The Demarcation Problem

An article by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NYT, suggests that science is experiencing an identity crisis. It used to be assumed that what distinguished science from other disciplines was that science was based on testing predictions which were entailed by a theory. This was called the hypothetico-deductive method.

Unfortunately, it seems that some theories in physics and biology have reached the limits of testability. In particle physics, for example, in order to probe more deeply into the structure of matter we have to build particle accelerators that would circle the earth. Since this is economically and, presumably, technically impractical, particle physics may have reached a dead end. It's not that we know everything there is to know, it's that we may have reached a point where we know everything which can be known, at least about particle physics.

Rather than submit to this glum state of affairs, however, some scientists want to expand the definition of legitimate science to include metaphysical speculation. The problem of discerning what to count as science is called by philosophers the Demarcation Problem and the tendency to blur the lines between science and philosophy (metaphysics) is especially prominent among string and multiverse theorists. Here's part of what Frank and Gleiser have to say about this:

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

How did we get to this impasse? In a way, the landmark detection three years ago of the elusive Higgs boson particle by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider marked the end of an era. Predicted about 50 years ago, the Higgs particle is the linchpin of what physicists call the “standard model” of particle physics, a powerful mathematical theory that accounts for all the fundamental entities in the quantum world (quarks and leptons) and all the known forces acting between them (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

But the standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end. It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building blocks with the other great edifice of 20th-century physics: Einstein’s cosmic-scale description of gravity. Without a unification of these two theories — a so-called theory of quantum gravity — we have no idea why our universe is made up of just these particles, forces and properties. (We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time.)

This is where the specter of an evidence-independent science arises. For most of the last half-century, physicists have struggled to move beyond the standard model to reach the ultimate goal of uniting gravity and the quantum world. Many tantalizing possibilities (like the often-discussed string theory) have been explored, but so far with no concrete success in terms of experimental validation.

Today, the favored theory for the next step beyond the standard model is called supersymmetry (which is also the basis for string theory). Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a “partner” particle for every particle that we currently know. It doubles the number of elementary particles of matter in nature. The theory is elegant mathematically, and the particles whose existence it predicts might also explain the universe’s unaccounted-for “ dark matter.” As a result, many researchers were confident that supersymmetry would be experimentally validated soon after the Large Hadron Collider became operational.

That’s not how things worked out, however. To date, no supersymmetric particles have been found. If the Large Hadron Collider cannot detect these particles, many physicists will declare supersymmetry — and, by extension, string theory — just another beautiful idea in physics that didn’t pan out.

But many won’t. Some may choose instead to simply retune their models to predict supersymmetric particles at masses beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider’s power of detection — and that of any foreseeable substitute.

Implicit in such a maneuver is a philosophical question: How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally? Should we abandon it just because, at a given level of technological capacity, empirical support might be impossible? If not, how long should we wait for such experimental machinery before moving on: ten years? Fifty years? Centuries?

Consider, likewise, the cutting-edge theory in physics that suggests that our universe is just one universe in a profusion of separate universes that make up the so-called multiverse. This theory could help solve some deep scientific conundrums about our own universe (such as the so-called fine-tuning problem), but at considerable cost: Namely, the additional universes of the multiverse would lie beyond our powers of observation and could never be directly investigated. Multiverse advocates argue nonetheless that we should keep exploring the idea — and search for indirect evidence of other universes.

Similar dead ends seem to be looming in cosmogeny (the study of the origin of the universe), origin of life, and origin of consciousness studies, all of which raises a question. If scientists yield to the desire to include in the discipline of science explanatory theories which are inherently untestable and which are essentially metaphysical, on what grounds can anyone argue against allowing the teaching of Intelligent Design in public school science classes?

Worst President Ever

Who would you say is the worst U.S. president ever? I suspect that liberals asked that question would answer George W. Bush or maybe Richard Nixon. Conservatives might respond with Barack Obama or Lyndon Johnson, but according to Robert Merry at the National Interest it's none of these, although in his mind Bush comes close. In fact, his answer will perhaps surprise most readers, but here's a hint: It won't surprise faithful listeners of Glenn Beck's radio program.

Here's how Merry begins his very interesting column:

If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea.

Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920 and quickly turned bad times into good times, including a 14 percent GDP growth rate in 1922. Labor and racial unrest declined markedly during his watch. He led the country into no troublesome wars.

There was, of course, the Teapot Dome scandal that implicated major figures in his administration, but there was never any evidence that the president himself participated in any venality. As Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, put it, “Harding wasn’t a bad man. He was just a slob.”

The academic surveys also consistently place near the bottom James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania. Now here’s a man who truly lacked character and watched helplessly as his country descended into the worst crisis of its history. He stepped into the presidency with a blatant lie to the American people. In his inaugural address, he promised he would accept whatever judgment the Supreme Court rendered in the looming Dred Scott case. What he didn’t tell the American people was that he already knew what that judgment was going to be (gleaned through highly inappropriate conversations with justices). This is political cynicism of the rankest sort.

But Buchanan’s failed presidency points to what may be a pertinent distinction in assessing presidential failure. Buchanan was crushed by events that proved too powerful for his own weak leadership. And so the country moved inexorably into one of the worst crises in its history. But Buchanan didn’t create the crisis; he merely was too wispy and vacillating to get control of it and thus lead the nation to some kind of resolution. It took his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to do that.

That illustrates the difference between failure of omission and failure of commission—the difference between presidents who couldn’t handle gathering crises and presidents who actually created the crises.

So who does Merry consider to be the worst? I'm afraid you'll have to go to the article itself to see, but while you're there read the whole thing. It's worth the time.

Fracking's Effect on Drinking Water: Nil

The debate over fracking is not likely to end anytime soon, but the Obama administration's EPA has just dealt a hard blow to the opponents of the process by releasing a report that finds that fracking has no significant impact on drinking water quality. According to the report:

We [the EPA] did not find evidence that these [fracking] mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The cases occurred during both routine activities and accidents and have resulted in impacts to surface or ground water....

The number of identified cases where drinking water resources were impacted are small relative to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, or may be an underestimate as a result of several factors.

The Pennsylvania EPA came to similar conclusions a few years ago. If the EPA in this administration can't find a serious problem with fracking it should give confidence to everyone of good will on both sides of the issue that fracking is a safe way to extract energy from the ground. Nevertheless, the battle will doubtless continue because just as the Keystone Pipeline isn't the real target of the more fanatical environmentalists, fracking, in my opinion, isn't what those environmentalists are out to stop. Their real goal is the elimination of the use of fossil fuels altogether, and their opposition to fracking is based, again in my opinion, on the fact that the process undermines a couple of their chief arguments.

