Archive Listing
May 15, 2009 - May 8, 2009

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

YouTube Wednesday:

MULTIMEDIA. YouTube takes a beating for many excellent reasons. It would be easy to get the idea from the MSM and even YouTube's own lists of favorites that the site consists of all that is low and despicable in the human condition. It is swept by fads -- girls beating up girls, boys torturing cats or breaking their own bodies in stupid stunts, disgruntled spouses and other exes spilling sewage about matters best left private, lunatics ranting into webcams about their fanatical beliefs and causes, music videos that call to mind the artifacts of archaeological research into dead civilizations. It is also pervaded by all things sentimental and cloying -- cute babies doing cute things, cute puppies doing cute things, tributes to cute child actors of the past, etc.

But the uncomfortable truth is that YouTube is a mirror. Whatever you are looking for there you will likely find. It's a vast repository of cultural memory, something like a computer version of Jung's collective unconscious. All the building blocks of our own memories are there -- sports, music, TV, celebrities, politics, commercials, science, technology, war, history, movies past and present, sex, and even religion..

It's no wonder the copyright and trademark battles surrounding YouTube are so fierce. How do you copyright the personal, individual memories that make up individual consciousness and the soul of the world? You don't, really. You can try, but this is an arena in which the law is lost and the value of the whole so transcends the mechanisms of government that constraining it becomes an effective impossibility. You may win a skirmish or two, but you will inevitably lose the larger fight. YouTube is bigger than all of us.

That's why we decided today to look for things that don't get much press. Not too surprisingly, a earch for "art" turns up positive and beautiful new permutations of classic masterpieces across the ages. A multimedia vehicle like YouTube has an unprecedented ability to make art personal again, to share individual perceptions that take flat canvases off the museum walls and restore the kinetic play of emotion and light and process which animated the genius of the artists.

The available tools are extensive and the results are accordingly varied. It's possible to rejuvenate old art in many ways -- by moving cameras, the addition of soundtracks, the sequencing of images, the use of playful animation, and even reenactments of the creative process. I suppose one could dismiss all this as a decadent, post-modern by-product of the end of art, but I suspect that it is only the beginning of a new epoch in art -- the resurrection of the old into a brand new synthesis that uses the past to inspire a creative explosion capable of capitalizing on the technology which is presently redefining everyone's experience of life. The innovations thus far are still rudimentary, but in some cases multimedia technology already seems to represent a completion and fulfillment of the artist's intention. Here, for example, is a YouTube permutation of Escher:


Yes, it's a lowball interpretation of what is implicit in the original, but don't you find yourself wondering what Escher himself would have done if he'd had access to our technology? Well, I do.

And does anybody else share my curiosity about what the cubists were trying to say, what they would have said if they had a software suite half as good as what's available to the average MySpace dude?


Or think about Dali. What would he have done with a computer?


And would Matisse have liked this presentation of his paintings? I have to think he would.


You think it only works with the moderns? Not true. Here's what seem to be the first of what will be innumerable new treatments of Hieronymus Bosch.




3-D by God. Are you starting to get the idea that a new engine is rumbling in the background of art? That's all I'm suggesting. Although I can't quit before I highlight an interesting trend with regard to the works of one of my own favorite artists, Edward Hopper. People aren't animating him. (Correct. He was a sculptor in paint.) They're scoring him. And I confess myself surprised. It never occurred to me that his work was jazz:


Truthfully, the Big Band thing isn't working for me. But whoever did it is not alone. Here's another.


Personally, I'm thinking the opaque solipsism of Miles Davis or John Coltrane would be more appropriate than the vitality of "Sing, Sing, Sing" or the schmaltz of Glen Miller. But that's the beauty of YouTube. If I disagree enough to do something about it, I can do something about it.

As a final note, I'll show you what I interpret as an act of YouTube art criticism. It's definitely NSFW, but here's what purports to be a tribute to Jackson Pollock. Yet its effect is to make of Pollock the joke that I always thought he was. See what you think.


