The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies, resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without the tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have appeared very early on in the history of life and therefore arisen very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. Its emergence required an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did, even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper (I've put some of this excerpt in bold face to emphasize the language of purpose and design the researchers feel compelled to use to describe the Krebs cycle):

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes.

Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derived by applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as those comprising the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves, perhaps unintentionally, the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this cascade of chemical reactions and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature has no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind at all. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it should take a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input to guide its development than to believe that it arose through the intentional agency of a biochemical genius.

Sexual Orientation

A question that often arises in our cultural controversies has to do with the percentage of people in our population who consider themselves to be same-sex attracted.

Sociologist Ryan Burge notes, for example, that a report from Brown University indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%.

Burge wonders whether Brown is an outlier or are huge percentages of college students truly either not straight or cisgender? Sifting through the data from a recent survey conducted by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) he finds that in a sample of some 39,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 25, the numbers are somewhat more modest.

Here's a graph which presents his findings:

I wonder, though, how representative of the overall population college students are. Young people in this cohort are often experimenting or in rebellion against traditional standards so in the general population I'd imagine that the percentage of straights would be considerably higher and the percentage of non-binaries and gays would be much lower.

This is just speculation on my part, however. Perhaps Burge will publish another study in the future that'll offer some clarification.

Meanwhile, there are several other graphs related to this topic at the link and anyone interested is invited to check them out.

Making Peace with the Russians

Why would Ukraine not be interested in some sort of peace deal with Russia? Quite simply because they don't have any reason to think that the Russians would stick to the terms of such a deal and lots of reason to think that they'd violate it.

For example, the Russians signed on to the Geneva Conventions which explicitly prohibit the torture and other maltreatment of prisoners of war. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian soldiers who've found themselves in Russian custody have been subjected to horrific tortures and starvation.

Jillian Kay Melchior has a column in the Wall Street Journal in which she gives us an idea why Ukraine would be reluctant to settle for a peace deal to end the current conflict.

Melchior tells us that 2,500 Ukrainians have been released in prisoner exchanges since February 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion began and cites the testimony of one of them, a man named Serhii Rotchuk.

She writes:

Mr. Rotchuk says he was beaten, was subjected to electrical shocks, and had needles jammed under his fingernails. He says he witnessed a lot of “blunt trauma of the legs, blunt trauma on the ribs, chest, and sometimes on the head.”

He describes his captors as “professionals” who can inflict painful wounds that don’t leave bruises. “Now I have a big problem with my knees, my joints,” as well as “permanent stress, I think.”

Mr. Rotchuk's experience was evidently not unique:

Samer Attar, a Chicago physician who has volunteered in Zaporizhzhia region, was present for one prisoner exchange during the summer of 2022. He recalls seeing “scores of young men,” all of them “emaciated” and “sickly looking.”

After their release, Ukrainian soldiers are handed off to professionals like Tetiana Sirenko, who is deputy director for psychological work at a clinic run by the Health Ministry.

She says nearly all the former prisoners she has treated endured electrical shocks, which can cause long-term cardiovascular damage. “A very common thing done to men is electrodes placed on their genitals and other parts of their body,” she says.

“Then there are also things like breaking fingers and bones, tearing out fingernails, and beatings on the heels.”

She has also treated cases involving “a lot of sexual violence—gang rapes, raping with objects.”

Russians sometimes brand their victims, and if they discover a patriotic tattoo, they may cut off “the skin and some of the flesh under it,” Ms. Sirenko says. A few of her patients were filmed as they were tortured, and the Russians sent the footage to their families.

Ms. Melchior concludes her column with this:

Given Russia’s lawless brutality, Ukrainians have no confidence it would abide by any negotiated peace, and they fear domination more than war.

Given what the Russians did to POWs in their custody it doesn't take much imagination to predict what they'd do to Ukrainian civilians, government leaders and military personnel if they were ever in a position to do so.

That's why those in the West calling for a peace deal are being ignored by the Ukrainian government. There's no point in making a deal with thugs like the Russians.

Scientism and Self-Refutation

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be true is itself a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable, and the belief that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century such as positivism and verificationism fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

A Short Argument Against Naturalism

One consequence of a naturalistic worldview (i.e. the view that the natural world is all there is) is that atheism would be very likely to be true, and if atheism is very likely to be true then materialism (i.e. the view that everything in the universe reduces ultimately to matter and energy, there are no immaterial substances like mind or soul), would be very likely to be true.

Now, materialism entails that every thought we have is solely the product of chemical reactions in the brain, but if that's the case what reason do we have for thinking that any of our thoughts are actually true? Why think that neurochemical reactions would or could produce true thoughts?

How, after all, could atoms swirling around on a neuron be expected to reliably produce a truth?

And if, given materialism, our thoughts can't be trusted to be true, what confidence can a materialist have for thinking that materialism, naturalism and atheism are true?

It would seem that naturalism, if we follow it consistently to its logical conclusion, leads to complete epistemological skepticism, including skepticism about the truth of naturalism.

