How Fast Are We Moving?

An article at Big Think has some interesting facts about our actual movement. Here are a few excerpts:

Someone at the greatest distance from Earth’s center located at the equator — 0° latitude — travels at 1676 kilometers per hour (1042 miles per hour), but the higher your latitude is, the slower you move due to the rotating Earth. Someone at 45° latitude moves at a speed of only 1183 km/hr (735 mi/hr), and someone at either the north or south pole wouldn’t move at all; they’d simply complete a rotation while always remaining at Earth’s geographic pole.

But that's actually pretty slow compared to our speed as we orbit the sun:

At its fastest, Earth moves at 30.29 km/s (18.82 mi/s), while at its slowest, it moves at only 29.29 km/s (18.50 mi/s): a difference of about 3%.

But as fast as this is, it's about seven times slower that the speed with which our entire solar system moves around the center of our galaxy:

It’s estimated that our Sun’s speed around the Milky Way is somewhere around 220 km/s (137.5 mi/s): about seven times as great as our planet’s motion around the Sun.

It's also interesting that if we picture the orbits of the planets as lying on a flat disc with the sun at the center, the solar system is moving around the galactic center tilted at an angle of about 60 degrees from the plane of the galaxy.

The Milky Way is located in a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group. Our Local Group is moving through the universe at a speed of about 375 mi/s.

The largest and most massive galaxy in the Local Group is Andromeda, located around 2.5 million light-years away and containing perhaps double the Milky Way’s mass. Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course:

When we factor in the direction and speed with which the Sun moves through the Milky Way, we can determine that the Milky Way and Andromeda are speeding toward one another at 109 km/s; we’re on a collision course that should culminate with a great galactic merger that will begin in about ~4 billion years.

When you add all of these motions together:

• the Earth spinning on its axis,
• the Earth revolving around the Sun,
• the Sun moving through the galaxy,
• the Milky Way heading toward Andromeda,
• the motion of the Local Group

It turns out that we're doing a lot of moving, even when we feel like we're sitting still.

That Hideous Strength

C.S. Lewis was an Oxford scholar of medieval literature, prolific writer and a famous Christian apologist (i.e. defender of the faith). He died in 1963 on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In his novel That Hideous Strength (1945) Lewis writes a "fairy tale," as he calls it, that's a prophetic allegory of the cultural battle we see raging in our own day between the forces of left-wing progressivism/scientism and those who struggle to hold on to the traditional values of family and religious commitment.

In THS Lewis illustrates this struggle by means of a plot by the progressive National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to take over, first a part of England, and ultimately the whole country and the world. N.I.C.E. is led by men who have embraced a scientistic worldview - naturalistic, atheistic, materialistic, reductionistic, objectivist, and purely rational.

As Lewis describes them in a classic work, The Abolition of Man, they're men without chests. They have no heart, no passions. They're men bereft souls who can be pictured as disembodied heads, which is, in fact, how Lewis symbolically represents the leader of N.I.C.E.

N.I.C.E. and the men who run it may seem like fantastically implausible caricatures, but the story should be read as a bi-leveled allegory. On one level it's Lewis' portrayal of the spiritual nature of the battle and on another level it's a portrait of the left's program for crushing their opposition and gaining power, a program that has been employed consistently by the left ever since the days of Karl Marx in the 19th century and perhaps since the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing terror.

The Marxists and their progressive allies have throughout this era sought to advance along three fronts. These can be summarized as follows (the summary is taken from Faith and the Arts):

The Four Stages of Cultural Revolution – As described by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in the 1970s, these are the stages by which Soviet agents worked to infiltrate and undermine America and other western societies.

1. Demoralization – using pornography and other methods through media, entertainment, education, etc., to break down the moral courage of the people. 
2. Destabilization – By undermining police, courts, borders, etc., to overwhelm public safety and further demoralize the people.
3. Crisis – Build 1 and 2 to the point of a crisis where people resort to rioting or to civil war.
4. New Normal – Declare emergency powers and install the administrative state as a solution for all of the problems which the revolutionary forces have themselves caused.

The Long March through the Institutions – This is a central concept of cultural Marxism. It concerns the strategy of neo-Marxists in America and in other Western societies to overcome the resistance of successful middle-class cultures to the Marxist rhetoric of revolution. Middle-class people tend to be somewhat satisfied with their lives and tolerant of income differences with others.