So that's it for today. Are you feeling artistic yet?

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

THE LIBERALS WE LOVE (UPDATE). It's hard to imagine the universe in which Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid live. It's like some bizarro-world they've made up for themselves, in which the sceptre of political office really can alter facts and even the laws of physics. Whatever they choose to affirm is automatically true, and whatever legislative response they fashion is bound to produce the result they desire. If only the annoying real world the rest of us live in didn't keep getting in the way.

Harry Reid declared the Iraq War lost when the surge was barely a few weeks old. To him, therefore, it is still lost, regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He is willing himself and, he thinks, the rest of us to dwell permanently in the year 2006. And Nancy Pelosi agrees with him.

Nancy Pelosi believes so devoutly in open borders and sanctuary cities that defy the authority of federal laws she has sworn an oath to uphold that she continues to defend a San Francisco policy even that city's mayor is backing away from -- a policy that has recently resulted in savage, random murders by an illegal alien gang member who should have been imprisoned and/or deported long ago.

They both subscribe to a rapidly unraveling theory of man-made climate change whose consequences would, at worst, occur only gradually over many many years, and in order to achieve an imperceptible diminishment of those consequences are prepared to put the national and global economies at serious risk in the here and now. These champions of the poor and dispossessed have already -- quite literally -- taken food out of the mouths of starving people around the world by legislating the redirection of American corn crops from cheap food to expensive alternative fuel.

For much the same reason, they are indifferent to the plight of American citizens who are struggling with the near doubling of gasoline prices within the past year. Their initial legislative impulse was to raise gas taxes because the consumer conservation they claim is integral to their own energy solution is marginally reducing gas tax revenues. And they insist that the immediate solution which is dead obvious to 70 percent of Americans -- drilling for more oil and gas in the United States -- is absolutely unacceptable because it won't produce results for ten years (they say) while the solution they offer instead -- windmills and solar panels -- won't be able to replace fossil fuels in thirty or even forty years. How is such bizarro logic justified? Nancy Pelosi says she's trying to "save the planet."

But it's worse than that, really. It's not just about misplaced priorities. It's also about a truly insane faith in government power. I think they believe, both of them, that government can mandate not only change but success. If the U.S. Congress decrees that Al Gore's idiotic carbon abolition schemes be met, they will be. If Congress commands automobiles that get 150 miles to the gallon or cars that run on discarded styrofoam peanuts, they will magically appear. If Congress decrees that an advanced industrialized nation can be run by windmills that consume all the arable lands of the plains states, that is exactly what will happen. And, I suppose, if Congress passes a law forbidding anyone to die of starvation in Haiti, Africa, or the world's other impoverished nations on account of dumbass alternative energy schemes in the U.S., they will obediently refrain from starving. Halleluiah.

One could call this kind of delusional mentality a great mystery. But it is (barely) explicable from the perspective of Capitol Hill. The most powerful members of Congress live lives almost completely devoid of consequences. Almost all the real world problems and nuisances that afflict ordinary citizens are mere expense account items to them. And unlike some of the lower ranking legislators they have to bully into compliance with their whims, they are essentially immune from being thrown out of office. Their pockets are too deep and their connections too vast for ordinary mortals to run successfully against them. And so, they can drink deeply of their power, become intoxicated by it, and begin to see even the worst human calamities caused by their delusions as unfortunate statistics in some subordinate's briefing paper, no more costly than the effort required to spin them away. They know their power, and it comes to replace every other consideration.


So maybe the Gothic congressional leadership of Pelosi and Reid isn't such a great mystery. Not nearly as great, anyway, as the mystery of why so many middle-class Americans continue to believe that the Democrat Party is the one that's on their side. At any given time, a majority of Americans are proud to claim an affiliation with the party that roots and actively works for the defeat of American troops in the field, that continuously sides with criminal illegal aliens against native-born citizens and legal immigrants who wait patiently in line for citizenship, that is perfectly willing to trade away all our hard-won present prosperity for phantom placebos in a distant, hypothetical future, and that bitterly despises almost all the basic human values and traditions of the very people who keep putting them in office.

