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Science-fetishizing materialists deny the testimony of thousands of direct eyewitnesses throughout the course of history. No doubt they will continue to do so:

“I’m seeing spirals of light behind people,” she reports. “Those are the people’s guardian angels. We’ve all got one. They are usually about three paces behind us. And then I’m also seeing the other angels, too, the ones that I call the helpers and teachers. They are white and beautiful. All angels have a human appearance, but that’s just for us, so we are not terrified.”

Now, I readily admit the possibility that Lorna Byrne is lying. After all, she presumably has a solid financial motivation to do so, having just received a book contract in excess of $100,000. It’s also possible that she is insane, although that’s not a particularly credible possibility given the fact that she apparently doesn’t manifest any of the usual signs of mental illness. The third possibility is even less believable, as she can’t possibly have mistaken ordinary visual and auditory artifacts for supernatural sights and sounds for the majority of her 54 years. The fourth possibility, of course, is that she is simply reporting what she has seen and heard with reasonable accuracy.

While one can attempt to reach a logical conclusion with regards to selecting between the four possibilities, it is important to recognize that one can claim to have done nothing more than that, reached a logical conclusion. The ironic thing here is that many so-called rational materialists stake out a fundamentally irrational position with regards to the supernatural; the only evidence they will accept – personal experience – is precisely the evidence they reject when it is provided by others.

Given the present inability to predict, understand, or cure mental illness, to say nothing of the large quantities of testimonial evidence in support of the supernatural, it is highly illogical to conclude that every single individual eyewitness is insane, especially in the complete absence of any information about the general mental stability of the eyewitness. Moreover, just a single example of empirical evidence, such as the Sarejevo shrapnel-detection mentioned by the Dublin therapist, is sufficient to jettison the materialist model should the testimony remained unimpeached.

The reach of science is not unlimited. I have read that cosmologists believe that in one hundred billion years, all signs of the 400 billion other galaxies in the universe will be undetectable to observers on the Earth; sans the testimony of the historical record, there would be no scientific evidence that these other galaxies ever existed. In other words, we know that there is a reasonable probability that future science will be forced to deny what present science insists is material. Given the testimony of Lorna Byrne and many others, given the spiritual model derived from the Biblical description of our fallen, silent planet, and given the obvious past and future limitations of science, it is far more rational to conclude that science is simply unable to detect the supernatural at present than to conclude from this inability that the supernatural does not exist.

While there are historical frauds on the supernatural side, there are no shortage of historical scientific frauds to counterbalance them. But the incredible number of baseless charges of deceit, error, and madness required to sustain the materialist model show how fundamentally weak it is when weighed against the known past and future limitations of the scientific method, to say nothing of the scientific consensus. Placing one’s faith in nothing more than the present state of technology, an intrinsically dynamic entity, is beyond illogical. It is wholly nonsensical. The reason Richard Dawkins and his fetish flock so hate the oft-heard quote from Hamlet is that they suspect, in their heart of hearts, that it is probably true.

As usual, Kathryn Jean has no idea about the latest thing that has her panties in a bunch:

Mitt Romney — is an example of someone who came to the wisdom of conservatism through practical experience. He saw its reasonableness in the face of liberal overreach. We should want to embrace such conversions. We should want to encourage people to get Right. Or we can fervently close the door to them and their contributions and fresh blood. What a good move for a movement that needs re-energization and recruits.

Now, Mitt Romney is a fine man, but he would be a terrible choice by the McCain campaign because he simply isn’t a potentially effective Republican leader. et me see if I can clock down slow enough to put this in terms that even a Catholic schoolgirl can understand.

1. Nominees for president and vice-president are leadership positions in the Republican Party, which is dependent upon conservative and evangelical Chistian votes.
2. There are many people in the Republican party who are not leaders.
3. A disinclination to embrace as leaders those whose commitments to conservative are recent, partial, or otherwise doubtful is perfectly reasonable on the part of conservatives. Likewise for evangelicals.
4. These reasonable disinclinations are reinforced by the actions of so-called conservative leaders who have led in a distinctly non-conservative manner over the last 20 years.
5. A rejection of Mitt Romney as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate is not tantamount to kicking him out of the Republican Party or the broad conservative movement.