Cultural Marxists therefore target all of the institutions of middle-class society — church, family, public education, media, the press, entertainment, business, academia, science, law, etc.—in order to create the problems and crises that lead to the imposition of emergency powers and the administrative state. 

Mass Formation – This is an academic concept that has been used for many years to try to understand the mass psychology that appears to be at work in societies like Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China, where thousands of ordinary citizens either turned a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow citizens or, in some cases, joined the forces that shamed and tortured them.

The process is based on fear and the desire to survive or escape the threat of suffering. Under these conditions, “normal” people may become callous to the suffering of others. They “go along to get along.” But the result is a complete collapse of genuine religious and moral civilization.

All of these corrosive strategies certainly seem to have experienced alarming success in our contemporary culture, at least until the election of Donald Trump, whose administration seems determined to arrest and reverse the trend. At any rate, Lewis shines a light on these strategies in his depiction of the machinations of N.I.C.E. and the spiritual barrenness of those employed in advancing its cause.

For those who may never have read That Hideous Strength, I'd recommend first reading Abolition of Man and perhaps then perusing brief summaries of the first two novels in Lewis' "space" trilogy Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra before tackling That Hideous Strength.

The story will make more sense if you do.

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it. Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here's another question: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Furthermore, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

For that matter where are the instructions stored that tell not only our bones to stop growing but also tell each organ in the body to stop growing? This information can't be stored solely on the DNA because the DNA has to be instructed when to stop and start producing RNA (and thus protein). How did that regulatory system come about and where is the information that governs it stored and how is it regulated?

And how is all of this produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution? No one knows. We just have to gin up enough blind faith to believe that it did, we are told, because believing that the body is designed by an intelligent agent has too many uncomfortable religious implications.

It all reminds one of a 1997 quote by the biologist Richard Lewontin who wrote that:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of heath and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door....To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Lewontin and his fellow naturalistic materialists refuse to believe that the marvels of biology are the product of intelligence, but they commit their lives to writing books about how blind chance, despite how absurd it seems, can accomplish miracles.

Fantastic Design (Pt.I)

One of the most fascinating books I've read over the past several years is one titled Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents resulting from over a billion or so years of genetic mutations and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's most probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned — all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

Robert Heinlein on the Political Divide

I recently came across a quote from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who observed that:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I'm not sure I fully agree. I do think he's right that the fundamental political difference is between people who want to control others, to limit the freedoms of others, and people who just want to be left alone and free to live pretty much as they please.

But I demur when Heinlein imputes noble motives to the controllers. I don't believe that there are many of those who seek to limit our freedoms who are doing it from idealistic motives. It seems rather that their chief motive is a lust for power augmented, perhaps, by a bitterness or hatred borne of envy or jealousy.

The left has always tended toward totalitarian authority over others, but, although some may be motivated by utilitarian desires for the greatest good, those idealists are often swept aside by those who covet power.

It almost always happens this way. The French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and all the lesser leftist revolutions in Asia (North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam) and Africa that plagued the 20th century began as efforts to make life better for people and ended in mass slaughter, including the executions of the idealists who started the revolution. Approximately 100 million people were murdered by leftist totalitarians in the last century alone.

Moreover, the lust for control is not just typical of full-blown revolutions. It exists in our own polity as well. The difference between liberals and conservatives can be summed up thus: Liberals want ever-increasing power concentrated in the federal bureaucracy, the better to dictate how people live. Conservatives want power disbursed to state and local authorities so that citizens have more say in the decisions that affect their own lives.

I think Heinlein is mistaken, too, in characterizing those who want to retain their freedoms as surly curmudgeons who lack altruism. No doubt that description fits some, and it may be the common stereotype, but it's basically unfair. Conservatives donate an enormous amount of their personal resources - money, time, and talent - to their local communities as well as to efforts to ease global miseries. Studies show that conservatives are at least as generous as liberals and some studies show that they are more so (See also here).

So let's give Heinlein's observation an A for pithiness and a C for accuracy.

A Day to Honor Valor

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but maybe it's not inappropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God this Memorial Day.

There's No "There" There

Probably to the disappointment of conspiracy theorists everywhere both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have concluded that on the basis of the evidence at hand Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself in a prison cell six years ago, and there's no evidence of any foreign involvement in the attempts on Donald Trump's life last summer.