Now that's a true Gothic tale. Who would ever believe it?

UNTITLE TOWN. I think you'd have to say that Philadelphians have mixed feelings about this weekend's event called "The Arena Bowl" and the championship it brought to a title-starved city.

Those feelings are probably best summed up by Ray Didinger's comments on WIP SportsTalk Radio the Friday before the game. Ray is the acknowledged Main Man of Philadelphia sportswriters. His knowledge of most sports is encyclopedic, and he is a continuously respectful, humble, and yet authoritative commentator on the city's teams. With the Phillies crumbling in the wake of the All-Star break and the Eagles wallowing in the aftermath of having failed to draft a first-round college prospect two years running, his WIP co-host asked Ray point-blank what the city's sports fans had to feel good about.

Ray said, "The Philadelphia Soul. They're playing Sunday for the league championship. That's something to feel good about."

Then the co-host, Glen Macnow, asked Ray, "So you'll be watching the game Sunday?"

And Ray replied, "Probably not."

Arena football just isn't a Philly kind of sport. For one thing, it's not exactly football. Well, to be more precise, it's almost nothing like football. Except for the ball (which is beige btw), and the helmets and pads, and the four downs of play, and the zebra stripes of the referees, and the endless delays caused by review of challenged calls, it's more like the much despised (in Philly) overtime shootouts in hockey.

Here's how it works. Team A receives the kickoff, heroically fields it off the net, and brilliantly returns it to the two or three yard line. Then Team A takes two, sometimes four, plays to throw a touchdown pass, which is always incredibly exciting because the field is almost twenty yards long. The extra point try is even more exciting because the goal posts are three feet apart.

Team B receives the kickoff, heroically fields it off the net, and brilliantly returns it to the two or three yard line. Then Team B takes two, sometimes four, plays to throw a touchdown pass, After the extra point, the whole drill is repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Mostly it's that simple, except that it does get confusing whenever a player runs into what, in hockey, would be called the boards, which are thickly padded with rules too complicated to understand about when a player is actuallly out of bounds and when he is merely, uh, bouncing. Even the players don't understand these rules. In the championship game, the Soul allowed the San Jacinto Crab-Lice to score an almost unheard of rushing touchdown because they didn't remember that sometimes you still have to tackle, or at least touch, a ball carrier who caroms off what would be, in football, an out-of-bounds marker.

Not that it really matters. It's pretty much a given that whoever has the ball is going to score a touchdown. The announcers in the NFL get pretty excited about touchdowns. "TOUCHDOWN," they yell. In the arena league, the announcers have to conserve their voices. "That's another touchdown," they concede.

Defense consists of preventing the other team from scoring a touchdown. Since this almost never happens, it's what's considered a big play in arena football. And there's no punting. Not on a twenty yard field. If you're some impossible distance away from the goal line -- say 18 yards -- you bring in your field goal kicker and get three points instead. Which is still enough to lose the game.

Or it would be if all the rules didn't change as soon as you get to the one-minute warning. That's when all hell breaks loose. AFTER the one-minute warning, the team that's ahead is required to stop passing and call only running plays. Since there are no running backs in arena football (the 8-man offensive team consists of a quarterback, two blockers, and 14 wide receivers), this doesn't work. The clock stops every time the team in the lead calls a running play. Since there's no punter, the team that's behind gets the ball back almost immediately and scores a touchdown -- AND a two-point conversion since there are no defensive backs, safeties, or linebackers (the 8-man defensive team consists of six non-pass-rushers and two guys who gesture unhappily after the touchdown pass.)

For some reason, there are also a lot of onside kicks inside the one-minute warning, which are invariably successful, because the ball only has to go six inches before the kicking team can fall on it.

It's possible that I didn't entirely understand the rules of the game I was watching because I'd never seen an arena football game before. All I know is that Philadelphia was 185 points ahead going into the final minute, and they won by 3.1416 points in a real squeaker.

