About Those Civilian Deaths

The media frequently report that Israeli military action in Gaza is responsible for 23,000 dead Palestinians. Our President, as expected, is beginning to go wobbly in his support of Israel as his political left flank turns up the heat to persuade him to stop providing aid and comfort to our ally because of the toll.

Progressive supporters of the Palestinian cause - a cause adumbrated in the chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," i.e. Israel will be exterminated - demand a cease-fire in Gaza, citing the 23,000 casualties as their proximal reason, but also wishing, perhaps, to prevent Israel from destroying Hamas.

So what are we to make of the figure of 23,000 fatalities?

First, it's a number provided by Hamas itself, a group willing to commit the most horrific atrocities. It's hard to believe that this group would draw the moral line at lying if it would be to their benefit to inflate the number of deaths.

Second, the figure does not distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians. The Israeli Defense Force estimates that 9000 of the deaths have been militants killed in combat.

That leaves 14,000 "civilian" deaths. I put "civilians" in quotes because many Palestinian "civilians" took part in the horrors of October 7th and have assisted and cheered Hamas as they've perpetrated their atrocities.

In any case, as British Colonel Richard Kemp says in a recent tweet, the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.

In the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.

Given that Hamas has hidden behind civilians, killed many of their fellow Palestinians themselves, built their tunnels under civilian buildings, used civilian structures such as schools and hospitals as sites from which to launch their rockets and store their weapons, it's really commendable that the IDF has been able to keep the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths so low. It's a testament to Israel's commitment to do all they can to protect Palestinian civilians.

It's too bad our media doesn't do a better job of letting people know Israel's side of the 23,000 dead Palestinians all of whom would be alive today if Hamas simply surrendered at the outset and gave back it's hostages.

Not Enough Time

Biologist Ann Gauger, co-author of Science and Human Origins, argues in this video, and in her book, that the time necessary to fix the number of mutations necessary to evolve a human from a chimp-like predecessor is greater than the age of the universe.

In other words, even if it were possible to coordinate the needed mutations so that they bring about the desired effect, it would take billions of years for these mutations to occur in just the right sequence, at least if they were to occur by chance.

Gauger is not saying that man did not arise from an ape-like ancestor, but rather that if he did, it is astronomically improbable that his evolution was driven solely by physical mechanisms like chance mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection. In order to make such an evolution plausible there must be something else, something in addition to the physical processes, that can drive biological change toward a goal, something that has foresight and engineering genius. In other words, a mind.

Apart from a mind, or something like mind, behind the process there's very little reason to think that Darwinian evolution is anything more than a materialist fairy tale.

Gauger's book is a good read and very informative, especially her chapter in which she discusses all the changes that would need to take place to derive a human from an ancestral ape.

Types of Antisemitism

Gary Saul Morson, a professor at Northwestern University, begins an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) with this:

If you ask students why they support Hamas’s call to eliminate Israel and murder Jews, many will deny—sincerely—that they are antisemitic. How is that possible? Some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may also sign statements condemning antisemitism and resent accusations that they hate Jews.

We can’t move them by showing the harm antisemitism has done because they don’t regard themselves as antisemitic.

Why not? Well, according to Morson it's because there are actually three types of antisemitism: The core type, which most people have in mind, is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. Reasons may be advanced, but the hatred isn’t based on reasons. Rather, the reasons stem from the need to justify the hatred. If one justification won’t do, another will be sought.

The readiness to switch between divergent, even contradictory, justifications is usually the best indicator of this incorrigible antisemitism.

This is the version of antisemitism evinced by the architects of the holocaust, for example. Not all of the students who've participated in the recent protests, however, are of this first type. The second type is a consequence of the near-universal inculcation on campuses of the doctrine of intersectionality which has the pernicious effect of,

[dividing] people into good and evil: racists and antiracists, victimizers and victims, colonizer and colonized. Once such thinking becomes routine, it is almost inevitable that opponents in any new conflict will be pigeonholed. And so Jews become colonizers and Palestinians, represented by Hamas, become their hapless victims.

Since one side is entirely evil, anything done to them is justified. One must prevail “by any means necessary.” That is why Hamas’s brutality can be accepted, even praised.

People who think this way believe they aren’t antisemitic because they didn’t start with some preconceived hatred. Rather, they applied a familiar, widely approved framework. Today the evil party is Israel; tomorrow another great Satan may be designated. Under different circumstances, Jews could have found themselves in the victim category.

