Banning Guns

John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime and bête noir of those who want to ban firearms regardless whether or not it would actually do any good, offers a few interesting observations in the wake of Mr. Obama's call to ban semi-automatic weapons. His concluding paragraphs are especially good:

But despite Obama’s frightening image of military weapons on America’s streets, it is pretty hard to seriously argue that a new ban on “assault weapons” would reduce crime in the United States. Even research done for the Clinton administration didn’t find that the federal assault-weapons ban reduced crime.

Indeed, banning guns on the basis of how they look, and not how they operate, shouldn’t be expected to make any difference. And there are no published academic studies by economists or criminologists that find the original federal assault-weapons ban to have reduced murder or violent crime generally.

There is no evidence that the state assault-weapons bans reduced murder or violent-crime rates either. Since the federal ban expired in September 2004, murder and overall violent-crime rates have actually fallen. In 2003, the last full year before the law expired, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people. Preliminary numbers for 2011 show that the murder rate has fallen to 4.7 per 100,000 people.

In fact, murder rates fell immediately after September 2004, and they fell more in the states without assault-weapons bans than in the states with them.

Nevertheless, the fears at the time were significant. An Associated Press headline warned, “Gun shops and police officers brace for end of assault weapons ban.” It was even part of the presidential campaign that year: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault weapons ban.” An Internet search turned up more than 560 news stories in the first two weeks of September 2004 that expressed fear about ending the ban. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fact that murder and other violent crime declined after the ban ended was hardly covered in the media.

If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple-victim public shootings, it is about time that we acknowledge a common feature of these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. The Cinemark movie theater in Aurora, like others run by the chain around the country, displayed warning signs that [patrons were] prohibited to carry guns into the theater.

The whole column is worth reading.

Many years ago I favored gun control. I even contributed to the Bradys' organization Handgun Control Incorporated and appeared on a local tv cable show to advocate for restrictions on rapid-fire weapons. But I was gradually convinced of three things: 1) People have a right to defend themselves and their loved ones, 2) where responsible citizens are allowed to own and carry weapons crime decreases, and 3) unless guns cease to be manufactured everywhere in the world no legal measure to limit them will accomplish anything other than to insure that the right of self-defense will be eroded.

When these three facts of life came together for me it completely reoriented my thinking.

This is not to say that there aren't reasonable restrictions which would pass constitutional scrutiny (evidently, anything is constitutional nowadays) and which could theoretically be legislated. I just believe that few of them would actually work in the real world, but what they could do is put the right to self-defense on a slippery slope that would eventually result in having that right abrogated altogether.

Until the millenial kingdom arrives that's a right we should fight to keep.

Indecision

It's hard to imagine that a president would have not one, not two, but three opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden and pass on all three, but that's apparently what President Obama did according to two-time New York Times best-selling author Richard Miniter.

The Daily Caller discusses an excerpt from Miniter's forthcoming book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him:

At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL mission, according to an explosive new book scheduled for release August 21. The Daily Caller has seen a portion of the chapter in which the stunning revelation appears.

Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the “kill” mission in January 2011, again in February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.

Miniter, a two-time New York Times best-selling author, cites an unnamed source with Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.

Obama administration officials also said after the raid that the president had delayed giving the order to kill the arch-terrorist the day before the operation was carried out, in what turned out to be his fourth moment of indecision. At the time, the White House blamed the delay on unfavorable weather conditions near bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

But when Miniter obtained that day’s weather reports from the U.S. Air Force Combat Meteorological Center, he said, they showed ideal conditions for the SEALs to carry out their orders.

The Obama campaign has portrayed the President in his decision to give the go-ahead to the SEALs as steely, gutsy and determined, but like so much else about this White House it seems that the actual wizard behind the curtain isn't at all what his minions portray him to be. Even so, I'd like to know exactly why the President declined to go after OBL on the first three occasions. Maybe he had a good reason, something more compelling, I hope, than just Valerie Jarrett's advice.

You Are What You Eat

I've written on previous occasions about the revolution in our understanding of genetic inheritance and gene expression that has been sweeping science with recent discoveries in what's called epigenetics.

Epigenetics refers to chemical tags or markers found to be attached to different parts of the DNA molecule which control the expression of certain genes. It also refers to the general architecture of the cell which seems to add another level of control to gene expression.

One of the most interesting aspects of the discoveries that're being made in this field is that these chemical tags, molecules consisting of a half dozen or so atoms, can be altered by diet so that what one eats when one is in prime child-producing years can effect one's offspring.

Doctors have long known that substances like folic acid and others help produce healthy babies but why, exactly, was a bit of a mystery.

It's turning out that, as this story at Live Science explains, such substances affect what chemical tags attach to the DNA and where on the genetic material they attach.

