Kelly asks a good question about Islamic outrage over the Teddy bear named for Mohammed on our Feedback page. Meanwhile, the teacher who allowed her students to name the bear was sentenced to fifteen days in jail and is to be expelled from Sudan.

The savages are not happy with the sentence, however:

That she was put in prison at all is an outrage although being expelled from Sudan is surely a great blessing.

Stefan links us to this video which takes the viewer through a size comparison of various celestial bodies. It gives a whole different perspective to life on earth and shows how microscopically puny our world and its inhabitants really are.

There are some other videos on the same page which are also pretty impressive.

CNN hosted the Republican debate Wednesday evening and, through either incompetence or appallingly bad journalistic ethics, utterly squandered whatever credibility they had as an objective news organization. No less than four of the people they had ask questions of Republican candidates were Democrat plants and one was even a Hillary campaign worker.

It's hard to imagine CNN allowing Republicans to ask questions of Democrat candidates and it's just as hard to imagine them allowing Republicans to represent themselves as "undecideds" when in fact they aren't undecided at all. Indeed, it's also hard to imagine CNN allowing Democrats to be subjected to any of the questions that were asked of the Republicans the other night.

Michelle has the goods.

Dick Morris was Mike Huckabee's political advisor in the early nineties so he knows him pretty well. He argues that, contrary to a lot of the sniping at Huckabee for being a tax and spend populist, he really is a fiscal conservative:

Huckabee is gaining momentum because he appears to be one of the few genuine social conservatives in the race. If he turns out also to be a fiscal conservative he will be a force to be reckoned with in the Republican primaries. It remains to be seen, though, what his detailed position on illegal immigration is. On that issue very few candidates find themselves in harmony with the electorate and it could prove to be the undoing of more than one of them.

The rest of Morris' column can be read here.

A good man has passed away and we would be remiss if we didn't note his passing. Henry Hyde died today at the age of 83. This column describes part of Hyde's contribution to the pro-life movement.

Trent Lott is a senator from Mississippi, not Missouri, as we mistakenly had it in our post titled Political Terrorists.

We've corrected the original post and thank Jason for pointing out the error.

This is the thanks Gillian Gibbons gets for forsaking a comfortable life in England to go to Sudan, a suburb of Mordor, to work among the poor. She and her students named a Teddy Bear Mohammed and members of the religion of perpetual outrage are now calling for her to be whipped and even executed:

Read the whole story. You'll marvel at the utter savagery of the Sudanese who think it glorifies God to call for the death of a kind, generous woman for having named a Teddy Bear Mohammed. What a vicious, cruel, bloodthirsty, stupid and petty deity they must think Allah to be. What vicious, cruel, bloodthirsty, stupid and petty people they themselves must be.

Here's a nifty example of solving a problem by defining it away. Some of our nation's schools have been designated "persistently dangerous schools" (PDS). They are PDS because they have high rates of violent assaults. So how does Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) address the problem? She has introduced a bill that changes the designation "persistently dangerous schools" to "schools which do not have a safe climate for academic achievement."

"This will remove the stigma," she explains, "associated with high violence."

Well. We certainly don't want to stigmatize violence in our schools. When you stigmatize something you usually get less of it and why would we want less violence? Besides, if we stigmatize violence somebody might get the idea that our schools are filled with dysfunctional cretins and sociopaths and that would be misleading. They're not really filled with them, after all.

The article linked to above tells us that:

To be sure, we absolutely don't want parents to think that they're sending their children into Fallujah everyday, even if all the evidence tells them that they are. It's a comfort to these parents, we're sure, to be told by school administrators that all the stories of classroom and cafeteria violence they hear from their children, though not exactly untrue, are just not helpful in creating a positive image of the school.

Another good way to avoid the appearance of being a war zone is to simply resist all but the most severe criteria that would identify your school as such:

So the day to day fear that many students and teachers live in doesn't count toward identifying your school as dangerous. Evidently, only if you've been murdered can you say that you attend a dangerous school.

How clever. Everyone agrees that there can't possibly be 36 dangerous schools in the fair state of Maryland, or any other state, so let's simply not identify them as dangerous and then there won't be. What a wonderful solution. Let's try it with other things. Since there are too many poor people living in the U.S. let's lower the standard for poverty to, say, $5000 a year instead of $20,000 and we'll have solved the problem of poverty overnight!

Exactly. How can anyone say a school is violent if no one has ever been murdered there?

Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi is resigning from the Senate and some lefty bloggers are gleefully insinuating that it's because he's been caught in a business relationship with a male escort. They offer not a shred of evidence, however, and the alleged escort has categorically denied it, but these people drag Lott's name through the slime anyway. See Right Wing Nut House for details.

For such people politics is total war. Whatever it takes to win is justified. They're the ideological equivalent of General Sherman burning everything in sight on his march to the sea. In total war there's no such thing as a banned weapon or a war crime. No tactic is too low for them to employ. They would be delighted, it seems, to assist in the utter ruination of every member of the Republican party if they could.

It's ironic that when conservatives talk about a culture war over values raging in this country it's people on the left who look shocked that such a thing would ever be suggested. Meanwhile, like political terrorists, some of them continue to assassinate their opponents every chance they get while denying that there's any ideological conflict going on at all.

The conservative movement in the United States is split between what are called neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives, and there's not much love among the latter for the former. Neo-cons tend to be prone to use force abroad in the name of justice and to use government at home to meliorate social ills. Paleos find both of these tendencies abhorrent.

Pat Buchanan is perhaps the most prominent of the paleo-cons, a segment of the conservative population which tends to be isolationist, nationalist, nativist, and fiscally libertarian (low taxes, small government). His new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart looks to be a very controversial and very provocative read. I haven't read it yet so I don't know whether it's aimed at neo-cons or at liberals. Probably both.

You can read a summary of it here.

Paul Davies points out the flaw in any science which claims to be based upon reason rather than faith in an essay in the New York Times. Here are a few highlights:

The last sentence is an irritatingly common misrepresentation of faith. Faith is not believing despite the lack of evidence, faith is believing despite the fact that the evidence falls short of proof. Anyway, Davies is going to argue that science, like religion, is ultimately based on faith:

This is correct if ultimate reality is physical but not if the ultimate reality is God. If beyond our universe lies something else that is physical then it's true that we lack an exhaustive explanation of physical reality because we have not explained that part of it which transcends our world, but if underlying all physical being is a non-physical Being then that Being provides an exhaustive explanation, at least in theory, of the physical reality.

Davies concludes:

Beyond the fact that this essay is guaranteed to send materialists into a tizzy it's also notable that Davies is saying what many philosophers - most prominently, perhaps, Alvin Plantinga - have been saying for decades: If the physical is all there is then ultimately the universe is non-rational. The rationality that scientists impute to the universe and which forms the epistemic foundation for their investigations of it can only be justified if the ultimate explanation for the universe is an intelligent, rational mind.

Here's a seven minute preview of the forthcoming exposè titled Expelled featuring Ben Stein. The film addresses the attempt by Darwinian materialists to suppress and purge any and all challengers to Darwinian orthodoxy from positions of influence in the academy. It's must viewing for anyone who still clings to the idealized view of the university as a forum for the free exchange of ideas.

Since the 1960s many universities have come to see themselves not as places where students are taught to think critically, challenge ideas, and learn "the best that has been thought and written," but to serve as reeducation camps for indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology and materialist philosophy. It's an unfortunate development and one that has taken place largely beneath the radar of the parents who are paying for their child's indoctrination.

Expelled will be released in February.

HT: Uncommon Descent

This article in the Chicago Tribune has a fascinating account of how a Sunni insurgent became an ally of American troops:

It is common to hear critics of the war argue that the reason things are better in Iraq today has nothing to do with the surge and everything to do with the fact that many Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda, but this is a puerile argument. It seems much more likely that both the American surge and Sunni desperation at al Qaeda tyranny have combined to turn the course of this conflict.

As the above account makes clear people like Abul Abed would not have survived were they not able to call upon beefed up American forces to defend them against al Qaeda. Nor would the Sunnis have been eager to challenge al Qaeda despite the terrorists' atrocities were it not for the knowledge that the U.S. would be there to support them and wasn't going to abandon them.

