Angry Liberals

At The Daily Beast a bunch of prominent liberals tell us why they're angry. Put simply their reasons boil down to this: The 50% of Americans who are carrying the other 50% on their backs are unwilling to hand them milkshakes to drink while they're enjoying their ride.

Taxes are too low on the "super rich" (However, even if the super rich were taxed at 100% of their income it wouldn't erase the deficit) and on corporations (our corporate tax rate is the 2nd highest in the world). The poor can't get loans (it was loans to people who couldn't pay them back that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), gas prices are going up (despite vast reserves of petroleum and natural gas accessible to us in our own country), and kids are not getting nutritious food at school (niggardly taxpayers are unwilling to pay for higher quality food for our kids. Of course, there's no reason why their parents couldn't pack their lunches at home.). Moreover, people are not making the connection between storms, floods, and fires to global climate change (could that be because no connection has been empirically demonstrated? Or could it be that if there is a connection we've been told that there's nothing we can do about it anyway?).

None of these people seem concerned about the degradation of the culture, the collapse of the family, the flood of illegal immigration across our borders, the threat to world peace posed by radical Islamists, government policies which make it very difficult for small business to hire and thrive, rising unemployment, the national debt, and a host of other matters far more pressing than school cafeteria food, climate change, and whether the top 1% of American earners should contribute 38% of total tax revenue or whether we should make them contribute 40%.

The fact is that angry liberals are just impatient socialists. Nothing short of government control of our economy in this country will salve their anger and even then I doubt whether they'd be content until the federal government controls not only the economy but every other aspect of our lives as well.

The Climate Controversy

Those readers interested in the climate change issue will find the following two items to be of interest. The first is a chart (Go here for a more readable version) that shows the fluctuations in global temperatures over the last 4500 years:

It appears that temperatures are correlated with solar radiation and volcanic activity and that a decrease in the former coupled with an increase in the latter triggers a cooling period. Contrary to popular belief we're currently in such a cooling period and, when compared to historical trends, our recent warming has been relatively mild, and the current mean temperature of the earth is completely unexceptional. The second link is to a letter written last fall by a prominent physicist named Hal Lewis explaining his reasons for resigning from the American Physical Society. Lewis wrote:

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists....

....the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

Lewis goes on to support his allegation that money and politics have had a corrupting effect on climate change research.

So, is the data represented by the above chart wrong? Is Lewis just a malcontent? Or are we for political reasons being led to believe that there's a catastrophe imminent when in fact there is not? If we are being misled then why? Who benefits? We can be sure it won't be the average guy like you and me.

Thanks to Joel for the link to Prof. Lewis' resignation letter.

Faith and Blind Faith

Atheistic biologist Jerry Coyne is disappointed that one of the top molecular geneticists in the world shows "a chronic and debilitating sympathy for religion."

The scientist is George Church and here's Coyne's description of his credentials:

George Church is a well known molecular geneticist who helped design the first “direct” method of DNA sequencing, and played an important role in initiating the Human Genome Project. He has an appointment at Harvard University and consults for several companies. His latest endeavor is the Personal Genome Project, designed to get DNA sequences from many individuals with the aim of curing genetic maladies.

Pretty impressive. He certainly doesn't appear to be professionally "debilitated", so what's Coyne's gripe? Well, evidently Church actually believes things that Coyne thinks no scientist should believe. On his blog Church wrote this:

Some people feel that science and faith have nothing in common. But a considerable amount of faith drives everyday science — and frequently religion addresses scientific topics .... The overlap is vast and fertile. As we learn more about nature, for many of us, this greatly strengthens rather than lessens our awe.

Coyne calls this "sad", the sort of thing, apparently, which debilitates one's performance as a scientist.

Coyne thinks there's a big difference between the sort of faith exercised by a scientist and the sort of faith exhibited by the religious believer and that the two should not be commingled in the same person. I think his distinction is problematic, but I'll leave it to the reader to check it out.

For my part, I don't think there's really any difference between the faith exercised in science and the faith exercised by a well-educated religious believer. For both, faith is believing something to be true despite the lack of proof that it's true.

Both the scientist and the religious person commit themselves to the truth of some hypothesis without having proof that the hypothesis really is true. What each does have, though, is evidence that their belief is true.

Some might acknowledge that this is so but reply that the scientist requires a higher standard of evidence than does the religious believer, but I'm not sure that that's the case.

Blind faith is believing something despite a lack, or paucity, of evidence, and a naturalistic scientist like Coyne is at least as likely to exhibit blind faith as is the religious believer and may even be more inclined to do so. Indeed, the naturalist believes many things for which he has no evidence at all.

For example, a naturalist (one who believes that nature is all there is) believes that living things were generated from inert matter, that information can be coded into DNA apart from a mind, that electrochemical reactions in the brain can generate meaning and sensations (qualia), and that naturalism itself is true. He may also believe that there are other universes (a multiverse) besides our own, that moral duties can exist independent of a transcendent moral authority, and that his life has an overall purpose. There's no empirical evidence for any of these beliefs, however. To the extent that Prof. Coyne or any naturalist believes any of them he's indulging in sheer blind faith and is thus hardly in a position to credibly criticize the religious believer for his beliefs.

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip.

Pain and Regrets

Kathyrn Lopez at National Review Online has a story about the emotional pain many young women experience after they've had an abortion. She begins with the story of Aerosmith's Steve Tyler and his erstwhile girlfriend:

In his new autobiography, Tyler recalls a then-16-year-old girl from his past. He has talked emotionally about the abortion she had: “It was a big crisis. It’s a major thing when you’re growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives. . . . You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done?”

This unveiling story became a duet when that girl, now the mother of six other children, married, and a practicing Catholic, told her side of the story, which differs from Tyler’s. She writes: “He has talked of me as a sex object without any human dignity. I have made a point over these long years never to speak of him, yet he has repeatedly humiliated me in print with distortions of our time together. I do not understand why he has done this. It has been very painful.”

All of the details of their testimonies do not match. She says the pregnancy wasn’t entirely unplanned, that Tyler had thrown her birth-control pills away. She says that he pushed her to have the abortion.

Kevin Burke, who wrote a piece for National Review Online highlighting Tyler’s abortion comments, wonders if the soft-porn treatment of his relationship with Holcomb in his autobiography is his “way to avoid the pain and reality of his role in the abortion.”

This much we know: There was an abortion, and there are pain and regrets.

The rest of Lopez's column elaborates on the pain and regret that many women suffer after they've had their baby killed. Whether abortion should be legal or illegal, one thing it will not be, apparently, is consequence-free.

Read Lopez's piece and then, for a contrasting view, read the declaration of Janette Barber, Rosie O'Donnell's producer, who recently said this on Rosie's show:

I think if you want an abortion, you get an abortion. If you don't want to get an abortion, I would never force anyone to get an abortion, but I'd fight to the freakin' death for somebody's right to have an abortion. When I was a kid, I thought, 'If we lose this right, I'm leaving this country.'

