The following is a summary of the April 2007, issue of the St. Croix Review:

Angus MacDonald in the editorial, "The Art of Governance" sees the elaborate ceremonies we devote to the funerals of presidents; he surveys the qualities of the presidential candidates; he notes the pivotal issues that are being discussed for the purpose of advantage--without serious attempts at solutions--by the candidates.

Herbert London, in "The Great Divide and the Bush Doctrine" sees how Shia and Sunni militants could be turned against each other, much to our benefit; in "Anti-Americanism on American T.V." he is disgusted while watching CNN in Japan an endless stream of critical reports on the U.S., with nothing positive offered; in "When Good Intentions Lead to Bad Results" he notes how an organization of scientists would have the U.S. create a new arms control system for space, thereby limiting the U.S. and giving the Chinese an advantage in anti-satellite weapons; in "Almighty Dollar Less Mighty" he discusses the consequences of a weakening dollar against the euro; in "Conyers and House Corruption" he notes how poorly Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric about ethical government matches the behavior of the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Allan Brownfeld writes, in "Republicans and Conservatives: The Gap Is Growing" that the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress overspent, over-regulated, and betrayed their principles in pursuit of advancement. Conservatism was not defeated in the November elections, though Republicans were. He writes, in "With Growing Immigration and a Population of More Than 300 Million-It's Time to Fire-up the Melting Pot" that the flood of immigrant should be taught the historic dream of America-that this is a place where a person's race or religion or ethnic origin needn't be a hindrance.

Clifford F. Thies surveys the economic outlook and sees good news in "A Look at the Economic Expansion in Its 63rd Month."

In the first of a four-part series on Ronald Reagan, Paul Kengor discusses what accomplishments have won Reagan high esteem among the public and historians in "Lessons from Reagan for Bush and the War on Terror."

In "Changing Standards and Marriage" John Howard points to a turning point in the disintegration of the institution of marriage.

Dennis T. Avery and Fred Singer reveal that there is no consensus among scientists pointing to human-caused global warming. In "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years," they discuss their recently published book at an event sponsored by the Hudson Institute.

Harry Neuwirth, in "Electoral College: Worthy Institution?" explains why we have the constitutional system that we do, and why some misguided people want to scrap it.

John D'Aloia cites developments in Ohio and Kansas in the ongoing controversy in "More on Eminent Domain."

Jigs Gardner, in "Writers for Conservatives: 8-- Realism and Reality" describes the ascendancy and exhaustion of the liberal literary culture during the last 100 years, which he characterizes as "a culture of alienation and rebellion, sour, nasty, negative." He questions what will replace the liberal view, and discounts Modern Realism.

In "C. S. Lewis on Moral Education" Gilbert Meilaender uses Lewis' writings to show what the basic principles of morality are, how we come to see these principles, and how we come to guide our lives by them.

Delbert Meyer reviews America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn.

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006), associate professor of Political Science, and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is part one in a series of four.

Because of a bitter, increasingly costly war in Iraq, Americans are questioning their president's leadership more than ever before, and George W. Bush has watched his approval ratings plummet to all-time lows.

Such challenging times were no stranger to past presidents-including three born in this month when America honors Presidents Day on February 19th: Washington and Lincoln led their nation to victory in wars that threatened to rip apart their country; similarly, another president who sought to lead America to victory in a difficult war likewise persevered-Ronald Reagan.

It was Reagan's victory over Soviet Communism that won him the accolades he now receives, and which has earned him the level of gold standard by which Republicans measure George W. Bush. A December Gallup poll found that Reagan is the most popular modern president, with 64 percent of respondents judging him outstanding/above average and only 10 percent rating him below average/poor, far outpacing Bush, who rated the most unpopular. An extraordinary June 2005 survey by the Discovery Channel and AOL, which included 2.4 million participants, declared Reagan the "greatest American of all time," beating Lincoln and Washington.

Actually, Reagan has been rating this high for a decade. A long list of top scholars-most of which never voted for Reagan-rate the 40th president highly: Harvard's late Richard Neustadt, Yale's John Lewis Gaddis, popular historians Michael Beschloss and David McCullough, to name a few. Even liberal politicians, from Bill Clinton to Ted Kennedy, now praise Reagan. Reagan "will be honored as the president who won the Cold War," explains Kennedy.

And it is Reagan's Cold War triumph that offers parallels for George W. Bush's struggles in the War on Terror.

This is the first of four articles noting lessons for Bush from Reagan's experience. But before considering tips from Reagan, we need to appreciate some significant differences in the two presidents-and some key lessons for Bush's detractors.

Obviously, Bush lacks Reagan's communication skills and ability to disarm political opponents with gentle wit. This has enabled his opponents to define public perception of his handling of the war, in a way Reagan's critics could not. Bush simply does not have Reagan's primetime television charm, and ability to appeal to Americans in Reagan's persuasive, winsome manner.

That said, comparisons between the two presidents are often unfair because of vastly divergent circumstances:

The Soviets did not directly attack us, as did the terrorists; we never engaged the USSR in a hot war. Also, because the Soviets embraced an atheistic ideology, they feared death, not believing in eternal rewards. Quite the contrary, the radical Islamic enemy views death in the name of Allah as a ticket to Paradise. For Bush, that is a more dangerous enemy-one that cannot be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.

Reagan, who spent a lifetime preparing to defeat Soviet Communism, could win the Cold War by changing one country, the USSR. Bush, who prior to his presidency never imagined what history had in store for him, cannot win the War on Terror by changing one country.

On the other hand, there are key common positives in Bush and Reagan:

Both had a deep faith in God, in country, and in their visions for America and the world. Their self-confidence gave them remarkable perseverance in the face of harsh criticism-criticism we have conveniently forgotten in Reagan's case. At this point in Reagan's two-term presidency, he was at an all-time low because of the emergence of Iran-Contra. Also, on the rare occasion he used military force, Reagan likewise encountered strong international disapproval. When Reagan dispatched troops to Grenada, the vote at the U.N. Security Council was 11 to 1 against the United States, while the General Assembly vote was 108 to 9.

Moreover, even Republicans have failed to grasp the most important shared objective of the two presidents: Bush has stated explicitly that he is seeking to carry on Reagan's "March of Freedom," a march begun centuries ago, not months ago-and which conservatives saluted when Reagan announced the goal in his historic 1982 Westminster Address. Against great odds, the current Republican president is attempting to shift Reagan's March of Freedom to that one area where it has been most resistant but is most needed-the Middle East.

This is not to say that Ronald Reagan would have supported the decision to invade Iraq. That is impossible to know. At the least, however, Reagan would commend Bush's goal of expanding freedom, and-ever the optimist-would likely be hopeful.

Yet, what are the lessons for Bush from Reagan?

Reagan found non-militaristic means to defeat the enemy, from extremely bold forms of economic warfare to other methods, such as aiding forces resisting the Soviets on various fronts. Reagan was able to marshal a multitude of resources that enabled him to pull off what no one 10 years earlier judged possible: he defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War without expending thousands of American lives. George W. Bush has lost thousands of precious lives and, in the process, has not been able to convince America that victory is in sight.

The next three articles in this series will examine three cases where Reagan defeated the enemy without firing a shot. *

"Consensus is the negation of leadership." -Margaret Thatcher

America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn. Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 224 pages, $27.95.

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse. --Osama Bin Laden, Kandahar, November 2001.

If we know anything, it is that weakness is provocative. --Donald Rumsfeld, Washington D.C., 1998.

Steyn begins:

Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: he feels good about feeling bad. But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? . . . worrying about nukes is so eighties.

So what should we be cowering in terror over? Steyn feels the harrowing nightmares of doom didn't start with Chicken Little and won't end with Al Gore. So, should we forget about the end of the world and head for the hills? Steyn says: Don't head for the hills-they're full of Islamist terrorist camps. He describes a much bigger nutshell. The Western world will not survive the 21st century. Many, if not most European countries will effectively disappear in our lifetime. Just as in Istanbul there's still a building known as St. Sophia's Cathedral, but it's not a cathedral: It's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. Forget the ecochondriacs's obsessions with rising sea levels that might hypothetically threaten the Maldive Islands circa 2500; contrary to Francis Fukuyama, it's not the end of history; it's the end of the world as we know it. Whether we like what replaces it depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world. If not, then it's the dawn of the new Dark Ages (if darkness can dawn): A planet on which much of the map is re-primitized.

Before you think that Steyn is as nuts as the ecodoom set, he reminds us of Chicken Little's successors in this field.

* Distinguished Scientist Paul Ehrlich declared in his 1968 best-selling book, The Population Bomb, "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

* In 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?

* In 1997, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States (incredible as it may seem), confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."