The surge may not be the only reason things are looking up in Iraq, but it is certainly a necessary reason. Without it there no progress would have been made at all.

In an article on the origin of life (OOL) in Scientific American physicist Paul Davies says this:

In other words the laws of nature are such as to make the origin of life an inevitability, notwithstanding that no one at present has any idea how it happened or could have happened. Even so, De Duve and others say, it had to have happened through purely material processes and forces because the laws of nature dictated it. And how do we know they dictated it? Because it happened.

So, when materialism can't explain the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmos materialists posit a multitude of other universes that are empirically undetectable in order to increase the probability that one like ours would arise by chance.

When materialism can't explain consciousness materialists simply deny that such a thing exists.

Now, because they can't explain how life might have evolved by purely mechanistic processes they posit the existence of laws that have never been detected that make the appearance of life a matter of course.

This is great sport, but it causes us to wonder where it will end. Will someone someday rub his chin and say, "Hmm, maybe the simplest explanation for all these phenomena is not an infinite number of worlds, or inscrutable laws of nature, or the denial of a consciousness that we're all conscious of having? Maybe the simplest explanation is that there's an intelligence out there somewhere behind all these phenomena which are so hard to explain in terms of materialism."

Such a possibility is certainly no less speculative than mumbo jumbo about other universes and mysterious, unknown laws of physics. It would also be, in its way, a Grand Unifying Theory of dozens of otherwise hard to explain phenomena.

This optical illusion is pretty amazing. According to the article, if you see the girl spinning clockwise, that means you're using the right side, or more creative side, of your brain. If she appears to be moving counter-clockwise, then that means the left side, or more logical side of your brain, is dominant.

What the article doesn't say is that if you focus on where her legs pass each other and visualize the elevated limb passing in front of the other when it appears to be passing behind it you can actually get her to switch directions. I guess this means that your brain is switching hemispheres.

Of course, you have to ignore the fact that the young lady appears to be in her altogether to get the illusion to work at all.

We here at Viewpoint have been following Mike Huckabee's progress in the Republican nomination wars and have found much about him to like and some things about which are troubling. Some conservatives, however, like Jonah Goldberg, find him, or rather his economic populism, actually scary.

I agree that there are reasons for concern, and it will be important for Huck to allay some of the fears being expressed by conservatives. Goldberg says this about him:

So what's so scary about Huckabee? Personally, nothing. By all accounts, he's a charming, decent, friendly, pious man.

What's troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do "good works" extends to using government -- and your tax dollars -- to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

For example, Huckabee has indicated he would support a nationwide federal ban on public smoking. Why? Because he's on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.

It will be interesting to see how Huck responds to this sort of critique over the course of the campaign. I am especially anxious to hear his views on illegal immigration. He has said that he favors a robust enforcement of the border but then everybody says that. We'll see.

A lot of people have drawn the conclusion that because intelligent design proponents lost the Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education case a couple of years ago that therefore ID was somehow refuted. This is an unfortunate misconception. As we have written elsewhere, the case may have been rightly decided but much of the reasoning and at least one of Judge John Jones' conclusions was deeply flawed.

The judge almost certainly exceeded both his proper role and his expertise when he gave as part of the rationale for his ruling the claim that intelligent design is not a truly scientific hypothesis. This is not something that a judge is competent to decide, and for Judge Jones to try to do so was as absurd as if he tried to rule on what constitutes art or sport.

The Judge, in fact, tacitly admits that he strayed beyond his purview in an interview on the Lehrer Report. Casey Luskin reports about it here.

Byron offers some dissenting thoughts on our post titled Common-Good Conservatism on our Feedback page. As always, he makes some good observations.

We noted over a week ago the good news that recent developments in stem cell research have made the use of human embryos as a source of stem cells unnecessary. The LA Times has a story on this by Richard Hayes, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland. In the course of the story Hayes makes a rather stunning admission:

In other words, at least some of the apparent support for cloning human embryos was based on nothing more than a desire not be associated with Christians or George Bush. Apparently some liberals would rather keep their concerns to themselves rather than be found on the same side of an issue as George Bush or religious conservatives. It gives us a warm feeling to think that so many of our nation's citizens are so highly principled.

I wonder how many scientists are also skeptical of Darwinism but dread being associated with creationists, or skeptical of some aspect of the current global warming enthusiasms, but quaver at the thought of being on the same side of the issue as the Bush administration.

It's all reminiscent of high school social dynamics. These people would rather be popular and politically correct than do the right thing.

Further evidence to support the belief that most people who vote have no idea what they're voting for: In one of the most inscrutable political moves ever made by the voters of Pennsylvania the man who wrote the following lost his senate seat a year ago to an all but anonymous liberal Democrat for no discernable reason other than that the challenger was a Democrat:

This is former senator Rick Santorum sounding like Mike Gerson sounding like Mike Huckabee sounding like George Bush. For fifty years the preferred solution to poverty among Democrats has been to take from the rich and give to the poor. Unfortunately, six trillion dollars later, the poor are as numerous now as ever because simply throwing money at them does nothing to resolve the reasons they are poor in the first place.

Government has largely usurped the role of meliorating poverty previously filled by community organizations like churches and charitable organizations which are best suited to provide the oversight and discipline necessary to help people lift themselves into the middle class. Not only does government tend to perpetuate by its policies a culture of poverty, not only is it poorly equipped to teach the values needed to eliminate that culture, but, as Marvin Olasky writes in his wonderful book The Tragedy of American Compassion, government usurpation of the role played by local institutions has caused those institutions to largely abandon those roles and to atrophy like a limb that's no longer used.

Whether we call it Compassionate Conservatism (Bush), Heroic Conservatism (Gerson), or Common-Good Conservatism (Santorum) the key to winning the struggle to truly help the poor requires empowering those institutions closest to the people to instill in them the set of attitudes, disciplines, and moral values they must have in order to join the middle class. Simply sending people a check every month almost guarantees that they and their children will remain stuck where they are for the rest of their lives.

Booting out of the senate people who have a strong record of assisting the poor and replacing them with an empty suit - just because the empty suit belongs to the party that wants to send the monthly checks - doesn't help much either.

Go here and look at the upside down pictures of George Bush. They appear to a casual observer to be pretty much identical, but they're very different as you quickly see if you click on the image.

What is it about the brain that causes it to process upside down images differently than the same image right side up? How much of the world do we fail to see because our brains simply don't recognize it? How much different is reality from what we perceive it to be?

Perhaps the world in which we live and move is to the ultimately real world like the world of actors in a movie projected onto a screen is to the three dimensional world of the audience in the theater. Perhaps the ultimately real is comprised of additional dimensions in which we are embedded that our brains are simply unable to process and to which we are oblivious.

If so, the ultimately real could surround us and yet be impossible for us to imagine. We could no more conceptualize it than a blind man could conceptualize the color red. Trying to imagine it would be like a man born deaf and blind trying to imagine what he feels and smells as he sits on a crowded seashore is really like.

Among our philosophical prejudices is the prejudice that the world is pretty much as we experience it. This was the conviction of the prisoner chained in Plato's cave until he was able to break free and climb out of his prison and behold the world in the light of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Perhaps reality is in fact something like it is portrayed in this parable titled Plato's Cave for Modern Man.

Mike Huckabee's first campaign ad is out. I'm not sure it makes much sense, but then few campaign ads do, I guess.

Joe Carter takes issue with a National Review piece critical of Mike Huckabee's fiscal populism as governor of Arkansas and makes a case that between Huck and Romney the Huckster was the more fiscally conservative governor.

If Huckabee finishes strong in Iowa, which polls show him doing, he will be a major player the rest of the way out because he will have a great deal of appeal for Republican moderates and social conservatives. He will also seem an attractive alternative for many Evangelicals who would have otherwise gone to Romney.

I just wish he didn't look so much like Richard Nixon.

Bill and I wish all our readers a wonderful Thanksgiving. Each year on this day we've run the original Thanksgiving Day Proclamation issued in 1789 by George Washington. It's worth reading. Here it is:

All Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations can be found here. No doubt those who say that this country was not founded by religious men nor upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions would rather you not read these, but here they are.

We hope that each of us takes time this day to reflect upon all that we have to be grateful for and to reflect, too, upon our relationship to the God from whom all our blessings flow. Have a great Thanksgiving Day.

