Speaking Truth to Power

At yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast world renown pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson did what few people have been able to do. He outlined a couple of policy prescriptions for the nation that run almost completely counter to those of the president, and did so in a forum in which the president was not only a captive listener but sitting only two chairs away.

Carson's speech was simple, compelling, and full of common sense. It has also apparently gone viral in the cyberworld.

Here's his presentation. It lasts a little over twenty six minutes, but it's worth listening to. The whole talk is good, but the controversial part is during the six minutes from about the 16 minute mark to about 22 minutes.

Carson has been criticized by some in the liberal media for being disrespectful to the president. Do you think he was out of line or do you think he was speaking truth to power in the spirit of the Old Testament prophets? If you think he was out of line would you have formed the same judgment had it not been Barack Obama sitting at the table but rather George W. Bush and if the speaker had been as obliquely critical of Bush's policies as Carson was of Obama's?

Abolishing the Constitution

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says in part: "No person .... shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." The Obama administration, it's been discovered, appears to find this fundamental right inconvenient and has arrogated to itself the prerogative of killing American citizens against whom no evidence of criminal activity has been adduced, who have not been charged with any crime, and who have not received the benefit of judicial review.

Mr. Obama was one of the foremost critics of the Bush administration for detaining known terrorists without a trial and for wiretapping without benefit of judicial warrant foreigners believed to be engaged in terrorist activity. Senator Obama, his fellow Democrats, and the liberal media were outraged at Bush for what they perceived to be his violation of civil liberties, but now that they're in power they're adopting measures far more lethal and constitutionally problematic than anything Bush ever did.

The folks at MSNBC's Morning Joe, all of whom are Obama supporters, are appalled that the president would be a party to this, but they shouldn't be surprised. Mr. Obama's disdain for the restrictions placed on government action by the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments has been clear for some time. Here's the discussion on Morning Joe:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The memo they're talking about lays out a three part test for killing an American citizen. According to the article at the above link:

In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.”

But the definition of "imminent threat" and "infeasible" appears to be very elastic. For example:

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

By this definition of "imminent threat" even Mr. Obama's friend the erstwhile terrorist Bill Ayers could be targeted for killing by a drone strike.

But at least Bill Ayers really was a terrorist. Two years ago Democrats were calling Tea Party members terrorists. If American citizens can be killed abroad even though they haven't actually plotted to commit any crime against America, what's to stop the government from labeling American citizens here at home as terrorists simply for speaking out against the government and having them arrested, or worse?

The fact that the man who made the video which the administration falsely blamed for inciting the mob in Benghazi to kill our ambassador still languishes in a California prison on a minor charge should give us pause before we dismiss the fear that citizens exercising their First Amendment rights would be punished by this, or a future, administration.

Moreover, what makes a capture "infeasible"? Is it just danger to American troops? How much danger? What if the American citizen is in a country that will not arrest him nor permit us to do so? What if Bill Ayers decides to live in Cuba or Venezuela? If so, he'd qualify, under the Obama policy, as a terrorist whose capture is infeasible and the only protection he'd have from a missile being delivered through his bedroom window is that he happens to be a friend of the Obamas.

This policy is an assault on the Constitutional protection afforded by the Fifth Amendment all by itself, but worse, it places us on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies a total disregard of the Constitution should whoever is president deem it expedient.

On the bright side, it has also placed conservatives and at least some liberals in the very unusual position of being united in mutual outrage.

Nagel's Critics

I've written several times in the last month or so about philosopher Thomas Nagel's new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The book has stirred a hornet's nest of criticism, probably because Nagel was himself a materialist and still is an atheist, yet he finds materialism and the Darwinian view that is its chief intellectual buttress deeply unsatisfying and intellectually untenable.

VJTorley at Uncommon Descent casts a gimlet eye upon the arguments of some of Nagel's critics and finds them uniformly unconvincing. The fascinating thing about the reviews he examines is the degree of faith that the reviewers place in materialism. His column is a bit long, but his lede paragraph is a good summation:

I do not wish to question the sincerity and learning of the reviewers, but I was deeply shocked by their unshakable attachment to Darwinism. Reading through the reviews, I was astonished to find the authors arguing that even if the origin of life should prove to be a fantastically improbable event that would not be expected to happen even once in the entire history of the cosmos, even if scientists are utterly unable to predict the general course of evolution, even if all attempts to reduce the science of biology to physics and chemistry are doomed to failure, even if it can be shown that we will never be able to explain consciousness in terms of physical processes, and even if neo-Darwinism proves to be incompatible with the existence of objective moral truths, such as “Killing people for fun is wrong,” we should still prefer Darwinism to any other account of origins, for to do otherwise is unscientific. I have to ask: whence such madness?

These are indeed astonishing admissions by Nagel's critics, and Torley examines them more thoroughly in his essay. The reviewers as much as assert that even if materialism is an utter explanatory failure we should still cling to it because science relies on materialist assumptions, and we cannot abandon science. Better to be scientific but wrong than to perhaps find the truth by abandoning materialism, especially if the truth might be that life can only be adequately accounted for as the product of the design of an intelligent mind.

The inviolable rule that any explanation must be a materialist explanation, even if materialist explanations cannot account for the empirical data science discovers, reminds me of a line from William James' The Will to Believe. James writes that, "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

So it would.

