Not so Fast, Himalayan Glaciers

The surprising thing about this article isn't that the global warming doomsday alarmists were completely unscientific and wrong - it's that they won the freaking Nobel Prize for this nonsense.

Seriously, between Obama and these jokers, does the Nobel Peace Prize panel have any more objective value than the average MSNBC opinion host?

This is my favorite part:

Despite the controversy, the IPCC said that it stood by its overall conclusions about glacier loss this century in big mountain ranges including the Himalayas. “This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment,” it said.

Oh, why would anyone ever doubt the "underlying science"?

Massachusetts is My Hero

Just sayin'.

Armed "Services"

This is an interesting take that I had never really considered. Our military, whatever it's other intended uses, is the most organized and quickly-deployable humanitarian force in the world. Without it, chaotic regions (like Haiti) would be too disorganized and dangerous for civilian aid organizations to operate effectively.

Clearly, people who favor reduced spending on our military want impoverished Haitians to die.

Just kidding.

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Proud of My Country: Observations on the Cataclysm in Haiti
by Mona Charen
As I write, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and half a dozen other U.S. Navy ships are steaming toward Haiti. They will join some 900 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in providing emergency aid. Twenty-two hundred Marines will also be on hand.

We don’t maintain the world’s largest military to provide humanitarian relief. But those who disdain our military power may want to say a private prayer of thanksgiving that we make the sacrifices to maintain it — if only because in cases such as this, there is no substitute for a military response. After the 2004 tsunami, when ports and roads were destroyed, the U.S. deployed 15,000 troops, a carrier task force, and a Marine expeditionary force. This flotilla supervised the delivery of tents, water, food, medicine, and other supplies to Indonesia and Thailand before any other aid could arrive. The chief of naval operations at the time, Adm. Mike Mullen, noted with justifiable pride: “We literally built a city at sea for no other purpose than to serve the needs of other people.”

The following year, the U.S. military deployed similar aid to Pakistan after an earthquake, to Bangladesh following a cyclone, and to the Gulf coast after Katrina....

You're no Pat Robertson, Danny Glover

I'm sure the outcry over this will be equally as intense as the response to Robertson. This sentence from the report is priceless:

His obscene opinion would be bigger news if Glover had – in the manner of others – idiotically blamed a less-fashionable deity.

He's getting too old for this s***.

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Pat Robertson

I think it's very important for Christians to realize precisely why Pat Robertson's words on Haiti were wrong.

There's a lot of sneering going on in the media, basically implying that his sheer religiosity amounts to insanity. This reaction is as irrational and misguided as Robertson's, if not more so. The problem with Robertson's claim isn't that it asserts the existence of a very real God who is active in the world and in the lives of individuals. Rather, the flaw with his argument is that it reflects a skewed conception of the role of suffering in Christian theology.

This article by Peter Wehner of NRO explains beautifully the danger of Robertson's overly simplistic theological view that righteousness leads to temporal reward while immorality leads to temporal suffering. He points out that the suffering of innocents is central to the claims of Christian theology, and Robertson's view is fundamentally at odds with this reality.

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UPDATE: Here's more great insight from Mike Potemra.

Why not?

Why can't someone who is Catholic (or more generally, simply Christian) support abortion rights? Well, this is why.

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In a recent interview with Eleanor Clift in Newsweek magazine (Dec. 21, 2009), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about her disagreements with the United States Catholic bishops concerning Church teaching. Speaker Pelosi replied, in part: “[...]I feel what I was raised to believe is consistent with what I profess, and that we are all endowed with a free will and a responsibility to answer for our actions. And that women should have the opportunity to exercise their free will.”

Embodied in that statement are some fundamental misconceptions about Catholic teaching on human freedom....

Catholic teaching on free will recognizes that God has given men and women the capacity to choose good or evil in their lives....

However, human freedom does not legitimate bad moral choices, nor does it justify a stance that all moral choices are good if they are free....

It is entirely incompatible with Catholic teaching to conclude that our freedom of will justifies choices that are radically contrary to the Gospel.... Freedom of will is the capacity to act with moral responsibility; it is not the ability to determine arbitrarily what constitutes moral right.

While we deeply respect the freedom of our fellow citizens, we nevertheless are profoundly convinced that free will cannot be cited as justification for society to allow moral choices that strike at the most fundamental rights of others. Such a choice is abortion, which constitutes the taking of innocent human life, and cannot be justified by any Catholic notion of freedom.

- Archbishop George H. Niederauer

"Osama bin Laden: The Che Guevara of the East"

This is the title of a book written by the wife of the suicide bomber that killed 7 CIA employees in Afghanistan.

I really just can't think of a more fantastic analogy. It isn't really accurate, ideologically speaking, but it will make me snicker every time I walk into a Starbucks and see an upper-middle class, dreadlocked college sophomore reading Nietzsche while proudly sporting his Che shirt as evidence of his open-mindedness and intellectual sophistication. Not that I didn't already have good reason to laugh at that guy, but whatever.