First the Democrats sought to pass a bill that would censure Turkey for an atrocity committed 90 years ago. Then they wanted to cut off aid to Pakistan as long as Pervez Musharraf was running the show, now they want to cut off aid to Ethiopia. Quick quiz: What do Turkey, Pakistan and Ethiopia have in common? Time's up. They're all allies of the U.S. in the war against radical jihadism. Ethiopia, especially, is fighting the Islamists in Somalia which takes a lot of pressure off of us.

Next question: What principle is driving the Dems to embarrass and weaken those who are helping us in our fight against the extremists? If you said the desire for justice you might be right, but you'd have a hard time proving it. The Democrats have been relatively silent in the face of injustices elsewhere in the world. Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, China, North Korea, and Sudan are all tyrannical states or on their way to becoming so, yet there's very little stomach on the left for doing much of anything significant to change them. Why, then, are they suddenly aroused from their slumbers when they find abridgements of democratic principles among our friends but not when they occur among our foes?

Perhaps you reply that we don't have as much leverage with our enemies as we do with our friends. This is true, of course, but if one is concerned with justice there are ways to embarrass the perpetrators of injustice other than withholding aid. The condemnation of Turkey wasn't a matter of withdrawing money, it was a matter of passing a resolution. If Ethiopia's lack of a totally free press is the reason for the left's displeasure where are the vocal denunciations of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and the rest of their fellow malefactors?

Third question: Since all the bad guys in the second paragraph are hostile to the U.S. is there a pattern here? Do the Democrats seek to punish those who are useful to our national security while giving those who despise us a pass? If so, why?

Last question: Can people so perverse or so maladroit be trusted to run the foreign policy of this country?

I recently finished reading the much talked about memoir by Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas titled My Grandfather's Son. Thomas describes a rather turbulent life from his days as a poor boy growing up in Pinpoint, Georgia through the rebellion of adolescence to his historic tribulations as a Supreme Court nominee.

The entire book is a good read, offering as it does valuable insights into the complex character and thinking of one of the most powerful men in America, but to anyone who followed the debacle of his Supreme Court nomination, the last several chapters are riveting.

One comes away from the book with his political cynicism intact, if not reinforced. Consider, for example this passage where Thomas, while employed at the Department of Education during the 1970s, asks a staffer to find a study that would show that black students do better in integrated schools than in segregated schools:

When Thomas gets to his confirmation hearings in 1991 the reader's cynicism soars even higher. The account of what he was put through, the attempt to destroy him personally, the lies and treachery he experienced at the hands of Anita Hill and others (Senators Howard Metzenbaum and Joe Biden don't fare well in Thomas' telling of the story), is beyond disgraceful. Yet Thomas treats those who acted so shabbily toward him with fairness and grace.

Even if Anita Hill were telling the truth when she accused Thomas of once, a decade earlier, making inappropriate remarks in her presence, the fact that she never expressed any disapproval to him and instead treated him as a friend - someone she admired - until the day he was nominated for the Supreme Court is beyond contempt. That she made the accusations for no apparent reason other than to destroy his career and to prevent him from taking a seat on the Court is an astonishing betrayal of a man who had helped her several times in her career. One wonders how she and those who used her can sleep at night.

In any event, there are heroes in the book as well as villains. Thomas' grandfather is one of the former (although it's sometimes hard to see why). Senator Jack Danforth is another, and there are more.

All in all it's a very good read, especially for those interested in recent American history and for those who like biography. I know that Hearts and Minds has the book in stock.

Why can't they ever just tell us what they're really trying to accomplish? Why does the left so often package their agenda in camouflage gift wrap?

All through the S-CHIP debate conservatives were saying that the ultimate goal of the Democrats was to impose universal socialized health care on the nation by gradually expanding the coverage beyond just the poor and the young. Progressives denied the allegation by arguing that their intent was to do nothing more than help poor kids. Now, however, former Democratic governor of Iowa, and early presidential candidate, Tom Vilsack has tacitly admitted that conservatives were right and that S-CHIP was just a ploy to get the camel's nose inside the tent. In a speech at Drake U. last week Vilsack acknowledged that:

In other words, the plan was to expand coverage to middle class children, then their parents and eventually to everyone.

Universal coverage is what they have in Canada and England. It doesn't appear to be working well there and there's little reason to think it'd work well here. What it would do is raise everyone's taxes and, if other countries' experience is any indication, lower the quality and accessibility of health care.

It's the dream of the left to fold more and more of the economy into the government in order to realize socialist nirvana but nowhere has socialism ever lived up to its promise. In every western nation in which it has been implemented it has sapped the country of its economic energy and vigor. For the left, however, it's better to have a limping economy than economic disparity.

Even so, there may be a case to be made for universal health care in the U.S. I just wish that its proponents would be forthright about what they're trying to do and let the case be judged based upon its merits. To try to sneak universal health care into our social structure without people realizing what's going on only causes one to doubt that there's a compelling case to be made for it.

HT to the ever vigilant Michelle Malkin who has more on this.

The movie Tears of the Sun is about a team of Navy SEALs sent into Nigeria during a fictional civil war to extract an American doctor. The team is leading a group of civilians out of the country when they come upon a village in which the people are being raped and murdered by Nigerian soldiers. The team's orders for the mission are to take no action unless in self-defense, but the viewer can't help but think that the right thing for them to do is to intervene to save the lives of these poor people. As the Americans watch from a hillside the thugs douse a man with gasoline and prepare to burn him alive. A girl has her breasts cut off and is then raped while she bleeds to death.

As this scene of the movie unfolded I couldn't help wonder, is it not immoral to be able to stop such atrocities and yet refuse to do so? Is it not itself an atrocity to have it within one's power to protect people from the horrors of evil men and yet demur? Do we not have a moral obligation to save those we can from such a fate, even if it means the resort violence?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then should we not have intervened in Rwanda in 1994 to save the Tutsis from the Hutus (Watch Hotel Rwanda or Beyond the Gates)? Should we not have intervened in Darfur to save the victims of that genocide from the Sudanese Islamists in Khartoum? If the answer to those questions is yes, then why should we not also have intervened in Iraq to save the millions of people who were being slaughtered by Saddam Hussein?

I also wondered what pacifists like Howard Yoder or Jim Wallis at Sojourners would say if they were watching Tears of the Sun with me. Would they maintain that the SEAL team should bypass the village and allow the slaughter to continue? If the SEALs intervened and rescued some of the Nigerian children and women would Yoder and Wallis condemn them for their choice?

What would Jesus do, I hear someone ask. I don't know, but I can't imagine that He would just pass on by and let those women and children be savagely slaughtered, or that He would want us to.

If you think that the SEALs should avoid confrontation with the soldiers in that tragic village I urge you to watch the movie and then explain to someone why you think it would have been wrong for the Americans to use violence to help those people. I wonder if your words won't sound hollow even to yourself.

As a contribution to the ongoing debate on torture and waterboarding Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost offers up a couple of posts. In the first he asserts, amidst some disappointingly insulting rhetoric, that torture should never be legal. In the second he seeks to clarify his position, but his clarification seems a little muddled.

He says this:

There are at least two things wrong with what Joe says. The first is that it is a confusion. If there are circumstances in which torture should be carried out then torture in those circumstances is, as Carter acknowledges, morally justifiable. This means that it may, under those circumstances, be the right thing to do, and it is folly to say that the right thing to do should nevertheless be illegal and that the person who does the right thing and perhaps saves thousands of lives thereby should be punished and perhaps even executed.

In his first post he had claimed that "As Christians we must never condone the use of methods that threaten to undermine the inherent dignity of the person created in the image of God." Now he is saying that a man who uses torture against a terrorist to save thousands of innocent lives might himself be legally put to death. This is an odd thing for one to say who has just insisted that we should never do anything to undermine the dignity of someone created in the image of God. Nothing undermines someone's dignity like taking his life away.

What Carter should say is that the torturer bears the responsibility of knowing that he must never resort to torture unless extraordinary circumstances obtain. To do otherwise would be to incur the risk of punishment, but, given those extraordinary circumstances, torture may be considered not only justifiable but perhaps even morally obligatory.

