What Are They Afraid of?

Materialists deny that there's anything that cannot be explained in terms of material substance and the laws of physics. The incredibly complex, information-laden biological world, they argue, as well as the astonishingly fine-tuned cosmos which life inhabits are both the unintended product of chance and physics.

Their metaphysics allows for no mind or intelligence behind it all nor, they insist, is there any reason or evidence for supposing that any such non-material, non-natural intelligence exists.

William J. Murray offers a dissenting view in a comment at Uncommon Descent. He poses an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose we landed on a planet in a different star system, and on an otherwise barren planet we found a massive, self-sustaining and self-replicating metallic machine comprised mainly of alloyed materials found nowhere else on the planet other than as a material manufactured by the machine for it’s own duplication and repair, what would be the materialist’s reaction?

Further, what if the machine was run by a library of code and a code-processing system?

Would they accept the machine as evidence of non-human intelligent design? If they found no archaeological evidence on the planet supporting the idea that an intelligent race of beings at any time in history constructed that machine, would they turn to naturalistic explanations? Would they insist that somehow humans had been there before and left the machine without any other trace of their presence?

Or, would they come to the conclusion that an intelligent agency of some sort designed and built the machine, even though they didn’t know what that intelligent agency was?

At the very least anyone in this situation would have good reason for supposing that some non-human intelligence had been at work on that planet. But we ourselves are in an analogous situation on this planet since we are surrounded by much the same sort of machines, albeit biological machines, as Murray describes.

Or consider the fine-tuning of the universe:

[W]hat if we were exploring space in distance areas of the galaxy and came across a habitat floating in space, perfectly balanced to be self-supporting for a rich and diverse spectrum of life. Let’s say this habitat is enclosed by some form of unknown energy with no apparent source. Everything in the habitat is finely tuned for the flourishing and preservation of that life.

Would the materialist conclude that there must be countless other such habitats floating around, produced by some as yet unknown unintelligent process, each tuned differently and most not capable of supporting life? Or, would they conclude that some intelligent agency must have designed and built the habitat for the purpose of sustaining life? Would they insist other humans must have built it? Would they ever even imagine that a non-human intelligence might be responsible?

Of course they would unless they were so obsessively determined to avoid that conclusion, unless they found that conclusion so repugnant that they'd refuse to accept it no matter how much evidence were available to them. But then, of course, they would be behaving irrationally, perhaps even insanely.

One might conclude that the materialist's refusal to accept the evidence that Murray describes is motivated by fear of what that evidence points to.

Murray again:

[M]aterialists contort themselves as if they are headed toward some horrible, painful experience simply by admitting this [that the universe appears to be intelligently designed].

They do similar such contortions when confronted by the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of subjective morality, when admitting that objective morality must exist, and admitting that consciousness exists beyond the material, commits them to no [particular] spiritual or religious doctrine whatsoever. It’s just admitting what evidence indicates and what is logically necessary....

Why fight it tooth and nail? Why contort, obfuscate, and run from these things? Why deny the obvious and the logical to the point of saying such foolish things like “consciousness is an illusion” or “morality is subjective”, when they cannot even act or speak as if such things are true?

Good questions. What are they afraid of?

The Fine Structure Constant

There are a lot of mysteries in our universe. Two that are especially puzzling are the nature of time and the origin and nature of human consciousness, but there are others, of course. One such is something physicists call the fine structure constant.

Astrophysicist Paul Sutter explains that this constant is "a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137."

There are several peculiarities about this number.

First of all, no one knows why it has the value it does or where it comes from. It's value seems awkward and ungainly and is completely unexplained. No current theory predicts it.

Sutter states that,

We have no explanation for the origins of this constant. Indeed, we have no theoretical explanation for its existence at all. We simply measure it in experiments and then plug the measured value into our equations to make other predictions.

Second, unlike other constants in nature this one has no units. It's not measured in any dimensions or units like meters/second or miles/hour.

Third, it has to have the precise value it has for the universe to be able to sustain life. As Sutter explains,

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from....Change that number, change the universe. If the fine-structure constant had a different value, then atoms would have different sizes, chemistry would completely change and nuclear reactions would be altered.

Life as we know it would be outright impossible if the fine-structure constant had even a slightly different value.

It's truly remarkable that such a finely-tuned parameter would exist, and indeed there are dozens, if not hundreds of similarly fine-tuned values to the forces and constants in the universe. This chart shows the exactitude with which two such forces, the strong nuclear force and the strength of electromagnetism (i.e. the fine-structure constant), must be calibrated in order for a life sustaining universe like ours to exist:

Note that the axes on the above chart are logarithmic, every increment represents an increase by a power of ten. To plot these parameters on a standard scale the chart would have to be enormous.

It also compares just two of the hundreds of parameters that must be set with exquisite precision in order for the universe to be the kind of place in which life could exist.

Such precision could just be a lucky accident, of course, or it could be the consequence of intentional engineering. If we were to be guided by experience and nothing else, I think it safe to say that we'd dismiss the first alternative as quite literally incredible.

Sutter has more on this at the link or if you prefer you can watch him discuss the fine-structure constant on this 16 minute YouTube video:

Infinity Is Weird

The following is excerpted from the book Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng. In this very interesting excerpt Cheng, who is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explains why infinity is not a number in the ordinary sense and why we have to be careful in how we talk about it.

The passage begins with Cheng asking us to think about what we mean when we talk about infinity:

Mathematics is all about using logic to understand things, and we’ll find that if we’re not careful about exactly what we mean by “infinity,” then logic will take us to some very strange places that we didn’t intend to go....

Infinity goes on forever.

Does this mean infinity is a type of time, or space? A length?

Infinity is bigger than the biggest number.

Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of.

Now infinity seems to be a type of size. Or is it something more abstract: a number, which we can then use to measure time, space, length, size, and indeed anything we want? Our next thoughts seem to treat infinity as if it is in fact a number.

