More Confusion over Evolution

Frederick Turner returns to the Evolution v. Intelligent Design debate with an
article to remind us that evolution has been proved.
Lots of people are
weighing in with their own takes.

Well yes, evolution has been proved, more or less. It’s true in the way that the theory
of the triune brain is true. It’s a good way of referring to a very complicated
business, the development and transformation of life forms. But, just as the
theory of the triune brain gets unsatisfactory as you get closer to the brain and
start to differentiate brain stem, mid brain, and cortex into a bunch
of different organs, the idea of evolution starts to get pretty complicated as
you get into details of the biology.

But the argument isn’t really about this theory or that theory. It is really
a fight to define what it all means, and who gets to define it for
our generation. But all the fighting obscures the awful truth. The more we
learn about ourselves and about the universe, the more we extend our knowledge and develop the sciences the more puzzling the whole
thing becomes.

We are still asking: What’s the point of it all? And the truth is: We just don’t know.

What's It Really Like in the Academy?

We’ve all heard the horror stories about the intellectual left-wing terrorism in the nation’s
universities, but still wonder: Is it really like that?
Writer Steve Salerno
has just left the academy after a sojourn teaching magazine
journalism, and he should know.

What is it really like? It’s more sad that bad, with minds stuck in the past and mindless
protection of the status quo. Money graf:

Contrary to popular opinion, a surprising degree of free speech flourishes
on today’s campuses. Trouble is...
Faculty have few qualms about socio-political evangelism — which, put more bluntly, means they’re
not sheepish about bullying any skeptical students into submission. I met a number of professors
in political science, history, and the so-called “diversity disciplines” who upheld their private
beliefs as empirical truths. Therefore, they felt entitled to grade based at least in part on the
degree to which a given student accepted their wisdom. (After all, students who oppose affirmative
action or U.S. “imperialism” can’t be thinking very clearly, can they?) The spirit of open inquiry
that scholars like to tout in their self-congratulatory journals simply did not exist on the campuses
where I worked. A student who tilted right,
or failed to tilt visibly left, invited academic reprisals.

If I were an academic, I’d be worried. Not because I feared that some day evil Republicans
would come and take my job away and put a stop to all this, but because this sort of in-bred producer cartel is death to creativity
and life, and it is a short ride to irrelevance.

For over two hundred years, people everywhere have accepted that a youth spent in formal
education is the sine quo non of a productive life. But is it? Books like The Power of
Productivity by William W. Lewis suggest that education may be a lot less important than we imagine. Illiterate
Mexican construction workers in Houston are still four times as productive as illiterate Brazilian
construction workers in Sao Paolo.

Suppose
we reduced education to the basic work of literacy and numeracy and put kids to work instead of
institutionalizing them from K thru whenever? We could, you know. The reason we have laws
against child labor is that adults don’t want to have to compete against children. And if
we pruned the education system we could save, out of the total education bill of $750 billion...
well what? $250 billion? $500 billion? And, that wouldn’t be the full extent of the savings.
The kids would be working for a living, paying taxes, and all.

And best of all, we wouldn’t have as many Angry Left professors eating their heads off on our dime.

Can't Wait for Single Payer Health Care?

As you’d expect, after 60 years Britain’s single payer health care system, aka
the National Health Service, is working like a champ. Not.

Britain’s Panorama program sent an undercover nurse to a Brit hospital
and what they found wasn’t very pretty. Reports
Julie Wheldon
in the Daily Mail:

Miss Haywood and undercover reporter Shabnam Grewal,
who delivered food and drink to patients, found:

• An 82-year-old woman dying of cancer who was left in
  almost constant pain because nurses were regularly late giving her
  morphine.
  
  
• Another woman with an infection who was left for
  almost nine hours without fluids and lying in urine because
  staff failed to fix a catheter.
  
  
• An 86-year-old with cancer who did not eat because no one was
  there to help feed her. She died alone with no one even noticing.
  
  
• Food that was thrown away because nurses were too busy to feed
  patients. And nurses eating patients’ food.
  

The hospital, which has the lowest rating of zero stars
and an £8million deficit, had already received a number of
complaints about care on an acute medical ward when filming started.