None of these things occurred. But according to Steyn, here's what did happen between 1970 and 2000: in that period, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. Is that fact less significant than the fate of some tree or endangered sloth? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian subcontinent gave much though to Islam. Even the Palestinian situation was seen within the framework of a more or less conventional ethnic nationalist problem. Yet today it's Islam a-go-go: Almost every geopolitical crises takes place on what Sam Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, calls "the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims." That boundary loops from Bali, to southern Thailand, to an obscure resource-rich Muslim republic in the Russian Federation to Madrid, and London before penetrating into the very heart of the West in a little more than a generation. September 11, 2001 was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. That Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

Steyn says that his book is about the seven-eighths of the iceberg below the surface-the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world, including the United States, Canada and beyond.

He cites three key factors:

* Demographic decline: People Power.

* The unsustainability of the Advanced Western social-democratic state: Welfare and Warfare.

* Civilizational exhaustion: Fighting vainly the old ennui.

1. People Power

Steyn starts with demography, because everything does. He wonders how many pontificators on the Middle East peace process ever run this number: the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation-or pseudo-nation of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

In a similar fashion, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history. The heart-warming ethnic comedies, where a WASPy type dates a gal from a vast, loving, fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room, are an inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility rate is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain, 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world are having "big" families these days, it's the Anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand's a little below. Hollywood should be making a movie on a sad, Greek, only child marrying into a big-heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

Steyn says this isn't a projection-it's actually happening now. But if you do extrapolate, here goes: by 2050, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, and no uncles. The big Italian family with papa pouring vino and mama spooning out pasta on an endless table will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs.

Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. Many of the developed world's citizens gave no conscious thought to Islam before September 11. Now when we watch the evening news, there are many trouble spots around the world. As a general rule it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali, Muslims vs. Danish cartoonists in Scandinavia. The environmentalist may claim to think globally but act locally; these guys live it. They open up a new front some where on the planet with nary a thought.

Why? Because they've got the manpower. Because in the seventies and eighties, Muslims had children (those self-detonating Islamists in London and Gaza are literal baby boomers) while Westerners took all those silly doomsday tomes about "overpopulation" seriously. We still do In 2005. Jared Diamond published a best-selling book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A timely subject, so Steyn bought a copy. It's all about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. The author sees his curious choices of "societies" collapsing because they chopped down their trees.

Steyn surmises: Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. Russia's collapsing and it's nothing to do with deforestation. It's not the tree, it's the family tree. It's the babes in the wood. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in. Because, when history comes a-calling, it starts with the most basic question of all:

* Knock-knock.

* Who's there?

2. Welfare and Warfare

In this section, Steyn gives us valuable insight into our welfare system. Demographic decline and the unsustainabilty of the social-democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

Steyn gives several examples of peaks and valleys of populations without any harm. In the post-Gold Rush Yukon, one minute the saloons are bustling and the garters of the hoochie-koochie dancers are stuffed with dollar bills; the next they're all shuttered up and everyone's skedaddled out on the last south-bound dogsled. But the territory isn't stuck trying to figure who's going to pay for the hoochie-koochie gals' retirement complex. Unlike the emptying saloons of White Horse and Dawson City, demography is an existential crisis for the developed world, because the 20th-century social-democratic state was built on a careless model that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it.

Steyn formulates it like this:

* Age + Welfare = Disaster for you

* Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

By "Will" Steyn means the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans; as seen in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents in the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere. Islam has youth and will. Europe has age and welfare.

Steyn feels we are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century's progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: Its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.

3. Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Steyn then proceeds into the third factor-the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of Civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood-health care, child care, care of the elderly to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. These programs corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: It increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on September 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: In the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. The collapse of Communism is seen by Americans or at least non-Democratic, voting Americans-as "winning" the Cold War. But the French and the Belgians and the Germans and the Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies-they were technically on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. There was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for Communism year in, year out.

The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation states though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then in Somalia. September 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.

When Osama bin Laden made his observation about people being attracted to the strong horse rather than the weak horse, it was partly a perception issue. You can be, technically, the strong horse-plenty of tanks and bombs and nukes and whatnot-but if you're seen as too feeble ever to deploy them, you'll be kitted out for the weak-horse suit. He wasn't thinking of Europe, whose reabsorption within the caliphate Islamists see as all but complete. Rather, he was considering the hyperpower.

America is the most benign hegemon in history: it's the world's first non-imperial superpower and, at the dawn of the American moment, it chose to set itself up as a kind of geopolitical sugar daddy. By picking up the tab for Europe's defense, it hoped to prevent those countries lapsing into traditional power rivalries. Nice idea. But it also absolved them of the traditional responsibilities of nationhood, turning the alliance into a dysfunctional sitcom family, with one grown-up presiding over a brood of whiny teenagers. American's preference for diluting its power within the UN and other organs of an embryo world government has not won it friends. All dominant powers are hated-Britain was, and Rome-but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because there are all these born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it.

If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyper-power is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy. "We are," warns Al Gore portentously, "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe." Steyn lists a number of so called alleged strains on the earth in ways that genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of this fantasy is very revealing about how unthreatening America is.

Consider those nations who regard themselves well-disposed toward America and share the view that Islamism represents a critical global security threat, yet have concluded that the United States lacks the will to get the job done. You hear such worries routinely expressed by the political class in India, Singapore and other emerging nations. The British historian Niall Ferguson talks about "the clay feet of the colossus." Admiral Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" has become hard to rouse. In Vietnam, it took 50,000 deaths to drive the giant away; maybe in the Middle East, it will only take 5,000. And maybe in the next war the giant will give up after 500, or 50, or not bother at all. America has the advantage of the most powerful army on the face of the planet, but she doesn't have the stomach for war, so it's no advantage at all. The minute you send it anywhere hysterical congressmen are shrieking that we need an "exit strategy." The corpulent snorer in the La-Z-Boy recliner may have a beautifully waxed Ferrari in the garage, but hates having to take it out on the potholed roads. Still, it looks mighty nice parked in the driveway when he washes it.

So why is a book concerning America's future so relevant and timely for physicians and health care? Steyn writes about the future of heatlh care as part of all government entitlements. He puts government heatlh care into a perspective that few who are still pushing for making it an entitlement understand. He has given up on Europe, calling it Eurabia. He predicts their cradle-to-grave welfare system will totally collapse before 2050, when there won't be enough children to pay for the beneficiaries. Then all heatlh care, social security, childcare and government programs will simply disappear; those that believed in entitlements will wonder why they are without benefits.

Suffused with Steyn's trademark wit and piercing insights, America Alone calls on us to summon the will to fight this great struggle for Western civilization. He provides an enlightening basis on just how bad things are currently, and how they likely will get worse. We should take his insight seriously so as to ensure that our children and grandchildren will live in the bright light of freedom our forefathers fought so hard to win. Let's not turn our backs on our heritage.

There is a message on how detrimental state heatlh care is for our future. He places it in context that even the most arched advocate of government medicine should be able to understand. It is critical for the leaders of our physicians' professional organizations (who are supporting single payer initiatives) to understand. This book has important messages for all physicians, nurses and health administrators. It is urgent, not only for our patients, but for all Americans to comprehend.

--Del Meyer

Gilbert Meilaender

Gilbert Meilaender is the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University and fellow of the Hastings Center. He is also a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale college on the topic "C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings." This article is reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

When we think about C.S. Lewis' understanding of morality, we have to distinguish three elements: (1) what moral truths we know, (2) how we know them, and (3) how we become able to know them.

What do we know when we know moral truth? Most fundamentally, we know the maxims of what Lewis-in his book on education, The Abolition of Man--calls the Tao. These "primeval moral platitudes" (as Screwtape, in Lewis' Screwtape Letters, once terms them) constitute the human moral inheritance. We would not be wrong to call them the basic principles of natural law: the requirements of both general and special beneficence; duties both to parents/ancestors and to children/posterity; and requirements of justice, truthfulness, mercy and magnanimity. These are the starting points for all moral reasoning, deliberation and argument; they are to morality what axioms are to mathematics. Begin from them and we may get somewhere in thinking about what we ought to do. Try to stand outside the Tao on some kind of morally neutral or empty ground, and we will find it impossible to generate any moral reasoning at all.

Lewis provides an illustration of the Tao in That Hideous Strength, the third and last volume in his space fantasy series. He himself subtitled the book "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups," and in the short preface he wrote for the book, he says:

This is a "tall story" about devilry, though it has behind it a serious "point" which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.

We can follow his hint and illustrate the Tao by remembering the scene in That Hideous Strength in which the sinister Frost begins to give young professor Mark Studdock a systematic training in what Frost calls "objectivity." This is a training designed to kill in Mark all natural human preferences.

Mark is placed into a room that is ill-proportioned; for example, the point of the arch above the door is not in the center. On the wall is a portrait of a young woman with her mouth open, and with her mouth full of hair. There is a picture of the Last Supper, distinguished especially by beetles under the table. There is a representation of a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and another of a man with corkscrews instead of arms. Mark himself is asked to perform various obscenities, culminating in the command to trample a crucifix.