I had plans [in the event of pregnancy]...I'm gonna wear a tent dress while I don't eat so I can get big and I can go in the woods, have it, kill it, and bury it, 'cause I didn't know how else I would get rid of it if I lost that right. I was pretty young when I had that plan, and I got over it.

Presumably, it never occurred to Ms Barber when she "was a kid" that if she didn't have sex she wouldn't have to fantasize about such hideous solutions to her predicament.

I know. It's unrealistic to expect kids not to have sex. It's much more enlightened to give them the means of canceling unintended consequences by just making it easy for them to snuff out the life inside them, and surely we live in enlightened times.

On a related matter, Byron forwards a report from America's most trustworthy news source, The Onion, which informs us of the grand opening of an $8 billion Abortionplex in Topeka. It sounds like a great facility:

"All women should feel like they have a home at the Abortionplex," Richards continued. "Whether she's a high school junior who doesn't want to go to prom pregnant, a go-getter professional who can't be bothered with the time commitment of raising a child, or a prostitute who knows getting an abortion is the easiest form of birth control—all are welcome."

Nineteen-year-old Marcy Kolrath, one of the Abortionplex's first clients, told reporters that despite her initial hesitancy, she was quickly put at ease by staff members who reassured her that she could have abortions over and over for the next decade before finally committing to motherhood. Kolrath also said she was "wowed" by the facility's many attractions.

"I was kind of on the fence in the beginning," she said. "But after a couple of margaritas and a ride down the lazy river they've got circling the place, I got caught up in the vibe. By the time it was over, I almost wished I could've aborted twins and gotten to stay a little longer."

"I told my boyfriend we had to have sex again that very night," Kolrath added. "I really want to come back over Labor Day."

Thanks to Jason for the link to the Lopez column.

He Asked For It

Breaking news! God uses atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss to prove that He exists! In a dramatic display of divine power God responded to the challenge issued by Professor Krauss and thereby offered compelling evidence that He does, indeed, exist. Watch for yourself:

Well, if I had any doubts before, they're certainly gone now. How about you?

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Thinking in Herds

William Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and one of a tribe that's come to be known as global warming skeptics. He gives us an explanation for his skepticism in an essay at First Things which I commend to everyone interested in the issue, whichever side of it one is on.

Happer examines the mix of scandals, politics, money and science that attach to the issue of global warming, and what he says, to the extent that it's accurate, is very helpful in understanding what's really going on amid all the confusing claims and counterclaims.

Here are a few paragraphs to serve as an appetizer:

Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet.

The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius during that time. Therefore the warming is due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. Roosters crow every morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for Sunday dinner.

Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas and other things being equal, adding the gas to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration, from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere—about 2 ppm per year—it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling. The combination of a slightly warmer earth and more CO2 will greatly increase the production of food, wood, fiber, and other products by green plants, so the increase will be good for the planet, and will easily outweigh any negative effects. Supposed calamities like the accelerated rise of sea level, ocean acidification, more extreme climate, tropical diseases near the poles, and so on are greatly exaggerated.

It is worth recalling now a quotation from the preface of the second edition of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Between these graphs is a lot of very helpful information on how some of the climate change folks have suppressed dissenting views and manipulated data to get the results they want. It's not pretty, but it's important. It would be an historic blunder if fear of a calamity that's not really pending were to cause us to needlessly and severely diminish our standard of living by disdaining the use of fossil fuels.

Restoring Educational Excellence

There's a fine article by Justin Paulette at The Daily Caller in which he contemplates the decline of America's educational system and what can be done to reverse it. The descent into educational mediocrity began in the 60s, Paulette argues, when public education fell under the control of progressive theorists and ideologues:

This trend of scholastic failure has a precise beginning which was preceded by a long history of educational prosperity. In the radicalism of the 1960s, the American left came to dominate a newly emergent education bureaucracy (culminating in the Department of Education), leveraged teachers as collective-bargaining-chips (forming the nation’s largest labor union) and commenced upon a nationwide social-engineering experiment (intent on redefining human nature). This consolidation of progressive authority over education precipitated an immediate and disastrous decline in America’s academic competitiveness.

He might have added that it was in the early 70s that the idea of a school being in loco parentis, a substitute parent, as it were, was dropped and student rights became a major cause celebre of the progressive left. When that happened the authority and ability of schools to maintain discipline began a long, slow collapse. It also precipitated a long, slow increase in the cost that taxpayers would have to bear for schools that became increasingly dysfunctional.

Paulette continues:

Naturally, not every rural American school adopted wholesale the progressive lesson-plan. But the pseudo-social-psychologists constituting state and federal education bureaucracies ensured that all public schools were influenced through federal guidelines, textbook revisions and a leftward lurch in scholastic literature, evaluation standards and political climate. The liberal coup of university faculties and the rise of quasi-substantive degrees in “education” further ensured that all future teachers would be subjected to the crucible of progressive indoctrination.

This centralized education bureaucracy and its misguided reform policies resulted in a gradual replacement of traditional educational values — such as discipline, competition and ethics — with a creed of self-esteem, diversity and relativism. Gifted programs have been abandoned as “elitist,” whereas (in an academic version of blaming the victim) one out of every eight students is now labeled “disabled” and remanded to “special education.” SAT scores had declined so sharply by the mid-1990s that examiners were forced to “re-center” the grading scale by adding 100 points to test scores in order to maintain the 800-point average.

Another aspect of the decline of authority has been the decline of moral authority. With the secularization of schools it has become increasingly difficult for schools to maintain high standards of dress, language or behavior. Any such standards are seen as an unwarranted and needless imposition of an arbitrary standard unrelated to educational performance.

The feeling one gets from reflecting on the miserable state of many public schools today is that the first step in reforming them needs to be to reclaim them from the grasp of the progressive theorists and leftist unions which have dominated American education for the past fifty years.

Paulette goes on to argue that the solution to our nation's educational malaise is privatization and the marketplace and he makes an impressive case. He concludes with an apposite quote from English philosopher John Stuart Mill who wrote in On Liberty (1859) that:

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments.

Paulette's column should be read by anyone concerned about America's fall from academic preeminence and might well be followed by a viewing of the film Waiting for Superman.

Reducing Crime

The Wall Street Journal has a piece by sociologist James Wilson in which he contemplates the declining crime rates across the country and possible reasons for the phenomenon.

Since the 1960s it's been conventional wisdom that high crime rates, particularly among African Americans, were directly correlated to joblessness and poverty. Thus it was expected that when we entered tough economic times crime would once again increase. Wilson argues that this view simply doesn't fit the data - crime is actually decreasing, even during the current recession.

Some of the reasons will not be welcome among liberals, others will make conservatives uncomfortable, but they're all compelling. They include higher and longer incarceration rates, better policing (including emphasis on maintaining a presence in high crime areas), better self-protection measures available to citizens, a decrease in the popularity of hard drug use, lower lead levels in the environment, and abortion.

For an explanation of how each of these has helped to reduce criminal behavior read the full article. It's pretty interesting.

Ugly Ducklings Make Beautiful Swans

Were you something of an outcast in high school? Did you find yourself shunned by the "popular" crowd? If so, you can take heart from this article in the LA Times:

In seven years of reporting from American middle and high schools, I've seen repeatedly that the differences that cause a student to be excluded in high school are often the same traits or skills that will serve him or her well after graduation.