Sounds great. Let’s copy their system in the US! (Tip to
James Bartholomew.)

Democrat SCOTUS Agenda, Defending Their Benefits

Radio host extraordinaire
Hugh Hewitt
had a grand old time Wednesday making fun of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) remarks
about the Roberts nomination. He likes to joke about her limited mental capacity. As a lawyer and
a former White House aide, maybe he’s got the right to do so.

But let us be serious
for a moment. The advantage of politicians that cannot keep too many thoughts in their heads is that
they give us the straight scoop. And Senator Boxer tells us very clearly what she believes and what
she fears in the slow conservative takeover of the court.

The first thing to notice is the expansive list of issues that Boxer feels that the Court is there
to decide. Said
Boxer:

Judge Roberts could go down the same independent, non-ideological road
as Justice O’Connor, or he could join with the right-wing block on the Court which has
consistently expressed the belief that a woman’s right to choose isn’t guaranteed, nor is
the federal government’s ability to protect workers, the environment, and a family-friendly workplace.

Senator Boxer went on to complain that the President had made a “ground-breaking appointment, you know, of a woman, of a minority,”
and went on to talk about how young girls used to ask her how they could get to where she was, how they
could make it in a man’s world.

Senator Kerry, of course, is smoother. He felt that

the Senate must learn whether [Roberts] has clear consistent principles upholding Constitutional
standards like civil rights and the right to privacy in Roe v. Wade.

We know what they want. They want the Supreme Court to defend the high tide of the liberal agenda, at
all costs, whatever the American people think, and whatever the American people want.

Some of us believe that the job of the Supreme Court is to decide constitutional questions, and that
the big problem with recent court jurisprudence is its appetite for getting involved in
issues that are not strictly constitutional. By deciding issues on constitutional grounds it
elevates them into constitutional issues, and removes them from the arena of normal
legislative action.

Government is a blunt instrument, the agent of force and compulsion. The wise man resorts to
government with hesitation. It has turned out that the Supreme Court has become the bluntest instrument
in the tool cabinet. Its headline decisions on race, abortion, school prayer, and property rights over the past
half century have not settled
questions but created new political movements instead. A court decision that aims to make a big splash, especially
when it conjures new constitutional principles out of thin air, reflects the decay of the aristocratic
branch of government into mere oligarchy. It is not government by the best, but government by the few.

If you want to settle things, have an election.

Some of us believe that this habit of the Court to interfere in political questions is one of the driving forces
in the culture war. Some of us also believe that this habit has been a boon to
the conservative movement and the Republican Party as each liberal “social gain” decided
by Supreme Court fiat has driven a new platoon of Democrats out of the party and eventually into the
Republican Party.

When Men Buy and Sell Women

In the regions of China bordering on North Korea men are now buying and selling
North Korean women like chattels,
Donna M. Hughes reports.

Women and children are increasingly the majority of refugees
crossing the river into China. If they can locate a friend or relative’s
house, they have a chance at finding a safe haven. But if the ethnic
Korean Chinese traffickers find them first, they are abducted and sold,
either to men as informal wives or concubines or to karaoke clubs for
prostitution. Their price and destination are determined by their age
and appearance... Kidnapping and trafficking have
become common ways that Chinese men acquire women.

The reason that these women can be victimized is that they are illegal immigrants
into China and thus have no legal rights. If found by the Chinese police they are
sent back to North Korea and imprisonment or worse.

We in the United States are arguing over a Supreme Court nomination in
which the issues are, to be frank, marginal, probably no more extreme than a
reversal of Roe v. Wade that would send abortion back to the states. I.e., in the
worst case for liberals, they will be able to construct their own abortion
laws in their blue-state redoubts instead of relying the U.S. Supreme Court to
do it for them.

But on the borders of China and North Korea, in the twilight of the Kim dynasty
the issue is life and death. It is about people migrating away from their homes
and their relatives into a lawless, stateless existence where they become
prey not to the “robber barons of the mountain passes” that liberal hacks conjure out of nothing
to stigmatize creative businessmen, but real robber barons robbing, killing, and enslaving vulnerable
people desperately searching for simple survival.