Here's part of the article:

You are what you eat, the saying goes. And, according to two new genetic studies, you are what your mother, father, grandparents and great-grandparents ate, too. Diet, be it poor or healthy, can so alter the nature of one's DNA that those changes can be passed on to the progeny. While this much has been speculated for years, researchers in two independent studies have found ways in which this likely is happening.

The findings, which involve epigenetics, may help explain the increased genetic risk that children face compared to their parents for diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

The punch line is that your poor dietary habits may be dooming your progeny, despite how healthy they will try to eat. Recent studies have shown how nutrition dramatically alters the health and appearance of otherwise identical mice.

A group led by Randy Jirtle of Duke University demonstrated how mouse clones implanted as embryos in separate mothers will have radical differences in fur color, weight, and risk for chronic diseases depending on what that mother was fed during pregnancy.

That is, the nutrients or lack thereof changed the DNA environment in such a way that the identical DNA in these mouse clones expressed itself in very different ways.

The article notes that epigenetic changes wrought by diet occur in all cells of the body including ova and sperm so that these changes can be passed on to offspring by both parents. The article closes with this:

It is possible that eating more omega-3 fatty acids, choline, betaine, folic acid and vitamin B12, by mothers and fathers, possibly can alter chromatin state and mutations, as well as have beneficial effects…leading to birth of a 'super baby' with long life and [lower risk] of diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Gun Control

Carl M. Cannon at Real Clear Politics has an excellent column in the wake of the Aurora shootings in which he ponders the question whether there are too many guns or too few.

Shortly into his essay he sums up the problem:

After last week’s horrific shootings inside a movie house in suburban Denver, Americans did what they always do in such circumstances: We moved in two different directions at once.

Many people decried the ease with which firearms can be obtained in this country by unbalanced people with no business playing with matches, let alone high-powered rifles. Others went out and bought a gun. And some did both.

These are contradictory impulses, but they both make sense. Many ordinary Americans, unlike our polarized and linear political parties, can hold two competing ideas in their minds at the same time. In the aftermath of the “Dark Knight” killings in Aurora, those two thoughts were as follows:

(1) It is far too easy for mentally unstable individuals to acquire deadly firearms in this country.

(2) The only person known to be packing heat in that multiplex last week was the killer, and, God forbid, if a similar situation ever arises, carrying a loaded gun would at least give me a fighting chance.

So this week legal gun sales, along with applications of “carry and conceal” permits, spiked upward -- just as they did after Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in Tucson in January 2011. One factor at play? Fear that President Obama intends to push for stricter gun controls.

It is indeed too hard to keep guns out of the hands of lunatics, and that's the problem with almost any form of gun control. It simply won't work. The only people who'll obey the laws are the people who obey laws. Those inclined to use a gun illegally will not scruple at doing something illegal to obtain one.

Cannon relates a number of stories about how guns have been used both illegally to murder and legally to protect, one of the most interesting of which coincidentally occurred in Colorado five years ago.

A rampage shooting at the Youth With a Mission center in Arvada, Colo., the night before had taken two lives and left a third man critically wounded. The crime scene was 70 miles from the Colorado Springs campus of the New Life Church. But the killer had escaped into the snowy night, and one member of the congregation -- former Minnesota policewoman Jeanne Assam -- had an ominous feeling he might strike again.

Acting on her instincts, Assam urged the church pastors to post volunteer guards -- some of them armed -- at Sunday services at the sprawling mega-church. And at 1 p.m. on Dec. 9, 2007, Jeanne Assam’s premonition came true.

The Arvada gunman, 24-year-old Matthew J. Murray, showed up just after the 11 a.m. worship service at New Life had ended. He began blazing away in the parking lot, killing two teenage sisters and wounding their father and another woman. Unloading two pistols and a semi-automatic rifle from his car -- along with 1,000 rounds of ammunition in a backpack -- he headed into the church’s foyer.

Hearing the gunfire in the parking lot, Assam drew her licensed pistol from its holster and headed toward the gunman . . .

Two church members ran toward the sound of the guns that day. The first was Jeanne Assam, the former Minneapolis policewoman. The second was Larry Bourbonnais, a Vietnam veteran. Assam was armed, Bourbonnais was not.

“Where’s the shooter? Where’s the shooter?” Bourbonnais shouted. He found him near the entryway to the church. Between him and the mad gunman was an armed male parishioner who’d been pressed into service as a security guard. He had his weapon drawn, but was not firing.

“Give me your gun!” Bourbonnais shouted. “I’ve been in combat. I’m going to take this guy out.”

But the guard would neither give Bourbonnais his gun, nor use it himself. “Get behind me,” was all he said to the frustrated Vietnam vet, who was then shot in the arm by Murray.

Just then, Assam approached. She walked calmly and rapidly toward the gunman shouting at him to surrender. Instead, he opened fire. So did Assam. She felled Murray who, seriously wounded, then turned his own gun on himself.

It’s no disgrace for an untrained person to fail to fire when confronted with the sudden and unexpected choice of whether to kill another human being. It’s perhaps a sign of mental health, or, at least, of inward grace, to hesitate in such a circumstance. Killing strangers, no matter the provocation, is not a natural act.

