptitiously filmed the proceedings as they visited two ACORN offices, one in Baltimore and one in Washington, posing as a pimp and a prostitute. The pair claimed that they wished to run a prostitution business using teenage El Salvadoran girls and they needed advice on housing options. They were counseled by ACORN representatives as to how they could get away with running their business in Baltimore and how they could mislead the IRS and avoid paying taxes.

The conselors were fired when the video broke, but there's a much deeper, more systemic problem with ACORN than just a few ethically challenged housing advisors. ACORN representatives have over the years been convicted in numerous states of voter registration fraud and a host of other legal violations. The odor of corruption and/or mismanagement has clung to them for at least a decade.

Yet ACORN has been given access to millions of dollars in stimulus money and were contracted to help carry out the 2010 census (although in the wake of this latest scandal the census bureau has severed its connection with ACORN).

If you'd like to be brought up to speed on this latest episode in the ACORN saga go here and scroll down. There's plenty of information and video shot by the young undercover investigators in the ACORN offices.

By the way, the young man who did the filming, who did the kind of investigating reporting the traditional media seem loath to do, James O'Keefe, may be prosecuted by Baltimore City for secretly taping the exchange with the ACORN people. Law enforcement authorities had been questioned as to whether the city was going to do anything about what some thought to be ACORN's obvious breach of the law so the State's Attorney's office looked at the tape and decided, astonishingly, that the malefactor was the filmmaker.

Meanwhile, the traditional media slumbers while this travesty plays out.

Margaret Williams, an ACORN board member, predictably blames the whole contretemps on .... racism. Sigh.

RLC

Jason writes to inform me that ABC is denying having ever claimed that there were 2 million people marching in Washington yesterday.

I have no way of knowing what the actual number was, but when taken together with the fact that there were other such gatherings around the country, it does seem that there's a lot of dissatisfaction out there with the direction the Democrats are taking this country.

It's also noteworthy, perhaps, that so many of the people who traveled across the country to attend this event say that they've never done anything like it before. They never protested anything more than an underdone steak in a restaurant, but they've finally decided that they can be silent no longer. Their children's futures are being placed at risk by this Congress and administration.

Let's just set the number in D.C. yesterday at "lots."

RLC

According to ABC as many as two million people showed up in Washington, D.C. today to protest out-of-control government spending and an unprecedented arrogation of centralized power. My local news was reporting "tens of thousands" but this appears to be a gross underestimation:

That's an awful lot of racists.

Go here for more pics of the party and enjoy the Doobie Brothers a while:

UPDATE: The photo above showing the crowd in the Capitol mall tuurns out to have been taken at a different rally which took place in 1997 and should not be used to guage the number of people at the 9/12 protest.

RLC

Caleb, a young law student and friend, writes to share some thoughts on our post about the President's speech last Wednesday.

He has a lot of interesting things to say and closes with this:

Caleb's right. The Democrats were just as rude to Mr. Bush when he tried to pitch social security reform to them in 2004, Mr. Obama was not being forthright about coverage of illegal aliens, and Senator Reid has never been forced to apologize for calling Mr. Bush a liar on national television. Nevertheless, it was unseemly and inexcusable for congressman Wilson to blurt out "You lie!" in that forum, and he apologized for it. We're still waiting for Senator Reid's apology.

Read the rest of Caleb's thoughts on the Feedback page.

RLC

Bradley Monton is an atheist philosopher of science who has written one of the best books on the controversy surrounding intelligent design I've come across. Monton's book is exceptionally fair to the point of being in places almost sympathetic to ID, though he's at pains to stress that he's not a proponent. Even so, I suspect that the book will have a lot of opponents of ID wondering exactly whose side Monton is on.

The book is titled Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (157 pages) and is divided into four chapters plus a preface. It opens with the claim that "This book is not providing a full-fledged endorsement of intelligent design. But intelligent design needs to be taken more seriously than a lot of its opponents are willing to."

His goal in writing the book is:

This is certainly a welcome approach, one rarely found among opponents of ID (Michael Ruse and Ronald Numbers are the only other anti-ID writers I can think of who might share Monton's desire to be fair to the arguments of their opponents), and Monton's treatment of the topics in his book is as fascinating as it is refreshing.

The first chapter consists of an attempt to refine the definition of intelligent design so that the arguments both pro and con can be evaluated more effectively and to dispose of a number of weak or misleading arguments with which opponents of ID have cluttered the landscape. It should be noted that this is not a book about the science involved in evolution. In fact, there's very little science in the book at all. It's a book of public philosophy and can be read with profit by any educated person who is aware of the controversies swirling around ID.

In chapter one Monton makes an interesting claim. He observes that if we're trying to find an explanation for certain features of the universe - like its existence and the fine-tuning of the cosmic constants and parameters - then an intelligent cause is clearly our best option. ID offers the best explanation for cosmic fine-tuning and the existence of the world, but he doesn't accept ID because, as an atheist he doesn't think there's any explanation for these phenomena at all. ID is the best explanation, but he believes all explanations are false. The universe just is and there's no explanation for it.

