How to Sound Like a Complete Doofus

There's a conviction among many liberals that conservatives have no heart and a similar conviction on the right that liberals have no brains. I don't know to what extent either side is correct, but this guy, a politically liberal rabbi named Joshua Hammerman certainly reinforces the stereotype. He claims that if the Denver Broncos were to win the Super Bowl Christians might be running through the streets burning down mosques and deporting immigrants.

I know it sounds bizarre, but here's an excerpt of his exact words courtesy of Jammie-Wearing Fools:

People are always looking for signs of God’s beneficence, and a victory by the Orange Crush over the blue-clad Patriots, from the bluest of blue states, will give fodder to a Christian revivalism that has already turned the Republican presidential race into a pander-thon to social conservatives, rekindling memories of those cultural icons of the ‘80s, the Moral Majority and “Hee Haw.”

The culture wars are alive and well, and, if the current climate in Washington is any indicator, the motors are being revved up for what will undoubtedly be the most cantankerous Presidential campaign ever. When supposedly well-educated candidates publicly question overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change and evolution and then gain electoral traction by fabricating conspiracies about a war on Christmas, these are not rational times.

Into the middle of it all rides [Broncos quarterback Tim] Tebow. Absolutely confident that God is on his side, he comes across as a humbler version of the biblical Joseph, who, in this week’s Torah portion, audaciously lays claim to being the Chosen One, and then goes out and proves it. Tebow’s sanctimonious God-talk has led even pious peers like Kurt Warner to suggest that he cool it. Joseph could have used the same coaching.

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.

Some people are apparently convinced that the best way to attract attention to themselves is to talk like a blithering idiot, a task that's easier for some than for others, I suppose. Hammerman's buffoonery is as if someone had made the claim that Sandy Koufax's amazing performance for the Dodgers in the 1965 World Series should have so buoyed American Jews that they might have been expected to run about New York City burning mosques and bashing Muslims.

In any case, I wonder what the rabbi would think if a Christian were to make remarks about Jews as bigoted as his were about Christians. I also have to wonder how many Christians the rabbi actually knows.

Why Not Newt?

I can't remember an election when the Republican front-runner claimed to be a conservative and yet was so vigorously opposed by so many of the leading lights in the conservative movement. Newt has managed to secure the disendorsement of Senator Tom Coburn, columnists George Will, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer, talk show guy Glenn Beck, prominent blogger Eric Errickson, and a host of others.

Now National Review, the foremost conservative journal of opinion, founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley, has lent it's prestigious voice to the anti-Newt chorus:

A hard-fought presidential primary campaign is obscuring the uncharacteristic degree of unity within the Republican party. It has reached a conservative consensus on most of the pressing issues of the day. All of the leading candidates, and almost all of the lagging ones, support the right to life. All of them favor the repeal of Obamacare. Most of them support reforms to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. All of them favor reducing the corporate tax rate to levels that will make the U.S. a competitive location for investment. Almost all of them seem to understand the dangers of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and of a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest.

Conservatives may disagree among themselves about which candidate most deserves support, but all of us should take heart in this development — and none of us should exaggerate the programmatic differences within the field.

Just as heartening, the White House seems winnable next year, and with it a majority in both houses of Congress, so that much of this conservative consensus could actually become law. A conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a halt to the march of regulation, free-market health-care policies: All of them seem within our grasp. But none of them is assured, and the costs of failure — either a failure to win the election, or a failure to govern competently and purposefully afterward — are as large as the opportunity.

We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the polls, would be to blow this opportunity. We say that mindful of his opponents’ imperfections — and of his own virtues, which have been on display during his amazing comeback.

Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president. Gingrich himself has never run for a statewide office, let alone a national one, and has not run for anything since 1998. That year he was kicked out by his colleagues, the most conservative ones especially, who had lost confidence in him.

During his time as Speaker, he was one of the most unpopular figures in public life. Just a few months ago his campaign seemed dead after a series of gaffes and resignations. That Gingrich now tops the polls is a tribute to his perseverance, and to Republicans’ admiration for his intellectual fecundity.

Both qualities served conservatives well in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gingrich, nearly alone, saw the potential for a Republican takeover of Congress and worked tirelessly to bring it about. Even before the takeover, Gingrich helped to solidify the party’s opposition to tax increases and helped to defeat the Clinton health-care plan. The victory of 1994 enabled the passage of welfare reform, the most successful social policy of recent decades.

Gingrich’s colleagues were, however, right to bring his tenure to an end. His character flaws — his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas — made him a poor Speaker of the House. Again and again he combined incendiary rhetoric with irresolute action, bringing Republicans all the political costs of a hardline position without actually taking one. Again and again he put his own interests above those of the causes he championed in public.

There's much more at the link. Newt rose to the top because the party conservatives are looking for an alternative to Mitt Romney and Newt certainly seemed like the best qualified candidate in terms of intellect, accomplishment, and stature. Even so, as more information has emerged about him, largely from those who worked with him in congress in the 90s and others who have observed his career, huge doubts have been raised which make it unlikely that his lead will prove sustainable. I don't see how a candidate who's running as a conservative can campaign successfully when most of the most influential conservatives in the country don't want him as their president.

