Universal Coverage, Substandard Care

Kerri Toloczko has a piece in the Washington Times that compares our current health care system to the Canadian system which Obamacare will soon approximate. Her story is about an elderly family member named Martin who lived under the Canadian system for thirty years before finally heading south for the States. Martin's story is intended to illustrate that where health care is "free" and universal it's woefully substandard:

"Martin" is an American who lived in Canada for 30 years under the Maple Leaf version of Obamacare. In 2011, Martin and his family became increasingly concerned about access to care for the octogenarian, and he fled "free" health care in favor of a system that requires payment for health services and actually provides them.

Martin always saw the biggest problems with universal health care as diminished access and long waits. But after visiting multiple specialists and an easily accessed American geriatric internist (nationwide, Canada has fewer than 190 geriatricians), Martin learned the real problem was quality. As he received care in America and talked with his doctors, he quickly grew weary of hearing the phrase "well below the standard of care" in reference to his Canadian health care history for issue after health issue. The phrase incensed his loved ones.

I know - I am one of them.

Martin was fortunate to have had a family physician in Canada - 20 percent of Canadians do not, and it is nearly impossible for new patients to find one. The average wait to see a specialist in Canada is five months.

For years, Martin had suffered falls with serious injuries, including facial and rib fractures. His family doctor in Canada had done nothing to investigate the cause. When his family, who suspected Parkinson's, insisted he see a Canadian specialist, he waited 11 months for a neurologist who also did nothing to diagnose or treat the problem. After waiting two days for an appointment with a neurologist in Virginia, Martin was diagnosed with Parkinsonian Syndrome and provided medications. Falls are down from weekly to only three in the last year.

In Canada, Martin was told he had kidney cysts, but was never given a sonogram - a procedure with an average eight-month wait. His Virginia nephrologist (next-day appointment) told Martin he needed one. Martin asked, "How long will it take to get that?" Looking perplexed, the physician answered, "about three minutes," pointing to the machine in the corner of his exam room.

After his American gastroenterologist reviewed his medical records, he informed Martin that he had not had the regular colonoscopies in Canada as he had been led to believe. Instead, Martin had sigmoidoscopies, which are inadequate in detecting colon cancer, but cheaper. Again he heard that this was "below the standard of care." The average wait for a colonoscopy in Canada is 16 weeks with 7,000 patients waiting for one on any given day. In the United States, Martin waited four days.

The American ophthalmologist looked in Martin's eyes and exclaimed, "Who the hell is your eye doctor? You should sue him!" His Canadian ophthalmologist refused to release Martin's records; the American doctor was sure she knew why. Martin has now had one standard cataract surgery and another delicate one requiring a subspecialist because his cataracts went untreated for so long.

The wait for cataract surgery in Canada is 16 weeks, except for seniors, for whom it appears to be forever.

Martin had a serious eye infection in 2008, causing burning pain, itching and redness, eventually infecting one side of his face. A Canadian clinician told him to wash it with baby soap. His family doctor told him to get an appointment with the dermatologist (average wait three to six months.) When Martin arrived for a visit in Virginia, a doctor at a local urgent care facility (30-minute wait) gave Martin oral and topical medication for what was determined to be a staph infection. Within 48 hours, his months of agony ended.

As a health care policy analyst, I have often compared the American free-market health care system with Canada's government-run plan. Numbers relating to wait times, rationing and substandard care are staggering. Personal anecdotes are heartbreaking.

After pointing out that Obamacare will give us a similar government-run system Toloczko finishes with this:

America has the best health care system in the world, but a dysfunctional coverage system. Canada and the United Kingdom have universal coverage and rationed, substandard care. Which would you rather have?

Good question. What I'd like to know is how typical Martin's experience is for Canadians, or people living in the U.K. Perhaps some of our readers from these precincts will share their thoughts with us on this.

Magnetite and Migration

Investigators have long believed that fish, birds and other migrating creatures oriented themselves along the earth's magnetic field and that they used magnetite crystals to aid in the process, but it was never clear how this was done. Now scientists have isolated the cells in anadromous trout that contain the mineral and are making headway in solving the riddle of how the earth's magnetism effects the crystals and how that interaction translates into instructions from the brain as to the direction in which the animal should move.

I wonder if they'll also make headway in explaining how such a system could have evolved by unguided forces and random mutations in most of the major phyla, but be employed by only some representatives of those phyla. Since, for example, not all butterflies or birds migrate do they all possess the magnetite system but only some of them use it, or do only some species in a taxon possess it? Whatever the answer, it raises the question why that should be.

Perhaps there's a compelling story of how this marvelous phenomenon could have evolved naturalistically. If so, I'd like to hear it.

Great News

This article pretty much speaks for itself. Let's hope that either what it tells us is not true or that Republicans gain the necessary electoral victory in November to kill this Affordable Care Act beast before we wind up having to wait six months before we can see a doctor to have a tumor diagnosed. Or maybe we should hope for both.

Here's the crux of the story:

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.

Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.

By 2025 the shortage will balloon to over 130,000, Len Marquez, the director of government relations at the American Association of Medical Colleges, told The Daily Caller.

“One of our primary concerns is that you’ve got an aging physician workforce and you have these new beneficiaries — these newly insured people — coming through the system,” he said. “There will be strains and there will be physician shortages.”

The DPMA found that many doctors do not believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will lead to better access to medical care for the majority of Americans, co-founder of the DPMA Kathryn Serkes told TheDC.

“Doctors clearly understand what Washington does not — that a piece of paper that says you are ‘covered’ by insurance or ‘enrolled’ in Medicare or Medicaid does not translate to actual medical care when doctors can’t afford to see patients at the lowball payments, and patients have to jump through government and insurance company bureaucratic hoops,” she said.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is famous for having fatuously pronounced during debate over the ACA that, "We have to pass the bill to see what's in it." Well, now that we've passed it and we're seeing what's in it, a lot of people are wondering what the heck we've gone and done.

Science and Blind Faith

In the course of a post on how scientists say some pretty peculiar things, Rabbi Moshe Averick quotes world reknown chemist Dr. George Whitesides of Harvard, expatiating on the problem of the origin of life (OOL):

The Origin of Life: This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth...How? I have no idea. Perhaps it was by the spontaneous emergence of 'simple' autocatalytic cycles and then by their combination. On the basis of all the chemistry that I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable. [emphasis mine]

So what's so peculiar about this? Imagine that a scientist were to say "Many theists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from an act of divine creation in the ancient Earth...How? I have no idea. Perhaps God simply spoke and cells appeared. On the basis of all the chemistry that I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable that naturalistic processes alone could account for it.

Neither Dr. Whitesides nor the hypothetical theist have any evidence to support his belief, yet the latter's belief is considered irrational blind faith while Whitesides' belief is considered proper science. Why? What's the difference?

The answer, of course, is that the latter resorts to supernatural explanations whereas the former doesn't, but perhaps supernatural explanations are the correct ones. Why rule them out a priori? And how is it proper science to hold a belief when there's no empirical evidence to support it? If it's blind faith to believe that the OOL was supernaturally caused, even though evidence for this is difficult to come by, why is it not also blind faith to believe that it happened naturalistically even though, as Whitesides implies, there's no evidence for it?

There's nothing wrong with continuing to search for natural explanations in science, in fact, it's proper, but there is something wrong with assuming that a non-natural explanation is not to be considered simply because it's non-natural. It reminds me of William James' famous dictum that "A rule of thinking that would prevent me from finding a truth, if that truth were really there, is an irrational rule."

