The Dish

Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf are debating the topic. Here's Adam:

Any movement that claims to represent "Real Americans" but is 98 percent white is by definition going to have a definition of Americanness that is partially defined by race. Whether you call them "Real Americans" or "The Silent Majority," we all know what we're really talking about. Pat Buchanan's saving grace is that he's always had the stones to give the state of things without equivocation or evasion, without grasping for the plausible deniability of putting a few nonwhite speakers on the stage in order to foster the perception of diversity.

Jerry Coyne counters Sean Carroll:

It would be perfectly possible for organisms to evolve self-repair mechanisms that would render them immortal, and many species have gone partway to this end. Salamanders, for example, have evolved the ability to regenerate limbs, and I’ve already mentioned that organisms have evolved complex ways to repair mutations.  No matter what theory of ageing you have, it could be reversed without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

(Image: Walter Breuning, age 112, the oldest man in the world as of July 23, 2009/Getty)

A reader writes:

Is there any doubt that if Palin were asked what her favorite works of Beckett were she would say, "All of 'em?"

As Brown tries to save his party from third place in the electoral vote, Cameron is certainly showing signs of confidence, saying he would prefer to run a minority government than form a coalition with the Liberals. Some new polls show a slight return to normality with the LIb-Dems subsiding a little. Politics Home's poll of polls gives the Tories 35 percent to the LIberals' 29 and Labour's 27. But how all this plays out in a complex, seat-by-seat, region-by-region national election is extremely hard to measure:

The Lib Dem surge, along with claims by the Tories and Lib Dems that the Labour vote is going into freefall, has opened up many more possibilities for both opposition parties. 

“There are huge numbers of Labour to Lib Dem switchers, which gives us an advantage in seats you wouldn’t expect and we hope to exploit [that],” said one Tory source.

They say the changes mean that up to four seats may be in play in the North East, traditionally a no-go area for the Tories. In addition to Sunderland Central, they are Tynemouth, a longstanding target needing a 6 per cent swing to the Tories, Stockton South, needing 7 per cent, and Middlesbrough South, a 9 per cent swing.

I would not be surprised to see a small Tory majority. Why? Because this is a change election and they are the most likely practical vehicle for such change:

Voters are ready for a change of direction, with 70% agreeing with the sentiment "time for a change", against just 25% who say continuity is most important and want to stick with Labour. Many are also likely to vote: 68% of those polled said they were certain to cast a ballot on Thursday, and a further 9% said it was likely, which if it happens could see turnout rise well above the 61% recorded in 2005.

(Photo: Prime Minister Gordon Brown makes a speech to a Sunday congregation at the Church of the New Testament in Streatham on May 2, 2010 in London, England. By Lewis Whyld – WPA Pool/Getty Images.)

Templeton is holding a forum on whether whether moral action depends upon reasoning. Jonah Lehrer responds by looking at the brains of pyschopaths. He contends that reason is relevant but that the emotional core of our brains is key to morality:

Neuroscientists are beginning to identify the specific deficits that define the psychopathic brain. The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for secreting aversive emotions, like fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. Aggression doesn't make them nervous. Terror isn't terrifying. (Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is activated when most people even think about committing a "moral transgression.")

This emotional void means that psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences: They are four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime after being released. For a psychopath on parole, there is nothing inherently wrong with violence. Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what they want, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy their desires. In other words, it is the absence of emotion–and not a lack of rationality–that makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible to them.

Indian children play in a waterfall at the Lumbini Water Cascade in Hyderabad on May 2, 2010, to beat the high temperatures. India's monsoon, vital to hundreds of millions of farmers and of crucial importance after the worst drought in 37 years, will be normal strength this year, the weather office said last month. By Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images.

The times they are a-changin'. From France:

A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions.

JCall, which describes itself as "the European J Street" and is to be officially launched Sunday with the presentation of the letter, has raised a storm with its call to stop construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem.

