The UVA Rape Case

Here's what happened. A woman named Jackie accused a group of men in a University of Virginia fraternity of having serially raped her at a party at their frat house. Rolling Stone magazine's Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote a big spread on the alleged assault. It confirmed what people believed about the rape culture on campus and was vindication, of sorts, for liberals who had forfeited so much credibility in their rush to judgment in the similar Duke lacrosse players case in 2006.

Rolling Stone, however, in a case of journalistic malpractice that will probably be taught in journo schools for decades to come failed to actually interview any of the accused rapists. Erdely and her editors just swallowed Jackie's story hook, line, and sinker.

The Washington Post decided to do some actual investigation of the account and turned up a few interesting facts which have cast a great deal of suspicion on Erdely's account, and now RS is walking back their story and apologizing for their journalistic negligence. You can read a good summary of all these developments here.

Part of RS's problem in this episode is that they are a lefty magazine and the left has been marinating for decades in a bitter stew of assumptions about men. It's assumed on much of the left that all males are sexual predators, that all men are rapists of one sort or another, that women who report rape are never to be doubted, and that actual facts don't matter. Indeed, what matters in the worldview of people who write for magazines like Rolling Stone is whether the charges fit their preferred narrative. If so, then the allegations are "true" regardless of what really happened and the oppressors are to be punished for their crime of being males and ergo rapists, whether they personally committed the crime or not. Perversely, the accused are seen as a synecdoche of male patriarchy and by punishing them a blow is struck for justice on behalf of women everywhere.

Given this environment on the left, RS probably saw no need to question the authenticity of Jackie's account, and now they've seriously jeopardized the reputation of their magazine and made themselves a laughingstock much like the District Attorney in the Duke lacrosse case, Michael Nifong, made himself the butt of countless jokes and ill-will and finally suffered the ruination of his career.

Adding to the chuckles over the left's discomfiture and their absurd worldview is a piece by Charles C. Cooke at National Review which deserves to go down in the annals of journalism as a classic example of parody.

Here's a teaser:

It is with a heavy heart and a furrowed brow that I must conclude this afternoon that Rolling Stone, once a venerated pop-culture institution, is a rape-apology website. A few hours ago, in a “note to our readers,” the magazine cast aspersions on its own story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, doing a disservice to women everywhere and buying into an anti-female, denialist agenda that needs smashing from the ground up. As students of feminism know, any institution that would question the testimony of a young woman is by definition buying into a culture of “skepticism” that holds women to be untrustworthy and wishes to derail any conversation about Rape Culture in favor of maintaining the patriarchy and the status quo.

Rolling Stone claims today that it has “concerns about the evidence.” This, I’m afraid, is nothing more than coded obfuscation. Here, the outfit is demonstrating an appalling unwillingness to prioritize the “she said” part of its investigation, thereby bowing to those who would scrutinize and scoff at the lived experience of women everywhere. When the magazine refers to “new information” and to “discrepancies” in the alleged victim’s “account,” it is merely attempting to draw attention from broader truths about sexual violence.

When it throws its source under the bus, conceding that it has “come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” it is broadcasting, loud and clear, that women are not to be believed – effectively declaring them, in fact, second-class citizens. “Rape apologists,” Slate’s Amanda Marcotte clarifies, “think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” It is sad to see an institution such as Rolling Stone harboring such disgraceful aspirations. As Jezebel’s Anna Merlan might say: They are “idiots” — yet more people hellbent on teaching our society a class that Rachel Sklar calls “Rape denial 101.”

Read the whole thing. Cooke's parody of so much of contemporary radical feminist thinking is note perfect.

The lesson in this episode - for all of us, but especially for liberals - is the same as it was in the cases of the Duke lacrosse players, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. It's to make sure we've seen or heard all the relevant facts before solidifying our judgments, particularly if that judgment is going to contribute to the destruction of other people's lives.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Death of Eric Garner

Sean Davis at The Federalist has a good piece on the death of Eric Garner last summer. In case you missed it, Garner was illegally selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York City last July 17. The police, charged with enforcing the absurd ordinance which prohibits this, tried to arrest him.

Garner, who was very large, refused to allow himself to be arrested although he did not try to harm or threaten the officers. At this point several officers sought to subdue Garner in order to handcuff him. One of the policemen, Officer Daniel Pantaleo, placed Garner in a choke hold that had been banned in the police department since the mid-nineties because it had resulted in several deaths nationwide. Garner was asphyxiated.

The whole thing was filmed by a witness. Here's the video, but you're cautioned that it's very hard to watch.

Garner does not appear to have been a thug and didn't deserve to be treated as if he were. Yesterday a grand jury declined to indict the policeman who employed the banned choke hold, and a lot of people are wondering why.

I want to give the police the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, and it is true that Mr. Garner was wrong not to follow the officers' commands to allow himself to be cuffed. Even so, his defiance did not merit his death, and it's hard to see how the officer responsible is not guilty of second degree manslaughter since a person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when he recklessly causes the death of another person. Davis writes:

The second-degree manslaughter charge requires only two factors: 1) the person charged must have caused the death of the victim, and 2) the perpetrator must have caused the death of the victim via reckless means. As the video shows, the officer clearly caused the death of Eric Garner, who was alive until the officer put him in a chokehold, a move which is banned by the NYPD for good reason.