We can see, when viewing people in extremis, that government and law
are not mere questions of narrative and power. Settled government and the rule
of law really do make people safer and, most important of all, protect women
from sexual predation.

Can we agree that the first duty of government is to protect women
from sexual predation?

Roberts Nomination: Strategery at Work

The first reactions to the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court indicate
that the Bush Administration has thought long and hard about court nominations. Roberts is young, brilliant, boringly
straight arrow, and has only been on the bench for a year and a half. Thus
Charles Hurt forecasts an
easy nomination process, and
John Podhoretz evaluates him as suitably boring.
As the nomination process starts let us conduct a quick tour d’horizon.

Grand Strategy We want liberals to abandon their living constitution doctrine. They have
developed this doctrine over the last half century because they have come to rely on the Supreme Court to rule
in favor of their educated elite agenda. We want to change their minds. We want them to
see the constitution as a bulwark against the evil right-wing agenda. They will start to change their
minds when a conservative court starts goring their oxen. Putting a conservative on the court hastens
the day when they will opportunistically discover the virtues of a “dead” constitution over
a living one.

Strategy We want a court that has a smaller appetite for power, that does not seek, like
the Massachusetts High Court, to be out there on the cutting edge of societal evolution. In that sense
Roberts appears to be a good choice. He appears to be a work horse, not a show horse.

Tactics In the past few years as Microsoft has begun to focus above all on the issue of
security they have come to appreciate, like the military, the advantage of a small target. A small target
is more difficult to destroy. So they have begun to work to make Windows smaller, with fewer entrances and
exits. The Bushies have applied this understanding in the Roberts nomination. Roberts has spent most of his life litigating, so
he doesn’t have a long paper trail. Also, he appears to be a mild-mannered man without enemies. Writes
Podhoretz:

Roberts has, by all accounts, an astonishingly mild demeanor. He’s a churchgoing
father of adopted children, personally well-liked on all sides of the political spectrum —
evidently because he hasn’t given anybody a reason to dislike him personally.

Notice too that if this mild-mannered man gets confirmed without a big fight it cools down the whole
judicial nomination furnace. It will be harder for the liberal activists to blow their supporters up
into white heat for the next nomination.

No doubt Ralph Neas of the (liberal) People for the American Way and Nan Aron of the (liberal)
Alliance for Justice will deploy every argument they can against Roberts. But, as of today, it
looks like they have an uphill fight ahead of them.

American Buy Hybrids for Power

Here in Seattle just about every liberal in the city
is driving around contentedly in a Toyota Prius saving oodles of
gasoline with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive®. They have the same conceited look
on their faces as shoppers at PCC Natural Markets while they watch their groceries being
bagged into their own bags that they bring to the market. Not for them the evils of non-recyclable plastic sacks.

But all is not well in the hybrid car business. Most Americans buy hybrids not
for the gas mileage or to save the environment. They buy them for the extra power. That is what
Matthew L. Wald reports
in The New York Times.

Mark Buford just bought a hybrid Honda Accord. It’s the top of the line V6 Accord
and it gets about the same gas mileage as the four cylinder Accord costing $10,000 less.
Buford “liked the way that the electric motor on his new car kicked in early during acceleration.”
He

got just what he wanted from the Accord, a hybrid
with no sacrifices. “I wasn’t prepared to give up anything to `go green’ -
not performance, amenities, or space,” he said.

But guess what. Mark still gets the tax subsidy for buying hybrid. The national
nannies are not amused.

“The new ones are all being used for power,” said Kateri Callahan,
the president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group
based here.

Hybrids should be encouraged, Ms. Callahan said, because their
electric components some day could be useful in an all-electric car,
perhaps running on a fuel cell. But she added that the government
should be careful
about which hybrids it subsidizes through tax benefits.

Don’t you just love these activists that care so much about us, and only
want to force us to conform to their agenda in our own best interest?

A word to nonprofit advocate Kateri Callahan. If you want to be “careful” about something, the last thing
you’d do if you had any sense would be to get the government involved.
Let’s just call it
the “precautionary principle.”