Shared Sacrifice

A group of religious notables went to the White House recently to urge President Obama to be sure that whatever solution to our deficit crisis is ultimately decided upon it not worsen the situation of the poor. One of the attendees, Jim Wallis, writes about the visit on his blog God's Politics.

Several times in his column Wallis says things like this:

We reminded ourselves that people of faith must evaluate big decisions on issues like a budget by how they impact the most vulnerable.

We urged the president to protect programs for low-income people in the ongoing budget and deficit debate, and in any deal concerning the debt ceiling and default crisis. In an engaging back and forth conversation, the president and faith leaders discussed how we can get our fiscal house in order without doing so on the backs of those who are most vulnerable. We shared the concern that the deficit must be cut in a way that protects the safety net, and struggling families and children, and maintains our national investments in the future of all of us.

[P]rograms serving poor and hungry people should be protected and exempted from any budget cuts.

We agreed that we need both fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice. Those already hurting should not be made to hurt more, and those doing well should do their part in sacrificing.

Our goal is simply this: Whenever a new budget or deficit reduction proposal is put forth, somebody should ask how it will impact the poorest and most vulnerable. This is a biblical question, a fair question, and a question of justice.

Well, yes, but there are other questions of justice which are also "fair and biblical" which need to be answered as well. Until they are statements like Wallis' are pretty much meaningless. Here are some examples:

What exactly is a "fair share" from those who are doing well? What percentage of one's income is a just contribution to the welfare of the poor? Ten percent? Twenty percent? The highest income tax bracket in this country is 35% on those making more than $379,000. Is that a just figure? Should it be higher? If so, why?

How much of the burden should the wealthy be justly expected to bear? The top 1% of income earners (those who earn $410,000 or more) currently pay over 40% of the federal income taxes in this country. Is that a "fair share"? If not, would it be more fair for them to bear a greater percentage of the burden? Why? And what effect would it have on the working poor if small businesses making over $250,000 had their taxes raised?

What, specifically, is our government's obligation to the poor? How much of our income should we be compelled to allocate toward helping them? Should the poor be subsidized to the point where they have as much of the world's goods as everyone else?

Are there really any poor in America, anyway? Should people who have electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, heated houses, indoor plumbing, cars, televisions, cell phones, computers, and access to food, shelter, schools, medical care etc. be considered poor just because they don't have as many of these things as others do? How much more do we owe them, especially given that poverty in America is largely a function of personal choices that people make (e.g. the choice to drop out of school, to use drugs and alcohol, to not get married before one has children, to not develop a disciplined work ethic, etc.).

These are questions that always seemed to be glossed over when people like Wallis wax eloquent about our moral duties to the poor. Everyone agrees that there should be "shared sacrifice" and that we need to "help the poor", but what exactly these words mean is left very, very fuzzy, and Wallis doesn't do anything, at least in this recent essay, to help clear things up.

Bible Phobia

The phobic reaction to the Bible of those who call themselves scholars is not infrequently a source of genuine amusement. It's understandable, perhaps, that cosmologists or biologists might disregard clues that the Bible gives to where truth may lie in those disciplines, but for historians or archeologists to do so seems quite irrational.

Uncommon Descent directs us to an article in the journal Biblical Archeology in which archeologist Hershel Shanks relates a story about two friends and colleagues that reflects the absurd lengths to which people who reject the religious pronouncements of the Bible will go to demonstrate their utter contempt for any information whatsoever that's found in the book.

An archeologist named Eilat Mazar deduced from the Biblical evidence that the ancient palace of King David might be found by digging at a particular location. This apparently scandalized another colleague named Ronny Reich who accused Mazar of breaching professional ethics for basing her hunch on the Biblical record.

Here's Shanks' account:

One of Eilat’s crimes, according to Ronny, is using the Bible as a guide to where to excavate. Let me unpack this: As Eilat read the Bible, it seemed to indicate just where King David’s palace might be buried in the City of David—at least, it did to her. On this basis, she decided to dig there.

This was highly improper and unscientific, according to Ronny. When he heard that Eilat was using reasoning like this to find King David’s palace, he knew immediately that, proceeding in this way, “she would certainly find that building” (emphasis in original).

According to Ronny, that is the wrong way to proceed. Ronny refers to “minimalists,” who do it properly, “correlat[ing] their teachings first and foremost to the archaeological findings” and only then looking at the Bible. Ronny counts himself as one of these “minimalists,” who permit the use of the Biblical text “only if it is supported by another historical source (for example, Assyrian documents) or clearly supported by appropriate, unambiguously dated archaeological data (for example, an inscription found on a site).”

I would have thought that Eilat would have been praised for proceeding quite scientifically—according to the vaunted scientific method that has produced so much for our civilization. As I understand it, you formulate a hypothesis and then you proceed to test it, either proving or disproving it. Eilat had a hypothesis and she wanted to test it by digging.

But you can’t do that in the case of the Bible, according to Ronny. The reason appears to be that you can’t trust the archaeologist to test his or her hypothesis in an unbiased way once he or she formulates a hypothesis based on the Bible. If the archaeologist proceeds in this way, he or she will “certainly” find what was hypothesized....Ronny, of course, is not the only archaeologist to espouse these views. Indeed, in many archaeological circles, it is the prevailing view. It is OK, they say, to bring in the Bible after you have your archaeological results, but you can’t use the Bible to formulate a hypothesis or decide where to dig.

