Discovery Blog

You have to laugh (almost) at the pathetic efforts of some Islamists to impute a Jewish conspiracy to an elected government in power anywhere. But it is particularly odd when the government is a supposedly "religious right" Muslim government, as is the case in Turkey.

And who is leveling the anti-Semitic smear? Folk connected to Turkey's secularist movement!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100401357.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Once again the estimable Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol of the Turkish Daily News pins the tail on the jackass. Congratulations also to the Washington Post for savoring the irony on their pages.

Who's Who is seldom easy to figure out in the Muslim world, but there are a few invaluable guides. Mustafa Akyol is one. Here he drives home a key judgment: don't trust "secularists" to save civilization from violence and prejudice.

We once again are indebted to Mustafa Akyol for insights on modern Islam. His article from Monday's Turkish Daily Newsmakes a useful distinction between a "secular state" and a "secularist state". It is a distinction relevant to Muslim countries; but could it also have some utility in America?

There are many helpful sites on the Internet that can provide real news on the war against Islamofascist terrorism, including the war in Iraq, but I want to recommend this one now, The Long War Journal:http://www.longwarjournal.org/ It, in turn, will lead you to various sites that offer current reports from the many fronts of what is, yes, "The Long War".

Did you know about the successful meeting of 300 tribal leaders just held in Iraq? An earlier meeting that was disrupted by the terrorists managed to make the news, but mainly because of the attack, not because of the positive organizational commitments being made by the tribes.

Did you know about the capture of Iranian trained militia, especially in the detail given at this site?

Or the foreign fighters killed in the past two days in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Sadly, there often are few ways to find out this kind of thing from the mainstream media. They are too busy trying to convict the private contractors of Blackwater. That is because they hope that Blackwater might write what many in the media regard as the only valid script for Iraq: U.S. failure. There are many fine reporters covering facets of the war against terrorists, but the daily headlines seems to have concentrated on problems with the U.S., especially anything that could be worked up as a scandal. We are seen as the center of attention. The focus is rather chauvinistic, in its perverse way.

In contrast, can you rely on the accuracy of The Long War Journal? I don't don't know its provenance, but I do note that its accounts cite officials in government (ours and others) and the military as sources. Its scope is truly global.

So, friends, is the war. And this historic global war is not mainly about us--certainly not in Thailand or Indonesia or even Somalia. It is not about us when the terrorists' cells are uncovered in Europe. It is about fanatical Islamists out to undermine Muslim countries first, and then the West.

Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith’s fine blog contains a report today on a study with the breathless conclusion that chimps don’t really have a human sense of fairness. Oh, but how can that be? Don’t we have 97 percent the same DNA?

Well, yes, but so what? We have much the same DNA as a mouse, too, or a tulip, for that matter. DNA is not destiny. Genes are not blueprints, but building material. Efforts to make us seem like little more than complicated apes are less about elevating the animal world than lowering the stature of human beings.
If humans are just animals, then the whole panoply of liberal views apply to the question Pope John Paul II strategically asked, “What does it mean to be human?”

Smith himself offered a timely way of posing the issue in a now-famous message that Starbucks picked up and used on several million paper coffee cups a year or so ago: “The morality of the 21st Century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest.”

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Michael Medved is my favorite talk show host for several reasons. He is funny--often even devastating, watch-or-you'll-drive-off-road-funny--but never vulgar or demeaning. He talks about important subjects, not just what is in the day's papers. He not only encourages people who disagree with him to call in, he "puts them at the head of the line." Unfortunately, that usually that means that the poor wretch is quickly reduced to stuttering, but occasionally a shrewd caller forces Michael to concede a point, and that makes the show real sport, not inhumane slaughter.

Medved could easily monopolize his own show--many hosts do--and he certainly is entertaining and bright enough to keep the viewer involved without bothering to bring on guests. But, he is not so smug as to hog the mike and likes very much to introduce to his program exactly the kind of interesting figures that one would like to hear from--topical authors, of course, politicos, and even worthy adversaries. Medved is polite and conversationally avuncular with all. He also is courageous; he doesn't shirk from unpopular stands, but rather tries to take them in a way that causes listeners (and readers) to rethink their assumptions.

