harmonicminer

Mark Steyn: Unsustainable’s the new normal

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:

“Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year? What’s that, you don’t work for the government? Yes, you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that. In the past month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”:

“WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”? And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life. If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:

“Unsustainable

That’s what you are

Unsustainable

Though near or far

Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us

How the thought of you has flopped on us

Never before Has someone spent more … .”

It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

As usual, when Steyn is done, there isn’t much left to say.

I was watching the Superbowl. Drinking soda from an aluminum can. And this ad comes on:

Some of us have been warning for some time now that the Greens are the new fascists…. well, make that the old fascists, with a new propaganda twist.

Just to stick it to the man, I tossed my aluminum can into the trash.

UPDATE:  Did you see the smug expression on the Audi driver’s face as he was allowed to drive on?  Yeech.

Hubble sees Pluto changing color, ice sheet cover

Newly released Hubble Space Telescope photos show Pluto is changing color and its ice sheets are shifting. That’s got astronomers surprised.

The photos paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, the color of molasses, but astronomers say it has about 20 percent more red than it used to have.

The pictures show nitrogen ice growing and shrinking, getting brighter in the north and darker in the south. Astronomers say Pluto is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That’s surprising because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.

Probably due to too many Plutonians burning fossil fuels.

The previous post in this series is here.

This post is less about the Left AT Christian Universities than it is about the pressures of the Left ON Christian Universities, although the latter is mostly made possible by the presence of the former.  That is, the Left outside of Christian Universities will only be able to pressure them into making concessions with the help of Leftists inside those institutions who encourage leaders to succumb to the pressure.

Blacklisting a Christian University Much more at the link.

According to the Langley Advance, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the Canadian version of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has issued a report stating that Christian universities fail to provide faculty members with academic freedom. Specifically the report places Trinity Western University in British Columbia on its list of universities and colleges that have a faith or ideological test as a condition of employment.

There are also professional academic organizations in the USA that are considering taking the position that universities may not require any particular beliefs or lifestyle commitments on the part of employees or job applicants.   This is especially humorous since there are all kinds of “unofficial litmus tests” that virtually any faculty member must accept in order to be hired in the modern university.   Those tests are defended with positively religious fervor, though they are not religious in nature.  Far from it.

Try to get in a job in a university these days if you say in the job interview that you don’t think “diversity” should be a higher value for the university than simply getting the most competent faculty and best prepared students it can get.

It would be wise not to volunteer in the job interview that you think anthropogenic global warming is an enormous scam.

If you happen to think that the Iraq war was a proper use of American military power, it would be wise not to say so until you have tenure.

Do you think that God created human beings in a special act of creation (whether you are an “old earth” creationist, a “young earth” creationist, an “intelligent design” proponent, etc.)?  Just don’t bring it up, and sidestep any questions that may touch on it.

Do you think Sarah Palin would have been better for the USA than Barrack Obama?  Unless you desire to be laughed at as you exit your unsuccessful job interview, don’t let on.

Do you think economic growth and the spread of capitalism is a better aid program for the third world than permanent entitlements in the form of foreign aid?  Better not say so.

Do you think that God’s Word in scripture means pretty much what it says, and that historical understandings of its theological and moral content are correct?  Learn to beat the quasi-polygraph on this one, since, obviously, only bigots and haters believe this.

There are pieties to which all must make obeisance in the world of academia, and they are pretty much the exact reverse of the positions just stated.  Sadly, these same pieties may be defended by all too many in Christian universities as well, and defended more vigorously, at times, than the bedrock commitments one would have thought more central to their mission.

The only question remaining is if Christian universities are going to capitulate to the very real pressures that come along with seeking respectability in the eyes of the secular academic world.   When Christian universities do succumb, it isn’t really the pressures from outside that make it happen….  it’s the pressure from inside.

The scary thing is that those applying that pressure will be quoting scripture as they do it.