But if we treat infinity like a normal number we get contradictions:

If you add one to infinity it’s still infinity. This is saying

∞ + 1 = ∞

which might seem like a very basic principle about infinity. If infinity is the biggest thing there is, then adding one can’t make it any bigger. Or can it? What if we then subtract infinity from both sides? If we use some familiar rules of cancellation, this will just get rid of the infinity on each side, leaving

1 = 0

which is a disaster. Something has evidently gone wrong. The next thought makes more things go wrong:

If you add infinity to infinity it’s still infinity. This seems to be saying

∞ + ∞ = ∞

that is,

2∞ = ∞

and now if we divide both sides by infinity this might look like we can just cancel out the infinity on each side, leaving

2 = 1

which is another disaster. Maybe you can now guess that something terrible will happen if we think too hard about the last idea:

If you multiply infinity by infinity it’s still infinity. If we write this out we get

∞ x ∞ = ∞

and if we divide both sides by infinity, canceling out one infinity on each side, we get

∞ = 1

which is possibly the worst, most wrong outcome of them all. Infinity is supposed to be the biggest thing there is; it is definitely not supposed to be equal to something as small as 1.

What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be.

You can read more of Cheng's thoughts on infinity here.

Sometimes scientists trying to avoid the cosmic fine-tuning problem or an initial origin event of the cosmos say things like, "There's an infinite number of universes in the multiverse," or that "The cosmos is infinitely old." Cheng shows that we have to be very careful about such uses of "infinite."

In fact, one argument against the universe being infinitely old is that if it is infinitely old then there must have been an infinity of moments of time. But if so, then there was no first moment, because if time is infinite in the past, whichever moment one designates as "first" will always have been preceded by an earlier moment, and, if there was no first moment, there could have been no second, or third moment, etc.

The consequence of this is that if there were no first, second, third etc. moments then we could never have arrived at the present moment. But, of course, we have arrived at the present moment, which means that the universe must not be infinitely old. It must have had a beginning, a first moment.

This, then, provokes the question, "If the universe had a beginning, what caused it?" Whatever the cause, it must have been outside of space and time (because these are components of the universe), very powerful and very intelligent.

In other words, the cause must have been something like God.

Love Thy Neighbor

I'm currently reading a book on the war in Bosnia in the early 90s. The book is titled Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass. Maass was a war correspondent for the Washington Post who witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated by Serbs upon Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics in the Balkans.

As Maass recounts the cruelties these people inflicted on their neighbors, co-workers, even family members, the reader is benumbed by the horrors.

How could people who socialized with each other, went to school with each other, worked cordially side by side with each other, suddenly turn on them en masse, torturing, raping, and murdering them?

Then we turn on the evening news and watch stupefied as the reporters recount the terrors the Russian forces are deliberately visiting upon civilians in Ukraine, bombing a theater, for instance, in which hundreds of children were taking shelter, crushing some 300 of them under the rubble.

We thought that the cruelties of al Qaeda and ISIS were horrific, that the brutalities of Africans against their fellow Africans are appalling, but the Arabs and the Africans were savages from whom such behavior was to be expected. Yet their crimes were and are no less odious than the crimes wreaked by Europeans upon each other. ISIS and Boko Haram are no more savage than were the Germans in the early 40s, the Serbs in the early 90s or the Russians today.

I mention this because there's a conceit among many of our secular friends that man is basically good and if only he could be placed in an Edenic environment of equity and equality there'd be no crime, no inhumanity, no injustice.

This belief goes back to the French thinker Rousseau, and it's one superstition that moderns hold that is massively contradicted by the empirical evidence.

Much of our own experience tells us that human beings are certainly not inherently good, we are in fact just the opposite. As the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah wrote some 2600 years ago, "The heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it?"

The Jewish journalist Dennis Prager takes issue with the rosy, Roussean view of human nature. He writes:

In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers.

These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean “comfort women” and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.

And that is only a partial list.

Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.

Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals.

To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.

And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.

And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.

Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.

If experience teaches us anything about human nature it is that we are, as a race, inherently hateful and vicious. Despite the claims of some that humanity is "every day in every way getting better and better" we're not much better now than we were a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Our civilization is just a thin veneer over the heart of a brute, and all one need do to verify this claim is to read history and today's newspapers.

Mr. Putin's Doom

A column by Douglas London in The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required) argues that Vladimir Putin will be undone by people in his own government who will be vulnerable to Western intelligence services seeking to "turn" them.

London, who spent 34 years in the CIA's clandestine service, writes:

Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done.

Mr. Putin’s disastrous choices are causing military strategists to reconsider which tactics could be used against Russia’s overrated and underperforming armed forces. Political experts and economists are rethinking tools for punishing malign behavior. Other potential aggressors—namely China—must take notice. If your job is cultivating spies, I suspect that recruiting must be good....

Resurrecting the Soviet empire, as Mr. Putin wants to do, brings with it the same forces that prompted most of the Warsaw Pact’s best CIA agents to turn against the Kremlin. Agents across the Soviet bloc often shared the same desire: to inflict whatever harm they could.

They took up the fight not for money, but to undermine a toxic system that enriched a corrupt elite, wrought suffering and economic stagnation, and occasionally brought the world to the brink.

Mr. London goes on to tell us about Russians in the old Soviet Union who spied for the West because they were embittered at how their families had suffered under Kremlin corruption or because they were disgusted with Soviet aggression in places like Czechoslavakia.

He then continues:

Mr. Putin has delivered a rival intelligence officer a great gift: a precipitating crisis. The desire to take control over their own destiny amid crisis drives people to spy. Intelligence officers take advantage of that desire to secure an agent’s cooperation through inspiration, trust and means to make a difference.

Mr. Putin’s bumbling has provided the crisis, Ukrainian courage the inspiration, and the response of the U.S. and its allies the trust and tools for Russians to strike back.

Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service....Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.

Mr. Putin will use intimidation, violence, repression and bribery to combat counterintelligence risk and will reward blind loyalty from the incompetent and opportunistic sycophants who lord over his system. But these measures will only create incentives for the brave to act — and it takes only a few to make an extraordinary difference.

It is tragic what Mr. Putin has wrought in Russia. As London notes, he has in a few weeks undone 30 years of progress for the Russian people.

There was a growing middle class in Russia whose members were enjoying a standard of living much improved over what they had suffered through during the Soviet era. Now their money is worthless, their sons are dying by the thousands in a war that few understand, Russia's vaunted military has been humiliated and reduced to slaughtering civilians, and soon food, medicine, and all manner of consumer goods will be scarce in Russia.

In conditions like these disillusioned generals and government bureaucrats will be thick on the ground, and not a few of them, perhaps, will be eager to be recruited by Western agents. When they are Mr. Putin's reign of terror, and possibly Mr. Putin himself, will be nearing an end.

Russian Morale

Hot Air's Allahpundit has a summary of the effects that the war in Ukraine is having on Russian morale. He mentions a story in the N.Y. Times (paywall) which cites a video interview posted online on Monday by Igor Girkin, a former Russian F.S.B. intelligence officer and head of the Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said…

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”…

The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services.

