Who Designed the Designer?

Perhaps you've heard materialists retort, when confronted with the argument that the universe and life show overwhelming evidence of having been designed for life, that if that is so then who designed the designer? Implicit in the objection is that if you can't describe the designer or say how, exactly, it designed things then your argument is refuted. It's a philosophically naive reply, but a common one for all that.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a simple three step rejoinder to it:

Step 1: Assume that Craig Venter (a biologist working on developing artificial life) succeeds in developing an artificial life form and releases it into the wild.
Step 2: Assume that a researcher - let’s call him John - later finds one of Venter’s life forms, examines it, and concludes that it was designed by an intelligent designer.
Step 3: John’s design inference is obviously correct. Note that John’s design inference is not any less correct if he (a) does not know who Craig Venter is; and (b) is unable to say who designed Craig Venter.

Arrington goes on to ask, "Does it say anything about the paucity and/or weakness of our opponents’ arguments that they think the 'Who designed the designer' argument is one of their best?"

It's the fundamental claim of intelligent design proponents that certain aspects of the world, specifically cosmic fine-tuning and complex specified information in living things, are evidence of a cosmic intelligence. Despite what some of their philosophically unsophisticated critics may think, their argument is not the least discredited because they can't say how the engineer came to be or who the engineer was (or is).

Progressive Civility

The following is a quote from Froma Harrop a syndicated columnist who heads the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a group that runs a project called Restoring Civility which is dedicated to the improvement of the tone of our public discourse. Given Ms Harrop's involvement in Restoring Civility this passage will cause you to shake your head:

Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States–threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate. . . . Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that’s what Obama has been doing. . . . That the Republican leadership couldn’t control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party. But oddly, Obama’s passivity made it hard for responsible Republicans to control their destructive children. The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he’d say, ‘OK.’ So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, ‘Let’s talk.’

Well, a lot of people have noted the disconnect between Ms Harrop's role in Restoring Civility and her incendiary language in this passage and have called her on it. Her attempts to explain herself are pretty funny. For instance, she said this:

I see incivility as not letting other people speak their piece. It’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse. Of course, there are matters of delicacy, and I dispensed with all sweet talk in this particular column. And I did stoop to some ad hominem remarks, I’ll admit.

This elicited so much derision on her website that she flouted even her own self-serving definition of civility by shutting down the comments and denying others the ability to "speak their piece." You can read about Ms Harrop and her peculiar notions of civility at Hot Air.

The lesson here, apparently, is that when secular liberal/progressives talk of civility what they have in mind is a conversation between two or more progressives in full agreement on the topic under discussion. As for courteous, respectful discourse between them and, say, a tea partier, well, in that case name-calling and other forms of abuse are amply justified. After all, it's not as if these are reasonable people with whom Ms Harrop and her progressive friends have to deal. They're tea-partiers, for heaven's sake.

Syria

Syrian president Bashar Assad has already murdered several thousand Syrian protestors and the slaughter continues apace:

Horrifying images of bodies and limbs floating in the Orontes River in Hama were aired by Syrian state television early Thursday, Aug. 4. Contrary to official claims that they belonged to Syrian soldiers torn to pieces by protesters, debkafile reports they are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up in the streets. Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river.

They are reliving the terrors of the massacre President Bashar Assad's father inflicted on this city of half-a-million in 1982 which left 30,000 dead. The Syrian ruler decided to take advantage of three events for unleashing an all-out assault against rebellious Hama:

1. World attention was riveted on the deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's trial which opened in Cairo Wednesday.
2. The crisis between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and the army after the entire top command resigned in a body has immobilized Turkey.
3. The UN Security Council convening Wednesday night routinely condemned the killing of civilians in Syria and human rights abuses but stopped at approving sanctions or any concrete penalties for the delinquent Assad regime.

The Syrian ruler has therefore concluded he can safely ignore international opinion. In the face of US and Western indifference, he can continue to mercilessly slaughter his people without fear of the sort of intervention they undertook in Libya or UN sanctions.

Well, he can safely ignore Barack Obama's opinion, that seems certain. Mr. Obama appears to be too busy defending the Libyan people from Qaddafi's genocidal urges to worry about a few thousand Syrians being slaughtered by Mr. Assad.

