"Not Liberal" equals "Extremist?"

So I made it back to the US with no trouble whatsoever. Hats off to British Airways - everything was on time, they gave me the good bulkhead aisle seat, and they didn't involve me in any traffic accidents on the tarmac (see that, KLM?)

Now I am back and enthralled by the recent political maneuvering in the US Senate. President Bush has nominated several judges for appointments to various federal courts. Now the way I understand the appointment process, from my high school civics class, is that once an nomination is made, the senate should vote on the nominee. If a majority of senators approve the nominnee, the appointment stands, right? I also undertand the role of the fillibuster in the senate to protect the rights of the minority. The question is, exactly whose rights are potentially being trampled by the nomination of conservative judges?

This morning on CNN, Senator Ted Kennedy was talking about the "extremist" judges who were so far out of the judicial mainstream that they were unacceptable. But if these people are so far out of the mainstream, why is there even a possibility that they would be approved? If a majority of senators approve that person, are the senators also extremists? If an extremist view is held by a majority of people, can it really be called extremist, or is that view, by definition, the mainstream? The thing about liberals is that they win arguments by coloring the issues with labels: non-liberals are "extremists," pro-life is "anti-choice," and Christians (a term which itself is becoming derogatory) are "the religious right" or "radical fundamentalists."

One of the common traits among several of the present nominees is their opposition to abortion. One nominee, Priscilla Owen, is criticized in a CNN.com story for seeking to limit the ability of minors to get an abortion without parental consent. "Not everything said about her has always been flattering," CNN tells readers, in its paragraph about her opposition to teenage abortion. How is that unflattering? But this is how liberals operate. Rather than engage in a legitimate discussion of an issue, they resort to name calling and labelling. Rather than explain why children should be allowed to have abortions without notifying parents, and thus why Judge Owen's view is unflattering, they just assert that this is so. And this is the typical means of persuasion used by the left. Conservatives are portrayed as mean, selfish, biggoted fascists, while they present themselves as kind, compassionate voices of the oppressed (unless the oppressed are unborn - then screw 'em).

Take for example recent television ads from MoveOn.org, which portrays Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as the evil Star Wars Emperor. They claim that the "radical right" is trying to "sieze absolute power." The only way to prevent this is for the minority to fillibuster. What MoveOn PAC fails to explain in the ad is why a fair hearing for the judicial nominees should be denied. We are just left to wonder how such an extremist president got elected (twice) and how the majority of the senate came to be populated with such radical right-wing men and women. Could it be because a moajority of Americans put them there? Perish the thought....

Booked and Bound to Go

I've got the key to the highway
I'm booked and bound to go
I'm gonna leave here running
Walking's most too slow
(from "Key to the Highway," by Big Bill Broonzy)

So I have my electronic plane tickets all booked. I am bound for the golden shores of the United States tomorrow morning. Most of the details of leaving the country, I have sorted out. I have a bit of packing left to do, but otherwise I am merely biding my time until 9:40 AM tomorrow.

Over the weekend I faced the unenviable task of getting rid of my car. The problem with selling a car when your moving is that you don't want to get rid of it too early, because then you're stuck without transportation for however long. But if you wait too long, your options for unloading the car get fewer. I have some experience in this arena, since in the last ten years I have moved great distances more times than I like to remember. The situation has worked out exactly right exactly once. On the other hand, I have twice had cars turn against me in the weeks before moving, and given the lack of time - or more accurately lack of energy - to deal with getting them repaired. On both occasions, I had to get scrap dealers to haul them away, myself getting nothing from the deal beyond the relief of being automotively unfettered.

The situation I found myself in this weekend is, so far, the least satisfying of all of my last minute car trades. I advertised the car, a 1994 Subaru Legacy "estate car" (that's a station wagon to you and me), on the Durham University website for several weeks. All I got out of that was several e-mails from people with names like Bob Anderson and messages that went something like this: "I am very much interested in your (item). Please advice me to you last price. I am pleased to you for accepting my personal cheque for the price of you item. Thanks you very much..." How many Bob Andersons do you know who speak such English? Nonetheless, I responded to the first of these, telling Bob the asking price and offering to have him come out to see the car at his convenience. The reply, translated into standard English, was that he was working on behalf of an American client who wanted to send me a cashier's check for significantly more than the asking price of the car, sight unseen. I would deposit the check, keeping my share for the car, and wiring the remainder to an unspecified shipping agent who would then come and collect the car. Right - that doesn't sound shady at all, does it? Where do I sign? Needless to say I mostly ignored all subesquent contact from Bob and his ilk.

