More Thoughts on Sandy Hook

John Fund has a column at NRO that answers a couple of the questions I asked in my previous post. It turns out that mass killings are not more common today than they've been historically. Fund tells us this:

Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.

In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.

The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.

Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.

Fund believes that rather than discussing gun control, a measure that would almost certainly fail to stem the tide of guns in the hands of criminals, we should be discussing the laws that make it difficult to control mentally ill people prone to violence and the wisdom of gun-free zones:

First, the mental-health issue. A lengthy study by Mother Jones magazine found that at least 38 of the 61 mass shooters in the past three decades “displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings.” New York Times columnist David Brooks and Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson have both suggested that the ACLU-inspired laws that make it so difficult to intervene and identify potentially dangerous people should be loosened. “Will we address mental-health and educational-privacy laws, which instill fear of legal liability for reporting potentially violent mentally ill people to law enforcement?” asks Professor Jacobson. “I doubt it.”

Civil libertarians won passage of laws in the 1970s that essentially emptied our mental health hospitals and dumped thousands of potentially violent people onto the streets. Ever since it's been difficult, as the mother in the previous post attests, to get such people committed to a long term facility to protect the rest of us from their rages.

But what about gun-free zones? Fund makes a strong case that such restrictions are counterproductive:

Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting.

Indeed, there have been many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. — where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.

Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.

I spoke with Lott after the Newtown shooting, and he confirmed that nothing has changed to alter his findings. He noted that the Aurora shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home.

The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals. All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.

“Disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks,” Lott told me. “A couple hundred people were in the Cinemark Theater when the killer arrived. There is an extremely high probability that one or more of them would have had a legal concealed handgun with him if they had not been banned.”

Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

Fund notes that the fear that armed citizens would be a danger to society is misplaced. Statistics show that the rate of improper use of a weapon by a holder of a license to carry a concealed weapon is about the same as the rate of improper use of weapons by police officers.

Fund closes with this:

In all of the fevered commentary over the Newtown killings, you will hear little discussion of the fact that we may be making our families and neighbors less safe by expanding the places where guns aren’t allowed. But that is precisely what we may be doing. Both criminals and the criminally insane have shown time and time again that those laws are the least of the problems they face as they carry out their evil deeds.

I argued in this space several years ago that I thought one way to end school shootings would be to have a weapon available to school administrators in case of emergency and require them to take annual training in its use. Nothing that has happened since has caused me to change my opinion. Surely, if the principal of the Sandy Hook school had been armed when she courageously rushed at the man slaughtering her children she might have been able to save many of their lives. As it was she became one of his victims.

Time to Talk About Mental Illness

A woman named Liza Long who blogs under the name Anarchist Soccer Mom writes a post in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy that's apparently gone viral. It's her story, but it's the story of perhaps tens of thousands of mothers like her. She writes:

In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

There's much more to her post which you can find here.

One question her story raises is why there seems to be so many more deeply disturbed children today than formerly. Was it always like this or is there something especially tragic afflicting people to an unprecedented extent in our modern society?

Another question that the Connecticut mass murder raises is whether there are commonalities between the perpetrators of these horrific acts. Specifically, I would like to know the following:

1. What is the nature of the perpetrators' relationship with their father?
2. To what degree are they immersed in our contemporary culture of violence and death (video games, music, movies, etc.)?
3. What is the family's attitude toward religious belief and practice?
4. How often do they use non-medicinal drugs?

I've never seen any studies that address these questions, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say what I think such a study would find. I suspect that in many cases of mass murderers in the last decade or so the answers would be:

1. Poor to none
2. Deeply
3. Indifference
4. Often

If someone knows where such data can be found, and if that data contradicts my suspicion, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Meanwhile, read the rest of Ms Long's post. The pain she and so many other contemporary parents are experiencing is heartbreaking.

Krauthammer Has it Just Right on RTW

Isn't it peculiar that liberals insist that we should have no choice about where we send our children to school nor should we have a choice about whether we support a union at our place of employment, but that we should be able to choose whether to kill our unborn child.

Something's not right about this. Anyway, Charles Krauthammer has a column in the Washington Post that I think sounds all the right notes on the matter of right to work.

Union people have a legitimate complaint when they object to workers benefiting from union negotiations without having to make a contribution to support those efforts.

