Splitting the Tasks

Debkafile has a reputation for being a little unreliable, but nevertheless this particular report makes sense. It's also interesting:

An authoritative US military source told debkafile Sunday, Aug. 5 that the American armed forces are standing ready for war with Iran. Without going into the thorny question of who should lead the operation to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, the US or Israel, it is understood that one of the US Air Force’s tasks will be to destroy Iran’s Shehab-3 ballistic missile batteries which have Israel and Saudi Arabia within range.

This task is not as formidable as Iranian spokesmen would have the world believe. Tehran’s entire stock of those missiles is no more than 30-40. That quantity is not nearly enough to take on the entire gamut of potential wartime foes, the United States Middle East bases, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Turkey. They would quickly be picked off by American Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Systems and Israeli Arrow guided interceptor rockets, which are synchronized through the advanced US X-Band radar systems installed in the Israeli Negev and southeast Turkey.

There's more info on this at the link. I'm a little surprised that there's not more talk in the media about the impending war with Iran. It seems that if it happens, which it almost certainly will, it'll catch many Americans by surprise.

God and Quantum Physics

University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr at Big Questions Online poses this thought-provoker: Does quantum physics make it easier to believe in God? Here's his prelude to his answer:

Not in any direct way. That is, it doesn’t provide an argument for the existence of God. But it does so indirectly, by providing an argument against the philosophy called materialism (or “physicalism”), which is the main intellectual opponent of belief in God in today’s world.

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things. No less a figure than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that materialism --- at least with regard to the human mind --- is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” And on the basis of quantum mechanics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, said, “the premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

How, one might ask, can quantum mechanics have anything to say about the human mind? Isn’t it about things that can be physically measured, such as particles and forces? It is; but while minds cannot be measured, it is ultimately minds that do the measuring. And that, as we shall see, is a fact that cannot be ignored in trying to make sense of quantum mechanics. If one claims that it is possible (in principle) to give a complete physical description of what goes on during a measurement --- including the mind of the person who is doing the measuring --- one is led into severe difficulties. This was pointed out in the 1930s by the great mathematician John von Neumann. Though I cannot go into technicalities in an essay such as this, I will try to sketch the argument.

Barr goes on to show in what follows how, if there are no non-physical minds, i.e. if everything is material or physical, then the laws of quantum physics lead to the absurdities of the Many Worlds Hypothesis. He closes with this:

In the Many Worlds picture, you exist in a virtually infinite number of versions: in some branches of reality you are reading this article, in others you are asleep in bed, in others you have never been born. Even proponents of the Many Worlds idea admit that it sounds crazy and strains credulity.

The upshot is this: If the mathematics of quantum mechanics is right (as most fundamental physicists believe), and if materialism is right, one is forced to accept the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that is awfully heavy baggage for materialism to carry.

If, on the other hand, we accept the more traditional understanding of quantum mechanics that goes back to von Neumann, one is led by its logic (as Wigner and Peierls were) to the conclusion that not everything is just matter in motion, and that in particular there is something about the human mind that transcends matter and its laws. It then becomes possible to take seriously certain questions that materialism had ruled out of court: If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?

In other words, the most common sense interpretation of quantum phenomena suggests that materialism is false and that mind is an ontologically real substance. If that's the case then there's good reason to think that the appearance of design in the cosmos is not appearance only, but rather a genuine product of intentional, conscious creative activity. And if that's the case we're on the threshold of acknowledging the existence of a Mind that sounds very much like the Mind described in Genesis 1.

If you have even just a basic understanding of quantum theory you'll find the rest of the article very interesting.

Stifling Business

Often someone will observe that government regulations are stifling business, but it's sometimes unclear as to exactly how and why. Rep. Tom Price has a column in the Washington Times in which he dots the i's and crosses the t's.

The cost is $1.75 trillion. That’s the price of complying with Washington red tape — and that’s not a misprint.

While the federal government has the responsibility to establish reasonable regulations to help protect the American people, federal rule-making is so costly and cumbersome that it actually impedes job creation and economic growth.

That grim reality comes into focus when one looks at the Federal Register, the official compilation of federal regulations. It’s only July, yet this year’s edition already is 41,662 pages long. Complying with these new rules will cost $55.6 billion and require 114.1 million paperwork hours to complete. That is money and time lost on unproductive activity — all done to avoid the punishing arm of an intrusive federal government.

President Obama boasts that he has taken major steps to improve America’s regulatory climate. The truth is that his administration has expanded the federal government’s reach and oppression. He has instituted four times the number of major regulations of President George W. Bush, and they cost five times as much.

