Viewpoint

What Am I Missing?

2012-02-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

I need some help understanding something. All my adult life I've heard from Democrats and their media allies that Republicans want to end social security, or curtail its benefits, and that they, the Democrats, will let this happen only over their dead bodies. They are, I've always been told, the only bulwark against a niggardly, cold-hearted GOP which wants to throw old people out into the street.

So now we come to the debate over the Payroll Tax cut. The Payroll Tax is the only funding mechanism for social security, but it's not the Republicans who want to cut it, it's the Democrats, and when the Republicans balk the Democrats and the media wax livid.

In a confusing reversal of roles the Republicans argue, correctly it seems to me, that you cannot reduce revenues to social security by over a hundred billion dollars a year without having to borrow the money to pay for the shortfall from somewhere, and more borrowing just hastens fiscal armageddon.

Cutting the tax would reduce funding to Social Security by $119 billion over the next year, on top of the $105 billion reduced from funding in 2011, so who is it who's jeopardizing old folks' retirement? Is what I've heard all my adult life a fable? Is it really Republicans who want to protect seniors from being thrown into the streets and Democrats who are willing to pitch them under the bus for the short term political benefit of putting a few more dollars in younger workers' monthly paychecks?

Why isn't the media talking about this aspect of the debate? Does anyone think that if it were Republicans who were cutting social security funding that the network talking heads and newspaper opinionaters would not be venting their outrage 24/7? What am I missing? The world seems to have been turned upside down and all the media seems to be able to do is yawn and play endless clips of Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You."

Pact with the Devil

2012-02-17T14:58:00.000-05:00

Paul Rahe a professor of political history at Hillsdale College has a blistering critique of the Catholic Church at Ricochet.com. It's a long piece, but it will be of great interest to anyone who cares about American Catholicism.

The gist of it is that the current troubles the Catholic Church faces regarding the Obama administration's mandate requiring them to provide insurance for contraceptives and abortifacients are really their own doing and are the outcome of their longstanding complicity in the expansion of the welfare state.

This passage perhaps best sums up his essay:

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork.

They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the [Church] hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package – that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

I would submit that the bishops, nuns, and priests now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for. The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it.

I do not mean to say that I would prefer that the bishops, nuns, and priests sit down and shut up. Barack Obama has once again done the friends of liberty a favor by forcing the friends of the administrative entitlements state to contemplate what they have wrought. Whether those brought up on the heresy that public provision is akin to charity will prove capable of thinking through what they have done remains unclear.

Rahe doesn't mention it, but the administration's attempt to tell insurers what they will cover and what they won't is disturbing as well on grounds other than religious freedom. Suppose down the road the government decides to mandate that insurers not cover the costs of having more than two children, or they mandate that insurers raise the premiums for anyone owning a firearm. The Obama administration is putting itself in position to control a vast swath of behavior simply by controlling what the insurance industry will cover and how much we'll pay for that coverage.

This way lies the road to serfdom, to borrow the title of Friedrich von Hayek's famous book, and it's another reason why Obamacare strikes many Americans as a very dangerous idea.

Hooking Kids on Sex

2012-02-17T14:38:00.002-05:00

One of the reasons Planned Parenthood has incurred the wrath of so many Americans has nothing to do with abortion, nor birth control, nor the racist eugenics that animated their founding. Rather it has to do with the way they seek to expose young people to, and indoctrinate them in, a squalid pornographic view of human sexuality.

Tina Korbe at Hot Air discusses a video put out by the American Life League that reveals exactly how perverse are the PP "educational" materials they distribute to elementary and older kids. The video is at the end of her post. I didn't want to put it here because, frankly, although I think it's important and I have no qualms over its pull-no-punches style, the stuff it presents about PP is just too sleazy and disgusting for Viewpoint.

Instead I'll just recommend that if you want to know what your kids will be exposed to in many public schools and other venues in the name of "family planning" go to the link, scroll down, and watch the six minute video. And then marvel that the organization that puts this stuff out is subsidized by your tax dollars. UPDATE: The video has been taken down after someone claimed "copyright infringement."

Freedom to Choose

2012-02-16T08:55:00.001-05:00

Hot Air offers video of three people called to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which was conducting hearings on forced union membership. Their stories are sad, especially that of Sally Coomer.

Coomer was forced to join the SEIU by the state of Washington because she receives Medicaid for caring for her severely disabled daughter. She then has to pay the union $95 every month in dues, money which she needs for her daughter. This sounds incredible, I know, but watch the video:

It really is an outrage that Coomer and others like her are forced to join a union because she's considered to be a "health service provider" when she takes government money to care for her daughter.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey writes:

Both Michigan and Minnesota tried to extend this forced-unionism into day-care operations as well as home-care situations. There is no reason to force parents who receive Medicaid to care for developmentally-disabled children into unions, except to pick their pockets for the benefit of union bosses and political parties. It’s positively ghoulish ... and only the efforts of Republican-controlled legislatures in both states kept them from forcing babysitters into unions.

Why is it that when President Obama talks about "fairness" he never seems to get around to questioning the fairness of forcing people like Sally Coomer to belong to a union and then having that union take almost $100 dollars a month out of her pocket for the privilege of being a member and helping to pay for causes she opposes? Mr. Obama won't complain about injustices like these, of course, because the unions, particularly SEIU, are among his biggest supporters and make up a large segment of his party's base.

There are similar videos at the link - testimony of others who've been forced to join a union if they wish to keep their jobs and feed their families. Progressives tout the "freedom to choose" but they only support that freedom for women who want to choose to terminate the life of their unborn child. When it comes to giving poor women the choice of which schools their children will attend or the choice of whether or not to join a union the word freedom suddenly vanishes from the Progressives' lexicon.

Politicians can support compulsory union membership or they can stand for individual liberty, but they can't do both.

What Must Moammar Be Thinking?

2012-02-16T08:24:00.000-05:00

The shade of Moammar Qaddafi must be scratching its ghostly head over recent developments in Syria. After all, the Libyan leader was himself peremptorily dispatched to his eternal reward, such as it might be, largely because President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton insisted on humanitarian grounds that we intervene to prevent him from killing thousands of his citizens. So we proceeded to kill hundreds, maybe thousands, of young Libyan soldiers to keep Qaddafi from killing thousands of civilians.

"Very well," Moammar must be musing from his ethereal perch, "I can understand that, but then why not Syria? What's the difference?" Good question. How does Bashar Assad get away with killing thousands of his people with every bit as much remorseless brutality and cruelty as Moammar could ever have mustered and there's no military response from the U.S? Is it that Libya has oil and Syria doesn't? That can't be the reason because Mr. Obama and Ms Clinton are lefties, and if there's anything we know from the Iraq war it's that lefties would never, ever spill blood in order to secure oil. Heck, they won't even build a pipeline to secure oil.

Perhaps we've not intervened in Syria like we did in Libya because thousands of leftists have made it clear to Mr. Obama that if he threatens military force they'll journey to Syria and serve as human shields just like they did when George Bush threatened to invade Iraq. And they did, too, at least until the bombs started falling at which point they disappeared. Maybe they told Mr. Obama that this time they really mean it, and the administration believed them.

Okay, maybe that's not it. The vociferous anti-war left has been as quiet as church mice since Mr. Obama ascended to the Oval Office. It's only when Republicans launch hostilities, it seems, that they're able to find their voice.

Whatever it is, Mr. Qaddafi must be wondering today whether there are any guiding principles governing American foreign policy and if so, what they might be. If he is wondering this he's got a lot of company, except in the American media which seems completely uninterested in the question.

Two Options

2012-02-15T12:38:00.000-05:00

Biological animator Drew Berry gave a TED talk in 2011 in which he described his work. In the lecture he displays some of his breath-taking animations of processes that occur around the clock in every cell of our bodies.

Keep in mind as you wonder at the precision and complexity of these molecular machines and the operations they perform that there are only two viable explanations for how they came to be. Either blind forces and chance mutations resulted in these amazingly choreographed molecular dances or they were intentionally designed by an intelligent agent:

The only reason anyone would opt for the first explanation, in my opinion, is that they've ruled out a priori the possibility of there being an intelligent agent capable of having directed the creation of life. Moreover, the primary reason, perhaps, for ruling out such an agent a priori is the fact that one simply doesn't want such a being to exist.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel provides a clear example of this when he writes the following in his book The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I suspect that most people, believers and non-believers alike, hope that God exists or that he doesn't. What I don't understand is why people like Nagel would hope that he doesn't.

Gutter Politics

2012-02-15T10:51:00.002-05:00

It's sad, but we've come to expect high stakes political campaigns to be pretty sleazy. We expect character assassination, libel, and other offenses against propriety and civility. What we don't expect is that private, tax-exempt organizations will undertake, for political reasons, the systematic destruction of a television news network by any means that lies at hand. This is, however, what the progressive organization Media Matters for America (MMFA) has undertaken to do to Fox News.

The Daily Caller has been running a series of articles based on revelations from employees and former employees of MMFA detailing exactly what and how they're trying to smear and discredit Fox News and the lengths to which they're willing to go to harass and intimidate Fox's employees.

It's a pretty sordid tale but then the MMFA folks are progressives, after all, and progressives, or at least many of them, are firm believers in the principle that the end justifies the means.

The DC exposé makes for fascinating reading for those familiar with some of the players, and it's certainly important that people be aware of the sorts of things that are being done to insure Mr. Obama's reelection. Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz even observed that all of this is going to backfire and that MMFA will single-handedly cause Mr. Obama's defeat in November because he'll inevitably be associated with, and soiled by, MMFA's squalid tactics. We'll see.

Meanwhile, check out the series at the Daily Caller website. The links to the installments are below the picture of MMFA president and founder David Brock at the top of the DC home page.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller's page has changed so the best way to access their series on MMFA is to go here.

Is it Fair?

2012-02-14T08:59:00.000-05:00

Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore notes that President Obama's main criterion for measuring the value of a policy is "fairness." That being so, he writes, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask about the fairness of much of what the president and his party are doing, or would like to do, in the realm of public policy. I leave it to you to decide how fair the following of Moore's facts are:

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?
Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?
Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?
Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?
Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?
Is it fair that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel and other leading Democrats who preach tax fairness underpaid their own taxes?
Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?
Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?
Is it fair that the three counties with America's highest median family income just happen to be located in the Washington, D.C., metro area?
Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is "subsidized"?
Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don't work?
Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can't afford to repay?
Is it fair that thousands of workers won't have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?
Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama's largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees on their investments in renewable energy projects that went bust?
Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office?
Is it fair that soon almost half the federal budget will take income from young working people and redistribute it to old non-working people, even though those over age 65 are already among the wealthiest Americans?
Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?
Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?
Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?
Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Fairness often seems to be in the eye of the beholder. It's a bit annoying of the president and his epigones to insist, for example, that the rich need to pay their "fair share" of taxes but never tell us what's unfair about the rates they now pay and what rates they should pay. No one disagrees that tax rates should be fair, but telling us the "rich need to pay their fair share" is simple-minded demagoguery unless it's accompanied by an explanation of what exactly their fair share would be and why that amount is more fair than what they're currently contributing.

To assert that the rich need to pay their fair share is to imply that they should be paying more than the 40% of the total taxes paid by Americans they now pay even though they comprise less than 1% of the population. Why is it "fair" to demand they do more? Just because they can?

We need to have this discussion about fairness and taxes, but we need to go beyond silly sound bites and no one who's talking about "everyone paying their fair share," least of all the president, seems willing to do that.

Stay Away From Black Holes

2012-02-13T14:36:00.000-05:00

One never knows when one might be traveling through space and encounter a black hole. Here's a simulation of what it might look like should such a calamity ever befall you:

Platypus Walk

2012-02-13T14:33:00.001-05:00

Whatever you might think of Mr. Obama's politics and leadership there's one thing about this administration that I think is beyond doubt. Mrs. Obama is surely the best dancer of any First Lady in the history of the republic:

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the video.

What's the Difference?

2012-02-13T14:29:00.000-05:00

I'm one who believes that the Obama administration was wrong to attempt to compel the Catholic Church to bend to its will on the matter of contraception coverage. I also agree with those who find the subsequent "compromise" little more than a ridiculous charade. For more on why it's all smoke and mirrors read this piece by Hanna Smith at National Review Online. Mr. Obama seems to be telling the Catholic Church that if they don't want to eat their peas that's okay, but he's going to put the peas in a salad and make them eat the salad.

But this post isn't about that. I have a question that no one yet seems to have addressed. How is a government mandate that requires people to violate their conscience by forcing employers to provide coverage for morally problematic products and procedures substantively different from the government requiring people who are opposed on religious grounds to war and capital punishment to pay taxes to support those? Is there a significant difference between being forced by the state to pay for birth control and abortions and being forced by the state to pay for military action and criminal executions when one opposes all of them?

If religious groups can be exempted from mandates to provide certain kinds of insurance coverage on grounds of conscience (which they should) why aren't religious believers exempted from paying taxes on similar grounds? William James once said that "A difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference." So what's the difference here that makes a difference?

I'm just asking the question. I don't have an answer.

Conservatism

2012-02-11T09:21:00.000-05:00

A panel of mostly young conservatives discusses what it is to be a conservative, particularly in the context of the current Republican primary race:

Conservatives often refer to themselves as classical liberals which sometimes confuses people. This is addressed briefly at the end of the clip and it's pointed out that the values embraced by conservatives were, a century and a half ago, considered liberal.

The ideological spectrum has since then shifted so far to the left, however, that people who today call themselves liberal would have been considered socialists or communists in the 19th century and people who call themselves conservatives today would have been considered liberal in that earlier age.

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the video.

The Mysterious Epigenome

2012-02-10T18:50:00.000-05:00

Recall your tenth grade biology class wherein you learned that the code or blueprint for building a living organism was contained in the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. Segments of DNA form genes and these code for proteins and those build the body of the organism. Well, biologists are learning that that's only part of the story, and maybe a very small part at that. It's beginning to look as if the information that directs the construction and maintenance of the organism is dispersed throughout the cell and maybe even throughout the organism.

This is the thesis of a new book by Thomas Woodward and James Gills who argue that beyond the organism's genome (the set of genetic instructions contained in DNA) there is a deeper level of instruction, the epigenome, that is to the genome what the submerged part of an iceberg is to its tip.

Their book is titled The Mysterious Epigenome and according to Casy Luskin who reviews the book at Evolution News and Views, it's a very accessible introduction which is geared toward the layman interested in the biological sciences. Luskin quotes the authors:

In probing the operation of DNA, scientists have learned much more about a second biological encyclopedia of information that resides above the primary information stored within our DNA. Researchers have discovered a complex system in the cell -- sophisticated "software" situated beyond DNA -- that directs DNA's functions and is responsible for our embryonic development and the differentiation of a single, fertilized egg cell into more than two hundred cell types in a mature body.

This higher control system is also implicated in aging processes, cancer, and many other diseases. It guides the expression of DNA, telling different kinds of cells to use different genes, and to use them in the precise ways that meet the needs of those different cells. This "information beyond DNA" plays a crucial role in each of our sixty trillion cells, telling the genes exactly when, where, and how they are to be expressed.

[T]he living cell possesses vast riches of life-enabling codes, which go far beyond the spiral thread of DNA itself. Information, in a diversity of usable forms, is lodged in virtually every corner of the cell, from the outer cortex to the centrosome, with its system of microtubules, to the histones with their decorated tails, to the methylation patterns attached to DNA. The mutual integration of these systems and layers of information is a marvel to behold. Unraveling these complex relationships will surely occupy the diligent study of biologists for decades to come.

Luskin himself asks the question that is inevitably raised by the discovery of this new layer of information in the cell:

Could this newly discovered information arise by the Darwinian mechanism? A key issue addressed by the book has to do with the implications of the epigenome for the debate over Darwinian theory and intelligent design. The authors believe this new information points to "irreducible complexity" in the cell, and ask: "How can scientists account for a nature-driven origin of the cell's complexity when they stumble upon new layers of information -- a whole new system of coded-language -- above and beyond the cell's DNA?"

Woodward and Giles close by pointing out the challenge posed by the epigenetic revolution to materialist views of evolution:

[T]he epigenome adds tremendous pressure to the already-weak Darwinian explanatory apparatus. Random changes, inherited over generations, must not just explain the explosion of DNA as one moves up the purported tree of life; one must also now explain by these mindless mechanisms the rise of each sophisticated layer of the epigenome.

Biologists are just beginning to understand this new source of information. Indeed, the whole field is really on the cutting edge of a fascinating biological frontier. As Luskin says:

The newly discovered layers of cellular complexity they discuss are astounding. What's even more astounding is the likelihood that if Woodward and Gills were to rewrite this book in another five years, they would have much more to add about known levels of cellular epigenetic information.

The deeper we probe, the more we learn, the more complex, the more information-rich, we find living cells to be. It makes the old 20th century materialism seem almost quaint.

Here's a computer animation which shows in greatly simplified form how the cell constructs proteins. The question that it raises is how the cell knows how and when to perform all these operations? What's the "control center," so to speak, that coordinates and directs all of this activity, and how did such an amazing thing ever evolve?

The amazing choreography of all this makes one wonder if perhaps the panpsychists (those who believe that everything is pervaded by mind) aren't on to something.

Iron Man, Marching Bands, and Embryos

2012-02-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

The other night I paused as I was flipping through the channels to watch a part of the Iron Man movie where Robert Downey, Jr. is encased in his hi-tech iron man suit. As all of the robotic assemblers timed and coordinated their operations with magnificent precision to construct the suit around Downey's body I was reminded of an article I'd read that afternoon which describes how a developing human embryo is assembled in pretty much the same way.

The coordination, timing and precision needed to assemble the iron man suit, as exacting as it is, is really a pretty simple affair compared to that which takes place in every developing child. After all, the iron man assembly process was presumably intelligently designed by human engineers, but embryonic assembly is designed to unfold by .... what? Accident?

Here's the article's lede:

Embryonic development unfolds as if it were a symphony and the members of the orchestra were the various genes that are turned on and off in the course of development. Every player must perform his part at the right moment and in the right way, otherwise the delicate balance of turning on and off signals will be disrupted, with catastrophic results. Scientists have been uncovering layer upon layer of complexity that seems to point to a symphony of processes that could only have been orchestrated by design.

In the embryo, cell processes, like musicians in an orchestra, are turning on and off with astonishing precision, but even more astonishing, perhaps, is that while they're doing this they're also migrating to precise locations around the embryo. Embryonic cell activity is actually more like a highly accomplished marching band performing a halftime show than it is like a stationary orchestra.

Imagine a band instructor leaving to chance whether the band members will play their instruments properly while moving to their assigned spots on the field at just the right time. How long would it take for a band of several hundred members to hit upon just the right pattern if every time the wrong pattern was formed the band is disqualified and another band takes its place? After all, if an evolving embryonic process gets it wrong the embryo dies.

It takes enormous faith, blind faith, in chance and serendipity to think that such a process evolved naturalistically, but blind faith is not in short supply among naturalists.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

2012-02-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

Giles Fraser at the U.K. Guardian discloses the interesting autobiographical tidbit that it was through reading the work of atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that he was prompted to convert from atheism to Christianity. Giles doesn't explain exactly how such a counterintuitive result came about, veering off course just as he seemed about to tell us, but he does go into a lot of illuminating detail about Nietzsche's hostility toward Christian theism. Here's part of his column:

The Big Ideas series has for several months now explored the meaning of a number of familiar intellectual phrases, among them Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message", Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" and Adam Smith's "invisible hand". But none of these feels quite as big an idea as Friedrich Nietzsche's "God is dead". After centuries of Christianity, a new dawn is being announced. And the language Nietzsche uses in his famous passage from The Gay Science reflects the enormity of his discovery: "How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?" Nothing again will ever be the same.

But what is his discovery? It isn't a eureka moment in which Nietzsche comes to understand that God does not exist. Indeed, he is not all that interested in the question of God's existence. The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson recently told me that he would be an atheist even if God walked into the restaurant. Similarly for Nietzsche, it's not a question of evidence or the lack of it.

He is in a completely different place to the new atheist brigade of Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling. If God walked into the room, Nietzsche would stab him – for his "God is dead" revelation is that humanity can only become free if it rejects the idea of the divine. Christianity is not a mistake. It is wickedness dressed up as virtue.

Nietzsche chafed at the constraints Christian morality places on man's natural inclinations and appetites. To read Nietzsche straightforwardly is to read a call for the "overmen" - the supermen, such as himself - to give free reign to his passion, his selfishness, and his cruelty.

Nietzsche's case against Christianity was that it kept people down; that it smothered them with morality and self-loathing. His ideal human is one who is free to express himself (yes, he's sexist), like a great artist or a Viking warrior. Morality is for the little people. It's the way the weak manipulate the strong. The people Nietzsche most admired and aspired to be like were those who were able to reinvent themselves through some tremendous act of will.

I have never seen anything to admire in Nietzsche's view of morality or immorality. He was badly interpreted by the Nazis. But his ethics, if one can call them that, are founded on the admiration of power as the ultimate form of abundant creativity. His hatred of Christianity comes mostly from his hatred of renunciation and the promotion of selflessness.

Jesus was a genius for having the imaginative power to reinvent Judaism but a dangerous idiot for basing this reinvention on the idea that there is virtue to be had in weakness. The weak, Nietzsche insists, are nasty and cruel. They take out their frustration on those who have the power of genuine self-expression.

It's ironic that nastiness and cruelty are not really wrong in Nietzsche's world. He despises the Christian, in fact, for influencing the strong and noble to suppress their own nastiness and cruelty. These, for Nietzsche are the prerogatives of the strong, and the weak have no business usurping them or imposing a sense of guilt on the strong who would, but for their feelings of guilt, exercise them.

Giles writes an interesting article that serves as a good introduction to the thought of the man who is considered by some to be the first modern existentialist. Give it a read.

Wisconsin Recall

2012-02-08T14:35:00.000-05:00

This spring we'll be hearing a lot about the effort in Wisconsin to unseat their governor, Republican Scott Walker, via a special recall election. Who's trying to do this and why?

Christian Schneider at explains. He opens with this lede:

One morning last February, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called his staff into his office. “Guys,” he warned, “it’s going to be a tough week.” Walker had recently sent a letter to state employees proposing steps—ranging from restricting collective bargaining to requiring workers to start contributing to their own pension accounts—to eliminate the state’s $3.6 billion deficit. That day in February was when Walker would announce his plan publicly.

It turned out to be a tough year. The state immediately erupted into a national spectacle, with tens of thousands of citizens, led by Wisconsin’s public-employee unions, seizing control of the capitol for weeks to protest the reforms. By early March, the crowds grew as big as 100,000, police estimated. Protesters set up encampments in the statehouse, openly drinking and engaging in drug use beneath the marble dome. Democratic state senators fled Wisconsin to prevent a vote on Walker’s plan. Eventually, the Senate did manage to pass the reforms, which survived a legal challenge and became law in July.

The unions aren’t done yet: they’re now trying to recall Walker from office. To do so, they will try to convince Wisconsin voters that Walker’s reforms have rendered the state ungovernable. But the evidence, so far, contradicts that claim — and Wisconsinites seem to realize it.

So how have Walker's reforms been working out for the people of Wisconsin? You'll have to read the rest of Schneider's piece to get the details, but the short version is this: In just six months Wisconsin has balanced the state budget, saved the taxpayers of the Wisconsin millions of dollars, and saved the jobs of hundreds of people.

It's not a bad record. It'd be nice if the folks in Washington would follow Walker's example.

Unpersuasive

2012-02-07T09:06:00.000-05:00

The Obama administration and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius have come under severe criticism from both the Catholic church and some civil libertarians for their decision to compel Catholic organizations to cover birth control and abortifacients in the insurance they provide their employees. The other day Joan Vennochi, writing for the Boston Globe (subscription required), sought to defend the administration, but in my view she only managed to show how weak the administration's position is. The crux of her case is this graph:

Not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care (the other medical care was abortions)? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That's the Obama administration's argument and it makes sense.

Well, maybe to some people it makes sense, but not to me. In the first place, birth control and the morning after pill are not health care, or at least not primarily so. They're primary use addresses no physiological malady. Although they may be prescribed for certain health conditions like depression or irregular menstruation, that's not why most women buy them.

Secondly, Catholic employers are not imposing their religious beliefs on anyone. On the contrary, they're trying to live by those beliefs themselves. President Obama is saying, in essence, that Catholics can no longer be Catholic. The government will dictate to which of their beliefs they can adhere and which they can't.

Nor do Catholic employers tell their non-Catholic employees that they can't use birth control or have abortions. They're simply telling them that they, Catholic employers, aren't going to pay for them. If anyone is forcing their beliefs on others in this episode it's Kathleen Sebelius and her boss Barack Obama forcing their beliefs on the Catholic church, telling the church that its employers must ignore whatever religious convictions they have about the morality of birth control and abortion and subsidize them. They're telling Catholics, essentially, that they can no longer be Catholics.

I don't know whether the affected organizations receive taxpayer support or not, but why does that matter? If they do receive it it's because they perform a valuable service to society which we want them to continue. If the government forces them to choose between violating their conscience or shutting down everyone will suffer. One in six hospital patients in this country are currently cared for by Catholic hospitals. Close every Catholic hospital, school, adoption agency and other charitable institution run by the Catholic church and their public counterparts would be swamped. Maybe Ms. Vennochio thinks it makes sense to force all those patients into public hospitals, but it's not at all clear to me what's sensible about it.

She closes with this:

Obama isn't trying to regulate religion or undermine Catholicism. He's telling Catholic leaders they can't regulate the beliefs of other faiths. That's fitting in a country that treasures religious freedom, but also values separation of church and state.

Exactly how is it regulating the beliefs of people of other faiths to decline to compensate one's employees for doing things that one believes on religious grounds to be morally wrong? The employee knows when she applies for and accepts employment what her insurance will cover and what it won't. She doesn't have to seek the job, she doesn't have to accept it, nor does she have to remain at the job if she doesn't like the coverage she receives. By taking the job and keeping it she has tacitly consented to the employer's provisions for her and she shouldn't now have the right to demand that the employer start paying for what he considers to be moral vices.

