David Klinghoffer, a Discovery Institute fellow, published a column today in the LA Times descrying the descent of conservatism from the heights of "neocons" to the swamps of "crazycons", from the high-minded polemics of Bill Buckley (who did not see himself as a neocon, by the way), Irving Kristol and Richard John Neuhaus, to, well, internet innovator Andrew Breitbart and his supposedly "deceptive" attempt to reveal Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod as a racist. The latter episode, Klinghoffer thinks, typifies a rise of uncivil behavior and a decline of interest in positive policy alternatives.

The article is bound to provoke misunderstandings. Liberals will use it to pummel all conservatives and all conservative arguments, though that, of course, is not what Klinghoffer intended. (Exactly what he did intend is not at all clear.) Conservatives will see it--also incorrectly--as a demand that the Right lay off attacks on liberal leadership failures that are all too apparent in Washington, D.C.

This reminds me, sadly, of the early 60s when George Gilder and I criticized the Goldwaterites for tolerating segregationists and the John Birchers who was who were calling President Eisenhower a communist. We had good arguments on both points and maybe they helped lead to change. It certainly is gratifying to read recent historical accounts that show how Bill Buckley and others made a successful effort to turn the conservative movement around on civil rights and rhetorical extremism. Republicans in Congress at the time, as it happens, supported civil rights legislations in higher percentages than Democrats did, and the influence of the John Birch Society's paranoia managed to evaporate rather fast.

But meantime, many of the positive things Gilder and I were trying to contribute to right of center politics temporarily got lost in the controversy. Constructive conservative initiatives we tried to present languished. We found that we were perceived as foes by many on the right (that abated in time, of course), while the left only valued what we had to say so long as they could use it as a weapon against conservatives. The lesson I learned is that conservatives can make news by criticizing their natural allies, but seldom (given mainstream media bias) by criticizing their natural adversaries or by offering new policy ideas.

In only a few years it became clear, in any case, that the real locus of extremism was on the left. America and the West are still suffering from what the 60s and 70s wrought.

On the right, the conservative movement went on to triumph in the election and policies of Ronald Reagan. Buckley and Reagan brought people like Gilder and me more closely into the conservative fold. Both of us, in different ways, were able to provide ideas and leadership on national policies in the now-iconic Reagan administration.

Yes, today there are a few cringe making voices on the Right. Still others make mistakes, despite generally solid analyses. But it is one of the Left's favorite tactics to exaggerate and misrepresent mistakes by conservatives and to try to marginalize conservative spokesmen based on opportunistic and one-sided criteria of political correctness. I have not followed the case closely, but that may have happened to Andrew Breitbart.

Self-indulgence of stridency once again is much more pronounced on the Left. Only recently, for example, Tea Party activists were being accused of violent tendencies. When a federal judge voided much of the Arizona law on illegal immigration, who demonstrated in the streets? The angry Right? Nope, the Left.

Conservatives do need more policy initiatives in both domestic and international policy. The country needs it from them. But that hardly warrants now taking the spotlight off the destructive policies presently in place in Washington, D.C. First things first.

In the deconstructionist critical age it is hard to assert the truth about anything, especially something that used to be thought tautological: "science". What Discovery Institute has been saying for years is that the guardians of big science, cocooned in walled universities and succored on federal grants, humbly catered to by the major media, and in-bred at small journals with foundation-assured budgets, have become another modern institution suffering from advanced sclerosis--hardening of the very arteries meant to provide society with copious supplies of oxygen.

Real work goes on in the sciences, but with little thanks to the ideological gatekeepers that patrol the corridors these days.

The universities have not yet been inspected by any visiting committees. Nor have the supposed science journals (from the biggest to some of the smallest). Nor, of course, have the grant-making organs of government and philanthropy.

But someone--Virginia Heffernan--finally has taken a look inside the world of "science blogs", the new frontier of alternative media. The doubly amazing thing is that her article just appeared in The New York Times.

What she finds is not science, but self-referencial sophomoric pranks, vitriol and cavil.

That world, also amazingly, seems to be fraying badly.

Americans' superstitious belief in the assured blessings of a college diploma is waning. A degree by itself does not mean someone is well-educated, in the classic sense of, say, 100 years ago. If it did, there still would be an audience for philosophy, for example, and for poetry, but there is not.

A college diploma (in contrast to most doctoral degrees) also does not by itself signify that someone has acquired a vendable set of economic skills--the litmus test of most parents paying the bills these days. The current recession displays how inadequate a college degree has become, with your average espresso barista boasting a bachelor's degree in English literature theory or sociology. Slowly the frustration is growing among the young as they realize that they have not just been indulged, but cheated.