Extremist Party

Stephen Hayward of The Weekly Standard writes a fine piece on the oft-heard charge that the GOP is now in the hands of extremist Tea Party types and is well outside the mainstream of American life. The charge is ridiculous on the face of it but made moreso by virtue of emanating from members of a political party whose iconic figures of the past would have a hard time being nominated to high office today:

The never-ending Democratic attempt to resurrect the strategy that destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964—he’s an extremist, don’t you know—rolls on, with liberals and the media trying to tar the Republican party as an “ideological outlier” in American politics.

There are three legs to this rickety barstool of an argument. One is the pseudo-social science findings of Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann that congressional Republican voting records have lurched sharply to the right in recent years (though it is not obvious why this should be bad news).

The second is the populism of the Tea Party, which, to be sure, is a disruptive force in the Republican party much as the anti-Vietnam war movement was a disruptive force in the Democratic party in the late 1960s and 1970s. The wobbliest leg of the triad is the argument, unfortunately abetted by Jeb Bush, that the GOP has become too extreme even for Ronald Reagan.

To see how silly this all is consider the charge of extremism and ask which party is it that has wandered far from its roots? Is it the party who wants to return to the policies of Reagan or the party whose most famous president would find himself persona non grata in many precincts of today's Democrat party?

Hayward explains why FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK would be more comfortable today as moderate Republicans than as Obama/Pelosi Democrats:

Start with Franklin Roosevelt. Despite his New Deal programs, he piled up a considerable record of statements that would be anathema to contemporary liberal orthodoxy. “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me,” he told Congress in 1935, “show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief .  .  . is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” A liberal can’t talk about our welfare state that way today.

FDR opposed public employee unions. In a 1937 letter to a public employees’ association, FDR wrote: “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. .  .  . Militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.”

FDR, an Episcopalian, made the kind of remarks about religion that send the American Civil Liberties Union into paroxysms of rage when someone like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin says the same thing today. During World War II, FDR wrote a preface for an edition of the New Testament that was distributed to American troops: “As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.” On the eve of the 1940 election, FDR said in a campaign radio address: “Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.” Today, the left-wing fever swamps would call this “Christianism.”

Environmentalists would stoutly oppose FDR because of his massive public works projects, such as the giant habitat-destroying dams on the Columbia River and in the Tennessee Valley. The car-haters of the left decry FDR for promoting urban sprawl and road-building. Historian James Flink wrote, “The American people could not have done worse in 1932 had they deliberately set out to elect a president who was ignorant of the implications of the automobile revolution.”

Hayward makes a similar case that Harry Truman and John Kennedy would also find themselves getting cold-shouldered by today's party. Both Democrats and Republicans have shifted leftward over the last fifty years. Republicans, however, are trying to paddle back to the traditional conservatism from whence they came, while Democrats are surging at full throttle toward the socialist nirvana. Yet Democrats, insouciently unaware of the silliness of the charge, are tagging the Republicans with the "extremist" label.

Here's a good rule of thumb: Whenever you hear liberals call anyone an "extremist" understand that by that word what they mean is "someone who disagrees with them."

Thanks to Jason for calling my attention to this article.

Complexity and Simplicity

A thread at Uncommon Descent addresses an argument that Richard Dawkins raises in his book The God Delusion viz. that if a cause must be at least as great as its effect, and if God is the cause of the complex design of living things, then God must be more complex than living things. So, if, as intelligent design advocates argue, complex information demands a designer then God must have an even more complex designer, which must also have a designer, ad infinitum.

This argument has been repeatedly refuted by far more capable people than me, but I'll take a shot at it anyway. The basic flaw is that those who employ the argument fail to understand what is meant by the term "God." For instance, complexity is a property of material objects or perhaps abstract ideas. God is neither of these. He's not the sort of being that has parts, as material objects do, nor is God, as opposed to the concept of God, an abstract idea. Thus, to impute complexity to him is a category mistake.

Moreover, God, as conceived by most philosophers of religion, is a being possessing maximal greatness. If such a being exists it would be a necessary, not a contingent, being. I.e. it would be a being which, unlike contingent entities, is not caused by any other being. If it were caused by something else it would not be maximally great. God, therefore, if he exists, is the ultimate cause of all being and is himself self-existent and uncaused. To speak, as Dawkins does, of a cause of an uncaused being is to indulge in incoherence.

But, even if one accepts Dawkins' argument that the cause of the world must itself have a cause the argument does little to advance the atheist's position. Since there is personality in the cosmos, at some point along the regress of the cosmos' causes it's reasonable to assume that there's one cause that itself possesses personality. Furthermore, there must be a cause in the regress that is extremely powerful (able to create worlds ex nihilo), extremely intelligent (in fact, a mathematical supergenius), personal, and transcendent.

That's not yet the God of traditional theism, perhaps, but it's very close. So close, in fact, that the atheist who posits this infinite series of causes in order to confute the intelligent design hypothesis must acknowledge that if such a regress exists it would make atheism pretty much untenable.

Is Science Becoming Less Ethical

The folks at Science Now raise the question, in light of a series of scandals involving the fudging and fabrication of data in scientific research, whether science researchers are becoming less ethical.

If I were asked, I'd frame the question somewhat differently. I would ask whether we are finding that practitioners of science, many of whom have forfeited any ground for thinking that there really is objective right and a wrong, are simply acting more consistently with their metaphysical amoralism.

When scientists one after another deny the existence of any transcendent basis for moral behavior, when they embrace a metaphysical naturalism that entails an amoralist view of the world, then why should we expect that they would hold themselves to arbitrary standards of conduct if violating those standards is in their self-interest?

Lest you think that I'm overstating the degree to which science (and philosophy) has abandoned such a basis let me offer just a few of the many quotes on the subject that could be adduced:

"What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Richard Dawkins

"[I had] been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.” Philosopher Joel Marks, An Amoral Manifesto

"For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel." Philosopher Richard Rorty.

"Truth (including moral truth) is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying." Philosopher Richard Rorty

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." Charles Darwin (Autobiography)

"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." Biologist E. O. Wilson and Philosopher Michael Ruse

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will...." Biologist Will Provine

“[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.” Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg

When people come to think this way it's just a short step to rationalizing otherwise unethical behavior if that behavior helps one gain tenure, grants, and prestige. In other words, scientific malfeasance is consistent with the naturalistic materialism held by many scientists. It's inconsistent only with the worldview of those scientists who've not succumbed to the modern infatuation with naturalism.

Tale of Two Scientists

The cover story in the current issue of Christianity Today is a fascinating description of the journey of two Christian biologists and how they have come to two very different conclusions about life's origin and diversification.

One of the men, Darrel Falk, is a theistic evolutionist who believes that the evolutionary process is the means by which God has created all of the forms of life we see today. The other, Todd Wood, is a special creationist who believes that the entire creation occurred within six days as described in the book of Genesis.

Reading their stories they both come across as sympathetic, sincere lovers of science who are trying to "think God's thoughts after Him." I wonder, though, why the author of the article, Tim Stafford, chose not to include a representative of the intelligent design movement in his piece.

Unlike special creation, ID takes no formal position on questions like who created life, how it was done, and how long it took. Their only claim is that whatever the answers to these questions might be it did not happen, contra the Darwinian naturalists, apart from intelligent agency.

Unlike theistic evolutionists, on the other hand, ID advocates argue that signs of intelligent agency permeate the created world, particularly in the enormous amounts of complex information contained in living cells as well as the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmic values and parameters which constitute the fabric of the universe.

All three agree, though, that whatever happened and however it happened, the notion that life is solely a result of blind, impersonal forces acting randomly over billions of years is simply and profoundly wrong.