If that turns out to be the case the question then becomes to whom do the anti-Romney folks turn? Ron Paul? Jon Huntsman? Rick Santorum? Michelle Bachmann? I don't know but it seems that for now Romney is in the driver's seat.

Christopher Hitchens

We've had numerous occasions to mention Christopher Hitchens on these pages over the years. He was a brilliant writer and speaker, despite his too frequent predilection for unkindness and his obvious contempt for lesser minds, of which there are many.

Hitchens spent much of the last fifteen years or so writing what can justly be called screeds against belief in God, including an attack against Mother Teresa, of all people, as well as the book God Is Not Great.

He was diagnosed with esophygeal cancer last year but continued to write for Vanity Fair between his radiation and other treatments. Those treatments in the end proved unavailing. Christopher Hitchens died yesterday at the age of 62.

If he was wrong about the existence of God presumably he now realizes his error. If he was right, which I doubt very much, then he'll never have the satisfaction of knowing that he was right. Such is the tragedy of atheism.

Plantinga's New Book

Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times has a fine piece on one of the most consequential philosophers of the last half century, Alvin Plantinga, on the occasion of the release of Plantinga's new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

Schuessler writes:

There are no atheists in foxholes, the old saying goes. Back in the 1950s, when the philosopher Alvin Plantinga was getting his start, there were scarcely more religious believers in academic philosophy departments.

Growing up among Dutch Calvinist immigrants in the Midwest, Mr. Plantinga was used to intense theological debate. But when he arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate, he was startled to find equal intensity marshaled in favor of the argument that God didn’t exist, when classmates and teachers found the question worth arguing about.

Had he not transferred to Calvin College, the Christian Reformed liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Mich., where his father taught psychology, Mr. Plantinga wrote in a 1993 essay, he doubted that he “would have remained a Christian at all; certainly Christianity or theism would not have been the focal point of my adult intellectual life.”

But he did return, and the larger world of philosophy has been quite different as a result. From Calvin, and later from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Plantinga has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers who, if they haven’t succeeded in persuading their still overwhelmingly unbelieving colleagues, have at least made theism philosophically respectable.

“There are vastly more Christian philosophers and vastly more visible or assertive Christian philosophy now than when I left graduate school,” Mr. Plantinga said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Grand Rapids, adding, with characteristic modesty, “I have no idea how it happened.”

Mr. Plantinga retired from full-time teaching last year, with more than a dozen books and a past presidency of the American Philosophical Association to his name. But he’s hardly resting on those laurels. Having made philosophy safe for theism, he’s now turning to a harder task: making theism safe for science.

Alvin Plantinga

The rest of the article discusses his book and some of the reaction of his atheistic colleagues to his work. It's good to know that Plantinga, though retired form teaching, is still in the trenches waging intellectual combat.

Rape of the Soul

Several posts in recent days have centered around the moral predicament postmodern man finds himself in having discounted the existence of any moral authority beyond human subjectivity. My friend Mike has responded with a poem which addresses this theme:

Rape Of The Soul

I want to seek out
Those who won’t come out
Of their lust-licensing oblivion,
Those envelope-pushing minions.
I will raise an acute rage
Against the naked emperors
In Bertrand Russell’s relativistic parade.
Against those who would violate us all,
Who would rape our souls,
By pretending God and morality
Are things we chose,
Like sweetener in our Starbucks,
Or the color of our clothes.
“All meta-narratives are suspect,”
Says the trendy postmodern prof.
Not nearly as much as the thug who murders his wife;
Trendy philosophies are flimsy
When applied to your own life.
Take your subjective morality
To Nanking or Rwanda or Darfur.
You’ll be an Ivan Karamazov,
Left writhing in hope for more
Than your childish evasion
That puts up love and justice for sale,
That frees your money and libido
To go wherever your appetite drives them,
And frees the forces of evil to drive the world to Hell.

As an illustration of the last few lines of Mike's poem consider the post immediately below this one.

Normalizing Pedophilia

Janice Shaw Crouse, the author of "Children at Risk," reveals in the Washington Times the agenda of organizations which are lobbying to make pedophilia and pederasty legal.

It may be hard to believe that these organizations even exist, but when a society can no longer talk about moral good and evil, when right is whatever you feel good about and wrong is whatever makes you feel bad, then there's no limit to the perversity men will pursue.

Crouse writes:

B4U-ACT is a small group of mental health professionals and pedophile activists who seek greater tolerance for "minor-attracted persons" (pedophiles). Indeed, those involved in the lobbying want to decriminalize, even normalize, pedophilia. They are working to change public perceptions so that raping children is acceptable behavior.

Among the academics lending respectability to these efforts by speaking at the recent conference in Baltimore were researchers from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the universities of Louisville and Illinois.

The fringe activists promise to disrupt future meetings of the APA until they are successful in normalizing pedophilia, a strategy successfully employed in the 1970s to get homosexuality removed from the DSM [Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] - not because of new scientific evidence, but because of political pressure by a small group of activists. For instance, in 1990, the Journal of Homosexuality published a special double issue devoted to adult-child sex, calling it "male intergenerational intimacy."

