Why We Need Sleep

According to the Washington Post recent research has confirmed some theories about why human beings, and other animals, require sleep. During sleep the brain is bathed in cerebrospinal fluid that removes waste products and other toxins that accumulate during waking hours.

Staying up all night, the article says, could prevent the brain from getting rid of these toxins efficiently, and this would explain why sleep deprivation results in mental fog, crankiness, and increased risks of migraine and seizure.

Here's part of the WaPo's story:

Last year, [University of Rochester neurosurgeon] Maiken Nedergaard and her colleagues discovered a network that drains waste from the brain, which they dubbed the glymphatic system. It works by circulating cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain tissue and flushing any resulting waste into the bloodstream, which then carries it to the liver for detoxification.

She then became curious about how the glymphatic system behaves during the sleep-wake cycle.

An imaging technique called two-photon microscopy enabled the scientists to watch the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through a live mouse brain in real time. After soothing the creature until it was sound asleep, study author Lulu Xie tagged the fluid with a special fluorescent dye.

“During sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid flushed through the brain very quickly and broadly,” said Rochester neuropharmacologist Xie. As another experiment revealed, sleep causes the space between cells to increase by 60 percent, allowing the flow to increase.

Xie then gently touched the mouse’s tail until it woke up from its nap, and she again injected it with dye. This time, with the mouse awake, flow in the brain was greatly constrained.

“Brain cells shrink when we sleep, allowing fluid to enter and flush out the brain,” Nedergaard said. “It’s like opening and closing a faucet.”

They also found that the harmful beta-amyloid protein clears out of the brain twice as fast in a sleeping rodent as in an up-and-about one. The study was published in the journal Science on Thursday.

New York University cell biologist and Alzheimer’s specialist Ralph A. Nixon, who was not involved in the study, said the findings could be of great interest to the Alzheimer’s research community. For instance, the overproduction of beta-amyloid could be linked to the development of the disease, but he said these new findings hint that the lack of clearing it out might be the bigger problem.

Other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, are also associated with a backup of too much cell waste in the brain. “Clearance mechanisms may be very relevant to keeping these proteins at a level that isn’t disease-causing,” Nixon said.

There's more on this at the link.

So, if you're a college student who likes to stay up late and has to get up early and you wonder why you can't stay awake in class, it's because your brain is polluted with toxins and you may be on your way to Alzheimer's. Turn off the computer and get some sleep.

How Far We've Come

When I was in high school in a suburb of Philadelphia in the early '60s there was a working class ethnic neighborhood not far from mine into which a black couple named Baker wished to move. The neighborhood, named Delmar Village, was all-white and there was a great deal of turmoil generated by residents who wanted to keep it that way. The mob smashed the windows of the Baker home and attacked police. Mounted state police were called in to quell the disturbances that lasted for at least a week and which at the time were called a race riot by the media.

The black family believed they had a constitutional right to live wherever they wished and could afford. Presumably, they wanted their children to have the same opportunities that white children of similar economic means had. The white residents, or many of them, felt that regardless of what the constitution says about equality under the law, the black family had no place in that neighborhood. They didn't belong there by virtue of their skin color.

Martin Luther King Day is a good time to reflect on that awful episode and lament the bigotry that leads one American to tell another that he has no place in a neighborhood simply because of his race. But even though this event happened fifty years ago last August and September, and even though we've come a long way in many respects since those years, that kind of bigotry is still around today, not just among the lower socio-economic classes of both whites and blacks, but at the highest levels of the liberal-progressive movement in this country.

As a case in point consider the statement last Friday by the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who said this about conservatives:

"Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are."

In other words, people who believe that we should protect the weakest among us by protecting their right to life, and people who believe that the second amendment of the Constitution allows them to defend themselves and their families are extremists and have no place among the good people of the state of New York.

It's not clear what Mr. Cuomo means by being "anti-gay," but if he's referring to people who oppose gay marriage then he's saying that those who hold a view of marriage that almost everyone held up until the day before yesterday are extremists and also have no place among tolerant New Yorkers.

This is what Jonah Goldberg calls "liberal fascism." It's the sort of bigotry that says to people "We don't want your kind here. You have no place in our neighborhood, not because you don't look like us, but because you don't think like us." It's the kind of bigotry in which one American tells other Americans that, regardless of what the Constitution says, their opinions are so odious that liberals don't want them living in even the same state as they live in.

Cuomo's statement is ironic on several levels. It's ironic because liberals like to appear in public clothed in the theoretical raiment of tolerance and diversity, but in practice, they're intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them, and their openness to diversity only applies to things like skin color, gender identity, and sexual preference. Ideological diversity is unwelcome.

It's ironic because the governor is proposing to exile from the state probably 50% or more of its citizens for the crime of embracing both traditional views of marriage and constitutional freedoms.

It's ironic because the governor refers to conservatives as holding extreme views, but which is more extreme, to protect unborn children or to kill them at a rate of a million annually? Which is more extreme, to honor a provision of a constitution which has governed this country for two centuries or to seek to abrogate it? Which is more extreme, to hold to a view of marriage that has thousands of years of tradition behind it or to revise and probably end it for the sake of a notion of equality that was unheard of just a a few decades ago?

The governor's statement is also ironic because it's symptomatic of exactly the sort of thinking that led not only to the riot in Delmar Village in 1963, but also to the Japanese internment camps during WWII, and to the expulsion of Indians from Georgia and elsewhere in the 19th century, all of which liberals rightly deplore.

The tactic of the liberal fascists is to cover their own extremism in octopus ink while hurling the allegation at anyone with whom they have a political disagreement. I suppose it works with the uninformed, the gullible, and those who wish to be gulled, but I think we'd do well to recall the words of Martin Luther King who longed for the day when his children (and ours) would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin (or on which side of the ideological divide they reside).

Why Birds Fly in a V

I found this report pretty interesting:

Scientists have found that birds position themselves and time their wing beats so perfectly that, according to aerodynamic theory, they minimize their energy use. It's a task that requires each bird to monitor subtle changes in its wing mates' flight and alter its own path and stroke accordingly.

The new results "once again remind us that animals are much more complicated … than we often give them credit for," says Kenny Breuer, a professor of engineering and ecology at Brown University who was not involved with the study. "They're reacting in very sophisticated ways to maintain these V formations."

Aircraft can save fuel by flying in a V, leading scientists to predict how closely bunched birds in a V-shaped flock should be to save the most energy. But it's no easy feat to measure the coordinates of a bunch of geese or gulls flying fast and high overhead. "It's not something you can do with a pair of binoculars and timing it 'one Mississippi, two Mississippi,' " says study author James Usherwood of Britain's Royal Veterinary College.

When the researchers analyzed the data from 14 young ibises flying in a V, they found that each ibis placed itself an average of four feet behind the bird in front of it and at an average angle of 45 degrees. That's just the configuration needed for individual birds to catch the rising air generated by the flapping of the bird in front of it. By capturing this rising air, or "upwash," the bird stays aloft more efficiently.

But the birds do more to save their strength than simply choosing the right spot. Measurements of the ibises' flaps showed the birds time their wing beats so precisely that they continually catch the upwash left behind by the moving wings of the guy or gal ahead. That means a bird regulates its stroke so its own wingtips trace the same path in the sky as the bird in front. If a bird happens to get a little closer to or farther from the bird it's following, it instantly adjusts its wing beat accordingly, the researchers report in this week's Nature.

At the end of the video at the link a researcher muses over the question why smaller birds don't also fly in v-formations. My theory is that perhaps large birds use this pattern, in part, to take advantage of the aerodynamic benefits, but also to avoid collisions with other birds in traffic. By aligning themselves with regular spacing they diminish the chances of banging into surrounding members of the flock which would be catastrophic for large flyers like geese and swans.

Smaller, less massive birds are able to react and maneuver much more quickly than large birds, which means the smaller birds can fly in tight flocks without colliding with their neighbors. Moreover, it may be that smaller birds don't create the air turbulence that bigger birds do so the aerodynamic benefits of flying in a formation are probably not as great for the smaller birds.