Cats

I'm probably going to stir up controversy, and maybe even hostility, with what I say at the conclusion of this post, but it's something I feel strongly about and needs, I think, to be said.

In the area in which I live in south-central Pennsylvania Ring-necked pheasants and Bob-white quail were once abundant. Suddenly, beginning in the 1970s, their numbers suffered a dramatic decline resulting in the complete disappearance of both species by the 1990s. Pheasants are no longer seen in Pennsylvania fields, except on game lands where they're stocked by the game commission, and quail are never seen nor heard anymore in the county in which I live.

The extirpation has been variously ascribed to bird flu, West Nile virus, habitat loss, etc. but I've long suspected that feral house cats played a major role. Now a study published in the science journal Nature reinforces my admittedly speculative opinion. Here's the abstract of the study:

Anthropogenic threats, such as collisions with man-made structures, vehicles, poisoning and predation by domestic pets, combine to kill billions of wildlife annually. Free-ranging domestic cats have been introduced globally and have contributed to multiple wildlife extinctions on islands. The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data. Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.

These numbers sound almost incredibly high to me, but even if they're off by a factor of ten the toll taken by cats is immense. And it's not just un-owned cats that are the problem. Owned cats which are allowed to roam freely throughout a neighborhood take a heavy toll on birds at feeders as well as mammals like chipmunks and voles. It is, in my opinion, simply irresponsible of people who own cats to allow them to come and go as they please. Unconfined cats are a disaster to wildlife and people simply should not own them if they're unwilling to keep them in the house.

There, I've said it. Let the hate mail from cat enthusiasts begin.

The Illegal Immigration Problem

Can we trust the political class on immigration reform? Specifically, can this administration be counted upon to enforce any requirement to stop the influx of illegals along the border? If the past is an indicator the answer is no.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have been feckless in their attention to border security and Mr. Obama has signaled that he has no desire to be any more diligent in upholding our laws in a second term than he was in his first.

Thus any reform which trusts either Republicans or Democrats to establish a secure southern border somewhere down the road is doomed. The current plan, much ballyhooed because Senator Marco Rubio supports it, is a farce. Eleven million (or so) current aliens will be granted immediate amnesty on the promise that sometime in the foggy future the administration will bestir itself to do something it currently has no inclination or incentive to do. Fat chance.

At VP we've long advocated a kind of amnesty for those already in the country illegally (To read it go here and scroll down to "Addressing Illegal Immigration"), but insisted that it be predicated on two prior conditions: First, that it be codified into law that no one who has broken our existing laws to get here be placed on a path to citizenship, and second, that prior to any amnesty being declared a secure fence be erected along the entire length of the southern border to ensure that there'll be no future deluge of illegal immigrants into the U.S. Israel has done something similar and has cut terrorist infiltration from Gaza to zero. We can do it, too.

Some Republicans oppose such measures, though, because they mistakenly see illegal immigrants as a source of cheap labor and as the answer to our long-term social security funding problem. Democrats won't go along because they see illegals as a vast Democrat constituency. Rush Limbaugh has pithily observed that Democrats would be down on the border right now pouring the footers for the fence if they were persuaded that illegal immigrants would, upon being granted citizenship, vote overwhelmingly Republican. He's also claimed that he himself would support complete amnesty and a road to citizenship if part of the deal was that these new citizens be prevented from voting for twenty five years. If that were the condition, he opines, the Democrats would quickly lose interest in any solution to the immigration problem. He's probably right.

As Charles Krauthammer argues, we need to build the fence first - we could even have the president go down and drive in the final golden post at a Promontory Point II - and then declare amnesty. To do it the other way around means that the golden post will never get driven in, and we'll be having this same debate all over again in another twenty five years when there are millions more illegals in the country.

Krauthammer's probably right, too.

Craig/Rosenberg Debate

A pair of philosophers who couldn't be more different met Friday night at Purdue University to debate the question whether faith in God was reasonable. The combatants were William Lane Craig a Christian philosopher who has written, debated, and lectured extensively on theism and Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chairman at Duke and a widely published advocate of atheism.

If you'd like to watch all or part of the debate you can view it here. The introductions begin about four minutes in.

Rosenberg offered, in my opinion, a number of weak arguments and one fairly good one. I think he's right to point to human suffering as counting against the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, but that argument by itself is not enough to make belief in God unreasonable. His best argument, however, was implicit in his question as to why God didn't create a world in which everyone had free will but always chose to do right. I thought Craig's dismissal of this was premature. Surely that world is a logically possible world and thus one which God could create, so why didn't he?

I thought Rosenberg was disingenuous when he sought to deflect the force of Craig's attack on the views he advocates in his book in which he endorses moral as well as other forms of nihilism. Craig points out that by Rosenberg's own admission atheism produces nihilism. Rosenberg replied - unconvincingly, I thought - that nihilism does not follow from atheism but that both of them follow from science. Thus, Rosenberg argued, if one wishes to embrace science, which all thinking people should, one should be an atheist as well as a nihilist.

I think this view is mistaken. Science does not entail either atheism or nihilism. Science is simply the search for empirical truth. Taken straight, unencumbered by the philosophical presuppositions of some of its practitioners, it has nothing to say about the existence of a God. Atheism, however, certainly does entail nihilism, both moral and epistemological.

