Biological Gears

Phys.org has a report about a British leaf-hopper, a small insect of the genus Issus which moves by taking large leaps, much like a grasshopper. This particular insect, however, is especially noteworthy because the legs which propel its leaps are synchronized not by nerves but by mechanical gears.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

A plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the "first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure".

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement - the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect's primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in "yaw rotation" - causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.

"This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required," said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge's Department of Zoology.

"By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force - then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.

This is all incredibly fascinating, but almost as fascinating is what the discoverers of these gears say about them next in the article:

"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough," added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.

"These gears are not designed; they are evolved - representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world."

I'd like to ask two questions: First, how does Mr. Sutton know these gears weren't designed? When a structure bears such a close resemblance to a structure we know to be designed by an intelligent agent we conclude by analogy that the original structure has a reasonable possibility of being similarly designed. This is the principle, widely accepted in science, that like effects are reasonably attributed to like causes. Why should we simply acquiesce to the view that such wonders are the product of unintelligent forces plus chance plus time?

Second, isn't a bit embarrassing for scientists to always have to impute such a marvelous capacity for innovation and engineering to blind impersonal processes? When amazing structures such as this gear system or the outboard motor that propels bacteria are discovered Darwinians express no reservations about dutifully waving their magic wand of mutation and natural selection, squirting a little pixie dust into our eyes, and declaring that even though it nay seem like magic to the benighted, functional gears and outboard motors are the sorts of miracles that purposeless forces and chance can build a dozen times before breakfast every morning.

It seems to me that one has to be either a) very gullible or b) resolutely committed a priori and with religious tenacity to metaphysical naturalism in order to believe such prodigies uncritically. Someone with a healthy scientific/philosophical skepticism would judge claims like Mr. Sutton's to be at best rash and at worst superstitious nonsense.

Scientists don't, or at least shouldn't, invoke magic or miracle as an explanation.

Metaphysical Freeloader

P.Z. Myers is a very devout atheist. He's committed to an evolutionary view of life, so it's perplexing that he makes so many moral pronouncements in his recent condemnation of atheistic fellow-traveler Richard Dawkins' latest transgressions against Myers' moral sensibilities. Myers quotes from an article in The Times magazine in which Dawkins discusses an incident from his childhood:

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

That was Dawkins saying that being briefly fondled by his teacher as a child was no big deal. Well, it is to Myers. Note the moral outrage in his criticism of Dawkins:

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial. Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?

Should we be giving pedophiles the idea that a “mild touching up” is reasonable behavior? It’s just a little diddling...it does no “lasting harm”. [T]hat sounds like something out of NAMBLA.

And that all Richard Dawkins experienced was a brief groping does not mean that greater harm was not being done. That man was a serial child molester; do we know that he didn’t abuse other children to a greater degree? That there aren’t former pupils living now who bear greater emotional scars?

We do not excuse harm to others because some prior barbaric age was indifferent to that harm. Furthermore, the excuse doesn’t even work: are we supposed to believe that a child-fondling teacher would have been permissible in the 1950s? Seriously? Was that ever socially acceptable? And even if it was, in some weird version of British history, it does not excuse it. It means British schools were vile nests of child abuse, just like Catholic churches.

Thanks for swapping the moral high ground for a swampy mire of ambiguity, Richard. I’m not going to argue that compelling kids to memorize Bible verses and fear hell, as stupid an excuse for education as that is, was child abuse, while getting manhandled by lascivious priests was a trivial offense, to be waved away as harmless. I’m sure many Catholics are quite gleeful that Richard Dawkins has now embraced the same moral relativism that they use to rationalize crimes against children.

Myers is incensed that Dawkins would pooh-pooh what Myers sees as a terrible wrong. He condemns the act because of the harm it does, and expresses disdain, while he's at it, for Dawkins' moral relativism.

Now I share all of these sentiments with Myers, but what I'd like to know is where does Myers think his moral sensibilities come from? If he says they've evolved in us over the eons then why, exactly, should we pay them any heed? Evolution molded us for life in the stone age, not the modern age. Besides, if our sense of moral aversion to pedophilia is a product of evolution then so is the urge to indulge in pedophilic behavior. Why does the aversion take precedence over the indulgence? Why is the antipathy toward molestation any more "right" than the desire to fondle children if both are the products of evolution?

Moreover, how can an impersonal process like evolution impose a moral duty on us to refrain from molesting children in the first place? Moral duties cannot be imposed upon us by an impersonal force or process. They can only be imposed by the personal Creator of the universe, but Myers is absolutely hostile to the idea that such a Creator exists. Yet the fact is that for someone who shares Myers' worldview there are no grounds whatsoever for saying that pedophilia is wrong because in the absence of a personal, transcendent moral authority we have no moral duties at all.

Myers can say he doesn't like what happened to the young Dawkins and doesn't like Dawkins' minimizing of it, but for him to talk as if there's something terribly wrong with it, for him to talk as if there's much more than a simple expression of his personal distaste involved, is just silly.

As I argue in my novel In the Absence of God (see link above right) when an atheist makes a moral judgment, he's essentially acting as if God existed. On atheism there are no grounds for such judgments, but man can't live consistently with the nihilism his atheism entails so he temporarily piggy-backs on Christian theism in order to favor us with his moral pronouncements and hopes all the while that no one will notice that he is, in effect, a metaphysical freeloader.

No Such Thing As Cyberwar

There's been lots of talk over the past decade about cyberwarfare, but rarely has the concept been teased out in order to understand exactly what it is. Thomas Rid does this for us in a brief essay at New Scientist. It's Rid's thesis that when we understand what cyberwar entails we realize that it probably won't ever happen although lots of other bad things that are wrongly considered to be versions of cyberwar have happened and will continue to happen.

Rid starts by explaining three characteristics of warfare that do not typify cyber attacks:

What would an act of cyberwar look like? History suggests three features. To count as an armed attack, a computer breach would need to be violent. If it can't hurt or kill, it can't be war.

An act of cyberwar would also need to be instrumental. In a military confrontation, one party generally uses force to compel the other party to do something they would otherwise not do.

Finally, it would need to be political, in the sense that one opponent says, "If you don't do X, we'll strike you." That's the gist of two centuries of strategic thought.

No past cyberattack meets these criteria. Very few meet even a single one. Never has a human been injured or hurt as an immediate consequence of a cyberattack. Never did a state coerce another state by cyberattack. Very rarely did state-sponsored offenders take credit for an attack. So if we're talking about war – the real thing, not a metaphor, as in the "war on drugs" – then cyberwar has never happened in the past, is not taking place at present, and seems unlikely in the future.

He's quick to point out that cyberwar should be differentiated from cyber attacks:

That is not to say that cyberattacks do not happen. In 2010, the US and Israel attacked Iran's nuclear enrichment programme with a computer worm called Stuxnet. A computer breach could cause an electricity blackout or interrupt a city's water supply, although that also has never happened. If that isn't war, what is it? Such attacks are better understood as either sabotage, espionage or subversion.

