What Caused the Universe?

A BBC article from a couple of years ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix, and, in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis, gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago.

I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Not All the Polls are Grim for Trump

Recent polls have not been kind to President Trump, showing him trailing Joe Biden by at least 8 points. Yet not all the polls are so gloomy for the president. Elizabeth Vaughn at The Federalist points out that the results of a poll conducted by the Democracy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, suggest that other canvasses are missing something.

Here's part of her column:

Contrary to what the media would have us believe, 77 percent of the 1,500 likely voters surveyed do not view Mount Rushmore as a racist monument. When asked which of two phrases better fits their own thinking about race in America, 29 percent of participants indicated “Black Lives Matter,” and 71 percent marked “All Lives Matter.”

Most notably, rather than showing Biden with a sharp advantage, the survey forecasts a much tighter race, with each candidate receiving 47 percent of the national popular vote. Moreover, the Democracy Institute predicts that if the election were held today, Trump would win 309 electoral votes and Biden 229.

State-by-state data isn’t conclusive, considering the limited sample size, but the data indicates Trump is ahead in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a margin of 48 percent to 44 percent, with 8 percent undecided. The poll puts Wisconsin in the Biden column, while giving Trump Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Trump is considered less likable than Biden. When asked which candidate respondents would be more inclined to invite for a barbecue, 33 percent chose Trump, while 51 percent chose Biden. Sixteen percent said neither. When asked if they believe Biden is in the early stages of dementia, however, 55 percent answered yes, and 40 percent no.

As virtually all recent polls have found, the Democracy Institute identified the massive enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. Seventy-seven percent of Trump voters are very enthusiastic about their candidate, compared to only 43 percent of Biden supporters. That explains why 81 percent of Trump voters say their choice was “a positive vote for [their] candidate” rather than a “negative vote against his opponent.” For Biden, only 29 percent said it was a positive vote, while a whopping 71 percent said it was negative.

Notably, participants were asked if they were “comfortable with your relatives, friends, and coworkers knowing how you vote.” Only 29 percent of Trump voters said yes, versus 82 percent of Biden voters. This “shy” vote phenomenon was one of the reasons polls were so wrong in 2016. Many pro-Trumpers, wanting to avoid stigma, simply won’t tell a colleague or even a pollster whom they plan to vote for.

Fifty-two percent of those surveyed believe Trump will be reelected. While 4 percent of Trump supporters indicated their vote could change by Election Day, 12 percent of Biden backers said they could change their minds.

Ms. Vaughn cites other data from the poll that should be encouraging for those who wish to see the president re-elected. 

Polls this far out are notoriously unreliable, of course. In 2016 polls taken four or five months before the election showed that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide. Even so, the Democracy Institute poll must be encouraging for the White House.

The Democrats right now seem to be employing a three-pronged campaign strategy: 1) Criticize Trump relentlessly no matter what he says or does, even if they know they would often do the same thing were they in his place, 2) keep Biden out of the public eye as much as possible and 3) hope that the economy doesn't recover the vigor it had before Covid-19 struck, since the more people suffer the better it is for Biden's chances.

That really is quite a strategy. No wonder there's no real enthusiasm for Mr. Biden's candidacy.

One Statue That Should Be Taken Down

I wrote recently that I think there's a reasonable case to be made for removing some statues, especially those of Confederate soldiers, from our public spaces. One statue in particular that really needs to be removed is that of South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman who served as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate from 1895 to 1918. Why his statue is still allowed to disgrace that state's capitol is a mystery.

The Discovery Institute's John West explains:

Tillman was a monster. He publicly defended lynchings. He drew on evolutionary racism to preach black inferiority. And he worked to subvert representative democracy. 

During a U.S. Senate debate on January 21, 1907, Tillman boasted about how he and others successfully disenfranchised blacks after the Civil War through intimidation, killings, and fraud. 

He revealed that depriving blacks of their newly accorded political rights was in fact his motivation for becoming involved in politics: “We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank, and only one plank, namely, that ‘This is a white man’s country and white men must govern it.’ Under that banner we went to battle.” 

He meant “battle” literally, recounting how he and others killed blacks in a series of armed conflicts: “A month later we had the Ellenton riot, in which no one ever knew how many negroes were killed, but there were forty or fifty or a hundred. It was a fight between barbarism and civilization, between the African and the Caucasian, for mastery. It was then that ‘we shot them’; it was then that ‘we killed them’; it was then that ‘we stuffed ballot boxes.’” 

Tillman justified his actions by drawing on the standard tropes of evolutionary racism. As he explained, “We had decided to take the government away from men so debased as were the negroes — I will not say baboons; I never have called them baboons; I believe they are men, but some of them are so near akin to the monkey that scientists are yet looking for the missing link.” 

According to Tillman, it was the supposed biological inferiority of blacks that justified him in stealing elections: “We saw the evil of giving the ballot to creatures of this kind, and saying that one vote shall count regardless of the man… Then it was that we stuffed ballot boxes, because desperate diseases require desperate remedies.”

Frankly, I am appalled that South Carolina would continue to honor such a man. I definitely don’t favor illegally removing his statue (let alone blowing it up), but I do favor legally removing it.

Here’s an idea: Replace Tillman’s statue with a statue honoring the nine black Republican congressmen from South Carolina during the 1870s-1890s. Then move Tillman’s statue to a museum, and surround it with an exhibit exposing his racist record, including his promotion of scientific racism.

