Is Human Nature Funamentally Evil?

I rarely do this (mostly because of the risk of the blog becoming recursive and redundant) but a new voice posed a particularly interesting, intelligent and I thought, honest question yesterday on my initial Virginia Tech post and I felt compelled to answer. (So compelled, in fact, that Haloscan shut me out from posting until I cut the reply in two and eliminated some hyperlinks... and I thought I was being restrained!) 'Piercello' writes:

If I were to attempt to argue that human nature is not necessarily evil or even fundamentally imperfect (as imperfection measures the gulf between a thing and our expectations, rather than the thing itself), but simply not yet fully understood, would I be up against a doctrinal point set in stone, or is there a little room to maneuver?

I ask from the point of view of an agnostic possessed of both a healthy respect for religion and a lack of knowledge about particulars, who is nonprofessionally interested in the promise and also the gaps in research in cognitive science.

To be clear, I am not questioning the existence of malice and evil, just their inherent and inescapable embodiment in humanity, and whether that embodiment is an immovable point of doctrine.

Thanks in advance to anyone who feels like answering!

I won't duplicate my own response. It's here. Perhaps other commenters can add to the discussion on this post, as the other one sinks into the archives. But while we're on the subject of Virginia Tech, a few odds and ends I've been thinking about. Treat these as rhetorical or not. I'm just thinking out loud:

Why is it that virtually everyone can agree that an obviously disturbed young man who takes 32 innocent lives in one morning then kills himself is the kind of person we want to work with great vigor and resolve to keep in check in the future yet when the same thing happens in the Middle East, we break along ideological lines? A large portion of the U.S. electorate (and certainly the Congress) seems to be all for letting such killers have the run of the place who would never think such a thing if "the place" were Virgina or Rhode Island or Silicon Valley. Is there something different about the human victims of suicide bombings in Iraq (by deranged young men bent on taking their own lives also) that makes them less worthy than the victims on the Virginia Tech campus? It used to be a hallmark of racism or xenophobia to hold such views. Now they seem commonplace on the left.

The other night, I watched "2001, A Space Odyssey" for the upteenth time with some individuals near and dear to me (some of whom had not seen it before). As we watched the 'dawn of man' scenes at the beginning (in which the extra-terrestrial monolith transmits the knowledge of tools to proto-humanoids) someone who is for gun control made an interesting remark. The apes initially use their newfound tools for killing game, feeding their families better than they had before as a result. Then one of them gets the bright idea that he use the same tool to kill a rival ape. (The whole thing of course, is reminiscent of Cain and Abel, though that's tangential to the point). The comment made was to the effect that tools are morally neutral and that it is the users of the tools who put them to evil or good. It made complete sense to this person in that context. When the talk turned to gun control, the argument was reversed.

Approval Ratings are So Yesterday

Annoyance ratings* tell a different story:

Nancy Pelosi - 79.19% annoying, up from 53.24% last year
Harry Reid - 77.70% annoying, up from 44.31% last year
George Bush - 41.08% annoying, down from 66.90% last year

For reference, Barney the Purple Dinosaur is 71.26% annoying--a level that hasn't varied much in several years, except for an inexplicable spate of apparent inoffensiveness in 2002 when he was only 37.01% annoying.

Interestingly, at 76.74% annoying, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is seen as less annoying than either Reid or Pelosi, both of whom are well above the historical trend for Adolf Hitler.

*Yes, I took statistics. Yes, I know about sample size. Yes, I understand the problem of mob mentality and the utterly unscientific nature of such surveys. Still... ;-)

The Difficult Side of Diplomacy

Many on the left are fond of calling for 'dialogue' with foreign powers whenever it looks like interests may collide more forcefully. As I wrote earlier this month:

"Dialogue"... a favorite word of the left. All it means, of course, is a two-way exchange. Yet those on the left make (at least) three critical mistakes in applying it. They assume that: 1) dialogue must be verbal, only verbal and forever verbal, 2) all dialogue is somehow in good faith by virtue of being "diplomatic", even when it is conducted with rogues and proven liars, and 3) dialogue must be with the leaders of nations and that their peoples' opinions don't count.

I was almost willing to concede a tentative kind of success for this kind of dialogue earlier this Spring when it was reported that six-party talks with North Korea had achieved new breakthroughs. The Wall Street Journal's stealthily liberal news pages ran a page one story obviously placed by State, detailing how terribly clever the U.S. had been in putting the squeeze on banks in Macau and China that had been doing business with NoKo. (Most people assume that the WSJ leans conservative whereas its new pages in fact, are more liberal than those of the notoriously left-leaning New York Times; only their editorial pages are consistently conservative.)

For the first time in 57 years, they suggested, the U.S. had been clever enough to bring the throwback Kim dynasty to its knees. Fat chance.

I'm reminded, as I read this editorial in today's W$J, of Lucy and the football.

North Korea is more than a week overdue for missing a deadline to shutter its nuclear reactor, yet South Korea announced this weekend it will soon start shipping 400,000 tons of rice to its neighbor. How's that for "consequences"?

A quick review: When the six-party negotiations last convened in February, the North committed to demonstrate concrete steps toward ending its nuclear program within 60 days. It agreed to provide a full accounting of its nuclear programs and to close the Yongbyon reactor. The 60 days have come and gone but no list has been delivered and Yongbyon remains open.

Charlie Brown keeps asking Lucy to set the ball. He keeps running to kick it. She keeps pulling it away at the last minute. He keeps falling flat on his back. Every time. Over and over and over. That's what's funny about it. Even to a six-year-old, it's obvious that Lucy is not to be trusted, even as Charlie Brown's eternally naive hopefulness is an integral part of his sympathetic if bumbling character. A somewhat more dispassionate and more informative (if still deeply ominous) analysis can be found here, from Stratfor. (For some reason I can access the 'premium' analysis via Google News even though I cannot access the link directly. Try searching Google news based on a long phrase from the quote below and it may work for you as well.)