The only serious enquiry about the car came from a fellow member of the university community, but it was while I was away for several weeks. By the time I returned to Durham, this fellow had understandably already found a car. So I sent around an e-mail to all the grad students and research staff in my department, imploring someone to make me any offer - none was to ridiculous. No offers were forthcoming, and my most dreaded last resort was imminent - pimping the car around to low end used car dealers. I would rather deal in black market body parts with circus folk in dark back alleys than negotiate a car sale with a used car salesman, especially the type of used car salesman likely to be interested in my 11 year old Subaru. Alas, this was my fate on Saturday (the car sale, not the back alley body parts thing).

So I pulled into this tiny little yard situated in the back of a row of houses. The "lot" was a fenced in yard about 20 feet on a side, with a dozen cars packed almost close enough to touch each other. The only building was a dilapidated hovel that was missing one of its four walls. The guy is sitting in a metal folding chair surrounded by greasy tools and car parts. I explained that I had called earlier about my Subaru, and was here to have him look at it, and make me an offer. He wandered over to where I had parked the car, his nylon track suit pants whoosh-whooshing as he walked. He sucked his teeth and tut-tutted about the work he'd have to put into before being able to sell it. Then he noticed it had an automatic transmission. This, for some mysterious reason, is the death blow for selling a car in England. I guess because the automatic transmission is still such new, untested technology (it's only been around a mere sixty years or so?), it is viewed with suspicion and skepticism. Besides, anything that makes a task like driving slightly easier is a frivolity to be dispensed with. But I digress. Anyway, after totting up all the failings of my car, and driving it up and down the street a few times, they guy made me a profanely low offer. I was taken aback. Did I hear correctly? "No," I replied, "if I am going to give it away, I'll give it to a friend, or the Salvation Army, or that guy at the pub who looked at me funny." So he added and extra 25 pounds to his offer. He knew I was desperate to sell, and I knew he wasn't going to go much higher than this. And I was desperate to sell, so after thinking about my options (since their really weren't any, this didn't take long) I grudgingly accepted the paltry offer on the condition that he give me a lift back to Durham. On the ride back he had the cheek to point out that he'd saved me the bus fare I would have otherwise had to pay. In my mind I was bashing his smug face into the stearing wheel repeatedly. I spent the rest of the day in a gray cloud of disgust over the advantage taken of me.

But no matter now, right? I'll be off tomorrow into the bright blue yonder, and bright blue future of who-knows-what. I'll see my beautiful wife and my adorable children, and the 94 Subaru will quickly recede from memory.

All in all, I have no regrets about the year and half I've spent here in England. I have learned a lot, made several good friends, picked up some interesting language, and had a son here. So as I prepare to depart these fair shores, I'll say God save the queen, and God bless America!

Monkeys and Morality

On two separate occasions recently, I've found myself embroiled in friendly debates with colleagues over the issue moral relativism. The conversations have both begun with discussions of the pros and cons of Darwinian evolution. Most of my peers in the scientific world will readily defend Darwinism as scientifically proven fact (however, see the Discovery Institute for articles and discussion by academics who find Darwinism unconvincing). I am no young earth special creationist by any means, and my objections to Darwinism don't necessarily stem from my religious convictions. I just see no convincing evidence that one species has evolved into another by accumulating minute genetic changes over vast expanses of time. This is certainly not seen in the fossil record. In fact we find the opposite case in the Earth's record: thick rock sequences representing long periods of time, in which the fossil organisms remain virtually unchanged. Michael Behe, in his book Darwin's Black Box has explained how many of the supposed steps in evolution are what he calls "irreducibly complex." For example, the development of the eye is thought by Darwinists to have evolved in small increments from a light-sesitive spot in lower organisms into the image-forming, color-differentiating eye that most humans enjoy. Behe describes the myriad biochemical reactions and processes that must take place at just the right time in order for the light entering the eye to be transferred to the brain and interpreted as an image with some bearing on the seer's environment. Evolution by increments is not viable here, because all the components necessary for vision must appear together. There is no selective advantage in having an eye that doesn't work. The odds of all of these components appearing simultaneously by random mutations are about the same as that of putting one million monkeys in front of one million typwriters and hoping one of them eventually happens to come up with an exact transcription of Hamlet.

In spite of this evidence against Darwinian evolution, materialist scientists remain convinced that unguided evolution has occurred, because they see the present state of life on Earth, and realize that it had to have become this way somehow. And this is where the real problem with Darwinian thinking occurs - at the very beginning. Proponents of evolution begin with the belief that no higher being can be involved in the workings of the world, and so they have to construct a story to explain how that might have happened. It is a tiring and desperate task imposed on the proverbial monkeys.

