Deliver Them from Evil

When the Taliban were closing in on Kabul Afghanistan's president absconded with his family and his wealth. Not so the courageous president of Ukraine, Volodomyr Zelensky. He and many members of his administration and Parliament are not just ordering the Ukrainian people to fight, they're fighting alongside them in the streets even though Zelensky knows he's marked for death by Vladimir Putin.

When the Americans offered to spirit Zelensky out of Ukraine he responded that what he needed was ammunition, not a ride.

The stories of incredible courage coming out of Ukraine are as heart-breaking as they are inspiring. A Ukrainian soldier blew himself up on a bridge to slow the Russian advance.

Thirteen Ukrainians on an island in the Black Sea refused to surrender to a Russian warship and were all killed in the subsequent bombardment (although see here).

Middle-aged women are taking up rifles in Kyiv to fight the Russians in the streets. Unarmed citizens are standing in front of tanks to block their advance.

The stories of heroism are everywhere in Ukraine.

In the Lord's prayer is the petition to God to "deliver us from evil." May God deliver the brave Ukrainians from the evil that has come upon them, delivered by a man who will doubtless go down in history as one of the most evil European leaders of the last one hundred years.

Ukraine's Resistance

Television news reporting on the war in Ukraine has been a bit short on the details of the fighting. Strategy Page, however, has an extended column on the war in Ukraine, and one part provides some particularly interesting insight into what's going on outside Kyiv.

This is an excerpt from their column dated February 25th:

As expected, not a lot of the nearly 200,000 Russian troops now near the Ukraine borders actually entered Ukraine. All, or most appeared to be volunteers, rather than the one-year conscripts that comprise half the strength of the armed forces. Few of the conscripts and even fewer of their parents are eager for the conscripts to be fighting neighbors.

Russian airborne forces managed to take an airport ten kilometers outside Kyiv. Efforts to use that airport to bring in additional troops were disrupted by the Ukrainian use of Stinger portable anti-aircraft missiles as well as rifle and machine-gun fire at low flying aircraft.

The airport was quickly attacked by a Ukrainian army rapid reaction force organized and trained for retaking key locations seized by Russian airborne forces.

While the area around the airport was soon surrounded by regular reservists and armed volunteers, the Rapid Reaction unit retook the airport before the Russians could use larger transport aircraft to bring in more troops. [Today's news brings word that the Ukrainians have shot down at least two Russian transport planes, each capable of transporting up to 150 troops].

Russia appears to have underestimated the preparations Ukraine has made since 2014 to deal with this kind of invasion. In addition to 150 local defense units (of at least battalion size [400-800 troops]) arrangements were made to quickly arm, train and deploy volunteers, which includes all physically able males aged 16 to 60.

The regular army obtained more portable anti-aircraft weapons and trained special units to deal with any Russians that seized key objectives. All those armed Ukrainians were more of an obstacle than the Russians expected.

The invaders are using about a dozen main roads from the border to objectives inside Ukraine. Within hours all those roads were under fire from the armed locals. Even convoys with numerous armed escorts were fired on and the Russians did not have enough troops to clear the roads of armed hostiles.

Some convoys were halted by roadblocks, and at least one Russian reconnaissance platoon was captured.

While the Russians control most Ukrainian airspace and coastal waters, land areas remain under Ukrainian control. An amphibious assault on the major Black Sea port of Odessa failed and most ground advances appear to have stalled as well.

The Ukrainian newspaper, The Kyiv Independent, reports that as of February 26th the Russians have lost 3500 soldiers, 102 tanks, 536 armored vehicles, 14 fighter jets, and 8 helicopters.

I don't know how trustworthy those numbers are, but if they're in the ballpark it seems that Vladimir Putin is so far paying a steep price for his decision to invade Ukraine.

Mystifying Policy

As readers of Viewpoint can discern, I'm not a fan of President Biden. Now's not the time to get into the reasons, but I did hope that he would do all he could to make war in Ukraine such an ugly prospect for Vladimir Putin that the Russian president would find some way to save face and back out.

I thought that the best way to do this was to arm the Ukrainians with such an arsenal of defensive weapons that Mr. Putin would count the cost and choose not to invade. I have to say that Mr. Biden has deeply disappointed. However much he equipped the Ukrainian military, and that seems to be a classified secret, his use of sanctions is mystifying.

He has sanctioned several big Russian banks which means that the Russian people, already poor, will be made a bit poorer, but he has declined to sanction Mr. Putin himself, and worse, he has declined to sanction Russia's oil and gas industry.

Even as he's ostensibly trying to cripple Russia's economy we and our NATO allies are still buying Russian fossil fuels! Gas and oil make up 50% of the Russian economy, but Mr. Biden has decided that neither Americans nor Europeans are willing to pay $4.00 or $5.00 a gallon for gasoline in order to help the Ukrainian people.

Of course, had he not turned us from being a net exporter of fuel to being a net importer reliant on Russian petroleum for 10% of our fuel, we'd still be energy independent, as we were under Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden wouldn't be in the ridiculous position of allowing Russia to continue to sell its chief export while also seeking to stifle the Russian economy.

Nor is it clear that the sanctions Mr. Biden unveiled on Thursday will do much to help the Ukrainian people in any case. He admitted as much himself when he said that we'll have to wait a month or so to see if they're working.

The Ukrainian people don't have a month to sit around waiting to see how Mr. Putin's Russia is holding up under Mr. Biden's sanctions. I'm sure they'd like a bit more help this afternoon rather than next month.

I also don't know why, if the sanctions won't bite for a month, they weren't imposed a month ago. Nor is it clear why they were imposed at all if, as Mr. Biden acknowledged, they weren't intended, contra Vice-President Harris, to be a deterrent.

If they weren't a deterrent then they're just punishment, but why not save thousands of lives and do something before Russia launched its invasion to perhaps make them reconsider?

I'm not a military expert nor am I a statesman steeped in international finance, but none of what President Biden has done in Ukraine, just like none of what he did in the Afghanistan pullout, nor what he's doing on our southern border, makes any sense to me.

I don't think it makes any sense to many other people either, least of all the Ukrainians.

Ukraine

Ukraine had been part of the old Soviet Union until the dissolution of the Union that occurred from 1988 to 1991. As part of the U.S.S.R. some 1800 nuclear weapons were situated on Ukrainian soil, and when the Soviet Union disbanded Ukraine became a sovereign nation in possession of all those nukes.

These weapons included short-range tactical missiles and air-launched cruise missiles. The U.S. wanted to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, so in 1994 The U.S., U.K. and Russia signed an agreement in Budapest to guarantee Ukraine that their sovereignty would be protected if they gave up their nuclear weapons, which they did, returning them all to Russia by 1996.

In 2014 Vladimir Putin abrogated the Budapest agreement by invading Crimea, a part of Ukraine. The Obama administration responded by sending the Ukrainians blankets when they needed weapons with which to defend themselves.

Now the Russians want all of Ukraine back and have launched an attack against the rest of the country. This is an historic betrayal on the part of Russia, but the question for Americans is what we will do this time to help Ukraine. So far, President Biden has announced only sanctions against Russia, but what the Ukrainians need are munitions.

To fail once again, to refuse weaponry and other resources to Ukraine now, would be another betrayal on our part of the Budapest memorandum. Mr. Biden has already betrayed Afghanistan, and it would be a terrible thing if he compounded this stain on our national reputation by also abandoning Ukraine.