This country was shaken by the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman episode and the more recent Michael Brown/Darren Wilson shooting. I didn't think, based on the evidence, that either Zimmerman or Wilson should have been indicted, but I'm mystified as to why the officer who strangled Eric Garner was not indicted. I hope we'll soon hear the evidence that caused the grand jury to decide against it.

A lot of people are using this tragedy to once again stoke racial animosities but there's no indication that race played any role in this incident. In fact, the ranking police officer at the scene, the officer who supervised the arrest, was a black female sergeant named Kizzi Adoni.

What this appears to be is not an example of police racism, as much as the left might like to paint it in those colors, but rather a case of an excessive use of force.

Maybe there's a good reason for the grand jury's failure to indict Officer Pantaleo, but if so we should be told what it is. Otherwise, it appears that a man who recklessly caused the death of another is not going to be held to account, and that's not justice.

Why Everyone Hates You

Perhaps you've heard the story. A low level staffer to a backbench Republican congressman, a woman named Elizabeth Lauten, put some uncharitable remarks about the Obama girls deportment at the annual pardoning of the turkey ceremonies on her Facebook page. It was crass, Lauten apologized and was even fired, but the national lefty media has gone into orbit in their coverage of her faux pas. In the process they've displayed a level of hypocrisy extraordinary even for them.

Mollie Hemmingway has a wonderful column on this at The Federalist titled "Dear Media: This Elizabeth Lauten Nonsense Is Why Everyone Hates You." It's so good I'd like to copy and paste the whole thing, but I'll settle for some excerpts and encourage you to go to the link and read it for yourself.

Hemmingway notes that,

[Lauten's] comments were posted on Twitter where the social media mob fed their hankering for constant outrage. in a city where you can keep your job even if you’re involved in serious scandals at the IRS, State Department, Veterans Affairs or the Department of Justice, an actual job loss is refreshing, in its own way.

Still, what in the world was the media doing reporting on this non-story and firing up the mob? The Washington Free Beacon reported that “major media outlets are pouring resources into tracking her moves and digging into her past.” This included two network news vans camping outside of her parents’ home in North Carolina and a search of Lauten’s leaked juvenile records and college writings.

This is insanity and each and every person involved should be ashamed of himself or herself.

Hemmingway goes on to point out that the same Washington Post that could not summon the enthusiasm to write about the horrors of Philadelphia's murderous abortionist Kermit Gosnell has run a dozen stories on Elizabeth Lauten, even assigning a foreign affairs reporter to dig into Lauten's past where the intrepid investigator discovered, mirabile dictu, that Lauten in high school had opinions on Darfur and Saddam Hussein!

It may surprise you to learn that more journalistic investigative effort has been devoted to uncovering the past of this one obscure staffer than any of the liberal media could bring to bear on presidential candidate Barack Obama's academic record prior to the 2008 election.

Hemmingway writes:

[Columnist] Ruth Marcus ... bashes this low-level staffer for critiquing the daughters, then notes she herself did it to the Bush girls - including attacking them for showing so much “cleavage”, being churlish, and their speaking style - but that it was OK because she did it under the guise of parody and they had notable busts. I’m not joking. You can read it for yourself. As John Podhoretz said, “Ruth Marcus’s double standard FOR HERSELF is absolutely astonishing.”

The Lauten story has been all over other print and broadcast media. So we know that the national media is deeply concerned about stray insults directed toward the Obama family from Congressional staffers. Is raping people worse than that? Or not? I’m confused. Because a few years ago Congressional staffer Donny Ray Williams, Jr., was indicted for a series of alleged sexual assaults and it got only one “local crime” story in the Washington Post. Yesterday he pled guilty and that also generated one story in the Washington Post. If there’s network coverage of this congressional staffer raping people, I’m not seeing it. Did I mention he was a staff director for Democrats on a Senate panel?

Or what about child rape? We’re still opposed to that, right? I only ask because Terry Bean, a major campaign donor to President Obama — and a co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign — was just charged with sexual assault of a minor. And the Washington Post hasn’t covered it, according to a search of their archives. I mean, there are pictures of him on Air Force One and he was at the White House seven times including for a state dinner. He’s a member of the DNC. I know, I know, he’s certainly not as important as Lauten, but maybe a single story would be in order? Maybe that [foreign affairs] reporter could dig around and see if Bean wrote anything interesting in high school or something?

I already noted Ruth Marcus’ stunning hypocrisy regarding treatment of presidential children. On Twitter, S.M. noted that Salon’s Joan Walsh had her own troubles with consistency on whether it’s OK or not OK to go after presidential children. And this is not the first time Walsh has been called out for her double standards on the topic. Let’s also note another example. When the painfully unfunny David Letterman made a “joke” about Willow Palin getting impregnated by Alex Rodriguez, the New York Times’ “ethicist” Randy Cohen wrote an 1,100-word qualified defense.

