An Islamic Republic

Iran calls itself an Islamic Republic, which means that it's people live under Islamic, or sharia, law. To help us see what that entails, Matt Tardio has compiled a list of twenty laws to which the Iranian people are subject, and which devout Muslims aspire to impose on everyone, everywhere:

1. Apostasy (Leaving Islam): Punishable by death, especially for men who publicly renounce Islam. Women can face life in prison.
2. Homosexuality: Gay men can be executed; lesbians face 100 lashes. Even suspicion can result in arrest or forced confessions.
3. Blasphemy: Insulting the Prophet or sacred Islamic figures is punishable by death. This includes online posts, art, or speech.
4. Adultery (Sex outside marriage): Married offenders can be stoned to death. Unmarried receive 100 lashes. Applies to men and women.
5. “Corruption on Earth”: A vague charge used against dissenters, protesters, or activists. Often results in the death penalty.
6. Alcohol Consumption: Muslims caught drinking get 80 lashes per offense. 4-time offenders risk execution.
7. Female Hijab Law: Mandatory for all women. Punishment is imprisonment up to 10 years, flogging, fines, surveillance.
8. Criticism of the Supreme Leader: Even memes can lead to arrest. Public dissent brings 1–10 years in prison.
9. Same-sex relationships (non-penetrative): Still criminal. Punishable by lashes, prison, or worse.
10. Public Affection (Unmarried couples): Holding hands or kissing in public can get up to 74 lashes.
11. Women Need Husband’s Permission to Travel: Even for passports or leaving the country.
12. Child Marriage Legal age: Girls 13 or younger with father's or court approval.
13. Compulsory Military Service (Men only): Failure to serve results in being banned from travel, jobs, and university.
14. Cybercrime & Online Dissent: Criticizing Islam or the regime online is punishable by imprisonment, asset seizure, surveillance.
15. Western Music & Clothing: "Immoral" music, films, and fashion are banned with fines, confiscation, or arrest for disobeying.
16. Women Banned from Stadiums: Women are largely prohibited from attending men’s sports. Defiance results in arrest.
17. Public Singing or Dancing (Women): Illegal to sing solo or dance in public. Punishable by fines or jail.
18. Gender Segregation: Schools, buses, and workplaces are often segregated by law. Violations result in fines or expulsion.
19. Dog Ownership: Dogs are "unclean." Walking one in public could cost you jail time or seizure of your pet.
20. Baha’i Persecution: Adherents of the Baha’i religion can't hold government jobs, attend university, or practice freely.

Young men executed in Iran for homosexuality

What Jews Have Contributed to the World

The above title of this post should not be understood to imply that the following exhausts Jewish (or Muslim) contributions to humanity, but it's certainly an impressive statistic. Nor do I vouch for the accuracy of these claims, but anyone who's skeptical should be able to check them out easily enough.

The post points out the disparity between the world's population of Muslims and Jews along with an indicator of their relative achievements:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is one billion two hundred million or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat, 1990 - Elias James Corey, 1994 - Yaser Arafat, 1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:(none)

Physics:(none)

Medicine:1960 - Peter Brian Medawar, 1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is fourteen million or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1910 - Paul Heyse, 1927 - Henri Bergson, 1958 - Boris Pasternak, 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966 - Nelly Sachs, 1976 - Saul Bellow, 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981 - Elias Canetti, 1987 - Joseph Brodsky, 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:1911 - Alfred Fried, 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser, 1968 - Rene Cassin, 1973 - Henry Kissinger, 1978 - Menachem Begin, 1986 - Elie Wiesel, 1994 - Shimon Peres, 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer, 1906 - Henri Moissan, 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson, 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann, 1910 - Otto Wallach, 1915 - Richard Willstaetter, 1918 - Fritz Haber, 1921 - Albert Einstein, 1922 - Niels Bohr, 1925 - James Franck, 1925 - Gustav Hertz, 1943 - Gustav Stern, 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy, 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi, 1952 - Felix Bloch, 1954 - Max Born, 1958 - Igor Tamm, 1959 - Emilio Segre, 1960 - Donald A. Glaser, 1961 - Robert Hofstadter, 1961 - Melvin Calvin, 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau, 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz, 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman, 1965 - Julian Schwinger, 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann, 1971 - Dennis Gabor, 1972 - William Howard Stein, 1973 - Brian David Josephson, 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson, 1976 - Burton Richter, 1977 - Ilya Prigogine, 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias, 1978 - Peter L Kapitza, 1979 - Stephen Weinberg, 1979 - Sheldon Glashow, 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown, 1980 - Paul Berg, 1980 - Walter Gilbert, 1981 - Roald Hoffmann, 1982 - Aaron Klug, 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman, 1985 - Jerome Karle, 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach, 1988 - Robert Huber, 1988 - Leon Lehman, 1988 - Melvin Schwartz, 1988 - Jack Steinberger, 1989 - Sidney Altman, 1990 - Jerome Friedman, 1992 - Rudolph Marcus, 1995 - Martin Perl, 2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson, 1971 - Simon Kuznets, 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow, 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich, 1976 - Milton Friedman, 1978 - Herbert A. Simon, 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein, 1985 - Franco Modigliani, 1987 - Robert M. Solow, 1990 - Harry Markowitz, 1990 - Merton Miller, 1992 - Gary Becker, 1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:1908 - Elie Metchnikoff, 1908 - Paul Erlich, 1914 - Robert Barany, 1922 - Otto Meyerhof, 1930 - Karl Landsteiner, 1931 - Otto Warburg, 1936 - Otto Loewi, 1944 - Joseph Erlanger, 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser, 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain, 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller, 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein, 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman, 1953 - Hans Krebs, 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, 1958 - Joshua Lederberg, 1959 - Arthur Kornberg, 1964 - Konrad Bloch, 1965 - Francois Jacob, 1965 - Andre Lwoff, 1967 - George Wald, 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg, 1969 - Salvador Luria, 1970 - Julius Axelrod, 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz, 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman, 1975 - Howard Martin Temin, 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg, 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow, 1978 - Daniel Nathans, 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf, 1984 - Cesar Milstein, 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown, 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein, 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini], 1988 - Gertrude Elion, 1989 - Harold Varmus, 1991 - Erwin Neher, 1991 - Bert Sakmann, 1993 - Richard J. Roberts, 1993 - Phillip Sharp, 1994 - Alfred Gilman, 1995 - Edward B. Lewis, 1996 - Lu Rose Iacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The author goes on to note that,

The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, nor blow themselves up in German restaurants.