So the first type of antisemite hates Jews just because they're Jews. The second type hates Jews because they see them as oppressors. The fact that many Jews are white amplifies their culpability in the minds of the intersectional zealots.

In a third type of antisemitism, hatred is based on specific reasons, which aren’t merely excuses....if one really believes that the elders of Zion plot to enslave the world or that Jews have constructed a state based on apartheid and genocide, then militancy against Israel will seem rational.

These antisemites may really imagine they are drawing rational conclusions from the facts. The problem is that their “facts” are entirely spurious.

Morson asks rhetorically why these ignorant antisemites don't see the real facts. His answer is that they've simply shut themselves off from any source of information that doesn't support their ideological worldview:

In [today's America] educated people voluntarily silo themselves. They close themselves off from any unapproved voice and commonly favor censorship of “misinformation.”

It is, he asserts, willful ignorance.

"[All] three [types] can lead to the same horrors," Morson avers. "Antisemitism is a big tent, and in any group of antisemites we can find all types hating Israel."

In his conclusion Morson says that intersectionality must be eliminated from university curricula. I agree. Intersectionality, or perhaps more accurately, the critical theory upon which it's based, is a spawning ground for all sorts of hatreds - ethnic, religious, economic, racial, et al.

Young people are being taught that good and evil are properties of races, ethnicities, or economic classes, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Morson quotes, was much closer to the truth when he explained that "The line between good and evil runs not between classes, nations, or parties, but through every human heart."

Political Violence

In recent months there has been a building media refrain around the theme that Donald Trump is a threat to Democracy and that the possibility of violence instigated by Trump was growing increasingly likely.

The tendentiousness of these claims would be amusing were they not so frustrating. One wishes to attribute honest motives to journalists, even progressive journalists, but how can sincere motives explain the utter moral blindness of this refrain?

Eddie Scarry at The Federalist reminds us that political violence and calls for violence, were until January 6th, solely the province of the Democrat left. From Antifa to BLM to the Pro-Hamas demonstrators, violence, harassment and vandalism, both actual and threatened, have been an almost exclusive staple of leftist political action in this country.

As examples of progressive hand-wringing over the possibility of right-wing excesses ling right around the corner Scarry gives us these:

An article at the leftist Vox site at the start of the year acknowledged that threats of violence “are coming from across the political spectrum.” It said, however, that “the most important ones … emanate from the MAGA faithful.”

The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie ominously predicted last week that the former president might “use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions.”

On the same day, his neckbeard colleague David French claimed in a separate column that “while political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.”

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Friday whined that Trump has “fanned the flames” of prior “acts of political violence.”

All of this immediately followed — purely by coincidence, no doubt — a series of public remarks by Joe Biden making a big show about how he strongly, seriously, emphatically condemns political violence....

The above warnings notwithstanding, extremist, destructive behavior is much more likely to be a resort of the left than of the right. Yet the media seems oblivious, either willfully or otherwise, to this fact:

The advantage Democrats have had in recent years is that, unlike independent and Republican voters, they know their activists put politics above everything else. For them, only one thing matters: getting their way. If that means destroying public property and private businesses, so be it. If a few people are hospitalized or die for it, that’s a price they’re willing to pay.

Intimidation and harassment are their default strategies. It’s their voters who screamed in the faces of perfect strangers for not wearing face coverings. It’s their voters who torched and trashed inner cities in the name of “racial justice.” It’s their voters who showed up to menace Supreme Court justices at their private residences.

It’s their voters ginning up a second Holocaust over a religious conflict between two nations 6,000 miles away.

He's correct, of course. He's also correct in his conclusion:

If there has been any increase in violent threats from the right, Democrats have themselves to thank for it. They might do themselves a favor this time and knock it off before any of those threats are made good.

If there is violence perpetrated by the right in 2024, one of the main catalysts for it will be breaking-point frustration with a judicial system that allows leftists to get away with it- and a media that excuses it - while transgressors on the right are punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Does Matter Exist?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff". There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function", but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders. At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer.

The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia and intentionality, were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right.

Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have ... discarded Cartesian mind but retain Cartesian matter.

To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

Matter is a mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

There's no reason, in fact, not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction that modern physics has been moving in since the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, the sensation of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

Honoring Martin Luther King

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view, that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed an atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison is it just to imprison you as well, just because you're related, if you had no part in the crime?