See, he explained, it’s OK because Letterman meant to suggest Bristol Palin was a slut, not Willow Palin, the 14-year-old. According to Cohen, David Letterman “should not be fired. He should not even have apologized.” Bristol was fair game even at the age of 17, he said, because she chose to participate in the presidential campaign. Cohen said that Letterman is “an honest guy,” “ethical,” and “determined to do the right thing” (NB: this was written a few months before news broke that Letterman’s multiple affairs caused him to get caught up in a $2 million extortion plot). Further, Bristol was “a legitimate subject” if “a slightly pathetic one.” He conceded the “joke” was a “bit bullying.” Cohen said that Willow and Bristol’s parents were faking umbrage or were unable “to get the joke.”

Only recently, you might remember, a CNN host told viewers to “sit back and enjoy” listening to a woman traumatized by assault, saying it’s the “best audio in years.” That woman? Bristol Palin, of course.

What’s perhaps most surprising in the media coverage isn’t that the New York Times covered the story or that the Washington Post put one of its eleventy billion stories on the matter on the front page. It’s that even the broadcast networks with extremely limited time constraints covered it.

And they covered it immediately. The Free Beacon reports that networks news combined to give nearly four and a half minutes of coverage on Monday night. These same outlets either dramatically delayed or completely failed to cover Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber saying the healthcare law was passed in 2010 thanks to a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of American voters.”

NBC aired a segment on Lauten that lasted more than two minutes and featured White House correspondent Kristen Welker giving a detailed breakdown of the story. Welker interviewed Ruth Marcus — yes, the same woman who made jokes about the cleavage of the Bush daughters — for the piece.

[M]aybe Jonathan Gruber said something about Darfur in high school? Who can we get to check that out?

The media constantly tries to punish Republicans and conservatives for the same things they ignore when Democrats and liberals do them. It's so obvious and so dishonest that very few people have much respect any more for journalists. It's a shame because there are some good ones, but the good ones find themselves in a profession increasingly dominated by ideological hacks. They deserve the skewering Hemmingway gives them.

The Goldilocks Sun

Last week we posted a piece on how delicately balanced the solar system must be in order for biologically advanced life to exist on earth. The balance needed to sustain such life, however, involves far more than just the solar system. It turns out that the star which supports the life-bearing planet must also meet a number of requirements.

Daniel Bakken at Evolution News and Views mentions a few of those conditions. He notes among other things that in order to support life a star must be (I'm paraphrasing him here):

1. A single star, not a binary star: Many stars in our galaxy are binaries.

2. Must be just the right size and temperature: The stellar classification system used by astronomers ranks stars in surface temperature, and assigns letters to them, in the sequence O, B, A, F, G, K and M, O being the hottest, largest stars and M being the lowest in temperature, and smallest in mass.

It's likely that only F and G dwarf stars are homes for potentially habitable planets as they are stable for billions of years, yet are large enough so their habitable zones are outside the tidal locking limit (the region where the star's gravity "locks" the planets rotation so that only one side of the planet ever faces the star). The Sun is a G-type dwarf star. F-type dwarf stars are slightly larger. Stars between O and A are large and evolve too quickly, providing only a short-lived habitable zone (the zone around the star where temperatures are moderate enough to allow for liquid water and life to exist).

The K and M dwarf stars are smaller red dwarfs. A serious problem with red dwarf stars in the K and M classes is their energetic flares and coronal ejection events. Potentially habitable planets need to orbit closer to these stars to be in their habitable zones. Yet the exposure to their stellar winds and more frequent and energetic flares becomes a serious issue for habitability. Because of these stars' smaller mass, ejections get released with more violence. Any planet's atmosphere would be subject to this ionizing radiation and likely expose any surface life to much more damaging radiation.

3. Emit just the right amount of UV radiation: Life needs enough UV radiation to allow chemical reactions, but not so much as to destroy complex carbon molecules like DNA. Just this flux requirement alone requires the host star to have a minimum stellar mass of 0.6 solar masses (a solar mass is equal to the mass of our sun), and a maximum mass of 1.9 solar masses.

In other words, our sun is not just an average star. In many respects it's unusual. Not only does it satisfy the above conditions, but it's also located in just the right place in our galaxy. It's between spiral arms where it's less likely to collide with debris, and also far enough from the center of the galaxy and not too high above nor too far below the plane of the galactic disk so that harmful radiation from the center is blocked by the intervening matter.

When we factor together all the conditions that must be met by the various parts of the solar system in order for intelligent life to exist anywhere within it the probability that any other star/planet system in the universe would duplicate these traits is dramatically diminished. It may be that, contrary to popular belief, earth is the only place in this enormous universe in which advanced life exists or even could exist. That's a stunning possibility.

Xmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, but perhaps their discomfiture is misplaced, as theologian R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ....There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting and helpful, but I still suspect that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid writing Christmas and have no idea what the etymology of the word is. In any case, Sproul goes on to explain the origin of the fish as a symbol for Christianity:

The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom.

If you already knew all this you have VP's permission to feel pleased with yourself. If you didn't know it before, now you do.

Christmas Gift Idea

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our ten years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd. It's an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

The book is available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it on your Christmas shopping list.

