How Can We Protect Our Kids?

The terrible tragedy in Uvalde, Texas on Wednesday has once again sparked discussion about why these shootings happen and what can be done to stop them.

I discussed yesterday what I think is wrong with our culture that hate-filled young men have the desire to slaughter children, and today I want to focus on one thing that can be done to stop at least some of these atrocities.

Among the steps that have been proposed by commenters, are these:

1. We can make it illegal to manufacture, sell or own guns, and try to eliminate guns from society.
2. We can pass more laws restricting gun ownership.
3. We can pass "red flag" laws which allow authorities to confiscate weapons from troubled individuals.
4. We can put armed guards in all schools.

Number one, eliminating guns, would solve the problem, of course, but it's virtually impossible. If gun manufacture was banned in the U.S. manufacturers would simply move off-shore, and guns, like drugs, would still be smuggled in and made available to those who wanted them, who would be primarily thugs and other criminals.

Number two is pointless as long as criminals still have guns. Although I would certainly support laws that make it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase a large magazine semi-automatic rifle, it's foolish to prevent responsible adult gun owners from protecting themselves as long as criminals still have the means to terrorize the innocent.

People have a right to defend themselves and their families, and any government that takes that right away and leaves people defenseless against armed criminals makes itself ipso facto an illegitimate government.

Red flag laws, if properly conceived, should indeed be enacted in every state, but some of the awful massacres that have occurred over the last few decades have been perpetrated by people like the Uvalde murderer who, until just before their rampage, had given scant indication that they could potentially commit a crime.

Others who might have been known to authorities sometimes obtained weapons illegally in "straw" purchases or stealing them from parents.

Putting armed guards in all our elementary and secondary schools would be helpful but also expensive, especially since the vast majority of schools will probably never need the services of an armed guard. Moreover, unless there are several guards it could take precious minutes for a single guard to traverse a building to get to where a shooting is occurring.

(It should be noted that there was an armed guard at the elementary school in Uvalde who was shot and wounded by the gunman.)

There's another option, however, which, though it may not be ideal, is in my mind the most practical. We could loosen gun regulations so that school officials and some select staff can have access to firearms in the building.

I once noted on Viewpoint that:

[Researchers have found] that greater efforts to restrict guns leads, counter, perhaps, to conventional opinion, to more gun crime. [These researchers] make a good case that the "gun-free zones" set up around schools are a farce. Such feel-good nostrums accomplish nothing more than to assure the psychopaths who roam the halls of every large public school in the nation that if they decide to go on a killing rampage there'll be no one able to hinder them.

The allure of exerting total, unstoppable power over others is irresistible to certain twisted minds, and "gun-free zones" don't do anything to keep them from bringing weapons into schools to carry out their horrific fantasies. They only prevent school staff from being in a position to stop them once the carnage begins.

Anyone who smuggles a gun into a school can massacre students for a long time before police arrive, and despite all the precautions that schools take to prevent such tragedies there's really no practical way an unarmed staff can prevent a student who wishes to murder his fellow students from actually doing it.

If at least some appropriate school personnel were thoroughly trained in the use of firearms, particularly in a school environment, and permitted to keep weapons under lock but easily accessible, the chances that someone would attempt, or succeed in an attempt, to perpetrate mass murder in the halls of a school would be greatly diminished.

Some people will understandably blanche at the idea of having guns in school, but the fact is they're already there. Some schools have armed guards roaming their hallways and some have armed kids roaming the hallways. A lot of schools probably have both. The question is not whether we will have guns in our schools - we already do. The question is who in the school do we want to have access to them.

Public school administrators, provided they are trained and licensed, should be allowed to keep firearms under lock and key in their office and certain properly trained classroom teachers should be allowed to do likewise. Had anyone in any of the schools that have been targeted by the deranged nihilists among us been armed many young lives could have been saved.

As it is, in almost every school shooting the shooter was confronted by heroic unarmed teachers or administrators who died trying to protect their students. Had these courageous men and women been trained and armed the outcome may have been much different.

Guns are probably here to stay in our culture, and as long as they are criminals and psychopaths will be able to get them. The answer is not to naively declare schools off-limits to guns, but to let those who would commit mayhem in a school know that they would probably not get far before they were challenged by someone who could shoot back.

There'd be risks, of course, with doing this, but what's the alternative? Not only would armed faculty be more likely to stop the carnage sooner once it starts, the knowledge that faculty, or at least some of them, are armed would have a substantial deterrent effect on at least some who may be inclined to carry out their odious crimes.

It's only because most school killers know that they'll be able to have their way for at least ten minutes before the police arrive to stop them that they even try it. If they knew that they'd have only a minute or two they might not think those few seconds worth the cost.

It's very sad that we've sunk as a society to the point where we need armed and trained adults in our schools (and churches), but, for reasons, some of which I outlined yesterday, that's where we are.

If someone had been able to confront the shooter in Uvalde with a weapon on Wednesday it may have saved many young lives and limited the immense grief the families of the dead children are experiencing today.

That, it seems to me, is the direction in which we should move until the day comes, if it ever does, when we need no longer fear to send our children to school.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

The tragedy at the Texas elementary school this week conjures up a lot of thoughts. Two questions in particular are on everyone's mind: Why do these things keep happening? What can be done to stop them?

I think that the answer to the first question is three-fold. First, too many young people are in the grip of a murderous nihilism because as a society we've rejected the only belief system which gives us any basis for valuing human life and for treating others with respect and kindness.

Second, too many young men have either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship at all. When a boy is alienated from his father, or has no father in his life, he often turns to violence as a way of expressing his masculinity and venting his resentments.

It would be interesting to see research, if any has been done, on the relationship the young men who commit these horrific crimes have with both God and their biological father. I'm quite sure that the majority of these killers are atheistic materialists, whether they're aware of it or not, and either have no father or have a dysfunctional relationship with him.

Third, many of our young are immersed in a culture of violence and death in which they hear about killing, talk about killing, laugh about killing, and practice killing in their video games for hours every day.

Those three toxic elements form a psycho-emotional time bomb in the soul of a young man which can turn him into a killer.

By abandoning the Judeo-Christian worldview that was the mortar which held our society together for three centuries, and replacing it with an atheistic materialism that offers no ground at all for morality or for conferring worth on other people, we've stripped our young of any basis for thinking of others as valuable in their own right.

In the absence of a God, people are valuable only to the extent that others value them, but atheistic materialism offers no reason why anyone should value any other human being. If we're nothing but animals then, like animals, we can be slaughtered if someone has the power and the inclination to do it.

Likewise, in the absence of an earthly father, young men often seethe with bitterness, alienation and resentments that often lead to anti-social behavior. Indeed, the one commonality among the vast majority of men in prison today is fatherlessness, yet our culture has decided for some perverse reason that fathers aren't really necessary.

Add to the spiritual and emotional emptiness entailed by fatherlessness an entertainment culture of grotesquely violent and pornographic film, music, and video games and the surprise is not that young people wantonly kill but that they don't do it more often than they do.

People immersed in what passes for entertainment in much of our culture become desensitized to death. They learn to see others as targets to be "blown away," not as people to be loved and respected.

Some will object that lots of people play these games, listen to violent music, watch movies depicting mass slaughter, and yet they don't kill others, but this misses the point. People reside on a spectrum at one end of which are the most psychopathic among us. The more we revel in bloodshed and horror the more we get shifted along toward the violent end of the spectrum.

Everyone who feeds on violence becomes a little more desensitized, a little more hardened. Everyone tends to see others as a little less valuable than they would have, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to harbor violent fantasies now do, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to actually carry out their murderous fantasies are pushed further toward exactly that behavior .

Tragedies like last Wednesday's will recur as long as we continue to erode the spiritual foundation upon which any morality must stand and substitute in its stead a culture that glories in violence, death, and horror. Just as we are what we feed our bodies, we are, too, what we feed our minds.

If this is correct, and I'm convinced that it is at least a major part of the problem, then the long-term solution to mass murders in our schools and elsewhere is to recapture the spiritual understanding that we've lost in this country and to reject the culture of death the adults among us so blithely tolerate and our young so eagerly embrace.

We'll take up a possible short-term solution in tomorrow's post.