Now the pedophilia activists are flexing their political muscles and with some success, changing the culture through changing the language of social science and medical terminology. To be released in 2013, the DSM proposes subtle yet significant revisions to its featured section on "paraphilic" disorders. The term "paraphilia" encompasses a wide range of aberrant sexual urges and behaviors, including but not limited to pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, sexual sadism and masochism.

In every version of the DSM, such forms of sexual deviance have been classified as paraphilic disorders. But now, radical fringe groups with a bully pulpit are arguing that people with "atypical, culturally forbidden or religiously proscribed sexual interests" should not be labeled ill, and they are putting tremendous pressure on the APA to comply.

Surely, the skeptic in all of us wants to cry out, "This can never happen. Pedophilia can never be normalized." After all, it doesn't take a medical or theological degree to know that child rape is wrong. But as David Brooks noted in a NewYorkTimes column, "Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it's thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart."

Due to our human sensitivities and American values of fairness and equality, our nation has been duped into accepting the unacceptable, all because the lies have been packaged for us so nicely. We were told that morality is relative and that right and wrong are simply cultural preferences. We were told that adhering to an absolute truth that judges between good and evil is narrow-minded. We were told we needed to alter our language to become more politically correct - that pedophiles are simply "minor-attracted persons" who are the victims of societal stigma, bigotry and intolerance. We are told that our children are sexual from birth and have the capacity to be willing participants in intercourse from their infancy.

A society that abandons its Judeo-Christian heritage and embraces secularism should not be shocked, I guess, that there are those who wish to turn the country into a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. Unfortunately, we've forfeited as a society the only ground we had to stand on from which we could oppose this agenda, i.e. the assurance that there are behaviors which are objectively and absolutely wrong. Using children for sexual gratification is one of them. We need to reclaim that ground before Jerry Sandusky is no longer seen as an aberration but rather as a common type.

Electrified Embryos

We've all learned that DNA programs the cell to create the thousands of proteins the body needs to develop and flourish, but how do those proteins "know" what three-dimensional body plan to construct? How, for example, do the proteins which make up a starfish know to make a five-armed structure? This is a mystery of long-standing and some biologists have speculated that there is in organisms a source of information that is separate from the nucleotide sequences in DNA.

Now a team of researchers has discovered evidence that this is in fact the case.

Jonathan Wells writes:

Many biologists believe that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program encoded in DNA. Other biologists maintain that development cannot be reduced to a genetic program. Although DNA is involved in specifying the amino acid sequences of proteins, other sources of information are needed to specify the three-dimensional structure of the embryo. One such source is a system of spatial coordinates communicated, in part, by an endogenous electric field -- that is, an electric field generated by the embryo itself.

These electric fields circulating through and around the developing embryo superintend the development of the specific morphology that the organism will take on.

This, however, raises another question: How are these electric fields produced and regulated? It's all so very complex that it takes your breath away to think that blind, purposeless forces could have ever produced such a system. They must have, though. At least you better be prepared to say they have if you're an untenured university biology instructor who wants to keep his or her job.

Anyway, here's a short video of two members of the research team talking about their discovery:

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the clip.

Barbarisms

Stanford journalism professor Joel Brinkley takes us on a quick tour of the underside of what passes for civilization in much of the world and concludes that relativism, both cultural and moral, seems simply foolish when confronted with the barbaric cruelties imposed on women and children in some foreign climes.

The relativist wants to say that what's wrong for us is not necessarily wrong for others. We're not perfect, the relativist avers, nor are we in the position of God that we can pass judgment on other societies, but as I argued last week in the case of Bibi Aisha, to refuse to condemn cruelty and injustice is to dehumanize both ourselves and those who suffer. Injustice is wrong wherever it occurs. Cruelty is evil wherever it occurs. Anyone who can read the following excerpt from Brinkley's column and not agree with those claims is morally underdeveloped:

On her final full day in office, President Roza Otunbayeva of Kyrgyzstan became the first senior Kyrgyz official to forcefully denounce “bride kidnapping,” an entrenched custom in her Central Asian state.

“Bride kidnapping is a tradition of the Kyrgyz people,” she acknowledged as she was preparing to leave the presidential palace on Nov. 29. “But these crimes often force women to commit suicide.”

Young men kidnap about 15,000 girls each year, Otunbayeva said. They simply grab a girl walking down the street, stuff her in the car, kicking and screaming, and take her home. He may rape her – or not. Either way, after she’s locked up overnight in an unrelated man’s house, the girl is unfit to wed anyone else. Her family won’t permit her to come home. So she’s forced to marry her kidnapper.

No one keeps precise statistics, but estimates suggest that half of Kyrgyz wives are married in this way. The outgoing president urged her people to stop romanticizing bride kidnapping and inaugurated a month-long campaign to fight the practice.

Around the world, numerous nations cling to longstanding traditions that, to Western eyes, seem barbarous – or worse. Most of them victimize girls.

In Northwestern Thailand, I interviewed a woman, one of many, preparing to sell her 12-year-old daughter to traffickers who would force her into prostitution. The mother intended to use the trafficker’s payment for her daughter to buy a new refrigerator. “It’s our tradition,” she explained.

In Saudi Arabia, centuries-old religious convention allows middle-aged men to marry prepubescent girls – some as young as 7 or 8 years old.

Pakistani officials use gang rape as a government-sanctioned punishment.

