Mr. Obama's Misleading 2%

Mr. Obama has consistently argued that we cannot lower gas prices by increasing the oil supply, and that drilling new wells would not help us. But he's now reported to be considering opening the national petroleum reserve in order to increase the supply so gas prices will come down. There seems to be a contradiction in there somewhere.

The president has also stated that we use 20% of the world's oil but have only 2% of the world's reserves. This, it turns out, is very misleading. Here's an explanation from John Merline at Investor's Business Daily:

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump.

"Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices.

It's the same rhetoric President Obama is using now, as gas prices hit $4 again, except now he puts the figure at 2%. "With only 2% of the world's oil reserves, we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," he said. "Not when we consume 20% of the world's oil."

The claim makes it appear as though the U.S. is an oil-barren nation, perpetually dependent on foreign oil and high prices unless we can cut our own use and develop alternative energy sources like algae.

But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country's oil needs for hundreds of years.

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.

When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports. Among them:

• At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered, according to the government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
• About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA.
• Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska's North Slope, says the U.S. Geological Survey.
• Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS.
• As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

Then, there's the massive Green River Formation in Wyoming, which according to the USGS contains a stunning 1.4 trillion barrels of oil shale — a type of oil released from sedimentary rock after it's heated.

A separate Rand Corp. study found that about 800 billion barrels of oil shale in Wyoming and neighboring states is "technically recoverable," which means it could be extracted using existing technology. That's more than triple the known reserves in Saudi Arabia.

All told, the U.S. has access to 400 billion barrels of crude that could be recovered using existing drilling technologies, according to a 2006 Energy Department report.

When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

And even this number could be low, since such estimates tend to go up over time.

Merline goes on to explain why we're not utilizing these resources. There's a pyramid accompanying his article that shows all the domestic petroleum in the U.S., and the 2% the president refers to is the very tip of the pyramid:

One thing Merline doesn't mention but which should be pointed out is that when the president claims we're drilling more than ever what he omits is that the current drilling is occurring under leases granted by the Bush administration or is taking place on private land. Under Mr. Obama it has become extremely difficult to get drilling permits for federal lands where so much of the recoverable oil has been found.

The fact is that the Obama administration, despite protestations to the contrary, really does want higher gas prices because they want to force us toward acceptance of green energy alternatives. They know that if fuel is cheap green energy simply will not be economically attractive and will not be able to compete.

This is why Energy Secretary Steven Chu admitted that he wanted gas prices equal to those of Europe (about $9/gallon).

At least he was saying this until recently when he apparently got a memo from the White House to shut up about it.

Progressive Utopianism

Progressive leftists are fond of dreaming up ways to create utopian societies, but often the brave new worlds they conjure up turn out to be dystopic prisons.

The communist prison states of the twentieth and twenty first centuries were the product of leftist attempts to produce perfect societies. Even if the dreamers seem like a sweet, kind souls the future they envision is often a dehumanizing, totalitarian nightmare. B.F. Skinner's Walden II comes to mind as does Peter Singer's vision of a future in which mothers are free to kill their young children.

Now comes The Atlantic with an essay on the thoughts of an academic by the name of S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. Mr. Liao believes that at least part of the solution to our pending environmental troubles is to re-engineer human beings so that they leave a diminished carbon footprint. Here's The Atlantic's lede:

The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED's, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before.

So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating.

Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Liao is keen to point out that the paper is not meant to advocate for any particular human modifications, or even human engineering generally; rather, it is only meant to introduce human engineering as one possible, partial solution to climate change.

He also emphasized the voluntary nature of the proposed modifications. Neither Liao or his co-authors, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford, approve of any coercive human engineering; they favor modifications borne of individual choices, not technocratic mandates.

Of course. Brave new worlds always start out sounding reasonable and non-coercive, but it's not long until, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, it all turns ugly. When people choose not to genetically rejigger their children or to wear the meat patch the state will decide to do something "reasonable" like set limits to how much carbon you can consume, or they'll tell you they'll not provide insurance coverage for more than two child births, or they'll not provide health care for people over a certain bodyweight, etc.

In the end they won't tell you that you'll have to do the things Liao suggests, you'll be free to ignore the wise advice of the government planners and statists if you wish, but you won't be able to afford to. You'll have been coerced by Big Brother into participating in their dehumanized society without even realizing it was happening.

Here are some of the "options" Liao proposes:

• A "meat patch" that makes you vomit when you eat meat.
• Hormones that retard your children's growth.
• Drugs that make you want to write checks (to charities, of course).
• Genetically engineering humans to grow "cat eyes" so we don't need light bulbs.

It all sounds so reasonable. Just like Mephistopheles' bargain sounded so reasonable to Dr. Faustus.

Young Nihilists

Thomas Kidd at Patheos reviews a book by sociologist Christian Smith that should be of interest to every parent and future parent. Kidd writes:

Endless consumer choices, easy access to drugs and alcohol, and an increasing lack of taboos in sexuality, all make it critical that emerging adults have a moral framework for making wholesome choices. But Smith shows that this foundational framework is exactly what the majority of his interviewees do not have. Sixty percent of them said that morality was in the eye of the beholder, and about half subscribed, as best they understood it, to the concept of moral relativism.

When pushed, most would concede that some actions, like rape and murder, were wrong almost regardless of circumstances. Some were not even prepared to concede such absolutes, however. One interviewee said he did not know if you were ever obligated to help a person in need: "I don't ever stop when I see somebody on the side of the road," he said; "maybe if someone is burning in the car, you should try to pull them out, but, no, not really." One in three had no idea what made something right or wrong. Many of those interviewed simply could not understand questions about their sources of morality, no matter how the interviewer rephrased them.

Interviewees displayed distressingly high rates of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as high-risk sexual behavior. About half of those studied had engaged in binge drinking within the past two weeks. Almost three quarters of the non-married emerging adults had experienced sexual intercourse a number of times with a variety of partners, typically beginning around age 16. Especially for women, this pattern of reckless sexuality has fostered deep regrets, insecurity, and trauma from abortions or sexually-transmitted diseases. Other emerging adults, especially some men, seem to sense no regrets whatsoever about their amorous escapades.

Smith's research is distressing but not surprising. Generation Xers have been variously described as morally adrift, nihilistic, lost in a sea of post-modern subjectivism, and so on, but why are they? When people have no categories for making moral judgments other than their own feelings, moral judgments quickly come to be seen as fluid, groundless, and arbitrary. It's an inevitable denouement in a culture that has cut itself free of the moorings of religion which has traditionally provided the only non-arbitrary, objective ground for moral standards and duties.

Check out the rest of Kidd's review at the link.

Why Stop with Contraception?

Those who follow the news know that the left is upset over conservatives' unreasonable unwillingness to require insurance companies and private employers to cover birth control expenses and to, in effect, subsidize the sex lives of their employees. In the left's typically understated rhetoric, the Republican reluctance to jettison the First Amendment's guarantee of a freedom of religion from state interference is proof that they're waging a "War on Women".

Allysia Finley, in a humorous piece in the Wall Street Journal, thinks mandating birth control coverage is not going far enough, actually. There are many other things that the government should require stingy insurance companies and employers to cover for their employees. She presents her proposals in a witty, tongue-in-cheek letter to President Obama. Here's part of it:

Dear President Obama,

Can you believe the nerve of employers? Many of them still seem to think that they should be allowed to determine the benefits they offer. I guess they haven't read your 2,000-page health law. It's the government's job now.

That's a good thing, too. Employers for too long have been able to restrict our access to essential health services like contraception by making us pay some of the bill. Really, it's amazing that we aren't all dead. Now, thanks to you, we'll enjoy free and universal access to preventative care just like workers do in Cuba. Even so, there are still many essential benefits that the government must mandate to make the U.S. the freest country in the world.

