Waiting for Superman

Last month when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was being raked over the coals because his budget reform plan would weaken public employees unions, including teachers' unions, Democrats in the state legislature and in the media were firmly on the side of the unions. They couldn't say enough good things about the job that teachers' unions were doing for the children of Wisconsin and how reprehensible Walker was for wanting to limit their ability to extort the Wisconsin taxpayers.

It was jarring, then, to say the least, when over the weekend I watched Waiting for Superman, a documentary on how awful our public schools are, particularly our urban schools. As I recall, WFS was highly acclaimed on all sides when it was released last year, but everything that the film showed to be wrong with our schools and everything that it recommended as a means to fix them is opposed tooth and nail by liberals in Congress and the media.

According to WFS, a film which every prospective teacher and parent really should watch, our schools went from the best in the world fifty or sixty years ago to among the worst in the developed world today. Why?

There are a number of reasons, of course, more, in fact, than what WFS talked about, but the chief reasons the film brought out are certainly at the top of the list. Schools today are failing our kids not because we're not spending enough money on them but primarily because teachers' unions, and the Democrat politicians they have bought and paid for, have made reform almost impossible.

They've made it incredibly difficult, for example, to remove an underperforming teacher from the classroom, and they oppose the one hope that many poor kids have of escaping the abysmal schools they're forced to attend - school choice. Private and charter schools are succeeding, according to the film, because they can fire poor teachers, extend the length of both the school day and the school year, and demand more from their students in terms of discipline and study. None of this is ever likely to happen in the regular public school. The film didn't mention it, but another thing private schools can do is remove discipline problems from the school environment, a measure which is necessary to creating a positive learning environment, but one which regular public schools either can't take or won't take.

A remarkable irony of the film is that some of the people arguing for reform, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and Bill Gates of Microsoft, support a party and a president adamantly opposed to any meaningful reform. Together they refuse to provide these kids with the means to escape bad schools, refuse to act to allow districts to get rid of poor teachers, and who believe the solution to failing schools is to simply throw yet more money and more bureaucrats at the problems.

At the end of the film we get to sit in on several lotteries taking place around the country in which children are selected to attend charter and private schools. Often there are hundreds of applicants for just a few dozen openings. The looks of desperation on the faces of both the kids and their parents is heart-breaking. Watching them get passed over is like watching them being given a death sentence, which, in a sense, it is.

President Obama, however, is unmoved by their plight, captive as he is to the teachers' unions. Early in his administration he canceled a scholarship program which gave District of Columbia kids the wherewithal to attend private schools like the one to which the Obamas send their own daughters (the Republicans are going to try to restore this program now that they're in the majority in the House), and later his Elementary and Secondary Education Act eliminated school choice options that were in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

It became very clear, as I watched Waiting For Superman, that the biggest impediment to meaningful school reform, the biggest obstacle to giving these poor kids a chance at a decent life, is the alliance between the President, congressional Democrats, and the leadership of the teachers' unions.

In fact, if the film weren't an hour and forty minutes long it'd be a great campaign commercial for the Republicans in 2012. Watch it and ask yourself whether you think the people who make it so hard for these children to get a decent education really are the champions of the poor or whether they're just the champions of the status quo.

Budget Battle Irony

There are a number of ironies attending to the budget debates that are swirling around Washington these days. One that I find particularly piquant is that many of the people who are most vociferous in condemning Congressional Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 proposal as being insufficiently compassionate toward the poor and the elderly are themselves Darwinian materialists.

Now they may not think of themselves in those terms, but that's essentially what they are, at least some of them, particularly those who write for the lefty journals and blogs.

So what's the irony, you ask? Well, on what grounds does a Darwinian materialist criticize anyone for being uncaring toward the poor and the elderly? What reason would a Darwinian give for caring about how these folks get by? Why would a Darwinian think we should not see the poor and the elderly as mere extraneous biological burdens who should be left to fend for themselves in the universal struggle for survival?

Indeed, good liberal progressives of a century ago thought exactly this, which is why they were so fond of eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia. Abortion was seen by the progressives who founded Planned Parenthood as a way to cull out the feeble and inferior, particularly among the minority races. Eugenics was popular among progressives until Hitler gave it a bad name in the forties and forced its votaries to mute their enthusiasm for it.

