Thoughts on a Government Shutdown

Random thoughts on the impending government shutdown:

• Some 800,000 "non-essential" workers will be furloughed. If they're non-essential why are the taxpayers paying for them in the first place?
• The GOP has passed a rider that would ensure that in the event of a shutdown military families would be paid. The President has promised to veto it. Why? He calls compensating the families of those who are facing mortal peril every day to keep us safe from Islamic extremists a "distraction". A distraction?
• Democrats have been all over the media declaring that Republicans are going to shut down the government over funding to Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Public Radio. I don't understand this. Republicans are trying to find money to cut from our budget anywhere it is currently being spent on "non-essential" items. Neither PP, the EPA, nor NPR is essential, but the Democrats refuse to pass a continuing resolution that would keep the government functioning if it contains cuts to these programs. So, my question is why isn't it the Democrats who are going to shut down the government over funding to PP, EPA, and NPR?
• Isn't Planned Parenthood a private corporation? Why are taxpayers subsidizing them in the first place?
• For the last two years Democrats have tried to portray Republicans as the "party of 'No' ". Who is it that's saying "No" to passing the continuing resolution?
• Of fifteen departments in the government  the Departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Education could cease to exist altogether at a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars and no one would miss them except the employees of those departments.

The End of the World

With footage of the horrific tsunami that devastated Japan fresh in our minds and the dire predictions of Al Gore about global warming still buzzing about, I thought I'd share this video animation of what would happen on earth if an asteroid the size of Japan hit the planet. According to scientists it'd make Mr. Gore's global warming scenarios seem like a cruise to Antarctica in winter.

Note: The relevant part of the video stops at about 6:50. The narration that follows was somehow tacked on by whoever posted the video to YouTube and has nothing to do with the first 7 minutes:

I was piqued by a couple of things mentioned toward the end of the video. The narrator claimed that scientists believe there've been a half dozen such strikes in the history of the earth and that they caused the earth's temperature to rise so high that the planet is completely sterilized. If so, how did living things repopulate the earth's surface? What was left to re-establish life? Or did these collisions occur before the first life is believed to have evolved?

It was also claimed that in such a catastrophe the oceans vaporize and situate themselves as a canopy of vapor high in the atmosphere for thousands of years before precipitating back to earth in torrents of rain water, refilling the ocean basins. Does that sound like anything one might find in, say, the first few chapters of Genesis? Just asking.

One last thought. Might the asteroid and its effects on the planet be an apt metaphor for our national budget deficit?

Law School PC

A former student of mine named Caleb, who now attends law school at Widener, sends me this dispatch from the culture war front:

There is a professor here, Lawrence Connell, who teaches criminal law and criminal procedure, along with a couple other occasional classes. Professor Connell was the faculty advisor for the Federalist Society, and is one of the few conservative professors on campus. Last spring, he taught a criminal law class, where, apparently, he made various "violent" hypotheticals.

It is common for criminal law classes to feature rather violent situations, in order to discuss the differences between murder, manslaughter, etc. What made these hypos different is that he used the Dean in several hypos (i.e. "The Dean made me mad so I shot her;" I was not in the class, so this is second hand, but that is a fair representation of the types of hypos that were done). It is, I should mention, common for professors to use the Dean, other professors, or even students in hypos. I should also at this point mention that our Dean is a black woman (Linda Ammons), and Prof. Connell is a white male.

Fast forward to the fall, when I was in one of his two criminal procedure classes. There were no violent hypos in this class, but rather hypos about criminal activity (for example, "A police officer sees a black dude walking down the street and he has a bulge in his coat. The officer does a Terry stop. Has there been a 4th Amendment violation?") At the end of the semester, Prof. Connell was placed on administrative leave, and charges were brought against him in a faculty proceeding. The charges were ostensibly due to these violent hypos, but many people believe that it is more due to his anti-PC views (for example, apparently the use of the term "black dude" or "black folks" is racist).

While the faculty charges were dropped, for now, a charge brought by students is working its way through a different administrative process.

Caleb links to some articles on this matter here, here, and here. This last is a partial interview with Prof. Connell.

I'm sure the professor doesn't see much humor in this situation, but those not affected by the stupidity of his accusers might be forgiven for laughing at how pathetic it is that these future lawyers would be so oblivious to the injustice they're doing to this man. To see how ridiculous the allegations of racism are (they almost always are ridiculous, it seems) all one need do is read the interview at the third link above.