And yet, many people were in that huge Colorado Springs church that Sunday, and no matter where one stands on the issue of gun control, it must also be said -- and New Life senior pastor Brady Boyd did say it -- that Jeanne Assam and her gun may have saved a hundred lives.

Cannon's article is worth reading in its entirety. It does a good job of describing the perplexity we feel over this issue. Meanwhile, there's also this report in the news yesterday:

A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith's store.

Police say the suspect purchased a knife inside the store and then turned it into a weapon. Smith's employee Dorothy Espinoza says, "He pulled it out and stood outside the Smiths in the foyer. And just started stabbing people and yelling you killed my people. You killed my people."

Espinoza says, the knife wielding man seriously injured two people. "There is blood all over. One got stabbed in the stomach and got stabbed in the head and held his hands and got stabbed all over the arms."

Then, before the suspect could find another victim - a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. "A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith's grabbed him."

By the time officers arrived the suspect had been subdued by employees and shoppers. Police had high praise for the gun-carrying man who ended the hysteria. Lt. Brian Purvis said, "This was a volatile situation that could have gotten worse. We can only assume from what we saw it could have gotten worse. He was definitely in the right place at the right time."

Dozens of other shoppers, who too could have become victims, are also thankful for the gun carrying man. And many, like Danylle Julian, are still in shock from the experience. "Scary actually. Really scary. Five minutes before I walk out to my car. It could have been me."

I wonder how many of those shoppers who were so thankful that the unnamed man had a gun were people who, a half hour before, believed fervently that people shouldn't be allowed to carry firearms.

Five Myths about the Crusades

Steve Weidenkopf at Crisis Magazine laments the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He assays to set the record straight by debunking five myths in an article titled Crash Course on the Crusades. The five myths he takes on are these:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these is true, or at least the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of these myths. As you might expect the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes. For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark.

Selective Indignation

You're no doubt aware of the brouhaha percolating through the media over the statement by Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy to the effect that gay marriage should be between one man and one woman. This view, a view that was shared by our president up until he evolved a few months ago, and is still shared by a majority of the country today, has outraged the leaders of two of our major cities.

The mayors of both Boston and Chicago subsequently announced that Chick-fil-A will not be welcome to do business in their cities due to their CEO's reactionary, out-of-the-mainstream views toward marriage.

Donning their most smugly self-righteous expressions, these Democrat officials declared that intolerance will not be tolerated under their watch. A Chicago alderman even stated that opposition to Same Sex Marriage violated Chicago's values. Well. How low does one have to sink to violate Chicago's values?

Anyway, here's a question for these august gentlemen. When the local Muslims - who make no secret of their religious aversion to the homosexual lifestyle which they deplore almost as much as they deplore Jews - apply for a building permit for a baklava business in your fair cities, will you deny it to them too?

Of course not. That's, er, different. Mr. Cathy is a Christian and Democrats have no qualms about bullying Christians. Bullying Muslims is a different kettle of chicken.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller has proclaimed the issue settled now that gay rapper Antoine Dodson has spoken out on it. I have to say that his argument makes a lot of sense, more than that of the Chicago and Boston pols, at any rate. Note the soda cup at the end. It's probably too big to be legal in New York.

There's a Chick-fil-A not too far from where I live. I think I'm going to start eating there. If it's good enough for Antoine it's good enough for me.

Dark Knight

For reasons which, if I explained them, would probably make me sound like a misanthrope, I rarely see movies in the theater, but I went yesterday (to the earliest morning showing when there were only a dozen or so others in the house) to see The Dark Knight Rises. I found it better than did some of the critics though not quite as good as some of the Batman aficionados might have hoped it would be. Even so, there were lots of good special effects, a good musical score, and most of the cast did a fine job.

The best part of the film, for me, was the story line which is really the story of the conflict between totalitarian "humanist" leftism and the traditional American way of life. The speech given by the evil Bane was perhaps the clearest illustration of this. I'd heard that he sounds in this scene like some of the Occupy Wall Streeters, and he pretty much does. He promises to take the wealth from the 1% and give it to everyone else, and to do all sorts of other OWS types of things, but his real plan is to imprison, oppress and destroy Gotham, all in the name of bringing peace and justice to the city.

Bane embodies the aspirations of leftists ever since the French Revolution. The "trial" scenes where the accused were assumed to be guilty and the only question was how they would choose to die reminded me of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. This is probably not a coincidence since the penultimate scene has the police commissioner quoting from the opening lines of that novel.

If anyone would like a metaphor for where radical leftism winds up they should watch The Dark Knight Rises, even in a theater. It's more than worth the price of admission.

Post-Hope and Change Depression

The video of this disillusioned Obama supporter has gone viral. How many of those who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 can relate to her? How many of those will vote the same way in November?

