Biomimetics

Salvo magazine has an interesting piece by ID advocate Casey Luskin on Biomimetics, the application of nature's designs to technological innovation. It's amazing how many of our modern technological marvels were inspired by studying how nature solves certain problems.

One might think that this should be considered evidence that nature is designed since if intelligent agents like human beings couldn't hit upon these solutions by themselves how could random chance and genetic mutations discover them, but, of course, you shouldn't think like that. We know that exquisite designs are the product of purely natural, unguided, blind forces because those are the only kinds of forces there are, and we know they're the only forces there are because we can explain every exquisite design in terms of them.

If you're concerned that this sounds like circular reasoning then you're insufficiently steeped in the wisdom of people like Richard Dawkins and other materialist illuminati.

Anyway, Luskin lists a number of examples of biomimetic advances (there are many more):

• Faster Speedo swimsuits have been developed by studying the properties of sharkskin.
• Spiny hooks on plant seeds and fruits led to the development of Velcro.
• Better tire treads were created by understanding the shape of toe pads on tree frogs.
• Polar bear furs have inspired textiles and thermal collectors.
• Studying hippo sweat promises to lead to better sunscreen.
• Volvo has studied how locusts swarm without crashing into one another to develop an anti-collision system.
• Mimicking mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical energy conversion might lead to the creation of cheaper solar cells.
• Copying the structure of sticky gecko feet could lead to the development of tape with cleaner and dryer super-adhesion.
• Color-changing cuttlefish have inspired television screens that use a fraction of the power of standard TVs.
• DNA might become a framework for building faster microchips.
• The ability of the human ear to pick up many frequencies of sound is being replicated to build better antennas.
• The Namibian fog-­basking beetle has inspired methods of desalinizing ocean water, growing crops, and producing electricity, all in one!
• Airplane design flowed from studying the body shapes of birds.

One of the arguments against using biomimetics as an indicator of intelligent agency behind the designs in nature is that nature too often presents us with poor design. It's hard to see, though, how this is an argument against an intelligent designer. After all poor design is still design. No one would think that because a particular automobile design was flawed that therefore it must not have been designed by intelligent agents.

Flawed design might be an argument against postulating that the designer is the omnipotent, omniscient God of Christianity, but intelligent design doesn't say that the designer is God. It simply says that there's powerful evidence that the universe and life have been designed by an intelligent agent. That's a scientific conclusion. The scientific critic who wishes to discredit ID by pointing out that an omniscient God wouldn't design things the way nature has is making a religious argument about how God would act, which is an odd thing for a scientific person to do.

One of the examples the critic uses to buttress the claim that living things are often poorly designed is the human eye, but Luskin replies that this is an unfortunate choice inasmuch as the eye, it has turned out, may very well have an optimal design. Luskin writes:

Some materialists attack design arguments not by alleging that biological systems lack high levels of specified complexity, but by alleging that they are full of "flaws." Yet anyone who has used Microsoft Windows is painfully aware that flawed designs are still designed. But theistic evolutionist biologist Kenneth Miller argues that evolution would naturally lead us to expect the biological world to be full of "cobbled together" kluges that reflect the clumsy, undirected Darwinian process.

For example, Miller maintains that the vertebrate eye was not intelligently designed because the optic nerve extends over the retina instead of going out the back of the eye—an alleged design flaw. According to Miller, "visual quality is degraded because light scatters as it passes through several layers of cellular wiring before reaching the retina."

Similarly, Richard Dawkins contends that the retina is "wired in backwards" because light-sensitive cells face away from the incoming light, which is partly blocked by the optic nerve. In Dawkins's ever-humble opinion, the vertebrate eye is "the design of a complete idiot."

A closer examination shows that the design of the vertebrate eye works far better than Dawkins and Miller let on.

Dawkins concedes that the optic nerve's impact on vision is "probably not much," but the negative effect is even less than he admits. Only if you cover one eye and stare directly at a fixed point does a tiny "blind spot" appear in your peripheral vision as a result of the optic nerve covering the retina. When both eyes are functional, the brain compensates for the blind spot by meshing the visual fields of both eyes. Under normal circumstances, the nerves' wiring does nothing to hinder vision.

Nonetheless, Dawkins argues that even if the design works, it would "offend any tidy-minded engineer." But the overall design of the eye actually optimizes visual acuity.

To achieve the high-quality vision that vertebrates need, retinal cells require a large blood supply. By facing the photoreceptor cells toward the back of the retina, and extending the optic nerve out over them, the cells are able to plug directly into the blood vessels that feed the eye, maximizing access to blood.

Pro-ID biologist George Ayoub suggests a thought experiment where the optic nerve goes out the back of the retina, the way Miller and Dawkins claim it ought to be wired. Ayoub finds that this design would interfere with blood supply, as the nerve would crowd out blood vessels. In this case, the only means of restoring blood supply would be to place capillaries over the retina—but this change would block even more light than the optic nerve does under the actual design.

Ayoub concludes: "In trying to eliminate the blind spot, we have generated a host of new and more severe functional problems to solve."

In 2010, two eye specialists made a remarkable discovery that showed the elegant mechanism found in vertebrate eyes to solve the problem of any blockage of light due to the position of the optic nerve. Special "glial cells" sit over the retina and act like fiber-optic cables to channel light through the optic nerve wires directly onto the photoreceptor cells. According to New Scientist, these funnel-shaped cells prevent scattering of light and "act as light filters, keeping images clear."

Ken Miller acknowledges that an intelligent designer "would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality." Yet that seems to be exactly what we find in the vertebrate eye. In fact, the team of scientists who determined the function of glial cells concluded that the "retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images."

ID-theorist William Dembski has observed that "no one has demonstrated how the eye's function might be improved without diminishing its visual speed, sensitivity, and resolution."

Luskin writes a good piece that should be perused by anyone interested in the arguments for ID.

Dissembler

Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to accept responsibility for Fast and Furious and perhaps he really wasn't responsible, but surely he knows who was, and yet he has refused to hold them accountable. This short video features Congresswoman Sandy Adams of Florida, who was a law enforcement officer, as was her late husband, trying to get Mr. Holder to explain to the American people what happened under his authority.

Unfortunately, the AG acts like a man who wants to avoid candor at all costs. What's he trying to hide?

Rep. Adams exudes competency, Mr. Holder exudes insincerity. We need more people like Ms Adams in government and many fewer people like Mr. Holder.

Thanks to HotAir for the video.

Blind Faith

This video from Reason tv explains why the Obama stimulus failed to do much to stimulate the economy.

The quick explanation is that you can't lower unemployment by giving money to people who are already employed, and, in any event, government is poorly equipped to spend money efficiently enough to really stimulate anything.