I have not a shred of scientific evidence to back any of this up, of course, but that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Here's a video of a starling murmuration that shows smaller birds maneuvering and reacting to each other in ways that appear instantaneous and which make collision avoidance seem almost miraculous:

Liberalism and Pederasty

A comment cited in a VP post the other day led me to wonder. The comment was a snide remark about Catholic priests and their affinity for sex with boys. Many of these sorts of remarks, as well as serious moral condemnations of pederast priests, are made by people who are politically liberal which is what I found puzzling.

Why, I wondered, do liberals condemn priests who prey upon boys? Why do they think such behavior should be illegal? It would seem to me that such predilections and practices are perfectly consistent with mainstream liberal assumptions.

For example, the thinking can't be that guilty priests are to be mocked and punished because of their attraction to males. That, of course, would be absurd given liberal attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexual marriage.

Nor can the reason for liberal contempt for the offending clerics be that these older men are sexually attracted to younger boys. What, on liberalism, is wrong with that? If the priests are born with a disposition toward boys how can a liberal say the disposition is wrong? And if the liberal maintains that the attraction is not a genetic condition but rather a choice for which the offender is morally responsible then why does not the same response apply to homosexuality in general?

Evidently, the liberal believes that the moral culpability of the pederast lies in the fact that he, an adult, is imposing his will on weaker children, often to their hurt, who are relatively powerless and uncomprehending. In other words, the immoral aspect of pederasty is that it exploits and often harms the unwilling weak for the benefit of the powerful, but, if so, how can a liberal condemn that?

That's precisely what happens in an abortion, the right to which is almost sacramental in liberalism. Unwavering support for the right of the powerful to harm the weak, via abortion, without the consent of the weak is the sine qua non for membership in good standing among the liberal elite. No one who opposes that right would ever win the nomination for president in the Democrat Party. How then can the same people who affirm the goodness of such a right then turn around and condemn those who use their power to abuse boys?

Perhaps it might be replied that whereas the unborn child is in the mother's body, over which she has ultimate authority, the pederast's victim is not similarly situated and therefore not subject to the abuser's authority over his own body. Perhaps, but one's sovereignty over one's body can only extend to the point where another person's body is involved. I can perhaps do whatever I wish with my own body, but I haven't the moral right to do whatever I wish to the body of another person, regardless of where the other person is located. To argue that one has a right to evict an unwanted person from one's body by killing it makes no more sense than arguing that one has the right to evict by killing it an innocent child who has accidentally wandered into one's home.

So maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that if one is in favor of abortion on demand in general, and late-term abortion in particular, one has no basis for condemning those who sexually molest young boys, whether the molesters are Catholic priests or anyone else.

The Cosmological Argument

Here's a brief and very accessible explanation of one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of a being which, if it does exist, would be very much like the God of traditional theism.

The argument is called the Kalam version of the cosmological argument, and, as the name suggests, it has roots in both Islamic and Christian thought. The argument has experienced something of a rebirth since the acceptance in the latter half of the twentieth century of the standard Big Bang model of the origin of the universe and has been especially prominent in the work of philosopher William Lane Craig.

Notice a couple of things. The argument is not a proof that God exists. It simply points out that both premises are more reasonable to believe than their alternatives and, since the conclusion follows from the premises, it's more reasonable to believe it than it is to believe its alternative - i.e. that the universe has no cause.

Of course one can argue that even if the universe has a cause that cause is not necessarily the God of traditional monotheism. This contention becomes less plausible, however, when we inquire as to what we can reasonably infer about this cause from the effect (the universe) it has produced.

As the video points out, the cause would have to transcend space and time since these are physical constituents of the universe. It would also have to be very powerful to be able to cause a universe to come into being, and, we might add, it would have to be very intelligent to design a universe that exhibits the amazing mathematical precision ours does. We might also think that, since the universe contains rational, personal beings (us), it's reasonable to suppose that the ultimate cause of such beings is itself rational and personal.

If these inferences are valid then we're very close to the existence of a being not unlike the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Even so, one attribute traditionally imputed to God that we cannot derive from this chain of reasoning, as far as I can see, is his goodness. The universe is morally ambiguous and so to arrive at the conclusion that its creator is omnibenevolent requires other resources and arguments.

Nevertheless, establishing the reasonableness of believing that there exists a being that possesses the attributes that a creator of this universe must have is not insignificant. In fact, in my opinion, it brings us so close to the God of monotheism that it makes the denial of the existence of such a being, seem intellectually perverse.

Racial Bigotry and In the Absence of God

One of the comments I sometimes get from readers of my novel In the Absence of God is that they were somewhat surprised that, in their estimation, much is made of interracial dating in the book. In the opinion of these readers this is just not a concern in these enlightened times.

I'd offer two responses to this criticism. First, I don't think that the book makes that big a deal of it, and second, if anyone thinks that interracial romances are no longer an issue perhaps they should talk to the actress Tamera Mowry. Mowry recently discussed her own experience with Oprah Winfrey:

It’s no secret that “Sister Sister” star Tamera Mowry is blissfully married to Fox News correspondent Adam Housely, but what some might not have known is that the actress has faced intense online abuse over their mixed-race relationship. Mowry, 35, tearfully recounted the name-calling and mistreatment she has received as a result of her marriage to Housely in an interview for Oprah Winfrey’s “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”

She appeared on the segment alongside her twin sister and co-star Tia. The response from online haters has apparently been so intense that Mowry told Winfrey she never experienced “so much hate” in her life until after her 2011 nuptials, the Daily Mail reported.

“See, this is where I get emotional, because it’s hurtful,” Mowry said through tears. “Because when my husband and I are so openly — and we’re fine with showing — in love. Love. But people choose to look past love and spew hate.”

The story at the Daily Mail has more details, particularly about where the hurtful comments are coming from. It really is sad that in 2014 it's still very hard for some people to see past skin color, but apparently it is, and In the Absence of God captures a relatively small and quite mild slice of this bit of social reality.

Know Nothings

I've noted in this space on a number of occasions that most of the racial bigotry in this country today is found lurking on the ideological left. This may seem counterintuitive, given the rhetoric of equality with which the left often lectures us, but examples of liberal attitudes that belie the rhetoric aren't hard to find. Nor is it at all difficult to document the claim that most contemporary anti-semitism and anti-Christian bigotry is on the left as well.

An example of the latter comes in the pages of a mainstream journal of opinion, U.S. News and World Report. U.S. News last week published a column by a woman named Jamie Stiehm which was noteworthy for its explicit anti-Catholic animus. The provocation which induced Stiehm's choler was the decision by Catholic Supreme Court jurist Sonia Sotomayor to grant a temporary stay to an organization of nuns who objected to being forced by Obamacare to provide contraception to anyone covered by their insurance.

Here are a few excerpts from Steihm's rant which sounds, mutatis mutandis, like something lifted right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

The Supreme Court is now best understood as the Extreme Court. One big reason why is that six out of nine Justices are Catholic. Let's be forthright about that. (The other three are Jewish.) Sotomayor, appointed by President Obama, is a Catholic who put her religion ahead of her jurisprudence. What a surprise, but that is no small thing.

How, exactly, Sotomayor "put her religion ahead of her jurisprudence" Stiehm doesn't bother to tell us, but never mind. There's a conspiracy afoot to bring religious beliefs into the public square and Catholics, don't you know, are the main conspirators. Sotomayor is a Catholic, Stiehm's reasoning seems to run, so what she did must have been an attempt to impose religion on the non-religious, or something:

Sotomayor's blow brings us to confront an uncomfortable reality. More than WASPS, Methodists, Jews, Quakers or Baptists, Catholics often try to impose their beliefs on you, me, public discourse and institutions. Especially if "you" are female. This is not true of all Catholics – just look at House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. But right now, the climate is so cold when it comes to defending our settled legal ground that Sotomayor's stay is tantamount to selling out the sisterhood. And sisterhood is not as powerful as it used to be, ladies.

Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I've noticed, practicing the separation of church and state. The pugnacious Catholic Justice, Antonin Scalia, is the most aggressive offender on the Court, but not the only one. Of course, we can't know for sure what Sotomayor was thinking, but it seems she has joined the ranks of the five Republican Catholic men on the John Roberts Court in showing a clear religious bias when it comes to women's rights and liberties.

Ms Stiehm holds an odd view of the separation of church and state. She apparently thinks that no belief one holds should be acted upon in the public arena if the provenience of that belief happens to be in any way religious. This view automatically disqualifies anyone who takes his or her religious beliefs seriously from holding any position of public power. The liberal Ms Stiehm is tacitly doing what liberals have long decried - she's seeking to impose a religious test for suitability for public office:

We can no longer be silent about this. Thomas Jefferson, the principal champion of the separation between state and church, was thinking particularly of pernicious Rome in his writings. He deeply distrusted the narrowness of Vatican hegemony.

The seemingly innocent Little Sisters were likely not acting alone in their trouble-making. Their big brothers, the meddlesome American Roman Catholic Archbishops are bound to be involved. They seek and wield tremendous power and influence in the political sphere. Big city mayors know their penchant for control all too well. Their principal target for years on end has been squelching women and girls – even when they should have focused on their own men and boys.

Imagine. Prelates having influence over their flock. What a scandal. Of course, there's nothing wrong with Democratic aldermen or union bosses wielding tremendous power in our cities, but if the leaders of the Church wield influence they're being "meddlesome." And, in Ms Stiehm's universe, everyone knows that the Church has been squelching women and girls for years. Just how they've been doing this and what this has to do with a liberal female Supreme Court Justice granting a temporary stay to an organization of female nuns, other than providing a pretext for a gratuitous insinuation of clerical pederasty, is a bit of a mystery.

It's also a mystery as to which "archbishops" she's talking about. Perhaps she meant "bishops" rather than "archbishops." One might think she should know the difference, but bigots can't be bothered with details like accuracy.

In one stroke with ominous implications, there's no such thing as Catholic justice or mercy for women on the Supreme Court, not even from a woman. The rock of Rome refuses to budge on women's reproductive rights and the Supreme Court is getting good and ready to strike down Roe v. Wade, which became the law of the land 40 years ago.

This is absurd given how limited Sotomayor's stay actually was, but worse than the absurdity is the contempt that seeps through in almost every paragraph, contempt for both the Catholic Church and for anyone who would object to the left's imposition of its values on the rest of society. It's more than ironic that Steihm is comfortable with secularists imposing their values on the rest of us, but she's driven to outrage that people, motivated by their moral understanding, would seek to resist.

It should be remembered that this essay was approved by Stiehm's editors and others at U.S. News who apparently think it's okay to say such things about Christians in general and Catholics in particular. Would this article have ever seen the light of day, indeed, would it ever have been written, were it about blacks, gays, or Muslims? Of course not, but in liberal precincts a writer is celebrated for having the "courage" to express her disdain for Catholics.

In the 1850s there was a political organization which promoted views about Catholics that were of a piece with those Ms Stiehm seems to hold. The group was called, appropriately enough, the "Know Nothings." Ms Stiehm could be an honorary member.

Smart Pills

I know this is going to sound like one of those ads that turns up in your inbox touting the discovery of some miracle drug that will bestow all sorts of amazing capabilities, usually of a sexual nature, upon whomever shells out a couple hundred dollars and their bank account number to the advertiser. But it's not, it's apparently a legitimate and remarkable scientific development.

Researchers at Harvard believe they've found a drug that actually restores the brain's capacity for learning back to what it was when it was at its peak at age seven. Here's the crux of the story:

[W]hat if it were possible for the adult mind to revert back to a more porous state of learning?

That's the subject of an investigation by Takao Hensch, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, who is studying a drug that may make it dramatically easier for grown-ups to absorb new skills and information — almost as if they were seven years old or younger.

The key ingredient here is valproic acid. Normally, it's used to treat neurological disorders like seizures and epilepsy, and various other mood disorders. But Hensch claims it may help restore plasticity in the adult brain.

In a new experiment, Hensch used valproic acid to bestow the gift of perfect pitch to a group of adult males between the ages of 18 to 27. Here's how NPR describes it:

Hensch gave the drug to a group of healthy, young men who had no musical training as children. They were asked to perform tasks online to train their ears, and at the end of a two-week period, tested on their ability to discriminate tone, to see if the training had more effect than it normally would at their age.

In other words, he gave people a pill and then taught them to have perfect pitch. The findings are significant: "It's quite remarkable since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch," he says.

"Plasticity in the adult brain," the story says. I don't know if valproic acid works, but if it turns out to be safe, and if it helps folks whose brains no longer have any more plasticity than their joints do, I want some.

The Governor and the President

If New Jersey Governor Chris Christie knew about the decision to deliberately snarl traffic in Fort Lee by closing traffic lanes leading onto the George Washington Bridge, and did it, as has been alleged, to punish the Democrat mayor of that town for failing to support him, he should resign. There should be no place in our politics for people who abuse their power to punish political opponents and who demonstrate such callous disregard for innocent people.

Of course, if Gov. Christie should be held accountable for this scandal (and he should), how much more should President Obama be held accountable for his numerous and much more serious abuses and illegalities. What Christie did was unconscionable, but compared to illegally supplying weapons to Mexican drug lords - weapons that were subsequently used in hundreds if not thousands of murders, compared to refusing to boost security for our diplomats in Libya and then lying to the American people about the murders of four of them in Benghazi, compared to illegally using the IRS to punish political opponents, compared to widespread spying on reporters and the American people, compared to allowing the health care website to go online when it clearly wasn't ready after having had five years to develop at enormous expense to taxpayers, what Christie did was, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, mere jaywalking.

But, I can hear someone say, the President claims not to have known about any of these high crimes and misdemeanors. That's true, and maybe he didn't (in which case one must question his competence), but Gov. Christie also makes the same claim and few believe him. Why should Gov. Christie be disbelieved but President Obama be believed?

Jay Leno had it right the other evening when he quipped that "now that Gov. Christie has denied knowing anything about what his subordinates were doing he sounds much more presidential." Christie certainly does sound a lot like President Obama.

Okay, it might be replied, but Gov. Christie recklessly hurt or inconvenienced innocent people in order to punish political foes. Indeed, but closing the Mall to tourists (but not to open-borders demonstrators) was a terrible inconvenience to a lot of people, and surely the inconveniences suffered by many innocent people in Fort Lee are not comparable to the hundreds of deaths at the hands of thugs armed with weapons by our Department of Justice or the dead and wounded diplomats in Benghazi.

Moreover, it was President Obama who famously assured an audience of Latino supporters that he would punish his enemies and reward his friends. It was candidate Obama who threatened his political enemies in 2008 that if they bring a knife to the fight he'll bring a gun.

The willingness of Mr. Christie's aides to punish opponents is repugnant, but it's no more so than the willingness of Mr. Obama's underlings to illegally use the power of the IRS to suppress conservative political groups, or to use the NSA to spy on citizens, or to close, during the government shutdown, public facilities that didn't need to be closed.

There is, however, one significant difference between Gov. Christie and President Obama. Governor Christie fired the person responsible for giving the order to create the chaos in Fort Lee. No one in the Obama administration has been held noticeably accountable for any of the wrongdoing, incompetence, or sheer stupidity that has accompanied Mr. Obama's tenure in office - not Eric Holder, not Kathleen Sebelius, not Hillary Clinton, not Lois Lerhner, not James Clapper - neither them nor any of their subordinates have been cashiered for so poorly serving the American people.

The Obama administration's astonishing record of abuse of power notwithstanding in the twenty four hours after the Christie story broke there was already seventeen times as much media coverage of it than there has been of just the IRS scandal in the six months since it became public. What could account for such a disparity if we assume the media to be comprised of men and women of professional integrity?