The second thing that's wrong with his clarification is that it seems that Carter has been arguing all along for a position he himself doesn't really hold. After excoriating Christians who refuse to adopt an absolutist position against torture he admits that he doesn't take an absolutist position either. He admits that there may be times when torture should be used and that's all anyone in the debate has ever said.

No one, certainly no Christian, thinks that torture should be undertaken lightly. Everyone agrees that torture should never be used as punishment, revenge, amusement, or as an ordinary interrogation tool. But neither should someone be guilty of a capital crime if, in order to save thousands or millions, he employs a technique like waterboarding which induces panic in someone who has the information needed to save those lives.

After many words and much insult Carter's argument seems to reduce to the truism that torture is wrong except when it isn't. But if that's all he's saying why does he bother to say it?

Amazing news out of Japan, via England, offers real hope for developing stem cells which can be used to heal numerous diseases without destroying human embryos. The technique is so promising that the scientist who developed the first cloned sheep, Ian Wilmut, has decided to adopt it for his own work.

Here are the basics:

There's much more about this development at the link.

Hard on the heels of the Norman Hsu campaign contribution scandal comes word that three of the people pardoned by Bill Clinton as he was on his way out the White House door have contributed thousands of dollars to his wife's presidential campaign.

Why is it that scandal and impropriety cling to the Clintons like a bad odor? Do we really want four, or eight, more years of all that all over again?

This Thanksgiving it might be a good idea, just to deepen our understanding of why we celebrate the day, to watch a movie. Not just any movie but a movie that will impress upon us how glad we should be that we live in the United States and not somewhere else.

Here are a few suggestions:

They're each R-rated, with all that that entails, so be advised, but each of them in its own way will make you thankful every minute that you watch it that you're an American living in this country at this time in history.

If anyone can think of other suggestions send them in via our feedback function by Wednesday, and I'll post them.

This is a glimpse of what radical Muslims are blowing themselves up for in order to impose it upon your children:

This story actually gets worse. Read the rest at the link.

Perhaps you've been wondering lately about the state of research into demonstrating the close kinship between apes and humans by teaching apes how to express themselves in language.

If so, you might be interested in an article by Clive Wynne in Skeptic. Wynne concludes that, contrary to popular misconception, all attempts to teach genuine language to apes have failed.

He notes that:

But then researchers set about in the 1960s and 70s to teach apes to express themselves using signs and symbols. The hope among some was that if apes had the ability to develop language skills of some sort it would provide evidence of our evolutionary relationship. After some initially exciting results enthusiasm subsequently waned, and Wynne concludes:

The problem is that apes can be taught to manipulate symbols but they cannot be taught (or have not been taught) grammar, which is the essence of language. This appears to be a uniquely human capability and thus the distance between us and our alleged anthropoid cousins seems to widen the more we learn about both them and us.

As we've noted before, it must be frustrating to be a Darwinian materialist nowadays. So little of what science is discovering about the world seems to support that view.

Ralph Peters discusses twelve myths of the 21st century:

Anyone who pays attention to the news outlets or reads what Democratic senators and congresspersons have been saying for the last five years has heard each of these in one form or another. Often they're stated with no supporting evidence and they're rarely questioned. Yet each of them is either false or, like #5 and #6, they make a point that's relatively trivial.

Read Peters' discussion of the errors of these twelve myths at the link.

There's something revealing about this line from a story at American Scientist:

Why are structures like bridges and buildings, whose engineering is borrowed from the biological world, considered to be well-designed, but the biological structures which they copy are just the product of blind chance?

Why do we repeatedly find structures in nature which have a design far superior to anything that intelligent engineers have developed yet those biological structures are assumed to be the result of blind, unintelligent, unintentional accident while the relatively inferior efforts of engineers are evidence of intellectual brilliance?

Just asking.

Kimberly Kagan at The Weekly Standard writes a thorough account of how the Surge accomplished the task of largely eliminating the threat of al Qaeda in Iraq. The strategy and tactics she describes may well be a major part of the curriculum in our war colleges in the decades ahead.

Senator Clinton boning up for her first term:

Thanks to Hot Air for the pic.

Reading a rather confusing column by Mort Kondracke on illegal immigration recently I was reminded of the old proverb, born at ancient Troy, to the effect that one should be very skeptical of Greeks offering gifts. Kondracke is so very concerned that the Republicans avoid the fatal mistake of making illegal immigration an issue in the coming campaign that he offers them the gift of some advice that contains within it the seeds of their own defeat.

Rather than opposing illegal immigration, which, Kondracke kindly reminds Republicans, is likely to alienate Hispanic voters, we should instead be digging into our wallets to help illegals cope with life in the U.S.

He thinks Congress should:

What a wonderful idea. Don't stop illegals from entering the country, just pour more money into those areas that are hardest hit by the costs imposed by tens of thousands of poor people flooding their communities. That will be a winner at the polls.

This is the best we can do, Kondracke wants us to believe, since any less generous measures will only cost Republicans the Hispanic vote. Anti-illegal immigrant efforts are a political loser, he assures us, and out of deep concern for Republican electoral prospects he urges them to resist the temptation to embrace such efforts. The voting public, he avers, is not sympathetic to attempts to close down borders and to deny illegals citizenship. This strange claim he supports with very tenuous evidence.

For example, he writes:

Kondracke then totally undermines his narrative by citing cases where anti-immigrant candidates have indeed won and also by acknowledging that measures such as awarding driver's licences to illegals are extremely unpopular:

So which is it? Does the public want the tidal wave of illegal immigration to continue or does it not? What happened in New York recently may offer some insight.

Governor Eliot Spitzer had proposed giving illegals driver's licenses but has since been forced by the massive public pressure that Kondracke says doesn't exist to abandon the idea.

One gets the feeling that Kondracke doesn't want Republicans to take a strong position against illegal immigration precisely because he fears that it would be popular with the voting public and that it would put Democrats at a serious disadvantage. They would be seen not only as the party of defeat in Iraq but also as the party of open borders, a combination that could be electorally fatal. Better, in Kondracke's view, to persuade Republicans not to alienate Hispanics by doing nothing much on immigration and thereby decline to take advantage of Democrat weakness on this issue.

We have made the case at Viewpoint that we cannot allow our borders to remain porous and have offered a solution that would combine justice and compassion. It's a proposal that should be adopted by every politician who wants to get out front on this issue.

I suppose I should say something about Senator McCain's "macaca" moment, i.e. his inappropriate response to a questioner who asked him "how we beat the bitch" (meaning Senator Clinton). I think several things:

1. The faux outrage by the likes of Keith Olberman over McCain's failure to admonish the questioner is as hypocritical as it is fatuous. Where was the outrage among Democrats when Senator Harry Reid called George Bush "a loser" in front of school children or when Senator Kerry called him a "f-ing idiot" or when lefties of various denominations call him or the Vice-President murderers, liars, Hitler clones, chimps, etc? Senator McCain's reaction to Senator Clinton being called a bitch is to what Democrats have called President Bush as a burp is to a hurricane.

2. Sen. McCain's apparent acquiescence in the questioner's insult of Sen. Clinton is not incompatible with other things that I've read about his temper and his mean-spiritedness (See The Ugly Side of John McCain). It is symptomatic of a character that I would be uncomfortable voting for even though I agree with Sen. McCain on many of the issues at stake in the coming election.

3. If the election next year is between Senator McCain and Senator Clinton I would still vote for Senator McCain. He is not only much the better qualified of the two, he is not the one, after all, who used the derogatory term. Senator Clinton, however, has been reliably reported to have on occasion used demeaning language to describe Jews. She is reported to have once called a campaign aid an "f-ing Jew bastard," and she essentially called General Petraeus a liar. That seems to me to be far more offensive than any alleged shortcomings in John McCain's character.

4. My favorite all along has been Mike Huckabee. It still is.

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Bush, has written a wonderful book based on his years in the White House. The book, both a manifesto and a memoir, is full of insights into the events of the last eight years and also into the character of George Bush. Gerson titles it Heroic Conservatism and in it he calls for a conservatism that refuses to turn its back upon the poor. He thinks that conservatism is the best hope for the country's future, and one gets the impression that he thinks liberalism, about which he says almost nothing, is pretty much incompatible with, or irrelevant to, our national well-being.