Africentrism

Kathy Shaidle has a bit of fun with the Africentric curriculum devised by the Toronto school board.

Shaidle helpfully explains why the proper word is now "Africentric" rather than "Afrocentric," or at least this is the proper usage for the time being. She then moves on to give us some glimpses into what an Africentric approach to math and science looks like in Toronto schools. She offers, for example, a sample Africentric class project, circa 2008.

Children were assigned the following question: “Why is President-Elect Obama’s win important to science?” Yes, Canadian children. (And this plan was presumably put together before Obama slashed NASA’s budget.)

But it gets better, if — imitating our leftist friends — we redefine “better” to mean something closer to “cringe-inducingly horrific.” Because the next photo depicts two black children obediently printing out the following answer, presumably at their teacher’s prompting:

“I think it’s important to science because it shows that black people are just as smart as white people.”

If being elected president means you’re “smart,” surely that proves George Bush is twice as smart as Obama, right?

No?

Man, this “African math” is too hard for my poor white brain!

Another slide shows the following text, again written in a child’s hand:

“I think Mr. James Watsons [sic] shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize because this man was a racist.…This man said that black people don’t have the intelligences [sic] that white people do but at the end of the day who is are [sic] President? And what colour is he?

Again, Barack Obama isn’t “are” president here in Canada, but I guess in the TDSB’s eyes, he are — I mean, is — the universal, Nobel Prize-winning President of Black People International Incorporated, so whatever.

This flaky curriculum is ostensibly designed to appeal to the city’s “at-risk youth,” none of whom ever seem to be Jewish or Japanese, but all of whom — at least if our newspaper’s depressingly frequent murder reports are to be believed — are “aspiring rap artists.” (Notice that they’re never “aspiring brain surgeons.”)

One sure-fire way to make certain that most black kids continue to aspire to be rap artists rather than brain surgeons is to convince them that the African perspective on math and science, whatever that may be, is just as worth learning as the European perspective. The great scientific advances of the last four centuries, dare I say it, received very little impetus from African contributors. Indeed, children of African descent might take a lesson from children of Asian descent. Asians are very successful in the math/sciences and they've achieved that success, not by insisting on teaching their young "Japacentric" math but by following the trail blazed by the great thinkers produced by Europe.

I hope that the assumption of the Toronto School Board isn't that that trail would just be too arduous for young black students to tread.

Alexander Cockburn, Almost There

John Fund remembers the erstwhile far-left radical Alexander Cockburn whose gradual metamorphosis into a conservative was cut short by cancer last Saturday. Here's part of Fund's column:

[O]ver the years he mellowed, even as he sometimes denied it. He became an American citizen in 2009. That same year he became a columnist for the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, a platform he used to rail against American imperalism, big-business corruption, and imbecilic leftists. A conservative would have agreed with large parts of most of his columns. He was a passionate defender of gun rights and believed a well-armed society was a bulwark against anyone who wanted to control a population.

He became a true heretic to the Left in 2007 when he declared that supporters of global warming were promoting a fraud: Their “pied piper,” he said, was a “hypocritical mountebank” named Al Gore. (Cockburn was an enthusiastic supporter of Ralph Nader against Gore in 2000.)

My last meeting with Alex came in 2009, when he showed up in New York at the Heartland Institute’s conference featuring dozens of global-warming skeptics. We stepped outside of the conference for a long chat. He cheerfully recounted all the places where he had been denounced for his global-warming views. “They hate me because I tell the truth: The environmental Left wants to deindustrialize America so they can exercise political power and control people’s lifestyles,” he told me.

“I’ve felt like the object of a witch hunt,” he said as he described how the Left treated him after he dissented from the global-warming “consensus.” “One former Sierra Club board member suggested I should be criminally prosecuted.”

Cockburn was at the conference collecting material for his forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, in which he planned to explore the link between fear-mongering and climate-catastrophe proponents. “No one on the left is comfortable talking about science,” he told me. “They don’t feel they can easily get their arms around it, so they don’t think about it much. As a result, they are prone to any peddler of ideas that reinforce their preexisting prejudices.”

I asked him how he felt hanging around with so many people who had more conservative viewpoints than he did. “It’s been good fun and I’ve learned a lot,” he told me. “I think what they are saying on this and several other topics is looking better and better.”

Too bad the 71 year-old Cockburn didn't live to make his transition complete.

Blind Squirrels

There's not much anyone can say yet about the Aurora massacre. We know very little about the details, but that hasn't stopped some in the liberal media from trying to score political points. The very worst example of this, perhaps, is George Stephanopolis and Brian Ross at ABC News.

Ross apparently Googled the name of the shooter, James Holmes and Aurora, CO and came up with a guy who's a member of the local Tea Party. That was all the justification he apparently needed to mention the connection on the air and throw this innocent man's life into turmoil.