The top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr. Soldatov said.

Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who vacations with Mr. Putin and has been spoken of as a potential presidential successor, has suffered a loss of standing, according to Mr. Soldatov’s sources.

Allahpundit adds this:

Another retired Russian general who leads a group of retired and current service members issued a statement in January, before the war, claiming that an invasion would be “pointless,” would alienate Ukraine forever, and conceivably would even threaten Russia’s existence. When the Times caught up to him this week, he said curtly, “I do not disavow what I said.”

For former Russian military leaders, the fiasco in Ukraine must be personal to some degree. After all, it’s not just conscripts who are dying under Ukrainian fire. At least 15 officers with the rank of captain or higher have reportedly been killed in less than a month.

Western military experts have puzzled over that, concluding that it would be impossible absent a serious breakdown in Russian capabilities.

There must be a failure of operational security — i.e. western penetration of Russian battlefield communications — on top of a failure of organization at the front lines. Top commanders are putting themselves in harm’s way to try to restore order in the ranks and some are paying for it with their lives.

With Russia deprived of some of its most skilled commanders, the military’s morale problem will get worse.

Yes, and one wonders what those surrounding Mr. Putin in the Kremlin are thinking about all this.

Ukrainian intelligence intercepted a Russian communication that indicates morale aamong the troops is very low:

Fascinating, claimed intercepted call from Russian officer near Mykolaiv to superiors in Russia. He says:
- This is worse than Chechnya
- 50% of troops have frostbite
- They can’t evacuate the dead
- Don’t have enough tents
- RU plane dropped a bomb on their own position 🧵 pic.twitter.com/3KjGrqD5jZ

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

- Troops don’t have body armor. When one complained to commander was told “son, be strong”
- This special operation is a “madhouse”
- Being told not to destroy buildings - it’s insanity. Unless we destroy everything and turn into dirt along with the civilians, nothing can happen

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

Ukrainian commander in Mykolaiv tells us Russians are abandoning many vehicles near the city. "They have no will to fight. They don't even have food. It's -10 with snow here, they don't want to be here."

— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) March 11, 2022

How long will these Russian troops put up with this before they all just decide to leave, regardless of what their officers tell them?

Near Death Experiences

In my class yesterday we talked a bit about NDEs (Near death Experiences) so I thought it'd be helpful to rerun a post from a couple of years ago on that topic:

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism.

First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

Plot to Poison Putin

There've been a number of stories in the media of late discussing what's claimed to be a plot to poison Vladimir Putin. According to one of the articles, the plot was discovered by Ukrainian intelligence.

However the plot was discovered, and by whomever, I can't imagine that if there were such a plot it would be leaked to the world. Why would the Ukrainians want to alert Putin to an attempt on his life by publicizing the plot if it were indeed genuine?

In any case, here are some excerpts from the article:

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine has said that "a group of influential" Kremlin insiders have been plotting to oust Putin. The goal of the "Russian elite" is to supposedly remove the president from power as soon as possible before restoring economic ties with the West.

According to the brief, the Ukrainian intelligence service also claims that a successor to Putin has already been lined up in the shape of FSB director Oleksandr Bortnikov, reports The Mirror. Powerful insiders are allegedly dismayed at the ramifications of the war and the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy.

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence said: "It is known that Bortnikov and some other influential representatives of the Russian elite are considering various options to remove Putin from power. "In particular, poisoning, sudden disease, or any other 'coincidence' is not excluded."

There's more at the link, including links to other sources. As I indicated above, I'm skeptical about this report which appears to be tabloid sensationalism, but it could nevertheless have the effect of stoking a lot of suspicion and paranoia among Putin's inner circle.

It has been reported previously that Putin already uses food tasters to make sure his food isn't tainted, so suspicion of his colleagues is apparently already well-advanced.

But whether the plot is genuine or not, I have a question for my pacifist friends who believe that killing someone is always wrong. If the story were true, and the plot succeeds, would the plotters have been wrong to murder Mr. Putin?

In other words, is it wrong to murder in order to save the lives of innocent people? If the reader of this post is a pacifist or knows someone who is, this question might lead to an interesting ethical conversation.

The Gorgeous Peacock Spider

There's a fascinating article at Evolution News about a taxon of spiders endemic to Australia called the Peacock spider. There are some 60 species of Peacock spider, and they're gorgeously patterned.

The colors are produced not by pigments but by tiny scales with microscopic curves and gratings that refract and diffract light to separate and reflect various wavelengths. This works somewhat in the same way that a film of oil on a surface produces an array of iridescent hues.

Studying the color-producing structures in these arachnids has given scientists ideas for new color technologies.

Here's a video of the mating displays of several species of these spiders set to music. It's astonishing to consider that these spiders are less than 5 millimeters in size and that the information that directs their displays, plus all the other behaviors in which the spider engages, as well as the production of the vari-colored abdomens is all packed into a brain that's smaller than a pinhead:

Here are a few more interesting questions and points raised in the article:

The artistic patterns on the males’ abdomens seem gratuitously beyond anything necessary for mating. Drab animals get by just fine; why the excessive color and beauty? And why the dozens of variations among different species? We could be forgiven for imagining a designing intelligence with an artist’s eye.

Aesthetic considerations, furthermore, lead us to ask why human beings are the only ones who get excited about the mating dances of an unrelated species. Does that speak to human exceptionalism? We don’t see any other animals, except the female spider, watching the performances, but people by the millions are fascinated by these tiny animals that have nothing to do with their own “fitness.”

What is the evolutionary explanation for the quality of charm? Of humor? Or enchantment? We don’t eat them or train them to do our work. How did our curiosity, sense of humor, and love for beauty “evolve”?

“Who knew that such a small critter would create such an intense iridescence using extremely sophisticated mechanisms that will inspire optical engineers,” said Dimitri Deheyn, Hsuing’s advisor at Scripps Oceanography and a coauthor of the study.

“As an engineer, what I found fascinating about these spider structural colors is how these long evolved complex structures can still outperform human engineering,” said Radwanul Hasan Siddique, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and study coauthor. “Even with high-end fabrication techniques, we could not replicate the exact structures. I wonder how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place!”

We might all wonder this as well. Especially might we wonder "how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place" if we limit ourselves to thinking that this amazing creature must have evolved these gaudy patterns and complex behaviors through an unguided, random process like Darwinism.