In Cameroon “breast ironing” remains an honored custom. After their daughters reach puberty, mothers heat a flat rock in the fire and then press it forcefully onto each of her daughter’s breasts – burning away breast tissue, leaving them flat-chested so avaricious young men will leave them alone.

“Breast ironing has existed as long as Cameroon has existed,” gynecologist Sinou Tchana told the Inter Press news service. Women “told us that it was normal for them.”

If it’s “normal for them,” how should Western societies regard practices like these? Anthropology’s “cultural relativism” rule suggests that we should not judge other countries by the standards of our own society. But some acts are just too vile, and cultural courtesies don’t stop human-rights groups from wagging their fingers at these states.

Brinkley is right. We avoid passing a judgment on these behaviors because we've bought into the paralyzing fallacy that moral right and wrong are matters of personal taste, and just as we should not criticize those who choose to eat roast dog meat so too should we refrain from criticizing those who press hot rocks to little girls' chests, or perform clitorectomies on young women, or practice "honor" killings, or shake crying babies until they suffer brain damage, or hold babies in scalding hot water.

When we can no longer say that these things are wrong no matter where they're practiced we're no longer a sophisticated, civilized people. We're barbarians.

Biomimetics

Salvo magazine has an interesting piece by ID advocate Casey Luskin on Biomimetics, the application of nature's designs to technological innovation. It's amazing how many of our modern technological marvels were inspired by studying how nature solves certain problems.

One might think that this should be considered evidence that nature is designed since if intelligent agents like human beings couldn't hit upon these solutions by themselves how could random chance and genetic mutations discover them, but, of course, you shouldn't think like that. We know that exquisite designs are the product of purely natural, unguided, blind forces because those are the only kinds of forces there are, and we know they're the only forces there are because we can explain every exquisite design in terms of them.

If you're concerned that this sounds like circular reasoning then you're insufficiently steeped in the wisdom of people like Richard Dawkins and other materialist illuminati.

Anyway, Luskin lists a number of examples of biomimetic advances (there are many more):

• Faster Speedo swimsuits have been developed by studying the properties of sharkskin.
• Spiny hooks on plant seeds and fruits led to the development of Velcro.
• Better tire treads were created by understanding the shape of toe pads on tree frogs.
• Polar bear furs have inspired textiles and thermal collectors.
• Studying hippo sweat promises to lead to better sunscreen.
• Volvo has studied how locusts swarm without crashing into one another to develop an anti-collision system.
• Mimicking mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical energy conversion might lead to the creation of cheaper solar cells.
• Copying the structure of sticky gecko feet could lead to the development of tape with cleaner and dryer super-adhesion.
• Color-changing cuttlefish have inspired television screens that use a fraction of the power of standard TVs.
• DNA might become a framework for building faster microchips.
• The ability of the human ear to pick up many frequencies of sound is being replicated to build better antennas.
• The Namibian fog-­basking beetle has inspired methods of desalinizing ocean water, growing crops, and producing electricity, all in one!
• Airplane design flowed from studying the body shapes of birds.

One of the arguments against using biomimetics as an indicator of intelligent agency behind the designs in nature is that nature too often presents us with poor design. It's hard to see, though, how this is an argument against an intelligent designer. After all poor design is still design. No one would think that because a particular automobile design was flawed that therefore it must not have been designed by intelligent agents.

Flawed design might be an argument against postulating that the designer is the omnipotent, omniscient God of Christianity, but intelligent design doesn't say that the designer is God. It simply says that there's powerful evidence that the universe and life have been designed by an intelligent agent. That's a scientific conclusion. The scientific critic who wishes to discredit ID by pointing out that an omniscient God wouldn't design things the way nature has is making a religious argument about how God would act, which is an odd thing for a scientific person to do.

One of the examples the critic uses to buttress the claim that living things are often poorly designed is the human eye, but Luskin replies that this is an unfortunate choice inasmuch as the eye, it has turned out, may very well have an optimal design. Luskin writes:

Some materialists attack design arguments not by alleging that biological systems lack high levels of specified complexity, but by alleging that they are full of "flaws." Yet anyone who has used Microsoft Windows is painfully aware that flawed designs are still designed. But theistic evolutionist biologist Kenneth Miller argues that evolution would naturally lead us to expect the biological world to be full of "cobbled together" kluges that reflect the clumsy, undirected Darwinian process.

For example, Miller maintains that the vertebrate eye was not intelligently designed because the optic nerve extends over the retina instead of going out the back of the eye—an alleged design flaw. According to Miller, "visual quality is degraded because light scatters as it passes through several layers of cellular wiring before reaching the retina."

Similarly, Richard Dawkins contends that the retina is "wired in backwards" because light-sensitive cells face away from the incoming light, which is partly blocked by the optic nerve. In Dawkins's ever-humble opinion, the vertebrate eye is "the design of a complete idiot."

A closer examination shows that the design of the vertebrate eye works far better than Dawkins and Miller let on.

Dawkins concedes that the optic nerve's impact on vision is "probably not much," but the negative effect is even less than he admits. Only if you cover one eye and stare directly at a fixed point does a tiny "blind spot" appear in your peripheral vision as a result of the optic nerve covering the retina. When both eyes are functional, the brain compensates for the blind spot by meshing the visual fields of both eyes. Under normal circumstances, the nerves' wiring does nothing to hinder vision.