The Warfare and Other Myths

If you've received a college education in the sciences you've probably been exposed to a one or more of the following myths about the relationship of science and religion:

You've probably heard that science and religion are incompatible and indeed are even "at war" with each other. I've written about this "warfare myth" here and here.

You've probably heard, too, that the ancients, following the Bible, believed that the earth was flat, and you also might've heard that the release of Nicholaus Copernicus' book De Revolutionibus in 1543 debunked the belief, promoted by the Church, that the earth, and thus mankind, enjoyed a privileged place at the center of the universe.

It turns out that each of these commonly held myths is false. Science and religion have never been at war, the ancients did not believe the world was flat, and although prior to Copernicus, it was believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, the center was not believed to be a privileged position. Indeed, it was thought that the center was a sump where all the corruption and offal of the universe accumulated.

Ironically, it turns out that the ancients were correct in one sense, though. With almost every new scientific discovery the universe appears to be more and more anthropocentric. Man is at the ontological center of the universe, as an increasing number of scientists are pointing out, either implicitly or explicitly.

For an example of the latter see geneticist Michael Denton's new book The Miracle of Man in which he catalogs the stunning array of physical and chemical properties of the universe, and thus the laws of physics and chemistry, that are exquisitely calibrated to make human life possible.

Other books have made similar arguments. Lewis and Barnes' A Fortunate Universe, Gonzalez and Richards' Privileged Planet, and Stephen Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis are just three which come to mind, but there are many more.

But going back to the myths. Historian of science Michael Keas explains why each of them (and one other) is false in this 12 minute video. He also shows how atheists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and the late Christopher Hitchens who subscribe to the myths are simply not very well-informed.

Ken's Racism

I read recently of a white man named Ken who expressed deep concern that his one-year old daughter had developed an attachment to African American dolls. Ken worried about raising his daughter in an atmosphere free of the "smog" of blackness that he believes has become pervasive in our culture.

He says that he wants to protect his daughter from the black racism such as characterized the Waukesha massacre and the Brooklyn subway shooting.

I think Ken sounds like a racist, but maybe I don't understand racism. I read another article recently in which another father experienced very similar concerns with his daughter, but apparently this father is not a racist because he's an "antiracist."

The major difference is that Ken is white, but the other father is black, and the races of the dolls was different:

Self-described “anti-racist scholar” and author Ibram X. Kendi reportedly grew concerned about white supremacy when he noticed his daughter developed “an attachment” to a white doll, according to a column from the Los Angeles Times.

Kendi is slated to release a new book in mid-June titled “How to Raise an Antiracist,” according to the publisher Penguin Random House. A Los Angeles Times columnist reported that in the book, Kendi claims he began thinking about white supremacy and kids after his one-year-old daughter took a liking to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll.

“[Kendi] began to think about what it would take to help [his daughter] grow up without the pervasive ‘smog’ of white supremacy surrounding her,” the column reads.

The Los Angeles Times columnist proceeded to tie Kendi’s new book on raising anti-racist kids to the Buffalo shooting committed by an 18-year-old inspired by racism.

It seems that whether a set of attitudes is racist or not depends on the race of the person who holds them and not on the attitudes themselves. That's a very interesting cultural strategy, I suppose, but it is itself obviously racist.

Postscript: Ken is fictional. Does that make a difference?

The Evolving Acceptance of ID

Granville Sewell Professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso argues in a pair of essays in The Federalist that the scientific establishment is slowly realizing it can no longer maintain the pretense that Intelligent Design lacks scientific merit and continue to exclude it from the scientific community.

Theorizing in science, like theorizing in other disciplines, often employs a method known as inference to the best explanation in which the theorist asks, given the empirical data, which of several competing hypotheses best explains what we see? The criteria for a "best explanation" are several, and include simplicity, adequacy, fruitfulness, testability, etc.

There are essentially two live options to choose between when it comes to the origins of life and the cosmos. These phenomena are the result of either the purposeful creative activity of an intelligent mind (Intelligent Design) or the product of mindless, random forces (naturalism).

Sewell limits his discussion to the origin of life, the origin of advanced life forms, and the origin of human consciousness and maintains that in each case naturalism is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation. We never see unintelligent forces producing massive amounts of information, such as is necessary to construct and operate the first living cell, but we see minds do this sort of thing all the time.

To read the details of his arguments check out his article, which isn't long, at the link. He summarizes it with this statement:

The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer: Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.

An example of how science is beginning to recognize the cogency of the ID arguments is the theme of his second article.

He discusses a scientific conference he attended in Israel on the topic of the potential and limitations of evolutionary processes to generate living things. The conference organizers invited numerous prominent evolutionary biologists, but also invited four or five scientists who are proponents of intelligent design. It's hard to imagine ID proponents being invited to speak at such an event even a decade ago.

Sewell writes:

Most, but not all [of the ID speakers], avoided mentioning design explicitly, but still emphasized the “limitations” of evolutionary processes.

Even Rice University chemist James Tour (who considers himself “agnostic” toward intelligent design) argued that origin-of-life researchers have deceived the public into believing that we are close to understanding how life formed, when we are not.

As stated on the conference web page, “the main goal of this unique interdisciplinary, international conference is to bring together scientists and scholars who hold a range of views on the potential and possible limitations of chemical and biological processes in evolution.”

The organizers attempted, to a large degree successfully, to create an atmosphere of mutual respect between those who emphasized the “potential” of evolutionary processes, and those who emphasized their “limitations.”

Until recently, intelligent design has been considered an untouchable topic in mainstream scientific circles, where it’s considered axiomatic that everything must be explainable in terms of the unintelligent forces of nature, no matter how implausible and incomplete our current explanations may be.

This axiom has worked well in other areas of science, but the problems of explaining the origin and evolution of life without design are inherently much more difficult than other scientific problems.

For this reason, a growing number of scientists seem finally ready to at least include intelligent design within the “range of views” allowed to be heard. The meeting in Israel represented an important step in this direction and shows that mainstream science can ignore the obvious for a long time, but not forever.

If you need further evidence that intelligent design is finally being taken more seriously, look at the long list of distinguished scientists endorsing Stephen Meyer’s 2021 book “Return of the God Hypothesis.” Physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson said the book “makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.”

Another endorser is Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin, whose own book “Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose,” which promotes intelligent design, carries the endorsements of three Nobel prize winners.

We're in the midst of a scientific revolution. Thinking on the origin and structure of the universe, life, and consciousness is "evolving" as more and more scientists recognize the power of ID to explain what naturalism simply cannot, or at least cannot explain in a plausible manner.

It'll be fascinating to see how this revolution unfolds over the next decade or so.

Male Pregnancy and Other Lunacies

Surely a significant portion of our intelligentsia is in the grip of some form of insanity. What other conclusion can be drawn from watching a clip from a recent congressional hearing in which Aimee Arrambide, the director of a pro-abortion non-profit organization called AVOW, is questioned by Republican North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop.

Bishop asks Arrambide how she defines a woman, to which Arrambide replies, “I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.” Bishop follows up with, “Ok. Do you believe then that men can become pregnant and have abortions?”

Arrambide's response was, “Yes.”

Q: "Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?" -@RepDanBishop

A: "Yes." -Democrat witness pic.twitter.com/TfxboajSJU

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2022

These are folks who in other contexts would boast about "following the science," but what science is there to support Arrambide's belief that men can become pregnant and have abortions?

It would've been interesting had Bishop asked her exactly what happens in a man's body when he conceives a child. How does the conception occur, what tissue does the conceptus implant upon, what physiological changes does the man's body undergo during the pregnancy?

Perhaps Ms. Arrambide would've given the Ketanji Brown Jackson "I'm not a biologist" reply. Jackson, a pending Supreme Court Justice no less, demurred when asked in a senate hearing to define "woman" by implying that only a biologist could make such a determination.

It's astonishing that we've come to the point in our national descent into madness that educated people actually believe that men can get pregnant, that we can't define what it is to be an adult female, or, for that matter, that we can't tell that what a pregnant woman (or man) is carrying in the womb is a human being .

It seems that one prerequisite to being a modern progressive is that you have to be deeply prone to a wide variety of delusions.

In the same congressional hearing which featured Ms. Arrambide's stunner, Rep. Bishop had also asked reproductive healthcare specialist Dr. Yashica Robinson, who uses “she/her” pronouns, if she could define what a “woman” was.

