Evolving Doubts about Evolution

The number of biologists who are beginning to think that Darwin got it at least partly wrong continues to swell. Lyn Margulis is a prominent scientist who has had doubts for some time and expresses them in a recent piece in Discover Magazine which Jonathan M. discusses at Uncommon Descent.

In the interview Margulis says the following:

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred...The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution?...This is the problem I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection....Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create....I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change — led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence....There is no gradualism in the fossil record....‘Punctuated equilibrium’ was invented to describe the discontinuity....The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or ‘God did it.’ They have no alternatives that are scientific....The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web....

Prof. Margulis is correct that ID advocates can't explain how an intelligent agent might have engineered life, but I don't see why that should be an impediment to believing that one did. There are lots of things, after all, that scientists believe even if they can't explain how those phenomena came to be. For example, no one can explain how an electron can be in two places at the same time when it's not being observed, or how the universe came into being out of nothing, or how the material brain produces the sensations of color and flavor, etc., or how matter generates gravity, or how magnets repel, or how radioactive decay occurs, and on and on. Nevertheless, despite our inability to explain how these phenomena happen, scientists all believe they do.

The same is true with the origin and diversity of life. It may be that we'll never know exactly how life was originally created, but that's no reason to doubt that it somehow required intelligent input.

Put another way, if the first astronauts to land on the moon had found an American flag already there, they may have had no idea how it could have happened, but that doesn't mean they would doubt that it was placed there by an intelligent agent. They wouldn't think that it was the product of a chance accident of some sort.

It'd be foolish to resist believing that an intelligent agent was responsible for the flag being there just because we cannot explain how the agent did it. Likewise, so much of life points beyond chance to intelligent agency that it's foolish to rule this possibility out simply because no one knows how the agent would, or could, have acted.

I'm reminded of the wise words of William James who wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

So it would.

Buy a Hybrid

Mark Steyn has a funny column over at National Review Online on the Democrats' apparent indifference to the economic peril our country faces. In the course of his column he tosses in some biting criticism of Mr. Obama's response to a man who asked him at a recent Town Hall if gas prices would ever go back down:

For a sense of Democrat insouciance to American decline, let us turn to the president himself. The other day, Barack Obama was in the oddly apt town of Fairless Hills, Pa., at what the White House billed as one of those ersatz “town hall” discussions into which republican government has degenerated. He was asked a question by a citizen of the United States.

The cost of a gallon of gas has doubled on Obama’s watch, and this gentleman asked, “Is there a chance of the price being lowered again?” As the Associated Press reported it, the president responded “laughingly”: “I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. . . . If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon — (laughter) . . .

That’s how the official White House transcript reported it: Laughter. Big yuks. “So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal.”

Hey, thanks! You’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here all year. Don’t forget to tip your Democrat hat-check girl on the way out: At four bucks a gallon, it’s getting harder for volunteers to drive elderly voters from the cemetery to the polling station. Relax, I’m just jerking your crank, buddy! And it’s not four bucks per, it’s only three-ninety-eight. That’s change you can believe in!...

America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.

So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.

The fact is President Obama doesn't want lower gas prices. He said during the campaign that $4.00 a gallon gas is just fine with him, presumably because it will force us away from fossil energy sources toward windmills and such. Windmills aren't going to help the folks who have a thirty mile commute to work every day. Nor is paying $30,000 to $40,000 for a hybrid much of an answer for workers barely able to meet their bills each month. And what does he suggest to those who heat their homes with fuel oil? Switch to electricity or solar panels?

Of course, maybe a man who has never had a real job in his life, who has always been provided for by political cronies and taxpayers, can not be expected to understand the circumstances in which most people live.

Might As Well Just Shut Up

In a recent post on the murders of U.N. workers in Afghanistan by a mob of Muslims outraged that a Florida pastor had burned a Koran, I argued that we cannot follow those like Senator Lindsey Graham who wish to conform our freedom of speech to Muslim standards of blasphemy and to whatever violent, crazed mobs will tolerate.

Paul Marshall and Nina Shea have a related piece at National Review Online that shows the folly of suggestions such as Graham's by enumerating the sorts of things that have been deemed blasphemous in the Islamic world:

Muslim blasphemy has recently been defined to include: denouncing stoning as a human-rights violation (Sudan), opening girls’ schools (Bangladesh), criticizing the Guardianship of the Jurists (Iran), petitioning for a constitution (Saudi Arabia), use of the word “Allah” by Christians (Malaysia), rejecting an order for violent jihad (Sudan), praying at the graves of relatives (Saudi Arabia), translating the Koran into Dari (Afghanistan), accidentally tearing a calendar page containing a Koranic verse (Pakistan), naming a teddy bear after a boy named Mohamed (Sudan), urging that the Koran be understood in its historical and cultural context (Indonesia), teaching Shiism (Egypt), and calling for a ban on child brides (Yemen). Mob violence, intimidation, court trials, and penalties accompany these cases.

It appears there's little one can say or do with respect to Islam that some Muslim somewhere wouldn't take as an intolerable insult. If we're to refrain from saying anything that might give offense, as Graham and even General Petraeus have suggested, then we might as well take a vow of silence, which, I suppose, is precisely what a lot of Muslims, not to mention Senator Graham, would like us to do.

Thanks to Byron for the tip on the Marshall/Shea article.

Re: End of the World

I just today discovered that the video showing the results of an asteroid impact on earth which was posted on Friday actually stopped at about the 6:50 mark and whoever had posted the video to YouTube added a narration that was not particularly relevant to the previous 7 minutes or so. I apologize for any confusion that may have resulted.

I saw the video on a different site and went to YouTube to get a downloadable version. I made the mistake of not watching the whole video that I found on YouTube.

The Long War

War is once again brewing between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinians have launched a massive rocket strike against Israeli towns and farms and targeted a school bus, severely injuring a 16 year old student.

Debkafile has a summary of recent events, including a recap of Israel's thus far futile attempts to intimidate and deter the Palestinian attacks.

The people of Israel are beseiged by enemies on every side except their western edge where they're bounded by the sea. These enemies, especially Hizbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, will settle for nothing less than either the complete annihilation of Israel or, failing that, permanent war. They know they can't lose because the world community will not allow Israel to decisively defeat them and will not seriously intervene to prevent them from wearing down the Israeli will to survive.

Thus, the constant rocket and mortar barrages and, when they can, suicide bombings, and murders of families in their beds. These are augmented by the knowledge that the world holds Israel to a much higher standard of behavior than it does the Palestinians and that it will condemn Israel whenever it takes steps to prevent arms from getting into Gaza, or otherwise protect itself. People cannot live in constant fear and cobnstant censure when they try to alleviate their fear. The Palestinians know this and thus believe that time is on their side.

Meanwhile, the war against the Jews is also being waged on American campuses where the Muslim Student Association has found willing allies among liberals and progressives in student bodies in many major American universities.

David Horowitz has put together a short film to show, in part, the state of Islamic/Jewish relations on American campuses. It's pretty chilling, especially the opening scene, but it's important that we know what's happening:

The only thing that has heretofore prevented another Jewish holocaust is the weakness of Israel's enemies and the strength of American support. But now Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, the Muslim Brotherhood is consolidating power throughout the region, the U.S. under Barack Obama is diminishing its relationship with Israel, and every time Israel acts to protect itself the Western world considers them guilty until proven innocent.

How long can the sort of murderous haters we see in this video have at their disposal not only nuclear weapons but millions of foot soldiers and a timorous Western public opinion before the region explodes in a cataclysmic war of extermination against Israel?

Presidential Timber

Anna Shukas of the Express.co.uk wonders if Barack Obama may not be the weakest president in United States history. She makes a good case which she opens with this line:

Ineffectual, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t'...