West is obviously correct. There should be no place in our society where men such as Tillman are honored. Take his statue down.

Do Facts Matter?

John Sexton at Hot Air asks this question: "When did it first become clear to you that verifiable facts didn’t matter to the opinions being spouted by every media outlet and progressive?" Sexton, borrowing from author Jesse Singal, calls this the "epistemic breach," the disconnect between what one chooses to believe and the established facts of the matter.

Singal says the moment he noticed it was the Covington student encounter in Washington, D.C. For Sexton it was the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. He also cites the Michael Brown shooting and a few other examples (There are plenty to choose from, he notes).

He writes:

For me this kind of breach with reality really became clear much earlier, during the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. In that case it was clear who had done the shooting from the start but almost every other detail seemed to exist apart from the facts. 

Remember when NBC News edited the 911 call to make it sound as if Zimmerman had been racially profiling Martin? Two NBC producers were eventually fired over that error. Remember when ABC News claimed there were no injuries to the back of Zimmerman’s head and then retracted that after an enhanced video showed they’d been wrong?  

Remember when Rachel Jeantel told a reporter she believed Martin threw the first punch in the confrontation that led to his death? (Most people never heard about that.) 

Remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates claimed he could hear a racial slur in the audio of the same call? Coates later wrote a major story for the Atlantic claiming that all of the pushback (to correct reported errors) was because President Obama was black. 

The point is there were a lot of things the media got badly wrong about that story, some of which were corrected, but a lot of people still insist on believing the first version. 

The same was true of the shooting of Michael Brown. Once again, you had a lot of instant myths crop up, some of which (“hands up, don’t shoot”) are still with us. 

I still remember the piece in which Vox’s Ezra Klein explained the moment in Officer Darren Wilson’s story when “every BS detector in me went off .” He was referring to Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown paused during his assault on Wilson to hand the bag of stolen cigarillos to his friend Dorian Johnson. 

Just one problem with his BS detectors. The story matched what Dorian Johnson said happened. Rather than admit he was wrong and issue a correction to the story, Klein published a second story the same day in which (many paragraphs later) he admits “Johnson does semi-corroborate a key moment in Wilson’s account.” 

Again, as with the Covington kids, most news outlets did eventually admit error in the initial coverage but it was too late. A lot of people preferred the initial stories about Mike Brown’s death and didn’t want to hear the revised (factual) versions.

Sexton goes on to give a few more examples, but an important consequence of all this is that when people refuse to allow themselves to be swayed by facts, progress, in this case social progress, grinds to a halt and shifts into reverse. 

We become balkanized into a hodge-podge of warring groups that no longer have any common ground upon which to stand to talk with each other. Instead it's women vs. men, blacks vs. whites, liberals vs. conservatives, atheists vs. Christians, and who prevails is not whoever has the best ideas and can marshall the most evidence but who can shout the loudest and who can intimidate their foes most effectively.

Rather than forming conclusions based on objective facts, many people form their conclusions based on their subjective emotions. For many in our postmodern age beliefs are justified by desires, not by reason. If they want something to be true it is true regardless what the objective evidence may indicate. If a biological male wants to be a female then he is a female notwithstanding his genetics and physiology. If progressives want it to be true that blacks are being "hunted" by white police officers then it is true regardless of what the statistics show. 

If the facts support their beliefs, fine, but if they don't support them, so much the worse for the facts. Indeed, to cite objective facts, to rely on reason, is scorned as patriarchal or an expression of "white privilege," as if non-whites can't be expected to be rational. 

This is not only irrational, it's atavistic. It's a throwback to a more primitive and tribal stage in our civilization's development. When facts no longer matter then all that matters is forcing others, by whatever means necessary, to conform to one's vision and desires, and that mindset has led always to the guillotine, the firing squad, the gulag and mass graves.

Why So Many Hoaxes?

An Oregon man who claimed on Facebook that he had received a racist letter has recently admitted to police that he wrote the letter to himself in yet another of what has become an epidemic of race hoaxes. Before this most recent episode came to light Dennis Prager had raised an interesting question: Why are there so many hoaxes? He writes:

If America is so racist, why are there so many race hoaxes? Virtually every time we read about a swastika painted on a door, or a noose hanging from a tree to taunt blacks, it turns out to be either a false alarm or, more frequently, a hoax.....

If there were a lot of racism, there would be no need for hoaxes. No Jew in Germany in the 1930s made up an anti-Semitic hoax. No Jewish shop owner ever made up a charge that a Nazi hurled a rock through his store window. The reason? None was needed. Nazi hatred against Jews was real. It didn’t have to be faked. To convince people that America is racist, you have to fake it. 