Perhaps we have indeed been quietly sending Ukraine the resources they need with which to resist the Russians. Mr. Biden hasn't said, but one thing is clear: if we haven't a lot of countries are going to take some lessons from this.

Taiwan and South Korea are going to wonder how steadfast the U.S. will be in honoring the security agreements we have with them.

Countries like North Korea and Iran are going to justify continuing their nuclear programs by pointing to what happened to Ukraine when they gave up their nukes. Other nations like Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan are going to want to obtain their own nuclear deterrents if they have reason to conclude that the U.S. is not a dependable ally.

By trying to limit nuclear devices and being unable or unwilling to enforce the security guarantees made to Ukraine, we've actually made it more likely, apparently, that those weapons will proliferate.

America is at what scholars call an inflection point. It falls to Mr. Biden to demonstrate to the world that we are not, to paraphrase one letter writer to the Wall Street Journal, a soft, self-obsessed consumer society whose primary concerns are the weather a few hundred years hence, transgender bathrooms, and systemic racism. We must demonstrate that we really do consider ourselves bound by our commitments and that our guarantees really are reliable.

This emphatically does not mean that we should put troops in Ukraine or go to war with Russia, but it does mean that we should do everything else in our power, including arming Ukraine, to dissuade Russia from doing what Putin obviously wants to do. It's still not too late.

China is doubtless watching to see what we'll do, and if we waver, if we shrink from the challenge, Taiwan will surely be next to suffer.

Mr. Biden's Silly Question

In his speech announcing the sanctions that the U.S. and its allies will be imposing on Russia for their incursion into eastern Ukraine President Biden asked, "Who in the Lord's name does Putin think gives him the right?" The right, that is, to invade another country:

This is, unfortunately, a very silly thing for our president to have said. In a secular world there are no rights except what the strong deign to grant to the weak. In the world of Vladimir Putin, might makes right. Mr. Putin may well answer Mr. Biden with the riposte that he gives himself the right, and what would our secular leaders have to say in reply?

They might respond that Mr. Putin is violating agreements and U.N. rules and whatnot, but Mr. Putin would doubtless reply, "So what?" Why can't he break those agreements if he has the power to do so? Who will hold him accountable?

The fact is we live in a secular world, a world in which there's thought to be no relevant transcendent ground for human or legal rights. If God exists in this secular world, He doesn't matter. Only what happens in this world matters. Indeed, that's the meaning of the word secular.

In such a world the state becomes the arbiter of rights and the stronger states get to impose their will on the weaker. To do so isn't "wrong," it just is. We may not like it, but unless we believe rights, like the right not to be invaded by another country, are granted by God, we just have to recognize that there's really no use asking the question that Mr. Biden asked.

To someone like Mr. Putin the question is risible. He has stolen millions from the Russian people and murdered hundreds of his countrymen along his road to power. He's not likely to be impressed by President Biden's implicit protest that he had no right to invade Ukraine.

Right and wrong, human rights, ultimately reduce to a question of who has the power. Only if there's a God who grants people rights and holds accountable those who violate them can it be otherwise.

I'm reminded of a passage in a book by the mathematician David Berlinski. The book is titled The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions and in it Berlinski describes a scene in the early years of WWII. An elderly Jew is being made to dig his own grave while an SS officer stands by holding a rifle. At length the Jew stands erect, faces the German, looks him in the eyes and says, "God is watching what you are doing." With that the SS officer shot him dead.

Berlinski goes on to say that,

what that officer did not believe, what Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

And I doubt that Putin believes it either.

Quitting Tik Tok, Reading Books

The Federalist's Zsanna Bodor offers some hopeful news amidst these grim times. According to Ms. Bodor Gen Zers are leaving social media and turning to, of all things, reading books!

She writes that, "Personalities like Timothée Chalamet, Kaia Gerber, and YouTube sensation Emma Chamberlain have promoted reading as a way to relax, learn, and escape the toxic world of social media."

I have no idea who these people are, but if they're promoting books instead of mindlessly grazing through the various social media sites, they have something to say that's worth listening to. Bodor goes on to tell us that,

In her YouTube video, titled “Reading Makes You Hot,” which has more than 3.8 million views, Chamberlain describes how reading alleviates her anxiety and depression. She explains, “Reading is harmless. Going on social media is not harmless. It makes you sad, it makes you compare yourself to other people, it makes you depressed.”

Since this video was released, Chamberlain has quit TikTok entirely and limited her Instagram usage, citing mental health reasons.

Millions of teens and young adults can relate to Chamberlain’s experience, and research has found a definite causal relationship between social media and depression. A study conducted by the University of Arkansas found that young adults who spent more than 300 minutes a day on social media platforms were “2.8 times as likely to become depressed within six months” than those who spent 120 minutes or less on social media.

According to Nicholas Carr’s bestselling book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the exhaustion many users experience after engaging with social media stems from the fact that “our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness — even, at times, fear — magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young.”

Thus, trying to relax through social media is a contradiction of terms. A social media user is not only subject to the myriad auditory, visual, and somatosensory cues put forth by the medium (think of TikTok’s addictive combination of music, fast-paced video content, and “swiping up” to see more), but is also perpetually conscious of his own status and social perception.

In a virtual world governed by likes and dislikes, the danger of being ignored or even “canceled” is an ever-present threat.

There's much more at the link on Bodor's view of the harm social media is doing to our young people's brains and bodies, and it's all worth taking the time to read. Here's one excerpt:

Reading comprehension has been declining in America for years, and lockdowns only exacerbated the situation. But Carr reassures us that rewiring your brain is possible. With enough training, those skills of deep concentration and focus can be relearned, or developed for the first time.

Just make sure to hide your smartphone while you practice. A 2017 study at the University of Texas found that students whose phones were in plain sight performed more poorly on a series of tests than students who left their phones in a bag or in a different room altogether. “As the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases,” explained Adrian Ward, one of the study’s authors.

In her last section she says this:

If you want to incorporate leisure reading into your routine, classical literature is a great place to start. When you read the classics, you interact with the ideas of the greatest minds in human history.

Spencer Baum declares classical literature “essential medicine in the age of social media.” He explains, “When you read Melville (or Hugo or Austen or Tolstoy or Plato or Shakespeare) you are sharing headspace with someone who is much better at slow, deep, meaningful thinking than you are because they’ve never lived in the shallows like you do.”

I agree. Reading the classics is not easy, it takes time and effort, but the rewards make the effort worth it.

I've acknowledged in other posts that I'm very reluctant to recommend particular books to people because what appeals to me usually doesn't appeal to others, but if I were asked what my favorite classical novels are, I'd probably list the following (although there are a lot of others that are really hard to leave off the list.):

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• 1984 by George Orwell

They're all wonderful, albeit for different reasons, but none of them are easy reads. If you tackle any of them, though, and persevere to the end, you will have undergone an intellectual growth spurt.

No Ordinary People

C.S. Lewis, the author of The Narnia Chronicles among many other works, delivered a sermon/lecture in 1942 titled The Weight of Glory in which he concluded with words that, though they were delivered to a Christian audience and have a Christian resonance, might be meditated upon with profit by anyone of any metaphysical persuasion.

C.S. Lewis 1898-1963

Our society would certainly be better off if all of us, even those who disagree with Lewis' religious beliefs, nevertheless lived as if what he says here is true:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit— immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner....

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

If we take Lewis' words seriously and look at others not as merely transient clumps of mortal flesh but as creatures whose destiny it is to exist forever, one way or another, it certainly does alter, or should alter, how we view them and how we act toward them.