On April 27-28, the two sides will meet to finalize preparations for the inter-Korean rail test, with the actual tests to take place May 17. Previous agreements to test the rail lines failed when North Korea backed out at the last minute, stirring speculation in the South of trouble in Pyongyang, where elements of the military consider the rail crossing a potential breach of security and defensive secrecy. However, this seems somewhat unlikely, given that roads paralleling the rail lines already are in operation, and there is extensive aerial and satellite surveillance of North Korean defensive lines. Rather, it is more likely Pyongyang is simply not yet prepared to deal with a more active rail link between the two Koreas, finding the slow movement of tourist buses and supply trucks more manageable.

For South Korea, the rail test is perhaps the most significant element of the whole agreement. Seoul has been eager to develop a land-link to China, Russia and beyond, ending its current status as a near island and perhaps gaining new trade routes not dependent upon the sea -- and therefore not vulnerable to competitors using the same routes...

Conspicuously absent from the deal is any mention of North Korea's nuclear program, or of Pyongyang's delay in implementing the February six-party agreement. The issue did come up in discussions, and triggered one of North Korea's expected tantrums, with the North's negotiators reportedly storming out of the room when the nuclear issue was raised. Of course Pyongyang came back, and Seoul justified the lack of mention in the final document by letting the media know the issue was discussed and that the rice aid to the North would be "difficult" to deliver if Pyongyang does not move on its commitments in the six-party talks.

While Seoul paid lip service to the nuclear issue, it, like Pyongyang, to some degree views these economic bilateral deals as separate from the nuclear issue entirely.

Much of this hinges on whether one believes that the essential motivations and behavior patterns of a long-entrenched, brutally homicidal, repressive, paranoid, Stalinist, megalomaniac throwback dictator can be altered by clever talk in the face of repeated caving-in by our side (i.e., nothing but talk and one-way concessions with no consequences). History says they cannot. Heck, most sensible parents know they cannot.

Environmental Feel-Goodism

I grow weary of the absolutist caricatures to which many liberals subscribe wherein one is either fully on board with the latest method of showing off one's supposed eco-consciousness (no matter how poorly grounded in science, non-efficacious or economically untenable) or else one is deemed ignorant, recalcitrant and utterly without conscience in all matters relating to the planet's (and humanity's) collective physical health and well being.

One is either with them or against them. (Funny... I think I heard that one somewhere else.) And if one is against them, one must surely be fond of heaping spoonfuls of extra pesticides onto the breakfast cereal of small children in the third world, making whales suck on exhaust fumes on purpose and dumping barrels of radioactive waste into the local swimming hole at midnight just to save a few bucks towards the purchase of one's next bulldozer to flatten the rain forest.

In the supposedly tolerant, relativist world view of many liberals--in which some kinds of moral distinctions are just so many shades of grey to be endlessly debated, the latest understanding of science is worshipped over and above the God who created it to begin with, and don't you dare go preaching to me about my lifestyle choices, man--environmentalism comes in only one flavor; it is manufactured in only one factory: theirs.

The environmental agenda will be released by our media. Please wait for it. Do not go thinking about it on your own. It's too complicated. Trust us on this.

And so it is that, having balked at spending $5,000 more than comparable cars last summer and deciding not to purchase a Toyota Prius, I'm laughing at the gullibility of those who did--as is Toyota. It's called marketing. The left used to be skeptical of marketing. Marketing was from "the man". Now that much of the boomer left is "the man" however, the morality of it all is sometimes a little more difficult to follow... or remember... sort of like Hendrix at Woodstock... I think... or maybe it was Janis or Wavy Gravy. Hmm...

I'm laughing, anyway, at those who made the purchase for the typically sanctimonious, ill-informed, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses reasons that many wealthy liberals do all kinds of things to assuage their deeply felt but misplaced sense of guilt. All kinds of things, that is, except seeking lasting atonement for that guilt in the right place... but that's another story.

And so it is that I'm laughing even harder this morning at this: the real environmental impact of the Toyota Prius.

...[the] ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer... the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles...

The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery... When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

And according to new EPA methods that mimic typical driving habits more accurately than previous ones, the Prius' gas mileage is only marginally better than comparable, traditional cars costing half as much. The article adds:

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.

Which is about what I calculated last summer on my own, highlighting a lesson few liberals have learned: good environmental policy doesn't attempt to suspend the laws or economics or deny the obvious self-interest of intelligent individuals. The original study (plus several other related items) can be found here.

H/T: JB

The Debut of K. Maru's Singing Career

Makes about as much sense as this from Sheryl Crow:

"I have spent the better part of this tour trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming... Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating. I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

In your mind indeed, Sheryl. Love the music. Just please keep your mouth shut if you're not singing, OK? Time was when most people knew where their talents lay... and didn't. As Dirty Harry said in 'Magnum Force': "A man's got to know his limitations". Or in this case, a woman.

For anyone even remotely considering Ms. Crow's ideas, think for a moment about the systemic environmental ripple effects of more people flushing more often to circumvent some loony "per sitting" law, of more hand washings, of more water heated and used, and of more soap down the drain. Oh, and btw Sheryl... I've run a marathon faster than your [former] boyfriend. :)

The Misattribution of Evil

Yesterday I posted about a local lecture given by the master of moral equivalence, Noam Chomsky. That got me thinking about the misattribution of the notion of evil in the world. Which in turn got me playing with Google News. Here's what I found:

"Virginia Tech" + Cho + evil = 1,031 articles
Iran + Ahmadinejad + evil = 360 articles
Bush + Iraq + evil = 2,621 articles

Now granted, a few of that latter bunch may be talking about the Bush administration confronting evil in the region, however a quick perusal says they are vastly outnumbered by the "we are all complicit... we are all murderers" so we might as well never make any moral distinctions of any kind except against closed-mindedness variety. It is, unfortunately, a common misconception.