There is not one single Jew who has destroyed a church.

There is not a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor do they have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.

Whether one agrees with the foregoing or not one has to wonder if there's not a connection between the last few sentences and what preceded them.

A Just Conclusion to Israel's War

Discussing the Israelis' end game in Iran, First Things' editor R.R. Reno notes that since the end of WWII, most wars have ended very unsatisfactorily. Indeed, I can't think of any war since 1945 that's ended in unconditional surrender. Here's Reno:

War seldom ends according to a satisfying script. Unconditional surrender—the banner headline of 1945—is a historical rarity, the exception, not the rule. More often hostilities conclude in the gray zone of ceasefires, armistices, and grudging diplomatic arrangements.

Israel stands in that gray zone now. Its defensive campaign against Iran and the Iranian proxy network seems to have primarily met its battlefield objectives. From a military standpoint, Iran appears to be defeated.

The harder task is to translate that success into a durable peace—without stumbling into George W. Bush 2.0, the grandiose dream of regime change by force.

Hopefully, he's correct that Iran is defeated and doesn't have a military ace up its sleeve. Though if it did, it'd be very puzzling why it wouldn't have played it before now. Anyway, after recounting Israeli successes against Iranian proxies, Reno adds this:

The just war tradition demands prudence at the end of war as well as at the start. As I see it, a settlement, whether by formal treaty or tacit modus vivendi, must impose three conditions:

• No nuclear pathway. Centrifuges disabled, inspections enforced.
• No ballistic missile expansion. Delivery systems are inseparable from warheads.
• No proxy rearmament. Hezbollah and Hamas must remain shells of their former selves.

These conditions are not maximalist fantasies. They are the foundation on which Israeli security—and regional peace—can be built. The peace will not be celebrated widely in the region. It is likely to be grudgingly accepted. But it can be achieved.

Reno is correct that these three conditions are necessary for achieving a durable peace, but they're not sufficient. As long as the mullahs and their brutally oppressive apparatus is left in place, then all of what Israel has accomplished in the last week will amount to little more than kicking the can down the road.

Any deal that Israel and the U.S. agree to must ensure that the Iranian people have a fair chance to establish on their own a much freer society, a society in which people are able to speak, write, worship, and dress as they please without fear of imprisonment, torture, and execution. A society whose wealth is used to raise the quality of Iranian life and not to buy missiles, guns, and nuclear weapons to wage war against Israel and perpetrate acts of murder and terrorism against Americans.

It won't be easy, but as Reno states,

Because Iran’s theocrats may spurn any compromise that forecloses their revolutionary aspirations, the “deal” Israel seeks may be no deal at all, but rather something imposed by realities on the ground. Even so, diplomacy must finish the work that airstrikes began: reassure nervous Arab capitals, institutionalize new alignments, and clarify redlines that make further aggression too costly for Iran to contemplate.

We'll see over the coming months whether such a peace is achieveable.

A Side Benefit of Israel's War

Beege Welborn at HotAir.com notes that one side benefit of the Israeli destruction of the Iranian muslim theocracy is that it might bring some relief to the most persecuted people in the world, Nigerian Christians.

Welborn writes:

There has been one place where Iran-backed proxies have run amok pretty much unhindered and ignored for years. In Nigeria they have slaughtered thousands of Christians with impunity. I can't even say the world yawned.

Save for some groups desperately trying to draw attention to it, the world hasn't even noticed.

She cites an article in the journal Global Christian Relief which says this:

Sadly, Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs. In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000—often more than in the rest of the world combined.

Violence against the Nigerian Christian population is significantly localized in the north, where twelve Muslim-majority states declared sharia law in 1999, resulting in huge numbers of Christians experiencing daily discrimination. But it was the rise of an extremist movement called Boko Haram, which first started its murderous attacks in 2009, that resulted in Christians experiencing unprecedented violence.

According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past fourteen years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria, with radicalized Fulani herdsmen killing Christians to steal their land.

Boko Haram has now been joined by another extremist group operative in the area, called the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and both seek the eradication of Christianity from the northern states.

The violence has resulted in refugees now numbering over four million, mostly Christian farmers. The government of Nigeria has proved unwilling to condemn the levels of violence, which some call genocidal, or inept in its attempts to engage and neutralize extremist movements.

At the beginning of the month, Muslim terrorists, who often arrive in the little Christian communities on motorbikes out of the blue, ran from house to house and through the village, slaughtering people in the town as they fled.

It's a scene repeated over and over again. The barbaric and sadistic Islamic murderers very much enjoy it when they can trap worshippers in a church on Sunday.

The latest brutal murders occurred this past weekend. Close to 200 souls, many of whom were already refugees seeking shelter from the violence, were viciously slaughtered by Fulani Islamic terrorists.

Welborn has more at the link. She concludes with this:

If the Israelis have managed to cut off the head of the snake, and the funds flowing to pay for weapons, ammo, machetes, and motorbike fuel these satellite proxies need in far-flung locales to rampage, what will happen in Nigeria? Surely, there might be some relief in sight.

Israel really is doing the entire Judeo-Christian world, and much of the Muslim Middle East, a huge favor by killing the Islamist snake.

China Is the World's Moral Authority?

Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris's 2024 running mate Tim Walz has demonstrated one more reason why we can be relieved that his bid to become our vice president failed. When asked whether he thought the U.S. could broker peace between Israel and Iran, he gave this response:

Now, who is the voice in the world that can negotiate some type of agreement in this? Who holds the moral authority? Who holds the ability to do that? Because we are not seen as a neutral actor, and we maybe never were.

