Hacker Wars

If anyone thinks that if Israel would just be reasonable and give the Palestinian Arabs all they want, i.e. put a gun to their collective head and pull the trigger, there'd finally be peace on earth and good will toward men they should read this. If it weren't so serious it'd be funny, especially the last sentence:

The war that worries most people in the Middle East is the one going on between Shia Iran and Arab Sunnis. This conflict ultimately takes over every other conflict. For example, Iran has been trying to get a Cyber War going against Israel. Prizes were offered for the most daring attacks on Israeli web sites by Moslem hackers. But the effort went sideways last year when some of the Shia hackers began attacking Sunni websites in retaliation for some Sunni attacks on Shia sites. For the Shia, this was also payback for the increasingly anti-Shia tone of Sunni mass media. This, in turn, was in response to Iran's nuclear weapons program, and increasingly belligerent Iranian claims that it should be the leader of the Islamic world.

For the last three months, Shia and Sunni radicals have escalated their attacks on each other's web sites. What really got things going was a Shia attack on the two main web sites for Sunni radical religious propaganda (including al Qaeda) on September 11, 2008. Sunni hackers retaliated shortly thereafter by defacing 300 web sites belonging to Shia clergy and religious organizations. Shia hackers then came back with more attacks on Sunni clergy, media and religious sites. The two main Sunni radical propaganda sites, Al-Ekhlaas.net and Alhesbah.net, have been down most of the time since September 11. Since some 80 percent of Moslems are Sunni (versus about ten percent Shia), the Shia soon began taking more damage than they were dishing out, by a margin of more than two to one.

At first Arab media and religious leaders pleaded for the hackers to stop. Some chastised the hackers for fighting fellow Moslems, rather than going after infidels (particularly Israel.) But Moslem hackers don't like tangling with the Israelis, who have a much deeper bench in the hacking department.

Meanwhile, Iran has been trying to get Moslem hackers united against Israel. For two years now, the Hamas office in the capital of Iran, has sponsored a hacking contest. Whoever makes the most spectacular attack on the most important Israeli web sites (belonging to a government agency or one of the major political parties), wins a prize of $2,000. Not that a lot of Moslem hackers need much encouragement for this sort of thing. But the Islamic radical groups have noticed that they are not getting the best hacking talent, and the Israelis typically respond much more forcefully. It has been found, however, that a prize, and a formal competition, tends to bring in the more skilled, if less religiously radical, Moslem hackers.

It was hoped that this contest would defuse the Internet based war between Sunni and Shia Moslems. Although most Hamas members are Sunni, Shia Iran is a major backer of Hamas. So it makes sense for Hamas to come up with something to stop the Internet war between Shia and Sunni Moslems, and unite everyone against Israel. It hasn't worked, and Israeli and Western counter-intelligence agencies appear to have joined in, making attacks on Shia and Sunni sites, and letting paranoia take its course.

Far be it from me, who can scarcely boot up a computer let alone hack into someone else's, to laugh at this kerfuffle, but the thought of Israeli and other Western operatives provoking the two sides to war against each other is kind of funny.

RLC

Getting the War They Wanted

Hamas wants war with Israel, and the world should let them have it. The status quo is untenable. Hamas has launched 300 rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians in the last week and 3000 in the past year while the world stood by and did nothing. Imagine if Mexico or Cuba were launching such strikes into the U.S. How long would the American people tolerate it? How many American children would have to die before the people demanded that the government do something to stop the killing and the terror?

Israel has finally run out of patience. Since the Israelis handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005 the Palestinians have expressed their appreciation by launching over 5000 missiles at Israel. The Israelis have suffered through a recent six-month "cease-fire" that was no cease-fire at all. They've seen their children terrorized, maimed and killed by thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortars in just the past year.

Now, finally, they've had enough, and today they've launched airstrikes at Hamas security stations in Gaza, but not before signaling Palestinian civilians to clear out of houses where weapons are stashed or Hamas fighters might be hiding. This is one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: The Israelis will try to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas, like Muslim terrorists everywhere, tries their best to inflict them. Indeed, the latest barrage of missiles and mortars rained down on Israel after they had sent 90 trucks laden with food and medicine into Gaza to bring relief to the Palestinian people.

It's not known how long this current offensive will last but Israel should be done with half measures. Hamas is a cancer that threatens Israel and oppresses its own people. Israel should take out not only Hamas' military but the leadership as well.