In any case, there's a lot in Stafford's article and I encourage you to check it out.

Roberts' Incoherence

Byron York at the Washington Examiner explains in simple terms why Chief Justice Roberts' Obamacare decision last week is so difficult to parse.

After some helpful background York writes:

[I]t fell to the administration's lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to argue that no, the mandate was not a tax, and therefore the case was not subject to the Anti-Injunction Act [which forbids bringing a tax case to court before people start paying the tax].

At the same time, everyone knew that the next day, when Verrilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, he had as a backup the argument that it was also justified by Congress' power to levy taxes -- in other words, that it was a tax.

Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict right away.

"General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax," Alito said. "Tomorrow you are going to be back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?"

"No," answered Verrilli.

At the time, some observers found the whole thing a little boring; the real action would come the next day, when the court got to the question of whether the Commerce Clause could be stretched to include the individual mandate.

But a lot of those same observers were shocked on Thursday, when Chief Justice John Roberts, rejecting the Commerce Clause argument, agreed with Verrilli that the mandate simultaneously was and was not a tax, and that therefore Obamacare would stand. Roberts joined the court's four liberal justices, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, who seemed prepared to uphold Obamacare under any circumstances.

Roberts' sleight of hand drove his conservative colleagues nuts. "The government and those who support its position on this point make the remarkable argument that [the mandate] is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax for constitutional purposes," wrote dissenters Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. "That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."

After the ruling, Obamacare opponents pointed out the thousands of times the president and Democratic lawmakers had contended that the mandate penalty was not -- repeat, not -- a tax. But it no longer mattered.

So, in the opinion of Justice Roberts something can be both P and not-P at the same time. This seems to my unlawyerly mind to be a violation of fundamental logic, and it's hard to see how future legislatures and courts, in light of this precedent, will be prevented from calling a tax anything at all Congress imposes. Those who feel unconstrained by either logic or the Constitution are praising the result, but there may be a very high price to pay down the road for Roberts' expediency.

Evolving from Liberalism

Emily Smith at the Washington Times profiles psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt and his evolution from liberalism to conservatism. She begins her column this way:

In 2004, Jonathan Haidt had an experience that changed his intellectual life.

The influential moral and social psychologist — at the time an atheist and a liberal — was at the Strand, a used-book shop in New York, when the brown spine of a book called “Conservatism” caught his eye. Edited by historian Jerry Z. Muller, it was an anthology of readings from David Hume to Philip Rieff.

Three pages into the book, Mr. Haidt was floored — that is, sitting on the ground of the bookstore — paging through “all these gems of insight on the relationship between human flourishing and society,” the spirited 48-year-old academic recalled over tea and chocolate in his office at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Its passages from Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and Winston Churchill confirmed Mr. Haidt’s empirical research about the limits of rationalism, human nature’s flaws, the necessity of social institutions and the value of the sacred. That confirmation was surprising to the man who, frustrated by the presidential election defeat of John F. Kerry in 2004, entered the field of political psychology to “help liberals win.”

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular former University of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says — an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism. But then, covering his copy of “Conservatism” with dense marginalia, he was forced to reconsider: “Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?”

This question appears in his new book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” which takes readers on a tour of human moral and social history. In the book, Mr. Haidt — now a centrist — argues that conservatives, liberals and libertarians each have fundamentally wise insights to contribute to our national conversation about the type of society in which we should live.

Here's another excerpt:

Mr. Haidt has repeatedly criticized his field, psychology, for including too few conservatives in its ranks. When the topic of academic discrimination against conservatives comes up, he pulls from his filing cabinet a new study by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers which finds that: “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents are, the more willing they are to discriminate.”

Good tolerant, open-minded folk, those liberal academics. Anyway, Mr. Haidt also is, or was, an atheist, a worldview that led him to the conclusion that life is ultimately pointless and without meaning.

Mr. Haidt came to study psychology by seeking to answer the question that has perplexed and inspired humanity from the beginning: What is the meaning of life?

When he graduated from Scarsdale High School in New York State in 1981, he thought there was very little meaning to be found. His senior yearbook quotation stands out, amid the sunny words about optimism and friendship chosen by his classmates, for its gloomy irony: “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence so why bother shaving?”

“It was a very Woody Allen depression,” he says, citing the source of that quote and describing his emotional state his senior year. After reading Samuel Beckett’s absurdist comedy “Waiting For Godot,” Mr. Haidt, already an atheist, became fixated on the meaninglessness and absurdity of life. He dwelled on thoughts of suicide in the abstract even though his own life was, by many accounts, almost perfect — he would soon attend Yale as an undergraduate, he had a fabulous girlfriend, and he was captain of the track team.

“Like the author of Ecclesiastes,” as he wrote in his breakout book “The Happiness Hypothesis” (2006), “I thought that ‘all is vanity and a chasing after wind.’”

In my opinion, Haidt's thinking on the question of meaning still has some distance to travel before he has firm grounds for rejecting despair. For example, Smith offers us this:

He [Haidt] eventually came to a happier conclusion: “If this really is all there is, why not embrace it rather than throw it away?”

In other words, if this is all there is we can either despair or we can pretend that it all means something, and, Haidt urges, we should do the latter. I suppose this is mildly defensible, given the alternative of despair, but it's pretty thin broth upon which to base a well-nourished, flourishing life. Sure, we can "embrace" life's emptiness, like a condemned man relishing his last meal, but what's the point in indulging in irrational exercises in self-delusion?

The fact is, unless what we do in this life matters forever, it doesn't really matter at all.

There's more on Haidt's evolving thought in Smith's article. It's all very interesting.

Till We Have Faces

The title of this post is an allusion to a book by C.S. Lewis whose title popped into my head as I watched this video at New Scientist. It's a brief but fascinating time-lapse based on human embryo scans captured between 1 and 3 months after conception as the embryo's face develops. The article tells us that:

A close look at the animation reveals that a face forms from three main features that rotate into place, meeting at the philtrum, the groove above the top lip. The transformation occurs with very precise timing and delays can result in a cleft lip or palate.

Doubtless, however, mutations occurring at precisely the right time and selected for by natural selection can explain how it all turned out swimmingly for human embryos so that cleft palates became the exception rather than the norm:

Panama Trip

I just returned from a week in Panama viewing birdlife and other natural beauties of the country with a couple of friends. We stayed for several days in a B&B in a lovely town named Gamboa which was built by the Panama Canal Company for its workers during the construction of the canal and is located just a mile or so from the prison which houses the erstwhile dictator Manuel Noriega.

Many of the birds and butterflies we saw there were simply spectacular, and I thought I'd share a couple of them with you. The photos were taken from the web except the hummingbird pic which was snapped by one of my companions on the trip.

The first photo is of the Ocellated antbird. It's a forest dweller that follows swarms of army ants and feeds on the insects the ants stir up. The blue patch around the eye (the ocellation) is bare skin:

The next photo is of a Spectacled owl which was perched on a branch only a few feet above our heads. We didn't see it until we were walking away and someone turned around and spotted it.

The Blue cotinga is known for its strikingly metallic blue plumage. We observed this bird from a thirty two meter high tower that allowed us to survey the forest canopy from above:

The Crimson-backed tanager was common in leafy residential neighborhoods. It's beak is a bright silver color:

Another favorite of the group was the stunning Violet-crowned wood nymph, a type of hummingbird found at feeders in forested regions:

For weirdness its hard to beat the Common potoo, a nocturnal bird that roosts during the day on trees which it mimics almost perfectly:

There were so many other beautiful birds, insects, and trees, that I can't show pictures of all of them, but here's one of dozens of the stunning butterflies we saw everywhere in the forest. It's called a Blue morpho:

The heat and humidity, especially in the lowlands in the canal zone, were, well, tropical, but seeing such gorgeous creatures made it easy to put the discomfort out of one's mind.