Gradually, however, Mark finds that the room is having an effect on him, which Frost had scarcely predicted or desired. "There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight." This was for Mark all interwoven with images of his wife Jane, fried eggs, soap, sunlight and birds singing. Mark may not have been thinking in moral terms, but at least, as the story puts it, he was "having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal."

He had never known before what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something that obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.

He is experiencing the Tao, which is neither his creation nor anyone else's. He does not construct these moral truths; on the contrary, they claim him. The world around us is not neutral ground; it is from the start shot through with moral value.

We can, of course, criticize one or another of these moral truths, or, at least, particular formulations of them. But we will inevitably call on some other principle of the Tao when we do so. Thus, for example, we may think Aristotle's magnanimous man insufficiently merciful and too concerned about his own nobility, using thereby one principle of the Tao (mercy) to refine another. In pursuit of our duties to posterity we may be willing to sacrifice the weak and vulnerable on the altar of medical research, but then we will have to ask whether we have transgressed the requirement of justice every bit as much an element of the Tao as our duty to posterity. But to step-or try to step-outside the Tao entirely is to lose the very ground of moral reason itself.

Thus the principles of the Tao do not solve moral problems for us; on the contrary, they create, frame and shape those problems. They teach us to think in full and rich ways about them, as we recognize the various claims the Tao makes upon us.

The Need for Moral Education

If this is what we know, how do we know it? If, as I put it a moment ago, the world around us is shot through with moral value, then to recognize a moral duty-as something other than our own choice or decision-is to see a truth. Lewis thinks we just "see" those primeval moral platitudes of the Tao. They cannot be proven, for it is only by them that we can prove or defend any other moral conclusions we reach. It is, as Lewis puts it at the end of The Abolition of Man,

. . . no use trying to "see through" first principles. . . . To "see through" all things is the same as not to see.

We might say, as Lewis says for instance in Miracles, that these first principles of moral reasoning are "self-evident." One can argue from but not to the maxims of the Tao.

This is, however, one place where we need to gloss Lewis' discussion just a bit, for he is not entirely consistent in his writing. If we look at what I take to be Lewis' most mature expression of his view, in The Abolition of Man, we will immediately see for reasons to which I will come in just a moment-that "self-evident" cannot mean "obvious." It cannot mean that any rational person, giving the matter some thought, will see that the maxims of the Tao are the moral deliverances of reason itself. Yet, consider a passage such as the following from Mere Christianity:

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one.

This is a different formulation, and a less satisfactory one, than that of Abolition of Man. The precepts of the Tao constitute a kind of natural law not because everyone knows them without being taught, but because they express fundamental truths-which we may or may not learn-about human nature. Those of us who do learn them will, to be sure, just "see" them. There will be no process of reasoning by which they are proven, but Lewis' more developed view offers us no reason to assume that we all will or can easily discern these first principles of natural law.

Why not? Because-although Lewis does not put it this way in Abolition of Man, a decidedly non-theological piece of writing-human reason and desire are disordered by sin. What Iris Murdoch once called the "fat relentless ego" constantly blinds us, so that the mere fact of opening our eyes does not guarantee that we will see truly. Indeed, if Lewis really held that the precepts of the Tao are "obvious," the central theme of Abolition of Man could make little sense; for it is a book about our need for moral education.

Which brings us to the third element in Lewis' understanding of morality. If we ask, what moral truths do we know? the answer is: the maxims of the Tao. If we ask, how do we know them? the answer is: we just "see" them as the first principles of all moral reasoning. And, now, if we ask, how do we become able to "just see" these maxims? the answer is: only as our character is well formed by moral education. Without such education we will never come to know the human moral inheritance. We may be very bright and very rational, but we will be what Lewis calls "trousered apes." Lacking proper moral education, our freedom to make moral choices will be a freedom to be inhuman in any number of ways. The paradox of moral education is that all genuine human freedom-a freedom that does not turn out to be destructive-requires that we be disciplined and shaped by the principles of the Tao.

Our appetites and desires may readily tempt us to set aside what moral reason requires. Hence, from childhood our emotions must be trained and habituated, so that we learn to love the good (not just what seems good for us). And only as our character is thus shaped do we become men and women who are able to "see" the truths of moral reason. Moral insight, therefore, is not a matter for reason alone; it requires trained emotions. It requires moral habits of behavior inculcated even before we reach an age of reason. "The head rules the belly through the chest," as Lewis puts it. Reason disciplines appetite only with the aid of trained emotions. Seeing this, we will understand that moral education does more than simply enable us to "see" what virtue requires. It also enables us, at least to some extent, to be virtuous. For the very training of the emotions that makes insight possible has also produced in us traits of character that will incline us to love the good and do it.

Moral education, then, can never be a private matter, and Lewis follows Aristotle in holding that "only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics." Hence, the process of moral education, if it is to succeed, requires support from the larger society. Ethics is, in that sense, a branch of politics. Thus, for instance, to take an example that Lewis could not precisely have anticipated, consider the problem of protecting children from internet pornography (which the U.S. Congress attempted in what was known as the "Child Online Protection Act," but which the Supreme Court ruled, in Ashcroft v. ACLU, was in probable violation of the First Amendment's free speech guarantees). True as it may be that this protection should be the primary responsibility of parents, they face daunting obstacles and almost inevitable failure without a supportive moral ecology in the surrounding society. Moral education, if it is to be serious, requires commitment to moral principles that go well beyond the language of freedom principles that are more than choice and consent alone.

We should not think of this moral education as indoctrination, but as initiation. It is initiation into the human moral inheritance: "men transmitting manhood to men." We initiate rather than indoctrinate precisely because it is not we but the Tao that binds those whom we teach. We have not decided what morality requires; we have discovered it. We transmit not our own views or desires but moral truth-by which we consider ourselves also to be bound. Hence, moral education is not an exercise of power over future generations. To see what happens when it becomes an exercise of power by some over others, when we attempt to stand outside the Tao, we can look briefly at two ways in which Lewis' discussion of morality in The Abolition of Man takes shape in That Hideous Strength, his "tall story" of devilry.

Man, Nature and Biotechnology

The driving force behind the plot in That Hideous Strength is the plan of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments-whose acronym is NICE-to take the last step in the control and shaping of nature. (It is rather a nice irony that in Great Britain today the National Health Service has established a National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence-whose acronym is also NICE-to formulate guidelines about the use of quality of life assessments in the clinical care of patients.) Having gradually conquered the world of nature external to human beings, the goal of NICE is now to view human beings also as natural objects-in particular, to take control of birth, breeding and death. The project that Lewis fancifully imagined in his "fairy-tale for grown-ups" has made considerable progress in the decades since he wrote. Let me illustrate.

Consider the following sentences from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea:

He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. . . . I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. . . . He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? . . . That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly. . . . The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen was looking after the skiff for him.

Hemingway's prose is, of course, generally regarded as clear and straightforward. And every sentence in the passage above is simple and transparent. But taken as a whole, the passage makes almost no sense at all. There's a reason for that: The sentences in the passage are drawn from pages 29, 104-5, 22, 74, 48, and 123-in that order. But consider now the image of the human being in the following frequently quoted passage from Thomas Eisner, a biologist from Cornell University:

As a consequence of recent advances in genetic engineering, [a biological species] must be viewed as . . . a depository of genes that are potentially transferable. A species is not merely a hard-bound volume of the library of nature. It is also a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species.

I have tried to provide a humble illustration of this by splicing together sentences from different pages of just one book, producing thereby something unintelligible. But I might also have spliced in sentences from Anna Karenina and A Christmas Carol--producing thereby an artifact we could not name.

This train of thought was first suggested to me by one of the findings of the Human Genome Project, a finding that got quite a bit of attention in news articles announcing (in February, 2001) the completion of that project by two groups of researchers. We were told that the number of genes in the human genome had turned out to be surprisingly small-that human beings have, at most, perhaps twice as many genes as the humble roundworm (downsized even more with new findings in 2004, so that human beings and roundworms have about the same number of genes)-and that the degree of sequence divergence between human and chimpanzee genomes is quite small. Considering the complexity of human beings in relation to roundworms and even chimpanzees, it seemed surprising that, relatively speaking, much less complex organisms should not have far fewer genes than human beings.

Why, one might ask, should that seem surprising? It will be surprising if you assume that the complexity of a higher being is somehow built up and explained in terms of "lower" component parts (which serve as "resources"). If we explain the higher in terms of the lower, it makes a certain sense to suppose that a relatively complex being would need lots of component parts--at least by comparison with a less complex being. And, of course, one might argue that the Human Genome Project is the ultimate product of such an extreme reductionist vision of biology.