Every media and political critic of Gov. Christie's behavior in this sordid episode should be asked a few simple questions: "Are you prepared to heap a proportional measure of criticism upon President Obama for the much more serious malfeasance of his administration? If you're calling for an end to Gov. Christie's political career over this (and, if he's guilty, I join the call) are you prepared to demand the resignation of Barack Obama whose presidency has been far more scandal-ridden and corrupt than Christie's governorship? If not, how do you justify treating the two men differently?"

It seems to me that many of Christie's critics are like a judge who punishes a purse-snatcher with a life sentence while letting Bernie Madoff go free.

Asia Bibi

Robert Spencer at Pajamas Media tells us the story of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for defending her faith against the insults of a group of Muslim women. She recently wrote a letter to Pope Francis asking him to intervene on her behalf. Here's what happened:

Picking fruit with a group of Muslim women, Bibi was ordered to fetch water for them – and drank a bit of it herself in the stifling heat. A Muslim woman rebuked her for doing so, saying to the other women: “Listen, all of you, this Christian has dirtied the water in the well by drinking from our cup and dipping it back several times. Now the water is unclean and we can’t drink it! Because of her!”

Bibi stood up to her, responding: “I think Jesus would see it differently from Mohammed.” That drove the Muslim women into a fury, and they started yelling at Bibi: “How dare you think for the Prophet, you filthy animal!” That’s right, you’re just a filthy Christian! You’ve contaminated our water and now you dare speak for the Prophet! Stupid bitch, your Jesus didn’t even have a proper father, he was a bastard, don’t you know that. You should convert to Islam to redeem yourself for your filthy religion.”

The embattled woman stood her ground, responding: “I’m not going to convert. I believe in my religion and in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind? And why should it be me that converts instead of you?”

Several days later, she was arrested for blasphemy as an enraged mob beat her and screamed, “Death! Death to the Christian!” She has been in prison ever since, awaiting execution for her “crime.”

In her letter to Pope Francis, Bibi wrote: “I do not know how long I can go on and on. If I am still alive, it is thanks to the strength that your prayers give me. I have met many people who speak and fight for me. Unfortunately still to no avail. At this time I just want to trust the mercy of God, who can do everything, that all is possible. Only He can liberate me.”

Spencer goes on to say that many Christians and Christian organizations are afraid to speak out against the barbarism this woman is suffering for fear of offending Muslims with whom they are in "inter-faith dialogue." He also expresses doubts, mixed with hope that he's wrong, that Pope Francis will be inclined to take up her cause.

It's ironic that many Americans think that Muslims are discriminated against in this country. Most of these people are apparently ignorant of what real discrimination looks like. They evidently believe that it's discriminatory to express a negative or critical view of a particular religion or ethnic group. They should ask Asia Bibi and the hundreds of thousands of other Christians who are being persecuted, tortured, and killed in communist countries like North Korea and throughout the Muslim world how discrimination, bigotry, and other forms of stupidity and hatred cash out in the lives of the people who are victimized by it.

They would do well to read a book like Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians by Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Nina Shea which documents a portion of the persecution suffered by so many Christians around the globe and then they might realize that being the object of anxious glances in an airport is hardly comparable to the misery inflicted by communists and Muslims on Christians almost wherever Christians are politically powerless.

The Twilight of Masculinity

A couple of articles highlight, from different perspectives, the changing nature, or, more precisely, the disintegration, of masculinity in our society. The first is an interview with feminist scholar Camille Paglia who asserts that our civilization is committing suicide by trying to erase traditional masculinity. Here are a few excerpts:

"What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia.... When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore.

That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda."

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

Actually, I'm not sure why she says there are no models of manhood. The Obama team a couple of weeks ago famously offered, presumably for our emulation, a stirring example of its paradigm of American manhood:

On the other hand, there is much to what Paglia says. When boys are suspended from elementary school for shaping a pop tart like a gun or kissing a girl on the hand then its clear that maleness is being suppressed and boys are being taught that to be a normal boy is somehow inherently bad.

The title of the second article states that men are, or are becoming, obsolete, but the article itself, written by Hannah Rosin, argues for a more modest proposition. She maintains that traditional masculine roles are no longer the norm in American society, a fact in which she seems to take no little delight.

She gives five reasons in support of her thesis and elaborates on each in her essay. Here are her reasons for believing that we're witnessing the end of men:

1. It’s the end of men because men are failing in both school and the workplace and women are succeeding.
2. It’s the end of men because the traditional household, propped up by the male breadwinner, is vanishing.
3. It’s the end of men because we can see it in the attitudes of single mothers in the working and middle class who decline to marry because a husband would be "just another mouth to feed."
4. It’s the end of men because men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression.
5. It’s the end of men because men, too, are now obsessed with their body hair.

Rosin adds this:

Obsolete does not mean worthless. It means outmoded. The twin combustion engine made the bicycle obsolete but that doesn’t mean we hate the bicycle. We just use it the way we want to, while recognizing the necessity of efficiency and change. We don’t have to turn men into eunuchs. We can keep whatever we like about manhood but adjust the parts of the definition that are keeping men back.

Now what do you suppose the reaction would be were a man to write a paragraph like this about women? Would the media not be filled with apoplectic shrieks and howls about a "war" on women? Yet Rosin can write this about men and her readers wistfully picture Pajama Boy and smile knowingly at Rosin's description of outmoded maleness.

Here's her closing thought:

I dedicated my book to my son because he is one of those boys who gets in trouble a lot, who thinks the institutions are rigged against him. I see my job as accepting him as he is, and teaching him how to adapt to the world as it is.

When I think of the world after the end of men, I think of the world my son will inherit, where, if he chooses to take his kids to a playground at 3 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, no one will look at him funny, no one will wonder if he’s out of work, no one will think, “What a loser,” and no one will think he’s from Portland or Toronto, they will just walk on by and not think anything of it at all. He can be his own lovely obnoxious self and also be at home in a new world.

I wonder if Rosin's son has a father around. If not, that might explain a lot.

Presidential Precedents

President Obama has established a number of very dangerous precedents for future presidents, precedents in the setting of which the media have been willing accomplices and for which the media has essentially sold its birth-right for a mess of pottage.

Victor Davis Hanson indicts both the President's conduct and the media's complicity in an essay at NRO in which he poses a series of penetrating questions. I've included more of Hanson's piece here than I probably should have, but his indictment is so powerful I wanted you to get the full effect. Please go to the link for the rest:

Will there be a scandal [in a future administration] if the new political appointees at the IRS sic their auditors on Moveon.org? What will the Washington Post say should the new president keep Guantanamo Bay open for five more years, quadruple the number of drone missions, or decide to double renditions? Will it say that he was shredding the Constitution, or that he found the terror threat too great to honor past promises?

Will NPR run an exposé on our next president should she tap into Angela Merkel’s cell phone, or monitor the communications of Associated Press reporters — and their parents? Will investigative reporters go after the president should he falsely claim that an ambassador and three other U.S. personnel died in the Middle East during a video-sparked spontaneous riot? Or if he then jails the filmmaker for a year on a trumped-up parole-violation charge?

In other words, because for the past five years the members of the Washington press corps have abdicated their traditional adversarial role as watchdogs of the executive branch, can we still have watchdogs at all in 2017? If the next president falsely swears that his new health-care program will not affect citizens’ current coverage, what consequences could possibly follow? If the New York Times went after such perfidy in 2017, would the new president just say, “Where were you when Obama did it?”

If a conservative should be elected, and his Justice Department decided not to enforce federal gun laws in certain cities, would not the president say to his critics, “You were happy to ignore the flouting of federal immigration law in sanctuary cities, so why not exempt gun control too?”

Or if the new attorney general were Asian, and called his fellow Americans “cowards” over their inability to address past discrimination, or referred to Chinese- or Japanese-Americans as “my people,” how could African-American activists or any other group possibly object?

If, in 2017, we begin another five years of 7-plus percent unemployment, will the media call it a “jobless recovery” — as they have not since 2009, but most surely did in 2004 when George W. Bush ran for reelection with a jobless rate of a little over 5 percent?

