Living Forever

George Dvorsky has an interesting piece at io9 in which he discusses whether living forever would be all that desirable. He writes:

Some futurists predict that we'll be able to halt the aging process by the end of this century — if not sooner. The prospect of creating an ageless society is certainly not without its critics, with concerns ranging from the environmental right through to the spiritual. One of the most common objections to radical life extension, however, is the idea that it would be profoundly boring to live forever, and that by consequence, we should not even attempt it.

Although Dvorsky's article is about prolonging physical existence indefinitely the same objection is sometimes raised to the Christian concept of eternal life. The argument is that in an infinite time people would eventually experience everything there is to experience and learn everything there is to know. At that point existence would no longer hold any fascination. It would cease to be interesting and become crushingly boring.

The discussion that ensues in Dvorsky's post is fascinating, and I commend it to you, but I'd like to share a couple of thoughts on the Christian notion of eternal life.

First, we need to keep in mind that boredom is a mental phenomenon. There's no reason to think that in an eternal existence boredom would be any more a part of life than would pain. Our mental structure in the eternal realm may be quite different than what it is in this physical life. In other words, although now each subsequent experience of, say, a beautiful piece of music may be less thrilling than the first experience, it could well be that in eternity every experience of some phenomena is equally as exciting as the first.

Second, boredom is a consequence of existing in time. We get bored because time drags by without offering anything to pique our interest, but eternity is not necessarily temporal. If eternal life is not a temporal experience, if those who experience eternal existence are outside of time (as we conceive God to be), then boredom may simply be irrelevant or non-existent.

Third, even if eternity is in some sort of time, it could be that there's an infinity of possible experience such that even in an infinity of time we would never exhaust it all. Like a man counting for an infinite time could never exhaust all possible integers, a man existing for an infinite time might never exhaust all possible experience.

At any rate, Dvorsky's column is interesting largely for some of the quotes he cites. For example, Chris Hackler, head of the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas, states that:

Let's face it, most peoples' jobs aren't all that fascinating. They put in a 9-to-5 and they're glad to have the weekend. So you wonder if having twice as much of this is a good thing, or if you'd get totally burned out.

In other words, life's a drag as it is and most people aren't going to want to make it any longer than it needs to be. I have no doubt that this is true, at least if this life is all there is. If there's no transcendent realm in which infinite joy and richness reside and of which we can catch a glimpse now and then, then it's surely true that life is a meaningless, painful interlude of suffering between two states of nothingness.

If, on the other hand, there is such a realm then there's hope that life can be rich, fascinating, and pleasurable forever.

Anyway, check out Dvorsky's essay. It's thought-provoking.

The Ryan Pick

Mitt Romney's vice-presidential pick, Rep. Paul Ryan, has garnered almost universal plaudits from the right and almost universal boos from the left. Ryan is an outstanding man, an outstanding politician, and an outstanding intellect. He's serious and sharp and has a winning personality.

I think these are some of the reasons the left is deriding the choice. They fear Ryan, or at least they should. The last thing they want is a debate between Ryan and anyone on the Democratic ticket because they know it can only go badly for them. It's not customary for the presidential candidate to debate the other party's vice-presidential candidate, but one wishes that this year it'd happen.

If the economy is to be the major issue in the 2012 election the Obama/Biden ticket is no match for Romney/Ryan. Mr. Obama has had three and a half years to solve our economic woes, and the nation is worse off now than when he took office. He has managed to preside over the worst economy in forty years and has advanced no plan for what he would do to improve it other than tax the rich. This is a purely symbolic gesture which would accomplish nothing in terms of raising revenue and would probably depress it.

Moreover, none of the president's budgets have received even Democratic support in the Senate, and his party hasn't passed a budget in three years. Neither has the president kept his promise to get unemployment below 8%.

President Obama has offered no indication of how he would save entitlements from financial ruin, and in fact his greatest achievement, Obamacare, will cut $710 billion from Medicare over the next ten years. Ryan's plan would also cut Medicare, but by giving people an annual voucher so that they could purchase their own insurance. He would also raise the reimbursement rate for doctors back to previous levels so that the exodus of physicians willing to treat Medicare patients is reversed.