After laying out a litany of presidential fecklessness and detachment she summarizes with this observation:

All of which means that it is starting to look as if Obama and the Democratic Party have but one aim in mind for the rest of this presidential term: to get elected for a second. That means not doing anything that might upset any number of special interest or niche groups, which in effect means not doing very much at all.

And closes with this:

Yes we can was a noble and powerful mantra which secured for Barack Obama the leadership of the free world. Those that can, do. It is time he started doing.

Mr. Obama certainly does have a very diffident leadership style. He seems to want to stay out of every battle while encouraging his troops in Congress and the media to slug it out with the Republican opposition. It's a case of "Let's you and him fight". The strategy appears to be to stay out of the visible fray so that nothing bad that comes of it will cling to him, but I don't think it's working.

Even the AP, one of his biggest supporters in the media, is beginning to lob darts at the President for his failure to exert leadership.

Perhaps the strategy is not deliberate but rather a consequence of Mr. Obama's temperament. Perhaps he just doesn't like to get drawn into political street fights when he has others who'll do the fighting for him.

Or perhaps Shukas is right and the community organizer is just not cut out to do the job he sought in 2008.

Thoughts on a Government Shutdown

Random thoughts on the impending government shutdown:

• Some 800,000 "non-essential" workers will be furloughed. If they're non-essential why are the taxpayers paying for them in the first place?
• The GOP has passed a rider that would ensure that in the event of a shutdown military families would be paid. The President has promised to veto it. Why? He calls compensating the families of those who are facing mortal peril every day to keep us safe from Islamic extremists a "distraction". A distraction?
• Democrats have been all over the media declaring that Republicans are going to shut down the government over funding to Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Public Radio. I don't understand this. Republicans are trying to find money to cut from our budget anywhere it is currently being spent on "non-essential" items. Neither PP, the EPA, nor NPR is essential, but the Democrats refuse to pass a continuing resolution that would keep the government functioning if it contains cuts to these programs. So, my question is why isn't it the Democrats who are going to shut down the government over funding to PP, EPA, and NPR?
• Isn't Planned Parenthood a private corporation? Why are taxpayers subsidizing them in the first place?
• For the last two years Democrats have tried to portray Republicans as the "party of 'No' ". Who is it that's saying "No" to passing the continuing resolution?
• Of fifteen departments in the government  the Departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Education could cease to exist altogether at a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars and no one would miss them except the employees of those departments.

The End of the World

With footage of the horrific tsunami that devastated Japan fresh in our minds and the dire predictions of Al Gore about global warming still buzzing about, I thought I'd share this video animation of what would happen on earth if an asteroid the size of Japan hit the planet. According to scientists it'd make Mr. Gore's global warming scenarios seem like a cruise to Antarctica in winter.

Note: The relevant part of the video stops at about 6:50. The narration that follows was somehow tacked on by whoever posted the video to YouTube and has nothing to do with the first 7 minutes:

I was piqued by a couple of things mentioned toward the end of the video. The narrator claimed that scientists believe there've been a half dozen such strikes in the history of the earth and that they caused the earth's temperature to rise so high that the planet is completely sterilized. If so, how did living things repopulate the earth's surface? What was left to re-establish life? Or did these collisions occur before the first life is believed to have evolved?

It was also claimed that in such a catastrophe the oceans vaporize and situate themselves as a canopy of vapor high in the atmosphere for thousands of years before precipitating back to earth in torrents of rain water, refilling the ocean basins. Does that sound like anything one might find in, say, the first few chapters of Genesis? Just asking.

One last thought. Might the asteroid and its effects on the planet be an apt metaphor for our national budget deficit?

Law School PC

A former student of mine named Caleb, who now attends law school at Widener, sends me this dispatch from the culture war front:

There is a professor here, Lawrence Connell, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure, along with a couple other occasional classes. Professor Connell was the faculty advisor for the Federalist Society, and is one of the few conservative professors on campus. Last spring, he taught a criminal law class, where, apparently, he made various "violent" hypotheticals.

It is common for criminal law classes to feature rather violent situations, in order to discuss the differences between murder, manslaughter, etc. What made these hypos different is that he used the Dean in several hypos (i.e. "The Dean made me mad so I shot her;" I was not in the class, so this is second hand, but that is a fair representation of the types of hypos that were done). It is, I should mention, common for professors to use the Dean, other professors, or even students in hypos. I should also at this point mention that our Dean is a black woman (Linda Ammons), and Prof. Connell is a white male.

Fast forward to the fall, when I was in one of his two criminal procedure classes. There were no violent hypos in this class, but rather hypos about criminal activity (for example, "A police officer sees a black dude walking down the street and he has a bulge in his coat. The officer does a Terry stop. Has there been a 4th Amendment violation?") At the end of the semester, Prof. Connell was placed on administrative leave, and charges were brought against him in a faculty proceeding. The charges were ostensibly due to these violent hypos, but many people believe that it is more due to his anti-PC views (for example, apparently the use of the term "black dude" or "black folks" is racist).

While the faculty charges were dropped, for now, a charge brought by students is working its way through a different administrative process.

Caleb links to some articles on this matter here, here, and here. This last is a partial interview with Prof. Connell.

I'm sure the professor doesn't see much humor in this situation, but those not affected by the stupidity of his accusers might be forgiven for laughing at how pathetic it is that these future lawyers would be so oblivious to the injustice they're doing to this man. To see how ridiculous the allegations of racism are (they almost always are ridiculous, it seems) all one need do is read the interview at the third link above.

The law professor's plight reminds me of the movie based on the novel by Philip Roth titled The Human Stain. The film version featured Anthony Hopkins in the role of a septuagenarian literature professor by the name of Coleman Silk. One day Silk asked his class about two students on his roll who had never shown up for class and whom he had never seen. He wondered aloud whether the two really existed or whether they were "spooks". Well, it turned out that they were African-Americans, and when they found out about Silk's "racist" musings they pressed charges against him, and he was hounded by the faculty senate and administration to the point where he finally resigned. The irony of the story was that unbeknownst to any of his antagonists who sought to have him censured Silk was himself half black but so light in appearance that all his life he passed for white.

As in the real-life case of Prof. Connell such behavior on the part of people who suddenly find themselves in a position to destroy someone who is far more accomplished than they are is simply evil. Faculty members who take these charges seriously are behaving just as immaturely and cruelly as are the students who bring them. At least students are expected to act immaturely because they're students. But faculty and administrators who are so incapable of sensible discernment as to not dismiss these charges out of hand or, worse yet, are willing to defame a colleague and devastate his career because they dislike his politics, are in the first case simpletons and in the second case despicable.

P.S. Caleb sent along an addendum lest anyone be given the wrong impression of the general quality of the Widener Law School student body:

Despite what the students here apparently did, most of the students I know have been appalled by this situation, and strongly supported Professor Connell (even the extreme liberals!). I don't want you to think that the students at Widener are all indoctrinated with Michael Moore-esque tendencies; although some of them certainly are, many more certainly are not.

P.P.S. Caleb reports that Professor Connell has now sued the Dean for defamation.

Terrorism in Iraq

Strategy Page gives us an update on the terrorist situation in Iraq:

While the terrorist violence is still down 90 percent from its 2007 peaks, there has not been much additional reduction. Each month, 200-300 people die from terrorist activity. Most of this mayhem is from Sunni Arab nationalists (both secular and religious), who are determined to return Sunni Arabs to power, or die trying. So the dying will continue until these fanatics are all dead. This could take years.

It's mainly a generational thing. The few older terrorists left have access to enough money, and younger sons and nephews (who tend to be uneducated and unemployed) that they can get bombs made and placed. Suicide bombers are harder to come by, which is the main reason there are fewer attacks. There is also less and less cash for this stuff. Corrupt terrorist leaders stole a lot of that money (part of the billions Saddam and his cronies stole from Iraq's oil revenue over the years) and there's simply been less and less of it each year.