To buttress his claim that race hoaxes are common he cites about fifteen examples of hoaxes (or mistakes) perpetrated by blacks over the last fifteen years, most of which have occurred within the last six years:

No. 1: The Duke lacrosse team (2006): Three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team were falsely accused by Crystal Mangum, a black student at North Carolina Central University, with having raped her. The charges were all fabricated, but the American media and Duke University faculty rushed to judgment and devoted months to smearing the three lacrosse players and Duke University itself as racist.
No. 2: UC San Diego library noose (2010): “Student apologizes for noose in UC San Diego library” (Los Angeles Times). A “minority student” was responsible for placing the noose in the university library. Previously, the Associated Press had reported, “Anger boiled over on the University of California San Diego campus today, where students took over the chancellor’s office to protest the hanging of a noose in a campus library.”
No. 3: Truck at Oakland’s Corporation Yard (2014): “A reported ‘noose’ tied to the back of a city truck in August, which stirred already simmering racial tensions at Oakland’s Corporation Yard, was not an intended act of racial harassment, a city-commissioned report has found” (Mercury News).
No. 4: University of Delaware (2015): “‘Nooses’ Found Hanging on University of Delaware Campus Were Lanterns” (NBC). University President Nancy Targett had earlier announced, “We are both saddened and disturbed that this deplorable act has taken place on our campus.”
No. 5: The LSU noose (2015): It was widely reported that a noose was sighted at Louisiana State University leading to protests against racism there. It was later reported, “LSU said a picture of what appeared to be a noose hanging from a campus tree Thursday was not what it appeared to be” (WBRZ).
No. 6: University at Albany (2016): “A state appeals court has upheld the University at Albany’s expulsion of a woman who along with two friends falsely claimed to be the victim of a racially motivated attack on a CDTA bus in January 2016” (Times-Union). The three black women had attacked a white woman and then claimed they had been racially attacked.
No. 7: Bowling Green State University (2016): “Bowling Green police say student lied about politically driven attack” (ABC). “The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University — about 90 miles west of Oberlin — said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story” (City Journal).
No. 8: Dreadlock cutting hoax (2019): “A black student at a Christian school in Virginia who accused three white sixth grade boys of cutting her dreadlocks and calling her ugly now says she was lying about the attack” (NBC).
No. 9: Jussie Smollett (2019): In one of the most notorious hoaxes, actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by white racists in Chicago on a freezing night. The story was a hoax. The “noose” was a rope his two co-conspirators had purchased for staging the “attack.”
No. 10: Oakland’s Lake Merritt (2020): After the city of Oakland launched a hate crime investigation regarding a noose hanging from park trees, Victor Anari Sengbe, a black man, tweeted: “It’s not a noose, this guy climbed the tree and put up the rope for a swing months ago, folks used it to exercise… ITS NOT A NOOSE.” Nevertheless, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf then tweeted, “Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes.”
No. 11: NASCAR (2020): A “noose” was found in the Talladega, Alabama, racetrack garage assigned to black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. FBI investigators determined it to be one of several such ropes placed sometime the year before in Talladega garages as door pulls, long before that garage was ever assigned to Wallace. But Wallace continued to maintain it was, in fact, a noose.
No. 12: University of La Verne (2020): “Racist Threats and Attacks that Rattled a California University Campus Were Faked, Police Say” (Newsweek).

Prager goes on to mention even more, but one additional takeaway from his article - besides Prager's point that the frequency of these frauds is strong evidence that racism is more a figment of the collective progressive imagination than it is a reality in our society - is this: Despite virtually every instance of an alleged racist threat turning out to be either a hoax or an innocent mistake, the media still runs with each one that's alleged as if they finally have the proof to justify their belief that the U.S. is filled with racists. 

Like Wile E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons or Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons every time they think they have their proof it blows up in their faces. You'd think that they'd learn from experience to be leery of these allegations, but our media Fudds and Coyotes are evidently very slow learners.

Our American Totalitarians

An open letter to Harper's Magazine defending freedom of speech and thought and signed by 150 sundry journalists and academics has caused a stir among left-wing progressives. A defense of freedom is seen, apparently, as an attack on progressive values.

After the obligatory swipes at President Trump and the ideological right, the signatories offer the most anodyne condemnation of our current "cancel culture" they could possibly have crafted. Here's the heart of it:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.  

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. 

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. 

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. 

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Many on the left are appalled that an endorsement of the Enlightenment values of free speech and thought would be endorsed by the signatories, some of whom are themselves leftists. The letter is seen as anti-progressive and anti-left because it endorses the freedom to express unfashionable opinions without the fear of losing one's livelihood. This is too much for progressives who believe that opinions with which they disagree must be silenced and people who transgress the leftist consensus must be fired or otherwise deplatformed.

This is, of course, the same pattern of thinking that prevailed in Hitler's Nazi Germany and during Stalin's reign of terror in the U.S.S.R., Mao and his successors' reign of terror in China, the Kim family's ongoing reign of terror in North Korea, and Castro's ongoing reign of terror in Cuba. It's how fascist and communist totalitarians always treat freedom - which they despise - and it has led invariably to mass slaughter and dehumanization ever since the French Revolution in 1789.

It's perhaps the paramount evil of our age, and it's rearing its grotesque head once again in the form of "cancel culture."

Perhaps the best response to those who are upset that freedom and liberty would actually be endorsed in America is Fredrik deBoer's who writes this pithy reaction:

Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left? There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy.  

So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe our political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion? 

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? 

Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

Amen.

Recanting Climate Alarmism

With all that's going on in the country right now this article at Quillette by prominent environmentalist and climate activist Michael Shellenberger has passed pretty much under the radar, but it's remarkable in its implications for the climate debate.

Shellenberger is a progressive activist who has been persuaded that the changes occurring in the global climate are not nearly as dire as we've been led to believe by the Al Gores of the world. Shellenberger writes:

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a "crisis."

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

So Shellenberger's no right wing coal CEO seeking to rollback regulations on carbon emissions. His article begins with an apology:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as expert reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Shellenberger goes on to list a dozen climate-related facts that few people know. Among them are these:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction.”
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s.
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse.
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change.
• Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003. 

