Another Puzzle

The other day we talked about a couple of evolutionary puzzles - insect metamorphosis and the waggle dance of bees. Robert Deyes at Uncommon Descent offers us another: Animal migration.

Creatures as diverse as Monarch butterflies, Green sea turtles, Arctic terns, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and salmon all must coordinate a complex series of factors - body mass, time of migration, food availability, weather, global position (without benefit of landmarks for pelagic migrants) - all, in the case of young of the year, without ever having done it before. How did such astonishing abilities evolve when the costs and risks to the organism are so high and the benefits so seemingly minor? Here's Deyes:

Those in favor of evolution's ways openly struggle to understand the selective advantage afforded by the migratory birds' seemingly deliberate draining of precious resources. By their own admission "Migration exacts a high toll [as] grizzlies wait in streams and gorge on exhausted salmon migrating home from the sea, and falcons feast on fatigued songbirds arriving at their winter home in Africa. Fuel used by muscles to propel wings, fins, and legs is unavailable for reproductive activities, and time spent on the move is time not spent gathering food." They counter their self-imposed quandary by assuming a priori that selection 'favors the brave' and that over time survival benefits must have outweighed such costs. Evolution is after all a 'fact' and so what must have happened must have happened. Such circular reasoning of course gets us nowhere and leaves the above functional challenges unanswered.

Migration is indeed a mystery - a mystery in terms of how it's accomplished and a mystery in terms of why and how it ever evolved. Of course, if the evolution of this amazing behavior were directed by an intelligent agent a big part of the mystery, though certainly not all of it (the question of how the agent did it, for example, would still remain), would be cleared up.

RLC

Huffing and Puffing

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Notes writes that:

"The ID-Darwinism debate is rapidly eroding materialist credibility, not only because of the strength of the ID arguments, but because ID proponents have forced materialists to state clearly what they believe. Candor is incompatible with materialist ideology; Darwinists are angry in large part because they've been forced to explain themselves."

This is an interesting insight. Nothing irritates a man like having to defend what he just knows to be true, especially when the truth is obvious to him and he can't understand why it isn't obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, Darwinism is only obvious if one starts from the assumption that materialism, or naturalism, is true. If that's so then something like Darwinian evolution simply must be the case, but the problem is that it's by no means obvious that materialism is true, and there are lots of reasons to think that it's not.

The IDer who attacks Darwinism by attacking materialism is cutting to the heart of the matter. He's laying seige to fundamental core convictions and showing them to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Few approaches are more certain to arouse a man's anger than exposing the hollow pretensions of his presuppositions. Most intelligent people sense when the philosophical ice is cracking under their feet and they often seek to mask their alarm and insecurity by throwing up clouds of anger and hostility, as if huffing and puffing were an adequate substitute for rational explanation.

It's a good rule of thumb, I think, that the angrier and nastier someone gets in an argument the less sure he is of the strength of his case.

RLC

Reacting to Race

Evan Coyne Maloney at Big Government.com offers us a heuristic for understanding everything from why criticism of President Obama is seen as racist to the failure of the traditional media to investigate ACORN to the reporting on the Kanye West boorishness at the Country Music Awards. Maloney tells us that there are several rules we need to keep in mind, and once we have mastered them we will understand all else. It's sort of like finding the DaVinci Code. Anyway, here are the rules:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that's ever been a victim of that oppression.
   
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
   
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
   
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
   
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
   
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.
   

Maloney applies the rules in order to interpret the three stories mentioned above, but he could have cited others. The reaction to the beating given to a white student to the cheers of the black students on a school bus would have almost certainly have been much different had the races been reversed. As it was, the media, leery of violating rule #2, focused their commentary almost entirely on the kindness of the boy who stepped in to stop the assault, and the possibility of racist motivation was scarcely mentioned even though the victim was one of only a few kids on the bus who was white. If the races had been reversed there's little doubt that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been on the scene demanding justice for the victim and the media would have been amplifying their voices. Instead, because it was a white kid that got beaten by black kids, the story, like others of its kind, quietly slipped off the media radar screen.

If we really wanted to move beyond race into the post-racial promised land that we heard so much about during the presidential campaign wouldn't we start applying the same standards of judgment to everyone regardless of their skin color? Let's judge people by what they do. Let's judge them by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Here's my rule, call it rule #7: Regarding any interracial incident, ask whether the reaction to the episode would be different were the races reversed. If the answer is yes, then something is wrong with one of the two reactions.