Even granting Rid the distinctions he makes his essay has about it the feel of quibbling about words. Sabotage, espionage, and subversion are all tactics widely used in war, even if they also occur between parties not in direct violent conflict with each other. Indeed, sabotage, like the insertion of the Stuxnet virus into the Iranian computers used in the development of their nuclear weapons, is an act of war. The only reason Iran did not respond against Israel or the U.S. for damaging their centrifuges with this virus was because they were too weak to do anything about it.

At any rate, Rid goes on to elaborate on his view of why cyberwar, properly understood, is not in our future. It's an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.

Global Freezing?

An article in the local paper today lamented how global warming is devastating state fisheries. A piece on the local public radio station this morning noted that a nearby ski resort is expanding to include warm weather activities due to, the reporter implied, dwindling snowfalls resulting from climate change, i.e. global warming.

Both of these stories were aired despite the fact that our state has experienced one of the coolest summers in memory, but perhaps our weather this summer is an anomaly. Perhaps, but what about this? For a decade or more we've been subjected to alarming cries of melting polar ice caps. We've been shown pictures of polar bears on shrinking ice floes to convince us that the situation is dire.

Yet the British Daily Mail published a report recently that claims that:

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

With all the conflicting claims about the catastrophic effects of global warming on one side and reports that there has been no warming at all for the last twelve years and the ice cap is actually growing on the other, how do we decide what's true?

Perhaps the wisest course is to decline to be swept up in the hysteria until unambiguous, incontestable evidence is adduced one way or the other. It would be wise, perhaps, to simply suspend opinion and maintain an open-minded skepticism toward both the claim that we're on the brink of an eco-catastrophe as well as the claim that nothing particularly unusual is happening.

Coyne on Free Will and Morality

Biologist Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution Is True raises an important question about human nature. Specifically, Coyne asks how, if man's morality is a product of the impersonal action of evolutionary forces, there can be such a thing as "free will," and if there isn't free will, if man doesn't in some sense choose his actions, how can there be such a thing as moral right and wrong?

Now, Coyne is a determinist who believes our choices are predetermined by environmental or genetic influences over which we have no control. Thus, he rejects the popular notion that there is such a thing as morality. He holds that what we call morality is simply an expression of our likes and dislikes. I think he's very much mistaken about this, but, given his naturalism, his conclusions are certainly unassailable. Here's part of what he says:

Readers here will know that, being a determinist, I’d prefer to dispense with the term “moral responsibility,” replacing it with the simple idea of “responsibility.” That’s because I don’t think we have dualistic free will that would allow us to decide between doing “right” and “wrong”. If that’s the case, then why add the adjective “moral,” which implies that one does have a choice?

We always hear that “unlike humans, nature is amoral.” You can’t say that the actions of animals are moral or immoral—they just are. When a male lion invades another group and kills the cubs, when a chimp tears another chimp to bits, those are just bits of nature, and aren’t seen as wrong.

So why, when a stepfather kills his stepchild (something that, presumably is not something he decides to do “freely”), that is morally wrong, but when a lion does it, or a chimp kills an infant, it’s just nature, Jake.

Now the idea of ethics—a codified set of rules to which we adhere for various reasons, usually as a form of societal glue—clearly was concomitant with the rise of human society and language. But much of our morality is surely based on evolution. I’m not saying that those evolved principles are the right ones to use today: clearly in many cases, as with xenophobia, they aren’t. But some of them remain salubrious, including reciprocal altruism, shame, guilt, and so on. So why can we do wrong but chimps can’t?

It's not clear to me why shame and guilt are salubrious if there's nothing to be ashamed of or to feel guilty about, and if there are no moral wrongs then surely there is nothing to feel ashamed or guilty about. But let's let Coyne finish his thought:

In other words, is it really true that all of nature, including primate societies, must be seen as amoral, while human actions must be judged by this thing called “morality”?

Why, if a male lion has no more choice about killing step-cubs than a human does about killing stepchildren, do we hold the human morally responsible but the lion not? (The ability of humans to foresee consequences and take in a variety of inputs seems to me irrelevant here). Should we punish cub-killing lions, given that they cause enormous pain and terror to the cubs and their mothers?

So Coyne poses this puzzle for us: If we don't hold animals morally responsible for doing things like torturing and killing their young why should we hold humans, who are also animals, morally responsible for doing the same thing? And if we think humans should be held morally responsible then don't we have to assume that humans have a moral obligation that other animals don't have? And if we assume that, then must we also assume both that humans have free will and that there exists a personal moral authority that imposes upon us that obligation?

In other words, it seems to me that accepting Coyne's naturalism leads, if one takes it to its logical conclusion, to moral nihilism. Coyne doesn't take it that far, but he gives us no reason why he doesn't. Perhaps he realizes that if people saw where naturalism leads a lot of them might be disinclined to accept it, but if one rejects nihilism then one must also logically reject naturalism.

Just Say No

President Obama has gone to Congress seeking authorization to bomb Syria, an authorization he insisted he didn't need until just the other day, but it's difficult to see the point of such an attack. We'll kill several hundred, maybe several thousand Syrians, many of them civilians, in order to punish Bashar Assad for the crime of killing several hundred other Syrian civilians, and what will we have accomplished thereby?

President Obama got himself into his current predicament when in a bit of bravado he gave everyone to understand a year ago that if chemical weapons were used by the Assad government Assad would be in deep trouble. At that point the President should have had contingency plans on the table ready to be implemented if in fact those weapons were used by the Syrians. Subsequently there were indications that chemical agents were in fact employed by the Syrian army against the rebels, but no measures were taken nor was anything much said about it.

Nevertheless, by that point those contingency plans should certainly have been fully developed if not implemented, but they were not. Now chemical weapons have manifestly been used, though it's not clear by which side, and for the past month we've been told that the President is still "weighing his options." The weighing should have been done a year ago. What has the President been doing since he first warned Syria against their use?

Mr. Obama also told us that he doesn't need Congressional authority to punish Syria militarily. But when Britain opted out, the President, in a fine example of "leading from behind" went to Congress to request an authorization to attack. This came after waxing absolutely loquacious about what kind of strike he had in mind, as if to assure the Syrians that it wouldn't really hurt too much and they certainly needn't worry about any "shock and awe." He even assured them it wouldn't last long, it wouldn't target their leadership, and it wouldn't seriously degrade their military operations. So, he seemed to be pleading with Damascus, don't make too much fuss, just let him flex his muscles to save face, and then you can get back to killing your people through more conventional means. Again, why should Congress go along with this charade?

Throughout his dithering and temporizing Mr. Obama has looked weak, indecisive, incompetent, and ineffective, and now he wants Congress to give him political cover by actually making the decision for him. His representatives have testified that the credibility of the U.S. is at stake, that we must not allow the Syrians to get away with the use of chemical weapons, but in fact, it's not American credibility that hangs in the balance, it's President Obama's credibility. He got us into a mess and to salvage his tattered reputation as a world leader he ostensibly wants to drag the country into a pointless, meaningless attack that would, like Clinton's attack on a North African aspirin factory, accomplish nothing except allow the President to posture and preen and declare that he did something.