What finally made him go over to the "dark side"? Last year, he writes, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.” 

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.” Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct (italics in the original). And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. 

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough.

He proceeds to discuss his book titled, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All in which he makes claims such as,

• Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.
• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.
• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium.
• 100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 percent to 50 percent.
• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities.
• Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 percent.
• Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.
• “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 percent more emissions
• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.
• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

"Why were we all so misled?" Shellenberger asks. His article goes on to give some reasons. Anyone interested in the environmental controversy surrounding climate change should check it out. 

When someone of Shellenberger's background and status as an environmentalist says we've been duped it's a bit like Anthony Fauci telling us that the Covid-19 pandemic was pretty much a hoax. It should grab our attention.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

From time to time we've talked about how physicists and mathematicians have expressed both surprise and wonder that the universe should be describable by mathematics. Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner wrote in a 1960 paper that "the effectiveness of mathematics is a miracle."

Here's a five minute video that summarizes the argument that this miraculous effectiveness of mathematics points to Mind as the architect of the universe, a Mind that is itself a mathematical genius. Take a look:

BLM's Dubious Ideological Roots

Black Lives Matter has been very much in the news recently as one of the participants in the turmoil besetting our cities. The media would have us think that BLM is an organization like, say, the NAACP in which people strive within the system to prod Americans to live up to the ideals of our founding.

On the contrary, BLM is an organization founded by Marxist revolutionaries like Patrisse Cullors, who openly acknowledges her Marxism, and which is not averse to employing violence to achieve its goals.

An article at Brietbart about Cullors says this:  

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a newly surfaced video from 2015 that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists” – making clear their movement’s ideological foundation, according to a report. 

Cullors, 36, was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization, and spent years absorbing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that shaped her worldview.

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers,” she said, referring to BLM co-founder Alicia Garza.

“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk,” Cullors added in the interview with Jared Ball of The Real News Network.

While promoting her book “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” in 2018, Cullors described her introduction to and support for Marxist ideology.

She described ... how she became a trained organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which she called her “first political home” under the mentorship of Mann, its director.

The center, which describes its philosophy as “an urban experiment,” uses grassroots organization to “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the US empire.”

It also expresses its appreciation for the work of the US Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as its support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s.”

Here’s what Black Lives Matter says about itself on its website:

We … do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege. We build a space that … is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered. We dismantle patriarchal practices … We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure … We foster a queer-affirming network … with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking …

This is not unlike the language employed by Marx himself who, in his Communist Manifesto, stated that one of the goals of communism is the disintegration of the traditional two-parent family.

BLM's communist roots are all the more chilling when one considers that communism was responsible for the murders of over 100 million people during the 20th century, and that never in the history of communist revolutions were people more free and less oppressed after the revolution than they were before. Every communist state is built on lies, terror, oppression and murder.

Seattle's short-lived dalliance with CHAZ, with its murders, rapes and intimidation, was a microcosm of what it's like to live under communist rule. Communism robs people of their humanity and enslaves them to the state. The literature of George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler paints a vivid picture of communism's horrors. It always promises heaven and always delivers hell.

The president of Greater New York Black Lives Matter, Hawk Newsome, promised in a television interview that, “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.”

And what is it Mr. Newsome wants? “I just want black liberation, and black sovereignty. By any means necessary.”

And what does black liberation and black sovereignty mean, precisely? Presumably, that, too, is to be left as "a matter of interpretation."

BLM and its progressive allies claim that America is irredeemably racist, that blacks are oppressed by a system that has had racism baked in from the beginning, but despite what Mr. Newsome and others would have us believe, it's simply a fact that there has never been a country in the history of the world in which blacks were better off, freer, with more political and economic opportunity and a higher standard of living than they enjoy in America today. It's why millions of blacks from Africa and the Caribbean have emigrated here.

Why would they do this if this country was such an oppressive tyranny for blacks? Why would they not emigrate to communist paradises like Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba?

The fact that some Americans, both white and black, are racist no more makes America a racist nation than the fact that some Americans, both white and black, hate Jews makes America an anti-semitic nation.

Just as the United States has been the best country, aside from Israel, for Jews to live in in their entire history, so, too, the United States, especially over the last fifty years, has been the best country for blacks to live in.

But none of this seems to matter to progressives or people like Mr. Newsome who think that as long as there are still flawed (white) human beings, as long as there are inequities in society, it doesn't matter how prevalent or minimal those flaws are or what the causes of those inequities are, everything must be destroyed, burned to the ground.

It makes no sense whatsoever.

Effacing Our History

It may surprise some readers when I say that I think some communities have good reason to consider removing from their statehouses and town squares vestiges of the Confederacy such as the stars and bars and statues of Confederate leaders, who, after all, committed treason and precipitated a war that took a half million lives.

Honoring these men with monuments seems as peculiar as erecting a monument to honor Benedict Arnold.

These memorials should not, however, be torn down at the insistence of know-nothing mobs. If they're to be removed it should be done respectfully, at the conclusion of calm public debate, and housed in museums. Moreover, those monuments which stand in our National Parks like Antietam and Gettysburg, which are essentially outdoor museums and history classrooms, should be left alone.