This is an interesting approach but it strikes me as a science-stopper, an accusation which is often leveled at ID. Scientists should always be looking for the explanations of physical phenomena. To say of some contingent state of affairs that it has no explanation seems to me, at least, to be rather ad hoc. Monton says our choice is between an intelligent cause of the world and believing that it just is and has no explanation or cause. If those are our choices, and I think Monton is right about that, it seems that the "no explanation" position is a very high price to pay in order to be able to hold on to one's atheism.

One of the weak anti-ID arguments Monton addresses is the claim by opponents that ID is a religious idea. Monton offers an interesting counter. He points out that, for all we know, our world could be a computer simulation designed by an inhabitant of some other world. Everything about the visible universe could in fact be the product of a very sophisticated software program. If that's a possibility, no matter how bizarre it may sound (and Monton cites some reasons for thinking it may be the case), then ID could be true and there would be nothing necessarily "religious" about it.

In other words, just because many IDers are religious people does not entail that ID must be a religious theory any more than the fact that many Darwinians are atheists entails that evolution is inherently atheistic.

I'll talk more about Brad Monton's book on Monday. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the issues involved in this debate, no matter which side of it you're on, you really should think about ordering a copy.

RLC

President Obama's speech on health care Wednesday night was disappointing. Once he got past making the case for why we need reform, a need most people agree we have, almost nothing he said about how that reform would look was credible.

We were led to believe that the President would be offering his own plan, but although he referred often to "his plan" the details were virtually the same as those in the proposals currently hibernating in congressional committees.

The president several times averred that his critics are lying about the plan when they claim it will cover illegal aliens, abortions, and will provide for the practical equivalent of "death panels." Yet even some Democrats are saying that the plan will in fact either do these things or permit them to be done. After the speech Democratic senators closed a loophole in their bill that would have given coverage to illegal immigrants and House Democrats twice defeated attempts to tighten the language in their bill that would insure that illegals weren't covered. Such measures are very strange if the bills did not allow for coverage of illegals in the first place.

The President insists he wants competition between insurance companies but neither of the two measures that would put competition into the market, allowing people to buy across state lines and reducing mandates in coverage, were in the President's plan. Either of these or both together would increase competition, lower insurance cost, and not cost a single dime, but the President is disinclined to adopt them. No one knows why.

He insisted that he will be able to save billions of dollars by cutting fraud and waste in the medicare system, but he never explained how he would do this or why he hasn't just gone ahead and done it already. He simply alluded to lots of details that need to be worked out.

AP ran a fact check on several other of the President's assertions and found them less than persuasive. The claim that he will be able to increase coverage on 30 million people (the original target was 47 million) without adding to the deficit or reducing or rationing care of the elderly is quite literally incredible.

His attacks on his critics seemed petulant and beneath his office. It seems that the speech did little to help salvage health care reform and even less to salvage the perception of Mr. Obama as quite the opposite of the "post-partisan" president he campaigned as.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Wilson is getting a drubbing in the media for his impolite and intemperate outburst during the speech, when he shouted "You lie" at Mr. Obama, but were these critics of Mr. Wilson not listening to Mr. Obama? Several times throughout the evening Mr. Obama accused critics of the Democrat health care reform proposals of lying. Why castigate Mr. Wilson, but not Mr. Obama? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once called Mr. Bush a liar on Meet the Press and refused to apologize. There was no outrage on the left at Mr. Reid's remark. Indeed, the left pretty much agreed. Mr. Wilson has learned an interesting lesson. If you act like a Democrat, you better vote like one or else you can expect to get pummeled by the media.

RLC

With due respect to the President, I think he's trivializing 9/11 by designating it a national day of service. When I heard that that was his intent I tried to imagine what the WWII generation would have thought had December 7th been designated by FDR or Harry Truman a day for people to clean beaches and volunteer for Welcome Wagon. I think they would have treated the suggestion with condign derision.

What we should reflect upon on this day, in my opinion, are three things:

First, we need to keep it firmly in mind that we are in a war to the death with radical Islam. They will not stop trying to kill us, our children and our grandchildren until either we have converted to Islam, or either we or they are all dead. This is a generational conflict. It will not end when we withdraw from Iraq or Afghanistan. It has been going on at varying levels of intensity for 800 years and will not cease just because we'd like it to.

Second, we need to remember, and continue to hold up to our young, the character of the people who acted so bravely and unselfishly on that horrible morning. From the firefighters who climbed the tower stairways to try to help the people trapped therein, to the people on board flight 93 who refused to be passive in the face of evil, to the workers in the buildings who, despite danger to themselves, struggled heroically to help their friends and co-workers escape.

There are many others, men and women in the armed forces and intelligence agencies, who subsequently exhibited great valor in fighting those who were allied with the terrorists who launched the attacks, but on September 11 we should remember the men and women who were directly involved in the attack and praise their heroism. Somehow, picking up trash and raking leaves in the community park seem pretty anemic and inappropriate gestures given the import and magnitude of what this infamous day calls for.