RLC

Refusing to Face the Emptiness

In a book review at First Things Edward Oakes makes the following observation about atheism:

In Untimely Meditations, Fried�rich Nietzsche spins a tale that goes like this: Once upon a time, on a minuscule planet orbiting a mediocre star, clever little animals emerged from the slime - and not long after began using puffed-up words like truth and goodness. Even worse, they thought they could attain genuine knowledge in this ultimately dead world. But their little C-grade star eventually cooled, and these pathetic little creatures died out, and with them died their proud words and hard-gained knowledge. The universe shed not one tear but merely looked on from its cold, infinite, uncaring skies.

One must at least credit Nietzsche for drawing out the consistent implications of atheism. Recent atheists, in contrast, seem to preach their atheism with an odd fervor, and one looks in vain for these overheated unbelievers to acknowledge that atheism entails a pointless universe. Perhaps, though, we should sympathize with our current crop of evangelizing atheists. Nietzsche's pointless-universe thesis is so difficult to maintain that not even he could manage it. In a later book, The Gay Science, he came to the conclusion: "It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato: that God is the truth, that truth is divine."

Rare is the contemporary atheist who takes his atheism as radically as did Nietzsche.

Indeed. Rare is the atheist who can bear to live consistently with his atheism. As someone once noted, atheists refute their belief everyday by how they live their lives. They live as if their lives are full of point and purpose when, in fact, in a Godless world, point and purpose are empty concepts.

The irony of this is that the atheist is often at pains to accuse the believer of living by an irrational faith when, in fact, the very essence of irrationality is refusing to accept the logical conclusions of one's presuppositions. The paradigm case of irrationality is the modern atheist who tries to inject meaning into his life by undermining belief in the only thing that could possibly make life meaningful.

Like Nietzsche, the atheist Jean Paul Sartre sees the consequences of his atheism much more clearly than do many modern skeptics:

"I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea)

RLC

William P. Alston (1921-2009)

Bill Alston died last week. That probably means very little to most readers, but if you're among those who have done some reading in the philosophy of religion and/or epistemology you've probably encountered Alston's name and works more than once. He was a giant among contemporary philosophers, and he was also, by all accounts, a wonderful man.

Tom Senor shares some personal memories of Alston at Prosblogion, and what he tells us about him might serve as a model and inspiration for any student who hopes one day to be a teacher. Alston exemplified, in Senor's account, everything that good teachers should be.

Jeremy Pierce also offers some fine reminiscences of Professor Alston here. Anyone interested in being familiar with modern philosophy should be familiar with Bill Alston and reading these two pieces is an excellent step in that direction.

RLC

Hope for Spinal Cord Injury Victims

In a stunning development scientists have been able to restore near-normal mobility to rats whose spinal cords have been severed from their brains. Evidently, tissue in the spinal cord is capable of taking over some of the functions of the brain:

Paralysed rats whose spinal cords had been severed from their brains were made to run again using a technique that scientists say can work for people, according to a study released Sunday.

Consistent electrical stimulation and drugs enabled the rats to walk on their hind legs on a treadmill -- bearing the full weight of the body -- within a week of being paralysed.

With the addition of physical therapy, the rodents were able after several weeks to walk and run without stumbling for up to 30 minutes, reported the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Remarkably, the animals could adjust their movements in response to stimuli despite the lack of signals to and from the brain: when the treadmill was reversed, for example, the rats walked backwards.

"This means that the spinal network is almost capable of cognitive processing," explained Gregoire Courtine, a professor at Zurich University.

"It can understand that the external world is changing, and interpret this information to modify the way it activates muscle," he told AFP by phone.

Earlier studies had shown that nerve networks in the spinal cord can produce limited motion in the muscles independent of the brain or sensory organs. But this is the first time that researchers have been able to restore normal or nearly normal functions.

The article concludes by pointing out that there's no reason why the same procedures couldn't work in human beings. This would be a marvelous gift to the quarter of a million people in the U.S. who have suffered severe spinal cord injury. Nearly half of all spinal cord injuries are caused by automobile accidents, and more than half of these occur among young people between 16 and 30 years old. Perhaps there is hope for these tragic cases.

RLC

Tolstoy Or Dostoyevsky

Lovers of Russian literature will enjoy the essay by David Hart at First Things in which he compares the genius of Dostoyevsky to the genius of Tolstoy. I've read both but studied neither and am in no position to pronounce upon the question of which is superior, as Hart does. I will say, though, that in all my admittedly inadequate reading of the great novelists there are few passages I have come across as powerful and mesmerizing as Dostoyevsky's chapter four and five of Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov. In chapter four, titled Rebellion Dostoyevsky presents the problem of theodicy in perhaps its most powerful form in all of literature. Theodicy is the attempt to explain how one can believe in God in the face of the world's staggering evil.

