Could Life Have Arisen by Chance?

One of the strongest arguments against any naturalistic theory of the origin of life is the enormous difficulty inherent in the attempt to give a plausible account of how the first cells could have ever been formed.

One of the problems for origin of life researchers is that even the simplest cell is immensely complex, consisting of thousands of molecular machines that must all be present and functioning in a coordinated manner in order for any cell to survive. And of course until there are living cells there could be no evolution of the sort described in high school and college biology textbooks.

This short video gives just a glimpse of the intractable nature of the problem. Don't be put off by the cartoonish graphics. The content is very sophisticated but also easily understood by anyone with a high school science education.

Check it out:

Completely Predictable

A report in the Daily Mail describing the effects of raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers in California should come as no surprise to anyone with even a modest IQ:

Fast food chains in California are slashing jobs - as a way to cut costs after the minimum wage in the state was hiked to $20-an-hour.

Almost 10,000 positions across chains from Pizza Hut to Burger King have been cut since the law came into effect on April 1, according to a report from a trade group in the state.

On top of that, chains have been shuttering restaurants - including beloved Mexican chain Rubio's Coastal Grill, which this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed 48 locations in the state.

When the minimum wage is raised for entry level workers those with more experience who had already been getting $20 an hour must have their pay raised as well, and this is just unsustainable for businesses working on thin profit margins.

The solution for employers is to raise prices, which means less business which means workers will eventually get laid off, or keep prices stable and lay off workers more quickly. Either way, it's hard to see how raising the minimum wage helps most workers.

The California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) slammed Governor Gavin Newsom for pushing the law through, which has also meant businesses in the state have had to raise prices.

To highlight the impact of the law, the trade group created out an advert in Thursday's edition of USA Today with mock 'obituaries' of popular brands.

The tongue-in-cheek advert (which can be seen at the link above), titled 'In Memoriam: Victims of Newsom's minimum wage', highlighted the issues faced by smaller brands including Rubio's, and fast food giants including Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway and McDonald's.

It features news clips documenting the changes made by companies in response to the wage increase.

This includes raising prices, letting go of workers to cut labor costs - and in some cases shutting down locations.

One says: 'A McDonald's franchisee who owns 18 outposts in California is considering reducing store hours, hiking menu prices and delaying renovations to offset the impact of the state's $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers.'

Even before the law was made official earlier this year, chains including Pizza Hut and Round Table let go of more than a thousand delivery workers to brace for the financial ramifications of the change.

A worker's worth is based on how difficult it would be to replace him or her. If a job takes no particular skill politicians can't artificially inflate the worker's value to his or her employer simply by raising the worker's salary by legislation. This placebo may make the politicians popular with the uneducated, but it guarantees that the workers who are supposed to be helped will only suffer in the long run.

One of the details in the article at the link explains that many franchises are planning to replace workers with digital kiosks, a trend that has already started in many restaurants. The kiosks cost money and would've been slow to displace workers had politicians, ignorant of basic economics, not made kiosks more attractive than training and paying workers more than they're worth to their employer.

Worse Than WWII Germans

Dennis Prager makes an interesting claim in a piece at HotAir.com. He states that, "Morally speaking, it would be difficult to name a less impressive people than the Palestinians over the past century."

Why does he say this? Here's his answer:

Immediately after the burnings, rapes, mutilations and murders of Jews on Oct. 7, I was not alone in noting the one moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis: The Nazis tried to hide their crimes against the Jews from the German people (and the world) while Hamas proudly publicized their crimes against the Jews to the Palestinian people (and didn't mind that the world would inevitably see them bragging about killing Jews).

In addition to videoing their atrocities, Hamas paraded captured Jews -- dead and alive, clothed and naked -- in front of cheering Palestinian crowds in Gaza.

This leads to a sobering realization.

Hamas boasting to their fellow Palestinians about what they did to Jews while the Nazis tried to hide what they did from fellow Germans means there is not only a moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis but a moral difference between the German people during the Nazi era and the Palestinian people today -- and for nearly the last hundred years.

Prager adds that the "cumulative Palestinian record of evil over the last century has few peers," and proceeds to make an impressive case in support of that assessment, a case that he states is "nowhere near" as exhaustive as it could've been.

