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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
From Jonathan Goldberg, in today's LA Times:
Just how crazy are the Dems?
MOST FAIR-MINDED readers will no doubt take me at my word when I say that a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds.
But, on the off chance that a few cynics won't take my word for it, I offer you data. Rasmussen Reports, the public opinion outfit, recently asked voters whether President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. The findings? Well, here's how the research firm put it: "Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure."
So, 1 in 3 Democrats believe that Bush was in on it somehow, and a majority of Democrats either believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance or can't quite make up their minds.
...why try to explain that it's implausible that Bush was evil enough to let this happen - and clever enough to get away with it - yet incapable either morally or intellectually of doing it again? After all, if he's such a villainous super-genius to have paved the way for 9/11 without getting caught, why stop there? Democrats constantly insinuate that Bush plays politics with terror warnings on the assumption that the higher the terror level, the more support Bush has. Well, a couple of more 9/11s and Dick Cheney will finally be able to get that shiny Bill of Rights shredder he always wanted.
And, if Bush - who Democrats insist is a moron - is clever enough to greenlight one 9/11, why is Iraq such a blunder? Surely a James Bond villain like Bush would just plant some WMD?
No, the right response to the Rosie O'Donnell wing of the Democratic Party is "It's just make-believe." But if they really believe it, then liberals must stop calling themselves the "reality-based" party and stop objecting to the suggestion that they have a problem with being called anti-American. Because when 61% of Democrats polled consider it plausible or certain that the U.S. government would let this happen, well, "blame America first" doesn't really begin to cover it, does it?
Goldberg concludes that that the poll may be in part "wrong or misleading":
So maybe it's not 1 in 3 Democrats suffering from paranoid delusions. Maybe it's only 1 in 5 , or 1 in 10. In other words, the problem isn't as profound as the poll makes it sound. But that doesn't mean the Democratic Party doesn't have a serious problem.
In this previous post, I noted that Liberals like to attack the successful, and reward the unsuccessful. I discussed the ideological grounds on which Liberals do this.
More recently, Evan Sayet has brilliantly discussed the root causes among Liberals for this behavior.
The fiasco of the firing of Don Imus this week provides the latest example of Liberals attacking the successful - even the most successful among their own supporters.
From the LA Times:
Democratic politicians lose a mouthpiece with Imus
His show gave many of them a way to reach a national audience of white males - a critical voting bloc.
...with Imus' career in tatters, the fate of the controversial shock jock is stirring quiet but heartfelt concern in an unlikely quarter: among Democratic politicians.
That's because, over the years, Democrats [...] came to count on Imus for the kind of sympathetic treatment that Republicans got from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.
Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.
With Imus' show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.
Hillary went out of her way to slam Imus as hard as she could, saying, last Tuesday:
I've never wanted to go on his show and I certainly don't ever intend to go on his show, and I felt that way before his latest outrageous, hateful, hurtful comments.
In doing so she helped to harm her own party.
Conversely, prominent Conservative Ann Coulter went out of her way to defend Imus.
The left is so devoted to attacking anything that is successful, that it strikes at the most successful things in its own party. Lieberman was turned away by his own party and had to run (and win) as an Independent. Cindy Sheehan slams leading Libs, such as Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John Edwards. And now Imus, who per the LA Times was the closest thing the Dems had to Rush Limbaugh, has been taken off the air, because the Dems wouldn't stand up for him.
The results show the error of the Libs' approach. Those who promote the unsuccessful, and attack the successful, are harming all of us, and that includes - themselves.
Could it be that the film 300 -- plus the grassroots sensation of my friend Evan Sayet's YouTube video (160,000 views and counting) -- signal the beginning of the end of moral ambiguity?
Here's Victor Davis Hanson on 300:
The phrase "300 Spartans" evokes not only the ancient battle of Thermopylae, but also the larger idea of fighting for freedom against all odds - a notion subsequently to be enshrined through some 2500 years of Western civilization.
...almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy - freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.