In chapter five, titled The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky relates his famous parable of Christ's return to Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. In the parable, Christ is actually thrown in prison, not by unbelievers, but by a Cardinal of the Church. What's more surprising, perhaps, is that the rationale the Cardinal gives for this incredible act seems wholly plausible. One can imagine such a thing happening.

Both of these chapters are dialogues between the devout Alyosha and his atheistic brother Ivan. It's Ivan who carries the dialogue, challenging his beloved brother, an orthodox monk, to respond. The two chapters are unequalled, at least in my experience, by anything else in literature. They can be read by themselves without reading the rest of the book, but I commend the entire novel to anyone who has the time. It'll stay with you for the rest of your life and the two chapters I've mentioned will compel you to think about the problem of evil more deeply, perhaps, than you ever did before.

I also recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment for its portrayal of a man named Raskolnikov who tries to live consistently as a Nietzschean moral nihilist. The man who thinks himself "beyond good and evil" (the title of Nietzsche's book on the subject), as does the otherwise likeable Raskolnikov, becomes a moral monster, who can't live even with himself. His amorality, his view of himself as a Nietzschean superman, leads to insanity. Dostoyevsky's treatment of this theme is the best I've ever read.

Nevertheless, Hart thinks Tolstoy is superior and perhaps he is, but I fell in love with Dostoyevsky as a young man and recommend him every chance I get.

RLC

Waggle Dance

Insects are amazing creatures. One of the most mind-rocking discoveries about them was made by Karl von Fritsch back in the 1940s when he worked out the significance of the honeybee waggle dance. This astonishing behavior occurs inside a pitch dark hive when a bee returning from a feeding foray does a dance that signals to other bees - which feel the dancer's moves with their forelegs - which direction and how far they should fly to find food. The dance even factors in such variables as windage. It's truly astonishing and, as an article by Caroline Williams at New Scientist tells us, how and why such a behavior could have evolved is a profound mystery.

Now new research is suggesting that honey bees usually ignore the dance and rely on other methods to find food, but if the dance is irrelevant the mystery just deepens. After all, the dance is still an accurate code for finding food so the question of how and why an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of sand developed such an elaborate behavior is still unanswered. Moreover, if the dance is unnecessary or ignored then we're faced with the question as to how it evolved when it doesn't confer any particular advantage on the bees. We're also confronted with the puzzle of explaining, if the bees don't need it and don't pay much attention to it, how and why it's retained in the genome.

Since we're asking difficult questions about the evolution of insect behaviors that are excruciatingly difficult to explain in terms of purely mechanistic processes, here's another - butterfly metamorphosis. How did it come to pass that a caterpillar could build around itself a chrysalis, completely dissociate the cells and tissues of its body inside the chrysalis, and reorganize those tissues in the form of a butterfly? To think that such a process could have evolved solely by chance is not unlike thinking that a computer programmed to build motorcycles could, by randomly jostling the bits and bytes of software code, reprogram the computer to build fighter jets.

I have no problem with the notion that metamorphosis developed over time and that mutation and natural selection played a role. My problem is with believing that such a process could occur without the guidance of an intelligent mind. It takes more faith than what I can muster to believe that natural processes alone are sufficient to accomplish such miracles.

People sometimes say that Christians must check their reason at the door of the church, but no one must suspend his reason or his skepticism more often than the materialist who believes that metamorphosis evolved solely by the chance concatenation of physical forces.

RLC

Hey, Let's Defend Iran Against Israel

Gerald Posner interviews former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for The Daily Beast and gets a real scoop. In the course of the session Brzezinski opined, believe it or not, that we should be prepared, essentially, to go to war with Israel in order to defend Iran:

Posner: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America's worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

Posner: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse. [Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, off the Sinai Peninsula, during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel later claimed the ship was the object of friendly fire.]

This is quite startling advice. Mr. Brzezinski advocates attacking an ally who was trying to do what we should have done ourselves by taking out Iran's nuclear weapons capability. Mr. Brzezinski is suggesting here that we should actually put our airmen at risk in order to defend Iran. He thinks that we should throw our relationship with Israel away - the intelligence cooperation, the alliance with the only country in the Middle East that shares our values - in order to keep Iran safe, even though Iran has threatened numerous times to use its nukes to destroy Israel.

People can differ on exactly what should be done about Iran, but an act of war against ally seems an odd way to treat one's friends. Wouldn't some sort of diplomatic protest after the fact be wiser than going to war with a country with which we share such a close relationship? Apparently, Mr. Brzezinski doesn't think so.

It's no wonder people get the willies when they think of Democrats running our national defense.