Third, we should reflect seriously on the fact that God blesses the nation that seeks to live justly and morally and may remove His hand from the efforts of those nations which have decided to estrange themselves from Him. We need to affirm our trust in God and keep in mind that our dependence for our survival rests ultimately in Him. Military might alone is insufficient and inadequate to keep us secure. If we forget about God and the path He desires us to follow, He very well may forget about us. In that case we might expect that many more 9/11s lie in our future.

Community service is fine, but it's perhaps more suited to Labor Day. Let's not do to 9/11 what we've done to so many other holidays, the real meaning of which has been obscured by the manner in which we celebrate or observe the days.

RLC

Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting commentators on the contemporary socio-politico landscape. She's a lesbian leftist (maybe more libertarian-left) who writes very clear-sighted criticism of politicians both liberal and conservative. She's an Obama supporter, but she's very tough on both him and the Democrats in general in this piece at Salon. I highly recommend her essay. She's equally hard, as is her wont, on the GOP and certainly doesn't soften her fire when she directs it toward the Bushies and other GOP targets. Here she is on Republicans:

This is only a slight exaggeration. Her point is well-taken that a party that professes to defend traditional values has little credibility when so many of its major office holders have been caught in flagrante, as it were. It's true that GOP malefactors are not in the same league as the Democrats, but the Democrats don't claim to be concerned about "family values," so no one is particularly surprised when a Democrat is caught siring children with his paramour (John Edwards) or engaging in rough sex with prostitutes (Eliot Spitzer).

This raises a very interesting question for conservative Republicans, one that really needs to be addressed more than it is. What exactly is the role of government in regulating personal morality? Most conservatives say they want government out of our lives, but then they want the government to enforce obscenity laws and to limit or ban abortions. I think there is a defensible principle involved here (the government has the obligation to protect our rights, especially the right to life, and therefore the government is acting within its proper sphere if it regulates abortion), but the principle needs to be articulated and argued for more than most Republicans seem inclined to do.

Here again, Paglia is voicing some difficult truths (I'll let her characterization of Newt pass). George Bush ruined his presidential legacy, in my opinion, by increasing the deficit (although compared to what Obama has done, Bush's irresponsible contribution to the deficit was like the weight of a fly on the back of an elephant) and by his desultory approach to stemming the tide of illegal immigrants flowing into this country. Nevertheless, Bush kept this country safe for eight years from a determined terrorist enemy and liberated (for how long remains to be seen) fifty million people from oppression. No President in American history can say the same.

It is regarding Dick Cheney, however, that I think Paglia detours off the highway of truth she's been cruising. I think Cheney will go down in history as one of the most unjustifiably maligned men ever to serve in high office. Paglia's accusation that he spooked Bush into a pointless war is neither supportable by the facts nor fair to either Cheney or Bush. Nor is it by any means clear that the war was pointless. I think Cheney, whether he was right or wrong, has shown exceptional courage, calm, and clarity. Few men in elective office have demonstrated the ability to think as clearly about the nature of the conflict with radical Islam in which we are immersed, and will be immersed, for the next several decades, as Cheney has, and, yes, I wish he had been the Republican nominee in 2008 instead of John McCain. At the risk of suffering Paglia's derision I would have voted for him.

Anyway, now that you've read what Ms. Paglia has to say about the GOP, read what she has to say about her own party at the link.

Thanks to Byron for passing it along.

RLC

The Weekly Standard reports that Hillary Clinton is planning to step down as Secretary of State in order to run for the office of Governor of New York. This makes sense on several levels. First she seems to have been marginalized, perhaps deliberately, by the White House which has appointed "czars" to manage most of the world's trouble spots. While Hillary was sweating in Africa entertaining school children her husband was sent to North Korea to get much of the credit for the release of two young journalists that the North Koreans had accused of spying. Whatever her portfolio she seems to be much less prominent in foreign policy than any of her most recent predecessors.

Then there's 2012. Ms Clinton may well smell blood in the political water. If the President is limping toward 2012 Ms Clinton may want to challenge him in the primaries just as a weakened Jimmy Carter was challenged in 1979. It would be very awkward to do this as a cabinet secretary, but a governorship would be the ideal vehicle from which to launch a bid for the presidency, an office she doubtless still covets. If Obama is strong going into the primary season the governor's office will still serve her even better as a launch pad in 2016.

If the Weekly Standard report is borne out her resignation will surely be stage-setting for a 2012 run at the White House, and a challenge from within the party to a sitting president. That should produce a lot of fireworks.

RLC

These people are a chuckle a minute. Lefty blogger Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake offers a fascinating defense of Van Jones by inadvertently admitting that what conservatives have long suspected about Progressives is in fact true:

What's she saying? That Jones is no worse or no kookier than a lot of other Democrats? Is she saying that most Democrats have either been communists or have communist sympathies? It sure seems that way.

Her phone must be ringing off the hook with calls from her fellow Dems demanding that she get that post off her blog.

HT: JustOneMinute

RLC

If I were a member of the Sierra Club (my environmental contributions go to The Nature Conservancy) I would withdraw my membership forthwith after having read this essay by Sierra Club president Carl Pope. Pope, like so many others on the left, seems unable to imagine why anyone would object to a man who was, and may still be, a radical Leninist revolutionary serving in a high level position in our government. Nor does he see any reason, evidently, to object to someone on the public payroll who believes that the Bush administration was in some sense complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Why else would people like Pope draw the conclusion that any criticism of someone like Van Jones must be motivated by racism? Are they so cynical that they can't imagine anyone objecting to the appointment of a man of Jones' philosophy of governance and political judgment to a position of responsibility in the Obama administration?