Finally in his favor, Michael Medved, is a true writer himself. He uses research assistance, but writes his own material, and it is very good. He is also prolific, perhaps the result of his remarkably retentive and precise--nearly photographic-- memory. One could envy such a gift, but it is wisest just to admire it.

A good example of Medved's combined facility and depth (and the original stimulus for this blog item) is his look at the multi-cultural history of America, or, rather, the NON-multi-cultural history of America. It appears as a long article on Town Hall.

This kind of prose is indicative of a genuine, contributing intellectual who just happens to appear on the radio, in contrast to the on-air blowhards (some with intellectual pretensions) who make so many talk shows tedious. His books are all insightful and accessible. His latest, Right Turns, is a classic in in the political autobiography genre.

I have noticed that Medved pre-tapes ahead for holidays, when there are no phone-ins, and, actually, those are some of his best programs. He told us all about the real history of Thanksgiving last year. This past Independence Day weekend he ran a riveting series on Israel's various wars. I thought I knew a lot about these matters, but Medved's radio show managed to inform and entertain on both subjects.

It is gratifying that a talk show of such charm and seriousness would have a large and growing national audience.

Like any big city, Seattle has a diverse fleet of yellow, orange, and every color in between, taxi cabs. If you've taken a taxi in Seattle in the past month, you may have noticed something different about the car that picked you up...

Continue reading this post at Cascadia Prospectus.

Poor George Gilder. My long time friend and co-founder of Discovery Institute is reviled in a new book by New Republic editor Jonathan Chait (reviewed in National Review by Kevin A. Hassett here) and all because he was, and is, one of the biggest proponents of supply-side economics. Chait, drinking deep of the current liberal doctrine (borrowed from Herbert Marcuse’s writings) that people who are left wing should have free speech, while others should not, makes many of his arguments ad hominem.

When it comes to George Gilder, Chait digs back almost 40 years to find a time in George’s life when he experimented with extra-sensory perception. I remember George telling me what fun he was having with the ESP versions of card tricks. In the most memorable case, he tried to reveal the best possible book of poetry to send to his girlfriend, Nini. He did it by walking backwards through the poetry section of his local bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts, bending his arm over his head to select a book off the shelf. Taking one, he opened the book at random and put his finger down, blindly, on what happened to be the perfect poem — something about a couple walking together through the snow in Lenox, Massachusetts. As it happened, George and Nini had just enjoyed such a walk. Talk about serendipity! That would almost make me believe in ESP.

Nini, of course, was dumbfounded and impressed when the book arrived, with that spectacularly apt page bookmarked, and undoubtedly inscribed with some ornate sweetness from George. He thinks it helped finally to crack her reluctance to become involved with such an oddball as he; and they were married and have lived happily ever after (about 32 years so far, with four fabulous children, now grown).

Photo Credit: Jerusalem Post

Even with that experience, George doesn’t do ESP tricks any more, though I have seen good Christians do about the same when, consulting the Bible randomly for wisdom, they open it and plunk their finger to some verse, hoping it will enlighten them. (I tried it once and wound up with something about dietary restrictions, which was not appropriate at all!)

What George does examine these days is high technology and, yes, economics. In the field of physics he can educate you beyond your capacity, and certainly beyond your interest, in “spooky action at a distance.” Maybe that is also attached to supply-side economics, which, after all, contains an idea that seems so contrarian to liberals like Chait: cut tax rates and you will get back more revenue, not less. Don’t try this at home, as it were, because it doesn’t apply to every situation. But it does so beautifully whenever government’s greed has exceeded the economy’s ability to produce.

Chait doesn’t want to talk much about actual results of supply side economics, of course. But here we have the record, from the administrations of Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and, now, George W. Bush: low tax rates work. A rising tide lifts all boats, as Kennedy would put it.

To appreciate what is happening, Chait should examine the latest report on the U.S. deficit. Despite all the terrible spending increases of the Bush years (Democrats pushing Republicans, who were only too ready in many cases to meet the challenge), and despite a war, the post-tax cut economy continues to grow, increasing tax revenues and driving the deficit downwards. Very “spooky”. And very nice.

You can thank supply-siders like George Gilder for that, and have a chuckle, meanwhile, at Mr. Chait’s pitiful personal attacks.

1) The secret Israeli raid against Syria six weeks ago that the London Times described a month ago (and I cited on September 16) does turn out to have been an attack on a nuclear reactor that probably was using materials from North Korea.