Polar Bears Prefer Bread

Russian sailors serving on submarines have noticed an interesting fact – the most preferred food for polar bears is bread, they like it very much, just look on those photos, how they risk their lives jump from one ice piece to another to get closer to the submarine and ask some more of this when the submarine appears on the surface of the cold polar ocean breaking the thin ice apart.

The Russian Bear is feeding the bears, it seems. Who knew they had a yen for bread?

Although from what I know of Russian bread, I’m surprised it doesn’t sink like a stone.

BTW, the overheated rhetoric on bears “risking their lives” is funny… Doesn’t the writer know that polar bears can swim, rather well?   If they fall off an ice floe, they’ll just swim to another one…. like bears have been doing for several tens of thousands of years…. or more.

With the weather we’ve been having around here lately, I’m thinking of putting in a bid on a used Russian submarine to use for commuting.

Keith Olbermann bloviates to shrinking audience

Has the countdown begun for the end of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann?” With his ratings in free-fall, and his hateful histrionics reaching new highs, even Olbermann’s former supporters on the left are tuning out. Bloggers at the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio noted the uberdork’s 44 percent drop in listeners ages 25-54 from January 2009 to last month. “Olbermann’s showboat is sinking,” one LA Times blogger noted. “Listing in you-know-which direction.” Jon Stewart ridiculed him on “The Daily Show” for calling Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown a “racist.” “There are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of — or patience for — Olbermann and his shtick as it once did,” Jeff Bercovici wrote on DailyFinance.com. Olbermann struck back at Bercovici, naming him as one of the “Worst People in the World” and mischaracterizing the Web site as “right-wing.”

For a deeper understanding of why Olbermann is finally wearing thin with his audience, check out the movie advertised on this site, “Media Malpractice.” Just lick the picture in the upper right of this page.

Olbermann’s audience seems to be declining in a linear relationship with Obama’s public ratings.

Fool me once….

UPDATE:  OK, OK, enough already.  I’ve had about 20 emails/facebook messages and counting….  I meant CLICK the picture in the upper right.  CLICK the picture.  OK?

I suppose that’s what I get for typing at the spede of light.

The Age of Obama: Anno Domini 2 You really want to click the link and read the whole thing. It’s Krauthammer in perfect form, with his usual clarity and concision.

In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama’s “virtual world,” America faces the reality of Iran’s intransigence and aggressiveness; China’s headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia’s determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states’ refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria’s designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez’s designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama’s foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm.

Perhaps I should have subtitled my address “How do you celebrate the first anniversary of the Second Coming?”–a theological conundrum that has confounded theologians for centuries.

There is one guaranteed way to stimulate employment. That’s to cut taxes for employers, and make it known that the cuts will be in place for a very long time.  That stability will be the enticement that employers need to feel confident about expanding their operations.  This is historically verifiable for anyone who looks.  But in a strange dream that somehow strategies that have never worked before will now start to work,  Congress looks to create jobs, but will it be enough?

Democrats in Congress are furiously crafting legislation to spur job creation, but experts warn that the benefits could be too small to make much difference.

Senate Democrats plan to meet Tuesday to discuss a package that could provide billions in help for strapped state and local governments, as well as infrastructure projects. They’re also considering tax breaks to small businesses for hiring workers and to help make homes more energy-efficient.

The House of Representatives passed its own $154 billion jobs plan last month.

………………

Some analysts warned that such limited stimulus measures would hardly make a dent in a $14.2 trillion economy, however.

“It’s more of a painkiller than a cure,” said Robert Bixby , the executive director of the Concord Coalition , which monitors fiscal issues.

“While $150 billion might give the economy some stability, it’s not large enough to make much of a difference,” added Muhammad Islam , an associate professor of economics at St. Louis University .

…………….

“The roadblock is just general business confidence,” Bethune said. “Whether this kind of legislation will do the job is hardly clear.”