Our Amazing World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically:

Trying to Play it Safe

Is China abandoning its "limitless" partnership with Russia? In one sign that Vladimir Putin has "jumped the shark" It seems that his erstwhile Chinese BFFs are having second thoughts.

An article by HotAir's Allahpundit certainly suggests that China is reassessing its betrothal to Russia and Mr. Putin:

— On Monday, the Chinese ambassador to Ukraine met with authorities in Lviv to say that China “will respect the path chosen by Ukrainians because this is the sovereign right of every nation.” He also promised Chinese help with Ukrainian economic development after the war.

— The same day, Jake Sullivan held “intense” talks for seven hours with a Chinese official in Rome warning Beijing of consequences if it rescued Russia’s war in Ukraine by supplying Putin with military and economic aid.

— Last night, a German paper reported that the Russian foreign minister was en route to China for a visit when his plane mysteriously made an about-face and returned to Russia. It’s unclear why, but some speculate that Chinese officials may have decided they didn’t want the bad optics of meeting with him at the moment.

— This morning, the White House announced that Biden will speak with Xi Jinping directly tomorrow about the prospect of China providing Russia with aid.

— Today, a change has been detected in the tenor of Chinese media’s coverage of the war. CGTN is a state-run network with chapters in the west, a sort of Chinese version of RT. They ran multiple segments about Ukrainian civilians being killed within the past 24 hours and made no bones about who was responsible.

A cynic might say that it's not the human rights abuses and atrocities perpetrated by the Russian forces in Ukraine that have the Chinese feeling a bit anxious. After all, their own record with regard to the horrors perpetrated on the Uyghurs and others in China is not particularly heartwarming.

Rather, China is probably upset that the Russian invasion appears at this point to be an abject failure. The Chinese don't want to be associated with a fiasco, but neither do they want to file for divorce from their incompetent significant other just yet.

On the other hand, if it looks to them like Ukraine might actually prevail in this war they don't want to completely alienate themselves from Mr. Zelenskyy either.

The Chinese are walking a geopolitical tightrope, and they doubtless realize that a single misstep will be most unfortunate for them.

Read the HotAir article for more on China's predicament.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In his great work The Republic the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) relates an allegory that is doubtless the most famous tale in all of Western philosophy and probably discussed in every introductory philosophy course.

In the allegory Plato invites us to imagine a cave in which prisoners have been chained since childhood. Behind them is a fire and between the fire and the prisoners there are men walking back and forth carrying burdens. The fire casts shadows of these men on a wall which the prisoners have all their lives been facing.

The prisoners see the shadows and hear the echoes of the men's voices and they mistakenly believe that these shadows and muffled echoes are reality. It is, after all, all they've ever known. They confer honors on each other for their ability to contrive clever interpretations of the shadows.

One prisoner, however, is released from his chains and dragged up and out of the cave where he beholds the world in the light of the sun. At first he can scarcely open his eyes, accustomed as they are to the darkness, but gradually he's able to see that a world that's infinitely richer than the world of the cave.

He won't believe his eyes but gradually he realizes that the world of the cave is all illusion, that the world he sees in the light of the sun is the true reality.

He would take pity on his comrades still chained in the cave. He would care nothing for the honors they value. He would count it all so much empty and meaningless chatter. All that would matter to him is the brilliance of the sun and the beauty and variety of the world.

He might even return to the cave to tell his fellows what he has seen, but they wouldn't believe him. They'd think he'd lost his senses, and if he tried to persuade them to join him outside the cave they may even kill him.

Plato's parable works on many different levels. For Plato the man who escapes the cave is the philosopher who escapes the realm of darkness and shadows and apprehends the world in the light of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. When the philosopher returns to the cave to seek to enlighten his fellow prisoners they refuse to listen to him and, perhaps like Socrates, he may even be put to death.

For Christians for two thousand years the cave represents the present world with its empty and meaningless pursuits and illusions. The sun is the absolute Good, Beautiful and True, i.e. God, and the world illuminated by this "Sun" is the really real.

When the "prisoner" seeks to persuade his fellows that they're wasting their lives debating about shadows when there's a beautiful, meaningful life awaiting them outside the cave, they often think he's gone insane, and, as has happened to millions throughout the last two millennia, they may even kill him.

Plato's allegory of the cave has endured for 2300 years because, whatever his original intent, it neatly captures a deep truth about reality and the human condition.

Why St. Patrick Is Celebrated

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Just War Theory

I thought it it might be helpful to look at the current war in Ukraine in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory.

From the time of Augustine (c.400 A.D.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Gospel imposes on the use of force.

One result of that thinking has been a list of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war).

These criteria generally include the following:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like ISIS is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it's always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely.

Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by these stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello: justice in war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of war and incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Even so, I think it's clear to anyone who's been following the war in Ukraine that Russia is waging an unjust war. They fail the jus ad bellum test, particularly criteria #1,2 and 5, and they also fail the first criterion of the jus in bello test. The response of the Ukrainians is compatible with criteria #1,2,3, and 5 of the jus ad bellum test and #1 of the jus in bello test.

None of the other criteria really apply to their struggle.

The Russians from Vladimir Putin on down to those infantry troops who are shooting and raping civilians are war criminals, and one hopes that the world will not forget their crimes and return to the status quo ante once this conflict is over.

Those responsible for the death, terror and destruction visited upon the Ukrainian people should remain international pariahs as long as they live and as long as history is written.

Valor on the Cheap

One of the uglier and more irrational responses to the Russian atrocities in Ukraine is the attempt by people here in the West generally and the U.S. in particular to vent their frustration and anger by punishing anyone in any way associated with Russia.

Sometimes this nonsensical reaction is borne of righteous indignation, but often it's merely an attempt to showcase one's own moral righteousness.

It's an attempt, at least by some, to affirm their own valor without ever having to risk anything.

Tommaso Dorigo discusses some such efforts in a column at Science 2.0. He writes:

What reason can there be for firing an artist based on his or her nationality? .... given the presently ongoing prosecution of opposers of the Russian regime, who are we to blame anybody who refuses to publicly proclaim they disagree with their country's actions?

Musicians, athletes, para-olympiad atlethes - there seems to have been an escalation, a competition for the most absurd ban....

But we have reached the top with the recent suggestions, now circulating in the world of fundamental research, that scientists should stop collaborating with Russian colleagues, stop publishing papers with them, etcetera. What nonsense! Science unites countries - are we now going to take that attitude back, and create a divide?