Having said that, the self-righteous yahoos rampaging through our streets seeking willy-nilly to topple statues of abolitionists, Christian saints, Europeanized representations of Jesus, past presidents and any other symbol of Christianity and American history they can get their hands on are revealing a shocking depth of ignorance indicative, if nothing else, of an utter failure in our public education system.

It also reveals a highly selective moral outrage. For instance, consider this question: If monuments to every American who was less than perfect are to be expunged from our collective consciousness will the virtue mob next demand the de-naming of every school and street named for Martin Luther King and the removal of every portrait and statue of the man? King, after all, has been, according to some scholars, credibly accused of spousal abuse, philandering and worse. If every one who is not as pure as distilled water is to be rendered a non-entity by the leftist puritans then why stop with white men?

But the benighted mob is impervious to questions like this. Like a forest fire feeds on wind and tinder, the left is in the grip of a hysteria that feeds on abject historical ignorance and irrationality. They're mostly twenty-somethings so they think they know everything there is to know and they're overflowing with vast surpluses of moral sanctimony.

Here's an example of this ignorance and irrationality:

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College at the University of London, surveyed self-described liberals and found that 44 percent of self-described liberals and 58 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” agreed that the United States should “remove the monument to four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and repression of women and minorities.”

Of course, the native people in question, the Lakota, were themselves in possession of the land because they had brutally seized it from others who possessed it before them, and so on for millenia so who should ultimately get it? Ironically, the New York Times has joined the clamor on behalf of the Lakota, suggesting that Rushmore is a symbol of the white man's maltreatment of native Americans.

I say this is ironic because the New York Times building in Manhattan sits on land that was essentially stolen from the Lenape by the Dutch Europeans in the 17th century. Don't hold your breath waiting for the Times' owners to practice what their paper preaches and return the land their building sits on to descendents of the Lenape.

President Trump held a Fourth of July celebration on Friday evening at Mt. Rushmore which the Democratic National Committee (DNC) fatuously condemned as an event “glorifying white supremacy....Trump has disrespected Native communities time and again. He’s attempted to limit their voting rights and blocked critical pandemic relief. Now he’s holding a rally glorifying white supremacy at Mount Rushmore — a region once sacred to tribal communities,” the DNC tweeted.

About the only thing in this tweet that has any connection to the truth is that Trump held a rally at Mt. Rushmore which is on land once sacred to tribal communities, but then so was much of Manhattan. If the faces of the presidents on Rushmore are a symbol of "white supremacy" are not the skyscrapers on Manhattan likewise? Should the buildings on Manhattan be removed and the land returned to the Lenape? Why not?

In any case it's doubtful that the left really cares much for the Lakota. Most of the young people marching in the streets probably never heard of the Lakota before last week. What the left is trying to do by cutting us off from our history is the equivalent of slicing through the trunk of a tree to sever it from its roots. The trunk may teeter on the stump for a time, but it'll eventually topple. 

That's exactly what the left has in mind for the United States, and if that's what Americans really want there are plenty of candidates running in November who'd be happy to grant them their wish.

On America's Birthday

Today many Americans will celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our nearly two hundred and thirty year experiment as a constitutional republic.

Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents in our universities and on our streets notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.

America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.

They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.

These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.

Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.

The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.

The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.

New York's governor, retorting to President Trump's call to make America great again, opined that America was never that great. Only someone clueless about American history could make such a fatuous assertion.

Where would Europe be today were it not for the United States? Not just our involvement in WWII but also our reconstruction of it in the aftermath. The Marshall Plan cost the United States $103 billion in today's dollars. What other nation would've done that? What other nation would've rebuilt Japan and return to them their national sovereignty after Pearl Harbor and a brutal war that cost almost 65,000 servicemen dead and over 200,000 wounded?

What would Eastern Europe be today had the U.S. washed its hands of European involvement after WWII and chose not to engage in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union?

What nation would have sacrificed over a million people in a civil war fought largely to abolish the institution of black slavery?

Where would Africa and much of the rest of the third world be today were it not for economic aid and health care, both public and private, donated by Americans?

If America ceased to exist in 2020 what would be the likely consequence? Europe would soon become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably result in nuclear war.

It's not unrealistic to fear that America is the only nation preventing much of the world from spiralling into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.

On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans (and even those who aren't), to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.

Racism at the New York Times

Imagine it were discovered that a white journalist at the New York Times had, as a college student, written a letter to the student paper about African Americans in which the writer claimed that the African American race was "the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief in the modern world." Do you suppose that that white journalist would still be employed at the Times by the end of the day?

Surely not, but if the journalist were an African American woman describing white folks in such terms would it then be acceptable? Should she not be fired just as a white colleague would be?

Well, apparently not as Jordan Davidson at The Federalist explains:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist on New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, wrote a letter to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer [when she was a student there] stating that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

Hannah-Jones claimed that the actions of European settlers and explorers such as Christopher Columbus were “acts of devils” and likens them to Hitler.

“[The whites] lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people,” Hannah-Jones wrote.

Hannah-Jones' 1619 Project at the Times has been roundly panned by historians for its historical inaccuracies - such as her claim that the American Revolution was fought in order to maintain slavery. So bad was her history in the piece that last December five distinguished American historians wrote a letter to the magazine's editor, expressing their dismay "at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it." Their letter can be read here.

Unsurprisingly, her grasp of history while a student at Notre Dame was evidently no better than it is today. Here's more from Davidson:

Hannah-Jones claims Africans arrived in North America long before Europeans, but that unlike Europeans, Africans befriended and traded with the indigenous people. She claims pyramids in Mexico are a symbol of said friendship.