Interestingly, the notion of collective guilt, a favored trope of the left, only applies when it works against whites. The left is today insisting that Israel is harming Palestinians for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimniate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?

In fact, left-wingers are holding Jews in this country reponsible for what Israelis are doing in the Middle East, yet they claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the people the Palestinians elected, and cheered for, did to Jews on October 7th.

The concept of collective guilt is absurd. Guilt and merit are individual, not collective. No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago or are doing today. They're only guilty to the extent they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.

We'll have a much healthier, cohesive society when everyone follows Martin Luther King's example and acknowledges that simple fact.

What's the Universe Made of?

An idea that has percolated through this site over the years - because I find it fascinating - is that the universe, contra the materialists, is not fundamentally comprised of material particles, nor, contra the physicalists, is it fundamentally made up of fields and forces. Rather, the idea is that ultimately the universe and everything in it reduces to information.

An article by Philip Perry at Big Think elaborates on this strange sounding notion:

There are lots of theories on what the basis of the universe is. Some physicists say its subatomic particles. Others believe its energy or even space-time. One of the more radical theories suggests that information is the most basic element of the cosmos. Although this line of thinking emanates from the mid-20th century, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a Renaissance among a sliver of prominent scientists today.

Consider that if we knew the exact composition of the universe and all of its properties and had enough energy and know-how to draw upon, theoretically, we could break the universe down into ones and zeroes and using that information, reconstruct it from the bottom up. It’s the information, purveyors of this view say, locked inside any singular component that allows us to manipulate matter any way we choose. Of course, it would take deity-level sophistication ....

Indeed, which is why scientists committed to metaphysical materialism aren't eager to hop on board. The implications of the information hypothesis sound too much like what theists have been saying for centuries.

Following a discussion of the work of Claude Shannon, the creator of classical information theory, Perry notes that most physicists still maintain that matter, material particles, is the fundamental stuff of the universe. But not all scientists agree:

The eminent John Archibald Wheeler in his later years was a strong proponent of information theory. Another unsung paragon of science, Wheeler was a veteran of the Manhattan Project, coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” helped work out the “S-matrix” with Neils Bohr, and collaborated with Einstein on a unified theory of physics.

Scientists in Wheeler's camp argue that:

To look at information theory from a quantum viewpoint, the positions of particles, their movement, how they behave, and all of their properties, gives us information about them and the physical forces behind them. Every aspect of a particle can be expressed as information and put into binary code. And so subatomic particles may be the bits that the universe is processing, as [if it were] a giant supercomputer.

In the 1980s, [Wheeler] began exploring possible connections between information theory and quantum mechanics. It was during this period he coined the phrase “It from bit.” The idea is that the universe emanates from the information inherent within it. Each it, or particle, is a bit. It from bit.

In 1989, Wheeler produced a paper for the Santa Fe institute, where he announced "every it--every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself--derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits."

A team of physicists earlier this year announced research conclusions that would make Wheeler smile. We might be caught inside a giant hologram they state. In this view, the cosmos is a projection, much like a 3D simulation....

If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor.

All of which implies not only a mind on the receiving end but also a mind at the generating end. Information is not just recognized by minds, but is the product of a mind. If the universe really is, at bottom, information then there's very good reason to believe that there is a mind of incomprehensible computing power that has produced it. It's a breathtaking implication.

Perry links interested readers to this video for more on information theory as the basis of the universe. If you like slightly zany videos give it a look:

Either Naturalism or Evil

The horror in Israel last October 7th was yet another reminder of how deep lies the depravity in the human psyche. That human beings could take such glee in wantonly wreaking such horrific pain on so many individuals and families is a vivid manifestation of the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece some years ago in the New English Review, offered some insight into the depravity we're witnessing with alarming frequency in our modern world.

Francis writes:

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

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

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life. Nietzsche is reported to have run over to the horse and held it in his arm to protect it before he collapsed to the ground. Such cruelty, devoid of morality and human compassion, knows no bounds.

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

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

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

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath.

But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter. All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

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

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

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

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

Well, yes, there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them.

The naturalist has a choice. He can hold onto his naturalism or he can hold onto his belief that evil exists. He can't have both.

Islamism

The biggest threat to the safety and freedom of those living in the West today is an extreme form of Islam called Islamism. The ambition of its votaries is to impose strict Islamic law, sharia, on the entire world, including Europe and the United States.