Well, it's not at all clear to me why we should intervene in a civil war in a country in which we have no vital interest and which is surrounded by neighbors which have the military capability to punish Assad if they think it necessary.

Congress should decline to give Mr. Obama the authority he has insisted he already has for the same reason that Sheriff Andy refused to give Deputy Barney Fife bullets for his gun. Andy was afraid Barney was not competent to carry a loaded sidearm. It seems that similar considerations may apply in this current muddle.

If the President wants to do something truly meaningful and significant he should ignore the rattles at the tail of the snake and cut off the head of the serpent - in this case Iran. Tehran's pursuit of nuclear weapons is a far greater threat to both the region and to the world. It is Iran which empowers Assad and equips him to carry out his atrocities. If we're going to launch an attack it should be an all out effort to destroy Iran's nuclear capability and to decapitate its leadership. This would be a condign and meaningful act, but alas, those who seem eager to toss a few feckless missiles at Assad have little stomach for tossing those missiles where they'd do some real good and serve a real purpose.

At any rate, the President wants approval for an attack on Syria. As Congress debates the authorization request this week our representatives need to ask what's going to happen once we've done it? What will we have accomplished? What's going to happen when the attack is over and the Syrian forces emerge from their bunkers to resume the war? What's going to happen when photos come out of Syria showing dead children, their bodies dismembered by our Tomahawks? Those photos will surely appear whether they're genuine or not. Will Israel's enemies use our assault as a pretext to attack Israel? If so, will we then be drawn into a wider war?

These are questions to which the American people deserve answers, but none have so far been forthcoming from the warhawks in the White House or in Congress.

Demographic Time Bomb

Taylor Washburn at The National Interest has a column that should be of special interest to our Russian and Chinese readers.

Despite their apparent chumminess the demographic trends in both Russia and China are an ominous augur for the future of Sino-Russian relations. Chinese population is growing, Russian population is contracting. Where will the burgeoning Chinese masses go? Washburn thinks that the vast underpopulated Russian territory along the Chinese border may prove an irresistible temptation for Beijing.

Here are a few excerpts from Washburn's essay:

For although China currently maintains no claims to Russian land, many in Moscow remain convinced that Beijing has not given up on the Far East forever. Fueling Russian fear is a fantastic population imbalance and a wave of illegal Chinese immigration which could eventually render European Russians a regional minority. With 110 million residents—and 65 million in the border provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin alone—the northeast holds only 8 percent China’s population but is more than three quarters the size of Russia’s, which is heavily concentrated west of the Ural Mountains.

With around 6 million people, the Russian Far East is among the most vacant places on earth and is only growing emptier, as nationwide demographic collapse is compounded by out-migration. Endowed with oil, gas, coal and timber, the region is the opposite of nearby China: rich in resources while starved for labor and capital.

Thus, although Moscow and Beijing recently staged their largest-ever joint naval drill off the coast of Primorsky Krai, Russia has continued to run exercises which appear to be aimed at China—including a 2010 ground drill tailored to repel an invasion by an unnamed foe resembling the People’s Liberation Army, and massive war games held just last month.

In addition, the Kremlin has maintained its time-honored partnership with India, and has also sought to improve ties with China’s archnemesis Japan, pledging to negotiate a long-delayed World War II peace treaty, which would not only sow the seeds for additional Japanese investment in Far East oil and gas fields, but could provide a hedge against Chinese economic and military coercion.

Washburn concludes with this thought:

...relentless demographic trends in Northeast Asia suggest that any collaboration between Moscow and Beijing will operate under a cloud, which could grow darker as China’s relative military strength increases. Even if Chinese leaders try to reassure Moscow that its hold on the Far East is secure, both states surely know that the growth of the region’s Chinese population amidst Russian decline may place the other in a bind, with nationalist pressure setting constraints on compromise. While Putin and Xi grip and grin, the demographic time-bomb between them is ticking—and if it goes off, a shared suspicion of the United States may prove a brittle bond.

It would seem that the natural frictions that would be exacerbated by population trends along the Sino-Russian border offer the United States opportunities to advance its own interests. If tensions increase between the two Asian powers both would have an interest in courting the favor of the U.S. An adroit State Department would work that to our advantage. It'll be interesting to see how matters unfold in this region.

Women in Combat

Last January I did a post titled "Women in Combat" in which I quoted from a piece written by an attorney and combat veteran of the Iraq war named Ryan Smith who explained why the Obama administration's plan to integrate women into combat units was a thoroughly bad idea. The post elicited a response from a student named Dustin who wrote this:

As I was reading through Mr. Smith's article about women in combat I found myself agreeing with every point that he made. I am also a combat veteran with a tour to Afghanistan and when I first heard about the integration of men and women into combat units many of Mr. Smith's points entered my mind. I have no doubt that there are plenty of women that can meet the physical requirements of being in a combat unit. This does not, however, mean that they would be able to mesh properly with the men in their units.

"Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion," and the combat effectiveness of the military that has worked for well over 200 years would be damaged by integrating men and women into the same combat arms units. I have seen and experienced what can happen when women are merely attached to combat arms units. I was disciplined following a mission because a female military intelligence officer was offended that, while in a vehicle, I had to urinate and I used an empty water bottle in her view.

Animosity towards women can also build up because of the special treatment they can receive. Co-ed showers were not allowed on our combat outpost so we had one shower dedicated to men while the other was dedicated to women. It greatly frustrated the men that we always had to wait in line while the women, who were much smaller in numbers, came and went as they pleased. The biggest issue that can come out of men and women serving in combat units together, in my opinion, is sexual desires. It could ruin a unit's cohesion if sexual relationships developed between men and women that could turn friends against friends.

I am now off of active duty and in the Pennsylvania National Guard. I received word that my unit will be one of the units that are the first to have women integrated into combat arms. I truly hope that I am out of the military before that happens.

The military is an institution maintained to fight and win wars. It's not a laboratory for social engineers to test their theories on how best to structure society. Mixing women with men in combat will not improve the effectiveness of our fighting forces and, as Dustin points out, may well diminish that effectiveness. The only reason the administration is doing it is because it's another step toward the left's dream of complete egalitarianism and the obliteration of all differences between the social roles performed by men and women.

Bad Parents

Every now and then a liberal progressive lets drop the mask of pretense and circumlocution and affords us a candid example of how and what folks on the left really think. Such is the case with an article at Slate by a woman named Allison Benedikt.

When a friend first sent me this column I thought it was a satire on liberal thought, a parody of the left's insistent demand that other people behave in ways that are unreasonably altruistic for the sake of some pie-in-the-sky greater good. Having read it a couple of times I've concluded that it is indeed a parody, but the parody is inadvertent and the subject is, in fact, precisely people who think like Ms Benedikt.

A quick summary: Ms Benedikt argues that the remedy for the dismal condition of many of our public schools is for parents who send their kids to private schools to be shamed into keeping their children in their dysfunctional public schools. She all but recommends a scarlet letter be affixed to the clothing of any parent who has so little concern for others that they would choose to send their child to a school where the youngster might receive an education.