DEBKAfile offers this analysis of what they think is next:

While Israel's air attack is counted a success, its war chiefs are taking care not to be trapped by an early achievement into the sort of blunders which led to the Lebanon war's unsatisfactory conclusion in 2006. That campaign was commanded by a former airman, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who saw no point in a ground operation after Hizballah's command center was razed by air - until it was too late.

The first objective of a ground force in the coming hours will be to destroy "Lower Gaza," the underground city designed by an Iranian general and spread under most of the enclave's area. This subterranean sanctuary kept the bulk of the Hamas army, 15,000 men, their officers and leaders, out of harm's way during the Israeli air offensive Saturday. Their resistance must be broken before Hamas can be brought to surrender. Until then they will fight on.

The second Israeli objective must be to sever the Gaza Strip from Egypt by recapturing the Philadelphi border strip.

Hezbollah will not sit by and let Hamas take this punishment so the Israelis expect reprisals out of Lebanon to the north. Such attacks should be answered with an all-out attempt to destroy Hezbollah which is another festering boil on the rump of civilization.

It'll be interesting to see how Barack Obama, who campaigned as a friend of the Palestinians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who once kissed the wife of uber-terrorist Yasser Arafat, will respond to Israel's action.

RLC

Mass Density

We wrote the other day about how the dark energy of the universe is fine-tuned to a value of 1 part in 10(120) and exclaimed about the incomprehensible precision of such a value. Yet dark energy is not the only quantity in the cosmos whose value must be unimaginably precise in order for the universe to be a place capable of sustaining life. There are dozens of additional parameters, forces, and circumstances that must be set just right in order for life to arise and survive somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos.

For example, there is a huge amount of mass in the universe, but there cannot be just any amount if the universe is going to be suitable for life. The amount has to be precisely what it is. If it were off by 1 part in 10(60) at its inception the universe would have been rendered unfit for life. This is, astonishingly, an amount of mass equal to just one dime.

If a dime's worth of mass (actually mass-energy) had been added or subtracted from the total at the initial creation event it would, among other things, have caused the universe to either expand too fast (if the mass were less) or cause all stars to be too big (if the mass were greater). In either case life could never have arisen.

As we've pointed out before, skeptics have only one way to avoid the conclusion that this universe is not an accident - that it's the product of purpose and brilliant design - and that is to assume, without any evidence whatsoever, that there are an infinite number of worlds with an infinite variety to them. If that were so then one of them would have to have the properties our world does, no matter how astronomically improbable that may seem, and we just happen to be in it.

In other words, the skeptic scoffs at believers for thinking there's a Creator who designed the universe while they, in their desperation to avoid that conclusion themselves, embrace the theory that there's an infinity of universes for which the only real evidence is the fact that if there isn't this "multiverse" then there must be a Cosmic Designer. Pretty funny.

RLC

Crash Course

Bill passes along a link to a course on global economics given by Chris Martenson. The course consists of twenty sessions, each a few minutes long, in which Martenson takes the viewer through the basics of economics and along the way teaches some very important lessons about the peril we find ourselves in in today's global environment.

Readers who wish to develop a better grasp of economics but who are unable or unwilling to take a class or read a book on it, will find Martenson's short, punchy explanations a welcome and helpful tool.

The first two chapters are each less than two minutes long. The third one, which may literally stun you, is about six minutes. Check them out.

RLC

Good Year in Iraq

Strategy Page summarizes the last year in Iraq and assesses the current situation. Problems remain, but Iraq is a far better place than it was a year ago and Barack Obama's opposition to the surge, his pronouncements of it's failure, and his early promise to end the war on his first day in office all make him look myopic, naive, and foolish.

He has already backed away from his promise to end the war immediately, and I expect that by the time he takes office he'll have had a Damascus Road experience that will result in his prosecution of the fight against Islamic terrorism being pretty much indistinguishable from that of George Bush. It'll be great fun to read the excuses the liberal media will conjure for his change of heart and to listen to the yawping of the far left which will certainly feel betrayed by the man whose election they made possible.

RLC

Dark Energy

Ever since the discovery of a mysterious property of the universe called "dark energy" scientists have feared that the fabric of the universe was, in time, going to rip apart, but Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at the University of Arizona, allays our fears in this story.

Dark energy is very weird stuff. For the first 5 to 7 billion years after the Big Bang the universe expanded at ever-decreasing rates as gravity acted as a brake on the exploding sphere of space-time, but then about 7 billion years ago the expansion began to accelerate, as if someone pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

It turns out that the universe acts like a rubber band in reverse. As a rubber band is stretched the elasticity decreases and acts as a drag on further stretching. The "elasticity" of the universe, however, actually increases the more it stretches.