The best way to get the economy going, it seems to me, is not to throw money around but to provide incentives to business to hire people, and the best way to do that is to relieve the various economic burdens weighing them down.

Rather than follow the current model of imposing increasingly higher taxes, imposing increasingly onerous regulations, and imposing crushing costs as will be assessed against employers under Obamacare, we should lower the cost of doing business by reducing taxes, removing the threat of Obamacare, easing regulations, and exploiting our domestic energy resources so that fuel costs are reduced.

Not only would making energy more abundant reduce what it costs to manufacture and transport goods to market, it would put more money in the pockets of consumers, especially poorer consumers, which would enable them to purchase those products. The more products that are purchased the more products that'll be manufactured and the more manufacturing that's going on the more people who'll find employment.

Perhaps the Obama administration's policy of throwing massive amounts of money around, raising taxes and imposing ever more regulations on business will somehow work eventually, but after three years of it we're mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Blind faith is believing something despite the lack of empirical evidence, and there's certainly no empirical evidence that the Obama strategy has worked or will ever work.

Maybe it's time to take the ideological blinders off and try something, and someone, else.

The Wet Blanket Party

Joe Carter at First Things has begun a campaign for a new political party. He calls it the "Wet Blanket" party. I think he's on to something:

In the coming election we don’t need the second-coming of Teddy Roosevelt to fan the flames of National Greatness. What we need is a Coolidge clone that is able to brandish a wet blanket. In fact, we need a Wet Blanket movement—an enterprise of inactivity designed to sap any and all enthusiasm for political and governmental robustness.

Sadly, there is only one man who could lead such a movement and he died back in 1933. I’m speaking, of course, of our greatest modern president: Calvin Coolidge. The liberal journalist Walter Lippman, in his 1926 essay, “Calvin Coolidge: Puritan De Luxe,” wrote an unintentionally beautiful tribute to the patron saint of small-government conservatism that provides an outline for what is needed today:

"Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for the soft and easy desire to let things slide.

Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.

The White House is extremely sensitive to the first symptoms of any desire on the part of Congress or of the executive departments to do something, and the skill with which Mr. Coolidge can apply a wet blanket to an enthusiast is technically marvelous. There have been Presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge’s equal in the art of deflating interest. The mastery of what might be called the technique of anti-propaganda is worthy of prolonged study by students of public opinion.

The naive statesmen of the pre-Coolidge era imagined that it was desirable to interest the people in their government, that public discussion was a good thing, that indignation at evil was useful. Mr. Coolidge is more sophisticated. He has discovered the value of diverting attention from government, and with exquisite subtlety that amounts to genius, he has used dullness and boredom as political devices."

It is difficult to read this passage without a sigh of resignation. Our culture is able to provide us with innumerable dull and boring politicians. But how many have the ability to use tedium as a sophisticated political tool?

The rest of the post is equally amusing. I can almost promise that if you read it you'll be asking where you can go to sign up.

In Search of the Higgs

Imagine you're on the beach and you sprint full speed into the ocean. As soon as you enter the water you slow down. Even though you're trying just as hard to run, the resistance of the water has the effect of slowing you almost as if you had become more massive.

Scientists have believed for some time that space is permeated with a field analogous to the ocean and that as sub-atomic particles move through this field it resists them. The amount of resistance is what gives these particles their mass.

The field is called the Higgs field and one of the hopes particle physicists had had for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was that it would detect a particle, called the Higgs Boson, which, in our analogy, is like a wave in the ocean. This would have confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and would have completed what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. Unfortunately, the prospects for finding the Higgs are dimming.

Since the Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model, the favored theory in particle physics, failure to find it will be very disappointing. It could mean having to rethink the entire discipline. New Scientist has a pretty good primer on the Higgs for those who might be interested in learning more about this exotic bit of matter:

The Large Hadron Collider finally has enough data to explore every nook and cranny where the elusive Higgs boson could be hiding. LHC physicists will announce the results of their latest hunt on Tuesday at CERN in Switzerland.

What is the Higgs boson?

It is the last undiscovered member of the standard model of particle physics, the leading theory describing how particles and forces interact. The mysterious particle is thought to give all other particles mass, but the standard model can't predict what the Higgs itself weighs.

Where might the Higgs be hiding?

The Higgs may be produced fleetingly when particles smash into each other at high speeds, and for years physicists have been looking for evidence of it at various particle colliders. They have gradually ruled out its existence at different masses, but there is still a narrow mass range, between 115 and 141 gigaelectronvolts, where the simplest version of the Higgs could take refuge.

What will LHC physicists report next week?

Rumour has it they have found hints of the Higgs at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts, about 133 times the mass of a proton. What is known for sure, though, is that researchers from the LHC's main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, will separately present the past year's worth of data from the proton collider. That represents more than 300 trillion high-speed particle collisions, more than twice the amount of data reported at a conference in August. That is still not enough data to be able to rule the Higgs definitively in or out, but it should be enough to show hints of the Higgs if it exists in the mass range that had previously not been scrutinised.

What if there is still no sign of the Higgs?

This time, if nothing materialises, physicists will really start giving up. "If we witness a lack of events in the full mass range, then clearly we will start disfavouring the presence of the standard model Higgs boson in LHC data," says CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli. "To really exclude it we would need additional data. But if in this amount of data we don't see any indication that something is happening, the most likely hypothesis is that we have to look for another solution."

You can read more about these possible alternative solutions at the link.

Straw Man

Peter Wehner has a low view of the presidential rhetoric emanating from the White House. He's evidently insufficiently appreciative, for example, of Mr. Obama's undeniable skill at constructing straw men and his artful use of the ad hominem:

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: “Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement — silly because it’s so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. The problem for Obama is it’s becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves.”

After that, he told us the GOP plan is ”dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” Given his rhetorical trajectory, Obama will soon be insisting that Republicans favor reinstituting slavery at home and genocide abroad (or perhaps it’s favoring genocide at home and slavery abroad).

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The point is that there seems to be no limit, no check, on what Obama will say in order to demonize his opponents — or, to quote Obama’s own words, his “enemies.”

Now I think this is too harsh. Mr. Obama is a gentleman, a good husband and father. Such men are not demonizers. After all, it was Mr. Obama, wasn't it, who during the campaign repeatedly promised us "hope and change" from the tawdry politics of the past.

It was Mr. Obama, Wehner admits, who in an interview once declared, ”I want us to rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this constant petty bickering that's come to characterize our politics.” Does that sound like the sort of thing we'd expect from a man who would demonize his opponents?