The historical and anthropological ignorance reflected in these claims is stunning, but the "hate-speech" in her letter was worse as she goes on to claim that white people today are still guilty of horrific crimes against black people:

The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community,” she writes.

“But after everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them,” she wrote. “I understand that because of some lacking, they needed to [sic] constantly prove their superiority.”

Well, perhaps she's sincere when she says she doesn't hate whites (though her use of capitals for "Blacks" and lower case for "whites" is telling), but a white person having made similar comments about blacks would not only be banished to professional exile but find herself the butt of relentless ridicule by late-night comedians if, after having called blacks "barbaric devils" she then tried to deny that she hated blacks.

The Times did not respond to a request for comment on whether their employee still maintained the racist beliefs expressed in her Notre Dame letter, but again, were this a white journalist who had written something similarly offensive and ludicrous about blacks it wouldn't matter whether the writer still held those views or not, that journalist would've been cashiered the very day the college letter came to light.

But at the Times racism is evidently acceptable as long as it's manifested by "people of color." This is the same paper, after all, that employs Sarah Jeong, a sample of whose vile racist tweets can be read in Davidson's article at the above link.  

Here's a litmus test for whether what anyone, white or black, says is actually racist: reverse all the racial references in what was said, and by whom it was said, and ask whether you'd consider the statement racially offensive.

In other words, if it'd be racist if a white person said it then it'd be racist if a black person said it. To deny this would itself be racially discriminatory, would it not?

More on Gorsuch's Terrible Argument

We recently featured on VP excerpts from Rusty Reno's analysis of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County and how Gorsuch's reasoning leads to absurd results.

Recall that Gorsuch argued that if a man (or woman) were fired from a job for engaging in behavior that would've been acceptable were that employee the opposite gender then their dismissal is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In other words, the Court's ruling established that firing an employee simply for being gay or transgender is a violation of federal law under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a form of discrimination based on sex.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the six-justice majority. He established a simple “rule” for when sex discrimination occurs under Title VII: if changing the sex of an employee would change the employer’s decision, then the employer has violated Title VII.

The end result may be proper, but Gorsuch's rule is bound to have some very undesirable unintended consequences. Consider this hypothetical situation proffered by attorney Jacob Roth at The Federalist.

[Gorsuch's] Bostock opinion ... provides the basis for the argument that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms violate Title VII. Even further, Bostock provides the basis for the argument that it is a violation of Title VII to enforce sexual harassment policies that are mandatory under Title VII.

Imagine an employer that has locker rooms for its employees. There is a male locker room and a female locker room. Each has a communal changing area and a communal shower area. The men in their locker room change and shower in front of one another. The women in their locker room do the same.

The employer also maintains sexual harassment policies that are mandatory under Title VII. These policies prohibit harassing behavior that creates a hostile or offensive work environment, as is federally required.

One day, after reading the Bostock opinion, a male employee who does not identify as transgender walks into the women’s locker room. The women are disrobing in the communal changing area and some are showering. The man disrobes in front of the women, then showers. The employer immediately learns of this and informs the male employee that he has violated the employer’s sexual harassment policies and is fired.

The male employee sues the employer for sex discrimination under Title VII based on the Bostock standard that the decision to fire him for his actions would have been different if he were a woman. The male employee argues that all he did was enter the women’s locker room, disrobe, and shower, and that female employees do those exact actions all the time without penalty.

He argues that his performance of the same actions got him fired only because he was a man doing them, which constitutes sexual discrimination under Bostock in the same way that if a man and a woman at a company are both attracted to men, but only the man is fired for it, then the company has sexually discriminated against the man.

Roth goes on to consider an objection that Gorsuch's defenders might raise, but points out that the objection is easily dispensed with. The problem is that the Gorsuch rule permits a man to do anything that would be permissible for a woman to do and vice versa. If it would be permissible for a female high school coach to mingle in the locker room with her female high school athletes then Gorsuch has made it permissible for a male to do likewise.

It's a maxim among conservatives that ideas have consequences, and it's astonishing that a putatively conservative Justice would've been so oblivious to the implications of this idea.

"A Reprehensible Idea"

Jordan Peterson opens the video below by claiming that "the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible." 

I believe he's right about this. The idea of "white privilege" is as pernicious as it is ubiquitous in our contemporary racial discourse. It's pernicious because it instils feelings of guilt in people who have nothing to feel guilty about, it fosters both white paternalism and black resentment, it drives yet another psycho-social wedge between the races, and it rationalizes black failure, frustration and resignation by implying that the deck is so stacked against blacks that their failures are understandable and excusable.

Any idea that entails those outcomes surely is reprehensible.

Jordan Peterson and Brandon Tatum combine to rebuke and refute the conventional liberal assumption that whites need to own up to their privilege in this Prager U. video in which Peterson is taped responding to a question from a member of a live audience. His segment lasts for 1:43, and is followed by Tatum's segment beginning at the 1:44 mark. 

Peterson is always interesting, but the five minutes or so of Tatum's critique of "white privilege" is especially good.

Check it out:

What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain. In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism." The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.

So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U.

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name. Indeed, at least one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his entire life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their GPAs and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone gets a C. 