The law professor's plight reminds me of the movie based on the novel by Philip Roth titled The Human Stain. The film version featured Anthony Hopkins in the role of a septuagenarian literature professor by the name of Coleman Silk. One day Silk asked his class about two students on his roll who had never shown up for class and whom he had never seen. He wondered aloud whether the two really existed or whether they were "spooks". Well, it turned out that they were African-Americans, and when they found out about Silk's "racist" musings they pressed charges against him, and he was hounded by the faculty senate and administration to the point where he finally resigned. The irony of the story was that unbeknownst to any of his antagonists who sought to have him censured Silk was himself half black but so light in appearance that all his life he passed for white.

As in the real-life case of Prof. Connell such behavior on the part of people who suddenly find themselves in a position to destroy someone who is far more accomplished than they are is simply evil. Faculty members who take these charges seriously are behaving just as immaturely and cruelly as are the students who bring them. At least students are expected to act immaturely because they're students. But faculty and administrators who are so incapable of sensible discernment as to not dismiss these charges out of hand or, worse yet, are willing to defame a colleague and devastate his career because they dislike his politics, are in the first case simpletons and in the second case despicable.

P.S. Caleb sent along an addendum lest anyone be given the wrong impression of the general quality of the Widener Law School student body:

Despite what the students here apparently did, most of the students I know have been appalled by this situation, and strongly supported Professor Connell (even the extreme liberals!). I don't want you to think that the students at Widener are all indoctrinated with Michael Moore-esque tendencies; although some of them certainly are, many more certainly are not.

P.P.S. Caleb reports that Professor Connell has now sued the Dean for defamation.

Terrorism in Iraq

Strategy Page gives us an update on the terrorist situation in Iraq:

While the terrorist violence is still down 90 percent from its 2007 peaks, there has not been much additional reduction. Each month, 200-300 people die from terrorist activity. Most of this mayhem is from Sunni Arab nationalists (both secular and religious), who are determined to return Sunni Arabs to power, or die trying. So the dying will continue until these fanatics are all dead. This could take years.

It's mainly a generational thing. The few older terrorists left have access to enough money, and younger sons and nephews (who tend to be uneducated and unemployed) that they can get bombs made and placed. Suicide bombers are harder to come by, which is the main reason there are fewer attacks. There is also less and less cash for this stuff. Corrupt terrorist leaders stole a lot of that money (part of the billions Saddam and his cronies stole from Iraq's oil revenue over the years) and there's simply been less and less of it each year.

What there has been more and more of each year are trials, convictions and executions of senior terrorist leaders. There are also more incidents of terrorist leaders being found, refusing to surrender, and dying in the ensuing gun battle. All this sends a message, that this is the end. According to police interrogations, this had been bad for terrorist morale.

All of which means, I guess, that when Arab Muslims no longer have Americans and Israelis to kill they'll fall to killing each other. It's a way of life, so to speak.

What Will His Message Be?

Mr. Obama's announcement the other day that he will seek re-election in 2012 induces a number of perplexities.

For example, I don't know whether he'll be re-elected in 2012, but if the GOP can't find a compelling candidate to run against him he probably will be, given that the media will campaign for him. Even so, I can't imagine what accomplishments he will be able to boast of on the campaign trail, nor what his message will be during the coming campaign.

His foreign policy has been either an extension of the Bush policies (Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo) or, when he has struck out on his own, he has made a complete mess of things. He bumbled and fumbled the Hondurans' decision to legally unseat their far-left president Manuel Zelaya who sought to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers. He has alienated our allies in Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. He launched a feckless war against Libya, killed and maimed a couple of hundred Libyans, and then quit, leaving Col. Qaddafi in place to wreak further mischief on his people and the world.

The President's economic policies have put us on a curve that'll ruin the nation within the next two decades. Unemployment hovers at around 9%, despite his promise that it wouldn't go above 8%, and to subsidize his massive spending he has borrowed so heavily from China that we dare not criticize them for their atrocious human rights record lest they demand that we cash in their bonds. In order to service the debt we've had to print more money which is reducing the value of the dollar and spurring inflation.

To make it all worse, the President has been largely absent from the debate on the major economic issues confronting the nation and has left a real leadership vacuum in Washington.

His most touted accomplishment, Health Care Reform, has already been ruled unconstitutional, is widely believed to be completely unaffordable, and will probably be defunded if Republicans regain the Senate in 2012.

We are approaching $4.00 per gallon for gas, largely because inflation is forcing oil producers to raise the price of crude to keep pace with our diminishing dollar and also because the Obama administration refuses to allow drilling in many of our own oil reserves. If gas prices continue to go up, as Mr. Obama has assured us they will, inflation will accelerate, and unemployment will grow even more severe.