Who do we think we are hurting if we stop collaborating with our Russian colleagues, if not the whole world?....

There are hundreds of Russian colleagues who are just as sorry as we are for the recent events in Ukraine, if not more. Many of those colleagues have even signed a letter that condemns the actions of their government, and in so doing they have exposed themselves to the risk of being fired, or even imprisoned.

And what is our attitude now - do we stop working with them? What do we think we are going to achieve by cutting ties with people who, exactly like us, consider the progress of human knowledge their mission in life?....

If we consider ourselves above the idea of countries having the right of invading other countries, if we believe that women and men are equal on both sides of the border, if we believe that what unites us (humanity, and love for knowledge and art) is more than what divides us (language, habits); if the feeling of wasting lives of Ukrainians as well as of Russians makes us weep the same tears, we have to stop this....

If we are against war we cannot be in favor of cutting collaboration and positive interaction among peoples, which can and should exist regardless of the decision of a warmonger that happens to rule one of these peoples....

What matters is what you can do to stop the war. If you can't do anything of that sort, then sit down and stop taking decisions that have nothing to do with that, and all to do with petty revenge.

The attempt to punish people who have nothing to do with Putin or his crimes, just because they are Russian, is inhumane and stupid. Even many of those boys who were sent to Ukraine by Putin didn't want to go, they don't want to be where they are nor doing what they're doing. Whether they survive or die their fate is tragic.

Those who seek to put on display how much they despise the horrors Putin is inflicting on both Russians and Ukrainians by punishing those who are completely innocent are behaving like brutish primitives. They need to be made to realize that wisdom and justice consist in judging people as individuals and not as members of a particular race, nationality or religion.

Faith and Reason

We often hear that there's a dichotomy between reason and faith. Reason, we're told, gives us a solid basis for our beliefs whereas faith yields beliefs that have no basis whatsoever.

This claim, however, belies a very shallow understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. Indeed, unless one has faith they have no ground for trusting their reason to lead them to truth.

By the term "faith" is meant "belief or trust despite the lack of proof." We have faith in this sense when we entrust ourselves to the surgeon to perform the operation skillfully and successfully or when we entrust ourselves to the competence of the flight crew when we board a jet.

We tacitly believe the surgeon and the pilot are competent even though we may not have proof that they are.

Modern Neo-Darwinian theory tells us that our reason, like all our cognitive faculties, has evolved to suit us for survival, not for finding truth. It needs be kept in mind that the survival of an individual or a species is only coincidentally related to truth.

If, for example, a belief exists that the more offspring a man has the greater will be his reward in an afterlife, that belief, if it's genetically based, will proliferate throughout the society with every subsequent generation since anyone holding it will doubtless have, on average, more offspring than those who lack the belief.

The belief has wonderful survival value for those who hold it, or at least for their genes, but the belief is false.

Another example: Atheists tell us that religion evolved because it offered comfort and solace and that due to these advantages religion has spread everywhere around the globe. Yet despite the acknowledged survival value of these religious beliefs atheists nevertheless believe them to be false.

In other words, evolutionary success often has nothing to do with truth, so why do we believe that reason has evolved as a reliable guide to truth? The answer is that we have faith that it is.

If it takes faith to believe that reason is trustworthy, what is that faith based upon? Some say it's based on the laws of logic which are independent of human reason, but as Michael Egnor points out in an article at Evolution News, it requires a measure of faith to think that the laws of logic are trustworthy.

Take Descartes' maxim that thinking proves the thinker's existence - "I think therefore I am." It would seem that there's no faith involved in this succinct proof, but as Egnor points out, that's not quite so. He writes:

For example, even Descartes’s assertion, “I think therefore I am,” is not something we can prove without faith. The problem lies in the “therefore.” We must tacitly assume the validity of logic — specifically the logic of non-contradiction — to link “I think” to “I am.”

If we do not have faith in logic, then it would be possible to think but not to exist. Of course we find this possibility absurd, but it is only absurd because of our profound faith in the validity of logic — in this case, the validity of the logical principle of non-contradiction. That is the principle inherent in the belief that thinking presupposes the existence of the thinker.

If logic were not reliable, there would be no logical connection between thinking and existence. Thinkers could think without existing.

We can't prove the axioms of logic. We accept them on faith. Nor can we prove that reason is trustworthy for to attempt to do so requires us to rely on a rational argument which itself requires us to use our reason. But to use our reason to prove that our reason is reliable is to commit the fallacy of begging the question.

The secular man and the theist are in the same boat here. Both must exercise faith in the trustworthiness of their reason, but the secular man must have faith that blind impersonal forces serendipitously gave rise to a cognitive faculty that purely by coincidence turns out to be a reliable guide to knowledge.

The theist has faith that his reason is a generally reliable guide to knowledge because she believes it to be the gift of a rational and good God who gives us this cognitive faculty for the express purpose of discovering truth.

I leave it to the reader to decide which option is a priori more reasonable to believe.

Putin, MiGs and Corn Pop

Journalists as of Friday were reporting that the Russians were maneuvering heavy artillery into firing positions aimed at Kyiv in Ukraine, apparently with the intent of leveling the city.

Right now the Ukrainians could certainly use the 28 MiG fighter jets that Poland was planning on delivering until President Biden personally nixed the deal. The plan was to fly the jets to a U.S. airbase in Germany so that Polish jets would be transferred to Ukrainian pilots at an American base on German soil.

It would be a thoroughly NATO operation. Those fighters would be helpful in neutralizing Russian artillery, but Mr. Biden canceled our role in the process at the last minute for fear that delivering the jets would anger Vladimir Putin.

As the Wall Street Journal (paywall) opines this is a fiasco that's going to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainians, and the president's thinking on this matter seems incoherent:

The logic seems to be that sending lethal anti-aircraft and antitank weapons won’t provoke the Russian, but 28 fixed-wing aircraft would. That distinction is hard to parse, especially when the Pentagon is also saying that the Ukrainians don’t need the jets because their other weapons are more effective.

So sending less lethal aircraft will lead to World War III, but not arms that are really deadly?

Evidently, all Mr. Putin has to do is threaten nuclear war and Mr. Biden hastily and shamefully retreats:

The bigger problem is the message this fiasco sends to Mr. Putin about NATO. The essence of credible deterrence is making an adversary believe that taking certain actions will draw a response. By so ostentatiously not sending the fighters, and saying the reason is fear of escalation, Mr. Biden is telling the Russian what he doesn’t have to worry about.