You can read the circumlocution that passed for Dr. Robinson's response at the link.

Subsequently, the Daily Caller took it upon themselves to conduct a poll of our august senatorial leaders, America's "best and brightest." They reached out,

to every Senate Democrat to see if any of our leaders would provide a definition. Each request was met with silence. Only 15 Republican Senators were willing to provide a definition of what a “woman” is when questioned by the Caller.

I don't know why this should be so hard or why one needs to be a professional biologist to ascertain whether an individual is a man or a woman. In probably 95% or more of the cases all one need do is "look under the hood," so to speak. In cases where such an inspection may fail to give an unambiguous result, an abdominal MRI or a simple genetic test would settle the matter.

If there's a uterus or a prostate present, that would seem to be dispositive, as would an XX or XY genotype.

But, someone might object, what if a person who's anatomically, physiologically and genetically male really thinks he's a female. Doesn't a person's psychology trump their biology?

The short answer to that question is, why should it? Why should one's psychology be privileged over one's biology? How does thinking something is the case make it objectively the case?

Abraham Lincoln was once confronted with that question in a different context. He responded with a question of his own. He asked, "If you called a dog's tail a leg how many legs would it have?" "Well, it'd have five legs," his interlocutor answered. To which Lincoln replied, "No sir, it'd have four legs. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."

Admit it, You're a Racist

Are you a white supremacist? According to something called the white supremacy pyramid employed by some "anti-racist" speakers you really can't help but be. Note that the pyramid is divided into examples of "Overt White Supremacy" and "Covert White Supremacy."

According to "anti-racists" white supremacy, whether overt or covert, is an expression of racism so if any of the views or opinions anywhere on this pyramid describe you, you are a racist white supremacist.

No one would disagree, of course, with those attitudes depicted as overt white supremacy. They're all harmful and most of them are evil and deserve condemnation. The problem for the anti-racist crowd is that they're so rare that if they were the only manifestations of racism in this country it'd have to be acknowledged that America had pretty much resolved its racial problem.

To avoid thinking that the problem has been largely resolved, to keep racial animus alive and perpetuate the idea that white America still owes black America, the anti-racists espy covert racism almost everywhere. This, we're assured, is the real racism that saturates American life and with which black people have to deal every day.

Here's the pyramid:

It's hard to know exactly what some of these things mean, but in any case notice that,

• if you try to look past a person's race (colorblindness) and treat everyone as a human being and child of God, you're a racist. By this measure embracing Martin Luther King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color is racist, and so was King for dreaming it.
• if you believe that our culture was derived primarily from the intellectual resources we inherited from Europe and that this inheritance has made this country the freest, most prosperous country in history and that this heritage should be taught to our children, you're a racist.
• if you were, or are, a Trump supporter who believes that America has wandered away from the institutions and values - like strong two-parent families, Judeo-Christian morality, the belief that hard work tends to be rewarded - that make a nation strong and resilient, you're a racist.
• if you believe that all lives are equally valuable in the eyes of God, you're a racist. But if you believe that God values some lives, based on race, more highly than others then you're also a racist.
• if you believe that many blacks need white help (paternalism) either through transfer payments, donations, affirmative action, or other kinds of support in order to help them become self-reliant, you're a racist. But if you believe blacks shouldn't be given this kind of support you're also a racist.
• if you adopt for yourself aspects of what might be called "black culture" (cultural appropriation) you're a racist. This only works one way, though, since virtually everything that blacks use, enjoy and benefit from throughout their lives is a product of white "European" culture. Of course, if you were to refuse to adopt or appreciate something because its a product of black culture, that, too, would be racist.
• if you believe that we should control our borders and regulate who immigrates into the country, you're a racist.
• if you believe you're not a racist then you are a racist, and if you believe you are a racist then, of course, you are a racist.
• if you believe that black people can be as racist as anyone else then you're a racist. If, on the other hand, you believe that black people cannot be racist then you believe they're morally superior to every other race and that's also racist.

In other words, no matter how hard you may try to expunge your soul of the ugly stain of racism, if you're white it's ineradicable and the purging project is hopeless. But if that's the case where does it lead?

If whites cannot help but be racist might not a lot of them conclude that if no matter what they do they're going to be hectored about their white privilege, their white supremacy and their intrinsic moral failure, they may as well stop trying to treat everyone equally and just stick to people like themselves, racially balkanize, resegregate, and let each race take care of their own?

Resegregation might make the anti-racist crowd happy for a while, but it certainly wouldn't work out to the well-being of the vast majority of blacks who've benefited from having integrated into white society.

I guess to think that, though, is paternalism, and that, according to the pyramid, is also racist.

Why Gas Prices Are High

In a recent column at National Review Jim Geraghty explains a matter that's no doubt of interest to everyone.

His topic is why fuel prices in general, and diesel prices in particular, are rising to record levels. Contrary to allegations from Mr. Biden, Senator Warren and others, it's not because oil companies are too greedy. It's because, Geraghty tells us, six U.S. oil refineries have shut down and a seventh is slated to close. Meanwhile, there are no new refineries on the horizon.

The lack of refining capacity has exerted upward pressure on all fuel costs, but the soaring cost of diesel is particularly alarming. Geraghty writes:

As of this morning, the national average cost of a gallon of diesel fuel is $5.57 — which is the record high, according to the American Automobile Association. A year ago, it was $3.17 per gallon. (The national average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline this morning is $4.52; one year ago, the cost was $3.04.)

We are now reaching the point where the cost of diesel fuel is making some goods too expensive to transport. One trucker told the Orlando Fox affiliate yesterday that, “The cost of diesel is single-handedly taking us out of the game one by one no matter how big you are. . . . If you’re getting paid $2 per mile you’re not taking that load no matter if it is baby formula or orange juice because the cost of diesel is $5 plus. You just can’t take that load.”

Why is there a dearth of refineries? Geraghty explains:

Back in 2020, U.S. oil-refinery capacity peaked at 19 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. But because of the pandemic, and the delayed decision to permanently shut down the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery after a major accident in 2019, U.S. refinery capacity declined significantly during that year. (PES was the largest oil refinery on the East Coast and refined 335,000 barrels per day.)

In addition to the PES refinery, five more shut down over the course of 2020: the Shell refinery in Convent, La., the Tesoro Marathon refinery in Martinez, Calif., the HollyFrontier refinery in Cheyenne, Wyo., the Western Refining refinery in Gallup, N.M., and the Dakota Prairie refinery in Dickinson, N.D. Those six collectively refined more than 1 million barrels of oil per day.

Thus, the U.S. started 2021 with its lowest annual refining capacity in six years, and that capacity did not expand significantly over the rest of the year. And as the pandemic’s effects on American life faded, month by month, demand for fuel increased — not just from drivers but from trucking and shipping companies, construction companies — remember, 98 percent of all energy use in the construction sector comes from diesel — and from airlines and other consumers of jet fuel.

Why are we experiencing these stunning fuel prices? Because we’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And you know what happens when you mix lower supply with higher demand.

Nor can those closed refineries simply be reopened:

The former PES refinery complex in Philadelphia is being demolished. The Shell refinery is slated to become an “alternative fuels complex,” and it’s a similar transition for the Tesoro refinery.

The HollyFrontier refinery is already converted to processing biofuels, as is the Dakota Prairie refinery. (Certain environmentalists will denounce the greedy oil companies and praise the companies producing environmentally friendly biofuels, never stopping to check and realize that many of them are the same companies.)

Wait, I haven’t even gotten to the bad news: Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.

The petroleum industry read the handwriting on the political wall, saw that there's no future in fossil fuels given the current hostility toward them, and begun the process of transitioning out of them.

But when diesel gets prohibitively expensive, industries that rely on it will begin to cut back or shut down. Farming, construction, airlines, and, of course, trucking will all find it financially impossible to stay in business at the level necessary to keep our economy humming.

Most of the products in our homes are petroleum-based so they'll all become more costly.

A declining refining capacity and the concommitant rise in the cost of diesel and jet fuel will ultimately lead to higher unemployment, empty store shelves, more difficult and frustrating air travel and almost surely a recession, if not another Great Depression.

Read Geraghty's column for more insight into this very troubling predicament.

