Don't Know Much About History

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed several books written by historian David McCullough, so when I saw that he was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of teaching history to our children, I wanted to see what he had to say. To summarize his view succinctly, he's not pleased.

Here's the lede:

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."

He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

Answer: We've been teaching history poorly. And Mr. McCullough wants us to amend our ways.

So what's wrong with the way history is taught today? McCullough focuses on three things, teacher education, method, and political correctness:

One problem is personnel. "People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively," Mr. McCullough argues. "Because they're often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing." The great teachers love what they're teaching, he says, and "you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know."

Another problem is method. "History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

This is, of course, what happens when the left takes over an institution, as they've taken over American education. History is not taught for the sake of helping students understand and appreciate their heritage, but rather as a means to indoctrinate them with a political or social agenda.

The same thing is happening to some extent in the sciences. Students in many schools are taught about various environmental problems, often inculcated with left-wing political views in the process, and often at the expense of learning basic science. They're also often indoctrinated in Darwinian materialism regardless of the offense this might cause to the students', or their parents', deepest beliefs.

Literature classes are likewise often politicized. In many schools the classics are eschewed in favor of works which have a liberal socio-political message. Students in many cases are required to read novels that emphasize race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, but are never exposed, except superficially, to Shakespeare.

Perhaps as time goes on the pendulum will swing back to the side of common sense, assuming that we have time. Perhaps in time people will realize that the left has the Midas touch in reverse, pretty much vitiating everything it handles. Perhaps in time people will have had enough.

Jacoby on Free Will and the Mind

It's important to understand at the outset here that Susan Jacoby is an atheistic materialist. Materialists, if consistent, should be skeptical of free will given that in a purely material world everything is governed by the laws of physics, including the chemical processes in our brains that give rise to our choices. Jacoby is indeed such a skeptic so to that degree she's consistent, but that's pretty much where the consistency ends.

She composes a somewhat rambling essay in the Washington Post in which she voices her doubts about whether human beings make genuinely free choices. Here's a part:

Even if our ostensibly free choices are ultimately bound by genetic and environmental factors stretching back over millennia, that does not mean that our choices, in the here and now, are inconsequential. Free will may or may not exist in an ultimate sense, but proximate decisions must be, and are, made as if free will does exist.

She seems to be saying here that we have to live as if we are free even if we aren't. In other words, a materialist worldview does not permit us to live consistently with the truth. We can't live consistently with the knowledge that our behavior is the product of genes, environment, and physical laws. It's strange, I think, that a process, natural selection, that's supposed to adapt us to the world as it is would create in us an illusory belief, the belief that we're in fact free to choose when in fact we are not.

Jacoby adds this:

There is clearly a deep human need—yes, encoded in our DNA as a species—to believe that we are in some way set apart from and superior to the rest of nature.

But why should this be? Why hasn't evolution molded us to conform to reality, to accept our lot as just another mammal, a cog in the machine of existence? And if we are just another animal in the world of nature then our morality is just another illusion because there's no morality in nature.

As a materialist Ms Jacoby is also unwilling to posit any immaterial substances as part of the make-up of reality:

I don’t believe any of this [i.e. God, soul, consciousness, mind] and consider the idea of a “mind” independent of our physical brain as just another attempt to inflate humans above nature. Call it what you will, but consciousness is the literally marvelous result of what the brain makes of various stimuli over a lifetime. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

I don't know how familiar Ms Jacoby is with the problems posed by sensation, intentionality, incorrigibility, memory, etc. for her view of consciousness, but I commend to her this fine piece on the subject by Raymond Tallis in The New Atlantis. Perhaps reading it will help her to realize the utter inadequacy of materialist explanations of consciousness.

Ms Jacoby concludes her column with this perplexing thought:

Insofar as real evil is concerned, I think that the philosophical question of whether ultimate free will exists is as irrelevant as it is in more ordinary matters. If there are, as I believe, significant limitations on free will as defined in either religious or secular terms, that does not negate the existence of good and evil any more than it does the consequential nature of the lesser choices we make.

This is simply confused. There can be no good and no evil if there's no genuine choice nor if we're not somehow "inflated" above nature. We don't consider animals to be moral creatures because their behavior is genetically determined. A cat torments a mouse, presumably causing it much pain, but we don't call this behavior evil because the cat is simply obeying imperatives which it's simply not free to override. If we're not free to do other than what we do then human cruelty is no different than what the cat does. It's neither good nor evil, it just is.