The next time those who wish to change the way we help the less fortunate are criticized for their "lack of compassion toward the poor" perhaps we might ask the critic to explain the reasons why he/she thinks we should be helping the "unfit" survive in the first place. Unless the person is a theist, their awkwardness in honestly answering the question should be amusing.

Who Pays Taxes

Economist Stephen Moore edifies those of us interested in the raging budget debate by offering some facts about taxes:

The latest data show that a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shoul­dered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 per­cent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent — those below the median income level — now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes. These are proportions of the income tax alone and don’t include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

This is interesting because we're constantly told that we need to tax the rich as if the wealthy aren't paying any taxes.

What income demarcates the top 1%, 5%, etc.? It turns out that to be in the top 1% you needed to make $380,000 in 2008. The top 5% earned $160,000 or more and $114,000 put you in the top 10%.

If you made less than $33,000 you were in the bottom 50% and paid almost no income taxes. In other words, only half the wage earners in this country are paying taxes.

The President wants the top 2% to pay their "fair share", but what is their fair share? They already provide over 40% of the income tax revenue to the treasury. How much more should they have to pay? Here's another question Mr. Obama should answer: How much could taxes go up before no more revenue would flow into the treasury? Raising the top rates does not increase revenue and often depresses it, so what's the point?

The problem, as the Republicans repeat like a mantra, is not that we need more taxation. Raising taxes stifles job creation and generates very little revenue. What we need is less government spending, but cutting spending will hurt social programs, we're told.

So what's the implicit assumption in this claim? Is it not that 5% of the people in this country should have to carry the other 95%? Is that just? And what's going to happen to those social programs anyway when the wagon gets so heavy that the top 5% can no longer pull it? The attempt to sustain these programs at current levels while taxing the top earners even more will guarantee that the programs will collapse under their own weight.

Raising taxes is a myopic pseudo-solution that should disqualify anyone who proposes it from being taken seriously.

Craig vs. Harris

Last weekend William Lane Craig debated Sam Harris, one of the leading lights of the New Atheist movement, on the question whether there can be ethics without God. Harris' position is interesting in that, though he's an atheist, he's not a relativist or subjectivist. In fact, he spends much of his first address in the debate pressing his considerable rhetorical skills into the service of criticizing relativism. Nevertheless, Harris' reluctance to embrace subjectivism comes under Craig's scrutiny and during the course of the nine-part video of the debate Harris' position just unravels.

In fact, by his second address Harris was left with no response to Craig's challenge to explain the ground upon which he based his ethical views so he retreated to more familiar terrain, launching a philippic against religion in general and Christianity in particular. He spent much time on the ethical shortcomings of the Bible and expatiated on the problem of evil, all of which were, unfortunately for him, irrelevant to the debate. Harris, in effect, switched the topic from whether God is necessary for moral good and evil to the question whether the Biblical concept of God is morally tenable - an interesting question, to be sure, but not germane to the topic of the evening.

Even so, Craig did a good job of holding Harris' feet to the fire. It's an enlightening debate and one from which much can be learned about the problem that moral obligation poses for the thoughtful atheist who wishes to avoid nihilism.

Gay History

Their state teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, many of their most productive citizens and businesses are fleeing in search of economically friendlier climes, and the California state senate is darn serious about the crisis they find themselves in. To show just how serious they are and how well-ordered are their priorities they've just passed a measure requiring public schools to teach gay history:

Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people would be added to the lengthy list of social and ethnic groups that public schools must include in social studies lessons under a landmark bill passed Thursday by the California Senate.

If the bill is adopted by the state Assembly and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, California would become the first state to require the teaching of gay history.

Supporters say the move is needed to counter anti-gay stereotypes and beliefs that make children in those groups vulnerable to bullying and suicide.

Opponents counter that such instruction would further burden an already crowded curriculum and expose students to a subject that some parents find objectionable.

The legislation, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco, passed on a 23-14 party line vote. It also would add disabled people to the curriculum.

California law already requires schools to cover the contributions to the state and nation of women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor.

In California one must always offer proper obeisance to the gods of political correctness, I suppose. It's an interesting exercise, though, to wonder what would happen if a lawmaker proposed teaching, say, Christian history and/or Christian contributions to Western civilization. Surely such a bill is needed to counter anti-Christian stereotypes and beliefs that make children in those groups "vulnerable to bullying and ridicule".

I doubt that argument would have much purchase in that context, though. Perhaps if it was a course on Gay Christianity it'd have a chance.