Mandating coverage of morally problematic products and procedures is not the same as the government passing laws about working conditions or minimum wage. Compelling employers to provide work breaks or to pay a certain wage does nothing to violate their conscience or their religion. By treating matters of conscience as if they were the same sort of thing as matters of pay equity or work safety the administration has put us on a slippery slope to eventually dictating to religious organizations how they will be able to practice all their religious beliefs.

Perhaps next the government will require churches, whatever they may believe about gay marriage, to marry gays or lose their tax exemption. Mr. Obama's mandate brings us closer to the day when the Church is entirely in thrall to the state and the statists.

Anyone who values separation of church and state, as Ms. Vennochio implies she does, should be appalled at this unprecedented move by the Obama administration to extend the aegis of government over matters of conscience and the contempt it shows for the principles that undergird the First Amendment to our Constitution.

Michael Ramirez expresses his judgment on the matter in this finely detailed piece of artistry:

Calling for Armageddon

2012-02-07T08:16:00.000-05:00

If this report is accurate (it's from World Net Daily, after all, which is not always a sober news source) the Iranians have just made it impossible for the Israelis to refrain from launching an attack on the Iranian nuclear and military facilities. By calling for the complete annihilation of Israel and all Israelis in a massive pre-emptive missile strike against Israel's cities they have pretty much forced Israel to launch their own massive strike against Iran before the Iranians can carry out their plan.

The call for a pre-emption and annihilation seems to have come from surrogates of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and although it could just be bluster and bluff, how can Israeli leaders afford to take the chance that they're not serious?

If there's any chance that this threat accurately reflects the thinking of Iran's leadership, Israel surely will not wait until Iran's missiles are in the air. It would take less than ten minutes for Israel to be laid waste. Let Reza Kahlili, a former CIA operative in the Iranian Republican Guards, tell the story:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people. The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.

Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.

On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel.

Iran’s Defense Ministry announced this weekend that it test-fired an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile and boasted about successfully putting a new satellite into orbit, reminding the West that its engineers have mastered the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles even as the Islamic state pushes its nuclear weapons program.

The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]... and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”

It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles.

In order to attack Iran, the article says, Israel needs the approval and assistance of America, and under the current passive climate in the United States, the opportunity must not be lost to wipe out Israel before it attacks Iran.

Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles, killing all its inhabitants.

The radicals ruling Iran today not only posses over 1,000 ballistic missiles but are on the verge of ICBM delivery and have sufficient enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs even as they continue to highly enrich uranium despite four sets of U.N. sanctions.

The Iranian secret documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” clearly indicates that these radicals believe the destruction of Israel will trigger the coming of the last Islamic Messiah and that even Jesus Christ, who will convert to Islam, will act as Mahdi’s deputy, praying to Allah as he stands behind the 12th Imam.

There's more at the link. The Iranians also threaten to destroy the United States in the piece. It's talk like this that makes war a matter of when rather than if. The Israelis must be thinking that they simply cannot afford to ignore it. An attack on Iran, the Israeli planners must reason, may have disastrous consequences for the world but the consequences of not attacking would be far worse. One way or another the fanatics in Tehran seem determined to precipitate Armageddon.

Holy Grail

2012-02-06T16:21:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've heard the news that a planet 4.5 times as massive as the earth has been discovered occupying the habitable zone of a relatively nearby star.

Artist's rendering of the alien planet GJ 667Cc, which is located in what could well be the habitable zone of its parent sun in a triple-star system.

The properties of the planet and it's star have led to the claim that this star is the best candidate ever for being able to support life, but the author of Privileged Planet, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, dissents:

Here are a couple important points about this particular system. First, the planets orbit an M dwarf star. M dwarfs provide very poor environments for life. They show erratic brightness fluctuations, and they produce powerful flares with dangerous radiation. Planets in the habitable zone of an M dwarf will spin down fairly quickly, leading to a "tidally-locked" situation that leads to all sorts of problems.

Second, terrestrial planets more massive than Earth are likely less habitable than Earth for several reasons. For instance, they will have less surface relief, which makes it less likely they will have dry land.

Some astronomers are eager to discover planets that can support life because if they do it'll be an important step in discrediting the modern argument for an Intelligent Designer. As it is there's no reason to doubt that our planet is unique, perhaps not just in our galaxy, but in the universe. Books like Rare Earth and Privileged Planet make this case pretty convincingly by identifying a raft of characteristics any life supporting planet (and its star and galaxy) must possess.

These books support the claim - inadvertently, perhaps, in the case of Rare Earth - that the earth is extraordinarily special, that in some sense we really are at the center of the universe, at least ontologically.

If it were discovered that our planet is not privileged, however, that it's not special, not unique, then the design argument is rendered a little less compelling. Thus the search for other suitable planets is the "Holy Grail of exoplanet research," not only for those astronomers curious to learn as much as they can about the cosmos and life, but also of those astronomers seeking, for whatever reason, to discredit the belief that the earth is a very special place.

Why the West Is Best

2012-02-06T15:12:00.000-05:00

Over the years it's been dispiriting to encounter students who no longer feel confident that they live in the greatest country in the history of human civilization. Their lack of confidence in American exceptionalism is as unwarranted as it is sad.

Of course, anyone who bases their opinion of America upon Super Bowl ads, political ads, or television in general, can be forgiven for scoffing at the claim that the United States is a great nation. Even so, it is. No nation in modern times has been as a great a force for good in the world as has the United States.

It's ironic, therefore, that proclaiming the greatness of the West in general, and of America in particular, falls to foreign-born writers like former Muslim Ibn Warraq. Pamela Geller talks about Warraq's new book Why the West Is Best at The American Thinker. After quoting a passage from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (perhaps a regrettable selection on Geller's part) she says this:

But what about slavery? What about colonialism? What about the usual laundry list of the evils of the West that America-hating leftists trot out at every possible opportunity? This is what they're learning in our own universities these days: that America and the West are the worst things that ever happened to this planet, and if we just gave up and gave it all back to the Native Americans, the world would be better off.

Ibn Warraq shows in Why the West Is Best that the sins of the West are common to the whole world: plenty of other cultures have histories of conquest and colonialism, as well as slavery and exploitation. Only in the Western Judeo-Christian context, however, did the principles of free speech and free inquiry develop to the point that longstanding societal and cultural practices could be questioned and ultimately rejected.

Muslims took plenty of slaves, but only in the Western world did there ever arise an abolitionist movement. Muslim countries have been home to plenty of tyrants, but only in the West did free speech become a valued and protected principle, as one of society's foremost protections against regimes that could do whatever they wanted, no matter how much it outraged the will of the people.

There's more at the link. I hope liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reads Warraq's book. She recently made the baffling assertion to an Egyptian audience that Arabs contemplating a new constitution should not look to the American constitution as their model.

More importantly, I hope Warraq's message about the West percolates through American culture to the point where young Americans take pride in the accomplishments of this country and in what our country means, not only to it's own people, but to the people of the world. No other nation has ever been as powerful, as free, as prosperous, and as just.

Some nations may be able to match the U.S. in one or two of these qualities, but no nation has ever come close to matching America in all four.

Singer's Peculiar Argument

2012-02-04T16:01:00.000-05:00

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer certainly is led to some odd conclusions given his premises that there is no God and that human life is not inherently valuable. He's argued in the past that infanticide should be legal and that people suffering from dementia should be euthanized, and his latest foray into the ethics of life is equally controversial. Singer believes it's immoral for the navy to use dolphins to detect mines because it endangers the lives of the dolphins. He writes:

According to earlier reports, the US Navy has trained about 80 dolphins to detect mines. Some reports say that the dolphins only locate the mines and drop acoustic transponders nearby, so that humans can destroy the mines, but it is also possible for the dolphins to set off the mines and die in the resulting explosion, and, of course, using the dolphins in this way makes them – and any other dolphins in the area – targets for the Iranians to destroy if they can.

Animals, or at least those who are conscious and capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, are not things for us to use in whatever way we find convenient. To believe that, because they are members of a different species, we can ignore or discount their interests is speciesism, a form of prejudice against beings who are not "us" that is akin to racism and sexism. We should give equal consideration to the interests of any sentient being, where their interests are similar to our own.

Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group. They respond to images of themselves in a mirror, and use the mirror to examine marks on parts of their body that they cannot otherwise see – a test that is widely taken to be a sign of self-awareness, which human children cannot pass until they are somewhere between 18 months and two years of age.

The United States no longer conscripts its citizens to fight its wars. All its human troops are volunteers. But even conscripts have some basic rights. The dolphins have none.

Late last year, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, together with three international orca experts, and two former orca trainers asked a federal court in San Diego to declare that five orcas held and forced to perform by SeaWorld are held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that outlaws slavery. The suit has yet to be heard, but a similar case might be made against the US Navy for its use of dolphins.

I'm a bit surprised that PETA wants to extend constitutional protections to orcas inasmuch as I don't think the drafters of the 13th amendment had orcas in mind when they drafted the prohibition against slavery. Indeed, the logic employed by Singer and PETA would make it both immoral and unconstitutional for Amish farmers to use mules to pull their plows, for police to use dogs to sniff out contraband, and for zoos to keep animals in cages.

I'm also a bit surprised that Singer bases his argument for banning the use of dolphins on these missions on the high intelligence of these animals. If they're so intelligent, and they don't want to do what the navy trains them to do, then they can simply swim off.

Singer concludes with this:

Various civilizations have, at times, enslaved human beings and forced them to fight for their oppressors. That despicable practice is now rightly condemned, as far as human beings are concerned, but the enslavement of other species continues, in many areas of human life, and the use of slaves in war continues in the United States Navy.

What makes a slave a slave is that they are kept against their will and forced against their will to serve their master. How does Singer know that the navy's dolphins meet either criterion?

He doesn't, of course, but the main point to be made here is this: Singer is assuming that people will agree with him that it's wrong - immoral - to place in harm's way intelligent animals against their will, but why, given Singer's atheism, does he think that this is wrong, or, for that matter, that anything is wrong?

Neither Singer nor anyone else who shares his naturalistic worldview can say that there is any moral right and wrong. All they can say is that they don't like how the navy's treating dolphins, but why should anyone care what Professor Singer likes about this any more than we should care what flavor ice cream he prefers? It's absurd for Singer, given his rejection of any ground for objective moral values, to argue for anything on moral grounds, but he does it all the same. It's a very peculiar argument.

The Existential Christian

2012-02-03T20:17:00.000-05:00

Philosopher Paul Pardi pens an excellent series of essays at his website Philosophy News on questions of religious faith and reason. He's specifically interested in defending the claim that religious belief is grounded existentially but subsequently argued for rationally.

Students interested in existentialism, Kierkegaard, and the relationship of faith and reason should check it out. Here is the list of topics he discusses:

Unlocking the Tension Between Faith and Reason
The Ground of Faith
How do Faith and Reason Relate?
Faith and Reason in Existentialist Thought
Is Faith Practical?
Faith and Reason in Tension
Kierkegaard and the Modern Religious Mind
The Irrational Faith--Proof, Intuitions, and Religious Belief
Interview with Dr. Paul Moser: On Knowing God
Interview with Dr. C. Stephen Evans: Kierkegaard, Natural Signs, and Knowing God

One of his key points throughout the series is that it's the failure to comprehend the existential grounding of belief that causes so many atheist writers to go astray in their critiques of Christian theism.

By "existential grounding" he means something like the following taken from his essay on Kierkegaard and the Modern Religious Mind:

I met my wife-to-be when I was 17 and she 14. She was from Oregon, I was from New York. She grew up in a middle-class town consisting mainly of residents of Irish, Scottish, and German descent. I was raised lower-middle class in a homogenous population of second and third generation Italian-Americans. She loved sushi, salsa, smoked salmon, and lima beans. I subsisted mainly on pasta with red sauce and Iceberg lettuce salads. Distance, age, family background, economics, and a long list of other circumstances should have kept us apart. Yet we found ourselves spending a summer together and connected on wholly irrelevant grounds: we both are identical twins. Our relationship made little sense and most everyone we knew let us know it.

My mother regularly reminded me of my full-blooded Italian heritage and the implications of “breaking the chain.” Her father, with a knowing grin on his face, thought that “dating” a scrawny boy of 17 who lived 3000 miles away wouldn’t last more than 3 months. Our twin siblings, amused by the quaint letter writing and phone calls, didn’t get it. Our worlds couldn’t have been more distant. Our families couldn’t have been more different. Yet we were in love. Damn the critics and naysayers and all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. We didn’t care what was reasonable. We cared about each other and we wanted nothing more than to be together and spend each waking minute with each other.

For Søren Kierkegaard, being a Christian is like falling in love. Most passionate, erotic relationships are not rational nor should they be. They are not strictly irrational though reason doesn’t seem to apply to them. When two people fall in love, they may know very little about one another but this is not relevant; in fact its part of its virtue. Common sense becomes a ballast and the lovers discard it, intentionally or not, for the possibility that all the promises they hope are true will be realized.

To those on the outside, their relationship may seem silly at best and dangerous or harmful at worst. Yet they jump in with both feet, critics and naysayers be damned. Theirs is a voyage christened by passion and driven by the excitement of a lifetime of discovery and private, personal moments that only the two will share. Their relationship is lived each moment, and only analyzed or talked about or reasoned with when disaster strikes. They have nothing to prove to outsiders and seek to be true only to themselves and what they’ve committed to each other.

If one is to be a true Christian, says Kierkegaard, one must take a similar leap of faith.

In other words, arguments against Christian belief that are based on reason, to the extent that the argument itself has any validity, is not going to be particularly effective because Christian commitment is a matter of the heart, not of the head. It's much more like falling in love than it is like working a problem in geometry.

The critic can tell the believer that his belief is irrational, just like friends and family can tell a person in love that his love is irrational, but the effort is usually pointless and unavailing.

White Tribes

2012-02-02T16:03:00.000-05:00

Charles Murray is a sociologist of some repute having to his credit several very prominent books on race and class (The Bell Curve, Losing Ground). His newest book, like his others, is generating a considerable amount of discussion.

Bradford Wilcox, for example, has a piece about it in the Wall Street Journal and David Brooks writes on it in the New York Times.

It's often assumed, at least by conservatives, that the repository of traditional values (faith, work, family), and the key supporters of traditional institutions (church, family), had always been the middle class and that the greatest threat to these values came from liberal elites in the upper middle class and higher. What Murray has shown is that this paradigm is not true, or at least is no longer true. Today it's the upper classes which cherish the traditional values of religion, family, work, etc. and the lower classes that are sloughing them off, at least this is the case among whites (Murray didn't study other racial or ethnic groups).

His book is titled Coming Apart: The State of White America, and its message is important.

Here are some excerpts from Wilcox's column:

Mr. Murray contends that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four "founding virtues"—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation's most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and non-marital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America's best neighborhoods.

But it's a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and non-marital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Who would have guessed, for instance, that the white upper class is now much more likely to be found in church on any given Sunday than the white working class? Or that, just before the recession struck, white men in the 30-49 age bracket with a high-school diploma were about four times more likely to have simply stopped looking for work, compared with their college-educated peers? By Mr. Murray's account, faith and industriousness are in increasingly short supply among working-class whites.

Mr. Murray's sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness.

As I read this I found myself wondering which way the cause and effect arrow points here. Has the loss of values created poverty and unhappiness, or is it the other way around? I suspect it's largely the former. When people no longer value family, hard work, and faith they, or their children, almost inevitably wind up inhabiting the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, but the reverse is far from true. People who value the traditional virtues may start out poor, but they're often able to rise out of it.

In any event, David Brooks adds these thoughts:

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe...live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

All of this is fascinating and perhaps - for those of us of a certain age and sociological background - counterintuitive. Brooks, however, isn't content to simply describe Murray's analysis. He feels compelled to give voice to his inner progressive and offer a typically liberal solution to the problem:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Egads. This prescription is absolutely execrable. People work hard and sacrifice so that they can get away from those who don't, but Brooks calls for government to force them to live together whether they want to or not. Like so many on the Left Brooks labors under the delusion that if you throw people with weak values and lousy social habits together with those who possess strong values and good social habits the good will pull the bad up to their level. Perhaps no dogma in the liberal catechism has been more thoroughly discredited by human experience than this one.

It flies in the face of the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Good apples don't make bad apples good. Good money doesn't drive out bad. Putting weak students in classrooms with good students only slows down the good students and frustrates the weak students even more. The examples are legion.

But Brooks is a liberal and liberals cling to their fantasies and superstitions regardless of what traditional wisdom teaches or empirical facts demonstrate. His solution has all the attractiveness and merit of the old forced busing nostrums of the 1970s.

Mr. Brooks opines that the solution to our increasing tribalism is to forcibly "jam the tribes together." I wonder how economically diverse his own neighborhood is.

Obama's War on Religious Conscience

2012-02-01T16:33:00.000-05:00

Michael Gerson is one of the most irenic, even-tempered columnists in journalism. He's a man who eschews fiery, over-heated rhetoric and scarcely ever utters a cross word. So when he writes a column in which he sounds like he's angry there's probably good reason to be angry. It turns out that in this case there is, and he's not the only one who's upset.

The column in question was animated by the latest assault on the First Amendment and freedom of conscience by the Obama administration. It comes on the heels of a decision by Democrats in the state of Illinois to give Catholic adoption agencies the choice of going out of business or placing children with gay parents.

Soon thereafter President Obama's Secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, cut funding to an organization that works with girls rescued from the sex trade because the organization would not recommend abortion services.

Now Secretary Sebelius has refused to grant exemptions to religious organizations (such as hospitals and universities) which hire people of other faiths from provisions in Obamacare which require them to violate their conscience and provide free contraception and abortifacient coverage in their health care plans. Mr. Obama could have issued a waiver for religious organizations but chose not to, earning him a storm of condign criticism.

Rod Dreher, for instance, quotes a friend, a liberal lawyer and Obama supporter, who is astonished at this move:

But Obama, to placate the abortion lobby, has decided to not merely ignore Catholic concerns as he already did, but now to affirmatively attack them. It is unimaginable that he could be this politically stupid. He now provides evidence that makes me (largely a liberal Democrat) wonder if this administration and elements in the Democratic Party are not in fact pursuing a wider agenda to reduce religious voice and presence in the public square. Until now, I had left that kind of theorizing to the conservative talk shows — but what else explains this move?

Dreher's friend has a lot more venting to do at the link.

Here are some excerpts from Gerson's column:

In politics, the timing is often the message. On Jan. 20 -- three days before the annual March for Life -- the Obama administration announced its final decision that Catholic universities, hospitals and charities will be compelled to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.

Catholic leaders are still trying to process the implications of this ambush. The president had every opportunity to back down from confrontation. In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, a unanimous Supreme Court reaffirmed a broad religious autonomy right rooted in the Constitution. President Barack Obama could have taken the decision as justification for retreat.

And it would have been a minor retreat. The administration was on the verge of mandating nearly universal contraceptive coverage through Obamacare without public notice. There would have been no controversy at all if Obama had simply exempted religious institutions and ministries. But the administration insisted that the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's Hospital be forced to pay for the privilege of violating their convictions.

Obama chose to substantially burden a religious belief, by the most intrusive means, for a less-than-compelling state purpose -- a marginal increase in access to contraceptives that are easily available elsewhere. The religious exemption granted by Obamacare is narrower than anywhere else in federal law -- essentially covering the delivery of homilies and the distribution of sacraments. Serving the poor and healing the sick are regarded as secular pursuits -- a determination that would have surprised Christianity's founder.

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama's decision -- an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 -- a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists.

Obama is claiming the executive authority to determine which missions of believers are religious and which are not -- and then to aggressively regulate institutions the government declares to be secular. It is a view of religious liberty so narrow and privatized that it barely covers the space between a believer's ears.

Obama's decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-clericalism.

The administration's ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared.

Whatever Mr. Obama's motivations, if he has his way Catholic institutions will be a fading presence on our cultural landscape, and all of us, Catholic and non-Catholic, will be the poorer for it.

The Vote Pump

2012-02-01T16:09:00.000-05:00

Here's an entire course explaining why we're in deep economic trouble contained in a six minute video by Bill Whittle:

If you're a young person just entering the workforce .... good luck. These problems were bad when Mr. Obama came to office, and, to his everlasting credit, he has worked assiduously to make them infinitely worse.

Same-Sex Science

2012-01-31T09:57:00.000-05:00

Stanton L. Jones is provost and professor of psychology at Wheaton College. In the recent issue of First Things he takes to task two widely-held and, in his mind, equally mistaken views of homosexuality:

Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

Jones goes on to discuss these popular misconceptions about homosexuality and homosexuals: Are homosexual persons as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals? Is homosexuality biologically determined at birth? Has science established that sexual orientation is immutable? Are homosexual relationships equivalent to heterosexual ones? Has empirical science established homosexual identity as positive and legitimate?

Jones delves into the science on these questions and concludes that much of what we think we know about them is simply not supported by the evidence. It's a very worthwhile article for anyone interested in the issues he discusses.

If Assad Survives

2012-01-31T09:33:00.000-05:00

Bashar Assad appears to be holding on to power in Syria, at least for now, despite the efforts of rebel groups to end his bloody rule. If he does survive it will be a serious blow to the West for a number of reasons. According to debkafile's analysis, there are at least seven very regrettable consequences of Assad's continued rule in Damascus. Here's a summary:

1. The Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah bloc, the Middle East axis of terrorist evil, will emerge greatly strengthened.

2. Iran, which is Syria's sponsor, will record a major strategic success in counteracting the US and the Saudi-led Gulf Arab emirates' depiction of the Islamic regime as seriously crippled by crushing international sanctions imposed to halt its drive for a nuclear bomb.

3. Hizballah will have won a chance to recover from its setbacks in Lebanon. The Pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite group stands to regain the self-assurance which ebbed during Assad's brutal crackdown against Syrian dissidents, re-consolidate its bonds with Tehran, Damascus and Baghdad, and rebuild its political clout in Beirut.

4. Enormous damage will have been suffered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey from their colossal failure to topple Assad's government in Syria. The Palestinians will also be hurt since Hamas repudiated Iran in support of the Syrian rebels. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their security agencies invested huge sums in the Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime but were trounced by Assad's security and intelligence services and the resources Iran provided to keep him afloat.

The Arab League, which for the first time tried its hand at intervening in an Arab uprising by sending observers into Syrian trouble spots to cut down the violence, watched impotently as those observers ran for their lives. Assad first accepted, then ignored, the League's peace plan. Turkey, too, after indicating its military would cross the border to support the Syrian resistance and provide the rebel Free Syrian Army bases of operation, backed off for the sake of not offending Iran.

5. Russia and China have gained credibility in the Middle East, and scored points against the United States, by standing up for Assad and pledging their veto of any strong UN Security Council motions against him. Moscow's arms sales and naval support for the Assad regime and China's new military and economic accords with Persian Gulf emirates have had the effect of pushing the United States from center stage of the Arab Revolt, where it stood during the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, to the sidelines of Middle East action.

6. Bashar Assad has confounded predictions by Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak that he couldn't last more than a few weeks. His survival and the cohesion of his armed forces have contributed to the tightening of the Iranian military noose around Israel.

The Syrian army was in sustained operation for almost a year without breaking and suffered only marginal defections. It is still in working shape with valuable experience under its belt in rapid deployment between battlefronts. Syria, Iran and Hizballah have streamlined the cooperation among their armies and their intelligence arms.

7. The Palestinian rivals, Fatah and Hamas, have again put the brakes on their on-again, off-again reconciliation. Hamas' decision to distance itself from Iran and the embattled Syrian regime has apparently been rescinded by Assad's survival, which puts them again in tension with Fatah.

All in all, the survival of the Assad regime would be a terrible outcome for the Syrian people, for the Israelis, and for the West. It would also be a significant foreign policy failure for the Obama administration as it seeks to impose its will on the Iranians and secure peace in the Middle East.

Warming, Cooling, or Staying the Same?

2012-01-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

So is the planet warming, cooling, or doing neither? Apparently, there are studies which support each of the three conclusions. This news report points to research that shows that there has been no warming since 1997 and that we may indeed be heading for a serious cooling period. Here are the highlights:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice-age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said. He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’. She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997. The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’ Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific. ‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

I should think so, and not only the scientists but also all the journalists, politicians, and others who've placed so much confidence, not to mention their credibility, in what those scientists were forecasting.

It may turn out that the global warming folks are right, but it has always been the case with science that the best approach is an open-minded skepticism toward any theory for which the data and/or the methodology is uncertain. Skepticism is also prudent when a scientific forecast coincides with someone's ideological agenda, and it's always wise to be leery of anyone, for example Al Gore, who claims that the science on a matter is "settled." It rarely is.

Arsenic and Old Life Forms

2012-01-30T14:05:00.000-05:00

A year or so ago a NASA chemist named Felisa Wolfe-Simon, then at NASA's Astrobiology Institute in Menlo Park, California, stirred controversy in the scientific world with claims that she had coaxed bacteria from an arsenic-rich lake in California to swap the usual phosphorus in their DNA for toxic arsenic. The discovery that living organisms could function and thrive on arsenic rather than phosphorous had lots of implications, including implications for origin of life scenarios. Apparently life was more flexible than previously surmised and this might make abiogenesis easier to accomplish than had been thought.

Well, perhaps not. Like so many discoveries having to do with the origin of life and evolution it turns out that Ms Wolfe-Simon's work has fallen under a pall. It can't be duplicated by other researchers.

The New Scientist reports that:

... after trying to grow the same strain of bacteria in a soup containing arsenic, other researchers have failed to repeat the findings. "To the limit of what our spectrometer will detect, there's no arsenic in the DNA," says Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who posted her results to a blog this week.

Wolfe-Simon has defended her original results and is continuing to analyse her lab-grown bacteria at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "As far as we know, all the data in our paper still stand," she told New Scientist. "We shall certainly know much more by next year."

Perhaps she'll be vindicated, but it's still true that whether it's microfossils of bacteria found in meteorites, or primitive ape-men, or alleged vestigial structures, or a host of other finds that subsequently turn out to have been mistakenly advertised as confirmations of darwinian evolution, it seems as though eagerness to make a breakthrough leads to an awful lot of damaged scientific reputations.

