THOU ART GOD: At least if thy name is Sergey Brin, apparently.

HAPPY MOON DAY: But it’s kind of pathetic that we haven’t been back for nearly 35 years.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Are Democrats the Peak-oil Party?

A BASIS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS: Norm Geras, Andrew Sullivan, and Ramesh Ponnuru have been writing about this. The best treatment of this subject is Arthur Allen Leff’s Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, 1979 Duke L.J. 1229 (1979), which is, alas, not available online, even on Westlaw. Leff wrote:

I want to believe –and so do you– in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe –and so do you– in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.

And here’s a passage from his Memorandum from the Devil, 29 Stanford Law Review 1479 (1977) addressed to Prof. Roberto Unger, who ended his Knowledge and Politics with the plea “Speak, God.” Leff, the least diabolical of people, nonetheless responded in character:

Yes, yes, I know your book ends “Speak, God,” and that I, therefore, am the very antithesis of Him whose reply you so sincerely sought. But after all, a good part of the book is written, if not to me, at least against me. And Knowledge and Politics, despite the meagreness of mortal or divine response thus far, is a very important book, certainly meriting a little diabolical commentary. So hear me, pending Him. It was, indeed, the fact that you ended your work with prayer that first attracted my attention. I am something of a connoisseur of these attempts by scholarly humans to find and describe some meaning in their personal and species existence, and when nonironic divine address comes out of Langdell Hall these days, attention must be paid. . . .

Well, well, let me not be cruel. I know at least as well as you what total separation from Him can lead to in the way of self-deception and bad lines. I tried to replace God with myself, and you tried, as He appeared unwilling to come again, to put your faith in some laughable Second Coming of Man. No hope. As long as you wanted simultaneously to make something in the world–mankind– into the good and still reserve the right to judge its goodness, you were doomed. You were trapped in what, to save time, I might call a Gödel problem: how to validate the premises of a system from within itself. “Good,” “right” and words like that are evaluations. For evaluations you need an evaluator. Either whatever the evaluator says is good is good, or you must find some superior place to stand to evaluate the evaluator. But there is no such place in the world to stand. From the world, only a man can evaluate a man, and unless some arbitrary standards are slipped into the game, all men, at this, are equal.

Or to put it another way, one more congenial, I think, to both of us, by dispensing with God we did more than just free ourselves of some intellectual anachronism. We also dispensed with the only intellectually respectable answer to the ultimate “Why is it right to do X?” It was not so very long ago that most people (and I, too) could and did answer: “It is right to do X because God says so.” That answer was at least intelligible, the only one that did not depend upon mere sublunary assertion, the only one that even if it too involved the transformation of fact into value, was not for that reason insufficient. For assuming that God existed, and had commands, it was He who was evaluating our actions. He was not part of our evaluation system, nor were his evaluations subject, or even amenable, to our evaluations of them.

That does not mean, of course, that God exists, or existing, bothers to evaluate your activities. He may not, literally or figuratively, give a damn. It is just that if He does exist (whether or not He cares), as an intellectual matter your problem of normative grounding would be solved. No more would ethical imperatives consist merely of human beliefs, intuited in privacy, perhaps validated by wide sharing or whatever, but just mortal opinions nonetheless. A belief in God and His will would solve the Gödel problem and would avoid the necessary defeat visited on any attempt to validate a system from within itself.

There are, Professor Unger, not very many possibilities. In fact, there are, I think, just two. The first is that mankind is a species that doesn’t mean anything at all, except to itself. There is no evaluator out there. If the species is or becomes one thing or another, or ceases to exist altogether, nothing else cares–except perhaps some other species which, mostly with joy, might register the ecological impact of man’s extinction. You are what you are, and will become what you will become, and the goodness or badness of that being and becoming is for you, and you alone, to define and declare. No state of being is more authentic than any other or, just because it exists, any better. Oh, it’s not so awful. If being isn’t meaning, and it isn’t, meaninglessness isn’t nonbeing either. You and the species get to live. It’s just that you have to shape your living, and its meaning, all alone.

The second possibility is that God exists, and still cares. My own opinion is that the Hand that holds you suspended over my fiery pit doesn’t abhor you, but has forgotten completely that It has anything in It. But God may still care, and, if that is so, you have but one epistemological problem, to learn the will of God. If there is no God, everything is permitted; if there is a God, it’s even more terrifying, because then some things are not permitted, and men have got to find out which are which. Since He has the right and power to evaluate you, but no duty to do so, you are bravely right: you must pray.

But while you try to live as best you can until His revelation, perhaps you will accept some practical advice from me. Look around you at your species, throughout time and all over the world, and see what men seem to be like. Okay? Now take this hint from what you have seen: If He exists, Me too.

The older I get, the more profound this seems.

UPDATE: You can get Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural law online through JSTOR, if your university or public library has a license. Thanks to reader Dale Belhoffer for the tip.

MY WIFE: “Just another elitist from some Socialist Indoctrinated University.”

Oh yeah. That’s her.

THOUGHTS ON handgun ownership and privacy rights.

MICKEY KAUS: “Is the infamous NYT TimesSelect paywall about to disappear? kf hears rumblings that the paper is about to abandon the whole misconceived project in which it has blocked unpaid Web access to its op-ed columnists.”