Ryan has worked hard on these issues. He has a vision for what needs to be done to get Americans back to work and to get our debt reduced, and he's skilled at eloquently articulating both. It'll be painful, no doubt, and it will take time, but the Obama alternative of doing nothing other than continuing to spend money we don't have, driving us deeper into debt, while blaming Bush for all our troubles, will ultimately be far worse.

The question that I ponder is whether the American electorate will ultimately prefer competence or charisma, freedom or big government, economic justice or crony capitalism. I guess we'll see on the first Tuesday in November.

Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs

French president Hollande has apparently chosen to follow the thinking of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises and raise the top tax rate in his country to 75%, essentially confiscating most of the wealth of thousands of Frenchmen. His reason has nothing to do with economic need. It's simply class warfare, at least according to this New York Times article:

A chill is wafting over France’s business class as Mr. Hollande, the country’s first Socialist president since François Mitterrand in the 1980s, presses a manifesto of patriotism to “pay extra tax to get the country back on its feet again.” The 75 percent tax proposal, which Parliament plans to take up in September, is ostensibly aimed at bolstering French finances as Europe’s long-running debt crisis intensifies.

But because there are relatively few people in France whose income would incur such a tax — an estimated 7,000 to 30,000 in a country of 65 million — the gains might contribute but a small fraction of the 33 billion euros in new revenue the government wants to raise next year to help balance the budget.

The French finance ministry did not respond to requests for an estimate of the revenue the tax might raise. Though the amount would be low, some analysts note that a tax hit on the rich would provide political cover for painful cuts Mr. Hollande may need to make next year in social and welfare programs that are likely to be far less popular with the rank and file.

In that regard, the tax could have enormous symbolic value as a blow for egalité, coming from a new president who has proclaimed, “I don’t like the rich.”

Whatever revenue Mr. Hollande realizes from such a tax he'll only realize it once. After that there won't be anyone left in the upper tax brackets to squeeze money from:

Many companies are studying contingency plans to move high-paid executives outside of France, according to consultants, lawyers, accountants and real estate agents — who are highly protective of their clients and decline to identify them by name. They say some executives and wealthy people have already packed up for destinations like Britain, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States, taking their taxable income with them.

They also know of companies — start-ups and multinationals alike — that are delaying plans to invest in France or to move employees or new hires here.

....Mr. Hollande was elected in May on a wave of resentment against “les riches” — company executives, bankers, sports stars and celebrities whose paychecks tend to be seen as scandalous in a country where the growing divide between rich and poor touches a cultural nerve whose roots predate Robespierre.

Taxes are high in France for a reason: they pay for one of Europe’s most generous social welfare systems and a large government. As Mr. Hollande has described it, the tax plan is about “justice,” and “sending out a signal, a message of social cohesion.”

But what will France do when there are no rich left to tax?

“The thing French politicians don’t seem to understand or care about is that when you tax away two-thirds of someone’s earnings to appeal to voters, productive people who can enrich businesses and the economy won’t come — or they will just leave,” said Diane Segalen, a corporate headhunter.

She said she had been close to sealing a deal for a seasoned executive in London to join one of France’s biggest companies earlier this year, when Mr. Hollande made his 75 percent vow.

“When the guy heard that, he said, ‘I’m not coming,’ and withdrew from the process,” said Mrs. Segalen, the head of the Segalen et Associés, a consulting firm.

For Mrs. Segalen, the proposal is the latest red flag in a country that has long labored under the image of being a difficult place to do business. France has a 33 percent corporate tax rate — the euro zone’s second-highest, after Malta’s 35 percent. That contrasts with the 12.5 percent rate in Ireland, which has deliberately kept a lid on corporate taxes as a lure to businesses.