In some ways the book is mildly self-serving. Gerson praises Bush's vision, for example, by quoting throughout the volume what Bush said about this or that issue, but these words were often written for Bush by Gerson himself.

He's also a little unfair to traditional economic conservatives who he faults for lacking sufficient compassion for the disadvantaged. He says that traditional disdain for big government leads many to a libertarian view that market forces will by themselves somehow pull the poor out of the mire of destitution, and he faults some for opposing welfare reform and other initiatives to help the poor. This all seemed a little strange to read since it's not so much government itself that conservatives abhor but rather the tendency of bloated, profligate government to squander our tax dollars, wasting them on ineffective programs.

It's bureaucratic ineffectiveness and incompetence that provoke conservative contempt, not government per se. It was also strange that Gerson chose to criticize conservatives for opposition to welfare reform in the nineties when in fact this was a reform initiated by Republicans and opposed almost exclusively by liberal Democrats.

Such quibbles aside, however, Gerson's prose scintillates and the portrait he paints of George Bush will be a real eye-opener for anyone who gets their news from the mainstream media and who believes Bush to be both stupid and evil.

Heroic Conservatism is a call for conservatives to stand against oppression and tyranny around the world and to make the poor a priority here at home. He grounds this call in an explicit Christian worldview that informs everything Gerson (and Bush) believes. It's a book that gives the reader a good idea of the conservative thinking embodied in Ronald Reagan and George Bush and which appears to be the brand of conservatism represented in the current crop of presidential candidates by Mike Huckabee. It is, one hopes, the kind of thinking that will set the agenda of our nation for decades to come.

You can get the book at Hearts and Minds Bookstore. If you're interested in politics and political ideas you're certain to enjoy Heroic Conservatism.

The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen its "word of the year." It is ... locavore. Never heard of it, you say? Neither have I. You can check it out here.

Michael Totten has an excerpt on his site from a book written by Staff Sergeant David Bellavia about the battle for Falluja. In the excerpt Bellavia describes an encounter he had as he and his men were going house to house to clear insurgents.

The language is rough, the violence is ghastly, but it is gripping stuff. The book is titled House to House: An Epic Memoir of War.

A few days ago a young man walked into a high school in Finland and opened fire, killing several students. What motivated the attack? It turns out that the killer, who called himself the natural selector, was a zealous Darwinian. The following is from his website:

The lawyer who represented families of the Columbine High School victims says this about the Columbine killers:

Yes, we do. Ideas have consequences. When people believe that they're animals like any other and that morality is an illusion created by our genes to get us to cooperate, who should be surprised that acts of nihilistic mayhem follow?

Materialistic Darwinism drains the human soul of all meaning and purpose. It empties us of all moral value and human worth. And then its votaries, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, perversely accuse Christianity, the only belief system which actually offers a basis for exalting human beings, of being a bane upon the earth. How long will these people be allowed to get away with such fatuousness?

There are a lot of people who wish to be able to do something to help the world's poor, but have no idea how best to do it. Indeed, a lot of the poverty aid we send abroad either never gets to the intended recipients (In some African states only one cent out of every aid dollar gets to the people who need it) or actually hurts the people it is intended to help.

The problems of the world's poorest people are almost intractable and cannot be solved simply by throwing money their way. Oxford's Paul Collier explains the difficulties in a book that is both depressing and hopeful. It's titled The Bottom Billion and in it Collier notes that there are roughly five billion people in the world. Approximately one billion are living in relative comfort and affluence. About three billion of the remainder are moving in the direction of increasing prosperity (an unprecedented historical achievement), but one billion, the inhabitants of about two dozen nations concentrated mostly in Africa, but including places like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Burma, remain mired in poverty and failure. Not only is their standard of living not rising relative to the other four billion, it's not rising in absolute terms either. In fact, in many of these countries it's declining.

Collier explains why this is with analytical and dispassionate professionalism and suggests what can be done to change it. Reading him one is struck with a confidence that one is reading a man who knows what he's talking about.

The problems he describes are so ingrained that no solution can be guaranteed to work, but there are some things that have a chance.

The first thing, though, is that we have to recognize that the bottom billion live in countries afflicted by one or more of four poverty traps that are like deep wells from which it is nearly impossible to escape. These are the conflict trap (war), the landlocked with bad neighbors trap, the poor governance trap, and the natural resource trap (having an abundance of a single valuable resource like diamonds or oil). This last seems counter-intuitive but Collier explains why being blessed with a valuable resource is often more of a curse than a blessing to the development prospects of the country.

Most of the book is spent explaining how these four traps keep the bottom billion in abject poverty. In the last few chapters he offers some suggestions as to what rich countries can do to meliorate their predicament. His prescription includes elements likely to displease both liberals and conservatives, but Collier is not an ideologue. He's a pragmatist who is not shy about criticizing the "headless hearts" who seek to assuage their pity for the poor by just doing something without really understanding what the problems are.

He argues that if we're serious about helping the poor in many of these failed states we have to be prepared, among other things, to use military force, a suggestion bound to cause fainting spells in liberal salons across Europe and North America. Nor is he shy about challenging those conservatives who think that we should either leave the poor alone or teach them capitalism. He argues (not very persuasively, I'm afraid) that we just can't do the former and (much more persuasively) that the latter is much too simplistic.

I recommend this book to anyone concerned about the problems of the world's poorest people and especially to students doing international studies or who are thinking about doing mission work in places like Africa.

You can order it at our favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post is a consistently lucid foreign policy thinker who has written a critique of U.S. Middle East policy that one hopes is required reading at the State Department and the White House. If she's right, and she certainly makes a lot of sense, this administration has lost its way in how it addresses the problems posed by both our putative allies as well as our enemies.

The fact that Iran is undeterred in its quest to build nuclear weapons, that Saudi Arabia has jacked the price of oil to $100 a barrel, that Hezbollah and Hamas are as virulent as ever, that the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and that Pakistan is on the brink of collapse, all suggest that an all carrot no stick diplomacy isn't working very well. Indeed, the only thing going well in the Middle East right now is, remarkably enough, Iraq, but unless the issues in play in Pakistan, Iran and Syria are resolved, even that success, bought at such a high price, is at risk.

Read Glick's analysis at the link.

The Washington Post has an excellent article on the effects rising oil prices are having around the globe. There are winners and losers, but the winners are not necessarily the people who inhabit the oil-exporting countries. The residents of Chad for example see little of the wealth their oil has generated. Most of the oil revenue is going to buy weapons. Other winners are nations we wish weren't winning - Venezuela, Iran, Russia. One winner, perhaps surprisingly, is Alaska.

Losers include almost all third world oil importers plus China, South Korea, Japan, etc.

One country the article doesn't mention is Mexico which has a lot of oil. Evidently the revenues they're accruing from this blessing are not finding their way down to the poorest Mexicans, otherwise why would they risk the ordeal of a border crossing to come here to do stoop labor for a few dollars a day? Apparently, the Mexican government is getting rich while their poor throw themselves on the mercies of the American taxpayer.

Anyway, check out the Post article. It's an education.

Here's interesting news: Brazil has discovered a major oil field lying just offshore. It has the potential to be as big as the reserves in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Now if only our Congress would allow us to drill offshore and in Alaska we'd be awash in oil. As it is some analysts are predicting $4.00 a gallon gasoline within a couple of months.

If this prediction should come to pass don't blame the oil companies, blame a Congress which has blocked new drilling, made refineries prohibitively expensive to build and pretty much regulated nuclear power to the point where no one wants to build new power plants. If Congress had wanted to make us dependent on foreign oil they couldn't have devised a more effective way of guaranteeing that we would be.

E.W. Bullinger provides an interesting commentary of the letters of apostle Paul in his The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians and offers some fascinating insights.

In the beginning of the book, he discusses the organization and structure of the epistles and explains how the seven books can be grouped into two sets of three and four. Romans, Ephesians and Thessalonians making the set of three, and then Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians making the set of four. At first I was going to attempt to provide my own interpretation but I quickly came to see that it would be more expedient simply to use his words. He goes on to explain that Romans stands first, containing the A, B, Cs of Christian education...