Investing in the Future

Here's a story that'll give you a deeper appreciation of the extent to which your government is looking out for you and your tax dollars. The story reveals that President Obama "invested" $9 billion of the $800 billion dollars of stimulus money in green energy projects which ultimately resulted in the creation of a little over 900 jobs. That comes to about $10 million per job.

CNSNews does the depressing arithmetic:

The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.

At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600). Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.

In his campaign speeches the president pleads with us to give him four more years so that he can finish the job. I don't know what job he's talking about, but four more years of this sort of investing and he'll pretty much finish the country.

Truthiness

I confess I experienced a twinge of regret at never having read Barack Obama's celebrated memoir Dreams of My Father. I thought that had I read it I would've gained valuable insights into the character of the man. Now, however, I'm glad I didn't waste the time. Thanks to the inadvertent revelations of David Maraniss in his new book on the president, we learn that much in Dreams is in fact untrue. Mr. Obama's book does tell us something about himself, I suppose, but what it tells us, apparently, is that he's either delusional or he's simply not burdened by any felt obligation to be honest.

Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg have a couple of pieces on Mr. Obama's cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy at National Review.

Here's Steyn's lede:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony.

Goldberg writes that:

Obama has been less than honest about many things. Some of his biggest distortions should be the subject of sustained soul searching on the part of the media. For instance, as New York Times reporter Janny Scott first reported over a year ago, Obama lied about his cancer-stricken mother being denied coverage for her preexisting condition. Yes, he was close to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former terrorist Bill Ayers. Yes, he was a member of the socialist New Party (as my National Review colleague Stanley Kurtz has documented).

In the spirit of charity, some of the lies can be chalked up, at least in part, to fanciful family narratives. Obama claims his maternal grandfather fought in Patton’s army and liberated Nazi death camps. He says his paternal grandfather was tortured by the British imperialists in Kenya. He’s claimed his Indonesian step-grandfather was killed by the Dutch while fighting for independence. None of that is true.

What I find more interesting are the lies Obama tells not so much about himself, but about society. In Dreams from My Father, Obama tells readers that he struggled with racism and racial alienation all his life. He wasn’t a starter on his high-school basketball team because he played “black” while his coach coached “white.” He confabulated a black friend in high school who, like himself, was shunned for racial reasons. He wrote of a “big fight” with a white ex-girlfriend who, after seeing a racially charged play, “started talking about why black people were so angry all the time.”

As Maraniss methodically shows, these and other tales of racial woe were false. His coach didn’t start him because he wasn’t good enough to start. His friend in high school was half-Japanese, not black, and neither of them was racially ostracized. The girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, never saw the play and never said anything of the sort. And so on.

Maraniss, unintentionally to be sure, shows that Mr. Obama (or if you believe some, Bill Ayers) concocted a biographical novel rather than a memoir in Dreams, but the most telling aspects of Maraniss' revelations seem to be what he has omitted.

Jack Cashill at American Thinker explains;:

David Maraniss has no use for "birthers." In a recent interview, he dismissed their beliefs as "preposterous" and wonders why they cling to them, since "every fact and document leads in another direction."

Yet the one core belief that has united the birther community -- if there be such a thing -- is that Obama dissembled when he talked at both the 2004 and 2008 Democratic Conventions about his parents' "improbable love" and "abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."

Birthers have known for years that there was no Obama family, that the couple never lived together, that Obama campaigned on a lie, and that the major media covered for him every step of the way. This, ironically, Maraniss confirms in Barack Obama: The Story, a book that has to be parsed as carefully as the Talmud or Finnegan's Wake to be made sense of. Despite his slam on birthers, the facts herein will come as more of a shock to the Obama faithful than to those who have questioned the official birth narrative.

There's more from all these writers at the links. Given that Mr. Obama felt it expedient to create for himself a past that was largely fictitious and then peddle it to the public as factual truth, it's difficult to place much confidence in anything he tells us today. A man who'll make up stories about himself in order to create a narrative and an image will certainly not balk at doing the same thing in order to promote his political agenda and place in history.

Likely Reprisal Scenarios

In an article in National Review foreign policy expert Daniel Pipes discusses the work of a pair of analysts named Michael Eisenstadt and Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy. Eisenstadt and Knights have produced an assessment of the likely responses by Iran to an Israeli attack on their nuclear program. Here's a list of what they consider to be possible Iranian reprisals with a note on their likelihood. More detail on these is provided in the article:

1. Terrorist attacks on Israeli, Jewish, and U.S. targets. Likely, but causing limited destruction.
2. Kidnapping of U.S. citizens, especially in Iraq. Likely, but limited in impact, as in the 1980s in Lebanon.
3. Attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very likely, especially via proxies, but causing limited destruction.
4. Missile strikes on Israel. Likely: a few missiles from Iran getting through Israeli defenses, leading to casualties likely in the low hundreds; missiles from Hezbollah limited in number due to domestic Lebanese considerations. Unlikely: Hamas getting involved, having distanced itself from Tehran; the Syrian government interfering, since it is battling for its life against an ever-stronger opposition army and possibly the Turkish armed forces. Overall, missile attacks are unlikely to do devastating damage.
5. Attacks on neighboring states. Likely: especially using terrorist proxies, for the sake of deniability. Unlikely: missile strikes, for Tehran does not want to make more enemies.
6. Clashes with the U.S. Navy. Likely, but, given the balance of power, doing limited damage.
7. Covertly mining the Strait of Hormuz. Likely, causing a run-up in energy prices.
8. Attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. Unlikely: difficult to achieve and potentially too damaging to Iranian interests, because the country needs the strait for commerce.

There's more on this analysis at the link. Pipes concludes with this:

In all, these dangers are unpleasant but not cataclysmic, manageable not devastating. Eisenstadt and Knights expect a short phase of high-intensity Iranian response, to be followed by a “protracted low-intensity conflict that could last for months or even years” — much as already exists between Iran and Israel. An Israeli preventive strike, they conclude, while a “high-risk endeavor carrying a potential for escalation in the Levant or the Gulf . . . would not be the apocalyptic event some foresee.”

This analysis makes a convincing case that the danger of nuclear weapons falling into Iranian hands far exceeds the danger of a military strike to prevent this from happening.

No doubt Israel has conducted similar analyses. Whether they've drawn similar conclusions is hard to say, but we'll probably know by January.

The President's Biggest Success

Mr. Obama has squandered billions trying to stimulate jobs in green energy industries and elsewhere, all to little effect. But there's one industry that's prospering richly from having Mr. Obama in the White House - the firearms industry.

Gun sales have soared since Mr. Obama was elected, the industry has not laid off employees, and, not coincidentally, violent crime has been declining;;. In fact there seems to be a correlation between declining crime and the increase in states that issue concealed carry permits.

The Washington Times' Emily Miller has the story:

Gun-control advocates are noticeably silent when crime rates decline. Their multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts are designed to manufacture mass anxiety that every gun owner is a potential killer. The statistics show otherwise.

Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that violent crime decreased 4 percent in 2011. The number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults all went down, continuing a pattern.

"This is not a one-year anomaly, but a steady decline in the FBI's violent-crime rates," said Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association. "It would be disingenuous for anyone to not credit increased self-defense laws to account for this decline."

