Making the Most of College

Gideon Strauss continues the series at Comment on the theme of making the most of college. He writes:

College is a time for falling in love, reading great books, and asking big questions. It is a time for adventure and exploration, discovery and delight-for "tensed leisure," as Calvin Seerveld sometimes calls it. While our deepest loves may take root in childhood, it is in our young adult years that we are most likely to begin to articulate the implications of what we love for how we hope to live. For those of us privileged to spend time at college, the provocations offered by books and movies, paintings and songs, teachers and friends encountered during these years bring us to question the answers we have inherited from our parents.

Sometimes we appropriate those answers for ourselves with deepened conviction, and sometimes-wrenchingly-we reach for other more convincing and more coherent answers. It is a time in which we can try out different ideas, ways of life, kinds of work, with a little more wiggle-room in the face of destiny, and a little more tolerance from others for backing out of options we find to be cul-de-sacs.

Strauss goes on to address seven basic questions about life to which all students should seek answers while they're in college:

• What do I love?
• What do I believe?
• Where do I belong?
• Who am I?
• What hurt needs healing in the world?
• What potential waits to be realized?
• What is to be done?

Each of these questions receives elaboration on the post. It's a good read for students and parents of students.

Iranian Attack on Israel?

Little Green Footballs reports that:

A barrage of Katyusha rockets has been launched at northern Israel, and for the first time one has reached the city of Haifa.

CNN has reported that at least one of the weapons was a long-range ballistic missile (not just a Katyusha rocket), fired by Iranian guards.

If this report is true it represents a clear act of war on the part of Iran. Iranian prime minister Ahmedinejad, out of Muslim solidarity, is threatening Israel with terrible consequences if they attack Syria, but it looks as if the Iranians may have already overplayed their "solidarity" hand.

Determining the Past

According to cosmologist Thomas Hertog the universe consists of many pasts, and it is not until an observation is made in the present that one of these fuzzy potential pasts becomes actual. It's as if the universe is like a vast quantum event made real by a particular observation.

It sort of reminds me of the movie Frequency where a man is able to communicate with his father in the past and change what actually occured. Every time this happened, however, it changed the present.

This raises a fascinating question, at least for me. If God is not bound by time, and if the present can determine the past, and if God answers at least some prayers, is it possible that God, in response to prayer, might change the past? Of course, as in the movie Frequency, if He did change the past it would revise the present and we would never know that the past had been altered, or even that we had prayed for it to be altered.

The universe is certainly a strange place.

Stop Whining

GOP outrage over a Democratic ad that shows flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers is almost as silly as the hue and cry over the Valerie Plame affair. I fail to see what's wrong with an ad that presses home the fact that there have been casualties in this war. Instead of whining about Democratic tastelessness Republicans should be pressing them to explain what they would do differently to prevent those casualties.

The answer of course is that they would either do nothing differently or they would cut and run. Force them to admit this in public debate and their use of the ad will be seen by voters as either hypocritical or symbolic of defeat and surrender. This seems to be a more grown up response than complaining that Democrats aren't playing fair.

Time For a Few Laughs

YouTube has an evolutionary Guinness beer commercial. The science is shaky, but it's a cool commercial nonetheless.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

By the way, UD is a blog which deals with Intelligent design issues, but they have a video up which depicts what happens when a design is carried out by a quite unintelligent being. It'll make you laugh out loud. So will the old Ma and Pa Kettle video they've posted.

The State of the Economy

Larry Kudlow has a fascinating story on the vibrancy of the American economy. It's worth posting here in its entirety:

Did you know that just over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent? In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland and Belgium.

This is an extraordinary fact, although you may be reading it here first. Most in the mainstream media would rather tout the faults of American capitalism than sing its praises. And of course, the media will almost always discuss supply-side tax cuts in negative terms, such as big budget deficits and static revenue losses. But here's another suppressed fact: Since the 2003 tax cuts, tax-revenue collections from the expanding economy have been surging at double-digit rates, while the deficit is constantly being revised downward.

For those who bother to look, the economic power of lower-tax-rate incentives is once again working its magic. While most reporters obsess about a mild slowdown in housing, the big-bang story is a high-sizzle pick-up in private business investment, which is directly traceable to Bush's tax reform. It was private investment that was hardest hit in the early decade stock market plunge and the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist bombings. So team Bush's wise men correctly targeted investment in order to slash the after-tax cost of capital and rejuvenate investment incentives.