During his campaign, when a reporter pointed out to Obama that across-the-board tax cuts had created economic booms in the past, he said, regarding even-handed tax cuts for all economic classes, “It’s a matter of fundamental fairness,” by which he meant that tax cuts that benefit all economic classes, including the “rich,” are somehow unfair.  The Left, of course, is only for “targeted tax cuts,” meaning tax rebates to people who pay little or no tax..  and who do not engage in the kind of economic activity that creates jobs.

Crystal ball time (not that it’s especially difficult to predict that what has happened before will happen again):  the Democrat congress will not lower taxes generally, in a way that affects all businesses and likely employers.  They will fund a bunch of non-productive public works projects that will create flurries of employment, but nothing sustained, nothing that leads to a true recovery.  They will lionize themselves for small gains, and portray themselves as the great rescuers of the economy. 

Hopefully, the electorate will know better.  Of course, they didn’t in 2008.

Reagan proved that cutting taxes during a recession is the surest road to recovery.  Obama and the Democrats are raising them, regardless of what they say, simply by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010.

Some people are slow learners.

This is one time when I wish that being a bit over the top in predicting the possible future of airline security hadn’t turned out to be more than likely.  I was at least half joking…  but I guess the terrorist have no sense of humor.

Jihadists plan attack with bombs inside their bodies, to foil new airport scanners

Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.

Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, Underground trains and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes or underwear to avoid detection.

But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ’surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time.

Security services believe the move has been prompted by the recent introduction at airports of body scanners, which are designed to catch terrorists before they board flights.

It is understood MI5 became aware of the threat after observing increasingly vocal internet ‘chatter’ on Arab websites this year.

The warning comes in the wake of the failed attempt by London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.

One security source said: ‘If the terrorists are talking about this, we need to be ready and do all we can to counter the threat.’

A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.

A shaped charge of 8oz of PETN can penetrate five inches of armour and would easily blow a large hole in an airliner….

Orphaned, Raped and Ignored (much more at the link, and a difficult read)

Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.

Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.

That’s why I’m here in the lovely, lush and threatening hills west of Lake Kivu, where militias rape, mutilate and kill civilians with a savagery that is almost incomprehensible. I’m talking to a 9-year-old girl, Chance Tombola, an orphan whose eyes are luminous with fear.

There are those who pretend great concern for the third world. Bluntly, the Congo is a problem that will only be solved by an imposed peace from the outside. Yes, it won’t be a perfect solution. But no amount of mere “aid” will fix it, and there really isn’t anyone to “negotiate” with.

If we cared for these people, we would be mounting an international military mission to rescue them. Yes, there would be problems from the misbehavior of the soldiers we sent in, and there would be continued abuses and horrors… but they could hardly be worse than the reality on the ground now.  I have always wondered why the African-American community does not demand that we do more about this.

Question:  How many pacifists does it take to rescue a threatened child?

Answer:  There aren’t enough in the world to do the job.

h/t:  Hugh Hewitt

Here is a piece of leftist propaganda.  It’s a bit long, about 20 minutes… so watch the beginning, the middle, and the end, and you’ll get the idea…  insofar as there is one.

Hmmm…according to the end credits,  GAIA had something to do with producing this golden turkey, hmmm?

No surprise there…. it is, after all, the eco-pagan earth worshipers who are obsessed with the notion that earth is some kind of giant organism, a living thing in its own right.

The film is filled with economic and scientific ignorance. For one thing, there are NO “circular, non-linear, closed-loop” systems on earth, and never have been. If there were, climates would never have changed, new species would never have arisen, nor died out, and all would be in some kind of stasis forever. It is simply false that earth had some great stability of climate and species until humans came along, as even the most ignorant surely know.

One of my favorite lines is the one about people leaving the natural areas that had “sustained them” for generations, and moving to the cities. Well, duh. I suppose that might be a problem, if the definition of “being sustained for generations” didn’t basically mean most people being hungry most of the time, and most people dying young. If you’d like to be sustained that way, go for it.   Personally, I’d rather start out the day with a nice diet coke…  which requires an industrial culture and modern distribution system.  But I promise to recycle the can…  mostly, anyway.