Why not? If the Bible were to tell us where to look for Mose's stone tablets or Jesus' tomb why would it be professionally offensive to look there without waiting until some other corroborating historical document was found which provided the same information?

Shanks enjoys a little sport with this bizarre principle:

I wonder if this rule would apply to other ancient Near Eastern texts. If, for example, an archaeologist working in ancient Babylon thought a cuneiform text indicated that a city extended beyond the limits hitherto accepted and decided to test this hypothesis by digging outside what was then thought to be the city wall, would anyone question proceeding in this way?

And I wonder what poor Eilat should have done when it occurred to her on reading her Bible that the text seemed to indicate the very spot in this small 12-acre site where David’s palace was located. Drive it from her mind? Perish the thought! Or perhaps she should formulate the hypothesis and then enlist some other archaeologist, untainted by her bias, to excavate the site.

Reich is apparently a materialist who seems nervous about people making archeological predictions based on Biblical data that may turn out to be confirmed. It's better to hold one's colleagues to an asinine rule, even if it means that great discoveries will not be made, than to risk confirming that perhaps the Bible is historically correct. This sort of perverse reasoning is a symptom that the materialist worldview is entering the latter stages of philosophical dementia.

The episode reminds me of a wonderful quote from William James: “A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” Indeed, and irrational rules are one indication that people are struggling to cling to an intellectually unsustainable metaphysics.

Big Society, Just Society

All people of good will, whether liberal or conservative, desire a society which is maximally just. The disputes between liberals and conservatives orbit around how best to achieve that common goal.

My friend Byron forwards an article by Jonathan Chaplin at Cardus which lays out how British conservatives are seeking to maximize social justice by implementing what they call a "Big Society" (as distinct from big government). The Big Society essentially draws upon the Catholic idea of subsidiarity and the Reformed notion of sphere sovereignty:

According to the UK government, there are three parts to the Big Society agenda, all of which will have their parallels in other countries: “community empowerment,” “opening up public services,” and “social action.”

The first of these (“community empowerment”) involves giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power over planning decisions. This amounts to a process of administrative decentralization within the sphere of government (from central to local), and a strengthening of democratic accountability (of local governments to the neighbourhoods they govern).

The second (“opening up public services”) involves an expansion of the existing policy of contracting out selected public services to non-governmental organizations (charities, social enterprises, private companies, and employee-owned cooperatives), where these might deliver a better or more efficient service. Such services will include not only routine tasks such as catering and cleaning but also specialist health services, employment support programmes, or drug rehabilitation centres. This amounts to a process of institutional devolution (from state to “third sector” civil society organisations or to commercial bodies operating in the market).

The third part (“social action”) is defined rather blandly as “encouraging and enabling people to play a more active part in society,” but takes concrete shape in three specific initiatives: the National Citizenship Service (a youth volunteering scheme), Community Organizers (a training scheme for local activists), and Community First (a fund for community groups in deprived neighbourhoods). This amounts to governmental enabling of voluntary action by individuals and local organizations. This is the smallest plank of the Big Society agenda and, while worthy enough in itself, is not likely to make that much impact.

In the U.S. the ideas comprising the "Big Society" have been talked about for a long time among conservatives. They were implicit in Marvin Olasky's book The Tragedy of American Compassion and in George Bush's abortive attempt to gin up support for community faith-based organizations which seek to deliver goods and services to the poor and the elderly. They were also embedded in his notion of "compassionate conservatism", a fine concept with an unfortunate name, suggesting, falsely, that most conservatism is flinty, niggardly, and hard-hearted.

Anyway, there's not much chance that the "Big Society" will catch on in the U.S. as long as Barack Obama is president and the Democrats control the Senate since the principles above (except the utilization of community organizers) run counter to the Democrat philosophy of a strong central government. If conservatives prevail in 2012, however, the principles discussed in Chaplin's article may have a real opening.

Chaplin says that the "Big Society" means both that people must never be allowed to fall below an agreed threshold of basic human dignity—a dignity shared equally by all and ultimately guaranteed by the state—and that they must never be denied the opportunity to exercise the full range of basic human responsibilities—a calling to which all must be invited in a society big enough for human flourishing.

This is precisely right. The social safety net has for too many become a hammock. One in seven Americans are on food stamps. Almost fifty percent pay no federal income taxes, essentially living off the largesse of the other fifty percent. We must continue to work toward a society where help for those who need it is seen as a kind of temporary loan to be paid back (or forward) and not as a permanent way of life.

After all, once people become permanent dependents of the state we can dismiss high-sounding talk of their dignity. Once an individual has lost his sense of self-reliance he'll have lost along with it whatever sense of dignity he might have had.

No Sacred Right

Victor Stenger is a retired physicist and active atheist who endorses an aggressive assault on all forms of religious faith. In a recent article titled Why Religion Must Be Confronted he argues that too many non-believers treat religious belief with a level of respect that it doesn't deserve and that therefore the public thinks that the case for the existence of God is stronger than it really is.