Classless Act

Victor Davis Hanson marvels at how anyone, let alone a president, can say one thing one day and the opposite thing the next with as much ease as does Mr. Obama. Speaking of yesterday's dressing down Mr. Obama gave to his political opposition in the GOP Hanson notes that:

The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).

Hanson offers five alternative explanations for Mr. Obama's detachment from his previous firmly-held positions and declarations. Any or all of the five may be true, but there are other possibilities as well, none of them pleasant to consider, implying as they do that the president has a tenuous acquaintance with the importance of truth, and a moral character sufficiently protean that it can adapt itself to every exigency.

Anyway, check it out at the link.

Meanwhile, the esteemed Charles Krauthammer declares that the President's speech was "a disgrace".

Krauthammer has a point in more ways than he articulates in the brief segment at the link. The President invited Paul Ryan, the architect of the GOP budget proposal, to attend the speech and sit in the front row. Then Mr. Obama pretty much imputed the basest of motives to Mr. Ryan in front of a national audience, accusing him (though not by name - at least he observed that decency) of, among other things, wanting to throw grandparents into the street and abandoning autistic children. This ugly display, as short on honesty as it was on class, besmirched both himself and the office Mr. Obama occupies.

Mika Brzezinski liked it, though, which is not surprising, even if her rationale is:

There's much more commentary on Mr. Obama's speech and the disconcerting direction in which he seems to be determined to take this country at National Review Online.

Morally Stunted

Dennis Prager over at National Review Online shares some thoughts on the media silence about the Muslim murders of United Nations workers in Afghanistan ostensibly motivated by the burning of the Koran by Pastor Terry Jones. Prager goes on to point out the absurdity of some of the liberal-left reaction to this crime, taking Time magazine's Joe Klein as a typical example:

Joe Klein, political commentator for Time magazine, morally equated Terry Jones and the Afghan murderers: “There should be no confusion about this: Jones’s act was as murderous as any suicide bomber’s.”

Anyone with common sense knows that there is no moral equivalence between destroying a book, no matter how holy, and destroying a human life. So how does one explain Joe Klein’s statement?

Klein is a leftist, and his comment embodies two aspects of the contemporary Left.

One is the Left’s hard time identifying and confronting real evil.

Instead of focusing on Islamism, the Left focuses on small evils like alleged pay gaps between men and women working at the same job, or on non-evils such as carbon-dioxide emissions. Or they engage in moral equivalence: The Muslim murderers are no worse than Terry Jones.

The other characteristic of the Left embodied in Klein’s statement is what George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is clear that Klein has contempt for Muslims. If Christians had slaughtered innocents because of Piss Christ, it would never have occurred to Klein to write “There should be no confusion about this: Serrano’s act was as murderous as any slaughtering Christian’s.”

With Islamism dominating major parts of the Muslim world, and leftism dominating much of the non-Muslim world, these are not the best of times.

The inability or unwillingness to hold everyone to the same moral standard is a trait of those who don't think seriously about moral justice. They use moral judgments as an ideological club with which to beat their opponents over the head but are not really interested in an equitable distribution of those judgments.

Anyone who draws an equivalence between what Terry Jones did and what those Afghan Muslims did is morally stunted. The same might be said of anyone who condemns Jones but is silent about "art" that desecrates that which Christians hold sacred.

Both of these kinds of people suffer, perhaps, from what might be called moral Stockholm syndrome. Fearful of their intimidators they supinely seek to ingratiate themselves into their good graces by rationalizing their behavior and despising that which their intimidators despise. It's as ugly as it is cowardly.

Atheism and Nihilism

Ethan links us to this video in which the narrator makes the case that an intellectually honest atheist should be a nihilist. He is, of course, correct:

Here's the problem for the atheist:

If there is no God then there are no moral duties. Most atheists, however, believe there are moral duties and objective moral values. But they can't have it both ways. Either they should give up their belief in moral duties and objective moral values (and with it any grounds for making moral judgments of any behavior other than their own) or they should give up their atheism and acknowledge that there must be a personal, transcendent moral authority which grounds all moral duties and values.

To continue in their atheism while making moral judgments - such as oppression is evil, capitalism is bad, war is immoral, or child abuse is morally abhorrent - is to abandon their commitment to the life of reason. It's surely an odd choice for people who pride themselves on being more rational than those gullible, superstitious theists.