Given this, we have an outline "structure" as follows:

The rest of the book provides a commentary on the seven Epistles and expands considerably on the structure and content above.

What a fascinating individual Bullinger must have been to have been able to glean such insights from his study. I am continually amazed as I read his work. I haven't finished The Church Epistles - Romans to Thessalonians yet but I already know that, like some of his other work, I'll read it again a second or third time. This is definitely a must-read volume that anyone who is serious about the Bible will want to have in their library. I suspect the folks at Hearts and Minds Books would be happy to get a copy to you.

WSC

Dinesh D'Souza talks about his recent debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens at his web site. Among other interesting morsels he offers this:

Indeed. Atheism offers nothing to society except perhaps "gangsta" rap and art that consists of crucifixes immersed in urine. Atheism has inspired no charities, no hospitals, no feats of moral greatness, no great art or music. It inspires nothing because it is essentially nihilistic. It denies the existence of meaning, purpose, and hope in the world. It tells us that human beings are nothing but cattle, that we have no dignity or worth, that morality is an illusion. All of this leads to ugliness and despair. It's certainly not very inspiring.

On the other hand, it does inspire one question: Why, given the bleakness and sterility of the atheistic worldview, does anyone embrace it? I suspect that at least part of the answer for at least some atheists is that the denial of God enables one to reject certain moral constraints placed upon our sexuality. A recurrent theme in the biographies and writings of atheists from Bertrand Russell to Michael Onfray is the sexual liberation they desire and which atheism facilitates.

Like a man in the grip of homosexual lust who is willing to risk contracting HIV if only he can gratify his need in some anonymous bathhouse encounter, some are willing to embrace a meaningless, hopeless existence as long as they can have sexual pleasure. It's the same sort of bargain Dr. Faustus made with Mephistophilis and which proved his undoing. It's a bargain that has been destroying lives ever since the dawn of civilization.

We've received a lot of feedback on the post Boys Adrift, most of it from young women, interestingly, but some from young men. Most of the people who responded to that post said they knew people who fit exactly the description of the guy who experiences "Failure to Launch." Some of the responders asked what the author suggests parents can do about it. I urge anyone interested in the problem to read Sax's prognosis and prescriptions. It's one of the most important books published in the last couple of decades, in my opinion, and anyone who is a parent, teacher, or who works in any capacity with young men or hopes to someday be one of these should definitely spend time with it.

Michael Yon took this photo in Baghdad of Muslims helping Christians replace a cross atop St. John's Church. It's a nice story which you can read here. The second paragraph is especially encouraging.

This interesting article, passed along by a student, suggests that moral behavior is a function of the brain and that if we alter the brain we will disrupt the normal moral decision-making process.

This is no doubt true, but we shouldn't think that this proves determinism to be true. It doesn't follow that because some choices for some people are not free that therefore no choices for anyone are free.

A healthy brain may well work with the mind to produce choices that are not necessitated by prior states of affairs. In other words, in a normally functioning mind/brain system we have the freedom needed to be held morally responsible for our decisions. The future is not predetermined by the past nor by our present brain states. There is right now more than one possible path into the future that we can choose.

The determinist disagrees with this, but he has a difficult time explaining why. After all, he has to admit that ultimately his disagreement is the inevitable product of all the influences that have acted upon him throughout his life, and he has no way of knowing whether the "truth" of determinism is one of those influences or not.

From time to time we hear laments in the media about the flow of jobs out of the country and the deteriorating economic position of the American middle class. Much of the blame is placed on globalization (when they get done blaming Bush), but this article by Daniel Griswold in the New York Post argues that the conventional complaints about globalization are little more than myths. Griswold points out, for instance, that:

There's more in the article to shine a ray of optimism into the gloominess you might be feeling today as the Dow continues its dispiriting free-fall.

The conventional wisdom has long been that intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific, hypothesis and when Judge Jones' oracular ruling in the Dover trial reinforced the conventional view everyone nodded their heads in unthinking agreement. Dave Scott over at Uncommon Descent argues persuasively that this is simply wrong. He explains succinctly why it is that ID bears the chief qualification of any theory that aspires to be scientific - it's falsifiable.

Scott writes:

It might be argued, however, by those who deny the claim that ID is science that had P. falciparum produced complex systems that it would have at best only falsified certain versions of ID. Many ID theorists believe that design was front-loaded into the cosmos so that the Designer produced a semi-deterministic process that would gradually unfold the varieties of living things we see today. Someone who holds this view, if confronted by empirical evidence of complex systems produced during the trillions of falciparum replications, could technically claim that the bacterium is simply playing out the program that had been downloaded into the universe (or into life) at its origin.

Thus, the critic might argue, ID is not falsifiable even if it appears that natural processes are producing the complex systems that ID alleges natural processes cannot produce. Therefore, ID is not a truly scientific theory.

Even so, whatever the technical refuges available to the IDer might be, discovering an actively evolving complex system in P.falciparum would deal a devastating psychological blow to intelligent design and would make it very difficult for anyone advocating it to get traction in the intellectual community. For this reason I agree with Scott that ID is in principle psychologically falsifiable if not technically so.

Moreover, it is at least as falsifiable as is the Darwinian claim that natural forces and processes are responsible for the great diversity of life we see in the world around us. What set of observations could be reasonably expected to prove that claim false?

Thus if that claim is considered to be within the domain of science there's no justification, other than metaphysical prejudice, for excluding the claim that natural processes are inadequate to account for specified complexity in the biosphere.

Michael Ramirez comments on how Congress might handle a terrorist nuclear threat:

Mark Steyn, who seems to know everything about music, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Alan Bloom's classic work the Closing of the American Mind with a paen to Bloom's chapter on the music culture in the U.S.

If you liked Bloom's book - I won't believe you if you tell me you've never read it - and/or you're a student of music and/or music history, you'll be delighted by Steyn's essay which he opens with this:

Read the rest. It's very good.

One of the claims made by open borders advocates on both sides of the border is that a fence would not keep people from illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States. I always wondered how they knew that and why, if they did know it, they would so strongly oppose the fence since, according to them, it wouldn't stop illegals from pouring across our frontier anyway.

Their assertion always seemed at best counterintuitive and at worst disingenuous. Now we can add to it's list of shortcomings the fact that it appears to be empirically false. Just ask the people on both sides of the border who live near the section of fence that has been erected.

If you watch the video at the link note the statement of the third guy interviewed: People should be free to go where they want. I wonder if he keeps the doors of his home open to anyone who wants to wander in and out.

The matter of torture has raised its ugly visage once again last week, this time in the hearings for President Bush's nomination for the post of Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey was asked whether waterboarding was torture, in response to which he wiggled and waggled and never answered the question, an evasion which cast momentary doubt upon his confirmation.

What Mukasey should have said is that the question the Senators asked really can't be properly answered until Congress has legislatively established a meaningful definition of torture. Everyone is "against torture" in the abstract, of course, but few can say with any precision what torture is and under what circumstances, if any, it should ever be permitted.

The United Nations Convention on Torture, which is frequently cited as authoritative and to which we are a signatory, is so vaguely worded as to be not much help. Article 1 says:

The difficulty is the phrase "severe pain or suffering." What constitutes "severe"? What metric do we use to assess mental pain to determine whether it is severe? What is severe for one person may be easily tolerated by another.

Another problematic construction is the phrase "intimidating or coercing." Anyone who is a prisoner and held under armed guard is going to be ipso facto intimidated and coerced. It would appear that, taken literally, the Conventions rule out holding prisoners.

Article 16 of the document states that in addition to torture all acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1 are also to be forbidden.

But this is no help either. What is inhuman and/or degrading is highly subjective. It is degrading to be yelled at or to be shackled or even detained by another, for heaven's sake. The U.N. Conventions, if taken seriously, make an interrogator who raises his voice to a prisoner subject to being charged with a war crime. This is ludicrous, of course, which is why no one takes the U.N. Conventions seriously. They define torture so broadly that almost anything the military does with detainees could be construed as falling afoul of the guidelines.

As matters stand torture is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. What is needed is for the Congress of the United States to do what President Bush has urged it to do and conduct a debate on these matters and produce more lucid guidelines as to what will be permitted to our interrogators and what will not.

Until then, questions like the one asked of Mukasey will remain pretty much meaningless.