Fitness club memberships. Most doctors agree that exercising is one of the best ways to prevent disease. However, gym memberships can run between $240 and $1,800 per year. Such high prices force us to choose between exercising and buying groceries. While we could walk or jog outside, many of us prefer not to. Therefore, employers should be required to pay for workers' gym memberships. Doing so might even reduce employers' health costs, which is why many companies already subsidize memberships. Those that don't are limiting our freedom to exercise.

Coffee. Studies show that coffee can ward off depression, Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes and sleepiness—which makes it one of the most powerful preventive treatments. Workers who drink java are also more productive and pleasant. While many offices have coffee makers, some employers—most notably those affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—continue to deny workers this essential benefit. All employers should have to provide workers with freshly brewed coffee. Oh, and workers must also be able to choose the kind of coffee regardless of the price.

Republicans might argue that requiring Mormon charities to serve coffee is a violation of "religious liberty" since the Mormon church's doctrine proscribes coffee, but this argument is a red herring. Leading medical experts recommend drinking coffee. Moreover, 99% of adults have drunk coffee at one point in their lives (including most Mormons).

Finley has more amusing suggestions at the link. She argues, for instance, that insurance companies should be required to cover employee massage therapy and salad bars in the workplace. She recognizes, of course, that getting Republicans to go along with mandating these coverages would be difficult, but, she concludes, if the president can justify a mandate on individuals to buy health insurance what she's proposing should be "a piece of cake".

Re: Wheeling, Dealing, and Looking Venal

A few days ago we discussed some of the behind the scenes deal-making going on between the U.S. and Israel over Iran. The post mentioned that the U.S. was providing some military hardware and weaponry to Israel in exchange for a pledge not to attack Iran until after the November election.

I suggested that, if the report was accurate, it implied that the president was subordinating matters of great national importance to his own electoral fortunes. This elicited an informative response from a reader named Keith who thought there is another possible explanation for why an attack on Iran might be delayed until 2013. Keith wrote:

With regards to the 2013 comment, I would be very surprised if it actually has anything to do with the election. The weapons promised to Israel, which will be a very good deterrent to Iran, will probably not be ready until sometime into late 2013. I'm guessing the bunker busting bombs promised are the MOP GBU-57. Testing for those bombs is not slated to be completed until sometime this year. The MOP was developed for the type of application that may be required if there is an attack on Iran. These bombs are designed to penetrate farther into hardened sites than any other bomb before and pack more explosives than any other - including the MOAB GBU-43.

As for the [mid-air refueling] tankers, after nine years, the Air Force finally got through the hurdles with being able to order replacements for the KC-135. The KC-X program has been marred with protests by the general contractors, GAO accounting related issues, and criminal investigations. It has only been about a year since the Air Force has placed orders to replace our fleet, which has been flying since the Eisenhower administration.

In both of these cases, export versions will likely have to be developed before being delivered to Israel. The United States typically only ships variants to what our military uses. Yes Israel's Air Force using F-16's (as do we). But the versions sold to them, do not have the most powerful, fuel efficient engines as ours [do]. The navigation systems are not as good as ours. The list goes on.

Bottom line: I strongly believe the 2013 statement has nothing to do with our election and more to do with weapons availability. The underlying statement from the U.S. is, "Don't start something now and expect we are going to deliver the weapons technology as soon as things start going bad for you."

This sounds plausible, and it certainly puts the Obama administration in a better light than does the claim that they're pressuring Israel to delay an attack on Iran for political reasons. Even so, whether the White House is tailoring their demands upon Israel to suit their political ambitions or whether, as Keith says, they're simply bending to logistical necessity, war between Israel and Iran would in fact cause oil prices to soar and that would almost surely diminish Mr. Obama's reelection prospects.

Ants

There's a fascinating piece in Biology News Net about the amazing variety of tools ants use to navigate their way home from a foraging trip:

Desert ants have adapted to a life in a barren environment which only provides very few landmarks for orientation. Apart from visual cues and odors the ants use the polarized sunlight as a compass and count their steps in order to return safely to their home after searching for food.

In experiments with ants of the genus Cataglyphis in their natural habitats in Tunisia and Turkey, behavioral scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now discovered that ants can also use magnetic and vibrational landmarks in order to find their way back to their nest − a small hole in the desert ground. In addition, carbon dioxide produced by their nestmates' breathing also helps homing ants to pinpoint their nest entrance. Hence, the ants' navigational skills prove enormously adaptable to their inhospitable environment.

Visual cues, chemical odors, polarized light, counting into the hundreds if not thousands, magnetic fields, vibrations, and CO2 density gradients - all this processed in a brain scarcely larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

I never cease to be awed by the power of dumb luck and natural selection to produce the most astonishing prodigies in nature. If I hadn't read my Dawkins and my Dennett, and been reassured by these worthies that this sort of thing is child's play for unguided natural processes, I'd be sure there must be some kind of intelligent guidance behind the appearance of such marvels in so tiny an organism.

This video gives an inkling of Cataglyphis' many talents:

Political Agility

You have to hand it to the Obama folks. They're nothing if not politically nimble. It helps, of course, to have the media in your vest pocket and to be unconcerned about truth, but the ease with which they've turned a loser position into a winner is amazing. Here's an overview:

President Obama launches an assault on the first amendment in general, and freedom of religion in particular, by requiring Catholic institutions to violate their conscience and provide birth control for female employees, something they've never before done. The ploy blows up in their faces when Catholics resist this blatant infringement on their freedom to hold to their religious convictions.

The president's waterboys in the media immediately rush to his aid by framing the Church's objections as an attempt to deny women birth control when, of course, it was nothing of the kind.

George Stephanapoulis asks Mitt Romney out of the blue whether he thinks a state has the right to ban birth control. No one has ever proposed such a thing. Romney wonders why on earth Stephanapoulis is asking such a question, and the exchange makes news.

Now it's all over television that Mitt Romney is talking about birth control. The media then dredge up Santorum's personal opinions on birth control, which are the same as those his church has held for a thousand years, and which he articulated in speeches as a private citizen to Catholic audiences before becoming a candidate.

The media press Santorum to clarify his views on the matter. The candidate, out of politeness, answers their questions which spurs the media to ask him why he's talking so much about contraception. Does he intend to ban it, they inquire. He insists that he does not, but it's too late. The very question, added to his personal, religious objection to contraception, serves as reason enough to suspect that he does.

Republican candidates are subsequently grilled with the question. The media keeps bringing it up even though the candidates want to talk about the economy and the catastrophe we're headed toward unless we stop spending and borrowing money. The media, however, is obsessed with the topic of birth control, they ask about little else, and then can't figure out why, if the candidates really don't want to ban it, they're talking about it so much.

The reason they're talking about it, of course, is that the media ask the questions, and that's what they're asking about. They're using contraception as a foil to deflect and forestall substantive criticisms of the incumbent's record. The Republicans, too late, seem to realize what's going on, but choosing not to answer the questions affords no way out for the hapless candidates.

Mitt Romney, for instance, is asked what he thinks about Rush Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke. Romney doesn't want to get anywhere close to a discussion on birth control so he answers somewhat tepidly. The Democrats then lower the boom on him for being so lukewarm about Limbaugh's offensive comments, even though these same Democrats have been almost totally indifferent toward the misogyny that's almost epidemic among their own media personalities.

So now a clumsy attack by President Obama on the first amendment has morphed into the perception that the Republicans are campaigning to deny women the right to buy birth control and are, in fact, waging "a war" against women.