Speaking of oil, his handling of the BP oil spill, once he decided to involve himself in it, gave the impression of ineptitude, as did his handling of the Louis Gates incident in Massachusetts, the New York Mosque incident, and the attempt to try Kalid Sheik Muhammed in New York City.

Speaking of KSM, despite Mr. Obama's campaign vow to shut down Guantanamo, it is still operating and will continue to operate until long after Mr. Obama is gone.

The President appointed a man to be Attorney General who gives every indication of being a racist. Eric Holder is unwilling to prosecute minorities for crimes for which whites would be relentlessly pursued by the Justice Department. He also appointed a man to be Secretary of the Treasury who was found to be in default of paying his taxes.

Despite having been awarded prizes for "openness in government" his tenure has been highly secretive, and despite being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he has involved us in armed conflict in at least four different countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya).

He refuses to clear up the easily settled matter of his eligibility for the presidency by allowing Hawaii to release his birth certificate. Indeed, he spent several million dollars in legal fees to prevent them from having to do so, thus allowing doubt to fester throughout the country that he's a legal occupant of the office he holds.

Through it all, he has spent millions of taxpayers' dollars jetting his family around the world and has spent more time golfing than any president in history.

The message of Hope and Change has become the punch line to a multitude of jokes, and the idea of winning the future is absurd given that our current trajectory will yield a national debt exceeding 800% of GDP within twenty five years.

This is not a record that makes one confident of the wisdom of casting one's vote for the man, so what reason can Mr. Obama give the American people to vote for him in 2012? It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

Biological Newspeak

I once opined that I thought biologists, in a desperate attempt to make intelligent design less appealing to students, would eventually try to strip the awe out of biology education. Awe causes students to think that a particular biological phenomenon just couldn't have happened by chance. Awe is the enemy of naturalism.

When biological discourse is sterilized so that astonishment and amazement give way to matter-of-factness - when "gee whiz" yields to "ho hum" - students will be less tempted to think they're gazing into the mind of God when they peer into their microscopes. Darwinian materialists everywhere would rejoice at such a denouement even if it came at the cost of diminishing the natural excitement students might feel when they learn the intricacies of the immune system or protein transcription.

Well, it appears that a lot of biologists have come to the conclusion that biology teaching does indeed need to be scrubbed of any misleading teleological overtones. The problem, it seems, is that biologists have a hard time talking about the things they study without resorting to that dreaded word design.

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Notes reports on the movement among biologists to rid themselves of the cursed locution that ensnares potential young proselytes to naturalism by suggesting that there really is design in nature. Here's just one of several examples Luskin has dug up:

A recent article in the journal Bioessays by its editor Andrew Moore, titled "We need a new language for evolution. . . everywhere," suggests that biologists should stop using the term "design." According to Moore, under "Evolution old-speak" we would say, "Structure X is designed to perform..." but under "Evolution new-speak" we must simply say, "Structure X performs Y." If there's any doubt that Moore is worried about the intelligent design implications of the language used by biologists, consider the following passage from his article:

"A banal example shows how an apparently trivial change in words can radically change perceived meaning: to accomplish metabolic process X, enzyme Y evolved a specificity for Z. In an objective scientific sense, we should phrase this as 'in accomplishing X, Y concomitantly evolved a specificity for Z'. It is that innocent little word 'to' that transforms the meaning, giving enzyme Y the essence of 'will' - 'to' being short for 'in order to', or 'with the purpose of'. Purpose can only be exercised by a supernatural entity in this situation."

Apparently Moore is so worried about any implications of language that might be friendly towards intelligent design that he's unwilling to even state that any particular structure exists "to" perform some function. Clearly this shows that evolutionary thinking is taking biology into the realm of the absurd.

Luskin notes the irony of Moore's decision to call his "new language" Newspeak. Newspeak, of course, is exactly what the totalitarian thought police in George Orwell's novel 1984 called their language. Newspeak was an attempt to deceive people into believing what the government wanted them to believe by truncating some words and completely deleting others. It was a form of thought control which shaped people's perceptions of reality.

Doubtless that's exactly what Moore and the others Luskin quotes in his piece have in mind when they propose banning the word design from all biological discourse.