What there has been more and more of each year are trials, convictions and executions of senior terrorist leaders. There are also more incidents of terrorist leaders being found, refusing to surrender, and dying in the ensuing gun battle. All this sends a message, that this is the end. According to police interrogations, this had been bad for terrorist morale.

All of which means, I guess, that when Arab Muslims no longer have Americans and Israelis to kill they'll fall to killing each other. It's a way of life, so to speak.

What Will His Message Be?

Mr. Obama's announcement the other day that he will seek re-election in 2012 induces a number of perplexities.

For example, I don't know whether he'll be re-elected in 2012, but if the GOP can't find a compelling candidate to run against him he probably will be, given that the media will campaign for him. Even so, I can't imagine what accomplishments he will be able to boast of on the campaign trail, nor what his message will be during the coming campaign.

His foreign policy has been either an extension of the Bush policies (Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo) or, when he has struck out on his own, he has made a complete mess of things. He bumbled and fumbled the Hondurans' decision to legally unseat their far-left president Manuel Zelaya who sought to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers. He has alienated our allies in Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. He launched a feckless war against Libya, killed and maimed a couple of hundred Libyans, and then quit, leaving Col. Qaddafi in place to wreak further mischief on his people and the world.

The President's economic policies have put us on a curve that'll ruin the nation within the next two decades. Unemployment hovers at around 9%, despite his promise that it wouldn't go above 8%, and to subsidize his massive spending he has borrowed so heavily from China that we dare not criticize them for their atrocious human rights record lest they demand that we cash in their bonds. In order to service the debt we've had to print more money which is reducing the value of the dollar and spurring inflation.

To make it all worse, the President has been largely absent from the debate on the major economic issues confronting the nation and has left a real leadership vacuum in Washington.

His most touted accomplishment, Health Care Reform, has already been ruled unconstitutional, is widely believed to be completely unaffordable, and will probably be defunded if Republicans regain the Senate in 2012.

We are approaching $4.00 per gallon for gas, largely because inflation is forcing oil producers to raise the price of crude to keep pace with our diminishing dollar and also because the Obama administration refuses to allow drilling in many of our own oil reserves. If gas prices continue to go up, as Mr. Obama has assured us they will, inflation will accelerate, and unemployment will grow even more severe.

Speaking of oil, his handling of the BP oil spill, once he decided to involve himself in it, gave the impression of ineptitude, as did his handling of the Louis Gates incident in Massachusetts, the New York Mosque incident, and the attempt to try Kalid Sheik Muhammed in New York City.

Speaking of KSM, despite Mr. Obama's campaign vow to shut down Guantanamo, it is still operating and will continue to operate until long after Mr. Obama is gone.

The President appointed a man to be Attorney General who gives every indication of being a racist. Eric Holder is unwilling to prosecute minorities for crimes for which whites would be relentlessly pursued by the Justice Department. He also appointed a man to be Secretary of the Treasury who was found to be in default of paying his taxes.

Despite having been awarded prizes for "openness in government" his tenure has been highly secretive, and despite being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he has involved us in armed conflict in at least four different countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya).

He refuses to clear up the easily settled matter of his eligibility for the presidency by allowing Hawaii to release his birth certificate. Indeed, he spent several million dollars in legal fees to prevent them from having to do so, thus allowing doubt to fester throughout the country that he's a legal occupant of the office he holds.

Through it all, he has spent millions of taxpayers' dollars jetting his family around the world and has spent more time golfing than any president in history.

The message of Hope and Change has become the punch line to a multitude of jokes, and the idea of winning the future is absurd given that our current trajectory will yield a national debt exceeding 800% of GDP within twenty five years.

This is not a record that makes one confident of the wisdom of casting one's vote for the man, so what reason can Mr. Obama give the American people to vote for him in 2012? It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

Biological Newspeak

I once opined that I thought biologists, in a desperate attempt to make intelligent design less appealing to students, would eventually try to strip the awe out of biology education. Awe causes students to think that a particular biological phenomenon just couldn't have happened by chance. Awe is the enemy of naturalism.

When biological discourse is sterilized so that astonishment and amazement give way to matter-of-factness - when "gee whiz" yields to "ho hum" - students will be less tempted to think they're gazing into the mind of God when they peer into their microscopes. Darwinian materialists everywhere would rejoice at such a denouement even if it came at the cost of diminishing the natural excitement students might feel when they learn the intricacies of the immune system or protein transcription.

Well, it appears that a lot of biologists have come to the conclusion that biology teaching does indeed need to be scrubbed of any misleading teleological overtones. The problem, it seems, is that biologists have a hard time talking about the things they study without resorting to that dreaded word design.

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Notes reports on the movement among biologists to rid themselves of the cursed locution that ensnares potential young proselytes to naturalism by suggesting that there really is design in nature. Here's just one of several examples Luskin has dug up:

A recent article in the journal Bioessays by its editor Andrew Moore, titled "We need a new language for evolution. . . everywhere," suggests that biologists should stop using the term "design." According to Moore, under "Evolution old-speak" we would say, "Structure X is designed to perform..." but under "Evolution new-speak" we must simply say, "Structure X performs Y." If there's any doubt that Moore is worried about the intelligent design implications of the language used by biologists, consider the following passage from his article:

"A banal example shows how an apparently trivial change in words can radically change perceived meaning: to accomplish metabolic process X, enzyme Y evolved a specificity for Z. In an objective scientific sense, we should phrase this as 'in accomplishing X, Y concomitantly evolved a specificity for Z'. It is that innocent little word 'to' that transforms the meaning, giving enzyme Y the essence of 'will' - 'to' being short for 'in order to', or 'with the purpose of'. Purpose can only be exercised by a supernatural entity in this situation."

Apparently Moore is so worried about any implications of language that might be friendly towards intelligent design that he's unwilling to even state that any particular structure exists "to" perform some function. Clearly this shows that evolutionary thinking is taking biology into the realm of the absurd.

Luskin notes the irony of Moore's decision to call his "new language" Newspeak. Newspeak, of course, is exactly what the totalitarian thought police in George Orwell's novel 1984 called their language. Newspeak was an attempt to deceive people into believing what the government wanted them to believe by truncating some words and completely deleting others. It was a form of thought control which shaped people's perceptions of reality.

Doubtless that's exactly what Moore and the others Luskin quotes in his piece have in mind when they propose banning the word design from all biological discourse.

Competence

Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has stepped into the leadership void left by the President and his party, both of whom seem to be uninterested in fulfilling their duty of offering a budget, and has proposed a serious financial plan for next year and thereafter. He's already taking a lot of flak from the same people who refused to advance a proposal themselves, but an ad he's put out makes clear why we have to severely reduce the amount of money that government spends, especially on entitlements:

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the abdication of leadership on this issue by the White House is in fact a political ploy. The objective, it's being said, is to draw the Republicans in to offering a plan and then to savage it in the media so as to discredit the GOP for 2012.

I hope this isn't what they're thinking. To be so corrupted by politics as to toy with our children's future just to get some short term political advantage would be unconscionable. Unfortunately, the only other alternative is that the leadership vacuum is due to the fact that the Democrats simply don't have anything they can plausibly say about spending, which is on the trajectory it is because they, with a kick start from the Bush administration, have put it there.

If we're going to save our future and that of our children, we need to put the economy in the hands of competent adults who know what they're talking about and are willing to lead, and shunt to the side those who just think that the role of a politician is to hand out goodies to every interest group that puts its hand out. Since the President either won't or can't, Congressman Ryan is trying to fill that role.

Re: The Fukushima Fifty

I'd like to share some feedback we received on our post titled The Fukushima Fifty which was about true heroism and what passes for it in today's culture.

Dave K. sent along this:

Very nice reflection on the Fukushima Fifty heroes. That's something all of us should hear about, but you're right, unfortunately it's not deemed "news-worthy" most of the time. Or if it is, it's all too easily drowned out by the "real" news of the day. In this "me-first" society, I wonder how many here would make the same choice, day after day, to go back into that reactor. Is it something we think about, or does this all just make for another entertaining read in the comfort of our homes, perhaps a topic of conversation like who won the baseball game last night.