Craig, for his part, made a number of arguments which, though they're not proofs that God exists, can rationally be accepted and thus together make belief that there's a God a reasonable epistemic position which was, after all, the topic of the debate.

For what it's worth the auditorium audience voted 1390 to 303 in favor of Craig as the winner. Online viewers voted 734 to 59 for Craig, and the judges voted for Craig 4 to 2. I'm frankly not sure what those two judges who voted for Rosenberg saw that I didn't.

Evolution and Altruism

An article in Science Daily on altruistic behavior in plants, of all things, quotes a Harvard evolutionary biology professor named William Friedman:

"One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives," said Friedman. "Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary."

Either Friedman doesn't consider humans the product of evolution, which would be an odd stance for an evolutionary biologist to take, or he's never heard of Mother Teresa.

Why We Need the 2nd Amendment

One of the types of firearms that some folks would like to ban from public use are semi-automatic weapons - The very type of weapon that saved a Texas woman and her son from a trio of thugs recently. Watch the video here, and then ask yourself why lawmakers should be allowed to disarm people like this mother. If semi-automatic handguns are banned - which a law against semi-automatic "assault" weapons would probably do - this woman might not have had a means of self-defense at her disposal but the thugs who broke into her home surely would have.

For more examples of how possession of a firearm saved innocent lives, go here.

More on Women in Combat

I recently posted a piece by an Iraq vet named Ryan Smith about some of the problems created by putting men and women together in combat conditions, a move the Obama administration evidently intends to make. Now comes a similar piece, this one written by a female veteran, explaining why she thinks such a policy would be foolish. It appeared at Hot Air which quoted it in its entirety so I'm going to do likewise since it's now all over the net anyway. I urge you, though, to go to HA to read their remarks.

I wonder how many of those who are so eager to throw women into combat have actually spoken to women like this vet who writes under the pseudonym "Sentry." I wonder how many of them even care what people like her think:

I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.

We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit.

First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.

I saw the male combat units when I was in Iraq. They go outside the wire for days at a time. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate in front of each other and often while on the move. There’s no potty break on the side of the road outside the wire. They urinate into bottles and defecate into MRE bags. I would like to hear a suggestion as to how a woman is going to urinate successfully into a bottle while cramped into a humvee wearing full body armor. And she gets to accomplish this feat with the male members of her combat unit twenty inches away. Volunteers to do that job? Do the men really want to see it? Should they be forced to?

Everyone wants to point to the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?

Regarding physical limitations, not only will a tiny fraction of women be able to meet the male standard, the simple fact is that women tend to be shorter than men. I ran into situations when I was deployed where I simply could not reach something. I wasn’t tall enough. I had to ask a man to get it for me. I can’t train myself to be taller. Yes, there are small men…but not so nearly so many as small women.

More, a military PFT doesn’t measure the ability to jump. Men, with more muscular legs and bones that carry more muscle mass than any woman can condition herself to carry, can jump higher and farther than women. That’s why we have a men’s standing jump and long jump event in the Olympics separate from women. When you’re going over a wall in Baghdad that’s ten feet high, you have to be able to be able to reach the top of it in full gear and haul yourself over. That’s not strength per se, that’s just height and the muscular explosive power to jump and reach the top. Having to get a boost from one of the men so you can get up and over could get that man killed.

Without pharmaceutical help, women just do not carry the muscle mass men do. That muscle mass is also a shock absorber. Whether it’s the concussion of a grenade going off, an IED, or just a punch in the face, a woman is more likely to go down because she can’t absorb the concussion as well as a man can. And I don’t care how the PC forces try to slice it, in hand-to-hand combat the average man is going to destroy the average woman because the average woman is smaller, period. Muscle equals force in any kind of strike you care to perform. That’s why we don’t let female boxers face male boxers.

Lastly, this country and our military are NOT prepared to see what the enemy will do to female POWs. The Taliban, AQ, insurgents, jihadis, whatever you want to call them, they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions and treat women worse than livestock. Google Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca if you want to see what they do to our men (and don’t google it unless you have a strong stomach) and then imagine a woman in their hands. How is our 24/7 news cycle going to cover a captured, raped, mutilated woman?

After the first one, how are the men in the military going to treat their female comrades? ONE Thomasina Tucker is going to mean the men in the military will move heaven and earth to protect women, never mind what it does to the mission. I present you with Exhibit A: Jessica Lynch. Male lives will be lost trying to protect their female comrades. And the people of the US are NOT, based on the Jessica Lynch episode, prepared to treat a female POW the same way they do a man.

I say again, I would have loved to be in the infantry. I think I could have done it physically, I could’ve met almost all the male standards (jumping aside), and I think I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever came. But I would never do that to the men. I would never sacrifice the mission for my own desires. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if someone died because of me.

- Sentry

Mr. Obama's First Four Years

The Washington Post's George Will opines that President Obama's record over the last four years, and his apparent plans for the next four, afford numerous targets of opportunity for an adroit conservative opposition. Will begins with the president's unsubstantiated claims about climate change:

Happy days are not here again, but they are coming for conservatives. Barack Obama — with the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50 percent, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any reelected president when inaugurated since World War II — has a contradictory agenda certain to stimulate a conservative revival.

