Not Human

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a couple of cases this Fall that will once again bring abortion back into the news. Indeed, one of the cases centers around a Texas law restricting abortion that has already created national controversy.

I thought it appropriate, therefore, to rerun two posts that originally appeared on VP in 2019 that address some of the issues involved in the debate over abortion. The first follows and the second will be up tomorrow:

There are several deeply flawed arguments frequently adduced whenever the topic of abortion is discussed, and several of them popped up the other day on CNN's Primetime with Chris Cuomo show.

CNN contributor and former New York City politician Christine Quinn argued, for instance, that “When a women is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is part of her body."

This is a stunning assertion. What, exactly, does Ms Quinn think that it is that resides in the mother's womb if not a human being?

The embryo or fetus is most certainly a "being" of some sort, and it is most certainly human. It's surely not a frog or cow embryo that's growing inside the mother's body, nor is it a cyst or tumor.

It has the genetic composition of a human being even if it's not as big as an adult human nor look exactly like an adult human. After all, size and looks are not what makes a human being human. If they were then neither dwarfs nor toddlers would be human beings.

Nor is it part of her body like, say, an appendix is. The developing human being has its own DNA signature, it's own blood type, sex and race, all of which may be different from that of the mother.

If it were just a part of the mother's body why is it, as Chris Cuomo observes, that mothers who abort often agonize over their decision? Do people agonize over whether to destroy a tumor or excise an appendix?

The argument that the unborn child is not human and can therefore be disposed of however the mother wishes is pretty much the same argument that was used to enslave blacks and to exterminate Jews. Once a particular group is dehumanized it's easy to rationalize killing them.

Another claim that often arises in discussions about abortion (though not in the present one) is the contention that "No one knows when life begins." This statement reflects an utter ignorance of biology. Life is a continuum going back to the first living cell, and there's no stage in the procreation process from that first cell to the most recently born child in which there's any doubt about the organisms and cells involved being alive.

Two living adults produce living gametes which fuse to form a living conceptus, which in turn differentiates into a living child. At no point are any of these entities not biologically alive.

Moreover, to insist, as many often do, that a child becomes human at birth is absurd. It's a delusion to think that something magical happens to the fetus as it's being birthed that somehow transforms it from subhuman one moment into a fully human being the very next moment. What, precisely, occurs during the voyage down the birth canal that effectuates this transformation?

Anyway, here's video of the exchange (Well, "exchange" is a bit euphemistic as a description of what follows) between Cuomo, Quinn and their pro-life antagonist, former senator Rick Santorum:

The Most Rational Bet

Imagine that you're a contestant on a game show and that the game consists of placing a sealed box in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance of either. You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

Those are the terms of the game. What would you do? Would you play? Which option would you choose?

Suppose you were told that the odds were not 50/50 but rather 100 to 1 that there was $1 in the box. Which option would you choose then?

The reasonable thing to do, of course, is to guess that there's a fortune in the box regardless of the odds. If you're right you gain $1,000,000, and if you're wrong you lose almost nothing. If, on the other hand, you bet that there's $1 in the box and you're right you gain very little, but if you're wrong you lose out on a fortune. To bet on the $1 seems irrational and foolish.

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists. As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

By "believe" Pascal doesn't intend a simple intellectual assent but rather he means a placing of one's trust in the one in whom he believes. Nor is Pascal offering this argument as a "proof" that God exists. Nor does he assume that one can simply choose to believe or even should choose to believe as a result of a calculation of the benefits and liabilities. What he's saying is that belief, if one has it, makes perfect sense.

In other words, the skeptic who declares theistic belief to be irrational is simply wrong. The theist has everything to gain and relatively little to lose. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and everything to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, much of it negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some of them are not. Susan Rinnard a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a pretty good job in just a few minutes of explaining the Wager and which offers a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly much better than most of the stuff one finds on Pascal's Wager on YouTube.

The Unexamined Life

In their book When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People philosophers Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro have a chapter on the events surrounding the trial of Socrates. It's during his trial that Socrates utters his famous dictum to the jurors that the unexamined life is not worth living.

On the surface, what Socrates means by the unexamined life is a life in which one "never questions things, least of all his own actions and plans." Nadler and Shapiro describe it as a life "spent in front of the television watching junk and eating crap."

But, these authors insist, Socrates is really saying more than this since it's possible that an unexamined life can be heroic, as in the case of Achilles who never did much rational introspection and allowed his life to be governed by his passions.

Socrates is employing a bit of hyperbole, they argue, to press home the point not that the lives of those who neglect the relevant kind of examination or questions are worthless, but rather that they're living a less than fully human life. They're failing to live up to their fullest potential as human beings.

The man or woman who neglects to think seriously about life's most important questions is squandering one of the gifts that make humans more than just brute animals - our rationality. Such people are "like a thoroughbred racehorse that spends its days in a stable."

If that's so then what are some of the questions one should ponder, not just in a once and done fashion, but throughout their lives?

One such question, surely, is how should we live? What is the best way of life for a particular man or woman? Another question follows from it - what is a morally good life? What is the right thing to do in a particular situation? What ought I to do and how can I know?

These lead to other questions such as what gives my life meaning? What is the nature of justice and what is love? What do I think about death?

These are just a few of the things everyone might give more than a little thought to as they approach adulthood and as they go on to live out their lives. The paramount questions, though, are what do I believe about God, why do I believe whatever it is I believe, and what are the consequences of my belief or unbelief for everything else I believe?

Indeed, how one answers most of life's ultimate questions depends upon how one answers the question about God.

Unfortunately, many people never really spend much time thinking about these things. They're like philosophical tumbleweeds allowing themselves to be blown in whichever direction the winds of life take them. Their lives and projects are often shallow and superficial, spent in the pursuit of frivolities and trivial amusements.

At least that's the subtext of Socrates' claim. I leave it to you to judge whether he's correct and whether you think he's being fair.

Faith and Blind Faith

Physicist Michael Guillen has an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he argues that the "central conceit" of naturalism (atheism) is that "it is a worldview grounded in logic and scientific evidence. That it has nothing to do with faith, which it associates with weakness. In reality, faith is central to atheism, logic and even science."

He goes on to mention that atheism was his own belief during much of his earlier academic life:

I became an atheist early in life and long believed that my fellow nonbelievers were an enlightened bunch. I relished citing studies appearing to show that atheists have higher IQs than believers. But when I was studying for my doctorate in physics, math and astronomy, I began questioning my secular worldview.

In the course of this exploration he learned three things about worldviews:

First, ... all worldviews are built on core beliefs that cannot be proved. Axioms from which everything else about a person’s perception of reality is derived. They must be accepted on faith.

Even reason itself—the vaunted foundation of atheism—depends on faith. Every logical argument begins with premises that are assumed to be true. Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer than 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.

As has been pointed out in this space on other occasions, the naturalist must assume that our reason evolved to make us more fit to survive, it didn't evolve for the purpose of finding truth. Thus, both the theist and the atheist must accept by faith that reason is a reliable guide to truth.