It may be that there really is no free will. A free choice is a difficult thing to conceptualize in any event, but if we're not in some sense free then no one ever deserves punishment or reward, there's no such thing as moral obligation, and our notions of human dignity and human rights are absurd. It's no wonder that atheistic materialists find it so hard to live by the implications of their worldview. Indeed, one wonders how Ms Jacoby might answer the question whether she has actually chosen not to believe that her choices are free.

If someone believes in the existence of free will, moral duties, moral accountability, human dignity, human rights and a conscious immaterial mind distinct from the brain they almost have to be a theist if they aspire to be logically consistent. If they're an atheist they have almost no grounds for believing that any of these exist.

Another essay by Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis addresses the question of free will and determinism that Ms Jacoby raises. You can find it here. Both of his essays are a bit lengthy but well worth the time it takes to read them.

Good News for Old Guys

And for lots of other people, too:

A vaccine that destroys advanced prostate cancers while leaving healthy tissue untouched has been developed by scientists. In laboratory tests, the gene therapy jab successfully wiped out 80 per cent of cancers without causing serious side effects.

The British researchers behind its creation said it was a 'completely new approach' and predicted that it could start trials on people within a few years.

Although the jab has been tested on prostate tumors, they believe it could work on a range of other deadly cancers including breast, lung and pancreatic cancer.

Unlike a conventional vaccine which is given to prevent infection with a virus or bacteria, the new treatment is used after someone has contracted cancer.

See here for the rest of the article. It's not something you have to be an old guy to appreciate.

Palin Is Stupid, Obama Is Brilliant

The purpose of posting the following video is not to try and make Mr. Obama look stupid. Brain freezes, solecisms, and gaffes of various sorts are part of the human condition and afflict us all. Rather the purpose is to provoke us to wonder what it is about people that makes them say the most vicious, hurtful things about someone with whom they disagree, especially when they wouldn't dream of saying those things about someone who is equally as vulnerable to the criticisms but with whom they do agree:

I want to extend to both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt, knowing that were I under the pressure they're under I'd probably be just as bollixed up as they, on occasion, find themselves.

Nevertheless, one cannot extend that benefit to the inexcusable, and inexcusable is what I think the president's remarks were last week when he blamed the difficulties of job creation in part on technological innovations like ATMs.

The president has been severely mocked for his belief that ATMs are an example of how technology is hurting job growth, and it is distressing that someone with so little understanding of how an economy works has been ensconced in the highest office of the land, but mocking is unkind. The proper response, perhaps, is dismay.

When the president delivered himself of this opinion people wondered how someone who is reputed to be so smart and so well-educated could say something which evinces such startling ignorance about job creation. That so many Americans depend upon his grasp of economics for their own livelihoods is profoundly alarming.

An ATM might displace one bank teller, but dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are employed in designing, manufacturing, and servicing these machines.

ATMs are a large chunk of the business done by armored car companies like Dunbar and Brinks which employ drivers, guards, cash and coin handlers, etc. to support this business. These companies in turn lease facilities and purchase machinery and vehicles from other companies in order to service their ATM contracts. If ATMs were to disappear overnight, dozens of banks in a region might have to hire another teller, but hundreds of people would find themselves out of work altogether.

Moreover, the convenience to the customer of being able to access his cash 24 hours a day 7 days a week from an ATM rather than having to travel to his bank during working hours to make his transactions must also be taken into account. That convenience translates into greater economic productivity on the part of the customer.

It's as incredible as it is distressing that this is apparently all news to Mr. Obama.

On Accurately Depicting Intelligent Design

In a CNN report on Michelle Bachman's assertion that intelligent design should be taught in schools reporter Peter Hamby offered this definition of intelligent design:

Intelligent design suggests that the complexity of the universe cannot be explained by evolution alone, and must also be attributed to a creator or supernatural being.

Kairosfocus at Uncommon Descent takes issue with Hamby's portrayal, which is indeed a little misleading. It implies, for example, that ID is an argument from ignorance, an argument which asserts that since we can't explain the complexity of life therefore life must have a supernatural provenience. It also implies that ID is a religious hypothesis that invokes a God of some sort as the explanation for life. In fact, neither of these implications is correct.

Kairosfocus directs us to a much more satisfactory explanation of intelligent design at the New World Encyclopedia:

Intelligent design is the view that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection”.

