Time to Bomb Iran?

Mario Loyola thinks the point of no return may have been reached.

The story in essence is that Iran appears to have blocked access by IAEA inspectors to an underground facility where it has been enriching uranium. So far as I know, both the U.S. government and the IAEA are refusing to comment on the story. But if true, this represents a point of no return, which Iran has staged deliberately to catch us off guard while everyone is studying its lengthy answer to the EU3+3 offer. In my piece in the current (August 28) print edition of National Review, I described precisely this eventuality as a point of no return, and argued that the United States should invoke preemption if this ever happened.

Update:

Loyola found out more about the AP story. It was, no surprize to anybody, “accurate but critically imprecise,” meaning that the tipping point has not been reached.

God and Man in the Dorm

If you follow The Corner you know about last week’s “dorm room” conversation (as Jpod called it) about religiosity and conservatism. Today Derb linked to a great summary by an obviously bright agnostic, Razib Khan of Gene Expression.

Mac Donald clearly believes that reason and skepticism, in concert with a healthy dose of empiricism, can serve as the grounding for a conservative & traditionalist worldview. I tend to agree, and, as an empirical fact I have met many individuals who lack a belief in God but are generally conservative. Where Heather stands apart has been her recent vocality in attacking the symbiotic relationship between American conservatism and religion over the last generation. I think Ponnuru is correct that the Republican party isn’t going to lose atheist & agnostic votes over their religiosity, we’re probably less than 5% of the population (most people with “No religion” are theists of some sort). Additionally, last I checked The Almanac of American Politics unbelievers only gave 20-30% of their votes for Republicans anyhow. Republicans worrying about losing the Jewish vote is a good analogy, Jews cast about 3 out of 4 votes in a given election for Democrats, and they are fewer than 1 out of 20 voters. But, there was a reason in the 1950s William F. Buckley expelled the anti-Semities from the conservative movement. In fact, there were two reasons:

1) The conservative movement included many Jews from the beginning. Frank Meyer, the father of fusionism being a prominent early example (Kristol and Podhoretz came on board in the 70s). Even if Jews are a trivial proportion of the “base,” they are numerous in the “braintrust.”

2) Jews are not the only group that rejects anti-Semitism, many American Christians are not particularly tolerant of this attitude. Though Jews did not form much of the base, those who would be turned off by anti-Semitism do (this was before the influx of philo-Semitic evangelicals, the conservative movement in the 1950s was a coalition of Jews, secularists and “High Church” Christians).

Includes updates and some interesting reader comments. I’m going to bookmark that site.

Update:

Derb notes

Razib wishes it known that he is an atheist, not an agnostic. Nice to know that a Madrassa education can do that.

And Heather Mac Donald has a wonderful reply to Novak about what’s what’s right and wrong with religion.

Funny Money

The Hezbos are giving away $12,000 in cash to help Lebanese families rebuild. Isn’t that nice?

Oh… Did I forget to mention that they, Iran and North Korea are all known counterfeiters?

(Follow the link for additional hilarity, like the Hezbo Engineers.)

Still Missing

Buttle’s World joins Michelle Malkin in a blogburst about the kidnapped Fox News crew.

My opinion: No news is news. So is unchecked terrorist thuggery against Western journalists. The disappearance of Centanni and Wiig is at least as newsworthy as–and far more threatening to our national security than–people falling off cruise ships or getting eaten by alligators or attacked by bees.

I can understand that perhaps Fox doesn’t want to raise the profile of their people while in captivity. But after a while silence sounds a lot like defeat.