No one thinks we should intervene militarily in Syria (although the reasons given by Mr. Obama for doing so in Libya certainly apply a hundred-fold to Syria), but why is there no interest in pressing for sanctions against this regime? Why is our administration not every day condemning the atrocities Assad is committing against defenseless civilians in the same city in which his father once slaughtered 30,000 people? Why are we daily spending millions of dollars bombing Libyan soldiers, but all we can muster against Syria are meaningless pronouncements in the U.N.? Is it because Libya has oil and Syria doesn't? Where is President Obama?

A Parable

An obese young man, weighing over 700 lbs., decided to see his doctor. The doctor inquired about his eating habits. The young man told him that he consumed 5000 calories every day and that he's actually increasing that figure by 500 calories a month so that in ten months he expects to be consuming 10,000 calories a day.

The doctor advised him that he was on a path to a stroke, heart attack, and/or diabetes and that the only way to improve his quality of life was to cut back on his calorie consumption. If he didn't he would surely die young.

The man was addicted to food, however, and very reluctant to give it up so he proposed a compromise. "How about if I just increase my intake at a rate of 450 calories a month instead of 500," he suggested, "so that ten months from now I'll only be eating 9500 calories every day."

The doctor replied that that was foolishly inadequate, that he had to do more than cut the rate of increase, he had to cut his base consumption back to about 1500 calories a day.

At this the young man grew angry. He called the doctor's proposal "extremist" and a fringe view in the medical community. He complained that the doctor was needlessly trying to deprive him of everything that made his life pleasurable. He insisted that the doctor's advice would kill him. He stomped out of the office declaring as he left that the doctor was "a lunatic."

And so the young man continued gorging himself until one day a year or so later he dropped over dead.

Drone Warfare

Christianity Today features a piece in which Paul Zahl, Daniel Bell, and Brian Stiltner consider the question whether it's moral to use Predator drone strikes to kill terrorists.

Zahl's contribution is puzzling, to put it charitably. He makes two points, both of which are hard to take seriously.

First, it's wrong, he claims, to conduct war when one side in the fight doesn't see the effects of their actions. The United States Air Force and the CIA operate predator drones thousands of miles away from the intended targets. There's no possibility of making eye contact with the enemy and fully realizing the human cost of the attack. If we could see the carnage we caused we'd be much more judicious in our use of force.

Be all that as it may, where does it say in just war theory, or anywhere else, that a conflict is waged morally only if the consequences are visible? Zahl acknowledges that his criterion would rule out aerial bombing and artillery strikes, and believes these are also wrong. Apparently, for him the only acceptable warfare is hand to hand combat.

His second reason for thinking that the use of drone aircraft is wrong is that unmanned predator drones prevent war from being "a fair fight". Here's why:

They emasculate the enemy. I use emasculate intentionally, because our victims live in societies where male humiliation is a fate almost worse than death. This method of fighting reduces people on the ground to a condition of absolute helplessness, because they cannot fight back against unmanned drones.

This reduction of the enemy to absolute helplessness is good for us, you may say. It means we can't lose! But it also creates resentment in the people we are fighting.

Well, yes, but war does that. People resent it when they're being shot at, even if accidentally. It's a little odd of Zahl to take the position that we'd be better off sending troops into Pakistan to fight and die than to use missiles. Wouldn't the presence of U.S. troops cause at least as much resentment as do drone strikes? What guarantee is there that combat troops would cause fewer inadvertent casualties than missiles do?

It's also strange that Zahl thinks war has to be a "fair fight" in order to be moral. How could there ever be a completely fair fight? One side will always have an advantage over the other and if they didn't the conflict would result only in a standoff. Is it unfair that our troops are better trained and equipped than the enemy? Is it unfair that our military uses satellites and aircraft for reconnaissance?

The other contributions in the column seem more reasonable than Dr. Zahl's. Indeed, Bell makes the point that it's not the technology of war that is at issue in determining the morality of its execution, but the virtue of the combatants.

I'm with him.