Mr. Arulanandam pointed out that only a handful of states had concealed-carry programs 25 years ago, when the violent-crime rate peaked. Today, 41 states either allow carrying without a permit or have "shall issue" laws that make it easy for just about any noncriminal to get a permit. Illinois and Washington, D.C., are the only places that refuse to recognize the right to bear arms. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not respond to requests for comment.

As for gun sales Miller writes:

"Firearms sales have increased substantially since right after the 2008 election," said Bill Brassard, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which represents the $4 billion firearms and ammunition industry. "There was a leveling off in 2010, but now we're seeing a surge again."

The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) serves as one of the best indicators of gun sales because it counts each time someone buys a gun. Checks hit an all-time high of 16.5 million last year. In the first five months of this year, the numbers have gone up 10 percent over the same period last year as Americans rush to the gun store in case President Obama decides to exercise "more flexibility" in restricting guns in a second term.

Perhaps when Mr. Obama said that the private sector was doing fine he had firearms manufacturers in mind:

Sturm, Ruger & Co. sold 1 million firearms in the first quarter of 2012 - an amazing 50 percent increase from the first quarter of 2011. The jump was so steep that the company stopped accepting orders from March to May to catch up with demand for its products.

Last month, Smith & Wesson announced a firearm-order backlog of approximately $439 million by the end of April, up 135 percent from the same quarter in 2011. Sales in that period were up 28 percent from 2011 and 14 percent over its own predictions to investors. NSSF estimates the industry is responsible for approximately 180,000 jobs and has an annual impact on the U.S. economy of $28 billion.

So, not only can Mr. Obama claim credit for thousands of jobs "saved or created" in the firearms industry he can also take credit for the drop in violent crime that this industry's products have facilitated. I wonder if he realizes how helpful this would be to him in the election if more people knew about it. As one gun dealer told me a couple of years ago "If I would've known how good Obama would be for my business I would've voted for him myself."

The Implausibility of Unguided Human Evolution

Evolution News and Views takes a look at a new book by biologists Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe and lawyer Casey Luskin titled Science and Human Origins. One of the ideas the authors want us to understand is the very great difficulty, assuming that only blind mechanistic processes were at work, of constructing a plausible pathway from an ape-like ancestor to Homo sapiens. In her chapter Gauger writes this:

Let's begin by considering what distinguishes us from great apes. What are our distinctive characteristics? There are significant anatomical differences, of course: Our upright walking, longer legs, and shorter arms, changes in muscle strength, our significantly larger brains and skulls (three times bigger than great apes), and our refined musculature in hands, lips and tongues.

There are also our relative hairlessness and changes to our eyes. More importantly, there are whole realms of intellect and experience that make us unique as humans. Abstract thought, art, music and language: These things separate us from lower animals fundamentally, not just in degree but in kind....

Chimps are suited for life in the trees. Humans are suited for life on the ground, walking and running. The anatomical changes needed to move from tree-dwelling to complete terrestrial life are many. To walk and run effectively requires a new spine, a different shape and tilt to the pelvis, and legs that angle in from the hips, so we can keep our feet underneath us and avoid swaying from side to side as we move.

We need knees, feet and toes designed for upright walking, and a skull that sits on top of the spine in a balanced position. (The dome of our skull is shifted rearward in order to accommodate our larger brain and yet remain balanced.) Our jaws and muscle attachments must be shifted, our face flattened, and the sinuses behind the face and the eye sockets located in different places, to permit a forward gaze and still be able to see where to put our feet.

How many mutations would these changes require and how much time was available in which they could occur? ENV gives us some idea:

Varki and Altheide (2005) document hundreds of phenotypic traits that differ between humans and great apes.

Gauger goes on to consider whether there has been enough time (roughly one and a half million years) to render plausible the number of instances of anatomical novelty that are required to change an Australopithecus afarensis into a Homo erectus. Citing Durrett and Schmidt (2007, 2008), Gauger draws on their conclusions that "for a single mutation to occur in a nucleotide-binding site and be fixed in a primate lineage would require a waiting time of six million years" and that "it would take 216 million years for the binding site to acquire two mutations, if the first mutation was neutral in its effect."

Since the transition from our last common ancestor with chimps to modern humans is only about six million years, argues Gauger, the time allowed is nowhere near enough to accomplish such a feat of genetic and anatomical re-engineering, especially since "many of the anatomical changes seen in Homo erectus had to occur together to be of benefit."

That humans evolved from apes certainly seems possible, maybe even probable. That they accomplished this by the unguided forces posited by Darwinian evolution, however, seems improbable in the extreme. Indeed, it would be almost miraculous. The more one reads about evolution the more one sees it as a strong argument for the necessity of a superintending mind directing the process. It simply takes too much faith to think that it could have happened without one.

Either/Or

The Supreme Court ruling this morning on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) upheld the law, including the mandate compelling all Americans to buy insurance. What I've seen on their reasoning so far seems to me very odd. For three years the Democrats, from the president on down, have been assuring us that the penalty one must pay if one does not purchase insurance is not a tax. They have been adamant about this because Mr. Obama repeatedly promised in his campaign that he would not raise taxes on families making under $250,000 and if the penalty is a tax, rather than a fine, it would violate this promise.

Here are a few instances of the Democrats' insistence that they weren't trying to impose a tax:

Now, as I understand it, the rationale used by the majority of the Court in upholding the mandate is that the penalty is indeed a tax and that since Congress has the constitutional authority to levy taxes, the mandate passes constitutional muster.

In other words, the Court is saying that the president and his surrogates lied to the American people to get us to accept the ACA, but since lying is not unconstitutional, the ACA stands. (There is, of course, the remote possibility that all the Democrats and their vast army of lawyers and advisors were simply mistaken and that they really didn't realize it was a tax when in fact it was. One could believe this, I suppose, just as one could believe that Santa Claus visits every house in the world on Christmas Eve.)

This is the victory the left is celebrating. If all the people in that video were telling the truth and the mandate was indeed not a tax, it should have been struck down, but since it is not what they represented it to the American people to be it's constitutional.

Either they were telling the truth on the video, in which case the majority of the Court has committed a grievous error, or the majority was correct to rule as they did because the Democrats, including the president, were lying about the nature of the mandate. Thus, either the Court made a terrible mistake or our president and his people are egregiously dishonest.

So far from going around high-fiving because they won the case, the Democrats right now should be either saddened at the Court's misjudgment or deeply ashamed of their own behavior, or both.

How Overturning ACA Could Help Obama

Most commentators are assuming that if the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is struck down by the Supreme Court today it'd be a severe blow to President Obama, but there's one possible outcome of voiding the law that would actually make him look good, at least to those not paying close attention.

Becky McCaughey explains how striking down the law could redound to the president's benefit in an article at Investor's Business Daily. She writes that an Obamacare defeat would probably produce a hiring boom for which the president would doubtless take credit even though it would have resulted from the ignominious defeat of his signature legislation. Here's the heart of her argument:

If the justices rule that mandatory health insurance is unconstitutional, they will also strike down a big chunk of the health law — all of Title 1 — including the burdensome "Employer Responsibility" provision that has struck fear in the hearts of employers and deterred hiring.

Beginning in 2014, the "Employer Responsibility" provision would require employers with 50 or more workers to provide health coverage or pay a penalty. Not just any coverage, but a package of expensive benefits that the president deems "essential."

In most states, that requirement would add $1.79 per hour to the cost of a full-time employee. That would amount to the biggest hike in labor costs in American history. Employers in New York and New Jersey, where health plans are the most expensive, would be hit even harder.