Instead of deterring Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden is letting the Russian deter the U.S.

Mr. Biden likes to talk like a tough guy but has repeatedly shown himself to be, as the Texans say, all hat and no cattle. When our military proposed an operation to get Osama bin Laden, then Vice-President Biden advised against it.

As president he ordered the disgraceful evacuation of Afghanistan leaving dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans behind, as well as thousands of Afghans who helped us in our war against the Taliban. Because he didn't want to provoke the Taliban most of those Afghans are likely dead by now.

And, as the Journal reports, this month the Administration stopped the scheduled test of a U.S. nuclear missile after Mr. Putin issued a vague nuclear threat. The test had nothing to do with Ukraine, and Russia knew about it, but the Biden Pentagon stopped the test anyway.

Meanwhile, as the White House dithered over those MiGs, reports have it that Russia has been preparing to use chemical weapons on Ukrainian troops.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, tough-talking Joe from Scranton told a cringe-worthy and rather dubious tale of his encounter with a "bad dude" of his youthful acquaintance named "Corn Pop." It's too bad for the Ukrainians that Mr. Biden isn't as steely-spined with Vladimir Putin as he claimed to have been with old "Corn Pop."

How the Javelin Works

Journalists reporting on the war in Ukraine frequently mention the use by Ukrainian forces of a weapon called the Javelin which has been very effective, apparently, against Russian armored vehicles like tanks and armored personnel carriers. Ross Pomeroy at RealClear Science writes a helpful explanation of how the missile works. Here are some excerpts from his piece:

"This weapon allows a single soldier to target and destroy even the most heavily armored main battle tank with an almost guaranteed kill rate, at great range and with minimal risk," Army Capt. Vincent Delany wrote of the Javelin for West Point's Modern War Institute.

With the Javelin, a soldier using the portable, reusable Command Launch Unit (CLU) looks through an infrared sight to locate a target up to an incredible 2.5 miles away.

When the user spots a target, he operates a cursor to set a square around it, almost like cropping an image. This is then sent to the onboard guidance computer on the missile itself, which has a sophisticated algorithmic tracking system coupled with an infrared imaging device.

When the missile locks on to the target, the operator can launch the self-guided weapon and quickly relocate or reload to fire another missile at a different target.

The Javelin originally debuted in 1996, bearing a couple remarkable innovations. For one, it offers a "soft launch." David Qi Zhang of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute explained what that means in his Master of Engineering thesis on the Javelin.

"The first motor... produces enough thrust to launch the missile out of the tube and a safe distance away, but is completely burned before the nozzle left the tube, leaving no exhaust to hit the operator. The flight motor then ignites to propel the [missile] along its attack path," he wrote.

A second innovation of the Javelin is that it strikes from above. The missile rises high into the air, up to 490 feet, then blasts down on its target from a steep angle, striking the top of an armored vehicle or tank, where the armor is typically weakest.

Russian tanks are not helpless against the Javelin. Most are equipped with explosive reactive armor. When struck by a penetrating weapon like a missile, the armor detonates, blasting a metal plate outwards to damage the missile's penetrator and prevent it from piercing the tank's main armor.

The Javelin overcomes this by having tandem warheads, one to deal with the reactive armor plate, and the second to impact the tank's armor itself.

Modern Russian tanks are also equipped with a radar system called Arena, which detects incoming missiles and automatically fires a wide burst of projectiles to destroy or redirect them. But here, again, the Javelin reigns supreme, Delany says.

"The Javelin can defeat Arena while in top-attack mode, due to the missile descending from too steep an angle for the system to engage properly," he wrote.

Ukraine had been shipped roughly 77 launchers and 740 missiles before Putin invaded. Many, many more of each are now on the way courtesy of the U.S. and European allies. According to an article at NDTV as of a week or so ago at least 280 Russian armoured vehicles had been destroyed with the American Javelin missile, out of 300 shots fired.

By now thousands of these weapons are in the hands of the Ukrainian armed forces, which is one reason why the Russians aren't advancing very quickly on the ground but are instead bombarding cities either from the air or from a safe distance away with artillary.

Here's a chart released by Ukraine showing Russia losses thus far in the war. Whether the Ukrainians have inflated the numbers or not is hard to tell:

The chart appeared in an article in The Sun which has some other information on the war.

The Arctic Tern

The Arctic tern is a remarkable bird. It flies from the Arctic circle to the Antarctic and back again every year. The amazing thing is that it makes each trip entirely over the ocean without stopping anywhere to rest. It even sleeps while airborne.

This brief but beautiful video explains some of the remarkable abilities of this bird and suggets that those abilities and structures are better explained as a product of intelligent design than blind, mechanistic processes. Give it a look:

Progressivism's Book of Genesis

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English thinker who wrote during the turbulent period of civil strife and struggle for power between King Charles I and Parliament.

His thoughts on the best political system for avoiding the calamitous consequences of war were put down in a book titled Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan is one of the first books of modern political philosophy. Hobbes' central concern was peace, more specifically how to avoid the calamities of civil war. He began with two principles or axioms from which all else follows:

1. Men are all engaged in a constant struggle for power over others.
2. Men try to avoid death with all their might.

The word "leviathan" means great beast and is used to describe the state or commonwealth as Hobbes saw it. Hobbes' book, historian Peter Ackroyd observes, has been called "the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language."

Be that as it may, Hobbes wrote that the worst calamity to befall men is war. In one famous passage he wrote these lapidary words:

In such condition [i.e. civil war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a primitive state of nature, He argues, in which there is no government, the condition of man ...

...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body.

And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.

And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

Men in a state of nature are in a constant struggle each with every other for power and each lives in constant fear of violent death. Hobbes' solution is for all men to yield their own individual sovereignty and rights to that of one sovereign (or a committee) of rulers, whose will would govern all.

Once yielded that sovereignty can never be rescinded. There would be in Hobbes' state no such thing as liberty of conscience, which only leads to conflict and violence. The state will determine what religion people will follow. Justice and truth are whatever the sovereign determines them to be. Nothing the sovereign does can be said to be unjust.

This, of course, is big government on steroids. It's the blueprint for the totalitarianisms of the Nazis and communists of the 20th century, and it's the logical endpoint of contemporary liberal progressivism, even if many modern progressives would balk at going so far.

Progressivism is a faith that a government run by highly educated elites will naturally be the best way to prevent conflicts and protect individual rights. The bigger, more massive the bureaucratic state the more power it has over individual lives, the better able it will be to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

Government is the progressive's religion, and its book of Genesis is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

What Will Break First?