A “major regulation” is one that federal agencies estimate will create an economic impact of more than $100 million annually. Since taking office in January 2009, Mr. Obama has instituted 106 major new federal regulations, adding more than $46 billion in compliance costs for American families and businesses. That’s $46 billion taken out of a productive economy. No wonder jobs aren’t returning.

Follow the link for specific examples of regulations that are making it economically impractical for companies to hire new workers. Here are two of the biggest:

One of the most egregious red-tape initiatives of this administration is the Dodd-Frank law. According to the House Committee on Financial Services, just 224 of Dodd-Frank’s 400 rules have been written, and they already consume 7,365 pages. It will take job creators 24.2 million hours every year just to comply with the first half of Dodd-Frank regulations.

Another outrageous example is the president’s health care law, which greatly expands the government’s reach into every American’s life. This disastrous law will result in a minimum of $17.1 billion in regulations imposed on the private sector and $7.2 billion in compliance costs borne by the states.

Add to the regulatory burden the highest (or second highest) corporate tax rate in the world (35%) and it's little wonder that real unemployment continues to hover around 15%. That number could be substantially reduced with a few strokes of the presidential pen, but it'll never happen as long as Mr. Obama occupies the White House. High taxes and onerous regulations are embedded in his political marrow.

Simply Uninformed

Perhaps the person who posted this picture on the internet, along with the superimposed commentary, is still an adolescent in which case he/she may have an excuse for the ignorance and lack of thought it seems to evince:

After all, who does the poster of this pic think runs the food banks and homeless shelters? Readers of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? The secular Marxist/Leninists? Most ministries to the poor in this country are staffed by Christians. Most charitable giving is given by Christians. Many hospitals and retirement homes were founded and run by Christians.

A week before this unfortunate picture was circulated on the internet Glenn Beck held an event in Texas which included a day of service in which thousands of people from all over the country came to Texas to work among the poor, painting their houses, delivering food, etc. Fourteen tractor trailers loaded with food were sent off to 11 cities to help feed people.

Perhaps the poster of the above message didn't know about this, which is understandable since the major media hardly mentioned it - tens of thousands of people gathering to recapture a sense of community without the government being involved is evidently not something they deem newsworthy - but it happened, and perhaps our uninformed friend should visit this site to see a few pictures of part of the "Day of Service" and to find out what it is Christians are actually doing. Maybe he/she will be chagrined enough to want to take down the photo.

Drive-Thru Hero

Some people are so earnestly self-righteous that they just can't help embarrassing themselves. This particular example, a man named Adam Smith, is an adjunct professor at a college in Arizona and also CFO/Treasurer at Vante Corp. His idea of standing up for his convictions is to harangue a young woman, an employee at Chick-fil-A who has nothing to do with her employer's views on gay marriage.

Nor, by the way, are the CEO's personal views on gay marriage the views of Chick-fil-A as a corporation. CFA doesn't discriminate in their hiring nor in whom they will serve, but a lot of news coverage is treating CEO Dan Cathy's remarks about his personal beliefs as though they were corporate policy.

Anyway, this guy is so infatuated with his own moral superiority that he videotapes himself preparing to lecture a young employee on the hatefulness of her CEO's stand for traditional marriage and how he doesn't know how she can live with herself working for this company:

This noble warrior against hate then posted the video on YouTube where it outraged many, including his bosses at Vante who fired him yesterday, probably for being an obnoxious jerk.

Malevolent Design

Evolution News and Views has a Drew Berry TED Talk notable not only for the beauty of his art but also for its philosophical implications.

Berry is a biologist and computer animator and the structures and processes his videos illustrate are breathtaking. This particular video is also interesting, though, because the last couple of minutes shows via animation how malaria infects a human body. In my opinion, this animation poses difficulties for both creationists and Darwinian naturalists.

The creationist has a problem because he wants to say that an omnibenevolent God designed this, but if so why would a good God design such a manifestly horrible organism as the malaria parasite? The creationist may have an answer, to be sure, but the fact that he needs to answer this question suggests that his theory doesn't neatly accommodate phenomena such as this. Moreover, his answer may sound contrived or ad hoc to some.

The problem for the Darwinian naturalist is trying to come up with a plausible pathway by which the parasite and its behavior might have evolved solely by chance. Any explanation the naturalist proffers sounds like just so much pixie dust and magic wand waving.