Here's her lede:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

The judgmental Ms Benedikt (isn't being judgmental a sin in the liberal catechism?) is just getting warmed up. Meanwhile, we might ask why parents are flocking to private schools in the first place. Is it not largely because they've grown frustrated with their inability to effect change in their child's inadequate public schools? Why think that if they returned their children to those schools that things would change?

She continues:

So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)

Unfortunately for her thesis, the reasons public schools struggle has little to do with parental involvement in the school and everything to do with parental involvement with their children at home. Moreover, many of the problems schools face are impervious to parental involvement - burdensome mandates issued by state and federal bureaucracies, disciplinary chaos, and powerful unions which make firing bad teachers nearly impossible, to mention just a few.

There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to eventually work at Slate. But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons. Or, rather, the compelling ones (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.

And you're a bad person if you avail yourself of the opportunities a private school might offer your child. Instead, you should be a "good liberal" and send your kids to the public school (There are, of course, some very good public schools. Many of you attended one, and I taught in one for 35 years. Some, however, are execrable.) where they might waste twelve years of their life, as Ms Benedikt all but boasts that she did, so that other kids seventy years from now might benefit from your involvement in your child's school.

I believe in public education, but my district school really isn’t good! you might say. I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education — the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy. She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that. Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine.

Why will she be fine? Is Ms Benedikt saying that smart kids really don't need good schools? Is she arguing that it's more important that the mass of kids at the bottom experience a marginal improvement in their standardized test scores rather than that the really bright kids excel? She seems so afraid that the country is going to be stratified into a pyramid of achievers at the top and a vast class of uneducated, unemployables at the bottom that we need to lop off the top of the pyramid or smoosh it down so that the educational achievement chart is shaped less like a pyramid and more like a football with everyone clustered in the middle.

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. There wasn’t even soccer. This is not a humblebrag! I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.

This is astonishing. It amounts to a plea for parents to just be satisfied with a diploma for their child regardless how much real learning the diploma represents. But the goal of education isn't to merely "survive," it's to prepare the ground for future success.

Ms Benedikt addresses any concern parents might have about their child's academic preparation by dismissing the importance of academics. What's important, she informs us, is learning how to get along in a diverse world:

Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

What a sterling message Ms Benedikt brings us. The best part of an education is getting drunk together. It teaches you how to be part of the universal brotherhood of man. Ms Benedikt's disdain for quality education seems rather analogous to Miley Cyrus' attitude toward modesty.

Many of my (morally bankrupt) colleagues send their children to private schools. I asked them to tell me why. Here is the response that most stuck with me: “In our upper-middle-class world, it is hard not to pay for something if you can and you think it will be good for your kid.” I get it: You want an exceptional arts program and computer animation and maybe even Mandarin. You want a cohesive educational philosophy. You want creativity, not teaching to the test. You want great outdoor space and small classrooms and personal attention. You know who else wants those things? Everyone.

Well, not everyone, but lots of people do to be sure. Nevertheless, just because not everyone can have what they want doesn't mean that no one should. Lots of people would like to have a house at the beach and a European vacation every year. Doubtless Ms Benedikt, Slate's Nurse Ratchet, would upbraid those who can enjoy these things on the grounds that since not everyone can enjoy such amenities neither should they.

Whatever you think your children need — deserve — from their school experience, assume that the parents at the nearby public housing complex want the same. No, don’t just assume it. Do something about it. Send your kids to school with their kids. Use the energy you have otherwise directed at fighting to get your daughter a slot at the competitive private school to fight for more computers at the public school. Use your connections to power and money and innovation to make your local school—the one you are now sending your child to—better. Don’t just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.

Yes, if you really love your child you'll send her to a school where she'll walk the halls in fear, where she'll be pressured into taking drugs, having sex, getting drunk with Ms Benedikt's kids before basketball games, where she may be taught to despise her country and her religion and where she'll emerge after 12th grade without having learned much of anything except what a fine thing diversity is.

Instead of shaming parents into sending their kids to inferior schools a better approach might be to shame her liberal friends into supporting school choice so that every parent who wanted a good education for his or her children could get it for them. This approach, however, would never occur to progressives like Ms Benedikt or, for that matter, Mr. Obama. Indeed, one of the first steps taken by President Obama, after enrolling his own daughters in the finest private school in town, was to shut down the voucher program in D.C. that enabled thousands of minority kids to escape the woeful D.C. public schools. Progressives make the rules that everyone else lives by while they exempt themselves.

Anyway, in the eyes of the left if everyone can't experience excellent schools then no one should. Progressives want footballs, not pyramids. If you think that excellence is what made this country great, if you think the government should facilitate people rising toward the top rather than squashing everybody into mediocrity, if you send your kid to the best school you can afford, then you're morally bankrupt. Just ask Ms Benedikt.

Perhaps if she had attended a private school instead of her "crappy" public school she would've learned how to avoid making such silly arguments.

Cause for Optimism

Joel Kotkin at New Geography writes that despite what he considers to be sub-mediocre leadership provided by the last two administrations in Washington the U.S. is doing much better than its rivals and has a much brighter future than do they. He writes:

To paraphrase the great polemicist Thomas Paine, these are times that try the souls of optimists. The country is shuffling through a very weak recovery, and public opinion remains distinctly negative, with nearly half of Americans saying China has already leapfrogged us and nearly 60 percent convinced the country is headed in the wrong direction. Belief in the political leadership of both parties stands at record lows, not surprisingly, since we are experiencing what may be remembered as the worst period of presidential leadership, under both parties, since the pre-Civil War days of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

Yet, despite the many challenges facing the United States, this country remains, by far, the best-favored part of the world, and is likely to become more so in the decade ahead. The reasons lie in the fundamentals: natural resources, technological excellence, a budding manufacturing recovery and, most important, healthier demographics. The rest of the world is not likely to cheer us on, since they now have a generally lower opinion of us than in 2009; apparently the "bounce" we got from electing our articulate, handsome, biracial Nobel laureate president is clearly, as Pew suggests, "a thing of the past."

Nevertheless, Kotkin assures us, there's reason for optimism and he proceeds to elaborate upon those reasons in the rest of his essay. Not only is the future of the United States looking rosy but the future of our competitors around the world is, by comparison, looking bleak.

He concludes with a couple of parting shots at Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama:

So, if things are so good, why do they seem so bad? Sixteen years of lackluster leadership has not helped – a succession of two spendthrift presidents, one a too-happy warrior with a weak sense of the limits of even an imperial power, and the other, a posturing and arrogant academic oddly disconnected from the fundamental grass-roots drive that moves his country's economy. Yet I prefer to see it in a more positive light: If we can do better than our major competitors under such leadership, how great a country is this?

Read his analysis of the advantages the U.S. enjoys vis a vis Europe and Asia at the link.

Heroes

President Obama recently awarded our nation's highest honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor, to Staff Sergeant Ty Carter for his heroism in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2009.