“It is a ridiculous proposal, but it’s great for us,” said Jean Dekerchove, the manager of Immobilièr Le Lion, a high-end real estate agency based in Brussels. Calls to his office have picked up in recent months, he said, as wealthy French citizens look to invest or simply move across the border amid worries about the latest tax.

“It’s a huge loss for France because people and businesses come to Belgium and bring their wealth with them,” Mr. Dekerchove said. “But we’re thrilled because they create jobs, they buy houses and spend money — and it’s our economy that profits.”

We're seeing something similar happening in California where people with means are fleeing the state to get away from confiscatory taxes and oppressive regulations. When the rich leave everyone else is poorer. You may not like the rich, you may have good reason not to like them, but it's an economic fact of life that the more of them there are, the better off everyone else is. They may not be likeable, but we need them.

Ten Things

Gavin McInnes is a libertarian who believes that there are some things liberals get right. He's correct about this, of course, although I don't know that he's correct on the specific things he mentions in this article. At any rate he lists ten examples of issues on which he agrees at least somewhat with the liberal position.

It's an amusing read, the tone of which he establishes at the outset:

[U]nlike extremist Muslims and Hasidic Jews, some of the things [liberals] believe are actually correct. For example:

1. AMERICAN FOOD PORTIONS ARE TOO LARGE
2. CEO SALARIES ARE TOO HIGH
3. OBAMACARE IS A GOOD IDEA
4. WAR IS BAD
5. WOMEN WHO GET PREGNANT FROM A RAPE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO ABORT
6. GAYS SHOULD BE ABLE TO GET MARRIED
7. BLACKS ARE VICTIMS OF SYSTEMIC RACISM
8. BIG BUSINESS HAS TOO MUCH INFLUENCE ON CAPITOL HILL
9. MACHINE GUNS SHOULD BE ILLEGAL
10. DRUGS SHOULD BE LEGAL

When you read McInnes' rationale for each of these you'll probably find yourself agreeing with more of them than you might have expected to.

Welfare State

This chart, courtesy of The Blaze, will probably ruin your day. It provides a stark illustration of the explosion in dependency on the federal government from 2009 to 2011. Keep in mind that it doesn't include Social Security or Medicare.

Today there are over 110 million people in the U.S. currently receiving some form of government welfare. That's up from 97 million in just three years. According to the article at The Blaze, Medicaid has increased from 34 million people in 2000 to 54 million today and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) has grown from 17 million to 45 million.

Moreover, spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach nearly $800 billion over the next decade. Not only citizens, but non-citizens are eligible for food stamps paid for by the American taxpayer:

USDA has acknowledged a formal partnership with Mexico to boost food stamp enrollment amongst non-citizens, migrant workers and foreign nationals. In a ‘radio novela’ USDA even depicted an individual who resisted food stamp enrollment (saying her husband earned enough to take care of them) but who was successfully pressured into enrollment.

Why not? It's only money. If we need more we can just print it.

Even Some Libs Are Outraged

How dishonest are the Obama super pacs' campaign ads? They're so bad that even the folks at CNN and MSNBC are disgusted by them. It takes a lot to make Mika Brzezinski recoil from anything associated with President Obama, but after the ridiculous "felon" business and the Bain capital attacks, the latest ad where a steel worker seems to blame his wife's death from cancer on Mitt Romney, she's apparently had enough:

Here's Wolf Blitzer at CNN raking Bill Burton over the coals for producing such an egregious piece of propaganda. The video is a little long, but it shows the ad and it affords a good idea of what the controversy is all about and why the ad is inaccurate. Even more, it shows that the folks at these liberal outlets are not happy with what's being done on behalf of Mr. Obama's candidacy:

Christian Terrorism

An academic by the name of Mark Juergensmeyer foists this bit of flapdoodle upon readers at the blog Religion Dispatches:

The killing spree by Wade Michael Page on the Sikh Gurudwara in Milwaukee that left seven dead including Page’s own death in a hail of bullets is an act of Christian terrorism. Page was a member of a skinhead band, End Apathy, that advertised the evils of multiculturalism and advocated white power.

