On Wednesday, the Spanish Parliament called on Spain to protect the great ape’s right to life and freedom.   Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Ape Project called it an “historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades.”  The Project works to remove the great ape “from the category of mere property” and to “provide these amazing creatures with the right to life, the freedom of liberty and protection from torture.”

While Spain may have more of a reputation for matadors than for conservationists, the recent installment of a socialist government under Prime Minister Zapatero has facilitated legalized gay marriage, a reduced role for the Church in education, and the creation of an Equality ministry.

This animal-rights legislation, which will likely come into effect within a year, will “outlaw harmful experiments on apes in Spain.” While there are no known cases of such testing within the nation, Pozas insists the legislation is much needed, as “there is currently no law preventing that from happening.” It will also be illegal to keep apes for circuses, television commercials or filming.

While the Great Ape Project laments “the arbitrary denial of fundamental rights and protections to non-human great apes,” it is difficult not to notice arbitrariness of another sort in such fervent defense of animal rights from a nation that sanctions (and subsidizes) some 92,000 abortions annually.

The Project’s chief philosophical proponent, Dr. Peter Singer, doesn’t see the inconsistency.  In a 2007 article in the Melbourne Herald-Sun, Singer argued that though “the opponents of abortion are right to say that abortion ends a human life…mere membership of our species doesn’t settle the moral issue of whether it is wrong to end a life.”

Singer argues that consciousness (and thus the ability to experience pain) is the proper criteria for evaluating “personhood.” Thus, for Singer, an adult ape has more intrinsic value than a human infant, more consciousness, and thus more of a right to life.

For months, Dublin has huddled under a blizzard of political debate that blanketed every wall, telephone pole, and street corner with drifts of flyers, proclaiming loudly (in Gaelic as well as English) either, “Vote Yes!” or “Vote No!”

The controversy surrounded the Lisbon Treaty, whose promised reform of unwieldy EU institutions
failed in a national referendum in Ireland on Thursday. The controversy surrounding the Treaty resembled the fierce debates over the US Constitution, both in passionate intensity and in the opposition of regional autonomy to international national unity. Though a majority of Ireland’s poltical leaders and business interests supported the treaty, a campaign of widespread grassroots lobbying, headed by Libertas.org, was able to derail Lisbon’s passage, and potentially spell its demise since all 27 member states must ratify.

The Lisbon Treaty seeks to consolidate the EU as a political body in order to improve inter-state commerce and allow Europe to act as a more unified, stronger international player. Controversies included the creation of an appointed (unelected) President and Foreign Minister with longer term lengths, the reduction of the European Commission from a council of all 27 member states to a rotating body of 2/3 the members, and a greatly shortened list of areas subject to the veto of a single state.

Europa.com, an EU database, claims that Lisbon will produce not only “a more efficient Europe” – better able to combat terrorism, reduce international barriers to trade, and fight global warming – but also “a more democratic and transparent Europe,” by strengthening the power of the European Parliament, elected by EU citizens.

However, Libertas.org presents a very different view of Lisbon, positing a laundry list of objections to its passage: Lisbon “halves Ireland’s voting weight while doubling Germany’s,” “abolishes Ireland’s commissioner for five years at a time,” “opens the door to tax interference,” and generally “hands over power…to Brussels.”

Advocates for the Treaty focus on its ability to foster economic growth and political unity in the EU, while its opponents emphasize its potential for diminishing national sovereignty and cultural distinctions within Europe.

This threat has particular poignancy for the Irish, who endured nearly 900 years of political domination by Great Britain, only securing their independence after a bloody revolution in 1916. Ireland is a nation still fiercely in search of a distinctive identity: all government documents, including street signs, are printed in both English and Gaelic, a language spoken by fewer than 1% of the population. The words of a Dublin tour guide and Irish historian named Paul seem to capture the public attitude towards Lisbon: “It would spell the end of democracy in Europe.”

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Bob Herbert bemoaned the four million American youths, aged 16-24, who have no job, no schooling, and little hope of finding work. He blames this situation on “economic policies” that “have favored the wealthy,” creating conditions exacerbated by the tightening summer job market and receding economy.

However, Mr. Herbert did not mention a simple measure that, according to many economists, could dramatically reduce joblessness, particularly among unemployed youths: lowering the minimum wage. Mr. Herbert’s silence has particular poignancy given President Bush’s May 25th approval of a hike in the minimum wage to $5.85, effective July 24th this summer.

James Sherk of The Heritage Foundation explained the principal effect of the minimum wage in terms of simple economics: “Like anything else,when the price of labor rises, businesses buy less of it.” The minimum wage drives up the price of labor, which is especially devastating to those in the job market whose most attractive feature is their ability to underbid other workers. The youths Mr. Herbert writes of have few marketable skills, and, because they are not in school, they aren’t acquiring any.