Here's the Army's official report of Sgt. Carter's actions in that battle. It's a little long but once you start reading you won't want to stop:

On Oct. 3, at 5:53 a.m., an interpreter approached the troop command post and notified Pfc. Jordan Wong, who had pulled duty that night, that the Urmol Police Chief had personally relayed a warning that 50 to 100 enemy fighters were presently staged in Urmol to attack COP Keating. Wong astutely logged the warning and notified the Sergeant of the Guard. At 5:59 a.m., six minutes after the warning had been received, the hills erupted.

The enemy engaged COP Keating and OP Fritsche with a coordinated, complex attack the magnitude and intensity of which had not been seen in the Kamdesh since Coalition Forces toppled the Taliban eight years earlier. At COP Keating, attackers fired from the creviced and overgrown high ground above all four sides of the combat outpost, initiating contact with rifles and Degtyaryov-Shpagin Large-Calibre, or DShK, heavy machine guns. The ANA guard positions suffered immediate casualties and collapsed. Ten to 15 Afghan Soldiers fled through the wire. The remainder abandoned their positions to U.S. occupied buildings in the western portion of the combat outpost, leaving the northeast corner undefended.

At the gun bursts, B Troop Soldiers jumped to reinforce guard posts throughout the compound. Staff Sgt. Justin T. Gallegos, Sgt. Bradley Larson, and Spc. Stephan L. Mace, raced to fortified High-Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicles, or Humvees, at the southern side that served as a Battalion Position. The Battle Position overlooked Urmol and a series of wide, roughly graded “switchbacks” that climbed a steep ridgeline to the south, providing enemy forces a convenient infiltration route.

Larson and Gallegos immediately engaged the enemy in the hills with the Humvee’s .50 Caliber Machine Gun and ground-mounted, belt-fed M240 Machine Guns, while Mace engaged the east with him M4 carbine.

Across the compound, Carter had just emerged from his barracks and sprinted 100 meters across open ground, under concentrated fire, to join the others at the southern Battle Position. Upon arriving at the battle position, Carter gave two bags of M240 ammo to Gallegos, and most of his M4 magazines to Mace.

Above the din of the assault, Gallegos alerted Carter that they needed lubricant for the .50 Caliber and additional ammunition. With complete dedication to the task, and at great risk to his life, Carter ran the gauntlet a second time as enemy fire blossomed around him. Carter received two cans of lubricant from his platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Jonathan G. Hill, and then ran to the Ammunition Supply Point, or ASP, to collect ammunition. The doors were locked. Without hesitation, Carter shot off the hasps, secured additional M240 belts, and weaved his way back to the Humvee Battle Position.

The enemy attack was unrelenting, the cacophony of gunfire deafening, and the crew at the southern Battle Position quickly expended the additional M240 rounds. With suppression fire waning, the enemy fired a series of RPGs at the position, which had forced Gallegos, Mace and Carter to take cover in the Humvee. A PKM bullet struck Larson in his Kevlar helmet and he too ducked into the vehicle. At this point, Sgt. Vernon W. Martin joined the team as well.

Moments later, three to four rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, struck the vehicle carriage. One rocket detonated on the turret and destroyed the .50 Caliber, spraying the interior with shrapnel. Larson, Martin and Carter were wounded.

Approximately a half hour into the fight, at 6:30 a.m., with both crew-served weapons disabled, and the Humvee under heavy small-arms fire from an estimated 20 to 30 fighters on the high ground to the south, and another 30 to 40 fighters attacking from Urmol, Gallegos decided to break contact and move north, employing bounding over-watch to link up with the remaining Soldiers of B Troop, near the Tactical Operations Center, or TOC. Carter volunteered to stay with Larson and provide covering fire for the others as they attempted to bound back.

Carter and Larson left the vehicle and provided suppressing fire with their M4 carbines, while their three colleagues began displacing. As he maneuvered his team, Gallegos was hit by machine gun fire from the direction of Urmol, killing him instantly. Martin was hit in the leg and scrambled beneath a nearby laundry trailer. RPG shrapnel wounded Mace, who managed to crawl to low ground 30 meters from the Humvee.

Amidst a punishing hail of gunfire, Larson and Carter returned to the shredded Humvee. Lurching across the compound in a second Humvee, Sgt. Joshua M. Hardt, Spc. Christopher T. Griffin, and Pvt. Edward W. Faulkner Jr. reinforced the Battle Position. The new vehicle immediately encountered concentrated RPG fire from the southern high ground, and a squad of enemy fighters that breached the combat outpost through the Entry Control Point, or ECP. Eight successive RPGs hit the Humvee, including a direct strike on the right passenger door that severely wounded Hardt and sprayed Griffin and Faulkner with shrapnel. Hardt evacuated the Humvee, but was instantly cut down by PKM fire.

Recognizing the imminent threat from the enemy squad inside the wire, Carter and Larson engaged and swiftly killed two enemy combatants and wounded one. Their accurate fire under intense pressure, force the enemy into a hasty retreat and prevented them from overrunning several Soldiers pinned down in the nearby mortar pit. Griffin and Faulkner darted north toward the command post across the same open ground Carter had already traversed three times.

Faulkner made it to safety, but Griffin was struck and killed instantly. Enemy fire set ablaze a number of buildings, and acrid black and grey plumes of smoke curled from the valley against the sky.

With their M4 ammunition nearly exhausted, Carter again stepped from the Humvee to secure additional ammunition and check on whomever might be in the second Humvee. Crawling through the dust and gravel as intense volleys of enemy fire rained around him, Carter found the Humvee empty, but grabbed an M249 light machine gun with a partial drum of ammunition, and an M203 grenade launcher, and crawled back to Larson. Realizing the drum had only 50 rounds left, Carter suggested they delink the ammunition and employ it in the M4s, so both men could continue to fight.

Though each had less than a full magazine, Carter and Larson engaged the enemy with precision fire. Carter killed a two-man enemy RPG team and two additional fighters in the Urmol station. Wounded, outmanned and outgunned, Carter and Larson still suppressed the enemy’s assault teams. Their accurate fire under extreme duress, with no margin for error, prevented the breach of COP Keating’s vulnerable southern flank. Overhead, close air support and attack weapons teams hunted the hills, but the rocky overgrown slopes provided ample cover to the myriad enemy fighters.

Nearly two hours into the fight, at approximately 7:30 a.m., Carter observed from the passenger seat in the Humvee, Mace moving exposed toward low ground 30 meters off. Carter turned to Larson and said he wanted to attempt a rescue. Larson initially sought to deter Carter, stressing that “you’re no good to Mace if you’re dead.” When Mace was struck with a new volley of gunfire and pleaded for help, Carter decided he had no choice but to try to reach his fellow Soldier.

Knowing that he would almost certainly be killed, and with no regard for his personal safety, Carter jumped from the truck and sprinted forward to Mace. With small arms fire riddling the Humvee and the ground around him, Carter staunched Mace’s bleeding and placed a tourniquet on his shattered leg. With enemy fire intensifying around him, Carter summoned the strength to lift Mace and carried him through the hail of bullets up to the rise and to the Humvee. Carter placed his fellow Soldier in the back seat of the damaged carriage and returned to the fight.