Nonetheless, Dawkins argues that even if the design works, it would "offend any tidy-minded engineer." But the overall design of the eye actually optimizes visual acuity.

To achieve the high-quality vision that vertebrates need, retinal cells require a large blood supply. By facing the photoreceptor cells toward the back of the retina, and extending the optic nerve out over them, the cells are able to plug directly into the blood vessels that feed the eye, maximizing access to blood.

Pro-ID biologist George Ayoub suggests a thought experiment where the optic nerve goes out the back of the retina, the way Miller and Dawkins claim it ought to be wired. Ayoub finds that this design would interfere with blood supply, as the nerve would crowd out blood vessels. In this case, the only means of restoring blood supply would be to place capillaries over the retina—but this change would block even more light than the optic nerve does under the actual design.

Ayoub concludes: "In trying to eliminate the blind spot, we have generated a host of new and more severe functional problems to solve."

In 2010, two eye specialists made a remarkable discovery that showed the elegant mechanism found in vertebrate eyes to solve the problem of any blockage of light due to the position of the optic nerve. Special "glial cells" sit over the retina and act like fiber-optic cables to channel light through the optic nerve wires directly onto the photoreceptor cells. According to New Scientist, these funnel-shaped cells prevent scattering of light and "act as light filters, keeping images clear."

Ken Miller acknowledges that an intelligent designer "would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality." Yet that seems to be exactly what we find in the vertebrate eye. In fact, the team of scientists who determined the function of glial cells concluded that the "retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images."

ID-theorist William Dembski has observed that "no one has demonstrated how the eye's function might be improved without diminishing its visual speed, sensitivity, and resolution."

Luskin writes a good piece that should be perused by anyone interested in the arguments for ID.

Dissembler

Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to accept responsibility for Fast and Furious and perhaps he really wasn't responsible, but surely he knows who was, and yet he has refused to hold them accountable. This short video features Congresswoman Sandy Adams of Florida, who was a law enforcement officer, as was her late husband, trying to get Mr. Holder to explain to the American people what happened under his authority.

Unfortunately, the AG acts like a man who wants to avoid candor at all costs. What's he trying to hide?

Rep. Adams exudes competency, Mr. Holder exudes insincerity. We need more people like Ms Adams in government and many fewer people like Mr. Holder.

Thanks to HotAir for the video.

Blind Faith

This video from Reason tv explains why the Obama stimulus failed to do much to stimulate the economy.

The quick explanation is that you can't lower unemployment by giving money to people who are already employed, and, in any event, government is poorly equipped to spend money efficiently enough to really stimulate anything.

The best way to get the economy going, it seems to me, is not to throw money around but to provide incentives to business to hire people, and the best way to do that is to relieve the various economic burdens weighing them down.

Rather than follow the current model of imposing increasingly higher taxes, imposing increasingly onerous regulations, and imposing crushing costs as will be assessed against employers under Obamacare, we should lower the cost of doing business by reducing taxes, removing the threat of Obamacare, easing regulations, and exploiting our domestic energy resources so that fuel costs are reduced.

Not only would making energy more abundant reduce what it costs to manufacture and transport goods to market, it would put more money in the pockets of consumers, especially poorer consumers, which would enable them to purchase those products. The more products that are purchased the more products that'll be manufactured and the more manufacturing that's going on the more people who'll find employment.

Perhaps the Obama administration's policy of throwing massive amounts of money around, raising taxes and imposing ever more regulations on business will somehow work eventually, but after three years of it we're mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Blind faith is believing something despite the lack of empirical evidence, and there's certainly no empirical evidence that the Obama strategy has worked or will ever work.

Maybe it's time to take the ideological blinders off and try something, and someone, else.

The Wet Blanket Party

Joe Carter at First Things has begun a campaign for a new political party. He calls it the "Wet Blanket" party. I think he's on to something:

In the coming election we don’t need the second-coming of Teddy Roosevelt to fan the flames of National Greatness. What we need is a Coolidge clone that is able to brandish a wet blanket. In fact, we need a Wet Blanket movement—an enterprise of inactivity designed to sap any and all enthusiasm for political and governmental robustness.

Sadly, there is only one man who could lead such a movement and he died back in 1933. I’m speaking, of course, of our greatest modern president: Calvin Coolidge. The liberal journalist Walter Lippman, in his 1926 essay, “Calvin Coolidge: Puritan De Luxe,” wrote an unintentionally beautiful tribute to the patron saint of small-government conservatism that provides an outline for what is needed today:

"Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for the soft and easy desire to let things slide.

Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.

The White House is extremely sensitive to the first symptoms of any desire on the part of Congress or of the executive departments to do something, and the skill with which Mr. Coolidge can apply a wet blanket to an enthusiast is technically marvelous. There have been Presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge’s equal in the art of deflating interest. The mastery of what might be called the technique of anti-propaganda is worthy of prolonged study by students of public opinion.

The naive statesmen of the pre-Coolidge era imagined that it was desirable to interest the people in their government, that public discussion was a good thing, that indignation at evil was useful. Mr. Coolidge is more sophisticated. He has discovered the value of diverting attention from government, and with exquisite subtlety that amounts to genius, he has used dullness and boredom as political devices."