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis powerfully depicts the movement by which things came to be understood as simply parts of nature, objects that have no inherent purpose or telos--which objects can then become resources available for human use. Hence, the long, slow process of what we call conquering nature could more accurately be said to be reducing things to "mere nature" in that sense. "We do not," Lewis writes:

. . . look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. . . . Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

In that final step of this reductive process, the human being becomes an artifact, to be shaped and reshaped. One way to describe this is to say that we take control of our own destiny. But the other way to describe it is as the villainous Lord Feverstone puts it in That Hideous Strength:

Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest . . .

That is what happens, Lewis thinks, when we step outside the Tao and regard even morality as a matter for our own choice and free creation.

From this angle, developments in biotechnology are likely to affect most our attitudes toward birth and breeding. But there remains still the fact of death, and once we take free responsibility for shaping our destiny, we can hardly be content to accept without challenge even that ultimate limit. When Mark Studdock is asked to trample on a crucifix as the final stage in his training in "objectivity," he is-even though he is not a Christian-reluctant to obey. For it seems to him that the cross is a picture of what the Crooked does to the Straight when they meet and collide. Mark has chosen the side of what he calls simply the Normal. He has, that is, begun to take his stand within the Tao. But then he finds himself wondering, for the first time, about the possibility that the side he has chosen might turn out to be, in a sense, the "losing" side. "Why not," he asks himself, "go down with the ship?"

For those who stand within the Tao, how we live counts for more than how long. There are things we might do to survive-or to help our species survive or advance or, even, just suffer less-which it would nonetheless be wrong or dishonorable to do. Indeed, we do not have to look very far around in our own world-no farther, for instance, than the controversies about embryonic stem cell research-to see how strongly we are tempted to regard as overriding the claims of posterity for a better and longer life. "We want," Lewis' Screwtape writes,

. . . a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future with every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

Better to remember, as Roonwit the Centaur writes to King Tirian in The Last Battle--the seventh and final volume in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia--that all worlds come to an end, and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

This is at least something of what Lewis still has to teach us about the education we need to make and keep us human. In the modern world it is the task of moral education to set limits to what we will do in search of the rainbow's end-to set limits, lest that desire should lead to the abolition of man. "For the wise men of old," Lewis writes:

. . . the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.

But when freedom becomes not initiation into our moral inheritance but the freedom to make and remake ourselves, the power of some men over others, it is imperative that we remind ourselves that moral education is not a matter of technique but, rather, of example, habituation and initiation. And, as Lewis says, quoting Plato, those who have been so educated from their earliest years, when they reach an age of reason, will hold out their hands in welcome of the good, recognizing the affinity they themselves bear to it. *

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

John D'Aloia Jr.

John D' Aloia Jr. is a retired navy captain and submarine commander. He writes from Kansas.

I have been asked why I devote so many column inches to the topic of eminent domain. Good question. A glib answer, paraphrasing Will Rogers, would be that it is so easy to churn out words about eminent domain--politicians and judges provide more material than I could ever use, or editors would give me space to fill. There is a more sober response. The eminent domain attitudes and positions taken by politicians and others involved in the governance of the country give you a direct insight into what they think of individual liberty, freedom, and limited government. Their stand lets you know if they honor the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Their stand lets you know if they believe they have absolute control over you and your property. Strip away all the other rhetoric. Their position on eminent domain lets you know if you are dealing with a socialist who believes that government is omniscient and omnipotent.

Kansas Governor Sebelius, in campaign appearances, has said enough on eminent domain to place her squarely in the socialist fold. She believes that local governments should be able to use eminent domain for economic development. As soon as you hear her, or anyone else, advocate such use, they have labeled themselves as an elitist, someone who believes that they know better than you how your property should be used. Be assured that they will have no qualms about taking your property to put into action their beliefs and goals. In so doing, they ignore the Constitution and founding principles. No wonder they strive so hard to convince the country that the Constitution is a living document. As long as they get to define what it means today, they get support and cover for what they want to do or to whom they want to funnel tax dollars. It matters not to them what the Constitution actually says in plain language or what it meant to the Founding Fathers.

Historically, eminent domain has been limited to a public use, that is, for the acquisition of land to be used for a public function, such as a road, or bridge, or school that will serve the entire community. In my reading, everyone appears to acknowledge that this is a legitimate use of government power. Those who want the power to steal your land for their own aggrandizement have been able to morph the definition of public use into public purpose, opening up the use of eminent domain for increasing the tax base, for increasing tax revenues, for economic development, for the remediation of blight.

Ah, blight. It was so refreshing to read the Ohio Supreme Court's verdict in the Norwood case. The court, establishing a precedent that is sure to be cited in case after case, reversed the lower court's decision that the City of Norwood could steal land based on a blight determination. The court demolished any notion that blight remediation was a public use. The decision's Syllabus made seven statements, too long for repeating verbatim. The points made included (1) the position that a taking would provide an economic benefit to the government, standing alone, does not satisfy the public use requirement of the Ohio constitution; (2) the use of "deteriorating area" as a standard for determining whether property is subject to eminent domain is void for vagueness; (3) the use of "deteriorating area" as a standard for a taking is unconstitutional because the term inherently incorporates speculation as to the future condition of the property, rather than the condition of the property at the time of the taking; and (4) the provision of law that prevented the courts from getting involved after the compensation had been deposited with the courts but prior to appellate review violated separation of powers and was thus unconstitutional.

And the final court's final comment before rendering its verdict gives hope that courts can actually read and understand constitutions and render strict interpretations. The justices wrote:

Although the judiciary and the legislature define the limits of state powers, such as eminent domain, the ultimate guardians of the people's rights, as evidenced by the appellants in this case, are the people themselves.

The justices must have had Wendell Phillips (1811-84) in mind. Attributed to Phillips:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty-power is ever stealing from the many to the few. . . . The hand entrusted with power becomes . . . the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot . . ." *

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson

Harry Neuwirth

Harry Neuwirth writes from Silverton OR.

We live in a republic as outlined in the Constitution laid down by the Founders, a Constitution reserving a high degree of sovereignty to the states. Clearly, ultimate authority in the U.S. was meant to reside in the people and the states they live in as delineated in Article IX of the Bill of Rights: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," and in Article X: "The powers not delegated to the U.S., nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States . . . or to the people."

Serious language addressing serious conditions assessed by emigrants who had seen how life withered where power was narrowly concentrated as in the European world from which they were fleeing; where they and their ancestors had led constricted lives under the rule of monarchies of various stripe for centuries; colonists, now, who had endured great physical discomfort along with financial distress to erect the documentary ramparts that have defined and protected us since 1787.

How to establish and maintain equity among sovereign states which inevitably would experience differing rates of growth? They chose to adopt a bicameral legislature, two branches with fundamentally equal authority, but assigning membership in one strictly by population, the other accepting two members from each state without regard for numbers.

But then, how to avoid having the more populous states dominate election of the president, the sole national executive? They adopted the same equalizing formula as they'd seized upon for elections to congress. Rather than simply tallying popular votes, which would favor the more populous states as they evolved, that advantage serving as an attraction for even more people to migrate to those centers of power, the Constitution provided for an electoral college which follows the pattern of the national congress: each state receives electors in the "college" in proportion to its population, but with two additional electors without regard to population.

Should we care?

We should care. Employing statistics from the 2000 census, seven eastern states combined with Texas and California would have the numerical muscle to elect a president over the other forty-one in a popular election. However, those nine dominant states are limited to an additional eighteen votes in the "college," while the forty-one small states would bring an additional eighty-two votes to that party, overcoming the balance lost to population.

Yet we have state legislatures seeking to circumvent the "college" by adopting state laws that would award all of their state's electoral votes to the candidate who won the national popular vote in an attempt to establish this method of electing our presidents without having to go through the arduous process of amending the Constitution. It was reported in a local newspaper some weeks ago that there were forty-five states considering such legislation. If true, we should care!

It's hard to believe that "small" states would wish to adopt such self-abnegating policy. One analysis put forward is that, having had questionable tallies and suspect officials in some states in recent elections, hanging chads in others, that a popular vote total calculated from the results submitted by the fifty states would be more accurate, more honest, more dependable. May I never fly on an airplane piloted by someone who thinks like that.

Perhaps the unlikely vitality of the popular vote initiative in the U.S. can be explained by the civic perceptiveness of those in support of this circumvention of the U.S. Constitution as expressed by the speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives who stated--for publication--"I believe that whoever wins the popular vote should win, whether that is a school board or the U.S. Presidency."

It should come as no surprise to thoughtful people that the popular vote movement is coordinated by the National Popular Vote group headquartered in California, the nation's most populous state. *

"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret." -Ambrose Bierce

Dennis T. Avery and Fred Singer

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues, and S. Fred Singer is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and research professor at George Mason University. This article is an edited transcript of a book discussion sponsored by the Hudson Institute in November 2006; this discussion is reprinted with permission from the Hudson Institute. The full text of the discussion can be found at www.hudsoninstitute.org.