As their ammunition dwindled, Carter and Larson engaged the enemy with single, well-aimed shots. With inoperative radios and no contact with other B Troop Soldiers, the pair grew concerned that the rest of COP Keating had been overrun.

Recognizing that Mace needed immediate medical attention, and the vital need for reconnaissance, Carter, with Larson’s concurrence, headed toward the TOC along the same path on which Gallegos had been felled. Moving under Larson’s covering fire, Carter ran down the declining grade and maneuvered back toward the command post. En route, Carter came across Gallegos and checked his vital signs, grimly determining his fellow trooper had been killed.

Carter found the sergeant’s squad radio. Hearing traffic from others in B Troop, he turned around and made his way back to Larson. They called the command post and let them know they were alive, but still pinned down. Fires now burned in most structure on the eastern side of the compound, and it became apparent that enemy forces had penetrated the wire in at least two places. In response, the rest of B Troop had consolidated in a tight perimeter around the command post and surviving barracks.

While Carter and Larson had warded off a third breach, Staff Sgt. Clinton L. Romesha and Hill had led a counterattack to retake a meeting hall and close the ECP. Romesha and Hill killed several enemy fighters that had penetrated the combat outpost and opened an evacuation route that was still exposed to RPG and machine gun fire. When Carter and Larson called and confirmed they had been isolated and a litter-urgent casualty, Hill’s element established a base of fire to cover their withdrawal.

Carter climbed from the Humvee and dug through the debris of the two shattered vehicles to uncover a litter. Carter and Larson then carried Mace across 100 meters of open ground still being swept with sniper and machine gun fire. With Mace at the aid station, Carter reported to Hill and joined the fight with the platoon for the rest of the day. He served as a sniper providing accurate cover fire for the teams of Soldiers who were recovering the bodies of the fallen Soldiers.

Mace reached the aid station at approximately noon, nearly six hours after initial contact, and approximately five hours after he was first wounded. Capt. Chris Cordova administered extraordinary trauma care, including a series of intravenous drips, and six blood transfusions taken from the veins of the Soldiers in the troop, including his own.

The heavy firefights in the enclosed valley prevented a medical evacuation helicopter from touching down in the narrow landing zone, until the cover of darkness. When the helicopter was able to land, Mace was immediately flown to Forward Operating Base Bostick, and then on to Bagram Airfield. He succumbed to his wounds in the hospital, despite the heroic efforts of his fellow Soldiers.

About 12 hours after the initial attack, reinforcements finally arrived at the besieged combat outpost. A Quick Reaction Force, or QRF, that had set down at OP Fritsche had hiked down the interminable switchbacks, killing two retreating enemies en route, and linked up with the defenders of COP Keating. The command outpost had held, despite the unprecedented onslaught.

In operations over the next several days, Coalition Forces killed one of the top regional sub-commanders affiliated with the Taliban, turning a potential defeat into a decisive victory for Coalition Forces in the contested Kamdesh.

However, the outcome might have been very different without the valor of Carter and Larson, who held the southern flank and prevented a platoon-sized enemy element from penetrating the wire, linking up with the others, and attacking the TOC at close quarters. Carter’s and Larson’s heroism bought the necessary time for multiple air assets to come on station and blunt the massive enemy attack.

We should be thankful that our nation continues to produce young men like these.

Moral Monsters

Dennis Prager recounts the crimes of Ariel Castro and has no difficulty describing this man as an evil monster:

In August 2002, a homo sapien known as Ariel Castro abducted 21-year-old Michelle Knight, the mother of a two-year-old boy. In April 2003, he abducted Amanda Berry, a day before her 17th birthday. And in April 2004, he abducted 14-year-old Gina DeJesus.

For the next ten years, these girls were regularly raped, kept in chains, beaten, humiliated and almost never allowed to see the light of day. When Michelle Knight became pregnant, Castro starved her for two weeks and kicked and punched her in the stomach to induce an abortion. He repeated this method of pregnancy termination on Knight four additional times.

It is important to try to understand the magnitude of the sadism and other forms of cruelty and suffering inflicted by this creature.

First, there is the horror and suffering of being kidnapped; of being taken away from everyone you love. Even if no torture, rape, solitary confinement, etc., were involved, that would be enough to weep for these girls. And in Michelle's case, she was taken from her baby boy, whom she never got to see grow up, and had every reason to fear she would never see again.

Second, there is the nightmare inflicted on the families. One day, their daughter, sister, and in one case, mother, disappears -- seemingly forever. Was she murdered? Had she suffered? Is she suffering now? Day after day, year after year, those questions haunted the families.

Third, now add the torture, beatings, grotesque humiliations, rapes, permanent state of terror and confinement much of the time to a basement -- for 10 years.

Mercifully for us, we humans cannot completely assimilate the totality of the suffering of victims such as these three girls. But we can at least intellectually perceive the monstrous behavior that went on in that Cleveland house.

Now, what about Castro? What is he? The answer is that he is a monster.

Most of us, perhaps, would agree, but not our sophisticated elites who scoff at the word "evil." Evil, you understand, is a moral category, and according to many who set intellectual fashion, objective morality doesn't exist. Our behavior is caused by forces beyond our control, we're told. Our childhood experiences and our genetic predispositions establish who we will be and how we will behave. Ariel Castro himself declared that he wasn't a monster but rather that he was "sick" and needed therapy. A lot of academics agree with him.

Recall that George W. Bush was roundly ridiculed for referring to North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as the "axis of evil" in the post-9/11 years. Bush was right, of course, but the notion that governments are evil, even though they manifestly are, was risible to his liberal detractors.

Jeffrey Dahmer was another monster who killed young men and then cannibalized them. He told an A&E interviewer shortly before his own murder in prison that,

If a person doesn't believe that there's a God to be accountable to then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within "acceptable" ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution was true, that we all came from the slime. When we died that was it. There's nothing.

For Dahmer there was no moral good or evil because there was no moral authority beyond himself. Our culture largely accepts Dahmer's thinking on evil, even if it doesn't yet take that thinking, as Dahmer did, to its logical conclusion.

When a culture finds itself reluctant to make imputations of good and evil, when it laughs at such judgments, when good and evil are seen as archaic categories employed by those who still "cling to their guns and bibles," as Mr. Obama infelicitously described such folk, then we'll simply get many more Ariel Castros and Jeffrey Dahmers. We'll get many more young men like the three who just a couple of weeks ago shot dead the Australian baseball player jogging home from his girlfriend's house because the killers were bored.

When nothing, no matter how heinous, is thought to be genuinely evil, when no one is believed to be really responsible for their actions, evil behavior will proliferate throughout the culture. We can't eliminate it simply by redefining evil as something else. We need to call it by it's name and hold responsible those who do it. Otherwise, how different are we from the dystopia described in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games?

Read the rest of Prager's column at the link, and ask yourself if "evil" isn't precisely the word to describe the Nazi with the shovel.