The only escape from this problem for the naturalist is simply to decide to exercise blind faith in his neurochemistry to lead him to trustworthy beliefs, but ironically blind faith is one of the things he criticizes religious people for having.

A World from Pure Thought

Several years ago philosopher Nick Bostrom put forward the notion that the universe and everything in it is actually a massive simulation designed by humans living in the distant future. A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an update of Bostrom's original idea.

The Mind Matters article plays off an earlier piece at Big Think by Paul Ratner.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations run by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know.

Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

Bostrom imagined that the universe was physical but that humans in the future had achieved such a high degree of technological prowess that they were able to design computer programs which simulated the world we now inhabit and us as well.

Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

The current hypothesis, though, is that the universe is not material at all but is pure thought. It's an "idea" that has somehow generated itself.

The hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call “the principle of efficient language.”

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.”

How would the simulation itself be originated?

It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles.

Physicist Sir James Jeans anticipated something like this all the way back in 1930 when he wrote that, “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.”

Denyse O'Leary (under the pen name "News") at Mind Matters points out the significance of this:

The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism. Thus it bears comparison with newer theories of consciousness, which are explicitly panpsychist.

Panpsychism is the view that everything in the universe from the largest stars to the tiniest particles are all conscious to one extent or another. Panpsychism has been around for a long time but is becoming more mainstream now because the classical materialism (or physicalism) of the 19th and 20th centuries simply cannot explain many of the phenomena that scientists are observing, especially in quantum mechanics.

O'Leary continues:

However off-the-beaten-track this ... hypothesis may seem, it does solve two problems:

First, it offers an account of consciousness that conforms to what we experience. Materialist accounts generally fail at that. Famously, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett describes consciousness as a user illusion. It’s not really there. Which prompts the question, whose illusion is it then? The [new theory] sees human consciousness as a sub-thought of a grand thought.

Agree or disagree, that is somewhat closer to what we experience.

Second, the researchers’ approach — that the universe simulates itself into existence — gets rid of the problem of infinite regress (what simulated the universe?), in the same way that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” gets rid of it.

Of course, as noted above, anything that simulates itself into existence as “one grand thought” might as well be God.

What O'Leary is saying is that if consciousness is indeed the ultimate reality, if the universe is a grand thought, if information is the fundamental stuff of the world, then there must be a mind in which the thought resides and which is the source of the information out of which the world is constructed.

That mind must transcend the universe of space, time and matter and it must also possess unimaginable knowledge and power. Indeed, as O'Leary states it would seem to be almost indistinguishable from God.

The more science discovers about the world, the more untenable the old naturalistic materialism of the last two centuries seems to be and the more compelling is the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, has created the universe and is holding it all together.

The Monarch Miracle

Every Autumn an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarch's roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs has revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that in the history of the species there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations, all of which were random but which fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this migration.

While these mutations were accumulating in the genome what purpose did they serve and if they served no beneficial purpose why were they retained for eons of time until finally enough mutations accumulated in enough individuals to produce a behavior which, obviously, was totally unnecessary for the butterfly's survival?

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.

Children's Books

Concerned parents and conservative thinkers have for some time been expressing dismay at the sort of books that public schools are putting on their library shelves even at the elementary level. The books, they say, are pure pornography and have no place in a public school, and especially not in an elementary school.

Progressives, including the President, have criticized those who protest having their children exposed to such fare, calling them "book banners" and other taunts. When parents have gone to school board meetings to inform the board and the public what's actually in these books they've had their microphones cut off and have been otherwise prevented from quoting from the contents of these volumes.

The fact that no one is calling for the books to be "banned," rather merely not stocked in public schools, as was the practice in this country throughout our history until the day before yesterday, is a detail that the critics studiously ignore.

The fact that parents are prevented from reading from the books at school board meetings in a room full of adults because the books are too salacious for the ears of the adults is very strange since the school boards evidently have no problem with young children reading from them in their classrooms.

In any case, ignoring the parents' and others' concerns is getting more difficult. Aymann Ismail, a writer for the liberal online journal Slate decided to see for himself what some of those books actually contained. He was surprised.

He describes his experience with It's Perfectly Normal, a book recommended for ages 10 and up. Ismail considered himself pretty liberal about such matters, but even he admits to being shocked:

I felt sure that as a 34-year-old father of two there would be nothing in there that would offend my sensibilities. I’d heard nothing but glowing reviews from sex-ed pros about the child-friendly language in the book. But flipping through the book’s pages finally, I was a little shocked.

I had an involuntary reaction to seeing the nude cartoons, like I needed to make sure I was alone and hide the book. I skimmed ahead to look at the rest of the book briskly. On virtually every page I stopped to examine, I was confronted with detailed drawings of genitals.

It felt like every page had a cartoon of a naked body…

On Page 9, I came across the first illustration I recognized from the controversy. In the chapter “Making Love,” there are three graphic images that show adult bodies having sex. There is no visible penetration, but it’s still eye-popping.