Does America Have a Racism Problem?

Writing at CNN in the wake of the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown LZ Granderson states that we have a real problem with racism in this country.

He quotes Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP, who claimed that "What we have continued to see linger is the perception of young African-American men as dangerous and criminal. Until we begin to reverse this perception, and until all Americans -- white Americans in particular -- believe in the humanity of black people, we will continue to have these incidents of violence."

In other words, it wasn't Brown's actions which resulted in his death, it was the racism of the cop who shot him. She may be right, of course. Wilson may have done what he did because he was a bigot. It's possible, but who knows what was in his heart at the time he pulled the trigger? I certainly don't and I doubt very much that Ms Ifill does either. Why is it assumed that Mr. Wilson wouldn't have acted in the same manner had Brown been a white kid who punched him in the face? How does Ms Ifill or Mr. Granderson know that white Americans don't "believe in the humanity" of black people? Well, Granderson cites statistics:

A USA Today study found at least 70 police departments nationwide arrested blacks at a rate 10 times higher than nonblacks. Furthermore, "only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA Today examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups." This isn't a coincidence or a fluke. This is a problem too many whites don't see, and too many blacks are besieged by.

We can agree that there's surely a problem here (although given that so many police departments operate in areas where the population is largely comprised of blacks, I'm not sure how significant that second statistic is), but I think it's simply nonsense to say that "too many whites" don't see it. I think they see it all too clearly. The problem is that blacks like Granderson, and many white liberals, are simply oblivious to what whites see.

What many whites see in their daily newspapers and evening newscasts is a minority group that commits crime out of all proportion to its size as a percentage of the population. They see a minority group that evidently seethes with hatred for whites to the extent that they're disproportionately inclined to victimize whites. If blacks are arrested at a much higher rate than other racial groups, then just maybe it's because they commit crimes at a much higher rate than other groups.

After reciting some of the claims made by black leaders concerning "the scourge of white-on-black violence" the editors at Discover the Networks offer some statistics on such violence:

Viewing America as a hotbed of racism, leftist civil-rights leaders and academics routinely promote the notion that white-on-black violence is a major scourge plaguing the black community. Al Sharpton once said that such violence had reached “epidemic proportions.” Professor Cornel West characterizes African Americans as our country's “exemplary targets of racial hatred.” Robert Staples, a former professor of sociology at a University of California medical school, has spoken of “a sort of genocide, targeting young black males.” Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, says that “the primary explanation for racially motivated violence against blacks has been the need of a segment of the white population to preserve [its] belief in the inferiority of blacks, and to maintain the social and political subordination of an historically outcast group by any means, including violence.”

But in fact, white-on-black crime is a statistical rarity. According to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an estimated 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence. That same year, according to the Census Bureau, the white and black populations in the U.S. were 196,817,552 and 37,685,848, respectively. Whites therefore committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 32 per 100,000, while the black rate was 849 per 100,000. In other words, the “average” black was statistically 26.5 times more likely to commit criminal violence against a white, than vice versa. Moreover, blacks who committed violent crimes chose white victims 47.7% of the time, whereas whites who committed violent crimes targeted black victims only 3.9% of the time.

For many years and for a wide variety of crimes, this pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research. Nationwide in 2010, there were approximately 67,755 black-on-white aggravated assaults, as compared to just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. Thus, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate of 181 per 100,000—fully 201 times higher than the white rate of 0.9 per 100,000. Moreover, blacks guilty of aggravated assault chose white victims 44.1% of the time, while whites who committed aggravated assault selected black victims only six-tenths of 1% of the time.

Also in 2010, there were approximately 13,463 black-on-white rapes and 38,744 black-on-white robberies. Blacks guilty of rape chose white victims 50.2% of the time, and blacks who committed robbery chose white victims 48% of the time. By contrast, the number of white-on-black rapes and robberies reported in the NCVS surveys were so infinitesimal, that in each case whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.

If these statistics are accurate then several conclusions follow. First, we do indeed have a problem with racial violence in this country, but the problem is not primarily with white people. Second, if young black men resent being profiled by police then perhaps they should blame their fellow black males who are statistically far more likely to commit crimes than are any other group (If cops are such racists why aren't Asians the targets of police harassment and brutality?). Third, if interracial crime is a consequence of race hatred then by far the largest deposit of that hatred rests in the black community.

To be sure, whites sometimes say and do awkward, insensitive things. They sometimes tell racially-tinged jokes and indulge in stereotypes that blacks find offensive, but they rarely commit acts motivated by racial animus which actually and deliberately harm someone.

The out-of-whack statistics that Granderson cites will never be meliorated until responsible black voices stop imputing them to the phantom of ubiquitous white racism and instead start laying the blame where it belongs, in a community in which fatherlessness is epidemic and too many undisciplined youngsters enter their teen age years unequipped and unwilling to function in socially productive ways.

If we can't accurately identify the problem there's not much chance we'll ever solve it.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Political Nihilism

Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal is certainly no bomb-thrower, but even she has come to the conclusion that the current administration is sui generis, i.e. completely unique in American history, and not in a good way. In a column at the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)she writes:

What they [the Obama administration] forget is that facts largely decide what history thinks — outcomes, what happened, what it means. What they also forget, or perhaps never knew, is that the great [presidencies] are always constructive. They don’t divide and tear down. They build, gather in, create, bend, meld, and in so doing move things forward. That’s not this crowd.