One sentence in particular sums up Stenger's attitude. He states:

It’s time for secularists to stop sucking up to Christians—and Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and any others who claim they have some sacred right to decide what kind of society the rest of us must live in or what a human being can do with her (or his) own body.

This sentence is interesting for several reasons. First, I know no one, at least among Christians, who claims a "sacred right" to decide the kind of society in which others should live. I doubt that Stenger knows any such people either. I do know people who believe that in a democracy everyone gets a vote and that if you're in the majority you do get to decide, within the constraints of the Constitution, what will be acceptable and what won't.

Stenger apparently thinks that Christians should not have a vote and that the only people who should are those who agree with him. He's tacitly arguing that Christians have no right to impose their moral views on society, but he's also deviously trying to impose on us his moral views by delegitimizing the opposition.

The second reason Stenger's claim is interesting is that if he's right and atheism is true then the whole question of "rights" is moot. A person has the right to do whatever he has the power - legal, political, or otherwise - to do. It's simply nonsensical for an atheist to complain that Christians are claiming a right they don't really have. On atheism, might makes right. If someone has the power to impose his will on others, either through fiat or the democratic process, then there's no moral authority that forbids him and no reason, other than perhaps prudential reasons, why he shouldn't do it.

The irony people like Stenger fail to perceive is that the only way it can be true that there's no right to impose one's morality on others is if there's a transcendent, personal, moral authority who prohibits such coercion. Stenger discounts the existence of such an authority and so should accept, if he's going to be consistent, that those insufferable, deluded believers do indeed have a "right" to do whatever they have the power to do.

The Prize

Harry Lonsdale is an atheist activist and a very wealthy man. So wealthy that he has offered a prize of $50,000 to anyone who can come up with a solution to the problems inherent in naturalistic abiogenesis (i.e. the origin of life from non-life through purely natural means).

The offer is revealing for a couple of reasons. First, it spotlights the fact that there is at the moment no plausible explanation as to how living things could have arisen apart from some sort of intelligent guidance. Second, it spotlights the desperation that this lack of an explanation for something so fundamental to a naturalistic worldview has induced among atheists.

Ever since Darwin naturalists have assured us that in time a solution will be discovered to the problem of how life originated, but every attempt to solve the riddle has come to naught. Worse, from their point of view, discoveries in molecular biology keep making the problem more and more intractable.

As long as the cell was thought to be a tiny glob of jelly there was every reason to be confident that chemistry would yield an answer to the problem of how the first glob arose. But now the cell is seen as more like a computer complete with a very sophisticated operating system, and a materialistic explanation for how such a thing could have arisen by chance and chemistry seems more remote than ever.

Add to that the problem that the cell is filled with specified complex information and that all of our experience has been that such information is invariably the product of a mind and never the product of chance, and you can understand why rich atheists are willing to part with $50,000 to try to motivate someone, anyone, to proffer a plausible hypothesis.

Mr. Lonsdale explains:

My goal in supporting Origin of Life research is to help scientists solve one of the great remaining problems in biology. A solution will give every science teacher in the world, from high school to college, a fundamental understanding of how life probably began on the Earth. In time, the world will learn that the laws of chemistry and physics, and the principle of evolution by natural selection, are sufficient to explain life’s origin.

I'm an expert on neither origin of life science nor finances, but I nevertheless have good news and bad news for Mr. Lonsdale. The bad news is that it's highly unlikely that anyone will qualify for his prize. The good news is that means his money is safe.

HT: Telic Thoughts

Skin to Brain in One Step

Developments in the field of tissue regeneration are proceeding apace. Now comes word of yet another major advance in the use of skin cells to develop neural tissue:

Skin cells from a 30-year-old woman have been turned directly into mature nerve cells similar to those found in the brain using a procedure that promises to revolutionise the emerging field of regenerative medicine.

Scientists said they were astonished to discover that they could convert a person's skin tissue into functioning nerve cells – bypassing an intermediate stem-cell stage – by the relatively simple procedure of adding a few short strands of RNA, a genetic molecule similar to DNA.

The breakthrough could soon lead to the generation of different types of human brain cells in a test tube which could be used to study a range of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

It seems that so much of the progress we read about in this field is based on the use of somatic cells rather than embryonic stem cells. This is wonderful news in that it renders moot the ethical controversy over the killing of human embryos to harvest their stem cells for research.

The Thrill Is Gone

Naomie Emery declares that our 70 year fling with welfare statism is over. It doesn't work, and the evidence is there for all to see. Here's the heart of her brief:

In the United States, the states patterned most on the Old Europe model—those with high taxes, high spending, and strong public unions—suffered the same plight as Europe, while those with free-market models did not. “The eight states with no state income tax grew 18 percent in the past decade,” Michael Barone tells us. “The other states grew just 8 percent.”

The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15 percent in the past decade, the 28 others grew 6 percent. The 16 states that don’t require collective bargaining with state employees grew 15 percent, the others grew 7 percent. The most rapid growth—21 percent—was in the Rocky Mountain states and Texas, which have low taxes, weak unions, and light regulation.

Among the states with high taxes, strong unions, and heavy public employee pension burdens are those in the Rust Belt around the Great Lakes. As Matt Continetti writes in the Washington Post, “Five of the eight states that border the Great Lakes now have Republican governors working to limit union power,” while one Democrat, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, son of a much revered liberal icon, has been praised by New Jersey’s Chris Christie as his cost-cutting twin. And to everyone’s shock, the Democratic legislature in Massachusetts has voted to rein in unions, too.