I was sure I wouldn’t hand this book to my kids when they are 10. And I began to wonder if in my own allergy to the book-burning fervor, I had been a little too dismissive of the parents at the root of this fight…

It’s Perfectly Normal, more than any other frequently banned title I have flipped through, challenged my view. The images are not “pornographic,” and it’s obvious that anti-gay sentiment is partly fueling the objection to the book. But the images are graphic, and it’s startling to me to think they’re intended for kids who aren’t even in middle school yet.

It's Perfectly Normal is evidently not the worst book you might find in your child's school library.

Senator John Kennedy the other day read passages from a pair of commonly shelved books in a Senate hearing and caused something of a brouhaha among his colleagues.

You can watch Senator Kennedy's reading here if you're so inclined. I'm not going to put it up on VP because the excerpt he reads is too disgusting and vile.

Nevertheless, if shining a light on what public schools are exposing our children to forces the supporters of this stuff to have to publicly defend it he has performed a noble public service.

Russia's Losses

Strategy Page offers a helpful update on the situation in Ukraine. Here are a few highlights:

Russian forces have been in Ukraine for 18 months and Russia refuses to disclose any information on the losses. Ukraine has a similar policy about Ukrainian losses but will share what they believe the Russians have lost so far, which is 250,000 Russian troops dead, badly wounded (disabled), deserted or captured. Weapon and equipment losses includes 4,300 tanks and 8,500 other armored vehicles, 5,300 mortars or howitzers as well as 729 MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems), 490 air defense systems, 315 fixed wing aircraft and 316 helicopters as well as 4,300 UAVs and 18 ships of all sizes.

These heavy Russian losses were the result of poorly trained and led Russian troops being on the offensive much of the time. Corruption in the Defense Ministry and army left Russian troops in Ukraine with shortages of supplies, replacements and even munitions.

It's difficult to recall how powerful the Russian army seemed just a few years ago. It turns out that they had apparently built a Potemkin military. Someone once described Russia, which manufactures nothing anything anyone wants and produces only the oil they can extract from the earth, as a gas station with nuclear weapons, and so it seems.

Ukrainian intelligence reported that the Russian government is considering mobilizing another 450,000 personnel in a possible second major mobilization. Inside Russia the government is having a hard time finding many military-age men for the war in Ukraine. This has led Russian mobilization officials to take desperate measures, like forcing migrant workers from Central Asia to sign up for military service if they want Russian citizenship and the right to seek work in Russia.

Mobilization efforts are still seeking volunteers from men in prison. The military has found that these prison recruits are unreliable and often dangerous to local Russian civilians and their own officers.

Russia never had a surfeit of officers, and attrition from both Ukrainian fighters as well as disgruntled Russian enlisted men has exacerbated the problem.

Russian-language Internet chatter about the war often mentions the officer shortage and how it makes matters worse for Russian troops, especially new ones. For military-age men the threat of being mobilized and sent to Ukraine is considered a death sentence, or at least a situation that is extremely risky.

Since the invasion Russia has enacted a law that forbids military age men from leaving the country. The growing number of Russian men showing up illegally in NATO and Central Asian countries and asking for asylum is a problem few expected.

Putin's hope, evidently, is that his defenses will be able to bog the Ukrainian counter-offensive down long enough to cause Western nations to tire of supplying Ukraine with weaponry and other supplies in what they would perceive to be an endless stalemate. If the West's spigot is cut off Putin will be able to call for a cease-fire and essentially be permitted by Ukraine's "allies" to retain whatever he's been able to grab since 2014. Ukraine would be powerless to do anything much about it.

Immigration Pains

Last week I did a post on how one very liberal Minneapolis woman was literally "mugged by reality." Here's another example. During the Trump administration a number of cities and states made a great show of declaring themselves "sanctuaries" for illegal immigrants. They frequently cited the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty piously declaring that the "tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free" would be welcomed in their communities.

Then the Biden administration decided to open our southern border and implicitly welcomed anyone who could cross the Rio Grande into our country without having to bother with our immigration laws and procedures. These laws the left-wing progressives in the administration declared were racist, xenophobic and cruel.

The migrants came by the thousands, perhaps millions, putting enormous strain on border states like Texas.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to relieve the burden that the Biden border policy placed on their communities by transporting some of the influx to the states and cities that were pleased to declare themselves immigrant sanctuaries. Of course, it's one thing to pronounce one's city a "sanctuary" when the problem is a thousand miles away in Texas. It's quite another to maintain the facade of moral piety when the problem is dumped on one's own doorstep.

Now the sanctuary city overseers, Democrats all, are outraged that they find themselves being required to educate, shelter and otherwise care for thousands of people who've arrived in their communities as a result of Democrat policies.

New York Mayor Eric Adams recently complained about the intolerable situation in his city:

Let me tell you something, New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.

We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. One time we were just getting Venezuela. Now we’re getting Ecuador. Now we’re getting Russian-speaking coming through Mexico. We’ve got Western Africa. Now we’re getting people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they’re going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City.

And everyone is saying it’s New York City’s problem. Every community in this city is going to be impacted. We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut. Every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us. . . .

