Meditation for MLK Day

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 thinking 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.

Embryos and Fairy Tales

A couple of years ago I posted a video of Alexander Tsiaras giving a TED Talk on his work as a computer animator working with scientific subjects. Specifically his talk was about his work with developing embryos. The video is back in the news - Huffpo is running it - so I thought it might be appropriate to repost it. Here's the Viewpoint post from 23rd November, 2011:

Evolution News and Views has posted a video of mathematician and medical image maker Alexander Tsiaras giving a TED lecture on applying his craft to the development of a child from conception to birth. As you watch listen carefully to the language he uses to describe what he's depicting:

I don't see how anyone can watch this and not draw the conclusion that the materialist account of what it depicts - i.e. that it it all happened by chance mutations and natural selection - is anything but a modern fairy tale.

True Lies

Last October, right before the election, Mitt Romney made the claim that Jeep was going to start producing vehicles in China, and as a result jobs that could have been created here will be created in China.

This was immediately met with shrieks of derision in the media and other liberal precincts. The company denied it, Romney stood by it, and a fact-checking group called Politifact eventually called it "the Lie of the Year."

It's the sort of thing the media too frequently does to good people. If they can't attack their record they attack their character.

Well, it turns out that Mr. Romney was right after all. You can read the details at The Weekly Standard if you're so inclined.

I wonder if Mr. Romney will be receiving any apologies from those who called him a liar and debased his character. I rather doubt it, apologies not being the sort of thing one expects from people who are quick to engage in character assassination and political slander.

How Liberalism Is Devastating the Black Community

If President Obama wishes to do something really helpful to protect children he might direct his attention to the epidemic of fatherlessness that's ravaging our nation's minority communities and placing millions of young black kids, particularly males, at risk. Lee Habeeb at National Review has an excellent article on this crisis, a crisis that the media seems largely disinclined to discuss.

I'd like to display it in its entirety but I'll just give you this and urge you to read the rest at the link. Be especially sure to read the story of the elephants:

Twenty children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Conn., last month, and the media quickly, and justifiably, descended to tell the tragic story. In the first few weeks of January in Chicago, 25 people have already been murdered. Most were young black and Hispanic men, murdered by other young black and Hispanic men.

In Chicago, it’s Newtown every month. But the media haven’t converged on Chicago this month.

You don’t know the names of those kids and adults gunned down in Chicago this January, all by handguns....You don’t know the names of the other 530 young people, most of them minorities, who were killed in Chicago between 2008 and January 2012 either. You don’t know their names, and the national media haven’t parked their media trucks in Chicago, because the liberal narrative does not offer easy answers to the problems haunting Chicago.

You don’t know their names because the real racism that exists in the media is this: A young black male’s life is not worth reporting when it is taken by another black male. You don’t know the names because the media don’t or can’t blame the deaths in Chicago on a weapon like the AR-15, or on the NRA.

You don’t know their names because the media aren’t interested in getting at the real cause of much of the senseless gun violence in America: fatherlessness. About 20,000 people live in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., and there are probably twice as many guns. Folks own handguns, shotguns, rifles, and all kinds of weapons I’ve never even heard of. But I can’t remember the last murder story in the local paper.

That’s because my town has lots of guns, but lots of fathers, too.

Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem; it has a father problem.

Gun control isn’t the problem on Chicago’s streets; self-control is. When young men don’t have fathers, they don’t learn to control their masculine impulses. They don’t have fathers to teach them how to channel their masculine impulses in productive ways.

When young men don’t have fathers, those men will seek out masculine love — masculine acceptance — where they can find it. Often, they find it in gangs.

In my little town, if some boys tried to form a gang and do violence on our streets, the fathers wouldn’t bother calling the sheriff. Those boys would face a gang of fathers hell bent on establishing order in our community. And if that meant using physical force, so be it.

Why is the slaughter in Chicago not deemed worthy of national media attention? Perhaps the liberal media, as Habeeb suggests, simply doesn't care about the plight of black kids, but I'd rather withhold that uncharitable allegation to offer as a last resort. I think there are several other reasons that seem to me more plausible.

First, the fatherlessness epidemic can be convincingly tied to the welfare state, a sociological phenomenon that has been promoted and expanded by liberals for fifty years. The liberal media is reluctant to call attention to the slow-motion disaster occurring in our minority communities because it's largely due to a set of policies that media liberals have themselves been vigorous proponents of.

Second, liberalism has been telling us for those same fifty years that fathers are not all that important anyway, that the traditional family is oppressive, that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," and the media is understandably loath to run stories that show in stark tones the utter destructiveness, fatuousness, and idiocy of these claims.

Third, the ongoing degradation of our culture - the hypersexualization, the violence, and the secularization that pollute the cultural sea in which young men swim - is leading to its predictable denouement, and all of these trends have for the last five decades been facilitated and encouraged by liberalism and the liberal media.

Readers have occasionally questioned me as to why I'm so impatient with liberalism and its instantiation in the modern Democratic party. My response is, in light of the above how can anyone not be?

Pro-Choice Logic

An article in the recent issue of Touchstone reminded me of a post I did in March of last year. The article and post were both on the logic of the pro-choice movement and how that logic lead us ineluctably to the normalization of infanticide. I thought It'd be worthwhile to rerun the post, so here it is:

Back in the 1960s it was argued that a developing child isn't really a person until it reaches viability and that a woman should be permitted to abort up to that point.

In the 70s personhood was deemed to arrive at the moment of birth, and then it was set at the moment at which the entire child is outside the mother's body. Any time before that moment the child could be killed.

Then in the 90s people like philosopher Peter Singer argued that the baby really isn't a person until it can anticipate the future and have wants and desires for the future. All others, in Singer's view, are non-persons.

Now Singer's argument has gone mainstream. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue in the Journal of Medical Ethics that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. These academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Julian Savulescu, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing it and claimed that those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

I certainly don't condone death threats, but I have to say that Savulescu has an odd view of what constitutes a "liberal society." A liberal society is one which protects the rights of the weakest of its members. There's nothing liberal (in the classical sense) about seeking to justify infanticide and laying the philosophical groundwork for killing others who don't fit an arbitrary definition of personhood.

The report on all this is written by Stephen Adams for the Telegraph. Adams states that:

In the [Journal] article, entitled After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?, the authors argued that, “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Giubilini and Minerva define a person as “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.”

Since there's no significant difference between a newborn and a fetus, and since we feel free to kill a fetus if we so choose, we should also be free to kill a newborn, or so the argument goes.

I happen to think Giubilini and Minerva are right that there's no significant difference between a fetus and a newborn, but quite the opposite conclusion could be, and perhaps should be, drawn from this: Since it's illegal to kill a newborn and since there's no difference between a newborn and a fetus, it should also be illegal to kill a fetus.

Referring to the outraged mail and death threats Savulescu says:

This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.

This surely should win some sort of prize for irony. Isn't killing on the basis of their own moral certainty precisely what the authors of the article are advocating? They're presuming to have moral certainty concerning the personhood of the infant and on that basis they're advocating the right to kill it.

If we're going to adopt arbitrary definitions of "persons" perhaps we should define a person as someone who holds to a high view of human life and dignity. We could thereupon declare the authors of "After-birth Abortion" to be non-persons and thus subject to being the recipients themselves of an after-birth abortion. Would the Journal of Medical Ethics publish such an article, do you suppose?

Savulescu defends the writers by declaring that what they propose is not novel among ethicists:

What these young colleagues are spelling out is what would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new.