Examples abound: Taylor Swift's classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music. Last year, the Grammy winner was the nation's top-selling recording artist.

Students mocked Tim Gunn's love of making things; now he is a fashion icon with the recognizable catchphrase "Make it work."

J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has described herself as a bullied child "who lived mostly in books and daydreams." It's no wonder she went on to write books populated with kids she describes as "outcasts and comfortable with being so."

For many, says Sacred Heart University psychology professor Kathryn LaFontana, high school is the "first foray into the adult world where [kids] have to think about their own status." And for teenagers, says LaFontana, who studies adolescent peer relationships and social status, "the worst thing in the world is to be different from other people; that's what makes someone unpopular."

In the rabidly conformist school environment, the qualities that make people different make them targets. In adulthood, however, the qualities that make people different make them compelling.

If you've always felt like a social misfit in school you should know that the people who make you feel that way are often going nowhere once high school ends and that people like you time and again turn out to be the world's heroes.

Read the rest of the article to find out why.

The Single-Payer Omelet

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not nobody. She's the chair of the Democratic National Committee and a congresswoman from Florida. So when she's asked whether the Democrats have a plan to save Medicare, a plan that consists of something more substantive than just demagoguing the Republican plan, her answer is implicitly "No":

Set aside Ms. Wasserman Schultz's last line where she inadvertently reveals her inner nanny possessed by almost all liberals (What's wrong, exactly, with allowing mature adults to "figure it out" for themselves?). Consider instead that doing nothing means that the system goes bankrupt in a decade, and doing nothing is what the Democrats evidently plan to do.

Grandfathering everyone over 55 into the present system and then giving future retirees a voucher that enables them to buy their own insurance, which is the GOP/Paul Ryan plan, may not be the best idea, I don't know, but at least the elderly will have something. If the Democrats don't soon present a viable alternative the elderly are certain to have nothing.

I suspect, but can't prove, that Democrat opposition to the Ryan plan stems from the fact that if people are given public money to buy insurance, insurance companies will benefit. President Obama has as much as said that he wants to put insurance companies out of business in order to create a single-payer (government-run) system (see below). Thus, he and his fellow lefties will oppose anything that empowers the private market and diminishes the power of government.

The elderly are merely the eggs that have to be broken to cook this socialist omelet.

Above the Law

President Obama, with the connivance of both Democrats and Republicans, is traducing the rule of law by not abiding by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. So says George Will and so say I. Here's Will:

Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president “certifies” in writing an “unavoidable military necessity” respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war, which began more than 70 days ago.

The President has attempted to avoid the WPR's constraints by saying that our involvement in Libya is to provide a "supporting role". Will correctly labels this both ludicrous and meretricious. He goes on to add that:

Liberals are situational ethicists regarding presidential warmaking: Imagine their comportment if Obama’s predecessor — who got congressional authorization for his uses of force — had behaved as Obama is doing regarding Libya. Most conservatives, who preen about their commitment to keeping government on a short leash, seem anesthetized by the administration’s sophistries.

I suppose "situational ethicists" is accurate, but I think "hypocrites" is moreso. For an example of the absurdity of GOP spokespersons on the issue he turns to Senator John McCain who said that, “No president has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and neither do I. So I don’t feel bound by any deadline.”

This is frankly startling. It's the sort of thinking that occurs in the early stages of tyranny. When our President considers himself not constrained by any law he finds inconvenient he's arrogating to himself the powers of a despot. It's the sort of behavior we see in people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Mr. Obama has evinced such inclinations in the past, and no one is really surprised that he regards himself as unaccountable to Congress. It's a bit surprising, though, and disconcerting, to see McCain agree with him.

Meanwhile, our "watchdog" media are all aflutter, not over Mr. Obama's disdain for the rule of law, but over Sarah Palin's bus tour. Go figure.

Honoring Vets

Memorial Day seems a fitting time to show this trailer for a coming documentary on the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight. Honor Flight is a project to fly as many WWII vets to Washington as possible so that they can see the WWII Memorial before they die:

Hot Air has more details on the Honor Flight film project here.

Singer's Evolving Ethics

There's a simple and compelling argument that goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no moral duties.
2. There are moral duties.
3. Therefore there is a God.

Of course, both premises need to be defended, but I don't think it's hard to defend 1. (though 1. is precisely the assertion Sam Harris wishes to deny in his book The Moral Landscape) and denying 2. leads the denier ineluctably to moral nihilism. So, it seems that if 1. can be defended one either has to believe there is a God or be a nihilist.

Few non-believers are prepared to embrace moral nihilism so they're in an awkward position. Unwilling to accept belief in God they're also unwilling to accept the logical conclusion of their atheism.

This appears to be the predicament in which Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has come to find himself. The Guardian's Mark Vernon explains why. Here's the key graph:

[Singer] described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects [David] Hume's view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true.

At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people's preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on ... utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he "regrets" not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.

Or to put it differently, Singer seems to be recognizing that unless there exists a transcendent moral authority, an omniscient and perfectly good God, there's no non-arbitrary reason for being a utilitarian rather than an egoist. In a world without such a moral authority nothing one does can be morally wrong, and it'd certainly not be wrong to simply live for oneself or adopt a might-makes-right ethic. However we choose to live, if there is no God, is purely a matter of taste and to say that one should be a utilitarian is nonsense. The word "should" implies a moral duty and if there is no God there are no moral duties.

The only surprise in Singer's last sentence above is that it has taken someone of his intellectual stature so long to see it.

Cyber Warriors

An operation like the one which took the life of Osama bin Laden requires tough, hard, highly disciplined warriors, but much of modern warfare is being waged not by men such as these but by guys who considered themselves geeks and nerds when they were in high school.

Take, for example, what's going on in the cold war between Israel and Iran. Strategy Page explains:

Israel makes no secret of what it thinks about its Cyber War capabilities. Over the last year, Israel has revealed that its cryptography operation (Unit 8200) has added computer hacking to its skill set. Last year, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence said that he believed Israel had become the leading practitioner of Cyber War. This came in the wake of suspicions that Israel had created the Stuxnet worm, that got into Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment equipment, and destroyed a lot of it.

Recently, Iran complanied that another worm, called Star, was causing them trouble. Usually, intelligence organizations keep quiet about their capabilities, but in this case, the Israelis apparently felt it was more useful to scare the Iranians, with the threat of more stuff like Stuxnet. But the Iranians have turned around and tried to attack Israel, and are apparently determined to keep at it for as long as it takes.

This struggle between Israel and Iran is nothing new. Seven years ago, Israel announced that Unit 8200 had cracked an Iranian communications code, an operation that allowed Israel to read messages concerning Iranian efforts to keep its nuclear weapons program going (with Pakistani help), despite Iranian promises to UN weapons inspectors that the program was being shut down.

It's .... unusual for a code-cracking organization to admit to deciphering someone's code. Perhaps the Iranians stopped using the code in question, or perhaps the Israelis just wanted to scare the Iranians. Israel is very concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons, mainly because the Islamic conservatives that control Iran have as one of their primary goals the destruction of Israel.