An Atheist Defends Himself, Sort Of (Pt. II)

Yesterday I reviewed a post by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss in which he sought to bolster the case he had made against William Lane Craig in a debate last week on the topic Is There Evidence for the Existence of God? I'd like to finish this critique today.

The fourth argument Craig offered as evidence that God exists was based on the fine-tuning of the universe. The fact that many of the constants, forces, and parameters of the universe are set with a precision so exact that they point to a purposeful architecture woven into the structure of the world. Had any of these values deviated by the most unimaginably tiny amount a universe capable of sustaining life would never have existed.

Krauss' response is to point out that not everything is fine-tuned and that even if it were maybe the universe evolved by a kind of natural selection (how such an extraordinary process could have applied to the universe he leaves for us to figure out) or maybe there's an infinite number of worlds (a multiverse) in which at least one world would have to have the properties ours does no matter how improbable that may seem. He offers lots of mights and maybes, but none of this is a rebuttal of Craig's claim that cosmic fine-tuning counts as evidence for the existence of God. The fact that there are other possible explanations for cosmic fine-tuning does not nullify the claim that such mathematical exactitude is an indicator, though not a proof, of intelligent agency.

Moreover, what we know of the universe suggests that it's the only one around, there's no significant empirical evidence that there are other universes, and our universe certainly seems to be engineered to harbor intelligent beings such as ourselves. Thus, Krauss's response is irrelevant. What he must show is that either there is no fine-tuning or that, if there is, it does not constitute evidence of intelligence. He does neither.

Craig's final argument was based on miracles, specifically the miracle of Jesus' resurrection. Krauss calls this argument "so sloppy and fatuous that in an effort to demonstrate some margin of respect for Craig I tried to avoid it for as long as I could." Perhaps, but when he does finally address it he never explains to us exactly why it's "sloppy and fatuous".

All he does is observe that lots of people don't believe it happened, and that it's more probable that it didn't happen than that it did. How he knows this is beyond me, but evidently he does. Craig, on the other hand, argued that one of the reasons accounts of the Resurrection are credible is that people who were in a position to know the facts were willing to die rather than recant their claim that it happened. Krauss scoffs at this argument:

[T]he remarkable, and completely trite claim that the fact the Christians were willing to die for their beliefs demonstrates the validity of these beliefs would be laughable, if it weren't so pitiful. Especially, as I indicated during the event, in light of the fact that people were recently willing to fly planes into skyscrapers because of their beliefs in a religious framework that I know Craig has openly disavowed.

Throughout history people have been willing to die for their beliefs, and it is often the beliefs one is willing to die for that are most suspect. Did Roman soldiers believe in Romulus and Remus. Did Viking warriers [sic] believe in Thor. Did Nazi soldiers believe in the superiority of the Aryan race. I found and still find Craig's statement not only facile, and not even worthy of a high school debater, but I find the claim offensive.

The awkward syntax aside, I think what Krauss writes is kind of embarrassing, actually. Craig's point is not that the early believers were prepared to die for a conviction that they believed to be true, but rather that if the Resurrection didn't happen they would have known that it didn't happen and yet they were prepared to die for a belief they would have known to be false. Many people will die for what they falsely believe to be true, but who would die for what one truly knows to be false? The examples Krauss adduces don't address this question at all.

Finally, a word about Krauss' tone. His post at Pharyngula was laced with potshots at Craig's integrity, ability, and sincerity. Here's a montage of his insults and condescensions:

Craig is aware, from his superficial reading of cosmology, of fine tuning problems in Cosmology.... All of these are subtle and interesting issues worthy of discussion by knowledgeable and honest intellects. I found Craig to be lacking in both of the qualities during his discussion of this issue....Once again this is simple minded....As I tried to explain to Craig....Craig doesn't understand the physics.... including a typically disingenuous email from Wiliam Lane Craig to his followers regarding a debate I had with him in North Carolina last week....I believe that if I erred at all, it was in an effort to consider the sensibilities of the 1200 smiling young faces in the audience, who earnestly came out, mostly to hear Craig, and to whom I decided to show undue respect....I also wanted to demonstrate the need for nuance, to explain how these issues are far more complex than Craig, in his simplistic view of the world, makes them out to be....Unfortunately any effort I made to show nuance and actually explain facts was systematically distorted in Craig's continual effort to demonstrate how high school syllogisms apparently demonstrated definitive evidence for God....Let me now comment, with the gloves off, on the disingenuous distortions, simplifications, and outright lies that I regard Craig as having spouted....What I hoped I could convey to the truly open minded intellects in the audience, of which of course Craig was not one....Craig's rather monotonous repetition of his syllogisms, is indeed intellectually lazy.