Many environmentalists claim, for instance, that fossil fuels are becoming scarce so we need to move to alternative sources of energy, but the fracking process has opened up vast new reserves of oil and gas that could last until the end of the century. They also claim that dependence on foreign oil makes us vulnerable to the instabilities in the Middle East and north Africa, but fracking is rapidly making us energy independent of these troubled regions. Thirdly, environmentalists object to fossil fuels because they're dirty to produce and dirty to consume, but fracking is relatively clean and so is the natural gas that it produces.

As time goes on we'll probably see fewer demonstrations like this one and more people, especially the poor who won't have to pay so much for everything they buy, singing the praises of fracking technology:

Democrat Disillusionment

It's a regrettable fact of human nature that ridicule often works so well against one's opponents. Ridicule sounds cool and sophisticated to the masses, it saves the ridiculer the trouble of formulating arguments and saves his audience the trouble of thinking. That's why Karl Marx (and, sadly, Martin Luther in his later years) used it with great gusto against his opponents, it's why Saul Alinsky recommends in Rules for Radicals that it be used against one's political foes, and why Richard Dawkins calls for atheists to use it against Christians.

It's also a fact of political science that when the entertainment media starts making fun of a political figure, using ridicule against him or her, that figure is pretty much done for. Until relatively recently President Obama has had the media breezes at his back. Like the legendary dolphin ferrying the drowning child to safety, the media has carried Mr. Obama on its shoulders throughout his presidency, protecting him from scandal after scandal and blunder after blunder. No Republican would ever have gotten such deferential treatment and such uncritical press as has this one.

This, though, seems to be slowly coming to an end. Disillusionment seems to be growing among Democrats, who, like a young maiden awaking on the morning after a drunken seduction, are beginning to realize they've given themselves, body and soul, to someone who, had they been sober, would never have been allowed to first base.

The tip of the spear of ridicule, or it's less unkind cousin, satire, is often late-night television, and there President Obama is starting to feel the barbs. Jimmy Fallon's joke is funny but the reaction of the audience should be very disconcerting to the White House:

Actually, the growing disenchantment among rank and file Democrats is not just with the president, but with the party as a whole. A black Chicago pastor, admittedly a conservative but the leader of a large, mostly black congregation, recently made this observation:

We have a large, disproportionate number of people who are impoverished. We have a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated, we have a disproportionate number of people who are unemployed, the educational system has totally failed, and all of this primarily has been under Democratic regimes in our neighborhoods. So, the question for me becomes, how can our neighborhoods be doing so awful and so bad when we’re so loyal to this party who is in power? It’s a matter of them taking complete advantage of our vote.

Nor has it been lost on people that cities like Baltimore, Detroit, New York, Chicago and numerous others, cities fraught with corruption, violence, decay and joblessness, have all been run for generations by Democrats. Apparently, more and more African-Americans are beginning to ask how much worse the Republicans can be than the Democrats who have given their communities little more than drugs, high murder rates, poverty, poor schools, and family disintegration.

The Dying of Academic Freedom

Someone once said that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Professor Ed Schlosser is not a conservative but he certainly sounds like a disillusioned liberal in an article at Vox. He admits to being very scared of his liberal students, not for his physical safety but rather for the safety of his career. Liberal students, he claims, have a much different view than earlier generations of what should and should not be said in the classroom by the professor. Here are a few excerpts of what is a fairly long piece:

I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that ... a student [might accuse] me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate.

Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today's college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort. It's not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period.

Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hampshire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

This sort of perspective ... was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don't doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors' shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that's all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

I believe there are several reasons for the mind-set Professor Schlosser laments. One is that the left has given up on argument because they know, even if only subliminally, that most of their arguments are terribly unconvincing and that if they're forced to defend their views rationally they'll only be embarrassed. Better to resort to name-calling and insult or to simply shut down any expression of opposing views altogether so that they don't have to defend their own.

Another reason is that so many generations of students have absorbed a kind of epistemological relativism that says that all views have merit. Thus one's own view should be accepted for no weightier reason than that it's one's own view.

A third reason is that in the contemporary post-modern world truth is whatever you or your group believes fervently. Objective facts don't matter. Therefore, to have someone challenge what is true for you is at best impertinent and at worst insulting. It's offensive to have someone who knows nothing of the experience of someone of your gender, your race, your sexual orientation tell you that what you know to be true is perhaps not true. It's a kind of violence to your person, an assault, to be questioned in this way.

A final reason is that a lot of students are young narcissists who feel entitled to hold their opinions free of any challenge. People who've been told all their lives that they're special sometimes get angry at an authority figure like a professor who doesn't treat them with the deference they believe to be their due.

All these, ironically enough, are the fruit of the very liberalism Schlosser embraces. He's a man who has contributed to the creation of a species of academic viciousness and is stunned that it might be turned against him. Another irony is that, as he suggests in the article, he's placing his ultimate hope in a successful conservative push-back against the campus fascists and narcissists. He recognizes, evidently, that liberals, having created the monster, are poorly equipped to kill it.

Should Tsarnaev Be Executed?

Daniel Payne at The Federalist argues that there's no good argument for putting the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev to death and that it's "barbaric" to do so. I disagree with him on both counts. Here are a few of the salient passages from his article:

Upon the recent announcement that Dzhohkar Tsarnaev received the death penalty for his crimes in Boston, we were treated to a great many opinions that what would happen to this 21-year-old man was good, and justice: he had killed people, so now he will be killed. “What a relief,” everyone seemed to say. “Now the score will finally be settled.”

I confess to being baffled by this line of argument, chiefly because it seems to have no grasp on the workings of either scores or settling. To settle the score between Tsarnaev and the public — to put everyone back at square one — is not a matter of killing the murderer but raising his three victims from their graves.

I confess to being baffled by this as well. I never heard or read anyone say the things Payne claims "everyone seemed to say." I know of no one who thinks that killing Tsarnaev will "settle the score," and I suspect that Payne doesn't either. I wonder if he's not simply erecting a straw man. Anyway, there are more substantive claims laying ahead of us. He writes:

Tsarnaev should not be put to death. There is no satisfactory reason to execute him, and I am not positive than anyone who supports executing him can articulate a coherent reason for doing so. This is not to say that supporters of the death penalty are arguing in bad faith, only that they are arguing with bad arguments. Payne then goes on to outline some of the bad arguments.

The Catholic Church, which for centuries has acknowledged the legitimacy of the death penalty, has over the years approximated a rather stringent set of criteria for why we might execute a human being, and it is worth studying these to determine what we are going to do. According to the church, capital punishment can be justified on the grounds of either retribution, rehabilitation of the criminal, defense against the criminal, or deterrence of future criminals.

It seems needless to point out that Tsarnaev’s execution will satisfy none of these obligations and that killing him would thus be a pointless endeavor....

I am at a loss as to any other reasons one could give for killing this young man, other than simply out of spite....

There is no case to be made for killing Tsarnaev. Indeed, there was likely no case to be made for the other 1,408 inmates executed in the United States since 1976. The only reason we seem to have for executing another human being in cold blood is that doing so will make us feel a little bit better for a little while.