If Ross can't say for sure that this was the man who killed a dozen people then why say it at all? Was he simply trying to throw it out there that the Tea Party might somehow be implicated, or that members of the Tea Party are inherently violent?

Peter Wehner had some good thoughts about this sleazy example of journalism by innuendo at Commentary Magazine. Here's part of what Wehner wrote:

[T]he effort by some – in this case, by ABC’s Brian Ross — to attempt to politicize this tragedy almost as soon as the bullets from the killer’s gun had found their targets. (Ross mistakenly speculated, based on the flimsiest evidence, that the killer was a member of the Tea Party. ABC has since issued a retraction and an apology.)

This kind of politicization occurs in part because reporters on the air feel they have to comment on an event when they in fact have very little to say. It is also the result, I think, of an effort to draw some larger meaning from acts that often turn out to have no larger meaning. Sometimes they are what they are: the malevolent actions of poisoned minds. But part of it, too, is a reflex by some to fit a massacre like this into a preexisting political narrative. We saw it happen in the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School; the 2011 shooting spree near Tucson; and we will undoubtedly see it after today’s slaughter.

To be clear: there is such a thing as political violence. But what is troubling is the immediate assumption by some people, usually those who are part of the political class, that every massacre can be ascribed to political motivations. Acting on this assumption, they contort things in order to make them fit a convenient political template.

This effort to interpret everything through a political and partisan lens – to reduce everything to a political and partisan interpretation – is itself a disfigurement of reality. Life is a complicated and endlessly variegated thing. Politics has a role in all our lives; but for it to play such a dominant role in people’s imagination is surely not a healthy thing. And for people to immediately and instinctively take every human event – no matter how tragic and how painful — and place it in the maw of our politics is wrong and even repulsive. It exploits people’s sorrow and grief in order to score cheap political points and frame stupid political argument.

Blaming the Tea Party in particular, and conservatives in general, for instigating or perpetrating crimes of violence is a chronic ploy by the Left. They do it almost every time there's a national tragedy and each time they wind up looking foolish. You'd think they'd learn. Ace of Spades posts a summary of previous examples:

• When Dr. Amy Bishop shot her colleagues, the Left speculated that she was a Tea Partier. In fact, she was an Obama donor.
• A Discovery Channel hostage-taker was supposedly a climate change denier. In fact, he was an enviroweenie and Discovery Channel intern.
• The census-taker was supposedly hanged by extremist anti-tax Tea Partiers. In fact, he hanged himself.
• The Times Square Bomber was speculated to be upset about [Health Care Reform]. In fact, he was jihadi scum.
• The guy who flew his plane into the IRS in TX was supposedly a Tea Partier. In fact, he quoted from the Communist Manifesto.
• The guy who was stabbing NYC cabbies was supposedly an anti-Ground Zero Mosque Tea Partier. In fact, he supported the GZM.
• The Pentagon shooter was supposedly a Tea Party extremist. In fact, he was a 9/11 Truther.
• When the Ft. Hood shooting happened, the Left speculated that it was a “Right Wing Nut Job.” In fact, it was a Muslim nutjob.
• When the Tucson shooting occurred, it was immediately blamed on Tea Party rhetoric. In fact, Jared Loughner was apolitical and insane.

Perhaps they think that if they accuse the Tea Party of complicity every time there's a tragedy maybe someday, like the blind squirrel that eventually stumbles upon an acorn by sheer luck, they'll get lucky, too.

Pointless Punishment

Penn State has been handed an astonishing penalty for the derelictions of its representatives during the era of Sandusky's pedophilic depradations. Not only is Paterno's campus statue to be removed (an appropiate step, perhaps), not only is the university to be fined (an appropriate move), not only are they to be banned from bowl games for four years (four years?!), but all their football wins going back to 1998 are to be vacated (pure vindictive stupidity).

What's the point in banning the university from post-season play when no one currently in the program had anything to do with the events for which they're being punished? And what's the point in saying that games that were won weren't really won. Exactly what does all this accomplish? Why punish people who had nothing to do with Sandusky's crimes in the attempt to impose a posthumous punishment on one man who did? It reminds me of those accounts one reads of how some mob in a third world country will dig up the corpse of a hated foe so they can desecrate it even further.

It's the very definition of injustice that innocent people are punished for crimes they didn't commit. In this case, the NCAA's punishment affects only the innocent. The guilty are no longer there.

If PSU officials did not fulfill their legal obligations then prosecute them and put them in jail. If Paterno deserves disgrace then remove his statue, but why hurt the students and businesses in State College which rely upon Penn State football for financial aid, scholarships and revenue? Why take away wins that were achieved by players on the field who had no knowledge whatsoever of what Sandusky was doing?

The NCAA said they're not going to terminate the PSU football program, but they are. They're terminating it in the same way that withholding food and water from a man eventually terminates his life even if no one actively kills him. State College and Penn State will be a very different place, not just athletically, but also academically, for the next couple of decades and it's all so pointless.