Jim Geraghty has a full report on these revelations here. He writes that,

FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — two men who you figure would be highly motivated to find any sinister plot to kill Jeffrey Epstein before he would spill more secrets of powerful men, particularly if prominent Democrats were behind the plot — have concluded that Epstein killed himself.

The top two FBI officials also say that in their review of the assassination attempts against Donald Trump, they’ve looked for “any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike” and concluded, “the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there.”

The two men were guests on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures show hosted by Maria Bartiromo where they had this exchange:

Bartiromo: You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.

Patel: Well, I mean, listen. They have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor, who’s been in that prison system, been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.

Bongino: He killed himself. Again, you want me to — I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.

On the matter of the Trump assassination attempts Geraghty reports this dialogue:

Bartiromo: I know you can’t talk about any active investigation, and our viewers understand that. How come we don’t have more information on the assassination attempts on President Trump?

Patel: There are two reasons. Two open, ongoing prosecutions. So, two of the investigations are obviously closed, because the individuals are dead, but there’s two live prosecutions. And so, we can’t get ahead of the federal court case. A lot of that information will come out in the federal court cases.

But we have personally invested our time in making sure that we have looked at all the, any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike, and we’ve both been down to Quantico. We’ve both done the laboratory testing, we’ve both seen the explosives analysis, we’ve both seen the firearm and physically held it, we are all in on these investigations.

Bartiromo: Are we going to be surprised at what you learned?

Bongino: You know what, Maria? Kash is not kidding, we’ve been personally briefed extensively on every single detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so out of respect for the case, it’s probably more appropriate that I stay quiet on that. However, I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you.

If there was a big, explosive “there” there — given my history as a Secret Service agent, and my personal friendship as a director does with the president, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have — if you can think of one, there isn’t. In some of these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there. And I know people — I get it, I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.

Despite this testimony from two very big supporters of President Trump, I doubt that either issue - the Epstein affair or the assassination attempts - will be put to rest. You can read more on this at Geraghty's column at the above link.

The Waiting-Times Problem

Among the many serious problems besetting any theory of blind, unguided evolution is something called the "waiting-times problem." David Klinghoffer discusses this in his fine book on the work of biologist Richard Sternberg. The book is titled Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, and it outlines Sternberg's argument for a genetic influence that has no physical presence in the living cell, not in DNA, RNA, or what's called the epigenome. It's immaterial.

In Klinghoffer's discussion of the waiting-times problem he quotes Sternberg's summary of it: "if a particular trait needs two or more mutations - not to appear simultaneously, but just for two changes to coalesce, to come together in an individual - such that an adaptive trait appears, how much time would that take?"

Biologists have estimated that in humans it would take 216 million years for just two mutations that would have a beneficial impact in a population. In whales, which have a different generation time and breeding population sizes, it would take 43 million years for just two beneficial mutations to arise to change just a single trait.

The standard Darwinian model of evolution asserts that whales evolved from a land mammal named Pakicetus, but the waiting time for descendants of Pakicetus to evolve into whales would far exceed any amount of time plausibly available for such a transition to occur. It would require tens of thousands of changes in the animal,

changes to the eyes, changes to hearing, changes to the reproductive system. Modification to the body, so that instead of walking on four limbs, the body adopts a torpedo shape..., that has hydrodynamic properties....changes to the musculature....changes to the vertebral column. The origin of a tail fluke, and all of the musculature and neurological systems for coordinating that. Changes in breathing are very important....when diving the blow hole [must remain] closed....[The animal] has to be able to sleep at sea....[and do so] while most of the body is underwater.

These changes are just a fraction of the problems that would have to be overcome for a land mammal to evolve into a whale. It's like taking a Volkswagen Beetle, modifying it to be able to explore the ocean depths, and doing so through some random process. How long would it take for all the necessary mutations to occur?

The standard model states that whales didn't exist 50 million years ago and evolved from Pakicetus over a period of 14 million years, but it would've taken 43 million years for just a single change to have occurred. That's the waiting-times problem.

Sternberg maintains that there's something extrinsic to the material world, something immaterial (like Plato's Forms) that guides the evolutionary process and gives it direction. Without that, the waiting-times problem makes evolution - purely materialistic Darwinism - incomprehensible.

Of course, modern Intelligent Design theorists have been saying this same thing for almost fifty years.

Possible Explanations for a Finely-Tuned Universe

The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe. Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:

The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.