These fanatics realize that they can't persuade Westerners to adopt Islam and sharia through the free exchange of ideas and rational argument because their religion, based as it is on a strict fundamentalist totalitarianism, has very little appeal to people who are accustomed to the freedoms enjoyed in the West for the last two and a half centuries.

Their hope, therefore, is that by overwhelming democratic states with refugees and other immigrants who will eventually be given the right to vote they can gradually acquire sufficient political power to enact at least some of the strictures of sharia legislatively.

If and when they succeed the very freedom they exploited to gain their ends will be curtailed or even abolished and people will one day awaken to find themselves under the thumb of an alien, fascistic theocracy with the power to dictate every aspect of their lives and to compel everyone to conform to the teachings of the Koran.

Meanwhile, the Islamists know that in the postmodern West the highest values of millions of people are mere peace and security. Believing in little else, many Westerners would rather submit to the dominance of the Islamists than live with the anxiety of being second class citizens.

Thus, the will to resist the capitulation of the West to the Islamo-fascists is being steadily eroded, especially in Europe, by acts of terror committed by religious zealots willing to die in order to sap whatever confidence remains among Westerners in their values and institutions.

We're often told that terrorists are a small number of those who adhere to Islam, and in relative terms that's probably true, but in absolute terms they number in the millions.

Prager U. has a helpful primer on Islamism which packs a lot of facts into a five minute video. Give it a look:

Russian Morale

As winter sets in along the war front in Ukraine news reports are full of stories about how the war is going nowhere and the Ukrainians and Russians are at a stalemate or the Ukrainians are being slowly ground down.

A report from Strategy Page has a different take, however. To be sure, there are no quick victories on the horizon, but it seems, if SP is correct, that it's the Russians who are being ground down.

Here's an excerpt:

January 8, 2024: The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far.

Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to.

While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Russian commanders are aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight.

The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their commanders (assuming they had any at all). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. The government was often not supplying food, ammunition, and medical care for the troops.

It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of purported standard issue.

There's much more at the link. The Russians have superior numbers and firepower, but morale counts for far more than either of those. Troops who are hungry, cold and sick, fighting in a war that none of them really understands, aren't usually eager to give their all for a government which they have good reason to believe is betraying them.

Toward the end of their report SP adds this:

Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it.

Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution.

That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops.

Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.

Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.

One wishes our administration would stop dithering on the matter of the kind and quantity of assistance we provide to Ukraine and enable them to drive the Russians back across their borders into Russia.

A Great Book

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included?

Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article: He writes that a great book...

1. speaks from an important original setting.
2. is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. is well-crafted.
4. is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet the criteria of a great book?

Strange How Things Sometimes Work Out

Sometimes things in life work out in ways completely unforeseen and unforeseeable. Just when it seems nothing good can come of one's life, when we've all but given up hope that anything we do will amount to anything worthwhile, sometimes something wonderful happens.

The following is taken from a book by Robert Petterson titled The Book of Amazing Stories. The excerpt is titled The Chambermaid’s Choice and it truly is an amazing story:

Maria had hoped that her second marriage would make for a better future. Though born the daughter of a cook, she had dreams of being in high society. But at sixteen, she fell madly in love with a nobleman’s valet. When they married, she consigned herself to be dismissed as one of the serving class. After Maria gave birth to a son, her valet husband died. At age eighteen she was a grieving widow and a single mother. Not long after, her little boy died too.

Then she got a second chance at love [with a musician]. But when her young musician took her home to meet his prominent family, they looked down their haughty noses at this girl from the serving class. His father would ever after refer to her as “the chambermaid.” Her husband’s family would always view her as an inferior interloper. It was no wonder that Maria’s second marriage soon soured.

She later referred to her life as “a chain of sorrows.” The couple’s first child died six days after he was born. The “chambermaid” would bury five of her eight children. But her worst heartache was watching the decline of a husband who enjoyed the tavern more than practicing his music. If he wasn’t in a drunken stupor, he was with other women.

Then the beatings began. After he took advantage of her in one of his brutal rages, Maria discovered she was pregnant.

She determined that she wasn’t about to bring a child conceived by rape into her miserable world. She found her way to a woman who traded in concoctions that induced miscarriage.

Three drops of that deadly liquid would kill her baby. Any more might end her life too. She dumped it all into a cup of tea. But before she was able to drink it, the cup was accidentally knocked off the table. At first she was hysterical. Then she resigned herself to the fact that God must have a purpose for her unwanted child.