Oz on Islamophobia

As I write this the Pennsylvania primary election campaign is over, although it's still unclear whether Mehmet Oz, Dave McCormick or Kathy Barnette will be the Republican nominee to run next November for the seat being vacated by retiring U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R. PA).

Even so, I thought an article by Robert Spencer at PJ Media on a criticism by Oz of something Barnette tweeted in 2015 was worth highlighting.

Apparently, Barnette tweeted that “Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam,” a tweet that evidently deeply offended Dr. Oz. He has accused her of Islamophobia, and she now claims - incongruously, since she offers no explanation how the words appear on her Twitter feed - that she “would never have said that.”

Spencer notes, though, that what Oz alleges that she said is not unreasonable and that she would have been better off just owning the remark and defending it, as there is certainly ample justification in Islam for thinking it. He goes on to explain:

Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet) said in January 2018 that under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry. Ishaq Akintola, professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria, said in 2016: “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.”

Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi, Iraqi expert on Islamic law, said in 2008: “There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”

Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, declared in 2014 that there is no minimum age for marriage in Islamic law at all and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.” Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology has ruled that “Islam does not forbid marriage of young children.”

These authorities say these things because hadiths that Muslims consider [to be an] authentic record state that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88).

This doesn’t mean that all Muslims are pedophiles or approve of pedophilia, but it does mean that what Barnette wrote was not unreasonable.

Spencer links to all of the relevant sources in his article, but Oz thinks Barnette should be banned from the race for tweeting something defamatory to an entire religion. Yet, if her allegation is true how is it defamatory?

The question is, is it true? Does Islamic law actually permit adult men to marry and subsequently engage in conjugal acts with children or doesn't it? If it does, then Barnette's tweet certainly seems justified, unless we're so politically correct nowadays that the only religion we can say anything negative about with impunity is Christianity.

Speaking of which, a number of prominent atheists have written scathingly about what they believe are the shortcomings of Christianity. For example, Brits like Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor and the late Christopher Hitchens, a world renowned journalist, grew wealthy on the proceeds of their best-selling anti-Christian books The God Delusion and God Is Not Great.

Spencer wonders whether Oz would think, had any of these men taken out dual citizenship and run for a Senate seat in the U.S., that their attacks on Christianity, the bulk of which have in fact been debunked, would disqualify them from office.

It's a fair question.

An Inept Response to Inflation

President Biden recently alleged that there wasn't much he could do about inflation since the problem is due to factors beyond his control (Putin's war, supply chain problems, Covid, etc.). Well, according to The Federalist's Christopher Jacobs, that's just not true.

Jacobs writes that there are two things the Biden administration could do that would help to reduce inflation.

The first is repeal the $1.9 trillion "Covid stimulus." Jacobs notes that,

Press reports have listed some of the many wasteful projects that governments funded using the $1.9 trillion “stimulus” measure Democrats passed last March under the guise of “Covid relief.” The extravagant pork-barrel spending goes from coast to coast, from irrigation systems at a golf club in Colorado Springs to upgrades to a minor league baseball park in New York.

But the Congressional Budget Office notes that chunks of that spending have yet to go out the door. CBO estimates the bill will increase the deficit by $529 billion in the current fiscal year (which ends September 30), $114 billion in the upcoming fiscal year (which begins on October 1), and $59 billion in the fiscal year after that.

In his speech, Biden said that “reducing the deficit is one of the main ways we can reduce inflationary pressures.” Repealing last year’s “stimulus,” and rescinding any amounts not already obligated, would do just that.

The second thing the President could do would be to encourage more oil and natural gas production. This would bring down the cost of almost everything and have an almost immediate effect:

In his speech, Biden also claimed Republicans “have no plan to bring down energy prices today.” That claim is false.

Republicans have proposed numerous ideas to would bring down energy prices....Because oil and natural gas operate in “spot” markets, any announcements signaling an expansion of American energy would bring down prices almost immediately, well before any new oil or gas wells come online.

But leftist climate warriors don’t want to increase energy exploration activities, which explains why the Biden administration recently canceled oil and gas sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Inflation hits everyone, but it crushes those who live on the margin. The Democrats say they care about the poor, but they're refusing opportunities to demonstrate the sincerity of that concern because they don't want to stop the pork train or put on hold their plans to destroy the fossil fuel industry.

Meanwhile, all Americans are paying for their fecklessness, and the poor are suffering most of all.

The Wonder of Embryogenesis

Given the topic of several of last week's posts I thought it'd be appropriate to repost this one from a couple of years ago.

It features a beautifully animated video that shows the development of a child from insemination to birth and provides compelling reinforcement for the arguments made by Karen Swallow Prior and others that fifty years from now abortion will be as unthinkable as slavery is today.

When I watched this video for the first time I couldn't help wonder how the cells, both the sperm and the embryonic cells, "know" where to go. I marveled, too, at how the cells "know" to differentiate themselves into various tissues, and how the tissues "know" to arrange themselves in 3 dimensional patterns of a specific shape.

The amount of information and organization this whole process requires, the feedback and control systems that must be deployed, are all enormously complex and ingenious.

The developmental process from sperm to newborn appears to be wonderfully programmed and choreographed, but by what? The laws of chemistry? Natural selection?

How does a purposeless, mechanical process like natural selection generate the incredible amount of information - far more information than what's required by, say, a computer operating system - that's needed for embryogenesis, even given a billion years of evolutionary time?

Perhaps some purely naturalistic, mechanical process did produce this amazing developmental sequence, but if so, it's as if a fairy tale has come true. Or maybe it's a miracle.

This is breathtaking. Even moreso when we think that we're essentially witnessing the first nine months of our own existence.

An Acceptable Racial Inequity

This past week I posted on the topic of race and the topic of abortion. Today I'm going to talk about both.

Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal makes some interesting points in his Thursday column (subscription required). He notes, for instance, that the left is very much concerned with racial inequities in our society except when it comes to abortion.

On this particular inequity, one that involves the deaths of black children, they're mute. He writes:

In other contexts, group differences in outcome set off alarms on the political left. The racial gap in test scores has brought calls to eliminate the SAT and other admissions tests. The racial gap in arrest and incarceration rates has brought calls to legalize drugs and reduce resources for law enforcement. Racial differences in wealth and income fuel progressive demands for slavery reparations and a larger welfare state. And so on.

When it comes to abortion, however, left-wing concern seems to stop at making the procedure safe and legal, even while black-white disparities have not only persisted but widened.

A 2020 paper by public-health scholar James Studnicki and two co-authors cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to note that the black abortion rate is nearly four times higher than the white rate: “Between 2007-2016, the Black rate declined 29% and the White rate declined 33%—meaning that the racial disparity actually increased rather than decreased.”

Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in a 2019 abortion case observed that “there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.”

Mr. Studnicki and his co-authors likewise conclude that abortion’s impact on the size of the black population is pronounced. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, they note that in 2018 there were about 61,000 premature white deaths from all causes and 21,000 premature black deaths. “Abortions were 23.9% of the White deaths and 62.7% of the Black deaths.”

So, why are we not concerned about the radical disparity in deaths of unborn blacks? Why does this racial inequity not seem to matter so much? Perhaps silence on this issue is due to one very plausible reason for the disparity put forward by Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks in his book “Is Marriage for White People?”:

Having a spouse, Mr. Banks speculates, may be what matters most in a woman’s decision to seek an abortion. “A single woman with an unplanned pregnancy is about twice as likely as a married woman to abort,” he writes. “Black women thus may have so many more abortions than other groups in part because they are so much less likely to be married.”

The irony, he adds, is that even though single black women are less likely to abort than other groups of single women, black women still have more abortions because they are far more likely than their white counterparts to be single. “Some portion of the racial disparities in abortion are yet another cost of the marriage decline” among blacks.

In other words, we might suspect that the left doesn't talk about abortion inequity because the solution involves stressing the importance of husbands and traditional marriage. Yet not only does marriage reduce the likelihood that a woman will abort a pregnancy, it also reduces the likelihood that she'll be poor.

Riley finishes with a couple of thoughts on marriage and poverty:

The black poverty rate has been roughly a third higher than the white rate for close to 30 years. Among married blacks, however, poverty has been in the single digits over the same period. In some years, the poverty rate for black married couples has been below the rate of not only blacks as a whole but also whites as a whole.