This article is divided into two parts. The question and answer session will appear in the June issue.

Welcome. I am Ken Weinstein, CEO of the Hudson Institute, and I'm delighted to welcome everyone to the Hudson Institute today for the book forum on the publication of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery. This is a unique and well-written book that challenges much that passes for serious science today on global warming. And the book makes a very powerful case that in fact the current climate trends we're seeing are part of a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless, naturally warmer conditions approximately every 1500 years.

The book is a fascinating read, and is really quite thoroughly documented, and will create quite a controversy when the mainstream press starts to review it. . . . So let me now have the honor of introducing the co-authors of this book. . . . S. Fred Singer, who is, as everyone knows, a distinguished climate physicist, and then . . . the no-less-distinguished Dennis Avery, who is a senior fellow here at Hudson.

S. Fred Singer . . . is a professor emeritus of environmental research at the University of Virginia, currently a distinguished research professor at George Mason University. He has had a long and distinguished career. He was the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, and he is the author of a dozen books, and monographs, including, Global Climate Change, which he published first in 1989.

And Professor Singer will be speaking second. But first, it's now my distinct pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, Dennis Avery, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and director of Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues. . . . Dennis joined Hudson Institute in 1989 after a very long and distinguished career as an agricultural economist, and at a number of federal departments, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Department of State. He was a senior analyst in the Department of State, and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983 by then Secretary of State, George Schultz.

Dennis is well known as a columnist on science and environmental issues, and his articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Reader's Digest, and dozens of other publications. Dennis' first major book was, Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming.

D.A.: Thank you, Ken. . . . A little over 20 years ago . . . Ken called me, and I had done a little writing on--well, quite a lot on--environmental issues, and a little bit on the medieval warming, and they asked me if the world needed another book on global warming. And I said, yeah, I think we need a book on the physical evidence of past warming.

And I'll tell you why I said that, because wine grapes are one of the most accurate and sensitive barometers of climate change that we have, and I knew that the Romans had grown wine grapes in Britain during the first century; that when William the Conqueror and his Normans took over the country in the 11th century, their tax records showed nearly 50 vineyards. And we know that it is not yet warm enough in the modern warming to grow wine grapes in Britain. They are up to two years out of 10 and hopeful.

But this does two things. It first of all introduces the concept of a cycle--1st century, 11th century, 21st century--and it tells us that today's temperatures are by no means unprecedented.

And so we decided to do the book. I am an agricultural economist. I would not have presumed to do it without prodding. And I certainly wouldn't have presumed to do it without the advice, council, and assistance of Fred Singer, who has been my favorite expert on the climate of the Earth for a number of years. And let me say that we cite in the book over a hundred peer-reviewed studies, none of which were paid for by Exxon. (Laughter.)

We did the British wine grape thing. Let's come closer now to the current day because it's really only within the last 25 years that we have had a handle on this moderate, natural, massive, but difficult-to-discern cycle, completely unrecognized by people who lack thermometers and written records. The people of Iceland lived through the medieval warming, the little ice age-in 1920, they were still arguing whether there had been any climate change on the climate frontier. And they decided, well, no, there had been no climate change; we just had a lot of bad weather.

They had had climate change, and we learned this in 1984 with the first analysis from the Greenland ice course--250,000 years of climate history, ice layers with varying ratios of oxygen--16 to 18 isotopes and oxygen. The lighter isotopes evaporate to a greater degree. And a guy named Hans--Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oescher, I believe Willi was a Dane, Hans was a Swiss--in 1984 came out with an absolutely fabulous report on this new ice core.

They expected to find the big ice ages and the warm inter-glacials, like our own. They had not expected to find this moderate, abrupt 1500-year cycle running all the way through both the warmings and the ice ages. And they said the way that the Carbon 14 and the Beryllium 10 isotopes in the ice correlate with sunspot numbers shows that there's a linkage with the sun. And that's all proven to be true.

And four years later, down in the Antarctic, at the other end of the Earth, scientists dug up an even longer ice core, 400,000 years-a Russian team, led by a Frenchman--and here was the 1500-year cycle running all the way through it.

And since then, scientists have found the 1500-year cycle in the seabed of six oceans, including the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arabian Sea; tiny, little one-celled fossils from the phytoplankton that thrive in the oceans. Their varieties and their number vary with temperature, and our scientists have learned to turn their electron microscopes on these tiny, little one-celled organisms and read the temperatures in the layers. And we now have one seabed core that goes back a million years, from near Iceland--Maureen Raymo of Boston University--and the 1500-year cycle runs through the whole million years, roughly 600 of these moderate natural cycles.

Tree rings from around the Northern Hemisphere. Some of the trees are very old. Some of our trees go back 4,000 years, still alive, bristle cone pines in the Sierra Nevada of California among them. Some of the trees are dead. They've been buried in peat bogs or submerged under lakes. And the scientists have been very creative at finding these old pieces of wood and tracing the tree rings, which demonstrate temperature by their summer widths, although you have to be careful about insect attacks and drier or wetter--but these tree rings are important clues.

None of these proxies by themselves would be adequate, but there are dozens of proxies sought out in thousands of places. We have, as I say, over a hundred peer-reviewed studies in the book. We could have done 300, probably 500, all of them showing physical evidence that this cycle is real and has been with us, and there's no reason to believe that it has stopped with the modern world.

Cave stalagmites--layered history, annual layers. Some of them are nicely light and dark, depending summer or winter, and they can be read like the ice layers and the tree rings. We have them showing the 1500-year cycle from every continent plus New Zealand.

There's been some talk, even in the scientific community, that the medieval warming and the Little Ice Age were Europe-only events. No. No. We have found lots of evidence, lots of physical proxies in the Southern Hemisphere: cave stalagmites from both South Africa and New Zealand; 130 glaciers in New Zealand advanced and retreated with the medieval warming and the Little Ice Age at roughly the same times as the glaciers in Europe advanced and retreated; archaeological evidence of prehistoric village locations which marched upslope in the Andes during the medieval warming at the same time they were marching upslope in the Alps in Europe, and then in both cases retreated back down again when the cold, unstable Ice Age came along.

Fossil pollen--pollen is very tiny, but our microscopes now can seek it out and identify it, and each plant's pollen is unique. And the North American Pollen Database shows nine complete reorganizations of our trees and plants in the last 14,000 years. That's one every 1,650, for you who are challenged without a calculator like I am.

In Ontario, Environment Canada says what that meant was during the medieval warming, beech trees were the predominant trees in the forest. As the Little Ice Age set in, the oaks took over; in the depths of the Little Ice Age, pines were predominant. We're now 150 years into the modern warming; the oak trees are coming back and the beech trees are waiting their next turn.

Some people say, gee, I don't like to think of the polar bears having to go through 600 global warmings in the last million years. The polar bears may not prefer it, but they have obviously survived it. We'll talk about that a little bit more later on.

It's not my favorite, but it's kind of kinky. In the tooth enamel of dead Vikings scientists have examined the oxygen isotope ratios in the corpses buried in the Greenland Viking colonies early in the life of the colony, and 400 years later, when it was near its expiration-there was one and a half degrees Celsius change in average temperature during that period. If any of those Vikings had lasted until 1700, there would have been a more extreme temperature change, perhaps three degrees Celsius, but we ran out of Vikings.

Shifting rainfall. Near the equator, we don't get a temperature change, we get a rainfall change as the tropical rain belts move north with the climate cycle. This is why during the Holocene warming 5,000 years ago, the Sahara had rhinoceros, giraffes, hunters, cattle and sheep pasture. They hunted and raised Barbary sheep. The Nile Valley was too wet and wild. Nobody lived there. And then by 3,000 years ago, the cycle had shifted, the Sahara had dried out, and people were raising wheat in the Nile Valley. Not disaster, but change.

Sun/climate connection, how can this happen? There's a new book coming out next March by a Danish scientist named Svensmark, and it'll be called the Chilling Stars, and it will be on his experiments duplicating the impact of additional cosmic rays on the Earth's atmosphere and its temperature. Suffice it to say, that when the sun is weak, we get hit by more cosmic rays, they ionize the water vapor in the air and create more low, wet clouds which deflect heat back into space and cool the Earth. And a tiny change in the irradiance of the sun, a tenth of a percentage point, is enough to drive a significant temperature change here on Earth. I won't belabor that point more than that, particularly since I'm not qualified to do so.