RLC

Market Trends

For those of you interested in business and the stock market, David Callaway at Marketwatch.com has good news and bad news. Here's a synopsis:

Wednesday's 108-point run was the best day of the month for the Dow, and it's now up more than 3% for September, 11.6% for the year, and nearly 50% from its bear market closing low on March 9.

But just as stocks couldn't go straight down to zero this spring, a favorite prediction of the bears and the shorts at the time, they can't go straight back up either. We've no better chance of hitting Dow 14,000 again this year as we had of hitting Dow 3,500 in March, when the average got below 6,500.

Earnings aren't good, Washington is in typical gridlock on health care and financial regulation, banks continue to fail at an alarming rate and unemployment is approaching 10%. Yet some economic numbers do show that the worst of the recession is over, a theory which garnered a modicum of credibility this week when Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke said the recession has "likely" ended.

Still, it's hard to see this rally as anything other than a momentum bandwagon right now. Online brokerage trading volumes are surging at Charles Schwab Corp., E-Trade Financial, and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and small investors are jumping back into funds and especially exchange-traded funds.

At some point, a correction is inevitable. And arguably, it's OK to just ride this out until that day comes. Might be next week; might be next year. When it does come, though, it will come with a loud crack in equities, as all the positive momentum behind the market right now suddenly shifts to an embarrassing, emperor-without-clothes type of feeling, which will precede a rush to sell.

That ultimately will be healthier for the market than the current sprint to Dow 10,000, though it might not feel like it at the time. By the end of the year, I think we'll be higher than we are today, likely above 10,000. December in particular could be a strong scene-setter for a recovery run in 2010.

So what's the take home message? It appears to be that the road ahead for investors (and businessmen and women) is going to be bumpy, but that if you just ride it out you'll be fine. I'm not an economist but I have some doubts about this. It may be that over the relatively short term things will be fairly positive, but what happens when our huge deficits start building in a year or so, and we have to pay on the debt. The only way we'll be able to do that is to impose onerous taxes on businesses or print money which will generate inflation. Either course will kill the markets. It seems inevitable that one or both of those alternatives lies in the not so distant our future, so I wonder why Calloway thinks that 2010 will be a year of recovery.

Perhaps the only thing that's going to be recovered in 2010 is the good sense of the voters who will decide to cashier the people who got us into this mess.

RLC

Why The Arabs Languish

The folks at Strategy Page analyze Islamic terrorism and why Arab civilizations have stagnated while the rest of the world passes them by:

In many parts of the world, especially among young Moslem men, Islamic terrorism has become fashionable. It's a coping mechanism for failure. More than half a century after the Arab world once more became free (first from centuries of Turkish rule in 1918, then a few decades of European supervision), the truth has sunk in. While the rest of the world prospered during the last half century, the Arabs are still uneducated, unproductive, poor and ruled by tyrants and kings. What are young Moslems to make of this?

Blaming the Jews has accomplished nothing, except to provide more opportunities to fail. Supporting al Qaeda (with money and volunteers) produced the September 11, 2001 attacks. That had young men dancing in the streets all over the Arab world (much to the chagrin of their elders, and embarrassment of their governments). But the response has led to an even longer list of failures. Not only was al Qaeda, and similar organizations, revealed to be mindless murderers of innocent Moslems (in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other Islamic nations), but these Holy Warriors proved embarrassingly incompetent when fighting the Crusaders from the West.

American troops suffered far fewer casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan (where the casualty rate was actually a third of what it was in Vietnam) than in earlier wars. While pro-terrorist web sites loved to feature videos of roadside bombs going off and American troops getting shot out, more embarrassing were U.S. videos of Islamic terrorists being caught in the act, and bombed or shot up. Worst of all were those videos, taken by American UAVs or helicopter gunships, that showed terrorists trying to plant roadside bombs, which then blew them up because of improper handling (or construction.)

One of the little discussed tragedies of Islamic terrorism is the fact that most of those it attracts are the least capable. Islamic terrorism is not only an act of extremism, but also of desperation of those who have few other prospects. It's an international organization because Islam, in general, has not been amenable to taking advantage of new technology and economic opportunity, except for cable TV and the Internet. That's why the Moslem world has lagged so far behind the rest of the world in the last century. Religious leaders are reluctant to discuss the possibility of Islam being part of the problem, although many educated Moslems are becoming more aggressive in seeking out cultural problems, and proposing solutions. Terrorism is not seen as a practical way out by most Moslems, but the threat of retribution by Islamic radicals makes it difficult for most Moslems to speak up.