King's Dream

Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It's ironic that so much of what his dream was about has come to pass, but the hope expressed in his most famous phrase, the most memorable part of the speech, seem more distant than ever. King's dream consisted of the following:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Happily, all of this has either come to pass or we've made great strides toward achieving it, but then King spoke these lapidary words:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

It's a sad fact of our modern age that we seem to be moving further and further from this ideal. Nowadays, character doesn't matter, or so we were often reminded during the Clinton years. What does matter, the only thing that matters as regards race, is one's skin color. Color trumps character almost always. Indeed, in a postmodern world the very idea of character, like the idea of morality in which it's rooted, is under suspicion.

King went on to say this:

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

Despite the efforts of the race hustlers like Al Sharpton and the divisive, ill-conceived comments of our president in the wake of the Louis Gates and Trayvon Martin episodes, and of liberals who want to keep us divided so as to keep African-Americans from wandering off the Democratic plantation, America has almost realized King's dream.

Except, that is, for the part about judging each other on the basis of their character and not their color. When we learn to do that, when we learn to stop seeing race in every interaction, when we learn to stop picking at the scabs of historical injustice, when we learn to look more to the future than to the past, when we once again prize virtue and character, then we'll have joined King on the mountaintop.

Stay Away from the Parties

What with millions of kids going back to colleges all across the country this week Glenn Reynolds at USA Today throws a bit of cold water on the excitement by reminding us that college isn't for everybody. Here are some excerpts:

Is college for everyone? That's pretty much the conventional wisdom today, but I don't think so. And, in fact, for some people, it may be actively damaging. In deciding whether to take on debt -- and give up years of their lives -- in exchange for a college degree, applicants need to think more about potential downsides. And alternatives.

While some college students make friends, and memories, for a lifetime, others are lonely, depressed and uncertain, drifting from major to major until eventually they graduate with whatever degree is easiest, and a lot of debt. Or, sometimes, they don't graduate at all, but still have a lot of debt. For some, college is the beginning of problems with drugs, or drinking, or sex that will cloud their adulthood for years, or even a lifetime.

College can even make income inequality worse, despite its being touted as the great equalizer. In a multiyear study of female college students, Paying For The Party, sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton found that students who looked similar in terms of "predictors" -- grades and test scores -- came out of college on very different trajectories. The biggest danger was when smart women from less-well-off backgrounds got onto what Armstrong and Hamilton call the "party pathway."

The richer girls who did this usually emerged OK, with family connections and parental subsidies allowing them to snag good jobs and internships in spite of any partying-related stumbles. The poorer girls with similar credentials ("strivers") who got on the party track tended to emerge with low GPAs, unimpressive post-college jobs (frequently jobs that they could have gotten without a college degree) and burdened with debt.

They actually often wound up with downward mobility, rather than the upward mobility that colleges sell. (Interestingly, the "strivers" who did best were the ones who transferred to less-prestigious regional state universities, which were also often cheaper. These schools -- the Northern Kentucky Universities of the world -- focus more on teaching, and are often more oriented toward student success, frequently in a less party-oriented atmosphere).

In their recent book, Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa note that many students show little actual learning in college. Some students -- especially those from poor and minority households -- actually come out of college doing worse on assessment tests than when they went in. (Perhaps that's the impact of the "party pathway" again.)

College is a huge investment of time and money. It's a shame that so many young people squander the opportunity they have to prepare themselves for a rewarding career by spending that investment on what they consider to be a good time. College should be a kind of intellectual boot camp, not a four year long party binge, but many students don't see it that way. Neither do many colleges, for that matter.

It's sad enough when students whose families have the wherewithal to compensate for their kids bad decisions, but it's tragic when students who have only this one shot to give themselves the preparation they need to rise beyond the socioeconomic circumstances of their parents think this way. They're like a rocket straining to lift off the launch pad only to sputter and fall, crashing back under the gravitational pull of the party culture to the very circumstances they, and their parents, hoped they would escape.

It's Not Impossible

Rabbi Moshe Averick has a fine piece at the Times of Israel recounting the history of attempts to explain the origin of life (OOL) in a naturalistic, materialistic framework. The problem has proven to be intractable despite decades of intensive research and theorizing because, as Averick points out, the simplest living thing, a bacterium, is orders of magnitude more complex than, say, an i-phone. If we can't imagine how an i-phone could have arisen apart from intelligent input and direction, it's vastly more difficult to imagine how a living cell could have emerged purely through the laws of chemistry and physics. Indeed, workers in the field often refer to the OOL as almost a miracle.

Averick covers a lot of ground in his essay, but the most interesting part to me was his skewering of the standard fall-back position among naturalists, the multiverse hypothesis. This is the idea that there are an infinity of worlds and that, given an infinity of possibilities, every possible event must at some time occur. No matter how improbable an event might be in a finite universe, if there are infinite universes, every possibility will sometime, somewhere be actualized. In other words, even if something is astronomically improbable, it's still possible and if possible, then, the thinking goes, it's inevitable. Here's Averick:

It is obvious that life was created by an intelligent designer outside of the natural world and the reason why the origin of life “seems almost like a miracle,” is because it is a miracle.

However, atheist/materialist scientists refuse to give up so easily. Dr. Koonin himself has proposed a possible solution and escape hatch from having to accept a Creator of life: “The Many Worlds in One version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation might suggest a way out of the origin of life conundrum because, in an infinite multiverse with a finite number of macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times), the emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not just possible, but inevitable."

Translation: The odds of rolling a six a thousand times in a row with a single die is 1 in 6 to the 1000th power, or 1 chance in 6 x 10 to the 999th power. The size of this number is beyond our comprehension but to provide some kind of baseline keep in mind that the number of atoms in the entire universe is roughly 10 to the 80th power.

Despite this, as Koonin points out, if I am able to roll the die an infinite number of times, it is not only possible, but inevitable that it will happen. Although reason and scientific investigation have informed us of the virtual impossibility of life having formed on our planet by an undirected naturalistic process, the “way out of the origin of life conundrum” – that is to say, the way to avoid the obvious answer that life was created – is to propose a multiverse. With an infinite number of trials and errors available, it is not only possible but inevitable that life will form no matter how fantastic the odds against.

He is right of course. With an infinite number of trials and errors not only is the formation of life inevitable but it is just as inevitable that at least one of each of the following has formed by pure chance and can be found on our planet today: iPhone 5, Toshiba Satellite Laptop Computer, Schwinn Discover Men’s Hybrid Bike, full color poster of Jimmy Hendrix playing at Woodstock, Martin D-35 Acoustic Guitar, Mylec Eclipse Jet-Flow Hockey Stick, Revell 1:48 scale P-51D Mustang model airplane, and last but not least, a 2013 Rolls Royce Phantom Sedan (retail price- $465,000). I don’t believe it, no one reading this article believes it, Eugene Koonin does not believe it, and even Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe it.

Just as it is beyond absurd to propose that the iPhone 5 I am holding in my hand could be the product of chance it is exponentially beyond absurd to propose that a bacterium could have formed by chance. There is either a flaw in Koonin’s logic (which of course there is) or the multiverse theory is false and/or irrelevant to our question (which of course it is).