Why the climate models can't forecast. Interesting question. And we know they can't. First of all, they can't model clouds, and apparently clouds are the key factor in our climate changes. Secondly, nobody has ever figured out the proper X factor for CO2. Early on, the models predicted far more warming for today than we've had. The Hadley Center has gotten recently an approximation of the actual temperature observations by cutting their X factor by two-thirds. Apparently, these zoomy numbers about how much the Earth is going to warm have been based on a radical overestimate of how much CO2 changes the temperatures.

Why the models can't cope? Because we have a massive, cloud-controlled heat vent over the warm pool of the Pacific. This was discovered by NASA in collaboration with Richard Lindzen at MIT, published in 2003 in Science Magazine. When the sea surface hits 28 degrees Celsius, rainfall becomes more efficient. The number of high-ceilinged cirrus clouds, full of ice, radically reduced; the number of low, wet reflecting clouds radically increased. The Earth's temperature cools back down until the sea surface temperature is comfortable for the planet . . .

Why the models can't forecast? Chapter Four: "Sudden Ocean Cooling." I don't know how many of you have noticed recently a report by John Lyman of NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) who says that between 2003 and 2005, the oceans had thousand times more heat than the atmosphere, lost 21 percent of the heat they gained in the previous 50 years. No cycle, no prediction. We don't know where the heat went; we just know that it's not anywhere on Earth that can be found. The folks at NASA say it didn't go out through their heat vent. But we had a massive, sudden ocean cooling. And the data that documented it came from 2500 new smart floats that are scattered around the oceans today, and have been out there for just a few years. Previously our ocean temperature data was very sketchy and unreliable. And this new data allows NOAA to say that a sudden ocean cooling occurred earlier, between 1980 and 1983, with a similar massive heat reduction in the waters.

The models can't forecast this. Their forecasts are built up year on year based on trends. There is no reason to expect the models will ever be able to forecast this unless we identify some sort of cycle. It looks pretty unlikely at the moment.

Why Mr. Gore can't cope? I had the dubious pleasure of sitting through his movie--two big problems with it for me, aside from the fact that he doesn't understand the 1500-year cycle.

First of all, he showed us a graph with temperature and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at the Antarctic with the ice cores tracking closely together through 400,000 years and four ice ages. And that was a good graph to show. But he didn't show the second graph that shows the CO2 changes occurring about 800 years after the temperature changes. In other words, higher temperatures produced more CO2 in the atmosphere, not the other way around. And that's entirely logical because the oceans hold 75 times as much CO2 as the air, and cold water holds more gas, so when the oceans warm, they have to release CO2 to the air. There should be nothing surprising about it, and nothing intimidating.

My other problem is with the melting of the Antarctic, which is supposed to raise sea levels suddenly by 20 feet. Ladies and gentlemen, the Antarctic is the coldest place on Earth. It's 30 degrees from melting. The ice there does not melt, first of all, because it aggressively deflects heat; and secondly, with the very low temperatures, we may see a tiny bit of surface melting at the height of the summer in a warm period, but it will not actually melt. If we look at an aerial photograph of the Antarctic surface, we will see huge blocks of ice flowing downhill. And that's why when the ice gets to the edge of the Antarctic it fall off in big blocks, some of them as big as the state of Rhode Island, because they haven't melted. And we have this peer-reviewed study that says the ice has been flowing at about the same rate for the last 7,000 years, and that rate is changed with a lag time only by the ice ages themselves.

Will we lose a million species to extinction with the warming? A high-level biologist from Stanford University told us that the Edith's Checkerspot Butterfly is going locally extinct in Baja, California. Well, if you look at the habitat map of the Edith's Checkerspot Butterfly, it covers the entire Western quarter of the United States from Baja, California, to the Canadian border. As the temperatures warm, that whole habitat map is shifting slightly north. And this is true of birds in England, insects in Europe, and species all over the planet. They are colonizing newly warmer areas, mostly without leaving behind the temperatures where they flourished before, because trees and plants are coldlimited but rarely heat-limited. And we can expect this warming to create a greater biodiversity in our forests.

I will tell you that they somehow caught a fish from the Antarctic, and they put it in a tank and they warmed the tank, thinking that this poor Antarctic fish, which was adapted to virtually freezing temperatures for maybe a million years--it swam cheerfully in waters nine degrees Celsius warmer. We may not understand how the species cope, but any species on the planet today has coped, believe me.

Malaria--well, the biggest outbreak of malaria in history was in Russia in the 1920s. And malaria was eradicated here not by colder temperatures but by DDT and window screens.

As a closing note, let me point out that three-fourths of our modern warming occurred before 1940, which was before much human-emitted CO2. If we give industrial CO2 emissions credit for half of the warming since 1940, that's .75 to .15 to .075--a teeny bit. From that amount of warming, you cannot construct 5 degrees or 11 degrees warming. It just does not compute.

I would point out also that we've had no warming now since 1998. The last time that we saw a pattern like this in the Earth's temperature was 1940--strong run-up, high peak and then a 35-year decline. I'm not predicting that, but I'm saying that it could happen . . .

S. FRED SINGER: Dennis has given a great overview. All I have to do is add a few short remarks.

It's been a very eventful year. You know that we've had Al Gore's science fiction movie, which I've seen, and we've just had a report in Britain by Sir Nicholas Stern--in which he does the economics, strange economics, which no one really accepts; in which he argues strongly for heroic measures to stop global warming and stabilize the planet.

What they have in common is, of course, that they assume the science is settled. They don't assume it; they actually explicitly say so in the case of Al Gore. And nothing could be further from the truth. And our book, I think, is living proof, as it were, that the science is quite different from what they imagine.

What we maintain is that there are natural cycles of cooling and warming going back at least a million years. These are small excursions of temperature, global temperature, much smaller than the ice ages, which is why they haven't been noticed until the last 25 years or so. . . . So what's the problem? The problem is that many people would like to believe that the current warming is caused by human activities, specifically by the release of carbon dioxide in fossil fuel burning.

And this raises a very interesting question. How can you decide whether the current warming is human-caused, anthropogenic, or whether it is natural?

It's a very difficult question to answer. How would you do that? Think for a moment. You can go up and ask the thermometers. If you ask them, they won't talk back. They won't tell you. So that's useless.

You can do as Al Gore did. Al Gore simply says, well, there's a scientific consensus. He's wrong. There isn't a scientific consensus. That should be obvious by just looking at the literature, published papers. Of course he quotes an article in Science Magazine, which was written by an incompetent so-called authority, and Science has refused to publish a correction. So he can't work that.

The other thing he does is to say look at all the glaciers; they're melting. In the first place, they're not all melting; some are growing. And secondly, that's what you would expect if the climate is warming, you'd expect places to melt, and you'd expect them to grow where the climate is cooling. These are consequences of climate change; they don't tell you anything about the cause. There's a logical error here that these people make, which they don't seem to recognize: Consequences don't tell you anything about the cause.

What about the other factor he quotes, the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature? It's already been mentioned by Dennis--first of all, a correlation is not causation. We should all recognize that. And secondly, the correlation is imperfect. In the ice cores, for example, we've seen that the temperature increases before the increase in carbon dioxide. And in the last century, we've had cooling between 1940 and 1975--continuous cooling of the climate while carbon dioxide was growing. So that doesn't work either.

What's the final recourse these people have? They say the models predict warming; therefore, this must be man-made. That's not a good argument. Model results are not evidence.

So what evidence can you use? The only evidence that we have been able to think of--and when I say "we" I'm speaking about the whole scientific community--is to compare the pattern of warming--there's a geographic pattern and an altitude pattern of warming--with what greenhouse models calculate. And the IPCC tried to do that, that is the U.N. science group, and they published their results, and they're clearly wrong. They haven't republished them. They published them in 1995, and they haven't republished them since then, recognizing that they were wrong.

However, we're lucky. The U.S. government, after spending $18 billion on climate research, at the rate of roughly $2 billion a year, came up with its first report last May. You can look it up; it's called the Climate Change Science Program [CCSP] Report 1.1. It's their first report, and really the only one that one needs to look at because it's important. It compares the pattern of warming with greenhouse models. And guess what? They don't agree. They diverge strongly. Of course, they don't draw the right conclusion from this, but the data are evident. You just have to look at the graphs in the report.

I've written about this in several places and pointed out that this report exists, that these graphs show the discrepancy between data and models. And the believers pay no attention.

There is a blog called realclimate.org. You might have heard of it. It was started by people who wanted to defend the so-called hockey stick graph. It's now degenerated into a general attack on skeptics, written by the same people. It's really a funny, funny blog. I call it the unrealclimate.org or the nonrealclimate.org.

They'll quote, for example, the article I've written on the CCSP report that shows a discrepancy, but they won't quote the discrepancy. In the last iteration they mention unstoppable global warming, but they won't reference our book. It's sort of funny.

And then they claim that there was no 1500-year cycle during the Holocene, during our present interglacial period, which is clearly wrong. They do this in order to preserve the fiction that the 20th century is the warmest in 1,000 years or 5,000 years, give or take. It's all wrong; it isn't even as warm as it was during the medieval warming when the Vikings were able to grow crops in Greenland.