“For decades, the Great Lakes states have subscribed to a high-tax, high-spend, closed-shop political model,” explains Continetti. “That hasn’t worked out.” That didn’t work out in Europe (whose welfare states the American left has always looked up to); that didn’t work out in American states such as California and Michigan; that didn’t work out in Detroit, which is becoming a wasteland in spite of massive infusions of government money, and that didn’t work out for General Motors, which turned in time into a retirement plan with a car company attached to it, which priced itself out of the general market while foreign car companies built factories in right-to-work states in the South, employed hundreds of thousands of people, and took its share of the market away.

It probably won’t work out in Illinois, either, where the Democratic governor passed a massive tax increase, and the Republican governors of neighboring states invited Illinois businessmen to relocate there.

Of course, this overwhelming evidence of failure will be blithely ignored by true believers like Mr. Obama who insist, despite the contrary record provided by human experience, that if we just raise taxes on the rich high enough the rest of us can all have a good life at their expense.

Six in Ten Palestinians

When people wonder who it is that stands in the way of peace in the Middle East we might point to a recent poll that shows that 60% of Palestinians reject a two state solution:

Only one in three Palestinians (34 percent) accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg.

Respondents were asked about US President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.”

Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it.

Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians’ real goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.

Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.

Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.

When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.

These results will unfortunately leave much of world opinion unmoved. It's an odd thing about the Left that they always seem to assume that where there's conflict the fault must lie with the party most closely allied with the U.S.

Or they see the conflict through the lens of Marxism: The Palestinians live in squalor, the thinking goes, and the Israelis are relatively wealthy, so the Palestinian plight must be caused by Israeli oppression, exploitation and intransigence. The problem would go away if the Israelis would simply stop defending themselves and/or just went away themselves, and then there'd be peace in the region.

According to the Left, since the Israelis unreasonably refuse to do the one thing that would bring peace, i.e. commit suicide, Palestinian anger and violence is manifestly the Jews' fault. QED.

The Other Hockey Stick

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein posts a graph that illustrates how the national debt has exploded in the last several years and impresses upon us the imminent disaster that's looming ahead.

Klein notes that the colors showing control of the House of Representatives seem to be backwards, but that doesn't diminish the frightening significance of the data.

One wonders why those who oppose spending cuts in Washington aren't terrified out of their wits by this chart. After all, a similar "hockey stick" pattern of global temperatures has precipitated near panic and cries among liberals to take immediate remedial action to save us from impending disaster, so why doesn't this?

If Democrats are prepared to raise gas prices to discourage carbon consumption because they fear carbon dioxide is causing global temperatures to rise out of control - a fear that may well be unfounded - why are they not atremble over the data depicted in this graph? The threat it poses to our national survival is far more obvious and urgent than is the data on global warming.

Why are Democrats not demanding that we cut government programs immediately and severely in order to rein in spending? Why does President Obama insist on a carbon cap but not a cap on our bloated budget? Why does he allow fear of global warming and runaway greenhouse gasses keep us from drilling for American oil, but seems to have no qualms at all about the runaway spending that's leading us to the brink of a global economic collapse that could visit enormous calamity upon the world and far sooner than would climate change?

Why?

Thanks to Bill for passing along the link.

Call His Bluff

Charles Krauthammer puts the dart in the small red circle in his recent column in the Washington Post on President Obama's insincerity in the debt ceiling negotiations. Krauthammer begins with this:

President Obama is demanding a big long-term budget deal. He won’t sign anything less, he warns, asking, “If not now, when?” How about last December, when he ignored his own debt commission’s recommendations? How about February, when he presented a budget that increases debt by $10 trillion over the next decade? How about April, when he sought a debt-ceiling increase with zero debt reduction attached?

All of a sudden he’s a born-again budget balancer prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements. Really? Name one. He’s been saying forever that he’s prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts. But never once has he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement. Hasn’t the White House leaked that he’s prepared to raise the Medicare age or change the cost-of-living calculation?

Anonymous talk is cheap. Leaks are designed to manipulate. Offers are floated and disappear.

Say it, Mr. President. Give us one single structural change in entitlements. In public.

The rest of the column is very much worth reading.

Continually raising the debt ceiling is foolish. It just puts us deeper in debt and ties a heavy weight around our children's necks as they embark on their swim across the lake of life. The reason the debt ceiling needs to be raised is because we've spent much more than we have. We're like an unemployed man maxing out his credit cards and asking for his credit limit to be raised.

Given these realities the obvious course of action is to tear up the credit cards and sharply reduce our spending, which is what the Republicans want to do, but which the president refuses to do, at least in any meaningful way.

Instead, his solution is to require the top 5% of wage earners, people and small businesses who are already bearing about 55% of the federal income tax burden in this country, to pay even more.

The Republicans lack the power to impose the common sense solution on our spending addiction, but Krauthammer offers some suggestions:

It's time to call Obama’s bluff.