....It’s going to come to your neighborhoods. All of us are going to be impacted by this. I said it last year when we had 15,000. And I’m telling you now, with 110,000. The city we knew we’re about to lose, and we’re all in this together. All of us.

Well, it's not a surprise that he declined to recite Emma Lazarus' poem.

It's hard to symapthize with the mayor and those who voted to make New York - and dozens of other municipalities and eleven states - an immigrant sanctuary. After all, what's happening in their communities was predicted by conservative pundits years ago. It was not hard to see it coming.

In any case, I'm sure the White House is getting an earful from mayors like Adams, and I'm fairly sure if the Biden administration doesn't fix it that Democratic loyalty will be placed under a considerable strain.

To borrow a thought from Machiavelli, many will insist upon their loyalty to the leader when the threat is far off, but when the gates and walls of the city are being overrun, the leader may find that loyalty has vanished along with those who so vigorously declared it.

Let's Roll

Among the many heroes who died on 9/11/2001, especially the first responders who rushed into the World Trade Towers to save lives and lost theirs when the buildings collapsed, some who stand out were not on the ground but in the air on Flight 93.

Mene Ukueberuwa has a short piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) describing the actions of one of the many American heroes on 9/11 twenty two years ago.

For those readers too young to remember, this particular man's name was Todd Beamer, a young man who embodied in his courage, toughness and faith all that is great in America today.

Beamer was aboard United Airlines Flight 93 enroute to California when it was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists. It crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, following an attempt by the passengers and crew to regain control of the plane. All 44 people on board were killed, including the four hijackers.

The hijackers stormed the aircraft's cockpit 46 minutes after takeoff, and the captain and first officer fought with them. One of the terrorists, Ziad Jarrah, had trained as a pilot, and took control of the aircraft, diverting it toward the east coast, in the direction of Washington, D.C. The hijackers apparently intended to crash the plane into the Capitol Building or the White House.

Several passengers and flight attendants learned from phone calls that suicide attacks had already been made by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many of the passengers then attempted to retake the plane, and during the struggle the hijackers deliberately crashed the plane.

Ukueberuwa writes:

A 32-year-old software salesman for Oracle, Beamer was among the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who attacked the hijackers and prevented them from crashing the Boeing 757 into the U.S. Capitol. His rallying cry, “Let’s roll,” rests in America’s memory. It is exalting to think of what he and his fellow passengers did on that short flight, and the people they saved on the ground.

Beamer remained poised under extreme pressure. Many passengers made phone calls during the flight, but Beamer’s call with Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson became the fullest account of what took place in the air that day. He remained on the line for 14 minutes, describing the direction of the plane, the hijackers’ behavior and, eventually, the passengers’ decision to revolt.

“His voice was devoid of any stress,” Ms. Jefferson later said. “In fact, he sounded so tranquil it made me begin to doubt the authenticity and urgency of his call.”

Beamer was also physically confident, and courageous. As a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, he played baseball and captained the basketball team. In a memoir, Beamer’s wife Lisa relates that he once played a soccer game with a broken jaw.

Todd Beamer's wife and children with photo of Todd two weeks after 9/11

It’s fortunate that Beamer and the three other passengers who spearheaded the revolt — Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and Tom Burnett — were athletes. The hijackers pitched the plane back and forth sharply in a failed attempt to shake their attackers off their feet.

The cockpit recording, filled with slams, shattering plates, and howls, reveals that the terrorists took the plane down only after six minutes of the passengers’ sustained assault.

A strong Christian faith also carried Beamer toward his fate. Lisa recounts that their life together was founded on faith — at Wheaton, while rearing children, and teaching Sunday school at Princeton Alliance Church.

Before ending his call with Ms. Jefferson, Beamer asked, “Would you do one last thing for me?”

“Yes. What is it?” she answered.

“Would you pray with me?”

They said the Lord’s Prayer together in full, and other passengers joined in. Beamer then recited Psalm 23, concluding, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Immediately after, he turned to his co-conspirators and asked, “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.”

They passengers apparently managed to kill one of the hijackers, but when they breached the cabin, or were about to, the hijackers decided to plunge the plane to earth.

You can read a full description of what happened on Flight 93 here.

A country that produces men like Beamer and those who fought alongside him is, despite the cavils of the whiny antifa types, still a great country.

Mugged By Reality

Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of the far-left Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, who was brutally assaulted and carjacked Tuesday, leaving her face bloodied. You can see a pic of what she looked like in the aftermath of this vicious crime here.

She describes at the link the assault, which must've been horrific. She writes:

Yesterday my children and I were violently car jacked in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis. Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.

Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the sh$t beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was, "let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away."

This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four year old daughter screaming non-stop, her 7 year old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the back yard, her neighbors screaming in outrage... all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists.

I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising and cuts all over my body.

And I have rage.

These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse.

I'm now part of the statistics. I wasn't silent when I fought these men to save my life and my babies, and I won't be silent now. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM.

PERIOD.

Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

You could have been reading the obituary for me and my children today. But instead I'm here. To write this.

Look at my face. These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this.