Sixteen Scientists Demur from Conventional Orthodoxy

2012-01-28T09:39:00.001-05:00

Sixteen scientists have signed a letter to the Wall Street Journal claiming that there's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. In other words, the panic about global warming is unwarranted, at least in their opinion. A list of signers appends the letter. It's an impressive bunch. Here are some excerpts from their epistle:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

For a decade now those who have expressed skepticism about the extent, causes, and consequences of global climate change have been subject to ridicule, scorn and, in some cases, loss of employment. Skeptics have been told that they should literally be treated as criminals. Media buffoons like Chris Matthews humiliate guests on his show who hesitate to accept the liberal orthodoxy on climate change as mediated by the scientific priesthood. Untenured professors who transgress liberal doctrine have their jobs threatened.

There's a very great irony buried in all this. Liberals have always preached the importance of maintaining a skeptical attitude toward authority. Ever since the sixties such an attitude has been held by liberals as among the highest of intellectual virtues. We should question everything and everyone, we were told, whether the authority was religious, political, cultural, or scientific. We should never allow our devotion to freedom of thought and expression to be stifled. Those who stood against the tide of conventional opinion were "bold," "audacious," and "heroic."

In the last several decades, however, the skeptical virtue has been turned against some of the great shibboleths of liberalism itself. Heretofore unquestioned dogmas about big government, darwinian naturalism, global warming and others have come under withering scrutiny from those who refuse to truckle to the authority of the liberal elites, and now the erstwhile champions of open-mindedness and the free exchange of ideas, those who were all in favor of these wonderful attributes when they could be used to undermine religious belief and traditional moral and political convictions, are aghast that anyone would think to question their beliefs.

Their response to the challenge posed by the skeptics is to censor them, pillory them, and force them to conform.

It's sad, but that's the path so much of modern liberalism has chosen to take.

Another Advance in Stem Cell Research

2012-01-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

It may be hard to remember the media sturm un drang over the Bush administration's 2001 decision to end federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. From the intensity of the outrage you would have thought that Mr. Bush had ordered the immediate cessation of all funding for Social Security. John Edwards implied that Bush was keeping quadriplegic Christopher Reeves from ever walking again. Others were extolling the hope that hESC (human embryonic stem cells) would soon provide a cure Parkinson's and other diseases and that George Bush was an anti-science, red-necked Neanderthal.

Since then, however, research on stem cells has progressed apace and new sources of stem cells have been developed in adult tissues like skin. Many researchers who had previously worked with hESC have quietly switched over.

The difference between embryonic and adult stem cells is not trivial. Those who believe that an individual is a person from the moment of conception were understandably upset at the practice of extracting stem cells from living human embryos since the embryo was killed in the extraction. Contrarily, the use of adult stem cells which can be obtained from organs such as the skin, bone marrow, and umbilical cord blood is morally unproblematic.

Rebecca Oas reports at First Things on the recent development of hair follicles as another source of stem cells. These cells hold out the promise of curing a corneal condition that leads to blindness.

Despite such advances, when the Obama administration took office they quickly rescinded the Bush restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, but court battles have made it unclear what the future of federal funding for this research will be. As it is, much of its support comes from private sources:

For all the national angst it generates, hESC research remains a surprisingly small part of stem-cell research. Over the past five years, it has received $530 million in federal funding, only about 3.5 percent of total stem-cell dollars.

Half of all private funding and 9 of 10 federal dollars go to stem cells culled from adults, bone marrow, umbilical cords, or animals. So federal funding for hESC research could dry up tomorrow and the field of stem-cell research would continue.

"Over 80 cures and treatments have been developed using adult stem cells or [umbilical] cord blood cells, and zero using embryonic cells," says Ron Stoddart, director of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, one of the original plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "Overwhelming advances have been made using adult stem cells. Why spend money to destroy embryos when it's not necessary?"

Why, indeed. There's private funding out there for labs which wish to continue hESC work. Why ask taxpayers who believe that to kill an embryo is to kill a human being to finance it?

Insufferable Ignorance

2012-01-27T17:41:00.000-05:00

It's mildly surprising how eager some people are to try to sound like experts on matters they manifestly know little about. Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC program Hardball, insouciantly ignores the aphorism about fools rushing in where wise men fear to tread by humiliating a guest, calling him names, even, for being a skeptic both about anthropogenic global warming as well as for holding the view that man is the work of a Creator.

Matthews evidently thinks he knows so much about both of these matters that he can insult the intelligence of another man whose noetic structure is less exalted than his own:

Here's part of the transcript:

MATTHEWS: How are you standing on evolution these days?
CHRISTIE: I’m feeling pretty good about evolution these days.
MATTHEWS: Do you believe in it?
CHRISTIE: I believe that God is our creator, and I think that we all fall from the good Lord.
MATTHEWS: So you don’t believe in evolution?
CHRISTIE: I believe that God is our creator and we all from the good Lord.
MATTHEWS: What is [with] the troglodyte? The Luddites? What is the party that used to believe in things?
CHRISTIE: Troglodytes? Chris, it’s true. One of the things you’re missing here is faith. You’re missing faith in this country.
MATTHEWS: Excuse me — I don’t want to just plumb the depths, the position the party is taking that is so far right these days. Let’s go back to life on this planet here.

Forget about the global warming issue for now. To the extent that this exchange is coherent, Matthews parades an insufferable ignorance about evolution, at least it's insufferable in someone who seeks to use the topic to embarrass and insult someone who never professed to be either a scientist or a philosopher.

Matthews seems to assume that Mr. Christie's belief in God is incompatible with a belief in evolution, but as Alvin Plantinga explains in his recent book, Where The Conflict Really Lies, there is no such incompatibility. Indeed, the assumption that there is is such an elementary confusion that Matthews unwittingly embarrasses himself by making it.

It's too bad Christie didn't think to ask Matthews exactly what he means by the term "evolution" because the discomfiture that question would've elicited would've been entertaining to watch. Matthews seems to have no clear idea what is meant by the term. If he did he certainly wouldn't have framed the question the way he did.

Evolution simply means change. If he wanted to ask Mr. Christie whether he "believed in" biological evolution he would have to specify the extent of the change he had in mind. Is he simply referring to variation around a phenotypical mean or is he referring to "molecules to man" macroevolution? No matter which it is, before Mr. Matthews starts calling people "troglodytes" he needs to specify exactly how a belief in evolution is incompatible with Mr. Christie's belief that life was created by God. This seems to be beyond the scope of his powers, however.

There are only two ways that belief in even the most comprehensive type of evolution, the "molecules to man" type, could be made incompatible with the belief that God is the Creator. One would be to tack on to the scientific theory of macroevolution a metaphysical assumption that the whole process happened naturalistically without any input from a non-physical agent. Of course, no one, not even someone as eminent in the field of philosophy of science as Mr. Matthews regards himself to be, can know that this is the case.

The other way to make macroevolution incompatible with belief in a divine Creator is to tack on to one's belief in God a belief in young-earth creationism - the belief that God created everything in six days some 10,000 years ago. This view is clearly incompatible with "molecules to man" evolution, but it's not an essential element of theism nor is it clear that it's Mr. Christie's position. Even if it were, it's not clear that Matthews would have the faintest idea how to rebut it other than to just insult anyone who holds it.

But then insulting one's opponents is a time-honored tactic among those who have no compelling argument and who moreover haven't the foggiest idea what they're talking about. Perhaps someone might send Mr. Matthews a copy of Plantinga's book, but I doubt he'd be interested in reading it. Bullies aren't usually interested in deepening their understanding of the world.

Reaganite Or Opportunist?

2012-01-27T14:00:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich has rode to prominence by wrapping himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan and promoting himself as the most viable conservative alternative in the Republican field to squishy moderate Mitt Romney.

Elliot Abrams, a former Assistant Secretary of State under Reagan and colleague of Newt's in the House of Representatives, remembers things considerably differently, however:

In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.

The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

The fights over Reagan’s efforts to stop Soviet expansionism in the Third World were exceptionally bitter .... But the most bitter battleground was often in Congress.

Here at home, we faced vicious criticism from leading Democrats — Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Jim Wright, Tip O’Neill, and many more — who used every trick in the book to stop Reagan by denying authorities and funds to these efforts. On whom did we rely up on Capitol Hill? There were many stalwarts: Henry Hyde, elected in 1974; Dick Cheney, elected in 1978, the same year as Gingrich; Dan Burton and Connie Mack, elected in 1982; and Tom DeLay, elected in 1984, were among the leaders.

But not Newt Gingrich. He voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack . . . Reagan.

Abrams goes on to explain how Gingrich attacked Reagan.

It's really quite remarkable that a man who said the sort of things about Reagan that Abrams imputes to Newt, a president of his own party under relentless assault by the Left, would now claim to be the modern incarnation of the man himself. The more one reads about the Newtster the more one understands why so many conservatives not only don't support him, but actively oppose him.

How Private Equity Firms Helped Save the Economy

2012-01-26T14:24:00.000-05:00

Liz Peek at The Fiscal Times explains how private equity firms like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital actually helped save the American economy and make it stronger. Romney, of course is taking considerable heat for his involvement with Bain because part of what the company did was streamline the businesses it bought which made them more efficient but also put people out of work.

As Peek says, if Mitt Romney could articulate this story it would go a long way to helping him in his quest for the White House. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps for the country, Mr. Romney seems singularly unable or unwilling to defend himself by explaining to the public exactly what private equity firms actually do. His failure to do this is like George W. Bush redux.

Here's Peek's lede:

Eastman Kodak’s recent bankruptcy is a timely reminder of how sleepy managements can throw thousands out of work – and of the role private equity firms like Bain Capital have played in rescuing American companies. Kodak, the paternalistic giant, was blindsided by Fuji Photo decades ago and then by the rise of digital photography. The organizational structure was a mess.

At one time, while giant Canon was working with three different printer engines, Kodak was developing 66, so “silo-ed” was its operations. It is quite possible that outside investors like Bain Capital, with eyes uncluttered by past allegiances, could have saved Eastman Kodak – and at least some of the jobs that have been lost.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has failed to make that point. What was his campaign staff thinking? How could they be caught flat-footed by Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the candidate’s business career, his prime credential in the race to unseat President Obama? Supporters have been shocked that Romney has not countered criticisms of his experience at Bain Capital -- an appalling lapse that cost him South Carolina and has him now trailing in Florida. While others have spoken up for private equity investing, the campaign remains mute. Romney needs to tell the story that will resound with voters -- the story of America’s reboot.

During the ‘70s....upstart foreign competitors (mostly from Japan) were gobbling up market share. More alarming, the newly visible rivals were selling a better product. Quality control programs embraced by Japanese steel, auto and machinery producers meant a vast reduction in reject rates; they were not succeeding because of price alone. They delivered better value.

Some of our better managed companies (Caterpillar, Deere) rallied to this increased competition; others – including auto companies situated far from the California docks where Toyotas rolled off ships in the thousands -- didn’t have a clue. When OPEC sharply jacked up oil prices, the trickle of economical Toyotas and Hondas into the U.S. became a torrent. In 1965 the U.S. imported 25,538 cars from Japan. By 1975, that figure had soared to 695,573; a decade later, we imported 2.5 million automobiles from Japan – a 100-fold jump in 20 years. By contrast, sales of U.S.-made cars and trucks actually dropped between 1965 and 1985 – from 8.8 million to 8.2 million.

Similarly, Japanese steel producers clobbered U.S. manufacturers in the 1970s, producing cheaper and higher-quality products in modernized plants built after World War II. By the late 1970s our domestic industry was in trouble; five companies received $300 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration. Later presidents tried to help the industry’s long decline by imposing import quotas (Reagan) and offering loan guarantees (Clinton) to no avail.

So how did firms like Bain change all this? Read Peek's account at the link. Why other candidates, specifically Newt Gingrich and the departed Rick Perry, both of whom claimed to be market conservatives, would criticize this sort of activity is difficult to understand. It makes them sound more like Occupy Wall Streeters:

Hungry Children and Hot Dogs

2012-01-26T08:12:00.003-05:00

Perhaps the main objection to construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline as well as the use of "fracking" to extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale deposits is that these carry with them a risk of introducing pollutants into the landscape and the water supply. Of course, there is some potential for harm in any man-made project. Building skyscrapers results in the deaths of migratory birds. Building high speed rail lines fragments ecosystems. Building dams impedes the movement of migratory fish and changes the ecosystem of the river. The questions are how great are the risks, do the risks outweigh the potential benefits, and can the risks be minimized?

In the case of the Keystone pipeline the benefits seem so significant and the risks seem so low that a lot of people are stunned that the President has elected not to build it.

Construction of the pipeline will generate thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue. It will cement our relationship with Canada. It will increase our energy resources and make us less dependent on foreign petroleum. It will deny a global advantage to China who will become the chief beneficiary of our refusal to accept Canadian oil. An American market will result in less pollution than if the oil is shipped to, and consumed by, the Chinese, and it will keep fuel costs down which keeps the cost of everything else down, thus presenting a boon to the American consumer, especially the poor.

None of this seems to matter, though, to our environmentalist friends who maintain that almost any risk of pollution outweighs whatever benefits accrue from the pipeline. Their goal is to do away with the use of fossil fuels altogether, and replace them with green energy like wind and solar. They oppose the pipeline and increasing the abundance of oil because it just delays the day of green energy nirvana. It's somewhat like a Christian believer in the eschaton refusing to pray for peace on earth because achieving it, however imperfectly, might delay the second coming.

The environmentalist is like a man walking down a city street who encounters a cluster of hungry children huddled together on the sidewalk near a hot dog stand. The shivering children ask the man if he would purchase for them some hot dogs so they can fill their bellies, to which request the man launches into a disquisition about how hot dogs contain carcinogens which could some day cause them to develop cancer, and how they contain fat which might some day clog their arteries, and the rolls are made of processed flour which provides no real nutrition anyway.

The children would be much better off, he pontificates airily, to eat green vegetables instead of hot dogs, and if they'll do that he'll buy the vegetables for them. "But there are no vegetable stands around here," the hungry children protest in dismay, "and we're too hungry to walk until we find one. The hot dogs are right here."

"Maybe so," replies the man, "but for your own future well-being, you must try to find a vegetable market. Hot dogs are not good for you." With that he pats them on the head and walks away, leaving the poor children still hungry and shivering in the cold.

All the News That Fits

2012-01-25T17:32:00.000-05:00

Did you know there was a massive protest march in Washington on Monday? By some estimates 100,000 people were involved in the demonstration, but the major media almost completely ignored it. There were stories about all manner of other important events, of course. The visit to the White House by the Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins made the papers, for example, but the protests of tens of thousands of people fell into the liberal media pond without making so much as a ripple. Why?

The media certainly weren't shy about covering a few dozen protesting campers in Zucotti Park last fall. Heck, the New York Times even ran a 780 word story a while back about four demonstrators who marched in support of the Dream Act, which would have granted amnesty to illegal aliens, but not a word was written in the Times about Monday's demonstration, an event which, despite difficult weather conditions, drew huge numbers of people from all over the country. Why the silence?

Well, perhaps it was because Monday's demonstrators were taking part in the annual March For Life which is held annually on the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which stripped unborn children of the right to life. This is a cherished cause of the Left, of course, and the fact that so many people journeyed to the nation's capital to protest it is not something Leftist newspapers like the NYT want to publicize.

That tens of thousands of people are so strongly opposed to abortion on demand that they'd go to the trouble of trekking to Washington to demonstrate against it in foul weather, doesn't fit the narrative promoted by the Left that the majority in this country are pro-choice. The strategy, it seems, is to keep such news from their readers lest the masses be led to think that there really is overwhelming sentiment against the practice of killing one's unborn children.

And then the media mavens wonder why they're so unpopular. They're unpopular because a lot of people simply don't think they can be trusted to tell the truth.

One Fed Up Liberal

2012-01-24T08:11:00.000-05:00

I don't know if it's correct to say, as some have, that the Obama administration is waging "war" on religious organizations, but it certainly does seem that the administration is at least indifferent to the concerns many of these organizations have about being compelled to adopt government policies which violate their deepest convictions.

So flagrant has been what some see as open hostility to religious organizations, particularly Catholic organizations, that they've decided that though they voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, admire him personally, and support much of his agenda, they no longer can support him and will not vote for him in November.

Michael Sean Winters is an example of this disaffection. He's had enough of this administration's obvious intent to coerce and compel Catholic hospitals and adoption agencies to abandon their traditionally pro-life, pro-traditional marriage stances. Here's Winters:

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

I come at this issue as a liberal and a Democrat and as someone who, until yesterday, generally supported the President, as someone who saw in his vision of America a greater concern for each other, a less mean-spirited culture, someone who could, and did, remind the nation that we are our brothers’ keeper, that liberalism has a long vocation in this country of promoting freedom and protecting the interests of the average person against the combined power of the rich, and that we should learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.

I defended the University of Notre Dame for honoring this man, and my heart was warmed when President Obama said at Notre Dame: “we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity -- diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief. In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family.

What follows in Mr. Winters' essay is a long bill of particulars against the president for his failure to live up to the principles of classical liberalism he articulated as a candidate. Nevertheless, despite having had enough of Mr. Obama, Winters is not about to embrace the Republicans. He closes with this:

Some commentators, including those in the comment section on my post yesterday, have charged that people like me, Catholics who have been generally supportive of the President, were duped, that we should confess our sins of political apostasy, and go rushing into the arms of a waiting GOP. I respectfully decline the indictment and, even more, the remedy. Nothing that happened yesterday made the contemporary GOP less mean-spirited, or more inclined to support the rights of our immigrant brothers and sisters, or less bellicose in their approach to foreign affairs, or more concerned about the how the government can and should alleviate poverty.

It is also worth noting that the night before the decision, Mr. Gingrich said that he would halt the U.S. Justice Department’s suit against the State of Alabama regarding that state’s new anti-immigration law, a law that raises exactly the same kind of issues of religious liberty and the rights of conscience as are raised by the HHS decision. Religious liberty cuts both ways. Nor, is religious liberty the only issue. Voters should still consider how candidates for the presidency are likely to address a host of issues. As for myself, I could not, in good conscience, vote for any of the current Republicans seeking the presidency.

But, yesterday, as soon as I learned of this decision, I knew instantly that I also could not, in good conscience, ever vote for Mr. Obama again. I once had great faith in Mr. Obama’s judgment and leadership. I do not retract a single word I have written supporting him on issues like health care reform, or bringing the troops home from Iraq, or taking aggressive steps to halt the recession and turn the economy around. I will continue to advocate for those policies. But, I can never convince myself that a person capable of making such a dreadful decision is worthy of my respect or my vote.

It's remarkable to me that a committed Roman Catholic would have voted for Mr. Obama in the first place, given Mr. Obama's opposition as an Illinois state senator to a law that would have prohibited a practice that amounts to infanticide. At any rate, Mr. Winters is fed up with Mr. Obama's contempt for constitutional protections of religious organizations in general and Catholic religious and moral convictions in particular, and I suspect a lot of others are, too.

Dust, Dirt, and Death

2012-01-23T14:20:00.000-05:00

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them. Milloy has a column in the Washington Times which casts doubt on the credibility of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA, according to Milloy, claims that the air quality of American cities is responsible for the deaths of tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of people per year. They claim to know this because they've calculated that every 10 microgram-per-cubic meter of pollutants results in a 1% rise in deaths. But this calculation is suspect.

The Chinese city of Xi’an is among the worst cities in the world in terms of air quality. Yet using the same sort of data and statistical analysis employed by EPA-funded air quality researchers, the Chinese researchers reported having statistically correlated every 10 microgram-per-cubic-meter’s worth of fine particulate matter in Xi’an’s air with a 0.2% increase in the city’s death rate. Despite being almost ten times more polluted than the air in American cities, Xi'an's air is apparently five times safer.

Obviously, something is wrong somewhere, and Milloy thinks the problem is with the EPA's numbers. This is not just an academic exercise since the EPA figures are used to regulate the emissions allowed by various industries.

We want clean air as much as the next person but we want our standards to be based on empirical fact not on suppositions based on an ideological bias against fossil fuels.

JoePa (1926-2012)

2012-01-23T14:05:00.000-05:00

Joe Paterno, one of the finest men ever to be involved in American sports, has died, reportedly of complications due to lung cancer. I suspect, though, that the real cause of his death was a broken heart.

Paterno coached at Penn State for 60 years, setting a standard for what a class athletic program should be, bringing in many millions of dollars of revenue to the institution, and giving millions of his own money to promote the academic life of the university.

After having essentially put Penn State on the map as a first class school, after sixty years of changing students' lives and helping make PSU what it is today, the university Board of Trustees fired him without even giving him the courtesy of a meeting, without giving him the opportunity to resign, without giving him the chance to finish out the season. They owed him that much, but in their rush to wash their hands of the whole sordid Sandusky episode, they denied him his dignity and treated him in the least charitable fashion they possibly could have.

I don't question their judgment that, if it was the case that Paterno knew something of Jerry Sandusky's sexual predations on young boys and still allowed him the use of campus sports facilities, he was seriously negligent, and if he were a young coach who hadn't yet done much for the school, perhaps a summary dismissal might have been in order. But a man who had done so much good for so many, a man to whom the school and its students owe so much, deserved better than to be humiliated and disgraced because one time in his life he made a wrong judgment.

To no one's surprise, Paterno handled his dismissal with far more class than did his employers, but I'm sure that having been treated with such contempt by the institution he loved and to which he gave his life, he must have literally suffered a broken heart. I'm also confident that heaven holds a place of honor and respect for him even if the Penn State trustees don't.

The Titanic and the Concordia

2012-01-21T18:28:00.000-05:00

My friend Jason points us to the latest column from Mark Steyn who writes a brilliant essay comparing and contrasting the behavior of passengers and crew on the Titanic and the Costa Concordia. Steyn lets each event symbolize the society of the time in which the ships sailed and sunk, and, if that's a plausible assumption, there's much to be anxious about.

One particularly perspicuous point made by Steyn was the difference in the way the men of the Titanic took pains to ensure that women and children were safely ensconced in life boats before they looked to their own safety. Female passengers aboard the Concordia, however, testified to being shoved aside by burly crew members making haste to secure a spot in the life boats for themselves.

As one of Steyn's correspondents wryly noted, “The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you (they) complaining about?”

True enough, but what does it say about us that in extremis it's now every man for himself? What does it say about our materialist, secular society that male honor is rarer than once it was. I suspect that once a society minimizes and seeks to neuter masculinity and the masculine virtues, as modern liberalism arguably has done, a sense of honor and respect toward women is one of the first casualties. We certainly don't need to read about the treatment of the women of the Concordia to see evidence of that.

At any rate, there's much more thoughtful and delightfully acerbic commentary in Steyn's column. Give it a read.

Connections

2012-01-21T14:28:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder why none of the people responsible for the ethically questionable home foreclosures that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble haven't been prosecuted by Eric Holder's Justice Department? Well, so have lot's of other people wondered about that very thing, and maybe now we have some clue as to why there's been no interest in investigating the banks that foreclosed on the hapless souls who found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments.

It turns out that many of the big banks which were engaging in these questionable foreclosure practices were represented by a Washington law firm, Covington and Burling, which numbered among its law partners none other than the aforementioned Mr. Holder and his lieutenant Lanny Breuer. It's certainly good to have connections in the Justice Department if you're a big bank engaging in dubious behavior.

It may be hard to believe, on the other hand, that a man of the probity and rectitude Mr. Holder is known to possess would have looked the other way rather than prosecute his former clients, so perhaps there's more to the story. In any case, I wonder if the media will exert themselves as strenuously to ignore this matter as they've exerted themselves to ignore the Fast and Furious scandal.

No Need for Such Friends

2012-01-20T21:42:00.001-05:00

I don't know how accurate this report is, but if it's correct, the man who made these remarks is either an idiot, or he's despicable, or he's still in middle school.

The editor of a small-circulation Jewish newspaper in Atlanta, a man named Andrew Adler, allegedly opined that given the existential threat to Israel from its enemies and given Mr. Obama's apparent coldness toward Israel's danger, the tiny nation has three choices (it seems more like two choices but never mind that):

They can either attack Hamas, attack Hezbollah, or assassinate the president of the U.S. (presumably to get someone more favorable to Israeli interests in the Oval Office). Mr. Adler went on to amplify:

Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles?

Another way of putting "three" in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives ... Jews, Christians and Arabs alike? You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.

If Mr. Adler is indeed an adult and didn't realize the significance of what he was saying he's unimaginably obtuse. If he did realize what he was saying then he's morally contemptible. In either case, he should, if the situation is being reported accurately, be anathematized by the community of those who support Israel's right to exist and who believe the U.S. should be strongly committed to Israel's security. Israel has enough enemies. It doesn't need friends like Mr. Adler.

Why It's Hard to Take Them Seriously

2012-01-20T14:55:00.001-05:00

There was a day when people actually respected the media and put a lot of faith in what they told them, but that day - at least for the major print, cable, and broadcast media - is long past. To understand why one need only look at how the media is treating Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and compare that to how they've treated Democrats over the years.

Mitt Romney, for instance, is being ridiculed by many in the major media for being rich and out of touch with the common man, but I don't recall the same ridicule being leveled at the Democrat candidate for president in 2004 John "Where can I get me a huntin' license" Kerry who is just as rich - if not richer - than Romney and certainly just as out of touch.

The media is also guffawing at revelations of Newt Gingrich's various marital woes and affairs, but I don't recall similar merriment being enjoyed by media liberals at the expense of Bill Clinton who was arguably the most sexually licentious and irresponsible president in the last 100 years. Indeed, when word of his escapades became public we were told that character doesn't matter, only competence matters.

Nor did the media even mention the affair of John Edwards who fathered a child with his mistress and then ran for president. The media sat on the story until it was publicized by a tabloid.

Nor did the liberal media have much to say about Al Gore's frolic in a hotel room with a woman who testified that Mr. Gore forced himself upon her, demanding that she release his "third chokra," or some such thing.

Folks in the major print and network media have subjected every detail of Mitt Romney's taxes and Newt Gingrich's marriages to microscopic scrutiny, but for the last three years they've been completely disinterested in questions about Mr. Obama's qualifications for office, not to mention his constitutional eligibility for it.

They're so obviously in the tank for the Democrats that it's very hard to believe much of what they say, and most people don't.