Moreover, even Mr. Wehner acknowledges that it was Mr. Obama who during the campaign proclaimed that "We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism… [...] That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ’not this time….’” And it was Mr. Obama who said on the night of his election, on a stage in Grant Park, ”I will listen to you, especially when we disagree… [...] Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”

Those sound to me like the words of a high-minded intellectual, a man too noble to be grubbing about in the political gutters. Mr. Wehner should apologize for thinking that Mr. Obama is just a typical political opportunist and moral pragmatist who says whatever he needs to say to discredit his opposition in the eyes of the voters.

Indeed, he should be ashamed for even thinking such a thing about the leader of the free world. Read his column and see if you don't agree.

Fast and Furious Scandal

For those who need to get caught up the Fast and Furious operation was an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) scheme to secretly encourage American gun dealers to sell guns to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. They hoped to be able to track these guns to the top thugs in the cartels, but they lost track of thousands of weapons which fell into the hands of Mexican killers. Many were used in hundreds of violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The operation was a violation of both Mexican and American law.

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS has been almost alone among reporters in investigating this scandal and is now reporting that emails have been uncovered which show that the Justice Department, or at least the ATF, wanted to use the proliferation of weapons, which they caused and abetted, as a reason for imposing stricter gun controls on American dealers:

ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

In other words, the ATF would pour weapons into Mexico and then when these weapons started turning up at crime scenes they would use their proliferation and use in homicides as a justification for stricter regulations on the very gun dealers they encouraged to sell the weapons in the first place.

And then we wonder why people don't trust their government.

BO and TR

President Obama has in the past invoked the memory a number of former presidents to set Americans at ease over his plans to "transform America." Lincoln, Reagan, FDR, Truman, even George W. Bush (although never Jimmy Carter with whom he's most comparable) have all been trotted out as examples to reassure us that the path toward crony socialism Mr. Obama has set us upon is really nothing radical.

Most recently he traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas to summon the shade of Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the first of the progressive presidents, to validate his march toward an all-encompassing role for government bureaucrats in the lives of Americans.

National Review's editors mark the occasion with a fine "compare and contrast" of Mr. Obama and TR, and though they're no fans of either, they give us a fine skewering of the pretensions of a man of Mr. Obama's modest accomplishments seeking to clothe himself in the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt.

It is strange that Pres. Barack Obama has chosen to channel the spirit of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the president he least resembles. Teddy Roosevelt was a rough-riding, safari-loving, war-adoring imperialist (ask the Panamanians), the man who sent the “Great White Fleet” on a round-the-world tour to make it clear to American rivals hither and yon that they had better mind their own business or face the wrath of a budding world power. Barack Obama was an undistinguished law professor and legislative back-bencher who once gave a very good speech.

Roosevelt wrote 18 books on subjects ranging from naval warfare to naturalism, and not one soft-focus psychological self-examination about his tender feelings about his estranged father. Like President Obama, President Roosevelt was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Unlike President Obama, he earned it, having successfully negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

Not exactly mirror images.

And yet Barack Obama, the great indoorsman and man of inaction, whose only instinct when faced with a national crisis is to deliver yet another speech, has trundled himself down to Osawatomie, Kan., where TR, by that point an ex-president, made his famous “New Nationalism” address, to try to get a little of that Bull Moose magic to rub off on himself.

Color us skeptical, but we can see why TR’s New Nationalism might appeal to Barack Obama: It was an early instantiation of what our National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg has called, after H. G. Wells, “liberal fascism,” the central-planning, top-down, intrusively managerial approach to national government that has been the Left’s model for generations.

The editors go on to give us an incisive evaluation of Mr. Obama's speech at Osawatomie. It's worth reading. Here's a snippet:

President Obama’s speech, like President Roosevelt’s, was economically illiterate. Like TR, he juxtaposed the tycoons and the middle class, and committed the classic blunder of conflating the success of the former with the difficulties of the latter. The Democrat carried into office on a wave of Wall Street money called for a crackdown on Wall Street shenanigans even as he packs his administration with Wall Street veterans, while the Washington establishment’s perverse relations with Wall Street, and, especially, with the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, mighty contributors to the housing bubble, go unchallenged. It’s only greed when somebody else is making the money.

The NR editors conclude by noting that Mr. Obama's theme for the coming campaign appears to be "inequality", but, as the writers observe, Americans are not suffering from inequality. They're suffering from unemployment which, if the hundreds of thousands of people who have given up looking for work are taken into account, is pushing 11%.

Mr. Obama will try to blame the rich for this very troublesome state of affairs, but it's hard to see how it's their fault. On the other hand, it's easy to see how a bloated regulatory state which, with every new tax and regulation it imposes on business diminishes the incentive of employers to hire new employees, is a major contributor to the problem.

Back to the Drawing Board

Evolution News and Views has an interesting report of research on the metal zirconium that suggests that oxygen levels in the earth's early atmosphere were similar to what they are today.

This is interesting because pretty much every naturalistic theory of abiogenesis (the creation of life from non-living matter on the early earth) requires that oxygen be absent from the atmosphere since oxygen destroys organic compounds that are exposed to it for any length of time. That's why nutritionists encourage us to consume plenty of anti-oxidants. If life emerged through purely natural processes the first organic molecules could not have been exposed to oxygen.

Here's an excerpt from the ENV piece:

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction.

Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

So, if measurements are accurate which show high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere from almost the very birth of the planet, then we're left with two explanations for abiogenesis: either the first life originated elsewhere and migrated to earth or it didn't originate as a result of natural processes alone, but received some impetus from an intelligent source.

No doubt the finding reported in ENV will give new energy to theories that life originated elsewhere and hitched a ride to earth in asteroids. Any physicalist hypothesis, no matter how unlikely, no matter how untestable, is preferable among modern thinkers to the hypothesis that there's a Mind behind the origin of life.

The irony is that almost every contemporary discovery about biology and cosmology supports the latter and makes the former more difficult to believe.

Western Vagrant

Last month a vagrant from the western states showed up here in central Pennsylvania. There have only been a half dozen or so records of this bird appearing in PA over the years so it was a treat to be able to see one this far east. The little fellow is called a Green-tailed Towhee and it likes to scratch about on the ground in brushy areas, a habit which makes them hard to see. To catch a glimpse of this guy I stood out in a drizzle for two hours waiting for him to pop into view. It was worth it.

The bird is in winter plumage, but there's still a hint of reddish-brown cap and a little greenish-yellow in the wings and tail. Ed Norman took the photo (the date on the pic is incorrect).

Regulatory Reform

David Brooks comes to the defense of President Obama against critics who charge that the Obama tenure has imposed onerous regulations on business that are stifling hiring and dampening the economic recovery. Brooks seems to want to argue that this is not so, but he winds up arguing that, well, it actually is so, but that other administrations, including that of George W. Bush, were almost as bad. This is hardly the sort of defense Mr. Obama might have hoped for.