Thank you to the incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct Officers, Mayor Frey, Chief O'Hara, Paramedics, neighbors, friends and DFL family, who all came to our aide during this terrifying experience. I'm so grateful for this community that wraps us in love.

Her anger at these thugs is palpable, as well it should be, and she and her children deserve our sympathy. But maybe we could be forgiven for mingling just a tiny bit of schadenfreude in with our sympathy for in June of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd killing, she expressed very much different sentiments concerning the police.

Back then, like a lot of progressives who live in neighborhoods in which a strong police presence is not often necessary, she rejoiced that Minneapolis was going to defund and disband the police department. She wrote:

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me.

DISMANTLE 👏🏿 The 👏🏿 Minneapolis 👏🏿 Police 👏🏿 Department 👏🏿

As allies, what can we do right now? LISTEN and LEARN from our Black siblings. And then AMPLIFY this message right now, in this moment. MPD has systematically failed the Black Community, they have failed ALL OF US. It's time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities. If you are still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I'm not sure what to say to you.

I'm proud of the radical leadership and organizing of Jeremiah Bey Ellison and Phillipe Cunningham. We need to support them and all the City Council Members and electeds who are working alongside them. Today the Minneapolis City Council has an emergency hearing to approve a court order outlining immediate changes for MPD and a framework for systematic change.

If you live in Minneapolis, call and email your City Council Member to voice your support. If you don't live in Minneapolis, be LOUD. Spread this message. Show your support. NOW is the moment for change.

Now that she's experienced what a lot of people in high crime areas experience she doesn't seem to be in such a hurry to replace the police with social workers or whatever.

There's an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. Sadly, it took a literal mugging for Ms. Sathanandan to realize that the opinion she gave vent to in 2020 was, in fact, very unwise. Hopefully, she and others of her circle will learn from her recent trauma.

Evil Exists

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 produced horrors that defy description. Serb soldiers raped Bosnian women and girls and butchered their men and even their babies by the tens of thousands. The record of their barbaric inhumanity is as hard to believe as it is to read, and is a sickening testament to the depravity that lies within the human psyche.

That so many men were capable of such cruelty is surely compelling evidence of human fallenness and the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, a couple of years back offered some insight into the terrifying iniquity that plagues our world.

Francis reminds us that,

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God's] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter.

All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. An atheist like Leff has no grounds for believing that there is evil in the world. The most he can say is that there are behaviors he doesn't like.

The word "evil" has no meaning in a godless world other than as an expression of personal, subjective revulsion. Those who share Leff's unbelief have a choice. They can acknowledge that evil exists or they can continue in their atheism, but they can't do both.

Some Postmodern Assumptions

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting and may be ignored.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites.

Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent who perhaps works through natural processes, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences and conflicts today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

The Rotation Problem

Strategy Page highlights a problem Russia is having in their war against Ukraine that often goes unmentioned in media reports of the conflict.

This is the problem of combat fatigue. Here's an excerpt:

Russia has suffered heavy personnel losses in Ukraine and is considering mobilizing about 450,000 more civilians into the military. This is needed to prevent front line units from wasting because of casualties, desertions and illness....

Russian units are not receiving enough replacements to make up for combat losses.

Captured Russian soldiers confirm the growing lack of replacements and the extremely long periods Russian units stay in the combat zone without any relief by fresh units.

To maintain morale and combat capabilities it is customary for both sides to withdraw infantry units from the fighting for some rest, home leave, retraining and integrating new recruits into the unit. Without this downtime, which can last a few weeks to more than a month, combat units decline in per capita effectiveness.

This happens despite increasing combat experience because too much time in the combat zone creates exhaustion and hurts morale, always to the point of sharply reducing combat effectiveness. The troops refer to the latter as combat fatigue or burnout.

Most troops begin to suffer from combat fatigue after various periods, with generally an irrecoverable breakdown after 200-300 days total in combat.

Taking troops out of a combat zone for rest and then putting them back into a less active combat area for a period (rotation) is the only way to deal with this. The United States developed other methods to keep career combat non-commissioned officers (NCOs) effective after the 200-300 day limits during the war on terror, involving more frequent and longer periods of time off, and with special treatment when off.

Both sides are suffering from combat fatigue but it is worse for the Russians, most of whose combat personnel have not been rotated (ever), and who suffer from corruption in the military, especially among combat officers who cannot pass up opportunities or enrich themselves at the expense of the troops as Russian officers commonly do.

Russian troops have already been on the front for over a year, and if combat fatigue really is setting in it should soon be obvious as the Ukrainians continue to pressure the defensive lines the Russians have established.

The Ukrainians have declared they will continue to push against the Russian defenses into the winter. If Russian troops are forced to spend the winter in bitter cold, wet trenches with no hope of relief their willingness to resist will be severely tested.

It would be different, of course, if they were defending their motherland and their families, but in this war they are the aggressors and they have to be asking themselves why they should be suffering in what will likely seem to them to be a pointless and futile war.

Is Climate Change Exaggerated?

There's an interesting piece at The Federalist by Tristan Justice which mentions news that some of our environmentalist friends may not want to hear.