This White House seems driven — does it understand this? — by a kind of political nihilism. They agitate, aggravate, fray and separate. Look at three great domestic issues just the past few weeks.

ObamaCare, whose very legitimacy was half killed by the lie that “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” and later by the incompetence of its implementation, has been done in now by the mindless, highhanded bragging of a technocrat who helped build it, and who amused himself the past few years explaining that the law’s passage was secured only by lies, and the lies were effective because the American people are stupid.

I don’t know how ObamaCare will go, but it won’t last as it is. If the White House had wisdom, they’d declare that they’d won on the essential argument — health coverage is a right for all — and go back to the drawing board with Congress. The only part of the ObamaCare law that is popular is its intention, not its reality. The White House should declare victory and redraw the bill. But the White House is a wisdom-free zone.

The president’s executive action on immigration is an act of willful nihilism that he himself had argued against in the past. It is a sharp stick in the eye of the new congressional majority. It is at odds with — it defies — the meaning and message of the last election, and therefore is destructive to the reputation of democracy itself. It is huge in its impact but has only a sole cause, the president’s lone will. It damages the standing of our tottery political institutions rather than strengthening them, which is what they desperately need, and sets a template for future executive abuse. It will surely encourage increased illegal immigration and thus further erode the position of the American working class.

And there is the Keystone XL pipeline and the administration’s apparent intent to veto a bill that allows it. There the issue is not only the jobs the pipeline would create, and not only the infrastructure element. It is something more. If it is done right, the people who build the pipeline could be pressed to take on young men — skill-less, aimless — and get them learning, as part of a crew, how things are built and what it is to be a man who builds them.

On top of that, the building of the pipeline would show the world that America is capable of coming back, that we’re not only aware of our good fortune and engineering genius, we are pushing it hard into the future. America’s got her hard-hat on again. America is dynamic. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Not just this endless talk of limits, restrictions, fears and “Oh, we’re all going to melt in the warm global future!”

Which is sort of the spirit of this White House.

Great presidencies have a different one. They expand, move on, reach out....

“But history will be written by liberals.” Fair enough, and they will judge the president the more harshly because he failed to do anything that lasts. ObamaCare will be corrected and torn down piece by piece. The immigration order will be changed, slowed or undone by the courts, Congress or through executive actions down the road. Keystone will pass and a veto overridden.

And the president has failed liberals through unpopularity, which is another word for incompetence.

And if all that happens, if ten years hence nothing of the last eight remains, will we look back at the Obama years as a promise broken and an opportunity squandered? What lessons will we have learned?

A Very Sad Night for America

In the days to come there'll doubtless be much commentary on the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

I don't know whether or not the black community in Ferguson has been mistreated by the police over the years, as has been claimed. Maybe they have. Maybe some of the treatment about which the community has complained is warranted by the circumstances that exist in their community. In any case, even if there have been unjustifiable abuses by the Ferguson police force that doesn't mean that Officer Wilson was one of the offenders, and it is unconscionable to insist that he be made a scapegoat regardless of whether he acted properly in the shooting of Michael Brown.

Justice demands that individuals be treated according to how they behave, not according to the behavior of others who may have the same job or may be of the same religion or race. To demand an indictment and to riot, burn businesses, and threaten lives because the grand jury didn't believe the evidence warranted the indictment the rioters insisted upon is disgraceful.

Some of the businesses that were burned last night were small minority-owned enterprises whose owners have lost everything. No doubt all of the ruined businesses employed blacks who now find themselves out of work. The actions that deprived these people of their livelihoods were not only criminal they were incredibly stupid.

The rioters didn't care about the exculpatory evidence presented to the grand jury, much of it by black witnesses. They didn't care whether Officer Wilson was in danger of being done great harm by Michael Brown. Many of them probably didn't even care about Michael Brown.

What they cared about was that a white cop killed a black man, and given that solitary fact, the cop is, in their minds, ipso facto guilty. Moreover, if he's not punished they'll take matters into their own hands and burn down the stores and other businesses which employ them, and then they'll wonder in a year or two why no businesses want to open in their neighborhood and why they have to travel across town to shop.

If Americans cannot base guilt and innocence on facts and evidence, but must base it instead on some racial calculus - one tribe pitted against another - then we are in real danger of devolving toward the sort of mindless feuds and hatreds that plague the Arab world, and our civilization, built on the rule of law, truly is in peril.

David Harsanyi at The Federalist has some wise words on the Ferguson situation. I recommend his column.

Goldilocks Planet

Scientists have cataloged dozens of parameters that have to be just right for life to appear on earth. The improbability of a planet having so many of these properties is so high that some scientists have speculated that life, at least complex life, might exist nowhere else in the universe no matter how many other planets are out there. This is the thesis of such books as Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

A few such parameters are:

...a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial planet, the advantage of a gas giant guardian and large satellite, conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics, the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, the role of "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts, and whatever led to the still mysterious Cambrian explosion of animal phyla. The emergence of intelligent life may have required yet other rare events.