The question, though, is not which administration laid the costliest burden on business but rather which administration is going to alleviate that burden in order to stimulate businesses to resume hiring. When the question is put that way, the only possible answer is that it's either the Obama administration, a successor administration, or nobody.

If Mr. Obama is serious about creating jobs he could do worse than follow the advice given in an article at City Journal. Iain Murray, a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and David Schoenbrod argue that reforming the regulations imposed on business would create thousands of jobs almost immediately:

Since 1996 the number of pages of regulations heaped upon our entrepreneurs has exploded from 67,000 to 81,405.

Each page (apart from the bizarre blank ones) contains a rule that imposes costs on businesses while creating more jobs for bureaucrats. Small businesses suffer disproportionately from these rules because their owners have to deal with compliance themselves (they usually give up and hire someone else to handle it when they reach about 30 employees). The costs of complying with regulations average $10,585 per employee, the SBA says — enough to throw a small firm of 20 employees with $200,000 in profits into just-breaking-even territory.

No wonder small businesses, the engine of the U.S. economy, have stalled in hiring.

Chamber of Commerce surveys show that over 60 percent of small businesses have no plans to hire in the next year, and the firms cite greater regulation or the threat of it as a major reason for their reluctance. In short, bureaucracy helps explain why businesses are making profits but not jobs. Substantially reducing the regulatory burden would go some way toward getting them to hire again.

Unfortunately, regulations are the raison d'etre of big government bureaucrats. A party philosophically infatuated with the idea of government as the guarantor of social and environmental justice, as is the Democrat party, will be loath to reduce this burden. It's simply not in a liberal's DNA. If, however, they were to act counter to their nature and actually agree to reform measures what might some of those measures look like? Here are some ideas from the City Journal piece:

For starters, Congress should appoint an annual bipartisan commission to comb through existing rules and identify those that need repeal. The commission would conduct its own analyses of the costs and benefits of regulations, as federal agencies’ figures are notoriously suspect and far from independent. Congress would then vote on the entire repeal package, which would prevent legislators from trading their votes for the preservation of their preferred rules.

Further, Congress should add a five-year sunset provision to all new regulations. If it later decides that rules are worth keeping, it can vote to extend them for another five years. Congress should also revitalize the concept of “enterprise zones,” areas where businesses are exempted from some regulations to allow them to establish themselves at reduced cost. Enterprise zones proved an effective way of getting local economies moving in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another useful tool would be a new small-business license for all start-ups and microbusinesses — firms with five or fewer employees — exempting them from new regulations for a five-year period. The federal government might consider, too, devolving many regulatory duties to the states, letting the nation’s basic constitutional units discover the effectiveness of rules through trial, error, and interstate competition.

Two British policies invite imitation in the United States. Congress could experiment with “regulatory budgeting,” a system currently being introduced in the United Kingdom, by approving a proposal of Democratic senator Mark Warner’s: for every new rule introduced, an old one of equivalent cost would have to be repealed.

Congress could also implement an American version of Britain’s new Red Tape Challenge, which enables citizens to air grievances about particular regulations. This could be done either in conjunction with the bipartisan commission or, as in the U.K., by a team of business leaders that reports back to the legislature.

All these ideas would provide significant regulatory relief. First, however, Congress should take responsibility for regulations, instead of surrendering rule-making to unaccountable government agencies.

These all seem like fine proposals, but in order to enact them voters have to elect to office people who are genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the small businessman. As it is, our political class, or at least those on left, treats small businessmen as if they were public enemies and makes it exceedingly hard for them to take on new hires while simultaneously turning a profit. Perhaps that will change next November.

Trouble Ahead

Pat Buchanan must feel like one of those Old Testament prophets warning of impending doom while the people, oblivious to the coming storm, party on. Buchanan keeps churning out data in his columns and books that paint a depressing picture of America's future, but few seem to pay him any heed. If, as experts insist, demography is destiny, our destiny as a nation looks pretty bleak.

In a recent column Buchanan urges us to consider what the U.S. will be like in less than forty years:

Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK. Yet there are reasons to worry.

First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe.

Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history. We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.

We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.

What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?

Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave” from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.

In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.

Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.

The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050?

We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.

This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse.

Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?

Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.

The world’s largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.

Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time? Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?

There's much more at the link and very much more in his new book Suicide of a Superpower. Meanwhile, Republicrats party on as if it were all someone else's problem. Their insoucience reminds me of a story in Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah where Bork recounts watching the sordid spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings on television and going to a friend's office to lament that "Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color." His friend replied, facetiously, that "Of course, it's coming to an end, but don't worry. It takes a long time, and in the meantime it's possible to live well."

If Buchanan is right we have about forty years to live well.

The Fatuousness of Relativism

Denyse O'Leary passes on a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions, but I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

This is a picture of Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock. Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings. Since no one can say that their feelings are superior to the feelings of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha we hear fatuous insipidities like, "If it's right for them then it's right," or "It's wrong to judge other cultures."

This is moral paralysis, and it's the legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment.

Materialism and Near Death Experiences

Reductive materialism is the hypothesis that all of our mental events can in principle be explained by physical processes occurring in the material brain. The reductive materialist does not believe that we possess a distinct mind or soul, but are simply and exclusively made of matter. Mental events, in this view, arise from the chemistry and physics of matter much like heat and light arise from the combustion of wood.

Well, a reductive materialist neuroscientist named Eben Alexander had a Near Death Experience a couple of years ago and was so overwhelmed by what he "saw" that he consequently abandoned reductive materialism. It's a fascinating story, one which, if true, is nothing short of breath-taking. Alexander recounts his experience in an interview at a blog called Skeptiko. Here's part of it:

[O]ne thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over several years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul [in] us that is not dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.

But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get. It’s far more profound than I ever realized before.

That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this.

Read his description of what he experienced and draw your own conclusions. One of mine is that it's one thing for someone disposed to theism or a spirit world to report having encountered the sorts of phenomena they may have expected to encounter, but quite another when they're reported by a neuroscientist who, up until he had the experience, was an arrant materialist. That Alexander was not in any way disposed or prepared to experience what he experienced confers upon his narrative an extra measure of credibility.

Justice Without Justification

There's an outstanding essay by Colgate professor Robert Kraynak in the current edition of The New Atlantis. The article is titled Justice Without Foundations and in it Kraynak explores the attempts of two groups of modern thinkers to maintain a moral system based upon values like freedom, justice, autonomy, equality, and dignity while at the same time recognizing that, by rejecting Christianity, they have forfeited any possibility of providing an objective foundation for these values. They're simply subjective preferences that are invested with an aura of sanctity that has no rational justification.