Antony Flew, the world famous atheist philosopher who began having doubts back in the 1980s about the ability of atheism to explain certain facts about the world and who subsequently became a theist (though not a Christian), has written a book describing the thinking that led him to abandon atheism and embrace theism.

The volume is titled There Is a God and in it Flew, the son of devout Christian parents - his father was a Methodist preacher - recounts how he abandoned his parents' faith at about the age of fifteen, largely under the influence of the problem posed by the unfolding Nazi evil in the 1930s, and how he went on to become one of the most prominent philosophical atheists of the twentieth century. He was committed throughout his career to the principle that one should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and he could never see the evidence he was able to observe leading anywhere but to atheism.

This began slowly to change, though, in the 1980s. Throughout his career he had been in contact with some brilliant Christian thinkers - he knew C.S. Lewis - but by the late 80s the number of outstanding Christian philosophers had multiplied and their work was undermining several of Flew's chief philosophical arguments.

Following hard upon this state of affairs were the developments in cosmology which had been accruing for the past decade. Three questions in particular kept popping up and pointing Flew away from his atheistic assumptions: Where did the laws of nature come from? How did the cosmos come to be so finely tuned for life? And how did complex life arise out of nonliving matter?

Gradually, Flew was led by the evidence to the conclusion that there is indeed a divine mind behind the universe. He had no Damascus road experience, no moment of conversion, just a gradual realization that theism is true.

He is not a Christian and still finds the idea of an afterlife difficult to accept, but he's very open to Christian belief and even includes in his book an appendix written by renowned theologian N.T. Wright, with whom he has been in dialogue, in which Wright lays out the case for the resurrection of Jesus, a case that Flew finds impressive. He concludes with this assessment of Wright's argument: "It is absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful."

It will be interesting as the life of this great thinker draws closer to its end if there are not yet one or two further surprises forthcoming.

There Is a God can be ordered at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

The Daily Telegraph of England unveils its list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America. Like most such lists there's much to quibble with.

For instance, the list of conservatives belies a real failure to understand American conservatism. They have Rudy Giuliani ranked #1, but Giuliani isn't really much of a conservative, and he's certainly not influential. General Petreaus is #2, but I doubt that he has ever publicly stated a political position, and despite his excellent service to our country, he's hardly influential in the realm of conservative ideology. Matt Drudge at #3 deserves to be somewhere on the list, perhaps, as does Newt Gingrich at #4 but certainly neither belongs in the top five. Drudge is best known for his news website, not his political views and although Gingrich is influential his influence is mostly confined to the more cerebral conservatives. The most influential conservative in America actually doesn't appear on the list until #5. You can go to the link to find out who that is.

In my opinion the most influential liberal doesn't show up until #9 on the liberal list. I certainly don't think the number one choice, Bill Clinton, is really all that influential or even all that liberal.

Another reason to not like the list is that Viewpoint doesn't appear anywhere on it. What's up with that?

This will make your jugular bulge. The University of Delaware has been requiring students to attend mandatory reeducation and consciousness raising sessions with the Resident Assistants in their housing units. The group FIRE has the details in this press release from last week:

UPDATE: The chairman of the University politburo, Patrick Harker, sensing the PR disaster that this program has turned into, has ordered it be terminated. Good decision, comrade.

The situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate. Pakistan military personnel fighting the Taliban in the northwest (Waziristan) are surrendering or being captured and beheaded in droves. President Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. The Supreme Court has been disbanded. Thousands have been arrested and thousands more are marching in the streets in protest.

Why should we care? We should care because Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the Islamists fighting against the government want them. If they get them we will almost certainly be a target. We should also care because Musharraf has been a fairly steady ally in the war on terror. Should he fall, Pakistan, with its 160 million Muslims, may be lost to us.

Bill Roggio and Breitbart have further details.

The only silver lining here is that Musharraf may be getting desperate enough to take serious measures against the Taliban, and may even invite us to help him. This would go a long toward easing Taliban pressure on Afghanistan.

As Hugo Chavez moves inexorably closer to becoming a dictator in Venezuela and as thousands of protestors fill the streets to demand that he stop his quest for absolute power, the American left is showing its solidarity with ... Chavez.

It's not just Cindy Sheehan, of course. Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover have all made the pilgrimmage to Caracas to pay homage to the man who promises to be the next Fidel Castro.

The left has a strange fascination with thugs and killers. They loved Fidel Castro, and they recently oberved the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. Che was a mass killer, who did Castro's dirty work after he overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, executing hundreds of members of the previous government, but the left reveres his memory anyway, just as they loved Stalin and Mao who murdered millions of their countrymen in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students and others are marching for freedom in Venezuela and are being suppressed by rubber bullets, tear gas, and fire hoses, and the left in the U.S. is largely silent. Chavez wants to impose socialism in Venezuela and civil and political rights are expendable if they stand in the way of socialism.

This story about Francis Bok, a Christian refugee from the Sudan, is a snapshot of what life is like for black African Christians living in an Arab Muslim country. It's a column you shouldn't miss. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Read the rest of Bok's tale at the link.

In the movie Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughy plays a 35 year-old man named "Trip" who still lives with his parents who are growing increasingly desperate to have him leave the house. Unfortunately, McConaughy is in no hurry to give up this comfortable arrangement, and so the parents hire the services of a professional "interventionist" (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) to woo him out of the nest.

The movie is humorous, but Leonard Sax, a family physician and research psychologist, takes the main theme seriously. He cites a lot of evidence to support the claim that there is a growing and worrisome epidemic of boys and young men who seem listless, alienated from school, and unmotivated toward doing the things that one must do to achieve success in life. It's not that these boys aren't bright, many of them are. It's not that they're unmotivated, many of them are highly driven but not toward the goals that parents and teachers would prefer.

Sax assumes that boys themselves haven't changed much in the last thirty years but that our culture has. He discusses five changes in particular that have had a profound effect on young males and which he believes to be largely responsible for the lassitude many of them exhibit. Not every boy is affected to the same extent by these five factors nor do the five affect every boy, but, Sax argues, enough boys are harmed by at least one of them to have created a serious problem for many parents and teachers, not to mention the boys themselves. He concludes the book with some advice as to what parents might do to help their sons.

The five factors Sax discusses are these:

Changes at school: Many schools, particularly in the early grades K through 2 or 3, are not well-structured for boys. Consequently, boys fall behind early, become disengaged and often never develop an interest in academic success.

Video games: Sax points out that gaming often takes over a boy's life. He can have success, power, and thrills through video games that his normal activities can't come close to providing. As a result he's often not motivated to do much of anything but compete on-line and on-screen and this he often does for hours everyday.

Medications for ADHD: Alderoll and Ritalin are often over-prescribed and are now believed, according to Sax, to be damaging to a boy's brain.

Endocrine disruptors: This one was the most surprising to me. Some of the chemicals which leach out of the clear plastic bottles which are used to contain so much of the liquid we drink mimic estrogen, a female hormone. Some scientists believe that this is at least in part responsible for the decline in male fertility in much of the developed world. It has also, Sax, suggests had a number of other side effects which are harmful to male development.

Revenge of the forsaken gods: Recent generations of boys are unique in our history in that many boys have grown up without positive male models in their lives to pass on to them what it means to be a man. There are few masculine heroes today and many boys grow up surrounded only by their peers. Such boys tend to become either "slacker dudes" or they seek to emulate Akon, 50 Cent and other thugs.

There's much more to each of these factors than what I've sketched above, and the material Sax lays out for the reader in each of the chapters devoted to them is often fascinating.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is one titled End Result: Failure to Launch. In this section Sax shares e-mails and other correspondence he has received from parents, girlfriends, and wives of boys and young men who exhibit the characteristics he talks about in the book. The e-mails are riveting in their pathos and the sense of wasted lives that they convey.

If you are a young man, the parent of boys, a teacher of boys, or one who cares about our future then this is a must-read. I'm buying a copy of the book for my daughter and daughter-in-law for Christmas. It may be the best present you can give a parent of a boy you care about.