He turned out to be a strange little boy, often reclusive and unresponsive. But he did have his family’s love for music. When a local teacher took him on as a piano student, no one imagined that she was gaining a prodigy.

Maria was forty years old when Wolfgang Mozart allegedly declared that her son was destined for greatness. Two months later, the teenage prodigy rushed home to be at her deathbed. She told her son that giving birth to him was the best thing she ever did in her unhappy life.

We should all be grateful that Maria van Beethoven did not abort little Ludwig, a child of rape who would grow up to write the world’s greatest symphonies.

Maria's life, like that of so many others in her day and in ours, was tragic, yet out of her tragedy she gave the world a wonderful gift. Her son's symphonies, especially the fifth and the ninth, as well as many of his concertos, are marvelous, but his life, too, was tragic. He went deaf while he was still at the height of his powers, allegedly from beatings he received from his father as a child. Yet out of his sufferings he produced works of astonishing beauty.

Reading this I was reminded of a few lines from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who asked, "What is a poet?" "A poet," he replied to his question, "is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them they sound like beautiful music."

Kurt Gödel's Belief in an Afterlife

Kurt Gödel is one of the most prominent logicians and mathematicians of the last few centuries. His achievements in mathematics, logic, and computer science are momentous.

In a rather lengthy article at Aeon Alexander Englert discusses the argument Gödel makes for his belief in an afterlife. His reasons are found in a series of several letters he wrote to his mother Marianne in 1961.

The crux of his argument is contained in these words to his mother:

If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case [that there's an existence beyond this one]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

His argument has Kantian resonances, and his basic reasoning makes sense. If the universe is rational then human life is rational. But human life cannot be rational if physical death ends it before it achieves anything meaningful. Thus, if the universe is rational, which he believed it certainly was, then physical death must not be the end of our existence.

Gödel writes this:

What I name a theological Weltanschauung [Worldview] is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence – since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning – can be a means to an end for another existence.

Englert offers the reader much more insight into Gödel's reasoning, which the great logician elaborates over the course of several letters to Marianne, and there's a lot more analysis by Englert of the argument as well.

It's a fine essay written about one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century.

Who Are the Houthis?

Powerline blog recently ran a column by Washington Times columnist and defense expert Cliff May in which May explains who the Houthis are and why they've been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Given that the actions of these terrorists have the potential to drag us into a war in the Middle East I thought important that we know what's going on there and so have lifted a few excerpts from May's column.

May writes that the Houthis call themselves Ansar Allah, meaning "Supporters of God." They are a Shia military and political organization whose theology is consistent with Iran’s and is succinctly expressed in their slogan: “Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam.”

He goes on to explain that,

For a decade, they have been waging a civil war against the government of Sunni-majority Yemen, a conflict in which more than 150,000 people have been killed. A ceasefire between the rebels and the government has been in effect since 2022.

Just before leaving office, President Trump designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.

Just after taking office, President Biden removed the Houthis from that blacklist. He also froze weapons sales to Saudi Arabia which had been leading an Arab coalition supporting the Yemeni government.

If [allied naval forces fail] to silence Houthi guns, President Biden will face a choice: Capitulate or escalate.

The latter would mean at least directing the Pentagon to eliminate Houthi weapons warehouses, the vessels and helicopters used for hijackings, and perhaps command-and-control centers.

But such a response would be only tactical. A strategic approach would focus less on the puppets and more on those pulling the strings of the Houthis – along with the strings of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Shia militias.

That would mean directly punishing Iran which is the enabler of all these subordinate terror organizations. Such a measure carries the potential for a much wider conflict.

In recent days, Iran’s rulers have increased their production of enriched uranium. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, they may now have enough to produce three nuclear bombs.

A nuclear-armed regime in Tehran would be more difficult to contain and deter – and a more valuable partner for Beijing and Moscow.

President Biden, like his predecessors in the White House, has said that for Tehran’s jihadis to possess nukes would be “unacceptable.”

The problem for Mr. Biden is that the longer he waits the more nukes Iran develops and the more cataclysmic war with Iran becomes. It seems that if we do nothing war with Iran becomes inevitable since they've promised that they'll use their nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.

If we can find a way to punish them now, and simultaneously destroy their nuclear weapons capability without triggering a wider conflagration, that would be the more desirable alternative. Parenthetically, it's ironic that sanctions imposed by President Trump had severely crippled Iran, but President Biden removed the sanctions and Iran is now flexing its muscle.

