I Do

There's a story by Jason DeParle in the New York Times that should be read by every girl of high school age who doesn't want to wind up struggling with poverty all her life. DeParle writes that the difference between the haves and the have-nots in America really comes down to two words: I do.

Women who marry before they have children and stay married afterward are much more likely to avoid poverty than those who have children out of wedlock or who find themselves raising children pretty much by themselves. This, of course, seems almost self-evident but so many girls have to learn it the hard way. DeParle contrasts the lives of two women who are similar in almost every respect except that one is married and the other is not. The marriage makes all the difference:

Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused. They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages.

Ms. Faulkner goes home to a trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.

“I see Chris’s kids — they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there,” Ms. Schairer said. “That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time.”

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

There's much more in the article that should be read and digested about the importance of marriage in the quality of life it affords women and their children. Not only does having two parents give children an enormous advantage over those who have only one, but, something DeParle's piece doesn't mention, those children also often have two sets of grandparents who are an enormous resource in helping with kids and with finances.

Here's another excerpt:

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly consigns children to “diverging destinies.”

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.” She said, “I think this process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”

Ms. Schairer’s life offers a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and everyone she knew was married.

“I thought, ‘I’ll meet someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.” She got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support. With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

The two women in DeParle's column are personifications of the theme of Charles Murray's book Coming Apart which contrasts the evolution of marriage in the white upper and lower classes.

My only quibble with the essay is that he seems to suggest that the difference in how people value marriage is a function of their class and education, as though the correlations showed causation. But one doesn't have to be well off or well-educated to value marriage. In fact, as the lives of the women in the article suggest, being married is almost a sine qua non for women with children to become well-off.

Read DeParle's article on how things often go for those women who find themselves in Ms Schairer's circumstances. My heart goes out to this woman who works hard, takes complete responsibility for the choices she's made, and who fully recognizes, unlike some in her situation, that her children really do need a father.

Pants on Fire

Peter Wehner offers us an analysis at The Weekly Standard of what he calls President Obama's "accountability problem." After listing promises that Mr. Obama has failed to keep or has actually broken Wehner focuses on one of the president's major claims, i.e his repeated asseveration that he didn't realize the magnitude of our economic problems when he took office. Wehner argues that this claim is simply and deliberately false:

Given that Obama’s key economic promises haven’t been kept, what possible excuse can the president offer? Easy. The president’s explanation goes something like this: By the time he took office, the economic situation was far worse than anyone, including Obama, imagined. The deficit was far larger than anyone predicted. The president therefore can’t be held accountable for his failed promises. He was operating on a false set of assumptions. The crisis was much deeper than he knew when he made those promises. “We didn’t know how bad it was,” is how Obama put it last year.

Here’s the problem: If you go back and examine the record, you’ll find that Obama was fully aware of the depth and severity of the recession. As a candidate, for example, he said we were facing “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” As president-elect, Obama said we faced “a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime.”

Prior to being sworn in, Obama knew — in fact, he went out of his way to warn us — that we were shedding more than half a million jobs per month, the worst job loss in over three decades. That in 2008 we had lost more jobs than in any year since the Great Depression. That manufacturing had hit a 28-year low. That the stock market had fallen almost 40 percent in less than a year. That credit markets were nearly frozen. That businesses large and small couldn’t borrow the money they needed to meet payroll and create jobs. That home foreclosures were mounting. That credit card and auto loan delinquencies were rising. That the economy was “in a global crisis.” And that he was inheriting an “enormous budget deficit—you know, some estimates over a trillion dollars. That’s before we do anything.”

In other words, Barack Obama knew full well how bad things were when he promised he’d cut the deficit in half, when his economic team said that if his stimulus package passed, unemployment would not rise above 8 percent, and much of the rest.

What this means, then, is that Barack Obama’s only excuse for his failures is a myth and a mirage—a manufactured, after-the-fact effort to escape accountability for his own words, his own commitments, and his own failings.

How much Mr. Obama's integrity matters to voters remains to be seen, but it does seem as if something comes up every other day to remind us that he has a real problem with the truth.

Update on Iran

Strategy Page brings us up to date on what's happening with the sanctions imposed against Iran:

The new, and more severe, sanctions against Iran have been in force for nearly two weeks and they are hurting. Oil shipments, according to the Iranian government, are down 30 percent. Inflation, according to the government, is somewhere north of 20 percent. It's actually closer to 30 percent, largely because the government just prints more money to give angry Iranians, to help offset the ever-rising prices. This just makes the inflation worse....

Inflation and shortages of imported goods are both getting worse. This hurts most Iranians and has turned public opinion against the nuclear weapons program. The religious dictatorship that has run the country for three decades, long ago lost the loyalty of most Iranians. The corruption, brutality, and hypocrisy of the government has been matched by brutality and the loyalty of a quarter of the population that, for religious reasons, backs the clerics....