This story, along with your post, reminds me of Pat Tillman's life. Amongst the chorus of praise for what his sacrifice meant for our country, there was an unmistakable undertow of sentiments harbored by those that thought he was just caught up in the moment of wartime, and made a rash decision. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more we hear stories such as these, though, the more we realize that these heroes are no different than us. They're just ordinary people who make extraordinary choices when their time comes, and then carry out that choice with pride and honor. And it muffles those like Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen, in whom we really find no semblance of ourselves at all. It's a shame it takes a story like this to do that though.

Kristi included this moving passage in her email:

I have a very close friend that spent time in Iraq, and has now returned to the states, injured and psychologically affected. He completed his four year tour as a combat medic in the front lines, responsible for the health of 31 men below him. He has seen places, injuries, horror, and death, all of which I could never possibly imagine. While there, he lost some of his good friends, right before his eyes. He has described very little to me about his experience, but what he has told me gives me chills down my spine.

He says this...'soldiers sometimes return from war with depression and nightmares of their friends dying along side of them. Now imagine me, as a medic. Not only is my friend dying along side of me, but it is my job to save him. And when I can't, I feel that I have failed, and it is my fault that he has not lived.'

Wow. How can I even respond to a statement like that, with no true idea of the feelings of disappointment, anger, and extreme sadness that it describes. How can I make him realize that he did save some of his friends' lives, that he is not responsible for those deaths, and that he cannot blame himself forever? How can I make him see the true hero that lies inside of him? The admiration and awe that he gives to people like me who recognize and truly value what he has done, what he has seen, and the risks he took to protect those he loved?

He risked his life to save others, and although he didn't lose his life in the physical sense, psychologically he will never be the same. HE IS A HERO, and he can't slam dunk, carry a tune, or even THINK about acting in front of a camera. People like him and the Fukushima Fifty are what American needs to idolize, not those lucky enough to climb themselves to the top with some mutant vocal cords and a pretty face.

Good thoughts.

More Takers Than Makers

Stephen Moore has a sobering op-ed at the Wall Street Journal. It explains a lot about why so many states are in fiscal crisis and why big government is such a burden to the American taxpayer. Here's part of Moore's piece:

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two — Indiana and Wisconsin — has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees — twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.

To be sure, many government workers provide a valuable service to their communities. Teachers, police, firefighters, emergency responders, those who maintain vital services, are all important, but too many government workers, particularly at the state and federal level, receive pay and benefits for performing jobs that are utterly non-essential.

Those who actually create something, who make wealth, are carrying on their backs as many as three government workers apiece who create nothing but whose livelihood often depends upon being able to extract wealth from those upon whose backs they ride. The government has become, in effect, an employment sink for millions of people who might otherwise be unemployed, and we simply can no longer afford it.

The rest of Moore's article is very good. It's an eye-opener.

The Laffer Curve

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains why cutting taxes increases revenue to the treasury and raising taxes actually reduces revenue. Every voter ought to be familiar with the basic idea behind this because it forms the Republican rationale for not wanting to raise taxes:

Despite this economic fact of life the Democrats had to be brought kicking and screaming to extending the Bush tax cuts last winter. They wanted to raise the rates on the "wealthiest Americans" beyond point B which would have stifled growth and produced less revenue.

Why did they want to do that? Either they don't know about the Laffer curve, or they don't believe the Laffer Curve, or Mitchell's rendering of it, is an economic "fact of life", or they so despise the rich that they want to punish them regardless of the effect it has on job growth and revenue. Whichever it is, before they try again to raise taxes they ought to explain to us which of those three alternatives applies to them.

Thanks to Big Government for the video.

How to Silence the Doubters

F. Owen Smith is an OB/GYN and thus knows whereof he writes. He offers us a satirical rendering of what the President could do to end the "Birther" issue once and for all. Unfortunately, despite it's simplicity, he doesn't think POTUS will go for it, but I don't why not (unless Dr. Smith is right).

Assuming that he's not, it's a mystery why Mr. Obama doesn't put these doubts behind him, especially if there's an easy way to do it, nor do I understand why his supporters seem so contemptuous of anyone who raises the issue. It seems to me that their anger should be directed at the President for allowing this distraction to persist and not laying it permanently to rest.

A significant number of people have serious doubts about Mr. Obama's account of his birth and the number continues to grow the longer the question remains unanswered. Perhaps he'll address it in the 2012 campaign, or perhaps the media will force him to produce dispositive evidence that the truth is as he claims it to be.

Well, okay, forget the part about the media.

Blaming the Wrong Person

The Sunday talk shows yesterday from Fox News Sunday to NBC's Meet the Press were filled with severe condemnations of the Florida pastor who burned the Koran in order to show that the book promotes violence. There seemed to be wide agreement that his act was irresponsible and that Pastor Jones bears at least some of the onus for the deaths of U.N. workers at the hands of an angry mob of Afghan Muslims.

This is nonsense. Yes, the Koran-burning was insensitive, and offensive to Muslims, but it makes no more sense to blame the pastor for the murders committed by this mob than to blame the Danish cartoonist who drew a picture of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban for the murders committed by a mob of Muslims outraged by that depiction.

What those who blame the pastor and the cartoonist are doing is allowing violent people to veto our right to speak in accents of which they disapprove. What's next? Suppose mobs of Muslims are incensed by criticism of Islam, the Koran, or the Prophet. Suppose innocents are murdered around the world every time someone in the West speaks censoriously of any of these. Would it then be irresponsible to criticize Islam and the objects of its veneration? Should we just consider anything other than praise for Islam off-limits because Muslims might kill people if someone criticizes or ridicules them? Should this immunity from criticism be extended to all religions or just those whose members might be expected to react violently?

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway sums it up like this:

Should Jones have burned the Koran? No. But not because doing so might incite some evil people halfway around the world to commit atrocities against innocents. Rather, he shouldn’t have done it [because it] was needlessly hurtful without adding any value to the debate. Indeed, aside from generating publicity for himself, he’s likely generated sympathy for Islam and disdain for churches of his ilk.

But Jones is not the slightest bit culpable for the actions of others. Yes, he was warned that violence might ensue. But we’re not responsible for the evil, illegal actions others might take in response to our freely expressing our thoughts. Even if they’re ill-informed, half baked, bigoted thoughts. If we allow the possible reaction of the most dogmatic, evil people who might hear the message to govern our expression, we don’t have freedom at all. It’s worse than a heckler’s veto; it’s a murderer’s veto.

Suppose an obscure imam in Afghanistan claimed that Jesus wasn't really divine and to show his disdain for Christianity he desecrated a copy of the Gospel of John. Can anyone imagine a mob of Christians, instigated by their pastors and priests, rampaging through Detroit killing every Arab they could find? The thought is preposterous, but suppose it happened. Would anyone in the government or military of the United States blame anyone but the mob itself and the clerics who encouraged them for the atrocities? Would the members of the mob not be treated like a bunch of savage Neanderthals worthy only of their countrymen's contempt? So why did we hear General Petraeus, and Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham on Sunday blaming Pastor Jones for the murders of the U.N. workers?

We have a prima facie obligation, in my opinion, to treat what is sacred to others with a modicum of respect. We shouldn't go out of our way to insult or offend other people, but we must not allow those who threaten violence if we don't treat their beliefs with the degree of deference they demand to take away our freedom of speech or our right to criticize. Once we do we will have lost something very precious.

They're Not All Like This

A private American citizen, Pastor Terry Jones of Florida, burns a Koran and across the world in Afghanistan a mob of enraged lunatics retaliate by killing four Nepalese, three Europeans, and five of their fellow Afghans - a dozen people in all, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with the Koran burning:

Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — four Nepalese guards and three Europeans from Romania, Sweden and Norway — according to United Nations officials in New York. One was a woman. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said that at least two of the dead had been beheaded. Five Afghans were also killed.