And women, even Republican women, incredibly enough, are duped by the ploy. Here's part of a somewhat giddy New York Times report on how politically independent and GOP women are fleeing the Republicans:

As baby showers go, the party Mary Russell attended to celebrate her niece’s first child was sweet, with about a dozen women offering congratulations over ice cream and cake.

But somewhere between the baby name game and the gifts, what had been light conversation took a sharp turn toward the personal and political — specifically, the battle over access to birth control and other women’s health issues that have sprung to life on the Republican campaign trail in recent weeks.

“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold.

Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president. Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now.

“I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”

In Iowa, one of the crucial battlegrounds in the coming presidential election, and in other states, dozens of interviews in recent weeks have found that moderate Republican and independent women — one of the most important electoral swing groups — are disenchanted by the Republican focus on social issues like contraception and abortion in an election that, until recently, had been mostly dominated by the economy.

And in what appears to be an abrupt shift, some Republican-leaning women like Ms. Russell said they might switch sides and vote for Mr. Obama — if they turn out to vote at all.

“Everybody is so busy telling us how we should act in the bedroom, they’re letting the country fall through the cracks,” said Fran Kelley, a retired public school worker in Seattle who voted for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama in the 2008 election. Of the Republican candidates this year, she added, “They’re nothing but hatemongers trying to control everyone, saying, ‘Live as I live.’ ”

She continued, “If Republicans would stop all this ridiculous talk about contraception, I’d consider voting in November.”

[I]n a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, the president finished ahead of Mr. Romney among all women by 57 percent to 37 percent. He held much the same advantage over Mr. Santorum.

Last week Joyce Kimball, a retired secretary in Greenville, Ill., who voted for Mr. McCain in 2008, said she had recently become “fed up,” adding that it was not out of the question for her to vote for a Democrat in November. “I’m looking to hear how the candidates propose to put people back to work, not what they think about contraception,” she said. “I hope to God they stop talking about this.”

Even more than Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum has made himself a champion of the traditional family with two parents, arguing in speeches that single motherhood increases a child’s chances of poverty and related problems.

The stance particularly vexes Meredith Warren, a Republican strategist in Andover, Mass. “Well, guess what?” she said. “There are a lot of single moms out there. That’s reality. I don’t think he does himself any favors denigrating that situation.”

Ms. Warren said her job had not been made any easier lately. “A lot of my younger friends are Democrats, and it’s hard for them to understand how, as a woman, you can be a member of the Republican Party,” she said.

Ms. Russell, who changed her political views at the baby shower, said she was impressed with how Mr. Obama handled his administration’s compromise over the much-debated birth control policy, saying, “I think he’s more of a women’s candidate.”

A rally for women’s rights in San Diego on Thursday drew Jessica Lopez, 27, a registered independent who said she voted for President George W. Bush in 2004. Ms. Lopez said her choice this year became clear amid the Republican debate on contraception and abortion. “This has really energized me, that I need to get more involved with the Obama campaign,” she said.

Ms. Lopez added: “The G.O.P. has never been so clear about their agenda for women. I’m afraid if we get a Republican president, my health will be up to their personal discretion.”

It is so sad that so many can be so easily snookered by a media so intent on insuring Mr. Obama's reelection.

Slaughtering Wildlife in the Name of Green Energy

Seventy Golden eagles are killed annually at a single wind turbine site in California. Yet there are no fines, no jail time, no demands from enviros to shut them down. Bald eagles, osprey, and peregrine falcons nest comfortably and successfully in close proximity to both coal and nuclear power plants all up and down the Susquehanna river in Pennsylvania, but in Altamont California flying close to "green" energy sources is suicide for raptors:

Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America’s oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act.

But the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines. A violation of either law can result in a fine of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for two years...

Last June, the Los Angeles Times reported that about 70 golden eagles are being killed per year by the wind turbines at Altamont Pass, about 20 miles east of Oakland, Calif. A 2008 study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks—as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—are being killed every year by the turbines at Altamont.

...Bats are getting whacked, too. The Pennsylvania Game Commission estimates that wind turbines killed more than 10,000 bats in the state in 2010.

Despite the deleterious effect that the windmills are having on wildlife, the wind industry is pushing to keep both its carte blanche and generous subsidies. According to Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington D.C.-based lawyer who wrote a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “It‘s absolutely clear that there’s been a mandate from the top” not to prosecute the wind industry for violating wildlife laws. “To me,” he said, “that’s appalling public policy.”

It's a good thing for the wind industry that they slaughter their birds without using hydraulic fracking or oil pipelines. If they did they'd have been shut down years ago, but since they don't use fossil fuels they can continue to dispatch eagles as fast as they please and nothing will be done to stop them.

And don't bother calling the EPA, by the way. They're too busy trying to find ways to shut down the gas drilling industry in Pennsylvania, an industry which in some five or six decades has not killed a single eagle.

GCB

Maybe somebody more connected to the current vernacular can explain to me what the significant difference is between ABC referring to women as "bitches" and Rush Limbaugh referring to a particular woman as a "slut."

ABC has a show coming out titled GCB which stands for "Good Christian Bitches." The show is about nominally Christian women behaving badly. I haven't seen it, but those who have say that it's pretty offensive. If so, I wonder if there'll be any phone calls from Mr. Obama about how demeaning it is to call women "bitches" and how offensive it is to portray Christians behaving as if they lived by the standards of Hollywood celebrities.

Newt Gingrich makes the point that these folks would never dream of producing a show titled GMB about Muslims, and he's right. That would not only be insensitive, of course, but also dangerous, and Hollywood types are more noted for praising each other's courage than for actually being courageous.

Nor, for that matter, would they produce a show about "good black bitches," since this would certainly justify suspicions of racism, and members of the entertainment industry would rather contract AIDs than be called racists.

No, white Christian women are a safe vehicle by which to vent their inane little bigotries. There's no risk. No one will issue death threats and no one will call them racists. Anyone whose IQ is low enough to freeze water will have little difficulty in making it through an hour of GCB and will doubtless laugh heartily at the mindless, insipid "humor," and have their prejudices about both Christians and women reinforced. And Mr. Obama will have nothing to say about it.

Maybe if Rush Limbaugh had produced the show that'd be different.

Man's Uniqueness

Years ago Nobel Prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi introduced something called the Fermi Paradox. He wondered why, if the probability of life being common in the universe is so high, we don't find evidence of it anywhere but on earth. Tom Bethell explores that very question in an article in the Washington Times. Bethell begins with this puzzling fact:

Almost daily there are new reports of distant planets. They may outnumber the 100 billion stars in our galaxy. What we’re looking for, of course, is extraterrestrial intelligence, not just orbiting rocks. But nothing has been found. The silence in outer space “is maddening,” Charles Krauthammer has written. It “makes no sense.”

One of the great dogmas of our age is that there is nothing unusual about the human race. We are told that only in degree do we differ from the apes. The belief that nature and human nature form a continuum came to prominence with Charles Darwin, whose avowed aim was to bring man and nature “under one point of view.”

Yet the evidence for that continuum is still missing - despite a search that has persisted for over a century.

If humans are not exceptional, intelligence at the human level should be widespread and easily detected. But we are still looking. We have still not been able to find any trace of the intelligence that children display by the age of 3.

The Hubble telescope searches outer space; we refine our machines, add “memory” to our computers. Maybe one day they will become conscious. We coax chimpanzees in animal labs. Perhaps one day they will speak. Still nothing.

Fifty years ago, a mathematical exercise called the Drake Equation posited that extraterrestrial civilizations should be numerous. Carl Sagan thought there might be a million advanced civilizations in our own galaxy. But the numbers in the Drake Equation were guesses, and they were skewed by Sagan himself. They deliberately boosted the odds that life can arise by chance from non-life. As far as we know, life has only appeared here, and perhaps not by chance.