Competence

Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has stepped into the leadership void left by the President and his party, both of whom seem to be uninterested in fulfilling their duty of offering a budget, and has proposed a serious financial plan for next year and thereafter. He's already taking a lot of flak from the same people who refused to advance a proposal themselves, but an ad he's put out makes clear why we have to severely reduce the amount of money that government spends, especially on entitlements:

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the abdication of leadership on this issue by the White House is in fact a political ploy. The objective, it's being said, is to draw the Republicans in to offering a plan and then to savage it in the media so as to discredit the GOP for 2012.

I hope this isn't what they're thinking. To be so corrupted by politics as to toy with our children's future just to get some short term political advantage would be unconscionable. Unfortunately, the only other alternative is that the leadership vacuum is due to the fact that the Democrats simply don't have anything they can plausibly say about spending, which is on the trajectory it is because they, with a kick start from the Bush administration, have put it there.

If we're going to save our future and that of our children, we need to put the economy in the hands of competent adults who know what they're talking about and are willing to lead, and shunt to the side those who just think that the role of a politician is to hand out goodies to every interest group that puts its hand out. Since the President either won't or can't, Congressman Ryan is trying to fill that role.

Re: The Fukushima Fifty

I'd like to share some feedback we received on our post titled The Fukushima Fifty which was about true heroism and what passes for it in today's culture.

Dave K. sent along this:

Very nice reflection on the Fukushima Fifty heroes. That's something all of us should hear about, but you're right, unfortunately it's not deemed "news-worthy" most of the time. Or if it is, it's all too easily drowned out by the "real" news of the day. In this "me-first" society, I wonder how many here would make the same choice, day after day, to go back into that reactor. Is it something we think about, or does this all just make for another entertaining read in the comfort of our homes, perhaps a topic of conversation like who won the baseball game last night.

This story, along with your post, reminds me of Pat Tillman's life. Amongst the chorus of praise for what his sacrifice meant for our country, there was an unmistakable undertow of sentiments harbored by those that thought he was just caught up in the moment of wartime, and made a rash decision. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more we hear stories such as these, though, the more we realize that these heroes are no different than us. They're just ordinary people who make extraordinary choices when their time comes, and then carry out that choice with pride and honor. And it muffles those like Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen, in whom we really find no semblance of ourselves at all. It's a shame it takes a story like this to do that though.

Kristi included this moving passage in her email:

I have a very close friend that spent time in Iraq, and has now returned to the states, injured and psychologically affected. He completed his four year tour as a combat medic in the front lines, responsible for the health of 31 men below him. He has seen places, injuries, horror, and death, all of which I could never possibly imagine. While there, he lost some of his good friends, right before his eyes. He has described very little to me about his experience, but what he has told me gives me chills down my spine.

He says this...'soldiers sometimes return from war with depression and nightmares of their friends dying along side of them. Now imagine me, as a medic. Not only is my friend dying along side of me, but it is my job to save him. And when I can't, I feel that I have failed, and it is my fault that he has not lived.'

Wow. How can I even respond to a statement like that, with no true idea of the feelings of disappointment, anger, and extreme sadness that it describes. How can I make him realize that he did save some of his friends' lives, that he is not responsible for those deaths, and that he cannot blame himself forever? How can I make him see the true hero that lies inside of him? The admiration and awe that he gives to people like me who recognize and truly value what he has done, what he has seen, and the risks he took to protect those he loved?

He risked his life to save others, and although he didn't lose his life in the physical sense, psychologically he will never be the same. HE IS A HERO, and he can't slam dunk, carry a tune, or even THINK about acting in front of a camera. People like him and the Fukushima Fifty are what American needs to idolize, not those lucky enough to climb themselves to the top with some mutant vocal cords and a pretty face.

Good thoughts.

More Takers Than Makers

Stephen Moore has a sobering op-ed at the Wall Street Journal. It explains a lot about why so many states are in fiscal crisis and why big government is such a burden to the American taxpayer. Here's part of Moore's piece:

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two — Indiana and Wisconsin — has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees — twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.

To be sure, many government workers provide a valuable service to their communities. Teachers, police, firefighters, emergency responders, those who maintain vital services, are all important, but too many government workers, particularly at the state and federal level, receive pay and benefits for performing jobs that are utterly non-essential.

Those who actually create something, who make wealth, are carrying on their backs as many as three government workers apiece who create nothing but whose livelihood often depends upon being able to extract wealth from those upon whose backs they ride. The government has become, in effect, an employment sink for millions of people who might otherwise be unemployed, and we simply can no longer afford it.

The rest of Moore's article is very good. It's an eye-opener.