And here's Glenn Reynolds on 300:
... the movie industry -- or at least the critic section thereof -- is stuck in the 1970s, when moral ambiguity and angst used to be groundbreaking and novel. Now they're overdone, predictable and boring.
Is it a coincidence that at this moment, Sayet's YouTube video is attracting such attention, that Victor Davis Hanson and Dennis Miller were talking about Evan, enthusiastically, on the radio last night? Sayet makes powerful points illuminating the absurdist logic of moral ambiguity.
An end of moral ambiguity could have a massive impact on global geopolitics. To take one example, it's time for Israel to thrill the world by saying, loud and clear, that Israel stands for freedom, democracy, achievement, science, and equality of the sexes, and that those who do not recognize its right to exist, have neither freedom, nor democracy, nor achievements, nor science, nor equality of the sexes. That alone would electrify - and change - the world.
Evan Sayet's YouTube video already had 18,000 views yesterday morning, before it was linked by Drudge. Today it has over 120,000 views.
It's also currently ranked as the #5 Top YouTube Favorite for the Month in News & Politics. It's got over 700 comments. What is making this video so hot? Let's take a look at a few excerpts:
The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the modern liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, he will not only side with Saddam Hussein, he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Given the choice between the vicious, mass-murdering, corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat, and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, he will plagiarize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels, as did our former President, Jimmy Carter, to side with a terrorist organization, and to attack the tiny state.
......how do they think they're making better world, by siding with Saddam Hussein, by keeping his rape and torture rooms open, by seeking the destruction of a democracy of Jews that, I don't know if you've seen the list going around on the Internet, of all the Nobel Prize-winning scientists from this tiny state of Israel. How do they think they're making a better world by promoting to children, behaviors that are inappropriate and cause diseases and unwanted pregnancies and ruin people's lives? How do they think they're making a better world?
What I discovered is, the modern liberal looks back on - give me a number here - 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization - and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with - none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government - none have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime and injustice. So they're convinced, that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime and injustice must be found - can only be found - in the attempt to be right. See if nobody ever thought they were right, what would we have to disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight. If we didn't fight of course we wouldn't go to war. Without war there'd be no poverty, without poverty, there'd be no crime, without crime there'd be no injustice. It's a utopian vision. And all that's required to usher in this utopia, is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality and decency. All the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right, by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right, and moving towards it.
......So what you have is people who feel that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn't right, and to prove that wrong isnt' wrong. To bring about a philosophy - and you see this in John Lennon's song, "Imagine." "Imagine there's no countries." Not "imagine great countries." Not "imagine defeat the Nazis."
"Imagine no religions." And the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values - is devalued to the point where there's "nothing left to kill or die for."
Obviously this is not going to happen overnight. There's still going to be religions - but they're going to do their best to denigrate them. There are still going to be countries, but they're going to do their best to get us to cede our sovereignty to one-world bodies.
But in the meantime, everything they believe is designed - everything they teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies - the TV shows - the newspaper stories that they pick, and how they spin them - have but one criterion for truth, beauty, honesty, etc. etc. - and that's, does it tear down what is good, and elevate what is evil. Does it tear down what is right, and elevate what is wrong. Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success, and elevate the ones that lead to failure, until there's nothing left to believe in.
...There is no standard to them, because a standard would require them to say that something is better than something else, which goes against this entire philosophy.
(View the video for much more, including the many examples Evan provides, as well as the brilliant metaphor he opens with, regarding a man who says he hates his wife, and whose friend habitually assumes he is joking.)
What's making this hot, may be one of the same things that's making the movie 300 so hot - i.e., the proposition that there is good, there is evil, there is right, there is wrong, and that we have the ability to distinguish between them and to champion what is right and good, and to oppose what is wrong and evil.
Sayet brilliantly identifies that today's Liberals refuse to say that something is better than something else - and that they consistently seek to tear down those who are doing good, and to build up those who are doing evil.