The quest for artificial intelligence (AI) began in earnest at about the same time. A conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 was organized by mathematicians John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. The problem of creating artificial intelligence would be solved within a few years, they believed. It took much longer than that for failed experiments to show that the world of human intelligence can’t be reduced to math.

Like the search for extraterrestrial life, the development of artificial intelligence seems to have stalled. Likewise, the quest to develop language in apes seems to have hit a wall. Man still stands, as far as we know, as a unique being in all of the cosmos. Some find this galling.

They consider it laughably chauvinistic and anthropocentric to think that perhaps in all the universe we are the only living, intelligent, conscious beings. Sagan derided “our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe.” It must be frustrating to those who follow Sagan's thinking that almost every scientific discovery, and non-discovery, seems to conform to this delusional prejudice.

Perhaps the evidence is out there that intelligence, reason, consciousness, and life are commonplace in the cosmos, but the expectation that it'll be found seems to grow dimmer every year. And if it turns out that we and our planet really are unique then that raises some fascinating "how and why" questions.

I suspect that part of what motivates people like Sagan to find life elsewhere is a desire to avoid those very questions. Perhaps they don't like where they see them leading.

I'm reminded of the lines by the late Robert Jastrow, an astronomer who authored God and the Astronomers. Jastrow wrote:

The scientist has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries.

I imagine that would be irritating.

Demographic Revolution

City Journal's Heather MacDonald paints a depressing picture of the future of California and its demographic revolution. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Jon Pederson works as a pastor in the Willard area of Santa Ana, a formerly middle-class neighborhood of stucco apartment blocks whose balconies now sport bright blue tarps and small satellite dishes. Participation in gangs and drug culture is rising in the second and third generation of Hispanic immigrants, he observes. “It’s a perfect storm. When a family comes from Mexico, both parents need to work to survive; their ability to monitor their child’s life is limited.”

Families take in boarders, often kin, who sometimes rape and impregnate the young daughters. “Daddy hunger” in girls raised by single mothers is expressed in promiscuity, Pederson says; the boys, meanwhile, channel their anger into gang life. Nearly 53 percent of all Hispanic births in California are now out of wedlock, and Hispanics have the highest teen birthrate of all ethnic groups. Pederson saw similar patterns as a missionary in Central America: teen pregnancy, single-parent families with six or eight serial fathers, and high poverty rates.

Routine domestic violence is another Third World import, especially from Mexico. More than a quarter of the 911 calls to the Santa Ana Police Department are for domestic violence, reports Kevin Brown, a former Santa Ana cop who now serves on an antigang intervention team. “Children are seeing it at home—they’re living the experience,” he says.

Nationally, 42 percent of Latino children entering kindergarten are in the lowest quartile of reading preparedness, compared with 18 percent of white children, reports UCLA education professor Patricia Gándara in her 2009 book The Latino Education Crisis. By eighth grade, 43 percent of whites and 47 percent of Asians nationally are proficient or better in reading, compared with only 19 percent of Latino students.

U.S.-born Hispanic households in California already use welfare programs (such as cash welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance) at twice the rate of U.S.-born non-Hispanic households, according to an analysis of the March 2011 Current Population Survey by the Center for Immigration Studies. Welfare use by immigrants is higher still. In 2008–09, the fraction of households using some form of welfare was 82 percent for households headed by an illegal immigrant and 61 percent for households headed by a legal immigrant.

MacDonald has much more dispiriting news at the link, and although she tries hard to find strands of hope to which we might cling one cannot escape the conclusion that in a couple of decades California will have gone from one of the most prosperous regions in the world to a third world basket case.

Anyone interested in sociology or in America's future will want to read her entire essay.

Reluctant Warrior

Andrew Breitbart passed away recently at the age of 43. He had a reputation as a "culture warrior" loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. The following was excerpted by the WSJ for its "Notables and Quotables" column. It was taken from his book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World. There's a lot of truth in it:

Make no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure to get its message out.

Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television. . . .

If the political left weren’t so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, overtaxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant — and if the political left weren’t hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family’s life — the truth is, I would not be in your life.

If the Democratic Party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, I wouldn’t be on the political map.

If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russerts and David Brinkleys, I wouldn’t have joined the fight. . . .

If America’s pop-cultural ambassadors like Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo didn’t come back from their foreign trips to tell us how much they hate us, if my pay cable didn’t highlight a comedy show every week that called me a racist for embracing constitutional principles and limited government, I wouldn’t be at Tea Parties screaming my love for this great, charitable, and benevolent country.

I am a reluctant cultural warrior.

May his work on behalf of human freedom and against statist ideology continue and prosper even as he takes a "sabbatical" from the effort.

Wheeling, Dealing, and Looking Venal

An article in the New York Post claims that President Obama has offered prime minister Netanyahu some interesting inducements to hold off on an attack on Iran:

The US offered to give Israel advanced weaponry -- including bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes -- in exchange for Israel's agreement not to attack Iranian nuclear sites, Israeli newspaper Maariv reported Thursday.

President Obama reportedly made the offer during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week.

Under the proposed deal, Israel would not attack Iran until 2013, after US elections in November this year. The newspaper cited unnamed Western diplomatic and intelligence sources.

If this is correct then it is a case of good news/bad news. It shows Iran that we are serious that negotiations have to work or else there'll be serious consequences. It also shows Israel that we're prepared to give them substantial support, but why is the initiation of hostilities tied to our elections?

If that part is true, if the president really is playing political games with what is potentially the most serious crisis since the Cuban Missile crisis in the early sixties, that would be disreputable. If negotiations are the right thing to do, if arming Israel is the right thing to do, if going to war with Iran is the right thing to do, then they're the right thing to do regardless of the president's political calendar.

Let's hope that the reference to our elections is incorrect and that Mr. Obama is a bigger and better man than to subordinate such momentous matters to his electoral fortunes.

Why Atheists Eat Their Own

Bryan Appleyard at The New Statesman is an agnostic who's growing increasingly perplexed at the intolerance he finds among his atheistic brethren. He tells the following tale:

Two atheists - John Gray and Alain de Botton - and two agnostics - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I - meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do math and people are afraid of math.

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists' temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.

“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts," wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. "You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy." Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.

There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, "You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die."

De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. "To say something along the lines of 'I'm an atheist; I think religions are not all bad' has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?"

I think the answer to this question is that it's a symptom of insecurity. Any group that believes it must crush dissenters is a group which lacks confidence in their own belief system. They fear disagreement because they fear that they've committed themselves and their lives to a noetic structure that simply cannot withstand scrutiny and rational analysis. Rather than give up their beliefs they seek to shield them from challenge. We see this today both in the Muslim world and among atheists.

Appleyard goes on to analyze the "New Atheism":

First, a definition. By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the "perverse kind of secular" believer, who wants to "wipe religion from the public sphere" on principle.

“Why," she asks me, "are the followers of reason so unreasonable?"

Because deep down they suspect their life has been invested in an error, they feel it all slipping away and they're desperate to convince themselves that they've been right all along. The more voices on their own side who raise questions about their beliefs the more their confidence is shaken. They cannot tolerate a discordant note lest the whole fragile edifice of atheism topple over. Heretics must be reviled and excommunicated as an example to others who might stray from the consensus orthodoxy. As Appleyard says in his closing sentence:

There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

There's much more in Appleyard's essay. Check it out at the link.

Fatal Tweet

Two stories circulating in the news illustrate the horrific oppression that exists in so much of the Islamic world, and neither of them have to do with the massacres taking place in Syria. Two men are about to lose their lives in state executions, the first because he's a Christian pastor who converted from Islam at the age of nineteen and is refusing to have his children indoctrinated in Islam, and the second is a young Saudi who was insufficiently reverential toward the Prophet.