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, in confirming the attack.

I can't think of any reaction more likely to vindicate Mr. Jones' rationale for burning the Koran than what this mob provided him. Muslims are their own worst enemy. Every chance they get, it seems, they give the world more reason to want to have nothing to do with them or their religion. They seem determined to prove to the world that their religion encourages such awful, irrational spasms of violence.

One wants to plead that not all Muslims are like this, but the pleas are drowned out by the shouts of vast numbers who are indeed like this. Westerners who yearn for some sort of coexistence, like my friend Byron who passed this video along with the caveat that surely not all Muslims are the sort of people the speaker describes, watch this in the light of the U.N. murders and ask themselves, what does the guy in the video say that doesn't ring true? Is it possible to live peaceably with people whose worldview is so radically at odds with one's own?

It's doubtless the case that there are many Muslims who deplore the senseless, stupid killing of innocent U.N. workers in Afghanistan, but in many places in the world the Muslims who are not like those described in the video are cowed into silence by those who are:

A postscript: Was President Obama's statement in response to these murders as pathetic when heard live as it sounds in print?

In Washington, President Obama issued a statement strongly condemning the violence against United Nations workers. “Their work is essential to building a stronger Afghanistan for the benefit of all its citizens,” he said. “We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence.”

What is he saying? Is he really implying that U.N. workers should not be murdered because we need them? Are they to be left alone simply because they're useful? Would it be okay to kill them if they were just tourists? And could his last sentence be any more insipid? Who does he mean by "all parties"? Who, exactly, are the other parties in this horrific matter who must refrain from violence? Was he reading this statement off of an old form letter or something? The whole thing sounds as if he's addressing a bumptious town hall meeting rather than responding to the grisly murders of someone's sons and daughters. No wonder people criticize him for so often appearing to be an emotionless automaton.

Krauss vs. Craig at NCS

I really don't understand why atheists agree to debate philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God. Every time they do they wind up the way Wile E. Coyote winds up whenever he tries to ambush the Road Runner.

The latest example is physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss who debated Craig at North Carolina State University the other night on the topic whether there is evidence for the existence of God. He shouldn't have bothered. Despite being an accomplished scientist he was clearly out of his league, and appeared totally unprepared for Craig's arguments. He not only seemed unable to comprehend the relevance of confirmation theory to the topic, but looked confused and unsure how to respond to Craig beyond mildly patronizing asides and simple assurances that Craig was wrong. He didn't offer much reason why we should accept these asseverations, and indeed spent an awful lot of time agreeing with Craig while trying to sound like he was refuting him. Much of the rest of his time was spent elaborating upon irrelevancies.

Craig offered five clear lines of evidence for God's existence, to none of which was Krauss able to offer more than a perfunctory and uncomfortably desultory challenge. Perhaps it really is the fault more of the debate topic than of Krauss' ability to champion atheism. It's pretty hard, after all, to argue that there's no evidence for God's existence, and it's especially difficult when one has, as Krauss acknowledges early on, little interest in philosophy. Anyone who hasn't read much philosophy really shouldn't embarrass himself, no matter how much hubris he may bring to the stage, by publicly debating a philosopher on a philosophical topic.

If you're an atheist, or even if you're not, you'll probably be wondering why atheists can't put up someone against Craig who seems to know what he's talking about. Or, you might wonder whether the difficulty is more with atheism than with its defenders.

Heh

The Republican Party has an amusing political ad out that parodies the accomplishments of our President:

For some reason that chuckle at the end both makes me laugh and makes me worry.

Minds, Computers, and Thinking

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views discusses the question whether computers can "think".

He identifies the sine qua non of thinking with what philosophers call intentionality, i.e. the aboutness of something. Computers, he argues, are incapable of manifesting intentionality and thus cannot think. After giving a brief description of what is called the "Turing Test" Egnor writes:

[W]e must first ask: what do we mean by "think"? We mean a mental act. What are the characteristics of a mental act? Several plausible characteristics have been proposed -- free will, restricted access (only the thinker experiences his thoughts), incorrigibility (only the thinker knows with certainty the content of his thought), qualia (raw sensory experience), etc. But philosophers agree that one unambiguous characteristic is essential to mental acts: intentionality.

Intentionality is the other-directedness of a mental act. Intentionality is the "aboutness" of a thought. When I think about the weather, or about my boss, I'm thinking about something or someone other than my mental act itself. Things without minds don't have primary intentionality. A rock or a tree isn't intrinsically "about" something. A mental act can impart secondary intentionality to an object (that tree reminds me of spring), but the intentionality is imparted, not intrinsic. Only mental acts have intrinsic primary intentionality.

Computers certainly have secondary intentionality imparted to them by programmers and users. But to have a mind a computer would have to have primary intentionality. How would we know if a computer had primary intentionality? A computer's output would be intentional (in a primary sense) if the output were other-referential in a way that was not part of the program. Intentionality that was part of the program (the computer "talking about sports" because the programmer put "talk about sports" into the program) would of course merely be secondary intentionality -- the intentionality of the programmer imparted to the machine.

A "thinking" computer would have to talk about sports (or some other topic) that was not a part of its program. So primary intentionality would necessarily not be an algorithm of the computer. But an output by the computer that was not part of the computer's program wouldn't be computation. Computation is by definition bounded by an algorithm. Mental acts are not bound by an algorithm. If a computer were to manifest acts that were not algorithmic, it would be (in that respect) no longer a computer. No amount or ingenuity of programming can enable a computer to think. Mental acts are intrinsically non-computational.

Why does this matter? Materialists wish to reduce the human person to the collection of chemical reactions which occur in his or her body and reduce all mental activity to computer-like processes in the brain. They wish to deny that there is anything to us other than the physical, but the facts of physics, as we pointed out last week, are proving to be formidable impediments to this project.

The problems presented by human consciousness stubbornly resist the materialist's reductionism. The phenomena of consciousness - qualia, incorrigibility, intentionality - all suggest that the physical is not all there is to human persons.

One way to see this, perhaps, is to imagine a blind man who knows all the physical facts about red. He knows all the chemical reactions that occur in the brain when a sighted man sees red. There is nothing in the physical description of red that the blind man doesn't know, except he still does not know what red is. He doesn't know what it is like to experience red. There is something left over after all the facts about what happens in the brain when red is apprehended have been adduced.

In other words a complete physical description of red does not give us a complete description of red. There is, it seems, something non-physical involved in the sensation of seeing red, or tasting flavor, or hearing sound, or smelling frgarance.

One reason materialists are so reluctant to allow that there might be a non-material "substance" inhabiting the universe is that it's difficult to imagine how naturalistic evolution, which acts without purpose on material antecedents, could have produced an immaterial mind. The thought that we are more than just physical, material beings could lead to an openness to the possibility that the universe is underwritten, so to speak, by an intelligent mind that is the source of our minds, and that thought treads perilously close to the unwelcome conclusion, unwelcome for the materialist, that is, that the universe may be the handiwork of God.

The Fukushima Fifty

The heroes of our culture, celebrities of one species or another who've done nothing particularly worth admiring, let alone lionizing, look insubstantial and superficial compared to the kind of men we read about in this article on the Fukushima Fifty:

Workers at the disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan say they expect to die from radiation sickness as a result of their efforts to bring the reactors under control, the mother of one of the men tells Fox News.

The so-called Fukushima 50, the team of brave plant workers struggling to prevent a meltdown to four reactors critically damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, are being repeatedly exposed to dangerously high radioactive levels as they attempt to bring vital cooling systems back online.

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.

I wonder how many of the pampered, narcissistic, morally effete, recipients of our adulation and encomiums, the people we so handsomely remunerate for entertaining us in one way or another, would make a similar commitment.