In response to these Iranian threats, Israel has said that it will do whatever it takes to stop Iran from getting nukes. This apparently includes doing the unthinkable (for a code cracking outfit); admitting that you had successfully taken apart an opponent's secret code.

Israel is trying to convince Iran that a long-time superiority in code-breaking was now accompanied by similarly exceptional hacking skills. Whether it's true or not, it's got to have rattled the Iranians. The failure of their counterattacks can only have added to their unease.

One almost imagines teams of Woody Allen look-alikes sitting in front of their monitors saving the world from a nuclear holocaust while seasoning their successes with a little trash-talk directed at the opposition. God bless 'em.

Casey as Metaphor

People who support Israel in their effort to resist the aggressions of their enemies in the Middle East are sometimes asked why they do. There are lots of reasons which come to mind, of course - our shared democratic values, shared language, the awful treatment that Jews have suffered throughout history, their courage, their status as victims of terrorism, their admirable ability to defend themselves repeatedly against overwhelming odds, the fact that their enemies are driven by an irrational hatred and a desire to kill every Jew (and every American for that matter), and so on.

Perhaps another reason is that so much of the world, not just Arabs and Muslims, is hostile to Israel. They criticize Israel simply for trying to defend itself. They criticize Israel for using "disproportionate" force in defending itself. Israel is expected to perpetually turn the other cheek while no such demands are ever made of the Arabs who attack them with rockets every day, blow up school busses full of children, and sneak into their homes to slit the throats of entire families. The world seems to treat such atrocities as what is to be expected from Arabs, but if the Israelis retaliate, or build a wall to keep the murderers out, then they're denounced at the U.N. for "brutality".

It all reminds me of a video that was the talk of the web a few months ago. In the video an Australian boy named Casey was being punched and taunted by a little punk - an ordeal he had had to endure on previous occasions as well. Finally Casey defended himself and a surprising number of commentators sniffed that the poor kid overreacted, that he shouldn't have resorted to violence, that he could have hurt his tormenter. Casey was essentially condemned for protecting himself and giving his antagonist the thrashing he deserved.

I'm sure the Israelis sympathize with Casey:

Swinburne on the Soul

Having read several of Richard Swinburne's philosophical works over the years and having just this winter reread his book The Existence of God, I was eager to listen to an interview he did recently on the soul. Swinburne is a highly prominent philosopher of religion at Oxford, a Christian, and a substance dualist who conflates soul and mind.

By that I mean he assumes soul and mind are essentially two words for the same thing. This is not the only view of the soul a dualist(one who believes that there are at least two disparate substances comprising reality - mind and matter)could hold, but it's probably the dominant view.

Swinburne's argument against physicalism (the belief that there is no non-physical substance) is that if the self just is the material body then if my body exists then I must exist. However, there is a possible world in which a body just like mine exists, but in which I don't exist. If so, then it's possible to have a body like mine but not have me, or, in other words, my body and I are not identical.

In the course of the 17 minute discussion he touches upon the problem of personal identity, the problem of mind/brain interactionism (i.e. the problem of believing that two disparate substances can somehow interact), and makes an interesting distinction between how he came to believe in God as opposed to why he continues to believe. His reply toward the end to the interviewer's suggestion that he only believes what he does about the mind/soul because of his theological commitments is excellent.

The interview can be listened to at The Microphilosopher.

Thanks to First Thoughts for the link.

Ditchkins

Here's an amusing send-up of atheists Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens. The guy who does the composite "Ditchkins" sounds almost exactly like Dawkins:

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the link.

Palestinian Refugees

Peter Wilson at American Thinker tells us a few interesting things about the Palestinian refugee situation which was at the center of the recent dust-up between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu. Here's part of his column:

Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus -- or one should really say, the 1948 departure -- of Palestinians from Israel, is no exception. A typical formulation, chock-full of code words, appeared in a recent letter to the Boston Globe: "Generations of families living in squalor in refugee camps still await their right to return under international law to their homeland Palestine."

Many, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in his meeting with Obama, have pointed out how the "right to return" would impose an untenable situation for the Israeli democracy. The 860,000 or so who left in 1948 have grown to 4.8 million "registered refugees" living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Of this number, 1.4 million are "RRCs" -- registered refugees in camps. An influx of this magnitude, added to the 1.2 million Israeli Muslims, would create a Muslim population of 6 million, outnumbering Israel's 5.6 million Jews, potentially turning Israel into a sharia state. In other words, whatever "right to return under international law" may be asserted, as Netanyahu said, "it's never going to happen."

Describing Palestinians as "refugees" living in "refugee camps" is a further example of politicized word choice. The original group of Palestinians in 1948 left their homes in the face of an impending aggression by Arab countries and moved into canvas tents with primitive sanitation. Regardless of arguments about whether Israeli Palestinians "fled" or, as Noam Chomsky would have it, were pushed out by a campaign of ethnic cleansing, this original group can rightly be called refugees. However, to continue to call their descendants refugees sixty-three years later, as Obama did in his Middle East/North Africa speech, distorts the truth of their situation.

Sixty-three years is time enough for three, perhaps four, generations. Imagine the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Jewish refugees who came to Brooklyn or Brookline after the Holocaust referring to themselves as refugees. My own family includes a number of refugees from the Cambodian killing fields, and my nieces and nephews would never think of claiming refugee status and a right to return to Cambodia.

Wilson writes a pretty informative piece, one with whose content everyone should be familiar.

One cluster of questions that it raised in my mind is one which was implicit in Mr. Netanyahu's sermon to Mr. Obama in their presser: Why is it that the Palestinians are still refugees? There was a roughly equal number of Jews evicted from their homes in Arab countries in 1948 as there were Palestinians who fled from Israel. The Israelis were assimilated into Israel almost immediately, but the Palestinians still live in "camps" segregated from their Arab hosts. Why are the Palestinians still "refugees" but the Israelis are not? Why do not the vast Arab nations assimilate the Palestinians like tiny Israel assimilated Jewish refugees?

Is it that the Arabs really don't care about the Palestinians except insofar as they can be used as a cudgel with which to beat the Israelis over the head?

Odious Ed

Why is there so much misogyny among the people who claim to feel so strongly that misogyny is wrong? Keith Olberman at MSNBC once called Michelle Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick". I don't know what that is, exactly, but I'm sure Olby did not intend it as an expression of respect.

Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a vulgar sexual pejorative that I won't repeat, and then followed it a couple of days later by calling both Palin and Michelle Bachman "bimbos".

Now Ed Schultz, the guy MSNBC moved into Olberman's slot after Olberman grew too insufferable even for the MSNBC poobahs, calls Laura Ingraham a "slut":

What is it about so many liberal males that they so glibly insult women in such vile fashion? When will more liberal groups finally bestir themselves to be outraged? Why does the media not demand that these people be fired? Will progressives like Jim Wallis who rightly urge us to maintain a higher level and quality of public discourse have anything to say about the steady miasma of sleaze emanating from spokespersons of the Left?