I guess my hockey shootout analogy above wasn't exactly right. It's actually more like roller derby.

Which is what leads to the mixed feelings. All of us who live in the Philadelphia area have a genuine regard for Ron Jaworski, largely because we know the fans (uh, that would be US) treated him like dirt throughout the 17 years he started for the Eagles. We called him the Polish Rifle, which wasn't a compliment. Sure he could throw the ball 130 yards, but he was dumb as a, well, Polish person. It's not exactly guilt because that's an emotion we don't recognize or accept -- we go to games half naked and painted green here, so give us a break on the deep emotional stuff, okay? -- but we've all had to swallow the fact that he's the smartest football guy on ESPN's smartest, most educational football show (NFL Matchups), and he's also such a big-hearted guy that he loves Philadelphia in spite of having had more cans and bottles thrown at him from the stands than any other athlete in Philadelphia sports history.

We want him to be happy. And now that he's happy about his Arena Bowl championship, we're incredibly happy for him.

We're also grateful to Jon Bon Jovi, whose funding and dedication to the Soul is a more generous service to this sports-obsessed city than Bruce Springsteen ever made.

Which is why, right now, people all over the Delaware Valley are drawing straws about who has to man up and go to the parade that's planned Thursday to honor the Soul.

If you've drawn one of the short straws won one of the tickets, you're in for a real treat, the Parade Committee informs me. According to their press kit, there will be a marching band (pictured below):


Best of all, the Philadelphia Soul team float is all ready to go.


Excuse me... I'm just getting word from my Soul cell... DAMN.

Great news! I'm going to the parade. I'll see you there! Some of you, anyway.

SCOOP:

Monday, July 28, 2008

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Why InstaPunk Isn't Popular:

YEAH. WE'RE ON RECORD, ALREADY. You got to go along to get along, right? Can't do it. Most of the conservative bloggers are Sean Hannity on a CRT -- repetitive, dogmatic, shallow, only marginally literate, and oh-so-rarely insightful.

We've been burned enough here by superstar "conservative" blogs that we mostly leave them alone. We no longer point out that Ace of Spades is a strictly commercial site knocking sadly at the door of TV punditry with no hope that the door will ever open to an indifferent writer who can't even be bothered to proofread his headlines. We don't aim an accusing finger at Hugh Hewitt's site, which gambled the whole pile on being an official mouthpiece of the Mitt Romney campaign -- and lost, with a consequent crash of his credibility on just about everything. We don't do anything to document the pitiful truth that InstaPundit is a much more energetic version of Mort Kondracke with even nerdier hobbies (sci fi novels, digital photography, and a lawyerly crush on Ann Althouse). We don't make an issue of the fact that Michelle Malkin's site consists of a series of "look at me" setups for her various beaming appearances on Fox News.

And we tried to give a pass to Ed Morrissey, who apparently needed the job Michelle Malkin gave him to make Hotair.com a graphic-intensive counterpart to the Huffington Post. Or something. Ed's a veteran, he's conversant with spell-check software, and his arguments are usually slightly better than his sentence structure. Leave him alone, we thought.

Not that we aren't heartily sick of of his hammer-it-into-the-ground "The Obligatory Post About..." everything current in the news. If you're that hard up for content, admit it. (OR HERE'S AN IDEA -- DON'T POST, ASSHOLE.) Don't pretend that because you're writing piffle about all the biggest topics of the moment, you're only doing it because we righty rubes insist on it. Even Ace's standard punchline ("Terrorists killed by Big Mac Flatulence and U.S. Firepower, but Mostly U.S. Firepower..." is better than that.

But I just stopped cutting Ed a break. It happened with his "obligatory" post ridiculing Edgar Mitchell for his claim that the U.S. government has been covering up the existence of aliens for 60 years. Ed said:


ESP experiments on the moon?! Shouldn't that be actionable, Ed? In court, I mean? Cured of cancer... ? I can see how it would be better if he died of cancer like everyone else, but...