In any case, acting now certainly entails grave risks, but not acting entails even graver, much more horrific, certainties. This may well turn out to be the biggest test of Mr. Biden's presidency.

Ms. Gay's Resignation

Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard. She has, she implies, succumbed to racist animus which has put unsustainable pressure on her and the Board of Directors.

Here's an excerpt from her resignation letter:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Racism is, of course, the left's go-to response whenever a progressive black person is held to the same standard of conduct as everyone else, and although she may have received despicable emails or phone calls, it's absurd to think that that's what brought about her downfall.

Ms. Gay has been determined to have committed almost fifty acts of plagiarism in her scholarly publications, an offense for which lowly undergraduates are routinely suspended.

She also demonstrated an alarming degree of moral maladroitness when she was unable to condemn calls for genocide of Jews on her campus when asked to do so by a House committee.

The Fellows of Harvard College claimed to have accepted her resignation "with sorrow":

While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.

While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.

That first line above presumably refers to her failure, when given the opportunity before a Congressional panel, to condemn antisemitic demonstrations among her student population during which some demonstrators called for the genocide of Jews.

Gay stated that she was caught up in a combative exchange with Congressional interrogators and "failed to convey what is my truth.”

That it's wrong to threaten students with violence is somehow her truth, as if someone else might legitimately have a different "truth," is a notion which should alone be enough to disqualify her from being the president of a college, but set that aside. Jim Geraghty at National Review asks,

Hey, who among us hasn’t gotten caught up in the moment and argued that calling for the genocide of Jews might be okay in certain contexts? Some of us might say that if you can stumble into telling Congress that, in certain circumstances, calling for genocide is acceptable, you really shouldn’t be running anything, much less the most prestigious university in the country.

“Is calling for genocide a form of harassment?” should be the sort of question they ask when they are trying to assess if you’ve had a concussion.

Geraghty goes on to write:

Here’s the thing: If you’ve done nothing wrong, are being falsely accused of rampant plagiarism, and all of your critics are racists or are gushing “racist vitriol” . . . why are you resigning? Why are the Harvard Fellows accepting your resignation?

The contention of Gay and the Harvard Fellows is that Gay did nothing seriously wrong, certainly nothing that warrants her resignation, but she’s resigning anyway, because a bunch of racists are demanding it.

Good point. Ms. Gay's massive breach of professional ethics and her moral and epistemic squishiness, not her race or gender, disqualify her from holding the position she did.

Taught to Hate Jews

It's difficult, perhaps, for many Westerners to grasp the hysterical hatred that many Muslims have for Jews. It's a hatred that seems to consume a significant majority of them and which boiled over in the horrific atrocities of October 7th.

This article gives some insight into how Jew-hatred is instilled in Muslim children almost from their infancy and how some Muslims have rejected it and the religion that fosters it.

Here's the lede:

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel.

They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt.

All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.

One wishes that virtues like grace, tolerance, and love were more in evidence in a religion adhered to by 20% of the world's people. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps more Muslims will eventually realize that hatred and violence are spiritual dead ends and follow the example of the five whose testimonies were featured in this article.

The Elephant's Trunk

One of the animal kingdom's most amazing features is the elephant's trunk. It's an amazing piece of engineering and another example of how the Darwinian explanation for it requires an enormous amount of faith, blind faith, in undirected chance.

The following video gives some insight into the capabilities of this fascinating structure:

C.S.Lewis and Systemic Racism

People are often heard reciting some variation of, "Of course, there's still racism in America," but when asked to give an example of a racist occurrence, the individual is often at a loss to come up with one. Undeterred, they'll sometimes insist that the difficulty in citing examples just shows how insidious racism is. Though individuals may not show their racism outwardly, we're told, they're still guilty of it inwardly. Or, it's claimed that the racism is "systemic" - embedded so deeply in our institutions that it's not easily visible.

People hearing these allegations too often nod in agreement. They acquiesce to what's proffered as common knowledge whether or not they're given any evidence in support of it. It seems impolite or unnecessarily provocative or confrontational to demand that the person present some empirical evidence before they can expect their claims to be credible.

Yet why should anyone acquiesce? Why should people go along with the assertion that "Of course there's still racism in America" if they've never seen it or been shown specific, unequivocal examples of it? Are people just supposed to accept the existence of virulent racism on faith or on the supposed authority of their interlocutor?

It all reminds me of a passage from C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves. Lewis is writing about the claim made by some that deep friendships between men are really evidence of homosexual attraction.