The advocate of intelligent design, however, has no problem with this at all. Philosopher David Hume argued in his book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that the existence of such organisms as the malaria parasite is strong evidence against the existence of a benevolent designer, but even if the designer is malevolent it's still an intelligent designer. Once it's accepted that the universe does indeed seem to be the product of intelligent agency then the discussion can move on to questions about the nature of that agent. In other words, the biological world certainly appears to be designed, just as the intelligent design theorist postulates, but whether the designer is benevolent or malevolent is not something upon which the ID advocate, qua scientist/philosopher, takes a stand.

Most IDers would, in their personal lives, seek to offer a theodicy similar to that of the creationist, but the important point is that ID, as a scientific or philosophical hypothesis, doesn't rely on any such theodicy being offered because it makes no claim as to the identity or moral nature of the designer. It merely makes this simple assertion: the world, both physical and biological, shows manifest evidence of having been intelligently designed. That some designs appear to be malicious is no more an argument against the design hypothesis than is the belief that nuclear weapons are horrible an argument against their having been designed.

Anyway, watch the video and marvel at what you see.

So Why Did He Do It?

Mona Charen reminds us of the climate of opinion surrounding the welfare reform debate in 1996. It's worth remembering:

Once safely elected, Clinton downgraded welfare reform, and, in fact, increased funding for all of the traditional welfare programs in the federal budget. But when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994, they took the initiative. By 1996, after vetoing two welfare reform bills, Clinton was advised by Dick Morris that if didn't sign the legislation, he wouldn't be re-elected; it was that important to voters. Immediately after signing the bill, Clinton's approval rating on welfare jumped by 19 points.

The law changed the old AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In place of the open-ended entitlement to benefits for unmarried women and their children, the law imposed a five-year limit and the requirement that those able to work seek employment. In 2005, the work requirements were strengthened.

The prospect of asking welfare recipients to seek work struck most liberals in 1996 (including Obama) as degrading, cruel and doomed to failure. Three high-ranking Clinton administration officials resigned in protest. The New York Times called the reform "atrocious," objecting that "This is not reform, this is punishment." Tom Brokaw, interviewing the president, said "all the projections show that ... (the reform) will push, at least short term, more than a million youngsters ... below the poverty line." The Children's Defense Fund called the law "an outrage ... that will hurt and impoverish millions of American children ... and leave a moral blot on (Clinton's) presidency." Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan called the law "the most brutal act of social policy we have known since the Reconstruction. ... In five years' time, you'll find appearing on your streets abandoned children ... in numbers we have no idea." Sen. Edward Kennedy, with characteristic understatement, called the bill "legislative child abuse."

Well, what really happened? Welfare caseloads declined by 50 percent within four years of the law's passage and by 70 percent by the time Obama took office. The overwhelming majority of those who left welfare rolls did so because they found jobs -- and not just the worst jobs, either. By 2001, a Manhattan Institute study found, only 4 percent of former welfare mothers were earning minimum wage. The poverty rate declined from 13.8 percent in 1995 to 11.7 percent in 2003. Black child poverty dropped to its lowest levels in history. Childhood hunger was cut in half. It was the greatest social policy success of the past 50 years.

Sounds like just the sort of success story that both liberals and conservatives would want to take credit for, so why did President Obama undermine this manifestly successful program by issuing an executive order negating the work requirement? Charen thinks it's part of his plan to increase dependency on government:

Obama is trying to persuade Americans that while he has expanded food stamps to unprecedented levels, extended unemployment insurance to 99 weeks, vastly increased the already overwhelmed Medicaid program, created a new trillion dollar entitlement with Obamacare and expanded the size of the federal government to a percentage of gross domestic product not seen since World War II, that he is not the dependency president. [But] by stepping back into history to embrace the Democrats' nemesis -- unrestricted welfare -- he has clinched the argument for the opposition.

Some have suggested that what Mr. Obama is doing is reestablishing a kind of plantation slave culture, making the people on the government plantation completely dependent on the government for their every need. I don't think the comparison works, though. The slaves on the plantation at least were required to work.

Doing My Part

I went to Chick-fil-A today to do my part for free speech and traditional marriage. The nearest franchise to my home is about twenty minutes away, and I had never eaten there before. When I got there about 11:00 they were busy, but I got waited on almost right away. I placed my order, waited a couple of minutes to get my sandwich and drink, turned around to leave and the line stretched about thirty yards behind me down the mall. People were pouring in. I'll be surprised if the restaurant didn't run out of food. I understand it was like this all across the country today.