It is difficult to read this passage without a sigh of resignation. Our culture is able to provide us with innumerable dull and boring politicians. But how many have the ability to use tedium as a sophisticated political tool?

The rest of the post is equally amusing. I can almost promise that if you read it you'll be asking where you can go to sign up.

In Search of the Higgs

Imagine you're on the beach and you sprint full speed into the ocean. As soon as you enter the water you slow down. Even though you're trying just as hard to run, the resistance of the water has the effect of slowing you almost as if you had become more massive.

Scientists have believed for some time that space is permeated with a field analogous to the ocean and that as sub-atomic particles move through this field it resists them. The amount of resistance is what gives these particles their mass.

The field is called the Higgs field and one of the hopes particle physicists had had for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was that it would detect a particle, called the Higgs Boson, which, in our analogy, is like a wave in the ocean. This would have confirmed the existence of the Higgs field and would have completed what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. Unfortunately, the prospects for finding the Higgs are dimming.

Since the Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model, the favored theory in particle physics, failure to find it will be very disappointing. It could mean having to rethink the entire discipline. New Scientist has a pretty good primer on the Higgs for those who might be interested in learning more about this exotic bit of matter:

The Large Hadron Collider finally has enough data to explore every nook and cranny where the elusive Higgs boson could be hiding. LHC physicists will announce the results of their latest hunt on Tuesday at CERN in Switzerland.

What is the Higgs boson?

It is the last undiscovered member of the standard model of particle physics, the leading theory describing how particles and forces interact. The mysterious particle is thought to give all other particles mass, but the standard model can't predict what the Higgs itself weighs.

Where might the Higgs be hiding?

The Higgs may be produced fleetingly when particles smash into each other at high speeds, and for years physicists have been looking for evidence of it at various particle colliders. They have gradually ruled out its existence at different masses, but there is still a narrow mass range, between 115 and 141 gigaelectronvolts, where the simplest version of the Higgs could take refuge.

What will LHC physicists report next week?

Rumour has it they have found hints of the Higgs at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts, about 133 times the mass of a proton. What is known for sure, though, is that researchers from the LHC's main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, will separately present the past year's worth of data from the proton collider. That represents more than 300 trillion high-speed particle collisions, more than twice the amount of data reported at a conference in August. That is still not enough data to be able to rule the Higgs definitively in or out, but it should be enough to show hints of the Higgs if it exists in the mass range that had previously not been scrutinised.

What if there is still no sign of the Higgs?

This time, if nothing materialises, physicists will really start giving up. "If we witness a lack of events in the full mass range, then clearly we will start disfavouring the presence of the standard model Higgs boson in LHC data," says CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli. "To really exclude it we would need additional data. But if in this amount of data we don't see any indication that something is happening, the most likely hypothesis is that we have to look for another solution."

You can read more about these possible alternative solutions at the link.

Straw Man

Peter Wehner has a low view of the presidential rhetoric emanating from the White House. He's evidently insufficiently appreciative, for example, of Mr. Obama's undeniable skill at constructing straw men and his artful use of the ad hominem:

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: “Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement — silly because it’s so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. The problem for Obama is it’s becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves.”

After that, he told us the GOP plan is ”dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” Given his rhetorical trajectory, Obama will soon be insisting that Republicans favor reinstituting slavery at home and genocide abroad (or perhaps it’s favoring genocide at home and slavery abroad).

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The point is that there seems to be no limit, no check, on what Obama will say in order to demonize his opponents — or, to quote Obama’s own words, his “enemies.”

Now I think this is too harsh. Mr. Obama is a gentleman, a good husband and father. Such men are not demonizers. After all, it was Mr. Obama, wasn't it, who during the campaign repeatedly promised us "hope and change" from the tawdry politics of the past.

It was Mr. Obama, Wehner admits, who in an interview once declared, ”I want us to rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this constant petty bickering that's come to characterize our politics.” Does that sound like the sort of thing we'd expect from a man who would demonize his opponents?

Moreover, even Mr. Wehner acknowledges that it was Mr. Obama who during the campaign proclaimed that "We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism… [...] That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ’not this time….’” And it was Mr. Obama who said on the night of his election, on a stage in Grant Park, ”I will listen to you, especially when we disagree… [...] Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”

Those sound to me like the words of a high-minded intellectual, a man too noble to be grubbing about in the political gutters. Mr. Wehner should apologize for thinking that Mr. Obama is just a typical political opportunist and moral pragmatist who says whatever he needs to say to discredit his opposition in the eyes of the voters.

Indeed, he should be ashamed for even thinking such a thing about the leader of the free world. Read his column and see if you don't agree.

Fast and Furious Scandal

For those who need to get caught up the Fast and Furious operation was an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) scheme to secretly encourage American gun dealers to sell guns to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. They hoped to be able to track these guns to the top thugs in the cartels, but they lost track of thousands of weapons which fell into the hands of Mexican killers. Many were used in hundreds of violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The operation was a violation of both Mexican and American law.