Intelligent design cannot be inferred from complexity alone, since complex patterns often happen by chance. ID focuses on just those sorts of complex patterns that in human experience are produced by a mind that conceives and executes a plan. According to adherents, intelligent design can be detected in the natural laws and structure of the cosmos; it also can be detected in at least some features of living things.

In other words, it's not that we can't explain complexity and must therefore conclude there's a divine creator. Rather, it's that the world manifests properties which, in our experience, are produced only by minds. One of these is the specified information found in DNA which is in many respects like computer software. Randomness and unguided chemistry don't produce the kind of specified complexity which constitutes semantic (meaningful) information and which we find in living things. Only minds, as far as we know, can do that.

The Encyclopedia goes on to give a more detailed description of ID:

Greater clarity on the topic may be gained from a discussion of what ID is not considered to be by its leading theorists. Intelligent design generally is not defined the same as creationism, with proponents maintaining that ID relies on scientific evidence rather than on Scripture or religious doctrines. ID makes no claims about biblical chronology, and technically a person does not have to believe in God to infer intelligent design in nature.

As a theory, ID also does not specify the identity or nature of the designer, so it is not the same as natural theology, which reasons from nature to the existence and attributes of God. ID does not claim that all species of living things were created in their present forms, and it does not claim to provide a complete account of the history of the universe or of living things.

ID also is not considered by its theorists to be an “argument from ignorance”; that is, intelligent design is not to be inferred simply on the basis that the cause of something is unknown (any more than a person accused of willful intent can be convicted without evidence). According to various adherents, ID does not claim that design must be optimal; something may be intelligently designed even if it is flawed (as are many objects made by humans).

ID may be considered to consist only of the minimal assertion that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent agent. It conflicts with views claiming that there is no real design in the cosmos (e.g., materialistic philosophy) or in living things (e.g., Darwinian evolution) or that design, though real, is undetectable (e.g., some forms of theistic evolution).

Perhaps nothing is more often mischaracterized in the popular press, or by its sophisticated despisers, than is the theory of intelligent design. It might be useful to bookmark this brief summary and consult it the next time you come across a story on ID.

Incidentally, Bachman's opinion on teaching ID in schools sounded pretty reasonable to me.

Over-Representation of Factual Presentations

One of the fears expressed by people concerned about global warming is that melting ice caps will cause sea levels to rise and cover large swaths of coastline with water by the end of the century or thereabouts. In his book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore predicted that the seas were going to rise twenty feet submerging Manhattan Island by early in the next century.

An article at Fox News casts doubt on this and similar fears about rising sea levels:

Is climate change raising sea levels, as Al Gore has argued -- or are climate scientists doctoring the data?

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters -- or about the thickness of a fingernail -- every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

"Gatekeepers of our sea level data are manufacturing a fictitious sea level rise that is not occurring," said James M. Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute.

Steve Nerem, the director of the widely relied-upon research center, told FoxNews.com that his group added the 0.3 millimeters per year to the actual sea level measurements because land masses, still rebounding from the ice age, are rising and increasing the amount of water that oceans can hold.

"We have to account for the fact that the ocean basins are actually getting slightly bigger... water volume is expanding," he said, a phenomenon they call glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA).

Global water volume is increasing but the land is rising so the net change in sea level is minor. The impression people are getting, however, is that sea levels are rising rapidly relative to our coastlines and that we'll soon be inundated. This isn't happening, apparently, or at least not at rates that would justify concern.

Nerem acknowledges that:

"If we correct our data to remove [the effect of rising land], it actually does cause the rate of sea level (a.k.a. ocean water volume change) rise to be bigger. The adjustment is trivial, and not worth public attention."

"For the layperson, this correction is a non-issue and certainly not newsworthy… [The] effect is tiny -- only 1 inch over 100 years."

Well. That certainly makes a difference. Instead of facing the prospect of twenty foot sea level rises in the next hundred years the sea is really only going to rise about an inch. Taylor urges people to be wary of sea level rise estimates:

"When Al Gore talks about Manhattan flooding this century, and 20 feet of sea level rise, that’s simply not going to happen. If it were going to happen, he wouldn’t have bought his multi-million dollar mansion along the coast in California."

By the way, when Mr. Gore came out with the movie based on his book he said this:

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” (emphasis mine)

An "over-representation of factual presentations" is a euphemism for "lie". It's pretty hard to trust people you know will lie to you in order to persuade you to accept what they're selling.