He's certainly right about that. This isn't new. Progressives and fascists have been advocating infanticide for almost a century now, but he's wrong about this being the endpoint. History teaches us that it's in fact only the midpoint. Once we accept killing born children there's no place on the slippery slope we can stop. Next it will be mental and physical defectives, then the elderly, then criminals, the indigent, Republicans, anyone who is deemed undesirable.

We've been down this road before. It leads to the holocaust. Apparently people like the folks at the Journal of Medical Ethics don't much care.

The Failure of Materialistic OOL

Paul Davies is a physicist and science writer who, although he's not a theist, certainly seems to tread close to the water in some of his writing. A recent essay in The Guardian UK is a good example. Davies is talking about the origin of life (OOL) and says things like this:

The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped. But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle....

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.

But a more fundamental obstacle stands in the way of attempts to cook up life in the chemistry lab. The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organization. Informational narratives permeate biology. DNA is described as a genetic "database", containing "instructions" on how to build an organism. The genetic "code" has to be "transcribed" and "translated" before it can act. And so on.

If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life – but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.

This sounds an awful lot like what intelligent design theorists have been saying now for two decades, but there's more:

Now a new perspective has emerged from the work of engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists, studying the way in which information flows through complex systems such as communication networks with feedback loops, logic modules and control processes. What is clear from their work is that the dynamics of information flow displays generic features that are independent of the specific hardware supporting the information.

Information theory has been extensively applied to biological systems at many levels from genomes to ecosystems, but rarely to the problem of how life actually began. Doing so opens up an entirely new perspective on the problem. Rather than the answer being buried in some baffling chemical transformation, the key to life's origin lies instead with a transformation in the organisation of information flow.

As Stephen Meyer points out in his magisterial work Signature in the Cell complex coded information is always in our experience the product of an intelligent agent. Computer software and books do not result from natural processes acting randomly. Such a phenomenon has never been observed, yet when it comes to life we are told that we must believe that the equivalent of entire libraries of information somehow arose almost spontaneously in some "warm little pond" to use Darwin's phrase. A lot of thinkers, even those disinclined or even averse to the idea of an intelligent designer, scientists like Paul Davies and philosophers like Thomas Nagel, are beginning to realize that such a scenario is so highly implausible as to be literally incredible. Davies concludes his column with this:

The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program. Our work suggests that the answer will come from taking information seriously as a physical agency, with its own dynamics and causal relationships existing alongside those of the matter that embodies it – and that life's origin can ultimately be explained by importing the language and concepts of biology into physics and chemistry, rather than the other way round.

Perhaps at some point they'll also realize that they need to import the language of intelligent, purposeful agency as well.

Two Kinds of Atheism

Those who reject theism often argue that atheism is the default position and that the burden rests with the theist to demonstrate that there are good reasons to believe in God. A reader named Mat sent along a link to a blog by a fellow named Jason Dulle who assesses this and a few related claims.

Jason makes several very good points, but part of what he says I find problematic. In order to understand his argument I should explain that I hold that atheism is literally the lack of belief in a God or gods and that there really are two ways to be an atheist. One could claim that one lacks such a belief because there simply are no such beings as gods. This is a strong claim which I call hard atheism.

The second type is to say that one lacks a belief in God because one can find no convincing reasons to think such a being exists. This view, which is usually called agnosticism, I call soft, atheism. It doesn't assert, as hard atheism does, that there is no God, it simply asserts that, whether there is or isn't, there's insufficient warrant for believing there is.

Dulle rejects this view. He argues instead that only the hard version of atheism qualifies as atheism and that agnosticism is not true atheism. I think he's mistaken about this, but I invite anyone interested in the matter to read his entire argument at the link.

Here's his objection to the position I hold:

This new definition of atheism as “non-theism,” or a mere “lack of belief in God” transforms atheism from an ontological claim to a mere epistemological claim. It reduces atheism to an autobiographical note, telling us only about the psychology of its adherent, but nothing about whether God, in fact, exists or not.

I agree but one doesn't need to make an ontological claim about God's existence in order to lack a belief in that existence. Whether a person claims there is no God or simply holds no belief on the matter he's still an a-theist.

As a result, this new definition ceases to be explanatorily meaningful. Indeed, it ceases to be a view at all. Babies, and even dogs would qualify as atheists according to this definition. That seems patently absurd.

Well, yes, but it's also absurd to treat babies and dogs as the sort of beings who have metaphysical beliefs in the first place. Would it be appropriate to call a baby, dog, tree, or rock an agnostic because none of these holds a belief about God? Of course not. It's only appropriate to use these terms to describe persons capable of holding the beliefs in question, so I don't think this objection has much force.

Dulle continues:

There is a cognitive element to atheism that this new definition does not take into consideration. If atheism is to be understood as a meaningful position on the question of God’s existence, it must be about the object, not the subject; ontology, not epistemology. Otherwise, the presumption of atheism is more akin to agnosticism than atheism in any meaningful sense of the word. Indeed, it is difficult to see any meaningful distinction between the two. It appears to be a distinction without a difference. In the end, [atheism] collapses into agnosticism.

This is true, at least insofar as we're speaking of soft atheism, but I fail to see the problem with it. Dulle's quite sure there is one, though:

This new definition of atheism seeks to shirk its epistemic responsibility by engaging in meaningless word games. Every negative claim is an affirmative claim in reverse. If I say "I don't believe in Santa Claus" (a negative claim), it reflects my positive affirmation that "I believe Santa Claus does not exist." The same goes for the claim, "I don't believe God exists." The contrapositive of that negative claim is the positive affirmation, "I believe God does not exist." Seeing that every negative claim is a positive claim in reverse, the presumptive atheist cannot avoid making a positive claim, and therefore must shoulder his burden of proof for that claim.

This is also true, but only for the hard atheist because only he is making a negative claim. It's why, in fact, even such atheist stalwarts as Richard Dawkins, when pressed, will back away from the strong claim that there is no God. They realize that it's an intellectually indefensible position so they temporarily retreat from it until the challenge has passed and then they return to it.

But Dulle's critique only applies to the person who makes the strong claim. He goes astray, I think, when he says that "I don't believe in Santa Claus" is equivalent to "I believe Santa Claus does not exist." The claim could mean that, but it could also mean "I hold no beliefs about the existence of Santa Claus," or, as in the current case, God. Such a person is not saying, "I believe God does not exist," yet he is an atheist all the same. To see Dulle's error consider the proposition, "I hold no belief about whether Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016." This is a perfectly reasonable assertion, but it's not at all equivalent to "I believe Hillary Clinton will not run for president in 2016."

Perhaps this is all much ado about nothing, but I think it's important to be aware of the distinction between hard and soft atheism because a lot of people take refuge in agnosticism, thinking that it's more intellectually respectable to be called an agnostic than to be called an atheist. I suggest that it be pointed out to them that agnosticism is just atheism-lite.

Do We Have Souls?

Tim O'Connor addresses the question of the existence and nature of the soul at Big Questions Online.

His essay discusses several basic views: Materialist reductionism - which says that everything about us can in principle be reduced to the workings of material particles like atoms and their constituents; Emergentism - which says that we are fundamentally material but that the material of which we are comprised is organized in such a way as to give rise to capacities and features which are fundamentally different. It's similar to how a gravitational field emerges from a material object like a star; and Aristotelianism - the view that the soul is the form, or essence, of the body. It's that which makes us a human being.