The Laffer Curve

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains why cutting taxes increases revenue to the treasury and raising taxes actually reduces revenue. Every voter ought to be familiar with the basic idea behind this because it forms the Republican rationale for not wanting to raise taxes:

Despite this economic fact of life the Democrats had to be brought kicking and screaming to extending the Bush tax cuts last winter. They wanted to raise the rates on the "wealthiest Americans" beyond point B which would have stifled growth and produced less revenue.

Why did they want to do that? Either they don't know about the Laffer curve, or they don't believe the Laffer Curve, or Mitchell's rendering of it, is an economic "fact of life", or they so despise the rich that they want to punish them regardless of the effect it has on job growth and revenue. Whichever it is, before they try again to raise taxes they ought to explain to us which of those three alternatives applies to them.

Thanks to Big Government for the video.

How to Silence the Doubters

F. Owen Smith is an OB/GYN and thus knows whereof he writes. He offers us a satirical rendering of what the President could do to end the "Birther" issue once and for all. Unfortunately, despite it's simplicity, he doesn't think POTUS will go for it, but I don't why not (unless Dr. Smith is right).

Assuming that he's not, it's a mystery why Mr. Obama doesn't put these doubts behind him, especially if there's an easy way to do it, nor do I understand why his supporters seem so contemptuous of anyone who raises the issue. It seems to me that their anger should be directed at the President for allowing this distraction to persist and not laying it permanently to rest.

A significant number of people have serious doubts about Mr. Obama's account of his birth and the number continues to grow the longer the question remains unanswered. Perhaps he'll address it in the 2012 campaign, or perhaps the media will force him to produce dispositive evidence that the truth is as he claims it to be.

Well, okay, forget the part about the media.

Blaming the Wrong Person

The Sunday talk shows yesterday from Fox News Sunday to NBC's Meet the Press were filled with severe condemnations of the Florida pastor who burned the Koran in order to show that the book promotes violence. There seemed to be wide agreement that his act was irresponsible and that Pastor Jones bears at least some of the onus for the deaths of U.N. workers at the hands of an angry mob of Afghan Muslims.

This is nonsense. Yes, the Koran-burning was insensitive, and offensive to Muslims, but it makes no more sense to blame the pastor for the murders committed by this mob than to blame the Danish cartoonist who drew a picture of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban for the murders committed by a mob of Muslims outraged by that depiction.

What those who blame the pastor and the cartoonist are doing is allowing violent people to veto our right to speak in accents of which they disapprove. What's next? Suppose mobs of Muslims are incensed by criticism of Islam, the Koran, or the Prophet. Suppose innocents are murdered around the world every time someone in the West speaks censoriously of any of these. Would it then be irresponsible to criticize Islam and the objects of its veneration? Should we just consider anything other than praise for Islam off-limits because Muslims might kill people if someone criticizes or ridicules them? Should this immunity from criticism be extended to all religions or just those whose members might be expected to react violently?

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway sums it up like this:

Should Jones have burned the Koran? No. But not because doing so might incite some evil people halfway around the world to commit atrocities against innocents. Rather, he shouldn’t have done it [because it] was needlessly hurtful without adding any value to the debate. Indeed, aside from generating publicity for himself, he’s likely generated sympathy for Islam and disdain for churches of his ilk.

But Jones is not the slightest bit culpable for the actions of others. Yes, he was warned that violence might ensue. But we’re not responsible for the evil, illegal actions others might take in response to our freely expressing our thoughts. Even if they’re ill-informed, half baked, bigoted thoughts. If we allow the possible reaction of the most dogmatic, evil people who might hear the message to govern our expression, we don’t have freedom at all. It’s worse than a heckler’s veto; it’s a murderer’s veto.

Suppose an obscure imam in Afghanistan claimed that Jesus wasn't really divine and to show his disdain for Christianity he desecrated a copy of the Gospel of John. Can anyone imagine a mob of Christians, instigated by their pastors and priests, rampaging through Detroit killing every Arab they could find? The thought is preposterous, but suppose it happened. Would anyone in the government or military of the United States blame anyone but the mob itself and the clerics who encouraged them for the atrocities? Would the members of the mob not be treated like a bunch of savage Neanderthals worthy only of their countrymen's contempt? So why did we hear General Petraeus, and Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham on Sunday blaming Pastor Jones for the murders of the U.N. workers?

We have a prima facie obligation, in my opinion, to treat what is sacred to others with a modicum of respect. We shouldn't go out of our way to insult or offend other people, but we must not allow those who threaten violence if we don't treat their beliefs with the degree of deference they demand to take away our freedom of speech or our right to criticize. Once we do we will have lost something very precious.