Even so, one can be sympathetic to the union argument without completely agreeing with it. It seems to me that people should be free to join a union or not and they shouldn't have to pay union dues if they choose not to join. Perhaps the situation of workers who wish not to join is a bit like that of those who claim conscientious objector status in time of war. The conscientious objector benefits from the freedom and prosperity that our military fights to defend even though the CO refuses to participate in that defense.

The two situations are not exactly congruent, of course. The CO declines to serve because of a profound moral commitment to pacifism, whereas the worker may decline to join the union for less noble reasons. Even so, just as a society worth preserving will be able to find plenty of people willing to fight on its behalf and should tolerate those who have moral compunctions against violence, so, too, a union should be able to attract enough workers who believe in its cause that they need not coerce those who don't.

Krauthammer's take is slightly different. He begins with this:

For all the fury and fistfights outside the Lansing Capitol, what happened in Michigan this week was a simple accommodation to reality. The most famously unionized state, birthplace of the United Auto Workers, royalty of the American working class, became right-to-work.

It’s shocking, except that it was inevitable. Indiana went that way earlier this year. The entire Rust Belt will eventually follow because the heyday of the sovereign private-sector union is gone. Globalization has made splendid isolation impossible.

He elaborates with some interesting statistics.

Let’s be honest: Right-to-work laws do weaken unions. And de-unionization can lead to lower wages.

But there is another factor at play: having a job in the first place. In right-to-work states, the average wage is about 10 percent lower. But in right-to-work states, unemployment also is about 10 percent lower.

Higher wages or lower unemployment? It is a wrenching choice. Although, you would think that liberals would be more inclined to spread the wealth — i.e., the jobs — around, preferring somewhat lower pay in order to leave fewer fellow workers mired in unemployment.

Think of the moral calculus. Lower wages cause an incremental decline in one’s well-being. No doubt. But for the unemployed, the decline is categorical, sometimes catastrophic — a loss not just of income but of independence and dignity.

I also thought his conclusion was just right:

I have great admiration for the dignity and protections trade unionism has brought to American workers. I have no great desire to see the private-sector unions defenestrated. (Like FDR, Fiorello La Guardia and George Meany, however, I don’t extend that sympathy to public-sector unions.)

But rigidity and nostalgia have a price. The industrial Midwest is littered with the resulting wreckage. Michigan most notably, where its formerly great metropolis of Detroit is reduced to boarded-up bankruptcy by its inability and unwillingness to adapt to global change.

It’s easy to understand why a state such as Michigan would seek to recover its competitiveness by emulating the success of Indiana. One can sympathize with those who pine for the union glory days, while at the same time welcoming the new realism that promises not an impossible restoration but desperately needed — and doable — recalibration and recovery.

I think unions need to ask themselves why it is that there's so much popular antipathy toward them, even among people who have family members in unions. Perhaps it's at least partly because, whereas when unions first gained power they had a just cause, today people see them as organizations whose workers have it very good and want it much better. Just as the average person despises those CEOs who take huge bonuses and retirement packages, so, too, do they resent union workers who demand benefits that are driving companies like Hostess out of business.

Read the rest of Krauthammer's piece at the link.

Liberal Racism

Just as most of the political violence and incivility in today's society is on the left, so, too, is most of the racism. The latest example of this is found in comments made by a black ESPN analyst named Rob Parker:

So, if a black man is a Republican or has a white fiance then he's not genuinely black. He's not down for the struggle, in Mr. Parker's tribalistic worldview.

I wonder what the media would do to a white analyst who said similar things about a white athlete who had a black fiance. I'm pretty sure the analyst would be quickly dispatched to Mr. Obama's burgeoning list of unemployed persons, a list which happens to include a disproportionate number of "brothers," both cornball and otherwise.

Robert Griffith has made it a point to tell people that he's not interested in being identified as a "black" quarterback. He just wants to be identified as a man. Unlike racial troglodytes like Parker, Griffith refuses to live in the 1960s.

Fledglings

Like young birds teetering tentatively on the edge of their nest, wanting to fly, but afraid to leave, Darwinian materialists seem to be finding the old nest increasingly unsuitable for the accumulating knowledge of the 21st century. Yet they're reluctant to make a clean break with the philosophical nest they've called home for much of their lives.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel created a stir in the philosophical world when he took wing a couple of months ago with the release of his book Mind and Cosmos: Why Darwinian Materialism Is Almost Certainly Wrong. Now comes word that cosmologist Paul Davies, one of the most prolific writers of science books in the last twenty years, has placed himself on the rim of the nest and is flexing his wings.