Here are some excerpts from Pope's column:

Barack Obama campaigned as one who would put racial divisions behind us, but his votaries are determined to make any criticism of this administration all about race. To criticize the President or any of his African American appointees has become for many prima facie evidence of racism. What these race hustlers fail to realize, however, is that the charge of racism is losing its punch. If everyone's a racist, if every opinion one holds is rooted in racism, then the word "racism" loses its power to intimidate. People are beginning to realize that no matter how respectful they try to be to the racial sensibilities of others they're going to be branded as a racist as soon as they express any opposition to any black in American politics, so why bother worrying about it?

Arguments like Pope's are as silly as they are sad. After three decades of trying to get past skin color we find out that, for the left, skin color is often the explanation of first resort for anyone who disagrees with them. So strong is this heuristic that even the lack of empirical evidence of racism is itself considered evidence for how diabolically subtle modern racists are. I'm reminded of the line from the novel/movie/play The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orzy about the Englishman who masqueraded as a fop risking his life to rescue French nobles from the Jacobin terror:

Substitute "liberals" for "Frenchies" and "white racist" for "Pimpernel" and the lines could have been written for today's politics.

If Pope wants to find genuine racism perhaps he should look at Jones' comments about "white" polluters, or Jeremiah Wright's sermons, or Professor Gates' stereotyping of officer Crowley. Pope wouldn't see the racial bias in these men, though, because if he did, if he faulted any of them for the race-based sentiments they express, that would, by his own standard, make him a racist for criticizing a black man.

You can watch this video for yet another example of how the left seems unwilling to entertain any explanation, other than racism, for opposition to this administration or any African American who is a part of it:

RLC

This is bizarre. Van Jones, President Obama's recently-resigned Green Jobs czar, claims that health care reform opponents are responsible for his resignation:

Lies and distortions? All anyone did was show his signature on a 9/11 "truther" petition, quote his own words about being a Leninist revolutionary and black nationalist, and play the audio tapes of him insulting whites and Republicans. Apparently, for lefties like Jones telling people what he actually believes is a "vicious smear campaign," and quoting him is to "lie and distort." Pretty funny.

Now it would be nice to engage in a similar "vicious smear campaign" to get rid of a couple of other "czars" starting with John Holdren and Hugo Chavez booster Mark Lloyd. All that needs to be done is to show the American people, honestly, fairly, and without rancor, what these guys stand for and let the people give voice to whether they want such individuals working at taxpayers' expense, accountable to no one, in the White House.

RLC

Robert Wright is an atheist who argues that there is a moral law that somehow pervades the universe and which obligates us to do "right." P.Z. Myers is an atheist who sees things, at least this thing, much differently. Here's Myers:

Other than changing the word "compelled" to "obligated" I agree with what Myers writes. Given his atheism he's absolutely correct to conclude that there is no moral law. There's no right or wrong, there's no moral obligation, there are just things that people do. An atheist, as Myers implies, has absolutely no grounds for believing in moral obligation or for making moral judgments.

Wright thinks otherwise:

Be this as it may, it does nothing to explain why we're doing something wrong if we choose not to cooperate with others. Even if evolution has given us a moral sense, so what? That's hardly a reason why we should adhere to it. Evolution has given us wisdom teeth, too, but that doesn't mean that we need them.

Wright continues:

This is all pretty interesting, but, even so, it's not at all clear to me that people are naturally altruistic. They seem much more obviously to be naturally egoistic. If we are what we are through evolution then evolution has shaped us to be self-centered and selfish.

But even if we grant Wright's argument that we've evolved to be altruistic how is this an argument for moral obligation? If people don't cooperate with others all that we can conclude is that they don't carry the genes for it. We can't conclude that they're doing anything wrong. Nor can we say that because blind, impersonal forces have caused us to tend toward mutual cooperation that therefore we're obligated to cooperate with others. That's as ridiculous as saying that because nature has given us facial hair we're obligated not to shave it off.

Evolution (maybe) can explain why humans behave the way they do, but it cannot "demand" that we ought or ought not to behave that way. It cannot provide a ground for saying that some choices are right and others wrong. Nor can it provide a ground for saying that people are morally obligated to do what helps others. Only God can impose moral obligation, and if there is no God then P.Z. Myers is right.

RLC

On FOX News Sunday DNC Chairman Howard Dean repeated the charge that opponents of Democratic health care reform proposals are fabricating the idea of "death panels," and that there are no such entities in the Democrats' proposals.

The problem with this is that it's certain that if those proposals pass there will be rationing of care and that the rationing will impact medicare recipients especially hard. In other words, the government agency given the authority to decide who gets care and who doesn't and on what basis will function pretty much as a panel which will make life or deazth decisions for people. Just because the words "death panel" don't appear in any of the bills doesn't mean that, for all practical purposes, such entities will exist if the bills become law.