The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.

The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.

The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other, and even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.

The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.

There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.

The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.

The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, whether universes or their inhabitants.

Which of these options is thought most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.

Astonishing Behavior in a Cephalopod

This wonderful video raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary to camouflage itself like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these cephalopods display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA, and DNA generates proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through mechanistic processes that didn't "know" what they were doing?

The evolution of any behavior requires not just the appropriate genetic mutations to create the neural algorithms that control the behavior but also the physiological structures necessary for the behavior. These changes, moreover, must occur gradually over eons of time and pretty much simultaneously in a population of organisms, and, according to the naturalistic account, as a result of purely blind, undirected mechanisms.

If you keep all that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

Can't We be Good Without God?

It's not uncommon to hear those who bear a certain antipathy toward Christianity boast that they don't need God in order to be good, that they can live just as fine a life as any believer without committing themselves to all that Christian mumbo-jumbo.

Unfortunately for these folks, though, they're missing the point. The issue is not whether people can be kind, generous, compassionate, faithful, etc. if there is no God, of course they can.

Rather the issue is whether there can be any meaningful moral standards if there is no God. If there's no standard of morality outside ourselves and no accountability for how we measure up to that standard, morality is just a bundle of personal preferences and no one's preferences are any more "morally right" than anyone else's.

C.S. Lewis had something to say about the man who asks why we should think he can't be good without believing in Christianity. Lewis states that the man is not asking a reasonable question: "If [the man] never heard of Christianity, he wouldn't be asking this question," and "if, having heard of Christianity, and having seriously considered it, he had decided it was untrue, then once more he would not be asking the question."

Lewis says that the man who asks why he cannot be good without believing in Christianity,

has heard of Christianity and is by no means certain that it may not be true...to such a man it might be enough to reply that he is really asking to be allowed to get on with being "good" before he has done his best to discover what good means....He is deliberately trying not to know whether Christianity is true or false, because he foresees endless trouble if it turns out to be true....

He is like the man who won't go to the doctor when he feels a mysterious pain because he's afraid of what the doctor may tell him....

This man is not committing an honest error, Lewis asserts. Rather he's committing a dishonest error. Lewis doesn't put it this way, but the man is deliberately refusing to examine his reasoning. He's refusing to consider how there can be moral right and wrong if he, or society, is the highest moral authority. He's refusing to consider how anything can be morally wrong if there's no ultimate accountability for how people live. He's refusing to ask himself what the words "morally wrong" even mean if we're just the product of mindless forces and random chance.

If the atheist is correct, if there is no God, no transcendent moral standard to serve as an objective reference point, then there's absolutely no reason why people should care about those they have no feelings for. There's no reason why anyone should sacrifice his own well-being for the sake of others. There's no reason why we should not all be egoists or even nihilists.

The person who thinks that there are things that are objectively wrong, who thinks that it would be morally wrong to be an egoist or a nihist, is tacitly acknowledging that there must be a God.

The only reason human beings have for not being egoists or nihilists is that they believe that it would be objectively wrong to be such a person, but it can only be objectively wrong to be such a person if there's an objective standard of moral right and wrong. And there can only be an objective standard of moral right and wrong if there's a God.

There's nothing else that could bear the enormous weight of human morality.

Computation Is Not Understanding

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what digestion is to the stomach. It's what the stomach, or brain, does. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News and Views. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

That human beings are capable of such marvels is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and without which the brain cannot function.

Up from Atheism

Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was an atheistic British philosopher, perhaps the most influential atheist in the 20th century. He insisted that one should presuppose atheism until evidence suggesting a God was adduced, but he didn't think any such evidence existed. 

However, Flew was serious about following the evidence, and in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an Intelligent Creator of the universe. This conversion shocked fellow atheists.

Flew never publicly embraced any particular religion and claimed to be a deist, but keeping with his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a creator God.

In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind was written by Flew in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese.

In the book Flew says this:

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this Universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

The leaders of science over the last hundred years, along with some of today’s most influential scientists, have built a philosophically compelling vision of a rational universe that sprang from a divine Mind. As it happens, this is the particular view of the world that I now find to be the soundest philosophical explanation….

The French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said four centuries ago that there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it. Unfortunately, a lot of people today are ignorant of the evidence, in some cases, perhaps, culpably so, and some really are dead set against it.