An article in Science Daily discusses a recent paper Davies has written with a coworker named Sara Walker that sounds almost as if it could have been written by an Intelligent Design advocate. The article starts this way:

One of the great mysteries of life is how it began. What physical process transformed a nonliving mix of chemicals into something as complex as a living cell?

Davies and Walker have come up with what they think is a partial answer:

In a nutshell, the authors shift attention from the "hardware" -- the chemical basis of life -- to the "software" -- its information content. To use a computer analogy, chemistry explains the material substance of the machine, but it won't function without a program and data. Davies and Walker suggest that the crucial distinction between non-life and life is the way that living organisms manage the information flowing through the system.

"When we describe biological processes we typically use informational narratives -- cells send out signals, developmental programs are run, coded instructions are read, genomic data are transmitted between generations and so forth," Walker said. "So identifying life's origin in the way information is processed and managed can open up new avenues for research."

"We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable," added Davies. "We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a road map to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity."

In other words it's information that defines life and information processing that must be explained, but as Intelligent Design theorists have been saying now for a decade and a half, information is uniquely a characteristic of minds. If life is all about information what is the genesis of that information? Living cells are like libraries of information. They're like computer software, but the library's books and software codes are products of intelligence. You don't get Windows XP by random chance and natural forces.

The article continues:

"To a physicist or chemist life seems like 'magic matter,'" Davies explained. "It behaves in extraordinary ways that are unmatched in any other complex physical or chemical system. Such lifelike properties include autonomy, adaptability and goal-oriented behavior -- the ability to harness chemical reactions to enact a pre-programmed agenda, rather than being a slave to those reactions."

"Magic matter?" One might think that Davies has taken wing, but he's not ready to leave the materialist nest just yet. He still thinks that there's some purely physicalist explanation for the amazing amount and functionality of information in the cell, at least he says he does. Perhaps, he's at the stage of the fledgling which knows that leaving the nest is inevitable, but it clings to the security the nest represents as long as possible. After all, there's a tremendous professional price to pay when one becomes a full-fledged heretic.

Book Signing Reminder

Just a reminder that I'll be doing a book signing/meet and greet on behalf of my book In the Absence of God at Hearts and Minds bookstore in Dallastown, PA tomorrow evening (December 14th) beginning at 7:00pm.

My friend Byron Borger, the proprietor of Hearts and Minds, has graciously offered to host this event at his bookshop, and I hope many of you can make it, especially if you live close-by. It'll be an evening of good conversation, light refreshments, an opportunity to make new acquaintances, and an opportunity to browse the shelves of perhaps the most charming bookstore you'll ever visit.

It's also a great place to do some Christmas shopping, and In the Absence of God may make the perfect gift for someone who prefers novels to non-fiction and who's interested in questions about God. For more information on the book click on the link at the upper right of this page.

The address of Hearts and Minds is 234 East Main Street, Dallastown, York County, PA. I hope to see you there.

Civil Disagreement Over Right to Work

Michigan governor Rick Snyder signed a measure yesterday that would make it possible for workers who refuse to join a union to decline to pay dues to the union. This is called Right to Work, and it's vigorously opposed by the unions who see it as both unfair that those who don't contribute to the union still get the benefits negotiated by the union and also as a threat to their political influence.

Heretofore in Michigan and elsewhere a worker who refused to join certain unions still had to pay dues to the union.

Byron York writes on this in The Washington Examiner:

Michigan, home of the nation's heavily unionized auto industry, will become the 24th right-to-work state in the country -- a development that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Republicans say the move would not only give current workers the freedom to choose whether to join a union and pay dues but would, more importantly, bring many, many new jobs to Michigan. Rep. Gov. Rick Snyder, who supports the bill, points out that Indiana enacted (after a long and bitter fight) the same kind of law earlier this year. "We've carefully watched what's gone on in Indiana since they passed similar legislation back in February," Snyder told Fox News' Greta van Susteren last week, "and they've seen a significant increase in the number of companies talking about [bringing] thousands of jobs to their state."