The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

The fat-cat tax breaks (those corporate jets) that Obama’s talking points endlessly recycle? Republicans should call for urgent negotiations on tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles commission that, in one option, strips out annually $1.1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes while lowering tax rates across the board to a top rate of 23 percent. The president says he wants tax reform, doesn’t he? Well, Mr. President, here are five months to do so.

Will the Democratic Senate or the Democratic president refuse this offer and allow the country to default — with all the cataclysmic consequences that the Democrats have been warning about for months — because Obama insists on a deal that is 10 months and seven days longer?

That’s indefensible and transparently self-serving. Dare the president to make that case. Dare him to veto — or the Democratic Senate to block — a short-term debt-limit increase.

What do the Republicans have to lose?

Primer on Fine-Tuning

Readers who've heard of the argument for an intelligent designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe, but aren't sure what, exactly, the argument is can find an excellent summary in this excerpt from the film Privileged Planet:

Dozens of these parameters and constants are set to unimaginably precise values. In some cases the tolerance for error is as little as one part in 10^100. Deviation of just that much from the actual value would result in either no universe at all or a universe unfit for life.

When one considers that there are only 10^80 atoms in the entire universe the unimaginable exactitude with which it is put together is breathtaking.

Slaughtering Wildlife with Green Energy

Here's a good illustration of the law of unintended consequences:

Bats are something of a one-species stimulus program for farmers, every year gobbling up millions of bugs that could ruin a harvest. But the same biology that allows the winged creatures to sweep the night sky for fine dining also has made them susceptible to one of Pennsylvania's fastest-growing energy tools.

The 420 wind turbines now in use across Pennsylvania killed more than 10,000 bats last year -- mostly in the late summer months, according to the state Game Commission. That's an average of 25 bats per turbine per year, and the Nature Conservancy predicts as many as 2,900 turbines will be set up across the state by 2030.

Bats are nature's pesticide, consuming as many as 500 insects in one hour, or nearly 3,000 insects in one night, said Miguel Saviroff, the agricultural financial manager at the Penn State Cooperative Extension in Somerset County.

"A colony of just 100 little brown bats may consume a quarter of a million mosquitoes and other small insects in a night," he said. "That benefits neighbors and reduces the insect problem with crops."

If one turbine kills 25 bats in a year, that means one turbine accounted for about 17 million uneaten bugs in 2010.

Bats save farmers a lot of money: About $74 per acre, according to an April report in Science magazine that calculated the economic value of bats on a county-by-county basis.

In Allegheny County, bats save farmers an estimated $642,986 in a year. That's nothing compared with more agricultural counties in the region such as Somerset ($6.7 million saved), Washington ($5.5 million) or Westmoreland ($6.1 million).

Lancaster County? You owe bats $22 million.

It's not just bats that are dying around wind turbines. An estimated 1,680 birds were killed by turbines last year, according to the state Game Commission report.

The disparity in mortality stems from biology. Birds typically crash into the blade and die from blunt force trauma, while bats suffer from a condition called barotrauma. It's the bat equivalent of the "bends" that scuba divers can suffer if they surface too quickly.

The rapid drop in air pressure around the blades causes the bats' lungs to burst, and they collapse with no ostensible lacerations or scars on the body.

I'll bet the bats and birds are happy to know that green energy sources are so much more earth-friendly than those awful fossil fuels.

Congressional Buffoonery

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D, TX) continues the tradition of congressional buffoonery, a tradition to which she has herself generously contributed over the years, claiming on the House floor that opposition to President Obama's position on the debt ceiling issue is racist:

Only this president has been treated disrespectfully, according to Ms Lee. Apparently she has forgotten how the Democrats and the media treated Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Ms Lee's is another example of the following syllogism which circulates among Mr. Obama's supporters:

Mr. Obama is black
Mr. Obama is opposed by Republicans
Therefore, Republicans oppose Mr. Obama because he is black

I'm loath to pose the question for fear that it would be deemed either racist or sexist, or both, in Ms Lee's "community", but how did someone of her particular intellectual skill set ever make it to the House of Representatives?

Actually the question isn't racist because I wonder the same thing about Nancy Pelosi (D, CA):

Does she even know the story of Job? Is she not embarrassed to claim that Mr. Obama's situation with an antagonistic congress is far worse than that of a man who lost everything he owned, including his family?

Nor is it sexist to question Ms Lee's intellectual gifts because I wonder the same thing about Congressman Hank Johnson(D,GA) who's concerned that too many Marines on Guam may cause it to capsize:

These are the people who are, as you read this, deciding the fate of our nation. Sleep tight.

Push/Pull Immigration

Damien Cave has a very interesting article in the New York Times which states that illegal immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle and for some surprising reasons. He explains that immigration has always been a "push/pull" phenomenon - conditions in Mexico push people out while conditions in the U.S. pull them in. Neither of those forces is as strong today as they were just five years ago.

Here's Cave:

The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.

American census figures analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center also show that the illegal Mexican population in the United States has shrunk and that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators from Mexico settled in the United States in 2010, down from about 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004. Although some advocates for more limited immigration argue that the Pew studies offer estimates that do not include short-term migrants, most experts agree that far fewer illegal immigrants have been arriving in recent years.