Ed? Shut the fuck up. Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon. You of all people should know that's an accomplishment people earn by a lifetime of hard work, ability, rational excellence, extraordinary obedience to duty and military protocol, and character.Character. As in telling the truth when you're too old to care about your career.

I am really really really tired of people who dismiss the communications of those who are at last too old to be scared by institutional threats of various kinds. Oh. He's 77? Must be senile. And he was kind of squiffy even when he was doing things you and I could never possibly hope to qualify to do, let alone have the balls-to-the-wall courage to do.

Sorry, Mr. Ed. If Edgar Mitchell says there's been a cover-up, I'm interested. Your poorly written and tepidly argued dismissals don't mean a damn thing to me. You see, I've actually known a couple of 77-year-old men who were smarter than you've ever been on your best day and in full possession of their marbles till the day they died. Hell. A couple of them were even half as smart as I am.

A closing question. Ed. If someone had briefed you that incredibly advanced aliens were already here, just how strange would it be to pursue the possibility of remote healing and ESP? I mean, wouldn't such knowledge change your worldview a little bit?

Uh. Actually, I suppose it wouldn't. Ed. But maybe you should do a litle more research before you spout your weak-stream sarcasm at an old man who was braver and more dedicated to his country than even most recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

P.S. This can't be registered as a comment at Hotair.com, because as with MichelleMalkin.com, the privilege of commenting is only open for sign-up on alternate blue moons in the seventh house, when Jupiter is voting straight Republican on a Thursday. For some reason, we haven't been accorded this honor, even when the stars are properly aligned for our application. Any of you who enjoy this unique privilege, feel free to share it with Ed and her boss, Michelle Malkin.

Friday, July 25, 2008

TALKING HISTORY WITH THE GERMANS. I plan to leave all the highbrow analysis of Obama's latest "Speech of the Century" to those who have more patience for parsing and pedagogy than I do. All I can really say is that it reminded me of the young lady who saw a stage performance of Hamlet for the first time and said, "I don't see what all the fuss is about. All he did was string together a bunch of famous quotations."

The Germans in attendance seemed to like it, though, and everyone knows they have an infallible knack for distinguishing beween soaring rhetoric and authentic wisdom. I guess we should defer to their judgment. I mean, isn't deferring to European judgment the single eternal plank in the Democratic Party platform?

Jawohl, mein Obama.

SECOND COMING. I'm not saying the bloom is off the rose. But there are signs that the rose is slowly morphing into the plastic kind American liberals usually have to settle for. The kind that has to be dusted off regularly and sprayed with expensive perfumes that can't wholly cover the stink of artificiality beneath. You know. The valorous command personaility of John Kerry. The incandescent intellect and heartfelt populism of Al Gore. The "I feel your pain" sincerity of Bill Clinton. Etc. All fictions (un)scrupulously upheld for campaign purposes but never believed. Not really. Not without a certain cynical wink they winked at each other and never thought the rest of us could see. And certainly not the way they have believed in Obama -- devotedly, uncritically, irrationally, passionately, even religiously.

That's the explanation for the ridiculous displays featured in the McCain ad above. Forget the metrosexual ramifications of the creepy man-crush behavior exhibited by so-called hardened journalists in the ad. It's not really sexual. It's spiritual. (Well, maybe not for the giggling women on 'O-Force One.') The immense peril of the strictly secular culture the libs want us to embrace is that all people need a spiritual element in their lives. That's why hard-line marxist feminists trash all organized religions and then perversely immerse themselves in New Age fantasies about Gaia, Wicca, Yoga, and Reiki. The quest for meaning is not synonymous with calculating the solution to an algebraic equation. The most determinedly atheistic adherents of social-engineering rationalism have historically been the most vulnerable to getting swept up in a cult of personality of the sort Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and now Hugo Chavez exploited in achieving absolute power over their followers. Having renounced the divine in the universe itself, they must find an outlet for the ineradicable human yearning for a higher power who can fill the hole in their souls created by the absence of meaning.