Of course, the move is not just economic. It's political, too. Democrats depend on millions -- actually, billions -- of dollars in support from the forced dues of union members. If that money supply were to dry up, or even just decrease, the Democratic Party would be in serious trouble.

Which is why President Obama just happened to discuss the situation during his campaign-style visit to the Daimler Detroit Diesel Plant in Redford, Mich., on Monday. "These so-called right-to-work laws don't have anything to do with economics -- they have everything to do with politics," Obama said. "What they're really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money."

Meanwhile, outside the capitol building union protestors were engaging Right to Work supporters in a cordial effort to persuade them of the error of their ways. One such beneficiary of the union members' gentle appeals to reason was Fox News' Steven Crowder who was complaining, no doubt insolently, him being a Tea Party sympathizer and all, that the thugs, er, protestors had just pulled down a tent on top of women and children who were caught inside.

When Mr. Crowder failed to come around to their point of view, the protestors decided to employ a different kind of logic, a form of argument with which they're much more comfortable, in an attempt to hammer home to him the facts of the matter.

I need someone to explain to me why it is that when a Tea Partier holds up a sign saying Don't Tread on Me there are universal expressions of revulsion at the implied "violence," but when union thugs bully women and children, spew filth, and physically assault someone who doesn't agree with them no one seems much disturbed by it.

I suppose when the violence is on the left, it's no big deal. Boys will be boys, after all. When rapes, muggings and murders break out at the Occupy encampments, well, we just have to expect unfortunate things to happen when people are thrust into close quarters. When Obama supporters threaten to riot in the streets and burn down their cities if he loses the election, we're told that they're just kidding. But when a Tea Party guy says he's tired of excessive government spending and taxes the media treats him like he's Lee Harvey Oswald.

Why is that?

Honor and Mercy

The New York Post's Maureen Callahan writes a wonderful story about honor in wartime based on the book A Higher Call, by Adam Makos. Callahan's account opens with this:

On Dec. 20, 1943, a young American bomber pilot named Charlie Brown found himself somewhere over Germany, struggling to keep his plane aloft with just one of its four engines still working. They were returning from their first mission as a unit, the successful bombing of a German munitions factory. Of his crew members, one was dead and six wounded, and 2nd Lt. Brown was alone in his cockpit, the three unharmed men tending to the others. Brown’s B-17 had been attacked by 15 German planes and left for dead, and Brown himself had been knocked out in the assault, regaining consciousness in just enough time to pull the plane out of a near-fatal nose dive.

None of that was as shocking as the German pilot now suddenly to his right. Brown thought he was hallucinating. He did that thing you see people do in movies: He closed his eyes and shook his head no. He looked, again, out the co-pilot’s window. Again, the lone German was still there, and now it was worse. He’d flown over to Brown’s left and was frantic: pointing, mouthing things that Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend, making these wild gestures, exaggerating his expressions like a cartoon character.

Brown, already in shock, was freshly shot through with fear. What was this guy up to? He craned his neck and yelled back for his top gunner, screamed at him to get up in his turret and shoot this guy out of the sky. Before Brown’s gunner could squeeze off his first round, the German did something even weirder: He looked Brown in the eye and gave him a salute. Then he peeled away.

What just happened? That question would haunt Brown for more than 40 years, long after he married and left the service and resettled in Miami, long after he had expected the nightmares about the German to stop and just learned to live with them.

There's much more to this story, especially in how it ends. Check it out and watch the video.

The Inadequacy of Darwinian Naturalism

Paul Nelson is a philosopher of biology who gave a talk at Saddleback Church in California the Sunday after Thanksgiving. His topic was on why unguided natural processes, particularly genetic mutation and natural selection, cannot by themselves account for the evolution of microbes to mammals.

As Nelson puts it natural selection is real, but it can only conserve, it cannot create. Nelson explains one of the gravest difficulties for Darwinian evolution as a creative force - the origin of different animal body plans. The difference between a worm and a fly is enormous, but the kinds of mutations in the genomes of any ancestral species that would be needed to create either worms or flies are invariably lethal to the organism.

The video of Nelson's presentation is forty minutes long, but for someone interested in his argument and the ramifications of the evolutionary inadequacy of purely natural processes it only seems like ten minutes. Give it a look here.

But What Happens to the Little People?