Yousef Nadarkhani is a young pastor condemned to death in Iran on the charge of apostasy. It may seem odd, given the thousands of people condemned to die in Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world every day, but Nadarkhani's case has attracted world-wide attention.

Here's a news summary of his case which provides a note of hope:

Hamza Kashgari's predicament is less well-known. The Washington Times brings us up to speed:

Hamza Kashgari is a 23-year-old journalist who wrote for the daily al-Bilad in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 4, the observance of Muhammad’s birthday, Mr. Kashgari sent out three tweets expressing what he would say if he met Islam’s founder.

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you,” the first read. “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more,” went the second. The third tweet said, “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

In the West mixed expressions of praise and doubt are unremarkable, but in more enlightened climes like Saudi Arabia they can cost you your life.

The messages immediately caused controversy. Some welcomed and retweeted them, but thousands more angry Saudis called for Mr. Kashgari’s head for supposedly insulting Muhammad. He deleted the offending messages but soon lost his job. Last week, he attempted to flee to safety in New Zealand but was intercepted as he tried to pass through the Muslim country of Malaysia and whisked back to Saudi Arabia in a private jet. He is being held incommunicado in Jeddah while a prosecutor collects evidence to bring a case against him for “disrespecting God” and “insulting the prophet.” A conviction on either charge could bring the death penalty.

Freedom of thought is a capital crime in the Saudi kingdom. On Monday, Sheikh Saleh bin Fowzan Al Fowzan of the supreme committee of scholars in Saudi Arabia said, “We should first verify that this man did insult … Muhammad in his article on Twitter … if verified, then he must be killed.” There are reports that those who expressed public support for Mr. Kashgari’s message also could face the same charges; even a retweet could lead to the chopping block.

This is not merely a Saudi internal affair. When an Islamic theocracy may execute someone for a tweet, it’s an affront to humanity. “I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom,” Mr. Kashgari said shortly before his arrest. “I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights - the freedom of expression and thought - so nothing was done in vain.” These words may be his epitaph.

Those of us who value our right to freely express our opinion about whatever matters we choose without having to fear the state's wrath should thank God every day that we live in a time and in a country which places a high value on freedom of speech. Much of the world throughout much of the last fifteen hundred years has not. We should also keep in mind that those who want to execute Nadarkhani and Kashgari want to spread their theocracy around the globe and will use whatever means they can to accomplish it.

At the moment there are movements afoot to insinuate sharia law into the courts of Europe and even in the U.S. It's a step toward the imprisonment of our minds, toward holding them hostage to religious beliefs that seem alien, incomprehensible, and false. It's not at all a stretch to say that if we are apathetic or uninformed about that threat our children and grandchildren could well grow up in an America in which it is not merely impolite or vulgar to speak ill of religiously revered figures, but an act which could get one fined, imprisoned, or even killed.

Pale Blue Dot

Adam has passed along a video which illustrates a speech (heard in the audio) given by the late astronomer Carl Sagan over two decades ago. Sagan offers a great perspective on the smallness and meaninglessness of life on earth from the standpoint of a naturalistic metaphysics.

He once declared that the cosmos is "all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." If that's so, then, as this video illustrates, life on earth really is a pointless, insignificant, "tale told by an idiot."

In the speech, Sagan opines that a proper understanding of our place in the universe rids us of the pretension that we are somehow what it's all about. The universe is so old and vast, and life on earth is so recent, and earth is so tiny, just a pale, blue dot, that it's ludicrous to think that somehow we are at the center of it all, or so Sagan believed.

His argument was plausible thirty years ago, perhaps, but it's much less so now. There've been so many discoveries in the last couple of decades which point to a universe which seems to be exquisitely and intentionally designed to allow life to exist somewhere in it that it seems as if Sagan's pessimism is quite unwarranted. Moreover, the vast size and age of the universe appear to be precisely what must be the case in order for life to exist anywhere in it.

In order for all the elements needed for life to be formed stars must go through a cycle of birth and death, crushing protons together in the unimaginable heat and pressure of the stellar cores to form elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron and a hundred others. Then, when the star explodes at the end of its life, those elements are strewn across the vast stretches of space until they cool and form a planet like earth. These elements are crucial to life, but the life cycle of stars takes billions of years, and all during that time the universe is expanding. Thus, in order to form the elements needed for life to exist the universe has to be as old as it is and therefore as big as it is.

There's good reason to think, pace Sagan, that the universe, so far from being a fortuitous accident, is actually deliberately made for us and that we really do, in some sense, inhabit its ontological center.

When Race Hatred Doesn't Matter

A terrible hate crime occurred recently in Kansas City and surprisingly there's not much about it in the national media. It turns out two white teenagers set a black kid on fire causing him to have 1st degree burns to his face and possible eye and lung damage.

"They rushed him on the porch as he tried to get the door open," the boy's mother told a local news station. "(One of them) poured the gasoline, then flicked the Bic, and said, 'This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, black boy.'"

I would have thought that Al (Sharpton) and Jesse (Jackson) would have been all over this case, demanding justice for the injured boy and that the media would be conducting their usual meditation on the sick soul of racist, violent white America. But so far there's been nothing.

What? It was two black kids that set a white kid on fire? It was a white kid who was told he was getting what he deserved when the gasoline was lit?

Oh, okay, I guess that explains the silence from Al, Jesse, et al. Racial violence is horrifying only when the racists are white and the victims are black. When it's the other way around it's really no big deal. White victims are just "getting what they deserve."

Acceptable and Unacceptable Misogyny

Kirsten Powers, who is, it must be noted at the outset, a liberal Democrat at The Daily Beast, puts Rush Limbaugh's recent gender gaucheries into perspective. When such transgressions against decency occur on the right they're considered to be crimes against women everywhere, and the offender is all but committed to the flames. When they occur on the left, which they do with alarming frequency, the somnolent media slumbers contentedly.

Here's the heart of Powers' fine essay:

Let it be shouted from the rooftops that Rush Limbaugh should not have called Ms. Fluke a slut or, as he added later, a “prostitute” who should post her sex tapes. It’s unlikely that his apology will assuage the people on a warpath for his scalp, and after all, why should it? He spent days attacking a woman as a slut and prostitute and refused to relent. Now because he doesn’t want to lose advertisers, he apologizes. What’s in order is something more like groveling—and of course a phone call to Ms. Fluke—if you ask me.

But if Limbaugh’s actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.

Chris Matthews’s sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide. Over the years he has referred to the former first lady, senator and presidential candidate and current secretary of state as a “she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” and “Madame Defarge.” Matthews has also called Clinton “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” and once claimed she won her Senate seat only because her “husband messed around.” He asked a guest if “being surrounded by women” makes “a case for commander in chief—or does it make a case against it?” At some point Matthews was shamed into sort of half apologizing to Clinton, but then just picked up again with his sexist ramblings.

Matthews has wondered aloud whether Sarah Palin is even “capable of thinking” and has called Bachmann a “balloon head” and said she was “lucky we still don’t have literacy tests out there.” Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, who is the former president of the Women’s Media Center, told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in 2011 that Matthews “is a bully, and his favorite target is women.” So why does he still have a show? What if his favorite target was Jews? Or African-Americans?

But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC.

Powers gives the specifics of Maher's comments as well as those of liberal commentator Matt Taibbi, but the remarks she quotes from them are too obscene to put on Viewpoint. It says something, I guess, when relatively modest standards of decency prevent one from quoting what some prominent liberals have said about women.

Nevertheless, just as a man who weighs 700 lbs. would do well to refrain from criticizing others for being fat, the left would do well to refrain from criticizing Rush Limbaugh for misogyny.