O'Connor himself adopts an emergent view:

To have a human soul, on this account, is to be an embodied creature having (in some measure) such personal capacities or the biological potential to develop such capacities.

In other words, our soul is more like the capacities and potentialities we have by virtue of having the kinds of bodies we do. But O'Connor is a Christian so he wonders whether such a view is compatible with the traditions of the Christian faith:

Is this account congruent with religious understandings of the nature and destiny of human souls? In remarking briefly on this question, I will restrict myself to the understanding common to my own Christian belief and those of the other Abrahamic religions.

Reflective theological speculation concerning the soul down through the centuries has not been so nearly uniform as popularly thought, with many theologians emphasizing on scriptural, no less than philosophical-empirical, grounds the deeply embodied nature of human persons. (It is not for nothing that the ancient Christian creeds, e.g., look forward to the bodily resurrection of the dead.)

However, we might wonder whether a psychological, fully embodied account of the soul is consistent with the belief that all persons are deemed of ‘equal worth in the sight of God,’ given that some human persons exhibit these psychological capacities to a far lesser degree than others. By way of reply, I turn to the foundational Genesis text that states that all humans are divine ikons, image-bearers of God.

Plausibly, this not only describes our present distinctive capacities for rationality, for self- and God-awareness, for moral freedom, and for self-emptying love, it promises a future gift: the offer of friendship with God and an eventual, fuller realization of our human potential....

Of course, this promised destiny is predicated on the assumption that we will individually survive death. But how can this be, on an embodied view of the soul, given what death entails for the body? Note that in the Abrahamic religions, human persons are not naturally immortal. (Indeed, all of created reality is sustained in existence by God.) Survival of death would be a supernatural gift.

My own view is that our soul is not a set of capacities or a substance that's contained within us, but rather that our soul is information or data. It's every true fact about us, what we look like at every instant of our lives, what we think at every instant, our hopes, idiosyncrasies, personality, who our ancestors were, everything that forms a complete, exhaustive description of us.

Just as the information with which we are familiar in our everyday lives must exist in some medium like a book or a hard drive so, too, must our souls exist somewhere, but it's not "in" us. Rather it's in the mind of God. We might think of God's mind as a vast database that contains a "file" on everyone who has ever existed. Since it exists in the mind of God the soul is potentially immortal.

When a person's body dies, it's conceivable that God uses the information in our "file" to instantiate us in another body in another level or aspect of reality.

Perhaps there are some whom, for whatever reason, God chooses not to instantiate so they cease to enjoy conscious existence. Perhaps there are some whose file God simply chooses to delete so they cease to exist altogether.

In any event, the proper place to look for the soul, on this view, would not be inside us but in the mind of God.

Real Heroes

When Chilean miners were rescued after surviving trapped underground for 69 days in 2010 the world media oddly treated them as though they had done something heroic when in fact it was their rescuers who were the real heroes.

By contrast when hundreds of Japanese technicians chose to stay at the Fukushima nuclear plant after the 2011 tsunami they struggled at great risk to themselves to save a large portion of Japan from nuclear contamination. It was an act of genuine heroism and altruism, but these men live today in obscurity, stigmatized by their association with a company that many Japanese blame for the radiation hazard that befell them when the plant was damaged.

Even so, but for their selfless sacrifice the damage would have been far worse.

The Guardian UK has their story. Here's part of it:

Almost two years after the tsunami, the men who stayed behind at Fukushima Daiichi and spared Japan from an even worse fate occupy an uncomfortable place in the country's post-disaster psyche. While the Chilean miners who spent 69 days trapped deep underground in 2010 were feted as national heroes, most of the Fukushima workers continue to live unseen in the shadow of the disaster.

Tepco turns down most interview requests, and all but two of the handful of workers who have commented publicly did so on condition of anonymity. Most have chosen to remain silent, fearing they would be ostracised in the communities they tried, but failed, to prevent from turning into post-nuclear wastelands for years, perhaps decades.

Yoshizawa understands their anger. "Generally speaking, people in Japan believe we were the cause of the accident, and it's important to bear that in mind. As Tepco employees we have to take responsibility for the accident, and ensure that it never happens again. It's a matter of regaining people's trust, but it will take time. "Looking back, maybe there were things we could have done better to prepare, but at the time we did everything possible to respond to the accident."

The perception that the workers perpetrated the accident and then botched their response appeared to permeate every level of Japanese society. The Fukushima 50 waited 18 months before the then prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, publicly thanked them for "saving Japan", a gesture repeated this month by his successor, Shinzo Abe.

Some of the men in this story lost everything, including their loved ones, in the tsunami, but they nevertheless risked their lives to save others. It is indeed strange, perverse, even, that such men live in anonymity while the Chilean miners who had no choice but to just wait until they could be rescued were turned into celebrities.

$180 Billion Failure

One of the criticisms of liberal solutions to our nation's problems is that 1. They're usually expensive and 2. They rarely work. Welfare is a good example, subsidizing green energy is another. A recent article at Heritage.org by Lindsey Burke and David Muhlhausen tells us about yet another. They write about Head Start, a program initiated to prepare poor kids for school so that they don't fall behind in the early grades and condemn themselves to a lifetime of underachievement.

Since its inception in the 1960s we've spent over 180 billion dollars on the program and we're discovering now the disheartening news that the children we had hoped to help are doing no better than had there been no Head Start program in the first place.

The following excerpt is taken from the opening paragraphs of the article:

In 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completed data collection for its third-grade follow-up study of Head Start, a federal preschool program designed to improve the kindergarten readiness of low-income children. Four years later, just before Christmas, the agency finally published the results of the congressionally mandated evaluation.

The report’s publication date reads October 2012, meaning the final product sat at HHS for two months before being released.

Since 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $180 billion on Head Start. Yet, over the decades, this Great Society relic has failed to improve academic outcomes for the children it was designed to help. The third-grade follow-up evaluation is the latest in a growing body of evidence that should urge policymakers to seriously consider Head Start’s future.

The timing of the release raises questions about whether HHS was trying to bury the findings in the report, which shows, among other outcomes, that by third grade, the $8 billion Head Start program had little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of participants. On a few measures, access to Head Start had harmful effects on children.

The details are at the link, but here's one that's particularly worrisome given the ineffectiveness of the program:

Congress will soon vote on a supplemental aid package to Hurricane Sandy victims that includes $100 million in additional Head Start funding. The Senate Appropriations Committee notes that 265 Head Start centers will receive the funding, which equates to more than $377,000 per center.

Somebody's evidently benefiting from taxpayer contributions to the program, but it's not the children.

Fifty Most Religiously Oppressive Countries in the World

There's an interesting report from Open Door.org's World Watch List linked to at The Blaze on the 50 worst countries to live in if you're a Christian. As one might expect most of them are either Muslim or officially atheist (communist) and some are Hindu. The one notable exception, which surprised me, is Colombia, and I'm not sure what makes that country such a difficult place for Christians who wish to practice their faith. Perhaps a reader can help me out with that.

At any rate, here are a couple of graphics from the article. If you have trouble reading them they're clearer here:

The darker the country is colored the worse the level of persecution it inflicts upon religious minorities.

Here's an ordered ranking of the fifty worst:

There's a video at The Blaze which explains how the World Watch List arrived at its ranking. Whether we're Christian or not we should be thankful we live in a nation that protects the freedom to believe and practice what you want. At least it does for the time being.