Would we be asking these questions if the sleaze was coming from conservatives?

The Left's Doomsday Predictions

When religious eccentrics predict that the world is coming to an end, as Harold Camping did last week, it's the occasion for much merrymaking in the media, but as Dennis Prager points out, when it comes to failed doomsday predictions it's hard to outdo the record amassed by the Left.

In the sixties it was out-of-control population growth, written about by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, that was supposed to unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the world by 1990.

In the seventies it was the fear of nuclear catastrophe which would precipitate a "nuclear winter" that would cause mass extinctions and starvation as depicted by television specials like ABC's The Day After.

In the eighties and nineties it was the AIDs epidemic that was going to sweep the globe decimating the world's population. Heterosexuals as well as homosexuals were at risk and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to avoid it.

In the 21st century we are assured that global warming is going to raise the seas and alter the earth's geography causing widespread ecological and sociological catastrophe.

To be sure the jury is still out on climate change, although it's not looking good for Al Gore's troops, but in each of the other cases, as well as several more that Prager cites, the Left's prediction turned out to be just as wrong, and just as ludicrous, as that of Rev. Camping.

Strangely, though, there was no guffawing among the media sophisticates, like there was over Camping's silly prognostication, when the Left's prophesies of impending doom failed to come to pass. Why is that?

A Vanishing Breed

Speaking of doomsdays and extinctions (see above), Byron forwards us a piece that contains the frightening news that we're now down to our last one hundred grown-ups in the U.S. It has apparently been confirmed that adults are on the same trajectory as the passenger pigeon. I kid you not. It must be true because it's in The Onion. Here's the article's lede:

According to alarming new figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's population of mature adults has been pushed to the brink of extinction, with only 104 grown-ups remaining in the country today.

The endangered demographic, which is projected to die out completely by 2060, is reportedly distinguished from other groups by numerous unique traits, including foresight, rationality, understanding of how to obtain and pay for a mortgage, personal responsibility, and the ability to enter a store without immediately purchasing whatever items they see and desire.

"Our grown-ups are disappearing at a much faster rate than we previously believed," said Census Bureau chief Robert M. Groves, who believes the decline in responsible adults may now be irreversible. "Unfortunately, we've only recently noticed this terrible trend, perhaps because of this group's unusual capacity to endure hardships with quiet dignity instead of whining loudly to draw attention to themselves."

"If nothing is done, these wondrous individuals, with their special ability to consider the long-term consequences of their own behavior and act accordingly, will be wiped-out completely," Groves added.

According to recent data, the grown-up population has plummeted dramatically since 1950, when a Census count found that more than 24 million Americans could both admit when they were wrong and respect a viewpoint other than their own. Today, only one in three million citizens can provide thoughtful advice to a fellow human being instead of immediately shifting the topic to their own personal issues or what they had for lunch.

If you're as concerned for your country as you should be you need to read the whole thing. The article even has a remarkable photo of one of America's last remaining grown-ups.

Justified?

Here's a summary of what happened: A 53 year old woman was getting out of the shower when she saw a man in her bathroom wielding a kitchen knife. The man forced her into the bedroom where there was a struggle. The woman managed to retrieve a revolver from her night table and emptied it into her assailant who ran out of the house, collapsed and later died.

Questions: What do you suppose would have happened to the woman had she not had the means to defend herself? Should the woman have had the right to keep a loaded weapon in her home? If so, should she have the right to carry such a weapon on her person when in public? If not, why not? If you are opposed to allowing people to own and carry firearms exactly what would you say to this woman - that it would have been better had she been raped and possibly murdered than that she be allowed to have access to the means to prevent such a crime?

Only those opposed to the private ownership of handguns need respond. While mulling over your answers you might want to listen to the 9-1-1 call:

It's unfortunate that a man died in this episode, but one thing is certain: He'll never subject anyone else to the terror to which he subjected this woman.

Free Speech for Our Side, but Not for Yours

This video would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Dozens (judging from the number of signatures) of college students and adults signed a faux petition to have conservatives banned from television and radio even as they affirmed their unwavering support of the principles of the First Amendment:

"I'm for free speech," these signers are saying, "except for speech that I don't like."

It's sad enough that college students who are supposed to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the Bill of Rights and the freedoms upon which America was founded would not see the absurdity of signing the petition, but they are, after all, young and perhaps we shouldn't expect too much intellectual rigor from them.

What was really distressing about the video was the number of adults who blithely assented to sign. Presumably these people are faculty and administrators on a campus which is supposed to be a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas, and for them to sign a petition that effectively called for the elimination of the speech of people with whom they disagree is deplorable.

Is there not something hypocritical (or stupid) in educated people affirming their belief in free speech even as they happily sign a petition to ban it?

Computers and Brains

Stephen Hawking recently made the much commented upon remark that he regards the brain as a computer "which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Vjtorley has an interesting post at Uncommon Descent where, inter alia, he discusses eleven fundamental differences between brains and computers. According to vjtorley brains don't differ from computers merely in terms of the matter from which they're made, they're a completely different kind of entity altogether.

The discussion might not mean much except to those with some background knowledge of how computers work, but it's worth reading if you're interested in the debate over whether human beings are just biological machines or whether they're something unique.

Cosmic Expansion

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Some of them assume that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many modern scientists choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are remarkable.

Sobering Up

Nothing like having to make one's way in the real world to disabuse oneself of all those silly liberal ideas one picks up in college. The Daily Caller has the results of a survey of recent grads who voted for Obama in 2008. A lot of them are saying, in effect, that they won't make that mistake again:

A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.

The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.

The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by the job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.

“People have had time to reflect on how they voted in 2008, and now they’re thinking about whether they have a job or like their job,” said Maddalone. As their trust in the federal government shrinks, they’re becoming more self-reliant, as their attitude shifts from “‘yes, we can,’ to ‘yes, I can,’” he said.

In other words, these grads are becoming more conservative. They're realizing that "hope and change" doesn't pay the bills and that it doesn't make sense for a young person out looking for a job to support an administration whose policies discourage employers from hiring.

Embarrassing Tutorial

Mr. Obama's speech Thursday on the Middle East situation was fairly prosaic and unexceptionable until he drew close to the end. When he started talking about the Israeli/Palestinian difficulties he lobbed this stink bomb into the room and hence around the world:

We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

In two sentences the President managed to throw the "peace process", such as it is, into chaos. There is no way Israel is going to return to the pre-1967 borders which made the tiny country only nine miles wide at its narrowest point. To do what the President proposes would be to commit suicide.

Secondly, what does Mr. Obama mean by saying that the Palestinians should have a "contiguous" state? Right now there are two Palestinian entities, one on the West Bank and one in Gaza (See map). There is no way to make a contiguous Palestinian state unless a Palestinian corridor is created to connect the two territories, but such a corridor would bisect Israel which means that Israel's borders would then not be contiguous. Does Mr. Obama really think that cutting Israel in half is a viable proposal? If not, what alternatives did he have in mind?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited with Mr. Obama today, and on national television politely instructed him on the realities in the region. Mr. Obama appeared a bit embarrassed at having to sit quietly through Mr. Netanyahu's gentle rebuke, but the lesson, sadly, was much needed (Netanyahu begins speaking at about the 7:30 mark):

Except for the unfortunate paragraph above Mr. Obama tried to sound like a neutral broker between the interests of the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it's very hard to be neutral when the aspirations of the two parties are so different.