Jennifer Rubin at PajamasMedia explains that despite the outrage of liberal pundits over Sarah Palin's reference to "death panels" a lot of President Obama's supporters are letting the cat out of the bag as the discussion on health care has proceeded through the month of August. She writes:

It's interesting that Kaus, an Obama supporter, seems to think that Obama should essentially lie about his intentions, but never mind that. Rubin continues:

If Mr. Obama wants to end concerns about "death panels" he should stop surrounding himself with people who favor doing exactly what "death panels" would do - ration care to the elderly based on actuarial tables.

My own octogenarian mother needed to have a heart valve replaced and medicare picked up the tab. Given that she was in her eighties it's doubtful that people who share Ezekiel Emanuel's views would have approved such a procedure, at least if medicare would be paying for it. My mother's operation was five years ago, and she's still going strong, walking several miles each day. If she hadn't had it she'd be dead. Any bureaucrats who make the decision as to whether medicare will pay for an operation that makes the difference between life and death would indeed constitute a "death panel," and for Howard Dean, or anyone else, to obfuscate this is simply deceitful.

RLC

You may have heard of Rifqa Bary. She's the young woman who converted from Islam to Christianity and then fled her home in Ohio to find shelter with a Christian family in Florida because her father threatened to kill her for her apostasy. She has petitioned the state of Florida to allow her to remain there.

Now some may have a difficult time believing that a loyal member of the religion of peace, such as her father must be, would want to kill his daughter simply because she became a Christian. After all, it's not as if Muslims actually did this sort of thing, or at least it's not as if they did it very often, or at least did it very often here in the U.S., but the girl's fear is nevertheless palpable (see the opening 20 seconds or so of this video):

Pam Geller has been doing great work advocating on behalf of this girl and bringing her plight to the public's attention (though it's been largely ignored by the traditional media). Go here and scroll down to read about her ordeal.

So far the Florida courts have ruled that Rifqa can remain in Florida while her family is investigated to see if her terror is justified. If you wonder why she's in fear of her life go here and scroll down. Or you can ask Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Wafa Sultan, if you can get past their round-the-clock guard. I would've also mentioned Theo Van Gogh, but it's too late to ask him.

RLC

What lesson is there for the President in the massive public outcry over his plans to address the nations school children on Tuesday? Well, first, it should teach the Democrats about sauce and geese. President George H.W. Bush made a similar address to schools in 1991 and was hammered by Democrats who accused the Republican president of making the event into a campaign commercial.

The second lesson is that the President has used up much of the trust and confidence that the American people placed in him last November. There is growing fear among Americans that either Mr. Obama is not who they thought he was when they voted for him or that he is who they thought he was when they didn't vote for him.

For myself, I have no problem in principle with the President addressing school students. My difficulty is with taking students out of class yet again to hear a talk that will have very little impact on their lives. Students miss so much class time as it is for mandated tests, field trips, sports, student council activities and a multitude of other dubious reasons that to take them out of class once more to hear a lecture that is highly unlikely to make any lasting impression on more than a few of them is really a bad idea. Students thinking seriously about quitting school are not going to change their minds because some guy in Washington says they shouldn't do it.

I also had a concern about the lesson plans designed for the event. There was some reason to think that President Obama was going to use this event as an opportunity to solicit support for his political agenda. The lesson plans prepared for the event originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," and how the president "inspired them," but because the public objected these questionable assignments have been deleted.

So, the public's protestations were a good thing. The event, as it now seems to be unfolding, is fairly innocuous, but given my druthers I'd prefer that the kids be in class learning the things they won't be learning sitting in an auditorium sleeping through the President's speech.

RLC

Perhaps by now you've heard that Van Jones, the President's very controversial Green Jobs czar, has resigned. If you're wondering who Van Jones is you probably get your news from the traditional media. Byron York explains:

The traditional media are either too lethargic or too ideological to have reported prior to his resignation that as the New York Times now tells us:

Three questions press themselves upon us in the wake of this brouhaha: Why was Jones not vetted? If he was vetted why were his views and statements, including his Leninist sympathies, not considered disqualifying? And why did the traditional media ignore the story while it was raging on Fox and on the internet until after the man resigned?

It's all very puzzling and alarming. Either the Obama administration is displaying a distressing lack of competence or it's displaying a distressing fondness for people on the far left of the ideological spectrum.

RLC

A number of readers have pointed out to me that Isa al Masih is Arabic for Jesus the Messiah. I should have known but didn't.

Don't ask me why I didn't google the term before I wrote the response. I have no good answer.

RLC

Students sometimes wonder why and how our politics have gotten so nasty. Actually, this is not a recent development. Many conservative commentators trace the nastiness back to the ugly slanders to which Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were subjected by Senate Democrats, particularly Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, in the late 80s and early 90s. Liberal pundits, on the other hand, point to the impeachment of Bill Clinton by Republicans as another event that created wounds so deep that it may be decades before our public discourse ever recovers.

Whatever the more public catalysts may have been, it seems that a lot of people in politics today have taken rule #12 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to heart: "Pick the target. Freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct personalized criticism and ridicule works.)"