Jim Geraghty has a fine column today at NRO in which he asserts that: The Russian invasion of Ukraine will end when one or more of four things breaks:

• the Russian supply lines;
• the Ukrainian ability to effectively resist;
• the Russian economy;
• the patience of some armed individuals around Putin.

The explanations he gives for each of these four are interesting, and readers following what's happening in Ukraine will want to read his entire piece. I'll just highlight what he says about his first point.

He writes:

On Friday, there was a rumor that “Russia has resources left for the war until Sunday, after which they will collapse.”

There are numerous reports of Russian attacks as of this morning, so that rumor sounds like an exaggeration of a real phenomenon — that Russia invaded with far too few resources, that frontline Russian units are stretching their supply lines thinner and thinner, and that many Russian units are getting literally and metaphorically stuck in a quagmire.

Trent Telenko, a retired technical analyst at the U.S. Defense Contracts Management Agency, offered another fascinating assessment of the logistics and terrain challenges Russian forces are facing over at the ChicagoBoyz blog:

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole 40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already).

Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August.

Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About one-fifth of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped and are definitely out of the war for good.

There's more:

In a November 2021 essay, Alex Vershinin of War on the Rocks explained why the Russian army would face intensely challenging logistical problems if it invaded, and why each Ukrainian attack on Russian supply-chain trucks would exacerbate those problems:

As a result of extra artillery and air defense battalions, the Russian logistics requirements are much larger than their U.S. counterparts. If an army has just enough trucks to sustain itself at a 45-mile distance, then at 90 miles, the throughput will be 33 percent lower. At 180 miles, it will be down by 66 percent.

The further you push from supply dumps, the fewer supplies you can replace in a single day. . . . The Russian army does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps.

To reach a 180-mile range, the Russian army would have to double truck allocation to 400 trucks for each of the material-technical support brigades.

We’ve already seen videos of Russian soldiers looting shops and grocery stores for provisions. This is day twelve of the war; numerous reports indicate Moscow expected Ukraine to capitulate within a couple of days.

The longer Russia takes to subdue the Ukrainians the more their supply chains will be harassed and degraded. Not only is more weaponry entering the theater from the countries to Ukraine's west, but it looks like Poland will also soon be delivering Russian-made MIG fighter jets, which will further increase the hazards to Russia's supply lines.

When this war started twelve days ago all the experts were saying that the Ukrainians were fighting valiantly but that an eventual Russian victory was inevitable. Yet if Ukraine can hold out for another week or two the number of Russian troops who surrender may well turn into a flood, and if that starts happening there may be reason to hope that the whole Russian miltary effort will collapse.

Experts are often, if not usually, wrong.

Read the rest of Geraghty's analysis at the link.

No Promissory Notes, Please

One of the profound mysteries in biology that no materialistic theory like Darwinian evolution has ever been able to explain is how an organism develops from a fertilized egg. The video below shows the development of a chicken embryo, and as you watch it ask yourself how the cells know where to migrate to and what structures to form when they get there.

Ask yourself, too, how these cells know when to move, when to divide and when to differentiate.

What controls and choreographs all of this and how did that control system evolve?

A computer programmer can program a computer to control machinery in a factory so that it performs specific functions in a specific sequence in a very rudimentary version of what's happening in the embryo, but then the computer programmer is an intelligent agent.

How does all that happens in an embryo come about by undirected, mindless chance? I wish someone who thinks it did would explain it to me because the only explanation of these sorts of biological mysteries I've ever found are along the lines of, "It just did, somehow, and someday we'll know how."

Perhaps, but scientific promissory notes, especially notes whose maturity date is never specified, are very unconvincing as reasons for believing something that's otherwise very difficult to believe.

Here are a few other mysteries that seem to defy any materialistic or naturalistic explanation. I'd like very much to have someone explain how any of these could've evolved by those blind, mindless purposeless processes. And no promissory notes, please: Animal migration and navigation, insect metamorphosis, sexual reproduction, the first living cell, and human consciousness.

There are lots more, but those would make for a good start.

Anyway, here's the video:

The Incredible Maiden Voyage of the Barnacle Goose

I thought it might be well to take a break from the terrible events occurring in Ukraine this week, and inject a little awe and wonder into our day. To that end, I chose to write about the incredible manner in which young Barnacle geese leave their nest.

The Barnacle goose is a resident of Greenland but occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states of the U.S. It's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in North America.

One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged. They're hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below.

Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:

That any of them survive this first "flight" is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

A Few Thoughts on How Things Stand, Nuclear - Wise

Vladimir Putin recently ramped up Russia's nuclear readiness status which raises a lot of questions about nuclear weapons. Moreover, some in the U.S. in Congress and in the media have called for the introduction into Ukraine of American air power which could certainly escalate to a nuclear exchange.

The Heritage Foundation's policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and missile defense, Patti-Jane Geller, has been asked by The Daily Signal to give her thoughts on these matters, which she does by answering six questions posed to her by the Daily Signal.

I've listed the six questions she addresses in bold along with one or two of her sentences that give a succinct summary of her more detailed answer. If you're interested in her more extensive responses I encourage you to read the whole article:

1. Putin put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert during the invasion of Ukraine. What is the likelihood he would use nuclear weapons, and on who and what? "The simplest answer to this question is that while the likelihood is not high, it is not zero either."

2. A nuclear attack by Russia on the United States seems extremely unlikely. But what should be the U.S. response, and that of NATO, if Russia hits Ukraine with a nuclear weapon? "Ukraine is not a NATO member, and therefore the United States does not extend its nuclear umbrella over Ukraine. Nor are the United States and NATO currently involved in the conflict militarily, so they have no obligation to respond using military force."

3. Just out of curiosity, how much of the United States could be reached by a Russian nuclear attack? "All of it."

4. Does the United States have an adequate missile defense system in place under the worst-case scenario to defend itself or to defend allies from a Russian nuclear attack? Do Eastern European allies have adequate missile defense systems? "Many Americans find it hard to believe that we have no way to defend against a major Russian nuclear attack."