I'll bet not many. Anyway, check out the Goldberg video. It's illuminating.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning Points to a Cosmic Designer

This eight minute video succinctly explains how cosmic fine-tuning is strong evidence for an intelligently designed universe. Don't be put off by the Guy Fawkes masks. The theme of the video series of which this episode is a part is that a new generation of thoughtful young people is refusing to accept the materialist explanations for the universe and life that have prevailed among our cultural elites for a hundred and fifty years or more. 

The metaphysical assumptions of naturalistic materialism are increasingly difficult to sustain given the scientific advances of the last century, especially the last twenty five years, and the masks symbolize this generation's rebellion against the mindless acceptance of a naturalistic worldview to which previous generations of students have been pressured to conform.

A Refreshing Voice

Coleman Hughes is a refreshing black voice in the conversation about race in this country and to see why watch this 7:45 interview with David Rubin, a former leftist:

There are thousands of men and women just like Coleman Hughes in the black community, but progressive media outlets ignore them because if people, especially black people, were exposed to them it would undo everything the left has been trying to accomplish in this country for the last four generations.

The left thrives on racial division and the myth that the only thing holding the black man back is systemic white racism. It thrives on fostering white guilt in liberal whites and the myth of white privilege among young people both black and white.

There is indeed a pathway for poor people, both white and black, into the American middle class but progressives don't want to talk about it because it doesn't depend at all on liberal white paternalism, and in fact in at least one of its elements it refutes one of the major shibboleths of progressive politics over the last fifty years - the myth that women don't need husbands and children don't need fathers.

Professor Bill Galston, President Clinton’s domestic policy advisor and now a senior fellow at Brookings, stated back in the early 1990s that an American need only do three things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that child after age twenty. Only 8 percent of people who do so, he reported, will be poor, while 79 percent who fail to do all three will.

It sounds so simple, so why is it so hard? One doesn't need to be "privileged" to do any of these things. Nor is "systemic racism" forcing anyone to do otherwise.

Anyway, check out Coleman Hughes' interview

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies, resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without the tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved very early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did, even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as those comprising the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves, perhaps unintentionally, the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this cascade of chemical reactions and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (although, of course, nature has no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind at all. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it should take a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input to guide its development than to believe that it arose through the intentional agency of a biochemical genius.

Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Current Crisis

It wasn't too long ago that bumper stickers and t-shirts proclaimed the message that we should "fear no art." Portraits of the Virgin Mary could be covered in elephant dung, crucifixes could be immersed in jars of urine. 

All art was good especially art which offended, but that was until Black Lives Matter and the current wokeness. Now statues and portraits that bruise the delicate sensibilities of the wide awoke are to be torn down. Fear no art only applies, it seems, to art that offends those "deplorables" that the left despises.

By the way, will we soon be demanding that pictures of all the people whose statues are being torn down be expunged from our history textbooks as well? And is it not ironic that most of the statues and portraits that have been thrown down the memory hole are of Democrats? At least they were until the art-haters turned their attention, inexplicably, on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Where will it end?

Toward the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency the press was pleased to present to us, whenever the opportunity presented itself, the evidence of his failing mental capacity. Joe Biden is showing worse symptoms than Reagan did and Biden's presidency hasn't even started yet. Nevertheless, the same liberal media that chortled over Reagan's apparent dementia has had almost nothing to say about Biden's.

Does anyone think that if Biden wins the election in November that he'll actually be the president?

It's peculiar that when there are failures in our schools the progressives always say that we need to pump more money into them, but when failures occur in law enforcement the progressives say we have to take more money from them. I wonder what Congressional Democrats would do if someone advanced a proposal to defund the Capitol police force. 

Meanwhile:

Fourteen people, including five children, were killed as more than 100 people were shot in a wave of gunfire in Chicago over the Father’s Day weekend that produced the city’s highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year.

Among the victims was 3-year-old Mekhi James, who police said was fatally shot Saturday as the boy was in a car with his father in the south Austin neighborhood. Police said the child's 27-year-old father was the intended target when someone fired shots at the vehicle, but he is not cooperating with detectives.

The weekend's other young shooting victims included a 13-year-old girl who died after being shot in the neck while watching TV in her home, and two boys, ages 17 and 16, killed in a separate shooting on Saturday. Police Superintendent David Brown said police were working hard to track down those responsible for the violence in several Chicago communities. He said “gangs, guns and drugs” are the common thread in those shootings.

In all, 102 people were shot across Chicago from Friday evening to Monday morning — the highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.The violence comes nearly a month after Chicago had its deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015 as nine people were killed and another 27 wounded in shootings.

So where's the outrage, the protests? Where's Black Lives Matter, or do they only care about black lives when those lives are taken by white cops? According to the left what we need are fewer, more poorly funded police officers on the streets. That'd be sure to reduce the violence. 

Even so, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is in favor of the idea so it's got that going for it.

An Endless Argument

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson constructs an imaginary but not uncommon exchange between a Darwinian (Evolver) and an Intelligent Design advocate (Designer):

Designer: The formation of proteins from amino acids cannot occur in an aqueous prebiotic setting. Hydrolysis will attack the peptide bonds —
Evolver: Excuse me for interrupting, but that is not how proteins formed.
Designer: In the Oparin-Haldane model —
Evolver: You mean the Oparin-Haldane strawman?
Designer: But their “thin organic broth in a reducing atmosphere” was the leading prebiotic scenario for much of the 20th century.
Evolver: Hello, it’s 2020. The field has moved on. Proteins exist, so using a prebiotic soup model for their origin, when we already know that doesn’t work, cannot be right. You need to address the actual prebiotic pathway that occurred, not some old and erroneous hypothesis.
Designer: All right, what is the actual prebiotic pathway to proteins?
Evolver: We’re working on that. The tour bus is leaving, try to keep up.

