Shifting to Accomodating Evil

Another excellent post by Daled Amos (Pebble for sure).

He quotes Norman Doidge in his piece entitled, "Evil's Advantage Over Conscience."

Five stars.

The West's Inability to Confront Evil

Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the Mohammed cartoons, recently described the current (especially European) response to Islam by retelling Max Frisch's Biederman and the Arsonists.

It is a story that describes the West's inability to deal with evil in its midst.

Definitely worth reading.

QOTD: Fred Thompson

DaledAmos quotes Fred Thompson (Republican Presidential candidate) on Israel's response versus America's response (regarding rockets hitting Sderot).

Let me ask you a hypothetical question. What do you think America would do if Canadian soldiers were firing dozens of missiles every day into Buffalo, N.Y.? What do you think our response would be if Mexican troops for two years had launched daily rocket attacks on San Diego -- and bragged about it?

I can tell you, our response would look nothing like Israel's restrained and pinpoint reactions to daily missile attacks from Gaza. We would use whatever means necessary to win the war. There would likely be numerous casualties on our enemy's side, but we would rightfully hold those who attacked us responsible.

More than 1,300 rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza since Palestinians were given control two years ago. Israelis, however, have gone to incredible lengths to stop the war against them without harming Palestinian non-combatants. But make no mistake, Israel is at war. The elected Hamas government regularly repeats its official promise to destroy Israel entirely and replace it with an Islamic state. Hamas openly took credit for killing one woman and wounding dozens more last week alone.

The Palestinian strategy is to purposely target and kill Israeli civilians. Then, when Israel goes after those launching the attacks, Palestinians claim to be the victims. If Palestinian civilians aren't hurt in the Israeli attacks, they stage injuries and deaths. Too often, they garner sympathy and support from a gullible or anti-Semitic media in the international community.

Israelis, themselves, are often incapable of facing the damage they inflict in self-defense. Knowing this, Islamic extremists are using their own populations as human shields.

I'm beginning to wonder how much longer this vicious plot will work though. International sympathy for Palestinians has diminished as the same Islamofascist extremists have brought havoc to Madrid, Bali, Somalia, London and elsewhere. More importantly, Israelis themselves are suffering so badly, they may be on the verge of losing their sympathy for the people who have sworn to kill them.

Imagine what it would be like to live, knowing that a rocket could fall on you or your children at any minute. Half of those who live nearest to Gaza have fled their homes. Those remaining are traumatized by daily warning sirens and explosions.

The irony is that Israel has the military might to easily win the war that is being waged against them today. They haven't used that might, in the past, out of compassion for Palestinian civilians and because it could trigger a wider regional conflict.

That balance of power is about to change, though. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, the very existence of this tiny nation of Israel will be threatened. The Iranian regime has left little doubt that it intends to see Israel "wiped off the map.” Hamas is using the same language, not coincidentally, and has announced it will begin launching missiles into Israel from the West Bank too.

If the world doesn't act to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions, it must be prepared for the consequences of Israel defending itself.

I'm impressed. He gets it.

Carpet Bombing Gaza

JPost reports on Rav Eliyahu, former Sephardi chief rabbi in Israel, describing what is legally (from a Jewish point-of-view) allowed and should be done to stop rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides' commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."

Eliyahu wrote that "This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses."

CTL and GTL Fuels

Knowledge Problem discusses the economics of Coal-To-Liquids processing and touches on Gas-To-Liquids as well.

Currently, CTL is about $40/barrel to produce. This could come down to $35/barrel over time from volume production and improvements. (Compare this to oil at $5-$10/barrel.)

From the comments, it looks like it produces a lot of heavy metals, but uranium, mercury, and other metals could be extracted from the waste to lower the overall cost.

One other benefit is that CTL technologies use cogeneration/combined heat and power (CHP) technology in production, enabling the capture and recycling of waste heat and gases. With respect specifically to electricity generation, CHP can achieve fuel efficiency levels around 80%, while a conventional large-scale coal-fired generation plant has fuel efficiency levels around 33%. Thus with CHP you get more output from a given BTUs worth of fuel because less is wasted, and you also reduce pollution emissions (including CO2, if you want to consider that a pollutant) in the process. However, most petroleum refining (and petrochemical) production also use CHP processes, so that's not necessarily an incremental benefit relative to existing petroleum product manufacturing processes.

It still seems like this would be a benefit over purely coal-driven plants.

Goodbye, Jerry Falwell

Ze'ev Chafets on the life, death, and legacy of Jerry Falwell.

In the main building of the Liberty University campus in Lynchburg, Va., there is a Jerry Falwell museum.

The first exhibit you see when you walk through the door is devoted to Falwell's father. Carey Falwell was a nonbeliever, a successful entrepreneur, a hoodlum, bootlegger and gunman who shot his own brother dead two years before the end of Prohibition — not the kind of family skeleton usually put on public display by a university founder.

But the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who started Liberty University in 1971 and grew it into the largest evangelical institution of higher learning in the land, was not an ordinary college president. He was, first and foremost, a Baptist minister, and his Corey Falwell exhibit was meant to convey that even the son of a sinner can become a man of God.