We have men and women like the Fukushima Fifty in our society, too, of course. We saw them in action on 9/11 climbing the stairwells of the World Trade Towers knowing they probably wouldn't come out. We read about them in accounts of combat in far off places and stories of everyday police work in high crime communities, and yet if you ask the average Generation Xer, or Yer, to name one of them or explain what they have done, most would be struck dumb. We cheer and worship someone who plays the guitar or drums with a modicum of skill. We put posters on our bedroom walls of film stars and athletes. We soak up all the information we can of the details of these persons' lives. But we know little or nothing of real heroes.

Why do we have such a perverse, shallow understanding of what and whom deserves admiration? The Fukushima Fifty have much to teach us about this if we can break away from American Idol and Entertainment Tonight long enough to learn from them.

Mountain Bluebird

I drove over to Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Lancaster, Co. PA early this morning to get a look at this beauty. It's a Mountain Bluebird, fairly common in the west but very rare in the east. In fact, the bird at Middle Creek is only the sixth record of a Mountain Bluebird in Pennsylvania.

The photo is not of the same individual that's at Middle Creek, but it's the same species. I've seen them at very close range (today's bird was a couple hundred yards out) in Montana and Colorado, and the blue just takes your breath away. An interesting fact about this is that in birds blue color, unlike most other colors, is not due to a pigment. In fact, the feathers of birds like the Mountain Bluebird are actually colorless. The appearance of color is due to the structure of the feather which causes the light to reflect in such a way that most of the waves cancel each other out, leaving only the blue light to travel to your eye. A common blue bird in the east in summer is the Indigo Bunting, which superficially resembles the Mountain Bluebird, but as brilliant as its color appears, it's not due to pigment but to wave interference which cancels out the other colors of light.

Indigo Bunting

Compare the two pictures and see if you can tell how the two birds differ.

Extremists

As is their custom, the Left is once again debasing the language, turning perfectly useful words into meaningless space-fillers and empty pejoratives. The latest example is their use of the word "extremist" as a means to smear their political opponents. Senator Charles Schumer was recently overheard telling his Democrat colleagues that he was instructed to use the word often when talking about the tea party, presumably in order to couple the words tea-party and extremist together in the public consciousness.

From the frequency with which Senator Harry Reid and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi employ the word it's likely that they all received the same memo.

But what does it mean, exactly? What is an extremist in the liberal lexicon? Here are a baker's dozen criteria by which you can discern whether someone, yourself even, is an extremist. You know you're an extremist in the minds of liberal Democrats if you believe any of the following:

• The American people should be governed by what the Constitution says and not what we wish it said.
• Government should not spend more money than what it has.
• Paying a third or more of your income in taxes is quite enough.
• Regulations and taxes on business depresses the number of people businesses can hire.
• The best way to become energy independent in the short to medium term is to exploit the energy resources we have within our borders.
• People who come to this country should do so legally.
• Marriage should be between one man and one woman.
• The military is not a laboratory in which to conduct social experiments like inserting women into combat units or using affirmative action in promoting officers.
• Killing unborn children is not an acceptable means of birth control.
• Able-bodied people should work for their living and not be permitted to live off the labor of others.
• The United States was founded on principles that trace their genesis to the Christian tradition and that freedom of religion does not entail freedom from religion.
• We oppress the poor by denying them the right to choose the schools to which they will send their children.
• The most racially just society is one which is blind and indifferent to color. A society which makes color a criterion for special treatment is fundamentally unjust.

These are the beliefs held by the people it pleases Senator Schumer to disparage for their "extremism".

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Try to imagine what the views of the Left in this country must be if Mr. Schumer and his ideological soul-mates consider these views to be "extreme" by comparison.

Evolving Elites

First Things reports some fascinating statistics about the correlation between attitudes toward marriage, family and level of education.

The statistics, issued by the Institute for American Values, divides Americans into three groups: the least educated (no high-school degree), the moderately educated (a high-school degree and perhaps some college study), and the highly educated (at least a college degree).

Of these, the highly educated are much less likely to be divorced, cohabit, and bear out-of-wedlock children. They're also much more likely to attend church regularly, believe that divorce should be more difficult to obtain, and believe that premarital sex is always wrong.

This is striking in that it runs completely counter to what we often hear about these matters from our cultural mavens. The conventional wisdom is, or so I thought it was, that our educated elites are much more liberal in their attitudes toward family, sexuality and religion than were the less educated classes who tended in their ignorance to hold on to "traditional" values. The "redneck" conservative was generally portrayed as an uneducated rube, someone who clings bitterly to his Bible and his guns, as our president so inartfully put it, and as the folks in the tonier echelons of our culture imagine it.

It may have all been true thirty or forty years ago, but evidently it no longer is.

The editors at First Things opine that:

There is a certain view of culture, not an implausible one, that presumes the dominance of elite sensibilities: What the elite think and do now, everyone else will eventually think and do. The elites led the intellectual deconstruction of marriage fifty years ago. If they’re changing, and coming (finally) to see the necessity of marriage, perhaps everyone else will also. The moral fantasies of the 1960s generation are certainly due for retirement.

For our children's sakes, let's hope so.

Giving War a Chance

In his speech last night President Obama stated that, “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different, and as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

Instead, he decided to slaughter young Libyan soldiers, and no doubt some civilians, probably by the hundreds and maybe by the thousands, a fact that seems to be rarely remarked upon by either Mr. Obama's supporters or his critics. Of course, if this was necessary to prevent the massacre of thousands of civilians by these soldiers it may have been justified, but before we resorted to violence against young men, most of whom are just doing what they're told to do by Moammar Qaddafi, whom they dread, why did Mr. Obama not simply issue an ultimatum against the one person whose death may have ended the slaughter before it all began?

I have no problem with stopping Qaddafi, just as I had no problem with stopping Saddam. My problem is that President Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, of all things, has chosen a policy that is guaranteed to result in more death and destruction than it need have. Had he announced to the world that if Qaddafi murders civilians we will hunt him down and kill him, the Libyan leader would either have refrained from slaughter or, if he went ahead with his mass murders, he'd be done away with and his forces would've been thrown into disarray and unable to continue their crimes.

Moreover, the mission tasked to our military has now expanded from the humanitarian intervention it was ostensibly supposed to be to actually assisting the rebels in their war against Qaddafi. This means that not only will there be more death and suffering as the fighting drags out, but that we are also now empowering people who, for all we know, will turn Libya into another Iran once they get the chance.

What I wish the President had done was:

1. Warn Qaddafi that any attacks on civilians would seal his doom and then let the combatants in Libya fight it out.

2. Encourage those outside parties with an interest in Libya to carry the ball themselves to protect the oil fields, or, if they wish, intervene on the side of the rebels. We have no national interest there, as attested by none other than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, so we should stay out of the conflict. After all, Mr. Obama shows no inclination to intervene in Syria or the Ivory Coast where people are being murdered by the hundreds in the streets.

3. If Qaddafi had ignored our warning not to launch a mass slaughter then we should have gone after him with everything it took to get him. Once gone, his troops would have been leaderless and dispirited. If they nevertheless continued to attack civilians then we would perhaps have justification to intervene militarily. In fact, we would be precisely where we are now except that Qaddafi would be dead.

Wouldn't it have made more sense to make massive strikes against Libyan military facilities and armor a last resort rather than a first resort?

Four Myths about the Crusades

Way back in medieval times the Catholic Church launched a series of unprovoked, unjust wars, called crusades, against the Muslim world. These wars were motivated primarily by greed, and the cruelty and violence against innocent Muslims justifies Muslim resentment, hatred and suspicion of Christians that has plagued relations ever since.

This is what many Westerners believe. They've been taught it in their schools, as have Muslim students, and via films like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), but almost everything about it is, according to historian Paul Crawford, false.

In an essay at First Principles titled Four Myths about the Crusades Crawford explains why most of what people think they know about the Crusades simply isn't true.