Coulter on Christianity

Ann Coulter's column this week is worth reading. I completely agree with her that the response among media elites to Brit Hume's advice for Tiger Woods has been bizarre. I'm constantly amazed that journalists - presumably educated people - can be so brazenly ignorant of Christian theology and completely unequipped to discuss it intelligently. I understand how it happens of course, but it's still just inexcusable.

This also raises a question: Why do elites (intellectuals, journalists, etc.) tend to be irreligious? It's well established that societies become less religious as they become more educated, and people who like to feel smart often assume this happens because education somehow "disproves" religion. They believe that religion is a crutch to be cast away once the mind is strong enough to reject irrationality. But I think this is clearly wrong.

Education is not the enemy of religious conviction. Vanity is. "The smartest people in the room" are less likely to be religious precisely because they enjoy being "the smartest people in the room." Their intelligence doesn't bar the acceptance of religious claims, their self-conceit does. Religious devotion (and particularly Christian devotion) requires a healthy dose of humility - which is wholly inconsistent with feelings of intellectual or moral superiority.

In other words, any correlation between education and non-religiosity exists, in my opinion, only because education and self-conceit fit together so nicely - and self-conceit is the natural enemy of religious devotion. It's impossible for someone to be too smart to believe in God, but very tempting to decide that such a belief is intellectually beneath you. And I think this describes most modern secularists.

Soft Despotism

This is a series of fantastically interesting interviews (from National Review Online) with Paul Rahe on his book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift. Based on these interviews, it should be a fascinating read. I just ordered a copy.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Brit Hume Endorses Christianity for Tiger

Does this bother you? If so, why?

I can't imagine how any Christian could do anything other than heartily support the statement. I also can't imagine how any non-Christian dedicated to free and open societies could find anything offensive in the remark. And yet, I see things like this Olbermann interview where it's just arrogantly assumed that "smart people" know this sort of talk is unacceptable.

What country is this?

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UPDATE:
Ramesh Ponnuru addresses possible objections to Hume's comments over at The Washington Post and easily dispenses with each of them.

Uncommon Knowledge with Thomas Sowell

The estimable Dr. Sowell is on Uncommon Knowledge this week.

Goldberg on Avatar

Jonah Goldberg offers a very interesting take on Avatar. I had many of the same thoughts after watching the movie.

As a cinematic experience, it's not bad. Actually, I really enjoyed it. But as a story, it's utterly predictable, condescending, and preachy. If you haven't seen it yet, you can get essentially the same experience by Netflixing Dances With Wolves (great movie) along with some Disney-ish enviro-propaganda (Fern Gully or Pocahontas should suffice) and tapping yourself lightly on the forehead with a ball-peen hammer to simulate the effect of 3-D (I'm just being silly here. The 3-D was wicked cool and didn't make me nauseous at all).

I agree with Goldberg - the movie's preachiness doesn't bother me per se; it just made the story so much weaker than it had to be. Look, I'm preachy and I like preachy things (at least when I agree with the message). I just think it's strange that popular culture fails to acknowledge that movies written like this are the film equivalent of contemporary Christian music for Whole Foods shoppers that hate Sarah Palin. (To clarify: I like contemporary Christian music, but I'm willing to bet that many who sing the praises of movies like Avatar would find such music cheesy and shallow - too message-driven to be taken seriously as music.) It just proves that most people aren't as offended by public proselytizing as they pretend to be - they're just offended by certain messages.

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UPDATE: Goldberg has written another post examining the claim from some on the left that Avatar's popularity proves that Americans really do like left-leaning movies.

Goldberg responds:

Look, I enjoyed the movie. But Goldstein's line how Avatar turns conservative complaints on their head is really bizarre. He recounts a long list of explicitly left-wing movies that bombed, but says all that doesn't matter because people are flocking to see Avatar. Never mind [that] very, very few people are going to see Avatar because of its political content. Meanwhile, conservatives are "prickly" and "partisan sloganeers" for noticing the incredibly lame partisan sloganeering in the movie!

Let me explain something, if I may. I can't speak for every conservative who complained about Avatar, but it seems to me that most of the conservative complaints centered on the laziness of the story (a complaint that is hardly unique to right-wing critics of the film)....

The partisan stuff didn't make me angry because it took shots at Bush or Republicans. It made me angry because it was so incredibly lame.

I couldn't agree more. When we walked out I told Julie, "It was okay. The visuals were amazing, but I thought the story would be better. It was basically just Dances With Wolves with boring, two-dimensional characters."

War and the Courts

This is one of the best and most important articles I've read all year. Read it all the way through. Every word. Twice.

Our courts have long been activist, but only recently have they become imperialist. Activism can be reversed, but if we allow the judiciary to effectively eliminate the separation of powers with regard to the conduct of war - there will be no going back. We can stop this by electing presidents who will appoint Justices that understand and accept the constitutional limitations of their position.