The theist accepts that because the theist believes that reason is a gift from the Creator who is Himself reasonable. The naturalist believes reason is the result of a mindless process that by sheer chance produced the rational faculty that by a fortuitous coincidence sometimes helps us find the truth.

Second, ... every worldview—that is, every person’s bubble of reality—has a certain diameter. That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities. Even humanity’s unique spirituality and creativity—all our emotions, including love—are reduced to mere chemistry.

Third, ... without exception, every worldview is ruled over by a god or gods. It’s the who or what that occupies its center stage. Everything in a person’s life revolves around this.

For the naturalist, god is the cosmos, humanity, the state, or oneself. It is what they consider to be of ultimate importance and to which they pledge, consciously or unconsciously, their fealty and devotion.

What naturalists fail to grasp is that almost everything we believe, we believe to a greater or lesser extent by faith. Very little that we believe in life can be proven to be true. We can only accumulate more and more evidence in the belief's favor.

Of course, people, whether religious or secular, often believe things on the basis of little or no evidence. To believe something despite the lack of evidence is "blind faith," but true faith is believing (and perhaps trusting) despite the lack of proof.

Atheists like biologist Richard Dawkins are fond of saying that theisms like Christianity require "blind faith" whereas naturalism is based upon empirical evidence, but neither clause in that claim is true.

There's plenty of evidence for the main themes of theistic belief, so, if one insists on evidence to justify belief, there's plenty there to warrant it.

On the other hand, naturalists believe, and must believe, a host of things for which there's no evidence at all.

They believe that life originated through purely unguided, mechanistic processes, that the universe came into being from non-being, that there are an infinity of other universes besides our own, that moral and aesthetic judgments are actually meaningful assertions despite lacking any objective ground for them, that there are no immaterial substances like minds, that their reason is a reliable guide to truth, that the laws of physics apply consistently throughout the universe, and much else.

There's no evidence for any of these beliefs and lots of evidence, in some cases, against them. They're all instances of "blind faith."

Guillen adds this:

When I was an atheist, a scientific monk sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of my time immersed in studying the universe, my worldview rested on the core axiom that seeing is believing. When I learned that 95% of the cosmos is invisible, consisting of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” names for things we don’t understand, that core assumption became untenable.

As a scientist, I had to believe in a universe I mostly could not see. My core axiom became “believing is seeing.” Because what we hold to be true dictates how we understand everything—ourselves, others and our mostly invisible universe, including its origin. Faith precedes knowledge, not the other way around.

Here's a short video featuring an interview with the very prominent agnostic astronomer, the late Robert Jastrow, who discusses his own struggle to maintain his agnosticism in the face of the theistic implications of the empirical evidence that scientists were discovering:

Lots of Questions

Jim Geraghty at National Review has lots of questions about President Biden's vaccine mandate that he announced on September 9th. The mandate, when implemented, would require all employees of businesses with 100 or more employees to be either fully vaccinated or tested at least once a week for Covid-19.

At the time he confused a lot of people by declaring that, “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers. We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.” If the vaccines work then the vaccinated are already protected against the unvaccinated, aren't they? But set that quibble aside.

As Geraghty notes, we're two weeks along, and the agency that was to issue the regulations for this mandate, OSHA, has yet to do so. Evidently, reducing the spread is not as urgent as Mr. Biden suggested.

Here's Geraghty:

Almost immediately, businesses had a lot of questions about how this new mandate was going to work. What is considered documentation for proof of vaccination and how will booster vaccinations be factored into compliance? Must an employee be “fully vaccinated” in order to work?

How will the requirements address natural immunity? Will individuals that have contracted COVID-19 be required to be vaccinated or submit to testing requirements?

Will the requirements only apply to vaccines that are fully approved by the FDA? (The other day in my local pharmacy, a guy said he had gotten one shot of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in the United Kingdom and wanted to know whether Pfizer or Moderna was compatible with it.)

What are the consequences of falsifying one’s vaccination status, and does responsibility rest with the individual or employer? If an employee takes a COVID-19 test but the results are not yet available, is the employee allowed to continue to work pending the results?

Should employees choose not to vaccinate, is the company or employee responsible for securing and paying for testing? Will paid time off be required for weekly tests?

Perhaps the reason OSHA (and why is OSHA responsible for this mandate, anyway?) hasn't delivered the answers to these questions is that the folks tasked with developing it see what a quagmire of bureaucratic muck they'd be walking businesses into.

Did Mr. Biden think about all this before he issued his statement? Did he consider not only the complicated mess he was imposing on OSHA and the burden he was placing on businesses, but also the constitutionality of what he was doing?

Did he plan this out at all? Did OSHA even know they were going to be told to shoulder this responsibility before the announcement was made?

Mr. Biden has an odd manner. He sometimes makes stern public pronouncements with a steely, Clint Eastwood-like resolve, but then nothing seems to come of them. It's as though as soon as he walks away from the podium he forgets that he ever said what he said.

Sometimes, as with his tough talk about the Taliban and his determination to get all Americans out of Afghanistan, the consequences of the lack of follow-through are awful.

Maybe in the case of the vaccine mandate the consequences of letting the whole thing drop down the memory hole will be agreeable to everyone concerned.

Butterfly Beauty

Here's a beautiful 9 minute video on butterfly anatomy which will give you a deeper appreciation for these lovely insects that we see everywhere in our world and usually take for granted.

Whether you agree with the conclusion of the filmmakers that butterflies are intentionally and intelligently designed or you believe that they came about through purely blind, random mechanisms like natural selection, the sheer beauty of the engineering and design of these creatures is breath-taking.

The intuition that what we see in the natural world was purposefully designed is so powerful, however, that Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick felt compelled to remind us that, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."

In other words, those who observe the realm of nature must, through an exertion of will, convince themselves that it's all an accident, the result of an astonishingly improbable string of coincidences.

Here's the vid:

If you enjoy the butterfly video you'll also enjoy this one on birds:

In his 1996 book The Blind Watchmaker biologist Richard Dawkins stated that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” (italics mine)

Both Crick and Dawkins believe that the appearance of design and purpose in the realm of living things is an illusion. In order to avoid succumbing to the illusion we have to persuade ourselves that the compound eye, tongue and scales of the butterfly are not for anything. They serve a function but have no actual purpose.

These and every other structure in living things evolved step by step by blind, mindless undirected processes and found themselves at each stage put to particular uses until they finally reached their present form which happens to have a useful function.

Well, maybe so, but it takes a lot of faith, a lot of blind faith, in the efficacy of dumb luck to believe that it could produce a butterfly or a bird.

Scathing Rebuke

Meghan McCain has left The View and is now writing for the Daily Mail. Her first column is a scathing rebuke of the man she once counted as a friend and whom she supported in the last presidential election.

She writes:

Eight months since President Biden was sworn into office, the anticipation of a tone change and 'return to normalcy' has utterly disappeared. The man I once considered a friend and confidante has morphed into a feckless and unreliable leader I no longer recognize.