Justice reports that,

A coalition of more than 1,600 scientists critical of their peers’ hyperbolic claims about climate change drew a prominent recruit to sign their 2019 declaration that the climate “emergency” is a myth.

John Clauser, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in physics, became the second Nobel laureate last month to sign the document with 1,607 other scientists rebuking the idea of a climate crisis.

According to these scientists the climate crisis, so fervently believed in by much of our media and promoted by politicians and ideologically inclined scientists, doesn't exist.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) reads.

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) debuted a roadmap to net-zero emissions that became the model for corporate bishops of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards.

A June report from the Energy Policy Research Foundation criticized the initiatives outlined as a “green mirage.” The IEA roadmap, researchers wrote, “will dramatically increase energy costs, devastate Western economies, and increase human suffering.”

“The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times,” reads CLINTEL’s World Climate Declaration. “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm.”

There's no cause for panic or alarm, these scientists tell us, but somehow that message has not made its way to our schools and state and national capitals.

“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience,” Clauser said.

“In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists.”

The signatories insist that the planet is warming more slowly than had been predicted and that the warming that has occurred has had little to do with whatever natural disasters the planet has suffered.

In fact,

Mega-disasters are actually on the decline, while the destruction from natural events such as hurricanes and wildfires is on the rise. The increase in billion-dollar disasters, however, is a result of there being more to destroy. But that hasn’t stopped legacy outlets from blaming every natural event on the “climate crisis.”

Two years ago, The New York Times published “Postcards From A World On Fire” despite natural disaster deaths declining by 90 percent.

When hurricanes and tornadoes hit they cause a lot of economic destruction because it's much more likely that a storm will hit highly developed areas today than it was fifty years ago when fewer areas were under asphalt.

The World Climate Declaration also notes that carbon dioxide is not a toxic pollutant. It's essential to the nourishment of plants and assimilated by them to promote their growth and release oxygen. It has generated higher crop yields and global reforestation.

But the climate change lobby never tells us that.

Against Raising the Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day perhaps it's appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Davidson noted that,

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of them, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

DNA Repair and Breast Cancer

I recently came across this short video which explains how healthy cells in the body repair damaged DNA, why damaged DNA can develop into breast cancer and how one common treatment for breast cancer works. It's pretty interesting:

Aside from the medical aspects of the video, the clip raises an important philosophical question. How do you suppose the repair mechanism ever arose?

Presumably it didn't exist early on in the evolutionary history of life, but if it didn't it's hard to see how the first cells would've survived given the frequency with which DNA is damaged. And if it did come to exist roughly at the same time as cells came to be, how did such a complex function, requiring specific protein shapes, ever emerge so rapidly in the early history of life?

Could blind, purposeless processes just by accident have created such a system? Which do you think is the more likely scenario, that random chance could've engineered the DNA repair system or that such complex systems were engineered by an intelligent engineer?

Fairy Tale or Miracle

The video below features a beautiful animation depicting the development of a child from insemination to birth.

When I watched this video for the first time I couldn't help wonder how the cells, both the sperm and the embryonic cells, "know" where to go. I marveled, too, at how the cells "know" to differentiate themselves into various tissues, and how the tissues "know" to arrange themselves in three dimensional patterns of a specific shape.

The amount of information and organization this whole process requires, the feedback and control systems that must be deployed, are all enormously complex and ingenious.

The developmental process from sperm to newborn appears to be wonderfully programmed and choreographed, but by what? The laws of chemistry? Natural selection? How does a purposeless, mechanical process like natural selection generate the incredible amount of information - far more information than what's required by, say, a computer operating system - that's needed for embryogenesis, even given a billion years of evolutionary time?

Perhaps some purely naturalistic, mechanical process did produce this amazing developmental sequence, but if so, it's as if a fairy tale has come true. Or maybe it's really a miracle.

This is breathtaking. Even moreso when we think that we're essentially witnessing the first nine months of our own existence.

Declawing the Bear

There seems to be a growing chorus of voices, especially from Republicans, that we're spending too much money in Ukraine and that there's no accountability for where it's going. The concern seems, however, to be based upon a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that Jim Geraghty clears up in his "Morning Jolt" column today.

According to Geraghty, who's currently touring eastern Ukraine, Republicans "become more supportive when they learn that one, the amount of aid is not that much relative to defense spending; two, Ukraine is winning; and three, Russia’s war-fighting capabilities are being severely degraded."

Take the first point.

[A]s of last week, the U.S. government had provided $43.8 billion worth of military support to Ukraine...[and] it is worth reminding some people that this kind of aid is not cash. It is all kinds of vehicles, guns, and ammunition that the Pentagon largely had in storage. (As I wrote back in April, there are certain weapons systems in short supply — HIMARs, Javelins, and Stingers, in particular — that the U.S. should not send any more of until our stockpiles are replenished to sufficient levels to deal with other potential threats, including one particular threat with a Great Wall. But the majority of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment that the U.S. is sending Ukraine is in great supply. Some of it was going to be scrapped!)