What gives western leftists the chutzpa to think they know how “indigenous peoples” should live their lives?  Maybe “indigenous peoples” would like some diet coke, too.

The bit about having to replace computers every couple of years because “the chip is a different shape than the old one” is just so breathtakingly ignorant about the nature of computers, motherboards, support chip sets, operating system requirements, RAM, and the like, that I don’t know whether to laugh or horse-laugh.  Most of the rest of the economic assertions in this drivel are of similar quality, and betray a huge lack of understanding about the laws of economics, not to mention physics, that are at work in our culture…  and everyone else’s, too.

I’m especially entertained that the narrator thinks we should keep using the older, bigger, power hungry computer monitors, instead of the newer, flatter, power-efficient, low-magnetic-emission monitors.  These environmentalists should really get together and decide on some priorities.  Does she think I should have kept my 10 mpg 1967 Chevy monster-car so I wouldn’t have to buy a new one?  Sheesh.  Do we want sustainability or energy efficiency?  She should get in a time machine and visit New York City in 1850, and learn all about “sustainability” when horses ruled the roads, including the sustained smell of horse puckey.

I’ve read that my Prius puts more total gunk in the environment, from manufacture to disposal, than a Hummer.  But I still feel VERY virtuous driving it around, with everyone knowing how environmentally conscious I am.

The narrator is correct about the dangers of toxins.  But if I took her seriously, I’d worry about putting my head on a pillow at night, for fear it will give me cancer, judging from all the chemicals she claims are in my pillow stuffing.  I wonder what her opinion is of the West’s refusal to allow the use of DDT on malarial mosquitoes in the third world, leading to 50 million unnecessary deaths from malaria in the decades since.  Of course, since she thinks there are WAY too many of us, I suppose she isn’t that bothered by it.

The narrator says that “nursing is a sacred act” or words to that effect, as she frets about “toxins in mother’s milk.”  One wonders if she thinks carrying an unborn child is ALSO a sacred act.  One wonders if she votes for “pro-choice” (really, pro-abortion) politicians, since they’re more likely to be leftists like her.   Typically, those with her persuasion vote left.  Maybe she thinks abortion is a “sacred act,” too.

This film was recently shown in a university course on “diversity.”

No surprise there, though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the putative content of the course, which is supposed to be about racism and cultural bigotry and the like, according to its catalog description.  But, as I’ve observed before, in the minds of diversity activists, “diversity” is inseparable from the entire leftist agenda, and any discussion of “diversity” is an open door for discussion about global warming, environmentalism, the evils of American foreign policy, the sins of organized Christian religion (especially evangelicals and catholics), and the depredations of capitalism. And, of course, sustainability is the latest craze, as the left is gradually forced to acknowledge that anthropogenic global warming is a fraud, and so the left (which is really about centralizing power in government) needs a new environmental agenda to promote.  So a college course in “diversity” is indeed a likely place for a piece of leftist propaganda on “sustainability.”

It would be different, of course, if the film was shown in class, and then “de-constructed” for its racist content, of which there is a considerable amount, some in subtle references that imply that third worlders shouldn’t be allowed to do what they see as being in their own economic self-interest.   It would be different if the film was criticized as promoting greater poverty in the third world (which the policies it promotes would guarantee), and was shown as an example of how leftist bias harms the poor in the end, by undermining their ability to improve their economic situations due to implementing the misplaced ideologies of western leftists.

But that isn’t how it’s used.  This film was presented in a “Diversity” class, and apparently swallowed whole by many students, though it’s viewpoint isn’t “diverse” in the slightest…  it’s merely Left.

What does it have to do with “diversity”?  Nothing at all.

Except that the agenda of the left is, like the Republic, indivisible.

Religion could survive discovery of ET, survey suggests

Could the world’s religions survive the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Or would their beliefs be so shaken that they would eventually collapse?

A survey (pdf) discussed on Tuesday at a meeting on the search for alien life at the Royal Society in London suggests religion would survive.