What will court watchers do should the next president weigh in on pending trial cases — claiming, for example, that the son he never had would have resembled a murdered young man, or arguing that the police acted stupidly when they arrested a favorite of the president’s?

If our next president says there is a red line, ignores infractions of it, and then says he never said it, will the press go after her as it went after George W. Bush in 2003 when the promised stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction did not turn up in Iraq? If a debate moderator interrupts our next president’s reelection debate to incorrectly point out that his challenger is wrong about the facts, will we chastise her as unprofessional and ban her from further debates?

If a conservative president is elected, will the media object should he editorialize about personal success and wealth — suggesting that novice entrepreneurs should build their own businesses without federal help, reminding the struggling that they have not yet reached a point where they have made enough money, chiding some that we need to create wealth, not spread others’, or advising us that it is always the time to profit? Would the press object that the president’s serial and unsolicited sermonizing was proving a bit much? Or would he have to accuse doctors of lopping off limbs and ripping out tonsils for profit to win rebuke?

Will NBC object if our next president plays 150 rounds of golf in his first five years in office? Would it seem at all excessive to ABC if our next chief executive were declared a “god” by colleagues in the press corps, or if the president promised to lower the level of the seas and cool the planet?

In 2017, if the next president attempts to freeze new drilling on federal lands, only to brag that more oil and gas have been produced (on private land) during her tenure than ever before, how would CBS respond to such disingenuousness?

For that matter, in 2017 will novels again be written about killing the president, and prizes once more be awarded for docudramas about his assassination — and will he be called a “Nazi” and “Brown Shirt” by his political opponents, as President Bush was?

During the next presidency, will the filibuster still be bad, or will it suddenly be good again? Will there be a nuclear option again? Recess appointments? Executive orders? Signing statements? Votes against extending the debt ceiling? Are these again to be excesses, or is it a case of “It depends”?

What will the media do if the next president hires lobbyists, ignores the revolving door, or wins record donations from Goldman Sachs — while promising to run the most transparent administration in history? Will minority activists hound the next president should their constituents’ employment rate and income nosedive? Or is the answer to be, “It depends on the president’s race”?

If in 2017 the chief executive urges his supporters to “punish our enemies,” what will be the media reaction?

Will the Los Angeles Times object should the next president borrow $6 trillion in his first term? If we have four more years of zero interest, will that policy be deemed reckless and inflationary?

The predictable answer, of course, to all these questions is, again, “It depends.” If a liberal like Hillary Clinton wins, then the same exemptions will almost surely continue, even in the absence of the race card. But if a conservative should be elected, then the old hypocrisy will reappear and we will be treated to the damnation of a Christie, Paul, Rubio, or Cruz as “the worst president ever” or an “amiable dunce” or one of the other sorts of boilerplate disparagement accorded Reagan and the two Bushes.

.... we are entering a new period in presidential history, and it may be difficult to go back to the status quo ante 2009, when reporters were not state megaphones and the president paid a price for not telling the truth.

More likely, the members of the national press corps do not even now quite get it that they have been completely discredited. Whether they toady up to a liberal president or revert to standard criticism of a conservative, I doubt anyone will much care any more. If the next scandal is an open-mike slip to Putin, a linguistic flub like “corpse-man” for a Navy corpsman, a barefaced lie like swearing the president never spoke to his own disreputable uncle, or a complete distortion such as bragging of the energy production that she sought to stifle, the media will face a novel situation: If they object, then the public will wonder, “But why now all of a sudden?” If they keep silent, the public will shrug, “Oh, more of the same.”

Nor have we fully appreciated that a president who has supposedly taught constitutional law has done more to damage the Constitution than did Richard Nixon — and, so far, without consequences of any sort. The next president in theory can tap the communications of his opponents, pick and choose which laws are to be enforced and which are mere suggestions, and use federal agencies to monitor the politically suspect. He can go to, ignore, undermine, or praise the U.N. as he sees fit. He can bypass Congress to bomb a foreign country, and give pressure groups amnesty from any federal law he chooses. If the next president’s chief adviser claims that liberal Democrats are analogous to the mass-murdering Jonestown cult, would it really matter?

So we are living in scary times. The nation has grown used to the idea that what the president says is probably either untrue or irrelevant — and yet it does not really any more care which.

The people also assume that it doesn’t matter if our pundits talk of the person in the White House as a “messiah” who prompts tingling legs, or if they take notice of perfect pant-leg creases, or, of course, if they declare that he is the smartest president ever.

The result, in the Age of Obama, is a deeply rooted cynicism that works out something like the following: The president of the United States is now an iconic figure and thus cannot be held to the minimal standards of veracity demanded of other Americans. The press is an advocate of his agenda and picks and chooses which scandals can be half-heartedly pursued without endangering their shared vision.

How could the media possibly repair its sullied reputation without appearing abjectly hypocritical or artificially zealous? How can the next president resist assuming the extra-constitutional prerogatives of the current one?

I don't think the media can restore its reputation, nor do I think future presidents will feel the same constitutional constraints upon their power that past presidents have. When Barack Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to fundamentally change the country we had no idea the extent to which he would do so, but he has, and it will take us generations to recover from the precedents he has established, if in fact, we ever do.

For its part, the mainstream liberal media, having flung aside all pretense of integrity, objectivity, and veracity in its slavish, obsequious devotion to the Obama administration, will probably continue its long slide into obscurity and irrelevance.

Is the Debate Over?

Nina Munk has written a book titled The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. Her book is critical of the idea, promoted by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, that poverty could be meliorated by simple technological fixes such as bed nets to prevent malaria-spreading mosquito bites, wells to provide clean water, hospitals to treat curable diseases, fertilizer to increase yields of food crops, etc.

William Easterly reviews Munk's book at Reason.com. He writes:

[Sachs believed that ending poverty] was just a matter of raising enough money to pay for the right combination of known technical solutions to poor people's problems. Sachs would provide a slam-dunk demonstration project by deploying these comprehensive tech fixes in a dozen or so "Millennium Villages" in Africa. Success would build upon success, and advocacy money would flow, until poverty was eliminated from the poorest continent.

The Idealist, Nina Munk's brilliant book on Sachs' anti-poverty efforts, chronicles how his dream fell far short of reality. Munk, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, follows Sachs around as he supervises the experiment. She also goes out on her own to the Millennium Villages, especially Dertu, in the ethnic Somali region of Kenya's arid north, and the more centrally located settlement of Ruhiira, Uganda. What she finds in these villages reveals much about the future of the aid and development debate.

Sachs' technical fixes frequently turned out to be anything but simple. The saga of Dertu's wells is illustrative. Ahmed Mohamed, the local man in charge of the effort, discovers that he needs to order a crucial part for a generator that powers the wells. The piece takes four months to arrive, and then nobody knows how to install it. Eventually a distant mechanic arrives at great expense. A couple of years later, Munk returns to find Mohamed struggling with the same issues: The wells have broken down again, the parts are lacking, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.

A little more than a year after that, the wells are up and running again, and the Millennium Villages blog celebrates Dertu as having "the most reliable water supply within the region." Yet by 2011 the wells have run completely dry due to a drought—a not-uncommon occurrence in the arid region.

Such examples multiply in Munk's book, showing that purely technological answers to poverty fall well short of Sachs' promises. It turns out that technology does not implement itself; it requires the assistance of real people subject to widely varying incentives and constraints in complex social and political systems.

Munk relates successes as well as failures. Sachs' project spent $1.2 million on health in Ruhiira, hiring two doctors and 13 midwives. Now many fewer mothers in Ruhiira are left to their own resources to give birth, and the prevalence of malaria has fallen dramatically. But too often, the failures seem to offset these small victories. In recent years, Munk has found herself chronicling a rising chorus of criticism. Three months before the release of Munk's book, Foreign Policy published a harsh critique of the project, offering negative verdicts from an impressive roster of experts in the development field.