It is fair to call Page a Christian terrorist since the evidence indicates that he thought he was defending the purity of white Christian society against the evils of multiculturalism that allow non-white non-Christians an equal role in America society. Like the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the Norwegian militant, Anders Breivik, Page thought he was killing to save white Christian society.

Though there is no evidence that Page was a pious Christian, that is true of many religious terrorists. If the hard-talking, swaggering al Qaeda militants can be called Muslim terrorists, certainly Page can be called a Christian terrorist.

This is just silly. Muslim terrorists often are indeed very pious and claim to be acting in the name of Allah and Islam. As far as is known at this point Page has made no such claims, but the silliness doesn't end there.

Despite acknowledging that there's no evidence that Page (or McVeigh or Breivik) was a "pious Christian," despite the fact that - as far as I know - there's no evidence that any of these men were Christians in any genuine sense at all, nor that they were acting on behalf of "white Christian society," the writer goes on at some length repeating his assertion that Page was acting on behalf of "white Christendom."

I hope this is not the sort of thinking that passes for erudition in Mr. Juergensmeyer's field of sociology. It amounts to this: Page was an American, America is somewhat Christian, ergo Page "was killing to save white Christian society." Not only does this chain of "reasoning" perpetrate a brutal abuse of Aristotelian logic, it also demonstrates either an amazing ignorance on the part of a sociologist as to what Christianity actually is, or it evinces an astounding level of intellectual sloppiness on the part of someone who fancies himself an intellectual.

In either case, to suggest that Page is to Christianity what the al Qaeda terrorists were to Islam is ridiculous, and to insist that people like Page are somehow spawned by Christian belief is perverse.

Class and No Class

American Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones finished fourth the other night. Jones is a 29 year-old Christian who has publicly acknowledged that she's "saving herself" for marriage. This has made her an object of derision in some precincts on the left, particularly at the New York Times. Times writer Jere Longman wrote this about Jones:

Essentially, Jones has decided she will be whatever anyone wants her to be — vixen, virgin, victim — to draw attention to herself and the many products she endorses.

He went on to compare her to tennis player Anna Kournikova as just an empty suit.

Why? Why be so unkind to a young woman who has done nothing but succeed with class and grace throughout her career? I can't prove it, but I suspect that what's at play is the same irrational disdain that causes people to despise Tim Tebow and Carrie Prejean. They're good people who are trying to live according to the values prescribed by their Christianity and the secular world hates them for it. Their willingness to share their faith and values publicly is an indictment of a secular culture that devolves daily into deeper levels of sleaze and violence. If Jones had been involved in the debauchery taking place in the Olympic village she'd probably be ignored and the media would turn its attention back to women in bikinis playing volleyball on the beach.

Rob Doster at National Review offers this opinion:

Naturally, Jones was stung by the coverage, making an emotional appearance on the Today Show the morning after her loss and offering a passionate self-defense. “I have the American record. I am the American record holder indoors, I have two world indoor titles,” she said. “Just because I don’t boast about these things, I don’t think I should be ripped apart by media. I laid it out there. I fought hard for my country and I think it’s just a shame that I have to deal with so much backlash when I’m already so brokenhearted as it is.”

No, like Kournikova, Jones is merely a world-class athlete who has failed to check the right boxes to satisfy the Times’s sensibilities.

As this episode has made clear: They might not be champions, but both Jones and Kournikova are far better at their craft than Longman is at his.

They're far better at being human beings, too, I might add.

Speed Gene

Former Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson created a bit of a kerfuffle a few weeks ago when he opined that "a ‘superior athletic gene’ in the descendants of West African slaves means black American and Caribbean sprinters will command the sport at the London Games."

He was certainly right about who's commanding the sport in the 2012 Olympics (and just about every prior Olympics as well), but then Johnson went on to add that, "It’s a fact that hasn’t been discussed openly before. It’s a taboo subject in the States but it is what it is. Why shouldn’t we discuss it?"