It is the goal of the Israelis to live securely in their homes and at peace with their neighbors. It is the goal of the Palestinians, or at least that faction of them which wields all the power, to destroy Israel and the Israeli Jews. They've said so countless times. How can one be neutral between those two objectives?

As we consider the President's proposals we need to ask whose goals would his proposals further? Would returning to the 1967 borders improve the security of the Israeli people or would it make their destruction an easier task for the Palestinians? The answer is obvious and for that reason the President's attempt to sound impartial rings hollow. He sounds either very much disposed toward the Palestinians or very naive, or both.

It's no wonder, then, that Mr. Netanyahu felt the need to give him the embarrassing tutorial.

Immigration and Assimilation

Bruce Thornton has a column at City Journal which puts into words what a lot of people feel intuitively about immigration and the multicultural enterprise. He argues that modern immigration differs in one crucial respect from earlier influxes - assimilation. Whereas early immigrants expected to adopt, or at least adapt to their new home modern immigrants often demand that their new home adapt to them.

Thornton writes:

[W]hatever the degree of assimilation, most accepted a fundamental truth: that whatever affection they had for their homes, for their native tongue, or for their old ways and customs, those cultures had in some significant way failed them. Thus they had made a difficult, costly choice: to become Americans. If America’s core principles—such as individual rights, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and religious tolerance—conflicted with those of the old country, then the latter had to be modified or abandoned.

The choice was hard, at times even brutal. Racism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice could make the work of becoming American notoriously difficult. But people understood that to have a nation composed of immigrants, there had to be a unifying common culture in the public sphere. Transmitting that common culture was the job of the schools.

My mother’s mother came from Maschito, an Albanian village in southern Italy. Many Maschitans settled in Fresno, where every year they celebrated the feast of their ancestral village’s patron saint, Santa Elia. But I never heard a word about any of this in school. We were busy learning about George Washington and the Constitution, Valley Forge and the Gettysburg Address, the nation’s history and heroes, its virtues and ideals — and, crucially, those core American principles.

It was at school that the immigrant learned American history and celebrated the leaders who had created the country, fought in its defense, and embodied its most cherished values. In short, he learned how to be what he or his parents had freely chosen to become: American.

This process has been compromised over the past 40 years as the ideology of multiculturalism has colonized schools, government, and popular culture. Today, immigrants learn to embrace a sense of entitlement and grievance and to demand that schools and government acknowledge and atone for America’s sins. School curricula have degenerated into ethnic cheerleading and feel-good symbolism. The effect is to divide, not unify, to pit group against group as each tries to out-victim the other in a zero-sum competition for political clout and slices of the public [pie].

Those who come here for whatever reason generate resentments when they demand that taxpayers pay for schools in which they are taught the history of the culture they've left rather than the history of the culture they've chosen. When immigrants refuse to assimilate, when they nurse resentments toward America and insult indigenous Americans, as the university student group called MEChA (National Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan) does*, then our nation is destined to Balkanize and our sense of community, common purpose and concern for each other is doomed to disintegrate. Our infatuation with multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration is producing a social disaster, as does almost every policy promoted by the Left in the last fifty years.

*Thornton explains:

Aztlan is the mythical territory, comprising northern Mexico and the American Southwest, that was allegedly stolen and plundered by Americans. MEChA promotes a politicized Mexican identity called “Chicanismo” that “involves a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of our cultural heritage.” As such, MEChA “is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente [people] captive.”

If you need further evidence that this ideology is hostile to American culture and identity, just read a poem published recently at California State University Fresno in La Voz de Aztlán, a state-subsidized campus newspaper that functions as MEChA’s house organ: “America the land robbed by the white savage / the land of the biggest genocide / the home of intolerance / the place where dreams come to die / the place of greed and slavery,” and so on for another two dozen lines.

It's people who think like this whom the American taxpayer is expected to welcome with open arms, grant citizenship, subsidize the education and health care of, and make eligible for public welfare. And those taxpayers are called xenophobes by the Left if they resent having to do it.

What a country.

The Limits of Knowledge

A journal called The European has an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the head man at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland.

Toward the end of the piece Heuer is asked about his thoughts concerning the interface of what we can demonstrate empirically and what we believe on other grounds, i.e. the interface of science and philosophy or theology. Here's the exchange:

The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?
Heuer: I doubt it.
The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? You want to expand the realm of knowledge but at some point, there is a definite boundary that you cannot cross. Do you simply have to accept the fact that nothing was prior to the Big Bang?
Heuer: I wasn’t saying there was nothing, I am saying that we don’t know anything about what was before – if there was a before. But here we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief. I think many famous scientists have struggled with this question and people today also struggle with it.
The European: So at the very borders of human knowledge, science and belief tend to converge?
Heuer: In the scientific community we don’t tend to discuss such things too often. But the more we investigate the early universe, the more people are trying to connect science to philosophy. That is a good thing. Since we are struggling with the limits of knowledge, maybe philosophy or theology struggle also with our research.

It's an interesting consequence of modern science that the more the field advances the more naive the claims that science has disproven the existence of God appear.

In the last few decades many physicists have come to believe that the materialist view of 19th century science is just wrong and that what we call matter is simply an illusion. Our minds process the world in such a way as to present it to our conscious selves as a substantial something when in fact its substantiality is only an artifact of our being the size we are. Were we very much smaller, say the size of an atom, a brick wall would appear to be almost entirely empty space and the atoms in the wall would have the appearance of mere concentrations of energy or forces.

Many physicists have also come around to the belief that not only is the fundamental "substrate" of reality not matter, it's consciousness.

All of this, of course, is pretty much what theologians have been saying for centuries - the universe is not only the product of a divine intelligence, like a painting is the product of the artist, but it's also grounded in that intelligence, much like an idea is grounded in a mind.

In any case, the physicalism of modern atheism seems with almost every revolution in physics to grow more and more unlikely, simplistic, and obsolete.

Brinksmanship

One aspect of the assault on bin Laden's compound that has received little mention in the press is that the United States was prepared to go to war with Pakistan had they interfered with the operation. Strategy Page has the details:

[B]ecause the Pakistani government was full of bin Laden fans, the U.S. did not inform Pakistan about the raid until it was underway. Apparently, that message included a reminder that if the U.S. troops in the bin Laden compound were attacked by Pakistani forces, there would be instant, and far-reaching, consequences.

The extent of those consequences have since been pieced together, from unclassified information. By May 2nd, the U.S. had assembled a huge naval and air force in the region, that was pointed at Pakistan. This force would attack any Pakistani troops or warplanes that went after the U.S. forces in the bin Laden compound, or who might be able to do so.