The survey, designed by Ted Peters, a professor of Systematic Theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, asked 1300 people whether they thought the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would shake their individual belief, the strength of their religion as a whole or would adversely affect the beliefs of other religions. The survey included both religious and non-religious people, and most respondents were based in the US.

None of the 70 Buddhists questioned thought that the discovery of ET would undercut their belief systems, although 40 per cent thought it could pose problems for other religions.

More Roman Catholics believed ET could pose a problem for their faith. Only 8 per cent of the 120 surveyed thought that their individual beliefs would be shaken, but nearly a quarter – 22 per cent – said it could adversely affect their religion. Even more – 30 per cent – thought it could threaten the beliefs of other religious people.
Singled out

The patterns were similar for the other Christian sects surveyed, including evangelical and mainline Protestants, but there was not enough data to draw firm conclusions about people of other religions, such as Hindus and Muslims.

Of the 205 people who identified themselves as non-religious (either atheists or those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious), only 1 per cent thought it would affect their atheist or spiritual outlooks. But 69 per cent thought the discovery of ET could cause a crisis for other world religions. An average of only 34 per cent of religious people shared that belief.

Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University in Tempe was one of the first to suggest that the world’s religions would not cope with the discovery of ET. And he still believes such a find would pose theological problems for Christians.

“They believe that Jesus came down to earth to save humankind – not dolphins, Neanderthals or extraterrestrials,” he said in response to the survey results. “To make sense of this, either you need multiple incarnations [of Jesus on other planets] or a reason why this planet and this species was singled out for special attention.”
‘Extraterrestrial brothers’

Many survey respondents expressed no such qualms. A Roman Catholic said: “I believe that Christ became incarnate (human) in order to redeem humanity and atone for the original sin of Adam and Eve. Could there be a world of extraterrestrials? Maybe. It doesn’t change what Christ did.”

Another wrote: “From an evangelical Christian perspective, the Word of God was written for us on Earth to reveal the creator… Why should we repudiate the idea that God may have created other civilisations to bring him glory in the same way?”

“There is nothing in Christianity that excludes other intelligent life,” asserted an evangelical respondent.

Indeed, Vatican astronomers have said in recent years that there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of “extraterrestrial brothers”.

Readers of this blog will know that I am skeptical of the existence of intelligent life on other planets, in other star systems. Not that I think it’s impossible, it’s just that it seems to require a set of incredibly unlikely conditions for life on Earth to have survived 4 billion years… and those condititions seem so rare that it’s hard to see them being duplicated very often.

However, if God did create other intelligent beings on other worlds, they will have a moral sense of some kind…  or they won’t (hard to see them surviving as a species in this case).  If they do, and indeed, if we discover multiple intelligent races, ALL with moral senses, a belief in right and wrong, that belief will have to have come from somewhere.  I suspect we would learn of some striking parallels between our own history and the history of such beings, and I expect it’s likely that they would have “their own revelation.”

So, the shoe is really on the other foot.  How well will atheism survive the discovery of intelligent life on other worlds, particularly if THEY happen to be theists?  Since it’s more likely that they will discover us than it is that we will discover them, I wonder if they’ll try to “evangelize us”?

Perhaps, on their world, the Savior will have said, “You must be hatched again.”  Or, “If thine tail offends thee, cut it off.”

I’m only half kidding…  our “humanity” is not a matter of our anatomy, it is a matter of our minds, souls and will.

But my guess is that if the aliens are indeed atheists, historically without a belief in God the Creator, we may not survive the encounter (unless, of course, God protects us), because they will have had no religious ethic to shape their beliefs about how to treat “the other.”   There will have been no moral teaching preceeding the adoption of atheism that would shape a sense of right and wrong, unlike our own atheists, who end up affirming most traditional moral teaching in a kind of back-door “prooftexting” and materialistic mysticism.

But hey, who knows?    Maybe the aliens will have an equivalent of PETA who will prevail on them to protect us.  You know:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Aliens.