He concludes with these thoughts:

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, as of 2022, a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks against Israeli Jews. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank has been paying more than $300 million annually -- about 8% of the Palestinian budget -- to the families of imprisoned terrorists and of terrorists killed while engaging in an act of terror against Jews.

Another Palestinian poll states that the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank -- over 75% -- support Hamas at this time.

The Palestinian people love killing Jews and have loved doing so for nearly a century. Palestinian women routinely pass out candy in the streets in celebration of terror attacks against Jews. Compare this to Israel, which has many human rights organizations holding Israel to account regarding its treatment of Palestinians.

Compare this to Israelis, who for years had volunteered to drive Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

To be "pro-Palestinian" today means being pro-Hamas just as to be "pro-German" during World War II was the same as being pro-Nazi. The only difference is that the Germans as a whole were a better people than the Palestinians. If you support the Palestinians, you should know whom you support.

It's difficult to grasp, given the horrific record of Palestinian atrocities Prager adumbrates, that there would still be people in this country cheering them on and demanding that the Israelis cease protecting themselves from those who implacably seek their deaths.

There are some who insist that they demonstrate not in support of the terrorists of Hamas but on behalf of the long-suffering Palestinian people, but this is sophistry. Prager's essay shows that the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people is pretty much a distinction without a difference.

Hamas is simply doing what the Palestinian people, or at least a large majority of them, want them to do.

For Juneteenth

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day set aside to celebrate the end of slavery in America, so it's appropriate to honor two African-Americans who played major roles in abolition.

Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.

The details are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of this "peculiar institution."

Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.

There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.

Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.

In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.

While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

Dred and Harriet Scott

 

The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:

[Taney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.

Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....

Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.

The Scotts lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.

The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.

They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.

Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.

The War in Gaza

According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon the Israelis expect to be in full control of the Gazan city of Rafah by the end of this month.

The Beacon's Owen Tilman writes:

The Israel Defense Forces on Monday said that two of Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah have been destroyed and that Israel is expected to have full control of the city by the end of June, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

Israel said Division 162, part of the IDF’s Southern Command, has operational control of roughly 60 to 70 percent of Rafah. The assault on the Hamas stronghold has left at least 550 terrorists dead and destroyed 200 tunnel shafts and Hamas’s last major rocket supply, and battles with the remaining two battalions are already underway, the IDF said.

Israel launched its invasion of Rafah on May 6, taking control of 30 to 40 percent of the city by May 20. Rafah is home to an estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million Palestinians who have sought refuge following the outbreak of the war on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists launched an attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and took roughly 250 hostages.

President Biden's somewhat desultory foreign policy initiatives continue to be of little effect either in Jerusalem or in Hamas' tunnels in Rafah:

The development in Rafah comes just six days after Hamas rejected a U.N.-backed ceasefire proposal outlined by President Joe Biden, which would have secured the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for prisoners held in Israel.

The Israelis are determined to exterminate Hamas or compel them to surrender, and they should be encouraged to do so. To pressure the Israelis to allow Hamas to survive, as the Biden administration does, is to guarantee that October 7 will be repeated as often as Hamas is able to do it.

Hamas has repeatedly acknowledged that its whole raison d'etre is the destruction of the Jewish state and the death of all its people. It has vowed that attacks on Israel like the October 7th attack will continue until Israel is no more.

There can be no peace between Israel and Hamas as long as such hate-filled fanatics exist, and those in this country who support them are morally complicit in the atrocity of October 7th and in Hamas' desire to carry out such attacks in the future. Those who don the keffiyeh to show "solidarity" with Hamas are no different than those who would wear swastikas to show solidarity with the perpetrators of the holocaust.

What's Wrong with Socialism?

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true or close to the truth concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.

In an attempt to help correct this gap in understanding I offer this allegory which is certainly not original with me but to which everyone should be able to relate:

Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they instead play video games and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.

Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where socialism comes in.

Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success. The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.

Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C.

When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less-motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they did well enough to suit them on the last test by just goofing off.

The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, your diminished preparation only gained you C's.

The professor once again redistributes the points and everyone, including you, now has a D.

By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't work at all?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

Our Nation Needs Strong Fathers

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 almost thirty years 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.

Yesterday was Fathers' Day 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.

Men who are 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 biological 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.