It's hard to overstate the importance of the religious worldview of a people in shaping their culture. Everything they value, everything they accomplish, is a consequence of what they believe about God, man, life, and nature. A worldview, for example, that inculcates the idea that our minds are gifts from God that He wants us to use to unlock the secrets of His creation will have a completely different developmental history than cultures which believe that our minds should be used only to study theology. A worldview which sees nature as the creation of a rational, loving God who gives it as a gift for our safe-keeping will imbue the people who hold it with a completely different attitude toward scientific investigation than a worldview which teaches that technological progress is somehow outside the proper concern of the truly pious.

Even many thoughtful atheists recognize that the values we have always held dear in our democracy are derivatives of our Christian heritage and can not be sustained by any other worldview. Atheist philosopher J�rgen Habermas, for example, has observed that:

"Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Habermas is right, of course. The Enlightenment sought to ground the virtues of Western civilization in the exercise of human reason and wound up giving us the soul-crushing totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Modernity's rejection of God in general and Christianity in particular led to unprecedented horrors in China, Cambodia, Africa, Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere around the globe. One hundred million people were murdered in the name of reason, science, and state atheism. In the attempt to deify man the 20th century wound up dehumanizing him and grinding him into the earth everywhere but in those cultures which remained under the sway of a vibrant Christianity.

Jesus taught that truth makes us free. It will liberate us from superstition and the sort of assumptions that enchain men rather than free them. The problem with the Arab world is that they are in thrall to a worldview that locks its adherents in the chains of a mental dungeon rather than freeing them to fluorish.

RLC

Nowhere to Hide

Strategy Page features an interesting report on the silent war against Islamic terrorists around the globe:

Navy SEALS reportedly launched a daring raid Tuesday in southern Somalia that targeted and killed a senior al Qaeda leader wanted for several deadly attacks. This was the latest in a series of covert operations carried out by US and allied special operations. At least four other high-profile raids by ground forces took place in Pakistan, Madagascar, and Syria over the past several years, while others have gone unreported, according to US officials.

The successful Somali raid targeted Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa as well as a senior leader in Shabaab, al Qaeda's surrogate in Somalia. Nabhan is thought to train terrorists in Somalia and has been at the forefront in cementing ties between Shabaab and al Qaeda. He has been wanted for his involvement in the 1998 suicide attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as leading the cell behind the 2002 terror attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, against a hotel and an airliner.

Reports of the operation are still unclear as the U.S. military has refused to comment. But various press accounts from eyewitnesses and unnamed intelligence sources provide a glimpse of the operation.

The operation, dubbed Celestial Balance, was approved 11 days ago after US intelligence determined that Nabhan was shuttling back and forth between the Shabaab-controlled port cities of Merka and Kismayo. A car transporting Nabhan and five other foreign fighters was escorted by another car carrying three Shabaab escorts; the vehicles were hit as they stopped for breakfast as they traveled to Kismayo.

According to one witness, upwards of six helicopters were involved in the raid. At least two AH-6 Little Bird special operations attack helicopters strafed the two-car convoy. Other helicopters dismounted Navy SEALs, who seized the body of Nabhan and another, and purportedly took two other wounded fighters captive. An unconfirmed report indicated that Sheikh Hussein Ali Fidow, a senior Shabaab leader, was among those killed. All nine al Qaeda and Shabaab leaders and fighters were killed during the operation.

It's good to know that despite the widespread view on the Left that terrorists should be treated as criminals with Miranda rights rather than as mortal enemies President Obama is pressing the fight against al Qaeda wherever they can be found. It's also good to know that we have men capable of executing such dangerous missions with skill and courage.

RLC

This Is Very Sad

I want very much to like and respect former President Jimmy Carter, but it seems that every time he opens his mouth he says something irresponsible. This is no exception:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Like so many others who are calling any criticism of President Obama a sign of racism, Mr. Carter offers not a shred of evidence that any of Mr. Obama's critics are motivated by race let alone that the "overwhelming" number are. The charge of racism is an admission that the left has no argument. There's nothing they can say in defense of the current administration's headlong rush to bankrupt the nation and to move us toward an ever-expanding role for government in our lives, so they accuse anyone who doesn't want to go along for the ride of being a racist. They offer no evidence, no support of the accusation, they just state it as an axiomatic truth.

Liberals accept as an article of their faith that America is a deeply racist nation. If you ask them to show you an example of racism in America today they're hard put to come up with one, but that doesn't diminish the strength of their conviction. Their dogmatic certainty is just as rock solid and just as purblind as that of any stereotypical fundamentalist. Given their assumption that America is still living in the 1930s, and given their utter incomprehension that anyone could possibly oppose liberal policies on their merits, it seems obvious to them that opposition to Mr. Obama could not possibly be based on anything but his skin color.