They're Not All Like This

A private American citizen, Pastor Terry Jones of Florida, burns a Koran and across the world in Afghanistan a mob of enraged lunatics retaliate by killing four Nepalese, three Europeans, and five of their fellow Afghans - a dozen people in all, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with the Koran burning:

Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — four Nepalese guards and three Europeans from Romania, Sweden and Norway — according to United Nations officials in New York. One was a woman. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said that at least two of the dead had been beheaded. Five Afghans were also killed.

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, in confirming the attack.

I can't think of any reaction more likely to vindicate Mr. Jones' rationale for burning the Koran than what this mob provided him. Muslims are their own worst enemy. Every chance they get, it seems, they give the world more reason to want to have nothing to do with them or their religion. They seem determined to prove to the world that their religion encourages such awful, irrational spasms of violence.

One wants to plead that not all Muslims are like this, but the pleas are drowned out by the shouts of vast numbers who are indeed like this. Westerners who yearn for some sort of coexistence, like my friend Byron who passed this video along with the caveat that surely not all Muslims are the sort of people the speaker describes, watch this in the light of the U.N. murders and ask themselves, what does the guy in the video say that doesn't ring true? Is it possible to live peaceably with people whose worldview is so radically at odds with one's own?

It's doubtless the case that there are many Muslims who deplore the senseless, stupid killing of innocent U.N. workers in Afghanistan, but in many places in the world the Muslims who are not like those described in the video are cowed into silence by those who are:

A postscript: Was President Obama's statement in response to these murders as pathetic when heard live as it sounds in print?

In Washington, President Obama issued a statement strongly condemning the violence against United Nations workers. “Their work is essential to building a stronger Afghanistan for the benefit of all its citizens,” he said. “We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence.”

What is he saying? Is he really implying that U.N. workers should not be murdered because we need them? Are they to be left alone simply because they're useful? Would it be okay to kill them if they were just tourists? And could his last sentence be any more insipid? Who does he mean by "all parties"? Who, exactly, are the other parties in this horrific matter who must refrain from violence? Was he reading this statement off of an old form letter or something? The whole thing sounds as if he's addressing a bumptious town hall meeting rather than responding to the grisly murders of someone's sons and daughters. No wonder people criticize him for so often appearing to be an emotionless automaton.

Krauss vs. Craig at NCS

I really don't understand why atheists agree to debate philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God. Every time they do they wind up the way Wile E. Coyote winds up whenever he tries to ambush the Road Runner.

The latest example is physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss who debated Craig at North Carolina State University the other night on the topic whether there is evidence for the existence of God. He shouldn't have bothered. Despite being an accomplished scientist he was clearly out of his league, and appeared totally unprepared for Craig's arguments. He not only seemed unable to comprehend the relevance of confirmation theory to the topic, but looked confused and unsure how to respond to Craig beyond mildly patronizing asides and simple assurances that Craig was wrong. He didn't offer much reason why we should accept these asseverations, and indeed spent an awful lot of time agreeing with Craig while trying to sound like he was refuting him. Much of the rest of his time was spent elaborating upon irrelevancies.

Craig offered five clear lines of evidence for God's existence, to none of which was Krauss able to offer more than a perfunctory and uncomfortably desultory challenge. Perhaps it really is the fault more of the debate topic than of Krauss' ability to champion atheism. It's pretty hard, after all, to argue that there's no evidence for God's existence, and it's especially difficult when one has, as Krauss acknowledges early on, little interest in philosophy. Anyone who hasn't read much philosophy really shouldn't embarrass himself, no matter how much hubris he may bring to the stage, by publicly debating a philosopher on a philosophical topic.

If you're an atheist, or even if you're not, you'll probably be wondering why atheists can't put up someone against Craig who seems to know what he's talking about. Or, you might wonder whether the difficulty is more with atheism than with its defenders.

Heh

The Republican Party has an amusing political ad out that parodies the accomplishments of our President:

For some reason that chuckle at the end both makes me laugh and makes me worry.

Minds, Computers, and Thinking

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views discusses the question whether computers can "think".

He identifies the sine qua non of thinking with what philosophers call intentionality, i.e. the aboutness of something. Computers, he argues, are incapable of manifesting intentionality and thus cannot think. After giving a brief description of what is called the "Turing Test" Egnor writes:

[W]e must first ask: what do we mean by "think"? We mean a mental act. What are the characteristics of a mental act? Several plausible characteristics have been proposed -- free will, restricted access (only the thinker experiences his thoughts), incorrigibility (only the thinker knows with certainty the content of his thought), qualia (raw sensory experience), etc. But philosophers agree that one unambiguous characteristic is essential to mental acts: intentionality.