New Tone

I was going to do a post on the utter hypocrisy of the liberal left in the wake of the debt-ceiling debate - you know, all the name-calling directed at the Tea Party "terrorists", "hostage-takers", and "traitors" and how they wanted to "end life on earth as we know it". I had planned to write about how, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the left-leaning media exploded at alleged incivility on the right and how conservatives were poisoning our national discourse and how Sarah Palin was to blame for the lunatic in Arizona who shot Ms Giffords, and how liberals all demanded a new, more respectful tone in our politics, but how they're in fact blind to their own sordid, incendiary, and fatuous rhetoric.

I was going to write about all this, but then I read Jonah Goldberg's column at National Review, and I knew I couldn't say it as well as he does.

Here's his opening:

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map was an evil totem that forced some guy to go on a shooting spree. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks — particularly NBC whose senior foreign-affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, devotes, by my rough reckoning, ten times as much air time to whining about Sarah Palin as she does about anything having to do with foreign affairs — flooded the zone with “Have you no shame” finger wagging. A memo went forth demanding that everyone at MSNBC get their dresses over their heads about the evil “tone” from the right. Media Matters went into overdrive working the interns 24/7 to “prove” that Republicans deliberately foment violence with their evil targets on their evil congressional maps.

Everyone “knew” the shooter was a tea partier. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a conservative. He was a sick, demented, nutball. And it still didn’t matter! More bleating and caterwauling about the “tone” followed. More chin stroking and tut-tutting from Meet the Press roundtables and “very special segments” on the Today Show. More pizzas were ordered for the Media Matters galley slaves.

The rest of Goldberg's column is very much worth reading and I urge you to give it the two minutes it'll take to finish it.

It's sad that people whose economic policies are making day to day life in America purgatorial for millions, whose refusal to drill for domestic energy has delayed, directly or indirectly, the employment of tens of thousands, whose adamantine support for an industry that slaughters over a million babies a year is non-negotiable, and whose policies enable unions to hold taxpayers hostage all across the country, would have the chutzpah to stigmatize as "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" the very people who oppose all of this.

Maybe it's not chutzpah, maybe they just lack elementary thinking skills.

The Beauty of Mathematics

Australian Geneticist Michael Denton talks about the strange beauty of mathematics and how that beauty militates against the hypothesis that mathematics is something that we invent. Denton argues instead that mathematical truth exists independently of us and that we discover rather than create it. This raises, of course, the intriguing question of how it came to be in the first place:

Michael Denton - Mathematical Truths Are Transcendent And Beautiful -

An explanation of Pascal's Triangle can be found here. While you're at it you might also want to check out the Fibonacci sequence and its myriad occurrences in nature. It's fascinating.

The Corrosive Effects of Liberalism

People sometimes think that the only differences between conservatives and liberals are political. They may differ on how to address our economic problems but which one chooses is pretty much a matter of taste. This is, however, not true. The differences extend far beyond how we should manage the nation's finances. Dennis Prager argues that liberalism is corrosive of a nation's moral character.

He gives ten ways in which liberalism corrodes our character both nationally and individually. This is not to say that individual liberals are not fine people, but rather that the policies they support have a pernicious effect that they doubtless don't intend.

Here's a summary of his argument:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults....The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.

9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

Prager opines that progressives don't try to refute these charges, rather they simply invoke emotionally charged terms like "social justice" and "compassion," and smear their opponents as "selfish" or "racist".

He closes his piece by saying that if you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

Flying Squirrel

If you're a collegiate wrestling fan you'll appreciate this takedown by Ellis Coleman of Northern Michigan at the Junior World Championships. Coleman was competing against an Iranian wrestler named Mehdi Chooli Zeidvand who can probably look forward to being shot for embarrassing his country when he returns home.

The move is called "the Flying Squirrel."

Coleman went on to win the match, and eventually earned third place in his weight class.

Thanks to HuffPo for the tip.

That's Our Joe

Politico reports that Vice President Joe Biden compared the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists in the recent debt ceiling negotiations:

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

This is pretty funny coming from an administration that's reluctant to call actual terrorists terrorists.

In the Orwellian world of Mr. Biden and his associates, apparently, people who maim and kill for political reasons are not terrorists, but people who insist we stop spending money we don't have are.

Speaking of Mr. Biden, we were very disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that he's charging the Secret Service rent for living in a house he owns so that they can better protect him. What this means is that we the taxpayers are actually paying Mr. Biden for the privilege of protecting his life. Perhaps this is what the administration has in mind when they say that everyone should pay their fair share.

I wonder if people demanded an end to this scam if Mr. Biden would consider us terrorists.

Getting bin Laden

The New Yorker has an account by Nicholas Schmidle of what happened in Abottabad the night Osama bin Laden's luck finally ran out. Schmidle's piece has some fascinating details about the raid on bin Laden's compound and is a fascinating read. Here's how he begins:

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU.

A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

One of the details Schmidle discusses is why the president opted for a raid rather than a missile attack. He also points out that this mission was just a night's work for most of the men involved. Most of them had been on dozens if not hundreds of such missions not only in Pakistan but also Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Give it a read.

The Incredible Design of Chemistry

Scientist Michael Denton discusses the amazing fitness of the laws and properties of chemistry, particularly the properties of water and carbon dioxide, for the production of life on earth. Denton is an agnostic but he finds this fitness astonishing and inexplicable apart from a superintelligent designer:

Michael Denton - We Are Stardust - Fine Tuning Of The Elements - Fred Hoyle Atheist to Theist -

Denton's book Nature's Destiny goes into these matters in much more detail. It's an excellent read for anyone interested in learning more about the fine-tuning argument. A brief discussion of Hoyle's prediction can be found here.

Al Qaeda on the Brink

There seems to be a growing consensus in the intelligence community that al Qaeda is on life support. According to a report in the Washington Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al­ Qaeda to the brink of collapse.

The assessment reflects a widespread view at the CIA and other agencies that a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — an outcome that was seen as a distant prospect for much of the past decade.

Unfortunately, Islamic terrorism is hydra-headed. When al Qaeda is no longer viable other nihilistic savages will step up to fill their role. We are in a generational war with people who want to destroy everything about the Western way of life and everyone in the Islamic world who disagrees with them on any point of doctrine. This war won't end until one side or the other is exhausted either economically, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Honest Politicians

A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that the debt ceiling impasse has shown that our system of governance is broken. We're too divided and unable to get anything done any longer, the argument goes, and it's all the fault of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party. The Tea Party congressmen and women are nutty obstructionists, a scourge on our politics, and we need to vote them out in order to save our democracy.

I think this is all exactly wrong. I think our system is working fine. Americans are learning the difference between contrasting visions of what government should be and learning, too, that their votes matter, that they have the power to elect people who will truly represent them. So far from being the end of democracy, as some are saying, I believe we're seeing it's reinvigoration.

We're also seeing politicians model what we've always said we wanted political leaders to be.

For years we've heard that the problem with Washington is that the people we send there can't be trusted to do what they said they would do, they're too easily bought off, all they care about is their next election, they have no principles, they lie, etc.

Now for the first time in my memory a significant fraction of the House and Senate is comprised of people who are doing exactly what they said they'd do, who can't be bought with earmarks or promises of campaign funding, who don't care about being re-elected, whose only ambition is to see their principles upheld, who are genuinely putting the country's future ahead of their own political careers, and a lot of people, mostly on the left but also in the GOP (Senator John McCain, for example), are beside themselves with frustration and even anger.

To watch the fulminations of some of the commentators at MSNBC you'd think that people who refuse to be complicit in burdening our children with crushing debt are going to be the end of the Republic. Some are calling them "terrorists" and "anarchists". A casual viewer would gain the impression that these evil people were deliberately trying to destroy the country rather than save it.

What we're now hearing is that all that talk about the need for principled leadership is no longer "operative". What we really need are people who can compromise, who'll shrug off their principles, who'll renege on the campaign promises they made their constituents. In other words, what we need, we're now being told, are precisely the kind of politicians that everyone has for decades held in contempt.

It seems that what some folks mean when they say they want politicians with integrity is that they want honest politicians as long as those politicians are reliably liberal. Otherwise, they want them to be as weak and unprincipled as they can be.

Cosmogenesis

The journal New Scientist has an article that seeks to explain how something could come from nothing as it must have in the creation of the universe ex nihilo. I'm not sure how well they succeed.

Here's an excerpt from the article's lede followed by a video clip on the topic:

Around 13.7 billion years ago time and space spontaneously sprang from the void. How did that happen? Or to put it another way: why does anything exist at all? It's a big question, perhaps the biggest. The idea that the universe simply appeared out of nothing is difficult enough; trying to conceive of nothingness is perhaps even harder.

The question this all raises, I guess, is where did the quantum energy and the force of gravity come from that made the universe possible? If the universe sprung from the quantum flux then how do we explain that?

After all, if there was a preexisting quantum vaccum such that the universe didn't really emerge from nothing, then that vaccum is in fact the embryo of the universe and we're still left with the question of where it came from. Did it always exist? Where did the laws which govern the quantum world come from? Are we to just consider this level of explanation the terminus, and say that the quantum vacuum just is a brute fact with no need of explanation? Is that not a science-stopper?

Bad Day for the AGW Community

Yesterday was a bad day for the global warming community. First there was an article by James Taylor at Forbes in which Taylor notes that more heat escapes the earth's atmosphere than the climatologists' computer models had predicted:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds.

Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

Then there was the revelation that the initial warnings of polar bear peril that served as the symbol of global climate change have been called into question and the research scientist responsible for them suspended from his duties for suspected fraud.

All in all, not the sort of news one would hope for when one is trying to rebuild public trust and mobilize the world to radically alter our way of life.

Tipping Point

I don't know what to make of this article in Science Daily. It raises a lot of questions, but whether it's correct or not it's certainly interesting.

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

What I don't understand is why, if this is true, there are so many issues in which the country appears to be evenly split. For example, more than 10% of Americans believe fervently in either the pro-life or pro-choice position on abortion. Yet the country seems to be evenly divided on the question. Likewise with Darwinian evolution. It seems certain that 10% of the population is strongly committed to Darwinism, but the majority of people in the country is not.

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

This all seems counterintuitive, but perhaps not. Perhaps there's a kind of cultural critical mass at which point a new idea explodes through the society. The article offers some examples, none of which seems convincing, but perhaps readers can think of some historical examples which confirm this research.

Flight of the Millenials

Michael Barone cites some polling statistics that show a general abandonment of the Democratic party by white voters, but the flight of younger white voters, the so-called millenials, is stunning:

The most noteworthy movement among whites has been among voters under 30, the so-called Millennial generation. Millennials voted 66 to 32 percent for Barack Obama in 2008 and identified as Democrats rather than Republicans by a 60 to 32 percent margin.

But white Millennials have been moving away from the Democrats. The Democratic edge in party identification among white Millennials dropped from 7 points in 2008 to 3 points in 2009 to a 1-point Republican edge in 2010 and an 11-point Republican lead in 2011.

Barone's column attributes the disenchantment with the Democrats, particularly the president, to disillusionment over the economy after candidate Obama had held out such high hopes for young people. The reality has been dispiriting. Many young people are graduating from college in debt up to their ears and unable to find work that will enable them to pay off their loans.

Nothing like the prospect of fruitless job searches and endless loan payments to disabuse one of the romantic seductions of the euphoric rhetoric of hope and change.

Why Are They So Vile?

Andrew Klavan at City Journal comments on the increasing hate and vulgarity directed by liberal personalities like Bill Maher at attractive conservative women.

Comedian-commentator Bill Maher has been getting a lot of attention lately for trying to get a lot of attention. He generally goes about this by using sexist hate speech against attractive, powerful, and intelligent conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, calling them female vulgarisms, for instance, or, as most recently, hosting comedians who fantasize aloud about sexually abusing them.

Maher has been particularly bad, but he's far from the only one. Neither have Keith Olberman, John Stewart, and others been shy in displaying their misogynism.

But...there does seem to me to be one thing worth saying about Maher and the others. Their ugliness seems to be escalating day by day, and with it the dishonesty, distortions, and bullying anger of their mainstream-media fellow travelers. There’s a reason for this, I think. It’s the increasingly apparent failure of Barack Obama. With the notable exception of Osama bin Laden’s execution, the Obama presidency has resembled nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Bean, one slapstick misadventure after another. The stagnant economy, the rising unemployment, the staggering, soon-to-be-crippling debt—hiked more under Obama than under every president from Washington to Reagan combined—these can no longer be blamed on his predecessor but are his to own.

This has to be fantastically humiliating for our left-wing media. If you’ve forgotten what they were like during Obama’s 2008 candidacy—the weirdly sexual thrills up their legs, the unreasoning comparison of Obama with America’s greatest men, the pseudo-religious idolatry—you have only to turn to August’s edition of Esquire to find a representative reminder that has to be read to be believed. It’s a column from Canadian writer Stephen Marche hilariously titled “How Can We Not Love Obama?” and subtitled “Because like it or not, he is all of us.” At one point, Marche writes: “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” And later—and I swear I’m not making this up: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

Klavan might have included Evan Thomas swooning on MSNBC that Mr. Obama is "sort of God" bestriding the world.

At any rate, the left was so emotionally invested in the apotheosis of Obama that when they began to realize that conservatives were right all along that the man was an unqualified poseur, they found the truth so galling that in their humiliation and resentment they cast aside their ersatz liberal facades and lashed out against those whose judgment of Mr. Obama had been vindicated with as much venom and ugliness as they could get away with.

What many observers have wondered is where the feminist groups have been on this. There've been a few expressions of censure for Maher's sleaziness, to be sure, but there's been no sustained media demand for these people to be fired of the sort we'd certainly see had the offenders been conservatives insulting liberal women.

Was Breivik a Christian?

Perhaps you've heard that the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik was a Christian fundamentalist. Perhaps you were disheartened that a Christian would do such a horrific thing, or perhaps you felt a bit of schadenfreude in thinking that Christians are just as bad as anyone else, or perhaps you thought that the New Atheists are right in alleging that religion is the source of most of the world's evil.

Well, as a lot of people suspected when the media first put it out that this evil man was a Christian, the meme didn't survive a careful reading of his own manifesto.

John West at Evolution News and Views has done the leg work in uncovering Breivik's beliefs, and it turns out that he's in fact an atheistic Social Darwinist who used Christianity as cultural camouflage.

If you're one of the folks mentioned above you really should read West's essay. Here's a sample:

[I]t now turns out Breivik really isn't a Christian fundamentalist after all. According to his 1518-page manifesto "A European Declaration of Independence," he may not even believe in God. Instead of Christianity, his views are largely based on what might be described as a virulent mixture of scientific fundamentalism and Social Darwinism.

To be sure, Breivik identifies himself as "100% Christian" in his manifesto (p. 1403), and he certainly talks incessantly about defending "Christian" civilization. But he also makes clear that his Christianity is simply a pose adopted for political reasons.

Answering why he chose to align himself with a group supposedly espousing "Christian values," he states: "My choice was based purely [on] pragmatism." (p. 1380) He goes on to explain that "Christianity" has far more "mass appeal" than nationalism, white supremacy, or a revival of paganism, and so it is a more effective "banner" under which to build his movement. (p. 1381) In sum, Breivik views religion like Machiavelli viewed religion--as a political tool. It's worth noting that Machiavelli's The Prince is listed by Breivik as one of his favorite books. (p. 1407)

As for his own religious beliefs and practices, Breivik frankly admits: "I'm not going to pretend I'm a very religious person as that would be a lie. I've always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment." (p. 1344, emphasis added) Indeed, Breivik acknowledges that he used to believe that "Religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point in believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself!? Pathetic."

[Breivik] continues: "Perhaps this is true for many cases. Religion is a crutch for many weak people and many embrace religion for self serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength (to feed their weak emotional state f[or] example during illness, death, poverty etc.). Since I am not a hypocrite, I'll say directly that this is my agenda as well." (p. 1344, emphasis added)

Breivik's claim to be a Christian was a cynical attempt to appear socially innocuous. In fact, he was a Christian in the same sense that Hitler was a Christian.

Breivik was a Social Darwinist and an atheist, which, I think, is significant. Ask yourself this question, If both atheism and Darwinism are true in what sense did Breivik do anything wrong? What objective ground does an atheistic Darwinian have for believing that it's wrong for the strong to kill the weak?

Richard Dawkins, who is both a Darwinist and an atheist, makes this very point when he asks, "What's to prevent us from saying that Hitler was right? I mean, that's a genuinely difficult question."

He's right, it is a difficult question, at least it is for a man who accepts no transcendent moral law or authority. Were Anders Breivik actually a Christian he would have acted in utter violation of all that Christ taught. On atheism, however, his massacre of those young people violated no objective moral law and thus incurs no moral, only legal, guilt.