Now, I don't have any doubt that there's racism in this country. After all, one could go here,for example, and see a school bus full of white kids hooting and hollering as a couple of their friends beat up just about the only black kid on the bus (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget), but to accuse the President's political opponents of being racially motivated without adducing even a shred of empirical evidence for the charge beyond, maybe, a couple of ambiguous signs in a protest march is not only vile, it's stupid.

RLC

Why People Don't Believe Him

Newsweek columnist George Will explains why President Obama seems to be the victim of a strange kind of inverse relationship. The more he talks the less people believe what he says. The President has played so fast and loose with so many matters involving the people's money, most lately health care reform, that people respond to his words like they respond to the guy in the bar who's always spinning yarns that everyone knows aren't true.

Here are a few excerpts from Will's incisive column:

On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country's lapels for the 263rd time-that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

He says America's health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform-but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will "require" anyone to change coverage. He used to say, "If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period." He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

He deplores "scare tactics" but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government's prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion-without affecting benefits.

He says the nation's economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing "defensive medicine" intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers. He has said he will not add a dime to the deficit when bringing 47 million people into government-guaranteed health care. But Wednesday night, 17 million went missing: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage." Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, and most of them are illegal immigrants.

Presumably the other 7 million could get insurance but chose not to. Democrats propose fines to eliminate that choice. He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500's average. He says a "public option"-a government insurance program-would not be subsidized to enable it to compete unfairly with private insurers. (The post office and the government's transportation -"public option," Amtrak, devour subsidies.) He says the public option is vital for keeping health insurers "honest"-but that it is only a wee "sliver" of reform.

The President is either confused about his proposals or he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people into thinking that those proposals are something that they're not. In either case, he has just about exhausted the confidence the electorate placed in him last November. If he turns out to be a one-term President it won't be because of racism, or because people misrepresented his policies, or because of congressional Democrats (although they're trying hard to ensure that the voters get fed up with the President's party). If Barack Obama fails to win the support of the electorate in 2012 it will be largely because voters simply don't believe that he knows what he's talking about or that he's telling them the truth.

RLC

Norman Borlaug - Hero

Contrary to the faux heroes offered up by our celebrity culture most real heroes are people we've never heard of. Such, perhaps, was Norman Borlaug who died recently at the age of 95. Borlaug was an agronomist who won a Nobel prize in 1970 for having saved from hunger hundreds of millions of starving peasants around the world.

Guy Sorman tells his story in a piece at City Journal. The account of how Borlaug's work on developing strains of wheat and rice to relieve famine conditions in Mexico and India is fascinating in itself, and I hope you'll read it, but there's also an ideological moral to the story.

Sorman writes:

Borlaug was no innocent scientist: he knew that science could feed the world only when political conditions were right. In the case of India and Mexico, the semi-dwarf wheat and rice worked marvels because the farmers owned their own land. As private owners, they had a vested interest in using more expensive seeds that would produce a higher yield. Local authorities provided the water for irrigation: both the Mexican and Indian governments did it right, later followed by Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. But without private entrepreneurs, the Green Revolution would not have taken place. While touring the world, Borlaug always stressed that seeds by themselves could not eradicate hunger. Private property, entrepreneurship, and reliable governments were essential prerequisites.

Borlaug's pro-market advocacy did not please everyone in the Third World. The Indian Left always saw the Green Revolution as an engine of injustice, and it attacked Borlaug for generating a social divide. It's true that the most dynamic farmers in India did become wealthy, but the poor became poorer only relative to the new bourgeoisie.

As it was with the Left in India so it is with the Left everywhere. They seem to prefer that everyone be hungry rather than see a few get wealthy. They think that collectivism and socialism can solve food shortages despite the fact that the history of the twentieth century has consistently been one of capitalist countries sending food to hungry people in socialist countries. One reason why third world nations remain mired in poverty and hunger is because they've adopted an unworkable socialist model which removes all incentives for farmers to work hard to produce a surplus. Yet we keep hearing, even from many in our country, that private property and private enterprise are great evils even as American agriculture continues to help feed the world.

Those who believe that socialism would do better might offer some indication of how many hungry children socialism fed in the 20th century.

RLC

Is America Breaking Up?

Pat Buchanan wonders, with good reason, I think, if America is breaking up. Here's the heart of his essay:

[T]he episode [the President's speech to school students] reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health-care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

Buchanan has a point. As we become more and more diverse, as we focus on the things which make us different rather than the things which we share in common, as fewer and fewer Americans revere our nation's history, traditions and founding documents, as fewer Americans speak a common language, we will become increasingly Balkanized. Every nation is subject to certain centrifugal forces that tend to rip it apart. What holds a people together against those forces is a dominant culture in which everyone shares. We no longer have such a culture, or it is rapidly disappearing, and what we do have diminishes its hold on the hearts and minds of Americans with every new generation.