Imagine the universe as an inflating balloon with everything that we can observe resting on the surface of the balloon. The balloon is inflating faster and faster and although it doesn't appear that it will burst as it was originally feared, it does appear that the expansion rate will continue to accelerate until everything on the universe's surface is speeding away from everything else at close to or even more than the speed of light.

This, by the way, is why theories of an oscillating universe are no longer accepted. Once the universe expands to a certain point, it cannot collapse and thus cannot oscillate.

This means that eventually, billions of years from now, earth-bound observers would be able to see no other objects in the sky because they'd all be moving away at speeds so fast that the light from them would never reach us. Since the sun is one of those objects from which we would receive no light then, of course, there'd actually no longer be any earth-bound observers.

At any rate, here's the most fascinating thing about this. Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

RLC

Refuting Ayers

I think anyone who's willing to give domestic terrorist Bill Ayers the benefit of the doubt after his New York Times op-ed piece, or who still doesn't know what to make of Ayers, should read this piece at Pajamas Media.

The first part of the post is an introduction by Bob Owens to an op-ed written by an FBI informant named Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the Weather Underground during its heyday. Grathwohl submitted his op-ed to the NYT but they refused to run it. We're left to speculate as to their reasons, but it certainly doesn't make them look like a paper interested in getting at the truth.

RLC

Nepotism

A letter writer to the New York Times observes that:

"It's amusing that Andrew M. Cuomo, who owes his whole career to his dad, may not get the senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who owes her whole career to her husband) because David A. Paterson (who owes his whole career to his dad) may give it to Caroline Kennedy (who owes her whole career to her dad). You would think that a state as large as New York could find someone who deserves something on his or her own."

You would think that, I suppose, but probably there are thousands of well-qualified inhabitants of that state who don't want anything to do with politics, and who can blame them? To be a politician means that to earn your way into office you not only have to compromise your principles along the way, but you also have to subject yourself to the indignity of a prolonged media strip search in which every cavity, no matter how irrelevant, is publicly probed and exposed. How many people would be willing to undergo what Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and George Bush have been put through?

No one is more adamant than I that our candidates need to be scrutinized, but the scrutiny needs to be fair, relevant and dignified. The combination of our obsession with titillation and gossip and a media that loves to feed it to us all but guarantees that a lot of decent, well-qualified people will avoid politics like picnickers backing away from a skunk. Thus, too often, we get what we deserve: a celebrity rather than competent, qualified public servant.

RLC

Christmas Wishes

On behalf of my partner and brother Bill, I want to wish each of our readers a wonderful Christmas. If you're interested in reading what Christmas means to us you might find this story that we've run before helpful:

A man named Michael, a father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, had been a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force in the military and his duties drew him away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a critically important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew from childhood to young adulthood pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judy had left him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her. But there was not a day that went by when he did not think of them and wish that he could be with them.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he had not been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Apparently, Jennifer had run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced to submit to almost unimaginable degradation.

Finally, her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in her life she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys who she originally left with might be. He set out not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each day that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she hardly knew what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter lying on the filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was alert enough to comprehend what was happening and as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway she realized that her father really had come for her.

As she passed into the hall a step ahead of Michael the third abductor appeared in front of her with a gun. Michael quickly stepped between them and told Jennifer to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled through the room, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, her father lay bleeding and bruised, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had acted? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice of her father?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of Michael even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the anniversary of his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers. His love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

RLC

Personal Generosity

All Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times wants for Christmas is for liberals, of which he is one, to be as generous with their own money as conservatives are with theirs. Kristoff has read Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares and has seemingly had his world shaken. As we've pointed out in our own discussion (see here and here) of Brooks' research, conservatives, who the liberal media delights in portraying as a bunch of cheapskates and tightwads, are in fact far more generous in giving to charity than are those who belong to the "party of compassion."

The difference is not just financial. Conservatives are much more generous with things like blood donations. For example, did you know that if liberals gave blood at the same rates as do conservatives our blood supply would increase by almost half?

Kristoff also dismisses the objection that conservatives are generally religious and religious people give a lot to churches which just use the money to build more impressive buildings:

According to Google's figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It's great to support the arts and education, but they're not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Kristoff might also have pointed out that much of the money given to churches is actually redirected to charities of one sort or another. Most of the charities in our local communities are sustained by contributions from churches.