What are we up against? We're up against, then, Al Gore, Nicholas Stern, and now the elections, which will bring, I'm afraid, a lot of people into the Congress who are believers in global warming, and what's even worse, who are believers in strong action. These actions will probably consist of greater subsidies to uneconomic boondoggles that were started during the Bush administration, but they will continue and grow bigger.

My advice to you all is invest in ethanol, wind farms and anything else that you can think of that won't work. (Laughter). Because you'll be making a lot of money off the other guys who pay taxes.

Our only hope is the Supreme Court, which has agreed to examine the question as to whether carbon dioxide should be classified as a pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act. It's a legal point. The petitioner (that is the plaintiff) is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; the defendant is the EPA (that is, the U.S. government). It's an interesting case. The Commonwealth lost in the appeals court, so they've taken it to the Supreme Court.

I've studied the scientific brief produced by the plaintiffs, or for the plaintiffs. It's full of holes. It's very weak, easily taken care of. Unfortunately, the response brief doesn't take advantage fully of the weak points in the initial brief. But oral arguments will take place, I think, on November 29, and we will get some kind of a decision probably by early next year.

This is important because when the Supreme Court says that CO2 is not a pollutant, it will be much more difficult for any future administration or for any future EPA to try to regulate carbon dioxide.

So there you are. We have Al Gore, Nicholas Stern on the one hand, and the political establishment. We have unstoppable politics against unstoppable global warming science. Let's hope we win.

Thank you. (Applause.) *

"Well, the election campaign in the country is picking up speed. . . . All the candidates are talking about health care now. Don't they realize that it's their campaign speeches that makes us sick?" --Bob Hope

John Howard

John Howard is a highly decorated veteran of WWII (two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts, battlefield commission). He served in the Eisenhower administration, as President of Rockford College and founder of the Rockford College Institute and co-founder (with Allan Carlson) of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. This article is republished from The Howard Center.

A recent book, Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? provides detailed statistics about the consequences of legalizing same-sex unions in Scandinavia. The authors, Darren Spedale and William Eskridge, have judged from their findings that there have been no negative consequences for the institution of marriage from this new status for gay unions.

Spedale, an investment banker, and Eskridge, a professor of jurisprudence, have, in effect, carefully studied an elephant's trunk and made a totally unwarranted conclusion about an elephant.

Years ago, at a national conference, America's all-purpose genius, Buckminster Fuller, went to the podium and said,

Before I give my speech, I want to say something to that college president who just finished his talk. You folks in the colleges are going to ruin this country. What you do is identify the bright students and make them experts in something. That isn't all bad, but it leaves a residue of people with mediocre intelligence and the dunderheads to become the generalists, who must serve as the college presidents.

When the laughter subsided, he added, "and the Presidents of the United States."

That was an observation of the greatest importance. A true generalist is knowledgeable about human nature and the primary institutions of society, including their vulnerability and their interdependence. The generalist recognizes that social institutions can operate effectively only as long as the citizens support the fundamental principles of those institutions, and as long as the citizens esteem the people who reinforce those principles and disdain those who thwart and scorn those principles. In a successful free society, each new generation grows up learning to abide by the laws, for example, just as it learns to speak the language. The unspoken general assumption that lawfulness, truthfulness and family are just part of living is the glue that holds the free society together.

The family is chronologically the first human institution and has been the center of life in almost every known society. It is where children are sheltered and learn how to live responsibly in their own communities. It provides an intergenerational web of security.

In 1948, The United Nations formalized its complete support of the family, when it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article I, Section 16 of the document asserts:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have a right to marry and found a family.

Section 3 of Article I states:

The family is the natural unit of society and is entitled to protection by the society and the state.

The many important benefits to the child raised in a natural family have been thoroughly established in innumerable studies. The child raised by his or her married mother and father is far more likely than children raised in other circumstances to succeed in school, in a job, in a marriage, and far less likely to use illegal drugs, commit a crime, run away from home, have emotional problems, become an alcoholic or commit suicide. In short the natural family is the most reliable breeding ground for the good life and the good society. It is an invaluable and irreplaceable institution of the free society.

The watershed action which unintentionally, but actually, tore a gaping hole in the national belief system embracing the family occurred on the nation's campuses. Radical students at the University of California at Berkeley, coached by revolutionary Marxist professors, demanded that the campus parietal rules be abolished. Those rules, a fixture of America's co-educational campuses, barred men from being in women's dormitories and women in men's dormitories after a specified hour.

The human sexual impulse is so powerful that societies through the ages have found it necessary to establish standards of sexual behavior to protect the family. And because human nature is strongly inclined to act contrary to those standards, the societies have established taboos against behavior that does not conform to those standards. The parietal rules reflected the national commitment to the family. All the majesty America's higher education was, by policy, on record in support of the code of sexual conduct required to sustain the institution of the family. The students at the University of California asserted that since they were old enough to be drafted and killed in the Vietnam war, they were certainly old enough to decide how they would live their lives. There was, they said, no justification for rules about their sexual activity. The powers that be at the university, apparently not blessed with any generalists, couldn't think of any good reason not to grant the request and so the parietals were cancelled. In a few years, most of the other coeducational institutions followed that example.

No matter what standards of conduct the students had learned from family and church, they were living in a circumstance where they were, in effect, told by their university:

It makes no difference to us whether you shack up with your girlfriend or anybody else you find attractive. You decide for yourself.

Without the society-wide support for the code of sexual morality that had prevailed in America since its origin, family's secure status as the central and most important institution began to unravel.

The principle here is that since the institution of the family requires society-wide approval and support for standards of sexual morality, the formalized rejection of those standards results in a devastating and probably terminal attack on the family. Sexual liberation and the family are mutually exclusive. The more there is of the one, the less there will be of the other. America's acute shortage of generalists in high places leads to the weakening of all the social institutions, especially the family. *

"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." --Edward Gibbon

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006), associate professor of Political Science, and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is part one in a series of four.

Because of a bitter, increasingly costly war in Iraq, Americans are questioning their president's leadership more than ever before, and George W. Bush has watched his approval ratings plummet to all-time lows.

Such challenging times were no stranger to past presidents-including three born in this month when America honors Presidents Day on February 19th: Washington and Lincoln led their nation to victory in wars that threatened to rip apart their country; similarly, another president who sought to lead America to victory in a difficult war likewise persevered-Ronald Reagan.

It was Reagan's victory over Soviet Communism that won him the accolades he now receives, and which has earned him the level of gold standard by which Republicans measure George W. Bush. A December Gallup poll found that Reagan is the most popular modern president, with 64 percent of respondents judging him outstanding/above average and only 10 percent rating him below average/poor, far outpacing Bush, who rated the most unpopular. An extraordinary June 2005 survey by the Discovery Channel and AOL, which included 2.4 million participants, declared Reagan the "greatest American of all time," beating Lincoln and Washington.

Actually, Reagan has been rating this high for a decade. A long list of top scholars-most of which never voted for Reagan-rate the 40th president highly: Harvard's late Richard Neustadt, Yale's John Lewis Gaddis, popular historians Michael Beschloss and David McCullough, to name a few. Even liberal politicians, from Bill Clinton to Ted Kennedy, now praise Reagan. Reagan "will be honored as the president who won the Cold War," explains Kennedy.

And it is Reagan's Cold War triumph that offers parallels for George W. Bush's struggles in the War on Terror.

This is the first of four articles noting lessons for Bush from Reagan's experience. But before considering tips from Reagan, we need to appreciate some significant differences in the two presidents-and some key lessons for Bush's detractors.

Obviously, Bush lacks Reagan's communication skills and ability to disarm political opponents with gentle wit. This has enabled his opponents to define public perception of his handling of the war, in a way Reagan's critics could not. Bush simply does not have Reagan's primetime television charm, and ability to appeal to Americans in Reagan's persuasive, winsome manner.

That said, comparisons between the two presidents are often unfair because of vastly divergent circumstances:

The Soviets did not directly attack us, as did the terrorists; we never engaged the USSR in a hot war. Also, because the Soviets embraced an atheistic ideology, they feared death, not believing in eternal rewards. Quite the contrary, the radical Islamic enemy views death in the name of Allah as a ticket to Paradise. For Bush, that is a more dangerous enemy-one that cannot be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.

Reagan, who spent a lifetime preparing to defeat Soviet Communism, could win the Cold War by changing one country, the USSR. Bush, who prior to his presidency never imagined what history had in store for him, cannot win the War on Terror by changing one country.