The move paid off. Investors now keep nearly 50 percent more of their after-tax capital returns -- an enormous increase that has resulted in a remarkably profitable and highly productive business sector. While the overall economy has grown by one-fifth since mid-2003, private business investment has expanded by 37 percent.

The dirty little secret here is that record low tax rates on capital are leading to continued job and income gains, as businesses continue to expand.

"But," you might respond, "I thought job gains were soft." Well, the marquis employment report for June may have showed "only" 121,000 new non-farm payroll jobs, below Wall Street expectations. But this leads to another factoid that the mainstream media largely ignores: The household survey of job creation has been booming at a much faster clip than headline corporate payrolls.

When this last happened in 2003-04 (remember the "jobless recovery" election-year rant of Democrats?), it was corporate payrolls that caught up to the more entrepreneurial household survey -- which more accurately records job creation by small-business owner-operators. This is the source of the bulk of American job creation.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, firms with less than 500 employees created 88 percent of the net new jobs in the United States between 1990 and 2003 (the last year for Census Bureau data). During this 14-year period, the share of total jobs created by small businesses was never less than 50 percent and was sometimes double the employment total.

Large corporations are reluctant to hire because it is so expensive to do so. Think health care and pension costs, as well as payroll add-ons for unemployment compensation and worker disability. The modern cost-cutting pressures of globalization also force large firms to take a highly cautious hiring approach. But newly minted entrepreneurs don't face all these costs -- at least not initially. And that is why the household survey has become so important in the 21st century economy.

Wages are rising today, so we know domestic labor markets must be tightening, not softening. To wit, average hourly compensation has risen to 3.9 percent over the past year, while average weekly earnings have grown to 4.5 percent. In early 2004, these wage measures were only up 1.5 percent.

The June Labor report also revealed a 2.3 percent annual gain in aggregate hours worked -- which is consistent with 3.7 percent real GDP growth and a 6.6 percent gain in wages and salaries. These hefty numbers will bolster consumer spending in the period ahead.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is recognizing the importance of the small-business-driven household survey, and has suggested averaging household jobs with the corporate payroll survey to get a clearer jobs picture. Doing this yields a strong 186,000 new jobs per month over the past year, which is the key reason why the unemployment rate stands at a historically low 4.6 percent rate, with total employment now at a record high 144.5 million.

These data points hardly suggest a slumping economy. Instead, they reveal a low-tax, durable, resilient and flexible American market system that easily shifts from one sector (housing) to another (business investment). It is this American economic dynamism that separates our ongoing prosperity from the overtaxed and overregulated stutter-start stagnation of industrial economies in Western Europe and Japan.

This cartoon by Chuck Asay illustrates how remarkable it is that the economy is as good as it is:

On the other hand, Captain Ed argues that Kudlow's numbers are not quite as impressive as he represents them since he doesn't adjust for inflation. Nevertheless, Ed agrees that the economy is robust and that the good news is underreported by the MSM.

There's no guarantee that this vigor will continue through 2008 but if it does, and if Iraq has made substantial progress toward stability, the Democrats will have no big issues left to run on, and they'll be likely to get their booties kicked.

Hezbollah

Bill Roggio at Counterterrorism Blog updates us on events in Lebanon in the course of which he says this:

Israel is left with no other option than to destroy Hezbollah and remove their presence from the Lebanon frontier. Hezbollah has no intention of keeping the peace on the border, and the Lebanese government is far too weak to handle Hezbollah and secure the south on its own. The Israeli government has indicated Operation Just Reward should be viewed in the time frame of months, not day, indicating the IDF plans to pursue Hezbollah. The operations are already being described as the most intense in Israel's history of fighting in Lebanon.

Iran and Syria may very well enter this conflict. Hezbollah is the proxy of the Iranian and Syrian governments. The destruction of Hezbollah will be a massive loss of face for Iran and Syria, who have invested enormous amounts of time and resources to secure Hezbollah's position in Lebanon, as well as the international terror network.

Terror attacks against world wide U.S. and Israeli interests may very well take place if Israel presses the hunt for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran would very likely push Iraqi Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr to destabilize the situation in Iraq, for starters.