Update on The Epidemic of Sex-Trafficking

Readers who were interested in our post on sex trafficking last month will be interested to learn that the man who beat and pimped "Jane", a piece of human offal by the name of James Albert Jackson, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Chuck Neubauer, who wrote the original story in the Washington Times has some details on Jackson's conviction in a follow-up column in the Times. Here's the lede:

A federal judge in Oregon on Friday sentenced a 39-year-old man to 40 years in prison for taking a teenage girl from Seattle and forcing her with beatings to work as a prostitute in Portland. The girl’s story was the cornerstone of an April 25 article in The Washington Times on sex trafficking in this country.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman in Portland handed James Albert Jackson the sentence sought by prosecutors after Jackson pleaded guilty in March to sex trafficking a minor through force, fraud and coercion. Jackson also was sentenced to five years of supervised release.

“Today, the 40-year sentence handed down ... for James Jackson, a violent and predatory sex trafficker of children, sends a firm but clear message to others in the District of Oregon who are engaged in this form of modern-day slavery,” said U.S. Attorney Dwight C. Holton.

Prosecutors said Jackson beat the girl, then 15, about three times a week and had a history of violence against women. He had 26 prior criminal convictions on various assault and drug charges, they said.

The girl, whom The Washington Times called Jane, wrote the judge that Jackson “deserves all the time you can give him.”

This is as close to justice as we can expect to get in this life, I suppose, but it irks me that Jackson will now be supported for the next 40 years by the tax dollars of people who have suffered grievously at the hands of people like him. Theoretically, part of whatever Jane earns as she moves forward with her life will go to provide food, shelter, and recreation for the man who terrorized and traumatized her. There's something deeply wrong with that.

Fatherless America

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

On this Father's day weekend it might be good to remind ourselves of some of the salient points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers tend to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers tend to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent they exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Happy Fathers' Day.

The Democrats Predict the Rapture

The bad news is the misery index (the sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate) is the highest it's been since 1983:

When it comes to measuring the combination of unemployment and inflation, it doesn’t get much more miserable than this. In fact, misery, as measured in the unofficial Misery Index that simply totals the unemployment and inflation rates, is at a 28-year high, reflective of how weak the economic recovery has been and how far there is to go.

The index, first compiled during the soaring inflation days of the 1970s by economist Arthur Okun, is registering a nausea-inducing 12.7, 9.1 percent for unemployment and 3.6 percent for annualized inflation, a number not seen since 1983. The index has been above 10 since November 2009 and had been under double-digits from June 1993 through May 2008.

The good news is that it's all Bush's fault and that the Hope and Change we were promised with the election of Barack Obama is just around the corner. At least that's what they've been telling us, rather like Harold Camping predicting the end of the world, since Mr. Obama's accession in January of 2009.

This ad features DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on Meet the Press doing a pretty good Camping impersonation:

Well, where's the evidence that the administration has "turned the economy around"? Are we just supposed to accept this on faith? Is there any empirical reason why we should believe Ms. Wasserman-Schultz when she tells us that the rapture .... I mean the economic recovery .... is immanent?

A Few Interesting Facts

Joseph Farah, an Arab-American journalist, has a column in the Washington Times that presents an interesting picture of the history of the plight of the Palestinian people. If Farah is correct then perhaps a lot of what we believe about this troubled region may not be historically accurate. He makes the following claims, for example:

The idea of giving the Palestinians their own state is not new. The plan actually dates back to 1948 when Israel was re-created. At that time, so-called "Palestinian" Arabs got their own state – but they rejected it along with the rest of the Arab world.

Prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, there was no serious movement for a "Palestinian" homeland. In the Six-Day War, Israel captured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. But they didn't capture these territories from the "Palestinian Authority" or Hamas. They captured them from Jordan's King Hussein.

The name Palestine was assigned to the region by the Romans in 70 A.D. after they committed genocide against the Jews, smashed the Temple and declared the land of Israel would be no more. From then on, the Romans promised, it would be known as 'Palestine.' The name was derived from the Philistines, a Goliathian people conquered by the Jews centuries earlier. It was a way for the Romans to add insult to injury.

"Palestine" has never existed – before or since – as an autonomous entity.

There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.

Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of 1 percent of the landmass.

Farah also argues that Jerusalem's status as Islam's third most holy site has no basis, at least not in the Koran.