Why Kill the Pipeline?

2012-01-20T14:33:00.000-05:00

President Obama has for some time been saying that:

We need to be energy independent of the Middle East
We need to create jobs
We need to do more for the poor

If the president really believes these three propositions why did he kill the Keystone XL pipeline?

As Ronald Bailey tells us at Reason.com:

The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, would daily transport more than 500,000 barrels of oil derived from oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. already imports about 2 million barrels of oil per day from Canada. Since the pipeline crosses our border the president has the responsibility to decide if it is in the national interest. President Obama under pressure from the environmental lobby punted on approving the pipeline - bravely putting off his decision until after the elections in November. In December, the Republicans in Congress passed legislation that required the president to make his decision by February 21st. Apparently, he now has.

The pipeline would have increased the amount of petroleum we buy from our friends and reduced our dependence upon foreign markets. Its construction would have created 20,000 jobs directly and thousands more indirectly. It would have kept low the cost of fuel - gasoline, home heating fuel, etc. - which would have been a great benefit to those most vulnerable to rises in energy costs. Low fuel cost means that every other thing we buy would be cheaper than it otherwise would be. This would have been a special blessing to the poor.

So, why did the president decide we weren't going through with it? How is constructing the pipeline not in our national interest. Mr. Obama claims that it's because there wasn't enough time to study the environmental impact, but this is hard to credit. They've been studying this pipeline for three years. Here's Bailey again:

Proponents of the pipeline point out that the project is shovel-ready and would create 20,000 construction jobs. In addition, the pipeline has passed environmental muster twice already. And the company has agreed to re-site a portion of the pipeline in order to allay exaggerated fears that a leak from it might harm the Ogallala aquifer.

Some have complained that tar sands oil is particularly dirty and we shouldn't be putting its combustion products into the atmosphere, but this claim is also hard to place any confidence in. The pipeline will still be built, and the oil will still be burned but now instead of building the pipeline to connect the wells with refineries in the Gulf coast the pipeline will be built to the Pacific and the oil sent by ship to China where it will be burned with far fewer environmental safeguards than had it been burned in the U.S.

Whatever the liabilities and risks of the pipeline are they don't seem to outweigh the benefits of more jobs, more energy independence, and cheaper fuel. So why did the president turn down these benefits and kill the pipeline?

Economist Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post, a newspaper which strongly supports this administration, pulls no punches:

President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn't often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and -- beyond the symbolism -- won't even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his re-election that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won't get much. Stopping the pipeline won't halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global warming emissions. Indeed, Obama's decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Samuelson isn't done excoriating the president for what he sees as pure folly and detrimental to our national interest. There's much more in the column, and anyone interested in the issue really should read it.

Interview with William Dembski

2012-01-19T18:42:00.000-05:00

A website called The Best Schools conducted a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with William Dembski who is one of the leading lights of the Intelligent Design movement. The interview gives numerous insights into Dembski the man - his youth, his family, his motivations, etc. - and then closes with this Q & A:

TBS: Any final thoughts you would like to share with our readers? What do you see as the chances that free and open debate, without intimidation, about natural selection and evolution will be possible in this country anytime soon? Where do you hope to be personally 10 years from now? What does the future hold for the ID movement? Where would you like see it stand in coming generations?

WD: The epigraph to my book The Design Revolution is a quote from a short essay of Pascal’s called the “The Art of Persuasion”: “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” When I got into this business, I thought truth and its validation (what Pascal calls “proof”) was enough, or at least close to enough. Now that I’m older and wiser, I see that the majority of people have other priorities. Even those who protest that they love truth (Richard Dawkins is one) will use such protestations to advance their own biases and agendas.

Here, I’m addressing myself, as well—certainly earlier in my career, selfish ambition and narcissism were vying furiously in my so-called “quest for truth.” Perhaps I’ve not put these aside yet.

I’ve found self-deception as much among Christians as among atheists and agnostics. In fact, I’ve come to like dealing with secularists better than with the Christians who use religion as a cloak to cover their pride and absence of love. Secularists are at least more likely to admit that they’re being bad. Christians, especially American evangelical Christians, with pietism and puritanism always in the background, have to pretend to be good.

What does all this have to do with your question? It’s this: Whereas a decade ago I was all gung-ho about ID becoming the new reigning paradigm that would replace conventional evolutionary theory, I no longer have that optimism. That’s not to say I’m not going to continue to work toward that end. I will. And I could see ID’s fortunes changing quickly. But I could also see the old paradigm lingering on. The former Soviet Union collapsed very quickly even though it looked invincible a few years earlier. Our banking system, by contrast, has been skirting insolvency for decades and continually seems able to kick the can down the road.

ID, in my view, has the better argument. But as an attorney sitting across his desk from a client put it in a New Yorker cartoon dating back more than 50 years: “You have a pretty good case, Mr. Pitkin. How much justice can you afford?” I’m not sure how much justice ID can afford. Despite all the publicity it’s gotten, it has few backers. Atheistic evolutionists hate it. Theistic evolutionists hate it. And fundamentalists are also beginning to hate it, because it doesn’t deliver the pat answers about creation that they desire.

Machiavelli got it right: “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly for fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”

With this preamble, let me answer your questions directly: I don’t see free and open debate regarding evolution coming anytime soon—not until the Darwinists, kicking and dragging, are forced to acknowledge that there is a problem with their view. This may happen with another court case (the Dover case was a loss for ID, but it did not go to the Supreme Court; so, I could see another case reversing Dover).

That said, I put very little stock in court cases. Eventually, the evidence for ID will disseminate widely enough so that Darwinists will not be able to stifle the conversation. For now, however, they can. I think of a story told to me by one Baylor student (this happened after I left): Biology students wanting to do a summer research internship in the Biology Department are quizzed regarding their views on ID. If they are perceived as sympathetic to it, they are denied the research opportunity. For now, that’s how the game is played, and ID is kept at bay. Ten years from now, I expect still to be working on ID, but I expect to have branched out into economics and the development of social technologies. I have some ideas about developing a strongly encrypted, decentralized, information-based form of money that cannot be proliferated at will, as are our present fiat currencies. I want to write this up and patent it, and then work on disseminating this and other social technologies that advance human freedom.

It seems to me that the greatest challenge to our freedoms—a challenge I see all the time in the ID debate—is the centralization of power. I see my coming years as an effort to unseat these monopolies. I realize this may sound unduly ambitious, but we live in a technocratic age in which the elite think they know what’s best for us—and they do not, the evidence of which is staring us in the face (that’s why we now see books with titles such as When Genius Failed).

Ultimately, I think ID will win. A few years ago, I thought I’d be around to see its victory. Now, I’m not so sure. The Bible actually gives me great comfort in this regard, because one sees in it that God’s purposes are not generally carried out by the flamboyant, well-placed, and powerful. But in the end, the false prophets are always clearly identified, and those who were true are vindicated. ID, in my view, plays a prophetic role for our culture.

In the end, what I see as winning it for ID is the tendency in the long run for reality to vindicate truth. Unfortunately, as Keynes pointed out, in the long run, we’re all dead. I believe the most interesting and fruitful science will in the end be done under ID’s umbrella, because it gets at the truth of the matter—the intelligence that animates nature. When that happens, scientists will vote with their feet, abandoning Darwinism and embracing design. I hope to see this in my lifetime, but I’m not holding my breath.

It is remarkable that so much vitriol has been metaphorically thrown in the faces of the intelligent design people by their opponents given the seemingly minor scientific differences between their positions. The IDers don't disagree with the empirical data but the do disagree with the interpretation of that data. They disagree, for example, with the assertion of the Darwinians that physical processes and forces are adequate to explain the origin of life and its subsequent diversification. They argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos as well as the amazing complexity and information-laden nature of living things points to the involvement of an unspecified intelligent agent. This, however, is not a scientific disagreement. It's a philosophical disagreement.

No other controversy in science has engendered the level of personal invective and acrimony that has been aimed at the upstarts who've challenged the darwinian status quo as has this one, and the reason is that, unlike other scientific disputes, this one is really not about science at all. It's about the metaphysical assumptions of the scientists.

Intelligent design does not threaten evolutionary theory, it threatens the naturalism to which so many darwinian scientists cling. The Darwinism/ID controversy is not about the relevant science, on that there's actually a lot of agreement. The debate is about the fact that the dominant, entrenched religious establishment in the academy, i.e. metaphysical naturalism, finds itself under assault after enjoying a century and a half of hegemony. They now find themselves on the defensive and see their religion (naturalism) threatened. That's why their reaction has been so ugly, vicious, and seemingly desperate. They're fighting for their metaphysical lives, and I think they feel themselves losing.

Why Read Good Books?

2012-01-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and a farmer, limns a half dozen or so reasons why people should read great books and why a culture which abandons the classics is doomed to superficiality and tawdriness. Here's his opening:

So what are the reasons, in this age of the iPhone, Xbox, and PlayStation — or Fox News blondes and HBO — to sit down and read old stuff for an hour or two each week?

Here are a few reasons other than the usual defense of the “classics,” the “canon,” and the glories of “Western civilization.”

Mental Exercise

The mind is a muscle. Without exercise, it reverts to mush. Watching most TV or using the normal electronic gadgetry does not tax us much — indeed that is by design the very purpose: to eliminate effort, worry, unease, and afterthought. None of us thinks back a year ago to a great video game session. Few off-hand can recall the Super Bowl winner of 2001. I remember the scenes in a Shane or Casablanca, but not many others in the other thousand of movies that I have watched.

By nature, our ways of expression and even thinking always fossilize and are withering away with age and monotony — a process accelerated by the modern electronic age and the neglect of replenishment through reading. The actual vocabulary of our present youth seems to me reduced to about 1,000 words or so. “Like,” “whatever,” “you know,” “cool,” and other pop culture fillers now substitute for entire phrases, a sort of modern porcine grunting. The Greeks used particles to accentuate vocabulary and guide syntax; we used them instead of vocabulary. Our syntax, both written and oral, is reverting to “Spot is a dog”: noun, verb, predicate — period.

How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation? I used to listen to farmers without college degrees speak wonderful English; now to listen to a member of Congress almost requires a translator.

Reading alone enriches our vocabulary; it teaches us that good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar. Soon those well-read become the well-spoken.

Hanson closes with this:

Somehow we must convince this new wired generation that speaking and writing well are not just the DSL lines of modern civilization, but also the keys to self-mastery, a sort of code that one takes on — in addition to others, moral and legal — to uphold standards of culture itself, to keep the work and ideas alive of our long gone betters for one more generation — as if to say, “I did my part according to my time and station.”Nothing more, nothing less.

In between his opening and his conclusion there's much to delight anyone who loves great literature. You can read the whole thing here.

No Win Situations

2012-01-18T17:27:00.000-05:00

Juan Williams asked Newt Gingrich in Monday night's debate whether his comment that poor children should be given maintenance jobs in their schools to teach them a work ethic wasn't insensitive to black people. Coming from a man who was justifiably shocked when NPR fired him some months ago for acknowledging his personal unease when Muslims board the same plane he's traveling on, this seemed like a strange question:

Gingrich's response speaks for itself. If Williams thinks it's offensive to suggest that one of the dysfunctions that afflicts communities mired in generational poverty is that they've lost the skills needed to succeed in the workforce then he's delusional.

Meanwhile, Joy Ann Reid a guest on an MSNBC show the other day thought it was offensive for Mitt Romney to give a distressed woman money to pay her electric bill, ostensibly because the recipient of Romney's kindness was black.

In case you haven't the time to watch the video here's the transcript of what Ms. Reid said:

As an African-American woman, it galls me. I don’t even like to watch it. I felt like it plays into every sort of patronizing stereotype of black people. Oh, here’s this little lady, let me give her 50 bucks. I mean, this is the guy who offered a bet of $10,000 on stage, you know, to another candidate, but, you know, here, let me lay off 50 bucks on this woman. And I think it plays into that conservative meme that you don’t need actual programs that the government puts in place to help people in need, we’ll just give them charity. The church will take care of them, I’ll give them 50 bucks.

Apparently we must conclude that at least some black people think it just as patronizing for a white man to give a needy black woman a little help as it is racially insensitive to encourage poor blacks to learn work skills. If Romney had ignored the woman people like Reid would probably have accused him of being hard-hearted, especially toward blacks, but when he helps the woman he's accused him of being condescending.

Of course, it doesn't seem to occur to Ms. Reid that if it's patronizing for a white person to help poor people then all those government programs she admires, programs in which billions of dollars are transferred from white wage earners to black poor people, are surely patronizing to blacks. Perhaps she thinks it's okay if the money is taken from the white man in taxes by the government and then given to the poor, but not okay if it's freely given to the poor in an act of personal compassion.

What exactly is the logic, if any, behind the thinking of either Williams or Reid? Or is logic not even relevant to those who are desperately trying to reinforce the belief that anything whites do or say about blacks is suspicious, whether it appears that way or not?

It's ironic that in trying to show that Gingrich and Romney have ignoble motives lurking in their hearts these commentators actually give the impression that they themselves are petty, cynical, and irrational. Wouldn't it be better if we stopped probing and dissecting people's hearts and simply judge them on the basis of the truth of what they say and the virtue of what they do?

If War Comes

2012-01-18T06:39:00.000-05:00

A former agent of the CIA who once infiltrated Iran's Revolutionary Guard talks about some of Iran's plans and capabilities should the U.S. attack. Here are several of his main points:

In a recent meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, it was decided that the possibility of an attack by Israel or America in 2012 is real and that the country’s forces need to prepare several contingencies for war. It also was concluded that in case of war, the regime could be victorious, though the cost would be high, but it would emerge as the one and only champion of the Islamic cause in the world.

The radicals ruling Iran have long believed that obtaining the nuclear bomb will make them untouchable and will facilitate the expansion of the Islamic movement in the region and the world in bringing the West to its knees. They also have concluded that because of the troubles in the world’s economy and financial troubles in America, even a limited confrontation with America would benefit the Islamic regime.

Just as Hezbollah outfought Israel in the 2006 war, Iran can claim victory against the U.S. in such a conflict, which could include attacking Israel from several fronts. But the real prize for the criminal mullahs would be that it would help the regime bring down the monarchy in Bahrain, create instability in Saudi Arabia and, most important, help the Islamists in Egypt undermine military rule. All this would occur by inciting uprisings for a war of Islam against infidels and Zionists.

The guards in their preparations have mapped out several options. One would be to disrupt the oil flow from the Persian Gulf. They know that about 40 percent of the world’s oil and the majority of oil exports of eight countries in the Persian Gulf pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that could be blocked by the regime’s forces.

The guards’ navy of speedboats armed with cruise missiles, Iran’s submarines and, most important, the guards’ missiles of various kinds could be launched from deep within Iran and still target the narrow strait.

The guards also have mapped out an extensive list of U.S. bases in the Middle East to attack with their missiles, disrupting the movement of U.S. forces and the operation of the Air Force, which the guards believe will be the main thrust of any attack by America.

For that purpose, several U.S. bases have been identified that could be attacked either by short-range rockets with a range of up to 140 miles or with ballistic missiles with a range of more than 1,250 miles. The two air bases in Kuwait, Ali Al Salem and Ahmed Al Jaber, are less than 85 miles from Iran. In Kuwait, the U.S. camps of Buehring, Spearhead, Patriot and Arifjan, with distances of 65 to 80 miles, are all within reach of the guards’ various missiles.

The guards also are targeting four U.S. air bases in Afghanistan as the main launching pads for any attacks on Iran. The Bagram Air Base, home to most of the U.S. Air Force presence in Afghanistan, is just 450 miles from the Iranian borders and within range of all of Iran’s ballistic missiles. Other air bases in Afghanistan that would be attacked by the guards in case of war are in Kandahar, Shindand and Herat.

The super U.S. base, Al Adid in Qatar, which is home to a variety of U.S. bombers and fighters, is within 175 miles of Iran and a prime target for the guards, though because of favorable relations of the Islamic regime with the government in Qatar, the guards are not sure America can use that air base for its attack and therefore will be much more likely to use its other superbase at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates, also within range of various Iranian missiles. Other U.S. targets of the guards are the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain and Thumrait Air Base in Oman.

There's more at the link. Perhaps the American military can neutralize these threats, but if not, an attack on Iran will not be as painless as was the initial assault on Iraq. Iran has more formidable capabilities than did Saddam Hussein and the United States must be prepared for losses. Even so, if the world allows Iran to gain a nuclear weapon it must be prepared for even greater, perhaps catastrophic, losses.

OOL

2012-01-17T09:20:00.000-05:00

Moshe Averick at Algemeiner.com quotes a number of Origin of Life (OOL) researchers who speak frankly about their complete mystification as to how life could have arisen from non-living matter.

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, for instance, stated that “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines ... could have formed spontaneously from non-living matter.”

Dr. Harold P. Klein, of NASA, once wrote in similar terms: “The simplest bacterium is so damn complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened.”

When one of the greatest chemists alive today, Dr. George Whitesides of Harvard University, was awarded the Priestley Medal for Chemistry in 2007, he said: “Most chemists believe like I do, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea…On the basis of all chemistry I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.”

Dr. Eugene V. Koonin, a molecular biologist, once observed that:

Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is not due to lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.

This seemed to echo what science writer and cosmologist Dr. Paul Davies had written years earlier:

You might get the impression from what I have written not only that the origin of life is virtually impossible, but that life itself is impossible ... fortunately for us, our cells contain sophisticated chemical-repair-and-construction mechanisms, and handy sources of chemical energy to drive processes uphill, and enzymes with special properties that can smoothly assemble complex molecules from fragments…but the primordial soup lacked these convenient cohorts of cooperating chemicals…so what is the answer? Is life a miracle after all?

Averick goes on to summarize the current state of OOL research:

Everyone agrees that the simplest living bacterium – which is functionally complex beyond comprehension – looks like it was designed and created by an intelligent creator.
Everyone agrees that it is virtually impossible to imagine how it could have happened through an undirected process.
Everyone agrees that no one has any idea how it actually did happen.

What can we conclude from this? Averick offers an answer:

I simply draw the obvious conclusions. The reason it looks designed, is because it is designed. The reason why it seems “astonishingly improbable” for it to happen through an undirected process, is because it is “astonishingly improbable” for it to happen through an undirected process, and the reason why, in fact, no one has any idea how it happened through a naturalistic process, is because it didn’t happen through a naturalistic process.

But if one is a naturalistic materialist and has apriori ruled out the possibility of a non-natural, non-physical designer of life then it simply must have happened through some natural, mechanistic process.

Averick appositely reminds us of a quote from Darwinian biologist Richard Lewontin who once said:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to the understanding of the real struggle between Science and the Supernatural. We take the side of science despite the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanation, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”

What are we to make of all this? One conclusion I think we can draw is that evolutionary science is not just about science, it's about religion. Following the evidence where it leads is a maxim adhered to only if the evidence leads us away from a Divine mind. If the evidence leads toward the uncomfortable inference that there really could be an intelligence directing the progress of life then, as Lewontin admits, many scientists are prepared to accept patent absurdity in order to cling to their faith in naturalism.

They've got a faith commitment to an atheistic worldview and no amount of evidence will be allowed to change their mind. And they think theists are irrational?

We Just Don't Know

2012-01-17T08:40:00.000-05:00

We've spoken on occasion here at VP about the fact that we don't really know that global warming, if indeed it eventuates, will be the disaster the climate change alarmists predict. For all we really know it could be a boon to humanity to have more land in currently inaccessible regions like Siberia, Greenland and northern Canada open up to habitation, mining, and agriculture. Slightly rising temperatures could result in more rainfall in arid regions and reverse the desertification process of northern Africa and elsewhere, making agriculture around the globe more productive. Who knows?

Now science writer Matt Ridley raises another possible benefit of global warming - it could be saving us from an incipient ice age:

The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth's recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods. One theory holds that agriculture and dense settlement were impossible in the volatile, generally dry and carbon-dioxide-starved climates of the ice age, when crop plants would have grown more slowly and unpredictably even in warmer regions.

This warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end. In the early 1970s, after two decades of slight cooling, many scientists were convinced that the moment was at hand. They were "increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age," said Time in 1974. The "almost unanimous" view of meteorologists was that the cooling trend would "reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," and "the resulting famines could be catastrophic," said Newsweek in 1975.

Since then, of course, warmth has returned, probably driven at least partly by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. A new paper, from universities in Cambridge, London and Florida, drew headlines last week for arguing that these emissions may avert the return of the ice age.

Ridley elaborates on all this at the linked article.

The fact is that we don't know whether the global mean temperature is really rising, or, if it is, what's causing it. Nor do we know what the effects of a modest rise in temperature will be. Nevertheless, we're being told that we must spend billions of dollars and change the entire way of life of modern societies and do it now because if we don't we'll all die. But as Ridley points out, for all we know reversing greenhouse gas emissions may be the worst thing we could do for the planet and humanity.

Martin Luther King

2012-01-16T09:45:00.000-05:00

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America. His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters.

Students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance, but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. Our Attorney General is reluctant to prosecute blacks who deny others their civil rights, and any criticism of our president is interpreted as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than a reasonable opposition to his policies.

People are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history. I don't think this is what King had in mind.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the nation realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded. It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely held these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid seeing their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and to stop think of racism as a sin committed by the majority race only.

Let's judge each other on the content of our character and of our minds and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll never have the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

Did the Cosmos Have a Beginning?

2012-01-16T08:55:00.000-05:00

When the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe was first proposed it met with a lot of resistance from scientists and others who were dismayed by the fact that the Big Bang entailed that the universe had a discrete beginning rather than being infinitely old. If the universe had a beginning then it must have been caused by something outside itself, and since this sounded too much like the Genesis account of the Bible, many scientists resisted the Big Bang until the predicted background radiation left over from the initial "explosion" was serendipitously discovered in 1963 making further resistance seem futile.

Even so, the refuseniks have not given up and have over the years advanced a number of theories that would do away with the unpleasant theological implications of the standard Big Bang model by keeping the Bang, so to speak, but doing away with a cosmic beginning. However, in one way or another all of these theories have come to grief.

An article at New Scientist (subscription required) suggests that hope is fading that a beginningless universe can made to conform to the evidence we have. Here's part of the article:

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including [Stephen] Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

The details of Vilenkin's argument follow in the article, but the important point is that cosmologists are now in a quandary. The data does not support the idea of a beginningless universe, but if the universe had a beginning then the argument for a transcendent, very powerful, very intelligent, personal cause of the universe becomes almost irresistable.

Consider, for example, the following argument that has been popularized by the philosopher William Lane Craig:

1. Everything that comes into being has a cause of its existence.
2. Nothing is the cause of itself.
3. The universe had a beginning and thus came into being.
4. Therefore the universe had a cause.
5. There are only three kinds of causes: abstract (ideas), scientific (physical forces), and personal minds.
6. Abstract objects are causally impotent, and physical forces would only exist after the universe came into being.
7. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be a personal mind.

Thus we have good reason to believe that there is a transcendent personal cause that began the universe. Sound like anyone you know?

See vjtorley's post at Uncommon Descent and William Lane Craig's website for more.

John Rabe

2012-01-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

Ever think you'd watch a movie in which the hero was a member of the German Nazi party? Well, okay, Oscar Schindler in the movie Schindler's List, was a party member, I guess, but I can't think of any other candidates, or at least I couldn't until I watched the movie John Rabe the other evening.

Rabe's story was very much like that of Oscar Schindler. He was a German businessman, working for Siemens in Nanking, China in 1937. This was the year the Japanese invaded China and perpetrated the mass slaughter of what became known as the Rape of Nanking, brutally raping and slaughtering some 300,000 Chinese. The horrors perpetrated by the Japanese in Nanking are beyond imagining (see link), but the movie gives a glimpse of what it was like.

Since the Germans were allies of the Japanese in 1937 Rabe was able to use his Nazi Party credentials to carve out a demilitarized safety zone in the city in which Chinese civilians were able to find relative safety from the savagery of the Japanese troops. It's believed that Rabe and a dozen or so other foreigners working together were able to save the lives of some 200,000 Chinese.

The movie (2009) stars Ulrich Tukur as John Rabe and is very well-acted. I strongly recommend the film to anyone who wants to know more about one of the most savage episodes of man's inhumanity to his fellow man ever recorded, and who also wants to watch a film about real heroism during these terrifying days.

There's a biography of Rabe at Wikipedia. The tragedy of his life seems to have been compounded after he left Nanking and returned to Germany, but what he and his associates did for the Chinese is something which should never be forgotten.

Democrat Difficulties

2012-01-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

National Review's Yuval Levin lays out the difficulties the president faces in coming up with a viable campaign strategy:

I know we’re all supposed to think that the primaries are poised to turn out a weak Republican nominee and that President Obama will swoop in this fall and carry the day with some brilliant pincer move that simultaneously dubs the Republican too extreme, too moderate, too boring, and too weird. And I suppose it’s possible that the president and his team will suddenly turn out to possess keen political skills they have been hiding somewhere for the past three years. But can we spend a moment pondering the approach that team Obama seems to be hatching so far? Looking at what the administration and the Obama campaign have been doing and saying in the buildup to the general election, it has been awfully difficult to find evidence of a plausible strategy.

Obama has some very daunting problems to contend with, of course. His record of accomplishments, amassed mostly in his first two years in office, is extremely unpopular and so could not be the centerpiece of a reelection campaign. He has presided over the largest deficits in American history and nearly doubled the national debt. He pushed through a large stimulus bill in 2009 that is taken to have been a failure (in no small part because the administration defined metrics for success, like keeping unemployment from rising above 8%, that have plainly not been met) and a health-care reform in 2010 that started out quite unpopular and has gotten only more so with time. Meanwhile the economy remains weak, unemployment remains high, and 80 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This has left the president in an exceptionally challenging political position in a re-election year. At the beginning of November of 2010, on the day Republicans took 63 House seats and 5 senate seats from the Democrats, Obama’s job approval in Gallup’s daily tracking poll was 44 percent; today it is 43 percent. Party identification in November 2010, according to Gallup, was 31 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 41 percent independent; in December 2011 it was 27 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 42 percent independent. Republicans held a 5 point lead in Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot that November, and today they have a 6 point lead.