So what's it all mean? Well, at least this: People are getting tired of being told by liberal Democrats what's right and what's not. They're tired of being told that they have to not only tolerate gay marriage, but that they have to embrace it, and they dare not speak out in opposition to it.

Average people, the "silent majority," is fed up with the liberal thought police and political correctness, and when they have a chance to show their displeasure and stick their thumb in the eye of our political ayatollahs, they'll do it.

I also learned that Chick-fil-A makes a very tasty sandwich, and I think I'm going to go back.

Altruism and Atheism

In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado massacre one of the things we've learned is how a number of young men shielded their girlfriends from the bullets with their own bodies, some of them dying in the process.

These wonderful and amazing acts of altruistic heroism raise a question. On naturalism (atheism) what sense does it make to give up your life to save someone else's, particularly someone to whom you bear no genetic kinship? If the whole purpose in life is to produce offspring and pass one's genes into future generations then it seems that, on atheism, the morally correct thing would have been for these men to have hidden behind their girlfriends and let them take the bullets.

In other words, the atheist has no basis for saying that what these men did was "good" or admirable. The atheist, of course, can be glad there are altruistic heroes in society since he may one day benefit from another's selflessness, but if someone were to have acted selfishly in that situation by hiding behind his girlfriend, the atheist would have no basis for saying that that would be in any way a bad or wrong thing to do.

What most people consider noble, the atheist has no grounds for thinking noble at all and considerable grounds for thinking foolish, yet I'm sure most atheists do think the actions of these men in that theater were noble. That's why it's so difficult to live consistently as an atheist.

Liberal Solutions

This article in The Daily Caller affords us an example of why liberal/progressives are so hard to take seriously, or at least would be if they didn't have the power to impose their "solutions" on the rest of us.

African-American students find themselves in disciplinary trouble in school at rates out of all proportion to their numbers in the population. This is taken by progressives, including the president and attorney general, as strong evidence of institutional racism. It's evidently racist to expect blacks to behave at the same standard as do whites and Asians.

So what's the solution? For the left it's to allow blacks to go unpunished for offenses that will get whites and Asians suspended, or conversely, punish whites and Asians more severely for relatively minor offenses so that disciplinary actions like detentions, suspensions, and expulsions are more in line with those of black students.

Think of it as race-norming for bad behavior:

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Because of those causes, the report suggests, “over a third of African American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

Of course not everyone sees the wisdom of giving black misbehavior a pass:

“What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for,” because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

“It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

A similar program in Maryland was approved by the state board of education last week:

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional level of school penalties, regardless of the behavior by members of each group.

The board’s decision requires that “the state’s 24 school systems track data to ensure that minority and special education students are not unduly affected by suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures,” said a July 25 Washington Post report.

“Disparities would have to be reduced within a year and eliminated within three years,” according to the Post.

The state’s new racial policy was welcomed by progressives, including Judith Browne Dianis, a director of the D.C.-based Advancement Project. “Maryland’s proposal is on the cutting edge,” she told the Post.

Indeed it is on the "cutting edge" since the Advancement Project is a law firm that litigates race-related questions and stands to profit from laws and regulations that create race-related legal disputes. No wonder Ms Dianis is enthusiastic. The Project's website claims that:

“The combination of overly harsh school policies ... has created a ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,’ in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior.... This is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color.”

Reading this can be disorienting for anyone who thinks rationally, but that's what we get when we keep electing these people to public office.

Never mind that 7 out of 10 black students come from fatherless homes whereas only 3 out of 10 whites/Asians do. Couldn't that be the reason for the disproportionate misbehavior. Evidently not. It's no doubt racist to assume that blacks are misbehaving at greater rates than other groups. The real problem, the liberals are convinced, must be that blacks are being punished more harshly than whites by racist school officials. Thus, schools must prove that they're not punishing blacks at higher rates than other groups even if black misconduct is higher than that of other groups, which anyone who has ever spent any time at all in public education knows is the case.

What's racist is the tacit assumption of everyone involved in this farce, from President Obama on down, that blacks simply can't be held to the same standards as everyone else, that they're simply not capable of conducting themselves in the same fashion as others. I can't think of anything more insulting to black people than this, but it's precisely what's implicit in this policy.

Nor can I think of anything more likely to cause non-black students to view their black counterparts with derision and contempt than to allow them to go unpunished for infractions for which others are punished simply because they're black.

These policies make it almost certain that our urban schools will continue to decline into chaos. It's no wonder that anyone who can, black, white and brown, is fleeing them.

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.