Normally Iran pumps three million barrels a day. But about a third of that output has already lost its customers and oil wells are being shut down to reduce production. In June, Iranian production officially shrank 150,000 barrels a day. But the reality is greater. Iran has been storing unsold oil on ships but there are no more unused tankers for this (despite ordering 12 new ones from China and India), and Iran is hustling to expand the black market for oil. Iranian sales agents are making it known that deals can be made, to get large quantities of oil at large discounts. There is some risk but the profits would be great....Iranian smugglers have been very resourceful in the past, but smuggling oil that must be moved in 330 meter long super tankers is much more difficult.

Right now the Iranian government is facing monthly losses of $3 billion a month because of lost oil sales. The Iranian government budget is $38 billion a month, so that lost oil income is a major problem for cash-strapped Iran....Much of the budget goes to aid the poor and unemployed (who got that way largely because of the corruption and economic mismanagement of the religious dictatorship). Money must also be lavished on the quarter of the population who support the ruling clerics. Many Iranians are already feeling the pinch and they are not happy.

There's more at the link. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies are preparing for military action to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. According to debkafile:

The USS John C. Stennis arrives in August, raising the number of American aircraft carriers in waters off Iran to four including the USS Enterprise and the USS Abraham Lincoln, with the French Charles de Gaulle due soon to make up a fifth.

Thursday, July 12, American military officials announced that the US is also dispatching to the Persian Gulf dozens of tiny, unmanned SeaFox submersibles that can detect and destroy mines if strewn by Iran to block the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for transporting one-fifth of the world’s oil.

There are now additionally eight American minesweepers in the Persian Gulf as well as the USS Ponce, a platform for the special forces, helicopters and warships there to fight off Iranian marine units attempting to plant mines in the vital waterway.

There are predictions afloat that Mr. Obama will initiate some kind of action against Iran in October in order to muster the country behind him in November's election. Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that's a bit too cynical. Even if Mr. Obama would do such a thing he must realize it'd be counterproductive since such an obvious ploy would surely repel voters rather than attract them....Wouldn't it?

Is "Hypocrisy" Too Mild?

I hesitate to use the word "hypocrisy," mostly because it suggests something ugly but in this case also because it just doesn't seem strong enough.

A few examples: Liberals insist that they're tolerant great-souled folk who just want everyone to get along. No doubt this is true of some but, boy, when someone voices an opinion that transgresses their little orthodoxies a lot of them sure do get vicious. Michelle Malkin tells us what happened when the mother of actor Brad Pitt wrote a letter to her local paper defending Mitt Romney and criticizing President Obama for his stance on gay marriage, inter alia. The invective this lady elicited upon herself from the liberal/left was stomach-turning. One has to wonder what's wrong with these people. Why are they so bilious? Here's part of Malkin's article where she describes some of the tweets from these pathetic souls:

“BRAD PITT’S MOM WROTE AN ANTI-GAY PRO-ROMNEY EDITORIAL. KILL THE B***H.”
“Brad Pitt’s mom, die”
“F*** you, Brad Pitt’s mom. The gay community made your kid a star, you whacko.”
“Brad Pitt’s mother…what a brainless old b***h…”
“Brad Pitt’s Mom Slams Obama, Gays. That stand makes her a deluded, dumba** Fascist Repuke”
“I hope Brad Pitt has been supporting his mother and decides to cut her off. What a b***h.”
“Brad Pitt’s mom can choke on a (redacted).”

Then there's the spectacle of Democrats striving to find a flaw, any flaw, in Mitt Romney that can be used to distract people from the fact that Mr. Obama has understandably chosen not to run on his own performance in office. Among the latest in the series of dastardly deeds the evil Romney has perpetrated, a series that has included driving his car with his dog in a roof carrier, is that he was responsible for outsourcing jobs abroad when he was at Bain capital.

Forget that FactCheck.org has found this to be a complete fabrication. Forget that the Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made five million dollars via companies in which she held an interest which outsourced jobs. President Obama, who continues to make the charge against Romney, is a far worse "offshorer" and he has used taxpayer dollars to do it. Villainous Company explains:

The Obama campaign spent nearly $4,700 on telemarketing services from a Canadian telemarketing company called Pacific East between March and June, a Washington Free Beacon study of federal election filings shows. Pacific East is not the only overseas telemarketing firm raking in cash from the president’s reelection campaign. Obama paid a call center in Manila, Philippines $78,314.10 for telemarketing services between the start of the campaign and March.

The Obama administration had no problem with approving a plan by electric car company Fisker to use part of its $529 million federal stimulus loan guarantee to build its manufacturing facility, and the 500 jobs it supports, in Finland. Fisker employees were laid off at an old General Motors facility in Joe Biden's Delaware that Fisker was supposed to refurbish.