“What a relief,” people will say. Why?

I doubt many people will say "What a relief," but that aside, I think Payne is wrong to think he has exhausted all the reasons for invoking the death penalty. There's another which I think can be illustrated by the following example: A man attacks and rapes a woman and traumatizes her in the process. There's no doubt of his guilt, and when the sentencing hearing takes place the rapist is given the maximum sentence allowed by law - two months of community service.

If we were to discover that that was the maximum sentence in our society we'd doubtless be outraged at the leniency of it, but why? One reason, of course, is that it's a fundamental principle of justice that the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the severity of the crime, that the worse the crime, the worse the punishment, and that the very worst crimes deserve the very worst punishment.

A corollary to this, I think, is that our outrage at the relatively light sentence given to the rapist in our example is indicative of a lack of value society places on women. The sentence suggests that society believes that forcing women to submit to male sexual impulses is not such a big deal. A society which places a high value on the dignity and well-being of women would affix a severe punishment to the crime of violating them.

A similar argument can be made for the death penalty. Deliberately, maliciously, causing severe bodily injury and death to others is one of the worst crimes a man can commit. To impose anything less than the harshest penalty for doing it is to say, in effect, that the lives he ruined aren't worth taking his own life over.

In other words, contrary to what Payne apparently thinks, a society that refuses to exact the most severe punishment for the very worst crimes is essentially declaring that no one's life is so valuable that even if a murderer robs those we love of their lives the murderer should not be required to pay the ultimate penalty. It is, in fact, to place more value on the life of the murderer than on the life of the victim and is, for that reason, fundamentally unjust.

Rolling Back the Entitlement State

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist believes that reform of the welfare state is both necessary and possible but that it has to be replaced with something. We can't just eliminate things like the Affordable Care Act without giving people other options. Tracinski's essay outlines seven things a Republican administration and Congress can do to eliminate the welfare state and improve considerably the lives of all Americans. I list the seven here with a couple of sentences of explanation, but you'll have to go to the article to read his full defense of each.

What agenda for the right would really count as fundamental reform? What would help conserve the Constitution instead of conserving the welfare state?

I will take for granted all the reasons why we should fight the welfare state: its vast and unsustainable costs, its encouragement of dependency (and not just for the poor but for the middle class, which is less excusable), and particularly in the case of Social Security, its catastrophic diversion of money from private savings to government consumption.

Instead, I want to put forward some ideas on the how: specific political reforms that might actually be politically possible, and which would prepare the ground and build public support for a real scaling back of the welfare state.

1) Repeal ObamaCare
If we want to roll back the welfare state, we will never have any better opportunity to start than by repealing ObamaCare—a program that is relatively new, has never been popular, and is in a slow process of imploding. The latest reports: state insurance exchanges set up to implement ObamaCare are foundering, and insurers in these exchanges are filing requests for enormous increases in premiums. Why? Because “with a full year of claims data under their belt for the first time since Obamacare went into effect, they’re finding the insurance pool was considerably older and sicker than expected”—expected, that is, by everyone except ObamaCare’s critics. Meanwhile, ObamaCare has pushed a lot of people into high-deductible insurance plans that have made it harder for them to pay for health care.

But the point made by the reform conservatives is that we can’t just define our agenda in terms of what we’re against. We have to have a positive agenda, our own solution to the voters’ problems and concerns. Fair enough. A true reform agenda shouldn’t just be about knocking down failed entitlement programs. It should be about building up the alternatives to a massive federal welfare state. Hence the natural follow-up to a repeal of ObamaCare.

2) Health Savings Accounts
Scrapping ObamaCare would be a natural opportunity for Republicans to propose their own free-market health-care reforms. The centerpiece of that alternative should be Health Savings Accounts, which make it easier for individuals to save money in tax-free accounts which they can use for medical expenses. They were popular and worked well (I used to have one) before ObamaCare put the squeeze on them, because God knows we wouldn’t want people thinking that it’s possible to just pay for their own health care expenses.

Or maybe we would. That’s precisely the model for how to get from here to there: to make it easier for people to accumulate private savings for the things they’ve been encouraged to rely on government to provide. We can do similar things for other goods like education and retirement savings, where IRAs and 401(k)s perform that function (and are, naturally, under attack from the left).

3) Means-test Social Security
Social Security is already a bad deal for the middle class, since the benefits are already skewed in such a way that they are equivalent to a tiny return, between one and two percent annually, on what might have been a private investment. By contrast, long-term returns on the stock market are about seven percent annually. And in order to make Social Security sustainable, it will have to become a much worse deal.

A recent survey found that “41 percent of Americans think there will be no Social Security benefits for them when they retire and nearly a third expect reduced levels of benefits.” In other words, almost three quarters of the public already thinks they have no real stake in Social Security. They think they’re going to get milked their whole lives to pay for it and get little or nothing in return.

4) Restart economic growth
Since the financial crisis, the United States has slipped into the Obama rate of growth, a permanent state of semi-stagnation. We’ve been through market crashes and recessions before, but usually after a year or two of pain, we get a strong burst of growth to make up for it. This time, we’re in the long twilight of a non-recovery recovery. The economy is technically growing again, but at such a feeble rate that it hardly feels like it. It’s the kind of economy in which the unemployment rate falls, not because the long-unemployed are all getting jobs again, but because so many people are dropping out of the workforce altogether.

This low rate of growth makes the burden of the welfare state greater, because we can no longer grow our way out from under its expenses. At the same time, it makes the welfare state harder to get rid of. You can’t just tell the unemployed to go out and get a job when the economy is still flopping around and gasping like a fish in the bottom of a bass boat. If we’re going to expect people to be more self-reliant, they must also have a sense of economic hope.

5) Re-reform welfare
Never letting an opportunity go to waste, the Obama administration has used the recession to gut the welfare reform of the 1990s, extending unemployment benefits and loosening work requirements.

More broadly, it has rejected the whole spirit of welfare reform, which was to devise ways to move people away from dependence on government and toward work and opportunity and self-reliance. Instead, the administration has used the state for the opposite purpose: to push people from self-reliance into dependence.

Consider the food stamp program, which was rather unconvincingly renamed SNAP in an attempt to escape its well-earned stigma. (Eventually, they’ll need a euphemism for the euphemism, and they’ll have to change the name again.) The USDA has been spending millions of dollars advertising food stamps in an attempt to increase the program’s enrollment. Advertising for welfare. That says it all, doesn’t it? And it has worked. The Daily Caller notes that “In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today one out of every seven receive the benefit.” The program has doubled under Obama’s watch.

6) Save the cities
This year’s riots in Baltimore reminded us of a central irony of American politics: the centers of economic inequality and racial conflict—the key issues on which Democrats always campaign—are places that are the sole property of Democrats, owned and run by them for about as long as anyone can remember.