You might think that falling gasoline prices would be welcome news to the left. Cheaper gas brings down the cost of everything which is a special boon to the poor. It also reduces the cost burden of businesses which enables them to hire more people. Moreover, the reasons for the lower prices - the natural gas boom at home and the slowdown in petroleum demand worldwide because of cooling economies in India and China and difficulties in Europe - means that less carbon is being thrown into the atmosphere. All of this should be welcome news to the left, but it's apparently not.

The problem, as they see it, is that if gas is relatively cheap, then alternative fuels will not be competitive and there'll be little to no incentive to move toward developing them. Thus, lefties like those in the piece at the link believe we need to artificially make fossil fuel more expensive by imposing a hefty tax on carbon consumption.

The left doesn't seem to care much that such a tax will severely hurt the poor and middle class, stifle job creation, and smother any chance of an economic recovery. What they care about is making fossil fuels economically impractical and whoever has to be sacrificed to get to that goal is evidently expendable.

Cheap fuel is a blessing for everyone, but especially for the "little guy." If we really care about him we'd be a lot more reluctant to make his life harder than it already is.

Out of Whack

A post at the Daily Caller shows that something is very much out of whack with welfare spending. According to the article:

[T]he amount spent on federal means-tested welfare programs, if converted to cash payments and divided among households below the poverty line, would equal a daily income greater than the median household income in 2011.

The cash value of welfare spending, according to the analysis, is $167.65 daily per household in poverty. The median household income in 2011 was $50,054 or $137.13 per day, according to the analysis, released Friday.

When broken down into an hourly wage, welfare spending would be enough for $30.60 an hour for 40 hour weeks for each household in poverty. The median household hourly wage is $25.03, which drops to between $21.50 and $23.45 after federal taxes, depending on deductions and filing status, the minority side of the committee showed. The wage is further reduced with local and state taxes. Benefits from government assistance programs, they note, are not taxed federally.

No wonder people receiving government benefits are in no hurry to find gainful employment. Almost any job they take would result in a pay cut.

President Obama is not satisfied, however, that we're doing enough to subsidize poverty in this country. His budget would increase federal means-tested spending another 30% over the next four years. Heck, why not? Just tax the rich to make them pay their "fair share" and none of us would have to work.

Dare You to Cross That Line

I can remember seeing a cartoon when I was young in which one character drew a line in the dirt and dared an antagonist to cross the line. When the antagonist promptly stepped across the mark the character backed up and drew another line and again dared the foe to cross that one. Of course, he did and the character had to back up again and draw a third line making himself look both foolish and irresolute.

Barack Obama is making himself look like that character. According to an article in the NYT:

When President Obama first warned Syria’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, that even making moves toward using chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that might force the United States to drop its reluctance to intervene in the country’s civil war, Mr. Obama took an expansive view of where he drew that boundary.

“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” he said at an Aug. 20 news conference. He added: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

But in the past week, amid intelligence reports that some precursor chemicals have been mixed for possible use as weapons, Mr. Obama’s “red line” appears to have shifted. His warning against “moving” weapons has disappeared from his public pronouncements, as well as those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The new warning is that if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified consequences.

It is a veiled threat that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeated Thursday: “The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”

This sounds like playground threats. "You better not cross that line or else I'll...I'll do something, and you won't like it."

If the threat to do something if Assad uses the weapons sounds like playground rhetoric, the excuse for not having done anything yet sounds reminiscent of Bill Clinton's "It all depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Here's the Times:

The White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is all in the definition of the word “moving.”

Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday that “ ‘moving around’ means proliferation,” as in allowing extremist groups like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the material.

So when the Assad regime finally decides to thumb its nose at Mr. Obama and use the weapons against the rebels perhaps we'll be told by the administration that actually what the president meant by "using" those weapons was "using them against us," and since the Syrians haven't used them against us we should not entangle ourselves in their domestic affairs, etcetera.

By the way, from whence did the Syrians get those biological and chemical weapons, and why isn't the media wondering about that? Remember when the search for precisely these kinds of munitions in Iraq came up empty, how much abuse George Bush took for having claimed in the first place that the Iraqis had them. "Bush lied, people died" and all that. Remember, too, that convoys of trucks were seen moving from Iraq toward Syria immediately prior to our invasion of Iraq. Maybe Bush was right after all. No wonder the media isn't curious where Syria got these weapons from. The last thing the media would want is to raise the prospect that Bush had been right all along.

Sleight-of-Hand

This guy is absolutely amazing. His name is Yann Frisch. See if you can figure out how he does this stuff:

There's more on Frisch and his act here.

By the way, I don't wish to be pedantic, but the term that describes Frisch's art is sleight-of-hand, not slight-of-hand as the people at the link spell it, although it is pronounced as if the word were "slight."

Meaningful Gift-Giving

Looking for a meaningful way to observe Christmas and to file a silent protest against the crass commercialization and consumerism which seems to have taken over the season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ?

Nicholas Kristof has some suggestions in a recent New York Times column:

Looking for an unusual holiday gift? How about a $60 trio of rabbits to a family in Haiti in the name of someone special? Bunnies raise a farming family’s income because they, well, reproduce like rabbits — six litters a year! Heifer International arranges the gift on its Web site.

Or for $52 you can buy your uncle something more meaningful than a necktie: send an Afghan girl to school for a year in his name.

Kristof adds a number of other suggestions along with accompanying links. These include Shining Hope for Communities a Kenyan girls' school and clinic started by Kennedy Odede, a slum-dweller in Nairobi, Kenya, who taught himself to read; a hospital, school and refugee camp in war-torn Somalia; The Polaris Project, a leader in the fight against human trafficking in the United States; Fair Girls a Washington-based organization also engaged in the fight against sex trafficking at home and abroad.

Kristoff gives details on all these in his column, and they all seem worthy of our attention and consideration this Christmas season.

Some of my own favorite charities include Kiva, a microfinance organization that provides loans to third world entrepreneurs; Logos Academy, a private school in York, PA for underprivileged children; and ASAPH ministries, the support organization for a friend of mine who's been a missionary in Haiti for twenty years and who has started a school there.

If you'd like to give this Christmas but aren't sure where your gift would do the most good, I can promise you that each of the above are doing great work on behalf of the poor.

Reflection on the Election

Contemplating the results of the last presidential election has become something of a pastime, I suppose, and there are lots of theories floating about as to why things turned out the way they did last November 6th.

For my part I think that the election revealed a deep fault line running through our culture. There appears to be a fundamental difference in how we understand the basic principles of freedom, justice, and compassion.

Americans, perhaps guided by their individual temperaments and personalities, have found themselves on opposing sides of an epistemological divide. This is why political liberals and political conservatives so often feel like they're talking past each other. It's because they are. It's not that some people think these principles should inform our votes and others don't. It's that many conservative and liberal Americans agree that our politics should be oriented toward maximizing freedom, justice and compassion, but they interpret these principles in very different ways.

Consider the principle of freedom, for instance.

Conservatives often frame their understanding of freedom in terms of economics - the free market, minimal government regulation, private property, the freedom to invest, hire, fire, and so on in whatever way the individual thinks best.

Liberals might also think of freedom in economic terms but for them it's freedom from the tyranny of financial want and worry.

Conservatives tend to see big government as a threat to their freedom and want government kept small and unobtrusive. Liberals tend to see government as the defender of their freedom, a source of security, and tend to want more of it.

Conservatives place freedom from government above personal security whereas liberals tend to place personal security above all. Thus conservatives lament the welfare state while liberals promote universal health care and social programs. Given these differences it's easy to see why conservatives, for instance, want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and liberals see it as a great advance.

Or consider justice.

Liberals see justice as a striving for economic equality. Large gaps between rich and poor are, in the liberal view, fundamentally, unjust and need to be narrowed through tax policy and entitlements. Conservatives tend to see justice as a matter of ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.

For conservatives inequality is not, by itself, an indicator of injustice, but confiscatory taxation - the seizure by government of one's property - is. For liberals, on the other hand, the disparity between the rich and the poor is a clear measure of systemic injustice in a society and those who possess the nation's wealth should be compelled to share it with those who don't.

Compassion, too, is seen differently by conservatives and liberals.

For conservatives government should provide a safety net for the poor, but compassionate outreach to the poor beyond the safety net should be extended through the mediating institutions of the society - neighborhood societies, private charities, churches, etc.

Liberals tend to be skeptical that such institutions are adequate to the task of caring for the poor or that people, if allowed to keep their wealth, will use it for the common good. It therefore falls upon government, they believe, to insure that the poor are provided not only an adequate portion of life's necessities, but also given enough that they can be reasonably comfortable.