His first myth is the belief that the crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world. In fact, the Crusades were a response to four centuries of imperialist aggression, begun in the 7th century by Muslims, against the Christian world.

Crawford writes:

Nothing could be further from the truth [than the belief that the Crusades were unprovoked], and even a cursory chronological review makes that clear. In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities — not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed —though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837.

A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

The surviving central secular authority in the Christian world at this time was the East Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Having lost so much territory in the seventh and eighth centuries to sudden amputation by the Muslims, the Byzantines took a long time to gain the strength to fight back. By the mid-ninth century, they mounted a counterattack on Egypt, the first time since 645 that they had dared to come so far south. Between the 940s and the 970s, the Byzantines made great progress in recovering lost territories. Emperor John Tzimiskes retook much of Syria and part of Palestine, getting as far as Nazareth, but his armies became overextended and he had to end his campaigns by 975 without managing to retake Jerusalem itself. Sharp Muslim counterattacks followed, and the Byzantines barely managed to retain Aleppo and Antioch.

The struggle continued unabated into the eleventh century. In 1009, a mentally deranged Muslim ruler destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and mounted major persecutions of Christians and Jews. He was soon deposed, and by 1038 the Byzantines had negotiated the right to try to rebuild the structure, but other events were also making life difficult for Christians in the area, especially the displacement of Arab Muslim rulers by Seljuk Turks, who from 1055 on began to take control in the Middle East.

This destabilized the territory and introduced new rulers (the Turks) who were not familiar even with the patchwork modus vivendi that had existed between most Arab Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects. Pilgrimages became increasingly difficult and dangerous, and western pilgrims began banding together and carrying weapons to protect themselves as they tried to make their way to Christianity’s holiest sites in Palestine: notable armed pilgrimages occurred in 1064–65 and 1087–91.

In the western and central Mediterranean, the balance of power was tipping toward the Christians and away from the Muslims. In 1034, the Pisans sacked a Muslim base in North Africa, finally extending their counterattacks across the Mediterranean. They also mounted counterattacks against Sicily in 1062–63. In 1087, a large-scale allied Italian force sacked Mahdia, in present-day Tunisia, in a campaign jointly sponsored by Pope Victor III and the countess of Tuscany. Clearly the Italian Christians were gaining the upper hand.

But while Christian power in the western and central Mediterranean was growing, it was in trouble in the east. The rise of the Muslim Turks had shifted the weight of military power against the Byzantines, who lost considerable ground again in the 1060s. Attempting to head off further incursions in far-eastern Asia Minor in 1071, the Byzantines suffered a devastating defeat at Turkish hands in the battle of Manzikert. As a result of the battle, the Christians lost control of almost all of Asia Minor, with its agricultural resources and military recruiting grounds, and a Muslim sultan set up a capital in Nicaea, site of the creation of the Nicene Creed in a.d. 325 and a scant 125 miles from Constantinople.

Desperate, the Byzantines sent appeals for help westward, directing these appeals primarily at the person they saw as the chief western authority: the pope, who, as we have seen, had already been directing Christian resistance to Muslim attacks. In the early 1070s, the pope was Gregory VII, and he immediately began plans to lead an expedition to the Byzantines’ aid. He became enmeshed in conflict with the German emperors, however (what historians call “the Investiture Controversy”), and was ultimately unable to offer meaningful help.

Still, the Byzantines persisted in their appeals, and finally, in 1095, Pope Urban II realized Gregory VII’s desire, in what turned into the First Crusade. Whether a crusade was what either Urban or the Byzantines had in mind is a matter of some controversy. But the seamless progression of events which lead to that crusade is not.

Far from being unprovoked, then, the crusades actually represent the first great western Christian counterattack against Muslim attacks which had taken place continually from the inception of Islam until the eleventh century, and which continued on thereafter, mostly unabated. Three of Christianity’s five primary episcopal sees (Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) had been captured in the seventh century; both of the others (Rome and Constantinople) had been attacked in the centuries before the crusades. The latter would be captured in 1453, leaving only one of the five (Rome) in Christian hands by 1500. Rome was again threatened in the sixteenth century. This is not the absence of provocation; rather, it is a deadly and persistent threat, and one which had to be answered by forceful defense if Christendom were to survive. The crusades were simply one tool in the defensive options exercised by Christians.

To put the question in perspective, one need only consider how many times Christian forces have attacked either Mecca or Medina. The answer, of course, is never.

Read Crawford's analysis of the other three myths at the link. It's fascinating history.

Coffee Party

Some readers might be aware that liberal progressives, alarmed by the influence of the tea party on our electoral politics decided to start their own party - they called it the Coffee Party, which I thought was pretty clever - to serve as an ideological counterweight. Two of it's goals were to promote democracy and civility in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, three Coffee Party board members are resigning their posts. The reason they gave, ironically enough, is a lack of civility in the organization, a lack of democracy among the leadership, and an overall organizational chaos.

Well, a party comprised of the same people whose behavior was on display in Madison, Wisconsin last month can scarcely be expected to overflow with either civility or democracy, although admittedly they did seem pretty well organized.

How Liberalism Hurts Blacks

It is no secret that Viewpoint tends to think that on most matters of public policy conservative solutions are superior to those of liberals. Liberals, it seems to me, excel at discerning problems and calling them to our attention - the injustice of racial segregation, the need to preserve and protect our natural places are two examples that come to mind - but the solutions they propose often have unintended consequences that are counterproductive and even disastrous.

Economist Thomas Sowell discusses three examples of policies that, though intended to meliorate the plight of the poor, actually make them worse off than before. This is particularly true, as Sowell notes, of the black poor.

He explains first how the imposition of restrictions on housing construction in large areas of California have made it all but impossible for blacks to continue living in areas they have traditionally inhabited:

San Francisco's irrepressible former mayor, Willie Brown, was walking along one of the city's streets when he happened to run into another former city official that he knew, James McCray.

McCray's greeting to him was "You're 10."

"What are you talking about?" Willie Brown asked.

McCray replied: "I just walked from Civic Center to Third Street and you're only the 10th black person I've seen."

That is hardly surprising. The black population of San Francisco is less than half of what it was in 1970, and it fell another 19 percent in the past decade.

A few years ago, I had a similar experience in one of the other communities further down the San Francisco peninsula. As I was bicycling down the street, I saw a black man waiting at a bus stop. As I approached him, he said, "You're the first black man I have seen around here in months!"

"It will be months more before you see another one," I replied, and we both laughed.

Actually, it was no laughing matter. Blacks are being forced out of San Francisco, and out of other communities on the San Francisco peninsula, by high housing prices.

At one time, housing prices in San Francisco were much like housing prices elsewhere in the country. But the building restrictions — and outright bans — resulting from the political crusades of environmentalist zealots sent housing prices skyrocketing in San Francisco, San Jose and most of the communities in between. Housing prices in these communities soared to about three times the national average.

The black population in three adjacent counties on the San Francisco peninsula is just under 3 percent of the total population in the 39 communities in those counties.

Sowell goes on to wonder why liberal Democrats are allowed to get away with this, both by blacks and by Republicans.

If the Republicans did point out such things as building restrictions that make it hard for most blacks to afford housing, even in places where they once lived, they would have the Democrats at a complete disadvantage.

It would be impossible for the Democrats to deny the facts, not only in coastal California but in similar affluent strongholds of liberal Democrats around the country. Moreover, environmental zealots are such an important part of the Democrats' constituencies that Democratic politicians could not change their policies.

And it's not just housing policy that works to the disadvantage of the poor. Minimum wage laws which are ostensibly enacted to help the poor actually hurt them by making it more difficult for employers to hire more than just essential help. To be sure, minimum wage assists those lucky enough to get employment, but it also insures that many who might otherwise be hired are not. Sowell says, "[T]he facts are undeniable, and the Democrats cannot change their policy, because they are beholden to labor unions that advocate higher minimum wages."