Five Facts about Guns and Violence

In response to calls - some bordering on the hysterical - for more gun control, even to the extent of confiscation, we offer a few facts from a piece at Reason.com.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years. The violent crime rate - which includes murder, rape, and beatings - is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years. Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. “There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.

3. Schools are getting safer. Across the board, schools are less dangerous than they used be. Over the past 20 years, the rate of theft per 1,000 students dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crime, the victimization rate per 1,000 students dropped from 53 to 14.

4. There Are More Guns in Circulation Than Ever Before. Over the past 20 years, virtually every state in the country has liberalized gunownership rules and many states have expanded concealed carry laws that allow more people to carry weapons in more places. There around 300 million guns in the United States and at least one gun in about 45 percent of all households. Yet the rate of gun-related crime continues to drop.

5. “Assault Weapons Bans” Are Generally Ineffective. While many people are calling for reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons – an arbitrary category of guns that has no clear definition – research shows it would have no effect on crime and violence. “Should it be renewed,” concludes a definitive study, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Here's a video that accompanies the article at Reason.com:

In the wake of a tragedy like Sandy Hook it's easy to succumb to the desire to do something, even if what we do is ineffective. Even so, whatever measures we take should be dictated by the facts and not by emotion. More gun control is not going to solve a problem that is, at its core, a symptom of moral degeneration and cultural rot.

Got the Flu?

Perhaps you did your due diligence and got a flu shot this year but nevertheless came down with the bug anyway and are wondering why.

An article at The Blaze.com explains that there could be several reasons although one of them, the particular strain of virus that you came down with was not included in the vaccine, doesn't apply to this year's breakout:

[W]hy does [the flu] seem to be so virulent this year? The most popular strain identified this season is Type A influenza H3N2, which is historically associated with more serious illnesses. It is also among the strains covered by the flu vaccine.

The article goes on to give two other problems with the immunization that may apply in cases where a person got the shot this year but still got ill:

But as Cranston said “no vaccine is 100 percent effective.” One reason is the lag time between vaccination and active immunity. A person who received a flu shot but comes in contact with the virus before the vaccine becomes effective — between 10 days and two weeks — they are still susceptible to becoming ill.

[Moreover] recent studies have shown that the flu vaccine as a whole is only about 59 percent effective at preventing the illness... [T]he vaccine [also] appears to be less effective for the elderly, which is a population often highly encouraged to receive the shot in the first place.

So, the lesson seems to be get the shot early next year before you're exposed to the virus and hope that you're among the 59%.

What's a Liberal to Think?

Like the islanders in King Kong, every now and then liberals feel the need to sacrifice someone to appease the gods of racial "justice."

Remember when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida last year how the media did everything it could to portray Zimmerman, who evidently was having his skull bashed in by Mr. Martin, as the Grand Kleagle of the KKK? They seemed desperate to use the incident as confirmation of their conviction that white men are racists and black men are oppressed victims, even to the point of coining the odd construction "white Hispanic" to describe Zimmerman lest anyone should miss the point.

Unfortunately, the evidence in the case, as often happens, just wouldn't permit them to get away with it, but I'm wondering what will happen in the case of a young Georgia woman, a mother of two, who shot a man whom, since he was black and she was white, some in the media will probably portray as an innocent neighbor simply seeking to borrow a cup of sugar:

The incident happened at a home on Henderson Ridge Lane in Loganville around 1 p.m. The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar.

But the man eventually found the family.

"The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he's staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver," Chapman told Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh.

The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved.

"She's standing over him, and she realizes she's fired all six rounds. And the guy's telling her to quit shooting," Chapman said.

The woman ran to a neighbor's home with her children. The intruder attempted to flee in his car but crashed into a wooded area and collapsed in a nearby driveway, Chapman said.

Deputies arrested 32-year-old Atlanta resident Paul Slater in connection with the crime. Chapman said they found him on the ground saying, "Help me. I'm close to dying." Slater was taken to Gwinnett Medical Center for treatment. Chapman said Slater was shot in the face and neck.

In February, Slater was arrested on simple battery charges, according to the Gwinnett County Sheriff's Office. He has been arrested six other times in the county since 2008.

There's more at the link. This story is fraught with peril for our liberal friends. How does a good liberal decide what to think about it? A woman (a member of an oppressed class) who happens to be white (an oppressor race) shot a man (an oppressor) who happens to be black (an oppressed minority) with a gun (which she shouldn't have been permitted access to) in order to protect herself and her children (a noble act).

Perhaps the best thing to do, rather than try to untangle all these conflicting threads, is to just ignore the story entirely which is why we probably won't hear one hundredth as much about this shooting as we did about the Zimmerman/Martin affair. The media won't put her on trial, Al Sharpton won't be demanding "justice," The New Black Panthers won't put a bounty on the mother's head, and no one will be complaining about her ownership and use of a gun.

Anyway, here's an exit question for those who would like to see handguns banned. Could you say to that mother, who huddled with her terrified children in the attic listening to the intruder's steps drawing closer, "I'm glad you weren't harmed, but given the choice between protecting yourself and your children from that man and having access to a handgun, I prefer you hadn't had access to the weapon"?

That's essentially what people on the left are saying every time they say they want to keep guns out of the hands of responsible citizens.

Finding Out What's in It

An article in the New York Times should give pause to anyone who bought the sales pitch for Obamacare that it was going to "bend the cost curve down." People who work for small businesses or who buy their own insurance are, in some states, in for a real shock:

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent, and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

In order to provide insurance coverage for a few million people who didn't have it because they couldn't afford it, congress passed a law, Obamacare, that forces millions of those who are almost in that situation themselves to pay for those who can't. Then Mr. Obama boasts that he's cutting taxes on the middle class. What a guy.

California, Ohio, and Florida all voted for Mr. Obama in November. I wonder how they're liking him now.

How Much Risk Is Too Much?

The New York Times reports that an analysis done by the state of New York has shown that drilling for natural gas using hydrofracking poses minimal risks to people and the environment, but some environmentalists are not satisfied and, despite the enormous economic benefits that would accrue to the people of the state, still oppose fracking:

The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from an expert who did not believe it should be kept secret.

The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has long delayed making a decision, unnerved in part by strident opposition on his party’s left. A plan to allow a limited amount of fracking in the state’s Southern Tier along the Pennsylvania border is still seen as the most likely outcome, should the drilling process receive final approval.

The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others, and concludes that fracking can be done safely. It delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”

According to a WSJ piece quoted in Hot Air the stakes are pretty high:

According to the Manhattan Institute, lifting the fracking ban in New York could result in $11.4 billion in economic output and $1.4 billion in tax revenues, not to mention 15,000 to 18,000 new jobs.

Environmentalists, the Times piece notes, have raised some pertinent caveats to the state health department's report, but at some point the governor has to ask how low the risk of harm has to be and how serious must the potential harm to humans and the environment be to warrant continuing the ban on drilling. Some environmentalists seem to be of the opinion that any risk at all and any amount of harm are simply not worth it.

That's a position that, in this economy, seems awfully hard to defend.

Fruitflow Now Available in U.S.

Way back on December 23rd of '09 I did a post on a product called Fruitflow. Here's what I wrote about it:

Millions of people rely on aspirin to keep their blood thin to prevent heart attacks and strokes, but aspirin often causes stomach problems. It turns out that a natural blood thinner has been found in the gel that surrounds tomato seeds. In Britain a product called Fruitflow is made from an extract of this gel and has none of the side effects of aspirin.

Check it out here.