Until very recently, I was under the impression that the biblical admonition "thou shalt not kill" meant exactly what it seems to say in English--i.e., a hyper-pacifist directive with no exceptions for anything ever, including cops taking out crazed killers or U.S. troops taking out Al Quaeda homicide bombers or Saddam or the Allies taking down Hitler or Mussolini or anyone else.

That turns out to be incorrect. Something is lost in translation. (Those in places more biblically literate than much of my home state will be excused their bemused smiles and wise, knowing snickers.) What the famous Mosaic commandment actually says is "thou shalt not murder". As in, taking a life motivated by anger, rage, greed, malice aforethought, personal convenience or any number of other motives having nothing to do with protecting other, innocent life.

Friday Short-Takes: Evil as Springboard for God

No long essay today, just some observations that may end up being related... or not. You decide.

First and absolutely foremost in my thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings ever since I heard his story yesterday morning is Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu (see right). He was buried in Israel today. As his eldest son Joe remarked: "I walked through the streets today with my head held high because I have such a father." Quite deservedly so.

If you've just emerged from a cave and haven't heard what he did, just Google him. There were (quite appropriately) over 2,800 separate stories on him as of this writing.

The bottom line: Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. The other part of the bottom line: For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. I have no doubt that, having instinctively and without hesitation done Christ's work in the face of unadulterated evil, Mr. Librescu is enjoying eternal life. As the saying goes: actions speak louder than words.

And isn't it interesting and ironic (no, scratch that--awesome and amazing) that Mr. Librescu was where he was when it counted? That just when hell was literally breaking loose in one so utterly alienated from God that the same God had positioned another that he knew to be a loyal servant--one He knew would do the right thing (the non-instinctive but completely Godly thing) when it came to it--in just the right place at just the right time with just the right preparation to see it all through and serve His purposes?

Let us remember the name of Liviu Librescu, his example and the example he emulated (consciously or not). No human planned it this way... yet it was no accident he was there. Thank God that the forces of evil are met by such men.

Unfortunately, the story in my local paper this week is somewhat less uplifting. It too involves a school. It too features a Holocaust survivor standing nearly alone against the forces of evil. It is (thankfully) a bloodless story, but not one without implications for blood being spilt elsewhere. Actions speak louder than words... yet words represent ideas... and ideas have consequences.

The story surrounds a student group at a local high school that, with the blessing of parents, adminstrators, the school board and the major in this majority-Jewish town invited Noam Chomsky to speak. Here's one editorial on it--the only one I like. Here's the the morally vacuous opinion on supporting Chomsky. I am sickened. Warning: you will be too. E.g.,

I felt very fortunate to be able to attend Noam Chomsky’s lecture... [it] was informative and surprisingly mainstream...

Informative that is, if one has had one's head in the sand. Mainstream, that is, in a place that went 4:1 for John Kerry and boasts residents like Howard Zinn. Yeesh...

A Tale of Two Tunnels

Hmm... let's see:

$15 Billion of your money for barely three miles of leaky, unsafe tunnel and an imperceptibly faster commute (sometimes) in one city, courtesy of Mass. Dems Tip O'Neil, Teddy K, et al

Or a $10-12 Billion investment by a public-private partnership for sixty four miles of tunnel linking 90% of the terrestrial world, courtesy of some hard-headed Russian businessmen.

Gimme a minute... this is a hard one.

Perspectives and Agendas: Finding Meaning in the Virginia Tech Tragedy

I emerged from a day of physical immersion and distraction yesterday to headlines of tragedy that put my several hours of self-imposed suffering into proper perspective. How utterly random, nihilistic and senseless is the Virginia Tech tragedy.

One can ask "How can God allow such a thing?" or one can be thankful for our free will to choose to come to Him, praying and knowing that this is not His doing but that of one sinful man. And however easy it may be in this case to point out the evil in just that one man, his sinfulness is endemic--different only by degree from the rest of us. (There is no one righteous, not even one...)

I find several other things remarkable about the Virginia Tech shootings:

There is virtually no discussion in the MSM about this being evidence of the fundamental depravity of man--sinful, fallen man--strutting around the worldly stage, utterly self-centered. In fact, there is only one source on Google News (an editorial in today's Chicago Sun Times) that uses the term "depravity" at all in concert with the phrase "Virginia Tech". One. And the author seems genuinely puzzled that this should have come to pass [emphasis added]:

...for some reason, the outer boundary of depravity keeps getting extended further and further, each atrocity worse than the last.

For some reason... How about pure unadulterated, expansionist, franchise-seeking selfishness? How about jealousy? Envy? Anger? Rage? Wrath? Pride? Sin? (Now there's a word we don't often hear in the MSM--even in op-eds--anymore.)

None of this is a surprise: the body count, the method, the coldness, the calculation. None of it. Man is inherently evil. We deliberately forget that. We brush it under the rug. We don't like to contemplate it. It just doesn't fit in a culture of I'm OK, you're OK... and if more of us watched Dr. Phil and Oprah we'd all be OK in an instant. It just makes us feel better pointing at folks like Adolf Hitler and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and this latest nut-job with a grudge and a burning desire to share the hate and make others "feel his pain" as he digs deeper into it.

I was talking with a dear, but disbelieving friend last week and he spoke at length--insisted, in fact--on the inherent goodness of man (not least himself) and the transcendent beauty of what he termed "social evolution". What on earth are you talking about?, I asked him.

The only thing I could discern from his response amounted to a veneer of loosely attributed, mostly borrowed, incoherently integrated, vaguely Judeo-Christian notions of niceness to one's neighbors--what the agents in the Matrix condescendingly refer to in Neo as "pay[ing] your taxes and help[ing] your landlady take out her garbage".