There, according to economist James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation, the employer requirement would add more than $2 an hour to the cost of employing someone.

Many employers who already provide health plans will be hit with higher labor costs in 2014 unless the Supreme Court strikes down Title 1 or all of ObamaCare. The law takes away employers' option to provide low-cost mini-med plans, which are common in retail, fast food and other industries employing large numbers of low-wage workers. Mini-meds cap what the insurer has to pay out in benefits over a year or a lifetime. Employers opt for them on the philosophy that providing low-cost coverage is better than none at all.

But ObamaCare outlaws this option. Andrew Puzder, CEO of a chain of Carl's Jr. and Hardee restaurants, testified before Congress that switching to the one-size-fits-all government-mandated health coverage would more than double his company's health insurance costs.

Employers can refuse to provide the mandated coverage in 2014, but those who do will be hit with a $2,000 per employee yearly penalty (applied to all but the first 20 employees). Spread over a year, the penalty would add 95 cents an hour to the cost of a full-time worker.

No wonder businesses are reluctant to add employees. According to a March 2012 survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 73% of small businesses said the Obama health care law made it more difficult for them to add new hires.

So if SCOTUS strikes down the law today, employers will breath a sigh of relief and start hiring again. The economy will be given a jolt, the numbers will start looking good, and Mr. Obama could go into November boasting how his policies are taking hold and how we're moving in the right direction and all that. Given the indifference of much of the American electorate and the partisanship of our mainstream media he just might get away with it.

Who Is Karl Rove?

Demonstrators in D.C., evidently paid by someone to participate, recently marched to express their displeasure at Karl Rove because Rove is .... well, some of these concerned citizens don't seem to have any idea who, or what, Rove is. For these marchers, or at least those on the video, he's apparently a kind of Emmanuel Goldstein character that all good citizens must execrate for two minutes every day even though no one knows anything about him.

Doubtless these people will vote in November. No wonder our nation is in such a mess. The Blaze has more on the demonstration.

What Happens Next?

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote tomorrow on whether or not to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. If they do it'll be the first time in history that an AG was the subject of such a vote, and the question I've been hearing - and wondering myself - is what happens next? Where does Congress go with the matter once they vote tomorrow?

Josh Chafetz, a Cornell law professor, has a column in the Washington Post in which he lays out the possibilities and explains which he thinks most likely and why.

The options Chafetz discusses are these:

1. Refer the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution in federal court.
2. Sue him in federal court to get him to comply with their demand for documents.
3. Have the House sergeant-at-arms arrest him and hold him in jail until the contempt is purged.

None of these is a good idea for reasons Chafetz explains. Thus the most likely path, in his opinion, would be one of the following:

1. Impeach Mr. Holder and have him tried in the Senate.
2. Cut funding for the entire Department of Justice.
3. Refuse to pay Holder's salary until he complies with their demand for documents on the operation.

The fact that Mr. Holder is prepared to undergo any of these ordeals rather than turn over the documents certainly heightens the suspicion that he's trying to hide something extremely damaging to him and/or the White House. The American people have a right to know what it is, and they have the right to know it before they vote in November.

Ex Nihilo

An article at Space.com promotes the exceedingly odd idea that the universe popped into existence from nothing. All the matter and energy we see in the billions of galaxies that fill space, according to the scientists quoted in the piece, all somehow just suddenly came into being ex nihilo. Here's an excerpt:

Our universe could have popped into existence 13.7 billion years ago without any divine help whatsoever, researchers say. That may run counter to our instincts, which recoil at the thought of something coming from nothing. But we shouldn't necessarily trust our instincts, for they were honed to help us survive on the African savannah 150,000 years ago, not understand the inner workings of the universe. Instead, scientists say, we should trust the laws of physics.

Actually what the theory offends is not our instincts but our reason. To believe that sheer nothingness - a matterless, energyless state - could give rise to a universe of matter and energy requires that we suspend our rational faculties and embrace fantasyland. But there's more:

In the very weird world of quantum mechanics, which describes action on a subatomic scale, random fluctuations can produce matter and energy out of nothingness. And this can lead to very big things indeed, researchers say.

With all due respect, this is incoherent. If quantum mechanics acts on the subatomic scale then there must be subatomic particles, or their energy equivalents, in existence. The universe, if it was produced by a "quantum fluctuation" didn't arise out of "nothingness," it arose out of a preexisting quantum matrix.

When these scientists say the universe came from nothing they evidently don't really mean nothing. Nothing is the absence of anything, but these scientists are saying that there really was something. Moreover, they tell us, it's not just the stuff of the quantum world alone which generates the universe. There's more to it:

"The Big Bang could've occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there," said astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. "With the laws of physics, you can get universes."

Well, maybe so, but where did the laws of physics come from and where, exactly, do they exist when there's no universe for them to manifest themselves in? If there's no preexisting matter and energy then there simply would not be any physics nor any laws of physics.

When one reads a little further one finds that "nothing" as these scientists conceive it is actually even more densely populated. Not only does it include the quantum flux and the laws of physics, it also includes time, space, and even minds:

"Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos," said panelist Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the non-profit (SETI) Institute. "If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It's not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it. So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe," Shostak added.

So an agent has only to twist time and space and shazaam a universe exists. But where did time, space, and the agent come from? How can any of these exist independently of matter?

The fact is that if something comes into being it must be brought into being by something that preexists it, whether some science fair participant in another universe or whatever. Ultimately, the chain of causation must terminate in something that itself doesn't come into being and thus requires no cause.

One of the scientists in the article addresses this but does so in a rather unsatisfactory way:

The question, then, is, 'Why are there laws of physics?'" he said. And you could say, 'Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.' But that answer just continues to kick the can down the road, because you still need to explain where the divine creator came from. The process leads to a never-ending chain that always leaves you short of the ultimate answer.

This simply isn't true. A divine creator, if one exists, has necessary being. That is, if it exists it must exist. It is not the sort of thing that's caused by something else. It might be asked why the laws of physics could not be this necessary being, the uncaused cause which creates the world. There are at least two reasons why:

1. Physical laws are simply descriptions of the way matter behaves. They're ideas. In the absence of matter and in the absence of a mind they have no existence.
2. The laws of physics are either eternal or they had a beginning. If the latter then obviously they are not the beginningless something we're looking for. If they are eternal, and they're the ultimate cause of the universe, then we can ask why the universe is not also eternal. An effect will be produced by a cause as soon as the conditions are in place to produce it. If the cause of the universe are the eternal laws of physics then the universe should be co-eternal with the laws that caused it, but as the first quoted sentence above indicates, these scientists believe the universe had a beginning 13.7 billion years ago.

Unless there is an uncaused ultimate cause of the universe the universe would not have had a beginning, but an uncaused cause is exactly what God is. In their struggle to escape the conclusion that a divine cause is the only adequate explanation of the existence of the world, the researchers in the article have defined "something" as "nothing" and then tried to convince us that this is good science. It sounds to me more like very confused metaphysics.

Have You No Shame?

Bill Whittle's Afterburner video on the Fast and Furious scandal tends to treat what is at this point a surmise a bit too much as though it were established fact yet he does raise most of the essential questions and his assertion that F&F was a deliberate attempt to weaken opposition to gun control in the U.S., though one hopes it's not true, is unfortunately more plausible than the DoJ's explanation that the operation was intended to find out where the bad guys were holed up.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds this about the Obama administration's assertion of executive privilege to prevent Congress from reviewing the relevant documents on the matter:

The executive-privilege claim won’t hold up in court, and even the ideologues at the White House have to know that much. Furthermore, in order to make the claim stick, the White House will have to produce a “privilege log” that describes each document they shield through the privilege claim for a court to assess, so we’ll know who was involved in the conversations even before a court rules on the privilege claim itself. [Whittle's] accusation is very strong, but if it proves true, then Holder’s resignation won’t suffice to deal with the aftermath — and this highly suspect claim of privilege shows that the White House very much fears disclosure, for whatever reason.