Getting People to Listen

Over the last sixty or so years, it has grown increasingly difficult to have political conversations with people who vote differently from oneself. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but perhaps one is that our culture has, in large measure, lost the art of dialogue. By that, I mean we've forgotten certain basic conversational rules that help to prevent tensions and defensiveness.

One of these rules, of course, is to eschew insults; another is to employ humor whenever possible.

Insults convey a lack of respect for the person to whom the insult is directed, and no one wants to listen to someone who disrespects him.

Humor on the other hand, especially self-deprecating humor, is disarming. It opens people up and makes them more receptive to what we have to say.

A third rule that's often forgotten or ignored is to be humble.

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, elaborated a bit on this last one. He wrote that in seeking to explain his opinion on some matter, he made it a practice to never use, whenever "he advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any other that gave the air of positiveness to an opinion."

Instead, he recommended saying "I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so and so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so, if I'm not mistaken."

Such humility has the effect of making one's opinion seem more appealing, less dogmatic, and more winsome than does asserting the opinion in a peremptory or pugnacious fashion.

Whether we're discussing politics or religion, dogmatism, aggressiveness, and cock-suredness are often unpleasant and only serve to antagonize and alienate one's dialogue partner. If we really want to win the other person to our view we should avoid such antagonisms as far as we are able.

Otherwise, no matter how impeccable our logic, no matter how strong our reasons, a doctrinaire lack of humility will only cause the fellow across the table to erect a kind of intellectual or emotional force field around himself, which will be impermeable to all our logic and reasons.

If we want people to listen to what we have to say we have to say it in ways that are appealing. A lack of humility almost guarantees that the other person won't listen or take us seriously.

Leo XIV

The Catholic Church has elected a new pope, an American named Robert Francis Prevost who has taken the name Leo XIV. There's a lot of speculation about whether Leo XIV will be a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative, and although it's too soon to offer an opinion, his inaugural homily is encouraging.

Here's an excerpt (The entire text can be found here):

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed.

A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society. And these are not few.

Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.

If this is indicative of his views, and I can't imagine why they shouldn't be so regarded, then I'm encouraged. Everything he said there is what devout, educated Christians have been saying for a very long time, and it'd be wonderful to have a man in the Vatican who desires to use his influence to educate those who need to be disabused of their misconceptions of the Christian faith.

To the extent that Leo XIV will be that man he needs and deserves our prayers.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. II)

In yesterday's Viewpoint post it was argued that sensations like color, sound, taste, fragrance, pain, etc. are not objectively real but are rather the products of the interaction of electrochemical stimuli with the brain/mind complex.

In other words, were there no perceivers with sensory organs, a brain and a mind, there'd be no color, just as there'd be no color if there were no light. We create the sensation of red out of the electromagnetic energy that impinges on our retinas. Red doesn't exist independently of someone seeing it.

But why posit a mind as part of the apparatus responsible for these phenomena of our daily experience? Why not just attribute them to our physical senses working together with our brains?

After all, we know that if a brain ceases to function, as in death, we cease to have sensory experience. Moreover, we know we have brains, we can see them, measure them, observe various parts of them activate on brain scans. But why think we also have a mind that can't be observed, can't be described, and can't even be located?

The answer is that the material, physical brain, taken alone, seems to be an inadequate explanation for certain facts about consciousness, among which are the sensory experiences we talked about in the first paragraph above and in the previous post.

The problem is that the brain is material, the processes that occur in the brain are chemical or physical, but the sensations we experience are immaterial. There's no known bridge between an electrical impulse generated between neurons and, say, the taste of sweet. How does an electrochemical reaction among molecules produce the experience of sweetness or the sensation of sound or color or pain?

It's not just that no one knows how these amazing events happen, it's that no one knows how it could happen. A miniature scientist traveling throughout someone's brain while the person was looking at a red car would not see red anywhere in the brain, or the image of a car, for that matter. Where does the red come from? What exactly is it? How does a chemical reaction produce red in a person's brain?

The apparent inadequacy of matter to explain the immaterial phenomena of our experience is one piece of evidence - there are others - that something immaterial is involved in the creation of these phenomena. This immaterial entity is what philosophers call the mind or soul.

Of course, many philosophers, those called materialists, resist the idea that we have an immaterial mind separate from, and in some ways independent of, the brain. They resist the idea because they're wedded to the conviction that all that exists is matter and energy. Their ontology doesn't allow for mysterious immaterial entities that play a role in thinking and experiencing.