America may well be breaking up, and that fact raises an interesting academic question: Can a democracy long endure when none of its sub-cultures is any longer dominant? In other words, can a democracy survive multiculturalism and its attendant relativism? My fear is that the answer is "no." At least it's hard to think of an historical precedent.

RLC

Re: The 9/12 Photo

Several readers have written to inform me that the photo I used to accompany my post titled 9/12 Tea Party was actually taken at a different rally.

I thought when I first saw it that the scene looked too sunny to have been taken last Saturday when the northeast was pretty much soaked in a steady drizzle, but then I thought that maybe in D.C. the sun might have come out more than it did where I live.

Anyway, the pic is not of the 9/12 protest and should not be used as a guage of how many people were in D.C. last Saturday. TCS kindly sent along a link that has some info on the photo. It appears that the shot may have been taken of a Promise-Keepers rally that took place in October of 1997, an event that, coincidentally, I happened to have attended.

I was going to take the photo off the website, but since I'm in it I decided out of vanity to leave it up.

RLC

No-Brainer

Last year Congress and President Bush agreed to suspend the ban on oil drilling on the continental shelf. Things were set to resume tapping into the oil reserves on the shelf this year, but unfortunately the Obama administration suspended the suspension by imposing a six month delay on the granting of leases needed to begin drilling.

That delay is set to expire on September 21st and the administration and Congress have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how serious they are about creating jobs, stimulating the economy, balancing the budget, and making us energy independent of the Middle East.

According to a report by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) drilling would add $8 trillion to our GDP and generate $2.2 trillion in new tax revenues. This would go a long way toward reducing the deficit that Congress and the President have burdened us with.

Allowing drilling would also, according to the AEA report, create 1.2 million jobs each year and generate $70 billion in wages. The new jobs would not be limited to just the oil industry but would be realized in a wide spectrum of industries upon which oil drilling depends. It would be a substantial boost to the economies of coastal states like California which are teetering on the brink of insolvency.

The continental shelf holds at least 80 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Since we import about 4 billion barrels a year we could cut our imports in half and have enough oil to last for at least another forty years.

More oil and lower dependency upon foreign suppliers means cheaper gas. Cheaper fuel means lower prices for everything manufactured and/or shipped in the United States. This would be a boon not only to the middle class but especially to the poor.

Democrats in Congress, however, are very reluctant to go along with offshore drilling. They prefer a cap and trade system to reduce fuel consumption that would help reduce global warming. Cap and trade would raise the cost of fuel, kill job growth, make everyone poorer and reduce global temperatures a measly two tenths of a degree Celsius by 2100. It's hard to see why this is a more desirable policy than exploiting the resources we already have, and given the alternatives it's astonishing that there's any debate about which course of action we should follow.

Instead of just reiterating their refusal to allow drilling it would be helpful if the Democrats would share with us the reasons for that refusal.

[Some of the above information was gleaned from an article by Rep. Doc Hastings in the Washington Times.]

RLC

Seeking God in Science (Pt. II)

In chapter two of Seeking God in Science (See here for the first part of our discussion of the book) Brad Monton considers the question of whether ID is legitimate science and here, as in chapter one, he slays a number of hostile polemical dragons. He argues that attempts to define science have a dismal history and that, Judge Jones' decree in Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District notwithstanding, there's no good reason to think that intelligent design is not science. Monton takes on one contender after another and tosses each in turn out of the ring. His analysis of his opponents' arguments is incisive, sometimes brilliant, and the upshot is that, though he thinks ID wrong, there's no good reason for excluding it from the community of scientific theories.

The next chapter was perhaps the most interesting. He begins by saying that the important question is not whether ID is science but whether it's true, and he's exactly right about this. He thinks the arguments in its favor have some plausibility but not enough to persuade him to abandon his atheism or to accept that there is a non-theistic designer.

The problem, I think, with Monton's argument in this chapter is that he seems to make the term "somewhat plausible" synonomous with "not very likely." I don't know if this is intentional, but I do think it's misleading. For example, in considering the argument for a designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe he notes that most people simply lack the expertise to evaluate the claims that the relevant parameters must be set at precisely the values they are for life to exist and thus shouldn't make too much of the extraordinary coincidence that so many values are indeed calibrated to such fine tolerances.

That's true enough, but it's an objection one could make to any theory in science. Most philosophers and even many scientists know very little about relativity theory or quantum mechanics or string theory or even evolution. They rely on people who do know about these things, and they assume that the people who do have expertise are largely correct in their conclusions.