Here's an interview with Powers on her column:

It's worth noting that three of the men Powers talks about in the interview and in her column are current or former hosts on MSNBC's prime-time line up. That tells us a lot about MSNBC, I suppose.

It also says something that nine of Limbaugh's sponsors have dropped him, but none of Maher's or MSNBC's sponsors dropped any of these execrable gentlemen. Why not? Evidently some misogyny is acceptable and some is not. It all depends on your politics.

The President's Iran Policy

In principle it's hard to argue against the President's Iranian policy which grows out of his desire to make war a last resort. He wants Israel to postpone an attack on Iran until diplomacy and sanctions have had a chance to work. The problem is that it seems a case of too little too late. The severest sanctions don't kick in until June.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have invested billions of dollars, enormous prestige, and fifteen years in developing a nuclear weapon. They see themselves as just a few months away from achieving their goal. For them to say at this point that, okay, we'll stop building a bomb that will enable us to destroy Israel and intimidate the world would be like a marathon runner far ahead of the field in the Olympics deciding to quit ten yards short of the finish line. It's hard to believe that they're now going to back off just because the infidels impose a few inconveniences, especially when they can turn to the Russians and the Chinese for enough assistance to push them across the line.

The problem with the president's policy, other than it allows the Iranians to buy more time to make destroying their nuclear facilities both harder and costlier, is that it may have generated two unfortunate consequences.

First, some commentators have suggested that a deal has been struck with Iran to stay out of Syria. The Iranians have made it a precondition for negotiations, this theory goes, that we not interfere with Bashar Assad's systematic slaughter of his people. If so, it would explain our willingness to sit by and watch the citizens of Hom get blown to pieces by Syrian tanks even though we launched attacks against Libya with far, far less provocation.

Secondly, our dilatory approach toward Iran has, according to some sources, deeply angered the Saudis who loathe the Iranian regime and want us to end it. The Saudis, these sources say, are allowing oil prices to rise as a means of pressuring Mr. Obama who sees high fuel costs to be one of the gravest threats to his reelection. Attack Iran, the Saudis seem to be saying, or face $6.00 per gallon gas by November and almost certain defeat at the polls.

I'm not saying that either of these are true, but they do have a certain logic and the first seems to be an open secret in Western capitals.

At any rate, I think that, given what little we know, the president is so far probably doing the right thing in making sure that war comes only after all other options have been exhausted. At least I think he should be given the benefit of the doubt. I'm not at all optimistic, however, that sanctions will deter the Iranians, and as Tehran grows closer to developing a nuclear weapon, or to making their development facilities impregnable to attack, Mr. Obama is going to have to switch to other options or acquiesce in a nuclearized Iran and all the danger that entails.

If he does that he'll be seen as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.

Gooses and Ganders

There's an interesting development in the contretemps over Rush Limbaugh's recent intemperate and inexcusable name-calling. Recall that Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" after her testimony before Congress in which she bemoaned the fact that it's really hard for students to afford birth control while meeting all their other financial obligations and calling for insurance companies to essentially subsidize their social lives.

Limbaugh subsequently apologized to Fluke but now DNC Chair congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is criticizing Mitt Romney for not rebuking Rush Limbaugh. On Meet the Press Sunday morning Wasserman-Schultz said:

The bottom line is, the leading candidate on the Republican side for president couldn’t even bring himself to call Rush Limbaugh’s comments outrageous and call him out and ask him to apologize.

The irony - maybe irony isn't a strong enough word to describe this - is this: Last spring left-wing talk show host Ed Schultz (no relation to the congresswoman as far as I know), a big supporter of President Obama, twice gratuitously called another talk show host, Laura Ingraham, a slut.

Has Debbie Wasserman Schultz demanded that President Obama condemn Ed Schultz? Why, no, of course not. Why should he be expected to do that? Repudiating their supporters is only something Republicans should be required to do. Here's Mr. Schultz:

Ms Wasserman-Schultz would have a lot more credibility if she demanded of Mr. Obama what she's demanding of Mr. Romney. Don't hold your breath, though.

Mauling on Meet the Press

There seems to be a conscious effort in the media to portray the brouhaha over contraception as an attempt by Republicans to make birth control illegal. No one in the GOP is talking about banning contraception or preventing women from paying for it. The President injected it into the discussion by mandating that Catholic institutions would be required to violate their consciences and principles to see to it that it's covered in the health care plans they provide their employees.

Ever since then, the media has taken every opportunity to mislead their listeners by asking Republicans why they're opposed to women having birth control. The clear implication is that the GOP wants to take birth control away from women when in fact all they want is for the state to stay out of the church.

The media and the Democrats see their tactic as a double winner. Not only can they discredit Republicans in the eyes of women voters but they can also distract the nation from the very serious problems we're facing during the Obama presidency.

David Gregory sought to run the same play against Newt Gingrich during Sunday morning's Meet the Press show. Unfortunately for the hapless Mr. Gregory Newt Gingrich is not Mitt Romney. Here's a transcript of the resulting wreckage courtesy of Newsmax:

Gregory: I have to ask you about access to contraception. I realize it’s not at the core of your stump speech, but it is a debate that is certainly highly charged here in Washington and in Congress and on the airwaves. How much damage has this done?

Gingrich: I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the president’s apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion-dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of the week.

There’s no debate about access to contraception. There is a debate, which Cardinal George of Chicago has pointed out is a war against the Catholic Church. You do have this weird situation where President Obama apologizes to Islamic extremists while waging war against the Catholic Church. That’s the language, by the way, of the Catholic bishops. You have an issue here of whether the government can coerce the Catholic Church not just into contraception but into sterilization and abortion, something I don’t find any reporter wants to talk about.

You have a president who voted for infanticide as a state senator, who represents the most extreme, pro-abortion position in America, so if you want to have a dialogue about this, David, let’s set the record straight. Barack Obama as a state senator voted to allow doctors to kill babies if they survived the abortion. Barack Obama, as president, in the most radical, anti-religious move made by any president, is trying to coerce the Catholic Church at a time when he’s been told by the bishops . . . they would have to give up every single hospital, they would have to give up every single university and college associated with the church because he is asking them to violate their religious beliefs.

If you want a debate over whether or not the president of the United States should be able to impose his views on a religious institution, and whether America’s now a secular country, let’s have that debate.

Gregory: Can I just get to my question? Do you think it was harmful that Limbaugh, certainly an influential voice in the conservative grassroots, and you well know that, was it appropriate for him to apologize? Do you think he’s done damage to the debate that you’re now getting into?

Gingrich: I think it was appropriate for Rush to apologize. I am glad he apologized. Do you think the president owes an apology to all the men and women in uniform who he frankly abandoned when he apologized to religious fanatics in Afghanistan? What’s your opinion, David? Should the president have apologized to the men and women in uniform that he abandoned?

Gregory: Well, I’m going to continue with my questions, so . . .

Gingrich: Because if you want to get into a discussion about apologies, I’m happy to discuss it.

Gregory: So my question, though, is you want the other side to appreciate your view, which is that this is a religious liberty question at the heart of this access to contraception. Can you appreciate the view of those who disagree with you? That this is an attack on women’s rights? That’s their view. Reproductive rights? Access to contraception? And in the extreme, that it’s some sort of war on women? Do you appreciate that view at all?

Gingrich: Nobody’s blocking anyone from having access to contraception. No one. The young lady who testified can get access to contraception. Nobody said she couldn’t. The question is should a Catholic institution, or for that matter, the Ohio Christian University, which is a Protestant institution, which is a very pro-life institution, which is now being told it will have to pay for abortion pills.

Now, should a Protestant fundamentalist institution be dictated to by Washington politicians over whether or not it can have its own religious beliefs, or have we become a country where it’s okay to go to church on Sunday morning for one hour, but let’s not actually express those beliefs the rest of the week.