Speaking of GM, Government Motors, whose international headquarters is in Shanghai, recently announced it would be developing an electric car platform with its longtime Chinese partner, the Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corporation (SAIC). The president has no problem with that, either.

As part of doing business in China, GM, which has become virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the U.S. taxpayer, must share its taxpayer-subsidized technology with Beijing as a cost of doing business there, including that used in the heavily subsidized Chevy Volt.

According to a recent report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C., nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power. Nearly 80% of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines, the study found.

Another pair of examples is afforded us by the ineffable DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who has criticized Mr. Romney for putting his money, as do most wealthy Democrats, in foreign bank accounts and for refusing to release his tax returns. It turns out that Ms Schultz not only has foreign investments and accounts herself but she has also repeatedly ignored calls to release her own tax returns.

The word hypocrisy just doesn't seem to capture the full measure of shamelessness on display in the campaign to reelect the president. The most recent instance being the charge by Mr. Obama and his surrogates that Mr. Romney might be "a felon" for allegedly misrepresenting his status at Bain Capital to the SEC. The charge has been shown to be total nonsense, but nonsense is the mother's milk of politics for some politicos, especially political candidates who have nothing positive to say about their own record.

Feet of Clay

The Louis Freeh report charges that a number of Penn State officials, including the late Joe Paterno, suppressed information about former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's abusive sexual conduct with young boys and thus enabled Sandusky to continue his depradations. The report shows Paterno to have made some serious errors in judgment and to have been derelict in his moral and legal responsibilities.

This finding has led to calls for the university to disassociate itself of everything that honors Joe Paterno's enormous contribution and all of the good he did there. There are efforts now to have his statue removed from the campus and to rename those buildings that honor him.

Perhaps the university should do that, but there's something about it all that strikes me as both self-righteous and inconsistent. Do we tear down monuments to every person who has done good things because they've been shown to have feet of clay? Shall we rename Washington, D.C. and the Washington monument because George Washington owned slaves? Shall we tear down all the statues of all the Confederate generals in cities all across the South because those generals killed young union soldiers in defense, essentially, of the institution of slavery? Shall we rename J.F.K. airport because Kennedy was a philanderer? Shall we undo all the memorials to Martin Luther King because King was guilty of plagiarism, physical abuse of women, and sexual promiscuity?

Insist that the university take down Paterno's statue and rename the buildings if we think that's appropriate, but don't do it unless we're prepared to do the same with Martin Luther King and all the others as well.

If those men are considered immune to that sort of treatment then we at least need to hear an argument as to how their case is significantly different from Paterno's.

Not Helping the Cause

If there were an award for defeating your own argument while adamantly affirming it the man featured in this video would be a candidate for the prize.

Richard Dawkins interviews "Darwinian medicine" advocate Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and both men are insistent that design in the human body is an illusion, that all of the amazing processes and structures in the body are the result of purely unguided physical processes like natural selection and genetic mutation. Yet every time they bring up an example of Darwinian "design" Dr. Nesse seems to unwittingly refute it. It happens so often and so inadvertently that the viewer almost has to laugh.

Dr. Nesse agrees with Dawkins that the human body could not be intelligently designed because no intelligent designer would create structures like, for example, the two thin bones in our forearms because their thinness makes them susceptible to a certain kind of fracture. He then immediately goes on to explain, however, that that very thinness allows for dexterity of motion that allows for everything from piano playing to throwing a baseball. It's as if Nesse is saying that he has to say all this Darwinian stuff, but he's not sure he really believes it. He does something similar in part two when talking about the eye.

One of the most fascinating parts of the video is when Dr. Nesse says this:

I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [I'm amazed] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?

This is an excellent insight. The bacteria and viruses that wish to have us for lunch, as Nesse puts it, reproduce and thus evolve far more rapidly than do human beings. How then have they not managed to find ways to decisively defeat our immune system? Indeed, how did the immune system evolve fast enough to fend off microbial invasion in our early ancestors? It would seem that all creatures would have been vulnerable to microbial onslaught long before they'd had enough time to evolve defenses.

Nesse finishes that thought with this:

What exactly that transition was between one-celled organisms or few-celled organisms and multi-celled organisms -- the ability of an immune system to protect us from things that evolve so much faster than we do, that want to have us for lunch -- must be very crucial in the origins of life.

Crucial, yes, and awfully hard to explain in terms of Darwinian naturalism. Anyway, watch the video and note how hard it is for Dr. Nesse to talk about the body without using the word "design" and how Dawkins has to keep clarifying that, of course, Dr. Nesse doesn't really mean design.

One gets the feeling that Dawkins is thinking the whole time that this guy is just not with the program and certainly not helping the cause.

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.