I encountered an example of this, this very morning. I was recently talking to my friend, A.T., and telling him about the danger France (and all of Europe) is in, from radical Islamists, who seek to destroy European culture, and replace it with Sharia culture. This morning A.T. called up and said he's discussed this with a friend of his, a reporter for NPR, and she had said that the Muslims in France are oppressed, that they are denied rights, and that is the reason for their riots. The NPR reporter provided a perfect example of what Sayet describes. She did not express one word of condemnation of the Muslims for their evil burning of thousands of cars in France, or for their violent attacks on the Jews of France, as noted in this recent Miami Herald article. On the contrary, she took their side. She supported those who are doing evil, violent attacks. She showed no support for the people of France who are being attacked.
A.T. immediately agreed with me that seeking for rights would not justify these violent attacks on people and property. (I asked A.T. to ask his NPR reporter friend to provide links to me to
document her assertion that Muslims in France are denied rights.)
Sayet's views are immediately applicable to what we see around us. Try it out.
An article in the current Rolling Stone (issue 1022) slams Cheney for being, in the opinion of RS, mean:
In fact, per RS, he's even "meaner now than he ever was." So it would be reasonable to at least infer that Rolling Stone is opposed to meanness. RS, one might infer, hews to a reasonable, calm, point of view, that is never mean.
That's why it seems so jarring to see the table of contents entry for this same article:
They're using his name as a four-letter word, and making a joke of doing so. They're not only being rude and mean, they think it's funny.
So what is with this double standard? How is it reasonable to criticize Cheney for doing something that they themselves like to do?
Has Prime Minister Olmert, of Israel, lost his mind?
TEL AVIV - The Israeli army is "up in arms" regarding an order issued yesterday by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to remove a series of West Bank security checkpoints that regularly stop terrorists from infiltrating Jewish cities, according to military officials.
In accordance with promises made to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a summit this weekend, Olmert instructed the IDF to remove 49 West Bank roadblocks and checkpoints. Twenty-seven roadblocks are to be removed immediately, and the rest within about a week, subject to a final decision by government officials.
Olmert also instructed IDF soldiers to not thoroughly examine every vehicle at 16 of the West Bank's largest roadblocks. Vehicle examinations usually cause long delays at the checkpoints.
Olmert said the moves were aimed at bolstering Abbas at a time when his Fatah party is engaging in infighting with rival Hamas factions. Abbas last weekend called for new Palestinian elections in a move widely seen as attempting to dismantle the Hamas-led government.
Palestinians say the West Bank roadblocks and checkpoints are degrading. They complain of waiting in long lines to pass through West Bank cities.
But according to IDF statistics, upwards of 60 percent of all attempted suicide bombings are stopped at the checkpoints. Israeli soldiers routinely catch Palestinians at checkpoints en route to central Israel with explosives or suicide belts. Many of the terrorists are caught during vehicle inspections.
...Military officials told WND the removal of roadblocks in the past directly resulted in an increase in terrorism.
"The checkpoints work. It's that simple. It's how we stop most terrorism," a military official told WND.
Olmert is acting against the need of Israel's citizens for safety, and instead is responding to criticisms that Israel is an oppressor of Palestinians. As Olah Chadasha, of the Israeli blog Greetings from the French Hill, puts it:
Olmert's and Israel's constantly repeated and futile attempt to gain brownie points with the world by sacrificing its future and security is like repeatedly playing a CD you know you hate but hoping against hope that the next time it'll actually sound better to the point where you'll enjoy it.
Olmert is providing an extreme example of a Western disorder: if you tell him his country is an oppressor, he'll do whatever you want. It makes him predictable and pathetically easy to manipulate.
We in the West must recognize this absurd disorder and take steps to put an end to it.
Patriotic Liberals must have felt ill last week, when Al Qaeda "sent a message to leaders of the Democratic party that credit for the defeat of congressional Republicans belongs to the terrorists." The message accused America of "occupying the lands of Islam and stealing the treasures of the Muslims." The overlap between Liberals and Radical Jihadists is precisely this: that they both use this Western disorder as a means of pushing Western nations around. As posted here last May, author Shelby Steele has detailed this with regard to Liberals:
...[Steele] pointed out that accusations that Americans are racist, and that America as a nation is an oppressor, are inaccurate based on the facts, and are made only as an attempt to gain power.