Whatever happens next the Democrats' attempts to divert attention away from the real issues by calling the hearings a "partisan witch hunt," by alleging racism, and by falsely claiming that the operation started under the Bush administration, are shameful and hypocritical. Were a Republican administration and a Republican run operation similarly implicated in the murders of hundreds of Mexicans and two U.S. agents the Democrats and the media would rightly be in a frenzy of outrage, and anyone associated with the GOP who tried to defend the tactic of stonewalling Congress with the obfuscations that we've been hearing all week from the Democrats and their media surrogates would be made a national laughingstock.

In fact, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has already taken the early lead in the laughingstock department:

See also Stewart's take on the White House's use of executive privilege here.

Conversion of an Alarmist

Over the last decade or two a lot of environmentalists have tried to cajole and browbeat the rest of us into accepting that the earth is warming at an alarming rate, that this warming will have devastating consequences, that human activity is the cause, and that we need to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere immediately if we're to avoid global catastrophe.

Skeptics, citing the ambiguities in, and the thinness of, the evidence, have been, well, skeptical. It turns out that they're in good company. One of the founding fathers of the global warming movement, James Lovelock, has not only modified his former stance but he's also become very critical of the warmist "hysteria." The Toronto Sun has the story. Here's the crux of it:

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. The implications were extraordinary.

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

Among his observations to the Guardian:

(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.

As Lovelock observes, “Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it … Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.” (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, advocating the development of conventional and unconventional natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and save millions of lives in the Third World.)

(2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed. “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”

(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines. As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

(4) Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

In an age of politicized science, Lovelock seems to be one of a diminishing breed. He seems to be a scientist actually concerned with believing what's true and following the evidence wherever it leads. When nonagenarian philosopher Anthony Flew, impressed with the mounting evidence of design in the universe, abandoned his life-long atheism critics attributed his conversion to his advanced age and mental dodderiness. I wonder if the 92 year-old Lovelock will be the target of similar cheapshots.

Humility

I mentioned about a month ago that a friend of mine named Stephen Martin had recently written a wonderful book titled The Messy Quest for Meaning which I highly recommended for the lessons Steve imparts about life and the delightful style which he employs to impart them.

As it happens Steve also has a blog called Messy Quest in which he uses anecdotes, often self-deprecating and humorous, to illustrate how we might live a fuller more meaningful life. It's really very good, but one post in particular, a homily on humility is especially worth reading.

He starts it off this way:

The other night, for the first time, I showed up for men’s doubles night at some local tennis courts. There’s a hierarchy that determines the court on which you play. I was assigned to the court reserved for those with the lowest skill level, based on the fact that I’d never played there before and perhaps because the tennis pro in charge intuited how bad my backhand really is.

I was wandering around trying to locate Court #6 when a very tall, very old guy with exceptionally creaky knees stopped and pointed me in the right direction. As I thanked him, I couldn’t help thinking, “What the heck is that guy doing here? He can barely move.” But he was in fact there to play. And he was heading, quite slowly, toward Court #6.

When we got there, along with two other guys about my age, he introduced himself as Mac. Then he told us he’d been playing on the tennis club’s courts since 1965.

Math has never been my strong suit. But it didn’t take long to calculate that was five years before my parents had even met. No, wait, six years!

We warmed up by hitting some balls across the net to each other. I did my best to hit them right to him, so close that he wouldn’t have to take a step. I’m not always the most astute of men, but I definitely didn’t want to go down in history as the punk who, on his very first night on the courts, felled one of the club’s Founding Fathers with a deep lob.

Go to Messy Quest and read how the rest of Steve's story unfolds. You'll enjoy it.

Why Invoke Executive Privilege? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we raised the question why the president would invoke executive privilege to prevent documents associated with Operation Fast and Furious from being released to the House Oversight Committee. It would seem that doing so just casts suspicion on the White House and smells of a cover-up of involvement at the highest levels of government.

Today we'll consider one possible answer to that question, an answer I doubted when I first heard it several months ago but which makes more sense as time goes on. But first a little background.

When Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) agents first alerted us to Operation Fast and Furious, the rationale offered by DoJ for the fiasco was that it was designed to allow BATF to track and prosecute the leaders of the Mexican drug cartels. As more information surfaced from the Mexican government and the BATF's Mexican bureau chief specifying that none of them knew anything of this operation this explanation became increasingly incredible and untenable.

If the Mexican authorities had not been notified of the operation, if even the BATF's own agents were not authorized to operate in Mexico, then the DoJ's justification made no sense for the simple reason that once those guns made it into Mexico, there was no procedure in place to track them to their supposed targets. The illogic of this made reasonable people suspect that something else was afoot in the DoJ about which Mr. Holder wasn't willing to be forthcoming.

Russ Vaughn at American Thinker argues that F&F was part of a surreptitious plan to undermine Americans' opposition to gun control. I quote him at length:

For those who keep a constant wary eye on the left's never-ending war on our 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the increasingly fishy smell emanating from Washington led to connecting the dots back to the year-earlier revelations in the liberal media that weapons being used in Mexican crimes were traceable back to American sources more than 90% of the time. That false meme had spread quickly through the major liberal media, along with calls for stricter gun control laws in this country by...our president, our secretary of state, our attorney general, and other notable Democrats....

Here we had an operation mounted by the executive branch of the United States, an operation which had as its stated goal -- after being outed, that is -- the targeting of Mexican drug lords on sovereign Mexican soil. Yet this was done without the knowledge of anyone in the Mexican government. Quite clearly, a secret and subversive operation had been conceived and implemented against our sister nation to the south -- subversive because, again, quite clearly, the American government was subverting the sovereign authority of Mexico without that nation's knowledge.

If the goal was, as stated later by DoJ, to track guns into Mexico to the purchasing sources in the cartels, then was there not some diplomatic requirement to notify the Mexican government that we were arming their most violent criminal elements? And what was the need for keeping our own BATF agents in Mexico -- the only American agents with Mexican presence to conduct such surveillance and tracking operations on Mexican soil -- equally in the dark?

For those who haven't really followed the Fast and Furious scandal, here's a five-step summary of how the operation was supposed to work:

1. Allow guns to flow freely to criminal elements in Mexico, where they are naturally used in the extremely violent and deadly criminal activities of the drug cartels.
2. When sufficient guns of American origin have been used in such criminal activities, enlist the willing services of the liberal media to announce the discovery thereof to the world.
3. Enlist multiple prominent Democrats to untruthfully proclaim that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crimes originate in the U.S.
4. Use steps one through three to substantiate the liberal fallacy that private gun ownership leads to increased gun violence by gun owners.
5. With the compliance of a thoroughly duped American public, enact increasingly restrictive gun ownership policies through federal agencies, bypassing Congress and the Supreme Court.