I don’t want to tell anybody that. I think there’s a lot of people who say you always lean one way in this, but I think there was at least an attempt to be somewhat of the arbitrator in this. We saw President Carter do it with [Menachem] Begin and [Anwar] Sadat.

We’ve had certain wins along the way that were actually mutually beneficial both ways,” Walz continued. “Now I ask who that is. I mean, consistently over and over again, we’re going to have to face the reality, it might be the Chinese.

If Walz believes China has any moral authority at all then he's stunningly ignorant. If he doesn't believe it but said it anyway, then he's dangerously dishonest.

China has lied about, among other things, the origins and deadliness of the Wuhan virus, they've cheated on their World Trade Organization commitments, they've stolen our technology, fraudulently interfered on behalf of Biden in the 2020 election, persecuted and oppressed Christians, imprisoned, tortured, and harvested the organs of Falun Gong and Uyghurs who languish today in concentration camps, and facilitated the deaths of thousands of Americans by providing drug cartels with the precursors of fentanyl.

Moreover, they slaughtered as many as 8 million Chinese in their 1949 revolution and as many as 2 million more in their "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). They killed several thousand pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, threatened to precipitate a war with the U.S. by invading Taiwan, deliberately addicted our kids on apps that turn their minds to jelly, deprived their own people of basic freedoms, and aided Russia in their slaughter of Ukrainians. And there's probably more.

Like all communist regimes the Chinese communists are totalitarian, oppressive, and evil. They're among the last of nations to have any moral authority in this world, and if Tim Walz thinks otherwise then he has no business being in state or national politics.

Life and Platonic Forms

As difficult as it may be for modern minds to accept, a lot of scientists are beginning to believe that Plato was right. Plato taught that there existed in some transcendent realm what he called the forms or ideals of things.

There is, for example, an ideal of a perfect tree, a perfect circle, a perfect chair, etc. and all the trees, circles, and chairs we see in the world have the properties they do because they derive them from their ideal form. All trees, for instance, have the property of treeness by which we recognize a given tree as a tree.

According to Plato the highest forms were the forms of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Early Christians incorporated these into their concept of God who was seen as perfect goodness, perfect beauty, and absolute truth.

An article by a physicist and engineer named Brian Miller at Evolution News explains why the Platonic concept of transcendent forms is beginning to gain traction among scientists.

The hypothesis has been presented in a book by David Klinghoffer titled Plato's Revenge. Klinghoffer's book is very readable and gives a good overview of this new Platonism by focusing on the work of one of it's seminal thinkers, a scientist named Richard Sternberg.

Miller discusses Sternberg's work in his article. He points out that a developing human embryo requires far more information than can be accounted for in the cells of the embryo. So, where does the rest of the required information come from?

Miller runs through the calculations in the main part of his article which I'll let you work through on your own, but here's his conclusion:

If the zygote cannot contain the information directing development, then that information must reside in a logical and mathematical structure that stems from or is tantamount to a Platonic form, as Sternberg has inferred and as Plato’s Revenge describes.

If one does not wish to embrace such a radical conclusion, one must accept that developmental algorithms display an efficiency and ingenuity that vastly surpass human knowledge. They could only have arisen from a mind far superior to our own.

In addition, any undirected evolutionary framework must be abandoned. Every fetal region employs a set of operations that include a map of subsequent stages in development and the instructions to direct the current stage to the next. They must also possess contingency plans for countless perturbed starting states.

Any major evolutionary transition would need to simultaneously alter the algorithms in every region at every stage instantly. If mutations only redirected a few regions at a few stages toward a new organism, the subsequent stages would return the fetal trajectory back toward the original target.

If the redirection efforts failed, the individual would experience deformations or death. Only a designer could simultaneously alter every algorithm to guide development toward a new outcome coherently.

It's fascinating that the more scientists learn about biology and cosmology, the more improbable becomes the dogma that it's all an astonishing accident, and the more rational it becomes to believe that there's an astonishing Mind as the cause of it all.

Does the Right Have an Antisemitism Problem?

The answer to the title question is that it evidently does, although certainly not on the scale of the antisemitism of the Left. Even so, it's not insignificant. The characters discussed below would no doubt insist that they're not antisemitic, just anti-Israel, but this is, for most practical purposes, a distinction without a difference.

In any event, readers can judge for themselves the rhetoric coming from these ladies and gentlemen.

Haley Strack at National Review writes:

Since October 7 some of America’s most popular podcasters have congratulated themselves on their ability to “just ask questions” about Israel’s war aims that the legacy media will not; in the process of doing so, they have given platforms to revisionist historians, Holocaust distorters, and Christian antisemites to, they say, provide counter-narratives to the Israeli lobby that has so desperately tried to engage the U.S. in “forever war.”

Israel attacked Iran last night. As expected, the same people who were “just asking questions” revolted against Israel in support of America’s enemies.

Darryl Cooper, whom Tucker Carlson lauded on his show as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” said on Thursday that America should “commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.” Dave Smith, Joe Rogan’s favorite comedian-turned-foreign-policy expert, accused Israel of launching “a dangerous, preemptive war of aggression” that “should be condemned by the US government and US citizens alike.” Smith also denied claims that Cooper was an antisemite; Cooper just had “nuanced” views, Smith said.

It may be easy to disregard such online-right opinions as fringe, but their millions of followers and the billions of views they receive suggest otherwise. Nick Fuentes said “this is the final battle in Israel’s 50 year reign of terror to destabilize & destroy every country that resists their rule.”

Candace Owens called Israel’s “bloodlust” demonic. Matt Stoller doesn’t think Israel’s “bloodthirsty insanity” should be “our problem.” Crisis magazine’s Eric Sammons doesn’t think Catholics can support Israel’s attack on Iran.

UFC fighter and podcaster Jake Shields is “sick and tired of paying for and fighting Jewish wars” and demanded the destruction of Israel.