Consider his vow to expend political capital on climate change. The absurdity of the Kyoto approach — global climate treaties agreed to by 190 nations — is now obvious even to most former enthusiasts. Obama can propose cutting U.S. fossil-fuel emissions (just 16 percent of the global total) with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, but Congress will pass neither. So he will be reduced to administrative gestures costly to job growth, and government spending — often crony capitalism — for green energy incommensurate with his rhetoric.

He says that “the threat of climate change” is apparent in “raging fires,” “crippling drought” and “more powerful storms.” Are fires raging now more than ever? (There were a third fewer U.S. wildfires in 2012 than in 2006.) Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices? Is today’s drought worse than, say, that of the Dust Bowl, and was [that] caused by 1930s global warming?

As for “more powerful storms”: Because Sandy struck New York City, where the nation’s media congregate and participate in the city’s provincialism, this storm was declared more cosmically momentous than the 74 other hurricanes that have hit or come near the city since 1800. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina was called a consequence of global warming and hence a harbinger of increasing numbers of Category 3 or higher hurricanes. Since then, major hurricane activity has plummeted. No Category 3 storm has hit the United States since 2005. Sandy was just a Category 1.

Obama’s vow to adjust Earth’s thermostat followed the report that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous 48 states. But the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, who has concisely posed the actual climate policy choice (“How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change?”), has noted that although 2012 was 2.13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 2011, “2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006.” And “2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.” Such is the rigor of many who preen as devotees of science that they declared the 2012 temperatures in the contiguous states (1.58 percent of the Earth’s surface) proof of catastrophic global warming.

Will goes on to skewer Mr. Obama's prejudices against fossil fuels and the deadening effects of Obamacare on job creation. It's a record that'd be difficult to defend, and only the political inept would be unable to exploit it for electoral success in 2014. Fortunately for the president his opponents are clustered in a political party for which over the last several decades the word "inept" has been a connotative definition.

Word Power

Want to do better on your SATs, improve your chances of making more money and having a successful career? According to educational expert E.D. Hirsch one very good way to do all of that is to set out now to improve your vocabulary.

Hirsch notes the decline in verbal SAT performance over the last 40 years, ties it to "dumbed down" textbooks, and shows a correlation between that decline and increasing income inequality in our society. Educators, he argues, need to do more to help students enhance their vocabularies which he sees as a major key to future success. Here's an important part of his message:

There’s a well-established correlation between a college degree and economic benefit. And for guidance on what helps students finish college and earn more income, we should consider the SAT, whose power to predict graduation rates is well documented. The way to score well on the SAT—at least on the verbal SAT—is to have a large vocabulary. As the eminent psychologist John Carroll once observed, the verbal SAT is essentially a vocabulary test.

So there’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.

Early in the twentieth century, a well-meant but inadequate conception of education became dominant in the United States. It included optimism about children’s natural development, a belief in the unimportance of factual knowledge and book learning, and a corresponding belief in the importance of training the mind through hands-on practical experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, these ideas began spreading to teacher-training institutions. It took two or three decades for the new teachers and administrators to take over from the old and for the new ideas to revolutionize schoolbooks and classroom practices. The first students to undergo this new schooling therefore began kindergarten in the 1950s and arrived in 12th grade in the 1960s.

From 1945 to 1967, 12th-graders’ verbal scores on the SAT and other tests had risen. But then those scores plummeted. Cornell economist John Bishop wrote in the 1980s of “the historically unprecedented nature of the test score decline that began around 1967. Prior to that year test scores had been rising steadily for 50 years.” The scores reached their nadir around 1980 and have remained low ever since.

Later, another Cornell scholar, the sociologist Donald Hayes, showed that the decline of the verbal SAT scores was indeed correlated with a dumbing-down of American schoolbooks. Following the lead of the great literacy scholar Jeanne Chall, Hayes found that publishers, under the influence of progressive educational theories, had begun to use simplified language and smaller vocabularies. Hayes demonstrated that the dilution of knowledge and vocabulary, rather than poverty, explained most of the test-score drop.

Such correlations between vocabulary size and life chances are as firm as any correlations in educational research. Of course, vocabulary isn’t perfectly correlated with knowledge. People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the American population began knowing fewer words, getting less smart, and becoming demonstrably less able to earn a high income.

Why should vocabulary size be related to achieved intelligence and real-world competence? Though the intricate details of cognitive abilities are under constant study and refinement, it’s possible to give a rough answer. The space where we solve our problems is called “working memory.” For everyone, even geniuses, it’s a small space that can hold only a few items in suspension for only a few seconds. If one doesn’t make the right connections within that space, one has to start over again. Hence, one method for coping and problem solving is to reduce the number of items that one has to make sense of at any moment. The psychologist George A. Miller called that process “chunking.” Telephone numbers and Social Security numbers are good examples. The number (212) 374-5278, written in three chunks, is a lot easier to cope with than 2123745278.

Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory — say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the better you will be at dealing with various problems. Extend this example to whole spheres of knowledge and experience, and you’ll realize that a large vocabulary is a powerful coping device that enhances one’s general cognitive ability.

Hirsch goes on to discuss why the way students have been taught in the U.S. since the late 60s stifles the development of a powerful vocabulary and offers a number of suggestions for reform. It's a good article for anyone looking to make him or herself more marketable, as well as for those contemplating a career in primary education, or anyone concerned with the disparity between the "haves and the have-nots" in our society.

Who Cares If It's a Human Person?