The fine-tuning argument has as an implied premise that the physicists who argue that the dozen or more values must be almost exactly what they are or else the universe wouldn't exist and/or life wouldn't exist, are most likely correct. If they are then an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the cosmic structure.

The argument isn't a proof in the deductive sense, but it's much more than "somewhat plausible" since the claim that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life seems to be admitted by even opponents of ID and is much more likely to be true than false.

Similarly, Monton asserts that we are not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning because we can't know what happened prior to about 10 ^ -12 seconds after the initial event. Because we can't penetrate that time horizon we're not warranted in believing that the universe began to exist. I think this is not quite correct. We may well be warranted in believing that the universe began to exist in a big bang but we're not warranted in saying that it certainly did. And if we are warranted in believing that the universe began to exist then we may well be justified in believing that it had a cause of its existence.

His most problematic objection to ID has to do with the ID argument that life itself is astronomically improbable as a product of blind, impersonal forces. He doesn't dispute this, but he does argue that the universe is spatially infinite and rather homogenous throughout. Therefore there would be an infinite number of planets like our own and no matter how small the chances of life arising naturalistically, if the probability is at all greater than zero it must have happened. Indeed, it must have happened infinite times.

I find this argument implausible. It's based on the assumption that given infinite opportunities anything that is possible to be the case will be the case. Given an infinite number of planets there would be an infinity of planets like earth and in an infinite number of planets anything which is at all possible will be actual. One problem with this argument is that its based on the assumption that the universe is infinite and that it has a fairly uniform composition throughout, but we have no more reason to think this second assumption true than we did to think that the universe had a beginning. If Monton is not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning then I don't see how he's warranted in believing that the universe is both infinite and uniform.

But even if we grant Monton these assumptions it seems to me that they actually confirm the existence of a designer. Let's stipulate that there is a non-zero probability that some part of our spatially infinite universe was designed. In other words, we're stipulating that it's possible that a designer exists. If so, then given an infinite number of parts to the universe, at least one of them (actually an infinity of them) must be designed. Thus a designer exists. This doesn't prove that the designer has designed every part of the universe but its a very short psychological step from the existence of a designer of an infinite number of parts of the universe to the existence of the entire universe.

At any rate, an argument that demonstrates the existence of a designer of even just a part of the universe seems to be a defeater of Monton's belief that no such designer exists.

The fourth chapter addresses the question whether ID should be taught in public school science classrooms. Here again Monton relentlessly punctures many of the arguments raised by those who oppose doing so.

The book is a delight to read, as much for Monton's relentless devotion to the truth and the clarity of his argumentation as it is for the interesting perspectives brought to the topic by an atheist defending intelligent design. I recommend it to anyone interested in the controversy surrounding the debate between IDers and those who oppose them.

RLC

The ACORN Saga Continues

Perhaps you've heard that ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), President Obama's former associates, are once again in the news and the news isn't good. A pair of intrepid young indy filmmakers surreptitiously filmed the proceedings as they visited two ACORN offices, one in Baltimore and one in Washington, posing as a pimp and a prostitute. The pair claimed that they wished to run a prostitution business using teenage El Salvadoran girls and they needed advice on housing options. They were counseled by ACORN representatives as to how they could get away with running their business in Baltimore and how they could mislead the IRS and avoid paying taxes.

The conselors were fired when the video broke, but there's a much deeper, more systemic problem with ACORN than just a few ethically challenged housing advisors. ACORN representatives have over the years been convicted in numerous states of voter registration fraud and a host of other legal violations. The odor of corruption and/or mismanagement has clung to them for at least a decade.

Yet ACORN has been given access to millions of dollars in stimulus money and were contracted to help carry out the 2010 census (although in the wake of this latest scandal the census bureau has severed its connection with ACORN).

If you'd like to be brought up to speed on this latest episode in the ACORN saga go here and scroll down. There's plenty of information and video shot by the young undercover investigators in the ACORN offices.

By the way, the young man who did the filming, who did the kind of investigating reporting the traditional media seem loath to do, James O'Keefe, may be prosecuted by Baltimore City for secretly taping the exchange with the ACORN people. Law enforcement authorities had been questioned as to whether the city was going to do anything about what some thought to be ACORN's obvious breach of the law so the State's Attorney's office looked at the tape and decided, astonishingly, that the malefactor was the filmmaker.

Meanwhile, the traditional media slumbers while this travesty plays out.

Margaret Williams, an ACORN board member, predictably blames the whole contretemps on .... racism. Sigh.

RLC