Dan Bilzerian said, “These jews just can’t help themselves, they attack Iran unprovoked, and they’ll be crying about how they don’t feel safe by morning,” adding, “If I was the president, I would round up every politician supporting Israel and have them all tried for treason.” These are just a few.

On Wednesday night, Matt Continetti and Ruth Wisse joined National Review on a Tikvah panel in celebration of Bill Buckley’s 100th birthday. The event was about antisemitism, and, specifically, Buckley’s efforts to purge it from the right. A question that came up was: Does the conservative movement have an antisemitism problem?

Maybe (we hope) not among policymakers or in the Trump administration. But there’s no doubt that antisemites — whom popular pundits have shamelessly platformed as good-faith, question-asking, honest intellectuals — have become online heroes for some alarmingly populated factions on the new right.

The most prominent of these voices on the Right is that of Tucker Carlson. It might be wrong to say that Carlson is antisemitic but he is a libertarian and an extreme isolationist who thinks we should disentangle ourselves from both Israel and Ukraine.

According to Jewish Insider:

Talk show host Tucker Carlson broke with President Donald Trump on Iran on Friday, writing in a scathing commentary in his daily newsletter that the United States should “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars.”

“If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so. It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases,” Carlson wrote of Israel’s preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “But not with America’s backing.”

In recent days, Carlson has argued that fears of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon in the near future are unfounded and said that a war with the Islamic Republic would not only result in “thousands” of American casualties in the Middle East but “amount to a profound betrayal of” Trump’s base and effectively “end his presidency.”

Carlson reiterated that claim in his newsletter, accusing Trump of “being complicit in the act of war” through “years of funding and sending weapons to Israel.”

Direct U.S. involvement in a war with Iran, he said, “would be a middle finger in the faces of the millions of voters who cast their ballots in hopes of creating a government that would finally put the United States first.”

“What happens next will define Donald Trump’s presidency,” he concluded.

Well, the Trump administration has given no indication that we would get directly involved in the Israeli-Iran war, but why we would not provide Israel with material and intelligence assistance, why we should not shoot down Iranian missiles, outside Iranian airspace, targeting Israeli civilians, I don't understand.

Nor do I understand how some on the right could think that Israel (or Ukraine) is the aggressor in this war.

Nor do I think there's any practical difference bewteen those who hate the Jews and want to see Israel exterminated and those who claim to not hate Jews but don't care whether Israel is exterminated or not. The latter are like someone who says, "I don't despise blacks (or whites), but if somebody wants to kill them, that's their problem."

Here is a fact that I think should be beyond dispute, but apparently isn't. Israel was confronted with a choice, either fight a conventional war with Iran now or risk nuclear annihilation later. Iran refused President Trump's attempts to persuade them to choose peace. They were determined to produce a bomb, and may already have done so. They have said repeatedly that they will wipe Israel off the map as soon as they are able.

If they developed a nuclear weapon every country in the region would scramble to buy their own and the weapons would almost certainly be used at some point.

Given those facts and given that choice, I ask the gentlemen and lady referred to above, what should the Israelis have done? And why should we have refused to do exactly what we have done to help them?

Whenever a nation goes to war there's always the risk of calamitous unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences. Even so, what reasonable alternative did the Israelis, or the U.S., have?

Thanks to Powerlineblog for the links.

For Fathers' Day

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison, or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Cuttting Off the Head of the Snake

Israel has launched a stunning attack against Iran that has targeted not just their nuclear facilities but also all their top military people, their top nuclear scientists, and the missile bases from which Iran would be expected to launch a counterattack.

Ed Morrissey had a summary of Israel's attack in last night's Hot Air in the updates to which he notes that the head of Iran's IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), the military chief of staff, and the head of the Quds Force have all been confirmed killed, as have many of their top nuclear scientists. Redstate reports that,

Iran's top nuclear scientists are also dead, representing a major blow to the nation's ability to restart enrichment at some point.

Ali Shamkhani, the head of Iran's nuclear program and a chief adviser to the Mullahs, was reportedly targeted in the opening wave. It has not been confirmed whether that strike was successful or not, but if he was killed, it would be a huge development.

We also know that this was just the beginning. Shortly before this was published, a second wave of fighters began heading for Iran, and the Israelis have already announced they are in this for the long haul.

Much of what we are going to see moving forward will be targeting Iran's ability to retaliate. Most of its air defenses have already been destroyed, and its ballistic missile sites will be a top target. In fact, some have already been hit.

Morrissey has a follow-up post this morning in which he notes that President Trump is still pleading with the Iranians to make a deal. He warned them that this would happen, but they wouldn't listen:

I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to “just do it,” but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.

I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come - And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen.

They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse! There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!

He followed it up with this:

Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to “make a deal.” They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!

As Morrissey says, it's not clear that there's anyone left whose in a position to make a deal or anything left to make a deal with.

Will AI Ever Be Human?

A few years ago an engineer at Google made the startling claim that their computer, LaMDA, was actually sentient and self-aware. Here's some of the story:

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made news by claiming that a chatbot he developed was sentient and spiritual, and that it should have all the rights people have. Lemoine claimed the chatbot (named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) meditates, believes itself to have a soul, has emotions like fear, and enjoys reading.

According to Lemoine, Google should treat it as an employee rather than as property and should ask its consent before using it in future research.

This brought down a lot of criticism upon Google which subsequently relieved the engineer of his responsibilities for disseminating too much classified information:

Alphabet Inc's Google...dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave..., said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."

"It's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

Last year, Google said that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was built on the company's research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.

Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

A lot of people do believe, though, that computers will one day surpass human beings in terms of what they can do and will, in fact, be superhuman. Computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains why this concern is misguided in his very interesting book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will.

According to Marks computers will never be human no matter how impressive their abilities may be. No machine will ever be able to match what humans are capable of.

Computers can impressively manipulate facts. They have knowledge, but as Marks explains on page 16 there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge is having access to facts. Intelligence is much more than that. Intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding: the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning, and the ability to untangle ambiguities.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence has done many remarkable things....But will AI ever replace attorneys, physicians, military strategists, and design engineers, among others? The answer is no.