A college degree doesn't even mean that students are smarter, rather than merely older, than when they arrived as freshmen. Surveys show, for example, that some seniors know less about the U.S. Constitution and the American form of government (crucial knowledge for a responsible citizen in a republic that subsidizes these students' education) than do their first year counterparts.

But what our education system does accomplish in the college years is to provide increasingly good livings for tenured professors, largely trivial journals that publish their trivial writing on navel-gazing trivial subjects, and layers of administrators to create and manage forms.

The higher ed bubble is pricked in a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Breifus that is reviewed today in the Wall Street Journal.

Before readers complain that the article and the book (and my comments above) constitute an overly sweeping indictment, let us all acknowledge that there are some fine colleges and that even the bad ones have a some good professors. A few professors can even be called outstanding, whether on teaching or research grounds, or both.

Okay? But let the reader also acknowledge that the institution of college education is ripe for reform. If nothing else, the customers will demand it.

The Tower of Babel was a human impertinence that caused God to fasten on humanity many languages, a contribution to the confusion and disagreement that have become characteristic of human nature. Today we have the Internet.

The American Spectator, a fine journal of lively opinion, ran online an article by me today, A Classic Evolution Policy Blunder..

It is instructive to see the numerous comments that follow it. From the same article various respondents decided that I am anti-science, anti-Bible, anti-reason and pro-liberal judges. I am denounced as a creationist by one reader and an anti-creationist by another. (I am none of those things.) Soon enough, as is typical, some of the commenters are denouncing each other, often behind the protection of made-up names.

We now live in a media environment that is like a restaurant where all the patrons are shouting at the same time. The louder your neighbor, the more you raise your own voice. The more competitive the din, the more nuance and extended argument are cast aside in favor of sloganeering and insults.

In such an environment, one probably should lower his voice rather than raise it.

It should be obvious that just because I am aware of the disposition of federal courts on the subject of religion in public school classrooms I do not necessarily favor it. In the instance of Judge Jones in Dover, PA, I think the judicial opinion is poorly reasoned as well as unfair. Regardless, in real life, school leaders must deal with the law as it is, not as they would like it to be. In the case of Dover, some members on the local school board defended their actions on religious grounds and not only had their policy thrown out by Judge Jones, but also got themselves thrown out of office. In addition, they at least temporarily made the work of intelligent design scientists and other Darwin critics more difficult. The issue was not theirs to misrepresent and endanger, properly speaking, but they did it anyhow.

I hope that doesn't happen in Louisiana. The state government has a fine law that will allow controversial scientific subjects to be taught objectively on their scientific merits. It should be obvious (again) that no one denies that there are religious implications to Darwinian evolution and also to its rejection. But there also are religious implications, for example, to such topics as cloning. And there are political implications to global warming. But most people probably, upon reflection, can find common ground on teaching only science in public school science classes and leaving religion and/or politics at the door. Science should not avoid controversy, but it should respect its own limits. Within those limits there is still plenty to discuss.

The special army of 2010 Census workers is still being demobilized, but we already know that the south (including Texas, of course) is going to gain a lot of new Congressmen and certain northern states are going to lose. You can chart the way various states are faring by examining the various counties within them. It was clear even from figures from the boom times of a couple of years ago; I expect that the trends are stronger now.

With the exception of the political swing state of Ohio, almost all the states that have backed liberal candidates for the White House and Congress lead those losing Congressional districts. It's a blue state phenomenon. But it is not politics that characterizes this decline, but public policies. States (including Ohio) that have over-spent and over-taxed are hurting most.

The new "civil war" is really a struggle over those public policies. California, which since statehood never before failed to gain Congressional representation, is not going to gain any after this Census. The once-Golden State actually is losing people by the hundreds of thousands as punitive taxes and regulations destroy manufacturing and agriculture. People who own or run factories and farms are being hurt, but so are their workers. The Central Valley is being literally decimated.

Former Senator Ted Stevens, killed in a tragic plane crash in his beloved Alaska, is going to be the source of a great deal of sadness and regret in his home state tonight. It should induce some soul searching in Washington, DC.

Before Sen. Stevens was killed in real life he was ruined in political life by unscrupulous federal prosecutors. He finally was able to clear his name in court, but the indictment that preceded the 2008 election was timed so it would be all but impossible for him to be re-elected. Even so, he nearly was re-elected. The final vote margin was small. Clearly he would have returned to the Senate had it not been for the malign political activity of the federal prosecuting team.

Ted Stevens will be hailed correctly as one of the greatest sons of our fiftieth state, a giant of the Senate, a remarkable, durable public servant.

I hope his life story also will help speed reform of the judicial system that allowed rogue prosecutors to play politics with his honor and, frankly, with the democratic rights of Alaskans and the political well-being of the country.