The question is why. Experts and American politicians from both parties have generally looked inward, arguing about the success or failure of the buildup of border enforcement and tougher laws limiting illegal immigrants’ rights — like those recently passed in Alabama and Arizona. Deportations have reached record highs as total border apprehensions and apprehensions of Mexicans have fallen by more than 70 percent since 2000.

But Mexican immigration has always been defined by both the push (from Mexico) and the pull (of the United States). The decision to leave home involves a comparison, a wrenching cost-benefit analysis, and just as a Mexican baby boom and economic crises kicked off the emigration waves in the 1980s and ’90s, research now shows that the easing of demographic and economic pressures is helping keep departures in check.

This could all change very quickly, of course, if conditions both there and here were reversed. Cave calls one hundred thousand illegals a year "a trickle" but it's still a substantial figure.

That's why the need to secure the border and to address the problem of what to do with illegal immigrants who are already here remains pressing.

Gold Rush

World economic uncertainty is fueling a flight to gold that shows every sign, experts say, of accelerating. My brother Bill sends along a column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the British Telegraph which is full of foreboding. Here are a couple of salient lines from the column:

"It is very scary: the flight to gold is accelerating at a faster and faster speed," said Peter Hambro, chairman of Britain's biggest pure gold listing Petropavlovsk.

"One of the big US banks texted me today to say that if QE3 actually happens, we could see gold at $5,000 and silver at $1,000. I feel terribly sorry for anybody on fixed incomes tied to a fiat currency because they are not going to be able to buy things with that paper money."

As a point of reference gold is presently selling for just shy of $1600 an ounce and silver is at about $39 an ounce.

QE3 would be the third round of an infusion of dollars (actually electronic credits) into the money supply to buy government debt which we're going to have more of because the president and his party refuse to stop spending money we don't have. The more money the Fed pumps into the economy the less it'll be worth and the more people will look to convert their rapidly depreciating dollars into something that will hold its value.

Evans-Pritchard leaves us with this observation:

Step by step, the world is edging towards a revived Gold Standard as it becomes clearer that Japan and the West have reached debt saturation. World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said it was time to "consider employing gold as an international reference point." The Swiss parliament is to hold hearings on a parallel "Gold Franc". Utah has recognised gold as legal tender for tax payments.

This is an indication that people around the world are losing confidence in the American government's willingness and ability to properly manage its economy. The rush to gold means a loss of faith in the dollar and there's no other currency right now to take its place.

Drone War

One of the frequent objections to the use of predator drones and their armaments to dispatch terrorists in Pakistan is that all we're doing is alienating the local tribesmen and thus creating more recruits for the terrorists. Strategy Page, however, offers a very different perspective on this:

While the Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan's tribal territories are not happy with the six year CIA decapitation (kill the leaders) campaign, many of the local tribesmen are. Attacked by Predator and Reaper UAVs, armed with missiles, the terrorists (al Qaeda, Taliban and the Haqqani Network) have lost over 40 senior leaders in the last six years, most of them in the last three years. These losses are not only bad for morale at the top, but are seriously disrupting terrorist activities.

The locals love this, because the Islamic radicals have been nothing but trouble. For one thing, the radicals come across as a bunch of self-righteous bullies, and use their weapons to intimidate, or kill, anyone who crosses them. This includes coercing families to provide daughters to be wives of bachelor terrorists.

Then there is the terrorist tactic of using civilians as human shields for protection from the missile attacks. Here's where the CIA won hearts and minds, by scrupulously avoiding casualties among the innocent tribesmen. Moreover, the tribes eventually drew the line on human shields, bringing out their own guns and forcing the Islamic radicals to back off on hostages.

The locals also abandoned their compounds when the terrorists came by to spend the night. If the CIA hit the compound (after noting how the owners fled), the tribesmen blamed the Islamic radicals, not the CIA, for the damage.

The Islamic radicals know that the tribesmen have been cheering, not so much for the CIA, as against the radicals, but don't make an issue of it. On the surface, everyone is a good Moslem. But the local Moslems make no secret of wishing that the super-Moslems would go somewhere else.

The Afghan Taliban have created the same animosities, and American troops have long noted the pleas from local civilians to kill the local Taliban. This was often a matter of life and death for these civilians, because the Taliban would, if they were still alive after foreign troops left the area, come back and kill any civilians they believed had helped the foreign soldiers.

As with the war against al Qaeda in Iraq everyone benefits when one of these brutal thugs is eliminated and even though indigenous Muslims may prefer that it not be infidels to whom they should be grateful, evidently they're still glad that the infidels are doing it.

Wimpy's Bargain

Karl Rove has written a very helpful piece on the debt ceiling crisis for the Wall Street Journal. He clears away a lot of the fog about what exactly would happen if the situation remains unresolved come August 2nd:

President Barack Obama and Congress face a mess if the federal government hits the debt ceiling Aug. 2. The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, projects that the government will receive $172 billion in revenues between Aug. 3 and Aug. 31, but it is on the hook to spend $306 billion, leaving a shortfall of $134 billion.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama told Scott Pelley of CBS News that "there may simply not be the money in the coffers" to issue Social Security, veterans and disability checks after Aug. 3.

Not so. The $172 billion in revenues collected over the rest of the month can pay the $29 billion interest charges on the national debt, Social Security benefits ($49 billion), Medicaid and Medicare ($50 billion), active duty military pay ($2.9 billion), Department of Defense vendors ($31.7 billion), IRS refunds ($3.9 billion), and about a quarter of the $12.8 billion in unemployment checks due that month.