Greenland's Ice

One of the concerns with global warming is the rise in sea levels due to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. In an article at the Wall Street Journal (paywall), New York University theoretical physicist Steven Koonin argues that the situation is not nearly as dire as many make it out to be.

Here's his lede:

One of the most sacred tenets of climate alarmism is that Greenland’s vast ice sheet is shrinking ever more rapidly because of human-induced climate change. The media and politicians warn constantly of rising sea levels that would swamp coastlines from Florida to Bangladesh. A typical headline: “Greenland ice sheet on course to lose ice at fastest rate in 12,000 years.”

With an area of 660,000 square miles and a thickness up to 1.9 miles, Greenland’s ice sheet certainly deserves attention. Its shrinking has been a major cause of recent sea-level rise, but as is often the case in climate science, the data tell quite a different story from the media coverage and the political laments.

Referring to the following chart, Koonin declares that the amount of ice Greenland has lost since 1900 averages about 110 billion tons per year, which sounds like a lot but which has resulted in a rise in sea level of about one fifth the thickness of a dime.

On the other hand, the IPCC projects a more dramatic rise over the next 80 years:

In contrast, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that for the most likely course of greenhouse-gas emissions in the 21st century, the average annual ice loss would be somewhat larger than the peak values shown in the graph.

That would cause sea level to rise by 3 inches by the end of this century, and if losses were to continue at that rate, it would take about 10,000 years for all the ice to disappear, causing sea level to rise more than 20 feet.

However, according to Koonin, the ice melt is not increasing steadily each year. The graph shows that it's fluctuating, and in fact the ice loss today is not significantly larger than it was in the 1930s when human influences made much less of an impact.

"Moreover," he notes, "the annual loss of ice has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm."

His takeaway is this:

While a warming globe might eventually be the dominant cause of Greenland’s shrinking ice, natural cycles in temperatures and currents in the North Atlantic that extend for decades have been a much more important influence since 1900.

Those cycles, together with the recent slowdown, make it plausible that the next few decades will see a further, perhaps dramatic slowing of ice loss.

That would be inconsistent with the IPCC’s projection and wouldn’t at all support the media’s exaggerations.

For my part, I wonder why a gradual loss of ice in Greenland would be catastrophic. To be sure some coastal areas and islands may be rendered uninhabitable by a rise in sea levels of three inches, but if the rise was gradual enough many areas would be able to adjust.

Just as importantly, vast tracts of land in Greenland (and Siberia) would become available for human and wildlife habitation and resource mining. The loss of ice cover could well be a boon to humanity, so why do we assume that it would necessarily be a disaster?

Our Existential Predicament

My classes recently spent some time talking about the view of life called existentialism, so I thought it might not be out of place to offer a little mood music here on VP to perhaps nudge us toward reflection upon what's sometimes referred to as our "existential predicament."

The question this song by the group Kansas raises is, if it's true that all we are is dust in the wind what meaning or point is there to our lives?

The great 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer perceived the problem more clearly than most when he noted that, "Unless the point of life is to suffer, there is no point," and this depressingly droll observation: "Life is bad today, tomorrow will be worse, until we die," and, "Life is a task, the task of staying alive and staving off boredom." The world, for Schopenhauer, is a "penal colony" in which "happiness is measured by the absence of suffering."

He titled the book from which these quotes are taken, Studies in Pessimism. It's not hard to see why.

Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chair at Duke University, frames the problem of our predicament succinctly when he writes: "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."

Bertrand Russell put the same dispiriting thought this way:

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.

What these thinkers are urging us to recognize is that death annihilates all, it's the big eraser, obliterating everything we do and rendering our existence on the planet a pointless exercise in absurdity.

Those who insist on the one hand that death is the end of our existence and on the other that there can nevertheless be some purpose to our lives are a bit like a prisoner who insists on making his bed and brushing his teeth before accompanying the executioner to the scaffold.

At least that's how many who hold to a naturalistic worldview, as do all three of the philosophers quoted above, see life, and they're probably correct to do so if indeed death really is a personal annihilation. Unless what we do matters forever it's hard to see how it matters at all.

Maybe, though, naturalism is wrong and what we do in this life does matter forever. If so, that would change everything.

Topoisomerase

One of the amazing discoveries in biology in the last couple of decades is the discovery in the cells of living things dozens of incredibly complex molecular machines. One such machine is a protein named topoisomerase II. Topoisomerase II is an enzyme, that is, it's a protein that facilitates some process in the cell, and Casey Luskin at Evolution News describes what this amazing enzyme does:

The topoisomerase II enzyme is designed to untangle knots and supercoils in DNA strands which arise during replication and transcription. It does this by grabbing two tangled DNA segments, holding one steady while it breaks the other segment in two, and then passing the first segment through the break.

The second segment is then reconnected, and the two DNA segments are released, having been successfully untangled. Without topoisomerases, chromosomes would become an impossible mess, making DNA replication, transcription, and cell duplication impossible.

This sounds relatively simple, perhaps, but as the video below illustrates, it's anything but simple. It's an extremely complex mechanism and an extremely complex process, and here's an important point to keep in mind: The topoisomerase enzyme is necessary for DNA to function, but DNA produces the enzyme.

This is an intractable problem for any theory of the origin of life based on unguided, mindless processes. DNA can't function until there are topoisomerase enzymes, but the enzymes can't be produced until the DNA functions. How did such a system evolve by chance?

Darwinian evolutionists would probably argue that this process evolved gradually over millions of years, but how could evolution even get started if primitive strands of DNA got knotted up before they could do anything?

Do biologists think that the tangle problem only arose in DNA after the topoisomerase enzyme had evolved to fix it? If so, what did the enzyme do before DNA developed tangles, and how did it evolve just the right structure to perform a function for which there was no need?

Another aspect of this astonishing system is that somehow the topoisomerase is able to find the tangles on the DNA and manipulate the DNA into the enzyme in order to untangle it. How did that ability come about as a result of purposeless, random processes?

Anyway, watch the video and see what you think:

It takes a lot of faith in blind chance to think that this system could evolve naturalistically, and this is just one of dozens, possibly hundreds of molecular machines that are inexplicable in terms of genetic mutation and natural selection. How do mindless undirected accidents produce something like this?

I'm reminded of the words of biologist Francis Crick who said that "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." In other words, biologists must just keep telling themselves that seemingly impossible things happen all the time.

Belief in Darwinian evolution really is a testament to the power of faith in a naturalistic worldview on the part of those who are committed to that worldview.

The African Slave Trade

This being Black History Month an article by Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, seems especially relevant. It's a very important and interesting article, written a couple of years for The Federalist.

In his column, Jacobs informed us that black Africans are still being bought and sold by slavers, but you may have been unaware of this human rights atrocity because there's very little interest in doing anything about it in Western nations or the press.

Perhaps Western indifference is due to the fact that the perpetrators are mostly black or Arab Muslims, a favored class among Western media liberals due to their status as an historically "oppressed" group, and the victims of this odious trafficking are largely Christian, and thus not deemed worthy of the attention of our secular media.

If Israelis were selling Palestinians into bondage, or white South Africans were once again imposing apartheid on blacks, it'd be all we'd be hearing from our media megaphones, but Arab Muslims enslaving black Christians elicits little more than a yawn from our "compassionate" elites. They're evidently too preoccupied with climate change and the January 6, 2021 riot to concern themselves with genuine human rights atrocities.