Well, Michael might not be aware of the can of worms such a discussion would open. There are a couple of reasons why the dominance of athletes with West African ancestry is not often mentioned, at least not above a whisper, in the United States.

If Johnson is correct - and it seems to me as obvious as the noon day sun that he is - that the disproportionate success of black athletes is due to a genetic advantage enjoyed by the descendents of slaves, then the logical implication is that the disproportionate success in other areas of life enjoyed by other groups must also be largely due to their gene pools. The further unfortunate implication is that other disproportions, for example the disproportionate numbers of blacks who commit violent crimes, might also have a genetic basis.

These conclusions are certainly impolitic in contemporary American society, and no one wants to call attention to them on pain of being called a racist. Yet if athletic ability is genetic why not regard intellectual ability or a proclivity to violence as genetic? And if we should talk, as Johnson wants us to do, about the genetic gifts of Olympic sprinters, should we not also discuss genetic liabilities as well?

This gets very dicey. If over-representation is an indication of genetic inheritance then does that mean that under-representation in fields requiring, say, analytical and mathematical abilities, fields in which participants of African descent are sparse, indicate that people of African descent are genetically disadvantaged?

Are Asians and Jews, two groups which are probably over-represented in intellectual disciplines like science, genetically superior to those groups which are under-represented?

You can see the treacherous ground onto which such questions would lead us and why there's reluctance for people to mention out loud that the dominance of American and Caribbean blacks in certain sports must be genetic.

Of course, one reason why no one wants to talk about this is because, it's feared, it'll play into the hands of racists, but I don't know why it should be allowed to do so.

In any family there are diverse gifts and aptitudes. The expectations and hopes we have for one child aren't the same as we have for another. A child born with a hearing disability may not be as strong a musician as her older sibling. A successful athlete may not do as well in the classroom as the less athletic sibling. Children are often born with different intellectual and physical aptitudes and abilities. That doesn't mean that any of these children are more valuable and more loved than the others. If Asians aren't particularly good sprinters but often excel at intellectual challenges they shouldn't be deemed less valuable for that and neither should those who have amazing athletic ability but are not the equal to Asians in the classroom.

In fact, it's the refusal to recognize differences that leads to racial animosities. If blacks are underrepresented in a particular field, the assumption is that it must be white racial prejudice that has excluded them, whether it is or not, and thus the remedy must be quotas, affirmative action, race-norming, and equal representation. These solutions, however, not only create mistrust between groups, but they also breed resentments among those who get to where they are because they have the ability to do it.

It also hampers and frustrates those who lack a physical or intellectual ability because they can't meet society's expectations for them.

Johnson said:

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me – I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.

You may be right Michael, but you're raising an issue that our society is simply not mature enough to handle.

Curiosity's Motivation

You may have been wondering as you watched the amazing story of how NASA scientists landed the exploratory vehicle Curiosity on the surface of Mars why we were spending $2.5 billion to investigate the Red Planet. What was the chief purpose of the mission? Almost every spokesperson I heard talk about this said that what they hoped to achieve was to discover whether life could have at one time been present on Mars.

Okay, that's an interesting question, but $2.5 billion? Well, yes, when you understand that what's at issue here is not just a matter of scientific exploration but most importantly the need to buttress a major metaphysical or religious worldview.

David Klinghoffer explains:

Make no mistake, NASA has committed $2.5 billion to this little project in large part to satisfy a need in the culture of Big Science -- a culture that extends far beyond the professional ranks of actual scientists -- for validation of a particular worldview. In that worldview, life arises and evolves spontaneously -- it must do so -- reflecting no purpose or design, given a handful of (not especially elevated) ingredients and enough time.

In this Darwinian picture, life is nothing special. Countless men and women stake the meaning of their own lives, or rather the meaning they imagine and invest in their lives, on this idea. Yet two empirical problems intrude. First, the more science learns about the inner space of the cell with its "machinery" (for want of a better word), the more profoundly special life appears to be. Second, the Darwinian view requires, since life is so prosaic, that it should have arisen all around the cosmos, in intelligent and other forms, and probably in our own solar system too other than on Earth alone. Yet persistent efforts by SETI to detect evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence have conspicuously failed.