Nelson states that "We could continue this dialogue indefinitely, with Designer critiquing as unworkable, or false, every prebiotic protein origins hypothesis put forward by Evolver — and yet Evolver stands there, untroubled, yawning and checking the messages on his iPhone."

The reason that no progress can be made in such an encounter is because of an unstated assumption in Evolver's argument. Evolver tacitly assumes that naturalism, the belief that there are no non-natural forces at work in the universe, i.e. that there's no supernatural agency, is true. Here's the argument as it might appear to an onlooker (I've altered Nelson's version a bit):

1. Proteins exist.
2. Naturalism is true (tacit assumption)
3. Therefore, any non-naturalistic explanation for the existence of proteins must be false.

Obviously, this argument hinges on the truth of premise 2, but that premise is not a scientific assertion, it's metaphysical. It's a philosophical assumption for which there's scant, if any, evidence.

Designer's argument might go something like this:

1. The genesis of proteins is exceedingly improbable on any naturalistic hypothesis.
2. Proteins exist
3. Therefore, it's exceedingly improbable that naturalism is true.

The debate then is not really over the science. Evolver's commitment to a naturalistic explanation for all biological phenomena is not scientific, it's psychological. It's not based on any empirical evidence but rather on a psycho-emotional preference. It's the same sort of commitment that many people make to their religious beliefs.

Thus, Designer's task is a difficult one. His argument is scientific. It's based on biochemistry, probability and information theory, all of which militate against Evolver's naturalism. Nevertheless, no matter how much evidence he adduces to show that the biochemical hurdles to a naturalistic origin of the first proteins are astronomically high, Evolver will simply take refuge in his faith that naturalism is true and that there must therefore be some naturalistic explanation for how proteins evolved.

The irony is that Designer's case is scientific but points to a supernatural agent as the architect of the first life whereas Evolver's argument dresses itself up as science in appealing to natural forces as the cause of living things, but it has, in fact, much more in common with religion than does Designer's argument.

Pandemic Hypocrisy

John Daniel Davidson, political editor at The Federalist, argues that, should a second wave of coronavirus infections strike us this Fall, Americans should ignore lockdown orders from governors and mayors who sacrificed all their credibility and moral authority during the recent protests.

He writes:

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay. 

The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” 

The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.  

That’s a curious argument to make after forced business closures and lockdown orders destroyed tens of millions of American jobs, ruined countless businesses and livelihoods, and caused a sharp uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and domestic abuse. 

Never mind the compelling research that lockdowns are overall much worse for public health than the coronavirus.

Davidson provides links for the claims he makes throughout the article. It is ironic that our public health experts told us that no cost was too high to save lives, as New York Governor Cuomo put it, but as soon as the protests and rioting started the rationalizations for permitting them came thick and fast.

Here's Davidson again:

Witness the appalling double standard of men like New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio.  

On Monday, city workers welded shut the gates of a Brooklyn playground frequented by members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg. They claimed it was necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 

But this happened one day after the city allowed a massive “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza that attracted thousands of protesters packed together in close quarters.

Davidson gives a number of other examples of this hypocrisy in his article. Here are a few:

In Washington, D.C., which has seen days on end of massive BLM protests, some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday announced the city would begin “phase 2” of its reopening next week.

For restaurants, that means no more than 50 percent capacity, tables six feet apart, and all diners must be seated at the tables.

Same thing in Los Angeles, where thousands converged on Hollywood Boulevard Sunday for a Black Trans Lives Matter rally. Video footage of the event showed attendees packed tightly together on the street, with no possibility of social distancing.

According to news reports, there were no police present at the rally, and the city made no effort to stop it or limit attendance.

But like D.C. and other cities, Los Angeles still has strict pandemic policies for businesses, churches, and just about everything else.

For houses of worship, the city has issued elaborate guidelines for reopening, including a limit to the total number of people, clergy, and parishioners combined, who can attend a service: 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, whichever is lower.

Government officials have indeed lost their credibility as well as their moral authority. Should there be a "second wave," and these officials order people to once again shut down their shops, churches, and restaurants it's not likely that many of them will be taken seriously.

Naturalism's Daunting Difficulty

Within the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, the belief that nature is all there is (i.e. naturalism) and that everything in the universe can be explained by natural processes, has run up against a serious, and perhaps fatal, difficulty. 

The problem is that biologists have come to realize that the fundamental substrate of living things is not matter, as naturalism has always held, but information. Information is contained in codes like the amino acid sequence in proteins or the nucleic acid sequence in DNA and RNA, and the origin of information, especially in the first living cell, is inexplicable in terms of random, unguided, unintelligent natural processes.

This 21 minute video does an excellent job of explaining the problem in terms that are easy to understand and follow. It features a protein chemist (Doug Axe) and a philosopher of science (Stephen Meyer), both of whom have played prominent roles in bringing the significance of biological information in the origin of life to public attention.

Any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life has to show how the enormous improbabilities of evolving just a single protein can be overcome by mindless chance. It's a daunting task. Watch the video to see why: