Do Dems Really Want DACA?

Political Science professor Ed Zipperer doesn't think so. He has a piece at the Daily Caller which he begins this way:

Last September, President Donald Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, and the Democratic Party went into full hyperventilation mode — as if Trump had rescinded oxygen.

The Democrats fired out an all-caps email blast saying: “ON TUESDAY, DONALD TRUMP SECURED HIS LEGACY AS A CHAMPION OF CRUELTY.” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez emailed that the decision was “morally repugnant” and “rooted in prejudice.” And Deputy Chair Keith Ellison—not to be outdone with hyperbole — compared it to handing over Jews to the Nazis.

Now, however, it seems that the Dreamers are expendable pawns, to be sacrificed in pursuit of a bigger prize. What might that prize be? Why do Democrats who insisted up until last week that it'd be immoral to deport Dreamers and that they wanted border security as much as anyone, now refuse to give Trump the border security he wants in order to protect the Dreamers?

According to Zipperer the answer is simple. Compromising with Trump on DACA by giving him what he wants for border security would cost the Democrats dearly. Zipperer gives six reasons how the political cost would be high, the last of which is probably the worst of the lot from a Democratic point of view:

Democrats see illegal immigrants entering the country as a great bloc of potential, someday voters; we need no ghost come from the grave to tell us that. But many people don’t know that every 711,000 illegal immigrants who cross the border create a new congressional district that, due to the Permanent Apportionment Act which limits the House of Representatives to 435 seats, is taken away from another state.

As an unintended effect of the 14th amendment, each person — whether they’re here legally or illegally — must be counted as a whole person. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state…” That includes illegal immigrants and nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can change it.

Before the Civil War, southern states were overrepresented because they counted slaves (who were denied the right to vote) as three-fifths of a person toward congressional representation. Today, California is overrepresented because millions of illegal immigrants who cannot vote are counted toward their population. Trump’s border security measures would slow down a process that essentially allows a state like California with an ever-growing population of illegal immigrants to steal House seats (and consequently electoral votes) from other states.

Democrats are going to fight for a “clean” DACA bill sans border security measures — even if it means shutting down the government instead of compromising — because of the political calculus. Why else would the minority party refuse a compromise which gives them everything they’ve been screaming for? For Democrats, the DACA compromise is not about immigration, morality, or Dreamers.

It is about the political costs of real border security which far outweigh the political benefits of helping President Trump pass DACA legislation.

If there's a government shutdown this weekend the reason will be that the Democrats will be refusing to grant the president the funds he demands for border security in exchange for granting Dreamers permanent status. Apparently, it's more important to the Democrats that illegal immigration continue than that the Dreamers be protected.

Zipperer's other five reasons why Democrats are balking at a compromise can be read at the link. Given the animus Democrats feel toward Trump each of the reasons makes a lot of sense.

There's a two minute video here that explains what'll happen if the government shuts down. Most people will hardly notice.

Trump's Latest Imbroglio

Dennis Prager offers some thoughts on the president’s alleged, and unfortunate, choice of adjectives in a private conversation describing Haiti and certain African countries. Prager makes a number of very good points. Here are a few:

1. There are few filters between President Donald Trump’s mind and mouth. That is his appeal and his weakness. It is very common that a person’s strengths are also weaknesses. I wish Trump’s tweets and comments were as forthright — as un-PC — as they are now but stated in a sophisticated way. I also wish that cheesecake were not fattening. But just as cheesecake comes with sugar, Donald Trump comes with unsophisticated rhetoric. People are packages, not a la carte menus.

2. As a rule, a president of the United States should not label countries, let alone continents, “sh**holes.” I don’t know what word the president actually used, but had he used the word “dysfunctional” instead of “sh**hole,” that actually might have been a service to the people of many of these countries. I have been to 20 African countries. Corruption is Africa’s greatest single problem. That’s why those who truly care about Africans, many of whom are terrific people, need to honestly describe the moral state of many or most African countries. What benefit is it to honest, hardworking Africans or Latin Americans or others to deny the endemic corruption of these societies?

As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: “The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades.”

3. Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world’s worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant’s country and the immigrant’s contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.

4. The press’s constant description of Trump as a racist, a white supremacist, a fascist, and an anti-Semite has been a Big Lie. It is meant to hurt the president, but it mostly damages the country and the media. To cite the most often provided “evidence” for the president’s racism, the president never said or implied that the neo-Nazis at the infamous Charlottesville, Va, demonstrations were “fine people.” The “fine people” he referred to were the pro- and anti-statue removal demonstrators.

The notion that Trump is a racist can be credibly sustained only if one believes that anything remotely critical of anyone with a swarthy complexion is ipso facto racist. Otherwise, the evidence for Trump's alleged racism is gossamer thin, but when you're in the opposition party, and you see everything you've worked for over the past decades being systematically undone, and the country appear to be thriving as a result, I guess you reach for your most trusty weapon, which for some forty years has been the allegation of racism. The trouble is, that tactic is getting increasingly threadbare, and the people who invoke it at every opportunity are looking increasingly foolish.

In any case, it's hard to square the imputation of racism to Trump with what Senator Rand Paul describes here:

I suspect that a lot of the criticism that has befallen the president over this latest episode has little to do with his scatological description of these countries, which is surely accurate in its general sense. After all, the chief argument for expanded immigration from the countries to which Mr. Trump was inartfully referring is that the people residing in them are living amidst hellish conditions and that compassion demands we give those poor wretches a chance to escape the horrors to which they're daily subjected.