Hezbollah has been responsible for the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of Americans in the Middle East in the last twenty five years. It would be good were the malignancy excised. We hope that the United States doesn't try to hold Israel back.

Childlessness

No Left Turns points us to an article in USA Today which, as Julie Ponzi writes:

...tells us that in 1976 only 1 in 10 women in their 40s were without children. Today that number is 1 in 5. Another statistic cited: "In 1970, for example, 73.6% of women ages 25-29 had at least one minor child at home; 30 years later, 48.7% did." The article quotes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (the author of the famous "Was Dan Quayle Right" article many years ago and of many good books since) who points out the obvious truth that this necessarily shapes the culture in a different direction. "People who are rearing children and have children in the household no longer represent the dominant force in society or politics," she says. And that means alot. Everything from what kinds of ads appear on T.V., to what kinds of shows, to workplace policies, to government policies will be affected and are affected by this shift. The character of these changes is still open for debate. I have my doubts about the goodness of them.

One is tempted to think that if more of the people who produce our entertainment were themselves raising children our culture might be significantly less sleazy. I think that's true despite the obvious counter-examples. Hugh Heffner's daughter now runs Playboy, after all. Having a daughter in the Playboy manse apparently didn't cause old Hugh to change much in the stuff he was putting out.

Even so, I believe it is a general fact about human nature that when people have children it makes them far more sensitive to the cultural influences that wash over us than they would otherwise have been. Parenthood tends to make people more mature, more responsible, and more concerned about the world their children will inherit. The fewer adults who parent, and the longer they delay it, the less mature, responsible, and concerned about those cultural influences our society will be.

Darwinism That Amounts to ID

Mike Gene http://www.thedesignmatrix.com/content/?p=14 deconstructs the theistic evolutionism of a major witness for the prosecution at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial last Fall, Ken Miller.

Miller sounds very much like an IDer who is unaware that that's what he is. He seems to think that an ID advocate must hold that God intervenes sporadically in order to create biological novelties.

This is not the case. Miller's views seem very similar to those of other "front-loaders" who hold that the design of all subsequent phenomena was imposed on the cosmos through the establishment by the designer of the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

See the previous link for more discussion on the different positions that IDers hold.

Israel at War

The Islamists have struck a match to the tinder and have driven Israel to just a step shy of all-out war in both Lebanon and Gaza. The terrorists are getting what they wanted and are beginning to pay a terrible price for their unconscionable atrocities. Pajamas Media has a time line and links.

The Big Question: Will Israel carry the fight straight to the source - Damascus? Hezbollah in Lebanon is a proxy of Damascus and Israel may be tired of treating the cancer with aspirin. A strike at either Hamas or Hezbollah offices in Damascus or an attack against the Syrian air force may be in the offing.

Second Big Question: How much help is Israel getting in Gaza from Fatah? It's no secret that there are high resentments in Fatah for Hamas. The Fatah party would like nothing more than to see Hamas decimated. My guess is that they are surreptitiously providing the Israelis with at least some intel on the whereabouts of key Hamas leaders like Mohammed Deif and Nabil Abu Salmiyeh.

WW III

The folks at the New York Times don't seem to understand that World War III has begun, and we're already hip deep in it.

The cartoonist Ramirez understands, however:

Maybe someone at the Times can get Ramirez's work on their editorial page.

The Widening Conflict

Some news snippets from World War III:

David Gartenstein-Ross of Counterterrorism Blog gives some important background on the Chechen Islamist terrorist Shamil Basayev who was killed yesterday by Russian troops. Gartenstein-Ross also notes an important object lesson for American troops.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli troops along the Lebanon border, killing seven and taking two captive. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has called the attack an act of war and promises to respond with a "very painful and far-reaching response."

Bill Roggio discusses the growing Talibanization of Somalia and hints at the possibility of a United States intervention.

Confirmation Bias

Michael Shermer has an interesting piece at Scientific American on Confirmation Bias. He writes that:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. --Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

Pace Will Rogers, I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a libertarian. As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I have found at least something to like about each Republican or Democrat I have met. I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.

This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the confirmation bias arises and how it is unconscious and driven by emotions. Psychologist Drew Westen led the study, conducted at Emory University, and the team presented the results at the 2006 annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones," Westen said.