This $43.8 billion in aid sent to Ukraine since the beginning of the war is a drop in the bucket of the $5.3 trillion our government has spent on all expenditures just in fiscal year 2023

In other words, all military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war a year and a half ago adds up to about four-fifths of 1 percent of all U.S. government spending this year. Military aid to Ukraine since the start of the war is about half of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Transportation alone in one year. It is about a quarter of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is about one-sixth of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Education.

That Russia's ability to wage war is being severely degraded can be assessed in several ways. One is the difficulty the Russians are having in recruiting soldiers, another is the aborted Wagner Group mutiny a few months ago and the low morale it revealed among Russian forces. Another is the enormous manpower losses Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties including 120,000 dead.

Geraghty doesn't mention the loss of manpower but he does focus on the depletion of Russia's material assets:

[T]here is confirmed visual evidence of 11,906 Russian military vehicles being taken out, with 8,188 destroyed, 475 damaged, 444 abandoned, and ... 2,869 captured by the Ukrainians. (If you think the U.S. has given the Ukrainians a lot of vehicles, think about how many the Russians have given them.)

The comparable numbers for Ukraine are 4,322 vehicles taken out, with 2,901 destroyed, 331 damaged, 148 abandoned, and 942 captured.

Ever since the 1930s American strategists have predicted that the West was going to eventually face the Soviets/Russians in direct conflict*.

It's not likely that anyone expected the conflict to occur the way it has, but if war had to come, if the Russian bear was going to be declawed and rendered less of a threat, it's very fortunate for us that it's only costing Americans money and not costing American blood.

*Actually, Alexis deToqueville predicted it in Volume I (1835) of Democracy in America.

Rescuing Children

Maybe the biggest surprise of last summer's film offerings was the success of Sound of Freedom, the story of Tim Ballard the founder of Operation Underground Railroad. The movie was loosely based on Ballard's work in rescuing children who've been taken into sex slavery, but despite its powerful message that one would think everyone could agree with - that child slavery is a scourge that plagues the U.S. even more than many other parts of the world - the left was quite critical of the film and its theme.

This surprised me until I watched a Prager U. video of the real Tim Ballard telling his story (you can watch it here), and about 3/4 into the 13 minute video he mentions that he thinks that attempts to stock elementary school library shelves with pornography and to sexualize kids with drag shows and what-not are feeding into the child sex industry.

Of course, the library books and drag shows are supported by the left. Even President Biden has criticized Republicans for wanting to ban obscene materials from school libraries and to limit talk of sexuality by teachers. Ballard's indictment of such behavior is thus an indictment of the left which is perhaps the root of their disdain for Sound of Freedom.

Ballard himself has not escaped criticism, much of which seems to me to be either unsupported by evidence of just frivolous, but you can read more about O.U.R. and Ballard at Wikipedia and draw your own conclusions.

In any case, if the opportunity presents itself, watch the movie. It's very good and you won't be quite the same after having seen it.

Also, you might get a copy of my book Bridging the Abyss (see the radio button above) which is a novel based on the same theme as Sound of Freedom although it was published well before I was aware of Operation Underground Railroad and the methods used to rescue children in the novel are probably not the same as the methods employed by O.U.R.

Teaching Ethics in Public Schools

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools. By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that even hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions come up, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden teachers to offer to their students.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also ideas with religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

The Secular Theocracy

In an essay titled Lilies that Fester, written in 1955, the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis displays his characteristic prescience, although I want to register a quibble.

In the essay he touches on the fear that some then had, and many have today, that Christians wish to impose a theocracy - i.e. a government by the clerical elite ruling in accord with their interpretation of the will of the deity - on the rest of society.

Lewis writes,

The loftier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome, inhuman and oppressive it will be.

Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All political power is at best a necessary evil; but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives.

Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle in our private lives.

Thus far I think Lewis is correct, as he almost always is, but then he says the following:

Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is the worst corruption of all. But then I don't think we are in any danger of it. [Emphasis mine]

Lewis is talking about the prospect of a Christian theocracy, and though he may have been correct that a Christian theocracy was not a real threat in 1955, there's a very real threat of both a religious and a secular theocracy today.

The religious threat is most pronounced in Western Europe and comes not from Christianity, which in Western Europe is not a significant political force, but from Islam, which is maybe a decade away from wielding decisive power in many European capitals.

The secular theocracy is a threat here in the U.S. where the left has sought to deify the state and convert it into an all-powerful vehicle for rule by the priesthood of our secular elites.

Lewis calls the rule by elites by the rather clunky term "Charientocracy," but what he means by that is essentially a secular theocracy.

He writes that the coalescence of two groups, the unofficial, self-appointed aristocracy of the Cultured and the bureaucrats who hive away in the bowels of our alphabet agencies - Lewis calls them "Managerial rulers" - will bring upon us this Charientocracy or secular theocracy.

Culture, exemplified, perhaps, by an Ivy-league education, "is a bad qualification for a ruling class because .... the things we really need in our rulers - mercy, financial integrity, practical intelligence, hard work, and the like - are no more likely to be found in cultured persons than in anyone else."