All this suggests there is no self-evident path to reelection for the president. He can hope for significant improvements in the economy to change his fortunes (although the unemployment rate is a good bit lower today than in November 2010 and that doesn’t seem to have done the trick), but he can’t run on his record or rely on some cushion of public confidence and satisfaction. He needs a positive strategy to improve his circumstances. But the campaign strategy his team appears to be putting into place would seem to be very poorly suited to doing so.

To further consternate the Democrats, it looks as if the Republicans are poised to take the Senate and keep control of the House. If this happens, Obama, if he's reelected, will find it very hard to do much of anything which, given his apparent ambitions for the country, is probably a good thing. Not only will Republicans block his legislative agenda and prevent him from naming radical judges to the federal bench and Supreme Court, but they'll surely press investigations of some of Mr. Obama's more suspect cabinet members, particularly Attorney General Eric Holder.

There are thirty three Senate seats up for reelection in 2012 and only ten of them are currently held by Republicans. The remaining twenty three are occupied by Democrats (and one Independent who caucuses with the Democrats), and several of those twenty three look very vulnerable. Given that in order to take control of the Senate the GOP need only capture seven more seats - and hold on to the ten they have - it looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a very glum year for the Democrats.

Anyway, Levin has some interesting things to say about Mr. Obama's campaign options at the link. It's an interesting read. One of the things we can expect the Republicans to press him on is what, exactly, he intends to do with four more years in the White House. As Levin observes, nothing he's already done is popular (Stimulus, Obamacare), and the only thing he's talked about doing in the future is raising taxes on the rich and imposing more regulations on business. There's nothing innovative, positive or even specific in his message. It's all vague platitudes about everyone doing their "fair share," etc.

One gets the feeling that the only reason he wants to be reelected is so he can continue to take extravagant vacations and play more golf. Of course, if Republicans wind up with control of Congress that's about all he'll be able to do.

Camp Fire Girls

2012-01-13T13:22:00.000-05:00

Warren Cole Smith shares the improbable story of how a chance encounter with a Camp Fire Girls leader turned him into a fiscal conservative:

It was the fall of 1981. The United States was coming out of a recession. Ronald Reagan had been president since January. Among his first acts in the White House had been to dramatically cut spending for social programs.

And the woman sitting next to me on an airplane was not happy about it.

I was sitting on the aisle, and she had the window. She worked for an organization called Camp Fire Girls, now called Camp Fire USA, and she couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan. I wanted to know why. She described an after-school program she ran that served hundreds of poor children. I remember thinking then that it sounded like a worthwhile endeavor. The program had received about $100,000 — almost its entire budget — from the federal government. Reagan had eliminated that funding.

In 1981 I was a young man whose thinking was in a state of transition. In 1976 I had voted for Jimmy Carter, but in 1980 I pulled the lever for Reagan, in part because I thought Carter had shown general incompetency regarding economic matters. I had graduated from college in 1980, in the midst of the Carter Recession. I then spent more than a year in a series of part-time and temporary jobs, all the while looking for full-time employment. I had voted for Reagan not so much because I was a conscious part of the “Reagan Revolution,” but because — like many who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — I was hoping for change.

So when this Camp Fire Girl leader started railing against Reagan, I offered no defense. “That’s terrible,” I said. “Sorry that program got eliminated. What do you do now?”

“Oh,” she said. “I still run the program.”

I was confused. “I thought you said Reagan eliminated the program,” I said.

Smith goes on to recount the rest of the tale of how this conversation precipitated his conversion to conservatism. It's interesting. Check it out at the link.

Why Do They Dislike Him So?

2012-01-13T10:05:00.001-05:00

Denver quarterback Tim Tebow has become something of a cultural phenomenon in the last couple of months, hated by some, loved by many (He was voted the most popular professional athlete in a recent ESPN poll). It's easy to understand why he's loved, of course. He's a great success story - told by most experts that he lacked the skills to be a successful pro quarterback, relegated to third string on the Denver depth chart, coming off the bench to lead his team to several dramatic last minute, last second, victories and propel them into the playoffs.

On top of that he is by all accounts a humble young man of outstanding character and leadership skills. It's a perfect script for a Hollywood movie.

So why is he disliked, perhaps even hated? Ostensibly, it's because he's outspoken about being motivated by his Christian faith and love for Jesus Christ. An article by Matt Higgins at CBS elaborates:

Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has seemingly made himself the poster boy for Christianity, praying on the field after a win, putting Bible verses on his eye black during games and even starring in an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl, but one atheist group believes he’s doing it all for personal gain.

American Atheists — a New Jersey based group that promotes the separation of church and state — tells CBSDenver.com that the only reason Tebow is popular is because he constantly injects his Christianity among the public.

The only reason? There are others who have made no secret of their faith who have not achieved the level of celebrity that Tebow has. What makes Tebow different is the aura of the near-miraculous that surrounds some of his triumphs, particularly his role in the overtime win against the Pittsburgh Steelers. To the American Atheists, however, the amazing success of an unabashed Christian is like a chicken bone stuck in their windpipe:

When we watch a sporting event, we are all united for our team,” says David Silverman, president of American Atheists. “Tebow takes religion and injects it into the mix and divides the fan base.

Silverman seems to think that the Denver "fan base" is as narrow-minded and intolerant of other people's desire to express their deepest convictions as he is and that their common joy over the Broncos' success disintegrates as soon as Tebow kneels briefly in the endzone after a score. Presumably, Silverman is fine with the borderline-obscene dances with which some players celebrate their success, or the embarrassingly childish antics of other players who mimic and mock their opponents after a sack or a touchdown. Those ridiculous displays of arrested development are okay, Silverman would have us believe, because they're not "divisive," but an act of genuine humility and gratitude apparently just rips fan unity to shreds in Mile High Stadium.

Silverman states that Tebow’s repeated references to God in his post-game comments after a win is "bad" for football.

“(Religion) injects the divisive force into football,” Silverman says. “Why in the world are we talking about religion when we are talking about football?”

This is laughable. Anyone who has ever listened to athletes' post-game comments knows that they're usually as trite, banal, and hackneyed as the reporters' questions that elicit them. If Silverman thinks he's missing something important when Tebow takes three seconds to thank God for helping him to do his best then he hasn't listened to very many of those interviews.

Look. Tebow hasn't promoted himself. He never asked for all this attention. He just went about his business doing his job, and the media, always digging for a story, generated all the buzz about "Tebowmania," not just in the wake of his on-field success but also as a consequence of the mockery he has endured from other athletes, commentators, and people like Silverman. People talk about him, he doesn't talk about himself. As Higgins says:

The fascination over Tebow officially reached national heights when people across the U.S. started “Tebowing,” mimicking Tebow’s sideline prayers.

But Silverman, swimming furiously against the tide of opinion of everyone who knows the young man best, alleges that Tebow is a hypocrite:

Silverman believes that Tebow is “full of crap” when he publicly displays his Christianity on the football field and said his prayers are for publicity. “It’s not that Tebow prays, it’s that he waits for the cameras to be on him to do it,” Silverman says. “He’s totally faking.”

This is absurd. How does Silverman know this? Does he have access to Tebow's mind? Does he know something about Tebow that his teammates don't? Silverman's pinched, dessicated worldview has no room for the belief that someone can be absolutely sincere about their love for God.

Athletes give thanks all the time to different people - parents, coaches, mentors - for their success. Why is it over the line for someone to believe that God is the source of their ability and to thank Him for it?

Silverman says if Tebow is truly a Christian, he would pray in private, not public. “It is not surprising Tebow ignores Matthew 6:5 in which Jesus says, ‘When you pray, do not pray like the hypocrites in the street,’” Silverman says. “They pray to be seen praying. Pray in the closet.”

So this is it? Silverman thinks that Tebow is not sincere because he's praying where people might see him? Silverman simply fails to comprehend that the passage he cites is not about where one prays but about why one prays. Jesus is adjuring his followers not to pray with the purpose of bringing some sort of renown or credit to themselves but to pray with sincere gratitude to God.

Of course, Silverman doesn't think Tebow is sincere, but that's more a reflection upon Silverman's cynical and uninformed view of Christianity than it is upon Tebow whose sincerity no one closest to him questions.

David Silverman might be a pleasant enough fellow in person, but in this piece he comes across as sour, jealous, and petty. What a contrast with the guy he seems so bitter toward.

Snowy Owl

2012-01-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

This winter has seen an influx of one of the largest and most beautiful North American owls into the lower 48. Fans of Harry Potter are familiar with the Snowy owl, but most people have never seen one in the wild. Snowies are residents of the Arctic tundra where they feed largely on lemmings, but they move southward in winter and sometimes travel all the way to the U.S.

This year there's been a large-scale movement of these owls into the states and several have turned up in Pennsylvania. Unlike most owls, which are nocturnal, snowy owls are diurnal — they're active both day and night which makes them easy to see if one is in the area.

Snowy Owl

A Snowy was found recently near Shippensburg which isn't far from where I live so I went this afternoon to see it. It was a gorgeous bird, large and almost completely white. Younger owls have dark edges to their feathers giving a barred appearance, but older Snowies, especially older males, are almost completely white.

There's a very interesting story on this year's irruption of these birds which can be read here.

Where Things Stand

2012-01-12T07:28:00.000-05:00

Strategy Page fills us in on the nature and effects of the sanctions imposed against Iran:

These sanctions ...prohibited Iran's major customers from buying Iranian oil, and made it more difficult to pay for it if they did buy the stuff. The Europeans are switching suppliers, and East Asian ones (at least Japan and South Korea) are under pressure to do so. China is lining up suppliers outside the Persian Gulf. The $110 billion annual oil revenue is what keeps the Iranian religious dictatorship in power. As those new sanctions went into effect at the end of 2010, the value of the Iranian currency plummeted over ten percent and the Iranian economy shuddered.

Actually, in the last year, the Iranian currency has lost 60 percent of its value against foreign currencies. Now, it costs 16,000 Iranian riyals to buy one U.S. dollar. A year ago, it only cost 10,000. So not only are smugglers demanding higher fees to get forbidden goods to Iran (because of the increased risk of getting caught and prosecuted), but it costs 60 percent more to buy foreign currency to pay the smugglers, or legitimate suppliers of goods. All this grief doesn't get much attention in the foreign press, but in Iran it's big and seemingly unending bad news. Iran also sees income cut by ten percent because of additional banking sanctions, which makes it riskier to do business with Iran (and not have your transaction seized for violating sanctions.)

The new sanctions will not be completely successful, but if Iranian oil income were cut by a third or more, most Iranians would feel it. Iran has responded with threats, saying it will close the Straits of Hormuz (the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf, where 40 percent of world oil passes on its way to world markets). Another aspect of the new sanctions makes it more difficult (and expensive) for Iranian banks to operate overseas. Iranian economists and financial experts have convinced Iran's leaders that the new sanctions are worse than any previous ones and a real threat to the Iranian economy, and the survival of the religious dictatorship.

So the new sanctions have teeth, or will have if they're imposed rigorously. How will the Iranians respond? Strategy Page lays out the likely scenario:

Iran has long issued dire threats, and never followed through. Iran much prefers to operate in the shadows by quietly supporting terrorists and irregulars. Iran could use this approach by using submarines and small boats to plant naval mines in the Straits of Hormuz. This would quickly escalate as local and foreign navies moved in mine-clearing forces, along with warships and aircraft to protect the continuous mine-clearing operation. Iranian bases would be attacked to destroy the mines and delivery vehicles (small subs and boats). This would quickly escalate to an attack on all Iranian military equipment.

That is not likely to happen any time soon, as it will take months before the sanctions actually translate into significant lost Iranian oil sales. During that time, negotiations, many of them secret, will take place with Iran about nuclear weapons, support for terrorism and other bad behavior.

Perhaps the one thing that will give the Iranian fanatics pause as they try to find a way to survive an all-out war such as the one that toppled Saddam Hussein is that they have precious few friends in the world, not even in the Middle East:

Iran's bad behavior (supporting terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, threatening neighbors) has left it with few foreign friends. China, one of its major trading partners, is its major customer for oil. But China has made it clear that if Iran finds itself with more oil than customers, China will expect to pay less for Iranian oil, if only to compensate for any sanctions damage China might suffer.

Russia is another Iranian ally, but will not do much to help, because closing, or even trying to close, the Straits of Hormuz will be a bonanza for Russia, a major oil exporter that does not use the Straits of Hormuz. Oil prices will surge as long as there are problems at the Straits of Hormuz. Other Iranian friends, like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, are more a burden than a benefit.

Iran is holding very few high cards in this poker game. The smart thing to do would be to fold and follow the Libyan example of giving up nuclear aspirations. Unfortunately, fanatics don't always do the smart thing, and even when they do they often push matters to the very brink before they pull back.

There are other factors working against Iran. For instance, our pullout from Iraq has opened up Iraqi airspace making it much easier for Israeli warplanes to reach Iranian targets. Will Israel avail themselves of the opportunity?

Another is the coming presidential election. How will Mr. Obama's electoral prospects bear on what we do in Iran? If he's polling behind his opponent in October will he be more likely or less likely to launch a strike at Iran's nuclear facilities in order to gain a popularity surge?

My own feeling is that the Iranians will not back down and neither will the Israelis. In the end, neither will the U.S. The Iranians believe they're on a mission from God. The Israelis believe their survival is at stake, and the U.S. has said many times that we will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Given those three positions it's hard to see how the worst will be averted, unless there's a change in leadership in Iran.

Another Iranian Scientist Hit

2012-01-11T11:14:00.000-05:00

You'd never know it from watching the news talk shows, obsessed as they are with Mitt Romney's machinations at Bain Capital, but we seem to be hurtling toward war with Iran. The Iranians are determined to build a nuclear weapon and, one hopes, we're determined to prevent it. The U.S. is now poised to impose tough sanctions on Iran which, if they do what they're supposed to do, will cripple Iran's already feeble economy.

Iran threatens to retaliate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz which would block a lot of oil from getting from the wells to the market and cause oil prices to skyrocket around the globe. Of course, it would also shut down their own ability to sell oil which seems somewhat counterproductive.

In any event, the U.S. has vowed it will not let the Iranians close the Strait.

Meanwhile, Debkafile reports that yet another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated in Tehran:

Forty-eight hours after Iran began advanced uranium enrichment in the fortified Fordo bunker near Tehran, Prof. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, deputy director of the first uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was killed early Wednesday, Jan. 11 by a sticky bomb planted on his car by two motorcyclists. It exploded near the Sharif technological university in northern Tehran.

The pair made their escape. Prof. Ahmadi-Roshan was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be mysteriously assassinated in Tehran in two years. The same method of operation was used in a similar operation last year. Iran has blamed them all on Israel.

There's more on this at the link. One wonders how deep the Iranian's bench of nuclear scientists is and how much it has to be attrited before the nuclear weapons program grinds to a halt.

One also wonders how these guys sleep at night knowing that they're probably on the list to be blown to smithereens, and that if they escape and are successful in building a nuke, it'll be used to blow a lot of children to smithereens. It must be as tough on the nerves as it is on the conscience, if they have one.

Anyway, perhaps the Iranians can be persuaded to give up their nuclear ambitions before it comes to war or before any more scientists are dispatched to Paradise, but there's not much grounds for optimism, I fear.

The Conflict

2012-01-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

I've just finished reading Alvin Plantinga's latest book Where the Conflict Really Lies and recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in issues lying at the interface of science, philosophy, and religion. Plantinga is probably the most consequential philosopher of the last thirty years so whenever he speaks the entire philosophical community listens.

His project, as he makes clear several times throughout the book, is not to argue for the existence of God, nor to argue that atheism is false, nor to argue that evolution is bogus (he himself accepts the principle of descent through modification), but rather to argue that those who believe that science and religion (or more precisely, theism) are incompatible with each other are mistaken.

Indeed, he argues for much more than that. He mounts a persuasive case that whatever conflict there is between science and theism is superficial, but that there is profound conflict between science and naturalism - the belief, as Plantinga states it, that there is no God nor anything like God. He also wants to show that the concord between science and theism is deep while the concord between science and naturalism is superficial.

This will not surprise those who've been reading Plantinga for a while since he's been making this case in various venues for at least twenty years, but it'll come as a shock, perhaps, to many who've been inculcated with the idea that science and religion have been at war with each other ever since the Enlightenment.

Plantinga argues that the notion that evolution discredits theism is simply wrong. There's no conflict between evolution and theism. There is, however, great conflict between theism and unguided evolution, the idea that evolution is a purely fortuitous unplanned process governed only by natural forces. The belief that evolution is unguided in this sense, however, is not any part of proper science. It's metaphysics. It's an entailment of naturalism.

Moreover, naturalistic evolution is incompatible with confidence that our cognitive faculties (our reason) are reliable. If unguided evolution is a fact then we have no grounds for trusting any belief that we hold including the belief that unguided evolution is a fact. One can be an atheist (or naturalist), or an evolutionist, or believe that his reason is trustworthy, but he can't hold all three positions at the same time.

Plantinga has been making this argument for a long time and he's at his persuasive best in Conflict. Since the theory of evolution is a major pillar of modern science and since it's virtually impossible to dispense with confidence in our cognitive faculties, it seems that the conflict is between science and any metaphysics which entails the conclusion that we can't trust our cognitive faculties. That is, the conflict is really between science and naturalism.

This is not the place to lay out Plantinga's argument in detail, so I encourage anyone interested in these issues and who has read a little bit of philosophy to read the book for themselves. It's very accessible to the layman and constitutes one of the best rebuttals to the New Atheists on the market today. It can be ordered from our favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Tebow

2012-01-10T14:51:00.001-05:00

For those, like me, who are reveling in how Tim Tebow is making his detractors look like chuckleheads, I offer this little diversion from our usual fare:

Moral Confusion, Logical Consistency

2012-01-10T09:58:00.000-05:00

In an excellent piece at The Algemeiner Rabbi Moshe Averick analyzes the statements of four prominent atheistic thinkers with regard to the Jerry Sandusky pederasty allegations and finds that none of them have any basis for deploring or condemning what Sandusky is accused of doing. The interesting thing is that all but one of them admits it.

After clarifying precisely what he will claim in his argument Rabbi Averick examines the moral philosophy (and confusions) of philosophers Michael Ruse, Jason Rosenhouse, and Joel Marks as well as biologist Jerry Coyne, all four of whom have been discussed here at VP over the last couple of years.

He begins with Ruse who wants to have it both ways. Ruse says in several places that morality is a purely subjective phenomenon, but then in the wake of the Sandusky revelations he insists that "I want to say that what Jerry Sandusky was reportedly doing to kids in the showers was morally wrong, and that this was not just an opinion or something based on subjective value judgments. The truth of its wrongness is as well taken as the truth of the heliocentric solar system.”

How can he say this? What does he base it on? Actually, as his fellow atheists point out and Rabbi Averick explains, he bases it on nothing more substantive than that he simply feels very strongly that abusing young boys is wrong.

Coyne, Rosenhouse and Marks are more faithful to their fundamental assumption that there is no God. They just deny that pedophilia is really wrong. Here's Marks, for example:

Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.

He further explains his position in this passage:

The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. [Some atheists] would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Averick closes his post with a plea to atheists:

The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.

Atheism stands for nothing, signifies nothing, and affirms nothing except for one thing: All the moral aspirations of the advanced primate we call a human being are nothing more than a cosmic joke….and not a very funny one at that.

Ideas have consequences. Some people think that there's no difference between theists and atheists except that theists go to church, synagogue or mosque and believe a lot of crazy things. Nothing could be further from the case. There's a wide chasm between the two worldviews and Averick highlights it in this column.

The atheist has no basis for making moral judgments other than his own subjective, arbitrary feelings and tastes. When the atheist says pederasty is wrong he's saying nothing more than "I don't like pederasty." Any judgment based on one's personal tastes, however, has no more moral force than saying "I don't like sushi and you shouldn't like it either." One's personal preferences certainly don't make something morally wrong.

Here's the difficulty the atheist finds himself in: If there is no God then Sandusky's pedophilia is not morally wrong, but most atheists feel deep inside themselves that pedophilia is morally wrong. Thus they hold two mutually incompatible beliefs at the same time. Their problem is compounded in that despite holding simultaneous incompatible beliefs they also hold the belief that they're somehow more rational than the theist.

As more and more atheists realize where their disbelief logically leads them they find themselves confronted with the choice of either abandoning their disbelief or embracing moral nihilism which, as Averick notes, dooms them to a man-made hell of the human jungle where not even the sexual abuse of children can be said to be wrong.

Do read Rabbi Averick's post and also the comments. Some of them afford excellent examples of missing the point and other failed attempts to avoid the force of the rabbi's argument.

Does the Future Belong to Islam?

2012-01-10T08:22:00.001-05:00

In a recent column Pat Buchanan gives reason to answer this question either way. First some reasons to think the answer is yes:

If demography is destiny, the future would seem to belong to Islam.

Consider. The six most populous Muslim nations — Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Turkey — had a total population of 242 million in 1950. By 2050, that 242 million will have quintupled to 1.36 billion people.

Meanwhile, Europe’s fertility rate has been below zero population growth since the 1970s. Old Europe is dying, and its indigenous peoples are being replaced by Third World immigrants, millions of them Muslim.

But there are also reasons for thinking the answer is no:

[T]here is another side to the Islamic story.

In international test scores of high school students in reading, math and science, not one Muslim nation places in the top 30. Take away oil and gas, and from Algeria to Iran these nations would have little to offer the world. Iran would have to fall back on exports of carpets, caviar and pistachio nuts.

Not one Muslim nation is a member of the G-8 economic powers or the BRIC-four emerging powers — Brazil, Russia, India, China.

In the 20th century, the world saw the rise of the Asian “tigers” — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. Where are the Muslim tigers?

A few years back, the gross domestic product of the entire Arab world was only equal to Spain’s. Take away oil and gas, and its exports were equal to Finland’s.

Measured by manufacturing power, the Islamic world, though more populous, cannot hold a candle to China. And while Islam was a civilization superior in some ways to the West from the 7th to 17th century, somewhere that world began to stagnate and decline.

So the question arises: If Islamism is capturing Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and will capture other Muslim nations as the Arab Spring advances, where is the historic evidence that these Islamic regimes can convert their states into manufacturing and military powers?

Where is the evidence that Islamist regimes, such as Sudan and Iran, can deliver what their peoples demanded when they brought down the dictators?

And if, like the communist regimes of the 20th century, they cannot deliver the good life that the rebels sought when they dumped the tyrants, what will follow Islamism, when Islamism inevitably fails?

In the long run, does Islamism really own the future of the Islamic world? Or has the clock begun to run on the fundamentalists as well?

The only way the Islamic world could come to dominate the world would be if an effete West simply decides it doesn't want to fight for its culture, which is certainly a possibility. Otherwise, the Islamic world will be a force to reckon with only so long as it has oil.

After the oil is gone, or it becomes available elsewhere, the strict uniformity of thought - religious, scientific, and political - imposed by Islamic authorities will stifle any incipient advance, and the loss of oil revenue will cause the rest of the Islamic world to revert to the same levels of poverty which prevail in those countries, like Afghanistan, which have no petroleum.

The crucial question is whether the West has the will to resist the Islamic quest for world domination until that happens.

Do We Have Free Will? (Pt. II)

2012-01-09T09:04:00.000-05:00

Biologist Jerry Coyne, an atheist, wrote a column for USA Today in which he teases out the implications of an atheistic worldview for our belief in human free will. I shared some thoughts on the article on Saturday and would like to finish those up today.

Coyne argues that atheism, or metaphysical naturalism, entails that there is no free will as it is commonly understood. In other words, at every given moment there really is only one possible future and the conviction that we really were free to choose other than what we did choose is an illusion.

Toward the end of his column he talks about the implications of his denial of free will for our belief that we're morally responsible for the choices we make:

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

We should recognize that we already make some allowances for this problem by treating criminals differently if we think their crimes resulted from a reduction in their "choice" by factors like mental illness, diminished capacity, or brain tumors that cause aggression. But in truth those people don't differ in responsibility from the "regular" criminal who shoots someone in a drug war; it's just that the physical events behind their actions are less obvious.

But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you'll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them. What is not justified is revenge or retribution — the idea of punishing criminals for making the "wrong choice." And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior.

Set aside the objection that, given determinism, there is no "good" or "bad" behavior, just behaviors that we like or don't like. Still, Coyne never addresses the important point. If determinism is true not only are reward and punishment never deserved, but moral outrage is absurd. The man who tortures children and then kills them is not immoral. Those who let others starve while indulging themselves to excess are not immoral. The person who legally bilks the elderly out of their life savings is not immoral. There's no moral duty not to do any of these things.

None of those things are wrong because to be wrong an act has to be in some sense freely chosen by the agent. If a "choice" is merely the result of fermions and bosons spinning about in someone's brain then there simply is no moral responsibility.

It's understandable why Coyne would finesse this point by raising it and then changing the subject to crime, though. If he were to follow the logic of his claim that we can't hold people morally responsible for their actions most of his readers would be repelled by his conclusion and thus repelled by the atheism that leads to it.

Is Romney Worse Than Obama?

2012-01-09T08:34:00.000-05:00

One of the left's criticisms of presidential candidate Mitt Romney is that his work at Bain Capital resulted in people losing their jobs. In order to make their business clients stronger in the long-run real people were sacrificed. This is cited as proof that Romney is heartless and ill-suited to be president.

It's an amusing ploy as A. Barton Hinkle, in a column at Reason shows. It turns out that this very criticism of Romney, that he eliminated some jobs in order to make his clients stronger and better off in the end, is precisely the same rationale that the left uses to justify the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industries.

Hinkle notes that:

[J]ust a couple of weeks ago the AP reported that “more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations.” That estimate is based “on the [EPA]’s own prediction of power plant retirements.” When a plant shuts down, people lose their jobs – regardless of whether the job losses are offset by gains elsewhere.

In other words, forcing people out of work is okay when government does it in the name of improving human well-being, but it's a terrible thing when a private firm does it in order to make their business more efficient. Hinkle goes on to say that:

The Center’s overview notes that green-energy cheerleading includes “no analysis of job destruction due to increased cost of energy.” Furthermore, “there is no effort to balance the potential positive impacts with potential negative impacts of job destruction and higher energy costs. In a sense, these studies are cost-benefit analyses without any cost considerations.”