The implications of the findings reach far beyond politics. A jury assessing evidence against a defendant, a CEO evaluating information about a company or a scientist weighing data in favor of a theory will undergo the same cognitive process. What can we do about it?

In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.

This affirms what people have long known intuitively which is that we tend to see or believe that which we most want to be the case, especially about God. Take the classical cosmological argument for the existence of God, for example. A person who wants there to be a God will find this argument very persuasive even if they recognize that it's not a proof. They will be driven toward agreeing with the conclusion that there must be some necessary, self-existent underlying cause of all the contingent entities which comprise the universe. Things like galaxies and planets don't just pop into existence uncaused. On the other hand, a person not inclined to accept the existence of God will take refuge in the possibility that the principle of sufficient causes doesn't apply to the universe, or that perhaps the universe as a whole is the necessary entity upon which all else is contingent.

Which of these responses has most appeal to someone will depend on their prior inclinations and whether or not they want there to be a God. This is one reason why so few people are persuaded to believe (or disbelieve) in God through arguments. The most important step in conversion from one's former state of belief or non-belief is acquiring a desire either to find God or to reject Him. Once the desire is present reasons to support one's embrace or rejection will prove easy enough to come by.

Another way to put this is to say that belief is more a matter of the heart than it is of the mind.

Telic Thoughts has some thoughts on Shermer's piece as well.

What <i>Is</i> the Point Anyway?

We've been thinking the same thing:

Cartoon by Paul Nowak.

ID's Big Tent

Intelligent Design is said to be a "big tent" which has room to accomodate many different views on how the designer acts to accomplish its purposes. There are, for example, IDers who hold that the designer (who for Christians is the God of the Bible but for non-theists could be a denizen of one of the near infinity of other worlds hypothesized by theoretical physicists to exist in the multiverse) intervenes periodically in time and history to tweak the creation, creating life at one point and then consciousness, and so on. These are called progressive creationists.

There are others who believe that God acted much as described in Genesis, compressing all creative activity into a brief period of time at the beginning. These folks are called special creationists. There is a third group which holds that the designer "front-loaded" the creation into the initial events that triggered the Big Bang. In other words, the initial conditions of the Big Bang which give rise to all the laws of physics and everything that subsequently results, are foreordained in the creative event. These laws and constants eventually, through an evolutionary process, produced intelligent life.

All of these different formulations share two things in common that make them members of the ID club - they each maintain that however life came about it required an intelligent input, and they maintain that evidence of that input can be discerned in living things and in the cosmos. It is essentially this ability to detect the designer's work, by the way, that distinguishes the front-loaders from theistic evolutionists who believe that God's activity does not contravene the laws of physics and that the natural world does not reveal intelligent agency. The theistic evolutionists' belief that God exists is for them a matter solely of faith and that evidence of His existence should not be looked for in the patterns of life. Both the front-loaders and the theistic evolutionists are concerned with maintaining the uniformity of natural law (which is in some ways an odd concern since many of them believe in Biblical miracles).

I don't know who among the foregoing is correct in this matter, but I do think that if it were to turn out that God does not act the way the special or progressive creationists envision one still need not think that His action is located solely at the beginning of creation. Indeed, such a concept of God leads one in the unwelcome direction of deism, the view of God as a distant and uninvolved absentee landlord.

Imagine instead that the progress of life is like a river in a shallow stream bed meandering widely through a broad, flat valley. In mountain valleys in Alaska such rivers are often braided, i.e. they're made up of dozens of rivulets and lesser channels that weave through the valley in an intricate filigree, intersecting with, and diverging from, each other, all the while carrying the water forward. The pattern of progress appears imbricate, convoluted and completely random, guided by nothing but physical laws and forces much as evolution is guided by laws like mutation and natural selection.

But perhaps, just as the course of the water is really determined by the contours of the soil and rock which make up the channels of the stream bed, the flow of life is "embedded" in God. In other words, God guides the flow, it takes place in and through Him, not just at the outset of creation nor only sporadically throughout its history, but rather moment by moment as it wends its way over the course of deep time. God is not just a temporal cause of the development of life but also its sustaining cause. Just as there can be no river without a channel to guide and contain it, there can be no life or evolutionary development without God undergirding, enfolding, and leading it constantly and continuously toward the end He envisions.