The U.S. had assembled three aircraft carriers, hundreds of air force aircraft in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and dozens of helicopters, and thousands of troops, in Afghanistan. Most of these troops didn't know what they were alerted for. Such alerts happen all the time, often for no reason (as far as the troops are concerned.) But this time, as word of the bin Laden raid got out, it became obvious (at least to those who know how these things work) that the alerts throughout the region were to prepare for the possible need to quickly get the American raiders out, and destroy any Pakistani forces that sought to interfere.

Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis did not interfere. In fact, local Pakistani forces surrounded the bin Laden compound and kept anyone from getting in, or out, by land. The Pakistanis did not enter the compound until the Americans had flown away, with bin Laden's body, and documents.

If Mr. Obama keeps up with this sort of thing - lobbing cruise missiles at Libya, threatening Pakistan - pretty soon the media'll start calling him a "cowboy", or they would, anyway, if he were a Republican.

The Weight of Days

I'm not sure why it's news, but in a recent interview with The Guardian physicist Stephen Hawking made a claim that's been repeated at a number of news sites as if it were somehow revelatory. Hawking is being quoted as claiming that heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. Whether there's a life after this one or not, though, he's very much mistaken about the significance of the belief that there is. It's not so much a story for people who are afraid of the dark (or of death). Rather belief in an afterlife is the best explanation for why we have the existential yearnings we do.

What I mean is that human beings have a deep need for meaning and purpose, for a basis for moral judgment, for justice, for human rights, and so on. If death is the end of our existence then none of those needs can ever be fulfilled. There really is no purpose for life if the world is as Hawking conceives it, nor is there any justice, nor is there a ground for moral judgments and human rights. We are insignificant specks in a cosmos completely indifferent to our existence and nothing we do matters at all. We fool ourselves into thinking our life matters, that moral duties exist, that people have natural rights, and so on, but these beliefs are simply delusions that make our day to day existence bearable.

As Albert Camus once said, for one who does not believe in God "the weight of days is dreadful."

Given all this, none of which is really controversial, Hawking's answer to another question in the interview is perplexing. He was asked, "So here we are. What should we do?" His answer was, "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

This is perplexing for a couple of reasons. First, we might ask "seek the greatest value" for whom? Presumably for oneself, but what if I place a high value on ethnic purity? Would I be wrong if I acted on that value by exterminating the weak and the ethnically other? Suppose you place high value on kindness and I place a high value on cruelty. Which of us would Hawking say is right? If he says you are, then what is he basing that response on, if not just an arbitrary preference?

Hawking's view, in other words, is that death is the end so might makes right, and each man should do whatever he wishes, whatever produces the greatest value for himself.

Secondly, his answer is perplexing because if there's no life after death, if our lives are as ephemeral and insignificant as the light of a firefly on a summer night, then why should we do anything? What's the point? What difference does it make whether we discover a cure for cancer or write books on the structure of black holes? If death brings it all to a close, if death is the big eraser, why should we care about anything at all except maybe getting as much pleasure as we can while we're waiting to die?

Leo Tolstoy, in his Confessions, tells a parable that goes something like this: While walking down a path a man is confronted by a ravenous beast. The man runs from the beast and jumps down a well to escape it. As he falls he grabs on to a branch growing out of the wall of the well. He looks up as he hangs there and sees the beast waiting for him at the top of the well. He looks down and sees a dragon at the bottom with its jaws agape. He can't go up and he can't go down. He then notices two mice, a white one and a black one - day and night (time) - nibbling away at the base of the branch. His situation is hopeless, death is inevitable. But he notices a few drops of honey on the leaves of the branch and so while he waits for his annihilation, he strains to lick the honey.

For Tolstoy, the man's act is utterly pointless and absurd, but that is the predicament we're all in if this life is all there is. We're all hanging from the branch stretching to lick a drop or two of honey before we die, like a passenger on the Titanic scurrying about the cabin making his bed and folding his clothes while the ship is sinking.

Heaven isn't a fairy tale for those who are afraid of death. Rather belief that heaven exists is the logical consequence of believing that human existence is meaningful, that moral obligations do exist, that justice is possible, that people have value, that what we do in this life isn't just licking honey while waiting for time to run out.

If one believes what one does in life really matters one must also believe that death does not end his or her existence. Contrarily, if one believes that this life is all there is then one has no grounds for believing that what one does in the years given him really matters.

People who believe in heaven aren't necessarily afraid of the dark. They just believe that their life matters.

Thanks to Ethan for the link.

From Alarmist to Skeptic

David Evans has impressive credentials. He consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering.

He is also a man who formerly believed that carbon dioxide emissions were about to cause an ecological calamity via anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming, but he has looked at the evidence and has rethought his former fears. He concludes an article at The Financial Post with this observation:

Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

He explains the reasons for his conversion from alarmist to skeptic in the rest of the article. According to Evans there's no reliable evidence that global warming is occurring and the belief that it is is based on a false assumption about how the atmosphere handles water vapor and sloppy temperature measurements.

It's an informative piece. If you're interested in the issue and/or concerned about President Obama's plans to curtail greenhouse gas emissions through green energy and cap and trade, you should certainly read it.

Come Out and Fight, Richard

When Richard Dawkins came out with his book The God Delusion he was feted as the champion of atheism, the St. George who was slaying the dragon of theism and religion. Dawkins has argued that atheists should confront believers and show them and the world the foolishness of belief in God.

Well, philosopher William Lane Craig is planning a trip to England this summer and has said he would like to debate Dawkins, but the mighty hero apparently wants no part of such a contest.

Here are some details from a report by Tim Ross in The Telegraph:

Richard Dawkins has made his name as the scourge of organised religion who branded the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock”.

But he now stands accused of “cowardice” after refusing four invitations to debate the existence of God with a renowned Christian philosopher. A war of words has broken out between the best selling author of The God Delusion, and his critics, who see his refusal to take on the American academic, William Lane Craig, as a “glaring” failure and a sign that he may be losing his nerve.

Prof Dawkins maintains that Prof Craig is not a figure worthy of his attention and has reportedly said that such a contest would “look good” on his opponent’s CV but not on his own.

Four invitations to take part in public debates were sent to Prof Dawkins from The British Humanist Association, The Cambridge Debating Union, the Oxford Christian Union and Premier Radio. Prof Dawkins declined them all.

“I have no intention of assisting Craig in his relentless drive for self-promotion,” he said.

Some of Prof Dawkins’s contemporaries are not impressed. Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, wrote to him urging him to reconsider his refusal to debate the existence of God with Prof Craig.

In a letter to Prof Dawkins, Dr Came said: “The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.

“I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House.”

There's more at the link. I suspect that Mr. Dawkins has seen Craig's debates with other atheists and knows that his own position on the non-existence of God is indefensible against a debater of Craig's caliber. He also knows the whole world would be watching, he knows he'd get clobbered, and he knows his inevitable defeat at the hands of an evangelical Christian would have a seismic impact on the popularity of modern atheism, not to mention his book sales.

Thus he contents himself, like a man who has no confidence in the strength of his position, by hurling insults at his opponent from afar while evading the challenge to come out and fight like a man.