Neither side along the divide understands the other because they don't share a common view of freedom, justice and compassion. And neither side particularly appreciates the other because both sides think the other is ignoring very important aspects of these principles.

Parenthetically, it's an irony, in my view, that our secular friends often bandy terms like freedom, justice, and compassion about, but they fail to see that unless there's a transcendent personal moral authority who obligates us to pursue these there really is no moral reason why anyone should care about the well-being of anyone but himself. Those secularists who admonish us about our "moral duty" to do justice and have compassion for the less fortunate are simply indulging an arbitrary personal preference similar in kind to their preference for Pepsi rather than Coke.

This is one of the themes I try to develop in my book In the Absence of God (about which you can read more by clicking on the link at the upper right of this page)

In any case, when a wealthy businessman - like Mr. Romney - who wants to maintain low taxes on other very wealthy people competes against someone - like Mr. Obama - who boasts a strong identification with the poor and who guarantees them that his primary concern is distributing wealth to more of them, liberals will find the redistributionist's message much more attractive than that of the guy who wants to help people hold on to what they've earned.

I don't know if we've ever not been a divided nation. We were divided over the Revolution when many colonists took the side of the British or were at best uninterested in supporting the quest for Independence. We were certainly divided during the antebellum years, the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, and we were divided during the turbulent 1960s, but through all of that we more or less shared a common understanding of what it meant to be free, to do justice, and to be compassionate, even if many people failed to hold to those ideals.

We no longer have that shared understanding, though, and I suspect that the election of 2012 stamped an exclamation point to that fact.

Materialism and Intentionality

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism. This is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to the constituents of material substance. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial and affirm that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

In the Beginning

An article in New Scientist explores the question, "Has the cosmos existed forever, or did something bring it into existence?" The article points out that scientists believe that the universe started as a quantum fluctuation but then poses this additional question:

If the universe owes its origins to quantum theory, then quantum theory must have existed before the universe. So the next question is surely: where did the laws of quantum theory come from? "We do not know," admits [cosmologist Alex] Vilenkin. "I consider that an entirely different question." When it comes to the beginning of the universe, in many ways we're still at the beginning.

The consensus view is that the universe experienced a "Big Bang" but that this event was not the actual beginning. The beginning was in fact a hot, unimaginably dense state which produced the "Bang," but what then caused this state and why did it produce the universe when it did?

Vilenkin and others are coming to the conclusion that the universe is not eternal, that the original hot, dense state came into existence at some point, but how and why is still a mystery. There is at this stage of our knowledge no physical mechanism that's a plausible candidate for the initial cause.

Hmmm. I wonder, then, if there could be a non-physical cause that brought it all into being.

Religious Studies Today

I don't know if there was ever a time when a student could take a course in religious studies in an American university and actually learn something important about Christianity, but if ever there was, it's long past.

An article at The College Fix surveys 316 religious studies courses in a dozen major American universities and finds them pretty much devoid of any content that could be considered mainstream religious. Instead, what the researchers found were:

2 classes on witchcraft and shamanism;
2 classes on yoga and meditation;
3 classes on sex and religion;
3 classes on death and afterlife beliefs;
4 classes on religion and doubt/various conflicts;
5 classes on science and religion;
5 classes on mysticism;
12 classes on women/gender and religion; and
14 classes on religion and culture.

Some of the electives, the report says, are too difficult to even classify, such as: emergence, from biology to religion; suffering and transformation; anthropology of body and pain; religious dimensions in human experience; sport and spirituality; and a history of apocalyptic thought and movements.

University of Colorado at Denver’s 40-plus religious studies classes include “whores and saints,” “theories of the universe,” “Freudian and Jungian perspectives in dream analysis,” and “spirituality and the modern world.” No electives focused exclusively on Jesus, however.

Tne article goes on to describe the offerings at other schools similar to those at U. of Colorado. What the researchers didn't find in any of the schools surveyed were many courses that seriously addressed traditional Christianity, or the person of Jesus, who, despite the evident lack of academic interest in him, was easily the most influential individual to have ever lived.

It's a shame that universities have wandered so far from their original mission to teach the "best that has been thought and written" in Western civilization. It's equally lamentable that people pay money to have their kids take such courses that neither nourish their minds nor teach them much of anything useful.