New York University economist Jonathan Morduch told Foreign Policy that Sachs' "big-package approach is an anachronism relative to the ideas that development economists have gravitated toward.... Sachs ... hoped to show that properly delivered aid could bring about the end of poverty. His critics rarely mention this aspect of his work. The notion of such sweeping change is apparently so implausible to today's development economists that they do not consider it worth refuting. The big aid debate that Sachs initiated is already over.

We can now see that aid and development are two distinct topics that should each have their own separate debates....his idea that aid could rapidly bring the end of poverty was wrong. It's time to move on.

I'm certainly no expert on poverty or the aid/development debate, but I pose this question to those who are: Can we successfully and permanently reduce or eliminate poverty in places like Chad or Haiti without first changing the culture? And if not, how do we 1. change a culture, 2. justify doing so in an age when such attempts are condemned as chauvinistic and imperialistic, and 3. what do we change it to?

It seems to me that a culture cannot be altered without destroying the people who have lived it for centuries or millenia, but even if we could alter a failing culture I doubt there'd be a will to do so given the aversion to cultural imperialism and the embrace of cultural relativism that exists in much of American society.

And yet apart from fundamentally changing the culture I don't see how we can do anything more than bring temporary and minimal relief to the most blighted parts of the world. Aid is just economic aspirin and development requires building an entire infrastructure and network of interlocking institutions that evolve over long spans of time and which are undergirded by attitudes and ways of thinking that are alien to many stuck in poverty today. Can those kinds of changes happen? Can they happen without somehow changing the hearts and the mindset of a people?

I don't think so, which is why I believe that the most important work being done among the poor is that being done by missionaries who not only bring physical relief to those who suffer but also offer them the spiritual resources to gradually free themselves from lifestyles that chain them to their poverty. Without the liberation that those spiritual resources provide anything else we do is like trying to get an overloaded hot air balloon into the air. It just bumps along the ground until the fuel is exhausted and everything remains just as it was at the outset.

Closing of the Scientific Mind

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale who has written a very provocative essay for Commentary Magazine on the dehumanization of man that has been wrought by modern scientism. Gerlernter doesn't use the word "scientism" but when he talks of the modern disregard among scientists for any way of knowing other than through the empirical methodology associated with the hard sciences, he's talking about scientism. He writes:

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work that has always been mankind’s main spiritual support. Scientists are (on average) no more likely to understand this work than the man in the street is to understand quantum physics. But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.

The modern view that man is just a flesh and bone machine leads ineluctably to the belief that the human machine can be improved the same way we upgrade our computers: Today science and the “philosophy of mind”—its thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter than the boss—are threatening Western culture with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers are the measure of all men.

Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.

Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.

Your subjective, conscious experience is just as real as the tree outside your window or the photons striking your retina—even though you alone feel it. Many philosophers and scientists today tend to dismiss the subjective and focus wholly on an objective, third-person reality—a reality that would be just the same if men had no minds. They treat subjective reality as a footnote, or they ignore it, or they announce that, actually, it doesn’t even exist.

If scientists were rat-catchers, it wouldn’t matter. But right now, their views are threatening all sorts of intellectual and spiritual fields. The present problem originated at the intersection of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind—in the question of what consciousness and mental states are all about, how they work, and what it would mean for a robot to have them. It has roots that stretch back to the behaviorism of the early 20th century, but the advent of computing lit the fuse of an intellectual crisis that blasted off in the 1960s and has been gaining altitude ever since.

Gerlernter elaborates on these themes in the rest of the article, which I heartily commend to your reading. Along the way he talks about the shameful treatment dished out to Thomas Nagel for having the temerity to question the ability of Darwinism to account for human consciousness, cognition, and values in his book Mind and Cosmos. He also critiques the "transhumanism" of Ray Kurzweil and his acolytes, as well as various philosophical attempts (eliminitivism, functionalism, cognitivism) to banish consciousness from human ontology. His discussion of the "zombie" problem in philosophy of mind is particularly interesting.

He spends time discussing cognitivism (or computationalism) which is the view that mind is to brain what software is to computers. He concludes by pointing out that the analogy is deeply flawed:

But the master analogy—between mind and software, brain and computer—is fatally flawed. It falls apart once you mull these simple facts:

1. You can transfer a program easily from one computer to another, but you can’t transfer a mind, ever, from one brain to another.
2. You can run an endless series of different programs on any one computer, but only one “program” runs, or ever can run, on any one human brain.
3. Software is transparent. I can read off the precise state of the entire program at any time. Minds are opaque—there is no way I can know what you are thinking unless you tell me.
4. Computers can be erased; minds cannot.
5. Computers can be made to operate precisely as we choose; minds cannot.

There are more. Come up with them yourself. It’s easy.

There is a still deeper problem with computationalism. Mainstream computationalists treat the mind as if its purpose were merely to act and not to be. But the mind is for doing and being. Computers are machines, and idle machines are wasted. That is not true of your mind. Your mind might be wholly quiet, doing (“computing”) nothing; yet you might be feeling miserable or exalted, or awestruck by the beauty of the object in front of you, or inspired or resolute—and such moments might be the center of your mental life. Or you might merely be conscious.

It is indeed easy to come up with qualities of the mind/brain complex that are disanalogous to anything found in the software/computer complex. For example, human minds can hold beliefs and doubts, they can understand, they can appreciate beauty and humor, they can experience frustration, boredom, disappointment, chagrin, interest, etc., they can reflect on their opinions, and much else. Computational machines can do none of these things which suggests to a lot of philosophers that minds are something entirely different from brains and that the software/hard drive analogy is grossly inapt.

Check out Gerlernter's essay. It's a little long, but it does a nifty job of explaining why the heyday of modern materialism. It has simply failed to offer a plausible explanation for our subjective, conscious experience and the explanations that it has offered seem so far-fetched that the credibility of any metaphysical view that relies on them, as materialism does, is severely damaged.

More Guns, Fewer Homicides

It may horrify liberal progressives to read this, but study after study is confirming what people like John Lott have been telling us for years. Disarming citizens increases violent crime and arming them decreases it.

I grant that it's a national embarrassment that in order to create a safer public square we might have to accept seeing ordinary citizens walking about with revolvers strapped to their legs like characters out of a John Wayne western, but until we get over the idea that a healthy society doesn't need fathers, until we reverse policies that tend to disintegrate families, until we return to the idea that traditional values should be instilled in our young by family, church, and school and that a debased culture does nothing to make life in America healthier or more secure, let's give thanks for the second amendment.

From Reason.com:

Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius has published a new study, "An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates," in the journal Applied Economics Letters. From the abstract:

The purpose of the present study is to determine the effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed weapons laws on state-level murder rates. Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard (1997).

Even former foes of concealed carry like Detroit's new chief of police James Craig have changed their minds. Craig is now encouraging the good people of Detroit to arm themselves against the thugs and savages who've made Detroit the murder capital of the nation.

Perhaps there's a study out there that correlates concealed-carry laws with an increase in violent crime. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

On GLAAD's Blacklist

Robert Oscar Lopez is a tenured college professor who's African American, Christian (I think), conservative, and gay. He's also a living example of how the left, in this case the homosexual organization GLAAD, plays the politics of personal destruction. If you have a different point of view than theirs they will make your life as difficult as possible and destroy your career if they can. They tried this with Phil Robertson, of course, and failed. They haven't failed with Robert Lopez.

Here's part of Lopez's story (Thanks to Jason for the link):

Readers will have to forgive me for sounding angry, but the recent news involving GLAAD has enraged me. Mark Steyn's most recent piece in National Review sums up some of the worst aspects of the epic saga known as GLAAD v. Duck Dynasty.

Steyn resonates with me on one key point: yes, GLAAD is ridiculous and foolish. We knew this. But some conservatives who should know better are truly pathetic. A National Review editor scolds Steyn for being "puerile," while people on Fox News say that Phil Robertson should have been suspended. Pusillanimous obeisance to false ideology isn't exclusive to left or right.

A bunch of people on the left called GLAAD out, and I'm glad they did. Yet a bunch of people on the right are still terrified of GLAAD, or else actually believe that it's defamation to say negative things or think negative thoughts about homosexuality. In case you don't know the full extent of GLAAD's fascism, let me tell you what GLAAD did to me.