America's Liberals can't be expected to help recognize and put an end to this disorder - because exploiting it, and exemplifying it, is pretty much their whole game.
That leaves it up to America's Conservatives to become very aware of this and to spread the word to the many Americans who vote according to the issues and the specific politicians, rather than rigidly on party lines.
Why is the same strategy used by both Liberals and Radical Jihadists? The answer is easy. There's nothing sinister about it. It's used by both, merely because it works.
And that has got to end.
This blog has been looking into Ann Coulter's rejection of Darwinism. Currently a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" shows this site as the second link. Articles here on the subject have been eliciting great comments from a number of readers.
In previous posts, I was seeking a response to Coulter from the scientific community. There has now been some. And its been marked by some very unscientific behavior.
Several articles have used the very unscientific method of name-calling to respond to Coulter. From P.Z. Myers:
Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book ... shameless fraud ...
From the York Daily Record, via The Panda's Thumb, a leading Darwinist blog:
...the vitriol, idiocy, slander, vileness, ignorance, stupidity and simply breathtaking inanity that passes for the contribution to the public discourse of an alleged carbon-based life-form that goes by the name of Ann Coulter.
Of course, you've heard about this vile life-support system for a mane of blonde hair. She's been all over the media, spreading her poison, the vaguely human counterpart of a Gila monster, except with colder blood.
These insults are unjustified in light of the fact that 600 scientists around the world have expressed their own doubts about Darwinian evolution:
“I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma,” said Raul Leguizamon, M. D., Pathologist, and a professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
“Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all,” added Leguizamon. “Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as Bernard Shaw used to say. The hold it has in academic circles is not at all due to the empirical evidence that allegedly supports it, but to its philosophical presuppositions and implications, the political correctness of the Darwinian paradigm and the intellectual inertia of academia in general. "
...Prominent signatories include U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell; American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow Lyle Jensen; evolutionary biologist and textbook author Stanley Salthe; Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information Richard von Sternberg; Editor of Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum --the oldest still published biology journal in the world-- Giuseppe Sermonti; and Russian Academy of Natural Sciences embryologist Lev Beloussov.
Does Mr. Myers wish to explain to these 600 scientists that they are also "awful, ghastly, ignorant" ?
There is no place for insults in a scientific debate. What does it mean, when insults are used as part of such arguments?
The answer is rather shocking to someone such as myself who believed, all my life, that Darwin as a mechanism for the origin of species was an established fact. In short, Darwin as a means of the origin of species has not been proven at this time, and all leading Darwinists know it and tacitly admit it. This may explain the use of insults when that fact is pointed out to some of them. They can't prove their position and they know it.
One of the most powerful arguments against Darwin as a means of speciation (that is, as a means of the origin of new species), is that one would expect to see a massive amount of fossils of transitional species, and while there are a number of possible candidates for transitional species, the expected massive amount of such fossils does not appear in the fossil record.
Here's how the American Museum of Natural History tacitly admits that while there is evidence in favor of Darwin as a means of speciation, there is not yet proof:
Evolution Today: How Do New Species Evolve?
Separate groups of organisms belonging to the same species may adapt in different ways to better exploit diverse environments or resources. They also may evolve varied characteristics for attracting mates. That is, different groups evolve in different directions. Over time, these groups or populations may become so different that they can no longer breed together-separate species are formed.
Note the repeated use of the word, "may." The Museum doesn't say this is how species do evolve. It says this is how species may evolve.
Here's how the Natural History Museum in London tacitly admits the absence of the expected fossils in the fossil record:
There are countless species that live in environments such as jungles and mountaintops, where the bodies of dead animals are more likely to be eaten or broken up than preserved. Therefore, palaeontologists are faced with a daunting challenge: to construct the history of life on our planet with knowledge of only a tiny fraction of the creatures that once lived here.
In fact, the Natural History Museum in London has a whole wing devoted to evidence of Darwin - yet, absent from the wing, is evidence of Darwin as a means of speciation. From Dr. Gerald Schroeder's 1997 book, The Science of God, page 31:
The magnificent Natural History Museum in London devotes an entire wing to demonstrating the fact of evolution. They show how pink daisies can evolve into blue daisies, how gray moths change into black moths, how over a mere few thousand years, a wide variety of cichlid fish species evolved in Lake Victoria. It is all impressive.
Impressive, until you walk out and reflect upon that which they were able to document. Daisies remained daisies, moths remained moths, and cichlid fish remained cichlid fish. These changes are referred to as micro-evolution. In this exhibit, the museum's staff did not demonstrate a single unequivocal case in which life underwent a major gradual morphological change.
Per Wikipedia, "Dr. Gerald Schroeder is a former professor of nuclear physics at MIT
and former member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He holds
doctorates both in Earth Science and Nuclear Physics."
It may be that this museum has added to the wing since the publication of Schroeder's book. The absence of even any evidence, from such a prestigious museum, shows the absence of proof for Darwin as a means of speciation.
Perhaps we humans can't bear not yet knowing how we got to be here on Earth. Nature abhors a vacuum, so into the vacuum of our lack of information about this, we put the best available theory. Darwin is the best available theory at this time, but it isn't proven, and there is a powerful argument that while it may be part of the answer, it is very far from being the whole answer.
(Thanks to Olah Chadasha, of the Greetings from the French Hill weblog, for bringing Dr. Schroeder's book to my attention.)
What does the average person make of a headline like this, from the Arizona Daily Star?
Murtha says U.S. poses top threat to world peace
MIAMI - American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.
Perhaps at some time in the past, similar statements could be excused for being a bit over the top, as a way to get attention. But it's gotten to the point now when statements like this are just ludicrous. Surely many people read reports like this and think, A, The Dems are making no sense, and B, the Dems are no friends to America.
The courageous Dems will make sure America is safe and defended, as long as no one is shooting at any of our troops. If someone shoots at our troops, then the Dems believe the correct thing to do is to "redeploy" the troops to someplace else. That's a fair summary of what Dean said on the radio today:
In his party's weekly radio address Saturday, Howard Dean said the Republican plan of "stay the course" is not an option in the 3-year-old war and emphasized the Democratic call for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin by year's end.
He also rejected the Republican criticism that Democrats want to "cut and run."
"Among the victims are brave American soldiers who are the targets of an insurgency because of failed political leadership and a lack of foresight and planning," Dean said. "We don't want another wall with 55,000 names of courageous Americans who were let down by their government."
...Dean rejected the "cut and run" moniker, saying Democrats "will defend America, but we will be tough and smart."
How much more pathetic can the Dems get? How does Dean expect to fight Al Qaeda without having Al Qaeda shooting at our troops?
It wasn't long ago that one of the mantras of the Dems, in criticizing the war, was that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with going after Al Qaeda. One of the responses was that Al Qaeda would be drawn into fighting our troops in Iraq. This was called the "flytrap" or "flypaper" strategy. In September of 2003, Andrew Sullivan had this remarkably prescient post:
Listen to U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq. He just opined on CNN that attacks against U.S. forces have increased in "sophistication, especially in the improvised explosive devices that they are using, and we're working to learn from that and to be able to counter them." He went on, critically: "This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity... But this is exactly where we want to fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." You won't find a better description of the "flytrap" strategy anywhere - or from a more authoritative source.
The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East - but a victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia. Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs directly. Now they have a theater of war - and it isn't the West Bank.
Will this strategy work? Its obvious disadvantage is that it's tough to fight an escalating terrorist war in the same country you're trying simultaneously to nudge toward civil order and democracy. Terrorism undermines civil society even in countries with very advanced traditions of democracy, let alone a country like Iraq. Certainly, that internal contradiction helps explain why the U.S. is now desperate for more help in pacifying Iraq as well as waging war within it. One possibility is that better and more aggressive policing in urban areas (by Iraqis and foreign troops) will enable U.S. soldiers to leave the cities and fight a guerrilla war against al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the Iraqi hinterland, putting extra pressure on Iran and Syria at the same time. That would be an elegant solution. But at the moment it's a somewhat optimistic one.
At some point, I'd argue, the president therefore has to make this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam.
The flytrap strategy worked. We're capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists literally by the hundreds:
The US says coalition forces in Iraq have carried out more than 450 raids since the death last week of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The US said 104 insurgents were killed and 759 "anti-Iraqi elements" captured.
Iraq says documents seized after the killing of Zarqawi yielded vital leads and that this may be the "beginning of the end" of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So what do the Dems want to do now that the Iraq war has proven to be a powerful way of destroying the perpetrators of 9-11? They want to run away. The Dems want to get our troops out of a place where they are "targets," just as if Al Qaeda had arrived in Iraq and driven us out. Oh, the Dems are all for using the military to keep America safe -- just as long as nobody shoots at any of the troops.
And the Dems are all for going after Al Qaeda -- as long as Al Qaeda doesn't shoot back.
At a time when we are capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists by the hundreds, the Dems want to cut and run. It is one of the most pathetic things I've ever witnessed in politics.
Despite last week's defeat in Congress of a similar measure, Kerry and Feingold are sponsoring yet another cut-and-run-from-Iraq bill. As usual, these Dems want to reward the less successful (the evil, failed terrorists our troops are fighting) and punish the successful (the thriving U.S.)
The Dems used to claim that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorists. Now that it's unmistakable that we are fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq, how can Kerry and Feingold possibly want to cut and run from that fight?
Last week I posted a review of the Darwin chapters of Coulter's new book. One of the most telling points Ann makes, is that Darwin as a mechanism for the origin of species, appears to be disproved by the fossil record. If new species arise via Darwinian evolution, there should be a massive amount of fossil records of species mutating into new species. But there is not.
The comment thread for that post was started by several knowledgeable readers, who favored Darwin. In that thread, I asked:
How do you explain the absence in the fossil record of the massive amount of fossil evidence of random mutation of one species into another, which would appear to be required if Darwinian evolution is the mechanism for the origin of species?
So far, none of the pro-Darwin commenters have responded.
I just did a search of Google Groups for "evolution coulter." There are lots of discussions in many groups -- but no discussions yet in the scientific groups, at least in the first 7 pages of results. It appears that the scientific community may be trying to avoid discussing the questions Coulter is raising.
I really want to get a serious response from the scientific community on this important question.
My review of the Darwin chapters in Ann Coulter's new book is getting a lot of pageviews. At the moment, a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" lists this site as the second entry.
And the comments posted with the review are fascinating. Here's one, from Doc Duke:
I received my Bachelor and PhD degrees from MIT and Princeton, respectively, and am familiar with these arguments, having read the sources some years ago. Ann has done her readers a great service by presenting succinct, humorous, well-documented prose for her readers, of which there are happily very many. I agree with her, and think you have well summarized her arguments (and those in her cited literature), Vik.
I have two children in a public High School, and spend a considerable amount of time evenings and weekends making sure (1) that they know the other side if I don't trust what they are being taught, and (2) ensuring that they know to keep their mouths shut so that this knowledge does not have a negative impact on their grade-point averages.
You will seldom hear from (employed) scientists on this subject, because they to not wish to follow, even in a small way, the path of Natan Sharansky in Russia. Consult his "The Case for Democracy" to see where we could be headed without effective voices such as yours, Vik.
Doc, thanks very much for the good words.
What I can't get over is that not only does Doc have to check what his kids are being taught and personally give them the alternative view when necessary -- since the schools aren't doing so -- but he also has to tell them not to let on at school, that this is happening. This looks to me as though free expression at school is not only not permitted, it's actually being punished. There's the state-approved view of things, and discussing of alternative views is punished. Even thinking about alternative views is dangerous if discovered. This is showing some of the characteristics of a state that lacks freedom of speech.
This exposes why the current judicial reading of the Constitution, as forbidding the government from showing support for the Judeo-Christian tradition, is dangerously wrong. That judicial reading imposes a preposterous state-approved view of things in which it is forbidden to say anything favorable about any religion in our own schools. This, in a nation that was founded on the principals of freedom of speech and expression!