At any rate, Kristoff provides a public service in disabusing the readership of the Times of the notion that to be liberal is to be more compassionate and generous than conservatives. The myth may make liberals feel good about themselves, but there's no empirical substance to it.

RLC

Compatibilism

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being coerced by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being coerced by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation would be for the materialist to simply accept determinism, but not opnly does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because if it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive. So most people want to hold on to libertarianism, but they can only do so by giving up materialism. It's only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow allows for human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

RLC

Materialism and Intentionality

In the course of his ongoing debate with Dr. Stephen Novella on the topic of dualism vs materialism, Michael Egnor elaborates on the concept of "intentionality." There are different ways to think of intentionality, but basically it's the aboutness or meaning we attach to things. Egnor argues that meaning is a property of mind, not of matter and that the fact that we experience intentionality is strong evidence that there's more to our cognitive apparatus than just our material brain.

Materialist Paul Churchland sums up the materialist view that there is no immaterial component to us, no mind, this way:

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process...there seems no need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances of properties into our theoretical accounting of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact.

For materialists of Churchland's stripe mind is only a word used to describe what matter (the brain) does. It's a word that describes the brain's function, like the word "photosynthesis" is a word that describes what green plants do. You won't find in a plant any photosynthesis (PHS), you'll only see chemical reactions occurring which we label PHS.

We are merely brains, Churchland believes, and our beliefs, hopes, and experiences (which comprise our intentionality) don't really exist at all except as chemical reactions in the brain. Your belief that you are reading this is simply a product of certain combinations of atoms, like the light given off when you strike a match, and if you had a different chemical reaction when you read these words you'd have a different belief.

Egnor says that the problem with this kind of materialism (called eliminative materialism) is that it's essentially self-refuting. How, he asks, can one believe that there are no beliefs?

If eliminative materialism is true, then a discussion about eliminative materialism is merely changing chemical gradients in the interlocutors' brains. Some materialists are willing to eliminate the mind in order to deal with intentionality. For these philosophers the brain is just a computational device, like a very special kind of computer.

But meaning is not a quality possessed by calculating devices like computers. Computers don't reflect upon what their computation is about. Egnor invites us to...

Consider a simple electronic calculator. It computes, in the sense that I can enter 2...+...3...= and I get ...5. It's amazingly accurate, fast, and reliable. The reason for its accuracy is that it employs a causal string of electronic events such that pushing the '2...+...3...=' buttons causes the event '5' on the little screen. Integrated circuits, all that stuff. Of course, the calculator doesn't think (really quick) "hmmm...two plus three is....hmmm...five!" There's no thinking at all. There isn't even any 'arithmetic' going on in the little calculator. There's just causal events, electrons bumping electrons and going through gates on a circuit, structured by the program to cause 5 on the little screen when 2...+...3...= is pushed. What's going on in the calculator is a mechanism, a series of causally effective material events.

Note that the actual meaning of the numbers and arithmetic operations doesn't really matter. My toddler can push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5, without any meaning to the computation at all. 5 comes up just because it is caused materially by the physical events. My cat could push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5....the computation is completely independent of meaning.

To illustrate the lack of intentionality or meaning in a computer John Searle constructed the problem which came to be known as the "Chinese Room." Searle's illustration is as effective answer to the idea that our mental processes are just computational events such as a computer performs:

Imagine that you go to China, and get a job there. You speak only English, and don't know a word of Chinese. You work in an information booth, in which Chinese people can write questions on a piece of paper and pass the question through a slot to you inside the booth. You of course have no idea what the question is, because you can't read Chinese. However, the Chinese guys that hired you have given you a book that has written, all in Chinese, any question that could be asked, and along with it, the answer corresponding to each question. You take the question written on the paper and search through the book, until you match the Chinese characters exactly. Then you copy the Chinese answer, and return to through the slot.

The Chinese person who asked you the question believes, quite understandably, that you understand Chinese, understood the question, and were smart enough to figure out the answer. And of course, that is true of the Chinese guys who wrote the book. But it most certainly is not true of you. You don't know Chinese, you don't know what question was asked, and you don't know what the answer was.

A Chinese person outside the booth would have believed that he was interacting with a person who understood his questions and provided good answers. But what you have done is, precisely, a computation. You have mechanically matched input to output, just as a computer program does, but you have added no meaning. You understand nothing. Only the minds of the guys who wrote the Chinese book have intrinsic intentionality. Computation-by-itself does not give rise to intentionality.