Indeed, many of those who come here from those lands are willing to risk everything they have, including their lives, to escape them. Why would they do this unless they felt they were escaping a country that offers its people nothing but hopelessness and misery?

Nor does the controversy seem to have much to do with whether we should be admitting so many immigrants from countries wracked with poverty, dysfunction and lack of education. It surely is not in our national interest to open our doors to millions of the world's poor any more than it would be in a family's interest to permanently and indiscriminately open their home to the poor and homeless on their community's streets.

No, the outrage expressed over Trump's choice of words is more about laying hold of one more cudgel with which to beat him over the head than it is about his inveterate poor taste, or racism or whatever.

Here's a thought experiment one can apply to the immigration issue that'll serve as a kind of hypocrisy detector. Imagine that it were believed that all immigrants from third-world countries, whether legal or illegal, were granted citizenship and could reasonably be expected to vote Republican while any immigrants from first-world European countries were likely to vote Democrat. If so, how much enthusiasm would there be right now among Democrats for DACA, for open borders, amnesty and mass immigration from those blighted nations?

I can't prove it, of course, but I suspect that were this the case many Democrats would be clamoring for a border wall, demanding that we expand immigration from Europe and that we impose strict quotas on the immigration of people from the third world who lack skills and education. In other words, if I'm right, much of the outrage over Trump's comment is really about leveraging dissatisfaction and dislike for the president into votes and political power for themselves.

Check out the rest of Prager's comments on this matter at the link. They're very good.

Willful Blindness

The Washington Examiner has an annotated list of about 165 companies that have given their employees substantial bonuses, and/or have raised their minimum wage and/or have otherwise pledged to invest more in their communities all because of the newly enacted tax reform law.

Nevertheless, liberal opponents, particularly on MSNBC, continue to insist that the tax reform law will only help the rich and that workers will, in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's words, get only "crumbs". $1000 bonuses may be "crumbs" for wealthy people like Pelosi, but it's a godsend to a lot of ordinary people.

Here's a video that interpolates some opponents' criticisms of the bill with what workers are actually receiving from it. After a while you have to wonder at what point are people so blinded by their anachronistic ideology and their contempt for the president that they become oblivious to reality and consequently make themselves foolish:

As I skimmed through the list of companies at the Examiner I noticed that companies run by liberals, tech companies like Apple and Google or banks associated with Tom Steyer, were not represented. Maybe I missed them or maybe their employee bonuses are still in the works. Or maybe they're just going to take their tax cuts and keep them for themselves. UPDATE: Apple just announced that it'll be investing 350 billion in the U.S. economy over the next five years as a result of the tax reform bill and has plans to create 20,000 new jobs. The benefits to Americans keep on coming. The Democrats are going to have a hard time defending the fact that not a single one of them voted for this reform.

Top Ten Military Developments of 2017

An article at Strategy Page discusses the ten most noteworthy developments in 2017 that had military implications. I was a bit surprised that North Korea wasn't on their list, but in any case here are the ten with just a brief excerpt from SP's discussion. There's much more of interest said about each of these at the link for anyone who'd like to follow up.

ISIL

The most extreme Islamic terror group on the planet, hated by all other Islamic terrorists, was defeated but not destroyed in 2017. It was driven underground where, if tradition holds, it will fester for a generation or so and then revive and repeat. In effect this is a chronic problem. It is an unending Moslem civil war between those (mainly Islamic terrorists) who want a worldwide religious dictatorship run by themselves, versus those representing the majority of Moslems who are getting tired of being threatened and murdered by Moslem religious fanatics.

Syria

The defeat of ISIL changed the outcome of the rebellion, or did it? Until late 2017 everyone more (the West and their Arab allies) or less (Assads, Russia, Iran, Turkey) concentrated on fighting ISIL. This effort appeared to have destroyed the rebel advantage because early on most Syrian rebels embraced Islamic radicalism. This was because most of the population was Sunni Moslems who the Shia Assads suppressed and exploited for decades. That meant that after 2012 Islamic radical rebels spent most of their time fighting other rebels. With the defeat of ISIL the rebels are much weakened but more willing to cooperate with each other. Meanwhile the coalition that saved the Assads is falling apart.

Colombia

Colombia has finally ended over 70 years of fighting and general misery. In 2017 the main leftist rebel force (FARC) made peace and the much smaller ELN is negotiating a similar deal. The death rate is way down as is crime in general. The drug cartels are moving their operations out of the country and the economy is one of the healthiest in Latin America.

China

China has been building modern warships at a record rate, something rarely seen in peacetime. China has been building world class warships faster and cheaper than anyone else. There is nothing magical about this, the Chinese simply were practical and ruthless in catching up. Practical in the sense that they managed to merge a market economy with a communist police state. That rather unnatural act may yet come apart but since the 1980s China has been learning from what Russia did wrong during the Cold War and putting their more effective methods into practice.

U.S.

The American F-35 has entered service and mass production is under way and on schedule. F-35s are entering service in large numbers (a hundred plus a year) over the next few years and will be used operationally. Some are already operating near combat zones, like the ones Israel has put into service. Israeli pilots, and all others who have flown the F-35 agree that the software and the degree of automation built in is spectacular.... The F-35 has a large number of sensors (receivers for electronic signals, six cameras and a very capable radar) and the fusion of all that data and presentation to the pilot based on the current situation is impressive and makes the F-35 much easier to fly, despite all the additional capabilities it has.