[T]he Quran says nothing about Jerusalem. It mentions Mecca hundreds of times. It mentions Medina countless times. It never mentions Jerusalem. With good reason. There is no historical evidence to suggest Muhammad ever visited Jerusalem.

Whatever the degree of agreement among scholars over the points Farah makes it's a fascinating fact that modern Israel occupies a land area about the size of Belize and yet it has been the focus of the world's attention and Arab animosity ever since it was carved out of Jordan in 1948. Why? What makes Israel different from all the other countries in the world, almost all of which were created by displacing and/or assimilating far more people over far more territory than was Israel?

Moreover, why is it that Arab nations have so much land at their disposal, yet they refuse to assimilate the original Palestinian refugees and their descendents, instead keeping them confined in miserable refugee camps? Moreover, why is it that Arabs are better off living in Israel as Israeli citizens than they are in almost any majority-Arab country?

One last question: Does anyone really believe that there would be peace between Israelis and Palestinians if the Palestinians had their own state?

More on Fast and Furious

Bob Owens at Pajamas Media lays out the details of Project Fast and Furious (also called Gun-Runner) that we talked about yesterday. After explaining what the Iran-Contra scandal was about back in the 80s, Owens outlines the basic contours of Gun-Runner, a scandal he concludes, with very good reason, to be far worse than Iran-Contra.

Owens takes the following from a 51-page report based on testimony of ATF field agents released by Darrell Issa's congressional oversight committee Tuesday. The report consists of testimony from ATF field agents, states Owens, who objected to orders from their supervisors that directly conflicted with their primary order: to always follow the suspect with the gun and always interdict to keep the weapon from being used in a crime. Here's owens' summary of the report's findings:

• DOJ and ATF inappropriately and recklessly relied on a 20-year-old ATF order to allow guns to walk.” The agencies misrepresented the intention of the order to justify their actions.
• Supervisors told the agents to ‘get with the program’ because senior ATF officials had sanctioned the operation.” At least one agent was cautioned that if he didn’t stop complaining about the dangerous nature of the operation, he would find himself out of a job, and lucky to be working in a prison.
• Operation Fast and Furious contributed to the increasing violence and deaths in Mexico. This result was regarded with giddy optimism by ATF supervisors hoping that guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico would provide the nexus to straw purchasers in Phoenix. ATF officials were seemingly unconcerned over the deaths of Mexican law enforcement officers, soldiers, and innocent civilians, noting that you had to “scramble a few eggs” to make an omelette, in a callous disregard of human life.
• Senior ATF personnel including Acting Director Ken Melson, and senior Department of Justice officials at least up to an assistant attorney general, were well aware of and supported the operation.
• Department of Justice officials hid behind semantics to lie and deny that they allowed guns to be walked across the border.
• When asked by the Oversight Committee how many of 1,750 specific weapons that “walked” under orders of the ATF and DOJ could have been interdicted if agents were allowed to act as they were trained, the agents answered they could have stopped every single one.
• The more than 2,000 weapons that the Obama Justice Department allowed to be delivered to Mexican narco-terrorist cartels are thought to have been used in the shooting of an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers battling the cartels. Two American law enforcement officers have also presumably fallen prey to these weapons, along with an unknown number of civilians on both sides of the border.
• President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has purposefully armed narco-terrorist drug cartels that have been accused of bombings, ambushes, mass murders, public executions, and the assassination of police, politicians, and civic leaders.
• Obama’s Justice Department armed the enemy of our neighbor and ally, providing enough arms to equip ten infantry companies, or two battalions, of violent drug dealers.

So when will our media stop talking about the Anthonys (Weiner and Casey) and start talking about this?

Lying's No Big Deal

Anthony Weiner finally resigned his seat in congress today after having disgraced both himself and his office. Fox News commentator Alan Colmes, who is a liberal, argues that he should not have. Colmes argues that character doesn't matter as long as the congressman votes the way he wants him to vote, and that lying to the American people is not sufficient reason to relinquish one's power.

This is pretty stunning, I think. Is it not the case that if someone lies to his employer in the private sector it's grounds for firing? Is it not the case that our elected representatives, whom we remunerate with six-figure salaries and handsome benefit packages, should be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average American? Any elected official of whatever party who did what Weiner did should have resigned or been thrown out of office. Why should taxpayers be compelled to continue to pay people like this?