It's worth noting that Alinsky was a left-wing radical writing a manual for progressive activists. There's nothing that I'm aware of in all of conservative literature that comes anywhere close to Alinsky's adjuration to dehumanize and degrade one's political opponents. One searches in vain through Edmund Burke, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, or even Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levine for anything that matches in cruelty or odiousness Alinsky's rule #12.

Yet Alinsky is the left's tactical lodestar and guru. Obama incorporated his teaching into his work as a community organizer. Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on him. Reading Alinsky is a tacit requirement for leftists in good standing. Thankfully, not all of them follow him but evidently enough do that our political discourse has been gravely coarsened.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the left's attacks not only on Bork and Thomas, but also Ronald Reagan, Ken Starr, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Carrie Prejean, the tea partiers and town hall protesters, were so personal, vicious, and vile. Like Alinsky said, it works. Anyone who gets in the way of the progressive agenda can expect to be smeared, insulted, libeled, slandered, and ridiculed. It's the tactic their esteemed mentor urged them to employ and Alinsky's votaries, or at least too many of them, employ it with distressing gusto.

Unfortunately, we're likely to continue seeing this ugliness in our politics until the media and the public demand an end to it. Meanwhile, it's imperative that those on the right who value civil discourse ensure that their side, no matter how much they're angered by the behavior of the left over the last two decades, doesn't fall into the same destructive, degrading rhetorical cess-pool and that we dissociate ourselves from those on the right who may already be swimming in it.

Let's shine a light on this depraved behavior when we encounter it, but let us not succumb to the temptation to respond to it in kind.

RLC

An unidentified reader, who I infer from the screen name is a Muslim, sent me the following in response to the post on enhanced interrogation techniques titled Of Course They Work:

I deeply regret that the reader feels that my disagreement with the absolutist position against torture makes it impossible for him to consider the truth claims of Christianity. Nevertheless, I simply do not see rationality in the absolutist's position. Here's my reply to the writer (slightly edited and amended):

The question of torture, paradoxically, is really a question about who we will love. Will we love innocent human beings or will we love those who threaten them? Sometimes, in certain extreme cases, we can't do both. We have to choose who'll be the beneficiary of our mercy and compassion. When we're confronted with a forced choice, one we can't avoid, to choose the terrorist over one's children or the children of our neighbors strikes me as perverse. There are times in life when compassion and mercy require of us that we do very difficult things. Love is not always about warm, fuzzy feelings.

If you disagree please reread the questions I asked my correspondent and explain to your children why you would rather sacrifice them if the alternative was causing a terrorist discomfort.

A second correspondent's email can be found on the feedback page.

RLC

The funeral is over and a decent interval has passed. Perhaps it's not unseemly now to offer a counterpoint to the public canonization that took place in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy's passing.

To watch the television news and talk shows it might seem as if someone of the moral and political stature of George Washington had died. Ted Kennedy was not the sort of man that deserves the encomiums being heaped upon him by an adoring media. He was, like all of us, a flawed human being. He should be recognized for his commitment to the causes he championed, but it is a distortion of history to portray him as "great."

As a young man Kennedy was an indifferent student and was kicked out of school for cheating. He was probably intoxicated while driving home a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne after a party on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy, you've probably heard, drove off a bridge into the water. He escaped but Kopechne didn't. Even so, the woman could possibly have been rescued if Kennedy had called for help, but he left the scene and spent the next several hours worrying to a friend about how this would effect his career while Kopechne slowly asphyxiated in an air bubble in the back seat of the car.

During much of his subsequent life Senator Kennedy was a heavy drinker and a philanderer. He and Senator Chris Dodd were reported to have notoriously assaulted a waitress in a Washington restaurant, wrestling her under the table as they squeezed her between them in a "waitress sandwich."

The Senator arguably committed treason during the 80's when he wrote to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov offering to work with him to defeat Ronald Reagan's attempts to neutralize Soviet influence in Europe.

He was prone to smearing political opponents, as Robert Bork can attest, and despite George Bush's attempts to reach out to him, all the Massachussetts pol ever gave him was the back of his hand. His legislative successes were almost always of dubious worth to the country and his greatest achievement in the Senate may have been his longevity.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, was the recent revelation from friend and former Newsweek editor Ed Klein that Kennedy actually used to joke about the Chappaquiddick tragedy:

Except that he was born to privilege, Edward Kennedy was a man like the rest of us, full of faults and flaws. That his life would be celebrated by the media in the manner it was and that he would be held up as something of a hero reflects poorly on the state of American culture. It would be better if we asked of our heroes a little more virtue than Mr. Kennedy possessed.

We should certainly be saddened by his death, but let's not think he was someone that he wasn't.

Thanks to Hot Air for the audio.

RLC

This report is big...

This is an absolutely fascinating report. Just yesterday I was making the case that our government mistakenly believes we can spend our way back from bankruptcy to prosperity. Now here's a government, China no less, not only advocating that the people save, but that their savings be gold and silver.