Their greatest asset is the fact that they can afford the luxury of settling for less money: they have no children to support, no mortgages to pay, no car payments. A manager at McDonald’s might risk $5.00 an hour on a 17 year-old dropout from a poor neighborhood, over a high school graduate who won’t work for less than $6.00 an hour; if he has to pay $6.00 regardless, which is he likely to choose?

However, according to Sherk, the minimum wage not only reduces the ability of low-qualified workers to find work; it also “increases the incomes of teenagers with minimum-wage jobs, making entering the workforce more attractive. This, in turn, can be expected to cause some students to spend less time in school and more time working.” Economist David Neumark at Michigan State University found that “in states which allow students to drop out of school before they are 18, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop by two percent.” The minimum decreases the total number of low-wage jobs available, but creates the dangerous perception that dropping out of school to work might actually be to the student’s profit.

If Sherk and Neumark are correct in their assessment of the minimum wage, Americans should expect the constriction of the job market to continue even beyond the summer; they should also expect it to wreak the greatest havoc on those already least able to support themselves.

Nearly three years ago, Al Gore pronounced in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, “The debate in the scientific community is over” concerning global warming. That assertion echoes throughout the channels of the popular media, rising in volume and pitch with every reverberation. Its proponents enjoy increasing public acclaim (and funding), and receive the highest honors across disciplines. Does this cacophony from the advocates of man-made warming mark the close of any real debate?

The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary released last year by British television producer Mark Durkin (to scarcely a whisper from critics of any scientific persuasion), has the temerity to suggest otherwise. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Virginia, and author of perhaps its only review in an American newspaper, described this film as “a devastating documentary…based on sound science and interviews with real climate scientists, including me.”

The film features interviews with prominent scientists and media figures who have voiced skepticism of the prevailing account of climate change. These include, among others, Lord Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of the Exchequer in Britain, and among the first government officials to allocate public funds for research into emissions-linked climate change in the 1980’s; Dr. John Christy, listed as a “lead author” of the 2001 IPCC report, and still claimed by the organization as a “contributor”; Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace; and Dr. Ian Clark, a paleo-climatologist, and expert in the ice core-sampling that forms the heart of Gore’s argument in An Inconvenient Truth.

Durkin uses these interviews as a springboard to propose several audacious hypotheses. Among the most gut-wrenching, the interviewed scientists claim that increasing carbon dioxide does not, in fact, increase the Earth’s temperature; rather, they insist, the causal link between carbon dioxide levels and temperature runs the opposite direction—”Temperature,” claims Dr. Ian Clark, pointing impressively to a graph showing two jagged lines chasing one another across the millennia, “is leading CO2 levels by 800 years.” The documentary proposes that changes in solar activity, rather than carbon dioxide, predominantly influences global temperature, and that the current orthodoxy of anti-industrial environmentalism arose out of an unlikely allegiance between pro-nuclear British conservatives, lead by Margaret Thatcher, and neo-Marxists ideologically displaced by the fall of the Soviet Union.

Whether the argument presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle is true or not, the documentary provides an important perspective on what is potentially the most monumental issue facing the world today. Anyone evaluating the dramatic claims of the new environmental movement—denounced by its very father, Patrick Moore, as “anti-human” in the closing moments of the film—will do well to consider its claims.

In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood excoriates the arrogant fumblings of popular theodicy, which quickly brands every calamity-averted as “Gods’ protection,” while discreetly invoking “the mystery of providence” when true catastrophe rears forth. Wood outlines an “anti-theodicy” stemming from an outrage that, according to theologian David Bentley Hart, should be profoundly Christian.

Wood, whose agonies over the problem of evil gradually eroded his childhood faith into apostasy, scorns popular treatments of evil, from the weeping university students who praised God for preserving them from tornadoes (apparently doing so by sending the tempest to kill other area residents), to the Archbishop who, in article after the 2004 Asian tsunami, cautioned his Communion against expecting God “constantly to step in if things are getting dangerous.”

Wood lampoons the appeal either to selective intervention, or to mysterious providence–the former, because it seems to have God perenially “on holiday,” idly diverting a car wreck while the masses writhe and weep; and the latter, because it implicates God in “the Holocaust, the killing fields, the five people who die of malaria every minute.” Even if such suffering were justified, even if “the sound of weeping and of crying were heard no more,” Wood would have no part of such redemption.

This view, of course, is profoundly paradoxical, in that such outrage against the silent God is coherent only if there is in fact a God who is silent. Wood, still shivering in the tattered rags of his faith’s former finery, recognizes this contradiction, and, with heart-rending sincerity, calls his belief “permanent rebellion,” a state of “wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God is is not supposed to believe in.” Wood links arms with Ivan Karamazov, whose “Rebellion” speech in The Brothers Karamazov made famous this sort of anti-theodicy, in declaring war on any redemption that would seek to justify the senseless suffering of children.