One indication that people on one side of an issue are either winning or losing the intellectual argument is that, strangely enough, they grow more honest about what it is they want to accomplish.

For example, the left generally abhors the idea of private ownership of guns and would like very much to ban both firearms and the second amendment that protects the right to possess them, but they'll never acknowledge that that is their goal as long as it's unclear whether they'll win the issue. If they did admit it prematurely they'd be run out of town, so they speak more soothingly and circumspectly of "reasonable" measures while adopting a long-term incremental strategy for achieving their goal.

This, parenthetically, accounts for much of the resistance to their proposals by those who understand how the game is played. Savvy opponents realize that as soon as they compromise and grant some of the left's recommendations for gun restrictions the ratchet will kick in and additional "reasonable" measures will soon be advanced requiring even more compromise until eventually the right to possess a means of self-defense is eliminated.

If, on the other hand, the left thought it was either winning or losing on this issue we'd probably hear more of them admitting openly that we do indeed need to ban guns entirely and that until we do we'll never have a safe society, etc. Both losing big and winning big tends to elicit honesty. As long as the outcome is in doubt, however, these folks rarely tell us what they're really thinking.

We saw this ratchet at work recently on the debate over allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. Those who did not want to raise taxes were assured that it'll just be the wealthy who'll be required to pay their "fair share," a term that was never explicitly defined, and once the wealthy have their taxes raised then that'll be the end of it. Yet no sooner were the necessary compromises made and tax rates on the wealthy allowed to return to pre-Bush levels than we heard two conflicting claims. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader, naively declared that taxes were now "off the table," but Senator Chuck Schumer notified us that this was just an appetizer for our voracious government.

I thought of all this as I read an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon in which Ms Williams as much as admits that the pro-life folks have won the intellectual argument, that an unborn child is in fact a human person, that there's no point in trying to deny that truth any longer, and that it doesn't matter anyway because she still wants the right to kill it. She writes:

I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

As Roe v. Wade enters its fifth decade, we find ourselves at one of the most schizo moments in our national relationship with reproductive choice. In the past year we’ve endured the highest number of abortion restrictions ever. Yet support for abortion rights is at an all-time high, with seven in 10 Americans in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand, allowing for reproductive choice in all or “most” cases. That’s a stunning 10 percent increase from just a decade ago. And in the midst of this unique moment, Planned Parenthood has taken the bold step of reframing the vernacular – moving away from the easy and easily divisive words “life” and “choice.” Instead, as a new promotional film acknowledges, “It’s not a black and white issue.”

It’s a move whose time is long overdue. It’s important, because when we don’t look at the complexities of reproduction, we give far too much semantic power to those who’d try to control it. And we play into the sneaky, dirty tricks of the anti-choice lobby when we on the pro-choice side squirm so uncomfortably at the ways in which they’ve repeatedly appropriated the concept of “life.”

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

We’re so intimidated by the wingnuts, we get spooked out of having these conversations. We let the archconservatives browbeat us with the concept of “life,” using their scare tactics on women and pushing for indefensible violations like forced ultrasounds. Why? Because when they wave the not-even-accurate notion that “abortion stops a beating heart” they think they’re going to trick us into some damning admission. They believe that if we call a fetus a life they can go down the road of making abortion murder. And I think that’s what concerns the hell out of those of us who support unrestricted reproductive freedom.

Ms Williams believes her side has won on the larger issue, and she feels free to plainly admit that what pro-lifers have been saying for fifty years - that there's no substantive difference between a born and an unborn child and that abortion kills a person - is true. She says, in effect, "Yeah, abortion kills a living human person, but so what? If it makes my life easier I want to be able to do it." It's pretty chilling to think that this is probably the mainstream view among liberals.

She puts the cherry on top by calling those who are troubled by the culture of death she promotes "wingnuts." In Ms Williams' opinion it's not the people who are zealous in their determination to retain the right to kill children who are nuts, it's the people who want to protect children from a grisly death who are the lunatics. This piece of reasoning is nothing if not grotesque.

Media Derelictions

I realize that complaints about the dismal lack of professional fairness and objectivity in our major media are low-hanging fruit so easy to pluck that one sometimes wonders whether it's really worth bothering about. It's clear that much of the traditional media is in thrall to a liberal ideology and believe it their mission to promote that ideology and its champions in the White House and congress.

Perhaps we should just accept that fact, adjust to it, and not worry about the many egregious examples of bias and dishonesty that assault those of us who read newspapers and watch television news shows to learn the truth about what's going on in the country and in the world. Perhaps we should just accept that the media have lost all sense of a duty to objectively and even-handedly "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," and have instead placed themselves in the service of the Democrat party and the Obama administration.

Perhaps we should just accept it, but, even so, I can't.

The almost complete lack of media interest over the Fast and Furious scandal and Attorney General Holder's stonewalling of congressional hearings seeking to get to the bottom of it, and their insouciance over the Benghazi affair and their delight over Secretary Clinton's shameful performance in the recent congressional hearings are just two examples of their derelictions. They certainly wouldn't have been as disinterested had these scandals and disasters been the result of Republican incompetence and mismanagement.

Here's another example brought to our attention by Newsbusters:

The annual pro-life march, this year marking the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision, drew tens of thousands to Washington, DC on Friday, but didn’t garner a syllable of coverage on Friday’s World News on ABC nor the CBS Evening News. Yet on Saturday night, both newscasts highlighted a pro-gun control protest in DC which CBS anchor Jim Axelrod pegged at drawing “close to a thousand people.”