Here's the crux of the article:

10 studies -- two of which were published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition -- reported that three grams of Fruitflow were effective just three hours after consumption, making platelets smoother while leaving the rest of the blood able to clot normally in the case of injury. Regular tomato juice is subjected to multiple processing methods that degrade the gel ingredient, rendering it far less effective than its concentrated form. Plain tomatoes are also less effective because the body must slowly digest all parts of the fruit.

I closed by noting that the article doesn't say how long it will be before this product is available in the U.S.

Well, a reader named Vic has written to tell me that Fruitflow is now available in the U.S., it's marketed by Swansons and it works.

Reason and Irrationality

Andrew Seddon has an essay at the New Oxford Review in which he talks about the beliefs of Christians and atheists and makes the claim that, though atheists allege that theism is literally incredible, what the atheist believes is certainly no less so. Here's part of his essay:

While undeniable that Christianity entails a belief in the supernatural, the miraculous — God became man that first Christmas, Christ raised people from the dead, rose himself on the first Easter Sunday and ascended into heaven 40 days later — consider what atheists believe.

They believe that something came out of nothing, that reason came from irrationality, that a complex universe and natural order came out of randomness and chaos, that consciousness came from non-consciousness and that life emerged from non-life.

This is a bridge too far for the Christian for whom faith and reason tell him that for all of this to have been created from nothing is absurd; it presupposes a Creator.

Atheists believe, Seddon writes, that “a multiverse (for which there is no experimental or observational evidence) containing an inconceivably large number of universes spontaneously created itself.”

He doesn't mention, but could have, that many atheists also believe that life has meaning even though death cancels everything out; that moral duties exist, even though there's no basis for them; that reason is reliable, even though evolution only conserves traits that promote survival, not truth; that love is meaningful and that beauty is inspiring, even though both of these are simply the result of neurochemical reactions in the brain; that people are responsible for their choices even though those choices are predetermined by their genes and environment; and that human beings have worth and rights even though such valuations are completely arbitrary and rooted in nothing but the appraisal of others.

Despite holding a collection of beliefs grounded in nothing more than their subjective preferences they assure us that they are the rational people, the "brights" in Daniel Dennett's famously pompous description, and that theists are, by implication, dim-witted boobs. Yet theists recognize that none of the beliefs listed in the preceding paragraphs make any sense at all unless they're grounded in an objective, intelligent, personal, transcendent cause.

That recognition alone makes theism rationally superior to any view, like naturalistic atheism, which holds that the personal can emerge from the impersonal, that complex information can emerge from chaos, or that nothing can produce something.

Movies in 2012

I didn't get to many movies this year, but of the ones I saw I think the following were the most noteworthy. Opinions will vary on such things, of course, but here are some of mine:

The Dark Knight - The theme of good versus evil made this a special movie, but another theme that I found intriguing was the portrayal of Bane and his minions. They were, in fact, Occupy Wall Streeters with the power to fulfill their desire to destroy capitalism and the rich. That may seem a little strong, but listen to Bane's speech and ask yourself if it doesn't sound like it might have been given by any committed OWSer.

2016: Obama's America - Perhaps the most underrated but most important documentary of the last couple of years. It was underrated because, I suspect, those who write about movies were averse to its message, and it was important precisely because of its message. It argues that all of the influential people in Barack Obama's formative years were people who despised the United States and wished to make it into a Marxist/Socialist state. It was certainly unnerving to think that he's the product of such mentors.

Atlas Shrugged Pt. II - Another underrated film whose message is important. It portrays an America in which those who carry the country on their backs, the creative entrepreneurs, are taxed and regulated to the point where they simply decide to quit. In other words, these Atlases are the victims of the same sort of people who have exerted monopolistic influence on our president and who, given the opportunity, would do to America what Bane tries to do to Gotham.

Taken 2 - A sequel to the film in which Liam Neeson tracks down the kidnappers of his daughter. The family of those who ran afoul of Neeson's "special set of skills" in the first Taken seek revenge against him in the follow-up with consequences for them similar to those suffered by their brethren in the first movie. It's gratuitously violent, of course, but I'm a sucker for stories about fathers rescuing their wives and children from evil men and dispensing condign justice to said evildoers. Maybe the popularity of such films is due to the fact that so many people are frustrated that real evil rarely, if ever, receives genuine justice in this life.

Lincoln - My vote for best movie of the year. Daniel Day Lewis gives us a wonderful portrayal of Lincoln, and Steven Spielberg doesn't shy from showing the seamy side of politics and politicians. Tommy Lee Jones also turns in a superb performance as Thaddeus Stevens. If you can only see one movie in the next few months this is the one you should see.

Skyfall - It's James Bond, but not the insoucient Bond of Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Daniel Craig's Bond is more of a brooding, melancholy, almost psychopathic sort of guy. The most interesting character in the movie, I thought, was the antagonist Raoul Silva played by Javier Bardem, whom I first saw in No Country for Old Men in which he played Anton Chigurh, who was unquestionably a psychopath.

Les Miserables - Hugh Jackman was outstanding in the role of Jean Val Jean, but after a while I got a little weary of all the singing. Almost all of the dialogue was sung and although some of it was very good (Anne Hathaway's Fantine, for example) some of it was not so much (Russel Crowe's Javert, for example). The music was much better, in my opinion, in the play, and the story was better told in the 1978 made for tv version (Anthony Perkins set the standard to which all Javerts must be compared). Of course, as is always the case, nothing is as good as the book which I thought was a work of genius when I read it. One other thought: When people talk about the terrible plight of the American poor they should be urged to watch Les Mis to see what real poverty looks like. Nobody in America has to live in anything near the conditions most Europeans (and Americans, for that matter) lived in until the latter part of the 19th century when capitalist entrepreneurialism created jobs and wealth for everyone who wanted one.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - It was good, I guess, but it took too long to get into the story, and once it did it was too much like watching Lord of the Rings all over again. Moreover, LOR had a certain plausibility to it that The Hobbit lacks. Even so, I enjoyed it, for the most part, and I look forward to the next installments, although I probably won't spend the money to watch it in 3D again.

How to Win the War on Poverty

Peter Cove is a disillusioned foot soldier in the war on poverty. In a column at City Journal he tells how he came to believe that that war will never be won as long as the generals leading it are liberals. After explaining the various failures of welfare to get people out of poverty and the success of his own company, America Works, in putting people to work, Cove makes a startling proposal:

My experience with long-term welfare clients has led me to propose a radical solution: that we abolish all cash welfare, as well as food and housing assistance—except for the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled—in order to move from a dependency culture to one of work-first.

This recommendation may sound impractical at a time of high unemployment. But the work-first principle can easily be implemented even in a down economy, as America Works proved by getting jobs for more than 500 ex-convicts in Detroit—a local economy with 14 percent unemployment—in the past two years. After all, despite the economic downturn, more than 3 million jobs per year go unfilled in the United States.

The rest of his column is a rationale for this proposal. It begins with him sharing the story of his own disenchantment with the policies enacted in the War on Poverty:

Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty. Today, I’m still on the front lines, working to move people out of dependency and into employment. But with an important difference: I’ve become fed up with the useless policies that I once supported, and I’m trying to change the strategy of our bogged-down army.

We know for certain that income transfers, the preferred tactic of generations of liberals, have utterly failed to end poverty. My firsthand experience with welfare clients has shown me why: being on the dole encourages dependency. Working at a real job, by contrast, is the surest way for a person to climb out of poverty.