2) John Tierney of The New York Times has a commendable report on another scientific "consensus" that has proven wrong; this time, it is the supposedly dangerous role of fat in diets.

The article reads like a general warning against the idea that scientific "consensus" settles issues, but don't expect Corneia Dean or other Big Science tub-thumpers at The Times to admit it in respect to Darwinism, embryonic stem cells or euthanasia.

3) The Long War Journal's Bill Roggio has a fine update on progress in Iraq. It is not in the press yet, but (absence of news is telling, isn't it) the number of killings in Iraq during Ramadan month is way down from past years. The same is true specifically for deaths of U.S. servicemen. Further, Iraqi insurgents are turning on each other, and the Shia public is turning on the Mahdi militia. All good.

Former Discovery colleague Richard Rahn answers the question in an article that should be read out loud at the next presidential debate in Iowa. If America used all the land now under production for food to produce corn for ethanol instead--if we imported all our food, in other words--we still would not meet more than two thirds of America's oil requirements. As is, with highly politicized federal subsidies, we are using up huge tracts of land previously cultivated for food or livestock, plus wilderness, to plant corn for ethanol; the ethanol acreage is equivalent in size to the state of Indiana. For what? For the amount of energy we could get out of a few thousand acres of oil drilling in Alaska.

In what way is this a justifiable trade-off for the environment, let alone the economy?

Here is Dr. Rahn's article from The Washington Times.

National Review Online carries a telling article about viewpoint discrimination at the University of Iowa's history department. Prof. Mark Moyar, now teaching at the Marine Corps University, has supported the War in Iraq and published a significant history of the Vietnam War. He was turned down in a department whose political allegiance is 27-0 Democratic. The rejected candidate is distinguished, the selected candidate obviously less so. Most significant is the hiring process that is revealed. In theory it emphasizes the need for "diversity", not only or race and ethnicity, but also ideology.

In practice, the University of Iowa has very few conservatives anywhere on its faculty. It is an under-represented class, as it were. The History Department in particular doesn't seem to want--or tolerate--real diversity. It wants only variations of liberal and left wing viewpoints. Notoriously anti-Catholic job placement ads in 19th century Boston read, "Irish Need Not Apply." In Iowa, the faculty ads should read, "Conservatives Need Not Apply."

This is the commonplace but scandalous state of American university life, including, for some reason, in Iowa. Ordinary conservatives are steamed up over it. So far, however, not one of the presidential candidates has come to the defense of academic freedom and academic diversity in Iowa or anywhere else. Nor have Congressional or state officials. Why not? Are they afraid of losing votes from the overwhelming liberal university faculties? Do they think the Des Moines Register won't approve? What are they afraid of?

There is an historic presidential caucus coming up in Iowa. It is only a couple of months away. Iowans should start to demand answers from their elected officials and candidates on the effective persecution of conservatives on many college faculties. Surely, political, religious and ideological discrimination is as serious as ethnic and gender bias. And surely it is bad pedagogy, especially in state-supported institutions, to have a faculty whose dominant political group freezes out others.

While raising the issue of the Moyar case at IU the candidates also should be asked about the disgraceful failure at nearby Iowa State University to offer tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author with Jay Richards of The Privileged Planet, because of Gonzalez' claims to find evidence of design in the origins of the universe. Gonzalez is internationally prominent, a star astronomer. But a campaign by Iowa's leading atheist, Hector Avalos, a tenured--indeed, recently promoted--professor in the Religion Department (where else?) succeeded in smearing Gonzalez for his writings. People have complained, but the political establishment remains silent.

The people of Iowa, even the Democrats, are far more conservative and traditional than the university faculties. Outsiders imagine that the universities would take public opinion into account in such a situation. Well, in their way, they do: they go even farther to the Left to make clear that they are not to be confused with the hoi polloi who pay their salaries and provide--through Congress and the Legislature--the grants that keep their research going.

Two of the best tools for interpreting the news:

1) Ask, what if the shoe were on the other foot? When you see an attack on some organization or person for a comment or opinion implicitly or explicitly regarded as "beyond the pale," ask yourself, would this story be played this way if the target was on the other side politically? Numerous examples could be cited, but that's for another day. I want to get on to the second helpful tool.