As I said, the NCAA's punishment seems both stupid and vindictive.

Unintended Consequences

There are two things liberals desire (well, more than two, but...). One is to create a highly taxed, highly regulated state, and the other is to eliminate as far as possible the gap between rich and poor. What they often don't seem to understand, though, is that these two goals are mutually exclusive. An anecdote in the August/September issue of First Things (subscription only) illustrates why.

The piece notes that in California, the most highly taxed, highly regulated state in the union, the middle class is fleeing. Wealthy individuals and large businesses can absorb higher taxes and regulations, and big corporations, in fact, sometimes welcome them because they tend to drive out the competition, which is exactly what's happening in California.

The taxes and regs are forcing mid-level businesses out of the state and with them are going many of their middle class workers. This leaves behind two groups: the wealthy who can still afford to live there and the poor who can't afford to leave even if they wanted to. From 2000 to 2009 1.5 million more people left the state than have entered it. They're heading for states like Utah and Texas where they can find jobs and afford to buy a house. This makes California a far more class-divided society than the national average, and the gap is continuing to widen as the middle class continues to flee.

None of this seems to matter to the liberals who have a hammerlock on California politics, however. They're convinced that taxes and regulations on business are good things. That they're in fact counterproductive to, and incompatible with, the classless society for which they yearn simply eludes their comprehension.

What will happen ten or twenty years from now if there's scarcely any middle class left in the state? In order to support all of their manifold social programs California will need to raise more revenue, and the only place they'll be able to get it is from the wealthy and big corporations. Eventually, taxes will rise to the point where these, too, will be driven away, and then all that'll be left of the Golden State will be a blighted ghetto where teeming masses of poor live in third world squalor.

At some point Californians will have to realize that taking from the rich to give to the poor really helps no one in the long run and just winds up hurting everyone.

Syria Falling

News reports indicate that the government of Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad is about to fall as rebel forces are growing stronger and more competent by the day.

Strategy Page has this analysis:

In the last 24 hours the security forces have killed over 300 civilians and rebels. This was believed to be in retaliation for yesterday's bombing of a meeting of senior security officials. President Assad has not been seen or heard from since the fighting began in the capital. Rebels are firing machine-guns and mortars at military bases in the city and attacking security forces in new areas of the capital.

Five days of fighting in the capital intensified as gunfire was heard near the presidential palace. More combat units, including tanks and other armored vehicles, have been seen moving towards areas of the capital where most government buildings are. The rebels and their weapons are getting into the city, to join the growing number of residents who are joining the revolution. Thousands of civilians are fleeing the capital, many of them apparently government supporters.

Turkey reports that yesterday there were 246 Syrian refugees, including several officers (a general, five colonels, four majors, two captains, and one lieutenant) along with dozens of lower ranking soldiers. Many of the military defectors brought their families.

Desertion in the security forces is increasing, despite orders to shoot suspected deserters on sight. Commanders have also been ordered to immediately kill any soldiers who refuse to fire on civilians. Apparently many commanders are refusing to carry out that order.

If Assad's regime crumbles it's likely that a bloodbath will ensue as the majority Sunnis who've long been tyrannized by the minority Alawites decide to settle old scores. The Alawites know this and will surely fight to the bitter end to keep that from happening.

Russia and China, two nations which have thrown in with Damascus, provided it with weapons and other support, and have blocked any attempt in the U.N. to condemn Assad, are going to appear to be on the wrong side of both history and morality. Perhaps the fact that both nations tried to prop up a brutal man responsible for the murders of thousands of Syrians, and in some ways facilitated those murders, won't matter to the rest of the world, but it might, and it could take a long time to bleach out the stain. Russia also has a naval base in Syria which it'll probably lose as a consequence of its support of Assad.

Another loser if the rebellion is successful will be Iran which is the third major sponsor of Syrian oppression and perhaps their biggest economic backer.

A major concern for the U.S. is Syria's vast stockpile of chemical weapons which many fear Assad will use against the rebels in a desperate attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. How this can be prevented is not at all clear. Even so, it seems that by staying out of the fray, at least overtly if not covertly, the U.S. has played it just about right.

Whatever our role in Syria has been it'll be interesting to see, once Assad falls, whether President Obama will take any credit for what might in fact be a foreign policy success. Recall that after our special ops forces killed Osama bin Laden Mr. Obama wasn't shy about having his surrogates give him the credit, but now that he's instructed American businessmen that they deserve no credit for their accomplishments because they're the economic beneficiaries of what others actually did, I'm sure he'll recognize that the principle applies to him as well and that he deserves no credit for either the bin Laden success nor that in Syria, nor, for that matter, any other perceived success of his administration.

What Did He Mean?

The President is catching a lot of heat for his comment in Virginia last Friday that “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

What did he mean by this peculiar assertion?