If activists believe that higher black incomes will result in fewer black abortions, why not focus on how to increase black marriage rates?

One problem is that such a conversation requires frank talk about counterproductive attitudes toward marriage and solo parenting in low-income black communities. It requires discussing antisocial behavior and personal responsibility.

The Democratic left has fashioned a politics around avoiding those subjects and accusing anyone who broaches them of racism. No issue has a bigger impact on America’s black population than legal abortion, but we’re not supposed to talk about that.

No, indeed. Ever since Karl Marx the left has been seeking to undermine the traditional family. Encouraging black women to get married and stay married is hardly going to be a popular strategy with those who consider the traditional family to be a form of oppression that needs to be done away with.

When Does Life Begin? (Pt. II)

We ended yesterday's post by saying that what we designated Definition (1a) - A person is a living human being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will - was problematic. Here's why:

In the course of one’s life it’s possible that an individual becomes comatose. That is, they're in a state of deep unconsciousness from which they cannot be aroused by any stimulation, including pain.

Comas can be either reversible, in which case the individual will eventually come out of it, or irreversible in which case they won’t. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that medical technology can determine whether a comatose individual will ever be awakened from their coma.

Now here’s a problem with Def. (1a): Whichever form of coma an individual finds himself or herself in, on Def. (1a) the individual is no longer a person and therefore no longer has a right to life.

Some people might agree that an irreversibly comatose individual is no longer a person, but no one would want to say that of a reversibly comatose man or woman. Who wants to say that someone who's temporarily comatose, perhaps under anesthesia, is no longer a person and their rights may be suspended until they recover?

Unconscious or reversibly comatose individuals differ from irreversibly comatose individuals in that they have the potential to recover and exhibit all of the capacities that Singer ascribes to persons. So perhaps we should amend Def.(1a) to accommodate this potential:

Definition (2): A person is a living human being with the capacity or potential capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

This seems a reasonable definition of a person since it incorporates the characteristics that Singer imputes to persons and also covers those who are reversibly comatose. It will, however, not please those who wish to keep abortion legal at any stage of development prior to birth.

The problem, as those folks will recognize, is that Def.(2) extends personhood all the way back in the chain of development to the conceptus. A human embryo, just like the reversibly comatose individual, is a human being and has the potential to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will, whether or not it is presently able to do so.

At this point in the discussion someone might object that rather than adding potential capacity we should instead add former capacity.

Definition (2a): A person is a living human being with the capacity or former capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

This would cover the reversibly comatose as well as irreversibly comatose individuals without conferring personhood on a fertilized ovum or embryo.

The problem is that there seems to be no justification for excluding "potential capacity" except the desire to avoid considering the early stages of human development as persons. Philosophers call this sort of move ad hoc. There’s no independent justification or reason for it other than that it’s necessary in order to salvage one’s preferred position on abortion.

Indeed, since it would seem that in such a serious matter we should adopt the more expansive definition of person rather than the more restrictive definition perhaps the best definition would be:

Definition (3): A person is a living human being with the capacity, potential capacity, or former capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

But if we accept this definition what we’re saying is that:

Definition (3a): A person just is a living human being.

Note that Def. (3a) does not identify a conceptus, embryo or comatose individuals as “potential” persons. It identifies them as persons. There is, in fact, no such thing as a "potential person" unless one wishes to so regard individual gametes (ovum and sperm) as potential persons.

In conclusion, we’ve looked at six different definitions of a person. Which one, if any, you think is best is up to you to decide.

Of course, one could argue, as many pro-choice advocates do, that even if what's inside the mother's womb is a human being, i.e. a person, the mother should have the right to kill it anyway. That, however, is an altogether different argument than the "no one knows when life begins" argument.

When Does Life Begin? (Pt. I)

The leak of the pending SCOTUS decision in the Dobbs abortion case has once again stirred up the abortion debate and once again the claim is being circulated that "no one knows when life begins." It's not usually clear what the person making this claim means by it, so let's unpack it.

If it's meant literally the assertion belies an astonishing ignorance of biology. The ovum and sperm, the gametes that fuse to form a conceptus in a woman's womb, are living cells. They were produced by living persons, and the embryo that results is a living entity.

The point at which "life begins" is the point at which the first life appeared. Ever since then life has been a continuum. It’s simply bizarre to argue that we weren’t alive until we had a heartbeat or until we were born.

But maybe those who make this claim are talking about human life. Maybe they mean that no one knows at what point in the reproductive process a human being becomes a human being, but this, too, makes little sense.

What is a human being? Is it not an entity which possesses a specific genetic endowment? If so, the conceptus qualifies. After all, it's certainly a human conceptus - it's not a turtle or elephant conceptus - and it's certainly a being.

Nor is it, as we often hear, part of the mother's body. It's a separate being with a genetic makeup distinct from that of the mother. It's located in her body, but it's not part of her body.

Perhaps what's meant by the claim that "no one knows when life begins" is that no one knows when a developing individual becomes a person with all the rights appertaining to persons, including the right to life. If so, it'd be helpful if we had a definition of "person" with which there could be general agreement.

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who is pro-choice, gives us a definition we can use as a start. He says that, “I use the term ‘person’ to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future.”

I think this definition is inadequate, but to see why let’s reformulate his definition this way:

Definition (1): A person is a living being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

This, however, is a bit too broad for use in the abortion discussion. It would include at least some animals, and possibly aliens, if such there be, and it would certainly include God.

Since, however, neither animals, aliens nor God are subject to our laws concerning rights, like the right to life, perhaps we should specify that our definition refers to human beings.

Thus:

Definition (1a): A person is a living human being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

So, are all human beings persons under Def. (1a)? Clearly not. Human beings start out as a conceptus (in biology called a zygote), they develop into an embryo and thence into a fetus which has the form of a miniature human. If matters are allowed to proceed, the fetus becomes a newborn, a toddler, a child, adolescent, adult and eventually a corpse.

On Def. (1a) neither the conceptus (the fertilized ovum) nor the embryo and possibly not the fetus, at least in its early stages, would meet the criteria of being a person.

Yet even most pro-choice advocates would agree, I think, that Def. (1a) is inadequate. We'll consider some reasons why in tomorrow's post.

Race: Fact and Fantasy

Columnist Andrew Sullivan was invited a while ago to appear on Jon Stewart's show to discuss race, and, according to Sullivan, the show was something of a train wreck. He felt that he was ambushed, but more than that, Stewart delivered a monologue which, in Sullivan's opinion, grossly distorted the facts about race in this country.

Sullivan replied to Stewart's diatribe in his Substack column. I only discuss a portion of his piece which is a classic takedown of the arguments often made by those who wish to divide americans along racial lines.

He writes:

On the race question, Stewart has decided to go way past even Robin DiAngelo, in his passionate anti-whiteness....He argued that no one in America had been prepared to have an honest discussion about race — until the “reckoning” of 2020.

He also suggested that nothing had been done by whites to support African-Americans from 1619 (yes, he went there) … till now. The most obvious solution — reparations — was, he implied, somehow, absurdly, taboo.

His montage of “black voices” insisted that African-Americans are still granted only conditional citizenship, are still barred from owning property — “we don’t own anything!” — and ended with Sister Souljah — yes! — explaining that the thing that kills black people are not bullets, but white people.

This (Souljah) is the same moral avatar who once said: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Stewart then hailed Angela Davis — a proud Communist, with a particular fondness for East Germany’s suppression of dissent — and warmly thanked her as “Angela.”

But Stewart included not a single black voice of disagreement or nuance. He apparently believes that all black people hold the same view. And all white people just refuse to hear it.

Sullivan was far from finished with Stewart. He went on:

Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it.

His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy.

It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.

There's more:

Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans.

As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.”

To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.

Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, [Ibram X.] Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry.

He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”

I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening.

His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist.

There's much more at the link, and it's devastating to the views held by Stewart and the CRT crowd. Anyone interested in the issue of race in America really should read all of it.

Race in America

Americans with short time horizons often think that racism in the U.S. is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, media incitements to the contrary, racism, at least white racism, is probably at historically low levels right now.

It's so difficult to find examples of white racism that race hustlers have tried to persuade us that the difficulty in finding it is proof of how insidious it is.