Israel

In 2017 it finally happened. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait went public in support of an Arab-Israeli alliance to oppose Iran.... The Israelis know that the anti-Semitic attitudes in the Arab world go back to before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century and have waxed and waned ever since. Anti-Semitism is again widely tolerated in Europe. But the United States has a new president who grew up in and around New York City, built a fortune there, has a Jewish son-in-law, Jewish grandchildren and a pro-Israel attitude that is more decisive and imaginative than that of the last few American presidents.

Palestinians

It’s been a long time coming but the Palestinians are losing all their primary sources of income and special status with the UN. The Americans, long the largest contributor, are withdrawing support as are a growing number of European donors. The Arab oil states are also cutting way back because of Palestinian corruption, inability to unite and the Palestinian refusal to make some kind of peace deal with Israel. The Arab oil states are also mad at the Palestinians for supporting Saddam Hussein’s plans to conquer all of Arabia (starting with Kuwait in 1990) and now working with Iran.

Pakistan

Pakistan fears the United States and India will carry out more air strikes and commando operations in Pakistan against Islamic terrorist targets. Pakistan is particularly concerned with protecting the Haqqani Network, an Afghan led group that has prospered under Pakistani protection and is now believed to control the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan has long denied any connection with Haqqani, much less control of the group, but there is much evidence that ISI (Pakistani Intelligence) works closely with Haqqani. Growing American (and international) pressure has forced Pakistan to say it is acting against Haqqani. There is little evidence of that.

Philippines

After decades of effort the Philippines has finally made decisive progress in dealing with its endemic corruption, communist rebels and violence by Moslem separatists and bandits.

Iran

For the second time since 2009 Iran is undergoing a nationwide protest against the religious dictatorship. It’s not an armed revolution. The protestors have been loud but not violent unless attacked. Nearly all the deaths have been protestors attacked by the security forces. The government has called out its supporters (or simply those with a government job) to stage pro-government rallies. These are well guarded and thoroughly covered by state controlled media. The goal of the protests is to, at the very least, get the clerical dictatorship to openly discuss the mess they have made of the economy and much else in Iran.

An American Hero

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

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

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

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

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

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

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

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and of our minds and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

Insufficient Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably plead a special exemption for this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, standard for an inconclusive argument to live up to.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in what was later collated into his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Peacock Spiders

There's a fascinating article at Evolution News about a taxon of spiders endemic to Australia called the Peacock spider. There are some 60 species of Peacock spider, and they're gorgeously patterned.

The colors are produced not by pigments but by tiny scales with microscopic curves and gratings that refract and diffract light to separate and reflect various wavelengths. This works somewhat in the same way that a film of oil on a surface produces an array of iridescent hues.

Studying the color-producing structures in these arachnids has given scientists ideas for new color technologies.

Here's a video of the mating displays of several species of these spiders set to music. It's astonishing to consider that these spiders are less than 5 millimeters in size and that the information that directs their displays plus all the other behaviors in which the spider engages as well as the production of the vari-colored abdomens is all packed into a brain that's the size of a pinhead:

Here are a few more interesting questions and points raised in the article:

The artistic patterns on the males’ abdomens seem gratuitously beyond anything necessary for mating. Drab animals get by just fine; why the excessive color and beauty? And why the dozens of variations among different species? We could be forgiven for imagining a designing intelligence with an artist’s eye.

Aesthetic considerations, furthermore, lead us to ask why human beings are the only ones who get excited about the mating dances of an unrelated species. Does that speak to human exceptionalism? We don’t see any other animals, except the female spider, watching the performances, but people by the millions are fascinated by these tiny animals that have nothing to do with their own “fitness.”

What is the evolutionary explanation for the quality of charm? Of humor? Or enchantment? We don’t eat them or train them to do our work. How did our curiosity, sense of humor, and love for beauty “evolve”?

“Who knew that such a small critter would create such an intense iridescence using extremely sophisticated mechanisms that will inspire optical engineers,” said Dimitri Deheyn, Hsuing’s advisor at Scripps Oceanography and a coauthor of the study.

“As an engineer, what I found fascinating about these spider structural colors is how these long evolved complex structures can still outperform human engineering,” said Radwanul Hasan Siddique, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and study coauthor. “Even with high-end fabrication techniques, we could not replicate the exact structures. I wonder how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place!”

We might all wonder this as well. Especially might we wonder "how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place" if we limit ourselves to thinking that this amazing creature must have evolved these gaudy patterns and complex behaviors through an unguided, random process like Darwinism.

The Faith of the Naturalist

One of the most serious scientific threats to the belief of many moderns that the natural world is all there is (i.e. Naturalism) is the problem posed by trying to explain how life could have arisen on this planet through purely natural, unguided, random processes. The problem is daunting as the video below illustrates.

Once living cells appeared on the earth, the naturalist can argue, reproduction and natural selection can be invoked to account for the diversification of life into all the forms of living things we see in our world today, but how did those initial cells arise in the first place? Genetic mutation and natural selection, the traditional mechanisms of evolution, can only operate on reproducing populations of organisms, but until you have reproducing cells with something like genes that can mutate you can't have evolution.

Trying to explain how those original cells arose is like trying to explain how the laws of chemistry and physics could have organized a pile of atoms into a functioning computer complete with an operating system without any input from an intelligent engineer.

A living cell consists of hundreds of different proteins all serving different functions in the cell. The video explains the difficulties involved in the chance production of just a single functional protein.

Even if somehow those odds were overcome an unimaginable number of times and all the requisite proteins were somehow available to form a cell, how did they manage to randomly integrate themselves into an organized, functioning entity? Where did the information come from that directed these proteins to work together to perform specific tasks? How did the information arise that choreographed the proteins' ability to reproduce themselves and that choreographed the cell's ability to reproduce itself?