It was a bad idea, but I find I don’t miss them all that much. I get Times Select for free, but I basically never read Dowd or Krugman anymore.

NEWSPAPERS: Another day, another debacle.

GOOD NEWS: “AIDS drug cocktails may be able to restore the ravaged immune systems of some people infected with HIV, researchers reported on Wednesday. Immune cells known as CD4 T-cells returned to normal levels in an ideal group of patients, picked because they responded optimally to a combination of at least three AIDS drugs, the researchers reported in the Lancet medical journal.”

More progress, please. (Via Andrew Sullivan).

HOMELAND — SECURE! “A published report in Knoxville says federal agents took 3,400 rounds ammunition from a training exercise in Texas back to Oak Ridge on board a government plane without declaring it. . . . A report in Thursday’s Knoxville News Sentinel quotes a report by the Energy Department’s inspector general as saying 119 rounds of the armor-piercing ammunition is still unaccounted for. Further, the report says someone had colored the tips of some regular ammunition black in an apparent attempt to conceal that the more lethal variety was missing.”

THE SENATE JUST KILLED the John Doe amendment. Terrorists will be happy.

UPDATE: It’s a New York thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: TigerHawk: “I think the Democrats are going to regret this vote. I can imagine the oppo advertising already.”

GITMO UPDATE: Senate Rejects Moving Gitmo Detainees to U.S. Soil.

THE TROOPS USED TO BE HEROES. Then the media made them victims. Now it’s making them evil, like the hordes of “Jenjis Khan.” This will make betraying them more palatable.

We’ve seen this pattern before.

UPDATE: Reader Wright Steenrod emails: “Can you imagine the New Republic, of all magazines, writing a German occupation story in WWII and focusing the actions of some sick soldiers and not focusing of the existence of a mass grave of Jewish children?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Like the “Jenjis Khan” stuff, these reports appear to have a rather shaky foundation.

More questions here and here.

THE CHRISTOPHER LITTLE LITERARY AGENCY is embarrassing itself.

JAMES LILEKS IMAGINES THE 1977 VERSION OF FACEBOOK:

Imagine you’re in college. Far from home. It’s 1977. You’re partying down, as the Grand Funk Railroad put it. One guy is walking around with a clipboard, asking personal questions; he’s also taking photos. As the night goes on, inhibitions fade like cotton candy in a hot shower, and you find yourself in a hot shower. With someone named Cotton Candy, as it turns out. Who invited her? That guy is still taking pictures, too. Eventually you ask what he’s doing.

“Well,” he says, “I’m going to put together a big collection of incriminating photos and remarks, and post it up at that bulletin board outside the grocery store. And there’ll be another one in your home town.”

The 2007 response? “Awesome! Thanks, dude!”

AL QAEDA FOOLS RICHARD CLARKE: But, really, how hard is that?

A CYNICAL SAUDI SOLUTION:

While Saudi Arabia is not happy with how Shia Arabs have taken control of Iraq, and appear able to hold on to it, they are pleased with how the fighting in Iraq has greatly depleted the number of al Qaeda backers inside Saudi Arabia. Over 5,000 Saudi Islamic radicals are believed to have died in Iraq so far. For the last four years, up to half the suicide bombers have been Saudis, and about half the 135 foreigners currently held in U.S. military prisons over there, are Saudis. Currently, American intelligence believes about 45 percent of the foreign fighters (less than ten percent of all terrorists there) are Saudis. . . .

The few Islamic terrorists that remain at large are desperate, dangerous and good at avoiding capture. The only acceptable outlet for their zealous urge to kill, is Iraq. So the government has reached another informal truce with Islamic radicals. They can live in Saudi Arabia as long as they remain quiet and non-violent. The government will not interfere with their traveling to Iraq to do a little jihad. Apparently, most of these fellows do not survive the process.

Hmm. I wonder if this is the plan. Plus, good news and bad news about Taliban vs. drug lords in Afghanistan:

U.S. and NATO troops continue combing the south, smashing Taliban combat groups, and, more importantly, depleting the supply of Taliban leaders. The drug gangs see the Taliban as tools, not a threat. The Taliban like to puff themselves up, but most Afghans see them as a bunch of ignorant, vicious and inept religious zealots. The drug gangs are another matter, because these guys have lots of money, and more realistic goals.

Think what we could accomplish with drug legalization.

CRUISE MAKES HITLER FILM: Seems miscast — what would Tom Cruise know about an oddball cult founded by a reclusive weirdo that demands slavish devotion from its followers?

EARNINGS PROBLEMS for Google.

A VIDEO INTERVIEW from Michael Yon.

WILL COLLIER: “I was just interviewed by a camera crew, and will apparently be on the CBS Evening News tonight. . . . this must be the slowest news day in the history of the planet, and possibly the universe.”

PETER ROBINSON INTERVIEWS ANDREW FERGUSON about his new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America.

REDSTATE’S JEFF EMANUEL IS HEADING TO IRAQ, and he’s soliciting contributions for coverage. I donated.

ED MORRISSEY INTERVIEWS JOHN MCCAIN.

OAK RIDGE WORKER CHARGED with trying to sell nuclear secrets to France.