The rest of the book is an entertaining explanation of why the answer is no.

In short, computers can only do what they're programmed to do and programs consist of algorithms developed by human agents. No one, however, can write an algorithm for the host of qualities and capabilities that humans have. They're non-algorithmic and thus non-computable.

Consider this partial list of things that human beings do that no algorithm could capture:

Human beings are aware, they know, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, warmth, compassion, guilt, grief, disgust, pride, embarrassment.

In addition, humans appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math.

They’re creative. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.

Computers do none of this. There's a vast chasm that separates matter and conscious human experience.

The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel. A robot can be programmed to tell you it loves you, but it doesn’t feel love.

Human beings have minds which are immaterial and which can't be reduced to electrical signals along neural circuitry. Material machines will never have a mind.

Tolerance and Intolerance in America

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, if you believe that Islam is antithetical to principles articulated in our founding documents, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com explains that the footnote, which some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence, is being abused:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he senses that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He's at least subliminally aware of the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we seem to be today in America.

Materialism - A True Opium

Every now and then I have a burst of optimism and think that just maybe the materialist philosophy that has dominated science and culture throughout much of the 20th century and into the 21st is on the wane. It seems that more and more people, intelligent, well-educated people, are realizing that materialism is a bankrupt idea, offering no hope or meaning to those who embrace it. But what is materialism?

The co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick, was a classic example of a materialist. He once expressed it like this:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules... You're nothing but a pack of neurons.

On materialism we're nothing more than the atoms that make us up. A prominent lawyer named Barry Arrington once teased out the implications of this view in this passage:

Materialism posits that the physical is all there is. Its central premise is this: In the beginning, there were particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in motion.

This means that human beings are not special. You and your family and your friends are also merely particles in motion, reducible to the chemicals that make up your bodies. Humans are clever hairless apes with no more ultimate significance than rocks.

Yes, they have come up with this thing called “morality.” But morality is an illusion foisted on us by material evolutionary forces because it gives us a reproductive advantage. Morality in any objective transcendent sense of the word not only does not exist, it cannot exist. There are no moral or immoral rocks. And humans — in their essence — are in the same category as rocks. Both rocks and humans are mere amalgamations of burnt out star dust.

Arrington didn't believe that materialism was true, and neither did the theologian R.C. Sproul who once had this to say about it:

Modern man believes we came from nothing and are going to nothing, but in the meanwhile we're somehow significant. But if we came from nothing and we're going to nothing then we need to face the fact that we really are nothing.

Karl Marx was an extremely influential 19th century materialist who believed that "religion was the opium of the people." It anesthetized people to their suffering and oppression, but, Marx believed, there was certainly no truth in the superstitions of religious dogma. Rather, he was certain that everything could be explained in terms of science and economics.

The distinguished Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said of Marx's "opium" remark that,

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for all our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.

That sums up perfectly the philosophy of materialism. It's a true opium that anesthetizes the materialist's soul and quells his guilt and doubts. And hopefully, it will soon be consigned to the dustbin of discredited philosophical ideas.

By Any Means Necessary

National Review's Jim Geraghty noted last week that,

Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders: 40 percent say this descriptor applies more to the GOP, with just 16% saying it applies to the Democrats. They’re also more likely to call Republicans the party that can get things done by 36 percent to 19 percent, and the party of change, by 32 percent to 25 percent.

After the Democrats' pathetic response to the ongoing ICE "protests" in LA where thugs tried to kill cops, and Democrats both tacitly and explicitly sided with the rioters, and following Trump's more forceful response in which he ordered in 2000 national guardsmen to stanch the damage, those numbers will probably look even worse for Democrats.

Geraghty offers this thought to Democrats who aspire to greater popularity with the electorate:

Crazy idea, fellas. What if you tried governing well? I mean, really well — so well that even your state’s Republicans are impressed. What if, after (at least) four years of being governor somewhere, you could point to lower unemployment, higher wages, a more affordable cost of living, higher test scores in schools, lower crime rates, infrastructure that isn’t full of potholes, and a general satisfaction with public services? What if your state government was prepared for natural disasters?

Yeah, that would be difficult to achieve. But that is, you know, the core duty of government. If you demonstrated competence at governing, people might trust you with the presidency and like-minded congressional majorities!

I mean, maybe that stuff matters more than ensuring local police never cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that males can participate in high school girls’ sports, and free bus rides, and so on.

Geraghty's right, of course, but the problem is that the chaos isn't, as much of our media would have us believe, merely the cry of innocent people democratically airing their grievances. Rather, it's one more episode in a century-old effort to bring the West to its knees. Many Democrats, knowingly or unknowingly, are in the grip of a Marxist ideology that calls for the destruction of the institutions and civil structures of the West, and they know that the sort of good governance Geraghty suggests will do nothing to advance their revolution. Attacking traditional morality, co-opting our institutions, and abetting chaos in our streets will.

Some on the Left may prefer that the revolution be accomplished through peaceful means, they may prefer to boil the frog in the pot gradually without the frog realizing that it's being boiled, but if they encounter resistance, if people like Trump stand in their way, then they have few qualms about resorting to mayhem and bloodshed.

If, for instance, Israel is a tiny island of Western values amidst a vast Islamic sea then Israel must be destroyed, which is the meaning of "from river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and Jews everywhere must be punished. If ICE is an impediment to reducing white, wealthy, capitalist America to parity with the rest of the world, a transformation which is to be effected by overwhelming our institutions with third-world immigrants, then ICE is an enemy to be discredited and violently resisted.

As Saul Alinsky advises in his book Rules for Radicals, the Left must "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." In the present context that means focusing on law enforcement and making it an object of personal derision and contempt. If that doesn't work, as it hasn't against the Trump administration, then violence is necessary and there are plenty of people on the Left eager to employ it.

For the Left, after all, the revolution must be accomplished by any means necessary.