Despite assurances in the 20th century that scientists were on the cusp of elucidating how all this came about on the primeval earth, the problem has proven intractable. The origin of life is perhaps one of the three most perplexing problems in biological science today, along with the puzzle of how consciousness could have evolved out of inanimate matter and the problem of explaining the provenience of the biological information which programs cellular structures to perform the myriad functions and activities they carry out twenty four hours a day.

Conscious beings only seem to arise from other conscious beings. Information, such as is found in books or in computer operating systems, is only generated by minds. It may be that someday scientists will produce life from non-living matter in the laboratory, but if so, they will have only demonstrated that life, too, can be produced by the effort of conscious minds. The problem of how the first life can be accounted for in a naturalistic ontology will still remain, and it will still require an heroic exertion of blind faith to believe that against incomprehensible odds, somehow, in ways we can't even as yet imagine, life appeared.

It requires more faith to believe this, actually, than it does to believe in miracles. With miracles, after all, there's an intelligent, conscious Agent responsible for the miracle. On Naturalism there's nothing but blind, unguided accident.

Sanity and Insanity

President Trump is now having to defend his sanity from the left who will apparently try anything to get him out of office, including impugning his mental stability. Of course, the president played into their hands with a bizarre tweet to the effect that two of his "greatest assets are mental stability and being, like, really smart". He concluded this pronouncement by declaring himself to be "a very stable genius".

Well, maybe. I've never seen his IQ score or talked to the man, but I have to agree with Charles Gasparino of the Fox Business Network that there's sanity and insanity, at least on economic policy, and Trump's policies have been eminently sane:

One thing we don’t have to worry about is the economic sanity of President Trump.

In fact, it’s safe to say that the current president, for all his temperamental flaws and petty insecurities, makes his tightly wound predecessor, Barack Obama, look like a raving madman when it comes to showing sense on economic growth. Armchair psychiatrists are having a field day diagnosing the president’s mental state from afar, especially after his increasingly bizarre tweeting, but the market says otherwise.

Consider: The United States had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world — so high that companies (and jobs) were fleeing to places like Ireland. That’s why it was perfectly sane to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent as Trump just did, and presto: Corporations are announcing plans to hire more workers, and the economy, which was expected to slow after seven years of weak growth, is heating up. The markets are predicting that growth with their surge.

Likewise, regulations have been strangling businesses for years while making it difficult for banks to lend to consumers and small business. Trump went out and hired perfectly sane regulators who basically pulled the federal government’s boot off the neck of the business community.

It was described to me as a de facto tax cut by one business owner that gives him leeway to hire more people. A major win for the working class.

Gasparino then asks us to speculate as to what an insane president might do to our national economy. It might look something like this:

An insane president would threaten a significant tax increase immediately upon taking office following a financial crisis, and then eventually impose one on individuals and small businesses still in recovery.

He’d impose job-crushing regulations on these same businesses as unemployment rose. He’d put a cumbersome mandate on businesses that upends the entire health care system just as the economy was finally turning a corner.

A really insane president would blow nearly $1 trillion on a stimulus plan with little planning and direction, wasting much of the money on boondoggles (see: Solyndra) and then laugh at the lack of “shovel ready” jobs created.

He’d then try to spread his delusion to the masses, telling them to ignore historically low wage growth, anemic economic growth and the massive amount of people who dropped out of the workforce because the stock market rallied, thanks in large part to the Fed printing money instead of his own fiscal policies.

Of course Gasparino is not accusing Obama of being clinically crazy, but he is indicting his unfortunate economic decisions. Nor is he giving Trump an unqualified endorsement. He grants that some of his tweeting is troubling, but, he says, "smart investors with lots of skin in the game think his policies are perfectly rational, and that’s why the markets are soaring along with the prospect of economic growth."

I think Jim Geraghty at National Review Online accurately captures the view of a lot of conservatives concerning the president when he writes:

From here on out, conservatives ought to evaluate Trump with the cold-hearted cost-benefit analysis that New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick brings to an aging veteran. Applaud President Trump when he’s right, criticize him when he’s wrong, and ride the horse as far as he can take you — and the moment he can carry you no further, leave him behind.

If Trump proves incapable of resisting temptation and irreparably sabotages his own presidency, conservatives shouldn’t strain any muscles to defend him. You can’t save a man who isn’t willing to try to save himself.

Technology and Immortality

An article in the New York Post describes efforts by scientists to extend the human life span by decades and even to the point of immortality. The article is based on information in a soon-to-be-released book by Michael Shermer titled Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.

The major lines of research Shermer adumbrates involve cryonics, singulatarians, and mind uploading. Here are some excerpts about each from the article:

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, a psychology professor at Glendale College in California who had just died of cancer, took his first step toward coming back to life. On that day, the professor became the first person ever frozen in cryonic suspension, embedded in liquid nitrogen at minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bedford was neither the first, nor the last, to attempt the impossible — beating death at its own game, according to Shermer’s book.

Cryonics is the process of suspending a just-deceased person in a frozen state until the remedy for what killed them has been discovered. Then, theoretically, the person can be thawed out and cured.

Science will only consider a person properly preserved if they can be revived with all of their memories intact. Many question whether those currently frozen can be successfully revived.

Currently, the cryonic process “vitrifies” the brain, turning it “into a glass-like substance.” Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch — echoing the opinion of many experts — said it would be “utterly amazing” if this change to the brain’s chemistry didn’t destroy the synapses that hold memories, writes Shermer.