Yet another area in which liberal policy hurts blacks is in their opposition to school choice which forces poor children to attend underperforming public schools. Liberals oppose school choice because it's opposed by the teachers' unions which are a major element of their base. As Sowell notes, "No one loses more from this policy than blacks, for many of whom education is their only chance for economic advancement."

Another liberal policy Sowell could have mentioned that hurts the poor are welfare programs which encourage a dependency upon the state which saps people of the incentive to improve themselves and climb out of poverty.

Yet the black poor are constantly instructed by their "leaders" that they have to vote Democratic, that it's the only real choice for them, so they do. Every election cycle urban populations elect Democrats to run their cities, but how are they helped by their loyalty? Their neighborhoods are crime-ridden shambles and their schools are dilapidated failures. Yet the black poor who suffer the most from ineffectual policies imposed by Democrats for decades are the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in the nation.

Why?

Manning Up

MyDaily.com has an interview with Kay Hymowitz, author of the new book titled Manning Up. In a nutshell her thesis is that contemporary men are choosing to prolong their adolescence well into their twenties and early thirties, which makes them unsuitable as partners for women who are achieving at higher levels and at earlier ages than many of their male counterparts.

The reason for this retardation (forgive me, but that's pretty much what it is) is that men, for the first time in history, are being made superfluous. Here's how the MyDaily.com piece opens:

Men. Who needs 'em? Colleges don't. Employers don't. Women don't. Even their own parents don't. At least, that's how it feels to a lot of guys, according to prominent social critic Kay Hymowitz's controversial new book, "Manning Up."

And those guys may be right, to an extent. Colleges have infamously lowered admission standards for males, young women in major cities earn over fifteen times more than their male peers, the number of "choice mothers" (single women who choose to have and raise a child on their own) is rapidly rising, and couples who are planning a family report a strong preference for baby girls.

Generation Y, which Hymowitz refers to as "preadults," is poised to take over the world. Or ... make that half of Generation Y. Twenty-something women far outnumber their male counterparts in practically every arena that counts. They may even be better at brushing their teeth. Actually, that's pretty much a given.

So where does all this leave guys?

Sitting around a crowded living room strewn with beer cans, playing Halo 34 with their buddies, obviously. (What? You don't think we'll get to Halo 34?)

In other words, failing to man up. And, strikingly, it may be the first time in history that they've had that luxury.

You should read Hymowitz's explanation of why this phenomenon is besetting us at the link. Her view of it differs somewhat from my own.

In my opinion, our culture is becoming increasingly hostile to masculinity. It seems often to send the message that masculine virtues are, to one extent or another, liabilities and that men are at best bumbling dolts and at worst evil predators. All one need do to confirm this is watch the television commercials of the last forty years and see how many times women are needed to instruct men on the best way to do home repairs or to do anything, for that matter. On the other hand, how many movies and televison shows depict an evil male defeated by a woman who is as brilliant and deadly as she is beautiful.

Males are made to feel unnecessary, especially in roles that have traditionally been seen as uniquely suited for men.

Whereas at one time fighter pilots and combat soldiers were exclusively male, today women are making historic inroads into these domains.

Girls are participating in and, in some cases, out-competing boys in sports like wrestling and soccer.

Women are taking over the leadership roles in churches, government, and to some extent, even big business. As women in increasing numbers occupy the pulpits of our churches it will become even harder than it already is to draw adolescent males into the pews.

The role of father, family protector, and bread-winner has been usurped in large swaths of our society by the government which provides for the well-being and financial needs of millions of women and children. Men are considered extraneous. Single motherhood is a generational phenomenon in many of our communities.

Schools punish boys for drawing pictures of guns or for getting in schoolyard scuffles, both of which are normal parts of growing up male. In other words, boys are often punished simply for doing what boys do.

Young men, having few roles left to them which are uniquely male, begin to feel that they serve no unique function in society and are really quite unnecessary in it.

When boys see that a role traditionally and uniquely filled by males is now occupied by women, the boys tend to opt out. I think an anecdote about high school sports is instructive. When I first started coaching sports in the very early 1970s every equipment manager of every boys' sport was a male student. Managing was a way for young men who may not have been able to actually compete on the athletic field to nevertheless feel like they were making an important contribution. Then girls took an interest in doing this job and once they started doing it, boys just stopped. Today it's as rare to find a male manager as it is to find a male cheerleader.

Young males need to affirm their masculinity and one way to do that is by performing tasks that only males can do or are permitted to do. When girls move in and do the task just as well, most boys lose interest.

In some cases they seek male companionship and outlets for their masculinity which are harmful to society. Gang behavior, for instance, is in large part a result of males seeking to affirm their masculinity in an environment that offers them few socially beneficial means to express it. So, too, is the practice of siring children as though one were a famous racehorse put out to stud.

Other boys find themselves unsuited for such expressions of machismo and retire to their parents' family room to play endless games of fantasy on the computer with other boys of similar temperament. They seem uneager to move into the world of adulthood because that world is often filled with women who don't understand them and who subtly and, perhaps inadvertently, emasculate them.

This is not to say that girls should be denied the opportunity to achieve in whatever arenas they can, but it is to say that there is a cost. A society in which masculinity becomes increasingly marginalized, unnecessary, and unwanted is a society that is going to have a lot of young men who are disinclined to be productive participants in it.

Bashir's Dilemma (Pt. II)

The dilemma posed to Rob Bell by Martin Bashir of MSNBC at the outset of his interview was whether God was unable to prevent evil or unwilling to prevent it. In an earlier post we noted that there are perhaps two kinds of evil: that which results from human volition, i.e. moral evil, and that which results from natural events like disease, famine, earthquakes, etc.

In that post it was argued that it may be that God could be both able and willing to eliminate moral evil but has a good reason for not doing so.

It remains to consider possible reasons as to why He doesn't eliminate natural evil.

One possible answer is that among the things that even an omnipotent creator may be unable to do is create a world governed by physical laws that has no potential for evil. A world that contains gravity, for example, will also contain the potential for people to fall. A world that includes the law of momentum will also have serious consequences for embodied creatures which fall. All of which is to say that it may be that the laws which regulate this world, or any world, may make natural evils, or at least the potential for them, inevitable.

An objection to this idea is that in Christian belief heaven is a world that God creates that will apparently have no evil, so is that not a counter to the claim that any world God creates will have the potential for natural evil?

A possible reply to this objection might be that heaven does contain the possibility of evil but that God's presence permeates that world, overriding anything which would result in harm to its inhabitants.

But then, it might be asked, if that's so why doesn't God permeate this world in the same way so that an earthquake off the coast of Japan does not result in the deaths of 20,000 people? The answer to this question in Christian theology is that God did indeed create this world as a place He would fill, but that a terrible betrayal called by theologians the Fall resulted in an estrangement between God and His creation.

In an act of cosmic infidelity Man aligned himself with evil. It was as if a good and faithful spouse came home one day to find his wife whom he adored in bed with his worst enemy. Heartbroken, God withdrew His presence from the world that He had built for His beloved and a profound emptiness and aloneness has haunted us ever since.

Man was left to face the world pretty much as it is without God's superintending care. Parenthetically, since our forlorness is a consequence of Man's choice it could be argued that natural evil, like moral evil, is also a result of human volition.

The story doesn't end there, of course. God is intent on wooing back to Himself His beloved despite her betrayal, which is the message of the Christian Gospel. Nevertheless, until that happy denouement we find ourselves in a world that was originally meant to be filled with God and in which natural evils, though inherent or potential in the laws of nature, would never be able to manifest their baneful consequences.

I'm not saying that this is the answer, only that it, or something like it, is a possible answer. Maybe the reason Rob Bell didn't offer something like this to Martin Bashir is that such an explanation is difficult to convey in a thirty second sound bite.