Once such entities are admitted, the materialist fears, the door will be open to other such mental entities like souls and ultimately, God.

In order to keep the Divine Mind from intruding Itself into the world, the materialist believes, all independent immaterial entities, especially those such as minds which are conscious and intelligent, must be excluded, but then we're left with what seems to be an insoluble mystery: How does a material brain generate the immaterial sensations we experience every moment of our waking lives, and what exactly are those sensations?

Answer those questions and you'll win a Nobel Prize.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. I)

In my classes we discuss the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of the question we specifically address are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, sound, and so on.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and a tree falling in the forest makes a sound whether or not there's anyone around to hear it.

But is it true that the phenomena of our senses are objectively real? Consider this description of how music is downloaded to a computer and then transferred to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in us by our brains/minds. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain/mind complex to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy traveling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all, just electrochemical energy. The music is created by our brain/mind and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

One last question: Why do I refer to the brain/mind? Why not just assume that the brain is solely responsible for the sensations we experience? I'll consider that question tomorrow.

Spring Migration

One of the most astonishing phenomena in nature is occurring this week across much of the United States, but since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

I'm referring to the movement of millions of birds from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve through random mutation and natural selection? How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it?

It truly is a marvel.

Cape May Warbler

Is Trump a Fascist?

One frequently hears President Trump referred to these days as a fascist, an allegation which makes me wonder if any of his accusers know what a fascist actually is. Here are six characteristics of fascism:

First, a fascist is a blood and soil nationalist. That is, he defines the nation in terms of the ethnicity of the majority of its citizens. He invariably believes that all races, religions, and ethnicities except his own are inferior, and anyone who doesn't share the correct race, religion, and/or ethnicity is to be treated as a second class citizen. Iran is a fascist state based on religion. Nazi Germany was a fascist state based on ethnicity.

Second, a fascist is militaristic. He worships military power and its exercise, and often wears military regalia.

Third, a fascist is a totalitarian socialist. In a fascist state the dictator has ultimate control over individual lives as well as the economy, politics, and education. He seeks to centralize authority in himself.

Fourth, a fascist is secretive. The public is not given access to the workings of the central government. The press is controlled by, and is an organ of, the state.

Fifth, a fascist seeks to abrogate the constitution, or reduce it to a meaningless document.

Sixth, a fascist subjects his political enemies to extra-judicial sanctions. Those who oppose him are often tried on phony charges or summarily executed. There's no such thing as a rule of law for citizens of the fascist state.

Fascism, like communism, its ideological cousin, is an evil ideology. It's an ideology not of the right, as many suppose, but of the left, which accounts, at least in part, for why the left has become so comfortable with violence and violent rhetoric. Fascism is evil, the reasoning goes, so, if Trump is a fascist, then violence is justified to keep him and his allies from imposing tyranny on the country.

But how does Trump fit the above six criteria of a fascist?

• Trump loves America, but his love is not based on race, religion, or ethnicity, but on principles like the freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
• He may be the most averse president in our history to the use of military force, preferring whenever possible to settle disagreements by making "deals" and employing economic levers rather than military coercion.
• He's not a socialist, he's a capitalist who believes in free markets and fair trade, insofar as we're not being exploited by other countries.
• He may be the most open and transparent president in the history of the country. Unlike Mr. Biden, Trump is not hidden away in a basement, sequestered from the media - a media which, despite their hostility, is given unprecedented access to him.
• So far from seeking to abrogate the Constitution, Trump, unlike some previous presidents, appoints jurists to federal and Supreme Court seats whose judicial philosophy is based on a reverence for that document.
• Unlike his predecessor, Trump does not have armed FBI agents raiding Mr. Biden's home and rummaging through Jill Biden's underwear drawer. Nor has he sought to prosecute Mr. Biden in courts of law on frivolous charges as Mr. Biden had done to him.

The accusation that Trump is a fascist is an indicator that the person making it, having no reasonable criticisms, is desperate for something with which they can tarnish and discredit the president. It's an inadvertent admission that substantively speaking they have nothing.

Some Questions for Deportation Opponents

Democrats and their supporters in the media are still attempting to thwart the Trump administration’s efforts to remove illegal aliens from the country, as required by federal law, but there are some questions they should all be expected to answer before anyone pays them any heed.