A protest drawing a few hundred people merited coverage, but a protest drawing tens of thousands did not. What was the justification for this disparity? One can't help but think that the media honchos see gun control as a desideratum and wish to give the impression that its popularity as a cause is sweeping the nation. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, represent a cause that's anathema to liberal sensibilities and thus any suggestion that their cause is popular among the people must be squelched.

So, ABC, for example, couldn't find time to inform us about the pro-life rally in D.C. but they did have time to discuss the national crisis spawned by the discovery that Subway's foot-long subs are actually only eleven inches long.

They also spent six minutes recently interviewing Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey on the subject of immigration reform, but asked him nary a single question about the current FBI investigation of his dalliances with underage prostitutes. Had that been an interview with any Republican politician does anyone think that that topic would have been ignored? It would doubtless have been the lead story on the broadcast, but since Menendez is a liberal Democrat it never got mentioned.

These anecdotes illustrate why contemporary political journalists, members of a once noble profession, often rank in public esteem about where used-car salesmen ranked a generation or two ago. They simply cannot be trusted to be impartial and fair in what they report and how they report it.

They've exchanged the role of a people's watchdog over corruption and power-grabbing among politicians for the role of cheerleaders for those same politicians. Instead of maintaining an attitude of professional detachment from the people upon whom they report, they act, as they did at the presidential inauguration, like swooning, squealing thirteen year-old girls at a Justin Beiber concert. One got the impression listening to reporters enthuse about being so close to the President that they could almost touch the hem of his garment that had he taken off his shirt and thrown it to the crowd they would've joined in the melee to win possession of it.

All of which is why we can be thankful for the internet. Were it not for this amazing development in the dissemination of information we'd know next to nothing, at least nothing we could place our confidence in, about what was really going on in the world. To the extent that the net is driving traditional media out of business it's too bad, but in large measure they've brought it upon themselves by trading the public's trust and respect for a mess of political pottage.

Welcome to Brave New World

Wesley J. Smith has a piece at First Things that should send chills down the spines of every reader. He argues that the radical environmentalist movement represents an "ongoing convergence of deep misanthropy, radical Malthusianism, and renewed advocacy for wealth redistribution." In other words, a profound contempt for humanity conflated with a fear of dire ecological consequences from overpopulation and a yearning for economic egalitarianism is hurtling us into frightening times.

Radical environmentalists (as opposed to conservationists) see human beings as a blight, a "plague upon the earth" to use David Attenborough's phrase. For many of them we're a toxic bacillus whose numbers need to be severely reduced.

The suggested means for the needed purgation are all, we're assured, non-coercive, but if our presence on the planet is such a cancerous curse why would Darwinian materialists, if given the power, not favor whatever means are necessary to bring about ends they deem so overridingly urgent?

What sort of means might we be hearing about in the not-too-distant future? Forced sterilization, compulsory abortion, elimination of the aged, infirm, and criminal, etc., are no doubt some examples, and why not? Why, given a materialist, naturalistic worldview, would any of these be wrong? Why would it be wrong to kill people if such measures are necessary to save the planet? As atheist superhero Richard Dawkins put it, "What's to prevent us from saying that Hitler was right?"

All that stands in the way, in a secular society unmoored from the belief of earlier generations that every person is created in the image of God and is precious to God, is the task of acquiring sufficient media and political influence to legislate those kinds of policies into law. A culture which no longer values life will have no difficulty finding ways to promote death.

Women in Combat

Ryan Smith is an attorney who was also a combat Marine veteran of the Iraq War. He points to a little commented upon aspect of the Obama administration's decision to allow women in combat. It's a consideration that causes one to wonder, after reading Smith's column in the Wall Street Journal, whether anyone in the Pentagon thought about or cared about it. Here's the heart of his essay:

Many articles have been written regarding the relative strength of women and the possible effects on morale of introducing women into all-male units. Less attention has been paid to another aspect: the absolutely dreadful conditions under which grunts live during war.

Most people seem to believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have merely involved driving out of a forward operating base, patrolling the streets, maybe getting in a quick firefight, and then returning to the forward operating base and its separate shower facilities and chow hall. The reality of modern infantry combat, at least the portion I saw, bore little resemblance to this sanitized view.

I served in the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a Marine infantry squad leader. We rode into war crammed in the back of amphibious assault vehicles. They are designed to hold roughly 15 Marines snugly; due to maintenance issues, by the end of the invasion we had as many as 25 men stuffed into the back. Marines were forced to sit, in full gear, on each other's laps and in contorted positions for hours on end. That was the least of our problems.

The invasion was a blitzkrieg. The goal was to move as fast to Baghdad as possible. The column would not stop for a lance corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, or even a company commander to go to the restroom. Sometimes we spent over 48 hours on the move without exiting the vehicles. We were forced to urinate in empty water bottles inches from our comrades.

Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade's face.

During the invasion, we wore chemical protective suits because of the fear of chemical or biological weapon attack. These are equivalent to a ski jumpsuit and hold in the heat. We also had to wear black rubber boots over our desert boots. On the occasions the column did stop, we would quickly peel off our rubber boots, desert boots and socks to let our feet air out.