I won't hyperlink this, but if you go to GLAAD's website and seek out their "commentator accountability project," you will find my name. This is GLAAD's blacklist. Within hours of GLAAD's publication of my addition to the list, which amounts to an excommunication from polite society, an e-mail was sent to the president of my university, along with dozens of other high officials in California, with the announcement: ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ PLACED ON GLAAD WATCH LIST.

The e-mail stated clearly that as a result of my being placed on this list, I would never get a direct interview in the United States. (Whoever "they" are, they made good on the threat, because when I was brought onto Al Jazeera, they made sure that I was the only one critical of gay adoption, versus two hosts and two other panelists who were for it, and the host cut my microphone.)

According to the press release sent to my university, any media outlet introducing me would be bound to introduce me as an "anti-gay activist" certified by GLAAD as a bigot. When I read the claims of this e-mail, I wondered if this would be true -- would media in the United States really introduce me by saying I was certified as "anti-gay" by GLAAD?

Well, the answer to that question remains mostly unanswered. Aside from that one fling on Al Jazeera, since GLAAD placed me on their blacklist, no secular media outlet has invited me on its show in the United States. In-depth interviews with me have been broadcast in Chile, Russia, France, Ireland, and a number of other nations. In the United States, Christian broadcasters like the American Family Association and Frank Sontag's "Faith and Reason" show in Los Angeles have interviewed me. And I'd been interviewed, prior to the GLAAD blacklisting, by Minnesota affiliates of NBC, CBS, Fox, and NPR, as well as a number of newspapers. Since GLAAD's blacklisting, none.

Prior to GLAAD's blacklisting, I had received calls from people at universities discussing their interest in having me come to campus and give speeches. Three were working with me to set up dates. Since GLAAD's blacklisting, none. Those who had discussed this with me said point-blank that their superiors did not want to create controversy....

Being blacklisted by GLAAD was the end of my world. (It just so happens I entered a new, happier one, but that doesn't take away from the terror caused by their omerta.) Even though I wrote The Colorful Conservative, I am too colorful for right-wing think-tanks, too vulgar for Beltway Republicans, too much a fan of Sarah Palin for the Big Boys down in D.C. I'm too queer for the legit crowd, and GLAAD basically put the word out to the queers not to talk to me anymore.

Old friends and even some family members took GLAAD's marching orders and have summarily cut me out of their lives. And when I mean cut me out, I mean we will never be in the same room again. One person very close to me, who works in the entertainment industry, was accosted at a dinner and told in no uncertain terms that if he didn't join in denouncing me, he'd have difficulty finding work. I was less important than his shot at getting better contracts -- so gosh, I miss him.

One of the things that amazes me about the current state of our culture, a thing that I can never seem to get used to, is the complete socio-ideological reversal that has taken place since I was in college. Back then I had several lefty professors, one in particular who was my advisor and with whom I spent many hours in conversation (I worked for him on one of his research projects for a couple of summers) who regaled us with stories of how ugly and bigoted conservatives were and how noble and compassionate was the left. The right was all about hatred, censorship and oppression and the left was all about letting a thousand flowers bloom, love, tolerance, free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

I didn't think his take on the matter was quite right, but, being a college student and therefore pretty much uninformed, I was unable to argue otherwise. Even so, granting my advisor the benefit of the doubt, over the following decades the two ideological poles underwent a complete reversal in the nature of their character.

Today, I don't think there's any doubt that most of the bigotry, vitriol, hatred, racism, intolerance, and overall ugliness is on the left. I don't know whether it does any good to point this out, but I sometimes feel compelled to do so. I think people are for the most part reluctant to align themselves with those they perceive to be unpleasant and unkind, and I'm gripped by the hope that by pointing out where that unpleasantness lay, by insisting that ideas which are attractive to the mean-spirited and vulgar, some who might otherwise be drawn to the philosophy of the left might at least think twice about it.

Read the rest of Lopez's article at the link. It's both interesting and important, especially if you think that gays are virtually unanimous in their support for gay marriage and families.

Down-and-Outers

Chris Arnade, who earned a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins and then spent a career working on Wall Street, describes in The Guardian how his atheism was shaken by some of the most down-and-out people in America. He begins his story with a flashback to his youth:

They prayed whenever they could find 15 minutes. "Preacher Man", as we called him, would read from the Bible with his tiny round glasses. It was the only book he had ever read. A dozen or so others would listen, silently praying while stroking rosaries, sitting on bare mattresses, crammed into a half-painted dorm room.

I was the outsider, a 16-year-old working on a summer custodial crew for a local college, saving money to pay for my escape from my hometown. The other employees, close to three dozen, were working to feed themselves, to feed their kids, to pay child support, to pay for the basics of life. I was the only white, everyone else was African-American.

Preacher Man tried to get me to join the prayer meetings, asking me almost daily. I declined, preferring to spend those small work breaks with some of the other guys on the crew. We would use the time to snatch a quick drink or maybe smoke a joint.

Preacher Man would question me, "What do you believe in?" I would decline to engage, out of politeness. He pressed me. Finally I broke,

"I am an atheist. I don't believe in a God. I don't think the world is only 5,000 years old, I don't think Cain and Abel married their sisters!"

Preacher Man's eyes narrowed. He pointed at me, "You are an APE-IEST. An APE-IEST. You going to lead a life of sin and end in hell."

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.

During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.

I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.

None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.

You'll have to go to the link to read how these encounters shook his comfortable assumptions. It's an interesting story and has created a bit of a stir on the net. Many of the commenters at the link are critical of Arnade for his disparaging reflections on atheism in general and on Richard Dawkins in particular, but one wonders. What does atheism have to offer the people Arnade encountered?

The truth of the beliefs of these people aside, their faith that God cares for them offers them a tincture of dignity and hope in the midst of a life in which there's not much basis for either. The most atheism can offer them is the assurance that there is no hope, no dignity, no meaning to their misery, and no possibility for redemption. These wretched folk, the atheist must aver, will endure their suffering as long as they can and then they'll die and that'll be the end of it.

I can understand why someone would be an atheist if they were convinced that God didn't exist, but what I don't understand, except as an expression of human perversity, is why so many people would not want God to exist, why they would actually want him not to exist. Why want the world to be the kind of place that offers these street people nothing but despair and hopelessness. It's not only perverse, it's cruel, and yet many people who don't believe that there's a God, or anything like God, will acknowledge that it's not because the intellectual arguments for atheism are compelling that they don't believe, it's because they just don't want there to be such a being.

It's very strange. The atheist, following Freud, criticizes the theist for believing on the basis of "wish fulfillment," i.e. believing in God because they want it to be true, and yet wish fulfillment is precisely the reason many atheists are atheists.

Set aside the question whether one is justified in believing on the basis of wish fulfillment. If both theists and atheists do it, ask yourself this question: Which is more ennobling, uplifting, and inspiring, to want and hope there to be a perfectly good and just Creator who loves us and offers us eternal happiness, or to actually desire and hope that such a being not exist? For my part, I simply don't understand why anyone would choose the latter, yet many do.