He may have been stating the obvious, that no one lives in isolation from others, that we're all interdependent, but this is so trivial as to be banal. It'd be like telling a student who graduates magna cum laude that her accomplishment had little to do with her effort since she's not the one who built, equipped or administered the college which made her achievement possible. If this is what Mr. Obama meant then his statement was perhaps innocuous but profoundly dumb.

On the other hand, he could have meant that people who have a business, who are enjoying success, don't really deserve their success because they're just the fortunate beneficiaries of other people's labor, like a slacker who fortuitously inherits his grandfather's fortune. If this is what the President intended to say then his statement is insidious because it stirs up resentment of the haves among the have-nots by telling them in essence that what the haves have they don't really deserve, and that if you don't have it it's not because of any fault of your own, you're just not as lucky as the other guy. Abetting that sort of class envy is pernicious and destructive because it allows people to justify taking what people have worked hard to acquire and giving it to those who've done little. If this is what Mr. Obama was doing he's not the sort of man who should be in a position of national leadership.

The third possibility is that Mr. Obama simply and literally believes that no one who has built a business can claim to have been the one who built it, a possibility so exceedingly silly that it can doubtless be dismissed out of hand.

Whatever he meant, I'm sure he wishes he hadn't said it because none of these possible interpretations does much to burnish his reputation as a cerebral deep-thinker and because the Romney campaign has now released an ad which makes him appear completely out of touch with middle America:

I suspect that the second alternative above is the best explanation for Mr. Obama's statement in Virginia. It fits his view that, as he told Joe the Plumber in the 2008 campaign, we should redistribute wealth, and it dovetails with his recent decision to remove the Clinton work requirements for welfare recipients.

In any case, perhaps in the future the President's staff will be much more careful about letting him speak without a script. It won't do to have him giving voice to his true feelings in the middle of a campaign when voters are paying attention.

Where Does Information Come From?

Geneticist Craig Venter recently gave a talk at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in which he said this:

All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of hundreds of thousands of protein robots, coded for by the DNA, that carry out precise functions," said Venter. "We are now using computer software to design new DNA software.

In other words the fundamental basis of all living things is a kind of software, which means it's information. Scientists like to say that similar causes produce similar effects. If every time some phenomenon has in the past been found to be produced by the same cause then we're justified in assuming that whenever we see that phenomenon today we can assume it to have been produced by that same, or a similar, cause.

If this is so, however, then there are fascinating implications in what Venter says about the nature of DNA's information content. Information - complex arrangements arrayed in specific, recognizable patterns - is always, in human experience, produced by an intelligence. Software is information, it's a code. If similar causes produce similar effects then the cause of the information in DNA should be similar to the cause of information we find in any other medium - books, DVDs, magnetic tape, etc. The information we find in these devices is produced by minds, indeed, information is always, in our experience, produced by minds, so why think the information in DNA is any different?

Moreover, Venter's description of the cell as a collection of information-driven machines is precisely what intelligent design theorists have been saying for two decades. Machines are products of minds. They're constructed to serve a function. They don't just happen to form through the action of physical processes and time. Indeed, physical processes and time work to degrade machines. Even if the Darwinian myth of unguided mutation, natural selection, and differential reproduction could be invoked to explain the diversity of cells it cannot explain the origin of the first cells.

Evolution News and Views gives a dozen reasons why regarding DNA as software, i.e. information, leads to the conclusion that the cell is intelligently designed:

1. Our uniform experience with software is that it is intelligently designed.
2. Software runs on machines, and machines are intelligently designed.
3. Software operates other machines (e.g., robots) that are also intelligently designed.
4. Systems of interconnected software and hardware are irreducibly complex.
5. Functional systems imply purposefully planned architecture of the whole.
6. Software is comprised of information, which is immaterial.
7. Information is independent of the storage medium bearing it (e.g., electrons, magnets, silicon chips, molecules of DNA).
8. Meaningful information is aperiodic; so is DNA.
9. As a form of information, DNA software is complex and specified.
10. Epigenetics regulates genetics just as computer software can regulate other software.
11. Software can improve over time, but only by intelligent design, not by random mutation.
12. Software can contain bugs and still be intelligently designed.

This is not to deny that there has been descent through modification. The hypothesis that cells have been intelligently engineered does not rule out evolution, but it does rule out the idea that evolution could have occurred via blind, unguided processes. That idea is every day coming to seem more and more like a fairy tale.

Do As We Say, Not As We Do

It's curious that when the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the documents that would shed light on the Fast and Furious scandal, Democrats vigorously opposed their release, calling it a "fishing expedition" designed to just dig up whatever dirt the Republicans could find to discredit the administration, and the President himself refused to release them. Yet when Mitt Romney refuses to release his personal tax returns those same people consider this prima facie evidence that he's hiding something and scurry to pass a law that would make it a requirement that a presidential candidate reveal his tax returns for the last ten years.

The same people who condemn the Oversight Committee for seeking the F&F documents and who support those who refuse to release them are demanding that Mitt Romney release his tax returns, something he's not required to do, and criticizing him for not complying with their demand.