Egnor concludes:

Meaning is not inherent to computation, no matter how complex the computation. Material causation - silicon-based computation in an electronic calculator, or tedious illiterate computation in a booth in Beijing, or carbon-based computation in a living brain - does not give rise to intentionality. Matter ... does not give rise to intentionality. Intentionality - meaning - is the mark of the mind.

If there is something immaterial about us, like a mind, that fact raises a host of additional questions. Where does it come from? What's its relation to the physical brain? What laws does it obey? What happens to it when the body dies? Etc. No one knows the answers to these questions, indeed it's hard to imagine how they would even be investigated. At this point, however, it's enough of a task to determine whether there are good reasons to believe that such an immaterial substance, one that plays a role in human consciousness and cognition, actually exists.

RLC

Renewal in London

Christianity is experiencing a renascence of sorts in London, long regarded as one of the most secular places in all of Britain. The focus of this renewal is an Anglican church in the upscale Kensington district called Holy Trinity Brompton which boasts a membership of 4000 and whose congregation is comprised of some of the wealthiest and best educated among London's citizens. These folks are coming to Brompton because they've realized that money and learning don't and can't provide the answers to life's deepest questions.

TIME has the story here.

RLC

Sudden Concern Over Qualifications

Couldn't Congressman Ackerman have said almost everything he says about Caroline Kennedy's lack of qualifications for a Senate seat about Barack Obama's qualifications to be president? Why do those who enthusiastically supported a blank sheet like Obama in his quest for the presidency suddenly wax all principled and punctilious about qualifications when Caroline Kennedy expresses an interest in being appointed to a vacant position? Just wondering.

RLC

Penn Jillette

Magician Penn Jillette is an atheist who has not been shy over the years in announcing his unbelief which makes this video on Breitbart quite remarkable. There is much in these few minutes that Christians and atheists would both do well to heed, especially starting at about the three minute mark:

RLC

Have Happy Friends

A brief article at Edge by two researchers named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler claims that our happiness is not only influenced by those around us but also by those who reside at up to three degrees of separation from us:

We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal that addressed these questions. We studied 4,739 people followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the famous Framingham Heart Study. These individuals were embedded in a larger network of 12,067 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends-that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.

If this is true then our happiness must also affect the happiness of thousands of people we don't even know. It's a phenomenon that ripples across entire societies.

RLC

Legal Anachronisms

Critics of the current administration have faulted the President for disregarding international law as it pertains to the treatment of captured enemy combatants and terrorists, but Clifford May, citing a National Review article by Andrew McCarthy (only available by subscription), argues that the Geneva Conventions were designed for a world that no longer exists. He maintains that modern terrorism makes the Geneva accords, at least as they are applied to modern terrorists, obsolete and irrelevant.

Here's the heart of May's column:

Andrew C. McCarthy - director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies - writes what may be the definitive rebuttal of the now dominant narrative that the Bush administration violated international law and fundamental morality by not giving captured terrorists "the privileges the Geneva Conventions grant to honorable combatants."

He notes that what we short-handedly call the war on terrorism is complicated by the fact that the existing system of laws and treaties were designed with conventional conflicts in mind. "The animating idea of the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949 after the carnage of two world wars, was to civilize warfare," he writes. "Belligerents opted into the system by conduct" - that is, by obeying the laws of armed conflict.

But members of such groups as al-Qaeda (including al-Qaeda in Iraq), Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas routinely and egregiously violate the laws of war - for example, by targeting civilians, hiding among civilians, not wearing uniforms, and not carrying their weapons openly.

McCarthy, a former U.S. government terrorist prosecutor, also notes that before Bush became president, both the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against giving such "unlawful combatants" the status of POWs. Both approved President Ronald Reagan's 1987 decision not to sign "Protocol I," an addendum to Geneva specifically designed to extend to terrorists the Conventions' prohibition against coercive interrogations.

The Geneva Conventions are treaties, and treaties apply only to states that have signed them. You can't conclude they were meant to benefit non-state terrorist organizations unless you also believe there is no meaningful distinction between al-Qaeda and the French Resistance (as some critics of the Bush administration do indeed insist).

McCarthy elaborates: "[T]errorists cannot opt into Geneva. They fall outside because, by definition, they reject its minimum humanitarian requirements. Affording them Geneva's benefits rewards their savagery and undermines the system's civilizing objectives."

It is absurd to suggest that America can prevail in a war against terrorists by prosecuting them after they carry out attacks in which they intend to die. A rational government, conscious of its duty to protect the population, must attempt to prevent and pre-empt terrorists from completing their missions. That requires gathering solid, actionable intelligence.