As this site has proposed before in other contexts, that's the real genius of the founding fathers. What has been called "separation of church and state" was more importantly the excision of the divine from politics. It's a corollary of Matthew 22.21, which reads, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s": the constitutional understanding of this is, "Render unto your God the things that are your God's, and render unto Caesar only those things that are Caesar's." Which represents, above all, an absolute prohibition against allowing or enabling the state to usurp -- in terms of individual belief, obedience, and worship -- the role of private spirituality in everyday life. Politicians, however highly placed, are only politicians -- i.e., ambitious men who are fallible, inherently sinful, prone to corruption, and never to be trusted as arbiters of individual values for the populace as a whole.

The mission of secular liberals to exterminate all traces of the Judeo-Christian tradition from any part or institution of society that government touches -- which is, by now, all parts and institutions -- couldn't be any more contrary to the intrinsic intent of the founders. But the more they succeed, the lonelier they feel. As the spiritual -- and, yes, by that I mean an ineffable sense of the divine -- becomes less and less a part of their lives, they begin to seek it in the impoverished secular realm they have consigned themselves to. Without a Yahweh, a Christ, a Buddha, or an Allah of their own to whom they can pray in the dark night of private pain, they begin to long for... want... need... absolutely have to have a savior. Behold! Here he is! Eureka! They don't know what's happening to them. Their hyper-intellectualized worldviews are suddenly transformed by a profundity of emotional response that has no precedent in their experience apart from sex. But in matters of the spirit, they have become children, and so they respond to it like children making their first acquaintance with sexual attraction. As worshippers they are as inept and slavish in their devotions as any pubescent boy or girl who descends into the confusion of a hopeless crush. When it comes to religion they are tyros (and, yes, I am absolutely saying that Catholic Chris Matthews is no Catholic; he couldn't be such an ass about Obama if he were a Roman Catholic in anything but name only...)

Poor Obama. He's been set up. He's been propelled by this wave of misplaced desire for a secular messiah to heights where he cannot help but be humiliated, perhaps even destroyed. The MSM fever is so advanced that none of them -- and I mean none -- has yet perceived the horrifying irony of an American politician standing on a podium in Germany recruiting that nation's citizens to join him in his grand personal mission to usher in a new age of life on earth. No one has done that in Berlin since Adolf Hitler. And if the Germans should like it, does that really confirm his mission? Or does it sound a chord that Americans most of all are likely to respond to with suspicion and alarm?

Poor Obama. Back in the 19th century, Herman Melville wrote "Billy Budd," a short novel offering a different kind of Christ figure -- a pure innocent so guileless that he became the scapegoat for a multitude of sins he had nothing to do with. He was sacrificed to relieve everyone around of him of their very real guilt. Billy believed what people told him. He trusted them. And they killed him.

As a politician, Obama is not entirely an innocent. But he has the innocence of the talented neophyte in believing that he can somehow control the vast forces that are carrying him to power. He can't. He did not know that his messianic speech in Berlin was, however it's reviewed today and tomorrow, a truly terrible idea. He may not have a deeply developed sense of his own identity, which would make him a ripe target for manipulation by those who read their own hopes onto the blank canvas of his personality. And he is almost certainly unprepared for the price that will be paid by a putative savior who insists that good intentions and a friendly meeting of minds will solve all the problems of the world. The consequences will be worse by an order of magnitude if he has actually come to believe that he is the fiction his promoters have written for him.

What the liberals don't understand is that a great many of the people they habitually look down on are far more sophisticated about matters of spirit and divinity than they are. When they see a Golden Calf being worshipped by idolaters, they cock their heads and say, "Uh oh. This is something we know about. And it's never good."

I don't believe much in the polls. Some of the conservative blogs are trying to make hay out of the fact that so far, Obama doesn't seem to have gotten a "bump" from the World Tour spectacle. Time will tell.

But here's the one statistic I think might be meaningful:


Moreover, there are other signs of cracks in the faith called Obama.