Singulatarians believe that artificial intelligence will expand human capacities so much that we'll reach a point - a technological singularity - where technological growth and human capacity will explode exponentially.

The premier evangelist for the singularity is scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil....Kurzweil believes we’ll reach a point where “the world will change more in a decade than in a thousand centuries, and as the acceleration continues and we reach the singularity, the world will change more in a year than in all pre-singularity history,” writes Shermer. “When that happens, humans will achieve immortality.”

“By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud,” he said. “So we’ll have an additional neocortex . . . and we’ll use it . . . to add additional levels of abstraction.”

“As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process.

“I believe we will reach a point around 2029,” Kurzweil added, “when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy.

Proponents of “mind uploading” go further than Kurzweil, believing that you won’t even need a body or a brain to exist, because one day human consciousness will live on a computer.

The key to uploading the brain is the connectome, which is a comprehensive map of the brain’s neural connections and pathways that equals the sum total of one’s brain function.

Scientists are currently trying to figure out how to assemble and preserve the connectome of a brain. Once that’s achieved, they will theoretically be able to download a human being’s conscious mind.

This, of course, assumes that the conscious mind is simply and solely a function of the material brain which is certainly in dispute among philosophers and scientists. In any case, you can read more on each of these lines of research at the link.

I claim no expertise in these matters but the most intriguing and perhaps the most realistic development, at least in the near term, is the treatment of illness and other disorders by means of nanobots in the bloodstream. That could indeed lead to increased life spans and better quality of life throughout one's lifetime.

Nevertheless, if it's immortality one seeks perhaps one should be looking elsewhere than the science lab for it.

Who's Done More?

Which president has done more for African Americans: Barack Obama, for whom 92% of African Americans voted, or Donald Trump who received only 8% of the African American vote?

If one goes by the unemployment figures the answer is easily Donald Trump. In 2010 black unemployment soared to 16.5% and never fell below 8.2% until the last two months of 2016 when it touched 7.9.

The lowest black unemployment had ever been was 7% during the dot-com boom of 2000.

This is certainly good news for the African American community although Trump's critics are quick to point out that black unemployment is still higher than that of whites (3.7%) and that blacks continue to lag far behind whites in pay, wealth and home ownership. Even so, the gaps are narrowing and under no other president, including the first black president, have the economic prospects looked better for so many blacks as they do now.

Parenthetically, as the Dow scores record highs, stretching well past 25,000, it's somewhat amusing to recall the fretful pre-election predictions that a Trump victory would surely cause the stock market to crash. Here are some excerpts, for example, from an article in Politico in October 2016:

Wall Street is set up for a major crash if Donald Trump shocks the world on Election Day and wins the White House.

New research out on Friday suggests that financial markets strongly prefer a Hillary Clinton presidency and could react with panicked selling should Trump defy the polls and deliver a shocking upset on Nov. 8.

“Wall Street clearly prefers a Clinton win certainly from the prospective of equity prices,” said Dartmouth College’s Eric Zitzewitz, one of the authors of the new study along with the University of Michigan’s Justin Wolfers. “You saw Clinton win the first debate and her odds jumped and stocks moved right along with it. Should Trump somehow manage to win you could see major Brexit-style selling.”

The new report suggests that the stock market is worth 11 percent more under a Clinton presidency than a Trump presidency. This is a highly unusual circumstance because markets historically prefer Republican policies on taxes, regulation and trade to those of Democrats.

And while Trump has pledged to rip up free trade deals and slap tariffs on imports, he has also pledged massive tax cuts on individuals and businesses, policies that Wall Street investors usually embrace....

This also suggests that a shock Trump victory next month could crush stock prices, perhaps by as much as 10 percent, and send the peso and other currencies sharply lower while ushering in a period of intense market volatility as investors try and discern how Trump would govern and whether he would make good on his pledge to start trade wars with Mexico and China and deport 11 million current undocumented immigrants.

“You would see incredible pressure on stock prices if Trump wins and everyone flooding into rare metals like gold and into bonds” in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom, said Erik Jones, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies....

Overall, the authors of the new paper envision a massive global market shock should Trump win. “Given the magnitude of the price movements, we estimate that market participants believe that a Trump victory would reduce the value of the S&P 500, the UK, and Asian stock markets by 10-15%,” they write and “would reduce the oil price by $4, would lead to a 25% decline in the Mexican Peso, and would significantly increase expected future stock market volatility.”

When Donald Trump took office the Dow was just under 20,000. It subsequently "crashed" to just under 25,300 today. Maybe those economic shamans who predicted calamity if Trump won should invest a little of the profit reaped from their investments in 2017 in a new set of chicken bones.

Materialism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It is clear, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be. For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems obvious that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me. If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing. Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left. Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Favorite Reads of 2017

Erasmus once said that when he gets a little money he buys books, and if he has any left over he buys food and clothes. I sympathize with his priorities. 2017 was a year filled with good books, and, as is the year-end custom here at VP, I've listed some of my favorite reads from the twelve-month just past.