The letter is signed by some 3,000 Jewish intellectuals, among them philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut, considered some of Israel's strongest defenders among French intellectuals. Signatories also include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student protests in the 1960s and now a member of the European Parliament, as well as other Jewish members of the European Parliament. The letter calls occupation and settlements "morally and politically wrong," noting that they "feed the unacceptable delegitimization process that Israel currently faces abroad."

Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia, 6.30 am

An Arabic-speaking counterterrorism expert, SERE training expert, and a combat veteran with twenty-eight years of operational experience in the Middle East, Malcolm Nance, takes on the torture-defenders:

I spent twenty years in intelligence and four years in the SERE program waterboarding people before I ever opened my mouth on the subject. Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim of expertise. As for his claim about the relationship between Pol Pot–era waterboarding and what we have done derived from the SERE program, he’s wrong. Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in Cambodia. Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training program. Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies. I was waterboarded on arrival at SERE, and then as a senior staffer, I performed the technique or supervised it through hundreds of evolutions.

Thiessen’s central purpose is apparently to glorify the most extreme practices used by the CIA in the Bush era and to argue that each of these practices, including waterboarding, is vitally necessary to our national security–even though no president used them before, and it seems that President Bush himself halted many of these practices over Cheney’s objection. We have prosecuted and convicted men for using these techniques in the past, and we were right to do so.

This suggests to me that, while he may cite Thomas Aquinas, Thiessen has no sense of honor and no moral compass. I give him credit for his loyalty to the Cheneys, but he’s blind to their errors in judgment. The use of waterboarding and other torture techniques was a powerful recruitment tool for Al Qaeda; it spawned thousands of would-be suicide bombers. Thiessen claims that we gained “intelligence” by using these torture techniques. But this shows that he knows nothing about the intelligence process or how our enemy grows and sustains itself.

Thousands of American POWs died and suffered resisting torture practices that we have always called the tools of the enemy. The SERE program was designed to help them grapple with this inhumanity and retain their dignity in the face of it. Now Thiessen and his boss want us to embrace the tactics we used in that program–taken from the Russians, the Communist Chinese, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge–as our own. He claims that these techniques are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact. Really? I challenge him to put up or shut up. I offer to put him through just one hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the Bush Administration’s OLC memos–including the CIA-approved variant of waterboarding. If at the end he still believes this is not torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint. But not until then. By the way, I can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of falsehoods. He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the torture.

Philip Jenkins explores the impact of the Vatican sex scandals on the steady shift of Catholic influence into the southern hemisphere:

The secular media also don’t enjoy the same pervasive presence in Africa and Latin America that it does in Europe, and the Church has its own powerful media voices that will defend the faith. […] Indeed, as the crisis quickens the wane of Europe's Catholic influence, it will help solidify the Church's new roots in the south. Membership there will continue to burgeon, and Church's hierarchy will increasingly be paved with southern clerics. When the time comes to choose someone to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, the cardinals, acutely aware of the effects of the abuse crisis, will probably consider more innovative international candidates, untainted by European connections. A Latin American pope would be a likely choice.

This is Jenkins' usual line. But the abuse in these Southern hemisphere countries is likely to be much worse than in the West because the authoritarian culture is still resilient, if waning. At some point, without structural reform of the way the church is organized, the wave of revelations will hit the South as well. More to the point: it already has. Maciel was a Mexican, remember. Latin America is currently galvanized by tapes of a bishop abusing an altar boy. There was a pedophile scandal in Kenya. And marriage and polygamy are widespread among the priesthood in Africa. I suspect the South will be more affected in the future by priest scandals than the now-better-managed North.

In this, actually, I think Benedict was right. If the church loses the West, if it loses Europe entirely, it is doomed. A revival of the faith will have to occur outside existing structures rather than within them. The Southern escape hatch is a delusion. Modernity is the problem. Plunging into Africa and fundamentalism will not be real answers.