Due to the heat and sweat, layers of our skin would peel off our feet. However, we rarely had time to remove our suits or perform even the most basic hygiene. We quickly developed sores on our bodies.

When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation's military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.

Read the whole article at the link, particularly Smith's last paragraph, and ask yourself whether you think it's wise to throw men and women together into these kinds of situations.

No Exchanges, No Obamacare

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) continues to run into unforeseen difficulties. One of the gravest is that should states refuse to set up insurance exchanges the federal government will have to do it in their stead, but the tax credits and subsidies which were to help people purchase qualified insurance plans can only be awarded by the states, not the feds. This means that financial incentives to buy insurance will not exist which means that after four years of fighting and trillions of dollars of expense we'll still have as many, maybe even more, uninsured people as we did at the outset.

This is pretty dispiriting given that the ostensible purpose of going through this bitter four year ordeal was to insure all those who couldn't, or wouldn't, buy health insurance on their own. Here's an excerpt from a piece in The Daily Caller that explains the predicament:

The Obama administration is waiving the deadline for states to establish a health insurance exchange in accordance with Obamacare, reports The New York Times. But it should not be taken as a sign of deference to the states, or a willingness to be flexible; it should be taken as a sign of desperation.

The announcement is in fact an attempt by the administration to shore up the health care law’s inherent weaknesses and to cajole states into enacting a federal scheme. Contrary to what the feds now claim, the latest and most glaring weakness of Obamacare is that it was crafted to depend on states to establish health insurance exchanges. These exchanges are meant to be the vehicles for the distribution of tax credits and subsidies to buy qualified health insurance plans.

If a state refuses to set up an exchange, and so far 25 have refused, the federal government must step in and create one. However, the law does not authorize tax credits and subsidies to flow through federally created exchanges, only those created by states....[This] has huge implications. If federal exchanges cannot facilitate tax credits and subsidies, they also cannot be used to impose penalties on employers that fail to comply with the law’s “employer mandate” — a fine of $2,000 per employee per year. States that refuse to set up an exchange could therefore shield thousands of their residents and small businesses from onerous federal taxes and penalties.

[B]y stipulating that tax credits and subsidies would be available only through state-created exchanges, Congress sought to create an incentive for states to set up their own exchanges — because it could not simply order states to create them without overstepping constitutional boundaries. It seems that it did not occur to Obamacare’s authors that many states would simply refuse, or that offering tax credits and subsidies would not be sufficient inducement for them to comply. It was a gross miscalculation, and could mean the undoing of Obamacare.

During the debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) congressmen scoffed at the suggestion that they should actually be expected to read the 2000+ page bill before they voted on it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi embarrassed herself by averring that we'd "have to pass the bill to see what was in it."

Well, now they've passed it, by hook and by crook, and they're seeing what's in it, and a lot of it is making those who rammed the bill through Congress and signed the thing into law look like a bunch of incompetent amateurs.

How High Gas Prices Kill an Economy

Many of us grumble when the price at the pump goes up, but the pinch it puts on our own pocketbooks aside, higher gasoline prices are a millstone around the neck of the economy and are often a near-death sentence for the poor.

Gail Tverberg writes a post at The Energy Collective titled Ten Reasons Why High Oil Prices Are a Problem in which she lists and explains the ramifications of high oil prices. Her piece could have been titled How High Gas Prices Kill an Economy and Devastate the Poor. Here's just one example:

It is not just oil prices that rise. The cost of food rises as well, partly because oil is used in many ways in growing and transporting food and partly because of the competition from biofuels for land, sending land prices up. The cost of shipping goods of all types rises, since oil is used in nearly all methods of transports. The cost of materials that are made from oil, such as asphalt and chemical products, also rises.

If the cost of oil rises, it tends to raise the cost of other fossil fuels. The cost of natural gas extraction tends to rise, since oil is used in natural gas drilling and in transporting water for fracking. Because of an over-supply of natural gas in the US, its sales price is temporarily less than the cost of production. This is not a sustainable situation. Higher oil costs also tend to raise the cost of transporting coal to the destination where it is used.

High oil prices mean higher prices for everything. This means people have less discretionary income to spend on restaurants, vacations, automobiles, college, homes and home repairs, etc. This means that the jobs of people working in these sectors, particularly marginal jobs most often held by the working poor, are placed at risk. As unemployment rises the government has to spend more on relief, but it's also taking in less tax revenue because there are fewer taxpayers. This means that relief programs have to be pared back. All of this means that high gas prices result in more people struggling to get food, heat, and shelter.

Liberals see higher gas prices as a good thing because they think that if the price is higher people will use less of it, and there'll be less carbon polluting the atmosphere. They're right about that, of course, but high energy costs are no way to solve the problem, if it really is a problem, of carbon emissions. Tverberg gives a good illustration from the airline industry of the ripple effect of high fuel prices. Check it out.

ATP Synthase

It seems the more we learn about biology the less plausible any naturalistic account of living things becomes. Science has discovered that living cells, for example, are filled with tiny protein machines that are constructed just like machines in the macro-world. The amazing functions and complexity of these machines strongly suggests intentional, purposeful engineering and only someone with an apriori commitment that permits only materialistic, naturalistic causes could insist otherwise.