Moreover, the same people who insist that Romney turn over his financial records are the same people who get irate when people ask the President to release the records of his home loans in Chicago, his college records, and a legitimate, unphotoshopped birth certificate.

The Democrats play by an interesting rule: "You do what we say and we do what we want." Romney's response should be that as long as the President feels no need to release his personal records or the F&F emails he, Mr. Romney, sees no reason to release his personal records either. And if Congress wants to pass a law requiring candidates for office to make public their personal records why not pass a law requiring candidates to prove that they're constitutionally eligible to hold the office they're seeking?

The Tenth Problem

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views lists ten problems with unguided, Darwinian evolution that he believes public school students should be taught.

They're all important difficulties with which any student being instructed in evolutionary theory should aware, but #10 is especially intriguing:

Humans show many behavioral and cognitive traits and abilities that offer no apparent survival advantage (e.g. music, art, religion, ability to ponder the nature of the universe).

Consider our ability to do high level math, for example (or at least the ability of some people to do high level math). Why would nature have developed in human beings the ability to do mathematics, particularly pure mathematics, thousands, maybe millions of years before it ever had any use? Human beings can survive perfectly well, and did so, for most of their history without ever doing calculus. Even today, most people get along fine without exercising this innate ability. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga says, it's only the occasional grad student whose reproductive success depends on his ability to solve differential equations.

That our mathematical abilities evolved long before there was any need or use for them suggests that evolution has foresight, that it's teleological, but this is incompatible with the belief that evolution is an unguided process.

Darwinians might argue that math ability is a "spandrel" that is, it's an incidental consequence of some other evolutionary development, like higher temperatures are an incidental consequence of covering our urban areas in asphalt. This could be, of course, but then one has to wonder how this "accidental" add-on could so perfectly match the nature of the universe. Why does our mathematics so beautifully describe the way the universe is if natural selection is blind to it?

This is a question that has captivated many prominent physicists and mathematicians:

"At this point an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?" Albert Einstein

"It is positively spooky how the physicist finds that the mathematician has been there before him." Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg

"I find it quite amazing that it is possible to predict what will happen by mathematics, which is simply following rules which have nothing to do with the original thing." Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman

If math ability is just a coincidence then it's astonishingly fortuitous, and if it's the result of natural selection then it suggests that natural selection is somehow guided. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the ability to do sophisticated math that had no use or application until the 20th century bears the impress of purposeful, intentional design by a mind that itself understands math.

They're Not Supposed to Shoot Back

Here's a good illustration of why a lot of people favor concealed-carry laws.

Two thugs burst into an internet cafe in Florida expecting to steal money they know to be there for the taking. What they didn't expect to be there was 71 year-old Samuel Williams armed with a .380 semi-automatic handgun. Mr. Williams rose from his seat discharging his weapon in the general vicinity of the young miscreants, and teaching them a lesson about the wages of sin. Both were later apprehended and hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. No charges will be filed against Mr. Williams:

More details of the incident can be found at The Blaze.

I Do

There's a story by Jason DeParle in the New York Times that should be read by every girl of high school age who doesn't want to wind up struggling with poverty all her life. DeParle writes that the difference between the haves and the have-nots in America really comes down to two words: I do.

Women who marry before they have children and stay married afterward are much more likely to avoid poverty than those who have children out of wedlock or who find themselves raising children pretty much by themselves. This, of course, seems almost self-evident but so many girls have to learn it the hard way. DeParle contrasts the lives of two women who are similar in almost every respect except that one is married and the other is not. The marriage makes all the difference:

Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused. They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages.

Ms. Faulkner goes home to a trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.

“I see Chris’s kids — they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there,” Ms. Schairer said. “That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time.”

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

There's much more in the article that should be read and digested about the importance of marriage in the quality of life it affords women and their children. Not only does having two parents give children an enormous advantage over those who have only one, but, something DeParle's piece doesn't mention, those children also often have two sets of grandparents who are an enormous resource in helping with kids and with finances.

Here's another excerpt:

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly consigns children to “diverging destinies.”

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.” She said, “I think this process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”

Ms. Schairer’s life offers a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and everyone she knew was married.

“I thought, ‘I’ll meet someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.” She got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support. With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

The two women in DeParle's column are personifications of the theme of Charles Murray's book Coming Apart which contrasts the evolution of marriage in the white upper and lower classes.

My only quibble with the essay is that he seems to suggest that the difference in how people value marriage is a function of their class and education, as though the correlations showed causation. But one doesn't have to be well off or well-educated to value marriage. In fact, as the lives of the women in the article suggest, being married is almost a sine qua non for women with children to become well-off.

Read DeParle's article on how things often go for those women who find themselves in Ms Schairer's circumstances. My heart goes out to this woman who works hard, takes complete responsibility for the choices she's made, and who fully recognizes, unlike some in her situation, that her children really do need a father.