"The best source of such intelligence is the interrogation of captured terrorists," McCarthy writes. "Applying the steep Geneva interrogation restrictions reserved for honorable combatants would be suicidal: Life-saving intelligence would be lost and no reciprocal benefit achieved for captured Americans, whom terrorists would torture and kill in any event."

What I find most regrettable about much of the criticism of the Bush administration's handling of detainees is the self-righteous denunciations of the use of waterboarding, which causes no lasting harm to the subject, in order to extract information that might save American lives. I think every person who criticizes even the limited use of what are euphemistically referred to as "harsh measures" ought to be asked whether they would prohibit waterboarding if they had a son or daughter whose life would be saved if the technique were employed but lost if it weren't. I wonder how many of the critics would still maintain that it's use is "deeply immoral." How many of them would be willing to tell their loved ones that they would rather they be dead than that their lives be saved by the use of technique from which a terrorist would walk away none the worse for the experience?

RLC

Overview of the Bush Presidency

For those interested in such things the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have conducted a very thorough survey of public opinion on the Bush presidency. The results are discussed here.

One of the things that strikes me as peculiar about the survey is the number of people who refuse to credit Bush policies with having kept us safe from a second terror attack after 9/11. Fully 50% of Democrats said that Bush policies either did not do much or did nothing at all to protect us from terrorist attacks. I wonder what reason these people would give for why we haven't been hit again. Do they think that the Islamist extremists have just lost interest?

Another oddity is that in late April 2008, just 37% expressed a favorable view of the federal government, about half of the percentage of five years earlier, and yet by comfortable margins we elected to office the party most likely to give us a lot more federal government. Go figure.

One more thought on the survey. I think it almost politically impossible that Bush could be a popular president because to achieve popularity one has to be either a consistent conservative or a consistent liberal. Bush was neither. He was hated by liberals despite the fact that he did more to advance liberal ideas on helping the poor and oppressed and expanding government programs than did any Democrat president since FDR. Yet the left despised him because of the war and perhaps because of his Supreme Court appointments. Conservatives supported him for precisely those two reasons (plus his tax cuts) but were dismayed by all the things liberals should love him for. Consequently, because he did too much that people in both groups disliked, and because he did such a poor job of selling and defending his policies, few people on either side think of him as a good president.

Anyway, there's lots of data in the report to ponder and pore over. Most of the country, not surprisingly, thinks that Bush will be remembered as a bad president. Despite my frustration with some of what he hasn't done, I just don't see this, but time will tell.

RLC

Lost Opportunity

By now most readers will have heard of the sign placed by atheists next to a Nativity scene outside the legislative building in Olympia, Washington on which appeared this statement:

"At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

Okay. It seemed a little rude, perhaps, to place it next to a Nativity scene, but what's noteworthy about it isn't so much the message, but the reaction to it. People are outraged. They're calling the sign "hateful." They demanded that the governor of Washington have it removed. Somebody even stole it.

I think all of this suggests an insecurity concerning the beliefs of those who are miffed by the sign, and, maybe more importantly, it squanders an opportunity. Those who erected the sign are, no doubt inadvertently, offering Christians an opening to engage in a dialogue on the merits of the claims made on the sign and to show the public that each of them is either false or at least a matter of the atheist's own faith commitment to naturalism.

I think it would be wonderful if intelligent Christians posted themselves by the sign and invited passersby to consider what the world would be like were those claims widely believed to be true and engage skeptics in polite dialogue about them. Christians should use the sign as a springboard for writing well-reasoned pieces to the local papers explaining the evidence for God's existence and how Christianity, so far from being an enslaving force, has been a force for liberation throughout history, how so far from hardening hearts, it has been the greatest source of compassionate outreach to the poor, the sick and the oppressed throughout the last two thousand years. Instead of demanding that the atheists be denied the freedom to express their views Christians should seize the opportunity to show the intellectual superiority of their own view and the inadequacies of the atheist position.

Unfortunately, this takes confidence, learning, and effort so perhaps it's easier to simply demand that the other side just shut up. At least that's what a lot of people have chosen to do, and a good opportunity to defend the faith has been allowed to slip away.

RLC

Defeating the IED

American war casualties have not been much in the news lately due largely to a massive drop-off in the effectiveness of the insurgents' favorite weapon, the improvised explosive device (IED). A couple of articles at Strategy Page explain how coalition forces have managed to neutralize this devastating killer in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It turns out that it's being done largely by guys sitting at computers doing something called pattern analysis. You can read about it here and here.

RLC