The Dish

Slate wants to know:

Test-tube meat is getting closer to reality.

A reader makes a valid point:

To properly understand religious fundamentalism it is necessary to realize that "fundamentalism" has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with mindset. A quote on your site by George Orwell states "to see what is in front of nose needs a constant struggle", this is indeed very true, and the fundamentalist mindset is in the relinquishing of that struggle. One no longer needs to learn the basic realities of life and build from those as all of those assumptions have already been assigned to you. In allowing ones assumptions to be co-opted by a movement, religious or otherwise, it frees a person from having to understand the basis of ones decisions, and the responsibility held therein.  Fundamentalism is all about logic, not religion.  The same type of argument is easily made for completely irreligious things like Nazism or Communism. 

The people under these movements operate the same way, allowing ones basic assumptions of the world to be told to them, not formed by them.  Thus if the question is, what leads to the rise of fundamentalism, it is necessary to look at the type of person who wants to avoid the responsibility of understanding what is in front of ones nose.

For me, fundamentalism is not just a distortion of faith but a negation of it. Faith, in my view, should not be blind. It should have the widest eyes imaginable. Nothing that is true should stand in the way of faith, unless one has already conceded that one is believing in a lie. And so science is not to be feared but embraced. And historical scholarship is to be plumbed not ignored. And debate is to be welcomed, not policed. It is only through this process of doubt and questioning that real faith emerges.
 

Reihan and Ross loved this. Hard not to:

The House music version from Beatport. Best yet, I’d say.

A clip worth savoring.

The Rasmussen poll shows a very close race – closer since Bittergate and the Freak Show Debate. The poll of polls also shows tightening. I’ve said this for a long time, and you can look it up, but it seems to me that Clinton needs a double-digit win to avoid immense pressure to drop out. And in some ways, the nastiness of the campaign has both exhausted voters and disturbed super-delegates – which may lead to a collective decision to get this over with. We’ll see.

Juneau, Alaska, 7.30 am.

David Brooks makes some shrewd points about the Obama candidacy today. Yes: he has had the shine scuffed off him. Yes: his capacity to be a post-partisan unifier would have been easier if he hadn’t been forced into some rather classic primary warfare. Yes: he hasn’t been as deft as he might have been on the cultural issues. Yes: he isn’t the messiah. Yes: a blanket commitment to quit Iraq so quickly may well have to be adjusted in office, depending on events and developments we cannot yet know. And yes, his pivoting off NAFTA has not been pretty.

At the same time, his considerable strengths remain. He is the most persuasive and reasoned liberal on the national stage in a very long time. The inevitable initial swoon was always going to come down to earth at some point, and in some ways, it’s better for the bloom to be swiped off the rose now rather than in September. Despite the caricature, many of us who want Obama to be the Democratic nominee are aware he doesn’t walk on water, has a bit of an ego, has some iffy friends, and some ugly supporters. If the mountain were smooth, you couldn’t climb it.

The great benefit of a McCain-Obama election will be the emergence of two flawed, human, but basically decent men who represent what I think of as the best and most sincere faces of their respective parties.

The chance for a more honest and candid debate about Iraq, terror, healthcare and debt is infinitely higher now than it was six months ago and will be even higher if and when the Clintons give up. Both men have made ugly political compromises in their time. Both have character failings as well as enormous qualities. Both have enormous egos and bad days. They are in short politicians. I, for one, was not expecting saints. But they’re among the best we’ve got, and the emergence of the two of them is a real sign that Americans are engaged again, know we have serious problems and want to tackle them. It will be a tough and fascinating fight. It surely cannot be as depressing and as nasty as the primary season has become among the Dems.

Those two heavy-weights of the Democratic foreign policy establishment have just endorsed Obama. The momentum among super-delegates is now reaching critical mass. And I don’t think even Hugh Hewitt will be able to describe Nunn as a member of the "hard-left."