It was difficult to decide what to include because I enjoyed and profited from reading many more books than those listed below, but here are twenty or so that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the topics the books address:

• Taking Pascal's Wager (Michael Roda): A thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Blaise Pascal's famous argument for the reasonableness of belief in God.
• Knowledge and Christian Belief (Alvin Plantinga): In the year 2000 philosopher Alvin Plantinga's ground-breaking work titled Warranted Christian Belief was published. Knowledge and Christian Belief is a slimmed down version of WCB and is much more accessible to the layman interested in the epistemology of Christian belief.
• Gunning for God (John Lennox): Lennox is a brilliant Oxford mathematician who in this book has written an excellent and witty response to the arguments of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.
• Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel): A fascinating novel about the rise of Thomas Cranmer in the court of Henry VIII.
• Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society (R.R. Reno): Both this book and the next are excellent but very different critiques of our current cultural predicament and what could and should be done about it if one is a Christian. Reno borrows heavily from Charles Murray's highly praised study of the white lower class titled Coming Apart.
• The Benedict Option (Rod Dreher): See the previous annotation. Benedict Option created a much bigger stir than Resurrecting possibly because Dreher is a well-known writer and his prescriptions sound, at least prima facie, more radical than Reno's.
• Hidden Figures (Margot Shutterly): The story of the contribution of a number of black women to the successes of the nascent American space program.
• Reform and Conflict (Rudolph Heinze): 2017 is recognized as the 500th anniversary of the protestant reformation so I read a half dozen or so books on the topic. This one and the next three were the best.
• Martin Luther (Eric Metaxas): An outstanding, entertaining biography of one of the seminal figures in Western history. Another biography of Luther, Beyond the 95 Theses, by Stephen Nichols is also very good.
• The Reformation Experience (Eric Ives): Ives discusses the Reformation as it unfolded in England under Henry VIII and subsequently his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Very interesting history.
• Hillbilly Elegy (J.D. Vance): Vance is a bright young lawyer who writes an amazing story of his family and the dysfunctional "hillbilly" culture out of which they, and he, came. Reading his account the reader is astonished that, given his chaotic home life and early development, he not only turned his life around but graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School.
• Infidel (Ayaan Hirsi Ali): Ali writes an eye-opening account of her life from the time she was a young Muslim Somali until, having broken from the religious oppression she endured in Africa, she fled to The Netherlands, gained an education and was elected to Parliament. Her story should be read by anyone who believes the multicultural mantra that all cultures are somehow equally valid.
• The French Revolution and Napoleon (Charles Hazen): A spell-binding account of the 1789 revolution in France with its subsequent Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon. Hazen's book, published in 1917, was so interesting that I plan to read it again in 2018.
• For the Glory of God (Rodney Stark): I had read this some years ago and picked it up again last year because it addresses such an interesting theme. Stark explains in this book how Christianity led to the rise of modern science, witch hunts, and the abolition of slavery. He packs a lot of fascinating historical information into all of his books and this one especially.
• The Plantagenets (Dan Jones): A very readable account of the history of the early English kings. The sequel to this book, Jones' War of the Roses, about the rise of the Tudors, was also very good.
• Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert): This and the next were two classic novels I had always wanted to read and somehow never did. Madame Bovary is the story of a self-centered woman who tries to find some meaning in her dreary life through an adulterous affair. Things turn out badly.
• Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott): This novel, written in the early 19th century, is a fabulous tale of knights in shining armor and heroic deeds set in the early 13th century when King John ruled England and his brother Richard was returning to claim his crown. The story did much to perpetuate the legend of Robin Hood, but the most interesting aspect to me was its depiction of the shameful attitudes toward Jews harbored by people who called themselves Christians in medieval England.

I hope you find lots of good books to read in 2018 and lots of time to read them. P.J. O'Rourke advises that we should always read books that make us look good if we die in the middle of them.

On Reading Good Books

I'd like to share a delightful post sent by a friend. It was written by a man named Bob Trube, and in his post he talks about reading, particularly what he calls "reading well". Trube writes:

Among the resolutions people make each year is some variant on “read more books.” That’s certainly a goal that I can applaud when the average number of books read by adults is twelve a year (a number skewed by avid readers; most people read about four a year). But I have a hunch that many of these resolutions fare no better than those of losing weight or exercising more, and probably for the same reasons: lack of specific goals that are realistic, forming a habit, social support and a good coach. I will come back to these but I want to address something I hear less about – reading well.

For a number who read this blog, I don’t have to convince you about the value of reading, and in many cases, you already have good reading habits and exceed that book a month average. And even if you don’t, you probably sense that reading isn’t about numbers of books but part of a well-lived life. You read not only for amusement or diversion but to better understand your world and how to live one’s life in it. That can be anything from understanding the inner workings of your computer and how to use it better to a work of philosophy or theology or even a great novel that explores fundamental questions of life’s meaning, living virtuously, or the nature of God.

Trube goes on to list four aspects of reading well:

1. Reading well is an act of attentiveness. We read well when we read without external and internal distractions. A place of quiet and a time when we are not distracted with other concerns helps us “engage the page.” It also helps to turn off the notifications on your phone or tablet, or better yet, put the electronics in another room. Read on an e-reader without other apps if you prefer these to physical books.
2. Visual media often encourages us to passively absorb content. Books of substance require our active engagement–noticing plot, characters, and the use of literary devices like foreshadowing, allusions and more. Non-fiction often involves following an argument, and paying attention to the logic, the evidence, and whether the argument is consistent. Reading well can mean jotting notes, asking questions, or even arguing with the author. Above all it means reflecting on what we read, and how the book connects with our lives.
3. Reading well over time means choosing good books to read. What is “good”? I’m not sure there is one good or simple answer. There are a number of “great books” lists out there and they are worth a look. You might choose one of those to read this year. One test of a book’s worth is whether people are still reading the book and finding value in it long after its author has passed. Also, in almost any genre, there are reviews, websites, and online groups. Over time, you will find sources of good recommendations.
4. Finally, I’d suggest choosing something to read off the beaten path. Reading authors from other cultures, or a genre you don’t usually read can stretch your horizons. This year, I want to work in some poetry and get around to the Langston Hughes and Seamus Heaney that I’ve had laying around.