The Screwtape Letters, a novel of C. S. Lewis, is both satirical and instructional, maybe at once the funniest of Lewis' works and also the most trenchant. It has converted people, and amused many more. How many works of theological interest can say as much? (Just now I can't think of any). Published during World War II, Screwtape seems to remain fresh and accessible--and every few years its schema is reused for some other purpose, the sincerest form of flattery, as they say.

Screwtape seems like a natural for stage adaptation and has been performed by several writer/producers/actors before Max McLean. But it is McLean who has excelled. He presently has a bravura, small cast performance at the Westside Theater Off-Broadway in New York. The production has been favorably noticed in the World and The Wall Street Journal ("One hell of a good show"), among other places. But I particularly enjoyed a recent sizable back-story treatment by Retta Blaney in the estimable high church Anglican (Episcopal) journal, The Living Church (July 25 issue).

For what is worth, my opinion is that Screwtape would make an outstanding film and gain millions of new fans where it now wins thousands. The letters from the minor devil, Screwtape, to his agent, Toadpipe, are an indirect means to describe for us sympathetically and humorously the devil's "patient", a young man whose soul Screwtape intends to corrupt. It could be entertaining to follow the patient on the big screen.

There are at least two or three friendly film makers who should be looking at the possibility.

McLean, who himself plays Screwtape on stage--in a gaudy gold and red brocade smoking jacket--says his greatest difficulty was getting Lewis' long sentences into script bites that won't gag an actor on stage. He seems to have pulled it off and also to have reduced what would have been several hours of drama into a lively 90 minutes. "We have twice as much content as most shows and we're half as long," he says. "I feel audiences want to delve into the meatiness of the piece."

The play has been extended in New York into October. I am going to try to see it before then, but if I (and you) can't, McLean will have another national road show this winter (he's had at least one before the New York opening). Then maybe a movie?

The news about the court victory for critics of embryonic stem cell research is huge, though it is not being played that way. You can be sure it would have been a bigger story if the case had been won by the government.

Nonetheless, it is in the first section of most papers and even on page one of the Wall Street Journal (above the fold). Theresa Deisher of Seattle is one of the plaintiffs who sued the Obama Administration over the matter. She kindly sent us a copy of the ruling, found here.

Obviously, the Administration will appeal. But they have been called out and the pro-life issues now have a legal force lacking before. It is amazing and grand that Deisher and company have shown what citizens can do--on the right side.

The Journal story says the ruling "was cheered by some Christian groups as a defense of human life" (imagine that), but "denounced by scientists who called it a major setback for medical research."

But it is not a setback for science. Deisher is a scientist in the field and Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow of Discovery Institute, has pointed out repeatedly that you don't need human embryos to get scientific progress using stem cells. Furthermore, evidence suggests that human embryos are bad candidates for research in the field.

Embryonic Stem Cells are wonderful candidates, of course, for the effort to pit human life defenders against people who long for medical advances. Judge Royce Lambert of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. has thrown a monkey wrench into that strategy.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas supposedly are going to take place shortly. Poor Benjamin Netanyahu has to behave as if he really believes success is possible, even if, in truth, the possibility is slight to none.

George Gilder of Discovery Institute, and author of The Israel Test, spoke a few days ago upon return from a recent trip.

This short video is part of of his trip report.

The New York Times, as usual, leads the attack on the federal court ruling Monday against US Government funding for embryonic stem cell research (mainly through the National Institutes of Health), and as usual the reporting is tendentious.

"This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research," says Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH.

In a companion article ("The Two Plaintiffs at Center for the Ban on Stem Cell Use"), the Times employs innuendo to raise personal questions about the lead researchers who brought the case, Dr. James L. Shirley and Dr. Theresa Deisher. It is one of those stories that sounds worrying until you read it again and realize how empty the charges are. (Basically, the plaintiffs have had disputes with colleagues. Big surprise.) In other words, just because the Times runs a negative article about someone doesn't mean there is any content to the charges. The truth is that the scientists who are plaintiffs have put their careers at risk by taking on the Government and especially the likes of powerful funders at NIH--not to mention biased journalists. They are, in short, very courageous.

In a third article, "Stem Cell Biology and its Complications," way down the page, long after we read how people with diabetes and other ravaging diseases are distressed by possible funding cuts for cures, the Times admits, "Yet despite the high hopes for embryonic stem cells, progresss has been slow--so far there are no treatments with the cells." (Emphasis added.) After all these years and who know how much much money: "no treatments with the (embryonic stem) cells."

Finally, the Times leaps in with a fourth article, an editorial deploring the decision, "Wrong Direction on Stem Cells." Expect attacks by columnists to follow.

The plaintiffs would have no chance against that kind of stacked journalistic deck. Fortunately, they apparently have a better case in court.