Intentionality is the other-directedness of a mental act. Intentionality is the "aboutness" of a thought. When I think about the weather, or about my boss, I'm thinking about something or someone other than my mental act itself. Things without minds don't have primary intentionality. A rock or a tree isn't intrinsically "about" something. A mental act can impart secondary intentionality to an object (that tree reminds me of spring), but the intentionality is imparted, not intrinsic. Only mental acts have intrinsic primary intentionality.

Computers certainly have secondary intentionality imparted to them by programmers and users. But to have a mind a computer would have to have primary intentionality. How would we know if a computer had primary intentionality? A computer's output would be intentional (in a primary sense) if the output were other-referential in a way that was not part of the program. Intentionality that was part of the program (the computer "talking about sports" because the programmer put "talk about sports" into the program) would of course merely be secondary intentionality -- the intentionality of the programmer imparted to the machine.

A "thinking" computer would have to talk about sports (or some other topic) that was not a part of its program. So primary intentionality would necessarily not be an algorithm of the computer. But an output by the computer that was not part of the computer's program wouldn't be computation. Computation is by definition bounded by an algorithm. Mental acts are not bound by an algorithm. If a computer were to manifest acts that were not algorithmic, it would be (in that respect) no longer a computer. No amount or ingenuity of programming can enable a computer to think. Mental acts are intrinsically non-computational.

Why does this matter? Materialists wish to reduce the human person to the collection of chemical reactions which occur in his or her body and reduce all mental activity to computer-like processes in the brain. They wish to deny that there is anything to us other than the physical, but the facts of physics, as we pointed out last week, are proving to be formidable impediments to this project.

The problems presented by human consciousness stubbornly resist the materialist's reductionism. The phenomena of consciousness - qualia, incorrigibility, intentionality - all suggest that the physical is not all there is to human persons.

One way to see this, perhaps, is to imagine a blind man who knows all the physical facts about red. He knows all the chemical reactions that occur in the brain when a sighted man sees red. There is nothing in the physical description of red that the blind man doesn't know, except he still does not know what red is. He doesn't know what it is like to experience red. There is something left over after all the facts about what happens in the brain when red is apprehended have been adduced.

In other words a complete physical description of red does not give us a complete description of red. There is, it seems, something non-physical involved in the sensation of seeing red, or tasting flavor, or hearing sound, or smelling frgarance.

One reason materialists are so reluctant to allow that there might be a non-material "substance" inhabiting the universe is that it's difficult to imagine how naturalistic evolution, which acts without purpose on material antecedents, could have produced an immaterial mind. The thought that we are more than just physical, material beings could lead to an openness to the possibility that the universe is underwritten, so to speak, by an intelligent mind that is the source of our minds, and that thought treads perilously close to the unwelcome conclusion, unwelcome for the materialist, that is, that the universe may be the handiwork of God.

The Fukushima Fifty

The heroes of our culture, celebrities of one species or another who've done nothing particularly worth admiring, let alone lionizing, look insubstantial and superficial compared to the kind of men we read about in this article on the Fukushima Fifty:

Workers at the disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan say they expect to die from radiation sickness as a result of their efforts to bring the reactors under control, the mother of one of the men tells Fox News.

The so-called Fukushima 50, the team of brave plant workers struggling to prevent a meltdown to four reactors critically damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, are being repeatedly exposed to dangerously high radioactive levels as they attempt to bring vital cooling systems back online.

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.

I wonder how many of the pampered, narcissistic, morally effete, recipients of our adulation and encomiums, the people we so handsomely remunerate for entertaining us in one way or another, would make a similar commitment.

We have men and women like the Fukushima Fifty in our society, too, of course. We saw them in action on 9/11 climbing the stairwells of the World Trade Towers knowing they probably wouldn't come out. We read about them in accounts of combat in far off places and stories of everyday police work in high crime communities, and yet if you ask the average Generation Xer, or Yer, to name one of them or explain what they have done, most would be struck dumb. We cheer and worship someone who plays the guitar or drums with a modicum of skill. We put posters on our bedroom walls of film stars and athletes. We soak up all the information we can of the details of these persons' lives. But we know little or nothing of real heroes.