Colmes takes a stab at rationalizing Weiner's lying by saying that he was trying to preserve his dignity and marriage, but everyone who lies has some self-serving motive for doing so. Preserving one's personal dignity hardly justifies lying to the American people and further eroding the trust we have in our political class. When one believes that the greatest good is advancing one's political agenda (Weiner and Colmes are both left-liberals) then anything which accomplishes those goals is morally acceptable. This reasoning, though, puts us on course to agreeing that if lying would have enabled Weiner to ride out the scandal then lying is no big deal, and this leads inevitably to the conclusion that lying is almost never wrong.

People criticize Rush Limbaugh for asserting that it's in the nature of liberals to lie, but Colmes, to the extent that he's representative of the left, gives us a pretty vivid confirmation of Rush's claim.

Parenthetically, Colmes seems to have momentarily forgotten that he was on Fox News when he said that if we're going to demand Weiner's resignation we should also have demanded President Clinton's resignation for lying to the nation about his tryst with Monica Lewinsky. I think most Fox viewers watching that exchange were vigorously nodding their heads in agreement with that conclusion.

Fast and Furious

For those who may have missed the story the Department of Justice via the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was apparently running an operation named "Fast and Furious" that allowed criminals to smuggle guns from the U.S. to gangs in Mexico.

The ostensible purpose was to track the weapons to drug cartels to ascertain their hideouts, but several ATF agents complained about the operation, arging that it was illegal and predicting that allowing guns into the hands of criminals would not turn out well. Several of the guns subsequently turned up at the scene of violent crimes including the murder of an American border patrol agent and now the DoJ is on the hot seat.

Congressman Darryl Issa is holding hearings on the operation, and it looks as if some DoJ officials may have lied to his committee. If so, there will be contempt citations and more pressure on Attorney General Holder to resign.

Hot Air has the details. The evening news probably won't.

Bypassing Stem Cells

Science Daily is reporting another fascinating development in the quest to reprogram skin cells to build other kinds of tissue:

A research breakthrough has proven that it is possible to reprogram mature cells from human skin directly into brain cells, without passing through the stem cell stage. The unexpectedly simple technique involves activating three genes in the skin cells; genes which are already known to be active in the formation of brain cells at the fetal stage. The new technique avoids many of the ethical dilemmas that stem cell research has faced.

For the first time, a research group at Lund University in Sweden has succeeded in creating specific types of nerve cells from human skin. By reprogramming connective tissue cells, called fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, a new field has been opened up with the potential to take research on cell transplants to the next level. The discovery represents a fundamental change in the view of the function and capacity of mature cells. By taking mature cells as their starting point instead of stem cells, the Lund researchers also avoid the ethical issues linked to research on embryonic stem cells.

In experiments where two further genes were activated, the researchers have been able to produce dopamine brain cells, the type of cell which dies in Parkinson's disease. The research findings are therefore an important step towards the goal of producing nerve cells for transplant which originate from the patients themselves. The cells could also be used as disease models in research on various neurodegenerative diseases.

There's more at the link. The article doesn't talk about all the applications of this research, but if fibroblasts can be turned into nerve cells the implications for people who have suffered spinal cord and brain injuries are staggering. Permanently paralyzing injuries might become as rare as polio. It sounds too good to be true.

Long, Hot Summer

Bill sends along a link to the following video of a recent CNN broadcast. CNN is very supportive of the Obama presidency, so if their people are talking like this the president is in serious trouble. More importantly, if what Jack Cafferty says is true the nation is in serious trouble:

We could be in for a long hot summer and it won't have anything to do with global warming.

Plenty of Greenhouse Gas but No Warming

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News. He has a column in Forbes in which he makes an interesting claim and poses a tough question to global warming "alarmists":

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade.

The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures show absolutely no warming during the past the past 10 years. This is the case for the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, including the United States. This is the case for the Arctic, where the signs of human-caused global warming are supposed to be first and most powerfully felt. This is the case for global sea surface temperatures, which alarmists claim should be sucking up much of the predicted human-induced warming. This is the case for the planet as a whole.

If atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or primary driver of global temperatures, then where is all the global warming? We’re talking 10 years of higher-than-expected increases in greenhouse gases, yet 10 years of absolutely no warming.

Taylor does not object to what he calls global warming theory, but he does think the alarmists have gone too far with their extrapolations and concerns. His brief column offers some helpful data on this issue.

Is Syria Next?