On the right, we’ve gotten used to ignoring the failure of the cities and the Democrats’ tired, predictable excuses for failure. (It’s all the fault of slavery!) That’s because we’ve gotten used to writing off the cities as Democratic Party territory, so their failure is not our business. Long since, the respectable middle class (both white and black) voted with their feet, decamping to leafy suburbs with safe streets, affordable real estate, and halfway decent schools. We left, in part, so we wouldn’t have to worry about the perpetual dysfunction of the cities any more.

But the riots in Baltimore are a reminder that this is our business, after all. We have an interest in arresting the failure of the cities because they are the big remaining engine of social strife in America, the festering centers of class warfare and racial conflict. To the extent that there are still large numbers of people in this country who live in hopeless poverty and grow to resent the giant gap they can see between themselves and wealthier people who live in the next neighborhood over—they are mostly in the cities. To the extent there are people whose daily life reinforces the notion that America is systematically racist and the police are the enemy, they are mostly in the cities.

If we want less class and racial conflict, if we want more people moving up into the middle class and no longer feeling the need for government support, if we want to compete for the vote in what are now deep centers of political support for the left—then we need to start targeting the cities for basic reforms that will improve the quality of life there and bring back the middle class.

7) Federalism
Part of the reason we have such a bloated welfare state is because every decision in Congress has to be a compromise between “blue state” politicians who want more and more and more government and “red state” politicians who usually claim they want less. Hence my modest proposal that we kick these decisions back down to the state level, which is where they were always intended to be. This is not a foolproof solution, because we’ll still occasionally get local handouts like ObamaCow. But the general idea is that we can let New York and California set up more generous welfare states—if they want to pay for them. And they should let the hinterland scale back welfare. Then the states can compete to see whose approach is more successful and how many people vote with their feet for the small government model. Even now, the results on this are encouraging, with low-tax, low-regulation states experiencing huge increases in population.

Tracinski concludes with this: "The audience is there for a real reform agenda. We just have to find the right people and the right message to connect to it."

Butterfly Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies shows the incredible difficulties metamorphosis pose to any account of the process which insists that its genesis be completely unguided and naturalistic. Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no answer.

There is a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that such a process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

What Does it Mean to Know?

Ernest Sosa, a philosopher at Rutgers, offers us a quick lesson in basic epistemology for the layman at The Opinionator. Epistemology is the (surprisingly, perhaps) fascinating study of the nature of knowledge and belief. Most of us think we know something if we are certain that it's true, but things are much more complicated than that. The classical definition of knowledge is that whatever it is we claim to know must be true, we must believe it's true and we must have good reasons for believing it's true.

Unfortunately, there are difficulties with this definition lurking in the philosophical weeds and Sosa points out the biggest of them, something called the Gettier Problem. He writes:

What is it to truly know something? In our daily lives, we might not give this much thought — most of us rely on what we consider to be fair judgment and common sense in establishing knowledge. But the task of clearly defining true knowledge is trickier than it may first seem, and it is a problem philosophers have been wrestling with since Socrates.

In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing. This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis.

Here is an example of the sort used by Gettier to refute that theory. Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge.

Sosa then goes on to discuss a modern formulation of the definition of knowledge, which, for what it's worth, I don't think is much of an improvement, but read the article and judge for yourself.

Are Miracles Impossible?

A common objection to the possibility of miracles is that such prodigies as a man rising from the dead, for example, would entail a series of violations of the laws of nature, specifically the conservation laws, and that, as David Hume put it, it's been the "uniform experience" of mankind that nature's laws suffer no such violations. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains in this 11 minute video why, even if the laws of nature were inviolable, even for God, it's a mistake to think that a miracle violates them. Whether the laws are Newtonian or quantum mechanical the occurrence of a miracle is not ruled out by them:

The only way the claim that miracles are impossible can be true is if the universe is closed, i.e. if there's nothing beyond it that can act in it. In other words, miracles are impossible only if there's no God or anything else of a purposeful nature which transcends the space-time universe. If it's possible that God exists then it's possible that miracles occur. Since it is possible that God exists any report of a miracle must be assessed on the evidence for it and not on the apriori assumption of atheism.

Privilege

Should people feel guilty that they're better off because of the efforts of their parents and grandparents than those whose parents and grandparents couldn't, or wouldn't, pass on the same benefits to their progeny? Some liberals seem to think so. A British sociologist went so far as to claim that parents who read bedtime stories to their children should feel guilty that they're probably conferring an unfair "privilege" on their children over their peers whose parents don't or can't spend such time with their kids.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist will have none of this nonsense and has some fine things to say about "Privilege." Here are a few:

I have two young kids. And I am working my tail off to give them as much “privilege” as humanly possible.

As if the good things you do for your own kids constitute actual harm for the children of others.

I want my kids to start their adult lives with a laundry list of advantages: I want them to be bright, literate, skilled, capable of self-discipline, athletic, with good taste and manners and grooming, maybe a little bit of money, and heck, even a few family connections—enough to get their feet in the doors of whatever careers they choose. I had some of these things, mostly a good education, and undoubtedly more than most people. I want my kids to have even more. Why? Because that’s my job as a parent: to give my kids the best start in life possible—and better than mine.

Precisely. Liberals survey society and see many parents who are essentially letting their kids raise themselves. This, naturally, puts those kids at a severe disadvantage in life, so the liberal solution is to level the playing field by criticising parents who want for their kids what Tracinski wants for his instead of criticising parents who don't do the things Tracinski does. Bringing the bottom up is hard. It's much easier to achieve the egalitarian nirvana by reducing everyone to the same miserable level. That's the liberal worldview in a nutshell.

Tracinski is careful in his essay to distinguish "privilege" from "entitlement:"

Privilege is not the same thing as “entitlement.” Entitlement means taking one’s advantages in life for granted, as if they are part of the normal order of things, and not realizing where they came from or what made them possible. Which usually means frittering away all of those advantages by failing to take the initiative to accomplish anything of your own.

In fact, one of the most important advantages you can give your kids is a lack of entitlement, the ethos of knowing that he has to work for what he wants in life. One of the great secrets of the middle class strivers is that they realize lack of entitlement is a “privilege” that will give their children a leg up on the spoiled rich kids.

There is one kind of privilege which far more parents, rich and poor, black and white, could confer on their children if they wished. It's perhaps the most effective thing they could do to insure their child has a modicum of advantages in life. It is to get married and stay married:

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution discovered that the likelihood of a child raised by [unmarried] parents born into the lowest income quintile moving to the top quintile by the age 40 was a disastrous 3 percent. Worse, 50 percent of those children stay stuck in the bottom quintile. And the outlook for the children of those marriage-less children is equally stark....But Reeves discovered a silver lining while crunching the data: Those children born in the lowest quintile to parents who were married and stayed married had only a 19 percent chance of remaining in the bottom income group. Reeve’s study revealed that this social-mobility advantage applied not just to the lower class: The middle class was impacted, too. The study revealed that children born into the middle class have a mere 11 percent chance of ending up in the bottom economic quintile with married parents, but that number rises to 38 percent if their parents are never married.