A Few Films from 2013

I'm not one who sees every movie that comes out, nor am I a very good film critic, and I've yet to see some of the year's most popular films, but, even so, here, in no particular order, are nine of the movies I enjoyed in 2013:

• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Marvelous special effects from Peter Jackson make this tale of the conflict between innocence and good on the one hand and abject evil on the other a lot of fun to watch. The popularity of the Tolkien oeuvre in a time when the idea that objective evil actually exists is often treated with derision by our intellectual elites is a hopeful sign that we're finally shedding some of the relativistic, materialistic foolishness that has afflicted us for the last fifty years.
• The Hunger Games and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - The importance of these films, in my opinion, is the picture they paint of the moral nihilism that descends upon a completely secularized society. There's no mention in Panem of God, right and wrong, good and bad. The people there are interested only in titillation and spectacle and human life has value only insofar as it allows the effete citizens of Panem to indulge their appetites for drama, violence, and death. Whether Suzanne Collins intended it or not, whether young viewers get that lesson or not, it's an important message for them.
• Iron Man III - More of Robert Downey, Jr. saving the world from the bad guys. Good stuff.
• The Iron Lady - The life and work of Margaret Thatcher as played by Meryl Streep. The film spends too much time on Thatcher's late in life dementia but still manages to convey the strength and courage of the former British Prime Minister. Despite being loathed by the left, Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II will, in my opinion, be viewed by historians as the three most consequential leaders of the last half of the 20th century.
• All the King's Men - Based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren, it's an account of the turbulent life of depression-era pol Huey Long, a populist governor and senator of Louisiana who's life ended in an assassination. The book and movie are obviously about Long although they insert a fictional character, played by Sean Penn, in his stead.
• Moneyball - Brad Pitt plays the brash, unorthodox general manager of the Oakland A's MLB team, Billy Beane, who rescues the feckless A's in 2002 and leads them to the playoffs, despite their roster of low-salaried, unsung players.
• Argo - A dramatic account of the CIA operation in 1979 to rescue American diplomats who were hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran from Iranian revolutionaries who had already sacked the American embassy and taken over fifty of its staff hostage. loosely based on actual events, the film is a bit more dramatic than the real history, but that's okay.
• Zero Dark Thirty - The riveting account of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. Even though you know how it ends it's still a fascinating story.

Let me take this opportunity to wish all of you a safe, healthy, prosperous, and existentially meaningful 2014.

For Your Own Good

Several times during discussions of the various glitches and calamities wrought by the ACA (Obamacare) defenders of the law have informed us, in so many words, that the government knows best what sort of health care people should have and that if you're losing your insurance it probably wasn't a good policy anyway. Their hubris reminds me of a quote from C.S. Lewis in his 1948 collection of essays God in the Dock:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It is the conceit of modern progressivism that the liberal elites know what's best for you and they're going to impose their will on you for your own good. We see it in New York City where Mayor Bloomberg tried to limit the size of the soft drinks you could buy and the amount of fat in the food you eat. We see it in the attempt to ban smoking even on one's own property and in one's own home. It's always done "for our own good," by people who feel it's their mission in life to oversee your every decision. That's the progressive mindset. It infantilizes people. Lewis had it pegged perfectly:

They (progressives) may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

That in a nutshell is how liberals regard the inferior classes. They see them alternatively as either children to be coddled, animals to be herded, or imbeciles unable to feed and care for themselves and in need of government to make them wash behind their ears and eat their vegetables. The liberal mindset is more than just silly, however, it's insidious because it's dehumanizing. It deprives men of their dignity and their freedom, and enslaves them to tyrannical elitist nannies who presume to know what's best for them better than they do.

They're a milder sort of people, but in the same genus, Camus describes in his book The Rebel when he says that the writer Baudelaire thought that the real saint is the man who flogs and kills people for their own good.

May heaven deliver us from those who seek to run our lives for our own good.

Annotated Booklist for 2013

I hope readers will indulge me in an observance of what has become something of a tradition on Viewpoint. For the last few years I've done a year-end list of books I've read and movies I've watched during the year coming to a close. I'd like to continue that tradition with this list of books, with a word or two of explanation, that comprised my reading in 2013:

1. From Tyndale to Madison - Michael Farris: A fascinating account of the history of of religious freedom in England and the American colonies.
2. Back to Blood - Tom Wolfe: A tale of ethnic tribalism and hedonism set in contemporary Miami. Not Wolfe's best work, in my opinion.
3. The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham: A story of the undoing of a vain, superficial, and unfaithful wife who realizes too late what a fool she'd been.
4. Introduction to Phenomenology - Robert Sokolowski: An explication of Edmund Husserl's major contribution to philosophical thought.
5. On What Matters Vol. I - Derek Parfit: A technical, meticulously exhaustive study of Kantian deontological ethical thinking.
6. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens: Dickens' classic novel of human relationships, shortcomings, and redemption.
7. Inquiry and Essays - Thomas Reid: The most famous works of the man known as the philosopher of common sense in which he challenges the idealism of Berkeley and the skepticism of Hume.
8. Quiet - Susan Cain: A Fascinating look at introverts and introversion.
9. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals - David Hume: Hume reduces morality to gaining the approbation of others.
10. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God - D. A. Carson: Carson inquires into the meaning of the phrase, God is Love and finds it enormously complex and somewhat counterintutive.
11. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren: The Pulitzer-Prize winning fictional account of depression-era Louisiana politician Huey Long.
12. Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction - Richard Mouw: A summary of the life and thought of pastor, journalist, theologian, and prime minister of Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper.
13. Macbeth - William Shakespeare: The classic story of betrayal and lust for power and its consequences.
14. Our Culture, What's Left of It - Theodore Dalrymple: A critique of British culture, which serves as a synecdoche for all of Western culture.
15. Memoir on Pauperism - Alexis de Tocqueville: An exploration of the causes of poverty by one of the most trenchant of early 19th century political and cultural observers.
16. The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek: A classic analysis of how progressive economic policies lead to impoverishment and the loss of freedom.
17. Darwin's Doubt - Stephen Meyer: Another blow to the edifice of Darwinian dogma. Meyer shows that there simply are no good naturalistic explanations for what's called the Cambrian explosion where all the major phyla appear suddenly and fully developed in the fossil record.
18. The Path Between the Seas - David McCullough: The history of the construction of the Panama Canal. The short version is, it would never have been built today.
19. Going Clear - Lawrence Wright: A fascinating exposé of Scientology. Reading this book will cause you to wonder how anyone could believe what Scientologists evidently believe.
20. Leg Up - Louie Castriota: The inspiring story of how one young couple were motivated to do something for autistic children and the amazing facility and program they've built for these children.
21. God on the Rocks - Phil Madeira: Anecdotes from the life of one of the most prolific songwriters in America.
22. The Last Superstition - Ed Feser: A philosophical smackdown of naturalism by a Thomist philosopher. A bit too nasty in some parts for my taste, but pretty decisively argued, nonetheless.
23. American Exceptionalism - Charles Murray: An explanation of what, exactly, American exceptionalism is and isn't.
24. The Darkest Jungle - Todd Balf: The true story of the 19th century expedition which was the first to cross Panama in search of the best route for a canal. An amazing account of endurance and courage.
25. Killing Jesus - O'Reilly and Dugard: The judicial murder of Jesus told as history.
26. Consciousness and the Existence of God - J.P. Moreland: Moreland makes a compelling argument that consciousness does not fit in a naturalist ontology but fits very well in a theistic ontology. Thus its existence is strong confirmation of theism and disconfirmation of naturalism.
27. Inferno - Dan Brown: Another 24-hour thriller set amid the art and architecture of Florence and Venice. Brown can't seem to decide whether he wants to be a tour guide or a story-teller, nor can he shake himself of his obsessive need to get in his jabs at the Catholic Church, but the book is still entertaining for all that.
28. Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis: The first of Lewis' space trilogy in which he describes how human hubris corrupts and destroys. Reading it reminded me of Bartholomew de la Casa's Destruction of the Indies, the history of the Spanish war of extermination of the Indians of Caribbean and Central America in the 16th century.
29. Moral Man and Immoral Society - Reinhold Neibuhr: Neibuhr's thesis is that individuals can be selfless and altruistic but societies can only be egoistic. Writing in the period between world wars he explores the justifications for violent revolution.
30. God of the Possible - Greg Boyd: Boyd makes a powerful case for open theism, the view that God's omniscience nevertheless does not mean that he has exhaustive knowledge of the future.
31. Christian Philosophy - Bartholomew and Goheen: A summary of the history of Western philosophy from a Christian perspective. It tries to cover too much ground without explaining much of what it covers to be very helpful.
32. The Fall - Albert Camus: Camus' portrait of the modern egoist whose only value is the gratification of his own ego and desires.

The year's movies will be posted on Monday.