There are indications that the Obama administration has had enough of the massacres in Syria and is about to do something to stop it. At least that's what a report from debkafile suggests:

Debkafile's military and intelligence sources report that Monday, June 13, the US deployed the USS Bataan amphibian air carrier strike vessel opposite Syria's Mediterranean coast with 2,000 marines, 6 war planes, 15 attack helicopters, including new V-22 Ospreys, and 27 choppers for landing forces aboard. Also this week, US naval units went operational in the Aegean, Adriatic and Black Seas as part of the joint US-Ukrainian Sea Breeze 2011 exercise.

The USS Monterrey cruiser armed with Aegis surface missile interceptors has additionally been stationed in the Black Sea. Western sources additonally report a build-up of ship-borne anti-missile missile strength in the Mediterranean basin.

This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria.

Moscow, Tehran and Damascus, in particular, are taking this exceptional spate of American military movements in and around the Mediterranean as realistically portending American intervention in Syria.

That Obama would initiate yet a fourth major conflict in the Middle East is hard to believe, especially since the Libyan imbroglio seems to have sputtered to an inconclusive and embarrassing stalemate, and since Congress is now demanding that he secure their approval for continued military action in Libya as called for by the War Powers Act, and since any action against Syria will almost certainly elicit some sort of retaliation by Iran.

On the other hand, it costs a lot of money to move those naval assets around so there must be some reason for doing it.

Parenthetically, it seems peculiar that such portentous military preparations are apparently happening below the media radar. At least I haven't seen anything in the American press about them, but to be fair, the media have had a lot on their plate lately what with the Casey Anthony trial, Anthony Weiner's lewd text messages, Sarah Palin's emails, and other matters of equal importance for our nation's future. I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

Correction

In last Saturday's post Chasing Down Dawkins I mistakenly attributed the video to William Lane Craig's organization Reasonable Faith. The actual creator of the video is a talented fellow by the name of Peter Byrom (He's the gentleman asking the question in the clip below) who promises more great entertainment in the months between now and Craig's trip to England in October. We're looking forward to it.

My apologies to Peter.

Hitler's Ethic

A brief review of a new book by Richard Weikart is posted at Evolution News and Views:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, new in paperback), which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

Once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral standard at all. This leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity, i.e. what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if they a) had the power and b) were logically consistent. Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The consequences were completely predictable.

Cartesian Theist makes a similar point in this video:

Pro-Life Progress

Elections have consequences and the election last November has had more than most. One arena in which this is especially the case is the matter of abortion legislation. This interesting article by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra explains why:

The Oregon bill is one of 576 measures related to abortion that have been introduced so far in 2011 in 48 states, according to Elizabeth Nash, public policy associate for the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

[B]y early April, 142 abortion-related provisions had passed at least one chamber of a state legislature, compared with 67 in 2009. More than half of the 142 bills (57 percent) introduced this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38 percent in 2010.

About 40 new anti-abortion laws were on the books by mid-April. They include:

• expanding the waiting period requirement in South Dakota from 24 hours to 72 hours, and requiring women to visit a crisis pregnancy center in the interim.
• requiring a physician who performs an abortion in South Dakota to provide counseling on all risk factors related to abortion.
• allowing any hospital employee in Utah to refuse to "participate in any way" in an abortion.
• making it a felony in Arizona to perform or provide money for abortions sought because of a baby's race or sex.
• prohibiting insurance plans that participate in the state insurance exchange from including abortion coverage in Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
• prohibiting the abortion of a fetus capable of feeling pain in Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma.

Republican victories in the 2010 mid-term elections account for much of the legislative surge. Republicans....took 29 governorships and 680 seats in state legislatures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The November elections brought huge change in the state houses," said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life.

The legislation has been snowballing since the Republican sweep: "Just in the first three months of this year, we've provided testimony on 17 life-related legislative matters," she said. In previous years, the average number of testimonies provided was two or three for the entire year.

Restricting abortion through new state laws seems to be highly effective in reducing abortion rates. "We see that the number of abortions has gone down by 22 percent between 1990 and 2005," said Michael New, political science professor at the University of Alabama. "An important reason is the restrictions that more and more states are passing."

There's much more at the link. One interesting aspect of this that's not mentioned in the article has to do with how the rhetoric in the debate has changed. Back in the decades after Roe v. Wade (1973) we were often told by those who wanted to liberalize abortion laws that the majority of people in the country were pro-choice. We seldom hear that claim anymore. It'd be hard to explain, after all, why pro-choice majorities keep electing pro-life legislators to their state governments.