2) Ask yourself, what news is not getting a big play in the media, or is being under-reported? This always makes me think of the famous forensic shrewdness of Sherlock Holmes when he helped solve a murder case by noting the dog that did not bark in the night. The significance in that case--and in many instances of newsworthy importance--was what didn't happen. Very often, what doesn't get reported or emphasized in daily reporting is what history will judge most consequential.

When it became clear that the Berlin War was coming down and the end of the Communist empire was coming to an end, there was widespread surprise. Few had predicted that such a thing would happen in their lifetimes. (Two that did were Herman Kahn, founder of Hudson Institute, and Ronald Reagan.) The stories of Soviet collapse ultimately did make the news, of course, but hardly anyone bothered to show that the decades-old peace movement in Europe and the U.S., with its warnings of nuclear doom and recommendations of unilateral disarmament, had now been discredited and effectively decommissioned. If you thought that the only way to a peaceful future was to "converge" with the Soviets, as the Left had long argued, then a surprising capitulation by the USSR was not cause for dancing in the streets. It was cause for a kind of sullen and unreflective silence. But instead of investigating that defeat for the Left, most news organizations--themselves gulled for years by the peaceniks--simply ignored the topic.

My current prospect for relatively under-reported news is the apparent disintegration of the Al Qaeda campaign in Iraq and the world-wide improvement of the war against Islamist terroists.

The U.S.-led Coalition troops during the Surge have greatly diminished the effectiveness of Al Qaeda . Some Sunni insurgent groups have come over to the Coalition or are inert. Most importantly, the pro-Iranian Shia "Mahdi" militia is both fractured and increasingly unpopular among the Shiites themselves.

The story of opposition to the U.S. Coalition and to any non-terrorist government in Iraq has been a complex one and it is apparent that the Bush Administration didn't understand that complexity going in. Nonetheless, the situation on the ground seems to be improving for real. Even with more U.S. troops exposed to danger under the Surge, U.S. combat deaths are down by half over the past six months. So are civilian Iraqi deaths. Civic life and business are getting better.

This is really a big story. We know it largely through the Internet. You wouldn't know it from most MSM news coverage, but you can tell it from the way that the presidential candidates are reacting. Suddenly, the issue of immediate withdrawal is not discussed, but only the question of how and when to acknowledge victory and withdraw in stages. The under-reported but real story is partly responsible for the decline in the prospects of Senator Barack Obama, the viable candidate most invested in a pullout strategy. Perversely, it also may be hurting the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani, since he has been seen to some extent as the most outspoken proponent of seeing the war through. Now that position is almost a consensus on the GOP side, making other issues that are less advantageous to him seem more important.

But the political impact is not the true significance of the War in Iraq, in any case. What may be happening is that America's often stumbling, but consistently firm pursuit of the war against Islamist terrorists is emerging as a possible success, if we will only persevere. It won't be fast or even complete. There will be setbacks. But if we can win in Iraq, even to the point that a non-terror regime that is not actively hostile to the U.S., prevails, it will be a victory globally. That has enormous and hopeful consequences for world security and economic, and even environmental, progress.

It was asserted by Osama Bin Laden only a few years ago that the United States lacks tenacity and, thus, our will can be broken. That has not been true under George W. Bush.

It is a big story, and thus far it is under-reported. It will just kill the MSM to give credit where it's due.

Think of the headlines about business upturns that say, "Unemployment drops; inflation feared". The trope is that there is no sunny day that doesn't have a cloud somewhere if you look for it.

So we have the sad news of the gravediggers in Najaf, Iraq who are concerned that not enough people are using their services now that the Surge is working. Oh, there are a few terrorists' families, it seems. But it hardly takes up the slack.

I have written here before of how one supposedly settled “scientific consensus” after another is constantly being overturned, much to the distress of those who have staked their prestige and grant money on the status quo. Sometimes it seems to intelligent design proponents that Darwinism is the only subject where scientific dissenters are routinely shut down, ostracized, denied tenure or fired and personally attacked in the media. But it is not so. Scientific persecution has happened repeatedly in history and, oddly for a supposedly enlightened age, it is happening more and more now.

Yes, the Scopes Trial of 1925 has been turned on its head eight decades later. Scopes was fined for teaching Darwin’s theory, while today’s teacher will be fired if he offers the evidence against it, as well as for it. The same is true of the trial of Galileo. He upset the scientists of his day enough to cause them to get Church help in silencing him, while the scientific establishment of our day would use methodological naturalism to intimidate anyone (Church included) who challenges a materialist explanation for the origin of the universe.