5. By most counts, Russia has several hundred more nuclear warheads than the United States. How relevant is this? Or would such a conflict bring such annihilation that it almost wouldn’t matter? Concerning strategic warheads [warheads mounted on ballistic missiles which could travel thousands of miles] there's a rough parity. Concerning non-strategic "battlefield" weapons [nuclear weapons of relatively shorter range and lower blast yields designed for use on the battlefield] the Russians have a 10 to 1 advantage over the U.S. (2000 to 200)

6. Anything else about Russia’s nuclear capabilities that Americans should keep in mind as Putin’s rhetoric harshens? "As much as U.S. policymakers might like to wish away nuclear weapons from existence, unfortunately, the enemy gets a vote. Putin’s recent inflammatory rhetoric, nuclear saber-rattling, and military actions in Ukraine are proof of the need for a strong, modern U.S. nuclear force."

"Basically, That's Wrong"

Vice-preident Kamala Harris was asked recently to explain in layman's terms what's going on in Ukraine. Her answer indicates that she has a pretty low opinion of the intelligence of the average layman:

OH… MY… GOD

Q: “What’s going on in Ukraine?”

Kamala: “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so basically that’s wrong.”
pic.twitter.com/gDJDJQVsWb

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 1, 2022

We've arrived at another distressing point in our cultural decline when our highest political officials talk to Americans as if they were talking to a class of pre-schoolers.

Or, and I just had this depressing thought, maybe that's how Ms. Harris talks to everybody!

In any case, I'd like to ask her what she means when she characterizes one country invading another, deliberately killing and terrorizing its citizens and destroying its cities, by saying that "basically, that's wrong."

Is that the strongest censure she can think of? Would she say that "basically," child abuse is wrong or that "basically," the holocaust was wrong?

Thankfully, she didn't use the one timorous construction so popular today among those who can't bring themselves to condemn any behavior, no matter how iniquitous or vile - she didn't say that killing thousands of civilians, including untold numbers of children, is "inappropriate" or "not okay."

Even so, must our leaders speak about right and wrong, good and evil in such milk-soppy language as Ms. Harris did employ? Why is she - and not just her - so reluctant to say categorically that what the Russian political leadership and many in the Russian military are doing in Ukraine is pure, unadulterated evil?

Why are so many so reluctant to speak as if evil really does exist?

Do They Really Want a Nuclear Holocaust?

I find it beyond shocking that there are calls on Twitter and even in the halls of Congress to introduce American fighter jets into Ukraine to establish a no-fly zone (NFZ).

I'm stunned by this because surely they understand what they're calling for. A no-fly zone is not like some invisible force field over the country, it's an edict that requires enforcement.

If a NFZ were declared NATO aircraft would have to patrol the skies over Ukraine and shoot down any Russian aircraft that entered that airspace. They would also have to take out any ground-based radar and anti-aircraft missiles systems manned by Russian troops.

This would entail the loss of a lot of Russian lives at the hands of NATO, which would certainly elicit a Russian declaration of war against Europe and the U.S. That war might start out with conventional weapons, but it wouldn't stay that way. It would quickly escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, intermediate range nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles.

It would be mutually assured destruction. Our cities would be blasted into smoldering, radioactive piles of rubble. It astonishes me that anyone could seriously want this.

The Biden administration has a lot to be held accountable for in this current war. They waited too long to try to arm the Ukrainians, they passed on an opportunity months ago to build up the Ukrainian air force, and they waited too long to impose sanctions.

When the sanctions did come, they were too mild and the administration inexplicably delayed in targeting the right people and institutions and still haven't targeted Russia's petroleum and gas industry.

Nevertheless, they've done the right thing in refusing to heed the calls for a no-fly zone. Ukraine is not Iraq in the 1990s, the Russians aren't the Iraqis and Putin is not Saddam Hussein. Hussein could do nothing about our no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas he wanted to obliterate. Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons. Putin does. A couple thousand of them.

Arm the Ukrainians, demoralize the Russian army, but don't introduce American or NATO forces into this war unless Putin attacks a NATO country. To do so would be to invite a nuclear exchange nobody would win and everyone would lose.

How Far Will He Go Before...?

If there was any doubt about the evil of Vladimir Putin and his henchmen the last day or so should've dispelled it. In the last 48 hours the Russians have tacitly and explicitly threatened nuclear war with the West, attacked civilian sites with rockets, allegedly employed a type of bomb called a vacuum bomb that's banned by international law, and dropped cluster bombs on a school, among other places.

Russia appears to have used banned cluster munitions to indiscriminately shell civilian areas in Ukraine's east that had stood up to Vladimir Putin's invasion in what would constitute a war crime.

Kharkiv, which has witnessed some of the heaviest fighting of the war so far, was hit by rockets fired from Russian positions on Monday - with video showing a shopping centre in the Serpnia area blanketed by explosions. A military source told MailOnline that the videos showed 'cluster' munitions had been used.

'The BM-21 Grad is a multiple launch rocket system used for 'area denial', dropping cluster bombs on a concentrated area,' the expert said. 'It's mainly used on enemy troops before an offensive. Used against civilians, it's not only a war crime, but has only one purpose – to spread terror and alarm among the civilian population.'

Graphic images and video revealed streets littered with the bodies of dead and badly wounded civilians, with other images showing spent BM-21 Grad rocket cartridges laying in the streets and having fallen through apartment roofs.

Cluster munitions were also used to destroy a school in Okhtyrka, activist group Amnesty said, in which three people including a child were killed. The attack 'appears to have been carried out by Russian forces, which were operating nearby, and which have a record of using cluster munitions in populated areas,' Amnesty said.

'There is no possible justification for dropping cluster munitions in populated areas, let alone near a school,' secretary Agnes Callamard added.

The Russians have also deployed hundreds of assassins from a private militia run by an oligarch and Putin crony. These killers are tasked with killing Ukrainian officials and particularly President Volodomyr Zelensky:

More than 400 Russian mercenaries have been flown in from Africa to assassinate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, it was revealed last night.

A private militia known as the Wagner Group allegedly has orders from Vladimir Putin to take out Zelensky - and 23 other government figures - to allow Moscow to take over its eastern European neighbour.

According to the Times, the army-for-hire, run by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin - a close ally of the Russian president who is often dubbed 'Putin's chef' - was flown in five weeks ago and is being offered a huge sum for the mission.

The highly-trained operatives are said to be waiting for the green light from the Kremlin to pounce, with their hit list also including Ukraine's prime minister, the entire cabinet, mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir - both boxing champions who have become iconic figures on the front lines of the capital.

One wonders how far Putin will go before someone in his government or military decides that he simply can't be allowed to go any further and acts to put an end to the misery this man is inflicting on Ukraine, Russia and possibly upon the rest of the world.