This is not a finding likely to be trumpeted by the liberal media which, judging by the policies they endorse, seems to be more concerned with breaking families up than with building them up.

Tracinski closes his article with this:

I’ve always loved an old quote from Henry Ford: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” The same thing goes for “privilege,” which is really just a disparaging term for “opportunity.” In this white-collar era, it doesn’t necessarily come dressed in overalls any more. But it still looks like work.

The Idol of Equality

Sometimes it seems like the left has an equality fetish. They evidently think inequality is ipso facto proof of some sort of corruption in our body politic. Sometimes this leads them to rapturous excitement at some putative discovery of marginal validity of a primal egalitarianism between the sexes as in this article in the Guardian. The author gushes over a thinly supported theory of some anthropologists that primitive hunter/gatherer societies maintained sexual equality, to which one is tempted to respond by asking, "so what?" Apparently, any indication, no matter how tenuous, that women were treated as equals by men in some ancient culture is supposed to have important, if unclear, implications for us today.

On the other hand, liberals seem to be highly selective about the kinds of inequality which get their ideological juices flowing. For example, philosopher Peter Singer promotes a radical inequality which doesn't seem to ruffle the equality mavens at all. Here's an excerpt from a piece about Singer in which he declares that certain unborn children should not be treated as equal to the rest of us, or even to other unborn children:

On Sunday April 16, contentious Princeton Professor Peter Singer, once again argued that it is “reasonable” for the government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to infants with disabilities.

In the interview, which was perhaps ironically conducted as part of a press tour Singer is currently on promoting his new book about charities, “The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically,” the professor advocated the shocking claim that health care laws like the Affordable Care Act should be more overt about rationing and that we should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”

During the controversial segment, talk show host Aaron Klein quoted from a chapter of Singer’s “Practical Ethics,” titled “Taking Life: Humans” published in 1993.

Singer, who is known for his provocative and often contradictory views on animal liberation and infanticide, also repeatedly referred to disabled infants as “it” during the interview. Without offering any scientific evidence to support what amounts to a return to eugenics, Singer routinely contends the “right to life” is related to a being’s capacity for intelligence and having preferences, which in turn is directly related to an undefined capacity to feel and/or comprehend ethereal concepts like pain and pleasure.

Singer told Klein that health care rationing is already happening, and surmised that hospitals routinely make decisions not based on need, but rather on cost. He then used the presumed practice to rationalize the killing of disabled infants by arguing in support of “non-voluntary euthanasia” for human beings who Singer contends are not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, including “severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.”

For Singer the severely disabled are less equal than the rest of us and therefore don't merit a right to life. Singer, despite his radical inegalitarianism, is nevertheless a favorite of the equality fetishists at the New York Times.

Here's another form of inequality that fails to impress the left: The richest 1% of the taxpayers in this country contribute almost 50% of personal income tax revenue. Now if we really sincerely care about equality we'd find that appallingly unfair. Where are the demands from the liberals so outraged by "inequality" for a tax code in which everyone pays the same tax rate?

Perhaps the most absurd expression of the left's obsession is the solution to inequality we're beginning to hear about more frequently. The abolition of the family. Some on the left believe that the best way to eliminate inequality is to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator. Do strong families give some children an unfair advantage in life? Well, then let's limit what families can do for their children. This is only a step away from doing away with families altogether. Here's an example of the sort of thinking that is becoming more commonplace among liberals and other leftists:

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment. Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’ Once he got thinking, Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations. So, what to do?

According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’

The break-up of the family is plausible maybe, he thinks, but even to the most hard-hearted there’s something off-key about it.

Indeed. In any case, Swift is not himself advocating the abolition of the family, he claims, but he does advocate limiting what families can do for their children.

‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.

The test they devised was based on what they term ‘familial relationship goods’; those unique and identifiable things that arise within the family unit and contribute to the flourishing of family members.

For Swift, there’s one particular choice that fails the test.

‘Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’

In other words, private schools are not necessary for family closeness, private schools confer unfair advantages on those who attend them, therefore private schools should be abolished. The same can be said for inheritance, of course, family connections, and even, perhaps, religious faith. Swift himself extends the concept to the traditional two parent model of the family:

‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.

This is the sort of thing that follows once equality becomes an idol. There must be no differences, no advantage of one person over another, we must all be cut from the same cookie-cutter. How far have liberals fallen from the halcyon days of the 60's when all we heard was the need for individuality and the freedom to pursue our own ends in our own way. Liberalism employs this libertarian rhetoric until it succeeds in undermining all traditional institutions. Then it takes off the libertarian mask and reveals the underlying totalitarian impulse that seeks to control every aspect of our lives. The mask is starting to come off.

Perverting Science

Mark Franck at First Things tells an interesting tale of two social scientists who conducted research on a similar topic: Gay marriage.

The first researcher found that children of parents in gay unions do less well than children in traditional families on every measure tested. The second researcher found that when people talk in person to a gay man who describes to them how he would like to marry but is prohibited by law from doing so, the attitudes of the people frequently undergo lasting change in favor of gay marriage.

The first researcher has been put through the wringer because his results do not conform to the liberal narrative about gay marriage. The second researcher was roundly praised and feted by the media for his work.

The first researcher's work has been validated by everyone who has examined it, many of whom themselves favor gay marriage, but eventually other researchers whose mission it was to discredit the findings inexplicably threw out some of his data in order to get their results to conform to their preconceived conclusions. The second researcher, meanwhile, was found to have totally fabricated his research and his data.

The media is treating both cases as though they were somehow equivalently fraudulent. Science in America is taking on the aspect of science in the old Soviet Union. Unless the scientist's conclusions conform to the correct ideological line, they have no merit. The correct line in the liberal media is that gay unions are no different than traditional heterosexual unions, and if research finds that not to be the case then the research is ipso facto flawed.

Read Franck's fairly brief explanation of this absurd affair at the link.