The two groups Kraynak directs most of his attention toward are postmodern pragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty, and scientific materialists like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker.

He begins with these observations:

Every age has beliefs about the good life and about ultimate reality that seem normal at the time but are strange and inconsistent when viewed from a broader, more historical perspective. Our present age is no different — not only in the liberal democracies of the West, but also in the globalized world influenced by Western ideas. The strangeness of our day consists in a strong moral passion for the virtue of justice sitting alongside a loss of confidence in the very foundations for justice, and even an eagerness to undermine them.

People today display extreme moral sensitivity to injustices that they understand as violations of the equal rights and equal dignity of all persons — especially the rights of persons thought to be victims of discrimination and oppression. This sensitivity leads to demands for government policies on behalf of “social justice,” and for changing social customs to protect individuals and groups from insensitive words and actions.

But at the same time that people are asked to become more aware of injustices and indignities, the foundations that might justify such obligations are disappearing from philosophy, religion, science, and culture. In many cases, they are being actively undermined by the scholars and intellectuals who are the most vocal in protesting injustices. Among the leading intellectual currents shaping our culture are moral relativism and scientific materialism, especially Darwinism.

Neither supports very well the demands for moral sensitivity and social justice — understood today in terms of equal respect and equal rights. For the crucial requirement of human equality is a conception of human dignity, which views human beings as having a special moral status in the universe, and individuals as having unique moral worth entailing claims of justice.

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity.

How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times?

These are all important questions, questions to which the modern atheist is ill-equipped to offer a cogent answer.

Kraynak goes on to talk about how atheistic thinkers like Rorty, Dennett, Pinker, et al. are forced by their naturalism to live their lives in what Francis Schaeffer described as a two story building. In the lower story naturalists live their lives as rational beings, but, when they want to make moral judgments, they have to leave reason behind and leap to the upper story where non-rationality reigns.

Rorty is an interesting case because he, at least, recognizes that this is precisely what he's doing and even refers to himself as a "free-loading atheist." I.e. he admits to living off the moral capital of Christianity while denying the God from which that capital flows. Kraynak writes:

The best place to begin the discussion of justice without foundations is with the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, the influential spokesman for “non-foundationalism.” As a professor at the University of Virginia and Stanford, he made a strong impression on students by telling them to stop philosophizing and to live pragmatically on behalf of social justice and human dignity.

His rejection of philosophy was ... elaborated on in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and other writings, describing the futility of reason to grasp the external world of nature, or to provide rational foundations for knowledge, both moral and metaphysical....

He further maintained that political values such as democracy, equal rights, and respect for others are non-foundational commitments that North Americans and Europeans have built into their social conventions. Hence, we do not need philosophy to teach us how to act politically, because the ideals are embedded in our language and traditions; all we need to do is to affirm them by human sympathy and active citizenship.

The problems with Rorty’s position have been noticed by many critics — none more astutely than Peter Lawler in Aliens in America (2002). In developing these criticisms, it is useful to examine a little-noticed 1983 essay of Rorty’s called “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.” In that essay, Rorty honestly admits that his moral sensitivities are “postmodern” in the sense of being rationally groundless; yet he asserts that they are still legitimate as borrowings from Judeo-Christian notions of human dignity inherited from the past. With intentional irony, Rorty describes people like himself as “free-loading atheists.”

His justification [for "moral" behavior] is that he is part of a community of moral traditions inherited from Judaism and Christianity, which teaches us to care for a homeless person like the Good Samaritan would do.

Of course, if he had been born into a community that taught the virtues of ethnic cleansing and slavery then those traditions would be justified as well. For Rorty what's right is whatever your community teaches. Morality is simply a convention, like the rules of grammar. The rules could be different than they are, there's nothing really right or wrong about them, and if the relevant community wanted to change them, whatever they decide would then be the new norm.

There's much more to Kraynak's analysis at the link, and I urge anyone interested in the contemporary intellectual and philosophical climate to spend the time it takes to give it a thorough reading. It's important.

Specks and Logs

Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine gives us a good example of the Biblical aphorism about discerning specks in the eyes of others while being unable to spot the log in one's own eye. In a recent column on his blog Wallis complains that some Christians have been willing to dump their family values principles in order to embrace a candidate, Newt Gingrich, who has been divorced twice, married three times and had an adulterous affair while married to his second wife:

A piece by Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek chronicles some evangelical voters in Iowa trying desperately to contort their values in order to justify supporting Newt Gingrich. She quotes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council as saying, "Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community... But these aren’t normal circumstances."

In other words, this guy clearly doesn’t stand for our values but we are ready to jettison those in order to make sure our party wins the 2012 election. Newt Gingrich’s three marriages – serving his first wife divorce papers while she was suffering from cancer, and cheating on his second wife while leading the impeachment battle against Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual sins – would normally be disqualifiers for family values conservatives.

Set aside the fact that Wallis repeats a slander here, the story about Gingrich serving divorce papers to a dying wife, which by now most informed people know is apocryphal.

What's really astonishing about this piece is that Jim Wallis, who calls himself a pro-life pacifist who esteems marital fidelity, would, if given the choice between Democrats like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and almost any Republican, vote for either of those Democrats. Yet Clinton had multiple affairs, was accused of sexual harassment and even sexual assault. He vetoed legislation that would have outlawed partial birth abortion and launched a war in Bosnia.

Barack Obama twice voted in Illinois against legislation that would have protected newborn babies from being intentionally allowed by medical staff to die, has killed numerous terrorists with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and launched a war in Libya.

And now Wallis chides other Christians for failing to put their principles above politics?

What am I missing?

Anesthesia and Consciousness

Anyone who has ever undergone a surgical procedure in which they were "put under" by an anesthesiologist may have marveled at how a chemical cocktail injected into the arm or inhaled through a mask can so completely disengage one's consciousness that even profound insult to the body fails to trigger the sensation of pain.

An article at New Scientist offers an interesting glimpse into research which attempts figure out exactly what anesthetics do, how they do it, and exactly what goes on in the brain that causes consciousness to be extinguished by them:

The development of general anesthesia has transformed surgery from a horrific ordeal into a gentle slumber. It is one of the commonest medical procedures in the world, yet we still don't know how the drugs work. Perhaps this isn't surprising: we still don't understand consciousness, so how can we comprehend its disappearance?

That is starting to change, however, with the development of new techniques for imaging the brain or recording its electrical activity during anesthesia. "In the past five years there has been an explosion of studies, both in terms of consciousness, but also how anesthetics might interrupt consciousness and what they teach us about it," says George Mashour, an anesthetist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "We're at the dawn of a golden era."