Eddie Scarry at The Federalist poses three simple questions to anyone who stands in opposition to the deportations of illegal immigrants:

1. Can You Identify a Single Alien You Would Deport?

It's difficult to say how people who want to open the border and abolish ICE would answer this question other than a simple, "No, I can't."

2. How Many Appeals Should an Illegal Alien Get for It to Be Considered "Due Process"?

Scarry asks, "How many appeals and hearings should an illegal alien be entitled to, sucking up court hours in hopes of eventually landing on some trick that allows him to stay? If Democrats can’t state a clear number, it’s simply another way of admitting they don’t want to see anyone deported."

3. What Would the Ideal Deportation Look Like?

The point for deportation opponents is not setting up some ideal system whereby the deportee is given an infinity of appeals and then flown to the country of his or her choosing, all at taxpayer expense. The point for deportation opponents is to stop deportations altogether.

These are all good questions. I'd add a fourth question and a few corollaries to Scarry's three: What were the deportation opponents' objections when Barack Obama deported almost 800,000 illegal aliens in 2010 and 2011, about 50% of which were felons? Did liberal judges impose stays on Obama's deportations? Did liberal organizations petition the courts to stop Obama from evicting these people from the country? Did Democrat politicians fly to El Salvador to commiserate with the deported felons?

Not that I can remember, but then Barack Obama was a Democrat, and he was not Donald Trump. That political distinction, apparently, makes a significant difference to much of our media and many of those who have sworn to uphold the law.

A Heartbreaking Death

Karl Rove has written a lovely, and very moving account of the death of a young woman, the daughter of a friend of his. Her name was Elizabeth Sterling Oles O’Hara, she was 38, had twin children, and died of metastatic breast cancer. Here are some excerpts:

Sterling — “Sterl,” as everyone called her — was the eldest child of my close friends Julie and Pat Oles. Smart, warm, funny, kind and beautiful, she had a talent for developing strong friendships. She was the daughter I never had.

An all-state high-school lacrosse player, she’d gone to Southern Methodist University and interned for me in the White House. After college, she toiled in a nongovernmental organization supporting female entrepreneurs in Uganda, took a political job in Washington, and moved to New York to work at Fox News.

...In June 2019, she gave birth to twins — a boy and a girl — two months premature. Three days later, she was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer.

For six years she fought this horrible, vicious disease. Chemotherapy. Followed by surgeries. Followed by radiation. Then all over again, ad infinitum. Treatments worked at first. Hopes would rise, then be dashed. The cancer stalking her returned in a more virulent form.

Sterl suffered so much. Yet she found strength to raise her beautiful children, who have felt loved every day of their young lives, and to build a marriage that was solid and loving.

So it seemed all so unfair when I sat with her family and friends in a darkened hospital room. She had come to Los Angeles for new cancer treatments but instead contracted pneumonia, to which her weakened system had left her vulnerable.

Nurses quietly came and went as those who cherished Sterl sat amid a sea of flowers, occasionally whispering while one of them held her hand. Doctors politely said nothing could be done but make her comfortable and say our goodbyes.

Tuesday afternoon, the twins came. Their presence rallied Sterl; she held her babies, told them she loved them and that she would be their angel in heaven.

On Wednesday, her countenance changed. Gone were pain and fear. There was a calmness about her. Only family remained as friends waited down the hall. Early that evening, Sterling slipped peacefully into God’s arms....

Watching a young mother suffer and die can induce spiritual vertigo. Just reading about it raises questions. It did for Rove:

Her death has left me shaken. An ancient question hit me with tremendous force: Why does a loving and all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to good people, especially one so young? For answers I turned to “The Problem of Pain” by the 20th-century Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. But his book was too philosophical, too antiseptic, too distant. It provided little comfort.

Then I reached for “A Grief Observed,” Lewis’s journal after the death of his wife, Joy, at 45, also from cancer. There it was — the anger, fear, rejection and resentment I’ve felt the past two weeks. When told Joy was in God’s hands, Lewis replied that she’d been in God’s hands all the time, and he’d seen what they did. When he contemplated a restoration of his faith once her loss was behind him, he feared it would turn out to be another “house of cards.”

Lewis gradually regained his bearings. He came to recognize that God had given his wife life and was due praise for that great gift. He also admitted that the answer to his question about how God can allow good people to suffer is unknowable. God might be compassionately answering, “Child, you don’t understand.” He’s right; I don’t.