A Memorial Day Meditation

On Memorial Day we remember the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its yearlong mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

Hard Truths

Thomas Sowell states some politically incorrect truths about race in America in a recent column at The Jewish World Review. After discussing how the recent riots and looting were fed by the falsehood that Michael Brown was shot in the back while fleeing from a white cop, and the fact that a black cop in Alabama was, at about the same time, cleared of wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of an unarmed white teenager, an incident I'll bet most Americans who get whatever news they consume from the mainstream media were completely unaware of, Sowell goes on to talk about some fictions that surround black poverty. Chief among these fictions is the attempt to,

...automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a "legacy of slavery" in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence. The "legacy of slavery" argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

He supports these claims with an inconvenient fact. Black communities were healthier in the aftermath of slavery than they've been in the aftermath of the welfare state:

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s. You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, DOWN — during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Similar trends apply equally to poor whites in England, Sowell notes, as illustrated in Theodore Dalrymple's book Life at the Bottom. The point is not that blacks are somehow uniquely disposed to crime and dysfunction, but rather that liberal government policies destroy individuals and communities of any color by, in Sowell's words,

exempting them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain ....Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

As if to put the exclamation point at the end of his essay Sowell notes that "one key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994." In other words, if we were really serious about ending poverty in the black community we'd be doing everything we could to strengthen the two parent family rather than doing everything we can to weaken it.

What Now for Israel and Her Critics?

Hamas is nothing if not persistent. Having provoked Israel into waging war in Gaza and laying the place waste they're once again back to building tunnels into Israeli towns to facilitate killing more Israeli civilians. This, of course, is costing a lot of money, donated by other countries (including Israel) to be used to help Palestinians cope with living under the Hamas tyranny. No matter the needs of their people, what money and supplies there are in Gaza is being diverted to tunnel construction.

This presents both Israel as well as the Western critics of Israel's resort to force last summer with a problem: 1) Should Israel do nothing about these tunnels and allow Hamas to slaughter their civilians? 2) Should Israel once again invade Gaza and destroy the tunnels? 3) Should Israel ramp up their blockade of Gaza and squeeze Hamas economically until they stop construction? Western critics of Israel have condemned them for doing both 2) and 3) in the past, but to say they should not now resort to force or an economic blockade is to say they should allow the tunnels to be built and their children to be massacred by the Hamas barbarians.

While we mull over these options here's the essence of an informative piece on the state of affairs Israel is confronting right now:

The Israeli defense establishment and Israeli decision-makers have been well aware for many months of Hamas' rebuilding of the tunnels that were destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in August 2014. Hamas is not trying to hide its flagship project and has been pursuing it vigorously. The organization’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has invested immense resources in the project, while ignoring the deplorable condition of the population in the Gaza Strip, where things have worsened since last summer’s operation and the closing of the border with Egypt in December 2014.

The tunnel reconstruction project resumed a few weeks after the end of Operation Protective Edge. It employs hundreds of Palestinian workers as well as heavy transportation machinery. Palestinian men are fighting for the privilege of working in the tunnels, since this is their only chance to find work in the unemployment-riddled Gaza Strip. This intensive activity along the Israeli border has fully exposed the tunnel-digging and fortification project for all to see.

The defense establishment rejects the allegation ... that at least one Hamas tunnel has crossed the border into Israel. But members of Kibbutz Nirim in the western Negev Desert claim that a private company whose services they retained carried out a comprehensive inspection, which showed a high probability of a tunnel under the houses in the kibbutz.

Regardless of whether Hamas has been able to cross the border with Israel within 10 months, there is no question that this is its goal, and one that it has been pursuing strenuously. Before long, the project will get to the point at which dozens of tunnels are primed and ready for a strike in Israel. To date, Israel has apparently not taken any pre-emptive measures. Unlike on the eve of Operation Protective Edge, there is no dispute today over whether the defense establishment has intelligence about the scope of the tunnels and their real threat to Israel’s southern communities. Today, the threat is in the open.

Israel now faces both a military and diplomatic dilemma. If the IDF were to embark on another campaign in Gaza to destroy the tunnels, as Bar-Lev suggests, it is abundantly clear that it will not stop at the border. Instead, it will evolve into a large-scale operation with all the implications of such a move, namely rocket fire at Israel, a ground offensive and airstrikes in Gaza, fighting in densely populated areas and civilian casualties as well as further destruction of the infrastructure in Gaza, which is still licking its wounds in the aftermath of last summer’s fighting.

From an Israeli standpoint, another military operation in Gaza within a year will intensify the international pressure, regardless of the importance of the operation and the fact that destroying the tunnels is clearly a defensive need. On the other hand, when the picture is so crystal clear and the danger so tangible, Israel cannot again sit idly by and continue to treat Hamas as if the threat doesn’t exist.

Israel has been forced in recent months to ease the blockade on the Gaza Strip. Supplies are shipped only via Israel, after Egypt sealed off the smuggling tunnels in Rafah. Had it not been for the recent more lenient approach and the allowance of raw materials previously banned by Israel, Gaza would have faced a humanitarian crisis by now.

Jerusalem’s only option now is to give the ultimatum to Hamas’ political and military leadership that unless the tunnel project is stopped, the rationed construction materials Israel is currently transferring to Gaza will stop, and little by little the easing of the blockade will end as well. Tightening the blockade will cause further deterioration in the population's situation. However, this is apparently the only deterrent at Israel's disposal before a military operation, which in turn could lead to civilian casualties and fatalities and more suffering for Gazans.

The critics of Israel are in a difficult spot. If Israel employs tougher sanctions the critics will have to endorse that policy since it's the only plausible peaceful alternative to war. If an economic squeeze fails to deter Hamas then the critics will have to remain quiet should war break out again. To object would be to implicitly side with terrorism.

Conservative Calls for Civil Disobedience

Thomas Jefferson, borrowing from John Locke, wrote in the Declaration of Independence that,

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It may turn out at some point that revolution is the only way to avoid despotism, but the costs of such a measure are so high and the outcome so uncertain that it should be an absolutely last resort. Long before such drastic steps become necessary citizens who wish to remain free, who wish our nation to be a nation of laws and not executive fiat, who wish to retain their rights to free speech, freedom of religion and freedom to bear arms, all of which are under unprecedented assault in this country by the current administration, should take to the streets in acts of civil disobedience and non-cooperation.

That our freedoms are in the Left's crosshairs becomes plainer, it seems, every day. What, for example could the president possibly have meant when he said that we need to change the way we report the news? What could Hillary Clinton have meant when she said that religious convictions that cause people to oppose abortion must be changed?

Here's the president a week or so ago:

And so, if we’re going to change how Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like.

How can he do that without essentially abrogating the freedom of the press? Here's Mrs. Clinton last month:

Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper....Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone — and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.

How can she change the deep-seated ... religious beliefs of a people without abrogating our freedom of religion?

The progressive veils are being taken off. Their agenda of compelling people to accept their utopian vision and their understanding of a moral society is being explicitly stated. Charles Murray has written a book (By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission)in which, in the words of Clark Niely at The Federalist, calls for conservatives to resist the Left's relentless statism by engaging in selective civil disobedience. Niely writes:

Summarizing the thesis ... Charles Murray calls (read Murray's essay here)for citizens to push back against government over-regulation by refusing to comply with laws that are “pointless, stupid, or tyrannical” — especially when they interfere with our ability to earn a living, run a business, or use our own property....