This is the most fundamental assault on religious liberty in American history despite every effort by the elite media to distort what it’s not. It’s not about access to contraception. People who want to can get access to contraception every day. That young lady can get access to contraception. It is a question about whether or not a religiously affiliated institution should be coerced by the federal government.

Gregory: So it seems to me this — in your view — this is actually a pretty fundamental issue. You just don’t like the framing of it, but the fact that it gets raised is something that you think will certainly get you animated. You think it’s certainly going to energize a lot of voters on both sides of the aisle.

Gingrich: I don’t like the framing because I think the framing was false. That young lady has access to contraception every day. There’s no place in America where it’s illegal to go get contraception. What the question is, is should a religiously affiliated institution be required to provide abortion pills? Should they be required to provide sterilization?

Remember, the Obama rule was a lot more than just contraception, and by the way, Mitt Romney was on the wrong side of this issue in Massachusetts, where he instructed that Catholic hospitals would be required to issue abortion pills against their religious beliefs. This is a very serious fundamental fight about religious liberty.

The exchange between Gregory and Gingrich reminded me of a story last December about a street hoodlum who thought he'd mug a guy who turned out to be a mixed martial arts fighter. The thug wound up getting mauled. Gregory probably knows what the guy felt like.

Young, Jobless, and Deep in Debt

Patrice Hill at The Washington Times has an article to which many readers of Viewpoint will relate:

Nicholas Rastenis has been through the wringer. After getting a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale University in 2008, he expected to land a job at a top design firm. But nearly four years later, after many months of joblessness, austerity and anxiety, his ambitions in life have come down quite a bit.

Today, the Chicago resident toils at a photo lab at a major drugstore chain for $9 an hour and no benefits, using few of his creative design skills and earning only a fraction of what he once thought he could command. Still, he has had some designing gigs on the side, and he is glad to at least have a full-time job — any job — after years of doing without.

Mr. Rastenis, like many others of his generation, is a prime victim of the Great Recession. By most measures, he and his compatriots in their teens, 20s and early 30s bore the brunt of the worst job market in modern times. Even with slow economic improvement in the past two years, these so-called “Millennials” remain unemployed and underemployed at the highest rates of any group.

“It’s been a very hard road,” said Mr. Rastenis, who has taken jobs such as bike-cabbing and waiting tables to make ends meet while trying to land a full-time position in his profession.

“I’m doing things I never thought I’d be doing. I’m starting to question why I went to college. I could have done these jobs out of high school,” he said. “And not having an apartment or anything else … I’m miserable.”

Mr. Rastenis knows he’s not alone. It seems nearly everyone he knows in his age group is facing similar problems. “Nobody in the age range 20 to 35 are where they want to be right now,” he said.

Federal statistics as well as various opinion polls and studies bear him out. Joblessness among Americans ages 18 to 29, the Millennials, is at the highest levels since the U.S. Labor Department started keeping records.

The 15.8 percent unemployment rate for this group is nearly twice the national average. For those ages 16 to 19, the jobless rate is closer to 25 percent, and even for people 29 to 34, it’s closer to 10 percent — well above the 8.3 percent national unemployment rate.

The unemployment statistics represents only the tip of the iceberg. Millions of young people have delayed entering the workforce by staying in school, or they stopped looking for work so they aren’t included in the unemployment statistics. Millions of others have accepted short-term or seasonal work without benefits, and some are working without pay in hopes that it will land them a job.

The woes in the job market have fed an ocean of other heartaches and difficulties, including postponed marriages and childbearing, homelessness and having to live for years with parents who expected to be moving toward empty nests and retirement. A poll last year by Generation Opportunity, a Millennial group, found that 77 percent of Millennials are postponing major life changes, such as buying a home, getting married, starting a family and paying off student loans, because they can’t find good jobs.

There's much more on this at the link. The article doesn't mention it, but there seem to be two diametrically opposed sets of needs in play. In order to solve the social security problem we'll almost certainly have to raise the age of full retirement which means that older Americans will be holding onto their jobs longer at the very time when younger Americans need those jobs to open up so that they have a chance at them.

Also, in the past many employment opportunities were available in the public sector, but with state, local, and federal governments all cinching their belts, a lot of those have dried up and those there are are filled by people who aren't going to be willing to leave them in the current climate.

Our local school district, for example, is hiring only one new teacher for every two, or even three, retirees. The president, meanwhile, has proposed that the military cut troop levels by tens of thousands, which will make it tough for the young unemployed to use the service as a fallback as they often did in the past.

Add to these woes climbing gas prices and the prospect of much higher taxes when Obamacare kicks in, both of which dampen any enthusiasm businesses might have to expand their workforces, and, all in all, it's a tough time to be a young person.

Rush to Fluke: Sorry

Rush Limbaugh has apologized - sort of - to Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke for calling her a "slut" and a "prostitute" on his show the other day. He should have apologized sooner. It wasn't until several of his biggest sponsors withdrew their sponsorship that he realized he was in a no-win situation brought about largely by his own arrogance.

Fluke was testifying before an ad hoc congressional committee about the need to require insurance companies, or someone, to underwrite birth control for Georgetown's law students because they simply can't afford to finance their active sex lives themselves. This is, of course, absurd, and if Limbaugh had simply focused on the ridiculousness of students expecting to have their sex lives paid for by others he would have done a fine public service, but he chose to go further and make it personal, suggesting that the degrading epithets mentioned above applied to Fluke herself.

It needs be noted that Fluke made it clear that she wasn't talking about herself but was instead pleading for women with whom she was in contact in her role as a women's advocate. So, for Limbaugh to suggest that Fluke wanted to be paid to have sex was unfair, unkind, slanderous, and not a little sleazy.

It's a shame, too, because the expectation that others should compensate women for their recreational choices does indeed need to be publicly scrutinized, but it can be done without smearing people no matter how silly their arguments might be.

Anyway, here's the audio of Rush's remarks:

The report of Rush's apology can be found here, and here's video of the Fluke testimony which precipitated Limbaugh's contumely:

Rush will probably weather the storm but only if he avoids similar lapses of judgment in the future. If he doesn't he'll find it awfully hard to find sponsors to pay for advertising time and equally hard to keep affiliate stations who don't want to put up with the controversy.

What Is Consciousness?

Philosopher Colin McGinn of the University of Miami has some interesting things to say about consciousness in a column at New Statesman. He begins with a short summary of the philosophical problems consciousness poses:

The central defining property of the mind is consciousness, so philosophy of mind is concerned with the existence and nature of consciousness: what is consciousness, why does it exist, how is it related to the body and brain, and how did it come into existence?

These are big, difficult questions. Focus on your current state of consciousness - your experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, willing, and so on - and ask yourself what kind of being this consciousness is, what its function might be, how it is related to the activity of cells in your brain, what could have brought it about in the course of evolution. Allow yourself to feel the attendant puzzlement, the sense of bafflement: now you are doing philosophy of mind.

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, pan­psychist and mysterianist. The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion.

This view is clearly absurd, a form of madness even, and anyway refutes itself since even an illusion is the presence of an experience (it certainly seems to me that I am conscious). There are some who purport to hold this view but they are a tiny (and tinny) minority: they are sentient beings loudly claim­ing to be mindless zombies.

After discussing a few more problems with eliminativism McGinn offers his assessment of dualism, and here I think he's a bit off the mark:

The dualist, by contrast, freely admits that consciousness exists, as well as matter, holding that reality falls into two giant spheres. There is the physical brain, on the one hand, and the conscious mind, on the other: the twain may meet at some point but they remain distinct entities. Dualism may be of substances, properties, or even whole universes, but its thrust is that the conscious mind is a thing apart from, and irreducible to, anything that goes on in the body.