Here are a few excerpts from Jacobs' article:

Every day across the African continent, black men, women and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.

For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.

Americans first heard about Islamist slave raids in Nigeria when Michelle Obama made it a cause célèbre with her “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag, but interest quickly faded, and Boko Haram continued to kidnap hundreds of Christian girls into jihad slavery. So cruel are the events of their captivity that some girls prefer death as suicide bombers to the life of a slave.

Today, Fulani Muslim herdsmen raid Christian villages, massacring their inhabitants. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, has done relatively little to stop the assaults, even in the face of demands for action from the White House.

In Algeria, sub-Saharan Africans fleeing violence and poverty are enslaved by Algerian Arabs as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved in Algeria.

Migrant women and children of both sexes risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor.

The GSI estimates as many as 48,000 migrants are enslaved in Libya, with survivors reporting torture and sexual slavery.

Jacobs goes on to discuss two factors impeding any effective action that might eliminate this horrific practice, or at least diminish it. You can read about these and more of what Jacobs has to say about this modern plague at the link, and although his article was written in 2019, there's little indication that much has changed since then.

Oppressed blacks are only of interest to our elites when the oppressors are white.

Watergate Redux

In what should be the biggest domestic story of the year Special Counsel John Durham has produced hard evidence of what everyone has known but couldn't prove - the Clinton campaign illegally hacked into Donald Trump's computers, even after he was elected president, in an effort to fabricate a connection between him and Russia that would destroy his presidency.

This isn't quite the same as the president's men breaking into the offices of the DNC at the Watergate hotel in the early 70s, but it's very close.

Jeff Mordock of The Washington Times has the story:

Special counsel John Durham alleged in a court filing Saturday that the Clinton campaign paid for a tech company to hack servers in former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House to gather derogatory information on him during the 2016 campaign and while he was president.

In the filing, Mr. Durham says the government has evidence that an unnamed tech executive “exploited” an arrangement with the government to monitor Mr. Trump’s internet traffic at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment, the executive office of the president and an unnamed healthcare provider.

The tech executive was only identified in court filings as “Tech Executive-1”. In previous filings by Mr. Durham, “Tech Executive-1” referred to Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and internet data expert.

“Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the [Executive Office of the President] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump,” Mr. Durham writes.

Evidently, Mr. Trump was correct when he alleged repeatedly during the campaign and his early presidency that his campaign had been spied upon. The media, which scoffed at the allegations, has once again been shown to be embarrassingly unreliable.

I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem that hacking private, and perhaps top secret, computer info for the purposes of making it difficult, if not impossible, for the president to fulfill his constitutional duties should be a crime and should warrant prison terms similar to those meted out to the Watergate conspirators.

And it's not just Mr. Joffe who's in trouble. Whoever put him up top this and whoever knew about it in the Clinton campaign is also not sleeping well these days. One such miscreant appears to be a lawyer named Michael Sussman. Among other things,

Mr. Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI about a now-debunked claim of a secret communication channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank. He has pleaded not guilty, [but] Saturday’s filing alleges that Mr. Sussmann worked with a technology executive, an internet company and the Clinton campaign to assemble and convey the allegations to the FBI.

Mr. Durham said that billing records show that Mr. Sussmann “repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign” for his work on Russian bank allegations.

The fact that Sussman has been found to have billed the Clinton campaign for his work gives the lie to his earlier insistence that he was spying on Trump on his own. Martha Stewart, of all people, went to jail for five months for lying to federal investigators. Sussman might be looking at much more time than that.

In July 2016, Mr. Sussmann, the tech executive [Joffe] and “U.S. investigative firm” hired by “Law Firm 1” on behalf of the Clinton campaign worked with researchers at Internet companies to put together data and white papers.

Mr. Durham said the tech executive used the researchers to “mine internet data” to establish “an inference” and “narrative” tying Mr. Trump to Russia.

Mr. Durham also alleged that Mr. Sussmann relied on [internet] traffic from Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s apartment building and the health care provider to give the FBI additional allegations about Mr. Trump.

Those allegations included claims that Mr. Trump and his associates were using rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations, Mr. Durham wrote. The special counsel said he found no support for this allegation.

The rest of Mr. Mordock's article is a bit too complex to explain in detail in a VP post, but the gravamen of the piece is that it appears that the Special Counsel has dispositive evidence that several people were illegally spying on the President of the United States on behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign which funded their efforts to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.

This means that there will almost certainly be others in the campaign who must've known what was going on, who were actively involved in the criminality, and who will eventually be charged. The big question is, did Hillary herself know about it and did she give the green light to what Donald Trump and others are labeling acts of "treason."

It's hard to believe that underlings would've done this without her approval, but the Clintons have a long history of being able to evade legal sanction for shady behavior - for example, the case of Ms. Clinton's use of an unprotected personal computer to conduct offical state department business and the subsequent "wiping" of the hard drive to delete evidence - so we'll see.

But whether Hillary is prosecuted or not, it's clear that others in her circle will be. It'd be helpful if media outlets other than Fox News and talk radio showed some interest in this. They certainly would if it had been the Trump campaign caught hacking into President Biden's computer traffic.

Not to be Taken Seriously

The Washington Free Beacon informs us that according to Johns Hopkins University 503,804 Americans have died from COVID since President Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021. That is almost 100,000 more than the number of Americans who died from COVID under former president Donald Trump.

On average, more than 1,300 Americans have died from COVID every day that Mr. Biden has been president.

I for one am not going to blame these deaths on the president. There's not much he could've done to prevent them.

Nevertheless, in October 2020, when roughly 200,000 Americans had died from COVID, then-candidate Biden declared that any leader who presided over that many deaths "should not remain as president of the United States of America."

So, over twice the number of Americans have died since Mr. Biden unfairly blamed 200,000 deaths on Mr. Trump. Moreover, Mr. Biden has had at his disposal to fight the virus vaccines developed under Mr. Trump's direction which Mr. Trump did not have.

If Mr. Trump did not deserve to be president, does Mr. Biden? If Mr. Trump was actually responsible for these deaths, as Mr. Biden implied, how much more should Mr. Biden hold himself to account for over twice the number of deaths?

Of course, the media also are culpable. If things were reversed, had Mr. Trump said about someone what Mr. Biden said about him, the media would be harassing every administration spokesperson who dared to show his or her face in public demanding that Mr. Trump live up to his own standard and resign.

As it is our supine media can't be bothered to hold Mr. Biden accountable for anything, fixated as they are on the only thing they can talk about which doesn't make Mr. Biden look bad, the January 6th riots.

It's hard not to conclude from this that neither the president nor the progressive media are to be taken seriously by serious people.

Flores' Complaint

Former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores is suing the NFL, claiming it's racist because the percentage of black head coaches and front office personnel does not approximate the percentage of players in the league.

Since 70 percent of NFL players are black, and anywhere between 3 percent and 34 percent of coaches and executive personnel are black, Flores believes that constitutes prima facie evidence that the league is “racially segregated.”

But if an underrepresentation by blacks in the head coaching ranks and management is evidence of racism, doesn't it follow that an underrepresentation of whites on the playing field is also evidence of racism? Shouldn't the numbers of white and Hispanic players be proportional to their numbers in the general population?

If the answer is that sports are a meritocracy and blacks are over-represented on the playing field because they've demonstrated superior ability in the skills required to play the game, why can't the same argument be made for the higher percentage of whites in coaching and management?