He closes with a few thoughts "For those who simply want to read more and get into the reading habit." I encourage you to go to the link and check them out.

I sometimes wonder if reading isn't becoming a lost art, like knitting. Our lives are so full of work and other obligations that we don't have much time to read. Even during what leisure we may have we're constantly plugged in to some device or other that distracts us and makes reading seem boring by comparison. Yet good books are like vitamins and minerals for the mind. They nourish and enrich us in ways that last for a lifetime.

If you're one who would like to read more, but just can't seem to get into it, check out the tips that Trube gives at his blog. They're very good.

Hope for Alzheimer's Sufferers

If you're one of the millions of Americans who has a loved one in one stage or another of Alzheimer's dementia this news release might give you some hope:

A drug developed for diabetes could be used to treat Alzheimer's after scientists found it "significantly reversed memory loss" in mice through a triple method of action.

The research, published in Brain Research, could bring substantial improvements in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease through the use of a drug originally created to treat type 2 diabetes.

Lead researcher Professor Christian Holscher of Lancaster University in the UK said the novel treatment "holds clear promise of being developed into a new treatment for chronic neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease."

The tests were done with the diabetes drug because researchers hadn't found a new treatment for Alzheimer's in fifteen years and they thought it might be worthwhile to test drugs that had already been developed rather than spend time trying to develop new medications. Type 2 diabetes produces some effects in the brain similar to those of Alzheimer's and is considered a risk factor for Alzheimer's.

Dr Doug Brown, Director of Research and Development at Alzheimer's Society, said: "With no new treatments in nearly 15 years, we need to find new ways of tackling Alzheimer's. It's imperative that we explore whether drugs developed to treat other conditions can benefit people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. This approach to research could make it much quicker to get promising new drugs to the people who need them."

Although the benefits of these 'triple agonist' drugs have so far only been found in mice, other studies with existing diabetes drugs such as liraglutide have shown real promise for people with Alzheimer's, so further development of this work is crucial."

One hesitates to get too optimistic over reports like this, but this drug would be a tremendous blessing to millions of families around the world if it works. Let's get on with whatever further tests need to be done to see if the drug will work in humans and, if so, get it on the market as soon as possible.

Here's more from the article:

This is the first time that a triple receptor drug has been used which acts in multiple ways to protect the brain from degeneration. It combines GLP-1, GIP and Glucagon which are all growth factors. Problems with growth factor signalling have been shown to be impaired in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

In a maze test, learning and memory formation were much improved by the drug which also:

• enhanced levels of a brain growth factor which protects nerve cell functioning
• reduced the amount of amyloid plaques in the brain linked with Alzheimer's
• reduced both chronic inflammation and oxidative stress
• slowed down the rate of nerve cell loss

Either/Or

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

That's an account recited by David Berlinski in his book Devil's Delusion. His point is that when men lose the belief that there is a God to whom we are accountable for how we treat each other then they will often treat each other atrociously. I might add that it is also the case that when men believe there is a God which expects us to treat each other atrociously, as some Christians did in centuries past and many Muslims do today, then they certainly will do so.

Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference. When Christians act barbarously toward the other they're betraying everything that the One they claim to follow taught. They're rejecting His commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. They're rejecting the lesson of His Parable of the Good Samaritan. By elevating hate over love they're doing precisely the opposite of what He taught and how He lived.

On the other hand, when a Muslim kills "infidels," so far from betraying the one he claims to follow, he's actually following his prophet's example, and when an atheist commits murders like the one described by Berlinski or, for that matter, by atheist Devin Patrick Kelley who walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last November and murdered 26 people and wounded 20 more, or by atheist Stephen Paddock who slaughtered 58 and wounded nearly 500 from his hotel window at a Las Vegas concert in October, he's betraying nothing.

This is not to say that these men were motivated by their atheism any more than that German soldier was, but it is to say that in a world where "God is not watching" there's no real accountability, no genuine guilt, and nothing that's objectively wrong, no matter how horrible. That soldier believed his highest duty was to the Fuehrer, Kelley and Paddock believed they had no higher duty at all, and given their atheism, they were right.

We're horrified by what these men did, just as we're horrified when we watch a video of a lion kill a baby antelope, but the lion is not evil. It's not doing anything morally wrong, it's just doing what lions do. In the absence of God human predators are likewise just doing what human predators do. Our horror and revulsion at their crimes are misplaced. These reactions are simply non-rational emotional responses to events which are unpleasant or abhorrent to our sensibilities.

This conclusion, the notion that if atheism is true there are no moral wrongs and thus no moral guilt, offends our deepest intuitions, but that reaction confronts us with a choice: either our intuitions are wrong or atheism is wrong. One of the strangest facts about our modern age is that there are many who would sooner deny the legitimacy of their moral intuitions than consider that their atheism might be false.

New Year's Prayer

I want to wish all our readers a safe and meaningful new year. It's my prayer for you that wherever you live, whatever your vocation in life, whatever your ideological, political and religious convictions may be, 2018 proves to be a year filled with peace, good health, satisfying work and much joy.

God bless,
Dick

Why Has New York's Murder Rate Dropped?

Heather MacDonald is the author of The War Against Cops and writes often on crime and urban policy. She has a very interesting take on the recent statistics showing a drop in the murder rate in New York City to levels not seen since the 1950s, one response to which is that proactive policing - stop and frisk and other such measures - are unnecessary. MacDonald disagrees.

Here's an excerpt from her recent essay in National Review:

The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, [some] cop critics say.