Here are some facts from an essay by Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch:

Last September, American support for interracial marriage hit an all-time high. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve not merely of interracial marriage, but specifically of marriages between white people and black people. I’m not sure it’s necessary for my purposes, but I’m happy to concede that the “real” number might be a bit lower.

Polling on such questions is always open to “social desirability bias”—people say what they think they’re supposed to say. But even if there’s some of that at work—and there probably is—that too is a good thing.

In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. I’m sure some of those people were lying, too. In other words, what is considered socially acceptable to say—even to a stranger on a phone—has moved massively against racism.

As I’ve written many times, this is hardly the only data point about how America has become less racist since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For starters, we had a two-term black president and currently have a black vice president. In 1965, there were no black senators or governors and only five black members of the House of Representatives. In 2021, there were 57 black members of the House of Representatives, a statistically proportionate number to the black population (13 percent).

State legislatures are somewhat below that benchmark—about 9 percent in 2015—but even so, there are hundreds of them, most notably in the Old South. Georgia has 66, Mississippi 51, South Carolina 44, North Carolina 37, Alabama 31, etc.

“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.

By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.”

In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).

My only point is that America has made monumental and, to a significant degree, historically unprecedented racial progress.

It's one of the tragic flaws of human nature that we seek to divide ourselves along differences, but race is only one of those differences. We segregate ourselves along religious, gender, political, socioeconomic, geographical, ethnic, and linguistic lines. Blacks do it, whites do it, pretty much everyone does it, but for some reason we think it's especially problematic when the divides fall along racial lines and when whites are the perpetrators.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to live if you're black and it's not hard to see why. There's more opportunity here for blacks than there is in any other country in the world, even predominately black countries, especially predominately black countries.

This is why millions of non-whites are seeking to emigrate to the United States. It's certainly not because they think that the U.S. is a racist hell-hole. It's because they know that they have more opportunity to succeed here than anywhere else in the world.

In summary, there are two things I wish to stress about race in America: There's far less racism in this country in 2022 than we're led to believe, and blacks are just as guilty of what racism there is today as is any other race.

When our media and race-hustlers seek to ladle on the racial guilt by recounting stories, many from over fifty years ago, about racial injustices, simply ask yourself, or them, why, if the contemporary U.S. is so awful, so many non-white people are trying desperately to get in.

The Peregrine Falcon

Each spring the fastest bird in the world, the Peregrine falcon, nests in a man-made box on a ledge on the Rachel Carson Building in Harrisburg, PA, and each year a series of cameras records the progress of the chicks and all the goings-on in the eyrie.

The falcon had been on the brink of extirpation in North America due to the accumulation of pesticides in their bodies which caused them to produce thin-shelled eggs which broke prematurely in the nest. But since the 1970s the bird has made an impressive comeback due to the banning of the pesticides and the help of wildlife biologists who've done a marvelous job of managing these magnificent raptors.

The Peregrine can dive on prey at up to 200 mph and hits its target so hard that, if it doesn't grab it, it knocks it out of the air.

The Harrisburg Peregrine pair currently has four young and can be observed via the falcon cams here. If you're lucky when you tune in you might see the adults feeding the voracious nestlings. These young birds are still a couple of weeks away from venturing their first flight.

Meanwhile, the following video provides some interesting information on the Peregrine, although if you don't like seeing violence in nature perhaps you ought not watch it.

The Dobb's Decision

One of the arguments, if it can be called that, promoted by critics of the apparent pending Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case is that if the Court can overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) then it could also go on to overturn Griswold (1965), which established a right to buy contraception, Loving (1967), which struck down laws against interracial marriage, and Obergefell (2015), which struck down laws against same-sex marriage.

I expressed doubt that this may qualify as an argument against Dobbs because it doesn't offer any reason to think that Roe was grounded in the Constitution or that the Supreme Court has no good reason to overturn it.

The draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion takes pains to emphasize that the Dobbs decision has no bearing on any other matters. Alito states at least three times that Dobbs is relevant only to Roe and the subsequent 1992 Casey decision, and is not to be understood as setting the predicate for a challenge to any other precedent. He writes:

None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.

Whether these other cases were rightly decided or not, the fact that they may come under scrutiny is, in fact, no argument for why Roe should not have been reconsidered. If Roe is bad jurisprudence, as even many pro-choice scholars cited by Justice Alito in the leaked draft of his opinion have acknowledged it is, then it should be overturned regardless of whether it sparks subsequent reconsideration of other decisions.

As David Garrow writes in a column at the Wall Street Journal (paywall):

Justice Alito takes clear pleasure in citing by name the many liberal legal scholars who have dismissively criticized Roe’s reasoning, and he twice calls Roe’s constitutional discussion “exceptionally weak." That’s a conclusion with which even historians who fervently back abortion rights can’t cavil.

The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a legislature. It's not supposed to be a political vehicle for gratifying the esires of the masses. It's role is to decide whether laws enacted by political bodies like legislatures conflict with the Constitution.

When its own judgments are found to be in conflict with the Constitution, as in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which upheld racially segregated public facilities, then those judgments should be overturned, as Plessy was in Brown v. Board of Eduxcation (1954).

The Roe decision was a usurpation of the role of the legislature. Citing only the most tenuous constitutional warrant, it established a right to an abortion, overruling the laws of many states, simply because many people wanted it.

The current Court has apparently decided that its predecessors exceeded their constitutional authority in establishing this right, that there was no basis in the Constitution for creating a right to abortion, that Roe was thus wrongly decided and should no longer be the law of the land.

If the leaked Dobbs decision turns out to be an accurate picture of where SCOTUS stands, the citizens of the fifty states will now decide whether, and to what extent, to permit abortion in their states. Pro-choice advocates insist that polls show the overwhelming majority of people want abortion to be legal, which, if true, should alleviate their concerns about overturning Roe since majorities of voters will decide to keep it legal.

The hysterical reaction on the left, however, belies their own confidence that their claim to have a strong majority on their side. Indeed, a Gallup poll taken last year showed that 32% of the people think abortion should be "always" legal, 19% thought it should never be legal, and 48% thought it should be sometimes legal.

In other words, 67% disapprove of the current status of abortion in this country which, in most states, allows abortion for any reason at any time up to birth.

Whatever the actual statistics may be, the current Court appears to be returning the decision as to whether and to what extent abortion should be legal to the people to decide. In a constitutional republic that's where it should've been all along.

Putin's Famine

One of the many insidious consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the global food shortage and potential famine that it will precipitate. Jim Geraghty writes about it at National Review. He quotes Senator Roy Blunt (R., MO):

You can find different numbers on this, but roughly 25 percent of all the wheat exports in the world come from Ukraine and Russia, about 20 percent of all the corn exports in the world. 90 percent of the sunflower cooking oil comes from there, and a lot of fertilizer comes from there right now from Ukraine, which is the bigger partner in that food distribution of the two countries.

And nothing is coming out of Ukraine. Nothing is coming out of the port at Odessa. Nothing is coming out of the port at Mariupol and hasn’t since the Russian invasion began.

This has huge impact on the whole world but particularly on Africa, food in Ukraine, food in Africa. What’s in the silos in Ukraine right now is not getting out. And Ukrainian farmers aren’t getting crops planted for this year.

Geraghty adds this important note:

Keep in mind, even if the Russian invasion ended tomorrow — and it won’t — there’s still the issue of the hundreds of anti-ship mines now floating around in the Black Sea, a few of which have ended up drifting into the territorial waters of Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania. It’s not going to be safe to send cargo ships through those waters for a long time.

Moreover,

But the global fertilizer shortage is likely to reduce crop yields in a lot of places, which means we may be dealing with a worse problem in the coming months and years. Using less fertilizer usually translates into fewer crops.

Nor are we immune to the consequences of this problem here in North America:

The cost of the fertilizers farmers across Mid-Michigan use has doubled, and in some cases tripled. No joke, manure is absolutely a hot commodity.

Geraghty has a lot more important insight into this problem at the link, but I'll close with this:

Few of these problems are expected to be short-lived. The numbers in the latest World Bank assessment are eye-popping:

Energy prices are expected to rise more than 50 percent in 2022 before easing in 2023 and 2024. Non-energy prices, including agriculture and metals, are projected to increase almost 20 percent in 2022 and will also moderate in the following years. Nevertheless, commodity prices are expected to remain well above the most recent five-year average.