But the anti-Darwinists are not the only dissenters undergoing a contemporary scientific Inquisition. Here are two current illustrations, the first from an article by John Tierney in The New York Times that fat is not the public health menace that consensus science made it out to be a quarter century ago. Just think how many billions of dollars have been spent in the false belief that it was so! “Fat-free this,” “fat-free that.” Until recently you really couldn't challenge the consensus.

Now, as to persecution of dissent, it would be hard to match the ill-treatment Larry Summers got at Harvard for the sin of suggesting that there are differences between the brain biology of men and women. Humiliated already by losing his job as Harvard’s president, he is having his reputation for apostasy from accepted PC science ground into him at the University of California, Davis. Imagine, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary is now a “don’t invite’m” in polite liberal society.

There is a pattern here, friends. Global warming, abortion, cloning, embryonic stem cell research, the list goes on and on. Of course, it is not nearly so fierce in most fields as in the supposedly “non-existent” scientific debate over the adequacy of Darwin’s theory. You would be hard pressed to think of a subject where the leading spokesman in the field—Dr. Dawkins, in this case—not only wants rival scientists fired and disgraced (his New York Times review of Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, shows that), but he also wants ordinary citizens barred from teaching their children anything other than The Gospel According to Dawkins. The English haven’t been burning people at the stake for five hundred years now, but Dr. Dawkins’ apparently thinks the custom should be revived.

Since this subject is now slated for politicization in America, thanks to the National Center for Science Education and even the National Academy of Science, PBS, and at least one presidential candidate (Sen. Clinton), I plan to keep posting examples of failed scientific consensus and the crimes that have been committed in its name in the past. And those being committed now.

We all have to get over the childish assumption that scientists are superior beings immune from human pride and ambition, not to mention human guile and bile. Here’s a question though, do these negative qualities derive from evolutionary adaptation—and therefore must be excused—or from a human nature anchored to the very existence of man's soul, and therefore must be confronted?

My mother was told as a small girl, “Eat your dinner. Think of all the starving Armenians.”

The terrible events of 1915 made that big an impact in America, even during the competing drama of World War I—the war that precipitated so much of the madness of the 20th century in Germany and Russia and even now infects the Middle East.

It is appalling, however, that this history of 93 years ago should be exploited for political advantage in the U.S. Congress. It is not just stupid, it is hypocritical. Why, for example, would prominent members of Congress who present themselves as passionate defenders of Israel, want to hurt both the United States and Israel by alienating Turkey, one of the few friends Israel, as well as the U.S., has in the Muslim world?

To compare the Armenian genocide with the Nazi genocide of the Jews doesn’t really provide an explanation. This happened so long ago that there is no one alive who could have been remotely guilty of the crimes involved. There barely is anyone still alive who suffered the persecution then. And there are many current crimes being committed where the guilty are around and prominent and certainly unrepentant, starting with Al Qaeda and other terrorists and terror sponsors. Why do Congressman who press the grievances of a former century happen to be among the same ones who downplay the crimes against humanity in our own time? The Armenians were (and are) Christians. But there is hideous persecution of Christians going on in many lands right now. Why so little interest in them? The topic barely makes the news.

That is what is hypocritical: seeking satisfaction against one generation in Turkey for crimes of their ancestors, while ignoring the crimes taking place before your own eyes!

(Read Mustafa Akyol's fine article on the topic here:
Click here to read Mustafa Akyol's article "An Open Letter to the Aremenian Diaspora" in today's Turkish Daily News.

The furor over Dr. James Watson's comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people—resulting from evolution—caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist's speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.

Continue reading this post at Evolution News & Views.

Campaign polls are least reliable the farther one is from an election, because most people (as in the current presidential race) are not really paying attention yet.

Polls also are unreliable in the transition from one reality in the news to a new one. The improving U.S. performance in Iraq is not yet reflected in polls, such as this one from Gallup, because of the lag time between changes in complex situations. When the changes are adequately reported and then, even more, when a new reality filters fully into the public mind, poll results begin to reflect the change. The development of a new poll consensus on Iraq will emerge, but only after time--assuming, of course, that prospects in Iraq do continue to get brighter for the Coalition and anti-terrorist Iraqis.

Part of the difficulty is that polls are very good at providing answers to specific questions, but not so good at measuring intensity of feeling or--to the point here--whether an opinion is fixed or fluid. Before an opinion given to a pollster shifts, it first softens, and that softening is often hard for survey takers to catch.

In economics, likewise, public opinioin measured in polls suggest that in a period where the economy first starts to deteriorate, people appear to be slow to realize it. And, they seem slow to shift their understanding again the next time the economy improves. You see it especially on employment figures and inflation, matters where an opinion poll majority can sometimes conflict with hard data.

People usually take their time in changing their assessments.

Take someone you love (or would like to love you) to see the opening of Bella this weekend. It will be on some 800 screens, which is a nice number, but to get it shown in out of the way places (like Seattle!) it needs a big first weekend success. So you’ll be doing the rest of us, as well as yourself, a favor by going this Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

You won’t be sorry. It is a gorgeous, surprising, life-affirming story that confounds the usual Hollywood tropes. It’s hero, Eduardo Verastegui (“Veras-teg-wee”) is a Mexican media heart-throb making his Hollywood debut. You’re surely going to hear much more from him after this.

I saw the film a couple of months ago at a special screening and was stunned by its fine quality. So, apparently, was the Toronto Film Festival, where it won a surprising award last year. I won’t give away the story, but let’s just say that it is not the sort of cynical and downbeat fare that many mainstream reviewers like. Well, you can’t trust them.

Trust me, instead. This could be an important film. It definitely is an enjoyable one.

Check it out here.

Sen. Harry Reid this week managed to blame San Diego's wildfires on "global warming" at one moment, and to deny the next moment that he had said it. This gives new meaning to the term "spin". Namely; "'spin', to gyrate around inanely".

No matter, it seems that everything is indirectly the fault of global warming, when it is not directly the fault of George W. Bush.

Take hurricanes. Blame global warming and blame Bush. Post-Katrina, we saw various horrific models of how hurricanes were going to wreck our coastline and coastal cities. And those monster hurricanes the models predicted were coming at any moment. Few meteorologists, to their credit, took part in the hysteria, but that didn't diminish the fulminating media or the liberal pols.

It is interesting, therefore, to see that just as the big hurricane season of 2006 did not quite happen (the predictions of same were a bust, in fact), the 2007 season also has shaped up as something of a bore. Good thing, too, of course, unless you make your living covering such things. It appears that global warming has not yet suited up for the hurricane season.

Hurricane season, by the way, officially lasts six months, June 1-November 30. Only in comparison to baseball is that a short "season". It ought to be possible for Mother Nature to prepare plenty of trouble in that long a span.

Several outfits make annual predictions of hurricanes, in addition to the Farmers Almanac, of course. Those most widely cited seem to come from Colorado State University.

Last spring, perched safely in the Rockies, the CSU team predicted a "very active" 2007 hurricane season, with an anticipated nine hurricanes, five of them "major"--Category 3, 4 or 5, with winds of 111 mph, or more. However, by August, the Coloradoans, their windsocks drooping, lowered their prediction to eight hurricanes, four of them "major".

Two Category 5 hurricanes, "Felix" and "Humberto," did develop in the Carribean, neither of which, however, really hit the U.S. That meant, so far as U.S. media were concerned, they hardly can be said to have occurred. If it doesn't happen here, it doesn't really happen, as we all know. Humberto eventually did cross the Texas state shoreline going 85 mph, and I fully admit that Humberto was a big deal if you happened to be in the way. But, honestly, it was less of a blowhard than some senators I can think of.

By early October there had been seven hurricanes, and only three of them "major". If you were cheering for a really big season and an opportunity to whoop it up for global warming, you had to be disappointed.

Now we only have five weeks left. It would be just my luck for a half dozen historic catastrophes to develop off Antigua, head toward America and blow away my snide comments, not to mention a few thousand people's houses.

But, so far, like Chicago Cubs fans, the storm chasing Left can only pledge, "Wait 'til next year."

Am I the only one sensing that American public attention is wandering away from homeland security? There has been so much focus on Iraq, and now Iran, and, overall, an unseemly subtext that what really matters is how such developments may affect the 2008 presidential election—America’s longest running political soap opera—that the highest priority, our domestic physical security, is slipping out of view. It will snap right back, of course, if and when we are attacked.