Consciousness has long been one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything. It is something experienced by every one of us, yet we cannot even agree on how to define it. How does the small sac of jelly that is our brain take raw data about the world and transform it into the wondrous sensation of being alive? Even our increasingly sophisticated technology for peering inside the brain has, disappointingly, failed to reveal a structure that could be the seat of consciousness.

The article does a good job of summarizing how anesthesia research may give us deeper insight into the nexus between the brain and consciousness, but the mystery of exactly what consciousness is and how it is generated by the brain seems no closer to being solved today than it's ever been.

Two Very Different Black Men

Lloyd Marcus is a black man who, he confides, is the only politically conservative person in his family, a circumstance that is fraught with trials and frustrations. Marcus pens an essay in which he undertakes to help his siblings understand him by explaining to them the basic differences between conservatism and liberalism.

Here's his lede:

About 99.9% of my family are Democrats because Marcus family tradition taught us that the democrats are "for the little guy." Republicans are "rich white racists." Liberal media and the Democratic Party jointly support and promote this silly, simple lie, which still wins the Democrats 95% of the black vote.

Despite me, the eldest of his five children, being a black conservative Tea-Party Republican, my 84-year-old dad's negative view of Republicans remains steadfast. Dad tolerates my baffling political views because he loves me.

However, I would not be surprised if my family scheduled an intervention. A black van pulls up, a hood is thrown over my head, and I'm carted off to an undisclosed location. I am denied food, water, and bathroom privileges, and I am subjected to video of Obama speeches 24/7 until I break.

It occurred to me that my family, like many Americans, is probably clueless regarding the truth of what it means to be a liberal or a conservative. Ironically, the majority of my family live extremely responsible "conservative" lives. They go to work every day, serve their communities, attend church, and raise their kids. And yet, the liberal media has led them to believe that the term "conservative" equals evil white racist.

So I would like to offer my family and others a little "Conservatism 101." Let us begin with a parable.

The parable, as well as the rest of his column, can be found at the link. Meanwhile, since we're profiling prominent blacks in the media, let's take a look at one of MSNBC's latest hires. I don't intend this to be a comparison with Lloyd Marcus because there really is no comparison. The only reason for bringing this man up is that apparently MSNBC considers him a representative voice of the African-American left.

The man's name is Al Sharpton, and his past record as a political activist and agitator is quite out of phase with his current rhetoric. Presumably, it matters little to MSNBC, but Mr. Sharpton has one of the most odious personal histories of anyone in their lineup.

An account of Mr. Sharpton's sundry bigotries can be found here, but for those pressed for time this video gives an inkling of both the style and the liberalism of Mr. Sharpton.

Here's the transcript in case you had trouble understanding the audio:

“White folks was [sic] in caves while we [Africans] was building empires.... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

Evidently calling people "homos" is not a disqualifier for employment at progressive cable stations like MSNBC. It would appear that at that network all that matters is that you detest conservatives. If you satisfy that all-important criterion then perhaps you're given a pass on everything else.

Feminism's Mixed Legacy

Dennis Prager writes a provocative essay on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Prager argues that the legacy of feminism is a mixed bag of good and bad, but on balance it's mostly bad.

He begins with this:

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's feminist magnum opus, "The Feminine Mystique," we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore. And that perspective doesn't make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women's college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes -- four in particular -- have been great, and they outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

The rest of the piece is given to arguing that these four aspects of the feminist legacy have been devastating for society in general and women in particular. Here's his summation:

In sum, thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; postponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and now find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

I encourage you to read his supporting arguments at the link. They're very interesting.

Three Differences

Part of the difficulty the average person encounters in trying to follow present day ideological debates is a confusion of labels. Lots of people don't like labels, of course, but the fact is they are extremely useful and very hard to avoid.

As an example of label confusion, consider that modern conservatives hold views which in the 19th century were considered liberal. Thus, conservatives today are sometimes referred to as classical liberals, which is certainly confusing.

On the other hand, modern liberals hold many views which in the 19th century were associated with socialism. Today these liberals/socialists are often referred to as progressives, which has a more innocuous ring to it, at least to the ear of many Americans.

This short video does a nice job of illustrating three basic differences between classical liberalism (i.e. modern conservatism) and modern progressivism. There are other differences besides these three, to be sure, but these are pretty fundamental:

Neuroscientists vs. the Philosophers

An article at Nature News takes up the disparate ways in which neuroscientists and philosophers think about the problem of Free Will.

Neuroscience has shown that prior to a conscious choice the relevant part of the brain shows excitation, as if the brain makes the decision seconds before we are aware of it. Some investigators conclude from this that the brain determines the decision which, say the philosophers, is a bit naive. After all, we would expect that the brain plays some role in the decision-making process, but evidence that it plays a role in the choice is not evidence that it determines the choice.

Even so, if it were to turn out from analyzing brain states that it were possible to completely predict the decision that's ultimately made that would indeed be powerful evidence for determinism. We are, however, very far from being able to do such a thing:

Imagine a situation (philosophers like to do this) in which researchers could always predict what someone would decide from their brain activity, before the subject became aware of their decision. "If that turned out to be true, that would be a threat to free will," says Mele. Still, even those who have perhaps prematurely proclaimed the death of free will agree that such results would have to be replicated on many different levels of decision-making. Pressing a button or playing a game is far removed from making a cup of tea, running for president or committing a crime.

Whatever the case, if libertarian free will is shown to be an illusion, as many scientists believe, the consequences will be severe, but not even these scientists can live consistently with the belief the future is already set and that their choices are already determined.

The practical effects of demolishing free will are hard to predict. Biological determinism doesn't hold up as a defense in law. Legal scholars aren't ready to ditch the principle of personal responsibility. "The law has to be based on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, except in exceptional circumstances," says Nicholas Mackintosh, director of a project on neuroscience and the law run by the Royal Society in London.

Even so, if free will is an illusion, it's one which is very hard to escape, even for those most conscious of its unreality: Haynes's research and its possible implications have certainly had an effect on how he thinks. He remembers being on a plane on his way to a conference and having an epiphany. "Suddenly I had this big vision about the whole deterministic universe, myself, my place in it and all these different points where we believe we're making decisions just reflecting some causal flow." But he couldn't maintain this image of a world without free will for long. "As soon as you start interpreting people's behaviours in your day-to-day life, it's virtually impossible to keep hold of," he says.

Fried, too, finds it impossible to keep determinism at the top of his mind. "I don't think about it every day. I certainly don't think about it when I operate on the human brain."

The whole article is worth reading for anyone interested in the contemporary interface between neuroscience and philosophy. The question of free will is not simply an ivory tower exercise. There are a number of consequences which follow if it turns out that determinism is true, none of them good.