It was also a not very subtle reminder that Falwell came from tough stock. He was a Christian who couldn't be counted on to turn the other cheek.

When I mentioned this to Falwell, whom I met a number of times while writing my last book, he readily agreed. Falwell gloried in his common-man persona, and he viewed himself as a roughneck compared with his lifelong rival, the Rev. Pat Robertson. Known to his friends as "Doc," he was a man who didn't mind laughing at himself — or at his fellow evangelicals. (One of the country's leading Pentecostal figures broke off relations after Falwell publicly sneered at her effort to heal a chicken through faith. "We Baptists don't save chickens, we eat them," he told her.)

No chicken was safe within Falwell's grasp, and he liked them deep-fried. I dined with him several times, and he ate with the aplomb of a fellow whose cardiologist was Jesus. A pre-millennial Baptist, he believed that God sorted things out in God's own time. He also expected to go to heaven.

Falwell was a theological fatalist but a political activist. If this seems like a common combination today, that is largely due to Falwell himself. Before he came along, evangelical Christianity was inward looking. The Baptists, especially, had been badly burned by the failure of Prohibition and the mockery of the Scopes trial and turned away from politics during the first half of the 20th century. As a young preacher, Falwell asserted that the church had no business getting involved in such issues.

"I meant well, but I was wrong," he wrote in his autobiography. This change of heart was one of the many unintended consequences of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which galvanized Falwell. He got into politics not out of love but out of hatred for "abortion, the drug traffic, pornography, child abuse and immorality in all its ugly, life-destroying forms."

Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 with a four-point program: "Pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American." The movement's domestic conservatism transformed the Republican Party for a generation (today, Rudy Giuliani seems to be the un-Falwell), but Falwell had no illusions about the nature of his victories. "Look at the culture overall, and secular progressives are winning," he told me. "They have been for 50 years, and they probably will until Jesus gets here and sorts things out."

Falwell had a similar view of international relations. He believed that God had a plan for the United States and that its enemies were evil. He referred to Muslim radicals as "barbarians" and advocated taking out Iran's nuclear capacity by force. "Bush is probably too weak politically to do it," he told me over barbecue one afternoon. "It will be up to Israel. And we'll be at the White House, cheering."

Falwell's Zionism was by no means inevitable. Before him, evangelicals reluctantly acknowledged that the Jews were God's chosen people, but many didn't quite agree with the choice. Falwell embraced the Jews of Israel (who appreciated his friendship) just as he embraced American Jews (who, by and large, spurned it). He could be acerbic about Jewish leaders — he called Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League a "damn fool" and pointedly told me that the comment was on the record — but he never let Jewish hostility shake his philo-Semitism. American Jews who now take evangelical friendship for granted need to know that it is, to a large extent, a grant from Jerry Falwell.

Falwell was always aware that he was under scrutiny. He hated crooked TV preachers like Jim Bakker, and he didn't have much use for hypocrites like Ted Haggard either. He was married to the same woman for nearly 50 years. He took in millions of dollars during his lifetime without a scandal — not bad for a televangelist.

Not everything Falwell said and did was commendable. He sometimes said stupid things, like his famous crack that 9/11 was the product of American immorality. He knew he was wrong, and he said so (just as he apologized for the segregationist views of his youth). Not every man of God has "I'm sorry" in his vocabulary. He never apologized for his beliefs, though, or his tough partisanship. He was a born-again Christian, an American and a Republican, in that order, and if you didn't like it, well, there were plenty of other places you could spend Sunday morning.

I once asked Falwell about his legacy. We were, naturally, having lunch, in a Liberty University dining room. "This university has 10,000 graduates in pulpits and church boards all over the country," he said. "There will be more every year. They'll carry on."

Amen.

Under Construction

I am switching to the new blogger template system, so pardon the dust as the transition continues...

All modern humans descended from the same small group of people

Physorg notes this new research breakthrough. Apparently, we are all descended from the same people and lived among and replaced homo erectus, similar to Bible and other stories.

Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry.

The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia's aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.

The research confirms the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis that all modern humans stem from a single group of Homo sapiens who emigrated from Africa 2,000 generations ago and spread throughout Eurasia over thousands of years. These settlers replaced other early humans (such as Neanderthals), rather than interbreeding with them.

Now, can we all just get along? Kumbaya?

Internet Autobahn

From Ars Technica. Emphasis mine. Whoo-hoo!

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association is holding its annual convention in Las Vegas ... and this year, super-high-speed cable service is finally moving into the limelight. Announcements from hardware providers like Motorola and Texas Instruments suggest that we're finally moving closer to the promised land of DOCSIS 3.0.

DOCSIS 3.0 offers two immediate benefits over what cable ISP subscribers are currently stuck with (DOCSIS 1.1): faster speeds and support for IPv6. The technology has the potential to bump download speeds to 160Mbps and upload speeds to 120Mbps, although that bandwidth will be divided up between households attached to a single node.