New Scientist has a report on some research that shows yet another cosmic coincidence that allows life to exist on earth. It turns out that, as strange as it may seem at first, the orbit of Saturn has to be almost exactly as it is for life to exist on earth:

Earth's comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn's good behaviour. If the ringed giant's orbit had been slightly different, Earth's orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system's heavyweights – could have shaped other planets' orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth's orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn's orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth's orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are right for liquid water.

Tilting Saturn's orbit would also stretch out Earth's orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn's orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth's orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

In other words, our solar system is like a delicately balanced ecosystem, all the parts of which seem to be important in making earth the sort of place where life can arise and be sustained. The odds of such a system existing elsewhere in the universe would seem to be very small.

It might be mentioned in passing that it's not just Saturn's orbit that makes life possible on earth. Scientists have shown that massive outer planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune act as gravitational vacuum sweepers sucking up a lot of debris that would otherwise invade the inner reaches of the solar system and threaten earth with constant collisions. It really is astonishing how many factors must all be just right for life to exist on this one little planet.

A Meaningful Thanksgiving

Looking to do something that'll make a difference in people's lives, a meaningful way to celebrate the Thanksgiving season? Why not consider Kiva:

Kiva is a world-wide microfinance organization. People from all around the world lend money to small businesspersons and others in the third world to help them obtain the capital they need to manage their businesses successfully. The borrowers then pay the loan back over time and the lender can relend the money or withdraw it.

It's a great way to help the poor help themselves and a wonderful way to express your gratitude for all that you have.

The President's Curious Reasoning

During the president's speech last night in which he informed the nation that he's no longer content to be president and is henceforth elevating himself to the rank of emperor, he delivered himself of this bizarre piece of rhetoric:

And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill. I want to work with both parties to pass a more permanent legislative solution. And the day I sign that bill into law, the actions I take will no longer be necessary.

This is as nonsensical as it is brazen. As Jonah Goldberg puts it:

Obama is in effect saying [to Congress], “If you don’t want me to do something you believe to be illegal or unconstitutional - and I eloquently agreed with you not long ago - all you have to do to stop me is to do exactly what I want.”

Placating Obama’s wishes doesn’t erase his lawless deed, it establishes a precedent for a new presidential power of lawless action. It’s against the law for me to steal your car. If I do it anyway and then say, “Look, all you have to do to nullify my lawless action is sign over the title to me, that way it will all be nice and proper” does that really make it all better?

Mr. Obama and his media sycophants are blaming the Republican congress for not passing the immigration bill that he wants passed, but if he was really so concerned about the plight of immigrants why didn't he do something to reform the system during the first two years of his presidency when he controlled both houses of congress? He didn't do it then when he could have and now he blames the Republicans for dragging their feet.

Actually, congressional Republicans have very good reason to be reluctant. No immigration reform is possible unless it is all but certain that our border is secured against further incursions of illegals coming north a couple of years from now. The problem is that it's up to the president who swore an oath to uphold the laws of the nation to enforce any legislation that he signs, and no one, at least no one who has been paying attention, has any confidence that Mr. Obama will fulfill his obligation keep our borders secure. He has dissembled about so much so often that he has no credibility, even within his own party much less with Republicans.

By refusing to accept the limitations placed upon his power by the Constitution, Mr. Obama has very likely thrown this country into a constitutional crisis, and probably cemented his reputation as the most divisive and lawless president in the history of our nation.

The President's Overreach

President Obama is taking an unprecedented action which threatens to throw this nation into a constitutional crisis and will almost certainly insure that relations between Republicans and Democrats will grow even more sour than they already are. The president has chosen to grant amnesty to 4 million immigrants in this country illegally, a move he himself has insisted on numerous occasions that he had no constitutional authority to do.

The issue at hand is not whether these immigrants should be allowed to stay - I've advocated for years on VP and elsewhere a policy very similar to what the president outlined tonight - it's whether any president has the constitutional right to essentially usurp the prerogative of the legislature to make law.

Speaker of the House John Boehner's office has compiled a list of twenty two instances wherein Mr. Obama insisted that he had no authority to do what he has now said he will do. Here are three:

1. I am president, I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the Executive Branch to make it happen. I'm committed to making it happen, but I've got to have some partners to do it....The main thing we have to do to stop deportations is to change the laws....[T]he most important thing that we can do is to change the law because the way the system works – again, I just want to repeat, I'm president, I'm not king. If Congress has laws on the books that says that people who are here who are not documented have to be deported, then I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources, to focus on people who are really causing problems as a opposed to families who are just trying to work and support themselves. But there's a limit to the discretion that I can show because I am obliged to execute the law. That's what the Executive Branch means. I can't just make the laws up by myself. So the most important thing that we can do is focus on changing the underlying laws. (10/25/10)

2. I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books....Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that's not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written. (7/25/11)

3. This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed. And Congress right now has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system. And what that means is that we have certain obligations to enforce the laws that are in place even if we think that in many cases the results may be tragic. (2/14/13)