In general, there is something distinctly problematic about an outsider who wants to come in and lead. It seldom ends well, as the Germans learned after embracing an Austrian outsider. One of the reasons for the disastrous state in which conservatism finds itself, particularly the conservative media, is that so many of its self-appointed leaders are not really conservative and hail from very different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds than the great mass of conservative America. Can it really be considered any great surprise that irreligious Ivy Leaguers, naturalized aliens and secular New York City Jews have failed to provide successful intellectual leadership for religious conservatives from the heartland?

Until American conservatives refuse to permit non-conservatives and foreigners to act as their leaders, they will continue to be little more than a speed bump for the trans-nationalist American liberals who are already in a position to dominate American politics for the next generation.

Kevin Myers confesses:

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

It’s a brave mea culpa, and while I understand Dreher’s Christian compulsion, I disagree with him about the utility of it, especially if government organizations are involved. Leave Africa to the Africans. It’s their problem, so let them sort it out. What is more racist than to insist that an entire continent of human beings are totally incapable of addressing their own problems?

It seems Broadway is gay… there has got to be a book in this for the Littlest Chickenhawk:

MUSICAL theater in New York is being dominated by a certain type of man. He’s in the Public Theater’s revival of “Hair,” which began performances at the Delacorte Theater on Tuesday, and he’s headlining “[title of show]” and “In the Heights.” He’s in recent closures like “Passing Strange” and in soon-to-open work like “Billy Elliot.” Frankly, he’s everywhere. “He” is a lead character defined by vulnerability, confusion and sincerity.

And NYT shareholders wonder why their stock is diving towards zero. No doubt we can look forward to similarly ground-breaking stories about how child-bearing rates are surprisingly low in San Francisco, California and electronic dance pop is popular in Sydney, Austrialia.

I did, however, quite enjoy the reporter’s complete misreading of the socionomic implications of economic hard times. Hard times create hard men, it’s historically been the decadence of wealth and power that produces Peak Gay.

Not that McCain, the other McCain:

Like other “progressive” ideologies, feminism is implacable. There is no fixed objective, no ultimate goal. Rather, feminist is rooted in a culture of complaint. It seeks out grievances to protest and, because there will never be a world without grievances, the protesting never ends. As soon as one concession is granted, another will be immediately demanded, and the specifics of the grievance are essentially irrelevant to this process.

You might as well try to negotiate with a hungry shark as to seek to pacify a feminist. They are permanently indignant and perpetually aggrieved. It’s who they are and what they do, their raison d’etre…. Talk about whining! You get a 1,200-word write-up in the New York Freaking Times and then have the effrontery to complain about the placement? Screw you.

Perhaps that should be #6 on the list of how female bloggers can be taken seriously. If, due your homogameticism, you are the subject of a conventional media puff piece about how today’s women are now [insert predominantly male activity here], do not complain about the placement of the story, the accompanying picture or the inevitable factual errors it contains. You may certainly set the record straight on the mistakes, but do so without whining about them as if they are the first inaccuracies about anyone ever printed in a newspaper.

Anyhow, McCain does a nice job of explaining the wisdom of never giving in to the toothless threats of the feminists. The title of his post is also appropriate, albeit for the wrong reasons. Because women are sexually drawn to bad men, ranting on and on about how scary and evil a man is really isn’t the best way to diminish his appeal to them. As PJ O’Rourke once pointed out when accused of being a Nazi, no woman ever fantasized about being ravished by a liberal.