You can order a copy of Boys Adrift for someone you think should read it at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

Jonah Goldberg pens an insightful essay on the subject of why people who are basically conservative nevertheless often tend to vote liberal. Here's an excerpt:

Unless and until we start voting for what's in the best interest of the country as a whole and not for what's in our own best interest, special interest politics will continue to pull us further toward state socialism whether the government is run by conservatives or liberals. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans want to stroll toward socialism at a more leisurely pace whereas Democrats want to sprint to it.

I've been meaning to post a thought or two on Viewpoint but other concerns have prevented me from doing so. However, I felt today was a special day of sorts so I determined to at least post this brief observation. It was just over three years ago that I posted A Gold Primer and at that time, gold was selling at about $400 per ounce. I suspect when, at the time, our readers saw that, they felt gold was way over-priced and certainly, there must be better investments. I suspect that when our readers see the price of gold today they may continue to believe that the price of gold is too high and...there are better investments. You see, gold just closed the trading session today at $805.00.

I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of those posts to see if they might still be relevant today and I was fascinated with the sense of timelessness I felt while reading A Gold Primer. The main threads of interest were gold, the dollar, and oil. This week oil hit record highs, the dollar hit record lows, and gold is closing in on its record high of $850 from 1980.

As I mentioned in A Gold Primer, the cost of gold hasn't really increased in the last three years, rather the purchasing power of the dollar has been diluted by the flood of "liquidity" from the Federal Reserve. Since the process of inflation tends to accelerate, as it is wont to do, it's becoming much easier to observe. In only three years, the Federal Reserve has caused the loss of a cool 50% of the dollar's purchasing power.

Ignore the representatives at the Fed who claim that inflation is "tame". Inflation is alive and well. Asia and the Middle East oil countries see it first hand. China holds $1 Trillion dollars in US government investments and in only three years they have realized a loss of $500 Billion. They can't feel very good about that. Oil is similar to gold. It's not that the price of oil has gone to record highs, the purchasing power of the dollar has gone to record lows so the oil-producers demand more dollars for a barrel of oil. That should'nt be a surprise.

The individual articles that make up A Gold Primer can easily be found using the Viewpoint Search facility but I have consolidated them into one document and shamelessly placed it in the Viewpoint Hall of Fame section.

Enjoy,

WSC

Liberals, George Will tells us, have taken to calling themselves progressives because the word liberal has become rightly identified in the public mind with lousy ideas. Changing the name, however, doesn't change the quality of their ideas. For example, consider the upcoming referendum in Utah over a school choice/voucher program. According to Will, the benefits of the program are substantial, but it is being opposed by those who label themselves progressives. Why would liberals, who claim to be all in favor of a person's right to choose, nevertheless oppose it when it comes to our children's education? Will writes:

I've omitted a few paragraphs for the sake of brevity, but the rest of the essay can be read at the link. When a "progressive" says he or she favors a person's right to choose, the only choice they're referring to, evidently, is the choice to kill one's unborn children.

This story offers an excellent look and feel for what our troops have been going through in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last four years and what combat is like there. The courage and strength these men exhibit under unimaginably terrifying conditions is truly breathtaking. It's also a story which for some reason you'll never read in the MSM.

When Senator Sam Brownback dropped out of the Republican race for the nomination for President it opened the field for the guy we've kept our eye on for the past six months - Mike Huckabee. If Huck can do well in the New Hampshire primary he'll very likely vault into the first tier of candidates, and once he's there, and people get to hear him and learn what he's about, he may be competing for front-runner status by summer.

This Weekly Standard article, especially the second page, explains what makes Huckabee such an attractive candidate for many socially conservative Republicans and even some moderate Democrats. Or you might wish to read this piece by Dick Morris. They're both helpful in understanding who Mike Huckabee is and why, if voters got to know him, he'd be a formidable candidate not only for the nomination of his party but in the November election as well.

Unfortunately for Huck, conservatives are not unanimous in their appreciation of his positions. Dissenting views have been expressed by John Fund and Hugh Hewitt among others who explain that, though they sincerely like Mike Huckabee, he's not the conservative he appears to be, especially when it comes to economic matters.

Even so, he's probably more representative of many contemporary Republicans than anyone else in the race except, perhaps, John McCain who has burnt too many bridges in the party to get the nomination. If you're not sure what it means to be representative of Republican voters you might want to read one or both of the articles linked in the second paragraph.

Is it torture if you can volunteer for it and then talk about it while you're undergoing the treatment? It hardly seems the same as having one's fingernails pulled out. The guy in this video has himself subjected to the controversial interrogation technique called waterboarding, a technique critics call torture, but he certainly seems none the worse for the experience.

Anyway, when a terrorist is subjected to waterboarding in order to extract information that might save the life of one of your children, the terrorist is in complete control of how long it lasts. All he has to do is produce the information and it's over. Opponents of this technique, however, think that terrorists should have the right to withhold information that could save your child's life and should not be subjected to unpleasant experiences to make them give it up.

Here's a question for those who might be disturbed by the video of three men holding down the subject: Imagine the scene in a Civil War field hospital where men had to hold down a wounded soldier so that the surgeon could amputate his leg without anasthesia in order to save his life. What is the moral difference between what the surgeon's assistants did in holding down a screaming soldier in order to save his life and what modern interrogators do in holding down a panicky terrorist in order to save the lives of innocent civilians?

If you go to the post at Democratic Underground the guy talks about his experience of being waterboarded. He seems to be saying that since he couldn't take the treatment for more than a few seconds it must therefore truly be torture. This is a weird argument. If we accept it then we have to say that any technique that gets a terrorist to talk is ipso facto torture and therefore should be considered banned by the Geneva Conventions.

If the terrorist spills his guts after a few minutes of listening to AC/DC that would be torture according to the guy at Democrat Underground, but this is nonsense. Whatever torture is it doesn't consist simply in being unendurable.

There are lots of arguments on offer as to why we should not have gone to war in Iraq and why we should not now stay there. Some of these arguments are good, many are not, but one of the worst is an argument that a correspondent on another blog trotted out against my concern that a premature retreat would be a human rights disaster in the Middle East. The same argument recently appeared in a letter to the editor of the local paper written by a woman who used it to disparage anyone who supports the effort to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

The argument, sometimes called the "chickenhawk argument" goes something like this: Young men and women in the military are placing their lives at terrible risk in Iraq, and many are dying or being grievously wounded. Unless a supporter of the war has placed his/her own life in jeopardy in similar fashion (or has a loved one who has) he or she has no right to urge continuation of a conflict that will result in the deaths or maimings of some of those youngsters.

This line of reasoning is of a piece with the argument that since men can't get pregnant they have no right to tell women that they shouldn't have the right to an abortion.

There are so many problems with this kind of thinking that it's difficult to know where to begin to analyse it.

Let's start with an analogy that will show the flaw in the logic. If we accept the argument above then we must also accept any other argument of the same form. So, for example, unless we are willing ourselves to become police officers we have no right to insist that the police risk their lives to fight crime. Or, if the rigors and travails of missionary work do not appeal to us we have no business supporting and encouraging those who do feel called to risk everything, like those Korean young people in Afghanistan, by doing missionary work.

These arguments, which are of the same form as the original, are absurd, but if so, so is the original argument.

We might also point out that many who serve in the military never face combat themselves. Does this mean that they have no business offering an opinion on the war? Is it only those who have actually been shot at, and their families, who have the right to engage in the public debate on the war? Or, since most who have been shot at have come through the experience unharmed, perhaps we should restrict the qualifications to speak out in support of the war to those who have actually been wounded or to the families of those who have died. In other words, how do we decide exactly where we draw the line separating those who have the right to support the war and those who don't?

Do those who make the argument that no one who hasn't served should speak in favor of the war think that those who pay the nation's bills should have no say in deciding the most important issues that face us as a nation? Every person who pays taxes has an ipso facto right to express his/her opinion on every domestic or foreign issue, whether the issue is abortion or war. The fact that a supporter of the war hasn't served in the military himself no more disqualifies him from voicing his support of our mission in Iraq than the fact that a supporter of the police hasn't ever been a policeman disqualifies him from voicing his support of the mission of our police.

To try to silence supporters of the war because they have never themselves served in the military is a sign that one has no good arguments to counter the arguments cited in favor of what we are trying to do in Iraq. It's also a sign that one is rather desperate to come up with something to discredit those who offer those supportive arguments.