Accordingly, the surest way for the government to fight poverty is to eliminate cash assistance almost entirely and offer jobs instead.

During his all-too-brief presidency, John F. Kennedy signaled that he wanted to reform the nation’s Depression-era welfare system by giving “a hand, not a handout” to the poor. As Charles Murray noted in his magisterial study Losing Ground, Kennedy’s small initiative, which “consisted of a few training programs and other rehabilitative efforts amounting to only $59 million in the 1963 budget, . . . represented a major departure nonetheless,” since it shifted welfare policy “away from the dole and toward escape from the dole.”

When President Lyndon Johnson expanded Kennedy’s program into the War on Poverty, he likewise wanted not to mire generations in dependency but to free them from it. “The days of the dole in this country are numbered,” Johnson promised at the signing ceremony for the War on Poverty legislation in August 1964.

Listening to his soaring rhetoric, I believed that our nation was on the cusp of one of the great peaceful revolutions of modern times: the elimination not only of welfare but also of poverty and want. After all, by the mid-1960s, America was the world’s most affluent society, and economists predicted that the economic boom and high employment rates would continue for many years to come. The “conquest of poverty,” the 1964 Economic Report of the President explained, was “well within our power.

About $11 billion a year would bring all poor families up to the $3,000 income level we have taken to be the minimum for a decent life. The majority of the nation could simply tax themselves enough to provide the necessary income supplements to their less fortunate citizens.” The following year, the government allocated even more than the report had called for—$14.7 billion—to transfer payments....

But the government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse. Neither city hall nor I comprehended that the “community action” organizations on which we lavished taxpayer dollars would entrench dependency by urging people to get on the welfare rolls.

War on Poverty funds paid for social workers, community activists, and lawyers to organize the poor, but these organizers, far from lifting poor people out of dependency, helped them sign up for more—and more expensive—welfare programs. For instance, the National Welfare Rights Organization urged single black mothers to protest the welfare system’s eligibility restrictions, and the organization’s goal was to flood the system with new clients.

Cove's article should be required reading for every citizen in the U.S. but especially for every liberal Democrat.

Books of 2012

At the start of each year I like to pause and reflect on the books I've read and the movies I've seen during the preceding twelve-month. So here's an annotated list of the books I was able to read in 2012. I don't recommend all of them, but most of them are worthwhile and some of them are very much worth the time spent with them.

1. Destruction of the Indies - Bartolome de las Casas. An account by an eyewitness of how the Spanish systematically tortured and sought to extirpate the Central American native population in the 16th century. It is, inter alia, a numbing reminder of man's capacity for cruelty, horror, and evil and all, sadly, in the name of religion.
2. Where the Conflict Really Lies - Alvin Plantinga. An argument that there's deep concord and only superficial conflict between science and theistic belief, but that the reverse is true for science and naturalism. The concord between metaphysical naturalism and science is superficial and the conflict between them is profound. This flies in the face of conventional opinion, which provides us with another reminder that conventional opinion is quite often wrong.
3. Provocations: The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard - Charles Moore, ed. Moore collects Kierkegaard's thoughts on religious matters. There are a lot of them.
4. The Father's Tale - Michael O'Brien. A novel about a man's world-wide search for his estranged son. In places it's wonderful. In others it's a bit too preachy and tedious.
5. What We're Hearing You Say - Mike Mitchell. An incisive critique of Mormon belief written by a friend of mine who got to experience Mormonism at close range in Utah. Perhaps one reason why Mitt Romney did so poorly among blacks in the election is that traditional Mormon beliefs about blacks circulated through their communities.
6. The Mysterious Epigenome - Woodward and Gills. A fascinating introduction to developments in molecular genetics. It turns out that DNA isn't the only thing involved in making us who and what we are. There are levels of information and coding in our cells that boggle the mind.
7. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins. A description of a world without God and thus without any reason to value human life. It's probably no coincidence that nowhere in Collins' novel is God mentioned and neither is there any consideration by the characters in the story of the morality of the world in which they live.
8. The Triumph of Christianity - Rodney Stark. A very readable history of the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world and how and why it triumphed over its competitors.
9. God's Battalions - Rodney Stark. A very readable history of the crusades which every one who teaches concerned about current relations between Muslims and the West should read. It dispels a lot of myths, including the myth that the crusades were attempts by imperialistic Europeans to plunder and conquer poor, helpless Muslims. In fact, the crusades were mostly attempts at self-defense in the face of relentless Muslim aggression and atrocities.
10. Messy Quest for Meaning - Stephen Martin. A delightful series of vignettes about life and its foibles written by a friend of mine. Not even the fact that he mentions me detracts from the wit, wisdom, and humility which grace Messy Quest's pages.
11. A Brief History of Thought - Luc Ferry. French philosopher Ferry traces the story of man's attempt to find an answer for death. Quick summary: The best answer, Ferry acknowledges, is the Christian answer, but he can't bring himself to believe it.
12. Escape from Camp 14 - Blaine Harden. The amazing story of a North Korean named Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in a North Korean prison camp, a place of awful cruelty and deprivation, and how he managed to become, at age 23, the only person known to have been both born in the camp and to have escaped from it. This 60 Minutes interview of Shin by Anderson Cooper gives a very good overview of Shin's story:
13. Unbroken - Lauren Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand recounts the story of Louie Zamperini a long distance runner in the 1930s who becomes a bomber pilot in WWII, was captured by the Japanese after a 40 + day ordeal at sea in a life raft, and was repeatedly beaten and starved for several years by his captors. The author also takes us through Zamperini's life after the war. It's a fascinating tale of human endurance, courage, and Zamperini's struggles with alcoholism when he finally returned home. Here's a 2010 piece by Fox News on Zamperini:
14. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide - Ed Feser. A good introduction to the thought of one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.
15. A Shot of Faith - Mitch Stokes. Stokes' book is essentially an explication of the thinking of Alvin Plantinga, with special attention paid to Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies.
16. Science and Human Origins - Gauger, Axe, Luskin. A brief summary of some of the very serious problems scientists have recently encountered in their quest to explain human evolution.
17. Mind and Cosmos - Thomas Nagel. Atheist Nagel explains why Darwinian materialism is almost certainly wrong. The alternative, a supernatural intelligence, is not to Nagel's liking, however, so he's left positing some nebulous telic principle pervading the cosmos to explain how life arose. As the kids would say, whatever.
18. Philosophy of Mind - Ed Feser. A fine introduction to the philosophical study of mind and the mind/matter problem.
19. The World According to Monsanto - Marie Monique-Robin. An indictment of the Monsanto chemical company. If only a fourth of the allegations in this book are true the leadership of that corporation, at least during the last half of the twentieth century, should all be in jail. The book is better employed as a reference than as casual reading.
20. In the Beginning...We Misunderstood - Miller and Soden. An interesting explanation of the structure of the first two chapters of Genesis, where that structure came from, and what those chapters are really telling us about the creation.
21. Occupy the Economy - Richard Wolff. A critique of capitalism and an advocacy of Marxist socialism. It offers some important facts, but the argument it makes is pretty thin. Moreover, Wolff's enthusiasm for the Occupy Movement is so 2011.

Beyond Three Dimensions

Could it be that the three dimensional world in which we live is not all there is to reality? Is it possible that there are other dimensions, perhaps inhabited by other beings, which, though its all around us, we are oblivious to because we lack the ability to perceive more than three dimensions?

Such a possibility was the theme of a post I did in 2006 titled Plato's Cave for Modern Man. Check it out.