Why should performance on the field be a meritocracy but the grueling, pressure-packed work of being a head coach be subject to racial quotas?

Moreover, since head coaches are usually hired out of the assistant coaching ranks, Flores himself has contributed to the problem he deplores since 75% of the assistant coaches he hired while coaching the Dolphins were white.

Perhaps the NFL needs to be more punctilious in striving for racial equity, but why stop at racial equity? Why not consider gender equity as well? Is it not overwhelming evidence of sexism that NFL coaches and players are 100% male? Why should that be tolerated?

All of these questions and others have been raised by numerous observers, including Jake Bequette at The Federalist.

Flores seems miffed that he was fired by the Dolphins who made him a millionaire for his services. It might be worth mentioning, by the way, that the man who fired him, general manager Chris Grier, is himself black. In fact, as The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley, who I suppose I should note, though I shouldn't have to, is also black, notes (paywall) that:

It’s certainly possible that the Dolphins organization is guilty of discriminatory hiring practices. But is it plausible? “Dolphins owner Stephen Ross ran the ‘blackest’ organization in the NFL,” sportswriter Jason Whitlock observed in a recent column. “At one time, his head coach, general manager, assistant general manager, defensive coordinator, and several members of his ownership group were all black.”

At what point did Mr. Ross become a bigot? When he decided to fire Brian Flores?

Bequette asserts that the racial disparity that Flores' is upset about results, at least in part, from the league's imposition of the "Rooney Rule," which requires teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy:

The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002.

A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.

Riley also makes the point that, if Flores' goal is to get more blacks hired as head coaches then his lawsuit is surely counterproductive:

In a statement released by his lawyers, Mr. Flores said the lawsuit is not about “my personal goals.” Rather, “my sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”

Maybe, but the reality is that lawsuits such as this one could hamper efforts to increase the number of black coaches in the NFL. Teams might be less likely to hire someone they can’t fire without being labeled racist.

A similar phenomenon played out in faculty hiring at colleges and universities after affirmative action was implemented in the 1970s. Schools were reluctant to hire a professor who might not make tenure, lest they be accused of discrimination and face expensive lawsuits and unfavorable press.

Unlike among white academics, only the sure things got job offers, which reduced the overall number of minority faculty hires.

Like others who invoke “systemic racism,” Mr. Flores and his supporters point to statistical disparities as proof of discrimination, and progressives, both black and white nod in agreement, but why assume that disparity is prima facie proof of racism? Why not assume that there are other factors involved, like interpersonal skills, education, etc.

Riley adds that,

Progressive icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent 27 years on the Supreme Court while hiring only one black law clerk. Was she guilty of discrimination, or was she simply choosing from a pool of candidates that, for whatever reason, included relatively few blacks?

Head coaches in the NFL more recently have tended to follow a certain career path. An insightful article last month by the sportswriter Shalise Manza Young noted that, since 2016, three-quarters of the 40 head coaches hired had worked as offensive coordinators. In 2021 only seven of the league’s 33 offensive coordinators were black.

Ms. Young then pointed to another potential factor in the racial makeup of pro football coaches: old-fashioned nepotism. “By the NFL’s own data for its 2020 diversity and inclusion report, nine of that year’s 32 head coaches were related to a current or former coach in the league, whether by blood or marriage,” she wrote.

The same applied to the league’s 63 coordinators and position coaches, 53 of whom were white.

Bequette concludes his piece with this:

The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.

The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.

Racial bean-counting and pandering in the NFL, like Mr. Biden's declaration that he will appoint only a black woman to the Supreme Court rather than the best qualified candidate that he can find, whether male or female, black or white, guarantees that whoever is selected will be suspected of having been selected not because the selectee was the most brilliant and best qualified individual for the job but because the individual had the requisite skin color and anatomy.

We'd doubtless be upset to learn that our local hospital hired its surgeons this way, why should we think that Supreme Court justices or NFL coaches should be?

Rules for Thee but Not for Me

In the midst of the pandemic I had a conversation with a friend who was upset that some people weren't social distancing or masking up in our little corner of the world. He couldn't figure out how people could be so inconsiderate and reckless.

I replied that I thought part of the reason was that so many of our elected leaders, especially Democrats who tended to be the most adamantine social distancers and mask mandaters, were themselves showing the public by their personal behavior that they didn't think these rules were all that important, at least not for them.

More than a few of them threw social distancing to the winds when the opportunity arose to march arm in arm with protestors during the summer of 2020, and even more of them were caught partying, maskless, while at the same time insisting that the common people had to forgo social gatherings and wear masks when around others.

The Washington Free Beacon has come up with ten examples of our political leaders flouting their own rules about social distancing and mask-wearing and the dumb reactions they gave for doing so.

I encourage you to go to the link where the Free Beacon posts photos of the offenders en flagrante. Here are the ten with a bit of context courtesy of the Free Beacon:

10. "I should have been more astute to the specifics of the regulations." Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose

Liccardo hosted a large Thanksgiving dinner party in violation of state health guidelines limiting the number of households at private gatherings. On the same day his violation was exposed, Liccardo posted a tweet urging constituents to "cancel the big gatherings this year and focus on keeping each other safe."

9. "I am human." Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.)

The governor has repeatedly violated her own state-imposed mask guidelines in Michigan, and once flouted the Washington, D.C., mask mandate at a crowded bar near the White House. After being photographed in East Lansing at a large maskless gathering in violation of a Michigan Health Department order, Whitmer claimed to be "human," which is why she neglected to "stop and think about" the importance of rules.

8. "Don't be ridiculous." Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, D.C.

Bowser accused "right-wing nuts" of "spreading disinformation" after she was photographed without a mask at a wedding reception just days after imposing an indoor mask mandate throughout the district. The mandate included an exemption for individuals who were "actively eating or drinking." Bowser was not, but implied that she was, and called her critics "ridiculous."

7. "Everyone feels traumatized." Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago

That's how Lightfoot, a frequent violator of state and local mask mandates, defended herself for shouting into a bullhorn amid a crowd celebrating Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. "There are times when we actually do need to have … relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times," she said. "This has been a super hard year on everyone. Everyone feels traumatized."

6. "I was feeling the spirit." London Breed, mayor of San Francisco

Despite issuing one of the strictest masks mandates in the state of California, the mayor was defiant after being photographed dancing at a jazz club without a mask. "I got up and started dancing because I was feeling the spirit and I wasn't thinking about a mask," Breed said. "I was thinking about having a good time."

5. "Homophobia." Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D., N.Y.)

Maloney's spokesman blamed "disappointing" "homophobia" after the Free Beacon reported that the congressman was cavorting around Europe with his husband (often without a mask) in defiance of U.S. State Department travel guidelines.

4. "It was a setup." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.)

Pelosi was photographed getting her hair done in San Francisco despite local and state health orders preventing hair salons from opening. She claimed to have been duped by the salon's nefarious owner. "It was a setup," said Pelosi. "I take responsibility for falling for a setup."

3. It's "shameful" to criticize me during Black History Month. Stacey Abrams, gubernatorial candidate.

Abrams, who continues to believe she "won" the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, bared her face in front of a group of masked children last week during a visit to Glennwood Elementary School. She proceeded to denounce her "shameful" critics for launching a "false political attack" during Black History Month.

2. "I hold my breath" during photos. Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles

Garcetti was caught on camera mingling with maskless billionaires and celebrities during the NFC Championship game in Los Angeles. "There is a zero percent chance of infection from that," Garcetti insisted. Medical experts immediately debunked the scientific misinformation.