In the event of a prolonged war, or additional sanctions on Russia, prices could be even higher and more volatile than currently projected. . . . Wheat prices are forecast to increase more than 40 percent, reaching an all-time high in nominal terms this year. That will put pressure on developing economies that rely on wheat imports, especially from Russia and Ukraine.

The human cost of this is staggering, with the number of people around the world at risk of famine jumping from 45 million to anywhere from 53 million to 65 million.

Right now, there’s probably some cold-hearted isolationist saying, “Yes, yes, this is all very sad, but how is this America’s problem?”

Well, hungry people do things that well-fed people do not. They protest and they riot. Hungry people move across borders as refugees. They are more easily recruited into terrorist or extremist groups. Hungry populaces are more likely to turn to demagogues promising an easy solution. Where there is hunger, there is conflict.

A lot of people around the world are going to die because one power-mad narcissist, Vladimir Putin, took it upon himself to invade a country that was no threat to him or the Russia over which he presides as dictator.

If that's not evil then the word has no meaning.

Cephalopod Camouflage

We've posted this wonderful video on Viewpoint in the past, but I thought newer readers might like to see it because it raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology and anatomy necessary for cephalopods to camouflage themselves like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these animals display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA and DNA programs for the production of proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through purely mechanistic processes?

Anyway, keep in mind as you watch the video that, on naturalism, these creatures evolved these marvelous capabilities purely by mindless, undirected random mutations in their genome.

If you don't keep that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among some intellectuals, offers disappointingly inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

The Leak

Someone leaked a draft of the Supreme Court's decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which apparently overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The leak is certainly a betrayal of trust and a failure of professional ethics on the part of the leaker and the act is possibly criminal.

Whoever did it, whether affiliated with the Court's liberals or with the conservatives, deserves to have his or her legal career ended. If any of the Justices had anything to do with it they deserve to be impeached. The guilty party has done profound damage to the integrity of the Court.

But beyond that, the reaction of many on the left to the news that the Court appears poised to allow states to craft their own laws on abortion is deeply disappointing.

To see why it's disappointing check out this compilation of tweets from various lefties put together by Jordan Boyd at The Federalist.

Over and over those who express outrage over the Court's ruling - which is not yet official and won't be until the summer - call for violence, destruction, and threaten the Justices and their families. This is how barbarians practice politics: Give us our way or else we'll burn everything down and threaten you and your families with violence.

In all of the tweets that Ms. Boyd catalogues there's no evidence at all of any argument, no reasons are given to cause anyone to think that the Court has wrongly interpreted the Constitution in Dobbs, and no Constitutionally based defense of Roe against Justice Alito's scathing critique of that 1973 decision.

Rather what we see are very angry people forsaking rational argument and giving way to their rage over the fact that in the future they may have to travel to a different state for the opportunity to dismember their unborn baby.

Some aver that the Court is declaring war on women. They seem oblivious to the fact that for the last fifty years there's been the equivalent of a war on the unborn that has cost some 60 million fatalities. Besides, it seems odd that the same folks who insist that they don't know what a woman is are now telling us that there's a war against them.

They're also warning that democracy is imperiled by returning to the states and their citizens the right to decide whether abortion will be permitted and under what circumstances it will be permitted, as if allowing the people, through the ballot box, to make this decision is somehow anti-democratic.

Among Ms. Boyd's collection of tweets there are many which call for "burning everything down," even as the left has loudly and persistently condemned the violence of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. I hope in the days ahead to read numerous repudiations from progressives of their fellow progressives who are calling for mob violence today, but I won't be surprised if those repudiations never materialize.

(By the way, doesn't Twitter forbid calls for violence and mayhem on its platform, or did that all change when Elon Musk took over?)

In any event, Alito's majority decision clearly states why Roe was wrongly decided. It'll be interesting to see whether any of those who want the abortion regime to continue will offer a compelling case - based on the Constitution, not on emotion - for thinking that Alito is wrong.

Scapegoats

Spencer Lindquist at The Federalist explains what holds the leftist coalition together given that it's comprised of so many disparate interests. It's a common hatred of non-leftist scapegoats:

One would think that natural political discord would occur between those who want to “eat the rich” and the rich themselves, or between those who abide by a patriarchal sexual ethic and a movement that endured a collective aneurysm when Florida told them teachers couldn’t talk about sexuality with elementary schoolers.

The natural splintering of this leftwing coalition is delayed through what the French philosopher Renee Girard referred to as the scapegoat mechanism.

Through the scapegoat mechanism, internal social conflict between groups or individuals can be deferred by identifying a villain, the scapegoat.

The scapegoat is held responsible by the conflicting parties, who mutually, although not always consciously, cast the blame on those who simultaneously fulfill the role of the victim and the villain.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “the victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished.

In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.”

We see this scapegoat tactic employed frequently by the Iranian mullahs who divert blame for their egregious misgovernance by attributing all their misfortunes to the machinations of the Great Satan, i.e. the U.S, and the Little Satan, Israel.

So who are the scapegoats vilified by today's leftists? Lindquist writes:

Masculine men are turned into scapegoats when they are dubbed toxic, sexist enforcers of patriarchy. Christians similarly face accusations of oppressing women and those who are LGBT.

White people are also approved targets, thought to be inherently racist and privileged, simultaneously the beneficiaries and the managers of an intangible but ever-present system of oppression.

Even stable nuclear families are to be viewed with skepticism, either for perpetuating gender roles or straining the environment by daring to have kids.

Of course, anyone who effectively and persistently stands in the way of the left's march through the institutions on its way to total dominance and control of the culture is also subject to execration. Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, the list is lengthy.

Anyone on the list, or even moderately sympathetic to someone on the list, is considered a "deplorable" a "racist," "sexist," "bigot," or any of sundry "-phobes." The tactic is as intellectually absurd as it is vicious, but it's also very effective, especially when the bulk of the media and higher education constantly reinforce it.

You can read the rest of Lindquist's piece at the link. He closes it with this:

The simplest way to expose the incongruity of the leftwing coalition is to merely ask questions that highlight the absurdity of the progressive bloc.

Raise ethical inquiries about abortion or transgenderism among Democrat-aligned Muslims, or ask Austin tech workers why they support H1B visa programs that threaten their job security.

Ask progressive white women if they truly believe that they and their “white tears” will be able to maintain their rapidly deteriorating status among the oppressed and the immunity that comes with it.

Question radical feminists who rage against toxic masculinity, asking why they support mass immigration from highly patriarchal Islamic countries. Or ask a Seattle communist what the appropriate tax rate is for the millionaire who funded the neoliberal candidate he ended up voting for.

It'd be interesting to see how these folks would respond to these queries, but as Lindquist cautions, "This must be done without trafficking in the same dangerous divisiveness that the left used in their ascent to power, without engaging in scapegoating ourselves."

Elon, the Left and Free Speech

The reaction to Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter has certainly been interesting. The possibility that Twitter will now be a platform on which there's minimal censorship has some on the left in a tizzy.

They think free speech means that racist, sexist and homophobic epithets will become common currency on Twitter. They liked the way things used to be when people whose ideas and tweets they didn't like could be exiled from the social gathering place.

Under the old regime, for example, Twitter suspended the accounts of right-leaning users at a rate four times that of left-leaning users:

A recent MIT and Yale-led study of politically engaged U.S. Twitter users in both parties found that 36 percent of the Republican accounts studied had been suspended in the six months after the 2020 election vs. 8 percent of Democrat accounts.

Some attribute the disparity to the alleged "misinformation" disseminated by users on the right, yet the definition of misinformation seems to be any point of view which deviates from the progressives' approved opinion.

If a user tweets information about Hunter Biden's laptop, for example, or expresses skepticism about climate change, or the ability of men to get pregnant, or the efficacy of Covid lockdowns, they risk being locked out of their Twitter account.

Musk bought the company ostensibly to end this bias, to make the platform more tolerant of divergent views, and now the left seems to be in a panic. Liberals have sounded alarms, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) anticipating an “explosion of hate crimes” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the deal “dangerous for our democracy.”