Necessary but not near sufficient, I responded--not by a long shot. Such self-justification and happy talk is a distraction from what I described to another non-believing friend as "the dog poo in the ice cream". (Sorry for that image.) We cannot work our way into God's good graces. We cannot make our man-made brand of Rocky Road fit for Baskin Robbins. It must be entirely renewed from outside.

Back to the Virginia Tech tragedy...

The blogosphere does a little better than the MSM (but only a little). A handful of posts cite "depravity of man" and "Virginia Tech" in the same piece. A particularly useful post is this one at the "From the Bleechers" blog at Townhall.com:

Many... will question God for allowing a madman to wreak such destruction upon those who did him no wrong. However, it is not God's apathy that should be understood, but His grace...

In this hour God acts as He will and answers prayers as He desires for we live in "the day of Man" and in "the age of grace." Man is ruling as he sees fit and God is dealing with the eternal fates of individuals in longsuffering grace. Man is an untrustworthy ruler. The Founders knew this and created a three-branch system of government based on the idea that any powers granted to men must be kept in check. John Adams knew well the depravity of man.

The violence at Virginia Tech was perpetrated by a man. It is the wickedness of man that was on display... God is silent in our day graciously waiting to end the Day of Man. As man abuses man he often wants to blame God, but such accusations are illogical and foolish... although silent, He is neither absent nor unfeeling. His silence towards some is also the manifestation of His grace to many more.

It is easy to blame guns or immigrants. (Both angles are equally silly.) It is somewhat closer to the mark to blame 'loners' or 'the culture' or 'alienation'. Yet each of those explanations begs another question:

A loner separated... from what? A culture devoid... of what? Alienation... from what? Or more to the point: From Whom?

If Hell is total, voluntary (yes, freely chosen) separation from God's love ("Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven", so the misguided saying goes), then the shooter descended into his own before the first shot was fired. It is only when someone, through their silent, inconspicuous inner alienation seeks to draw in others to their personal hell that we pause to recognize the carnage that was there all along--a carnage in our souls.

There but for the grace of God...

UPDATE: ...creative writing professor Lucinda Roy went to administrators to voice her concern about violent themes in Cho's writing. Roy told ABC News that Cho seemed "extraordinarily lonely -- the loneliest person I have ever met in my life." [emphasis added]

Short Takes: Paglia & GF Will on Global Warming

George F. Will on the media and global warming. Camille Paglia: "Real Inconvenient Truths". When these two ultra-articulate columnists on opposite sides of the aisle end up agreeing on something, it's probably worth paying attention.

Europe's Militant Atheism

Crazy day here... proposal to write, two conference calls to prepare for. I hadn't planned on blogging today, but this couldn't wait.

If you don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, go to the newstand and pick up a copy. I only have time to excerpt a few of the more sad/outrageous bits. (That's not a characterization of the article, but the movement they profile.) This is the page one headline: "THE NEW CRUSADERS: As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit... Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist"

But first, a context-setting, watch-checking Word from our Sponsor:

3As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. "Tell us," they said, "when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"

4Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 5For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. 6You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8All these are the beginning of birth pains.

9"Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. 12Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, 13but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. 14And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Back to the WSJ piece:

With 40 minutes to go before show time, the 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium was already packed. A fan set up a video camera in the front row. A sound engineer checked the microphones.

The star: Michel Onfray, celebrity philosopher and France's high priest of militant atheism. Dressed entirely in black, he strode onto the stage and looked out at the reverential audience for his weekly two-hour lecture series, "Hedonist Philosophy," which is broadcast on a state radio station. "I could found a religion," he said.

Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books, stands in the vanguard of a curious and increasingly potent phenomenon in Europe: zealous disbelief in God...

Mr. Onfray argues that atheism faces a "final battle" against "theological hocus-pocus" and must rally its troops. "We can no longer tolerate neutrality and benevolence," he writes in "Traité d'athéologie," or Atheist Manifesto, a best seller in France, Italy and Spain. "The turbulent time we live in suggests that change is at hand and the time has come for a new order."
...
"The battle over religion is restarting. It is going to be a difficult one," says Terry Sanderson, president of Britain's National Secular Society, an organization that was founded in the 19th century but has now gained a new vibrancy. Membership has doubled in the past four years, to around 7,000, says Mr. Sanderson. For converts from Christianity, the society provides a certificate of "de-baptism." "Make it official!" urges the society's Web site...

Christianity, once the bedrock of Europe's identity, has been losing worshipers on the Continent for at least half a century, though some opinion polls suggest the downward trend has bottomed out. Around three-quarters of Europeans still describe themselves as Christians. But only a small minority go to church. In Western Europe, according to polls, fewer than 20% do.

The number of atheists is hard to pin down. Some surveys put the figure at under 3%, but others say it is much higher...

The atheist cause won a big-name endorsement late last year when pop star Elton John, in an interview, said organized religion turned people into "hateful lemmings" and should be banned...

The most potent force driving activist atheism is concern that Islam, Europe's fastest-growing religion, is jeopardizing the principles of the Enlightenment -- and emboldening other religions to raise their voices, too, and re-fight old battles.

"I have a big problem with Islam," says Mr. Onfray, the French philosopher. Last fall, he offered sanctuary at his house in northern France to a high-school philosophy teacher who had received death threats from Muslims. The teacher had denounced the Prophet Muhammad as a "merciless warlord" in a newspaper article. But Mr. Onfray says his basic beef is with all religions, not just Islam. [emphasis added]

Two quick comments. Wish I had time for more.

1) If one's "basic beef" is with all religions, one has failed to read and think, to listen and discern. As Ravi Zacharias likes to point out, the adage that "all religions are fundamentally the same and only superfically different" gets it precisely backwards. One has also (sadly) placed a flawed human institution in the foreground, obscuring a profoundly transformative relationship--one that the Living God lovingly seeks with us.

2) They do get one thing right: the untenability of neutrality and the coming final battle.

Argument will not do it; only prayer.

Loony Leftie Logic

I love San Francisco. I really do. In fact I'm heading there two weeks from now and staying for ten days. I'm really looking forward to the trip: the food, the wine, the climate, the scenery. I love San Francisco like I love sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris sipping a glass of Burgundy as the sun dips gently down on a long summer evening.

I love it, that is, to the extent that I can avoid reading any local newspapers, listening to any local news reports on radio or television or engaging in conversations about politics with any locals. My home state of Massachusetts is almost as lovable... except for the food, the wine, the climate and the scenery. I love San Francisco, in other words, in same way that the neutron bomb is to be loved: the infrastructure without the people... though maybe that's too harsh. Let me be precise: the infrastructure and the people without their politics--if that's possible to imagine.

So with that as preface, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this adulatory article: "Pelosi, Lantos may be interested in diplomatic trip to Iran" centered on local queen bee and almost-president Nancy Pelosi at SFGate.com (replete with annoying pop-up window). Let's fisk it, shall we?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, just back from a trip to Syria that sparked sharp criticism from Republicans and the Bush administration, suggested Tuesday that they may be interested in taking another diplomatic trip - to open a dialogue with Iran.

I couldn't help thinking, on reading this first paragraph, that Speaker Pelosi's and Congressman Lantos' main motivation for such a trip might be inseparable from the response they received on the first one. I.e., anything that annoys the president helps solidify the support of her base--and I do mean anything. That's parallel number one vis a vis her potential hosts.

Then there's the word 'open'. I almost missed it. It is damning. They--under their own initiative and in contravention to the power vested by the Constitution solely in the executive branch--want to OPEN dialogue with Iran. In other words, they want to make their own foreign policy. If someone in the justice department has the b*lls (and isn't distracted by the tempest-in-a-teapot surrounding the judge firings), they could work with this.

Paragraph two is filler. Here's paragraph three (emphasis added):

"Speaking just for myself, I would be ready to get on a plane tomorrow morning, because however objectionable, unfair and inaccurate many of (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's) statements are, it is important that we have a dialogue with him,'' Lantos said. "Speaking for myself, I'm ready to go -- and knowing the speaker, I think that she might be.''

"Dialogue"... a favorite word of the left. All it means, of course, is a two-way exchange. Yet those on the left make (at least) three critical mistakes in applying it. They assume that: 1) dialogue must be verbal, only verbal and forever verbal, 2) all dialogue is somehow in good faith by virtue of being "diplomatic", even when it is conducted with rogues and proven liars, and 3) dialogue must be with the leaders of nations and that their peoples' opinions don't count.

Thing is, the Bush administration is having a dialogue with Iran. It is not verbal, yet it is clear. (OK, not as clear as Churchill, Reagan or Thatcher, but clearer than Nancy Pelosi, that's for sure.) Iran is also having a dialogue with us (e.g., by capturing hostages, expelling weapons inspectors, infiltrating Iraq with irregular forces and IEDs, etc.) As I noted two weeks ago, Sun Tzu ('The Art of War'), would be pleased with Ahmadinejad's understanding of the purposes of 'dialogue' in time of war. He and the mullahs fall into none of the three traps I noted above that the left swallows whole. Paragraphs four through six:

Pelosi did not dispute that statement, and noted that Lantos -- a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust -- brought "great experience, knowledge and judgment" to the recent bipartisan congressional delegation trip to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia in addition to Syria.

"I find the president of Iran's remarks to be so repulsive that they are outside the circle of civilized human behavior,'' Pelosi said, referring to Ahmadinejad's past comments that Israel should be wiped off the face of the map and his questioning of the existence of the Holocaust.

"But a person of Mr. Lantos' stature and personal experience is saying that -- even as a Holocaust survivor and even recognizing the outrageous statements of the president of Iran -- it's important to have dialogue. I think that speaks volumes.''

Note the 'but' (in case you missed it). It is the ultimate tool of the moral equivalence set. As in "Yeah, I know John Wayne Gacy did some bad things, BUT doesn't he deserve a furlough now that he's spent a year or two in prison?" OK, maybe I exaggerate. Mike Dukakis has been out of politics for nearly twenty years now. Still, it's hard to relax on such issues when his legacy lives on and when--in this region anyway--it's not uncommon to catch sight of him crossing the street in the Fenway on his way to indoctrinating (err, I mean teaching) his college acolytes.

I'm going to be as delicate and precise about this as I know how to be. Surviving the Holocaust is indeed a cause for extra reverence and respect for what an individual has to say. One thinks immediately of Elie Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom... among others. Yet Ms. Pelosi is using Mr. Lantos here as a shield against legitimate criticism. (What, are you going to criticize a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Isn't that somehow anti-Semitic?).

It is the ultimate in political jiu-jitsu. She is using someone opressed by the last set of Nazis to deflect criticism of her cozying up to the current set. It's also worth noting that she is using Mr. Lantos in a Marxist (class-based) manner. That is, she is using his "stature and personal experience" as a kind of stand-in for all Nazi death camp survivors. Her touch is light but that doesn't make it any less abhorrent, especially against a backdrop of the left's impugning of the administration's neo-con strategies by oblique references to a kind of Jewish cabal (Wolfowitz, Perle, etc., none of whom would even dream of having a 'dialogue' with Mr. Ahmadinejad).

Which is all to say that other Nazi death camp survivors (Jewish or otherwise) might beg to differ with Rep. Lantos' purported 'wisdom' in these matters. The subsequent paragraphs note other Congressmen, including a Republican, who have visited Syria recently and are urging 'dialogue' with Assad... which only makes me slide them over on my political abacus into the category called 'RINO'. Because a Republican said it does not make it wise.

Because the opinion is nominally bipartisan does not change the fact that Syria's status as terrorist sponsor, Israel-proximate aircraft carrier and client state for Iran, close buddy of Russia and likely storage site for Saddam's WMD circa February, 2003, not to mention brutal, deliberate and vindictive instigator of mass murder bordering on genocide.

Here are paragraphs ten and eleven. (The truly damning stuff is always buried by the MSM.):

Pelosi said that throughout the congressional delegation's recent Middle East trip, "every place we went we had a constant message: the safety and security of Israel, fighting terrorism."

"There was, of course, a shadow over all of it, Iran: Iran's support of terrorist groups is something that must be stopped," she said. "Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon is something that must not happen and we must stop them with the strongest of diplomatic measures."

I have only two questions:

1) Did it ever occur to Ms. Pelosi that she was being had? That she was being used? That she was being lied to? Is she really that gullible? (I think not.) Or is she so power hungry that she thinks we're gullible enough (or rather, her base is gullible enough) to believe that she actually believes this?

2) If it proves impossible to "stop them with... diplomatic measures" THEN WHAT, Speaker Pelosi? Then what?? When and how will we know that diplomatic measures have failed? When Jerusalem is a great big smoking hole? When Iran's declaration of nulcear capability inhibits us from taking measures to stop their encroachment into and opression of other nations in the region? What should we do in addition to and in support of diplomacy? What will we do if diplomacy fails? In a foolishly pacifist (as opposed to peace-loving) world where verbal dialogue and diplomacy are all there is, the answer is quite simple: keep talking.

Tax-Financed Media Bias

As I was saying about public broadcasting just this morning... Now this:

Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank.

"I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds," Burke said... Burke wrote that his documentary depicts the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, adding, "Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them."

The similar tactics are as natural as Nancy Pelosi cozying up to the Syrians.

Climate Change Thought Exercise the Day

I've run into quite a few people recently, both on-line and in meatspace, who--faced with the facts surrounding climate change--fall back to the following argument:

OK, so there's no case, but what's the harm in reducing CO2?

I would ask such people to ponder the following hypotheticals:

- If it were shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, given all of the complex, compensating, poorly understood climate systems in play, C02 had no long-term effect on climate, would you still advocate for regulating CO2 specifically? (leaving aside regulation of other legitimate disease-causing pollutants) Why?

- If it were discovered that (through greater understanding of some as-yet poorly understood mechanism such as increased precipitation, cloud cover, etc.) that increased CO2 would actually cool the planet, would you still advocate for its reduction? Why?

- If CO2 does indeed cause warming yet on balance it were shown that a warmer planet would reduce weather-related deaths, increase crop yields (reducing famine deaths and allowing for increased population) and reduce weather volatility (and thus deaths from same, all other things being equal), would you still support CO2 curbs? Why?

- If you could turn back the clock, what far-reaching science issue would you select from among those known in 1907 and using only that knowledge that you would use as the fixed and irrevocable foundation for global public policy and social and economic organization through the 20th century? (Extra credit: discuss impacts of same.)

- What do you imagine would have been the results of Al Gore making a kind of inverse of his sensationalist movie and getting hold of the global agenda... in 1975... and causing massive action to reduce global cooling?

- What pressing issues would you in your pre-emptive wisdom choose to move down the scientific consensus list in order to focus resources on CO2 reductions?

Just in Case the Easter Bunny Goes Psycho...

...we'll have a plan for that too.

The CIA and Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue. The bipartisan proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass the Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever "national intelligence estimate" on global warming... "The Pentagon has plans for every conceivable--and often inconceivable--contingency," Representative Edward J. Markey [D, MA], said.

Congressman Markey, with all due respect, sir: You are wrong. The Pentagon does not have a plan for everything. Nor should they. It is the utmost in cynicism (and foolishness) to attempt to attach one's pet issue to the agenda of an organization one disagrees with and in so doing to slow it down and micromanage it and reduce its mission effectiveness. Especially during wartime.

The fact that the Senate is going along with the global warming myopia (and the Supreme Court, and presidential rhetoric too) does not make me question the science of global warming any more deeply than I already have. Trust me, dear readers, I have questioned it and read about it and studied it over 20+ years--quite deeply indeed... I would have to stop working and sleeping to question it much more deeply. It only makes me sad that so many are willing to go with the crowd even when the crowd is objectively mad (in the old, British sense of the word).

I actually know something about this (both things, actually). In my real life I do scenario planning for large organizations. I am familiar with the notion of thinking about the inconceivable on purpose. Like all things in life, the inconceivable has--and ought to have--bounds. Thinking about all scenarios is inherently paralyzing. When an individual does it, we call it psychosis.

Whether one acknowledges it or not, one brings a frame of reference--a set of filters, if you will--to any thinking, about the present or the future. Too small a frame and one gets surprised. Too large a frame and one cannot function. (I suspect that that is the secret Democrat agenda here.)

The Pentagon has its frame and (thank goodness) it's dialed in. It has Islamofascism at its core and other geopolitical threats (e.g., China, Russia, Venezuela) at its periphery. It does not focus, nor should it, on weather-forecasting or humanitarian relief (though it is laudable and excellent that it picks up those missions as it can). Weather forecasting is important only to the extent that it helps equip Marines with boots and camo equipment and dust masks and helps to forecast tides and moon phases and cloud cover for invasions.

Mr. Markey falls into the same trap as do the mandarins of public education (in many districts) and of most universities. It is the idea of "all things considered" (and nothing rejected)... and so why not my (nutty) idea as well? Throw it on the heap. Let's study it. There's no reason to say we shouldn't. Hey, why not study my belly-button lint? (Back off man... I was kidding.) It is, at its core, a philosophy of relativism. When all ideas are equally valid, there is no case to be made for studying say, American History or Calculus or Physics versus say, Cyberfeminism, Serious Marxism, The Phallus, Queer Musicology, 'Blackness', 'Whiteness' or Adultery. (My daughter just narrowly avoided attending one of the institutions featured on this list. Yes, there is a God and He listens!)

It is not at all by accident that the popular NPR show has that name: "All Things Considered". Anyone who listens to the show more than a few times quickly realizes that all things are not considered. Very few think to ask two critical questions about it: 1) Why do they carry these stories? and 2) What stories could they have covered... but chose not to? Only those things that a liberal elite deem worthy of discussion get aired.

Whether their motivation is cynical or ignorant isn't even important. We all have our biases and they are entitled to theirs. What they are not entitled to is public money and a claim that their vision is comphrehensive and balanced. (For the record, KMaru is neither subsidized by Congress nor do we claim objectivity or breadth.)

But I digress. Congressman Markey... global warming... the Pentagon. A few closing thoughts:

Why is it that some of the loudest noise on global warming (including the lawsuit that sparked the recent--head-shakingly bizarre--Surpreme Court ruling that the stuff coming out of my mouth right now is a pollutant) is coming from a cold state? (Wicked cold when I paahhked my cahh in Hahvahd Yahd this mahnin'). Shouldn't we let the residents of Southern states decide this one?

This may all come across as frivolous and funny but it's not. What we're witnessing in these last few weeks is a Supreme Court deciding on its gut a case with no standing based on the very long-term possibility that I might have to move my sand castle as far up the beach in the next hundred years as I have already had to move it in the last hundred. What we're witnessing is a Congress kow-towing to misplaced public fears and distracting our military from its primary job: protecting the United States and its interests. What we're witnessing is public hysteria. Michael Chrichton already wrote the script. The parallels are uncanny.

Global Warming Common Sense

Mainstream publication (Newsweek). Mainstream scientist (MIT). Common sense, tightly argued. An insanely cold Spring on the East Coast. Watch it all fall flat. Faith and logic know few bounds when confronted by the 'sin' of CO2 emissions and the 'importance' of the goal--world government.

That Pesky Iran Thing Again--Borders, Boundaries and Values

There is work and there is blogging and the latter has eclipsed the former of late. I started this post last Tuesday. My apologies to regular readers. My lack of posts is not for lack of thoughts on the world scene and most of them center on Iran, the legacy of empire, and the bounds of constitutional powers. (Yes, the three are related.) There are so many angles. Here are a few I've been thinking about:

Israel goes to great lengths to let its military personnnel know (as well as its civilian citizens) that, should they be captured--and even should they be killed--that their government will stop at nothing to bring them home. This may seem incongruous coming from one so skeptical of government power but it is government's primary and most natural function: protect its citizens.

It used to be this way for citizens of the U.S. and of Britain. Yet as the definition of national citizenship erodes (see: Mexico) so too does the righteous impulse to protect one's own.

Bill Bennett had Mark Steyn on Morning in America the other day and they had little trouble coming up with historical examples (all decades old) of both Britain and the U.S. going to extraordinary lengths to retrieve a single individual citizen (non-military in each case)--to the point of naval blockades and military threats. Examples in Israel's case are a good deal more current. In today's context, that kind of backing seems somehow antiquated and arrogant to the liberal set.

There is another reason governments that want to stay governments ought pay closer attention to this basic contract: citizens (and especially military personnel) unsure of how well they will be protected when captured will not go out of their way to defend their home nation. Their loyalties will be diluted by a thousand "what if" scenarios. E.g., if I am captured and tortured by the mullahs will my nation pay any price and bear any burden to get me back or will my elected officials see it all as an opportunity to consort with my captors for political gain?

A thin shadow that fervor remains in the form of black POW/MIA flags one sees flying from the aerial of the occasional car or home--presumably belonging to a Vietnam vet or vet family (and seldom anyone else). (Some government buildings sport them as well, but I suspect the impulse is largely symbolic.)

Other than such gestures however, the 'protect-our-own' impulse has grown weak in the West. About the most recent example I can think of is Reagan's raid on Grenada to bring home U.S. medical students--and that one is 20+ years old. It may have been the final exception that proved the rule that this kind of thing just isn't done anymore, coming as it did on the heels of Jimmy Carter's inept attempt at rescuing the Iranian embassy hostages while talking moral equivalence and peace at any price. Even at the time, Reagan's venture was regarded as a bit of a joke in liberal circles.

Which is all to say that the capture of the British Naval personnel a few weeks ago without serious opposition is both symptomatic of an eroded sense of national values and boundaries as well as a harbinger of even greater erosion to come. It is symptomatic in the sense that--in the EU/UN/liberal world view--national values and boundaries are ipso facto bad things. When world government is your goal, there's little sense in standing up for either because you expect, even hope, that they will go away for all intents and purposes in the not-so-distant future.

Never mind what those values actually are or whether they can lay some claim to objective goodness or righteousness in comparison to others that can't. If one is not a citizen of the world, says the thinking, one is not 'enlightened'. If one is seen to be overly chauvanistic about one's national values, one just doesn't get it and better call the boys in Brussels to set one straight.

Like it or not, physical boundaries have and always will imply values. (I'm tempted here to quote Robert Frost: good fences make good neighbors). When the latter are diluted, the former aren't worth fighting for. In that world view, the logic of the Iraq/Iran border is no different from what many view as the U.S./Canadian one: just an arbitrary piece of real estate not worthy dying for. And in the narrow sense of course, it's not (worth dying for).

Yet to ponder the opposite is to begin to understand the case for why values (and borders) truly matter. If one is willing to let oneself be kidnapped by armed men of evil intent at the border or maybe even a little on one's own side of it, then why not several hundred miles inside of it? Why not on in the "capital"? Why not on the other side of the ocean? Why ever resist kidnapping and murder at all?

It's an idea that the right has not explained terribly well in reference to Mexico. The case for a fence is not because we are racist or xenophobic. (Any self-respecting racist or xenophobe would have moved from Texas to Wyoming long ago.) The case for a fence (and for border security in general) is also not about terrorists. (The left's critique that the 9-11 hijackers were here legally is compelling).

Rather, the case for border security is about retaining and preserving values. No, not the values of right or left but the values of the Constitution. Any immigrant knows that the U.S. wouldn't be worth immigrating to if it looked and acted like the average of the rest of the world. Why bother going to the trouble of uprooting one's family merely for a different language or climate?

Borders also don't matter because the individuals on one side are inherently better than those on the other. If we are created equal, then to claim otherwise is pride of the first order. (I mean that in the old, negative sense of a cardinal sin.) No, borders matter because the set of values on one side of some borders is inherently better. There. I said it. It sounds odd, doesn't it? Yet some value systems are inherently, objectively, eternally better than others. (It's not the purpose of this post to expand on which one(s). Longtime readers know I have strong opinions on that issue.)

We've lost that confidence and with it the memory of why borders ever existed in the first place. If the UN is your ideal world, then none of this makes sense and we should just get it over with and do away with the passports and the armies and the border crossings. We'd save a lot of money. The EU did and hey, nothing has broken. Yet. Except maybe Theo Van Gogh, but he was a right-wing zealot, right? (Of course the EU will break, they just don't know it yet. We are witnessing the arc of the antique vase that has fallen from the shelf. One cannot catch it in midair without shattering it. One can only watch as it accelerates to the floor.)

None of this is to throw stones at the individual Royal Marines who had to make some life-or-death, split-second decisions in the heat of battle. It is easy and ignoble for armchair commentators like myself to second-guess them. Rather, it is to point out that those same Royal Marines, armed to the teeth, were never really given the latitude to make such decisions. The rules of engagement had already handcuffed them to a set of ideas that screamed: none of this really matters; we're just going through the motions; this is all play/pretend; we don't really stand for anything except standing for everything.

Liberals like to say that we conservatives see the world in black and white and that that is a bad thing. Yet when the entire world is grey, the consequences are not kumbaya world fellowship but the triumph of cunning and often violent opportunism--a game Iran is playing rather well at this juncture in world history.

Which brings us to Nancy Pelosi and her usurpation of presidential powers and provision of aide and comfort to the enemy. The easy angles on this one have already been played and I won't replay them. What is harder to face is the stark, cold fact that--other than a sternly worded but utterly obscure arms-length missive by the Vice President--nobody with any real power seems willing to confront her in any meaningful way. To do so, after all, would be seen as partisan and that would be bad.

Except that if things were reversed and Tom DeLay or Trent Lott had been cavorting with foreign Slobodan Milosevic during the Clinton administration, the media would have been in an uproar and heads would have rolled. Except for one thing: the analogy doesn't stand up. The hawk out of power cannot convince the foreign government that it is serious against a dove in the oval office (see Carter, Jimmy) whereas the dove always can. Hawkishness is a positive, action-oriented position. It requires cooperation and (by definition) the force of national will. All that capitulation requires is seeding the shadow of doubt and that is easy. It is a negative force--one that only requires lack of cooperation or a wrench in the gears of national will in order to have its way.

In other words, Nancy Pelosi can ruin a carefully constructed foreign policy by seeding doubt in the minds of foreign enemies a way that would not be true if (say) Dick Cheney were Speaker of the House and she were president (shudder). The presidential cannnot retract a signal to our enemies that we are not serious. And that is why we have the Logan Act.

Longtime readers know that I am not a supporter of the death penalty--at least not for ordinary onesy-twosey murders. Yet it has been a long time since someone has hung by the neck until dead for treason and that may have damaged us in ways we cannot fully appreciate. Excluding even the mention of that possibility (or even the word 'treason') from our national dialogue is ultimately harmful. We have forgotten what it means to have enemies and that to combat them effectively means psych ops at every level.

We have an open society where open debate is a good and precious thing, but consorting with the enemy is something different. Let's be plain: Nancy Pelosi has sacrificed the credibility of this nation on the altar of her own pride and ambition. The reason she is embraced by our enemies, why they warm to her overtures, and why the liberal set thinks this is all in the interest of peace and that the release of the British hostages proves the effectiveness of her approach miss an essential point. It is this: they want liberals in power because liberals will help them with their anti-liberal aims (sharia law and global conquest).

A few other things before I close:

I don't imagine for a second that Iran's release of the hostages during Passover week was accidental. The mullahs are more aware than many secular Jews (and Christians) of the meaning of the Passover and the symbolic value of a seemingly magnanimous release.

Where is the anti-Gitmo crowd when the actual (as opposed to the imaginary) Geneva Convention is breached? Mock executions, lack of access (or at least interest) by Red Cross personnel, coerced confessions. If their real aim were "human rights" (it is not), their credibility would be vastly enhanced by applying the principles they have so often screamed about in reference to non-uniformed terrorist enemy combatants to uniformed members of legitimate armed forces.

Revising History to Suit the Minority

If the following would be patently ridiculous and repulsive on its face...

Schools are dropping slavery from history lessons to avoid offending white pupils, a Government backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include slavery denial. There is also resistance to tackling the Civil Rights Movement - where blacks and whites fought for control of the South - because lessons often contradict what is taught by the Ku Klux Klan.

Then this should be also:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

Or am I missing something? (The latter is the true article. I adapted the former from it.)

Before anyone jumps on a potential double standard vis a vis teaching Creationism alongside Darwinism, the two instances are not comparable. The Holocaust obfuscation story is about not teaching a well-established, historical fact. The latter controversy is about adding another potentially complimentary explanatory theory into the mix for discussion.