The slim 60-page volume is helping me process my grief. But I’m not finished grieving and won’t be for some time. Still, I know Sterl is home.... We miss you terribly, sweet Sterling. Rest in peace.

There are no answers that can satisfy a heart shattered by grief, but there's one thing that those of us at some remove from the pain felt by this woman's family and friends might keep in our minds.

If the God that Sterling and Lewis believed in is really there then there's very good grounds for hoping that Sterling, and everyone for whom we grieve, is not forever gone and that our separation from those we've lost is only temporary.

The Christian has the words of Jesus to cling to: "Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die." (John 11:25,26).

On the other hand, if God doesn't exist, if Jesus was deluded or a charlatan, if He was not really God incarnate, then we are completely without hope. Loved ones suffer and die, sometimes tragically, sometimes cruelly, and none of it has any more ultimate meaning than the death of an ant.

For the person without God, without hope, life is, as Shakespeare put it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The Peregrine Falcon

Each spring the fastest bird in the world, the Peregrine falcon, nests in a man-made box on a ledge on the Rachel Carson Building in Harrisburg, PA, and each year a series of cameras records the progress of the chicks and all the goings-on in the eyrie.

The falcon had been on the brink of extirpation in North America due to the accumulation of pesticides in their bodies which caused them to produce thin-shelled eggs which broke prematurely in the nest. But since the 1970s the bird has made an impressive comeback due to the banning of the pesticides and the help of wildlife biologists who've done a marvelous job of managing these magnificent raptors.

The Peregrine can dive on prey at up to 200 mph and hits its target so hard that, if it doesn't grab it, it knocks it out of the air.

The Harrisburg Peregrine pair currently has three young and can be observed via the falcon cams here. If you're lucky when you tune in you might see the adults feeding the voracious nestlings. These young birds are still a couple of weeks away from venturing their first flight.

Meanwhile, the following video provides some interesting information on the Peregrine, although if you don't like seeing violence in nature perhaps you ought not watch it.

Terminal Lucidity

A fascinating article at Mind Matters addresses a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity. It happens that a small number of patients with dementia or some other cognitive impairment, patients who have lived, sometimes for years, in a mental fog will suddenly become lucid for minutes, hours or even days before their deaths.

One well-known case was that of Anna Katharina Ehmer (1895–1922) who, due to mental disabilities, lived in a psychiatric institution in Germany for most of her life.

… [She had] allegedly never spoken a single word during her life. Yet, she was reported to have sung dying songs for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head of this institution and by its chief physician....

In a 2018 article, Zaron Burnett III recounts that no one was expecting that: “The doctors and hospital staff who witnessed Anna’s concertina for death were rendered speechless themselves; some sobbed in bewilderment; others felt they’d witnessed a miracle of the soul.”

The Mind Matters article goes on to note studies that have found that,

....out of the 227 dementia patients tracked, approximately 10 percent exhibited terminal lucidity. From his literature review, Nahm has reported that approximately 84 percent of people who experience terminal lucidity will die within a week, with 42 percent dying the same day.

Another case involved a 91-year-old woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for 15 years:

The woman had long been unresponsive and showed no signs of recognizing her daughter or anyone for the previous five years. One evening, she started a normal conversation with her daughter. She talked about her fear of death, difficulties she had with the church and family members, and then died a few hours later.

There's much more on this phenomenon at the link, but here are four interesting points the article makes:

• Terminal lucidity occurs for atheists and believers at the same rate.
• Terminally lucid persons tend to focus on “reminiscing, preparations, last wishes, body concerns, such as hunger or thirst, as well as an awareness of their impending death.”
• Sometimes, that last burst of lucidity is a disappointment for friends and family who sometimes believe that a miracle of healing has occurred when in fact death soon follows.
• There's no known physical or medical explanation for the phenomenon.

Evidently, there's no change in the physical health of the brain when a person experiences this flash of awareness and cognitive ability. Does this suggest that the physical, material brain isn't the complete explanation for our cognition?

Might we also have an immaterial mind that works in tandem with the brain but at physical death is able to disconnect itself from it?

As research on terminal lucidity and related phenomena like post- or near-death out-of-the-body experiences continues to mount perhaps the evidence for the existence of an immaterial mind will continue to grow as well.

If it does then the conviction that our physical death is not the end of our existence will certainly be reinforced.