Trump's Jacksonian Supporters

A piece by Mike Watson at the Free Beacon does a nice job of identifying the thinking of a large segment of Trump's supporters. He writes:

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Iran had hidden evidence of some tests related to building nuclear weapons and had enriched enough uranium to make nine nuclear bombs on short notice. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei then rejected the most recent American proposal in the nuclear negotiations and denounced "the rude, insolent U.S. leaders."

Donald Trump fired back: "Time is running out on Iran's decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly!"

The back-and-forth has perplexed and disoriented much of Washington. Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently said that Trump is "negotiating something that, in its broad elements, is going to look and feel pretty similar" to the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran. "I seem to be on the same page as Donald Trump," he continued.

The strain has been too much for many of the Israel haters who claim to speak for Trump’s political base and favor an Obama-esque approach to the Islamic Republic. They have run into a major force in American politics, one that Khamenei should fear: America’s Jacksonians.

Who are these Jacksonian Americans?

Walter Russell Mead, who first identified this group in Special Providence, describes their values as "a deeply embedded, widely spread populist and popular culture of honor, independence, courage, and military pride." A "Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites." Andrew Jackson was one such hero; another is Donald J. Trump.

Trump rocketed into the White House largely thanks to his intuitive understanding of the Jacksonians and their resulting bond. They nod along to his criticisms of democracy promotion and nation-building and are skeptical of long, drawn out wars. Since they prefer to ignore foreigners whom they do not consider a threat, they can appear quite dovish.

They are not at all dovish about terrorism though, or about major terrorism sponsors like Iran. Since Iranian revolutionaries attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage for more than a year, Jacksonians have loathed the mullahs. Iran’s intervening decades of supporting worldwide terrorism—killing Americans and systematically cheating on agreements—have not engendered any new warm feelings.

Jacksonians do not want Iran to get the bomb, and the economic incentives that the Iranians are dangling do not change their minds.

How many Trump voters would be considered Jacksonians by this measure? According to a recent Rasmussen poll,

Three-quarters of Trump voters support strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Among those who strongly approve of Trump, the figure climbs to 84 percent. The anti-Israel crowd, and the doves who voted for Kamala Harris, are in the minority.

Crossing the Jacksonians can fatally weaken presidencies. Barack Obama and Joe Biden both hoped to smooth things over with Iran and gracefully exit from the Middle East. But the Obama-era chaos in Syria helped create ISIS, and Oct. 7 destroyed Biden’s Middle East policy. The subsequent outbreak of domestic terrorism by ISIS members in 2015 and pro-Hamas rallies in 2023 fired up the Jacksonians and helped propel Trump into office.

There's more to Watson's analysis at the link, but the Jacksonians may have a well-grounded concern. Trump has said the two ways to deal with Iran’s enrichment program are to "blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously."

But there's a fear that Trump will indeed settle for an Obama-esque "solution" in which there's no "blowing up" at all. Such a solution is no solution at all, and if that's what ultimately comes of all of this, there'll be a lot of Jacksonians whose support for Trump will erode. On the other hand, as Watson writes:

If the mullahs choose to have it done viciously, plenty of Americans will be happy to oblige.

Sharpshooter

The 8:00 minute video below captures the amazing abilities of a fish known as the Archerfish.

As you watch the video ask yourself how many structural and behavioral changes needed to occur in order for this fish to be able to do what it does. How many algorithmic changes had to be made in the neural wiring in the fish's brain just to enable it to adjust for the refraction of the light coming from the prey or to adjust the stream of water to adjust for distance?

Could all of the necessary mutations in the organism's genome have occurred by serendipity or does the Archerfish's incredible ability not point instead to intentional design?

Ask yourself as you watch which is a priori (that is, setting aside any prior commitment one way or another) a more plausible explanation for this phenomenal behavior, chance or intelligent engineering and programming:

Ukraine's Assassination Program

Last weekend, the Ukrainians bloodied Russia's bomber fleet with a drone attack that, according to Ukraine, damaged or destroyed 41 aircraft, but drone attacks aren't the only tactics in the Ukrainian arsenal. According to a piece at Strategy Page, they've also stepped up their assassination efforts. Here's an excerpt:

Over the last year Russian security officials began to notice a frightening pattern. A growing number of men who had been involved in the Ukraine war were dying, but from murder instead of natural causes.

Bombs, bullets and seeming accidents have killed a hundred or more people involved in supporting Russia in Ukraine. This included Ukrainian traitors as well as Russian army veterans and senior officers, plus members of Russia’s police, intelligence and security services.

It gets worse, the Ukrainian SBU internal security agency appears to have organized this campaign as they have had similar operations in the past. The Russian FSB, the successor to the dreaded Soviet era KGB, has been on the case and reported that this terror campaign is well organized and extensive.

Worse, the FSB found that many people in Russia were active in carrying out these killings. This is because several million Russians and Ukrainians were displaced from Ukraine during the war. Some fled, other were forced into Russia. The SBU has been in touch with many of these former Ukraine residents and found many of them willing to fight back against the Russians from inside Russia.

Since 2022 more of these exiles have turned against Russia and the SBU took advantage of that. The FSB knows this because they have managed to discover some of the shipments of weapons and explosives shipped into Russia from European countries for these Ukrainian operatives.

Some of the weapons used were obtained in Russia. As disabled or deserting Russian soldiers returned home, some brought weapons and explosives with them as souvenirs. Others planned to use these items for criminal activities.

It’s not just the Ukrainians who are bringing the war home to Russia; many pro-Ukraine Russian veterans of the war are doing so as well.

Russian intelligence noted that a growing number of these attacks are against Russian government officials. While Russian officers and troops are guilty of atrocities in Ukraine, their superiors are responsible. The attack victims are beginning to include more senior government officials and the FSB fears that the campaign will eventually include Vladimir Putin and his close associates.

Providing additional security for that many senior officials cannot be done. The growing labor shortage in Russia extends to government departments. Wealthy Russians have been able to send their families abroad for extended visits, at least until the war and its domestic hazards are past.

All the reliable personnel security people are employed and finding additional people is nearly impossible. The Ukrainians figured this out first and timed their internal Russian assassination program for when the targets would have the least protection.