As a candidate in 2008 Senator Obama condemned the very sort of arrogation of power he now tells us he plans to effect:

1. I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with [the president] trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.(3/31/08)

2. We’ve got a government designed by the Founders so that there’d be checks and balances. You don’t want a president who’s too powerful or a Congress that’s too powerful or a court that’s too powerful. Everybody’s got their own role. Congress’s job is to pass legislation. The president can veto it or he can sign it....I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.(5/19/08)

Of course, that's what he announced tonight that he's going to do. There are things the Republicans can do to try to stymie him short of impeachment which isn't going to happen since it would take a 2/3 of the senators, or a total of 67, to vote to convict. There will be 54 Republicans in the new Congress seated in January which means there'd have to be 13 Democrats who would go along with impeachment and that seems more than far-fetched.

Other options are discussed here. One of the most worrisome things about the president's action is the precedent Mr. Obama is setting. Suppose the next president, perhaps a Republican, decides he doesn't want to enforce the Clean Air act, the tax laws, or welfare programs? If a president can now unilaterally decide which laws he will enforce and which he won't, the Constitution is void and we no longer live in a democratic republic, we instead live in a dictatorship headed by a modern day Caesar.

The policy he presented tonight, the policy he'll soon promulgate by executive order, may be what should be done, I think it mostly is (although I'm deeply skeptical that the president is, after six years in office, finally serious about genuinely securing the border), but the way he's doing it is extremely destructive to the constitutional foundation of this country.

Understanding and Belief

Steve Mirsky of Scientific American interviewed cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley back in 2009. Lombrozo studies why people believe what they do, specifically, why they believe what they do about evolution, intelligent design, or creationism. The entire interview is interesting and worth reading. Here's an excerpt I found particularly fascinating:

Mirsky: Let's talk about some of the basics and some of the surprises about the people who accept and don't accept evolution and their reasons for it.

Lombrozo: Sure. I think one of the most surprising findings has to do with the relationship between understanding the basics of evolutionary theory and accepting it as our best account of the origins of human life. So most people, I think, [or] in particular scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it's because they don't understand it very well; they don't really understand what the theory is telling us. But in fact, if you look at the data from psychology and education, what you find is either no correlation between accepting evolution and understanding it or very, very small correlation between those two factors, and I think that's surprising to a lot of people and in particular to educators and scientists.

Mirsky: Yeah, it was surprising to me when your data were presented. So what [does] that mean for, you know, education in the country? What should people be thinking about if they have a desire to have evolutionary theory be more accepted by more people?

Lombrozo: I think it has a couple of consequences. One of them is that any kind of educational intervention that increases people's understanding of evolutionary theory is not necessarily going to have a consequence to whether or not people accept evolution. I think that's surprising, but it also raises a lot of complicated ethical issues; whether or not it's even appropriate in the classroom for teachers to be trying to deliberately influence students' acceptance of evolution as opposed to whether or not they understand it. We normally think about the role of education as being one to communicate basic concepts, to communicate scientific theories, not to actually change whether or not people accept a particular theory that might conflict with their relative views. So I think it raises some complicated issues there.

Two things are worth noting about this. First, Lombrozo is correct that the role of a public school teacher is to present students with the relevant ideas, not to indoctrinate them in those ideas. Teachers should teach students the pros and cons of evolutionary theory and let the students decide for themselves what they believe.

Second, the difficulty with teaching just the facts on evolution is that, by itself, it's apparently not enough to persuade many students that evolution is true. The problem is not that students don't understand the concepts and therefore don't accept them, the problem is that many of them do understand the theory and find it literally incredible.

The reason some Darwinists want students to be inculcated with Darwinism and don't want any criticism of Darwinism taught in the classroom is that they know intuitively that if students are made aware of the profound difficulties with naturalistic explanations of the origin of life and the inability of natural selection and random mutation to account for the enormous biological sophistication of living things, many kids will simply be skeptical of the whole business.

The Faith of Scientists

Philosophers of science have long noted that the line between empirical science and metaphysics has been increasingly blurred in the modern era. Scientists who once prided themselves on taking nothing on faith and demanding hard evidence for their scientific beliefs have long since abandoned that position. Science today is very much about faith.

A piece at NPR by Marcelo Gleiser elaborates on this. Gleiser writes:

I want to ... examine a ... controversial issue, one that has been in the limelight of cutting-edge physics for the past few years: Do some scientists hold on to a belief longer than they should? Or, more provocatively phrased, when does a scientific belief become an article of faith?

To talk about faith in the context of science seems quite blasphemous. Isn't science the antithesis of faith, given that it is supposedly based on certainties, on the explicit verification of hypotheses? This vision of science as being perfectly logical and rational is an idealization. Of course, the product of scientific research must be something concrete: Hypotheses must be either confirmed or refuted, and data from experiments should be repeatable by others.