One of perhaps thousands of such machines in living things is the tiny motor in the cell's mitochondria that produces, or synthesizes, ATP from ADP. ATP is a molecule that provides energy for myriad tasks within the cell, and copious quantities of it are necessary for the cell's vitality. The motor that churns it out, called ATP synthase, is illustrated in this short video:

One can believe that this device came about as a result of blind, purposeless, random processes like genetic mutation. One can believe that such things happened in a land faraway in the far, far distant past, but one would be hard-pressed to show how impersonal forces produce such marvels in any other sphere of human experience.

In other words, when we see machines like this we understand them to have been designed purposefully by an intelligent agent or agents. We have a "uniform experience," to borrow Hume's term, that machines do not result from the mindless activity of natural forces and processes but require the intentional activity of a mind.

It's not logically impossible that such contrivances could come about apart from intelligent agency, I suppose, but it takes a blind, irrational faith in chance and nature to think that they actually have.

Re: Liberalism and the Black Community

A student named Donavan writes in response to the recent post titled How Liberalism is Devastating the Black Community. I thought I'd share his reply with you, slightly edited:

I would have to agree with this article in some regard. I personally believe that you are absolutely correct that guns aren't the true problem. Like almost every action we do has an underlying emotion, so does violence in black communities. The thing that's behind the violence in these communities is the absence of fathers. I'm from Harlem, NY, and most of my friends that I grew up with are fatherless. All of them that I can think of right now are either dead or in jail, they either don't know their fathers or their fathers weren't present in their lives.

So first hand, I know the patterns of what could happen when a father isn't in the picture.

To go along with the fact that Chicago already has 25 murders, Philadelphia had the highest murder rate last year and those murders were committed by black and hispanic males. The statistics don't lie about how these neighborhoods need, as you put it, self-control and just all around guidance. Most media outlets in my opinion don't cover these stories as well as they should. I was complaining about this to some people that I know and I remember a person shared with me that if the news were to report just the deaths in New York alone, there would always be breaking news. I also remember someone else sharing with me that the news is too depressing as it is, and we don't need anymore depressing stories. Both of these comments make me see how people are viewing murders in these communities.

In my opinion, the first person was really saying, "Although I agree with you, there is no hope of this ever stopping." The second was saying, "This will never stop, and I'm sick and tired of it and don't want to deal with it." Multiple murders are tough to understand and deal with. Most people in these communities want to try but don't know where to start. I believe you have started in the best place possible, with fathers. Now my question is what is the plan?

I agree that Liberalism is part of the problem. My view on welfare has changed over the years. As a person that has been on the receiving end of welfare, I do understand the relief that it provides to single mothers, on the other hand, I also see how it promotes laziness. Seeing both sides of the coin, I can still understand how you can draw this conclusion. If I had a father in my life, it would've been easier on us or manageable with more income.

I completely agree that the media has completely destroyed the image of a father. We look at fathers today and see an oppressor, someone that never understands, someone that doesn't know how to apologize and someone that gets run over. One of the things I don't like is watching a movie where the daughter dictates what happens in the house, for a young man growing up without a father, why would I want to have a child that tells me what to do and how to do it, who even embarrasses me? The media makes fathers look weak. Another reason I think that kids don't grow up talking about being fathers is because it doesn't look attractive. The question I have is can this view that is being displayed by the media be directly linked to liberalism? Or better yet, who is to blame?

Another problem with media displaying bad views of fathers is they promote violence, sex, and what looks like "freedom". If no one is guiding a child, walking with him/her, telling him/her "no" on occasion, the pleasure-filled life looks amazing. When a child grows up without a father, they hurt. In addition to the city life that always offers whatever you want whenever you want it, why would you aspire to a future of parenthood?

Most people want to be parents, until they have a child. Living in the city, the mindset is "I want it, and I can get it". Who is sitting down with these children and telling them that the fun stops, who is telling them that they aren't really having fun, who is telling them that one day you will wake up to be thirty? (Kind of hard to get a child to see that when they think they won't make it to 21) The problem with violence, sex and drugs (all linked to gangs) is that they actually medicate. They feel good for the moment, but then it wears down. The need for a father's order, discipline and guidance is so high.

I agree with your view that liberalism is a problem as it relates to lack of fathers and violence, but there are also many others. I don't think you think that liberalism is the total foundation of the problem, but if you do then I don't agree. I believe it is a huge brick but not the whole problem. The problem as we both know is sin.

I was going to go into how the church has failed the community, but everyone does that so I'll focus on my opinions how we can help. I feel that we can get out into the community more often. I think in this generation we should talk more about marriage and sex and how beautiful it is when it is the way God intended. Going along with what you said in class today, it would help a ton if we would know the culture so we can better see how distorted the picture is and show them how it is supposed to be. I think we can do a better job of going to them and not waiting for them to come to us. All in all, I agree with you that liberalism does have a huge part in the devastation in the black community.

Chutzpah

The same man who heads the department which implemented Operation Fast and Furious which produced, by some estimates, 2000 dead Mexican civilians as well as at least two dead Americans, the same man who refused to answer the questions posed to him about this operation by a congressional oversight committee, is now saying that "we need tough penalties on gun traffickers who help funnel weapons to dangerous criminals."

Well, no kidding, but our Attorney General is essentially telling us that we need tougher penalties on people like himself, a statement with which I find myself in complete agreement:

After the Fast and Furious debacle and his stonewalling of the congressional inquiry into it how can he say this with a straight face?