If it is the case that our choices are determined by extrinsic causes like environment or our genes then there can be no such thing as a moral obligation since we can only be obligated to do what's possible to do. Nor would reward and punishment ever be deserved since no one is ultimately responsible for their choices. The categories of good and evil would cease to be meaningful as moral categories since without moral obligation there really is no morality. Human dignity, which is based on an ability to choose our path, would be difficult to maintain and for those who are theists it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that the pain and suffering in the world is ultimately authored by God.

Any one of these consequences would by itself be disastrous for civilization. Let's hope that those neuroscientists intent on proving that they don't really have the freedom to choose to believe their theories or to reject them, but are determined by factors beyond their control to believe whatever they believe, come to discover that that notion makes not only their science but all of life incoherent. It's no wonder that they can't live consistently with it.

Sophie Scholl

The other evening I watched what may have been the best movie I've seen in several years. The film is titled Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Released in 2006 it's not only based on a true story, but much of the crucial dialogue was taken from the reminiscences of people involved with Sophie as well as official transcripts of her interrogation and trial.

Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were devout Christians who were members of a resistance movement in Nazi Germany called the White Rose. They printed flyers which they then circulated among university students and others to attempt to counter the propaganda put out by the Nazi government.

The Scholls were caught, and the heart of the movie is the intense confrontation between Sophie and her Gestapo interrogator, Robert Mohr. Together with the final scene of her trial, every word of which was taken from transcripts, it is some of the most riveting dialogue you'll ever find in a movie. Both the acting and the cinematography are superb. The whole picture is shot in grays and browns except for Sophie's sweater which becomes an unspoken symbol of light and goodness in the otherwise drear, depressing world created by state atheism.

Julia Jentsch plays Sophie Scholl, Gerald Alexander Held plays Robert Mohr, and the trial judge, the insane Roland Friesler, is played by Andre Hennicke. All three are outstanding in these roles.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a film about courage, faith, and martyrdom in the face of demonic evil. It shows the German people of the early 1940s at both their best and their worst. I highly recommend it, especially to those who appreciate films like Schindler's List and The Lives of Others.

All About Nothing

New Scientist offers a brief explanation of how the universe could have popped into existence out of "nothing." Actually, what it is is a mathematical account of how such a counter-intuitive event might be explained. It's pretty interesting:

An accompanying article by Paul Davies gives much more detail. Here's an excerpt:

So the modern conception of the vacuum [i.e. "empty space"]is one of a seething ferment of quantum-field activity, with waves surging randomly this way and that. In quantum mechanics, waves also have characteristics of particles, so the quantum vacuum is often depicted as a sea of short-lived particles - photons for the electromagnetic field, gravitons for the gravitational field, and so on - popping out of nowhere and then disappearing again.

Wave or particle, what one gets is a picture of the vacuum that is reminiscent, in some respects, of the ether. It does not provide a special frame of rest against which bodies may be said to move, but it does fill all of space and have measurable physical properties such as energy density and pressure.

Evidently, according to scientists who study these things, there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is not completely empty. Very well, but I'm not sure how this explains the origin of the universe since before there was a universe there was no space and thus no vacuum out of which it could have arisen.

I suppose one might respond that our universe is actually only one of a multitude of universes embedded in a pre-existing space, like bubbles floating in the air, out of which our world arose. This, though, sounds more like metaphysical speculation than empirical science.

In any event, the universe is a very, very strange place.

Illegal Immigration (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted a column explaining why it's necessary to stop illegal immigration. Today's post offers some suggestions as to how to do that in a way I believe finds the best balance between justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border fence be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking. Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living. To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card." After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes the workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This would require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any criminal activity, past or future, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation, as would any serious infraction of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of the INS.

This is just an outline, of course, and there are details to be worked out, but it's both simpler and fairer than mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems a more simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem than most other plans that have been suggested.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as does amnesty as it is usually conceived. The "amnesty" is contingent upon first stopping the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country proved too onerous, if illegal immigrants concluded they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

Quantum Weirdness

From time to time we've mentioned how quantum physics presents a serious obstacle to those who want to argue that the universe and everything in it, including us, is merely a physical machine subject to the inexorable laws of Newtonian mechanics. We've speculated that, to the contrary, quantum mechanics suggests that the most fundamental characteristic of the universe may be mind and that matter and physicality may simply be illusions created by mind.

Be that as it may, whatever the ontological implications of the quantum world are it's agreed by all that it's a very strange place.

This PBS Nova video featuring Brian Greene takes the viewer on a jaunt through some of the more fascinating aspects of quantum weirdness. In it Greene discusses things like superposition - the property of very tiny particles to be in more than one place at a time; wave-particle duality - the paradoxical notion that everything is really both a wave and a particle simultaneously; the observer effect - the idea that the existence of things is in some way dependent upon their being observed, and quantum entanglement - the truly bizarre notion that an observation made of a particle here instantaneously effects particles on the other side of the universe.

The video is about 45 minutes long, but it's well-worth watching if you wish to gain a better familiarity with these phenomena. One thing to keep in mind is that though the video will help acquaint you with the phenomena, it probably won't help you understand them. Nobody really understands them.

Enjoy:

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: Quantum Leap on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Illegal Immigration (Pt. I)

The most recent Republican presidential debate generated something of a kerfuffle when Newt Gingrich proposed a quasi-amnesty for illegal aliens. What he said reminded me of a pair of columns I wrote for the local paper a few years back.

The numbers are perhaps a little dated now, but I think the arguments are just as valid today as they were then. The piece I put up today addresses why we must stop illegal immigration, and tomorrow I'll talk about what I think we should do about the illegals who are already here:

Pennsylvania state legislators, responding to mounting evidence that the flood of illegal aliens across our southern border is putting a serious strain on our national well-being, have introduced a bill that would make Pennsylvania a less desirable destination for people who are here illegally.