1. "Republicans are mad they can't date me." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D. NY)

The celebrity congresswoman lashed out at sexually frustrated Republicans for being "mad they can't date me" after she was spotted enjoying herself without a mask in Florida, where citizens are free to go maskless.

If you wonder why people are fed up with our political elites, why the Canadian truckers are protesting, why political science experts are expecting Democrats to get slaughtered in the November elections, and why President Biden's poll numbers continue to sink like a cannonball in water, the arrogance of those who think the rules don't apply to them might provide a clue.

Something From Nothing

Contemporary naturalistic scientists have a problem. It's very hard to explain in naturalistic terms how the universe could have come into being from nothing, which is what the standard Big Bang model entails.

As an article at Mind Matters puts it:

It does not appear that the Big Bang had a natural beginning. It was the beginning. Before it, there was nothing at all, which is a hard concept for us to grasp. In a debate with naturalist philosopher David Papineau, theistic neurosurgeon Michael Egnor described it as an effect with no physical cause.

For some scientists the solution to the puzzle of how a universe could come from nothing is to redefine what's meant by "nothing."

Physicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, argued in his book A Universe from Nothing, that the "nothing" out of which the universe arose actually included the laws of physics and the quantum foam.

This elicited a lot of pushback from philosophers who argued, rightly, that "nothing" doesn't mean a state where there are only some things like physical laws and the quantum foam existing. Rather "nothing" means "not anything at all."

But how did we get a universe out of "not anything at all"?

The Mind Matters piece discusses some attempts to explain this. One attempt involves the claim that there were brilliant aliens from another universe who somehow constructed our universe out of the seeming void of nothingness:

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, argued in Scientific American last October that advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang and that, when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well.

Thus, according to Loeb, there must have been some sort of intelligent agents who designed our world in the midst of nothingness.

Neurologist Steven Novella offers another approach. [He] outlines a theory by which the universe could have come about from nothing without a beginning by asking us to reimagine what “nothing” means. Perhaps there can’t be [real] “nothing,” but the fact that the universe is expected to wind down until it undergoes heat death may be, he considers, a way out:

Perhaps the laws of reality ... simply do not allow for a state that we would understand as completely nothing. We think of nothing as simply the absence of stuff, of matter and energy, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that. It may simply be impossible for there to be truly nothing in that simplistic sense.

But where, we might ask, do the "laws of reality" come from? Novella, however, ignores this inconvenient speed bump:

What if the maximally expanded and cold universe mathematically approaches the identical state as the singularity that resulted in the Big Bang? Again, our human minds ... cannot wrap around this concept, but we can crunch the numbers. At some point the heat death universe becomes a singularity, and then starts another cycle of the universe.

Maybe Novella's math can explain how the "heat death" universe is identical to the singularity that produced the universe at its origin, but it's hard to see how. A singularity is a point of zero volume and infinite density. The universe as it dies a heat death expands to an infinite volume and almost zero density. How are these two states identical?

The article continues:

If you want to really blow your mind, some physicists even speculate that this would be the same universe. Not another version of the same matter and energy, but the actual same universe in space and time. Essentially the end of the universe and the beginning of the universe are the same moment in time, the universe loops back in on itself in one giant self-contained temporal cycle.

This sounds a lot like Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence or the Hindu idea of cyclical time. The universe simply repeats itself over and over, forever. This is an idea which is probably deadly to science, which assumes a linear time, and which also leads to fatalism - the notion that no matter what we do the future is inevitable and ineluctable.

The best analogy is a ring, we just keeping going around the ring forever, but there is no true beginning or end. In this concept there is no beginning or end, there is no before, there is just a bound infinite loop.

This idea of a temporally infinite universe falls afoul of two additional philosophical difficulties. One is the set of problems and paradoxes entailed by positing an actual infinite and the other is the difficulty of explaining how we could ever traverse an actual infinite if such a thing could exist. These are serious problems which beset any theory based on infinity.

This solves the “something from nothing” problem, because the universe did not come from anything, it just always was. This still leaves us with the deeper question – why is there something instead of nothing, but that may not be a useful line of inquiry.

In other words, the question why anything at all exists is not "useful" because no naturalistic theory can answer it.

None of these theories, though adduced by scientists, are scientific theories. They're all metaphysical speculations and they're all attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking the God of theism.

Even so, whether we're talking about intelligent agents from another universe, or some preexisting laws that somehow formed the universe, most of these speculations seem to ultimately involve a mind of some sort. It's as if these thinkers are trying to attribute the universe to something that has the properties of God but isn't God.

One wonders why there's such desperation to avoid the conclusion that the origin of the universe seems to be the product of either God or something very much like God. Perhaps that's a question for psychologists.

Flexible Principles

GoFundMe stirred up a controversy recently when they decided that the Canadian truckers protest in Ottawa violated their principles. They claim that they'll refuse funding to anyone who breaks the law and uses violence, and they espied such behavior among the truckers.

In a recent press release they state:

We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.

The truckers protest against onerous vaccine mandates had won the support of donors all over North America, but GoFundMe originally intended to divert the contributors' donations, some $10 million, to charities approved by the truckers but relented after considerable pushback. They then decided to refund the money to the original donors.

As Elle Reynolds at The Federalist points out, GoFundMe's stance against violence and law-breaking seems a bit skewed. According to Reynolds, GFM has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for law-breakers and individuals accused of violence. For example:

• One GoFundMe fundraising campaign entitled “CHARGED WITH BANK ROBBERY DURING GEORGE FLOYD RIOT” is seeking bail money for Dominique Maxey, who was arrested in May 2020 and charged with bank larceny.
• In another listing, Raven S. is seeking $2,000 to help pay fines after, as she wrote, “on November 13 I was arrested and detained for trying to assist a man being wrongfully assaulted by police.”
• A woman named Stephanie has raised nearly $3,000 for her daughter who was arrested in conjunction with a riot in 2020. “Tia Pugh, a 21 year old resident of Mobile, was arrested for alleged criminal mischief and inciting a riot while attending a George Floyd protest the Sunday prior; two municipal misdemeanors. She was then arrested for federal felony civil unrest for the same incident,” she wrote.
• After three suspects were arrested for vandalizing the home of a defense witness in the Derek Chauvin trial, leaving his home “smeared with animal blood” with “a severed pig’s head dumped on the front porch,” GoFundMe enabled the three self-described “community activists” to raise more than $10,000 for legal fees.
• GoFundMe allowed a campaign called “PDX Protest Bail Fund” to raise nearly $1.4 million for arrestees.
• The fundraising site has also enabled CrimethInc. to raise nearly $60,000, despite the group’s promotion of violence to an extent that even Facebook banned it.
• After Alissa Azar was indicted on a felony riot charge and multiple misdemeanor charges, including one relating to the use of tear gas and pepper spray against another person, GoFundMe helped her raise more than $6,000 for legal defense.
• When “comrades” “reclaimed” (read: took over) a hotel in Minneapolis, GoFundMe enabled the trespassers to raise more than $245,000.
• GoFundMe itself donated $500 to the Riot Kitchen, a pro-riot food truck. Eight “Riot Kitchen” members were arrested in August 2020 near Kenosha, Wis., after filling numerous gas cans and attempting to escape after police confronted them, according to law enforcement. Police also reported “helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks and suspected controlled substances” in the vehicles.
• GoFundMe also took to Twitter to promote a fundraiser for farmers inside Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Occupational Protest,” in which rioters overtook a police precinct and set up their own lawless compound for weeks. (Contrast that to what GoFundMe’s leftist allies are calling an “occupation” in Canada.)