No, I am not alone. In this article for the Washington, D.C. Examiner, Logan Gage from our Washington office, calls attention to neglected recent testimony by Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence. And another Discovery agent in Washington D.C., John Wohlstetter, mild-mannered technology expert and DI senior fellow, is nearing publication of his Discovery Institute Press book, The Long War Ahead: and The Short War Upon Us. Look for it next month.

There are so many atheist attacks these days on literature with a Christian theme and on Christian holidays that one must ask, what would they have as substitutes? Well, here’s the answer. Charming, isn’t it?

What I reported last week in this space, in a blog called "Tepid Warming", is now coming out from other, more officials places, including a study from Florida State University. Cautious and conservative as I am, it seems I may have understated the dud this hurricane season has turned out to be.

According to global warming ideologues, it was supposed to be another terrible storm season, like 2005. Remember?

Now we await the explanation from the global warming folks on how, yes, 2007 was an especially weak hurricane season, but that, too, is the result of man-made global warming. Because, when you are an idealogue, all evidence can fit your theory.

News of grisly fighting by insurgents in Somalia in recent days has just been followed by news that the Prime Minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi, has resigned. He had been feuding with President Yusef and now will be replaced.

Sources close to the situation say that private Wahhabi money from Saudi Arabia has been funding revived insurgent Al Qaeda sympathizers within a faction of the Hawiye ("Ha-we-ya") tribe. Prime Minister Gedi is a Hawiye, but could not adequately combat the terrorists. (Shades of Iraq!)

A bigger political problem, say Yusef supporters, is that Gedi was corrupt. U.S. and European Union aid to the interim government is carefully administered and relatively accountable, but official Saudi Arabian money to support the government heretofore was delivered in cash, perhaps literally in suitcases. According to these sources, some $36 million of that money is missing.

The good news is that the Saudis (the official Saudis, that is) and the governments of other Gulf states, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have decided now to put at least a billion U.S. dollars into Somalia to help the Yusef regime. Above all, they do not want another Al Qaeda safe haven formed in their region. And this time the outside funds (we hope) will be properly administered.

If this report is true, it is a good break for Somalia. America is too preoccupied in Iraq and Afghanistan to handle the extra troops and funds needed for Somalia. The Gulf states can and should fill the void.

Here is a perspective you will not hear in news coverage, so far, from Iraq. When numbers of American soldiers who have died in Iraq are announced, the figures do not note how many American soldiers are dying in America, or Korea, or Germany, or anywhere else they are stationed. A certain number of deaths happen even in peacetime, whether from disease, accidents or violence from other soldiers.

Why does this perspective matter? Because a sizable share of military deaths in Iraq are now represented by non-combat incidents and those numbers tend to minimize what already is being accomplished in Iraq under the Surge. It takes nothing away from the risks run by soldiers on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor should it blunt the respect and gratitude we bear for those who die in combat, to make this observation. It simply lends perspective to the reality of the war.

In fact, October has been a very low month for American deaths in Iraq and a high one for killings and arrests of terrorists there. Even the 37 or so deaths reported so far in October include non-combat deaths. In some cases the "Iraq" killing even happened in another country; Bahrain, as in the case James Taranto picks up in his Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column. Combat death in Iraq in October came to something like 27.

Far from subduing an insurgency that is supported by the Iraqi people, the Surge has increased the confidence of the Iraqi population that the U.S. can protect them if they report Al Qaeda and other terrorist activity. The reports on this trend are stunning. Among other things, the horrific atrocities against civilians committed by the terrorists, and seldom covered by the American media--who never fail to cover a Congressional hearing on possible use of water boarding of terror leaders--clearly have alienated the population from all the brands of terrorists.

The slow realization and acceptance of these realities are behind the changed climate of political opinion in America, of course. Pro-war sentiment has not revived, but the "withdrawal" camp is dwindling.

You will never get to zero deaths in Iraq, even if the country is entirely pacified and democratic. There will always be some level of violence, not to mention accidents and fatal disease. That is true even in the United States homeland. Victory is not going to be an absence of U.S. deaths in Iraq, but the peaceful transfer of military leadership responsibility to the Iraqis. And that will be a very big victory, indeed.