The MSM is showing, well, some resentment of the lordly Obama campaign.

The "house conservative" of the New York Times has actually employed the phrase "jumped the shark." (And he didn't get his column mailed back to him for 'revision')

Not all the Brits are apparently on board. (So much, btw, for the idea that there's no way to make fun of Obama.)

Even the Germans seem anxious to correct the record.

And perhaps the troops, who have made the most sacrifices in recent years, aren't altogether buying the act.

It may well be that (some of) the true believers are starting to realize that their candidate is just a man, not a substitute divinity.

That would be a good thing. It may not change the end result of the election. But if Obama remembers that he's just a man, it may improve the end result of this campaign season, regardless of who wins.

What did the Goddess Gertrude say? "A rose is a rose is a rose." Even if it's a plastic counterfeit. This is America. We can live with that. As long as the rose knows what it is. Can you?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

THE BEAGLE BARKS. Something I'd never done, to be honest. Visit a couple of large-scale creationist sites. You know how they'd be. Crazy. Ranting. Not quite sure how to spell 'science,' let alone talk knowledgeably about it without going into a spasm of glossolalia. That's how I thought they'd be, too. There may well be sites like that, but they weren't the ones I found. Trueorigin.org and ScienceAgainst Evolution.org turned out to be far more intriguing than I thought they'd be when their names cropped up in my search for commentary on the latest dating of moon rocks. (I can't help being fascinated by the moon; it's much more mysterious than anyone lets on.) My first stop was at TalkOrigins.org (the educational site most evolution advocates send doubters to for remedial insight) where I encountered a fairly detailed effort to debunk some creationist claim that the moon was a great deal younger than moon rock analysis seems to suggest it is. I was surprised by the level of seriousness the author was applying to the task of defeating the creationist position. Then I proceeded to a direct creationist rebuttal of the TalkOrigins argument, and I was surprised again by the formal, scientific nature of the counter-argument. What was going on here?

I'd seen TalkOrigins before, but despite a burdensome level of detail, the contributors don't ever really add much to a basic understanding of the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution. They're too defensive and irascible to be a fun read. But it hadn't ever occurred to me that there might be areas where the creationists were going toe-to-toe with evolutionists and holding their own. So I started banging around at TrueOrigins, which somehow led me to ScienceAgainstEvolution and an altogether new understanding of the conflict between the two most extreme poles of thought on human origins. They are going toe to toe, about almost everything, and it's the creationists, not the evolutionists, who are willing to pursue the tiniest details in the most expansive possible range of subjects, including paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, geology, biology, microbiology, genetics, morphology, chemistry and organic chemistry, radio-carbon dating, the history of science, and even physics and cosmology. It's total war, and more often than you'd guess it's the evolutionists who end debates with empty declarations of victory that are reminiscent of press releases issued by Baghdad Bob. (If you don't believe me, wade through this and this -- and anything and everything else that strikes your fancy at both sites -- before you ignite your comment flamethrower.)

As with all omnibus sites, the level of quality varies, and some of the creationist titles make me cringe ("Did God Make Pathogenic Viruses?"). But there's more going on here than dumb and blind resistance to settled science. I'd be willing to bet that internet snobs like Rand Simberg and the usual insect horde of atheist-evolutionist commenters would crumble in a debate with the best of the creationists. (See, for example "The Hubble Variable,") They're not all backwoods lunkheads with a degree from Bob's Bible College and a passionate determination to stop the clock at 0:00 Scopes time.

But, as with most of you, they still make me uncomfortable. Are they (mostly) highly educated scholars and writers who are nevertheless monomaniacs about a certain book published in 1611? Or are they true descendants of a tradition that began with Isaac Newton and has continued against all odds into the present day, with its original values intact in terms of both religion and science? I don't know. So I sent an email to the lead contributor at ScienceAgainstEvolution. Here's the text of my email. Judge for yourselves whether its questions are on or off the mark:


Well, we'll see if there's any answer. If there is, or isn't, I'll let you know.

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