To understand what motivates this legislation consider just a few points made by Pat Buchanan in his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America:

• In 2005 there were 687 assaults on border agents, twice the figure for 2004.
• In 2004 160,000 non-Mexicans were caught illegally crossing our border. Only 30,000 were returned.
• Federal agents are required to release illegal immigrants if their home countries refuse to take them back.
• In George Bush's first 4.5 years in office approximately 4 million people entered this country illegally.
• Police in so-called "sanctuary cities" are prohibited from apprehending known illegal or criminal aliens. Gang members in L.A. who are in violation of deportation orders may not be arrested by police.
• In L.A. 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide, some 1200 to 1500, are for illegal aliens.
• 66% of the 17,000 outstanding fugitive felony warrants in L.A. are for illegal aliens.
• 12,000 of the 20,000 members of the 18th Street Gang in California are illegals.
• Between 300,000 and 350,000 "anchor babies" are born to illegal aliens each year. These children, one in every ten babies born in the U.S., are automatically citizens and qualify for all benefits of citizenship.
• Between 10% and 20% of all Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean peoples have moved to the U.S.
• One in twelve illegals caught by the border patrol has a criminal record. It's estimated that 300,000 felons have crossed into the U.S. in the last five years.
• Mara Salvatrucha, a gang responsible for numerous rapes, murders, mutilations and other crimes, has 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states. The illegal aliens in this gang are almost immune to police arrest and deportation because they operate in sanctuary cities. The gang is comprised primarily of El Salvadoran illegals.
• Illegals are bringing diseases that had been virtually eradicated in the U.S. Malaria, polio, hepatitis, tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis and other diseases are all skyrocketing in the southwest. From 1960 to 2000 there were only 900 reported cases of leprosy in the U.S. In the first three years of the 21st century there were 7000.
• Since few illegals have health insurance and since hospitals are obligated to care for them, 84 California hospitals closed their doors between 1994 and 2003 because they could not afford to provide free medical care for the numerous illegals who needed it.
• Immigrants in general, and illegals in particular, are depressing the wages of low-skilled Americans by almost 8% according to Paul Krugman of the NYT.
• It's a myth that immigrants help the economy by paying taxes. The cost of schooling, health care, welfare, social security and prisons, plus the costs of pressure on resources like water, land, and power far exceed the revenue that immigrants, legal and illegal, contribute. The net cost to the taxpayer, imposed by immigrants, has been estimated at around $108 billion for 2006.

The above is but a fraction of the crisis Buchanan outlines in his book. Other sources estimate that as many as twelve Americans are murdered every day by illegal aliens. That's 1000 more dead each year than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. Moreover, it's estimated that thirteen Americans are killed every day by DUI illegal aliens, and another study estimates that there are 240,000 illegal alien sex offenders in the U.S. who average four victims apiece.

I don't know how much of all this might be questioned by those more expert than I, but if only a tenth of it is accurate, we have an extremely grave problem on our hands. Unless our leadership in Washington is made to understand the peril, and commits itself to doing something to rectify it, our children and grandchildren are going to grow up in a very different country than we and our parents did.

There is no argument that justifies the fecklessness of both parties in Washington on this issue. Neither the argument based on compassion toward the poor nor the argument based upon economic necessity, nor the argument based upon the U.S. being a nation of immigrants justifies turning a blind eye to the economic and demographic convulsion building across North America.

President Bush signed a bill allocating $1.2 billion to erect 700 miles of high-tech fence, but construction has dawdled. Meanwhile, our state congressmen are to be commended for attempting to mitigate the consequences of the debacle being spawned by White House and Congressional indifference.

Brinicles

In the very cold Antarctic ice forms quickly on the water's surface, causing the remaining liquid water to become saltier. This brine is heavier than the water around it and thus sinks, but since it's so cold it causes the water around it to freeze which forms a briney icicle called a brinicle:

You can read more about the making of this video at The Blaze.

Stuxnet Redux

Debkafile raises the possibility that the recent missile explosion in Iran which killed some of their top scientists was in fact triggered by the Stuxnet virus that has infected their computer systems:

Exhaustive investigations into the deadly explosion last Saturday, Nov. 12 of the Sejil-2 ballistic missile at the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Alghadir base point increasingly to a technical fault originating in the computer system controlling the missile and not the missile itself. The head of Iran's ballistic missile program Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam was among the 36 officers killed in the blast which rocked Tehran 46 kilometers away. (Tehran reported 17 deaths although 36 funerals took place.)

Since the disaster, experts have run tests on missiles of the same type as Sejil 2 and on their launching mechanisms. debkafile's military and Iranian sources disclose three pieces of information coming out of the early IRGC probe:

1. Maj. Gen. Moghaddam had gathered Iran's top missile experts around the Sejil 2 to show them a new type of warhead which could also carry a nuclear payload. No experiment was planned. The experts were shown the new device and asked for their comments.

2. Moghaddam presented the new warhead through a computer simulation attached to the missile. His presentation was watched on a big screen. The missile exploded upon an order from the computer.

The warhead blew first; the solid fuel in its engines next, thus explaining the two consecutive bangs across Tehran and the early impression of two explosions, the first more powerful than the second, occurring at the huge 52 sq. kilometer complex of Alghadir.

3. Because none of the missile experts survived and all the equipment and structures pulverized within a half-kilometer radius of the explosion, the investigators had no witnesses and hardly any physical evidence to work from.

Iranian intelligence heads entertain two initial theories to account for the sudden calamity: a) that Western intelligence service or the Israeli Mossad managed to plant a technician among the missile program's personnel and he signaled the computer to order the missile to explode; or b), a theory which they find more plausible, that the computer controlling the missile was infected with the Stuxnet virus which misdirected the missile into blowing without anyone present noticing anything amiss until it was too late.

It is the second theory which has got Iran's leaders really worried because it means that, in the middle of spiraling tension with the United States and Israel over their nuclear weapons program, their entire Shahab 3 and Sejil 2 ballistic missile arsenal is infected and out of commission until minute tests are completed.

If this last theory is true - that the missiles were detonated on a command from a computer virus - then as deadly as the explosion was it could actually be more of a setback for Iran's foes than for Iran. Whoever planted the code probably expected that it wouldn't trigger the missile explosion until Iran actually tried to use the weapons, producing a devastating series of explosions that would wipe out their entire arsenal at the critical moment when they tried to use it. Now that the Iranians have been alerted to check for the virus they may be able to clean it up without having lost their missile fleet.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

I'd like to wish all our readers a very meaningful Thanksgiving. I can think of no better way to observe the day on VP than to repeat our annual post of the Thanksgiving proclamation of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived:

THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION OF 1789 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be - That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks - for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation - for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war - for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed - for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions - to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually - to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed - to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord - To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us - and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

No doubt those who like to believe that this country was not founded by religious men nor upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions would rather you not read this, but there it is.

I encourage each of us to take time this day to reflect upon all that we have to be grateful for, having been born in this country or having come to reside here, and to reflect, too, upon the nature of our relationship to the God from whom all our blessings flow.

I also encourage each of us to take a moment to pray for those of our acquaintances who find themselves grieving a loss or suffering in pain that God may hold them especially close to His bosom and give them consolation and comfort.

We should also keep in mind those who languish in poverty, either physical, psychological, or spiritual and ask God that He show us what He would have us do to bring relief where we can.

Finally, on Thanksgiving Day we should remember our secular friends who also have so much to be thankful for but no one, really, to thank. It's a sad circumstance which tends to render the celebration rather meaningless I should think.

Have a great Thanksgiving.