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS has been almost alone among reporters in investigating this scandal and is now reporting that emails have been uncovered which show that the Justice Department, or at least the ATF, wanted to use the proliferation of weapons, which they caused and abetted, as a reason for imposing stricter gun controls on American dealers:

ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

In other words, the ATF would pour weapons into Mexico and then when these weapons started turning up at crime scenes they would use their proliferation and use in homicides as a justification for stricter regulations on the very gun dealers they encouraged to sell the weapons in the first place.

And then we wonder why people don't trust their government.

BO and TR

President Obama has in the past invoked the memory a number of former presidents to set Americans at ease over his plans to "transform America." Lincoln, Reagan, FDR, Truman, even George W. Bush (although never Jimmy Carter with whom he's most comparable) have all been trotted out as examples to reassure us that the path toward crony socialism Mr. Obama has set us upon is really nothing radical.

Most recently he traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas to summon the shade of Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the first of the progressive presidents, to validate his march toward an all-encompassing role for government bureaucrats in the lives of Americans.

National Review's editors mark the occasion with a fine "compare and contrast" of Mr. Obama and TR, and though they're no fans of either, they give us a fine skewering of the pretensions of a man of Mr. Obama's modest accomplishments seeking to clothe himself in the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt.

It is strange that Pres. Barack Obama has chosen to channel the spirit of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the president he least resembles. Teddy Roosevelt was a rough-riding, safari-loving, war-adoring imperialist (ask the Panamanians), the man who sent the “Great White Fleet” on a round-the-world tour to make it clear to American rivals hither and yon that they had better mind their own business or face the wrath of a budding world power. Barack Obama was an undistinguished law professor and legislative back-bencher who once gave a very good speech.

Roosevelt wrote 18 books on subjects ranging from naval warfare to naturalism, and not one soft-focus psychological self-examination about his tender feelings about his estranged father. Like President Obama, President Roosevelt was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Unlike President Obama, he earned it, having successfully negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

Not exactly mirror images.

And yet Barack Obama, the great indoorsman and man of inaction, whose only instinct when faced with a national crisis is to deliver yet another speech, has trundled himself down to Osawatomie, Kan., where TR, by that point an ex-president, made his famous “New Nationalism” address, to try to get a little of that Bull Moose magic to rub off on himself.

Color us skeptical, but we can see why TR’s New Nationalism might appeal to Barack Obama: It was an early instantiation of what our National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg has called, after H. G. Wells, “liberal fascism,” the central-planning, top-down, intrusively managerial approach to national government that has been the Left’s model for generations.

The editors go on to give us an incisive evaluation of Mr. Obama's speech at Osawatomie. It's worth reading. Here's a snippet:

President Obama’s speech, like President Roosevelt’s, was economically illiterate. Like TR, he juxtaposed the tycoons and the middle class, and committed the classic blunder of conflating the success of the former with the difficulties of the latter. The Democrat carried into office on a wave of Wall Street money called for a crackdown on Wall Street shenanigans even as he packs his administration with Wall Street veterans, while the Washington establishment’s perverse relations with Wall Street, and, especially, with the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, mighty contributors to the housing bubble, go unchallenged. It’s only greed when somebody else is making the money.

The NR editors conclude by noting that Mr. Obama's theme for the coming campaign appears to be "inequality", but, as the writers observe, Americans are not suffering from inequality. They're suffering from unemployment which, if the hundreds of thousands of people who have given up looking for work are taken into account, is pushing 11%.

Mr. Obama will try to blame the rich for this very troublesome state of affairs, but it's hard to see how it's their fault. On the other hand, it's easy to see how a bloated regulatory state which, with every new tax and regulation it imposes on business diminishes the incentive of employers to hire new employees, is a major contributor to the problem.

Back to the Drawing Board

Evolution News and Views has an interesting report of research on the metal zirconium that suggests that oxygen levels in the earth's early atmosphere were similar to what they are today.

This is interesting because pretty much every naturalistic theory of abiogenesis (the creation of life from non-living matter on the early earth) requires that oxygen be absent from the atmosphere since oxygen destroys organic compounds that are exposed to it for any length of time. That's why nutritionists encourage us to consume plenty of anti-oxidants. If life emerged through purely natural processes the first organic molecules could not have been exposed to oxygen.

Here's an excerpt from the ENV piece:

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction.

Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

So, if measurements are accurate which show high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere from almost the very birth of the planet, then we're left with two explanations for abiogenesis: either the first life originated elsewhere and migrated to earth or it didn't originate as a result of natural processes alone, but received some impetus from an intelligent source.

No doubt the finding reported in ENV will give new energy to theories that life originated elsewhere and hitched a ride to earth in asteroids. Any physicalist hypothesis, no matter how unlikely, no matter how untestable, is preferable among modern thinkers to the hypothesis that there's a Mind behind the origin of life.

The irony is that almost every contemporary discovery about biology and cosmology supports the latter and makes the former more difficult to believe.

Western Vagrant

Last month a vagrant from the western states showed up here in central Pennsylvania. There have only been a half dozen or so records of this bird appearing in PA over the years so it was a treat to be able to see one this far east. The little fellow is called a Green-tailed Towhee and it likes to scratch about on the ground in brushy areas, a habit which makes them hard to see. To catch a glimpse of this guy I stood out in a drizzle for two hours waiting for him to pop into view. It was worth it.