Why do people choose to insult, patronize and demean those with whom they disagree? Perhaps it's a compensatory mechanism, employed particularly by those who realize that their arguments are not very persuasive and that the other fellow's are. They realize that they're looking bad to the audience, and their wounded ego causes them to lash out at the person responsible. If one's opponent can't be beaten intellectually then perhaps tearing him down personally with innuendo, scorn, and aspersions will diminish him in the eyes of those within earshot. Maybe that's what motivated Krauss but I hope not. It's a pretty sophomoric motivation.

If ad hominem is what wins arguments then Krauss certainly won. If it's organization, articulate presentation, preparation, strength of argument, and logic which prevails in a debate then he lost big. And I think he knows it.

Atlas Shrugged

Coming April 15th.

I don't know what it's rated, or if it's well-made, or whether the producers will seek to glamorize Ayn Rand's insufferable egoism, militant anti-Christian atheism, or sexual libertinism, but if they stick to the political message of the novel it could be a blockbuster.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

An Atheist Defends Himself, Sort Of (Pt. I)

Sensing, perhaps, that his performance in his debate against William Lane Craig last week left his fans and other atheists a bit dispirited Lawrence Krauss has posted a retrospective piece on the atheist/evolution blog Pharyngula in which he spends a lot of time insulting his opponent and some time saying what he wishes he had said during the debate. Having read his further ruminations I have to say I don't think they would have helped him against Craig. For all his accomplishments as a cosmologist Krauss just seems unable to understand the arguments Craig proffered in defense of the debate topic Is There Evidence for the Existence of God?

I'll consider a few examples today and tomorrow of how his clarification falls as flat as his original presentation. Craig presented five propositions which, he argued, constituted evidence (not proof) that God existed. Given the debate topic, Craig technically didn't even have to offer good evidence, although his five examples were, I thought, pretty good.

Craig's first argument was that the universe had a beginning and that whatever comes into being has a cause. Krauss' rejoinder is that, well, there are lots of mights and maybes that the universe didn't actually have a beginning. It could be eternal. That's possible, of course, though there's a lot of evidence that it did come into being in a primal explosion called the Big Bang in which case there's a lot of evidence that the universe has a cause of its existence, and evidence for a cause of the universe, it's reasonable to think, is evidence for the claim that God exists.

The second argument is that contingent entities like the universe require a necessary entity for their existence. Contingent entities are those, like you and me and your computer and your car, whose existence depends in some way upon something else. Ultimately, whatever is responsible for the existence of the entire series of contingent things must itself depend upon nothing else for its existence. Thus ultimately the universe, which it is reasonable to believe is contingent, must depend upon something which itself depends upon nothing else for its existence, i.e. something very like God.

Krauss' response is to aver that earthquakes and snowflakes can be explained without introducing God, so perhaps the same applies to the universe. This completely misses the point. The fact that some contingent things are the cause of other contingent things doesn't mean that an ultimate explanation of the totality of contingent things need not be a necessary being. The existence of contingent things is evidence for the existence of a necessary thing or being, which is how God is, in part, defined.

Craig's third argument is that the existence of objective moral duties requires a transcendent moral authority. Krauss replies by iterating a version of the Euthyphro dilemma (ED) as a rebuttal. However, the ED, despite its long pedigree, fails as an argument against the point Craig is making. It would take up too much space to go into here, but the interested reader can check here for more on the dilemma.

Krauss then adds this:

Lastly, if there is evidence that God provides absolute morality, it is missing from the world of our experience, where different religious groups, all of whom claim divine inspiration, have incompatible moral views, often leading to horrendous and violent acts against women and children, for example. Indeed, the Old Testament is full of such acts.

None of this is relevant. The point is not that if God exists everyone who believes in Him will know and do what's right. Rather the point is that unless there's a God there's simply nothing that is moral or immoral. There are just things that people do. As Craig would say, Krauss is confusing moral epistemology (i.e. knowledge of what's right) with moral ontology (the existence of moral right). Craig's argument is that since atheists do believe there are some things, like child abuse, that are absolutely and objectively wrong, they're either being irrational in denying God or tacitly conceding that there is a God.

More tomorrow.

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.