Michael J. Gaynor provides detail on why this judicial reading is wrong:
Did the United States Constitution really require complete separation of church and state, prevent the United States government from acknowledging God and supporting religion generally, and compel the United States government and state governments to be strictly neutral as between religion and "irreligion"?
The answer is no.
The contrary claims are secular extremist myths that need to be exposed.
In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court disregarded history and misconstrued the Constitution at the urging of the secular extremist minority and the expense of the overhwehelming religious majority in ruling that neither federal nor state governments "can pass laws which aid all religions."
In so ruling, the Court presumptuously substituted its personal view for the views of those who founded the United States, wrote and ratified the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and adopted the First Amendment and misued a much-quoted letter in which Thomas Jefferson had described the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and state."
The First Amendment did not create a wall between church and state. It prohibited Congress from making a law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The kind of separation that was intended is suggested by Pierre L'Enfant's plan for a national cathedral. In 1791, Congress selected the site to be the capital of the United States. George Washington, previously President of the Constitutional Convention and then President of the United States, then commissioned L'Enfant to design an overall plan for the future seat of government. That plan included a church "intended for national purposes, such as public prayer, thanksgiving, funeral orations, etc., and assigned to the special use of no particular Sect of denomination, but equally open to all." The Founders and Framers favored governmental neutrality among denominations, but they never expected government to be barred from supporting religion generally to please a tiny Godless minority.
The judicial reading is wrong and is corroding free speech in America.
As you may have heard, Ann Coulter's new book, Godless, rejects Darwinism. When I first found out about this from an early review of the book, I fully expected this to prove an embarrassment to Ann. Even as I read the book, as I began those chapters (chapters 8 - 10), I expected them to be specious.
But in the storm of criticism of the book so far, there has not yet been one word from the scientific community, objecting to Ann's views (at least that I have seen). How is this possible?
The astonishing answer is that Coulter has founded all of her views on the published work of prominent scientific experts, and presented them in a very compelling and persuasive manner. In short, it appears possible that she may be right.
She begins by discussing the Darwinian assumption that the intricate structures of an organism evolved gradually, via one random mutation at a time:
[Lehigh University biochemist Michael] Behe produced various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms, of which there are thousand -- complex cellular structures, blood-clotting mechanisms, and the eye, among others. A bacterial motor, called a flagellum, depends on the coordinated interaction of 30-40 complex protein parts. The absence of almost any one of the parts would render the flagellum useless. An animal cell's whiplike oar, called a cilium, is composed of about 200 protein parts. Behe compared these cell parts to a simple mousetrap, with far fewer necessary components than a cilium or flagellum. Though there are only a few parts to a mousetrap, all of them have to be working together at one time for the contraption to serve any function whatsoever. If one of the parts i s missing, Behe says, you don't get a mousetrap that catches only half as many mice: you don't get a mousetrap at all. Behe then demonstrated that it is a mathematical impossibility for all 30 pats of the flagellum (or 200 parts of the cilium) to have been brought together by the "numerous, successive, slight modifications" of natural selection. Life at the molecular level, he concluded, "is a loud, clear piercing cry of design."
Coulter goes through the responses from the scientific community to Behe's work, and notes that while many said that "more research is needed," no one even attempted to disprove it.
The evolutionist's answer is Assume that each one of the hundreds of mutations necessary to create the final product is itself "fit" in ways we don't understand but must accept on faith because it's Holy Scripture.
...Evolutionists believe -- purely as a matter of faith -- that individual, unrelated mutations facilitated the production of all 200 necessary parts, completely by chance, and thus created the flagellum. And then they tell us they want to keep "faith" out of the classroom. Okay.
Coulter then details something I did not know about -- and I suspect most of those reading this did not either -- namely that there is no evidence in the fossil record to support the theory of the slow transformation of species into other species. Such evidence would be expected based on Darwin's classic work, "The Origin of Species."