There will, however, be no cash for highway construction, no checks for federal workers or retirees, no agriculture payments, no open national parks. Interest rates are also likely to rise if U.S. debt is downgraded, adding massively to the deficit and further damaging the economy. This would be a disaster with no political winners.

So what's preventing our leaders from arriving at a solution? The Republicans want spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. The Democrats want tax increases in return for agreeing to spending cuts:

The president wants a $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase to get him past next year's election—and the deal he's proposing is based on promised future cuts paired with substantial tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 a year.

This means that it's not just millionaires and billionaires whose taxes would rise, but thousands of small businesses working on tight margins would have their costs go up as well. This would inevitably lead to higher unemployment and more business failures. This the Republican negotiators refuse to agree to, and even though Mr. Obama is willing to agree to spending cuts in exchange for his tax increase there's another problem:

[T]he $4 trillion in deficit reduction that Mr. Obama talks about is shy on details. No one who's attended his frequent negotiating sessions knows what his proposal really is.

The president has made a bipartisan agreement even more difficult by declaring certain spending off-limits to cuts. Mr. Obama's "untouchable" list includes his $1 trillion health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, education and training outlays, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal, spending on "green" jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements except further squeezing payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals.

Republicans have wisely declined. Demanding the GOP vote for immediate tax increases that would be offset by vague, future tax cuts conjures up images of Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. The tax increases would be real—the future tax rate cuts would be imaginary.

The Democrats complain that the Republicans are not willing to compromise by raising taxes, but why should they? Tax increases would only worsen the economy and it's profligate spending that got us into the mess in the first place. Why, then should we not just cut spending?

The president offers what might be called the Wimpy (of the old Popeye cartoons) bargain - he'll gladly pay us on Tuesday (spending cuts) for a hamburger (tax increases) today, but giving Mr. Obama the hamburger just fattens government even more and there's no guarantee that Tuesday will ever come. Some deal.

The White Queen and the Evolution of Sex

'Now I'll give you something to believe,' said the White Queen. 'I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.'

'I can't believe that!' said Alice.

'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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One of the vexing problems with any view of evolution that holds it to be an unguided, random process is the sheer improbability of the chance evolution of phenomena like abiogenesis, insect metamorphosis, and sexual reproduction.

Focussing on the last of these, Jonathan M. at Evolution News and Views has an interesting discussion of the intractable difficulties which confront attempts to explain the evolution of sex on purely naturalistic terms. Here's an excerpt:

There are several reasons why the origin of sex presents a problem. For starters, there is the waste of resources in producing males. Assuming a sexually-reproducing female gives birth to an equal number of male and female offspring, only half of the progeny will be able to go on to have more offspring (in contrast to the asexually reproducing species, all the offspring of which can subsequently reproduce).

Thus, it is to be expected that the asexual female will proliferate, on average, at twice the rate of the sexual species. Given the disadvantage thereby confronting the sexually-reproducing species, one would expect them to be quickly outcompeted by the asexual species. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that, in contrast to the asexual species, the females of the sexually-reproducing species perpetuate only half of their successful genotype. To transition, therefore, from a state of asexuality to sexual reproduction is, in effect, to gamble with 50% of one's successful genotype.

Given that the whole purpose of natural selection is the preservation of those organisms which pass on their successful genes, this strikes at the heart of evolutionary rationale.

The problems extend even deeper than this. For there is, of course, the additional conundrum related to the fact that gametes (i.e. sex cells) undergo a fundamentally different type of cell division (i.e. meiosis rather than mitosis).

Anyone who recalls their high school biology will realize how amazing it would be for meiosis to develop solely by undirected chance and random mutation.

Jonathan continues:

Meiosis entails the copying of only half of the chromosomal material. In similar fashion to mitosis (which occurs in somatic cells), each chromosome is duplicated to yield two chromatids. ...at the start of meiosis, each visible 'chromosome' possesses four chromatids. At the first division, these homologous chromosomes are separated such that each daughter nucleus has exactly half the chromosome number. At this stage, each is present as two copies (chromatids).

These chromatids are hence separated at the second division such that each new nucleus only has a single copy. In order for sexual reproduction to work, it is essential that the process of meiosis evolve to halve the chromosome number. And this ability must also only occur in the gametes and not in the somatic cells. This difficulty is accentuated by the multitude of novel elements which are found in meiosis, rendering it unlikely to be explicable in terms of single mutational steps.

And then there is the added problem of male and female complementarity -- a seemingly remarkable incidence of co-evolution.

Complementarity involves the simultaneous evolution not only of physiological and morphological processes and structures but also simultaneous evolution of behavioral patterns that synchronize the sexual rhythms of the two sexes of a particular species. It wouldn't do, for example, to have the male blossoms of a plant coming into flower in the spring and the female blossoms appearing in the autumn.

At any rate, one can be an evolutionist without sacrificing one's skepticism, but it's awfully hard to see how one can be a darwinian evolutionist - i.e. one who believes that the process proceeded merrily along without benefit of any intelligent guidance - without, like the White Queen, having to believe six impossible things before breakfast every morning. Yet somehow the darwinians manage to pull it off even as they scoff at theists for being skeptical and "superstitious".