Now, you can argue—the EPA certainly does—that environmental regulations which force coal plants to shut down make society better off in the aggregate. You also can argue ... that while environmental rules might cause job losses over here, they are more than offset by job gains over there. And you can likewise argue that, in the long run, Americans will all be better off if Washington forces the country to embrace green energy.

Just remember: If you do argue those things, then you are making the same point Romney makes about the “creative destruction” of leveraged buyouts: Over the long term, it makes everybody better off—despite the temporary “human toll.”

Here's Hinkle's conclusion:

There is one major difference, however. If you disapprove of what Bain and other venture-capital firms do to companies, you don't have to support it. That's one of nice things about free enterprise: You're free to choose. But if you disapprove of what the federal government's energy policies do to companies, too bad. You're going to take part—whether you like it or not.

During the campaign candidate Obama promised, essentially, to destroy the coal industry. If Romney were to say something like this the media would be apoplectic over the number of jobs people would lose:

For more on the human consequences of the president's war on fossil fuels see this article at Prison Planet.

Do We Have Free Will?

2012-01-07T12:56:00.000-05:00

One of the enduring philosophical questions is the nature of human volition or choice. Are our choices really free, as we feel them to be, or are they the inexorable product of our genetic dispositions or the environmental influences exerted on us throughout our lives? If our choices, or at least some of them, really are free what does that mean? What exactly is a free choice? Is it completely uncaused and spontaneous? If so, in what sense can we be responsible for it?

If, on the other hand, our choices are determined by factors over which we have no control it doesn't seem we could be responsible for them either. Moreover, if our choices are the inevitable result of extrinsic factors like our childhood upbringing, etc. then how can there be an obligation to behave one way rather than another? How can we have a duty to do anything unless we can make a meaningful decision to do it?

Biologist Jerry Coyne is an atheistic materialist who shares his thoughts on this matter in a column in USA Today. According to Coyne atheism entails determinism, and this has very important consequences. I think he's right. Here's part of his column:

You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.

Coyne is correct, I believe, if his implied assumption that brains are all that are involved in the choices we make is correct, but why think it is? If, in addition to our brains, we are also possessed of an immaterial mind (or soul) then all this talk about physics determining our choices is so much flummery. In order for Coyne's argument to have any force one would have to accept his materialism, but in order to accept materialism Coyne would have to persuade us that there's no immaterial mind and this task he doesn't assay. He just assumes it as though it were a settled matter. It's not.

Parenthetically, it's odd that he suggests that our brains, like real computers, are programmed by blind forces like genes and experiences. Real computers are programmed by minds and would hardly function, let alone evolve, were they solely operated and designed by random, purely physical forces.

In any case, we have an overwhelming sensation of being free. That sensation - Coyne calls it an illusion - would seem improbable if materialism is true but not so unlikely if we, in fact, have an immaterial aspect to our selves, a mind or soul. A mind or soul, however, would seem to be less probable on atheism than on theism. Thus, our sense that we are free seems more likely to be correct if theism is true than if atheism is true. That's why atheists like Coyne are anxious to persuade us that we're not free.

In other words, if you believe you are able to make choices that are in some sense free, if you believe that at least at some moments in time there is more than one possible future, then you should be a theist of some sort. Your belief in free will is much less likely to be true if atheism is true. The sensation of being free counts as evidence for theism and against atheism, and the belief that one really is free comports more easily with theism than with atheism.

I'll have a bit more to say on Coyne's column on Monday.

Racist Undertones

2012-01-06T15:17:00.000-05:00

Columnist Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times offers what seems like a parody of how liberals think about race and racism but which is evidently a serious column. Rosenthal writes:

Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.

Rosenthal is apparently one of those folks who sees racists behind every tree. I like when he says "it has to be said." This is what people often say by way of patting themselves on the back for their courage and resolve when they're about to say something that no one in their circle would object to.

You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American.

Surely he's not serious. Does he think no Republican would disrespect, say, Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi, or even Bill Clinton the way President Obama has been disrespected? Is it really "unthinkable"? Rosenthal offers us examples:

Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a joint session of Congress—the first such denial in the history of our republic.

We pause to gasp at the indignity of it. This is what passes for evidence of racism in the minds of people like Rosenthal? Newt Gingrich just called Mitt Romney a liar and nobody thought that was racism, but perhaps that's because they're both white. Then again, lots of black commentators accused George Bush of lying about WMD in Iraq, but that's different, too. It's only racism, we're supposed to believe, when whites do it to blacks, not when blacks do it to whites. If you don't understand that then you must be a political Neanderthal.

More recently, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a conversation overheard at Reagan National Airport in Washington, said of Michelle Obama: “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He offered a lame apology, but as Mary C. Curtis put it on the Washington Post’s new blog She the People: “Can you imagine how the incident would play out if an African American congressman made a crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush’s body? It certainly would have taken more than an insincere apology to wash that sin away.”

Someone in private conversation is overheard to comment unfavorably on the dimensions of Mrs. Obama's gluteous and we're to think this reveals latent racism lurking in his heart? Is Rosenthal serious? Any crude remark about a black person's butt is ipso facto a racial affront. Would it be racism, a "sin," if a black man were to joke about Hillary's hair style or the shape of her legs?

By the way, I'm curious as to what criticism anyone could utter about Laura Bush's body?

This ugly strain was crudely evident in the “birthers” and their ridiculous demands that Mr. Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he was American, and not secretly an African Muslim.

For Mr. Rosenthal it's a reliable indicator of racism if anyone should want a black candidate to meet the same constitutional eligibility requirements as anyone else who aspires to serve as president. It would be okay, presumably, to question the citizenship of a white candidate were that in doubt, but any misgivings about a black candidate are simply beyond the pale (no pun intended).

Blacks, Mr. Rosenthal implicitly argues, should not be held to the same standards as whites. Who among us would even hesitate if asked to show their birth certificate to insure there was no question about one's identity, and why is it "ridiculous" to be suspicious of someone who does refuse to show it? Mr. Rosenthal doesn't tell us.

Just the other day here in Iowa, Mitt Romney’s son, Matt, said his father might release his tax returns “as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things.” The younger Mr. Romney later backtracked, either because he was sincerely chagrined, or, perhaps more likely, because he recognized that it could hurt his father.

Again, why, exactly, is it racist to ask to see a black man's college grades? Didn't the liberal media make a big deal about George Bush's mediocre academic record at Yale (until they discovered that John Kerry's was worse)? Why is it okay to scrutinze a white candidate's record but not that of a black candidate? Does Mr. Rosenthal assume that Barack Obama's grades would be embarrassing? If so, why would he make that assumption?

Sometimes the racism is more oblique.

More oblique? More oblique than what Rosenthal has already given us?

Newt Gingrich was prattling on the other day about giving “poor children” in “housing projects” jobs cleaning toilets in public schools to teach them there is an alternative to becoming a pimp or a drug dealer. These children, he said, have no work ethic. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t get that poor kids in housing projects is code for minorities, he or she hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last 50 years. Mr. Gingrich is also fond of calling Mr. Obama “the greatest food stamp President in American history.”

So it's racist for Mr. Gingrich to think that poverty, joblessness, and the need to develop work skills is especially acute among minorities? Does Rosenthal deny that minorities are in special need of such skills? Does he really think that black kids are generally on par with white kids in terms of what they see as their future employment opportunities? If not, why does he even bring this up?

Is Mr. Romney playing the same chords when he talks about how Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society”? The president has said nothing of the sort, and the accusation seems of a piece with the old Republican saw that blacks collect the greatest share of welfare dollars.

Reading Rosenthal induces cognitive vertigo. He says above that Romney criticizes entitlements and insists that this is beyond any doubt a racist remark because Republicans associate entitlements with blacks, and since Romney doesn't want an entitlement society, he obviously doesn't like blacks, even though it's not true that entitlements only go to blacks, but Romney probably thinks they do, so there's proof that he's a racist. QED.

Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 was a triumph of American democracy and tolerance. He overcame incredible odds to become the first president of mixed race, the first brown-skinned president. It’s pathetic that some Republicans are choosing to toss that milestone into the garbage in their blind drive to destroy Mr. Obama’s presidency.

What's pathetic is the logical deficiencies in Mr. Rosenthal's thinking. It seems that he cannot imagine that people would really object to Mr. Obama's desire to spend this nation into bankruptcy and to crush us with taxes. For him such objections are inconceivable. They're a smokescreen hiding more nefarious motives. Mr. Obama's opponents don't really see him as a threat to the well-being of the nation nor do they care about the national debt, the unemployment numbers, the growing size of government and the erosion of freedom. What they really care about, Rosenthal assures us, is that the president's skin is brown.

Mr. Rosenthal is still living in the twentieth century, but let's turn this around. It seems evident that it's people like him who don't care about the debt, unemployment, bloated government and freedom. If they did care about these things, why on earth would they support Mr. Obama? Could it be that he's their hero just because his skin is brown?

Isn't that racist?

The New Old-Time Religion

2012-01-06T09:19:00.000-05:00

Chunkdz at Telic Thoughts provides the transcript of a podcast by the BBC reporter Michael Buerk who was covering the Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa. I think he sums up pretty well what a lot of people think about Anthropogenic (man-caused) Global Warming (AGW). Here's what he said:

The latest so-called Climate Summit, that’s been taking place in Durban, hasn’t made many waves. It could be because global warming seems less daunting if you can no longer afford heating bills. It could also be that we’re getting fed up with the bogus certainties and quasi-religious tone of the great climate change non-debate.

Now, I don’t know for certain that man’s activities are causing the planet to heat up. Nobody does. We simply cannot construct a theoretical model that can cope with all the variables.

For what it’s worth, I think anthropogenic warming is taking place, and, anyway, it would be a good thing to stop chucking so much bad stuff into the atmosphere.

What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.

You’re not necessarily a crank to point out that global temperatures change a great deal anyway. A thousand years ago we had a Mediterranean climate in this country; 200 years ago we were skating every winter on the Thames.

And actually there has been no significant rise in global temperatures for more than a decade now.

We hear a lot about how the Arctic is shrinking, but scarcely anything about how the Antarctic is spreading, and the South Pole is getting colder.

Droughts aren’t increasing. There are fewer of them, and less severe, than a hundred years ago. The number of hurricanes hasn’t changed, the number of cyclones and typhoons has actually fallen over the last 30 years.

And so on.

There may be answers, I think there probably are – to all these quibbles – I would like to hear them.

I don’t want the media to make up my mind up for me.

I don’t need to be told things by officialdom in all its forms, that are not true, or not the whole truth, for my own good.

I resent the implication that the exercise of my reason is “inappropriate”, an act of generational selfishness, a heresy.

I want a genuine debate about the assumptions behind the more apocalyptic forecasts.

As recently as 2005, for instance, the UN said there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year.

OK – so where are they?

I would like to hear a clash of informed opinion about what would actually be better if it got warmer as well as worse.

Where do you see reported the extraordinary greening of the Sahel, and shrinking of the Sahara that’s been going on for 30 years now – the regeneration of vegetation across a huge, formerly arid swathe of dirt poor Africa. More warming means more rainfall. More CO2 means plants grow bigger, stronger, faster.

I would like a real argument over climate change policy, if only to rid myself of the nagging feeling that sometimes it’s a really good excuse for banging up taxes and public-sector job creation.

It’s not happening. It’s a secular issue but skepticism is heresy.

They talk the language of science, but it is really a post-God religion that rejects relativist materialism. Its imperative is moral.

It looks to a society where some choices are obviously, and universally held to be, better than others. A life where having what we want is not a right and nature puts constraints on the free play of desires.

To reinvent, in short, a life where there is good and bad, right and wrong.

As with all religions, whether the underlying narrative is true, has become beside the point.”

No matter how hard people try to rid their lives of religious faith it keeps coming back in forms they don't even recognize.

Inflaton Fields, Multiverses, and Fine-Tuning

2012-01-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

In the video below physicist Bruce Gordon gives a very informative 25 minute presentation on cosmic fine-tuning, inflation and the multiverse. Dr. Gordon emphasizes that the latter two theories raise more problems than they solve. It's a very helpful video despite the film quality, despite the fact that Gordon isn't an electrifying speaker, and despite the irritatingly low threshhold that humor must attain to trigger the laughter of one member of the audience.

Watch it to the end, especially if cosmology is something that interests you.

The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon from Philip Cunningham on Vimeo.

The Logical Conclusions of Atheism

2012-01-05T19:31:00.000-05:00

Alex Rosenberg is a philosopher of science at Duke who has written a book in which he calls upon his fellow metaphysical naturalists (i.e. atheists) to face squarely the implications of their worldview. The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, in a somewhat choleric critique, summarizes those implications as Rosenberg presents them in his book. Here's Wiesltier:

Is there a god? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Why am I here? Just dumb luck. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding? Is there free will? Not a chance! What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes. What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it. Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.”

I take this cutting-edge wisdom from the worst book of the year, a shallow and supercilious thing called The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science at Duke University. The book is a catechism for people who believe they have emancipated themselves from catechisms. The faith that it dogmatically expounds is scientism. It is a fine example of how the religion of science can turn an intelligent man into a fool.

Rosenberg is an explicit exponent of a view called scientism, the view that science provides us with the only methodology for answering any questions that matter. According to scientism if a question can't be answered by the scientific method then it can't be answered at all. Indeed, there are no facts which are not scientific facts. Wieseltier elaborates:

Rosenberg arrives with “the correct answers to most of the persistent questions,” and “given what we know from the sciences, the answers are all pretty obvious.” (I have cited most of them above.) This is because “there is only one way to acquire knowledge, and science’s way is it.”

And: “Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality.” All that remains is to choose the wine.

Wieseltier concludes with this summation:

This shabby book is riddled with other notions that typify our time. Rosenberg maintains that atheism entails materialism, as if the integrity of the non-material realms of life can be secured only by the existence of a deity. Reason does not move him, no doubt because of the threat it poses to the physicalist tyranny ....

Rosenberg is untroubled by such complications. He is untroubled by everything under the sun. The man’s peace of mind is indecent. “We know the truth,” he declares sacerdotally in his preface. “Some of the tone of much that follows may sound a little smug. I fear I have to plead guilty to this charge ...” Once upon a time science was the enemy of smugness.

Actually, Wieseltier's umbrage precludes him from giving Rosenberg the credit he deserves. In my view he's being completely consistent. If atheism is true then materialism is more likely than not. Wieseltier thinks that one can be an atheist and still rationally believe in the trustworthiness of reason, a meaning to life and the cosmos, the objectivity of moral duties, but it's hard to see how such beliefs could be warranted given atheism. It would be nice if Wieseltier would give us an argument for his rather than simply venting his spleen at Rosenberg who is simply "drawing the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position" to quote Sartre.

Anyone who doesn't like what Rosenberg is saying can choose to reject Rosenberg's logic or reject his atheism. To embrace atheism while rejecting Rosenberg's logic is, in my opinion, to abandon reason and make an irrational leap of faith. It's to choose to live life as one wishes it to be and not as it is.

At any rate, for anyone who might be interested, I critiqued Rosenberg's views in a series of posts about a year and a half ago. Part I in the series is here. Go here for the second installment and here for the conclusion.

Is Darwinism a Cult?

2012-01-04T07:59:00.000-05:00

Philosopher of science Cornelius Hunter thinks so:

One day while walking to the life science library I was stopped by a cultist who wanted me to join. Having spoken with cultists before, I was able to explain his problems to him. The cult’s beliefs entailed several obvious contradictions, its leaders had well-documented ulterior motives, and so forth. But the fellow was undeterred. He was certain that his cult held the truth, in spite of the obvious problems.

Later I thought about some of the things he said. They revealed even more problems and I wished I had pointed them out. A few weeks later I saw him again and so I engaged him in conversation. Not only were there the problems I pointed out the first time we had spoken, but now I added several more. But again, the fellow was undeterred.

People have a remarkable capacity to hold bizarre beliefs. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not referring to beliefs that are not provable or don’t adhere to some logical formula. I’m referring to beliefs that are downright false. The cultist I spoke with was sure, and it is this unjustified certainty that revealed the problem, not the beliefs themselves. Who knows, maybe his cult did hold the truth, but his reasons provided little confidence. Between his assurance and his facts there was a wide chasm.

It is the same with evolution.

Hunter goes on to explain why he says this. I don't know that Darwinians comprise a cult, but they sure do seem dogmatic given the quality of their arguments.

It should be noted that a Darwinian is one who believes that the process of evolution is a completely physical, natural process requiring no intelligent agency at any point. Not all evolutionists are Darwinians but all Darwinians are evolutionists. Hunter doesn't make this distinction clear in his post, but rather tacitly conflates evolution, which could be an intelligently guided process, with Darwinian evolution which is not.

Movies in 2011

2012-01-04T07:40:00.000-05:00

I didn't get to watch as many movies in 2011 as I might have liked but many of those I did see were very good and/or quite enjoyable. Here's the list. Four stars indicates excellent, three is good, two is not really worth watching, and one is avoid at all costs. Thankfully, there are no ones:

The Tree of Life *** A film about the meaning of life, I think.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days **** The gripping story of a young woman whose faith and courage in resisting the evil of Nazi Germany made her a national heroine.

The Rite *** Interesting depiction of possession and exorcism in the Catholic Church and how a faltering young priest has his faith restored by his experience with it.

Mugabe and the White African *** A documentary of one family's brave fight to save their farm from Mugabe's expropriation of land from white landowners in Zimbabwe.

True Grit *** A good remake of the classic John Wayne story of a young girl's courage and determination to gain justice for her father's murder. Much better acting than in the original.

Harry Brown ** A Death Wish-style movie of a retiree's attempt to avenge his friend's murder by street thugs.

About Schmidt *** A retired insurance salesman seeks to find meaning in a life filled with absurdity. Darkly funny but tragically sad.

The King's Speech **** Excellent telling of the battle waged by King George VI to overcome a speech impediment.

Waiting for Superman **** A documentary about the difficulty young urban kids have trying to escape deteriorating public schools and get a safe, quality education in private and charter schools. A must-see for every parent and educator.

Secretariat *** The moving story of the legendary racehorse.

Inception *** Mind-bending sci-fi tale that raises fascinating questions about the distinction between subjective and objective reality.

Unthinkable *** A must-see film for anyone trying to decide, or has decided, his or her position on the use of torture.

Avatar *** The story is diminished for me by its obeisance to the tired trope of evil Americans killing off peaceful, bucolic indigenous peoples and despoiling the natural beauty of the world.

Interview with Alvin Plantinga

2012-01-03T18:19:00.000-05:00

Last month we noted a discussion in the New York Times of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies. In this book Plantinga addresses the question of the nature of the alleged incompability between science and theism and, as one would expect from the man who is arguably the most consequential philosopher of the last half century, offers many excellent insights into the matter.

Paul Pardi did a very good interview with Plantinga recently in which the philosopher talks, inter alia, about the themes of the book. Here's Pardi's introduction:

Dr. Alvin Plantinga is one of the foremost living philosophers. He has been writing and lecturing on almost all branches of philosophy for all of his long career and has had a tremendous amount of influence on how we think about metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and faith. His influence on the philosophy of religion has been so extensive that Christianity Today recently called him “the greatest philosopher of the last century” and “the most important philosopher of any stripe.”

Dr. Plantinga taught at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan and spent most of his long career at Notre Dame University. His most important work has been the Warrant series culminating with Warranted Christian Belief in which he argues that a person can be fully justified in believing in God’s existence even if that belief is not grounded on evidence as it’s typically understood.

Pardi himself has an interesting story to tell which you can read here.

Two Absolutes

2012-01-03T16:12:00.000-05:00

Techne at Telic Thoughts wonders whether a moral relativist could ever be trusted. Along the way he makes a helpful distinction about moral absolutes:

There are at least two ways to be a moral absolutist. The first way is to argue that if action X is absolutely and intrinsically morally wrong then action X is ALWAYS absolutely and intrinsically morally wrong. Call it “universal moral absolutism”. The second way is argue that if it is wrong for one person to commit act X in situation Z, then it is wrong for any person to commit act X in the same situation Z. The second view thus allows for a situation where action X in situation Z is wrong but is not absolutely and intrinsically wrong at different moments. Call it “situational moral absolutism”.

In other words, torture, for example, might be situationally wrong but not intrinsically wrong. It may be absolutely wrong to torture for pleasure or for punishment, but not wrong to torture in order to save the lives of thousands of people who will be blown up in a terror attack unless the perpetrator in custody is compelled to divulge what he knows about the impending attack.

Whether you agree or disagree with this example, the distinction is nevertheless helpful. It may be absolutely wrong to lie to cover up one's own malfeasance but not wrong to lie to the Nazis who are searching for the Jews you are hiding in your attic.

On the other hand, there are acts which certainly seem to be universally wrong, beating a child with one's fists, for example, or sexually abusing a child. No plausible situation could ever provide justification for such things.

My own inclination, however, is to say that there are only two universal moral absolutes: Love others and do justice. The reason beating a child is universally wrong is that there are no circumstances under which it could be loving or just. Lying to the Nazis in the circumstance we describe above, on the other hand, would be both loving and just and, in fact, telling them the truth about the Jews hiding in your attic would be neither just nor loving and would thus be the morally wrong thing to do.

What do you think?

Last Gasps

2012-01-03T15:07:00.000-05:00

Newsweek features an article that claims, based pretty much on the testimony of one young al Qaeda fighter, that his organization is all but dead. I take the report of a single witness with a heavy dose of salt, but it's an interesting story nonetheless. Here's the lede:

Deep among North Waziristan’s mountains, far from any village, Hafiz Hanif finally tracked down the remnants of his old al Qaeda cell last summer. The 17-year-old Afghan had wondered why he hadn’t heard from his former comrades in arms. They didn’t even answer his text messages in May, after the death of the man they all called simply the Sheik: Osama bin Laden.

Now Hanif saw why. Only four of the cell’s 15 fighters were left, huddled in a two-room mud-brick house, with little or no money or food. Except for their familiar but haggard faces, they looked nothing like the al Qaeda he once trained with and fought beside. They welcomed him warmly but didn’t encourage him to stay. They said the cell’s commander, a Kuwaiti named Sheik Attiya Ayatullah, had gone into hiding. The others had either run off or died. “Why should we call you back just to get killed in a drone attack?” Hanif’s friends explained.

Is it still too soon to write al Qaeda’s obituary? Over the past two years, the group’s ranks have been ravaged by America’s unmanned-aerial-vehicle attacks and by a steady exodus of demoralized jihadis fleeing Pakistan’s tribal areas.

When Newsweek interviewed Hanif (his nom de guerre) for our Sept. 13, 2010, cover story, “Inside Al Qaeda,” he estimated that the group had roughly 130 Arabs in Waziristan, along with dozens more Chechens, Turks, Tajiks, even recruits from Western Europe. But little more than a year later, he estimates there are no more than 40 to 60 al Qaeda operatives of any nationality on either side of the border. “Al Qaeda was once full of great jihadis, but no one is active and planning opera-tions anymore,” he complains. “Those who remain are just trying to survive.”

The son of longtime Afghan war refugees living in Pakistan, Hanif had just turned 15 when (against his parents’ strenuous objections) he ran away to join the war against the U.S. forces in his home country. That was in early 2009, and for the next year and more, the bright but impressionable boy lived among al Qaeda fighters in the isolated wilds of North Waziristan.

His parents finally persuaded him to return home in June 2010, but he headed out again this past June in hope of reconnecting with his old unit. He was shocked by what he found. “The flower is wilting,” he told a Newsweek correspondent who met with him in December in a Taliban safe house near the Afghan town of Khost. “I think the once-glorious chapter of al Qaeda is being closed.”

If this last statement is true it's not just al Qaeda which is suffering its last gasps but so is the credibility of those who have, over the last nine or ten years, repeatedly admonished us that the policy of killing terrorists was counterproductive because it only created more of them. Their claim seemed counterintuitive then and it seems manifestly foolish now.

The Newsweek story doesn't mention any of these folks, but someone ought to do a Google search and post their names for future reference. It's good to know whose opinion is worth heeding and whose isn't.

Books in 2011

2012-01-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

It's been customary at the end of each year to mention the books I managed to complete in the year just past. Several of them were books I read for the second time, most of them are worth reading a second time, and some, perhaps, were not worth reading the first time.

Naturalism (Goetz and Taliaferro): A good critique of metaphysical naturalism, the view that the natural world is all there is. There is no God or anything like God.

The Amish Way (Donald Kraybill et al.): A wonderful look at Amish life and belief.

Saving Leonardo (Nancy Pearcey): Pearcey takes the reader on a walk through the history of Western culture and how naturalism has changed it for the worse.

The Little Prince (Antoine Saint de Exupery): The classic children's allegory written for adults.

What Went Wrong (Bernard Lewis): Islam scholar Lewis writes about why Islam lost the glory it achieved in the Middle Ages.

Crisis in Islam (Bernard Lewis): Lewis talks about the struggle in Islam between the hard-core fundamentalists and the more moderate faction that wants to liberalize Islam.

The Existence of God (Richard Swinburne): Swinburne's is one of the most often cited arguments for the existence of God in contemporary philosophy of religion.

The Good Life (Chuck Colson): By means of fascinating vignettes Colson illustrates the relative emptiness of contemporary secular life.

The Unlikely Disciple (Kevin Roose): An amusing account of a young atheist (Roose) who enrolls at Liberty University to research a book about Christian fundamentalism. He's surprised by what he finds.

Information and the Nature of Reality (Paul Davies): One of the top science writers discusses how the world revealed by science is more a world of information than of matter.

Middlemarch (George Eliot): Famous novel of gentry life in mid-19th century England.

The Goldilocks Enigma (Paul Davies): Cosmologist Paul Davis writes about the puzzle posed to science by the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the different solutions to the puzzle that have been proffered by scientists and philosophers.

For the Glory of God (Rodney Stark): An excellent history of the impact of Christianity on pre-Enlightenment Europe. Along the way Stark debunks a lot of commonly held myths.

The iY Generation (Tim Elmore): Elmore discuss how technology makes the current generation of young people different.