Ideology is largely responsible for the insistence on embryonic stem cell research to the relative exclusion of other stem cell approaches. It is another case of Big Science and its journalists enablers acting like Big Brother.

Amtrak not only has had a monopoly on passenger rail in America, it has abused the franchise. The problem now is so serious that many observers have grown skeptical about any realistic future for passenger rail in this country. But don't give up. It is legal now for private companies, in certain circumstances, to bid against Amtrak management, and that is beginning to happen. Don Phillips, in the new Trains magazine (I cannot find the link; sorry) has the story from Virginia.


An old-fashioned rail battle erupts in the nation's capital

Boardman admits he was asleep at the switch

By Don Phillips

The great railroad battles of the last 180 years have been etched into the American consciousness. High school and college students know the names: Gould, Rockefeller, Huntington, Brosnan. There was the first railroad battle, over whether the new Baltimore & Ohio or the C&O Canal would get through the narrow gap at Point of Rocks, Md. There were numerous bitter strikes, including the great Pullman strike and a nationwide railroad strike that began at the still-standing roundhouse at Martinsburg, W.Va., both in the 19th century.

(George Gilder addresses Wired's September cover story, "The Web is Dead", by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolf.)

May I be so bold as to contradict my old friends at Wired? I would suggest that they have the picture wildly upside down. What is dying is not the Web but television and the Internet. The onrush of video bits as a share of traffic is irrelevant to the prospects of the web, which is measured not by bulk traffic but by information entropy: by impressions, transactions, and servers. The video flood, however, is deadly to the Internet with its ungainly TCP aks-naks, buffers and security patches, multi-layered latency and dropped links. It is the Internet that must die as a result of the dominance of video traffic.

Video will kill the cumbrous, porous seven layer Internet model just as the rise of voice killed the old best efforts, asynchronous, non-deterministic telegraph network. As my friend Henry Gau ingeniously explains, the rise of voice communications with their needs for deterministic synchrony required a new Bell infrastructure to replace the old Western Union tap-tap. Similarly video's needs for deterministic synchronous delivery precisely parallel the previous demands of voice streams when they became the prevailing form of traffic early in the last century with the rise of telephony.

Who will build this network remains in question but the floods of video all the way down from the server through the living room to the desktop to the handset cannot be handled by some Microsoft, Symantec, or Cisco patch on the old Internet.

Isn't it time to "follow the money" on science scams in academia? In the end, taxpayers are the suckers and that is a fit subject for public inquiry.

For example, evolutionary psychology includes the assertion that Darwinian evolution accounts for human morality. But that claim was dealt a hard blow last week when one of its leading exponents, Prof. Marc Hauser of Harvard, was exposed as a fraud. The monkey research he conducted didn't show at all what what he said it did. This isn't Climate Gate, but it's a scandal.

Dr. Hauser probably can escape permanent damage to his employment prospects if he explains that his genes made him cheat. In the history of hominids, after all, shaking down taxpayers is a well-established behavior to enhance reproductive advantage.

What no one in the media apparently bothered to check was the cost of Prof. Hauser's bogus research. Looking at National Science Foundation grants online, it seems to have been $504,000. Shouldn't the Inspector General at the NSF be asking Harvard for the government's money back?

The follow-up question is, how much of this goes on in academia? And why does Big Science, alone among American institutions, get to police itself? We have headline investigations if some Congressman misuses his per diem allowance on a junket to Ouagadougou. Total waste, maybe $300. In comparison, is 500K for rigged university research merely chimp change?

There are still cars zipping around America's bluer neighborhoods with bumper strips from way back in 2003: "No War for Oil."

That was the Iraq war, of course. There is no need to belabor the memories of the marches, the snide TV and radio commentaries, the alternative media fits about the supposed conspiracy. The idea that George W. Bush and his evil buddy, Dick Cheney, were sending American boys to die for oil was simply taken as a proven truth.

Only now, seven years later, as US combat troops leave Iraq, is oil production in Iraq finally back to its pre-war levels of production of 2.5 million barrels a day and easing upwards. Electricity production is doing better, but not great.

And the US oil companies that benefitted? Well, Exxon is there, but the biggest players are the Chinese. Does anyone remember the Chinese sending any troops to Iraq? Or the Russians?

Hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars have been spent on the Iraq war. By no conceivable accounting will anyone in the U.S. get that much back in Iraqi oil revenue--ever.

The Iraqis, meanwhile, do have oil as their big economic hope. The country's reserves are nearly those of Saudi Arabia and already supply 90 percent of government revenue. The big danger, simultaneously, is that oil will corrupt a country already steeped in traditions of corruption.

But it is long past time for those "No War for Oil" bumper strips to come off, don't you think?