There's more at the link.

If Russian officials are constantly looking over their shoulders and under their cars (for explosives), it will take a heavy toll on morale, which must already be pretty low. After all, how many Russians in Moscow really believe in Putin's war? How many would gladly see Putin dead if the deed could be done?

Despite Trump's efforts to mediate an end to the carnage, Putin has a tiger by the tail and he can't let go until he can claim, truthfully or otherwise, that he has won a glorious victory for Mother Russia. To just pack up and go home now after nearly a million casualties and untold economic harm to his country, would not only disgrace him in the history books, it'd almost certainly invite a coup that would not end well for him.

Life's Origin

Josh Anderson at Quora responds to the question whether it's "possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that intelligence was required to create life."

His reply is quite interesting. Here it is in full, slightly edited:

Yes, it is. Here’s the question you should ask yourself: Is symbolic code something that blind, intelligence-free physical processes could create and use? Or is mind alone up to the task?

The legendary John Von Neumann (1903-1957) did important work on self-replicating systems. A towering giant in the history of mathematics and pioneer in computer science, he was interested in describing machine-like systems that could build faithful copies of themselves.

Von Neumann soon recognized that it would require both hardware and software. Such a system had to work from a symbolic representation of itself. That is, it must have a kind of encoded picture of itself in some kind of memory.

Crucially, this abstract picture had to include a precise description of the very mechanisms needed to read and execute the code.

Makes sense, right? To copy itself it has to have a blueprint to follow. And this blueprint has to include instructions for building the systems needed to decode and implement the code.

In order to replicate itself, Von Neumann is asserting, a computer would have to be programmed with a complete set of instructions to direct the replication process. But how could a computer program itself to replicate itself?

Here’s the remarkable thing: Life is a Von Neumann Replicator. Von Neumann was unwittingly describing the DNA based genetic system at the heart of life. And yet, he was doing so years before we knew about these systems.

The implications of this are profound. Think about how remarkable this is. It’s like having the blueprints and operating system for a computer stored on a drive in digital code that can only be read by the device itself. It’s the ultimate chicken and egg scenario.

Again, how would a computer ever "know" how to program itself to produce a copy of itself without input at some point from a mind?

How might something like this have come about? For a system to contain a symbolic representation of itself [there has to be an] actualization of precise mapping between two realms, the physical realm and an abstract symbolic realm.

In view here is a kind of translation, mechanisms that can move between encoded descriptions and material things being described. This requires a system of established correlations between stuff out here and information instantiated in a domain of symbols.

Here’s the crucial question: Is this something that can be achieved by chance, physical laws, or intelligence-free material processes? The answer is decidedly NO. What’s physical cannot work out the non-physical. Only a mind can create a true code.

Only a mind can conceive of and manage abstract, symbolic realities. A symbolic system has to be invented. It cannot come about in any other way.

Another way to say this is that there's a vast chasm between immaterial, abstract information (symbols) and physical machines. The only way to bridge that chasm, whether in computers or human beings, is through a mind. But on naturalism there was no mind present when the first cells evolved the ability to replicate.

So how did they?

If you think something like this - mutually interdependent physical hardware and encoded software - can arise through unguided, foresight-less material forces acting over time, think again.

If I were to ask you to think of something, anything that absolutely requires intelligence to bring about, you’d be hard pressed to think of a better example. It’s not just that no one understands how it could be done, it’s that we have every reason to believe that it is impossible in principle.

No intelligence-free material processes could ever give you something like this. (i.e. a complex, self-replicating entity like a living cell)

But wait, how can we be so sure this feature of life was not forged by evolution, built up incrementally by the unseen hand of natural selection? What’s to say this is beyond the ability of evolution to create?

The question answers itself. In order for evolution to take place you have to have a self-replicating system in place. You don’t evolve to the kind of thing we’ve been describing. That is, necessarily, where you begin.

Evolution cannot get started until the first self-replicating system exists, but how does that first system come to exist? How, in other words, does life begin apart from a mind?

The DNA and the dizzyingly complex molecular machinery that it both uses and describes did not evolve into existence. This much is clear.

Any suggestion that it did is not based on a scintilla of empirical evidence or any credible account of how it could have come about in this way.

The conclusion is clear: The unmistakable signature of mind is literally in every cell of every living thing on earth.

Every living thing is comprised of millions if not trillions of self-replicating biological factories called cells. Naturalists insist that this ability to self-replicate evolved without any help from a mind, but they have no answer to the question of how that would've even been possible.

The claim that it did is no more than an assertion of blind faith.

Trump's Running Out of Time

An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report contains a damning indictment of Iranian cheating on their nuclear non-proliferation agreements and increases the likelihood that Israel will soon take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities. According to the IAEA, Iran is working hard to produce several nuclear weapons which, we can assume, will almost certainly be used against Israel and to blackmail other Middle East states.

Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com gives us a summary of Reuters' report on the IAEA's findings.

Iran carried out secret nuclear activities with material not declared to the U.N. nuclear watchdog at three locations that have long been under investigation, the watchdog said in a wide-ranging, confidential report to member states seen by Reuters.

The findings in the "comprehensive" International Atomic Energy Agency report requested by the agency's 35-nation Board of Governors in November pave the way for a push by the United States, Britain, France and Germany for the board to declare Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.

A resolution would infuriate Iran and could further complicate nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.

Using the IAEA report's findings, the four Western powers plan to submit a draft resolution for the board to adopt at its next meeting the week of June 9, diplomats say. It would be the first time in almost 20 years Iran has formally been found in non-compliance.

Morrissey notes that a separate IAEA report warned that Iran may be just about ready to build as many as nine nuclear weapons:

A separate IAEA report sent to member states on Saturday said Iran’s stock of uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% of weapons grade, had grown by roughly half to 408.6 kg. That is enough, if enriched further, for nine nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.

Approximately 42 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium is theoretically enough to produce one atomic bomb, if enriched further to 90%, according to the watchdog.