The Ledge

My friend Matt calls our attention to a film titled The Ledge just released last weekend. The movie explicitly endorses atheism and is an attempt to portray disbelief in a positive light. According to CNN's Belief Blog, The Ledge is "a story of religion, love and revenge that pits a conservative Christian husband against an atheist who has seduced the religious man’s Christian wife."

I suppose seducing another man's wife may pass for positive light among some, but let's not dwell on that. The film is written and directed by Matthew Chapman, an outspoken atheist who says that it's Hollywood’s first offering to feature an openly atheist hero in a story about religious conflict.

According to the article at the link,

Chapman's mission is to help create a more positive image for atheism, which he says is often misunderstood and maligned, for audiences who may otherwise not be exposed to it.

“My hope was to make an emotional appeal,” Chapman says. He hopes it’s a “Brokeback Mountain” moment for nonbelievers.

This is understandable. An appeal to peoples' emotions to persuade them to accept atheism is bound to be much more efficacious than appealing to their reason since there simply are no good rational arguments for atheism. Perhaps the following assertion, in which Chapman displays an wincingly inadequate understanding of what religious faith is, indicates why Chapman is wise to stick to emotional, rather than rational, appeals:

"This suspicion about people whose only crime is not believing in things until they're proven seems weird," Chapman said. "To me, there is something much more terrifying about voting for someone who accepts things on faith without any evidence whatsoever."

In the first place, no one, believer nor unbeliever, demands proof for epistemic justification, and for Chapman to assert that they do is to reveal a disappointing shallowness in his grasp of how and why people believe.

Secondly, it's just ludicrous to imply that Christians believe "without any evidence whatsoever". The evidence for the existence of God, for example, is very strong and the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is also strong enough to impress anyone who's not a priori opposed to the possibility of such an event. I'm somewhat surprised that a man who has undertaken to make a movie on the subject is apparently oblivious to this evidence.

The CNN article, which has a lot of other interesting material on the film, closes with this:

Chapman wants to open a conversation about people who don’t believe in God. Whether filmgoers will see his portrayal of Christianity as insulting is yet to be seen.

I hope that in the course of this conversation someone will think to ask those who don't believe to explain how atheism offers a superior view of the world than does Christianity. Which worldview, the Christian or the atheistic, offers the best explanation for the deep yearning people have for meaning in their life, for the universal desire for justice, for our conviction that selflessness is morally superior to selfishness, or for our belief that human beings have dignity, worth and inherent human rights.

None of these yearnings, desires, or beliefs make any sense on the supposition that atheism is true.

There's no room in an atheistic worldview for belief in an ultimate meaning to life, there's no foundation for moral obligation or moral judgment, and there's no reason to think that justice will, or could, ever prevail. Nor is there anything upon which to base a belief in human dignity or human rights. There's not even a good argument for believing that human reason is trustworthy, and there's certainly no basis for hope that any of these circumstances could ever be otherwise.

But don't take my word for it - although I do commend to you this paper in which I develop the argument at greater length - rather listen to what two of the most prominent of the "New Atheists", Will Provine of Cornell and Richard Dawkins of Oxford, have to say on the matter. Here's Provine:

"There are no Gods, no purposes, and [thus] no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death...no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will."

And Dawkins:

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

Given that atheism offers us such a bleak view of life I wish Mr. Chapman good luck with his emotional appeal and his attempt to portray atheism in a positive light. I'm afraid, though, that to the extent that he's honest about atheism he'll only depress those in his audience most disposed to his point of view.

Double Standards

For those who savor irony: Israel has been roundly condemned by the world community for building a wall to keep Palestinian terrorists from infiltrating the country and killing civilians. International observers have loudly complained that this wall works a hardship on the Palestinian people, and no doubt it does.

Now comes word, however, that the Palestinians are building a wall of their own to keep out terrorists seeking to infiltrate Gaza from Libya and Egypt.

The following is excerpted from a debkafile report:

While complaining to the world about the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip, four days ago, Hamas began building fortifications to block the territory's western boundary with Egyptian Sinai, debkafile's military sources report. Hamas is said to be anxious to ward off the spillover of post-revolutionary chaos from Egypt and Sinai into the Gaza Strip and curtail the new influx of fighters and smugglers from Libya and Sinai Bedouin affiliated with al Qaeda. These groups have gone into the smuggling tunnel business on their own and are causing mayhem.

Our sources report that a work force, building materials and equipment are working overtime to throw up a fortified earthworks barrier 10-12 meters high and 14 kilometers long, running from the Rafah crossing up to the Mediterranean 50 meters inside Gaza territory. The side facing Egypt is densely cloaked with barbed wire to stop climbers. Earthmoving equipment is flattening its top surface, presumably for watchtowers.

A bizarre situation has developed: While Hamas continues its smuggling operations underground, illicitly importing munitions, rockets and explosives for terrorist use, on the surface, it is putting in place a mechanism for blockading its own border.

Do you suppose the world will be as outraged by the construction of this barrier to block the flow of terrorists into Gaza as it was over the Israeli wall designed to block the flow of terrorists into Israel, or do you think that's a silly question?