This is the point at which my recent converstions have become the most interesting. If human life is the culmination of accumulated random physical and chemical reactions and genetic mutations, with no guiding hand behind it, then life is inherently purposeless. We are here by accident, and your life and mine have no intrinsic value other than what you or I choose to place on it. While this may seem like very enlightened thinking on the surface - each person's beliefs are equally true and should be equally respected - we don't have to follow the train of thought very far before we start seeing that it is an unworkable philosophy. One has only to wonder if this relativist idea is universally true: if it is, then it violates the very principle it proposes, that everyone makes up his or her own beliefs as they see fit. If it isn't true for everyone, then my belief that truth is absolute must be admitted, meaning that as soon as contradicting beliefs are encountered, at least one of them is wrong.

Even disregarding these logical difficulties, the path of moral relativism which Darwinism leaves us to wander ends at a chasm we can not easily cross: the moral principles we live by become nothing more than preferences exactly analaogous to our taste in music or favorite colors. As long as most of us define morality similarly, there are no problems. But what do we say to the psychopath who feels no moral reservation against brutally killing innocent people? We have no reason to abhor mass murder, rape, slavery, and child abuse. In the end morality gets imposed on us by whomever has the most power to enforce it. Hitler, Stalin, Mao...these men were merely following Darwinism to it's logical conclusions, like it or not.

We cannot possibly live with this conclusion. We all recognize that life has intrinsic value. This is why our hearts break when we read stories about babies abandoned in dumpsters being cared for by stray dogs. Once we admit that life does have value, we must conclude that it has purpose. Purpose creates value, and you can't have one without the other. If life does have some meaning, there must be someone to mean it. Suddenly we find ourselves in the hand of God, and we can relinquish our grip on chance and time as the mother and father of life. The monkeys can leave their typewriters and go happily back to the trees.

Hitting the Wall

Being a foreigner is wearying. I have been in England for close to two years, and honestly, I have tried to fit in. I say things like "Cheers, mate" to people I don't know. I have learned how to navigate roundabouts while sitting on the wrong side of the car. I carry an umbrella all the time. I have even forced myself to eat black pudding - once. All in all I think I have shown considerable effort to adapt -"when in Rome" and all that. Nonetheless, I have hit the wall. I just want to go home now. I don't want to do anything - just get on a plane with whatever of my stuff I can carry and leave all else behind. My impending return to the US next week probably exacerbates this feeling of apathy, and the fact that my family has already returned to the States in March doesn't help either.

Living here in England hasn't, in itself, been bad. I have made several good friends here, and have learned a lot of interesting things about geology, as well as the world. It is just exhausting to constantly wish things were like home, and always finding that they're not. There are specific things here that drive me nuts, certain inconveniences I could do without. But some things would be annoying regardless of where I lived. When you are at home, the annoying things don't stand out so much, because, in spite of being irritating, they are "normal."

So I have exactly one week left to be a foreigner, in which time I have to sell a car, sort out some bank accounts, and have my mail forwarded. I will eventually look back with fond memories, and time will blur the inconveniences and frustrations. But for now, I just want to go home.

Does it have to rain EVERY day?

So yesterday and today, the weather has been a tease. I sit inside, and it looks sunny and pleasant. The second I darken the door to go out, it starts raining. And not just a little rain, either. Sheets of rain, sometimes with little bits of ice that sting the backs of my ears. I get to where I am going, and guess what - no more rain. I tried once stepping out and jumping right back inside. It was like a blast from one of those oscillating lawn sprinklers. And here's the best part - it doesn't have to be cloudy to rain. Crystal blue skies, not a cloud to be seen anywhere, and still it rains. I don't know how this works, but I swear that's what happens here. Every day it rains at least a little. If I was a duck I'd be laughing, but I am not a duck, so I am just wet and cold and annoyed.

Actually, I have to admit that last Friday it didn't rain (at least not much). Friday the weather was what I like to call British Nice. It was cold and windy, but there was sunshine and a noticeable lack of rain - that's British Nice weather. Some friends and I went out for a drink after work Friday evening, and realizing that this was as close as we were likely to get to decent weather for some time (ever, really) we decided to sit outside. We splintered off from the larger contingent of Durham geologists amid exhortations that it was probably too cold to sit outdoors. "No, it's British Nice out," I said. We sat down outside, knowing that our indoor friends were keeping tabs on us through the window. We tried to nonchalantly zip up our jackets without being noticed; a campfire would have been decidedly too obvious. We congratulated ourselves on our bravery and fortitude, noting that it really wouldn't be that cold if the wind wasn't turning small dogs into kites. We talked about how warm it probably was in America right now - "It's gotta be in the eighties at least..." We talked about our favorite spicy foods - buffalo wings, barbecued ribs, and chili. None of this seemed to help, so after about a half hour, we slowly and quietly got up one or two at a time - so as not to attract the attention of the indoorsies - and walked casually back inside, trying to act like we had only just arrived. Nonetheless, we had to endure a few smug, we-told-you-so glances.