Their arguments are specious. New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime.

It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety.

The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent.

Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000.

The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.

This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves.

When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)

The high-crime areas of Baltimore and Chicago have not been gentrified. Baltimore is experiencing its highest per capita murder rate for the third year in a row. While Chicago’s homicide numbers are down somewhat this year, thanks to the aggressive use of shot-spotter technology, they remain at a level far higher than in the past decade. The year 2017 will mark only the second time since 2003 that homicides surpassed 600, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In other words, when upscale yuppies and similar folk take over a neighborhood, violent crime goes down. In cities where gentrification hasn't happened on the same scale as in New York violent crime remains high.

MacDonald has much more to say about this in her essay which you can access at the link.

Movin' on Out

Conservatives have long argued that liberal policies, however well-intended they may be, are often counterproductive and/or destructive. One bit of evidence that can be adduced in this regard is the out-migration of residents from three states - New York, Illinois, and California - that have been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades.

For many residents, apparently, the tax and spend policies of their liberal state governments have made their states just too burdensome to live in:

The exodus of residents was most pronounced in New York, which saw about 190,000 people leave the state between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week.

New York’s domestic out-migration during that time period was about the same as it was in the same time 2015 and 2016. Since 2010, the state’s outflow of just over 1 million residents has exceeded that of every other state, both in absolute terms and as a share of population, according to the free-market think tank Empire Center.

Long-beset by twin budget and pension crises and the erosion of its tax base, Illinois lost so many residents that it dropped from the fifth to the sixth-most populous state in 2017, losing its previous spot to Pennsylvania.

Just under 115,000 Illinois residents decamped for other states between July 2016 and July 2017. Since 2010, the Land of Lincoln has lost about 650,000 residents to other states on net, equal to the combined population of the state’s four largest cities other than Chicago, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

Illinois’ domestic out-migration problem has become a nightmare for lawmakers, who must find a way to solve the worst pension crisis in the nation as the state’s tax base shrinks year after year. Illinois’ Democratic-dominated legislature has tried to ameliorate the situation with tax hikes, causing even more people to leave and throwing the state into a demographic spiral.

“As people leave the state, they take their pocketbooks with them. That means there are fewer Illinoisans to pay the bills,” Orphe Divounguy, chief economist with the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s worrying because if you have a declining population and a declining labor force, you will for sure have a further slowdown of economic activity going into 2018.”

California was the third deep blue state to experience significant domestic out-migration between July 2016 and July 2017, and it couldn’t blame the outflow on retirees searching for a more agreeable climate. About 138,000 residents left the state during that time period, second only to New York.

In the past the high tax regimens in these states were tolerable because state and local taxes (SALT) could be deducted on one's federal income tax returns, but the newly-enacted tax reform bill caps SALT deductions at $10,000, a limit which will hit taxpayers in those states harder than just about any other state:

According to the Tax Foundation, New York, Illinois and California had three of the five highest tax rates expressed as a percentage of per capita income, with residents paying 12.7 percent, 11 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

An irony in this is that these states (Illinois being an exception) are on balance slightly increasing their population, but the increase is coming from births and international migrants. In other words, the people who are leaving are generally taxpayers who are being replaced by people who will contribute less in taxes and require more in benefits.

These states are about to pay a steep price for their fiscal irresponsibility. As Margaret Thatcher once said about socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people's money. When that happens the state's leaders will probably raise taxes again triggering another round of taxpayer flight, or they'll go to the federal government - i.e. the rest of us - demanding a bail-out to rescue them from their profligacy and the economic death spiral they'll find themselves in.

Which Questions?

The science writer at Forbes, Ethan Siegal, was asked which of these five physics-related mysteries would he most like to have the answer to:

• Did cosmic inflation happen or was there another process?
• Is earth the only place in the cosmos with life?
• How [can we] merge general relativity and quantum mechanics?
• What is dark energy and dark matter?
• How did life begin on Earth?

These are all fascinating questions, and I'd like to know the answers to all of them, especially the last. Siegal gives interesting explanations at the link as to why these questions are significant, and interested readers should check it out, but for me the two most fascinating science-related questions are not on this list.

The first question I'd like to read a convincing answer to is how did brute matter - atoms and sub-atomic particles - ever give rise in evolutionary history to human consciousness? Indeed, what exactly is consciousness? It would seem that the explanatory gap between material stuff and conscious experience is enormous so how was it bridged in human development or, for that matter, how is it bridged in each human brain?

The second question I'd like to see answered is what is matter in the first place? What is the fundamental constituent of matter? Is it something solid or is it a force of some kind? If it's the latter then how does solidity arise? Is solidity just an illusion? Is the material world objectively real and to what extent is it so?

Someone might dismiss such questions with the remark that the answers make no difference to how we live our everyday lives, and at one level they'd probably be correct. But, if, as a lot of very smart people think, the answers to these questions would point to an ontic reality beyond the universe itself, an intelligent mind, then the implications for everyday life could be considerable.

If, for example, it should turn out that consciousness cannot arise from matter but must be itself the product of consciousness then it would appear that conscious mind underlies the cosmos, and if it should turn out that matter (or mass/energy) reduces to information then, since information is the product of minds, it would appear, again, that a mind must underlie the cosmos.

Those are conclusions, one would think, of immense significance.

Perhaps we'll never know the answers. Perhaps we cannot know them. Perhaps solving these puzzles is as far beyond our intellectual capacities as solving quadratic equations is beyond the intellectual capacities of a rabbit. All the same, it'd be a stupendous achievement were the answers ever found.