Anyone who writes a best-selling book on the foolishness of theism ought to be willing to defend his thesis against the most able antagonists. To write the book and then avoid serious challngers is like being declared the heavyweight boxing champion and then refusing to defend the title against any but lightweight challengers and also-rans. It's not the sort of behavior that anyone would think particularly noble, confident or courageous.

Divorce Agreement

A "divorce agreement" between conservatives and liberals is making the rounds on the 'net. It's a clever, if perhaps a little uncharitable, way of illustrating the difference between the two groups. The agreement is supposedly drawn up by a conservative and is addressed to his liberal partner:

We have stuck together since the late 1950s for the sake of the kids, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its course.

Our two ideological sides cannot and will not ever agree on what is right for us all, so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.

Here is a model separation agreement:

1. Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by land mass, each taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy. Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.

2. We don't like redistributive taxes, so you can keep them.

3. You are also welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.

4. Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military.

5. We'll also take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind, solar, and bio-diesel.

6. You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore, Ted Turner, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Barbra Steisand, Jane Fonda and Rosie O'Donnell. We'll keep capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, WalMart, and Wall Street.

7. You can have your lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps, homeless homeboys, hippies, druggies, and illegal aliens. We'll keep the CEOs, entrepreneuers, and rednecks.

8. We'll keep the Bibles and Judeo-Christian values. You're welcome to Scientology, Humanism, political correctness, and Shirley McLain. You can also have Hollywood and the U.N.

9. We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks, and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can find.

10. You're welcome to give everyone healthcare, if you can find any practicing doctors. We'll continue to believe healthcare is a luxury, not a right.

11. We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The National Anthem." I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine" or "We Are the World".

12. We'll practice trickle down economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best shot.

13. Since it often offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our flag.

In the spirit of friendly parting, let's bet on which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.

P.S. You won't have to "Press 1 for English" when you call our new country.

Homework assignment: What, if anything, in the above is unfairly tendentious?

Obama's War On Free Enterprise

The administration's National Labor Relations Board is inadvertently giving us a revealing glimpse into the totalitarian predilections of the folks we elected to run the country in 2008.

Boeing Corporation, the airplane manufacturer based in Seattle, having grown weary of repetitious labor strife and strikes, has decided that a new plant they intend to build will be constructed in a Right to Work state (South Carolina). This means the workforce of the new facility will be non-union which fact the Obama administration finds completely unacceptable. The NLRB has sought to prevent Boeing from building the South Carolina plant on the grounds that it violates the rights of it's employees. Rich Lowery at NRO explains what passes for their reasoning on the matter:

The board accuses Boeing of “interfering with, restraining, and coercing” its union employees in the exercise of their rights by making a thoroughly understandable business decision.

Well, does it? Here's Lowery:

A writer at the liberal The New Republic says it “may be the most radical thing the Obama administration has done.” It’s an attempt to keep companies with the misfortune of operating in union-heavy states in perpetual thrall to organized labor.

The CEO of Boeing stands accused of saying the company could ill afford the “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.” In a memo, paraphrased in the NLRB complaint, Boeing management said it wanted “to reduce vulnerability to delivery disruptions caused by work stoppages.” What’s notable about these statements is that they are so obvious, they should go without saying.

As the NLRB itself notes, Boeing suffered strikes with some regularity, in 1977, 1989, 1995, 2005, and 2008. These job actions weren’t good for business, or the unions wouldn’t have undertaken them: Their express purpose is to inflict pain on the company. The logic of the NLRB’s position is that businesses shouldn’t notice strikes, and if they do, they should learn to like them and never factor their potential cost into investment decisions. At bottom, the executives of Boeing are guilty of a thought crime.

Boeing....is leaving its Washington State facility intact. In fact, Boeing has expanded it, adding 2,000 jobs. When the Charleston facility is brought online, Boeing will build ten of its 787 Dreamliners a month — seven of them still in Washington State.

How this harms Boeing's workers is a mystery that the NLRB chooses not to clarify. Rather they prefer simply to employ a raw exercise of government coercion to prevent Boeing from building a facility where they and their workers can prosper without having to bear the financial burden of an insatiable union. To make it worse, the NLRB relies on shameless stupidity to justify their attempt to deprive Boeing of a fundamental freedom.

It reminds me of this Billy Madison clip. I think he was talking to representatives of the NLRB trying to explain why they oppose Boeing's move:

The progressive rule of thumb seems to be that when you don't have good reasons for limiting free enterprise, bad reasons will do, and if the bad reasons make you look like a moron, then at least be a resolute, unapologetic moron.

George Will has much more detail on this matter, none of it flattering to either the NLRB or the Obama administration.

Red-necked Phalarope

For those who get excited about such things our humble little county in Pennsylvania was visited by a lovely rarity yesterday (and today). The bird breeds in the arctic and winters out in the ocean so it's rarely seen inland. Nevertheless, one was discovered yesterday at a local lake (Lake Redman) and was still there as I write this on the morning of May 14th. The bird is a Red-Necked Phalarope (No, it doesn't display the Confederate flag and chew tobacco).

Here's a picture:

Female Red-necked Phalarope

One of the interesting things about phalaropes is that unlike just about every other species of bird, the phalarope females are the more brightly plumaged and the males care for the young. I leave it to you to prise out the social significance of that twist of nature. As for me, I wonder how such a phenomenon ever developed in the first place. How many genes must have been altered in order to produce this role reversal and how did those gene mutations occur?

It's an interesting question.

Facts, Shmacts

More and more Mr. Obama demonstrates a troubling indifference to the facts of the matters about which he speaks. At yesterday morning's town hall the President delivered this howler, evidently without even a tinge of embarrassment:

“The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level,” he said. “Teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers– they have really taken it in the chin over the last several months. And so, what we’re trying to do is to see if we can stabilize the budget.”

Jim Geraghty at NRO runs the numbers and shows that this is simply false. In fact, Geraghty opines, it's hard to imagine how it could be any more wrong than it was. At the very worst, total government layoffs amount to about 2% of current unemployment, and probably account for less than that.

I know. Mr. Obama is a postmodern kind of guy, and we need to remember that for postmoderns it's the narrative that matters, not something as out of fashion as truth, but doesn't it bother people that our President is either so uninformed or so dishonest that such whoppers have come to seem typical of him?

Auditioning for the White House

Daily readers will have noticed that several recent posts were deleted last night. Blogger apparently had a maintenance problem that required them to reset all their blogs to last Tuesday while they fixed it. During that time our posts were deleted and we were unable to post to the blog.

Evidently they have everything fixed, and I'd like to celebrate with a rap that I jotted down as I reflected on Michelle Obama's invitation to the rapper "Common" to attend a poetry reading at the White House. I thought that if I could compose a rap maybe I'd get invited, too. So here's the first two stanzas of my effort to win Ms Obama's approval:

If you want a White House rappin' gig, just rap 'bout how you shoot a pig. Or rhyme 'bout offin' the previous POTUS, cuz that's what delights the current FLOTUS.

She 'parently digs the sentiment, even tho' denyin' that's what was meant. So rap on 'bout misogyny and killin,' and soon 'nuf you'll be in the White House, chillin'.

What do you think? Do I have a chance at a White House invite, yo?