Dualism proposes to give the mind its ontological due but the problem is that it has difficulties organising a rendezvous between the two spheres: how does the mind affect the brain and the brain the mind? Whence the systematic correlation and interaction? And how did the mind come to exist, if not by dint of cerebral upsurges? Dualism makes the mind too separate, thereby precluding intelligible interaction and dependence.

Well, no, not really. Dualists look at the relation of the mind to the brain something like the relationship of the wi-fi signal to a computer. The image on the computer's screen (a downloaded movie, for example) depends upon both the computer and the signal. Neither by itself is able to generate the image on the screen, and just as any alteration in either produces an alteration in the image so, too, any alteration in either the mind or the brain produces an alteration in our mental experience. Dualism sees the two, mind and brain, as tightly integrated though ontologically distinct.

Moreover, the objection that it's difficult to see exactly how the mind and brain could interact is no impediment to believing that they do any more than the difficulty in seeing how gravitational force acts on an object to pull it down is also an impediment to believing that it does. Indeed, science cannot explain how any of the fundamental forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear or the weak nuclear - actually cause the effects they do, but that's not considered an impediment to accepting that they nevertheless do cause those effects.

I also think McGinn's critique of idealism falls a little short. He writes that:

At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion - we merely hallucinate brains. The universe is just one vast spirit, or perhaps a population of the same, consisting of nothing but free-floating consciousness, unencumbered and serene. Stars and planets are just perturbations in this cosmic sensorium.

As an imaginative fancy, idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit? Where did consciousness come from, if not from pre-existing matter? Did God just create centres of consciousness ab initio, with nothing material in the vicinity? Is my body just a figment of my imagination?

If being an idealist requires a "maniacal antipathy toward matter" then at least some modern physicists are maniacs. Physics is showing that matter is, at bottom, a kind of illusion. If you go to this site and scroll all the way to the very smallest sizes it turns out that all there is, all that matter consists in, is unbelievably tiny vibrating wisps of energy. Solid matter is simply an illusion that results from us perceiving the world on the scale of size we do.

If that's so then "matter" really is somehow a construct of our minds, or at least a construct of some mind. One of the most famous idealists, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (d.1753), thought the material world was pretty much an idea in the mind of God.

McGinn finishes with a discussion of both panpsychism and the view he prefers, what he calls mysterianism. It's all pretty interesting and you might want to take a couple of minutes to read it.

Familiar Road

Back in the 1960s it was argued that a developing child isn't really a person until it reaches viability and that a woman should be permitted to abort up to that point.

In the 70s personhood was deemed to arrive at the moment of birth, and then it was set at the moment at which the entire child is outside the mother's body. Any time before that moment the child could be killed.

Then in the 90s people like philosopher Peter Singer argued that the baby really isn't a person until it can anticipate the future and have wants and desires for the future. All others, in Singer's view, are non-persons.

Now Singer's argument has gone mainstream. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue in the Journal of Medical Ethics that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. These academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Julian Savulescu, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing it and claimed that those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

I certainly don't condone death threats, but I have to say that Savulescu has an odd view of what constitutes a "liberal society." A liberal society is one which protects the rights of the weakest of its members. There's nothing liberal (in the classical sense) about seeking to justify infanticide and laying the philosophical groundwork for killing others who don't fit an arbitrary definition of personhood.

The report on all this is written by Stephen Adams for the Telegraph. Adams states that:

In the [Journal] article, entitled After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?, the authors argued that, “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Giubilini and Minerva define a person as “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.”

Since there's no significant difference between a newborn and a fetus, and since we feel free to kill a fetus if we so choose, we should also be free to kill a newborn, or so the argument goes.

I happen to think Giubilini and Minerva are right that there's no significant difference between a fetus and a newborn, but quite the opposite conclusion could be, and perhaps should be, drawn from this: Since it's illegal to kill a newborn and since there's no difference between a newborn and a fetus, it should also be illegal to kill a fetus.

Referring to the outraged mail and death threats Savulescu says:

This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.

This surely should win some sort of prize for irony. Isn't killing on the basis of their own moral certainty precisely what the authors of the article are advocating? They're presuming to have moral certainty concerning the personhood of the infant and on that basis they're advocating the right to kill it.

If we're going to adopt arbitrary definitions of "persons" perhaps we should define a person as someone who holds to a high view of human life and dignity. We could thereupon declare the authors of "After-birth Abortion" to be non-persons and thus subject to being the recipients themselves of an after-birth abortion. Would the Journal of Medical Ethics publish such an article, do you suppose?

Savulescu defends the writers by declaring that what they propose is not novel among ethicists:

What these young colleagues are spelling out is what would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new.

He's certainly right about that. This isn't new. Progressives and fascists have been advocating infanticide for almost a century now, but he's wrong about this being the endpoint. History teaches us that it's in fact only the midpoint. Once we accept killing born children there's no place on the slippery slope we can stop. Next it will be mental and physical defectives, then the elderly, then criminals, the indigent, Republicans, anyone who is deemed undesirable.

We've been down this road before. It leads to the holocaust. Apparently people like the folks at the Journal of Medical Ethics don't much care.

The Statist Mentality

What happens when government knows best? Stuff like this:

I don't want to give the impression that I think government has no role to play in our polity. Nor do I pretend to know precisely where the line should be drawn to keep government from obtruding upon our personal lives and infringing upon our freedoms.

I do think, though, that if the government can inspect little girls' lunches in North Carolina, tell them that their mommies aren't preparing their lunches correctly, and make them pay the cost of a "proper meal," or if it can scare the bejabbers out of a family over a crayon drawing, as in the above case in Canada, then the government has stepped well over that line.

Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

Andrew Breitbart, an enormous presence on the web, died suddenly last night at the age of 43. He was behind a number of exposés of organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood and as such he earned the enmity of the left.

Sadly, it seems that when one earns the enmity of the left you can expect them to get pretty nasty, but when someone dies, even someone they don't much like, decent people look for the good to say about the person or they just keep quiet. Not the commenters at this site, however.

Breitbart was someone's son, husband, and father. To thank God that he's dead is cruel and disgusting. For people to be joyful at a political opponent's death is disgraceful, but I guess that's the point to which we have sunk. When people believe that character no longer matters there'll no longer be many people who have much character.

Beelzebub

Rick Santorum has given our secular elites a case of the vapors with his claim in a chapel address to a group of Catholic students at Ave Maria college in Florida four years ago that Satan is targeting America. Millions of Americans believe that Satan is a real being, but the good folks at MSNBC, CNN and other liberal precincts are scandalized that someone would actually be so gauche as to actually say it.

To listen to the huffing, sniffing, and tut-tutting going on one would think that Santorum was the first politician to give voice to a belief in Beelzebub in private speech, but he's surely not. He is, though, a Republican and that apparently makes a significant difference even if one is hard put to discern why, exactly, it should.

I'll bet Lucifer was a topic for discussion in Jimmy Carter's Sunday School classes in his church in Plains, Georgia over the years, and that President Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright preached on the devil in some of his fiery sermons, even if he does think that the devil is the white man. More recently, congresswoman Maxine Waters identified John Boehner and Eric Cantor, two more white men, as "demons" so presumably Ms Waters holds demonological opinions which she has doubtless gleaned from years of careful Bible study on the subject.

So why do Santorum's views, views which he shares with both Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict, Mother Teresa, many theologians, and the very founders of the world's great monotheistic religions, make him derisory? Why is Republican Santorum a fanatic for believing that there is a literal Satan, but Democrat Jimmy Carter was not?

Okay, I guess I just answered my own question.