The IAEA report raised a stern warning, saying that Iran is now “the only non-nuclear-weapon state to produce such material” — something the agency said was of “serious concern.”

So what will the Trump administration do? If they allow Iran to continue to enrich Uranium they'll look just as weak as did both Obama and Biden. If they support an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities they risk a broader war, although that risk is much lessened by the diminished capabilities of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

Another question: Does Israel have the capability to actually destroy all the facilities that need to be destroyed? If not, will the U.S. help?

No one wants more war in the region, but the Islamists in Iran are forcing the issue. War will come either now when Iran is at its weakest or it will come later when Iran has nuclear weapons. As Machiavelli wrote centuries ago in The Prince, "War cannot be avoided. It can only be postponed to the advantage of the other side."

Ukrainian Drones Devastate Russia's Bomber Fleet

The Ukrainians are nothing if not extremely clever. Over the weekend they launched simultaneous drone strikes on five Russian air bases that damaged or destroyed approximately thirty percent of Russia's strategic bomber force as well as a number of other aircraft - forty one aircraft in all. The bombers had been used to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Redstate has more details:

Ukrainian special forces operatives launched simultaneous attacks on four Russian strategic bomber bases and the home port of the Russian Northern Fleet early Sunday. The attack was reportedly a year-and-a-half in the making and involved a novel means of delivery and the first use of autonomous drone swarms.

The airbases are the home to Russia's fleet of Tu-22, Tu-95M, and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers as well as AS-50 battle management aircraft. They were located from the Siberian Far East to the Arctic Circle. The furthest target, Belaya Airbase in Irkutsk, is over 2700 miles from Ukraine.

Reports indicate that at least 41 aircraft were hit. The unofficial tally indicates 24 Tu-22, 8 Tu-95MS, and 5 Tu-16 were hit. MiG-31 fighters and Il-76 transports were also hit. To put this in context, open-source data says Russia's bomber inventory is about 58 Tu-22, 47 Tu-95MS, and 15 Tu-160. These planes are the ones used to launch most of the missiles fired at Ukrainian cities.

By any standard, this was a devastating attack. Nearly half of the Tu-22, a quarter of the Tu-95MS, and a third of the Tu-160 fleet, representing just over 30 percent of Russia's strategic bomber force, were damaged or destroyed in one attack. When you consider the operational readiness rate, Russia probably has less than 50 aircraft capable of flying.

The Ukrainians smuggled the drones into Russia and used semi-trucks to deliver them close to the bases. These trucks served as launch platforms for the drones.

This was a fire-and-forget attack. There was no need for Ukrainian drone operators to remain on the scene to manage the attacks. An autonomously targeted drone swarm hit each target. SBU operatives placed the trucks, and the rest of the operation, from first launch to the self-destruct of the transport, appears to have been carried out without a man in the loop.

This is a huge embarrasment for Russia. The lost aircraft are irreplaceable, and the security failure is humiliating. Heads will almost surely roll. Unfortunately, Mr. Putin's is not likely to be one of them.

The Tu-22 and Tu-95MS production lines are closed, and the Tu-160 production is one...per year. For all intents and purposes, this represents a permanent decrease in the size of the Russian strategic bomber fleet.

There's video of the attack at the Redstate link.

Black Racism

Black author and columnist Larry Elder calls attention to a problem that would be amusing were it not so serious. It's the claim by many on the left that blacks can't be racist. Of course, much depends upon how one defines the word "racist," but if we adopt the common-sense definition that racism is discrimination against, or contempt for, someone solely based on their race then racism against whites is rampant among blacks.

Unfortunately, however, the word is often defined in ways that make it a characteristic of which only the majority race can be guilty. This is absurdly tendentious, and Elder cites an example from a recent Piers Morgan podcast:

Piers Morgan, in a February podcast, accused his guest, "trans activist" Blossom Brown, of "race-baiting." Brown replied, "Black women cannot be racist to white women." Brown then added this inability to be racist to white women extended to Morgan: "How am I racist to you? I'm Black. I can't be racist to you." Brown also accused Morgan of lacking "the intellectual capacity to understand" this position.

Ms Brown accuses Morgan of lacking the capacity to understand that there's a racial double standard held by people like Ms Brown. The double standard goes like this: When whites say X about blacks, it's racist and thus morally evil, but when blacks say X about whites, it's perfectly acceptable. If a white does Y to a black, it's racist, but if a black does Y to a white, it's not.

How convenient.

Elder writes:

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) made a similar slur against (black) Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). In a discussion about the breakdown of the nuclear family, Donalds factually noted that during Jim Crow, a black child was more likely than today to be raised by a married mother and father.

Crockett said: "The fact that you're sitting around talking about 'life was better under Jim Crow,' like, is this because you don't understand history? Or literally it's because you married a white woman and so you think that whitewashed you?"

"Whitewashed"?

Does this apply to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, former Vice President Kamala Harris, ex CNN host Don Lemon, to name a few, who married "outside their race"?

Or Barack Obama's mother and father?

Elder cites a 2020 Rasmussen poll that found that,

"75% of American Adults think the term 'racism' refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another." It found adults more likely to assert "most" blacks are racist than to make that claim about whites, Hispanics or Asians: "Eighteen percent (18%) say most white Americans are racist.

But 25% believe most black Americans are racist. Fifteen percent (15%) think most Hispanic-Americans are racist, while nearly as many (13%) say the same of most Asian-Americans. ... These findings parallel surveying done in 2013, although Americans were even more likely at that time to identify blacks as the most racist group."

The reason so many Americans think racism is common among blacks is because there are so many cases of it. For just a few examples of the dozens like it that could be cited go here, here, here, here, and here. If the races were reversed in any of these examples, we would've had a national meltdown over the insidious prevalence of white racism permeating the nation.

Elder closes his column with these words from black economist Thomas Sowell:

Anti-black racism, as an obstacle to success, has never been more insignificant. Thomas Sowell has said, "Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists.'"

Sowell is speaking of the white community, but racism is still alive, well, and tolerated in the black community.