Also, check out this video which illustrates how a being possessing more dimensions than does our world would be completely incomprehensible, even though thoroughly immanent, to us:

2012: The Best of All Possible Years

Reading this editorial in The Spectator will fill you with Christmas cheer - unless you're an inveterate pessimist or a secular leftist who abhors anything smacking of either Christmas or capitalist success stories. Indeed, as I read it I had two thoughts: first, it sounds so Panglossian that it just begs for a Voltaire to skewer it, and second, I wondered whether it could be that we actually are on the cusp of the millenial kingdom. Give it a read and see what you think. Here's the lede:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And what about the concerns that the oil would run out? Ministers have spent years thinking of improbable new power sources. As it turns out, engineers in America have found new ways of mining fossil fuel. The amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s escalating population — from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries — we live in an age of energy abundance.

Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade.

The editorial goes on to amass more such good news. Perhaps a New Years' Eve toast to 2012 is in order tonight. The Spectator closes its essay with this:

But now, as we celebrate the arrival of Light into the world, it’s worth remembering that, in spite of all our problems, the forces of peace, progress and prosperity are prevailing.

I'll sip some champagne to that even if I'm still not quite sure I believe it.

Guns, Israel, and Chicago

Rabbi Moshe Averick shares several interesting thoughts apropos the current controversy over gun availability and draws some pertinent conclusions. Here's the first:

Anyone from the United States who visits Israel cannot help but be struck with the two following observations:

1. There are guns everywhere. That includes pistols and semi-automatic handguns worn on the hips of civilians (some carry Uzi sub-machine guns) and guards at malls and theaters, rifles slung over the shoulders of teachers and guards accompanying school children on class trips and outings, and the ever present – and from my middle-aged perspective – impossibly young-looking soldiers, both male and female, carrying M-16 and Gallil automatic assault weapons.

Armed Israelis at a beach resort

2. One feels very safe. The reason is simple: Those carrying the guns are the good guys.

On the other hand, two observations about Chicago, where I grew up and currently reside:

1. Despite the fact that Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country (Illinois has completely outlawed concealed carry), 440 school-age children were hit by gunfire here in 2012. Of these, 60 died. Just in case it is overlooked, that is triple the number of those tragically murdered in Newtown, Conn. In fact, in a very bloody 2012 Christmas eve, 7 people were shot in the free-fire zones on the South and West sides of the city.

2. I do not feel safe. The reason is simple: Those carrying the guns are the bad guys.

First obvious conclusion: When good guys have guns we feel safe. When only bad guys have guns, you end up with…well, Chicago.

So why can guns be legally ubiquitous in Israel and there's little violence as a result whereas they're illegal but nevertheless still ubiquitous in Chicago and the violence is appalling? Averick argues that it's the result of decades of liberal policies. Read the rest of his post at the link to find out why he thinks that.

Punish the Rich

Jamelle Bouie at The Washington Post explains why Democrats are adamant that we raise taxes on the rich. It's not because of the revenue such taxes would raise because there's not much revenue to be gained from it. It's because they simply want to punish the rich. Bouie doesn't use the word punish, but that's what his column implies.

Democrats, it seems, are prepared to drive the country deeper into recession, perpetrate a disaster upon the poor, and see our military eviscerated just so they can knock the rich down a couple of pegs and make themselves feel morally righteous by so-doing. But let Bouie tell it:

[A couple of days] from now, the United States will probably “go over” the “fiscal cliff,” and begin to implement a series of tax increases and spending cuts that will — over the course of the year — take a large bite out of economic growth. A deal to avoid the cliff is still possible, but unlikely; Republicans remain opposed to upper-income tax increases, regardless of size, and even if they come with cuts to entitlement spending.

On Monday, I wrote that this opposition is rooted in a fundamentally different view of how to create economic growth in a recession.

Republicans believe that federal spending is driving the debt that, in their view, is holding back the economy. Until Washington gets its “spending under control,” conservatives have all but promised to shoot down any tax increases.

It’s also worth looking at the other side. Yes, we know that Democrats view the current economic climate as demand-driven, but that doesn’t explain their insistence on upper-income tax hikes, despite the fact that — all things equal — it’s probably better to keep the tax cuts and wait for further economic growth before ending them.

The key thing to remember, however, is that Democrats — and liberals, in particular — care about economic inequality as much as they do growth. And as explained in The Post this morning, it’s this concern with inequality that has driven Democrats to rethink their approach on the Bush tax cuts.

Rhetoric aside, there’s no doubt Democrats know that — barring a hike to pre-Reagan levels — there’s not much revenue to gain from restoring upper-income taxes to Clinton-era levels. And when it comes to deficit reduction, full employment — and robust growth — is the best solution. If upper-income tax hikes serve a purpose, it’s to slow the income gains of the wealthiest Americans, who — for the past decade — have reaped the lion’s share of gains from economic growth.

I don't think it's unfair to note that there are two very influential groups among liberals. There are those who are rich and feel guilty about being rich, and there are those who are not rich and who envy and/or resent those who are. The combination of guilt and resentment is a combustible mix that's causing Democrats, particularly the president, to insist on measures that'll do nothing to cure our country's economic ills but do a lot to make them worse.

Singer's Utilitarian Ethics

Peter Wicks reviews in First Things a book by Charles C. Camosy titled Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization. Singer, you probably know, is the enfante terrible of ethicists, insisting on a remorselessly consistent application of the utilitarian calculus, particularly in the matter of abortion and infanticide. For example, as Wicks writes:

Singer not only holds that abortion is permissible at all stages of pregnancy, but also notoriously defends the view that there are circumstances in which it would be moral to kill a newborn child.

Singer arrives at this position by running a familiar anti-abortion argument in reverse. The anti-abortion argument is that because a child does not undergo any transformation in the course of being born that could plausibly be supposed to give it a right not to be killed, the unborn have such a right, since to deny this would lead to the absurd conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrong in killing the newly born.

Singer reasons in the other direction and denies that both the unborn and the newly born have a right not to be killed.

In other words, pro-lifers argue that since there's no qualitative difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since killing the born infant is a moral wrong so, too, is killing the unborn. Singer, however, argues that since there's no difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since the unborn has no right to life, neither should the infant. Wick notes that:

Singer believes newborn infants are not yet persons because they lack the rationality and self-awareness required to possess a desire to go on living. It is the thwarting of that desire, rather than the taking of life as such, that he believes accounts for the wrongness of killing in those cases in which killing is wrong.

In the most recent edition of Singer’s Practical Ethics, he writes that strict conditions should be placed on the circumstances in which infanticide is permitted, but “these restrictions should owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”

This view shocks many, including many who admire Singer for his work on our duties to animals and the world’s poor. But his position is exactly the one that his utilitarian theory implies, and the way that he arrives at that position can serve to illustrate features of the utilitarian approach to ethics that make it attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions that it implies.

There's much more on Singer's utilitarianism at the link and I recommend reading it. Wick is correct when he adds that:

One reason utilitarian ethical thinking proves so persistently attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions it implies is that many of us have difficulty imagining what else ethical thinking could be.

Of course, Singer is an atheist, and if he's right about there being no God then it's hard to imagine how anyone could argue that he's wrong about infanticide in particular and utilitarianism in general. The former follows from the latter, and in a godless world one ethical system is just as useful and defensible as another since they're all matters of arbitrary personal preference.