There is absolutely no way that this latest legend in the growing mythology of the Obamassiah can possibly be true:

Obama (with toned arms and a strong back) puts on his headphones for his iPod to listen to pop music. He hums quietly. Then he jumps on a fitness bike. He pushes three times on the pedals – but then can’t be bothered with it. He goes and picks up a pair of 16 kilo weights and starts curling them with his left and right arms, 30 repetitions on each side. Then, amazingly, he picks up the 32 kilo weights! Very slowly he lifts them, first 10 curls with his right, then 10 with his left. He breathes deeply in and out and takes a sip of water from his 0,5 litre Evian bottle.

Now, Obama obviously keeps himself in shape, but either his magical negritude is much more powerful than I’d previously believed or this German reporter is at best mistaking pounds for kilos. I have lifted weights regularly for 20 years and at 17 inches in circumference, my arms should be significantly stronger than Obama’s appear to be in the famous beach photo. I do use the 32-kilo dumbbells occasionally myself, but only for shoulder press and even then for just four reps. Granted, I do both pull-ups and straight bar before getting to dumbbell curls, but I start with reps of ten at 35-40 kilos on the straight bar using both arms and 14 kilos for the single-arm exercises. I finish with four reps at 50 and 20, respectively. At no point have I ever used more than 22 kilos for one-arm curls and that was when I was hitting the weights very hard while using creatine.

If Obama proves that he can curl 10 reps with each arm using 70-pound dumbbells after doing a set of 30 with 35-pounders, I will publicly endorse him in a WND column because there clearly isn’t anything that the man cannot do.

And yes, Maureen Dowd’s NYT column today is precisely the sort of thing I was describing in today’s WND column: the pseudo-sophisticated American who thinks they know all about Europe from their two-week summer vacations to the various capitals.

Raker Tooth asks for my opinion:

Among Christians, there is a debate about who is to be forgiven. Some say that according to the NT, only those who ask for forgiveness are owed it. Do you have a position on this?

Yes. Now, bearing in mind that I am no theologian, my opinion is that since the Bible indicates God requires repentance in order to receive the gift of grace, forgiveness can only genuinely be granted to those who ask for it. This position is supported by the verses which indicate that forgiveness requested is not to be denied; there is a inherent presumption there that without any request having yet been made, no forgiveness could have been previously granted.

Personally, I tend to view gestures of “forgiveness” granted prior to any request for it or even indication of repentance to be a form of moral grandstanding that is contrary to the divine example presented in the Bible. Of course, this does not justify bitterness in clinging to past injuries or preclude a predisposition to readily grant forgiveness once it is requested.

Rod Dreher sees what is essentially the same connection between PZ Myers and reason-based totalitarianism that I drew between Jean Meslier, the French Jacobins, and the Marxist atheist horrors of the 20th century in TIA:

Back in the 1990s, during the Congressional fights over arts funding, Hunter says he was invited to a top-secret meeting in NYC, in which the heads of various arts groups and foundations, as well as an ACLU lawyer, gathered to strategize. They invited Hunter to speak to explain the conflict from a sociologist’s point of view. Hunter said he began by saying that in a pluralist liberal democracy like ours, how you say and do things is as important as what you say and do. His point was that given human nature and human passions, we have to be very careful to watch how we say and do things, because it’s very easy to spark unnecessary conflict. Preserving the political order that guarantees us individual freedom, including freedom of speech, requires a certain standard of behavior, especially when you share the public square with people who believe things radically different from what you believe.

Hunter said after he spoke, Sidney Blumenthal, then in the Clinton White House as an adviser, came to the podium to give his advice to the group. Hunter quotes him as saying, “You know how to deal with this? Seize power!”

To think that reason can be a replacement for religion is to make a serious category error. It’s akin to suggesting that what the Vikings really need this season is a good second baseman. As either GK Chesterton or CS Lewis has pointed out – I can’t remember which – the madman’s evil is all the more horrifying for its cold and cruel rational calculation. Scott Hatfield asked me last week what was the result of inputting bad information into an intelligent machine capable of pattern recognition; I told him that GIGO applied.