On the other hand, there are key common positives in Bush and Reagan:

Both had a deep faith in God, in country, and in their visions for America and the world. Their self-confidence gave them remarkable perseverance in the face of harsh criticism-criticism we have conveniently forgotten in Reagan's case. At this point in Reagan's two-term presidency, he was at an all-time low because of the emergence of Iran-Contra. Also, on the rare occasion he used military force, Reagan likewise encountered strong international disapproval. When Reagan dispatched troops to Grenada, the vote at the U.N. Security Council was 11 to 1 against the United States, while the General Assembly vote was 108 to 9.

Moreover, even Republicans have failed to grasp the most important shared objective of the two presidents: Bush has stated explicitly that he is seeking to carry on Reagan's "March of Freedom," a march begun centuries ago, not months ago-and which conservatives saluted when Reagan announced the goal in his historic 1982 Westminster Address. Against great odds, the current Republican president is attempting to shift Reagan's March of Freedom to that one area where it has been most resistant but is most needed-the Middle East.

This is not to say that Ronald Reagan would have supported the decision to invade Iraq. That is impossible to know. At the least, however, Reagan would commend Bush's goal of expanding freedom, and-ever the optimist-would likely be hopeful.

Yet, what are the lessons for Bush from Reagan?

Reagan found non-militaristic means to defeat the enemy, from extremely bold forms of economic warfare to other methods, such as aiding forces resisting the Soviets on various fronts. Reagan was able to marshal a multitude of resources that enabled him to pull off what no one 10 years earlier judged possible: he defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War without expending thousands of American lives. George W. Bush has lost thousands of precious lives and, in the process, has not been able to convince America that victory is in sight.

The next three articles in this series will examine three cases where Reagan defeated the enemy without firing a shot. *

"Consensus is the negation of leadership." -Margaret Thatcher

Clifford F. Thies

Clifford F. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Professor of Economics and Finance at Shenandoah University. This article was a presentation to the Clarke County Rotary Club.

February 2007 is the 63rd month of the current economic expansion. Considering that the average economic expansion from 1945 to 2001 lasted 52 months, and that we are now in the 63rd month of the current expansion, the economy must be considered to be doing well.

And a lot of Americans now recognize that we are no longer in recession. In the January 2007 survey of the American Research Group, 46 percent of the public--almost half--said we are not in a recession! So, the word is getting out . . . slowly . . . that we are not in a recession.

I must admit that I'm a little nervous about addressing this year's economic outlook. I looked over my notes from the prior three years, and I see that I've called the economy right three times in a row. What are the odds that, this year, I'll be right again? But, being a gambling man, I say, let it ride.

What I would like to do, in this presentation, is, first, summarize the performance of the economy during the past year; then, take a look at the "deepening" of the expansion, or, how the continuing expansion is now effecting production, employment and income throughout the economy; and, finally, I would like to focus a bit on the housing industry.

To anticipate some of what I will say, first, the Federal Reserve appears to have engineered a successful "soft-landing." The Fed, by raising short-term interest rates during the past two years, removed the building-up of inflationary pressure in the economy, and moderately slowed down the economy, so that we can now look forward to sustained non-inflationary economy growth.

The Fed looks to have removed the inflationary pressure in the economy while not precipitating a new recession. Hence, we call it a "soft landing."

Second, with our long economic expansion, we see that the recovery has made its way into the structure of the economy, strengthening production, lowering unemployment, and raising real wages throughout the income distribution. This deepening of the expansion is also exhibiting itself in an increase in activity in the goods-producing sectors of the economy (and I must say that the weakening of the dollar in the exchange markets has helped in this regard).

To be sure, even with all this good news, several problems or potential problems are out there. I will focus on one of these problems as part of this presentation, namely, the real estate market.

Where We Are in the Business Cycle

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group, is generally referred to for the identification of business cycle turning points. According to the NBER, our most recent recession, the 2001 recession, began in March 2001 and ended in November 2001. With the end of that recession we began the present expansion which is now in its 63rd month.

Since the average duration of the eight expansions from 1945 to 2001 has been 52 months, our current expansion of 63 months might be considered to be mature, and it might be supposed that we have fully recovered from the prior recession. Looking at recent trends of production, employment and income, this appears to be the case. However, there seems to be something lacking out there. The strength of the economy is still not fully reflected in consumer confidence, as a result of which, the rate of growth of the economy has been somewhat erratic.

The Index of Leading Indicators, compiled by the Conference Board, another private group, has increased over the past six months, and during the month. Because of this and other information, we can be pretty confident about the current expansion continuing for at least another six to nine months.

Let's look at the overall unemployment rate. The most recent figure we have for the unemployment rate, January 2007, is 4.6 percent. This is low compared to recent history in this country, and very low compared to unemployment in many other advanced economies.

That we have such a low unemployment rate and also have inflation under control challenges the view that some economists still have, that there is a meaningful trade-off between inflation and unemployment. It turns out that, with the right economic policies, we can have both price stability and low unemployment.

Last year, I said there was reason to believe that the unemployment rate, then 4.9 percent, would continue to fall during the forthcoming months, and I was correct. I think that the unemployment rate will continue falling during the next several months.

Having mentioned the rate of inflation, on a November-to-November basis, the inflation rate slowed down from 3.5 percent in 2004 and 2005, to 2.0 percent in 2006. The up tick in the rate of inflation to 3.5 percent in 2004 was disconcerting to the Fed. They didn't want a return of inflationary psychology. And, so, two years ago, they started raising interest rates--or, tightening money--and, as you can see, they got the inflation rate back down to 2.0 percent per year.

With the continuing economic expansion (again, along with a weakening dollar in exchange markets), has come a rebound of activity in the industrial sectors of the economy. According to the Federal Reserve's Index of Industrial Production, the goods-producing sectors of the economy grew last year at a healthy clip, 3.8 percent, as compared to 3 percent and 3.2 percent during the prior two years, and 1.2 percent during 2003. Thus, manufacturing, mining, electricity generation, construction and other such industries are back on the rise.

The recovery of production in the economy is dramatically reflected in the capacity utilization rate of our factories, refineries, power plants and other such facilities. Capacity utilization fell during the prior two recessions (and especially during the most recent one, because the strength of the dollar in exchange markets exacerbated the impact of the fall of aggregate demand on production). But, with the recent increases in industrial production, we are now at something like normal in terms of capacity utilization.

The Real Estate Market

I would now like to focus a bit on the real estate market. There is a lot of talk, nowadays, about the softness of home prices and the glut of unsold homes on the market. Well, I'd like to, first, examine the behavior of housing starts prior to our most recent business cycle.

Prior to the most recent recession, housing starts were strongly correlated with the business cycle. Housing starts were trending down prior to and during each of the five recessions of the 1970s, '80s and '90s. But, housing starts did not fall during the recession of 2001 (although they were falling a bit prior to the recession). Not many people noticed this non-event. In prior recessions, housing starts were falling during the period leading up to and during the recession. But, this pattern did not exhibit itself during the recession of 2001. What happened? (Meaning, what happened so that the usual pattern didn't happen?)

Two things can be mentioned. First, we have a deregulated banking sector. In the past, all kinds of regulations on banks caused a tightening of money to result in a constriction of credit to the housing industry. Today, banks and other intermediaries are able to extend credit to the housing industry based on factors such as the creditworthiness of the loan applicant even during a recession, so the housing industry is no longer devastated by recessions.

Second, the Fed pro-actively lowered interest rates in order to prevent the 2001 recession from getting worse. As a result of low interest rates, the P& I portion of newly financed mortgage payments was lowered, and housing affordability--or, the ratio of mortgage payments to income--rose to a high level. Housing affordability encouraged first time home buying, second home buying, and relocation to larger and more luxurious homes, and, so, helped to sustain aggregate demand during the recession.

Unfortunately, high housing affordability sparked something of a speculative bubble in housing. Some people were attracted into speculating in residential real estate by the "greater fool" theory of investing. A cool and calculating speculator buys low and sells high. But, during a speculative bubble, foolish speculators buy high in order to sell higher on the belief that there is a "greater fool" out there.

According to the Housing Affordability Index of the National Association of Realtors, housing affordability has come back down, from about 130 in 2003, when the Fed was pumping up the money supply, to about 100 in 2006. Along with this fall in housing affordability, home prices have softened, and time to sell has stretched out. In addition, housing starts have nose-dived.

What do these gyrations in the housing market mean? With regard to anybody's decision to buy or sell a home, or the kind of mortgage to use in order to finance a home purchase, my advice is always to make such decisions based on your long-term needs and preferences, not on the basis of speculating on the future course of housing prices and interest rates. But, having said this, I would say that it's a good time to buy. I don't see the bottom falling out of the real estate market, just a working-through of the excess inventory that was built-up during the housing bubble. *

"The American left has long deplored Bush's rhetorical reliance on such vulgar conceits as 'good' and 'evil.' But it seems even 'victory' is a problematic concept, and right now the momentum is all for defeat of one kind or another." --Mark Steyn