Atheist Delusions (David B. Hart): A well-crafted response to the New Atheists, specifically Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

Generous Justice (Tim Keller): Keller is a Manhattan pastor who writes in this book of the church's call to do justice in our communities and the world.

Philosophical Investigations (Louis Pojman): An introductory textbook in philosophy by one of the most prolific writers of philosophy books.

Silenced (Marshall and Shea): A deeply disturbing and important account of the tyranny and crimes committed by Muslim majorities against religious minorities throughout the Muslim world.

Fed Up (Rick Perry): Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry lays out his political views.

Fathers and Sons (Turgenev): !9th century Russian novel about two young men and their families.

Killing Lincoln (O'Reilly and Dugard): A captivating account of the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It's a page turner.

Throw Them All Out (Peter Schweizer): Schweizer explains how politicians use their office and power to enrich themselves and their friends. The title is apt.

You Lost Me (David Kinnaman): Kinnaman is president of the Barna Group which researches issues in contemporary religion. He records here the stories of young people who have grown up in the church and subsequently left it.

More Prison, Less Crime

2012-01-02T12:55:00.000-05:00

Sociologist Charles Murray believes that the drop in violent crime over the last two decades (see graph) is due primarily to the fact that we are now incarcerating more criminals than we did in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, a practice he urges us to continue:

[L]et me give a quick illustration why I think simple incapacitation—we’ve locked up a huge percentage of the really nasty guys—plus a substantial deterrent effect is a plausible explanation for why violent crime dropped at all.

Murray attributes the drop in property crimes to factors other than incarceration - primarily what he calls "target hardening."

It’s impossible to steal most new cars because there is no way to get the engine started without the key. Hot-wiring is futile. Try to burgle a home in a neighborhood where homes have much worth stealing, and you’d better be prepared to get in and out before the high-tech security system brings the cops. If you’re in a commercial area, you’ve got omnipresent surveillance cameras to worry about along with the security systems.

Violent crime is no more difficult to commit today than it's ever been so other explanations for its decline must be in play. Murray offers a graph to illustrate the trends:

The graph shows the violent crime rate per 100,000 population and the number of prisoners per 1,000 violent offenses from 1960–2010. Murray explains:

Here’s how I interpret those shapes: When crime gets safer, crime goes up very quickly as a response. In the late 1950s, the “prison only makes people into smarter criminals” school became dominant in criminal justice circles. By the early 1960s, imprisonment rates were plummeting. For that matter, even the raw number of prisoners fell. One consequence was that every cohort of young people saw acquaintances start to get probation for offenses that would have sent them to prison or reform school in the 1950s.

Pushing that toothpaste back into the tube takes a lot longer. Kids who are amazed when a friend gets away with a serious crime aren’t amazed when, say, 19 percent of their friends arrested for a serious crime are incarcerated instead of 15 percent. Understandably, crime continued to rise after imprisonment rates started to rise after 1974. Even in 1990, after 15 years of rising imprisonment rates, the risk of going to prison if you committed a violent crime was still far lower than it had been in 1960.

Cumulatively, however, two things happen. First, more and more of the “dirty 7 percent” of offenders who commit about 50 percent of all crime end up in prison. They cannot commit crimes, except against other criminals. Second, the cumulative impact of much higher imprisonment rates does make an impression—the idea that crime doesn’t pay is no longer completely a joke. For violent crime, the tipping point occurred in 1992, when imprisonment rates were heading straight up. By the time that the imprisonment rate for violent crime reached its 1960 level in 1998, the downward trendline was well established.

So how much of the reduction in violent crime was produced by increased incarceration? Here is my simple-minded thought: Suppose we had maintained imprisonment for violent crime at the rate that applied in 1974. In that case, we would have had 276,769 state and federal prisoners in 2010 instead of the 1,518,104 we actually had. Suppose tomorrow we freed 1.2 million inmates from state and federal prisons. Do we really think violent crime would continue to drop at a somewhat slower pace?

Nevertheless, we still today hear from the left that our incarceration rate is a disgrace. Actually, the disgrace is that there are so many people who need to be incarcerated, and the reason there are is that policies urged upon us by the left for the last fifty years - policies which destroy the family and weaken religious attachments - have had a powerfully corrosive effect on our social life.

If we want incarceration rates to decline we have to reduce the disposition to commit violent crime, and if we want to reduce the criminal disposition we have to strengthen the institutions in society that dampen our more bestial impulses, and if we want to do that we have to recognize that modern liberal nostrums are the cause of so much of the damage that's been done to those institutions.

A society without strong families, strong churches, and strong schools is going to turn out a distressingly high number of criminals. Liberal policies undermine all three of those crucial bulwarks against the barbarism to which the human species inclines.

New Year's Prayer

2011-12-31T15:46:00.000-05:00

I want to wish all our readers a safe and meaningful new year. It's my prayer that wherever you live, whatever your vocation in life, whatever your political and religious convictions, 2012 proves to be a year filled with peace, satisfying work and much joy.

God bless,
Dick

Accepting Bigoted Stereotypes at DOJ

2011-12-31T11:12:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe that our Justice Department, oblivious, or so it claims, to the Fast and Furious debacle which violated both U.S. and Mexican law, is now so on top of things that it espies a violation of the 1965 Civil Rights law in South Carolina.

South Carolina has passed a bill that would require photo ID at the voting booth, but this, Attorney General Holder argues, works a disproportionate hardship on black voters.

The Wall Street Journal provides the details:

In a letter to South Carolina's government, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez called the state law—which would require voters to present one of five forms of photo ID at the polls—a violation of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Overall, he noted, 8.4% of the state's registered white voters lack photo ID, compared to 10% of nonwhite voters.

This is the yawning chasm the Justice Department is now using to justify the unprecedented federal intrusion into state election law, and the first denial of a "pre-clearance" Voting Rights request since 1994.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was created to combat the systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, especially in Southern states with a history of discrimination. But the Justice position is a lead zeppelin, contradicting both the Supreme Court and the Department's own precedent. In 2005, Justice approved a Georgia law with the same provisions and protections of the one Mr. Holder nixed for South Carolina. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that an Indiana law requiring photo ID did not present an undue burden on voters.

Civil-rights groups claim this Justice offensive is needed to counteract a voting environment in which little has changed since Jim Crow. But South Carolina's law, like Indiana's and Georgia's, explicitly addresses potential disenfranchisement by offering state-issued IDs free of charge. When civil-rights groups fretted about the ability of minority voters to get to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up a free state-issued ID card, Governor Haley created an 800 number to offer free rides to anyone who couldn't afford the transportation. About 30 people called.

In October, the South Carolina Department of Elections reported that some 240,000 state voters lacked ID cards. The DMV now says more than 200,000 of those had allowed their IDs to expire, lived in other states or were dead.

The Voting Rights Act was once needed to counteract the gap between black and white voter registration. By 2009 the gap had narrowed to a few percentage points in some covered states while blacks out-registered whites in others. Yet Justice retains a federal veto on election-law changes no matter how innocuous or racially neutral. Section 5 has become a vehicle not to pursue equal access to the polls but to play the grossest kind of racial politics.

It's almost unfathomable that anyone involved enough in our social life to be a responsible voter would not already have a photo ID.

Mr. Holder evidently fails to see how insulting his stance is to blacks. Playing into the worst racial stereotypes, he's tacitly insisting that blacks are either too stupid to know how to get an ID or too lazy to get one.

What other plausible reason could he have for arguing that photo ID requirements are unfair to African Americans other than that he thinks those stereotypes are accurate?

How Liberalism Hurts the Poor

2011-12-31T08:06:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that a compelling case can be made for the proposition that modern liberalism, under the guise of social justice and compassion for the poor, has actually done a great deal more to exacerbate the condition of the poor in this country than to help them. Since at least the 1960s liberal journalists, academics, politicians, and judges have promoted and imposed policies which have made life much harder for the poor, and to the rest of us, than it might otherwise have been.

Perhaps it doesn't overstate the case to say that in the last 50 years liberal sexual mores have devastated families, liberal educational theory has diminished learning, liberal penal theory resulted in soaring crime rates, liberal environmentalism has cost us innumerable jobs, liberal solutions to poverty have created a permanent underclass, and liberal tax and spend economic theory has put us in the economic morass we find ourselves in today. All of this has created more hardship for the poor, not less.

Yesterday's New York Times brings word of yet another way in which liberal attempts to establish social justice are going to hurt the poor. Laurie Goodstein reports that the state of Illinois has decided to cut off funding to Catholic Charities affiliates in the state because the Charities refuse to consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care or adoptive parents for the poor and neglected children to whom they minister. The loss of funding will make it impossible for these charitable organizations to continue:

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

This comes on the heels of similar decisions in Washington, D.C. and Massachusetts. In Washington the Department of HHS cut funding to a Catholic charity that worked with girls victimized by sex-trafficking because the charity would not counsel the girls to get abortions.

Moreover, Obamacare will require that Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and charity groups cover contraception in their employees’ health plans on pain of having their funding cut. Appeals of this ruling have gone unanswered by the administration.

For the nation’s Catholic bishops, the Illinois requirement is a prime example of what they see as an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom while expanding the rights of gay people. The idea that religious Americans are the victims of government-backed persecution is now a frequent theme not just for Catholic bishops, but also for Republican presidential candidates and conservative evangelicals.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

The Illinois experience indicates that the bishops face formidable opponents who also claim to have justice and the Constitution on their side. They include not only gay rights advocates, but also many religious believers and churches that support gay equality (some Catholic legislators among them). They frame the issue as a matter of civil rights, saying that Catholic Charities was using taxpayer money to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most extensive social service networks, serving more than 10 million poor adults and children of many faiths across the country. It is made up of local affiliates that answer to local bishops and dioceses, but much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said.

By forcing the church to choose between keeping their doors open to the poor and facilitating conduct they believe to be harmful to children, the state has managed to once again give the poor the back of its hand so that it can uphold its commitment to a liberal vision of a just society.

The Bible reminds us repeatedly of our primary obligation to care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. For many liberals, however, that obligation is secondary to the more important obligation to affirm the rights of gay couples to raise children.

Parenthetically, it'll be interesting to see how long it'll be before this same reasoning is applied to the tax-exempt status conferred upon churches. The logic of the Illinois decision seems to dictate that if a church takes a stand against same-sex marriage or abortion it should forfeit its tax exemption. This will force many churches to curtail programs that bring relief to the poor and in numerous other ways benefit their communities.

Do liberals want to make the case that churches which uphold traditional moral values should be forced to pay property taxes like everyone else and let the poor be damned? I don't see how, at least in states like Illinois where they control the legislature, they cannot.

Peregrines, Pigeons, and Mitt

2011-12-30T10:17:00.000-05:00

While perusing John Hinderaker's reasons for endorsing Mitt Romney at Powerline I came across this BBC video on Peregrine falcons.

The Peregrine was close to being extirpated in North America - ostensibly by the softening of egg shells by DDT - in the 1960s but has since made a steady comeback. Their preferred habitat, before the advent of modern skyscrapers, was rocky ledges on steep cliffs. Today they can also be found nesting on ledges of tall buildings and bridges in almost every city of the country.

Since adopting urban life they've taken to feeding on the abundant supply of city pigeons, and that's what this video, though filmed in a rural setting, is about:

By the way, Hinderaker's endorsement of Romney is very persuasive.

Darwinian Blind Faith

2011-12-30T08:09:00.000-05:00

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views calls our attention to an article in Science Daily which contains an odd, probably unintentional, admission.

The article is about some well-preserved pre-cambrian microfossils found in China that were originally thought to be of multicellular organisms (metazoans), but which, on further analysis, turned out to be of single-celled creatures like amoeba.

This is disappointing to evolutionists who've not been able to explain how all the major phyla came to appear with relative suddenness in the Cambrian rocks some 500 million years ago. This phenomenon has been called the "Cambrian explosion" because of the sudden appearance of the major taxa which are believed to have been evolving for millions of years before their appearance in the Cambrian rocks but for which no metazoan precursors have been found.

Science Daily summarizes the problem:

All life evolved from a single-celled universal common ancestor, and at various times in Earth history, single-celled organisms threw their lot in with each other to become larger and multicellular, resulting, for instance, in the riotous diversity of animals. However, fossil evidence of these major evolutionary transitions is extremely rare.

What's peculiar about this is that it's an acknowledgement that scientists hold a significant belief despite the lack of supporting empirical evidence. There appears to be little or no empirical warrant for believing that single-celled organisms evolved into multi-cellular organisms, yet the Science Daily writer asserts that they did as though it were a certainty.

Belief despite the lack of proof is faith. There's nothing wrong with faith, even in science, even though some scientists might deny this. However, belief despite the lack of evidence is blind faith, a trait often derided by those who think that only religious extremists manifest it. Scientists regard blind faith as an epistemological vice, a defect that should never be allowed to find its way into the laboratory.

Apparently, though, not a few scientists are pretty much like the religious people they anathematize, embracing a belief for which there is a paucity of evidence simply because they want that belief to be true.

Atheism and Consciousness

2011-12-30T07:40:00.000-05:00

Atheist biologist Massimo Pigliucci is puzzled that so many of his fellow atheists deny the existence of consciousness. Here are a couple of excerpts:

For some time I have been noticing the emergence of a strange trinity of beliefs among my fellow skeptics and freethinkers: an increasing number of them, it seems, don’t believe that they can make decisions (the free will debate), don’t believe that they have moral responsibility (because they don’t have free will, or because morality is relative — take your pick), and they don’t even believe that they exist as conscious beings because, you know, consciousness is an illusion.

The oft-heard claim that consciousness is an illusion is an extraordinary one, as it relegates to an entirely epiphenomenal status what is arguably the most distinctive characteristic of human beings, the very thing that seems to shape and give meaning to our lives, and presumably one of the major outcome of millions of years of evolution pushing for a larger brain equipped with powerful frontal lobes capable to carry out reasoning and deliberation.

One more thing strikes me as strange from the point of view of the “consciousness is an illusion” school of thought. Its supporters have no account of why this illusion would evolve. If we take seriously the commonsensical idea that consciousness aids deliberative reasoning, then we see that it has a (important) biological function. But if it is just an illusion, what’s it for? .... [I]f a large amount of metabolic energy used up by the brain goes into maintaining the illusion of consciousness surely one wants an answer to the question of why did natural selection bring this situation about or ... why does it persist in the face of what should be strong selection against it.

So if consciousness is an illusion we have no idea why it would have evolved, but if consciousness is real, we have no idea how it would have evolved. Perhaps the problem isn't consciousness, perhaps it's atheism.

Israel v. Iran

2011-12-29T14:21:00.000-05:00

Eli Lake writes an interesting piece at the Daily Beast describing Israeli preparations for an attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Here's an excerpt:

For much of the last decade, as Iran methodically built its nuclear program, Israel has been assembling a multibillion-dollar array of high-tech weapons that would allow it to jam, blind, and deafen Tehran's defenses in the case of a pre-emptive aerial strike.

A U.S. intelligence assessment this summer, described to The Daily Beast by current and former U.S. intelligence officials, concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, Internet, cellphone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

For example, Israel has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to “sleep,” effectively stopping transmissions, officials confirmed. The Israelis also have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.

In a 2007 attack on a suspected nuclear site at al-Kibar, the Syrian military got a taste of this warfare when Israeli planes “spoofed” the country’s air-defense radars, at first making it appear that no jets were in the sky and then in an instant making the radar believe the sky was filled with hundreds of planes.

Israel also likely would exploit a vulnerability that U.S. officials detected two years ago in Iran's big-city electric grids, which are not “air-gapped”—meaning they are connected to the Internet and therefore vulnerable to a Stuxnet-style cyberattack—officials say.

A highly secretive research lab attached to the U.S. joint staff and combatant commands, known as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), discovered the weakness in Iran’s electrical grid in 2009, according to one retired senior military intelligence officer. This source also said the Israelis have the capability to bring a denial-of-service attack to nodes of Iran’s command and control system that rely on the Internet.

Tony Decarbo, the executive officer for JWAC, declined comment for this story. The likely delivery method for the electronic elements of this attack would be an unmanned aerial vehicle the size of a jumbo jet. An earlier version of the bird was called the Heron, the latest version is known as the Eitan. According to the Israeli press, the Eitan can fly for 20 straight hours and carry a payload of one ton. Another version of the drone, however, can fly up to 45 straight hours, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

Lake has more at the link. Recent news reports have had the Israelis and the U.S. engaged in talks to coordinate efforts in the event that Iran crosses any of several "red lines" that will trigger an attack. Iran, for its part seems determined to see just how much resolve there is in the White House.

It's a dangerous game, but Iran simply cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear device. It would set off an arms race in the Middle East that would almost certainly result in a proliferation of such devices and also make it extremely likely that one or more will be used, if not by a state entity then certainly by a group like Hezbollah, al Qaeda, or Hamas, any of which will doubtless find someone willing to supply them with a weapon.

Homeschooling and Liberals

2011-12-29T08:19:00.000-05:00

David Mills grew up a child of the sixties and although he's no longer quite so liberal many of his friends and acquaintances are, and something about them puzzles him.

In his young adulthood to be countercultural was a badge of honor. To reject the establishment, uniformity, regimentation, and the homogenization of culture was an act of courageous resistance. To walk to the beat of a different drummer was authentic. To flout authority, particularly government authority, was liberating.

That was then. Now many of his leftist friends seem to have unwittingly abandoned those formerly-held convictions. Mills is made especially aware of this by their reaction when he informs them that he and his wife are home-schooling their two youngest children. He writes about his experience in a column at First Things.

Here's Mills:

Thus I was surprised some years later to find the kind of people with whom I’d grown up—the leftists, the intellectuals, the activists, the public-spirited—suddenly alarmed at the growth of homeschooling. (And I first experienced this surprise when we still expected to send our children to the public schools.)

The critics treated it as a threat to the social order and a source of sectarian divisions. Some expressed concern that homeschooled children would find themselves unable to function in a pluralistic society. Many also argued that they would get an inferior education, but that always seemed to be a secondary concern, and grimly amusing coming from advocates of the near-monopoly of a public school system whose failures were beginning to be lamented even by liberal observers.

The critics found themselves so alarmed, of course, because now politically, culturally, and religiously conservative parents were educating their children at home and rejecting the influence of a system in which the critics—so many of them former countercultural types themselves—were heavily invested, and from which, as a Marxist would note, so many of them drew their salaries.

The homeschoolers were no longer a few hippies and leftists, whose numbers were always going to be small and their influence marginal, and who were reliably leftist anyway. Now the homeschoolers were a growing number of average parents, whose countercultural commitments were of the conservative and not the leftist sort, whose numbers might well increase and their influence grow stronger, particularly if the establishment lost its control over the education of children, which happened to be its primary way of reducing parental influence in, to borrow a famous phrase from my youth, the battle for their hearts and minds.

People who have no obvious stake in the matter, like most of the people who have expressed dismay at my wife and my decision to homeschool our children, tend to side with the establishment against the parents. They’ve somehow absorbed the key elements of the ideology, like the concern for “socialization,” which is either a faux concern for the children’s well-being or a real concern for their being educated outside of and probably against the ideas public schools (with exceptions, of course) inculcate and impose.

Mills has more to say about this strange reaction of liberals to the idea of homeschooling in his essay. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much, but I have to say that in the last seven years I have had dozens of home-schooled students in my classes. Many of them were still high school-aged kids taking college courses, and almost all of them were among the best students in the class. They were every bit as sociable, intelligent, and mature - often moreso - as their peers who had attended public schools. What's more, they often brought to class a level of background knowledge that their publicly educated peers lacked.

The idea that homeschooling is hurting kids is true only if by the word "hurting" one means that these students aren't being indoctrinated in the liberal orthodoxies and moral anomie that prevail in many of our public schools. It's ironic, though perhaps understandable, that liberals don't like, and even oppose, giving students a way to avoid those "benefits."

The Philosopher and the Tyrant

2011-12-28T12:55:00.003-05:00

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a writer for New York Magazine, does a piece on the role played by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy in persuading the French to come to the aid of the Libyan rebels last spring.

The essay is amusing in its portrayal of Levy's ego and surprising in its revelation of the influence Levy had with President Sarkozy. Here's a sample quote from the article:

Wars are no longer supposed to begin like this. They are exercises in national interest and self-defense, not personal morality and valor. They are the product of military plans, not proddings from celebrity philosophers. And yet Libya — so far the most aggressive humanitarian intervention of the 21st century — depended not on any broad public movement nor any urgent security threat.

There was instead a chain of private conversations: Hillary Clinton moving Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy moving Dmitri Medvedev, and at the chain’s inception this romantic propagandist, Bernard-Henri Lévy. “I think this war was probably launched by two statesmen,” Lévy told me. “Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy. More modestly, me.”

Levy is a well-known celebrity in France, something of a Christopher Hitchens character, a public intellectual. Because of his personal flamboyance and sometimes quixotic causes, however, he's often the butt of ridicule in the media. The mockery leaves him unfazed:

“They have no effect on my narcissism,” Lévy wrote in 2008 of his critics. “In the face of assaults, my ego is fireproof, shatterproof.”

His high self-esteem is apparently matched by his naivete. Being Jewish he was convinced that once the world's Muslims saw what had been done by a Jew on behalf of fellow Muslims in Libya it would produce a rapprochement between the two groups. Wells writes:

He was convinced, he says, that a NATO campaign could help bring Muslims and Jews together—a project he calls a “battle of my life,” and one in which he spotted a role for himself. On the front lines, he told the rebels and jihadists of his religion, believing history might move because a Jewish writer “has given a hand and helped a Muslim country.” Since the sixties, he says, “I have dreamed of this reconciliation of the sons of Abraham. I will have achieved my duty of being a man, if I contribute.”

Anyway, the article is a very good read, offering interesting insights into the life of an interesting man. He reminds me a bit of the late congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson, who, with only a couple of CIA agents, was able to equip the Afghanistan Mujahideen to defeat the Soviet Union back in the 1970s. A movie (Charlie Wilson's War starring Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Julia Roberts) was made about Wilson's exploits in 2007.

Maybe they'll make a film about Levy as well. I think it would please him.

Got the Flu?

2011-12-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

It might be some consolation as you suffer through the headaches, colds, and other miserable symptoms to know what it is that's happening in your body when a flu virus invades.

On the other hand, when you're really sick with flu you probably couldn't care less what's happening.

Anyway, for those who manage to retain their intellectual curiosity even when laid low by the insidious influenza bug there's this informative video:

Excellence Gap

2011-12-28T07:59:00.000-05:00

Sol Stern has a piece in City Journal which highlights one of the problems with the No Child Left Behind Act and with educational thinking in general over the last twenty five years.

In a nutshell, Stern argues that we've become so concerned with educating the weakest students and bringing them up to "proficiency" that we've failed to do all we can for the elite students who will comprise the next generation of technological and scientific innovators and engineers.

Here's his lede:

If an out-of-control national debt weren’t reason enough to worry about America’s global competitiveness, here’s another. Virtually all education reformers recognize that America’s ability to remain an economic superpower depends to a significant degree on the number and quality of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians graduating from our colleges and universities — scientific innovation has generated as much as half of all U.S. economic growth over the past half-century, on some accounts. But the number of graduates in these fields has declined steadily for the past several decades.

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation concludes that “bachelor’s degrees in engineering granted to Americans peaked in 1985 and are now 23 percent below that level.” Further, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 6 percent of U.S. undergraduates currently major in engineering, compared with 12 percent in Europe and Israel and closer to 20 percent in Japan and South Korea.

In another recent study, conducted by the Conference Board of Canada, the U.S. scored near the bottom relative to major European countries, Canada, and Japan in the percentage of college graduates obtaining degrees in science, math, computer science, and engineering. It’s likely no coincidence that the World Economic Forum now ranks the U.S. fifth among industrialized countries in global competitiveness, down from first place in 2008.

As bleak as this sounds, it may not be as bad as Stern suggests. So many people go to college in the U.S. that a low percentage of engineers could still be a large number in absolute terms. Nevertheless, he's on the mark in the rest of his essay. For instance he notes this:

Making matters worse is mounting evidence that America’s best students — kids we’re counting on to become those engineers, scientists, and mathematicians — have had a drop-off in academic performance over the past decade. A recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute study finds that the country’s highest-performing students in the early grades are losing some of that advantage as they move through elementary school and into high school.

Ironically, one reason for their slipping performance is almost certainly the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, the most significant federal education-reform legislation of the past half-century....NCLB became law thanks to a rare bipartisan consensus that U.S. public schools were failing to turn out high school graduates who could flourish in a technology-based economy. Democrats and Republicans need to reunite and recognize that federal support for elite education — above all, in math and science — is essential for advancing America’s economic success.

No Child Left Behind was propelled by a moral imperative best expressed by President George W. Bush’s call to overcome the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The new law’s “civil rights” component shaped some of its unique features, including holding states and school districts accountable for their success in narrowing racial achievement gaps.

Before NCLB, the federal government had sought to achieve some degree of educational equity through the Title I compensatory funding program, which sent nearly $200 billion to the nation’s highest-poverty schools over four decades. Title I yielded meager results, however, and suffered from lack of accountability. With NCLB, the federal government took a new, interventionist approach to education reform, requiring states and school districts to meet certain goals and mandates in return for Title I funds.

The states henceforth had to conduct annual tests in reading and math for all children in grades three through eight, with the results—broken down by race, sex, and socioeconomic status—made public.

The results, though better, are still pathetic. It's a dogma among education bureaucrats that "every child can learn," and though the dogma may even in some sense be true, so much effort and resources are expended in a futile attempt to demonstrate its truth that those who manifestly can learn don't get the nurture that we could and should be giving them.

The rest of Stern's article explains how this happens and the disadvantage it's putting us at in our competition with the rest of the world. If you're an educator or have kids in school you should read it.

At some point we have to recognize that, for whatever reason, there are large numbers of students who simply don't, won't, and don't want to, benefit from the educational largesse that is showered upon them and that it's a pointless waste of resources to spend billions of dollars in a vain attempt to raise their test scores by a few meager and meaningless points.

The Destruction of the Indies

2011-12-27T13:18:00.003-05:00

Perhaps it will seem like an odd choice for Christmas season reading, but then again, maybe not. This past week I took up Bartolome de Las Casas' An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies. If you're interested in history, either of the western hemisphere or of Christianity, it's an indispensible book.