Reason is like the machine. The quality of the result depends entirely upon the quality of the input. Religion, on the other hand, is not a machine, it is more akin to information. One could reasonably liken it to either the input or the output, but not the machine itself.

It appears increasingly likely that the Yushchenko “poisoning” was yet another media fiction:

The media narrative at the time was staunchly behind the poisoning theory, with the clear addendum that the Kremlin was responsible, if not Putin personally then some “rogue” element of the FSB, which was routinely referred to by its old acronym: KGB. There were all sort of indications, however, including testimony from Dr. Lothar Wicke – at the time chief medical doctor at the Rudolfinerhaus clinic, where Yushcenko was treated – that pointed to a rather more complicated if less dramatic diagnosis: pancreatitis, brought on by alcohol abuse. Wicke’s public statements disputing the official diagnosis provoked the ire of Yushchenko’s supporters, threats were made, and Wicke had to be provided with police protection.

It’s getting to the point that being “informed” by following the news is likely to leave you further away from reality than simple ignorance. Of course, no one cares, since as Raimondo rightly points out, the media and those whose realities are defined by it have a collective memory of about three days.

Female bloggers wonder why they’re not taken seriously:

Blogging has come a long way from its modest beginnings. These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site….

There were tears at many emotional panels, and also much hooting and applause, whether in response to news that Michelle Obama had just written her first blog post on the BlogHer Web site or that Michelin would be giving away a set of tires.

If a female blogger wants to be taken seriously, it’s not at all difficult:

1. Have at least half a brain and demonstrate that it actually functions by not writing egregiously stupid stuff.

2. At least 75 percent of your posts should have nothing to do with you or your life.

3. Don’t post a picture or talk about your romantic life, your children or your pets.

4. Don’t threaten to quit blogging every time anyone criticizes you.

5. Learn how to defend your positions with facts and logic instead of passive-aggressive parthian shots fired off as you run away.

The reality is that most female bloggers aren’t taken seriously because they don’t merit it. They market themselves based on their physical appearance because it attracts attention, then they are surprised when they are judged on that appearance and belittled for relying upon it. There are definitely good female bloggers out there – Rachel Lucas and Dr. Helen are my two favorites – and it’s no accident that neither of them are whiners like these ridiculous women, whose blogs are no doubt full of the female litany of complaints that are such music to the average man’s ears.

Blogging is one of the most pure meritocracies to be found. There are exceptions, of course, but the relatively low traffic of most female bloggers is primarily related to either their lack of talent and or their unwillingness to make the sacrifices required to drive it up. If someone isn’t interested in reading what you’ve got to write, that’s no one’s fault but your own. Notice how Megan McArdle, with whom I don’t agree all that often, provides a good example of how a female blogger merits being taken seriously, as she attempts to explain the importance of respect for symbols in civil society to the socially autistic:

Would it be okay if I spraypainted obscenities on your mother’s grave because it’s just a piece of highly compressed igneous rock with some lines chiseled into it? How about if I photoshop your a photo of your now-grown child onto a piece of child porn, because after all, no one’s actually hurt by this–it’s just a piece of paper.

If you reduce symbols to their base physical constituents, then of course it sounds silly to get all excited about them. Nonetheless, you’d probably be pretty damn upset if someone dug up a relative’s grave and desecrated the corpse on the grounds that it’s just some rotting meat.

Speaking of McArdle, this comment in her post on PZ Myers nearly did for me; I started laughing and coughing at the same time: “Also, those protesting against Myers can boycott his university all they want, but my guess is they don’t have the intellectual chops to get accepted there.”

The commenter is obviously not from Minnesota, as the appropriately named UMM doesn’t report average test scores, but they are proud of the fact that only 17 percent of their current freshmen scored BELOW 500 on the verbal portion of the SAT. You can get into UMM as long as you’ve got a pulse and the ability to spell your own name; as it happens, 20 percent of the applicants there can’t even manage that.