Why do we have such a perverse, shallow understanding of what and whom deserves admiration? The Fukushima Fifty have much to teach us about this if we can break away from American Idol and Entertainment Tonight long enough to learn from them.

Mountain Bluebird

I drove over to Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Lancaster, Co. PA early this morning to get a look at this beauty. It's a Mountain Bluebird, fairly common in the west but very rare in the east. In fact, the bird at Middle Creek is only the sixth record of a Mountain Bluebird in Pennsylvania.

The photo is not of the same individual that's at Middle Creek, but it's the same species. I've seen them at very close range (today's bird was a couple hundred yards out) in Montana and Colorado, and the blue just takes your breath away. An interesting fact about this is that in birds blue color, unlike most other colors, is not due to a pigment. In fact, the feathers of birds like the Mountain Bluebird are actually colorless. The appearance of color is due to the structure of the feather which causes the light to reflect in such a way that most of the waves cancel each other out, leaving only the blue light to travel to your eye. A common blue bird in the east in summer is the Indigo Bunting, which superficially resembles the Mountain Bluebird, but as brilliant as its color appears, it's not due to pigment but to wave interference which cancels out the other colors of light.

Indigo Bunting

Compare the two pictures and see if you can tell how the two birds differ.

Extremists

As is their custom, the Left is once again debasing the language, turning perfectly useful words into meaningless space-fillers and empty pejoratives. The latest example is their use of the word "extremist" as a means to smear their political opponents. Senator Charles Schumer was recently overheard telling his Democrat colleagues that he was instructed to use the word often when talking about the tea party, presumably in order to couple the words tea-party and extremist together in the public consciousness.

From the frequency with which Senator Harry Reid and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi employ the word it's likely that they all received the same memo.

But what does it mean, exactly? What is an extremist in the liberal lexicon? Here are a baker's dozen criteria by which you can discern whether someone, yourself even, is an extremist. You know you're an extremist in the minds of liberal Democrats if you believe any of the following:

• The American people should be governed by what the Constitution says and not what we wish it said.
• Government should not spend more money than what it has.
• Paying a third or more of your income in taxes is quite enough.
• Regulations and taxes on business depresses the number of people businesses can hire.
• The best way to become energy independent in the short to medium term is to exploit the energy resources we have within our borders.
• People who come to this country should do so legally.
• Marriage should be between one man and one woman.
• The military is not a laboratory in which to conduct social experiments like inserting women into combat units or using affirmative action in promoting officers.
• Killing unborn children is not an acceptable means of birth control.
• Able-bodied people should work for their living and not be permitted to live off the labor of others.
• The United States was founded on principles that trace their genesis to the Christian tradition and that freedom of religion does not entail freedom from religion.
• We oppress the poor by denying them the right to choose the schools to which they will send their children.
• The most racially just society is one which is blind and indifferent to color. A society which makes color a criterion for special treatment is fundamentally unjust.

These are the beliefs held by the people it pleases Senator Schumer to disparage for their "extremism".

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Try to imagine what the views of the Left in this country must be if Mr. Schumer and his ideological soul-mates consider these views to be "extreme" by comparison.

Evolving Elites

First Things reports some fascinating statistics about the correlation between attitudes toward marriage, family and level of education.

The statistics, issued by the Institute for American Values, divides Americans into three groups: the least educated (no high-school degree), the moderately educated (a high-school degree and perhaps some college study), and the highly educated (at least a college degree).

Of these, the highly educated are much less likely to be divorced, cohabit, and bear out-of-wedlock children. They're also much more likely to attend church regularly, believe that divorce should be more difficult to obtain, and believe that premarital sex is always wrong.

This is striking in that it runs completely counter to what we often hear about these matters from our cultural mavens. The conventional wisdom is, or so I thought it was, that our educated elites are much more liberal in their attitudes toward family, sexuality and religion than were the less educated classes who tended in their ignorance to hold on to "traditional" values. The "redneck" conservative was generally portrayed as an uneducated rube, someone who clings bitterly to his Bible and his guns, as our president so inartfully put it, and as the folks in the tonier echelons of our culture imagine it.

It may have all been true thirty or forty years ago, but evidently it no longer is.

The editors at First Things opine that:

There is a certain view of culture, not an implausible one, that presumes the dominance of elite sensibilities: What the elite think and do now, everyone else will eventually think and do. The elites led the intellectual deconstruction of marriage fifty years ago. If they’re changing, and coming (finally) to see the necessity of marriage, perhaps everyone else will also. The moral fantasies of the 1960s generation are certainly due for retirement.

For our children's sakes, let's hope so.