He gives all the signs of stubborn cantankerous naiveté, surrounded by idiotic sycophants anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes around politics should easily recognize as the worst type of corrupt bureaucrats.

Biden's policies have broken with his rhetoric of unity to create more division and distrust. Inflation has exploded. Americans are paying more at the pump and the grocery and soon for their kids' holiday toys. The schools are supposed to be reopened, but in-person learning is inconsistent and can be pulled away with the speed of a positive test.

The vaccine booster shots, which Biden promised at the beginning of the month, ran into a brick wall of FDA policy. New government mandates are testing the limits of executive power.

The man who promised he would shut down the virus, not the country, is doing the opposite.

Ms. McCain is just getting warmed up. Her indictment of her erstwhile friend continues:

You can see the discrepancy just turning on the television, where on Sunday morning Dr. Fauci and his fellow government spokesmen speak in terms of limiting our lives, restricting our travel, mandating masks, requiring boosters and vaccine card checks just to go to a restaurant, and just a few hours later, you can see stadiums filled with tens of thousands of unmasked football fans cheering together for hours.

Many of those cheering fans, who stand for the anthem and honor the flag, are the same people our media looks down on, and who Biden and his White House sycophants blame for continued Covid case numbers, despite no proof whatsoever that they are the source of continued illness.

So they berate them, call them fools, suggest they are insurrectionists, and blame them for their own failed policies, as a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that they literally have officials resigning in protest from the FDA over their interference in public health science.

The bureaucracy, the media, and this White House are out of touch with reality. They don't have a plan. They don't know what to do. They're trying to throw money at the problems, but deep down, they know this won't solve anything.

She could've mentioned, but didn't, the debacles in Afghanistan and on our southern border. She also could've mentioned, among other things, the Hunter Biden scandal which has been simmering for over a year but now threatens to burst into flames engulfing "the Big Guy," in a conflagration of corruption.

McCain closes with these words:

He is on the path to become worse than Jimmy Carter, who author Steve Hayward described as a man who ran for office promising 'a government as good as the people' and ended his term by saying the people were no good.

The American people are good. I believe in them. And I believe they deserve a better class of leader.

McCain, a Republican (her father was a U.S. Senator, a presidential candidate, a fighter pilot and Vietnam war POW) has good reason for having placed her hopes in Mr. Biden. Donald Trump insulted her father gratuitously, tastelessly and stupidly, even after McCain pere was dead. So Meghan's disdain for Trump and consequent support for Biden is understandable.

What's less understandable is why so many other Americans believed, despite the lack of any evidence in Mr. Biden's long public record, that he would be a competent leader.

A Simulation from Pure Thought

Several years ago philosopher Nick Bostrom put forward the notion that the universe and everything in it is actually a massive simulation designed by humans living in the distant future. A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an update of Bostrom's original idea.

The Mind Matters article plays off an earlier piece at Big Think by Paul Ratner.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know.

Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

Bostrom imagined that the universe was physical but that humans in the future had achieved such a high degree of technological prowess that they were able to design computer programs which simulated the world we now inhabit and us as well.

Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

The current hypothesis, though, is that the universe is not material at all but is pure thought. It's an "idea" that has somehow generated itself.

The hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call “the principle of efficient language.”

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.”

How would the simulation itself be originated?

It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles.

Physicist Sir James Jeans anticipated something like this all the way back in 1930 when he wrote that, “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.”

Denyse O'Leary (under the pen name "News") at Mind Matters points out the significance of this:

The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism. Thus it bears comparison with newer theories of consciousness, which are explicitly panpsychist.

Panpsychism is the view that everything in the universe from the largest stars to the tiniest particles are all conscious to one extent or another. Panpsychism has been around for a long time but is becoming more mainstream now because the classical materialism (or physicalism) of the 19th and 20th centuries simply cannot explain many of the phenomena that scientists are observing, especially in quantum mechanics.

O'Leary continues:

However off-the-beaten-track this ... hypothesis may seem, it does solve two problems:

First, it offers an account of consciousness that conforms to what we experience. Materialist accounts generally fail at that. Famously, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett describes consciousness as a user illusion. It’s not really there. Which prompts the question, whose illusion is it then? The [new theory] sees human consciousness as a sub-thought of a grand thought.

Agree or disagree, that is somewhat closer to what we experience.

Second, the researchers’ approach — that the universe simulates itself into existence — gets rid of the problem of infinite regress (what simulated the universe?), in the same way that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” gets rid of it.

Of course, as noted above, anything that simulates itself into existence as “one grand thought” might as well be God.

What O'Leary is saying is that if consciousness is indeed the ultimate reality, if the universe is a grand thought, if information is the fundamental stuff of the world, then there must be a mind in which the thought resides and which is the source of the information out of which the world is constructed.

That mind must transcend the universe of space, time and matter and it must also possess unimaginable knowledge and power. Indeed, as O'Leary states it would seem to be almost indistinguishable from God.

The more science discovers about the world, the more untenable the old naturalistic materialism of the last two centuries seems to be and the more compelling is the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, has created the universe and is holding it all together.

Something From Nothing

When scientists back in the 1930s discovered that the universe was expanding and that it must've originated from an infinitely small point, i.e. out of nothing, it shook the world. If the universe - all of space, time, matter, energy and the laws which govern these - arose out of nothing then whatever caused this phenomenon must itself be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and the author of those laws.

Moreover, it must be incomprehensibly powerful to create a universe and unimaginably intelligent to create one of such mathematical beauty and precision.

For many this was intolerable since it had too much in common with the notion of a creator God, a notion that a lot of naturalistic scientists thought had been laid to rest back in the 19th century. Now here it was rising up again as an implication of what came to be known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

As long as the universe could be thought to be infinitely old it was possible to escape the implications of a cosmic beginning, but the Big Bang eliminated that option. The universe evidently had a beginning in time, was therefore not infinitely old, and the question of what could've brought it into being was once again on the table.

A new episode in the Science Uprising series explains how the Big Bang theory puts to rest alternative theories and supports the idea of a cosmic creator.

David Klinghoffer explains the symbolism of the masks worn by the video's narrators.

The mask is a reference to the 2005 film V for Vendetta, inspired in turn by the historical English rebel Guy Fawkes, and a comic by David Lloyd, who is right when he says it has become “an icon of popular culture,” “a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.”

The symbolism of masks has evolved in the meantime, but the tyranny of scientism has remained a constant, or in fact grown more perverse and obnoxious, making the series of short videos more relevant than ever. Episode 7, debuting now, explains why the Big Bang — the idea of a cosmic beginning — has been resisted by atheists, yet why the best science demands it.

The video is about 9 minutes long and features philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, whose recent book Return of the God Hypothesis does an excellent job of explaining how the origin of the universe, as well as the universe's design and the origin of life all point to a transcendent intelligence.

Did You Enjoy Your Weekend at the Beach, Mr. President?

Mr. Biden spent the weekend at the beach. Perhaps he was able to relax, but it's hard to see how when, as he soaks up the sun, he reflects on the human suffering and chaos for which his policies are responsible.

Reports out of Afghanistan tell us that the Taliban are methodically hunting down and executing anyone who worked for the West, and that their barbaric savagery extends even to beheading nine and ten-year old children.

In retaliation for the suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed thirteen American servicemen and women and over a hundred Afghans the military launched a drone strike at a vehicle loaded with terrorists. Except there were no terrorists in the vehicle, only seven children, an aid worker and two other adults, all of whom were blown to bits.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Americans are still trapped in Afghanistan and in danger of their lives.

On the home front thousands of illegal immigrants, encouraged to swarm into the U.S. by Mr. Biden's decision to undo his predecessor's measures to prevent just such a humanitarian calamity, are camped out under a bridge that spans the Rio Grande river in Del Rio Texas.

The migrants seem to be mostly Haitians fleeing the awful conditions inflicted upon them by both nature and their fellow Haitians. Drugs and children are being trafficked across the border, no one is tested for Covid and the situation is chaotic, pretty much like President Biden's evacuation from Afghanistan.

Moreover, the legislation the president anticipated to be his signature achievement, the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill loaded with goodies for just about every conceivable constituency, both seem to be dead in the water. The problem isn't so much the Republicans but recalcitrant moderates and progressives in Mr. Biden's own party.

And then there's the widespread resistance to Mr. Biden's perplexing mask mandates, at least if the crowds at college and pro football games this weekend are any indication. Having told us the vaccines are safe and effective, we're then told that vaccinated individuals still must wear masks to protect themselves from the unvaccinated. I'm not sure how to make sense out of that.

On top of all that confusion, nose-thumbing and tragic news was yet another foreign policy bungle. The French were so upset with the Biden administration for deviously undercutting them on a deal to sell Australia $100 billion worth of submarines that they've called their ambassador home.

It's almost unprecedented for allies to recall ambassadors from each other's countries, and it's another example of how the Democrats' claim to have regained the respect of our allies after those "disastrous" Trump years and to have replaced the Trump administration with "grown-ups" looks laughable given how the "grown-ups" have botched almost everything they've touched in the nine months they've been in office.

Anyway, it must've been hard to enjoy the sun and surf amidst all of that failure, but the president had help. Much of our media, which would've been hysterical had any of the above happened during the previous administration, seems to have been vacationing at the beach along with Mr. Biden and blissfully uninterested in the calamities that the presidential sunbather has wrought.

Man's Search for Meaning

Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl once wrote a book titled Man's Search for Meaning in which he asserted that man can't live without believing that there is some purpose or meaning to his life.

To waken in the morning and realize that there's no real point to anything one does in the hours that lie ahead beyond just keeping oneself alive is psychologically deadening. It can lead to a kind of existential despair.

Each of us, of course, has projects which inject a kind of temporary meaning into our lives and help us to avoid a numbed listlessness, but when we ask what, in the overall scheme of things, those projects amount to, the answer seems to depend on how enduring they are.

Long term projects like raising a family or building a business seem more meaningful than short term projects like mowing the grass or watching a television program. Yet the problem is that if death ends our existence it also erases the meaning or significance of what we do, no matter how important it may seem to us while we're engaged in it.

For some, a relative few, their projects live on after them for a time, but even of many of these it might be asked, what's the point? Napoleon conquered much of Europe, was responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, but he was overthrown, died in exile, and the monarchy of France was restored. His deeds live on after his death, but what was the sense of all that death and carnage?

Meaning is a slippery notion, it's hard to define precisely what it is, but if our lives, like the light of a firefly, are here one instant and gone the next, if the earth is doomed to die a casualty of a solar supernova, then nothing lasts and nothing really means anything. Unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

These gloomy thoughts occurred to me as I read about a lecture given by biologist Jerry Coyne. Coyne told his audience that:

The universe and life are pointless....Pointless in the sense that there is no externally imposed purpose or point in the universe. As atheists this is something that is manifestly true to us. We make our own meaning and purpose.

This is perhaps the consensus view among those holding to a naturalistic worldview. It was eloquently articulated by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his book A Free Man's Worship in which he wrote the following words:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

It's a bleak view of life, to be sure, but given that extinction awaits us, both individually and corporately, it's hard to dispute it. As the writer Somerset Maugham put it:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said essentially the same thing though with a bit more angst at the prospect of the emptiness and futility of existence:

What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?

If, though, death is not the end of our existence as a person then there's a chance that maybe there's meaning in the chaotic horror that is human history. If death is simply the transition between two stages of life, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, then maybe there's meaning, not only to history, but to each and every individual life.

If, on the other hand, death really is the end then all we are is dust in the wind, and philosophers and writers from Schopenhauer to Shakespeare are right: Life is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. We're born, we suffer, and we die, and that's all there is to it.

Pretty depressing.

In the Garden of Allah

In 1995 Don Henley wrote a song he titled In the Garden of Allah in which he describes a visit by Satan to Los Angeles. The song is a stark piece of social criticism. Henley obviously believes that postmodern nihilism is creating its own version of hell on earth.

For those not familiar with the song you can find the lyrics here. The whole song is relevant to our time, but perhaps the words that are most appropriate for our present cultural moment are those uttered by Satan when he says:

Because there are no facts, there is no truth, just data to be manipulated
I can get you any result you like....what's it worth to ya?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night
No shame, no solution
No remorse, no retribution

Having lost any basis for objective truth, as the devil correctly notes, there are no longer for modern man any facts, only subjective interpretations. Everyone's interpretations, everyone's truth, is equally valid and true and the only thing that matters is power and who has it.

Of course, if there's no objective truth, if everyone is their own arbiter of right and wrong, then it becomes extremely difficult for anyone to trust anyone else. And when trust is lost, society soon disintegrates. As Henley says at the end of the song:

And the devil is downhearted
Because there's nothing left for him to claim
He said: "It's just like home
It's so low-down, I can't stand it
I guess my work around here has all been done"

You can watch the whole rather macabre video here:

Where Structural Racism Really Lies

Folks on the left insist that our cultural institutions are shot full of what they call structural or systemic racism. Usually the evidence that's adduced in support of this claim is pretty thin, but occasionally it becomes apparent that the claims of structural racism may have some merit. Ironically, though, the structural racism, if it exists, is often in institutions run by the progressive left, as William McGurn argues in an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal.

McGurn writes:

[I]f ever there were a structure systemically keeping African-Americans from getting ahead, it would surely be America’s big city public-school systems. By any objective measure, these schools consistently fail to provide their African-American students with the basic education they will need to get ahead.

But instead of addressing achievement head on, the progressive answer is to funnel yet more money into the existing failed structure, eliminate tests that expose its failure, and impose race-based preferences to make up for it.

If tests show a big disparity in achievement between whites and blacks, the progressive solution is to get rid of the tests. If too few African American students are taking AP and other advanced courses, the progressive solution is to get rid of the advanced courses. It sounds like something right out of George Orwell's Animal Farm. McGurn continues,

Look, for example, at the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. For the past 20 years, achievement has been broken down by school district level in its Trial Urban District Assessment. Of the 27 U.S. urban school districts that reported their results for 2019—from Boston and Chicago to Fort Worth, Texas, and Los Angeles—not a single one can say a majority of the black eighth graders in their care are proficient in either math or reading.

It isn’t even close. In a number of these school districts, proficiency rates for black eighth graders are down in the single digits (see Detroit’s 4% for math and 5% for reading, or Milwaukee’s 5% for math and 7% for reading). Most are in the low teens.

San Francisco and Seattle aren’t part of the Trial Urban District Assessment districts reporting their scores. But the other four are, and their scores for black achievement are as bad as the rest. Now imagine what this means in real-life terms for the majority of black students who are not proficient in these skills. For most, it means consignment to a place on the margins of the American Dream.

Embarrassed by the way our big city public school systems are failing black children, progressives answer not by making it easier for these kids to get into schools where black children are achieving, whether this be charter or parochial schools.

Instead, they focus on getting rid of the embarrassment by getting rid of the achievement tests that expose it, doubling down on race preferences and trying to hamstring the schools that show black children can and do learn in the right environment.

McGurn's right to suggest that that one solution to these dismal statistics is to make it possible for students to get out of those schools where education is next to impossible and attend schools of their choosing. Unfortunately, progressives, dominated as they are by the teachers' unions, oppose school choice.

Actually, though, I'm not convinced that weak administrators and bad teachers are the whole problem. They're certainly a big part of the problem, but many of the students who attend failing schools also come from families where the father is absent, and the children are being raised by a single mother who's trying to do the best for her kids while also working and taking care of the house.

It's very difficult for a single mother in a poor neighborhood to instill discipline in children, especially boys, even when she desperately wants to do so, and without discipline boys won't succeed in school unless they're geniuses.

School choice is a necessary but not sufficient remedy for black academic failure. It's likely to help only those students who have a supportive family structure. Any long-term solution must involve keeping families intact and having a consistent positive male role model in young boys' lives. Of course, progressives are also opposed to any serious push for strong two-parent families in African American communities. For them, the idea of strong two-parent families smacks too much of dreaded patriarchy.

Yet when there's a racial achievement gap in an institution and all the common-sense solutions are opposed by those who work in that institution or are in the back pocket of those who do, then it seems that racism might well be suspected as a root problem in that institution.

McGurn finishes with a discussion of the upcoming Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in which Harvard’s use of race-based admissions is being challenged.

Harvard’s defense is that it can’t achieve diversity without some race preferences. But few will say aloud the ugly implication of this argument: If black students had to compete on merit alone, they would largely disappear from our top universities. Didn’t someone once say something about the soft bigotry of low expectations?

Why are racial preferences necessary? Why aren't African Americans able to compete in numbers commensurate with their share of the population? Perhaps, as McGurn suggests, it's because our big city public schools, run by progressives, are in fact structurally, even if inadvertently, racist, and because progressives oppose doing anything that could possibly be expected to help.

Comparing January 6th to Other Riots

Some precincts of our media have been exerting considerable effort over the last eight months to persuade us that the January 6th Capitol riot was one of the worst episodes of mob violence in our history, and they seem determined to fix those riots in our national consciousness as a "right-wing insurrection."

Real Clear Investigations (RCI), however, has actually done the journalistic work of researching and compiling a side by side table of data comparing the January 6th riot with the riots that followed the George Floyd homicide and the riots which followed Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017. The comparison is helpful.

Among the key facts listed by RCI are these (The first number is for the Capitol riots, the second is for the George Floyd riots, the third is for the 2017 inauguration riots):

• Police Officer Fatalities: 0; 1; 0
• Police Officers Assaulted/Injured: 140; 2037; 12
• Non-Officers Who Died: Ashli Babbitt, 3 others; 6-20+; 0
• Arrests: >570; 16,241; 234
• Federal Assault Charges: >175; 44; 101
• Weapons Charges: >60; 79; 0 (The types of weapons were very much different in terms of lethality. See the data at the link)
• Estimated Damage: $1.5 Million; $1-$2 Billion; >$100,000
• Duration: ~5 hours from initial violence to order; Weeks; 30 minutes
• Scope: Single event, single location; ~8,700 events, 574 involving violent acts; 140+ cities; Single event at multiple locations in one city

There's much more information at the link, but based on the above, whatever one thinks of any of these events, it's ludicrous to portray the Capitol riots as more serious than the riots that rocked the country in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

Historic Betrayal

Jim Geraghty at NRO has promised to repeat the following message every day on his blog The Morning Jolt because, as he states,

it needs to be said every day until it’s resolved, that at least 100 American citizens, an unknown-but-considerable number of U.S. green-card holders, and more than 100,000 Afghan allies who qualified for Special Immigrant Visas remain trapped in Afghanistan.

They have been abandoned by the Biden administration despite the president’s promise that, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out.” The U.S. government still cannot say, with any specificity, how many Americans or U.S. green-card holders remain in Afghanistan.

Thank goodness retired military vets and other private citizens are stepping in to rescue people the Biden administration has chosen, despite the president's promise, to leave behind.

These heroic efforts have actually been opposed by the Biden State Department, which seems inexplicable (see also here).

Perhaps when the the full story comes out we'll learn that our government did much more to help these people than they can reveal now, but if that turns out not to be the case the last month or so will rank as one of the most shameful periods in American history. Certainly one of the most shameful in the last 120 years.

How Do We Explain it?

The seven minute video below is a computer animation of processes that take place in every one of the hundred trillion cells in your body. One of the most interesting segments of the video comes at about the one minute mark when it depicts a strand of DNA being folded and compacted by proteins into a chromosome.

Even if you don't know what the processes are that the video depicts you might still have an appreciation for the incredible choreography that's taking place as protein molecules catalyze all sorts of reactions like DNA transcription and replication.

These proteins are tiny bio-machines that somehow know exactly where to go in the cell and what to do when they get there. Where does the information that that requires come from? How is the information communicated to the protein molecules?

Many of these processes must have been present in the very first living cell. How did such astonishing complexity of information, molecular machinery and the coordination of the machines' function all arise so quickly and in tandem if it was solely the product of unguided, random collisions of atoms in a primordial sea?

The DNA "packing" depicted at the one minute mark has the appearance of an ingeniously engineered system, but engineering requires a goal in the mind of an intelligent engineer. Nature, by itself, has no goals, no mind and no intelligence.

So how do we explain the origin of what we see in this video?

Let's Roll

Mene Ukueberuwa has a short piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) describing the actions of one of the many American heroes on 9/11. For those readers too young to remember, this particular man's name was Todd Beamer, a young man who embodied in his courage, toughness and faith all that is great in America today.

Beamer was aboard United Airlines Flight 93 enroute to California when it was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists. It crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, following an attempt by the passengers and crew to regain control of the plane. All 44 people on board were killed, including the four hijackers.

The hijackers stormed the aircraft's cockpit 46 minutes after takeoff, and the captain and first officer fought with them. One of the terrorists, Ziad Jarrah, had trained as a pilot, and took control of the aircraft, diverting it toward the east coast, in the direction of Washington, D.C. The hijackers apparently intended to crash the plane into the Capitol Building or the White House.

Several passengers and flight attendants learned from phone calls that suicide attacks had already been made by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many of the passengers then attempted to retake the plane, and during the struggle the hijackers deliberately crashed the plane.

Ukueberuwa writes:

A 32-year-old software salesman for Oracle, Beamer was among the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who attacked the hijackers and prevented them from crashing the Boeing 757 into the U.S. Capitol. His rallying cry, “Let’s roll,” rests in America’s memory. It is exalting to think of what he and his fellow passengers did on that short flight, and the people they saved on the ground.

Beamer remained poised under extreme pressure. Many passengers made phone calls during the flight, but Beamer’s call with Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson became the fullest account of what took place in the air that day. He remained on the line for 14 minutes, describing the direction of the plane, the hijackers’ behavior and, eventually, the passengers’ decision to revolt.

“His voice was devoid of any stress,” Ms. Jefferson later said. “In fact, he sounded so tranquil it made me begin to doubt the authenticity and urgency of his call.”

Beamer was also physically confident, and courageous. As a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, he played baseball and captained the basketball team. In a memoir, Beamer’s wife Lisa relates that he once played a soccer game with a broken jaw.

Todd Beamer's wife and children with photo of Todd two weeks after 9/11

It’s fortunate that Beamer and the three other passengers who spearheaded the revolt — Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and Tom Burnett — were athletes. The hijackers pitched the plane back and forth sharply in a failed attempt to shake their attackers off their feet.

The cockpit recording, filled with slams, shattering plates, and howls, reveals that the terrorists took the plane down only after six minutes of the passengers’ sustained assault.

A strong Christian faith also carried Beamer toward his fate. Lisa recounts that their life together was founded on faith — at Wheaton, while rearing children, and teaching Sunday school at Princeton Alliance Church.

Before ending his call with Ms. Jefferson, Beamer asked, “Would you do one last thing for me?”

“Yes. What is it?” she answered.

“Would you pray with me?”

They said the Lord’s Prayer together in full, and other passengers joined in. Beamer then recited Psalm 23, concluding, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Immediately after, he turned to his co-conspirators and asked, “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.”

They apparently managed to kill one of the hijackers, but when they breached the cabin, or were about to, the hijackers decided to plunge the plane to earth.

A country that produces men like Beamer and those who fought alongside him is, despite the cavils of the whiny antifa types, still a great country.

You can read a full description of what happened on Flight 93 here.

Renounce the Rules

Ordinary folks often find themselves lamenting the lack of civility in our political discourse. Good people are often so put off by the loathsome rhetoric they decide they'll have nothing to do with politics, despite the fact that political involvement is perhaps our most important civic duty.

One reason there was such a sweeping anti-Trump vote in 2020 was the disgust many felt with what they considered to be President Trump's uncivil tone. Unfortunately, the desire among the public for a more respectful public discourse has little effect on politicians and journalists who regard politics as a bloodsport.

Vile, vicious, and hate-filled rhetoric, especially on social media, has come to be almost accepted as normal and pleas for greater civility and respect mostly fall on deaf ears.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals has had on left-wing political activism.

Alinsky was a guru for several generations of lefty politicians and activists many of whom have put his precepts into practice. Not everything in Rules is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salutary development if more folks on the left would distance themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here they are:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ his methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity.

Indeed, Alinsky promotes the very polarization many people deplore in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies.

Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy. Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but their opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our national discourse.

Division is what the book advocates and it's what its votaries want, but if they're serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his Rules.

Buyers' Remorse

Apparently some Democrats are regretting their support for Joe Biden in the last election. Ryan Girdusky gleans the data from a recent YouGov/Economist poll. It's the first poll that has Biden's approval under 40%.

(approve/disapprove):

• Overall: 39/50
• Men: 36/53
• Women: 42/46
• White men no degree: 28/61
• White women w/ degree: 53/42
• Black: 65/26
• Hispanic: 41/36
• Registered Voters: 43/53
• Dems: 77/15
• GOP: 9/89
• Independents: 35/56

As bad as these numbers are one wonders whether Mr. Biden has yet to hit the bottom or will he sink even further as the full extent of the Afghanistan debacle begins to dawn on the electorate.

Stephen Green at PJ Media observes that,

A Democrat president cannot survive with such [relatively] weak support from black voters, from female voters, and from independent voters.

To put it another way, Donald Trump in his last, tumultuous year in office, after five years of relentless attacks from the media-government-education-entertainment complex, still enjoyed support from 86% of Republican voters.

Biden, after less than a year in office and near-relentless cheerleading from the media-government-education-entertainment complex, has an approval rating of just 77% with his fellow Dems.

At Hot Air Karen Townsend notes that there's another group who seem to have quietly abandoned the Biden bandwagon:

As far as the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco, one group of Biden voters is being particularly quiet. Remember those 500 plus national security professionals who endorsed Biden in 2020 over Trump? Remember they said Trump was unfit to be commander-in-chief and Biden had the experience to be a calm and able leader?

Last week Real Clear Politics reached out to more than two dozen of the highest-ranking military and civilian leaders on the list of nearly 500 endorsers, but only a handful of them responded.

Perhaps these "experts" would rather the American people just forget that during the campaign they touted Mr. Biden's foreign policy expertise and gave him their enthusiastic support.

The Biden White House is eager to put Afghanistan in the rear view mirror, but stories of Americans and Afghans who worked with us being rescued out of Afghanistan by heroic individuals and private organizations while our State Department sits on its hands will continue to percolate through the news for a while, reminding people of what may be the most bungled foreign policy endeavor in the modern history of the United States.

It may be that the American people will indeed forget about Afghanistan once those stories wind down and President Biden's approval numbers float back up, but if so, it would speak very, very poorly of us as a people.

Double Standards, Etc.

The editors at National Review write concerning the Afghanistan debacle that,

It is bizarre that weeks into this crisis, no U.S. official has spoken harshly of the Taliban. Instead, it’s all hopefulness about the group turning over a new leaf. [Secretary of State] Blinken noted the Taliban’s commitment to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base, even though the Taliban have been in violation of their commitment to separate from al-Qaeda since the time they made it.

The liberal media is either silent about the administration's attitude toward the Taliban or they're puzzled, but they're far from being critical.

Which is strange since this is the same media that pummeled Trump for talking nice about North Korea's Kim Jung Un and Vladimir Putin. Surely the Taliban are as odious as Kim and more so than Putin.

It seems that the media standard for good and bad behavior is not what people do but who it is who does it. A Republican and a Democrat can perform the identical act and the Republican merits criticism and condemnation while the Democrat merits either silence, "understanding" or even praise.

Why is that?

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What was it that kept the thousands of desperate Afghans from pouring into the Kabul airport during the evacuation? Apparently it was in part a wall.

This is surprising since we were frequently informed during the Trump presidency that it's pointless to build a wall on our southern border to keep out the hordes of people who want to flood into the country because walls don't work.

Greece is building a wall to keep out refugees from Afghanistan and Hungary already has one which is working well. Israel built a wall to keep out Palestinian terrorists and it's been quite effective.

Whoever thinks walls don't work to keep people out (or in, as in the case of the awful Berlin wall) evidently hasn't thought about the matter very deeply.

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When a white cop shoots and kills an unarmed black person, especially if the victim is a woman, we undergo a season of national convulsion, trauma and introspection, but when a black cop shoots and kills an unarmed white woman the cop's identity is withheld, the media shows little to no interest, there are no protests, and the cop is quietly exonerated. Why the difference?

This is precisely what happened in the case of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a black Capitol police officer named Michael Byrd on January 6th.

Had Babbitt been black and the policeman white would the reaction of the media and the findings of the investigation have been the same? Would the investigation, including body cam footage as well as the officer's name have been kept secret from the public?

As it was, the media yawned, "anti-racism" activists and agitators busied themselves elsewhere, and the nation went about its business almost as if nothing happened. Why?

Why are we outraged, as in many cases we should be, at the death of unarmed blacks at the hands of white cops but serenely unconcerned when the races are reversed? Why are there no street murals of Ashli Babbitt? No demands to "Say her name"? No protests demanding justice for Ashli and the arrest of Officer Byrd?

One reason that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and received more votes in 2020 than any candidate in history except Joe Biden is because people are frustrated and angry with media double standards. To the extent that we are a divided nation it's to no small extent because much of the media has chosen to adopt the same role as the media played in the old Soviet Union, serving as a propaganda arm for one political party.

Why Assume the Universe has a Mathematical Explanation?

Perhaps the grandest pursuit of contemporary theoretical scientists is their search for a single theory that would explain all the laws of physics in a single equation. The quest is based on the assumption that there's a rational unity to the universe, that the universe can be completely explained mathematically.

Suppose, though, that the standard explanation for the origin of the universe, that it came into being in a massive expansion of mass/energy from a single infinitely dense point, is true. If so, why should scientists, or at least naturalistic scientists, assume that a mindless eruption of mass/energy out of empty space should obey the laws of mathematics? Where does the math that describes the world come from?

A fellow at Uncommon Descent quotes several very bright people on this question.

For example, there was this from Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner who wrote in 1960 that,

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

Wigner also wrote this:

certainly it is hard to believe that our [mathematical] reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.

In a 1952 letter to his friend Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein stated that the mathematical order of the cosmos and the fact that we can comprehend that order is something of a miracle:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world ... as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.

Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but “bared the miracles.”

The astonishing ability of human reason to comprehend the universe, the fact that the universe is explicable in terms of our mathematics, is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic view of the universe's origin. Why should scientists entertain the expectation and hope that that they'll eventually discover a single unified theory that explains everything? Why, on naturalism, should they assume that there's an underlying rational, mathematical structure to the cosmos?

The fact that there is such a structure makes sense on a theistic worldview but is simply a leap of blind faith on any naturalistic view.

As David Klinghoffer, writing at Evolution News, once put it:

Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless?

Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure?

I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers.

Whatever the case, it truly is remarkable that the universe lends itself to rational enquiry by intelligent minds. Is this just an enormously improbable coincidence or is Klinghoffer correct?

The Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day it's appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of them, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

Thin Blue Line

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Heather Mac Donald informs us that police chiefs and elected officials in several municipalities around the country - for example, San Francisco, CA, and Middletown and Manchester, CT - have prohibited police officers from wearing the "thin blue line" patch on their uniforms.

The patch honors fallen cops and recognizes the role police play in protecting society from anarchy, but detractors insist the symbol makes people of color feel unsafe.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if I lived in a minority community, but I have difficulty understanding why this is so. It seems somewhat like the ordinances in some communities prohibiting the display of the American flag in one's yard because it's said to be offensive to immigrants.

If people in minority neighborhoods harbor a fear of police it's hard to see how the patch would be more likely to trigger that fear than the uniform itself. African Americans in some cities doubtless have good reason to feel unsafe, but not because police are wearing a "thin blue line" patch.

Indeed, many of the officers who proudly wear that patch are themselves black and Hispanic.

Mac Donald points out that the overwhelming bulk of violence in cities like Chicago is not caused by the police but is in fact directed at both the police and innocent civilians by criminals. She writes:

Three days before the anti-patch vote, Officer Ella French was killed by a bullet to her head during a traffic stop. French and her two partners had pulled over an SUV for expired registration tags.

One of the SUV’s occupants, 21-year-old Emonte Morgan, allegedly fought with the officers and opened fire, killing French and critically wounding one of her partners with bullets to the brain, eye and shoulder.

Mr. Morgan was on probation for a recent robbery conviction, which a Chicago Tribune story characterizes as not a “serious” crime. His brother Eric, who was driving the SUV, was on probation for a theft conviction.

French and her partner were among the 78 people shot in Chicago over the Aug. 7-8 weekend, 11 of them fatally. Typical of the post- George Floyd urban mayhem, a child—this time a 4-year-old girl—was among the victims.

The carnage in Chicago is horrific. It's doubtless true that a soldier was safer in Afghanistan than are some residents of Chicago in their own neighborhoods:

Over Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, a 5-year-old girl, a 6-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were shot, along with 104 others. On July 1, a 1-month-old infant was critically wounded in a mass shooting.

Three young men emerged from a Jeep Cherokee spraying bullets in several directions. A 15-year-old and six other victims were also shot, along with the baby. Hours earlier, a 9-year-old girl was shot in the head.

Chicago is no outlier. In Minneapolis, six children 10 and younger have been shot since late April, including two girls, 6 and 9, who were killed; two boys, 10 and 3, both critically wounded; and an infant.

None of these Minneapolis children were shot by a cop; they were killed by criminals....

I'm sure that the parents of those children would've been deeply grateful had officers wearing the offending patches been present to prevent the terrible tragedies that took their little ones' lives. People in these neighborhoods have every reason to live in fear, but fear of police brutality is, or should be, pretty far down the list:

Police officers aren’t making minority neighborhoods unsafe; criminals are. The four victims of fatal police shootings in Chicago in 2021, all armed, are 0.7% of the 538 homicide victims year to date.

Meanwhile, police - white, black and Hispanic - are being murdered at unprecedented rates:

Ambush assaults against officers rose 91% in the year after George Floyd’s death. More officers have been feloniously killed so far in 2021—50, as of Aug. 18—than in all of 2020, 2019 and 2017.

Suspect resistance is up, which will increase the chance of officer use of lethal force. On Aug. 13, a Chicago police officer was seriously wounded while being dragged by a car fleeing a car stop.

It's little wonder that cops have stopped trying to enforce the law in many jurisdictions. They're pulling back from enforcing traffic ordinances and pedestrian stops. In California and elsewhere they've stopped making arrests for shoplifting.

The job is exceedingly dangerous and rules that prohibit any expression of pride in what a police officer does, like the rule banning the thin blue line patch, merely sends the message that their risks and efforts aren't appreciated by the communities they serve, or at least by the bureaucrats who employ them.

What is it that stands between society and anarchy if not the police? They really are the thin blue line that keeps our society from spiraling into chaos, and it seems ridiculous for elected officials and law enforcement bureaucrats whose lives are not in jeopardy every time they venture out of their comfortable homes to go to work, to prohibit their officers from acknowledging that fact.

Liberalism, Classic and Modern

To young people just beginning to think about politics some of the terminology they hear can be quite confusing. For example, it's frequently stated that today's political conservatives are in fact classical liberals, which seems confusing.

The confusion is compounded, perhaps, when one learns that modern liberals have little in common with classical liberals, but they have much in common with progressives and are essentially identical with them.

From time to time I've posted on VP a description of the differences between the political left and right and a discussion of where communists, fascists, conservatives, socialists and liberals all fall on the political spectrum, but Jonah Goldberg in his excellent and very informative 2007 book Liberal Fascism offers another way to parse the difference between classical liberals, progressives, conservatives and modern liberals.

He writes:

In the past "liberalism" had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state.

This is what's called "classical" liberalism and today's conservatives are called that because they wish to return to or "conserve" this classical idea of human liberty. Small government and maximum individual freedom consistent with a healthy community.

Goldberg continues:

The progressives, led by [John] Dewey (1859-1952), subtly changed the meaning of this term...[construing it instead] as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and faiths [particularly Christian faith and dogma].

For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a "constructive" citizen.

Progressivism arose in the early decades of the 20th century and was especially influential in the administration of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945). Progressives believe that problems are best addressed by a strong federal government, i.e. the state.

For this reason individual liberty should give way to the power of the state and that the most efficient government is one in which power is centralized in the federal bureaucracy, staffed by "experts."

Since progressives favor a powerful central government or state they're often called "statists."

An example of what progressives believed the state could and should do is outlined in Roosevelt's "second Bill of Rights" (1944) in which he declared that the state must provide,

a "new basis of security and prosperity," the right to "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education."

This second Bill of Rights remains, as Goldberg, says, "the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day."

To achieve all this it's necessary that the state must expand in size and power and individual freedoms must therefore diminish. The government must become a national "nanny," providing citizens with life's necessities and protecting them from life's vicissitudes.

It's a view satirized in this short video, the first episode in a series of five:

This is not the role that classical liberals envisioned for government, but it is the role that modern liberals (progressives) believe government should fill.

Conservatives, are by nature wary of "big government." President Ronald Reagan, a conservative, famously quipped that "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Conservatives believe that the more government grows - the more authority it's granted over an individual's ability to make his/her own decisions - the more bureaucratic, unresponsive, expensive and oppressive it becomes.

In sum, then, conservatives are in many ways very much like classical liberals whereas contemporary liberals, or progressives, are statists and hold views about the role of government quite the opposite of the classical liberals of the Enlightenment.

Is the Brain a Transducer?

Joseph Epstein has an article in Discover Magazine in which he posits that the brain acts like a transducer which on occassion connects the physical world of our everyday existence with a completely different world that's otherwise closed off to us.

This is rather remarkable because Epstein is a materialist and for him to acknowledge the possibility of another world, a realm beyond the physical, is quite a concession. Nevertheless, he finds the evidence suggestive.

A transducer is simply a device which converts energy from one form to another. A microphone which converts sound energy to electricity and the speakers which convert electricity back to sound are both transducers. Our sense organs likewise are transducers, and Epstein thinks the brain may be as well.

He asks us to consider this possibility on the basis of some very strange phenomena recorded by neuroscientists. He gives us some examples in this excerpt:

A 2020 study summarizing the observations of 124 caregivers of dementia patients, concluded that in "more than 80 percent of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers of the lucid episode" and that "[the] majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode."

The periods of lucidity typically lasted 30 to 60 minutes.

Some of the historical reports of lucid episodes are truly extraordinary.

Here is one of many cases reported by the German biologist Michael Nahm and his colleagues in 2012:

In a case published in 1822, a boy at the age of 6 had fallen on a nail that penetrated his forehead. He slowly developed increasing headaches and mental disturbances. At the age of 17, he was in constant pain, extremely melancholic, and starting to lose his memory. He fantasized, blinked continuously, and looked for hours at particular objects…. He remained in the hospital in this state for 18 days.

On the morning of the 19th day, he suddenly left his bed and appeared very bright, claiming he was free of all pain and feelings of sickness…. A quarter of an hour after the attending physician left him, he fell unconscious and died within a few minutes.

The front part of his brain contained two pus-filled tissue bags the size of a hen’s egg (Pfeufer, 1822)….

And another:

Haig (2007) reported the case of a young man dying of lung cancer that had spread to his brain. Toward the end of his life, a brain scan showed little brain tissue left, the metastasized tumors having not simply pushed aside normal brain tissue but actually destroyed and replaced it. In the days before his death, he lost all ability to speak or move.

According to a nurse and his wife, however, an hour before he died, he woke up and said good-bye to his family, speaking with them for about five minutes before losing consciousness again and dying.

If the brain is a self-contained information processor, how can we explain the sudden return of lucidity when the brain is severely damaged?

What if the variability is not caused by changes in processing power in the brain but rather by transduction effects? By changes occurring not in our local universe but in the [Other World]? Or by minor changes occurring at the point of connection? Or by changes occurring in brain structures that are essential to signal transfers?

Experiences of this sort were first summarized in a 1997 paper by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, later expanded into a book called Mindsight (1999). The paper and book describe the experiences of 14 people who were blind from birth and who had near-death experiences (NDEs), some of which included content that appeared to be visual in nature.

Soon after Vicki U. was in a near-fatal car accident at age 22, she remembered "seeing" a male physician and a woman from above in the emergency room, and she "saw" them working on a body. Said Vicki:

I knew it was me.... I was quite tall and thin at that point. And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that I was up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird. What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be me. Am I dead?"

Vicki had never had a visual experience before her NDE, and, according to the researchers, did not even "understand the nature of light." While near death, she also claimed to have been flooded with information about math and science. Said Vicki:

I all of a sudden understood intuitively almost [all] things about calculus, and about the way planets were made. And I don't know anything about that.... I felt there was nothing I didn't know.

About six weeks ago I posted a video of Vicki's story which is even more strange than Epstein suggests. Here it is:

Shakespeare has Hamlet say that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our philosophy. There may well be much more to ultimate reality than we assume. We may be a bit like the boy in the bubble in the movie The Truman Show who's surrounded by a world of which he's completely oblivious.

In any case, it seems that with every passing year science is making it increasingly harder to think that the physical, material world apprehended by our five senses is all that there is.