Lewis debunks the claim in the following excerpt in which he presents argument that applies as much to "racism" as to "homosexuality." He writes that the assertion that friendship evinces homosexual love...

...though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted....The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: "That," they say gravely, "is just what we should expect."

The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke just proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.

He then adds this,

[This is like] arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there's an invisible cat in it."

A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it.

Indeed, those who claim to see the invisible cat of racism in every chair are often people who are desperate to blame the invisible cat for the failures of those whom they insist are the victims of this nebulous, and perhaps imaginary, form of oppression.

If those who claim that racism is alive and well in contemporary America can adduce evidence of this assertion then, fine, we should heed them. If they can't adduce evidence they should be ignored.

What They Did to the Women

The New York Times recently ran a story on what the Palestinians did to the Israeli women on October 7th. John Hinderacker at Powerline excerpts from the Times' story some of the eyewitnesses' descriptions of the atrocities committed by these adherents of the "religion of peace."

Hinderacker opens with this:

I am generally contemptuous of the New York Times, but it deserves credit for this article on the violence against Israeli women and girls that was perpetrated by Gaza on October 7. The article is long and chilling. Organized gang rape, mutilation and murder were obviously features of the Gazans’ strategy. The evidence described by the Times is sickening; I credit a left-wing outlet for being willing to describe unflinchingly what Hamas’s supporters did.

He goes on to quote from the Times' article:

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

An eyewitness describes what she saw:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Another eyewitness offered this:

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

A dentist who worked with some of the bodies gave this testimony:

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

Hinderacker adds one more excerpt:

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Whenever we see students demonstrating against Israel and on behalf of the Palestinians, the above is what they're endorsing, either implicitly or explicitly. They may deny it but they're tacitly approving of such heinous crimes.

Here's Hinderacker's conclusion:

What accounts for this savagery? The sick culture that prevails among the so-called Palestinians, and that especially dominates Gaza. The Gazans are lost in hate and have been trained to do evil from childhood. It is that culture that must be destroyed, not [just] the political organization of Hamas, which is a symptom not a cause.

A number of commentators have written that the Israelis must not seek revenge for the atrocities of October 7. I don’t understand that. They absolutely should wreak vengeance on the Gazans. (“Everyone over there is a terrorist,” as one retrieved hostage says.)

In my opinion, Israelis have a moral duty to avenge the Gazans’ atrocities. Happily, they seem to be well on their way to doing so.

How can they not?

Kwanzaa

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden recently wished everyone a Happy Kwanzaa. You might wonder how Kwanzaa ever came about and why the President observes the day, so Lloyd Billingsley at Powerline blog tells us about the man who got it all started. His name is Ron Karenga, although he was born Ronald McKinley Everett in 1941.

Here's Billingsley:

Karenga was a political activist in the late 1960s and came to prominence as a theoretician of the black nationalist movement.

In “The Quotable Karenga” handbook, the Kwanzaa inventor told followers: “When it’s burn, let’s see how much you burn. When it’s kill, let’s see how much you kill. When it’s blow up, let’s see how much you blow up.”

Karenga also established Kuzaliwa, a tribute honoring Malcolm X’s birthday on May 19, and Uhuru Day on August 11, to commemorate the 1965 “civil disturbance” in Watts. Between 1971 and 1975, Karenga “dropped out of sight while serving a prison term for ordering the beating of a woman.”

In 1971, a court convicted Karenga of kidnapping and torturing two women in his organization. According to “Karenga Tortured Women Followers, Wife Tells Court,” from the May 3, 1971 Los Angeles Times, Karenga stripped naked Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat the women with a karate baton.

The Kwanzaa founder also stuck a hot soldering iron into Davis’ mouth, and used a vise to clamp down on one of her toes.

Before that torture session, Karenga created a black nationalist organization known as “US.” The rival Black Panthers, who made common cause with white radicals, mocked Karenga’s group as “United Slaves.”

On January 17, 1969, the Black Panthers and United Slaves shot it out at UCLA over control of the black studies program. Panthers John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter perished in the gun battle.

Billingsley has more on Karenga, but the preceding should suffice to give the reader a sense of the sort of gentleman the originator of Kwanzaa is. Given the character of the man, one might be tempted to think the holiday he invented is a giant con.

In any case, I think I'll stick with Christmas, a day associated with a God of love, rather than with a criminal with a record of hate and violence.