The bird is in winter plumage, but there's still a hint of reddish-brown cap and a little greenish-yellow in the wings and tail. Ed Norman took the photo (the date on the pic is incorrect).

Regulatory Reform

David Brooks comes to the defense of President Obama against critics who charge that the Obama tenure has imposed onerous regulations on business that are stifling hiring and dampening the economic recovery. Brooks seems to want to argue that this is not so, but he winds up arguing that, well, it actually is so, but that other administrations, including that of George W. Bush, were almost as bad. This is hardly the sort of defense Mr. Obama might have hoped for.

The question, though, is not which administration laid the costliest burden on business but rather which administration is going to alleviate that burden in order to stimulate businesses to resume hiring. When the question is put that way, the only possible answer is that it's either the Obama administration, a successor administration, or nobody.

If Mr. Obama is serious about creating jobs he could do worse than follow the advice given in an article at City Journal. Iain Murray, a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and David Schoenbrod argue that reforming the regulations imposed on business would create thousands of jobs almost immediately:

Since 1996 the number of pages of regulations heaped upon our entrepreneurs has exploded from 67,000 to 81,405.

Each page (apart from the bizarre blank ones) contains a rule that imposes costs on businesses while creating more jobs for bureaucrats. Small businesses suffer disproportionately from these rules because their owners have to deal with compliance themselves (they usually give up and hire someone else to handle it when they reach about 30 employees). The costs of complying with regulations average $10,585 per employee, the SBA says — enough to throw a small firm of 20 employees with $200,000 in profits into just-breaking-even territory.

No wonder small businesses, the engine of the U.S. economy, have stalled in hiring.

Chamber of Commerce surveys show that over 60 percent of small businesses have no plans to hire in the next year, and the firms cite greater regulation or the threat of it as a major reason for their reluctance. In short, bureaucracy helps explain why businesses are making profits but not jobs. Substantially reducing the regulatory burden would go some way toward getting them to hire again.

Unfortunately, regulations are the raison d'etre of big government bureaucrats. A party philosophically infatuated with the idea of government as the guarantor of social and environmental justice, as is the Democrat party, will be loath to reduce this burden. It's simply not in a liberal's DNA. If, however, they were to act counter to their nature and actually agree to reform measures what might some of those measures look like? Here are some ideas from the City Journal piece:

For starters, Congress should appoint an annual bipartisan commission to comb through existing rules and identify those that need repeal. The commission would conduct its own analyses of the costs and benefits of regulations, as federal agencies’ figures are notoriously suspect and far from independent. Congress would then vote on the entire repeal package, which would prevent legislators from trading their votes for the preservation of their preferred rules.

Further, Congress should add a five-year sunset provision to all new regulations. If it later decides that rules are worth keeping, it can vote to extend them for another five years. Congress should also revitalize the concept of “enterprise zones,” areas where businesses are exempted from some regulations to allow them to establish themselves at reduced cost. Enterprise zones proved an effective way of getting local economies moving in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another useful tool would be a new small-business license for all start-ups and microbusinesses — firms with five or fewer employees — exempting them from new regulations for a five-year period. The federal government might consider, too, devolving many regulatory duties to the states, letting the nation’s basic constitutional units discover the effectiveness of rules through trial, error, and interstate competition.

Two British policies invite imitation in the United States. Congress could experiment with “regulatory budgeting,” a system currently being introduced in the United Kingdom, by approving a proposal of Democratic senator Mark Warner’s: for every new rule introduced, an old one of equivalent cost would have to be repealed.

Congress could also implement an American version of Britain’s new Red Tape Challenge, which enables citizens to air grievances about particular regulations. This could be done either in conjunction with the bipartisan commission or, as in the U.K., by a team of business leaders that reports back to the legislature.

All these ideas would provide significant regulatory relief. First, however, Congress should take responsibility for regulations, instead of surrendering rule-making to unaccountable government agencies.

These all seem like fine proposals, but in order to enact them voters have to elect to office people who are genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the small businessman. As it is, our political class, or at least those on left, treats small businessmen as if they were public enemies and makes it exceedingly hard for them to take on new hires while simultaneously turning a profit. Perhaps that will change next November.

Trouble Ahead

Pat Buchanan must feel like one of those Old Testament prophets warning of impending doom while the people, oblivious to the coming storm, party on. Buchanan keeps churning out data in his columns and books that paint a depressing picture of America's future, but few seem to pay him any heed. If, as experts insist, demography is destiny, our destiny as a nation looks pretty bleak.

In a recent column Buchanan urges us to consider what the U.S. will be like in less than forty years:

Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK. Yet there are reasons to worry.

First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe.

Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history. We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.

We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.

What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?

Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave” from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.

In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.

Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.

The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050?

We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.

This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse.

Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?

Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.

The world’s largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.

Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time? Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?

There's much more at the link and very much more in his new book Suicide of a Superpower. Meanwhile, Republicrats party on as if it were all someone else's problem. Their insoucience reminds me of a story in Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah where Bork recounts watching the sordid spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings on television and going to a friend's office to lament that "Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color." His friend replied, facetiously, that "Of course, it's coming to an end, but don't worry. It takes a long time, and in the meantime it's possible to live well."

If Buchanan is right we have about forty years to live well.