Well, the sun is out and the wind seems to have diminished now, so perhaps I'll go out for a bit. Now where did I put my umbrella?

Travelling Blues

So I went to Vienna for a meeting last week. No sooner had I arrived, I was stricken - literally stricken - with a raging toothache. I have had a root canal performed on this particular tooth no fewer than three times - the latest one having been done a mere three days prior to my trip to Austria. Aside from dragging myself to the convention center to give my talk, I spent the rest of my three days in Vienna in bed trying to think of something other than blinding pain. It turns out, though, that one can purchase antibiotics over the counter in Austria - a useful bit of information to file away...

Then it was Wednesday - the day for me to return to England, and the pain had diminished markedly overnight, only to be replaced by pumpkinesque swelling on the left half of my face. So I ambled my one-man circus sideshow to the airport, waited for my flight and arrived, uneventfully, in Amsterdam. Now, Amsterdam Schiphol airport was converted from a shopping mall, and as such there are no gates or jetways, as one typically envisions an airport to have. Instead there is a vast parking lot full of KLM planes, which are accessed from the terminal by means of busses. The lady takes your boarding pass and herds you onto a bus which wends its way through the acres of jets, arriving twenty minutes later at the one bound for your particular destination - and its these busses that have a total of about six seats. Everyone else has to stand holding onto one of the poles going from the floor to the ceiling. The bus emptied out, the crowd flowed into the plane and we sat...and sat...and sat. An hour later the pilot announced that they couldn't get the door to shut properly, and so the flight was cancelled. Don't worry, though, the bus will be here shortly to take you back to the terminal for rerouting.

Alright, back onto the bus. At least I was in no real hurry to get home. No one is waiting for me to return, and I can sit around at the airport just as easily as I can sit around the house, right? So the bus begins its scenic trip back to the terminal. We're getting close, I know, because I can see the door I just came the other way through an hour ago. Then with no warning, I am on the floor of the bus! I am on top of some poor guy's luggage, and some other schmoe is on top of mine! Everyone around me is struggling back to their feet because the bus has crashed into a forklift thirty yards from the terminal entrance! So they send another bus to take us the long way around to the terminal.

To compensate the planeload of irate passengers, here's what KLM gave us: a telephone calling card good for three minutes in the Netherlands (I don't know any Dutch people, but even if I did, it would take me longer than three minutes to tell this story); Ten euros worth of food and drinks in the airport, the equivalent of about fifteen US dollars or, apparently, a slice of pizza, large Coke, and a chocolate bar. No kidding - that menu came to 9.40 Euros! And I didn't even get the sixty cents change back; and finally a voucher for fifty euros off any regular KLM fare. Like I'll be flying with KLM again any time soon...good luck with that..

Anyway, I was on the next flight from Amsterdam to Newcastle, which went off without any trouble. After a Metro ride and a train trip, I was back in Durham safe and, if not quite sound (remember the facial gigantism?) at least glad to be done travelling for a couple of weeks...

Seashells

So I am stuck here in England for a couple more weeks to finish up some work before relocating back home to America. Some friends and I went to Bamburgh castle on the northeast cost of England last weekend, and had a pretty nice day. The weather started out pretty ugly, but improved remarkably by mid-afternoon. We meandered up and down the beach in the sunshine after touring through the castle, picking up seashells along the way. As my collection grew, it prompted memories of doing the exact same thing with my family on Galveston Island when I was a boy (although there are few medieval castles in Texas). This moment of nostalgia forcefully reminded me that I have had a pretty good life so far all in all. I've never been seriously ill. My parents and sisters, neices and nephews, brothers-in-law are all in good health. I have four children who inspire me every day. I have a fascinating, beautiful wife that loves me and means the world to me and makes me want to be better than I am. Whatever else happens in life, I am grateful to God for these things. Maybe I'll get a good, permanent job soon, maybe I won't. Maybe my finances will become stable and comfortable, maybe they won't. I don't know what lies around time's corner, and I am not sure I really want to. I am learning (albeit slowly) to appreciate all the good things in my life on the one hand, and to let go of the clutter that doesn't matter on the other.