Here's a sample:

...The Framers did not include federal judges as participants in our national defense. The judiciary was formed as a part of our government, to protect American citizens from violations of their liberties by their own elected representatives....They are not supposed to be a forum to empower non-Americans — particularly alien enemies of our people — to invalidate actions taken in our national defense.

Our defense against foreign enemies is a political matter, not a legal one. To put it bluntly, it is none of the judges’ business. It is for the people’s representatives to decide — with the president holding the preeminent role as commander-in-chief, subject to the capacity of Congress to remove the president by impeachment [or] to shut off funding for...missions of which it does not approve, and the capacity of the American people at election time to remove the president and/or members of Congress who go either too far or not far enough in safeguarding our nation.

The courts, by contrast, are not politically accountable to the American people. That is why judges were given no role in national security. Self-defense is the natural right of nations. Without it, there is no liberty. In our system — the system of a free, self-determining people — the political branches were given plenary power over our defense. The courts were given no power. That was intentional: It created an accountability nexus between the officials making national-defense decisions and the people whose lives hung in the balance.

If we do not return to that arrangement, we are not free and we cannot defend ourselves.
...
We must face down the courts’ despotic reinterpretation of “separation of powers.” Government action is not illegitimate simply because it lacks the judicial imprimatur; judicial action is illegitimate if it intrudes into areas committed by the Constitution to the political branches or the states.
...
Republicans should make clear that the president should not comply with judicial rulings issued under circumstances where Congress has divested the courts of jurisdiction. Regarding enemy combatants, Congress has so divested the courts in the Military Commissions Act. Congress’s control of federal court jurisdiction is the rule of law, and where the judges fail to live within that constitutional framework, their decisions should be ignored.

This is not a betrayal of what the Left calls “our values.” It is a reaffirmation of our principles. It will still be necessary to treat our captives humanely. But it will be for us through our accountable representatives, not for the courts, to draw the lines between national security and due process for the enemy. Unless we declare our national-security independence from unaccountable judges, we will no longer be governed by our Constitution, we will no longer control our own defense, and we will no longer be free.

Breaking News: The Sun Affects Global Temperatures!

Jonah Goldberg is just awesome. His article about the effect of sunspots on global temperatures is careful to avoid hasty scientific conclusions while pointing out the sheer zealotry on display from proponents of anthropogenic climate change.

Here's my favorite part:

...[H]umility and skepticism [among the scientific community] seem to manifest themselves only when the data point to something other than the mainstream narrative about global warming. For instance, when we have terribly hot weather, or bad hurricanes, the media see portentous proof of climate change. When we don’t, it’s a moment to teach the masses how weather and climate are very different things.

No, I’m not denying that man-made pollution and other activity have played a role in planetary warming since the Industrial Revolution.

But we live in a moment when we are told, nay lectured and harangued, that if we use the wrong toilet paper or eat the wrong cereal, we are frying the planet. But the sun? Well, that’s a distraction. Don’t you dare forget your reusable shopping bags, but pay no attention to that burning ball of gas in the sky — it’s just the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in darkness. Never mind that sunspot activity doubled during the 20th century, when the bulk of global warming has taken place.
...
[M]aybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to “solve” a problem we don’t understand so well.

Cal Thomas on Teddy Kennedy

Cal Thomas is one of the few columnists who seems to truly understand the way christian conviction informs conservative idealogy. Most use faith as a crutch to prop-up their political convictions, but Thomas's faith always seems to precede his political conclusions. His article on Teddy Kennedy's passing is, I think, the way Christians ought to respond - although most (myself included) would probably take a bit more pleasure in pointing out Kennedy's flaws/crimes.

For me, this article highlights the important distinction between discernment and judgment, or as Thomas puts it "Judgment and Judgmentalism." Kennedy did lots of terrible things. God has empowered us and expects us to watch the actions of others with a critical eye - to identify behaviors that are wrong, call attention to them, denounce them, and encourage others to do the same. But God also expects this to be done out of love, not pride or vindictiveness.

Thomas says:

Many on the Right invoke the name of Jesus on Sunday and tear down a politician whose policies they don't like the rest of the week. Tearing down policy is fine, but diminishing the value of a fellow human simply because you don't like his politics (or his personal behavior) is not a good strategy for persuading him to change either.
...
This is not to absolve Senator Kennedy of his sins, only to say that we are neither the judge, nor the one who can absolve. We can't forgive ourselves, or as I put it to a TV interviewer who asked me "bottom line: Senator Kennedy, a good man?"

"Only God is good," I responded. "The rest of us are sinners."

It is not hypocritical to care for someone who behaves badly. In fact, it is the height of love to do so because you want him to have a changed life and attitude that will help him behave better for his own sake and that of his family. Denouncing that person and condemning him to Hell is not likely to make him more open to things that will lead him in the other direction. Who among us has lived a perfect life that would be acceptable to God?
...
I strongly opposed much of what Senator Kennedy proposed, but I cared for him as a person. Those without sin...