Michael J. Totten much more at the link

The Obama administration needs to start paying attention to Lebanon again before it explodes.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Hezbollah is moving long-range rockets and missiles away from the Israeli border and even north of Beirut in a move that would make a Third Lebanon War much more destructive over a much larger area than the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The previous conflict was mostly, but not exclusively, confined to the Hezbollah-controlled Shia areas in the south and in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Israel Defense Forces Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi says Hezbollah is now capable of firing rockets all the way to Tel Aviv from as far north as Beirut. Depending on where Hezbollah is placing its arsenal, taking out launch sites from the air might endanger America’s allies and Hezbollah’s enemies in the Christian, Sunni, and Druze parts of the country.

IDF Major General Giora Eiland says if a third war does in fact start, “Israel will not contain that war against Hezbollah. We cannot.” The last Lebanon war didn’t end well, and as Dwight Eisenhower once said, “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” The problem, though, must be enlarged in just the right way and to just the right size.

“The only way to deter the other side and prevent the next round,” Eiland continued, “or if it happens, to win — is to have a military confrontation with the state of Lebanon.”

That would make for both too much and too little enlargement. Too much because Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s “March 14 parliamentary majority is being held hostage by Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria and is not really part of the larger problem; too little because the problem is much larger than Lebanon. Hezbollah is but a piece of a region-wide resistance bloc. It can’t be effectively dealt with without acknowledging what it is — the Lebanese branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Syria is the logistical hub Iran uses to maintain its division abroad on the Mediterranean. Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t answer to anyone in Beirut, but to his patrons and armorers in Tehran and Damascus.

I have a daughter, age 11, and this story caught my eye.

German exhibit sheds light on fate of Jewish Berliners

Doris Kaplan died at age 11, but what exactly befell this German Jewish girl remains unknown to this day.

In March 1942, she went from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto. Shortly afterward, any trace of her disappeared. Perhaps she died of disease in the ghetto, perhaps she was sent to Treblinka and murdered in the gas chambers, like thousands of others. The only thing known for certain is that she did not survive the Holocaust.

Kaplan is one of 131 Jews, all residents of the Schoneberg district of Berlin, whose stories are being told at an exhibition that opens this week at the Berlin municipality, entitled “Wir Waren Nachbarn” (”We Were Here”).

The residents of this Jewish district were all expelled from their homes in a single day, never to return. Now, thousands of letters, personal documents and pictures are helping to bring their stories to life.

Some of the residents’ names are well-known: Albert Einstein, author Carl Zuckmayer and photographer Helmut Newton. But most, like Doris, were ordinary people whose fate never interested anyone before.

Doris was born in 1931 in Guben, in eastern Germany. Her father, Ernst Kaplan, was a physician, her mother, Elisabeth, a nurse. In 1940, her parents sent her to live with friends in Berlin, hoping she would be safe there until the family found a way to leave Germany.

Until her death two or three years later, she wrote her parents every Sunday. Her letters survived the war and are now on display.

More at the link. We must never forget.

Less choice, more murder

Democrats are pushing us in a perverse direction — they want to deny our personal freedoms while expanding our capability to murder our unborn children

Much more at the link.

The short story: “pro-choice” is the mantra where killing the unborn is concerned, not for much of anything else.

We have a president who considers abortion to be healthcare (to cure the “disease” of pregnancy, it would seem).

In the meantime, he works to restrict freedom on many other points in our society.

It would seem that while our rights from the first ten amendments to the Constitution are not inalienable after all (speech, religion, and guns come to mind), the right to an abortion, paid by government, is considered by him to be God-given.

I’m sure the Creator of life is proud of him.

Babies who aren’t wanted should really just die quietly, behind a door somewhere, so that decent people don’t have to watch.  If they would just have the grace to do that, we wouldn’t have to kill them.

Of course, we always have Obama and the Left, who want the government to pay “doctors” to do things that nature won’t do for them.