Evolution follows the course it does because of the "invisible channels" that carry it ineluctably toward a particular telos or goal. Evolution, especially its direction, is entirely contingent upon God as the river is dependent upon its underlying substrate. Unlike the deistic God of the front-loaders and theistic evolutionists, God is both immanent, or present in the world, and necessary moment by moment, not only for the existence of life but also for its development.

Just Deserts

It appears that the man who orchestrated the Moscow theater seige and the Beslan school massacre, Shamil Basayev, has been sent off to his reward by Russian security forces. The world, at least the civilized portion of it, will not mourn his passing.

Hot Air has the details.

Flawed Analysis at TruthOut

Larry Johnson at TruthOut.Org argues that we shouldn't have an inordinate fear of terrorism because, as bad as it is, the threat from the Islamo-fascists is not nearly as serious as the nuclear threat we were under at the height of the cold war. Back then we didn't "eavesdrop" or threaten other freedoms so we have no cause to be doing it now when the threat is so much less.

Even if we grant that what the government is doing today to defend us from terrorists curtails our freedom to some extent, Johnson's argument is misbegotten. He's correct, of course, that the threat of nuclear war during the sixties and seventies was serious, but he ignores the crucial fact that it was manageable because neither we nor the Soviets wanted to use nuclear weapons. Deterrrence worked because neither side wanted to initiate and die in a nuclear exchange.

The Islamo-fascists, on the other hand, look forward to dying and don't care how many people they take with them. Unlike the Soviets, if the jihadis can get their hands on a nuke they can be counted upon to use it against someone, probably Israel or the U.S.

Nor are they particularly impressed by the concept of deterrence or mutually assured destruction. After all, who would we retaliate against if a bomb were detonated in one of our cities?

So Johnson may be on safe ground in insisting that the threat today isn't as severe as it was on any given day thirty years ago, but his claim is misleading. As soon as the Islamo-terrorists succeed in obtaining a nuclear weapon the threat analysis changes completely. Al Qaeda with nukes is an inestimably greater danger than the Soviets ever were, and we must do everything we can to keep them from procuring a nuclear weapon and from getting into position to use one. That means that they must be treated as the most serious threat to the people of the United States in our 230 year history, because, in fact, they are.

Protesting the <i>Times</i>

This photo was taken at a protest held outside the offices of the New York Times yesterday:

There are more pics here.

We're wondering where we can buy those t-shirts.

You Never Know

This surprising (to me) factoid appears at the end of a 2003 Spectator column about Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards:

Richards married for the first and only time on his 40th birthday in 1983, and it probably saved his life. His bride was the 27-year-old Patti Hansen, a home-town girl from Staten Island, New York, and a devout Lutheran. His in-laws gave a startling interview in which they portrayed Keith as an 'enthusiastic disciple of Christ' and that he 'embraced Christ as a way of life'. Under Patti's influence, Richards cut back on drugs, attended church from time to time and even started a gentle exercise regime. 'She's a wonderful girl; I ain't letting the bitch go!' he confirmed in a speech at his wedding reception. Keith may have written 'Sympathy For The Devil' back when, but these days much of his life is spent with a woman who attends a weekly Bible study group and who won't stand for swearing around the house.

Who'd 'a thunk it? I don't know what it means, for sure, but it's interesting.

Thanks to GetReligion for the tip.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

According to Strategy Page North Korea has a peculiar strategy for winning friends - they steal their trains:

July 5, 2006: While everyone's attention was focused on North Korean missiles, the real story is the North Korean economy. It continues to fall apart, and more North Koreans are unhappy about that. Worse yet, more North Koreans are finding out how badly they have been screwed by their leaders.

Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border.

North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It's no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem. If the North Koreans appear to make no sense, that's because they don't. Put simply, when their unworkable economic policies don't work, the North Koreans just conjure up new, and equally unworkable, plans.

The Chinese have tried to talk the North Koreans out of these pointless fantasies, and for their trouble they have their trains stolen. How do you negotiate under these conditions? No one knows. The South Koreans believe that if they just keep the North Korean leaders from doing anything too destructive (especially to South Korea), eventually the tragicomic house of cards up north will just collapse. Not much of a plan, but so far, no one's come up with anything better.

You can't blame the Koreans, I suppose. Box cars make fine apartments, by Pyongyang standards.