There's much more at the link, but these examples amply illustrate GFM's failure to live up to its own stated principles.

Perhaps if generous donors, informed of a GFM effort on behalf of a worthwhile cause, simply found alternative ways to channel their money to the cause, GFM would realize that their pretentious and hypocritical leftist moral preening was counterproductive and just stop it.

The Beauty of American Freedom

The last couple of days the theme here at Viewpoint has been freedom, especially freedom of speech. I urge you to watch this video featuring a young North Korean woman who managed to escape from North Korea.

Listen to her description of the hellish country in which she was born, the further hell she had to endure in China in order to get to the West, and the appreciation she has for the United States. Listen, too, to her criticism of the progressive left which seeks to turn the U.S. into a replica of the countries - North korea and China - from which she managed to free herself.

Her name is Yeonmi Park, she's amazingly well-educated and articulate, especially considering that most, if not all, of her education came after she escaped the concentration camp that is North Korea.

She tells her story in an eleven minute video that you can find only at the above link to Prager U. It's not on YouTube, and if there's a way to embed it in a VP post, I haven't found it yet.

Anyway, Ms. Park does a marvelous job of expressing the beauty of the American people, a beauty we Americans often consider to be a matter of course. If you watch her tell her story I promise you you'll be glad you did.

Bolstering Free Speech

Yesterday I mused on why today's university administrators don't have the same courage to guarantee on their campuses freedom to both speak and hear opinions unpopular with the left as both the mayor of Syracuse and the owner of the venue at which Frederick Douglass was to speak demonstrated in 1861.

Coincidentally, a business professor at Georgetown named John Hasnas provides us with an answer in Monday's Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Hasnas explains that his university actually violated its own rules concerning free expression when they put newly hired administrator Ilya Shapiro on leave for his criticism of President Biden's declaration that he will only appoint a black woman to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

He writes that:

Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

Yet suppression is exactly what happened:

Mr. Shapiro tweeted that the candidate he viewed as “objectively” most qualified for the Supreme Court “alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” The dean of Georgetown Law, William Treanor, announced that Mr. Shapiro’s comment was “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law” and ordered “an investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”

Hasnas wonders rhetorically why universities make "grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them?" The answer, he avers, is that they have every incentive to do what they do.

University administrators get no reward for upholding abstract principles. Their incentive is to quell on-campus outrage and bad press as quickly as possible. Success is widely praised, but there is no punishment for failing to uphold the university’s commitment to free speech.

In other words, it doesn't cost the university anything to throw free speech overboard, but it could cost them plenty to protect it. Thus, university administrators, whose only principle is protecting the bottom line, will almost always take the easy route.

This pathetic state of affairs has a remedy, however, and Professor Hasnas outlines it:

The solution is to create an incentive for schools to protect open inquiry—the fear of lawsuits.

First, universities should add a “safe harbor” provision to their speech policies stating: “The university will summarily dismiss any allegation that an individual or group has violated a university policy if the allegation is based solely on the individual’s or group’s expression of religious, philosophical, literary, artistic, political, or scientific viewpoints.”

This language would be contractually binding.

Second, free-speech advocates should organize pro bono legal groups to sue schools that violate the safe-harbor provision. This would make it affordable for suppressed parties to bring suits over the violation of their contractual rights.

This sounds very appealing, but I see a problem. Why would weak-kneed administrators already inclined to cave at the slightest pressure from the left make it harder on themselves to capitulate by implementing the "safe harbor" provision? Isn't that a bit like telling a cowardly soldier that he should make it harder for himself to avoid the battle?

Anyway, Hasnas closes with this:

In the absence of damage awards, university administrators won’t act against their own interests merely to uphold an abstract commitment to free speech. The threat of such awards would make universities like Georgetown put their money where their mouths are.

It'd be marvelous if universities followed Professor Hasnas' recommendation, but it would take both courage and wisdom to do so, so I'm not optimistic.

Frederick Douglass and Cancel Culture

In his new book The President and the Freedom Fighter (Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) author Brian Kilmeade describes an event involving Douglass in the midst of the Civil War. Douglass was invited to Syracuse New York to give a speech which was expected to be critical of President Lincoln's early reluctance to emancipate the slaves.

Lincoln was afraid that if he did that the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia would secede and join the Confederacy, but Douglass saw this as unconscionable dithering.

Kilmeade writes:

[Douglass'] harsh criticisms of Lincoln's border state policy certainly angered a great many people. When he arrived ... to lecture in Syracuse, New York, he saw advertisements supporting his speeches - but side by side were handbills that called him "Thief!", "Rescal," "Traitor!!!" - and worse. It invited all comers to "give him a warm reception at this time for the insolence he deserves."

Reading this brought to mind the many times speakers invited to speak at university venues have been threatened with disruption and violence by those who fear ideas, including, incredibly enough, university professors.

Regrettably, pusillanimous university representatives often simply cancel the event, giving the intellectual thugs a victory over the freedom to speak and the freedom of others to listen.

But that's not what happened in Douglass' case:

The owner of the theater rejected calls from his neighbors to close the doors to his hall. When he was reminded that "Frederick Douglass was a Negro," he replied that his [the theater owner] principles of freedom applied to humanity, not to color."

Would that our universities and social media giants were so principled and courageous. But that's not all. Kilmeade tells us that:

The mayor reached into the city coffers and came up with three hundred dollars to pay for regular police and a special fifty-man security force.

Additional recruits were summoned. They marched into Syracuse, where they guarded the theater entrance, bayonets fixed on their rifles. When Douglass arrived, the mayor locked arms with Douglass, endangering his own safety to shield his guest from mob violence.

How many university presidents or provosts are willing to brave violence to ensure that someone whose opinions may be unpopular among the professoriat and their students has the right to address their student body? How many universities are willing to hire extra security to defend free speech? How many instead utter weaselly bromides like, "We can't guarantee the safety of those involved so we're cancelling the event"?

Denying the other side the opportunity to speak, shouting them down and threatening violence are tactics that fascists have used for a hundred years to stifle and suppress all opposition to their tyrannical goals. It's a tactic used by the Nazi brownshirts in Germany and the Bolshevik communist/fascists in Russia and everywhere else where totalitarians seek to seize power over peoples' lives.

It'd be a tragedy if the institutions entrusted with upholding the basic principles of freedom let them win here, too.

Aristotle and Nietzsche

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche. Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos. There was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth.

Virtuous acts were those which help men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and thus there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference.

Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver which fact makes for an odd state of affairs. Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, where would such a purpose come from? But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche is right that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective choice. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is correct, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos, then the moral law and the classical virtues really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless correct about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but nevertheless incorrect in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

The Next Taboo

Recently I speculated on VP as to which would be the next taboo to fall in our culture, a culture which seems determined to topple every taboo, especially sexual taboos, that it can find.

I suggested it would be the taboo against incestuous marriage, but mentioned that the taboos against polyamory (group marriage) and pedophilia (sex with children) are also good candidates.

As if the folks at The Federalist were reading VP (They're smart people so maybe they are!) a piece appeared soon thereafter by Spencer Lindquist introducing us to the thinking of a SUNY Fredonia professor named Stephan Kershnar.