When looked at this way, doesn't Obama's statement to a group of gun control advocates in March 2011 that he was taking steps to further gun control restrictions, but "under the radar," now seem less cryptic than it did at the time? For those who still don't believe Fast & Furious was an end-run on the 2nd Amendment by a liberal, gun-averse administration, here are five questions to consider:

1. Could the possibility that this plan was concocted at the very top of the administration, putting it on par with Watergate, explain Eric Holder's entrenched refusal to release the tens of thousands of documents being sought by congressional investigators?
2. Is the liberal media's refusal to investigate this scandal due to the fact that they suspect that the acts of this administration may rise to criminal and impeachable offenses?
3. Has the reluctance of the Republican leadership to more aggressively support the House investigation been attributable to the same possibility -- that full exposure could lead straight to the Oval Office and the politically unsavory possibility of impeachment of the nation's first black president?
4. Does anyone really think an ambitious politician like Holder would risk career-ending contempt of Congress charges to protect some incredibly stupid subordinates who supposedly, all by themselves, planned and implemented such a boondoggle?
5. In an administration known for its quickness in throwing friends and associates under the bus in matters of self-preservation, is it not remarkable that rather than being so dispatched by Holder, many of the key players in F&F have been promoted despite denials by their bureau?

Fast and Furious bids fair to become this generation's Watergate, but no one lost their lives in Watergate. The weapons this operation "walked" into Mexico were used in the murders of two American agents and at least two hundred Mexicans.

If it turns out the White House okayed it, and especially if they did so for political reasons, Mr. Obama will join, even surpass, Richard Nixon as among the most disreputable presidents of the last hundred years. If that turns out to be the case it'll be no wonder that, like Nixon, he has invoked executive privilege to keep the evidence from being made public.

Defection

You may have heard of the defection of a Syrian air force pilot on Thursday morning who flew his jet to Jordan and requested asylum. Debkafile has some interesting details:

Syrian President Bashar Assad Thursday night, June 21, ordered his entire Air Force fleet of fighter bombers grounded, for fear that more pilots might defect after Col. Hasan Merhi al-Hamadeh flew to Jordan aboard a MiG-21.

Syrian officials are convinced that the defection of the pilot with his plane was organized by the Americans and that more are in the pipeline in an attempt to show the Syrian people and Arab world that even the Syrian air force, the part of the armed forces most loyal to Assad, was in fact slipping out of his hands.

Debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that, early Thursday, Col, al-Hamadeh flew out of the Khalkhala air base, which is situated between the southern towns of Deraa and Suweida not far from the Druze Mountain.

While his MiG belonged to the 73rd Air Brigade, he was a member of the Syrian Air Force’s 20th Division and commander of the MiG-21 test squadron, which regularly inspects those aircraft at southern air bases to check if they are flight worthy.

That is why no one at the Khalkhala base saw anything amiss when this officer climbed aboard one of the aircraft and suddenly pivoted the plane at a sharp angle - even when he failed to respond to control tower signals. But before they could catch on, the MiG-21 was gone over the border to Jordan, a flight of no more than 90 seconds.

Because the Jordanians were not forewarned about an incoming Syrian air force plane, Col. Al-Hamadeh requested permission from the control tower at Al Hussein air base in northern Jordan to make an emergency landing. As soon as the MiG came to a stop on the runway, the Syrian colonel jumped out, shed is uniform and prayed.

Our sources disclose that the defector came from the village of Meles in the Idlib district of northern Syria where he has left his wife, four children and family. This village is one of the few parts of the embattled district to remain in Free Syrian Army rebel hands. Their agents were certainly involved in helping to arrange his escape.

Why Invoke Executive Privilege?

President Obama's decision to invoke executive privilege (EP) to prevent documents related to the Fast and Furious operation from being handed over to the House Oversight Committee is very puzzling. It's hard to see how the decision could withstand legal scrutiny and thus hard to understand why the President would have done it in the first place, unless he's desperately trying to hide something.

There are at least two reasons to think Mr. Obama's assertion of EP will not hold up in court. First is that EP applies only to the president and his staff in their role as advisors to the president. It does not apply to cabinet officials or to anyone outside the president's staff.

Second, it does not apply in cases where the purpose of soliciting the documents is to determine whether there has been government misconduct, which is the very reason the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed them.

The fact that Mr. Obama chose to take this route suggests an atmosphere of panic in the Oval Office, but why? It's hard not to think that either the White House knew about Fast and Furious early on, even though they've denied it, or worse, that White House personnel, possibly the President himself, were actually involved in the decision to go ahead with the operation. If this were the case it would be extremely problematic for Mr. Obama to have signed off on an operation that subverted the law, subverted a foreign government (Mexico's), and resulted in two hundred dead Mexican civilians and the deaths of two American agents, all for an operation the rationale for which is incoherent, as we'll discuss tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has some helpful details to add at Hot Air on the use of executive privilege. This is not going to go away, and I suspect that within a couple of days even the mainstream media will start reporting on it.

Is Time Slowing Down?

The assumption among scientists has been that, except for situations in which special or general relativity applies, time always flows at a constant rate. A hundred years today is the same as a hundred years a billion years ago. Now, apparently, there are some dissenters from this view who think that time is actually slowing down:

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether.

The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether.

If this is true then was time passing much more quickly in the distant past such that an event which, say, takes an hour to complete today might have taken only a minute to complete a billion years ago? If so, if a billion years in today's time is much longer than a billion years at the time of the universe's inception what does that do to claims that the universe is thirteen billion years old?

What is time anyway? Is time something "out there," objective, such that were there no minds to experience it it would still exist? Or is time, as Kant thought, a way our mind processes experience so that were there no minds there'd be no time?

If it's the latter, if time is a subjective phenomenon, then until human beings (or at least minds of some sort) appeared in the universe there would have been no time. There would have been only events occurring willy-nilly compressed in a timeless matrix perhaps like data compressed in a zip-file.

If that's so then to ask how much time elapsed from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds is a nonsense question. There was no time. It's as if all the events recorded on a movie film are run through the projector at near infinite speed. All the events happen and they all happen in the same relation to each other but they do so instantaneously.

To ask the question, then, about the age of the universe is to ask simply how long it would have taken to go from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds if someone was somehow observing the process.

It's all very strange.

Yet Another Evolution

The dictionary defines "chutzpah" as unmitigated effrontery or impudence. It defines "hypocrite" as a person who falsely professes beliefs and values he doesn't really possess. I leave it to the reader to decide which of the two, if either, applies to our president.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama granted his Attorney General "executive privilege" so that he would not have to submit subpoenaed documents to the House Oversight Committee trying to get to the bottom of the ignominious Fast and Furious debacle.

Whether the courts will allow this use of executive privilege to stand is uncertain. It's unclear what grounds Mr. Obama has for asserting executive privilege when national security is not at issue and the matter does not involve the White House (of course, we only have Mr. Obama's and AG Holder's word for it that F&F doesn't involve the White House. The fact that EP is being employed leads one to suspect that perhaps they're trying to hide something damaging).

In any case, executive privilege is something to which Senator Obama took a dim view when it was invoked by a Republican president.

This makes about the five thousandth flip-flop Mr. Obama has executed since becoming president. Like a freshly landed trout he twists and gyrates whenever he thinks it'll confer a political advantage to abandon any belief he professed in the past. He certainly gives the appearance of lacking any underlying core principle that guides those beliefs. Perhaps his apologists will construe this invocation of EP as merely another evolution in the President's thinking, like his reversal on gay marriage, Gitmo, the Bush tax cuts, and numerous other positions, but taken together with so many other such reversals, it begins to give one the impression of a hollow man devoid of any real character or virtue.

Now comes on top of all these a biography of Mr. Obama by David Maraniss in which he reveals that the President's autobiography Dreams of My Father is riddled with dozens of false claims about his family and himself. The man is simply not who he has claimed to be. It's very sad for the country.