Employees have quit, others have threatened to sabotage the site, and thousands of users have closed their accounts.

Musk doesn't consider himself a conservative, rather he sees himself as somewhat of a classical liberal or libertarian. He recently tweeted this illustration that shows him pretty much where he's always been on the political spectrum, while the left has moved much further toward the extreme left:

Musk is surely correct that the center has shifted leftward over the last two decades as many liberals adopted very far left positions on race, immigration, economics and sexuality. And free speech.

Free speech, once championed by liberals in the 60s and 70s is simply not a cherished value on the left anymore. They seem to value only speech with which they agree.

They claim their dislike for Musk's takeover is due to the fact that, as they believe, he'll allow hate speech to thrive on the platform. Of course, much hinges on how one defines hate speech, a term that's often conflated with any criticism of any leftist person or position.

In any case, the fact that thousands of users chose to leave now rather than wait to see what sort of platform Twitter becomes reinforces the suspicion that these people simply aren't interested in, and don't value, free expression. They want a platform on which only people who think just like them are allowed, and they want to be able to exclude any opinions or arguments which might nudge them out of their ideological comfort zone.

What they don't want, it seems, is for Twitter to become a genuine marketplace of ideas. Perhaps that's for good reason. When orthodoxies are allowed to be challenged they're sometimes found to be intellectually wanting.

The last thing the left can afford is to have their orthodoxies openly subjected to logical analysis and criticism. That, from their point of view, would be a calamity.

Nanomachines

My classes are talking about the relative expanatory merits of theism and naturalism when it comes to the rich information content of living things. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to rerun an older post on this topic: An article at Evolution News and Views (ENV) reflects on the news that three European chemists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for having engineered simple molecular machines. According to the article:

• Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France) in 1983 linked two molecular rings together.
• Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (Northwestern University, Illinois) in 1991 threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along the axle.
• Bernard L. Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) in 1999 got a molecular rotor blade to spin continually in the same direction.

These are amazing achievements, to be sure, and required incredible skill and genius to accomplish, but compared to the thousands of complex molecular machines that operate in every one of the cells of our bodies to keep us alive the machines these men built are quite simple.

So here's a question: If the highest human genius is required to design and develop relatively simple molecular machines, how did the far more complex machines in living things develop by unguided random chance with no input from an intelligent agent? Is such a development independent of intelligent guidance even possible?

One of the Nobel recipients, Bernard Feringa, was asked by the Prize Committee in a phone interview what inspired him to work on molecular machines. Interviewer Adam Smith asked him:

AS: So you describe your work as being inspired by nature?

BF: Yes, of course. If you look at the cells in our body or the functioning of the organism, it is flabbergasting. It is fantastic to see how this intricate machinery works.

And when I'm talking about motors, as we focus on motors, if you look at the essential functions in the cell, like cell division, like transport, like making your muscles move, bacteria that go to food .... it's all controlled by molecular motors, and so the biological motors, and the biological machinery, is so crucial to all these functions.

And of course we get great inspiration from that, while we as chemists are extremely good in building all kinds of materials, and that is what intrigued me.

What sort of molecular motors is Feringa talking about here? Below are animations of four examples. You don't have to be a biologist to appreciate how marvelous these are and why Feringa seems to be grasping for superlatives to describe them.

Kinesin:

ATP Synthase:

Protein synthesizers:

Topoisomerase

These wondrous nanoscale machines leave one speechless. Language seems totally inadequate to the task of supplying adjectives to express one's amazement.

How did such complex machines ever come about, especially on this scale of size?

Maybe the Darwinians are right and they really are just the products of natural processes acting solely by chance, but, assuming one's mind is not already philosophically closed to the idea, it seems far more plausible to conclude that they were designed by an intelligent engineer of some sort.

Remember that on the Darwinian view most of these machines had to be already present in the very first living cells which means they didn't have eons of time to evolve nor could they have been the product of genetic mutation and natural selection since they had to exist before the cells that housed them could survive to reproduce.

Yet students are often taught in school that unthinking nature, unguided by any purpose or intention, somehow produced these astonishing structures. It's as if Nature waved a magic wand, sprinkled some pixie dust, and, presto!, there they were.

And the same folks who tell us this also insist that the belief that these machines must have been engineered by an intelligent agent is unscientific and "superstitious." Why?

Bacterial Factories

A couple of weeks ago we reran the five episode video series titled Secrets of the Cell featuring Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe.

Now episode six has been released. Unlike the earlier episodes which were about five minutes long, episode six is about 17 minutes and explores the fascinating abilities of bacteria, particularly bacteria which can orient themselves along a magnetic field.

What Behe presents is truly fascinating and raises some profound philosophical questions. For example, if Darwinian evolution is true how did such amazing complexity and abilities ever arise just through unguided, purposeless processes that had no goal in mind?

Even if genetic mutation and natural selection could be invoked to explain how a bacterium diversified into numerous different forms, a highly questionable concession, how did the first bacterium or the first living, reproducing cell arise before mutation and natural selection could kick in?

The first cell must itself have been extremely complex, and yet it's construction must've been like the spontaneous construction of a functional computer by a tornado swirling through a parts factory.

If factories such as are shown in the video are impossible without having been designed by an intelligent mind or minds, how could a factory such as is found in each bacterium ever be constructed apart from the engineering of an intelligent agent?

Watch the video and decide for yourself:

The President's Pander Ploy

President Biden senses a massive repudiation of his presidency coming in November and has cynically decided he can essentially "buy votes" for his party by canceling student loan debt. Such a move, he evidently hopes, would entice multitudes of grateful recipients into voting for Democratic candidates in the Fall.

Perhaps, but such a move on his part would be a gross injustice to the millions of people who worked long hours at a job, or even two, while going to school in order to pay their way or to pay off their loans.

If Mr. Biden chooses to have taxpayers pick up the tab for the loans of those who just completed their schooling, or simply refused to pay on their debt, then he's essentially making saps of those who did the right thing and met their responsibilities.

Jim Geraghty writes about this at National Review. He says,

If you borrow money and sign a contract promising to pay it back, then you must pay it back, or you will suffer serious long-term financial consequences. Or at least, that’s the way it used to work until Democrats decided they could win a lot of votes by just waving a magic wand and declaring that people didn’t have to pay their student debt back.

If you take out a loan to buy a house, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to buy a car, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to pay for a college education, you must pay it back over time, with interest.

You signed a contract. You knew the terms going in — or at least you were supposed to know them. You’re supposed to read the documents you sign. You knew the payments you were going to have to make and when you would have to make them. If you don’t want to deal with the financial pressure of debt, don’t take out the loan.

Taxpayers have already bent over backwards to accommodate those with student loan debt:

The federal government has postponed repayments of student loans seven times since the start of the pandemic; no one has been required to pay back a student loan since March 13, 2020. Interest rates on those loans during this period dropped to zero, and collections on defaulted loans stopped.

Mr. Biden proposes to forgive as much as $10,000 per borrower. One of the ironies of this plan is that it will largely benefit those who least need it:

...forgiving $10,000 per borrower would most benefit whites under the age of 40 who have graduate degrees and live in high-income, majority-white neighborhoods. This is one of the most Democratic-leaning and outspoken progressive demographics in the country.

This is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the Democratic Party’s Twitter class.

If you paid back your student loans in recent years, there is a good chance you were a chump. You paid money that Uncle Sugar was going to come along and cover if you had just waited. You should have spent that money on other things you would have enjoyed and defaulted on your payments, waiting for the federal government to come along and say, “Don’t worry, the taxpayers have this covered.”

If you currently owe a lot on your mortgage, your car payments, your home-improvement loans, or any other loan, and you’re diligently and responsibly making your monthly payments . . . well, you are kind of a sucker, too, because you borrowed money that you had to pay back, instead of taking part in Joe Biden’s free-money program.

The Democratic Party claims to be all about equity and fairness, but where is the fairness in this proposal? Not only does it make the most responsible borrowers "chumps" for being responsible it makes them doubly chumps because as taxpayers they will now be helping to subsidize those who'll benefit from Mr. Biden's cynical political pandering.

Perhaps the whole idea will backfire. Perhaps the millions who are being played for suckers will be so outraged at the injustice of what's being proposed that they'll vote against the Democrats in November. That, at least, would be condign karma.