Professor Kershnar is an apologist for pedophilia, and he's not the only one in academia who harbors his perverse views. He may, though, be one of the most outspoken.

Lindquist posts a Twitter video in which Kershnar makes the claim that, as Lindquist describes it:

an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.

Lindquist adds that,

It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”

Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.

What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.

Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids.

He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.”

There's much more about this at the link, including a discussion of other attempts, both subtle and unsubtle, to normalize pedophilia and three things those who see this as an evil, which it surely is, can do to fight it.

I'd like to pose this question, though: How can people in a secular society, a society that has abandoned all objective moral authority, call this, or anything else, evil?

How can one who believes that we're simply the product of blind, impersonal forces plus chance, declare Kershnar to be morally reprehensible? Where does moral right and wrong come from in a Darwinian world?

Secular folk might find what Kershnar is advocating to be distasteful, of course, but why, exactly, is it immoral? What makes it morally wrong?

The secular man has no good answer to these questions. Hemingway expressed the secular, naturalistic view this way: "Right is whatever you feel good after. Wrong is whatever you feel bad after."

In the absence of God, Hemingway is correct, and if a pedophile feels good after molesting a child then there's nothing wrong with it.

If one is a secularist and one finds child molestation morally abhorrent then one has two options: Either shed your abhorrence or shed your atheism. You can't have both and claim to be rational.

If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now

A team of scholars at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise conducted a review of the relevant literature on Covid lockdowns and found that government imposed lockdowns enacted to mitigate the spread of Covid not only don't work, they're positively harmful.

A lot of people have been saying this for two years, and some of them have been kicked off social media platforms for expressing that opinion.

Now, however, with the publication of this authoritative study from Johns Hopkins, maybe the twenty somethings who decide who'll be allowed to say what on social media, along with our political and public health officials, will realize, even if they don't admit it, that the lockdowns they imposed and supported were a mistake.

As one example of how mistaken they were, researchers led by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College of London predicted in 2020 that a suppression strategy based on a lockdown would reduce COVID-19 mortality by up to 98%.

It turns out that, according to the Johns Hopkins study, that prediction was wildly incorrect.

Here are some slightly edited excerpts from the study:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

We use “NPI” (Nonpharmaceutical interventions) to describe any government mandate which directly restricts peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but does include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above.

We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality. There is some evidence that business closures reduce COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in estimates is large and the effect seems related to closing bars.

There may be an effect of mask mandates, but just two studies look at this, one of which one only looks at the effect of employee mask mandates.

We find no clear evidence that SIPOs (Shelter In Place Orders) had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality.

Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% (cf. the 98% prediction mentioned above) compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%.

Unintended consequences may play a larger role than recognized. We already pointed to the possible unintended consequence of SIPOs, which may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness.

Lockdowns often have also limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places.

Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality.

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.

These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument (Italics mine).

Maybe the next time we're visited by a pandemic or a resurgence of Covid, our political and public health leaders will actually follow the science instead of depriving people of their livelihoods, education and psychological well-being.

The Worst Enemy of Black People

As we embark upon Black History Month it might be of interest to reprise a piece written several years ago based on an article by the late Walter Williams titled The Worst Enemy of Black People. Here's the post:

A short piece by economist and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams appeared recently in The Meridian Star and is getting a lot of play on social media.

The essay is titled The Worst Enemy of Black People and it starts off recounting how, despite his very controversial legacy, Malcolm X is very much respected in the African American community.

Malcolm has been called one of the most influential black Americans and schools and streets bear his name in cities across America. Yet despite the homage he has received over the years since his assassination in 1965, Williams writes, there's one thing he strongly believed that has been quietly ignored.

(Remember as you read this that as Williams, who is himself black, notes, during the 1960s the word "Negro" was still a respectable term for, and among, blacks.)

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Williams goes on to cite some deeply troubling facts:

Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.

In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone. Plus, “shotgun” weddings are a thing of the past. That was when male members of a girl’s family made the boy who got her pregnant live up to his responsibilities.

The high crime rates in so many black communities impose huge personal costs and have turned once-thriving communities into economic wastelands. The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.

Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems. As Malcolm X said, “our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Indeed, liberal policies and attitudes are largely responsible for the erosion of the black family. Every urban region with a substantial black population is governed by liberal Democrats, nowadays often black but nevertheless supported by the larger white liberal consensus in the Democratic party.

Liberalism has done nothing to reverse the decline of the family in general and the black family in particular and has, on the contrary, done much to accelerate it.

Malcolm X and Walter Williams, saw this clearly, but unfortunately too few African Americans see it at all today (although there are signs that that's changing).

The Amazing Ant

One part of a larger interview at Mind Matters with Eric Cassell, the author of Animal Algorithms, focusses on the navigational abilities of an ant that lives in the Saharan desert.

Cassell starts off talking about airplane navigation systems which he worked on for 40 years.

When you talk about sophisticated navigation systems like those used by modern aircraft, these are highly engineered systems. Typically, you know, commercial aircraft have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code in their navigation and flight control systems. So they’re highly complex.

And there’s a number of aspects of the engineering that’s involved when you build systems like that. One is, they’re highly integrated. So you have to match up not just the software, but the hardware, the sensors, the flight control system, et cetera. And then all of this has to be done in a coherent manner.

And it turns out, surprisingly — not just to biologists, but to those of us that are engineers as well — when you start examining some of these systems in animals, they exhibit the same kind of principles that we use in developing man-made navigation systems.

My favorite example is actually a desert ant that resides in deserts in Africa. These ants actually employ several different types of navigation centers. They use a sun compass, a polarized light compass. They have an odometer, they do chemotaxis, in other words with sensing chemicals. And then they use all that information too, in an integrated manner.

And they actually do what biologists call path integration, what us engineers would typically call inertial navigation — basically the same thing, where they integrate all this information and then are able to navigate accurately.

One of the amazing things about this is that according to Darwinian theory all these systems evolved in the brain of this insect, a brain that has only a few hundred thousand neurons, purely by chance. Systems that took intelligent engineers decades to build, or, if we go back to primitive humans, thousands or millions of years, evolved in ants by pure dumb luck.

There's more, of course:

But one of the unique things about it is, whenever they go on a forging excursion from their home nest, they can go on a very circuitous path away from the nest, turning a number of times in different directions. But then when they go to return home, they are able to actually compute a direct path from wherever they are back to their home nest.

Again, it’s based on this inertial navigation type of system. It’s very surprising that such a system exists in an ant.

When Cassell says it's "very surprising" he's understating how utterly astonishing this is. The capability he refers to actually requires the ant to perform trigonometry, a skill that many intelligent students whose brains contain 100 billion neurons, have difficulty with. Here's a short BBC video that shows this:

Cassell adds:

And we are just now catching up technology-wise with what many animals have been doing for thousands or millions of years. Our human ability to navigate long distances didn’t really become a reality until sometime in the 1700s with the development of accurate clocks that could be used on ships.

Prior to that, ships had a lot of trouble navigating very long distances because they couldn’t determine longitude in an accurate way.

And finally, with GPS, we have a system that actually starts to mimic what many animals have been doing for a long time.

It takes a prodigious exertion of blind faith, it seems to me, to force oneself to believe that this ability evolved independently of any guidance from an intelligent Mind.

The co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA Francis Crick once wrote that "Biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved."

I'll bet they do have to constantly remind themselves of that. It must be like trying to constantly remind oneself that 2+2=7.