Thus, the mere fact that a court says it is constitutional to bulldoze people’s homes in order to build nicer ones, or license the sale of floral arrangements, or exercise federal control of local pet-care decisions does not make it so. Those decisions are so obviously wrong—and so poorly reasoned—that they can make no serious claim to anyone’s intellectual or civic allegiance....

Simply put, when the government’s abuse of its authority is sufficiently clear, sufficiently oppressive, and sufficiently offensive to the conscience and morals of decent people, there is nothing un-conservative about resisting it, even (or perhaps especially) when the Supreme Court is out to lunch—as it so often is.

In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail Martin Luther King famously observed that unjust laws are no laws at all and should not be obeyed. The same can be said for Executive Orders and other unilateral means of unjustly imposing the will of one man on the entire nation while denying the people's representatives the ability to stop him.

Statists like those in the current administration will strip us of every freedom they can, they'll stick their noses into every aspect of our lives that they can, unless at some point, the citizenry declares that we've had enough. Murray thinks we're at that point now. If Mrs. Clinton wins in 2016 we'll surely be at that point then.

Even with a legislative branch controlled by Republicans, many of whom are also infected by the statist virus, the president can still appoint federal judges, Supreme Court Justices, and bureaucrats in the alphabet agencies like OSHA, EPA, IRS, etc. to circumvent any roadblocks the legislature may erect to ever-expanding government and ever-diminishing individual freedoms. It's past time for Americans to rouse themselves from their comfortable slumbers and begin to reclaim the freedom bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers.

Accomplishments? What Accomplishments?

It's one of the charming oddities of our politics that people will vote for a candidate for all sorts of reasons other than the candidate's qualifications for office. The individual may be unqualified, corrupt, dishonest, untruthful, unprincipled, vindictive, and unscrupulous and people will still vote for the person as long as the person is in the right party. Then they'll spend the next four years complaining that politicians are unqualified, corrupt, dishonest, untruthful, unprincipled, vindictive, and unscrupulous.

The focus group in this video consists of a group of Iowa Democrats who are asked to name just one accomplishment Hillary Clinton can claim from her tenure as Secretary of State that qualifies her to be president. The consensus answer is, apparently, that she hasn't accomplished anything, but she's got the right view of gay marriage and abortion and she's better than Scott Walker because he's a Republican.

For those readers with long memories, remember that Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, innocently accepted a check from a Japanese magazine for arranging an interview with Nancy Reagan. There was no impropriety, he never cashed the check, and an FBI investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but nevertheless the Democrats howled about the stench of corruption until Allen ultimately resigned. Hillary Clinton accepted millions of dollars in gifts from foreign countries while she was Secretary of State, a clear conflict of interest that potentially compromised American foreign policy, and her base remains steadfastly supportive. It's no big deal. She's not a Republican, after all.

Older readers might also recall that fourteen members of the Reagan administration were indicted in the Iran-Contra affair for illegally selling weapons to Iran and illegally channeling some of the proceeds to the Contras in El Salvador. The Democrats were livid about this, but Hillary Clinton was evidently involved in illegally sending weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels, an operation that quite possibly precipitated the attack on the Benghazi consulate, and it hardly makes the news. What matters to a lot of people is not the candidate's qualifications or character, but whether there's a D or an R after his or her name. They'd vote for Beelzebub himself if he was a member of the right party.

Knowing What We Know Now

The "Knowing what we know now" game seems to be enjoying a spurt of popularity among the media, mostly because it's being used to make Republican presidential candidates like Jeb Bush squirm. The fun won't last, though, since the game is inevitably going to be turned against both President Obama and Hillary Clinton. It's not hard to imagine either of them or both at some point being asked to play the game. If it involves the president it might go something like this:

Knowing what we know now do you think it was a good idea to:

• Expend all your political capital on passing Obamacare
• Encourage the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt
• Undertake a "reset" of relations with Russia
• Overthrow Qaddafi in Libya
• Pull all our troops out of Iraq
• Refuse to arm moderates in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine
• Refuse to strengthen security for our Libyan diplomats
• Blame Benghazi on a video
• Facilitate the flow of weapons across the border to Mexico in the Fast and Furious operation
• Give millions in taxpayer dollars to numerous failing companies like Solyndra
• Trade five top terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl
• Select Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State
• Select Joe Biden to be Vice-President
• Promise to give the American people the most transparent administration ever

On further reflection I take back what I said above. It is indeed hard to imagine either Mr. Obama or Ms Clinton being asked questions like these by a media so desperate to see progressivism succeed that asking tough questions of fellow progressives would never even occur to them, nor would they have any idea how to go about it if it did.

I've already suggested one way I think Bush or any other candidate should answer the "Knowing what we know now" canard here. Here's another courtesy of Allahpundit at Hot Air: "Yes, knowing what we know now, i.e. that any military success we would enjoy in Iraq would be entrusted to Barack Obama to sustain, it was indeed a mistake to invade Iraq."

White Flight

It's not unusual to hear commentators blame the problems of our urban areas, at least in part, on "white flight." Whites, it's implied, don't want to live in proximity to African-Americans and other minorities so they take their money and flee to the suburbs, leaving the cities, and their schools, impoverished. The tacit, or sometimes explicit, assumption behind this allegation is that white flight is motivated by racism.

The charge is nonsense, but that doesn't stop it from being made, as Dana Casey clearly fears it will be in her case. Casey has written a fine piece at The Federalist in which she lays out why, when she was a child, her family, liberal Democrats to the core, finally gave up and left Baltimore, and why as an adult she returned.

At the end of her essay Casey calls for genuine dialogue about the problems of Baltimore and other cities, rather than finger-pointing monologues in which blacks lecture whites about their white guilt. She says this:

On April 27, 2015, I listened to the sirens rush past my bedroom window all night, heading to another fire at the senior center less than a mile away, a center being built by a black church for local citizens. Baltimore was never the same after the ’68 riots, but I don’t think that will be the case today unless we keep listening to people like author Jake Flanagin or Al Sharpton, Loretta Lynch, Malik Shabazz, and even President Obama, who all keep pointing the finger instead of calling for healing or common ground.

Their supposed calls for dialogue are really a demand for monologue. The rest of us (meaning white people) had better shut up and accept the fact that we are all racist and everything is entirely the fault of white people, all white people. Then we should be made to pay (as Sharpton has so successfully modeled).

So what is true? I can only speak to what I know, but if we start including everyone’s stories and not just the politically correct stories or those that support “the narrative” being pushed by the Left as the only truth that matters, we may get closer to the actual whole truth.

Just putting in writing the things I actually witnessed in Baltimore in those troubled times will be enough to make some people hate me and call me a racist. I am willing to take that chance. Real dialogue, not just monologue, has to start with someone. I know I do not have the whole truth, but I do have a part of it and I may be that part’s only voice right now in Baltimore. Real truth, real dialogue, and real healing of our wounded city will only start when all legitimate voices are considered.