A several observations may be made about this report:

• China is recommending physical gold and silver bullion as appropriate investment and savings vehicles, not stocks, ETFs, futures, options, etc. Why do you suppose that is? Answer: because the bullion is safer than the paper. A mine can be nationalized effectively sending the value of its shares to zero. Similarly, other paper investment vehicles are only promises to pay and subject to force major and can be defaulted. These risks are very real and that's why they tend to have a higher return than the bullion. The bullion is safe, and therefore, smart.
• China wouldn't dare make such recommendations if they didn't have confidence that gold and silver would be profitable as well as be a safe store of their wealth. Note that the Chinese people buying gold and silver will probably make the recommendation something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• China wants to become an economic super power. One of their tactics to accomplish this is to steadily swap their enormous dollar holding for raw materials thus turning worthless dollars into real assets. But they know a nation can hardly achieve such a goal if the majority of its people live in poverty. China knows the fast track to wealth for its citizens is through gold and silver, especially in the years ahead as the Western economies inflate their currencies into oblivion and crash and burn.
• This offers at least one explanation for why China continues to purchase our US Treasuries or at least hasn't dumped them yet - they are, in effect, supporting the dollar which in turn suppresses the price of gold making it relatively affordable for many Chinese. After, they start buying en masse though, the price will become prohibitively expensive if any of the metal is even available at all.

Now we have to wonder, why doesn't our government encourage us accordingly?

WSC

The Obama administration has populated itself with some of the most radical extremists ever to step onto the stage of our political life. We've talked on previous occasions about the worrisome views of men like John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel, and David Blumenthal (see here and here)

The latest to come to light is a communist by the name of Van Jones who is President Obama's "Green Jobs" czar. Jones may be the most radical of the bunch.

Here's an audio clip that reveals something of the kind of man Van Jones is and what his ambitions for this country are. The short of it is that he seems to want to turn America into Cuba:

Jones also believes that the Bush administration was actually behind the 9/11 attack or at least knew it was coming and deliberately chose not to prevent it.

When conservatives fretted that Barack Obama was too cozy with people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright the media pooh-poohed their concerns. Now Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with people just like Ayers and Wright and the pooh-poohers have egg on their faces. You really can judge a man by the company he keeps.

It's deeply disturbing that such a man as Jones would be considered unexceptionable by the administration's vetters. If Jones is allowed to stay in his post after it has now become clear that he's a communist revolutionary and a fringe 9/11 "truther" then we will have learned, or confirmed, something very important, and very troubling, about Barack Obama.

RLC

There's a fascinating report in Science Daily. It seems that researchers have discovered that the difference between chimps and humans is due to the fact that some segments of what is called "junk" DNA, DNA that doesn't code for proteins, were somehow "switched on" in the early history of primates. The resulting proteins coded for by this newly activated DNA were responsible for the emergence of the human species:

This is quite a revelation since Darwinians had long claimed that junk DNA has no function and Intelligent Design advocates had been predicting thatit would eventually be found to have a function in the cell. That there are 18 human-specific genes in what was previously thought to be genetic clutter is pretty embarrassing to Darwinism.

It's also interesting because the DNA was present in the cell prior to having any function. This is hard to square with Darwinian evolutionary theory since it suggests that the cell produced and carried macromolecules for which it had no use, a phenomenon which Darwinism disallows.

Finally, the finding fits nicely with the idea of front-loaded evolution, i.e. the theory that God laid the groundwork for biological evolution at the time of creation and that subsequent evolutionary change has simply been the unfolding of the genetic potentialities latent in life from the beginning.

Whatever the case, the news that junk DNA is not really junk should disturb those who wish to deny teleology in biology. The discovery that preexisting DNA was activated at a certain point in evolutionary history and subsequently gave rise to the human species certainly seems more compatible with a telic view of life than with the notion that evolution is purposeless and random.

RLC

Well, here we are in the beginning of September, notable for historically being a month in which the price of gold goes up so as we might expect, gold has been pretty perky lately. It was up around $20 per ounce yesterday and as I write this, it's up about $20 again for today. It appears that gold is attempting yet another assault on the $1000 level sometime soon.

One interesting observation is that the fundamental issues that have existed since the beginning of the gold bull market that started in 1999 have not changed and, if anything, they have gotten worse. Gold is the safe haven from geo-political and economic risk and it reflects the degree of concern at any given time.

Our government is particularly troubled about the perception of risk because people putting their money into gold are not putting their money into the economy. Since 70% of our GDP comes from the consumer, it follows they the government wants people to consume, not save. (It's ironic that excessive consumption is largely why we're in the economic mess that we are.) So it is predictable that we will see the government making every effort to instill confidence in the people about the economy. They're even rolling out VP Joe Biden to tell us about how the stimulus played a "significant role" in the recovery (in the past tense).

Yes, it's really all about confidence. Confidence in our politicians, our economy, and the strength of our dollar. The game will go on as long as there is confidence so we could accurately say this is a game of confidence or, a con game. A con game works until it doesn't. From the link:

The gold price reflects the degree of confidence inversely or better, we could say it reflects the lack of confidence. It's an invaluable tool for surviving and winning the con game being run on us.