Las Casas was a Dominican priest who recorded the atrocities committed by the Spaniards during the first fifty plus years of their colonization of the West Indies and surrounding regions. That behavior, if Las Casas is to be believed - and there's no reason to think, some exaggerated numbers aside, that he shouldn't be - is perhaps the most horrific account of man's inhumanity to man ever recorded in the entire course of human history. It rivals the Romans in cruelty and exceeds them in scope. It also exceeds the Nazi horror in sanguinary carnage if not in the scope of the genocide. Perhaps only the crimes of the Hutus in Rwanda and those of the Sudanese in Darfur surpass those Las Casas chronicles.

In any case, the slaughters, treacheries, torture, avarice, rapacity, and stark, numbing cruelty of the Spaniards is beyond comprehension. It can best be described, as Las Casas describes it, as demonic. Not even the Nazis at their sadistic worst equaled the viciousness of the Spaniards.

Against the hell inflicted on the Indians, whom Las Casas portrays as mostly innocent, trusting and ingenuous, stood a few Christian friars who were impotent to prevent the horrors. Cinematically, the book reads like a blend of The Mission and Avatar. Men, women, and children were slowly burned to death, dismembered, worked to death, trampled by horses, torn to pieces by dogs, starved, beaten, and subjected to every other torture the sick minds of their Spanish overlords could contrive. Although Las Casas puts the number of murdered Indians in the millions, a figure doubted by many historians, there seems no reason to think that it wasn't at least in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.

Las Casas addresses his account around 1545 to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was largely ignorant of the crimes committed in his name. The hope was to persuade Charles to take action against the genocidal madness that was devastating the entire Caribbean basin.

Although the Spaniards in the Caribbean acted in the name of crown and Christ there was nothing Christian at all about their behavior, and indeed Las Casas has no trouble assuming that these men were headed straight to hell which, given the heinous nature of their crimes, was a fate far too good for them.

One Indian chief was asked by a priest as he was about to be burned to death if he wanted to be baptized and go to heaven. The chief asked the priest if there would be Christians in heaven, to which the priest answered in the affirmative. The chief replied - understandably since he believed that it was Christians who were perpetrating these terrible crimes upon him and his people - that in that case he'd rather go to hell.

Las Casas was himself partly inspired to fight on the Indians' behalf by a sermon given in 1511 in Santo Domingo by Antonio de Montesino, a fellow Dominican, which received wide circulation. Montesino was appalled at the mass murders of the Indians in what is today Haiti/Dominican Republic, and, at an Advent service 500 years ago this Christmas season, Montesino addressed the landowners and other powerful Spaniards in a prophetic voice that stated clearly the indictment against them.

Andrew Wilson writes about the sermon in the December issue of First Things (subscription required). Wilson's essay was what moved me to read the book. He says this:

As luck (or Providence) would have it, the season was Advent. The text assigned for the fourth Sunday was John the Baptist’s quintessential call to repentance: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” To “make straight the pathway of our Lord,” the Dominicans chose Antonio Montesino, not for his authority — he was not their leader — but because he was “an eloquent preacher, harsh in the reproaching of vice.” Further, lest the public presume that his message represented a minority opinion, the whole fellowship signed their spokesman’s text ahead of time.

They even advertised, calling on the island’s governor Diego Columbus (Christopher’s son), as well as all royal officials and certified jurists, informing them that Sunday’s message included a “certain thing” that they would want to hear. “The citizens conceded willingly: one for the great reverence and esteem that he had [for the friars] because of their virtue and the strictness in which they lived and the rigor of their religion; the other because each one really wanted to hear what it was that . . . would pertain to them.”

When the fateful Sunday arrived, the sermon began in no unusual fashion. In front, a well-trained mendicant preacher employed his highest rhetorical abilities to paint the frank severity of God’s judgment. Opposite, an expectant crowd of hardened sinners sat ready to be shaken from their laxity. It was classic hellfire and brimstone, and they gladly joined the ride to the emotional brink, enduring “stinging and terrifying words that made their flesh crawl.” Then, at last, Montesino revealed the mysterious “certain thing.” “All of you are in mortal sin and in it you are living and are dying because of the cruelty and tyranny with which you treat these innocent people,” he declared, and then said:
In order to make your sins known to you I have mounted this pulpit, I who am the voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island; and therefore it behooves you to listen to me, not with indifference but with all your heart and senses; for this voice will be the strongest, the harshest, the most terrifying that you have ever heard or expected to hear....

Tell me: With what right and with what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? With what authority have you waged such detestable wars against a people who were so gentle and peaceful in your lands, where you have consumed uncountable numbers of them with death and unheard-of tortures? How do you possess them so oppressed and fatigued, without giving them anything to eat, nor curing them of their illnesses, which, due to the excessive work that you give them, they incur and then die — or to put it better, you kill them by taking and acquiring gold every day?

And what care do you take over who teaches them the faith, that they know their God and creator? Are baptized? Hear mass? Keep festival days and Sundays? These [Indians], are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not feel this? How is it that you are in such a deep, lethargic sleep? You can be sure that in your state you are no more able to be saved than the Moors or Turks, who lack and don’t even want the faith of Jesus Christ.

Las Casas took up the baton from Montesino and wrote and labored indefatigably on behalf of the Indians from 1520 until his death in 1566. His book is an important illustration of the depravity of which human beings are capable when they ignore God.

Postmodern Pedophiles

2011-12-27T09:55:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago we did a post which discussed the growing movement toward "transgenerational intimacy." Now Anne Hendershot writing for The Public Discourse gives us a helpful overview of the attempt to normalize pedophilia, particularly pederasty. Here's part of her essay:

Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”

The anger and disgust that most of us experienced when we learned of the allegations of sexual abuse of boys in the sports programs at Penn State and Syracuse University suggest that our cultural norms about the sexual abuse of minors are intact. Yet it was only a decade ago that a parallel movement had begun on some college campuses to redefine pedophilia as the more innocuous “intergenerational sexual intimacy.”

The publication of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex promised readers a “radical, refreshing, and long overdue reassessment of how we think and act about children’s and teens’ sexuality.” The book was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2003 (with a foreword by Joycelyn Elders, who had been the U.S. Surgeon General in the Clinton administration), after which the author, Judith Levine, posted an interview on the university’s website decrying the fact that “there are people pushing a conservative religious agenda that would deny minors access to sexual expression,” and adding that “we do have to protect children from real dangers … but that doesn’t mean protecting some fantasy of their sexual innocence.”

This redefinition of childhood innocence as “fantasy” is key to the defining down of the deviance of pedophilia that permeated college campuses and beyond. Drawing upon the language of postmodern theory, those working to redefine pedophilia are first redefining childhood by claiming that “childhood” is not a biological given. Rather, it is socially constructed—an historically produced social object.

Such deconstruction has resulted from the efforts of a powerful advocacy community supported by university-affiliated scholars and a large number of writers, researchers, and publishers who were willing to question what most of us view as taboo behavior.

Postmodern theorists are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. One of the most cited sources for this is the book Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological and Legal Perspectives. This collection of writings by scholars, mostly European but some with U.S. university affiliations, provides a powerful argument for what they now call “intergenerational intimacy.”

Ken Plummer, one of the contributors, writes that “we can no longer assume that childhood is a time of innocence simply because of the chronological age of the child.” In fact, “a child of seven may have built an elaborate set of sexual understandings and codes which would baffle many adults.”

Claiming to draw upon the theoretical work of the social historians, the socialist-feminists, the Foucauldians, and the constructionist sociologists, Plummer promised to build a “new and fruitful approach to sexuality and children.” Within this perspective there is no assumption of linear sexual development and no real childhood, only an externally imposed definition.

Decrying “essentialist views of sexuality,” these writers attempt to remove the essentialist barriers of childhood. This opens the door for the postmodern pedophile to see such behavior as part of the politics of transgression. No longer deviants, they are simply postmodern “border crossers.”

There's more in Hendershott's article to depress and dismay those who believe that sexual relationships with children are a moral outrage that society tolerates only at its peril. Thankfully, the reaction to the Penn State and Syracuse cases shows that the champions of pedophilia haven't yet won the cultural battle.

The problem, of course, is that they're not giving up. They're doubtless aware that a society which has lost its moral compass, which can no longer draw limits around marriage, which is loath to find anything wrong with pornography, which regards almost any form of sexual expression as healthy, virtually invites the next step in the progression toward legitimizing the sort of thing Jerry Sandusky is accused of doing with young boys at Penn State.

Hendershott mentions, for example, a 1998 article from the American Psychological Association in which it was concluded that child sexual abuse does not cause harm. The authors recommended that pedophilia should instead be given a value-neutral term like “adult-child sex.” NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association quickly posted the “good news” on its website, stating that “the current war on boy-lovers has no basis in science.”

We find ourselves in a world that has cut its Judeo-Christian moral anchor and is adrift in a sea of subjectivism. Those who desire us all to dive into the cesspool they themselves wallow in have an agenda, and every person and every generation needs to be vigilant and educated about the threats that agenda poses to our children.

Does the Multiverse Support Atheism?

2011-12-26T10:11:00.000-05:00

MIT's Alan Lightman has a very readable essay in Harpers titled The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith in which he discusses the implications of the amazing fine-tuning of the cosmos.

He begins by pointing out that the history of science has been one of trying to show how all phenomena are explicable in terms of fundamental principles and physical causes, but now that's all in jeopardy with the discovery of the incredibly precise values of many of the fundamental cosmic parameters and forces:

Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.”

So why is the multiverse attractive to some scientists? Consider some highly improbable event like being dealt a royal flush in cards. The odds against it are very high, but if you're dealt enough hands eventually one of them will be a royal flush.

Likewise with universes. If a near infinite number of different universes are somehow generated, then all possible worlds, no matter how vanishingly improbable any particular world may be, will eventually be produced. Thus, although it is exceedingly unlikely that a single universe with the precision of ours would have just happened, if there are an infinite number of different worlds then one like ours becomes not only probable but inevitable:

...the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen.

For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water....On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together.

As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life.

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life?

There are only two answers currently on the table: Either the universe was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent or there are an infinite number of different universes, a multiverse:

Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not....

From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

In other words, the multiverse is a hypothesis to which scientists resort so they don't have to accept the metaphysical implications of an intelligent design:

The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”

It's noteworthy, I think that in this entire essay Lightman never mentions how exquisitely precise the values of these cosmic parameters are. It's as if he realizes that if he did, it would only lend credence in his readers' minds to the designer hypothesis.

The most striking example of fine-tuning, and one that practically demands the multiverse to explain it, is the unexpected detection of what scientists call dark energy.

The dark energy is tuned to a value of something like one part in 10^120, an inconceivably fine tolerance (A stack of dimes reaching from the earth to the sun would consist of approximately 10^14 dimes). If the dark energy value were different from what it is by just one part in 10^120, the universe, if it existed at all, would be inhospitable to life.

But does the dark energy example "demand" the multiverse as Lightman claims? Only if one assumes a priori that no other explanation is correct, but such an assumption is hardly warranted, especially since the alternative, intelligent design, is discounted for no reason other than it's philosophically repugnant to atheistic naturalists.

Even so, for the naturalist who embraces the multiverse, there are numerous ironies lying about.

In the first place the multiverse hypothesis is metaphysics, not science. It's the consequence of the philosophical assumption that all phenomena are reducible to physical processes and forces and that there is no supernatural mind. This is emphatically not something that science has demonstrated, contrary to what Weinberg seems to think. Nor can science ever empirically demonstrate, even in principle, that there is a multiverse.

Secondly, the multiverse undercuts naturalists' objections to miracles. If every conceivable universe exists then there are universes in which, no matter how unlikely it may be, a man is born to a virgin. There are also universes in which water is changed to wine, and in which a man returns to life after being dead for three days. Indeed, there are worlds in which all of these highly improbable events are accomplished in the life of one man, and ours might well be one such world.

Thirdly, the multiverse makes the existence of a designer virtually inevitable. If every possible world exists then, since it's certainly possible that there's a world that's designed by an intelligent agent, there must in fact be at least one such world. Our world could be it, but whether it is or isn't the point is that a designer capable of creating universes must exist.

So, if atheists think they've escaped having to accept the existence of a cosmic designer by positing an infinite series of worlds they're deluding themselves. If there is no multiverse then there is an intelligent designer of the universe. If there is a multiverse then there is an intelligent designer of at least one universe.

Either way, there exists an extraordinarily intelligent, unimaginably powerful, transcendent agent. Who might such a being be?

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

2011-12-23T21:05:00.000-05:00

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

A Very Strange Belief

2011-12-23T08:05:00.001-05:00

Evolution News and Views posts this 2007 video as a response to those biologists who say that we shouldn't think of cell biology in terms of the coordination of molecular machines because, well, it makes people think that the cell was intelligently designed instead of resulting from purposeless, unguided processes.

The video shows how chromosomes in the nucleus are unwound and the DNA is transcribed into proteins. It's a bit fast-paced so those whose high school biology course was an event in the distant past might want to watch it twice.

It is, of course, not impossible that chance and electrostatic attractions somehow conspired to create this amazing assembly-line operation. There's doubtless some vanishingly small probability that it did indeed happen naturalistically, but the materialist concludes that because it's not impossible that therefore it happened. It's like insisting that because it's not impossible (at least not logically impossible) that I will win an Olympic gold metal in the 100 meter dash, that therefore I will win it.

The really odd thing about this is that anyone who makes this sort of argument has absolutely no grounds for disbelieving in miracles, yet not only do they disbelieve that, say, a man was born to a virgin, they ridicule those who do believe it. They have no trouble believing that the extraordinarily improbable processes depicted in this video "just happened," but they scoff at the notion that a man could rise from the dead, even though the probability of the latter is certainly no less than the probability of the former. It's all very strange.

St. Nicholas

2011-12-22T18:18:00.000-05:00

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned under Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan.

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some perhaps apocryphal traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

Microfinance on Christmas

2011-12-22T13:07:00.000-05:00

Looking for a way to help the working poor this Christmas? Give microfinance a look. I'm partial to a group called Kiva, but there are dozens of similar organizations out there doing good work in third world countries. Let me use Kiva to illustrate how they work.

If you click on the link to Kiva it takes you to their home page. From there you select from hundreds of small entrepreneurs looking for a loan to help start or sustain a business. If you navigate around the site you'll see that you can select borrowers by country, type of business, etc.

You then click on the "Lend $25" button next to the person or group you've selected to receive your loan. That will take you to a page where you give your credit card and billing info.

You're now finished, and you've done something to actually help people help themselves.

The borrower eventually pays back the loan and the money is placed back in your account. You can reclaim it or lend it out again to someone else, adding each time to the principle if you wish. In effect, you become a no-interest bank.

Check it out. It's a wonderful gift to give someone on Christ's birthday.

Throw Them All Out

2011-12-22T10:45:00.000-05:00

You know there's something wrong when people go to Washington, earn a salary of $174,000 a year for a dozen years or so and are suddenly worth millions. How does that happen? Peter Schweizer explains it with a calm lucidity that is an impressive display of self-control, given the injustice he documents in his book Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get rich Off Insider Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.

The stories Schweizer recounts are infuriating and the worst of it is that, for the most part, what these people are doing is perfectly legal. It's corrupt, it's unfair, it's a betrayal of the trust of the American people, but it's legal because the people who make the laws and oversee the Congress are the same people who are profiting from he corruption.

Schweizer focuses in particular on three kinds of political venality: Insider trading, earmarks, and paybacks of taxpayer money to donors (cronyism). He never mentions the political party to which the thieves belong, but there are representatives of both parties discussed in the book. His prime examples on the Republican side are former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and former Senator Judd Gregg. The Democrat rogues gallery includes Senator John Kerry, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and President Barack Obama.

There are, in addition, many others from both parties whose shenanigans he mentions, or could have mentioned, to illustrate the rampant corruption of what he calls the Permanent Political Class.

Some examples: During the debate over Medicare Part D in 2003, Senator Kerry made purchases of $5 million worth of stocks in pharmaceutical and health plan companies that he knew, by virtue of his position on his Senate committee, would profit from the legislation. He and his wife made millions from their advanced knowledge of the winners and losers. Kerry and others essentially bet on which companies would do well, knew in advance which companies these would be, and were in position to help those companies succeed.

It's not unlike a baseball player betting on games. It can get a baseball player thrown out of baseball - Pete Rose was banned from the Hall of Fame for it - but it's all legal when members of Congress do it.

Another example: In 2002 House Speaker Dennis Hastert inserted a $207 million dollar earmark into a federal highway bill that would facilitate construction of a road that just happened to run past his own property, raising the value of Hastert's acreage by 140%.

Nor is the President above it all. His graft is especially revolting since it involves direct giveaways of taxpayers' money to his donors and supporters. On pages 100 and 101 of the book Schweizer lists almost fifty of President Obama's bundlers, donors, and supporters who raised vast amounts of money for his campaign and who were rewarded for their efforts with millions, in some cases billions, of dollars of stimulus money.

Leucadia Energy had one employee and $120,000 in annual revenue, but it received billions of dollars in stimulus money because the CEO of its parent company, Leucadia National, was Ian Cumming who was a member of the president's 2008 National Finance Committee. The billions in stimulus created a net increase of three jobs for Leucadia.

A 35% stake in Solyndra, another green energy company, was held by an Oklahoma billionaire by the name of George Kaiser who raised at least $100,000 for the Obama campaign. As soon as the stimulus was passed Solyndra was awarded a government-backed loan of $573 million, despite widespread warnings that Solyndra was a poor financial risk. The company went bankrupt, as expected, and the taxpayers are left to pick up the tab. Kaiser didn't lose anything.

Schweizer closes his chapter on presidential cronyism with this:

Imagine for a minute that you are a corporate executive and you start using your companies assets to "invest" in projects that in turn benefit you directly. What would happen? You would be risking possible criminal charges for the misuse of those assets. But if it's taxpayer money? Suddenly it becomes legal. Even acceptable.

And for the billionaire who is looking to get a big return on his investment, there are few returns that can be higher than those resulting from campaign contributions. After all, how else can you turn half a million dollars from yourself and your friends into hundreds of millions of dollars after a single election?

Not surprisingly, many of those named here are raising money again for President Obama's 2012campaign. As a jobs program - the stated purpose - these billions in grants and loans were a failure. But as a method of transferring billions in taxpayer funds to friends, cronies, and supporters, they worked perfectly.

It makes you wonder why the Occupy Wall Street crowd is on Wall Street and not on the Capitol steps and the White House lawn.

This brief review is scarcely the tip of the iceberg that Schweizer uncovers for us. Every citizen, certainly every voter, should read this book. It'll make your blood boil and probably cause you to demand term limits for our elected kleptocrats. The problem, of course, is that the kleptocracy is the very group that has to legislate the limitations on how much time they have to make themselves rich. Fat chance that the fat cats will do that.

Winter Wanderers

2011-12-21T15:16:00.000-05:00

Winter often brings rare avian vagrants to the Middle Atlantic states and the last couple of weeks have been especially kind to those of us who enjoy seeing these feathered vagabonds. Recently three unusual species have turned up in central Pennsylvania, two of them in the same location, Blue Marsh State Park near Reading, PA.

The first rarity was a female Rufous hummingbird, a western species. Rufous hummingbirds have made appearances at a half dozen spots around the state recently, one of which was close to my home in York County.

Rufous Hummingbird (female)

Hummingbirds are the smallest bird in the world and are found only in the western hemisphere and mostly in South America. They're the only avian species capable of backward flight (they can also fly sideways). Their wings beat so fast (70 times a second in normal flight, 200 times a second in a power dive) that they're only a blur to the eye, and they're so tiny they must consume up to 8 times their bodyweight in food in a day to stay alive. Go here for more fascinating facts about these birds.

The other two wanderers to make their way to Pennsylvania were both gulls. One is the Glaucous gull which is completely white. Most gulls show some black or gray, but the Glaucous, a species which breeds in the arctic, has only a black spot on the tip of its beak.

Glaucous Gull

The third visitor was another western species called a Franklin's gull. The Franklin's adult looks superficially like the Laughing gull common to the east coast of North America, but it's smaller and differs in a few details. The bird seen at Blue Marsh was a juvenile in winter plumage.

Franklin's Gull

All this and winter's just getting started.

Making Philosophy Matter

2011-12-21T00:40:00.000-05:00

Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a lecturer in philosophy at Simmons College, sounds the tocsin for his fellow philosophers, urging them to wake up to the fact that their discipline is in trouble. Universities looking for ways to tighten their budgetary belts have let their eyes fall upon their philosophy departments which are increasingly regarded as academic fat.

McIntyre laments the short-sightedness of such a view, but also blames his colleagues for not doing more to make philosophy relevant to the lives of their students and to our public debates.

Here's a sample from his essay:

In March administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas announced that, because of budget cuts, the entire department of philosophy would be eliminated. Philosophers rallied, the administration flinched, and within a month the crisis was averted. So all is well, right?

Not so fast. Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.

In November 2010, The Boston Globe reported that student interest in humanities courses has cratered in recent years. And long-term trends are troubling, too. When adjusted for total enrollment, numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics show a 20-percent drop in philosophy and religion majors from 1970 through 2009. Of course, none of that is news to anyone who has worked recently in an American philosophy department. There is anecdotal evidence aplenty that our students are disappearing.

And how have we responded? Do we design better courses? Try to attract more student interest? Some members of our profession do, but by and large our response has been pitiful. We collapse tenured positions as soon as their inhabitants retire. We hire more adjuncts. Instead of trying to figure out how to reach more people with philosophy, we cut back. But in doing so, we eat our seed corn. (Note that in saving philosophy at UNLV, the department agreed to slate all its junior faculty members for termination.)

Something should be done about the growing crisis in philosophy, but no one seems to be doing anything. Who is to blame?

We are. Philosophers. We did this to ourselves.

McIntyre goes on to explain exactly how philosophers have done it themselves. Everything he says rings true, but there's one thing he doesn't mention that's an interesting fact about the jeopardy philosophy finds itself in. It doesn't seem to be at all in trouble in religious schools, at least as far as I can tell. One reason, perhaps, is that the problems examined in philosophy courses are highly relevant and crucial to a thorough religious education.

Philosophy as taught by secularists in secular institutions always struck me as a dry, barren and tedious affair. Philosophy is most exciting, I think, to those who are interested in seeing how the ideas of the great thinkers bear on their own deepest convictions. Philosophers who teach courses on very narrow, abstruse topics are simply walling themselves off from a larger body of students who might otherwise be eager to think about ideas and issues that both challenge and reinforce their own convictions, particularly their metaphysical convictions.

McIntyre goes on to observe that unlike scholars in other disciplines, too many philosophers eschew writing for a popular audience:

We have painted ourselves into a corner of irrelevance so completely that at times I wonder whether most philosophical work is even very interesting to other philosophers. There is, of course, genuine value to pure research in philosophy, just as there is in other fields. But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher's prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

Thus even when we have the chance to make a difference, philosophers often blow it. How many of us, when we teach ethics, have used the hypothetical example of whether torture is justified to get evidence in the face of a ticking bomb? But when a U.S. president actually endorsed the use of torture, there was mostly silence from the philosophical community, from both sides of the political spectrum.

Few op-eds in national newspapers. Little attempt to make use of our terrific critical-reasoning skills in the public arena to cut through the fallacies of the politicians or the blowhards on cable TV. Too many preferred instead to brag of their brave political convictions to the captive audience in their classrooms.

Quite so. Any discipline which can't show people how the subject it studies matters to them, how it relates to their life and their deepest yearnings, is by definition going to be culturally irrelevant. Philosophy is a rich and fascinating discipline, but when it's decoupled from the ultimate questions of life, or when it's presented to students by instructors who are themselves lost in the arid, empty wastelands of a naturalistic metaphysics, it often comes across as a dessicated exercise in pointless erudition.

Thanks to Byron for linking me to McIntyre's article.

Missing Bush

2011-12-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

Syrian protestors, having seen thousands of their countrymen, including hundreds of children, massacred by their government in Damascus, express their nostalgia for a man who actually did something about such injustice.

Think what you will about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren't always well-executed - few large-scale undertakings ever are - and they've been extremely costly, but they freed a total of 50 million people from tyrannical oppression and horror. The world is certainly better off without Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in it, and is also better off with a diminished al Qaeda, and Taliban. Almost all of the credit for this improved state of affairs goes to the Bush administration.

Evidently, the Syrians would like to add Bashir Assad and his cronies to the list of people with whom the world is no longer afflicted, and they miss having someone in the White House they could have counted on to help.

Thanks to The Weekly Standard for the pic.

RNA Interference and Naturalistic Fideism

2011-12-20T14:16:00.000-05:00

Here's a fascinating video which shows the incredible, breath-taking complexity of the chemical machinery of every living cell. What is being shown is very arcane and really doesn't matter (Those who wish to read more about it can find an explanation here).

Just watch the video and marvel at how wondrous it is that the Crea ... oops, I mean blind, unguided processes operating solely by chance - orchestrated the construction of such an amazing organization of molecular machines which, once in place, are capable of carrying on these processes completely autonomously without any intelligent input.

To be sure, it takes faith to believe that there's an intelligent mind responsible for the universe and for life, but it takes, in my view, a superhuman effort of the will to believe that something like what's depicted on this video could have all come about through random chance and the laws of chemistry. One has to simply not want to believe that there is a Mind behind it all in order to come to the conclusion that there isn't.

There are some religious believers who hold that we should have faith regardless of what our reason says, regardless of what the evidence is. This view is called fideism. Fideists maintain that when they encounter difficult evidence or experience doubt they should just believe and not waver. Naturalism, the belief that natural processes and forces can account for all the phenomena we observe in the universe, is, in my opinion, a kind of fideism.

Everywhere the naturalist looks he sees evidence of intelligent design, but, scrunching up his will, he repeats ten times, "Nature can do it."

He has no evidence of this, however. He's never seen nature create a cell nor create the information needed to operate a cell, even though everyday he sees minds perform such amazing feats.

Even so, his faith that there exists no Mind capable of creating universes is so great that he's impervious to the lack of evidence and the existence of contrary evidence. He's a fideist of the the first order.