Read the whole thing. It's very good and very important.

Water's Weirdness

There's an interesting article by Alok Jha in The Guardian on the very strange and unique properties of a substance we (unless we're Californians) take for granted - water.

It's hard to overstate how amazing water's properties are and how crucial those properties are to living things. For example, Jha tells us that,

Water is at its most dense at 4C and, at that temperature, will sink to the bottom of a lake or river. Because bodies of water freeze from the top down, fish, plants and other organisms will almost always have somewhere to survive during seasons of bitter cold, and be able to grow in size and number.

If the temperature of the water continues to drop toward 0C (the freezing point) the colder water actually gets less dense and rises to the surface. That's why ice floats. It's less dense than the warmer water it floats in. In fact, if it didn't float it would sink to the bottom and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up making it impossible for most forms of life to survive a cold winter.

Jha adds,

This, though, is just the start. Take a glass of water and look at it now. Perhaps the strangest thing about this colorless, odorless liquid is that it is a liquid at all. If water followed the rules, you would see nothing in that glass and our planet would have no oceans at all. All of the water on Earth should exist as only vapor: part of a thick, muggy atmosphere sitting above an inhospitable, bone-dry surface. A water molecule is made from two very light atoms – hydrogen and oxygen – and, at the ambient conditions on the surface of the Earth, it should be a gas. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), for example, is a gas, even though it is twice the molecular weight of water. Other similar-sized molecules – such as ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen chloride (HCl) – are also gases.

Of course if water were a gas at normal temperatures life as we know it would be impossible. Jha mentions a few other interesting facts about water, but he just touches the surface, as it were. Entire books have been written on the subject, and indeed, Jha himself has written one.

Here's one more fact that Jha didn't mention. Water gains and loses heat more slowly than almost any other substance. This is why the ocean is still cold even on a blistering hot day in June. It takes a long time for water to heat up and a long time for it to cool down. This is very fortunate for a number of reasons but one is that because there's so much water on the earth's surface and because it changes temperature slowly it tends to stabilize the earth's overall temperature and keep it within a range in which life can thrive.

Jha claims that evolution has shaped us to survive in a watery environment. Perhaps so, or perhaps the myriad fortuitous properties of water, so far from accidentally resulting from the mindless chaos of the initial Big Bang, are actually the deliberate result of the scientific genius of a brilliant cosmic Chemist.

The Enemies of Free Speech

Kirsten Powers is a liberal Democrat (in the classical sense) who appears sometimes as a political analyst on FOX News. Unlike many of her fellow contemporary liberals, however, she's serious about freedom of speech - so serious, in fact, that she's written a book (The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech ) about how her fellow progressives are crushing free speech in America. An editor at Christianity Today magazine, Katelyn Beaty, recently interviewed Powers about her book. Here are a couple of excerpts:

K.B.: Your book criticizes an intolerance among the cultural Left toward those with dissenting viewpoints. You give many examples of how the “illiberal Left,” as you call it, is not just disagreeing with but discriminating against those with different views. What are some of the most powerful examples of this from your research?

K.P.: There were an endless number of examples, to the point that I had to cut a couple chapters. If I had to, I’d say the absolute worst [example] is one in which a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara physically attacked pro-life demonstrators who were doing a peaceful demonstration. It’s a prototype of these cases, not in the fact that it was violent, because that’s unusual, but her argument is typical: Disagreement is treated as an attack and even violent in and of itself. The act of expressing a point of view they disagree with is an act of violence. This came up over and over in the police reports when the professor was arrested. She was the victim, even though she was the persecutor. She had been harmed, they [the protestors] made her unsafe, and she has a right to go to work and feel safe and they made her feel unsafe.

This actually just happened, so it's not in my book: [Scholar] Christina Hoff Sommers has been on campuses lecturing about feminism for the past 20 years, and she’s a critic of gender feminism and talks instead about equity feminism. In April, at two different events, one at Georgetown and one at Oberlin, she had to have campus security protection because the students were posting things that had the administration so alarmed for her safety. She has been a critic of the rape statistics that are cited to show there’s an epidemic of rape on campuses, so she’s been deemed a "rape apologist," even though she’s obviously not denying rape; she’s talking about statistics. Some Oberlin students wrote a letter to the editor before she came and said, “There’s nothing we can do to stop her from coming here, so let’s stand together in the face of this violence.” And she hadn’t even spoken yet.

Traditionally liberals in the United States have valued free speech as enshrined in our Constitution, have recognized that dissent can be good and shape public policy in important ways, and that the freedom to say what we think and feel is an important element of democracy.

K.B.: Why is free speech such an important value, and what’s the cost of losing it?

K.P.: Our conception of free speech in this country comes directly, indisputably, from liberals. We would not understand free speech the way we do today if not for—and I’m sorry to say, conservatives who don’t want to hear it—the American Civil Liberties Union, and liberal Supreme Court justices who charted the course of expanding the view of the First Amendment, and activists during the Vietnam War. So this is a core part of American liberalism. So we have people who call themselves liberals on the Left of the political spectrum, acting in complete contradiction of their values and the arguments that underlie them.

Powers is correct about this. The Left was on the vanguard of the free speech movement throughout much of the twentieth century and especially from 1960 to 1990, but during this time they were a minority seeking to change the establishment. Now they are the establishment and free speech is as much a threat to them as they were to the establishment two generations ago. Thus free speech is now being defined as hate speech, as violence, and is to be suppressed and punished. This is the Left's modus operandi throughout history. They use the democratic system to destroy the system and then, once they're in power, they impose a totalitarian conformity on everyone else. George Orwell vividly illustrates how this strategy works in his novel Animal Farm, which every intelligent person should read at some point in their education.

KB: Is the dynamic we're seeing simply political correctness run amok, or is something more insidious at play?

KP: I don’t refer to the dynamic as political correctness, because that downplays what’s going on. It’s something much deeper. In the book I don’t diagnose why it’s happening, I’m simply trying to establish that it is happening.

But what struck me while writing the book is that the illiberal Left reminds me of religious zealots, except of a secular religion. The average religious person has their beliefs, but they’re not trying to get people fired who don’t have their beliefs. But zealots do do that. It’s not enough for them to believe it; they can’t tolerate other people who don’t believe what they believe, and they have this absolute certainty that they’re right. It’s self-sanctifying. They have to establish that they are morally superior to people who disagree with them. It’s social signaling: “My identity comes from the fact that I’m pro-gay marriage and pro-choice and believe in climate change and oppose charter schools.”

There's much more at the link. Powers is one of a vanishing breed of liberal that used to be typical in the 50s and 60s. She's someone who believes that being liberal means that one stands for freedom. Today being liberal is too often very close to being fascist. Those who stand for freedom in our contemporary politics tend to be conservatives and libertarians.