WSC

There's a refreshingly contrarian view at New Scientist to all the claims that machines will soon be as intelligent as humans and that humans will eventually be almost indistinguishable, intellectually, from machines.

Noel Sharkey is a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and he's very skeptical that we will ever succeed in creating machines that can think like human beings. Here's part of a recent interview he gave:

The rest of the interview is at the link.

The danger many people see in the idea of machines having innate intelligence is that it blurs the distinction between human and machine. If humans are not essentially different from machines then humans become de-humanized. When humans lose their uniqueness and are considered to be "just animals" or "just machines" then there's very little reason not to manipulate them and exploit them just as we would animals or computers. Dehumanization always leads to tyranny.

Humans have dignity and worth because they're uniquely created in the image of God. They have intelligence and reason because they were endowed with these gifts by God. To the extent that a machine could be made to think it is only because it was endowed with this ability by an intelligent programmer. As Sharkey says, "It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself."

RLC

There are some lovely astronomical photos and other shots of the night sky at this site. Here's one:

Looking at the pictures I'm reminded of the words of Immanuel Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and more earnestly I think of them - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Indeed, its hard for me to understand how someone could contemplate either without at least wondering whether God exists.

RLC

Jason Mattera really is a piece of work. For those who aren't familiar with him, he's a young political conservative who masquerades as a left-winger at various progressive rallies and demonstrations. The results are often hilarious. Here he's "undercover" at a pro-health care reform rally:

For more of Jason's escapades use the search button and type in Jason Mattera in the search field.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Anyone who still believes that what the CIA euphemistically calls enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) don't work needs to read this article in the Washington Post.

The anti-EIT absolutists (those who believe that EITs are always wrong and never justified) have pretty much lost the moral argument with the American people. Most of those who think about it would affirm that if their child's life could be saved by applying physical or psychological pain to those who threaten her then by all means have at it. Having failed to convince the American people that they are morally perverse for placing the well-being of their children above the well-being of a murderous thug the absolutists fall back on the argument that EITs don't work anyway and therefore should never be employed.

This argument has always carried with it more than a whiff of implausibility (after all, how do we know they don't work unless we use them?) The WaPo article, however, strongly suggests that they do indeed work. It turns out that Sheik Kalid Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, after having been subjected to milder forms of interrogation to no effect, was then allowed to experience the bracing effects of sleep deprivation and waterboarding after which he pretty much ratted out the entire al Qaeda network in the U.S. Here's one relevant section of the piece:

All of this information and more saved countless lives, and it was only obtained because Mohammed's interrogators grew weary of politesse and decided to resort to measures calculated to more compellingly concentrate the minds of the terrorists. Of course, this won't matter to the absolutists who are apparently willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of innocents on the altar of their own narrow-minded, dogmatic concept of inviolable human rights.

RLC

Why, opponents of capital punishment sometimes ask, can we not be satisfied with putting criminals in prison for life? Why must we execute them? One reason, perhaps, can be found in the case of Phillip Garrido, the man arrested for the kidnapping, imprisonment, and rape of 11 year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago.

It turns out that on the day of the abduction, Phillip Garrido was on parole. He had been convicted of federal and Nevada state charges in connection with a Nov. 22, 1976, incident when he was 25 and kidnapped a woman, drove her to a warehouse in Reno and sexually assaulted her. Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison and five years to life in Nevada prisons. But, after stints in federal prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Lompoc, as well as a Nevada state prison, he was released on lifetime parole in 1988.

Having served less than twelve years of a minimum 50 year sentence, Mr. Garrido was released to inflict more horror on a girl and her family whose lives have been ruined by this man and by a system which seems indifferent to the people who must live with such monsters among them.

Whoever was responsible for this man's release, a judge or parole board or whoever, should be held liable for his crimes. If you or I, through an exercise of poor judgment, were to be responsible for harm befalling another person we would be liable and would probably lose all we have in lawsuits brought against us. Just so it should be possible to bring suit against those whose poor judgment results in crimes against others. The best way to stop early release of criminals from prison is to hold those who make those judgments financially accountable for their decisions.

RLC

We've seen that the Democrats' health care proposals, despite insistent denials, would indeed cover care for illegal aliens and would also have government bureaucrats making decisions about who gets what treatment, especially at the end of life.

Now it turns out that supporters of the Democrat plan are acknowledging that yet another serious concern about the plan is well-founded. The plan currently before Congress would, as opponents have alleged, pay for abortions.

Pro-lifer Jim Wallis, an Obama booster, claimed on CNN's Lou Dobbs show that the Congressional plan would indeed cover abortions. However, he goes on to say, incorrectly, that the President doesn't want his plan to do that. In fact, contrary to what Wallis believes, the President has made it clear that he definitely does want abortion to be covered:

One of the reasons so many people are so mistrustful of our political leadership, especially on the issues being advanced by this administration, is that it seems the claims made by supporters of the President are too frequently out of phase with the President's own words. Indeed, it's not uncommon for the President himself to contradict things he had said on previous occasions. There may be reasons for this, it may not be deliberate dishonesty, but if the President is going to regain the confidence of the people he needs to be consistent in what he says. Otherwise, confidence in his word will continue to fade among the American electorate.

RLC