As Averick observes, researchers in the field seem to be reduced to arguing that because no one can prove that a naturalistic origin can't happen therefore it must have happened.

Dr. Frank Sonleitner, a Professor of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma has written a lengthy essay on the origin of life which appears on the NCSE website. He writes as follows: “Modern ideas about the [emergence] of living things from non-living components...may not have yet come anywhere near answering all our questions about the process, but...none of this research has indicated that abiogenesis [origin of life from non-life]is impossible.”

Dr. Paul Davies: “Just because scientists are uncertain how life began does not mean that life cannot have had a natural origin.” (i.e. it’s not impossible)

Even Dr. Francis Crick, undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, is not immune. From his book Life Itself: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that…it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions.” (In other words, it’s not impossible.)

Imagine winning 200 hands of black-jack in a row at a Las Vegas casino. As the pit-boss and his crew are summarily throwing you out of the casino onto the sidewalk, you offer the following brilliant pleading, “I know it seems like a miracle that I could win 200 hands in a row by pure luck, but it’s not impossible!”

Atheist author Mark Isaak, from his book The Counter-Creationism Handbook: “Nobody denies that the origin of life is an extremely difficult problem, that is has not been solved though, does not mean that it is impossible.”

When intelligent people find themselves arguing that as long as something can't be disproven it's acceptable to believe it, they're no longer doing science. What they're doing is taking enormous leaps of blind faith. A religious person who reasoned this way would be mercilessly derided by skeptics who nevertheless seem unaware that their unbelief is predicated on the very same sort of reasoning they poke fun of in others.

Have We Learned Nothing?

In the wake of reports that pro-government Syrian forces have unleashed chemical weapons against both rebel fighters and civilians calls have intensified for a U.N. response, and pressure is being brought to bear on President Obama to make good on his foolish "red line" commitment.

I understand very well the desire to "do something." What I don't understand is how doing something changes anything. How does launching a few cruise missiles do anything other than killing a few Syrians and causing even more widespread scorn for the United States?

Surely we learned after supporting the overthrow of Hosni Mubarek in Egypt that things rarely work out the way we think they will. We support Mubarek's overthrow and we wind up with Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. We assist in the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya and we wind up with chaos and the Benghazi debacle. Even when our national interest is arguably at stake and military action is justified, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's devilishly difficult to control the forces that are unleashed.

If we assist the Syrian rebels against Bashir Assad and Assad falls all we will succeed in doing is paving the way for al Qaeda to gain control in Damascus. Assad is heinous, to be sure, but "heinous" is written on the DNA in that part of the world. As bad as he is, many of the alternatives are worse.

Nor is it clear to me why Assad's use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a "red line" for President Obama. Death by chemical weapons is horrible, but no more so than being buried alive under the rubble from an artillery barrage. Why do we think that once chemical weapons are introduced against his people that we then should punish him, but as long as he's just blowing them to bits with bombs, rockets, and artillery fire we should stay our hand?

I'm not one who believes that we should never intervene to help innocent people being killed by cruel neighbors and leaders, but intervention should be predicated upon national interest and/or a reasonable prospect of success. Moreover, the good we can reasonably expect to achieve should much outweigh the cost in blood and treasure that we expect to incur.

It's not clear that intervention in Syria would meet any of those criteria.

Fateful Turning Point

I recently came a cross a passage from former Princeton philosopher W.T. Stace writing in The Atlantic Monthly back in 1948. It summarizes so well a theme I've frequently written about on Viewpoint that I thought I'd do a post on it. The theme to which I refer is the idea that if there is no God, life is ultimately meaningless and moral discourse is simply an expression of our personal tastes, nothing more.

Stace, who was himself a non-theist, put it this way:

The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes"... [belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century.... They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

...The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world....

The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws....[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.

A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man....Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values....

If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative.

Stace is correct. If there is no God then life is a pointless absurdity and good and evil have no objective referent. An atheist, to be consistent, should embrace existential nihilism and give up lecturing the rest of us about right and wrong. Or, if he wishes to retain his belief that life is purposeful and that cruelty, slavery, ecological destruction, indifference to the plight of the poor, etc. are objectively wrong, he should repudiate his atheism. Atheism simply offers no grounds whatsoever for making any moral judgment.

To the extent that the non-theist seeks to have it both ways - which, of course, most of them do - he's acting irrationally.

Who's Most Racist?

The Wall Street journal reported recently on a Rasmussen Poll of racial attitudes among whites and blacks in the U.S. which came up with some interesting findings. Before discussing these I should note that I have concerns about the wording in the poll. The word "racism" isn't defined which I think is a major flaw, and I don't like that respondents were asked what "most whites/blacks" think since no one can really know what most people in a large group think, but having said that, let's look at what the WSJ reports:

There is a huge ideological difference on this topic. Among conservative Americans, 49% consider most blacks racist, and only 12% see most whites that way. Among liberal voters, 27% see most white Americans as racist, and 21% say the same about black Americans.

Among white adults generally, 10% think most white Americans are racist; 38% believe most blacks are racist, and 17% say most Hispanics are racist.

I wasn't surprised by this result, although I don't think it's fair to say that "most" blacks are racist. I do think it's fair, however, to say that most of the serious racism in this country today resides in the black community, which is a different claim. What did surprise me, however, as it did the writers at the WSJ, was this stat:

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

In other words, it's the majority view in the black community that there's more racism there than there is in the white community. Here's what the WSJ said about this:

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

Their conclusion is, in my opinion, exactly right:

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

I'm not a psychologist and am only offering my hunch on this, but I think there's truth in what the WSJ concludes. Much (certainly not all) of the moral posturing, whether about race, immigration, education, environment, war, or whatever, that we find among those on the left is animated not by logic, reason, or experience but rather by a deep-seated need to reinforce their feeling of moral superiority over other whites. It's the same need that causes some liberals, particularly in the academy, to affirm their intellectual superiority by haughtily deriding the "superstitions," religious or political, of other whites.

On the other hand, the patronizing, condescending manner in which they often treat blacks is evidence that they already feel superior to them, of course, although they'd never admit it.

Just Sayin'

Yesterday In the Absence of God was ranked at #200,000 out of 8,000,000 books sold on Amazon. That puts us in the top 2.5% of all the books they're selling. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, what are you waiting for?

No Accountability

One of the reasons the Tea Party was birthed is that more and more Americans have less and less trust in their government and in the politicians who run it. The Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to further erode what little faith is left. Not only have they stonewalled every congressional investigation into every administrative debacle (Fast and Furious, the IRS abuses, and the Benghazi attacks most prominently), but they've refused to hold anyone accountable for them which just gives the impression that the underlings were doing the bidding of the president himself.

Take, for example, this report on the fate of the four state department employees who were suspended for various derelictions related to the Benghazi affair:

When no one is held accountable, when no one can even be persuaded to honestly and forthrightly testify to what happened in these various scandals, citizens can't help but conclude that the administration is simply hiding what they know to be their own malfeasance and culpability.