If a society spurns the notion of a transcendent moral authority which establishes right and wrong and to whom we are accountable then there's no reason to prefer utilitarianism over egoism. Utilitarianism says that we should maximize human well-being and happiness which means that when I act I should take into consideration how my act will affect the happiness of others, but, given atheism, why should I? Why should I care about the well-being of people I don't even know? Why should I not just care about my own happiness and well-being?

Moreover, once we realize that in a godless world egoism (the belief that my well-being is all that matters) is the default position there's no reason not to adopt an ethic of might-makes-right. There's certainly no reason to think that anyone who does adopt such an ethic is wrong to do so. If promoting my well-being is right then whatever I have the power to do is right to do as long as it makes me happy.

When God is banished from ethics, when the divine commands to love God and love our neighbor are deemed obsolete, then society will ultimately devolve to the ethics of the Roman Coliseum or Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.

That's why it sounds so foolish when atheists like Singer make moral judgments about the treatment of animals or people. When an atheist asserts that X is wrong or immoral all he's saying is that he doesn't like X, but why should anyone care about what he likes? To that question the atheist can give no answer.

Christianophobia

Silently, almost beneath notice in the West, Christianity is being extirpated in much of the world. An article on a report by Ruppert Shortt published in Civitas gives some details:

The report surveys in detail the extent of Christian persecution in seven countries – Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Burma, China and India. And it cites findings from the Freedom House think-tank report to highlight the way that Muslim-majority countries are the most hostile to Christians.

Christianity is in serious danger of being wiped out in its biblical heartlands because of Islamic oppression, according to a new report from a leading independent think-tank. But Western politicians and media largely ignore the widespread persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the wider world because they are afraid they will be accused of racism. They fail to appreciate that in the defence of the wider concept of human rights, religious freedom is the “canary in the mine”, according to the report.

The refusal of young Christians in the West to become “radicalised” and mount violent protests against the attacks on their faith also helps to explain the “blind spot” about “Christianophobia” in influential liberal Western circles.

Intolerant Muslims and atheistic communists are waging war against Christian communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia:

Mr Shortt quotes expert findings that between a half and two-thirds of Christians in the Middle East have left or been killed over the past century. The pace of this assault is now intensifying with the rise of militant Islam in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and now, with the civil war, Syria.

Across the world as a whole, some 200 million Christians (10 per cent of the total) are socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.

They [Muslims]impose the greatest curbs on religious freedoms and make up 12 of the 20 countries judged to be “unfree” on the grounds of religious tolerance. Of the seven states receiving the lowest possible score, four are Muslim.

Iraq has also witnessed the decimation of its Christian community amid frequent bombings, shootings, beheadings and kidnappings, especially since the invasion of 2003. In 1990 there were between 1.2 to 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. By 2003, there were only around half a million. Today there are less than 200,000.

Christians are also under assault in non-Muslim countries. Mr Shortt points out that more Christians are imprisoned in China than in any other country in the world. It is estimated that almost 2000 members of house churches were arrested during the 12 months after May 2004 alone.

The author concludes that it took Christian societies many centuries to evolve a tradition of tolerance towards other faiths. He expresses the hope that Islam might eventually reach the same destination.

In other words, whereas Christian nations realized centuries ago that religious freedom and toleration are far more amenable to social and political well-being than sectarian violence, and, whereas this emphasis on freedom and toleration led to enlightenment, science, and technological advance, Muslims and atheistic communists prefer still to live in the dark ages of intellectual and spiritual barbarism.

There's more on the persecution Christians are facing in much of the world today at the link.

Collapse of the Pro-Choice Movement?

Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont College, argues in First Things that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that removed abortion from the realm of democratic judgment by the citizenry and elevated it, implausibly, to the status of a constitutional right, has actually precipitated the demise of the pro-choice movement.

Perhaps he's right, but whether he is or isn't he does make an interesting argument. Here's the crux of it:

Roe v. Wade did far more than create a constitutional right to abortion—it crippled the pro-choice and energized the pro-life movement, creating one of the largest campaigns of moral suasion in American history. Even while nationalizing abortion politics, the Supreme Court’s decision also localized and personalized the issue by pushing it almost entirely out of legislatures, giving an unexpected opening to the pro-life movement to affect the culture, and in turn the wider political debate, in ways no one expected.

Before Roe, the pro-choice movement was truly a movement: It organized letter-writing campaigns, subverted restrictive abortion laws through underground networks of clergy and doctors, and eagerly sought opportunities to debate pro-life advocates. After Roe, obviated by its near-total victory, the movement almost collapsed. It has never fully recovered its former strength and energy.

The impressive efforts of pro-life citizens suggest that Roe did not render them powerless, as both liberals and conservatives sometimes assert. Yes, Roe effectively disenfranchised pro-life citizens by denying them the right to vote over the basic contours of abortion policy. But it also decimated the pro-choice movement and cleared the way for a massive campaign of moral suasion. Much like women in the nineteenth century, pro-life activists have found ways to shape our culture and politics without the franchise.

Skeptics might reasonably question the influence of the pro-life movement, especially since abortion opinion has hardly changed since Roe was decided. That fact alone, however, may indicate the power — not the weakness — of the pro-life movement.

While the country has become far more socially liberal on a large range of questions since Roe, abortion opinion has remained a strange outlier. In fact, pro-choice sentiment stopped increasing after Roe altogether, even though it had grown dramatically in years prior. Roe represented an end to the rapid liberalization of abortion attitudes, perhaps in part because of the utter collapse of the pro-choice movement. Recent surveys find that young Americans are less pro-choice than their elders, even though they are more secular and more likely to support same-sex marriage.

Abortion rates, meanwhile, have steadily declined by nearly a third since peaking in the early 1980s. Those rates would almost certainly have been higher absent the pro-life movement’s massive campaign of moral suasion.

I, for one, hope Shields is correct, but I wonder. Abortion rates may be down by a third from their peak, but that still means that there are a million unborn babies whose lives are snuffed out every year. That doesn't sound like most people's idea of winning.

What's Needed, What's Not

Mark Twain once observed that there are thousands of people hacking at the branches of evil for every one cutting at the root. Perhaps our media and politicians, in their zeal to do something, anything to control firearms in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting are good examples of Twain's aphorism.

John Fund Sails against the media wind with another good column on the media frenzy over guns and the alleged need to control them. He makes several points about gun control which can be summarized in these four statements:

1. It isn't going to happen.
2. It wouldn't work if it did happen.
3. Most people in the media talking about "assault" weapons don't know what they're talking about.
4. A better solution would be to remove the barriers to treatment - erected by leftist groups like the ACLU in the 1970s - for people who show signs of mental illness.

In some ways the debate over gun control is like the debate over the fiscal cliff. The left is adamant that we adopt measures (taxing the rich, banning semi-automatic rifles) that don't address the problem and won't do any good. Nevertheless, their proposals are not outrageous in principle. If raising taxes on millionaires or doing away with semi-automatic rifles would solve our debt problem or prevent mass murders then I'd be for them.

But they won't, and therefore I'm not. Such measures would only succeed in further restricting our freedom which may be one reason why the left is so eager to implement them.

Diverting Killer Rocks

Astronomer Phil Plait gives a 14 minute TED Talk in which he describes the problem posed by asteroids whose orbits take them into a collision course with earth. He also discusses some current strategies for dealing with these threats if they're discovered in time.

Mr. Plait tries a bit too hard to be funny and his audience seems to have a low humor threshhold, both of which are somewhat irritating, but if you can tolerate that sort of thing, his talk is interesting:

For Christmas