In a recent interview, Dr. Hart, author of The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, remarked, “The pathos of [Ivan’s] protest is…exquisitely Christian.” For Ivan, and–Hart contends–for every Christian, “the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.”

Rather, Hart insists, “The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those powers — death chief among them — that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity.”

The truly Christian view, according to Hart, which requires “the eye of charity and a faith in Easter,” is to insist upon the beauty and wonder of creation, to shout obstinately in the face of suffering and death: “Where is your victory? Where is your sting?” If Hart is correct, then perhaps many Christians ought to fortify their theology with heavy doses of Wood’s outrage, that they might learn to speak, not of God’s justifying evil, but of His conquering it.

Despite Barack Obama’s clinching the Democratic Presidential nomination last Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s speech that night at Baruch College in New York sounded anything but resigned and accepting.

Rather, she sounded as though she were still on the campaign trail, as she outlined her platform, offered touching anecdotes, and continually mentioned “the 18 million” primary votes that allowed her campaign to creep forward long after most analysts had dismissed it. The day after her speech, many commentators interpreted such comments as, “I want the nearly 18 million people who voted for me to be respected and heard,” as a not-so-subtle demand for continuing political influence, perhaps in the Vice-Presidency.

However, Clinton may have had another, more immediate aim in in delaying her resignation. At this moment, her greatest worry is not securing the vice-presidency, but settling the more than $20 million in debt her campaign has accrued in stumbling after Obama. Legally, she only has until the Democratic National Conventon in August to raise any further funds, and her political capital will only devalue in the intervening months: if she is to raise that money, she needs to do it right away.

This helps explain perhaps the most curious aspect of Clinton’s speech: her continual return to the theme of, not merely voter support, but fundraising. With the persistence of a third grade teacher leading her class through the multiplication table, she spoke first of, “millions of Americans…raising money for the first time,” then of those “who came to HillaryClinton.com and showed the tangible support that they felt in their hearts.” Later in the speech, she told the story of a married couple–two veterans of Iraq–who donated their spending money to her campaign. However, the masterstroke came at the end; having given a speech more fit to inspire and energize the beginning of a campaign, one rife with references to fundraising, Hillary then closed with this simple plea for her “18 million supporters”: “I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my Web site at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.”

And what form might this assistance take? A simple trip to the HillaryClinton.com removes all doubt: a huge area at the top of the page is devoted, first to a space to register with the campaign by giving a name, address, and email (the better to SPAM you with), and second, to a bright yellow sign reading “Show Hillary Your Support,” directly above a red button reading, “Contribute.” Simple arithmetic tells the story: if she collects $5 from 4 million of those ostensible 18 million supporters, her campaign will be in the black once more. This move only reinforces what commentators have long understood: while she lacks Obama’s warmth and charisma, there is no more subtle and ambitious political mind in America than Hillary Clinton.

HT: Steve French

The recent torrent of natural disasters—devastating hurricanes, a holocaust of Southeastern wildfires, intense droughts—have many questioning whether some crazed archangel might not be upending the bowls of judgment upon our heads.

For Charles Blow of the New York Times, along with others like Al Gore and the IPCC, this confluence of weather-related catastrophes “more than likely” is one of the accelerating effects of anthropogenic global warming. Blow concludes his recent piece with a cry for action: “we need to declare a coordinated war on global warming,” which amounts to a top-down, systematic campaign to reduce carbon emissions, such as that outlined by the Kyoto Protocol.

But the government-run Energy Information Administration has estimated that the costs of reducing U.S. emissions 3% by 2012 would total $411 billion. By contrast, Blow’s laundry list of climate-related economic woes only tallies to $125.9 billion. Barry Heam and the editors of JunkScience.com estimate that Kyoto has already cost the global economy over $493 billion since 2005, while only potentially reducing global temperature .005 degrees Celsius—emphasizing “potentially,” because no one can measure global temperature accurately enough to register the change.

Considering the cost of sweeping reforms like Kyoto raises an important question. Why is it that when two devastating storms struck low-lying regions, the stronger of the two (Katrina) killed fewer than 2,000, compared to the more than 50,000 lives claimed by the weaker Nargis? The difference: meteorology, hospitals, paved roads, helicopters, and the industrial infrastructure needed to ship emergency supplies for millions of refugees hundreds of miles at a day’s notice. With all their inefficiency and backwardness, FEMA was a paragon of efficiency compared with the helplessness of the Burmese junta faced with the millions now starving in disease-ridden camps.

A “coordinated war on global warming” should take into account global economic growth, which might one day provide the Burmese with the resources to weather a Nargis with only a few thousand dead, rather than tens of thousands.