Birth Rate Decline

The folks at the Pew Research Center have come up with some startling statistics about birth trends in the U.S. Here's a quick overview:

The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession. The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from 2007 to 2010. The birth rate for U.S.-born women decreased 6% during these years, but the birth rate for foreign-born women plunged 14%—more than it had declined over the entire 1990-2007 period. The birth rate for Mexican immigrant women fell even more, by 23%.

Final 2011 data are not available, but according to preliminary data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the overall birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. That rate is the lowest since at least 1920, the earliest year for which there are reliable numbers. The overall U.S. birth rate peaked most recently in the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 in 1957, nearly double today’s rate. The birth rate sagged through the mid-1970s but stabilized at 65-70 births per 1,000 women for most years after that before falling again after 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession.

There's much more at the link along with lots of charts.

The population replacement rate is about 2.1 children per couple. We fell below that for the first time in the U.S. in 2008. If birth rates are continuing to decline that'll have serious consequences for the future of the country. Fewer people means fewer consumers and fewer taxpayers which means a poorer nation. It also means that entitlement programs for the poor are going to be hard pressed to find the wherewithal to sustain them. It also means that there'll be less revenue coming in to the Treasury to support programs like Social Security and Medicare.

There's much talk in the news about the impending "fiscal cliff," but there's a population cliff looming off in the middle distance, which, if it remains unaddressed, will guarantee that people in their twenties today will be much worse off financially when they hit their forties than were their parents and grandparents.

Rubio's Reply

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed by Dr. Josh Swamidass, a professor in the Laboratory and Genomic Medicine Division at Washington University in St. Louis, on the response given by Senator Marco Rubio to a question asked of him by an interviewer from GQ magazine. Rubio was asked how old he thinks the earth is, a strange question to ask of a politician to be sure, especially since Democrats rarely get asked these sorts of questions, at least not by journalists. Rubio was taken aback and gave a rather desultory reply which offended Dr. Swamidass and a host of other commentators as well. He writes:

Sen. Marco Rubio recently touched a land mine in America's culture wars: evolution, creation and the age of the Earth. When GQ magazine asked him how old the planet is, Mr. Rubio's winding response never directly answered the question. Instead, he noted his lack of scientific qualifications ("I'm not a scientist, man"), posited a need to teach the "multiple theories out there on how the universe was created," and settled into the platitude that the Earth's age is an unsolvable "mystery."

Mr. Rubio's answer enabled his critics to cast one of the Republicans' fastest rising stars as an ignorant religious nut. It also provided an opportunity for those hostile to Christians to lampoon them for trusting their sacred text more than science.

I'm sure this is indeed how the Democrats would like to portray every conservative, but they can only get away with it by making sure their media allies don't ask them the same sorts of questions routinely employed to flummox Republicans. How, for example, would Senator Harry Reid, a Mormon, have answered that question? Or Nancy Pelosi? Or Vice President Biden? Does anyone think these pols have any idea at all what the scientific consensus is on the age of the earth or the age of the universe? Why should a politician be expected to know this anyway? What difference does it make whether someone believes the earth is thousands, millions, or billions of years old? What else should they know? The Gravitational Constant and the Planck Time? The GQ question is absurd and so has been the reaction to Rubio's reply.

The number that journalists should be asking our politicians is the size of the national budget deficit and the national debt. As it turns out, Mr. Obama was asked this very question and he didn't know the answer (start at the 2:00 minute mark):

That the president couldn't even give an approximate answer to the question - he's being paid, after all, to get this number under control - should have generated howls of outrage from the media, but it scarcely mustered a yawn.

Coincidentally, Mr. Obama was also asked, as a U.S. Senator, the same question that Marco Rubio was asked, though presumably not by a journalist. In a 2008 forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, Senator Obama was served this version of it:

Senator, if one of your daughters asked you...“Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

His answer is scarcely different than Senator Rubio's. Senator Obama replied:

What I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don't presume to know.

Here's Rubio, in his interview for the December 2012 issue of GQ:

Q: How old do you think the Earth is?

A: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Why is it that Senator Rubio's reply elicits howls of derision and Senator Obama's reply creates nary a ripple? The only thing I can figure is that it has something to do with whether there's an R or a D after their names.