This is certainly true. It reminds me of the late William F. Buckley's quip that he'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

In any case, when the state is elevated to a kind of national deity those who run the state will be tempted to exercise their power to control every aspect of our lives, just as the clergy in a religious theocracy would take it upon themselves to do.

Lewis didn't think worry about a (Christian) theocracy was very realistic, but today's secular theocrats are another story. We see the state worshipers aggrandizing their power with every executive order that by-passes the people's representatives in Congress and with every attempt to limit the rights of ordinary citizens guaranteed us by our Constitution.

Perhaps Lewis never foresaw a Charientocracy being identical to a theocracy in which the state was god, but we may well be in danger of seeing it in our own day.

Three Possibilities

A couple of years ago I did a post on a book by two cosmologists named Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

The book details a number of the parameters, forces, constants and ratios that have to be just what they are to a breathtakingly fine precision or else the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I thought the book to be so important, and the style in which Barnes and Lewis wrote it to be so accessible to laymen, that when I came across this short video publicizing it I thought it'd be good to post it on VP in hopes that some readers may want to read the book.

This cosmic fine-tuning as it's called constitutes a powerful cumulative argument for the existence of an intelligent mind responsible for it all. There seem to be no other very plausible explanations, but some who are queasy about the support fine-tuning gives to traditional theism have adduced other possibilities.

Some have posited that our universe is the product of a computer simulation somewhat like the Matrix.

Of course, this explanation still relies on an intelligent transcendent being. Others have sought to abandon the idea of an intelligent creator altogether and have embraced the idea of a multiverse which incorporates every possible universe in one unimaginably vast array of worlds.

If such a multiverse exists, the thinking goes, then since our universe is certainly possible it must exist somewhere in this enormous ensemble of worlds.

So, there are essentially three competing explanations for why our universe exists: It's a computer simulation designed by a mind in some other world; it's one of an infinity of universes (Geraint Lewis' position); or it's the product of a supernatural agent (Luke Barnes' position).

The problem is that both of the first two explanations themselves must be explained. If the creator of our world is an alien computer wizard, then how did the wizard come to be? Or, if the reason for our universe is some sort of multiverse generator, how did that come to be?

On the other hand, if the creator of the universe is the God of classical theism then the creator is a necessarily existent mind upon which all contingent existents depend. The creator's existence requires no further explanation because the creator is not a contingent being. The explanation of its existence is in itself.

Here's a short video which elaborates on this argument:

My Sentiments Exactly

Jim Geraghty a National Review journalist responds to an accusation that his coverage of the Ukraine/Russia war is too heavily slanted in favor of Ukraine. He's unapologetic:

Indeed, I am very anti-unprovoked massive brutal invasions to annex territory and the wholesale slaughter of civilians, and I am very pro-defending your country when it gets invaded by the hostile autocracy next door run by a maniac with delusions of being a modern czar. I don’t think there’s “another side of the story” when it comes to soldiers raping civilians of all ages, from four to 82 years old.

If you’re looking for coverage with the tone of, “Maybe that Putin fellow has a point, or isn’t such a bad guy, or maybe the invasion is justifiable,” you’re going to be deeply disappointed.

I’m surprised by people who demand neutrality between the oppressor and the oppressed. Wait, did I say “surprised”? I meant appalled.

I feel exactly the same way about this war. There's no moral equivalency between Ukraine and Russia. Russia's invasion and the subsequent conduct of their military is a connotative definition of evil.

Despite what commenters on both left and right seem to think, I doubt that there are very many issues in which there's a moral equivalency between actors.

I've claimed in the past that I think the moral argument against supporting Trump is neutralized by the fact that his electoral opponents, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, are no less morally corrupt than he, so on that matter I do agree that there's a moral equivalency, but I do not believe there's a moral equivalency between Ukraine and Russia or Zelensky and Putin. Nor do I believe there's a moral equivalency between Israel and its enemies, or between the United States and any of its historic foes.

In fact, I'll go further and state that in my opinion the "moral equivalency" argument is quite often intellectually otiose. It's often made by people who are unwilling to look at a conflict between persons or nations deeply and objectively.

I hope that that's not an unfair judgment, but that's been my experience which, I admit, is not universal.

Where Does the Information Come From?

One of the most perplexing problems, if not the most perplexing problem, for any naturalistic account of the origin and development of living things on our planet is the source of the enormous amount of information that programs the functioning of biological organisms.

In order for even a single cell to function entire libraries of information are required, but since everywhere we find information it's a product of intelligent agents, and since it's astronomically improbable that any significant amount of information could arise by chance, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the information in biological systems is also the product of an intelligent agent.

Of course, an intelligent agent that generates the information in living things would have to be either God or something very much like God and that's a conclusion that is still widely resisted by many in the sciences and elsewhere in academia. Yet it seems inescapable.

The following video features Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe explaining the role of information in life and making the case for an intelligent mind behind it. The video's a bit long (17 minutes) but worth the time. It's episode 8 in a series titled Secrets of the Cell.