Turning from these discouraging data, NASA offers hope in the form of Curiosity and its mission. To shore up a beleaguered philosophical perspective, Darwinian materialists would be delighted -- no, tremendously relieved -- by the discovery of past or present Martian microbes. Failing that, they would receive news that life's "ingredients" have been found on Mars with reverent gratitude.

It's interesting that NASA is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to essentially seek confirmation of what is basically a religious doctrine, i.e. materialism. I wonder how much the government would be willing to spend to investigate the claim that there's a massive wooden barge frozen on Mt. Ararat. That would also confirm a major metaphysical belief, and there's at least some tenuous evidence that such an artifact is actually there, but I doubt that there'd be funds available to investigate that. Taxpayer money can only be used to support attempts to discredit traditional religion, not to reinforce it.

Anyway, Klinghoffer goes on to discuss why the discovery of evidence of Martian life would have no effect whatsoever on intelligent design theory and would really settle nothing in the debate between IDers and materialists. Give it a look.

How to Play Offense

Wayne Allyn Root, former Libertarian Vice-Presidential candidate and graduate of Columbia University the same year as President Obama schools Mitt Romney on how to react to the Democrats' scurrilous attacks on his integrity, particularly the campaign being waged by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who has accused Romney of having paid no taxes for the decade between 2000 and 2010, and demanding that he release his tax returns (while refusing to release his own returns):

Romney should call a press conference and issue a challenge in front of the nation. He should agree to release more of his tax returns, only if Obama unseals his college records. Simple and straight-forward. Mitt should ask “What could possibly be so embarrassing in your college records from 29 years ago that you are afraid to let America’s voters see? If it’s THAT bad, maybe it’s something the voters ought to see.” Suddenly the tables are turned. Now Obama is on the defensive.

My bet is that Obama will never unseal his records because they contain information that could destroy his chances for re-election. Once this challenge is made public, my prediction is you’ll never hear about Mitt’s tax returns ever again.

Why are the college records, of a 51-year-old President of the United States, so important to keep secret? I think I know the answer.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then - Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia has ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

Now all of this mystery could be easily and instantly dismissed if Obama released his Columbia transcripts to the media. But even after serving as President for 3 1/2 years he refuses to unseal his college records. Shouldn’t the media be as relentless in pursuit of Obama’s records as Romney’s? Shouldn’t they be digging into Obama’s past–beyond what he has written about himself–with the same boundless enthusiasm as Mitt’s?

The first question I’d ask is, if you had great grades, why would you seal your records? So let’s assume Obama got poor grades. Why not release the records? He’s President of the free world, for gosh sakes. He’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Who’d care about some poor grades from three decades ago, right? So then what’s the problem? Doesn’t that make the media suspicious? Something doesn’t add up.

Secondly, if he had poor grades at Occidental, how did he get admitted to an Ivy League university in the first place? And if his grades at Columbia were awful, how’d he ever get into Harvard Law School? So again those grades must have been great, right? So why spend millions to keep them sealed?

Third, how did Obama pay for all these fancy schools without coming from a wealthy background? If he had student loans or scholarships, would he not have to maintain good grades?

I can only think of one answer that would explain this mystery.

You'll have to go to the link at The Blaze to read Root's theory. If you don't like it how do you answer the questions Root poses?

Meanwhile, why is it that the Democrats are campaigning by slandering Romney, portraying him as the human incarnation of Lucifer, but are almost completely silent on why Mr. Obama deserves a second term? Why are they so willing to make the most outrageous slurs against Romney, suggesting he might be a "felon," holding him responsible for the death of an out-of-work steelworker's sick wife, as a new ad does, accusing him, with no evidence, of having paid no taxes for ten years, as Senator Reid is doing, but have nothing positive to say about Mr. Obama's last three years in office? Is dishonesty what now wins elections with the American electorate?

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.