Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

This article tells us that the Swedish Church (till recently the official Lutheran church, now independent but dominant) is actively promoting blasphemy and pornography. (more…)

I came across another story of how a homosexual, boy-abusing priest kept being transferred from one parish to another: “‘May our Lord forgive me’ How one problem priest in Vermont kept getting another chance” It’s well-written, with lots of excerpts from internal church letters about him. The theme here is to prevent scandal while keeping the priest employed in a parish somewhere.

Martin Kramer has a good post on why a foreign policy “Realist” should support Israel, Israel, Oil, and Realism:

If you are going to maintain that U.S. support for Israel has harmed U.S. vital interests, you have to start with oil. You can finish elsewhere, but you have to start there. So has U.S. support for Israel damaged the most vital, other U.S. interest in the region: the free flow of oil? …

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J. Philippe Rushton talks about the oddity that American Jews have a much higher average IQ than Israelis: (more…)

Consider the case of Mary McCarthy, the CIA employee who leaked secret information to the press in the hope, presumably, of stopping certain CIA operations of which she disapproved. This had the effect of helping our enemies. Is it treason— the kind of offense that merits execution?

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William Sloane Coffin, Yale campus pastor during the 1960’s and prominent liberal, recently died. I looked at a number of obituaries. None of them mentioned that he beat his wife except for David Zincavage’s, which I found via Stromata. Zincavage’s obituary was so damning, though as mildly written as it could be considering its talk about how Coffin fractured his wife’s skull and how all three sets of CIA agents he sponsored behind Soviet lines were quickly caught, that I asked him for his reference. It is William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience by Warren Goldstein, Yale U Press, 2004. Zincavage did not exaggerate, it turns out. In fact, it seems that when he punched his wife that time, it was because she desperately wanted to talk, and he wanted to sleep instead. Here are details of that, as well as other sordid episodes from the life of this celebrated progressive man of the cloth. (more…)

Stromata has a new possible angle on Mary McCarthy, the CIA employee fired for leaking (that is, releasing classified information to the press). This possibility might also explain why she is not being prosecuted and sent to jail: maybe she was not leaking truthful information.

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Bill Vallicella at Right Reason nicely puts naturalism, scientism, and anti-ID arrogance and philosophical naivete together. People just can’t seem to realize that to conclude there is no divine intervention needs empirical justification just as much as to assume there is divine intervention— and that neither side has anywhere near a conclusive case. Indeed, the ID people are trying much harder to argue empirically for their position than the anti-ID people, who usually just sneer and act (a) as if their position doesn’t need any evidence, or (b) as if the existing evidence for evolution somehow proves that God has never, ever, not one single time, intervened in evolution.

It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not
scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and
liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a
lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported
scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did
about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body
problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain,
but it shows a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else
ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about
the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about
consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality,
and the rest.

How can we explain why housing prices have risen so much 2000-2005 relative to
stock prices? Will prices fall? Maybe not, if the reason is low interest rates. Let
me explore the idea. (more…)

Wikipedia: “In literature, an epigraph is a quotation that is placed at the start of a work or section that expresses in some succinct way an aspect or theme of what is to follow.”

I’ll be giving a number of passages from a very important article by Mark Steyn :“It’s the Demography,
Stupid The real reason the West is in danger of extinction,”
Mark Steyn, Wednesday, 4 January 2006. One thing he does is to distinguish between primary and secondary functions of a society— to preserve existence, and to make existence slightly better: (more…)

Christianity Today reports on the case Christian Legal Society Chapter of University of California, Hastings College of the Law v. Mary Kay Kane, et al.. A state law school refused to give official status to a student group that would not admit homosexuals or non-Christians as members, as a matter of a policy that also forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, and sex. The group sued, and lost. (more…)

I was just reading Professor Bainbridge about the generals criticizing the Secretary of Defense. In thinking about criticism leadership by former generals of their leaders, civilian or military, the most important thing is to not regard the critics as unbiased technical experts. A good example is Marshall’s promotion of Eisenhower over 366 more senior officers. What would those 366 generals have said if you asked them about Marshall’s fairness and judgement? Marshall , in fact, when to Congress and got a special bill exempting him from the standard rules about who he could promote . In Speaking Frankly (1947) James Byrnes says, (more…)

James Lileks has a good column on illegal immigrants. Here’s the start: (more…)

HT, CT, I see that the trend towards outright infanticide is picking up steam in Europe. The London Telegraph tells us that many are calling for letting premature babies die if they’re under 25 weeks, regardless of their health, even though some 40% would survive: (more…)

From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

My Beckwith Tenure Denial post of yesterday inspired some useful comment. I know something of the quirks of the tenure process, having served on a schoolwide tenure committee that evaluated every case from various departments and having had my own tenure weirdly turned down at the university level. In my own case (and at least one other that same year), the decision was reversed without any need for the formal appeal process. A long supplemental memo from myself and lots of unsolicited mail from academics outside the university did the trick. (more…)

Senator McCain is amazingly out of touch. As the Boston Globe tells us, he thinks $50/hour is too low a wage to attract people to menial jobs. (more…)

I blogged on the Beckwith tenure denial
recently. I see that Reformclub has a list of links on the subject. None I’ve seen try to argue for why he should have gotten tenure except to say that he’s published a lot of words, he seems smart to them, and he’s inspired some students. (more…)

Iran is really not as big a problem as Al Qaeda, at least as far as knowing the right policy. The situation is that they are developing nuclear weapons, with the desire to use them against Israel, and, probably, the United States. Also, I would think, extreme-Sunni oil-competitor Saud Arabia. Both Israel and the U.S. (though not Saudi Arabia) have the Bomb and could retaliate, though, so it’s not clear how that would work out. What Iran could do is to give a few bombs to terrorist groups and let them do the dirty work, muddying up responsibility enough that Israel and the U.S. wouldn’t nuke Iran in return. (If Al Qaeda nuked New York with an Iranian bomb that the Iranians denied giving them, would we nuke Tehran in return? No.)

So what can we do? It’s quite simple: we bomb Iran now, just as Israel bombed Iraq some 20 years ago. Like Israel, we would be universally condemned at the time, but we would save hundreds of thousands of lives later.

Would Iran retaliate in some way for our bombing them? Yes, if they thought we wouldn’t retaliate for the retaliation. But we could, and probably would. The Iranian government, unlike a terrorist group, has land to protect. We can easily inflict far more damage on them than they can inflict on us. And after our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, our threat would be credible.

Why, then, is Iran persisting? First, because so far there has been absolutely no cost to them, politically. The U.S. and others criticize Iran, but we have been saying mean things about Iran for years and years, so their feelings don’t get hurt. Second, they can always pull back if it looks like the U.S. is getting serious, and if we don’t, they get the benefits of having the Bomb. Third, the Iranian government might benefit by getting the nuclear sites bombed by America, if America did restrict itself to nuclear sites and didn’t take advantage of the occasion to eliminate the Iranian air force and such things. Very little damage would occur except to the sites themselves, and the government leaders would be heroes for standing up to America. It would be quite hard for any opposition leaders to take power “during a time of war”. Thus, I expect Iran to keep working on the Bomb, though I make no prediction on the U.S. response.