It was a nice yarn Darwin had spun, but there was absolutely nothing in the fossil record to support it. Far from showing gradual change with one species slowly giving way to another, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing (almost like there was a big flood or something.)
Coulter quotes David Raup, a geologist at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, who wrote in 1979:
[W]e are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of he fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information -- what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.
Coulter comments:
Darwin's disciples simply assert that evolution led from this species to that by the process of random mutation -- with cruel nature striking down th genetic losers -- and to hell with the fossil record's showing nothing of the sort. At some point, it's not even pseudo-science anymore, it's just a crazy religious cult.
Coulter provides a massive amount of facts, examples, and evidence along these lines.
I've got a lifelong interest in the advances of science, and a couple of Master's Degrees (although neither is in science), and I'd never heard about this in my life. Coulter gives many examples of why this might be. Schools which attempt to discuss these facts in class are sued by the ACLU; scholars who attempt to publish on these items have been fired.
At this point, I can only consider this mind-blowing. It's too far-reaching for me even to feel comfortable stating at this instant that I am convinced Coulter is right (although I'm mighty close being convinced.) I have to hear the response from the scientific community.
Which makes the silence to date from that community, deafening.
Can it possibly be, that we are in the exact same state as our ancestors, who condemned Galileo for saying the Earth traveled around the sun? Can we be as ignorant as they were, punishing anyone who disagrees with an official view of the world which is without basis in fact?
We know that we as humans can find "the unknown" to be frightening; can it possibly be that we are still so far from understanding enough about how we can have come into existence on this earth, that we must use lawsuits and firings to prevent people from discussing that lack of understanding, out of an inability to face that (irrational) fear?
Update: See this follow-up post, Follow-Up on Ann Coulter and Darwin: Scientists Admit There is No Proof of Darwin.
The leadership of the Left rejects religion, but it is also no good at science.
Gore's attention-getting claims in "The Inconvenient Truth," are inconveniently (for Gore) easy to debunk.
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
...Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
...Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
Here Gore is following the Left's mantra of attacking anything that's successful. In this case, it's successful businesses.
Beware of Dems today who call any group of Americans "oppressors." They usually have no factual basis for doing so.
In the post Liberalism Explained, I show how Liberals believe that the less successful are so because they are oppressed by the more successful. There is no scientific basis for this belief. Liberals act on this belief by rewarding the less successful, and punishing the more successful. Any student of Darwinism can tell you that in this way Liberals are using the power of the state to oppose evolution, because Darwinism teaches that in evolution, the less successful behavior is not rewarded, and the more successful behavior is rewarded. And in Communist Russia, this worked - evolution of society halted. Nothing improved. Everything stagnated. And everyone suffered. (See the article for additional info and detail.)
The Libs are constantly providing examples of this. Let's look at what Libs had to say about the termination of the terrorist Zarqawi:
Rep. Pete Stark (via Say Anything): "This is just to cover Bush's [rear] so he doesn't have to answer" for Iraqi civilians being killed by the U.S. military and his own sagging poll numbers, said Rep. Pete Stark, California Democrat. "Iraq is still a mess -- get out."
CNSNews: "Zarqawi Killing Great, but Pull Troops, Say Kerry, Murtha."
Caption for photo, LA Times, 6-9-06, page B11 (no link): "Euphoria: Some Iraqis cheered Zarqawi's death, but terror attacks will likely go on." (Take out the word "likely," and this caption could have been part of the official Al-Qaeda statement.)
As these examples show, the Libs seek to punish the military for their success in this operation, by demanding that they get out of Iraq, and so be seen as a failure, having been forced to leave before Iraq is safely on the road to being a secure Democracy. They seek to punish GWB for this successful operation, with Stark absurdly claiming that success is just a way to avoid having to answer for the sacrifice required to achieve it. And Libs reward the terrorists by seeking to help them achieve their goal of getting the U.S. out of Iraq so that they can make Iraq a terrorist state once again.
As these examples show, the Libs seek to reward the less successful (the Islamofascist terrorists) and punish the more successful (GWB, our troops, and American Democracy).