This is all true, but it seems to fall afoul of much thinking today on matters of global warming, evolution, and the multiverse, the first of which seems to suffer from a dearth of empirical confirmation and the latter two of which lead to no experiments repeatable by others. Yet they're firmly held to be true by many scientists, and indeed they may be true, but the belief that they are is based more on faith than on empirical evidence and experimentation. Gleiser goes on to say that,

There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

The claim here is that it's dogmatic to hold to a theory in spite of the evidence and that such doxastic tenacity is characteristic of religious belief but is anathema among scientists. Yet surely Gleiser knows that the most deeply ingrained ideas, ideas that lie closest to the bone of our deepest metaphysical commitments, are rarely proven wrong in science. As Thomas Kuhn famously argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the old ideas only pass away when the scientists who hold them do.

When the beliefs people hold are entailments of their worldview those beliefs will not be surrendered unless the worldview itself shifts. And that tectonic intellectual event requires such a formidable expenditure of psychological energy and exertion of the will that it happens only infrequently among those who have reached their mature years.

If one's worldview demands materialistic explanations of phenomena, for example, then some materialistic explanation of a phenomenon will be clung to regardless of whether there's good evidence for it. The belief becomes a dogma, and scientists are no less likely to embrace dogma than are religious people. Examples of prominent scientists admitting to this are not hard to find. Here's a well-known admission from one of the world's top biologists, Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

In other words, defending materialism is more important than following the evidence. Evolutionary atheist and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse acknowledges that belief in evolution is actually religious, of all things:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint...the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

The stereotype of the completely objective scientist persuaded only by empirical evidence and unencumbered by biases, preferences, and ideological predilections is hard to find in the real world, at least in those scientific fields which have profound metaphysical implications.

Waste

I was listening to a show on public radio this morning, and they featured a segment during which it was explained that the EPA is very concerned with the amount of food that gets wasted in American households. The bureaucrats at the EPA (and the good folks at my local PBS) evidently think this deplorable and are doing studies to assess exactly how much food gets scraped off our plates and stuffed down the garbage disposal each week.

I was inclined to agree, in a knee-jerk kind of way, that it's bad to waste food until I heard this segment and started to think about it. I certainly agree that waste is bad when it's a non-renewable resource like oil that's being squandered, or if what's wasted is a mind, or time, or a life. To see any of these wasted is very sad.

But why is wasting food bad, I asked myself. It's not as if the food that goes down the garbage disposal would otherwise go to feed hungry children somewhere in the third world. Our wastefulness isn't depriving someone else of sustenance.

Then I wondered what would happen if people only bought exactly what they were going to eat. Would that be good? Well, not necessarily. The more food we buy the more money we put in the pockets of the food merchants who sell it, the farmers who produce it, the processors who prepare it, and the truckers who transport it, whether the food we buy gets eaten or not. This is a good thing. The food may go moldy in our cupboards, but buying it provides jobs for a lot of people and if we all limited ourselves to buying only what we consumed, a lot of those people would be worse off.

So maybe I'm missing something, but wasting food doesn't seem to be the same sort of thing as wasting time or wasting water during a drought. As long as it's not taking food out of the mouths of the hungry I don't see why it's "wrong" at all, and I don't know why the EPA thinks it's any business of theirs how much people waste.

Maybe if the EPA is concerned about waste they should do a study on how many taxpayer dollars they waste on dumb studies on waste.

Molecular Machines

Here's a post from April of 2013 that I thought worth running again:

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying the principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would say that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has whetted your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it the product of intelligence?

The Looming Iceberg

Almost overshadowed amidst revelations by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who was one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act, that he and his colleagues lied and misled Congress and the American people about what the law contained in order to get it passed, is the news that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the Halbig case (technically called King v. Burwell)

Essentially, what Halbig is about is this: When the ACA was designed it mandated that poor people be given subsidies to offset the cost of insurance if they purchased their coverage through their state's insurance exchange program. Thirty four states, however, refused to set up exchanges and the federal government had to go in and provide the service. The problem is that the ACA explicitly asserts that only consumers using state exchanges are eligible for subsidies, and it makes no provision for subsidies to people who use federal exchanges. Thus, as the law is written, millions of poor people in states with no state exchange will not be eligible for subsidies and will not be able to afford insurance. This, some observers believe, would be the death knell for Obamacare.

Consequently, the White House is arguing that the intent of the law was to give everyone subsidies even though the law explicitly denies this, and the same Jonathan Gruber is on tape explicitly insisting that subsidies were meant to be granted only to those using the state exchanges. The case has been quietly making its way through the judicial court system and the Supreme Court has now decided to take it up.

This development has led to a lot of speculation about exactly who the justices were (there were four of them) who voted to hear the case. Hot Air's Allahpundit makes a good case for thinking they were three conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, and Alito) plus Anthony Kennedy. If he's right about this, and if he's also right that it's unlikely these Justices would've chosen to hear the case unless they were inclined to rule against the administration, then Chief Justice John Roberts, who saved Obamacare in 2012 from being declared unconstitutional by transmogrifying a fine into a tax may well find himself the swing vote once again.

Roberts received so much condign criticism for that 2012 decision that a lot of people wonder whether he'd be willing to go through all that misery again and might instead be looking for a reasonable way to justify voting against the White House this time around (It's odd that nobody seems to think that a Supreme Court Justice might actually rule on what the Constitution says, but Roberts seriously diminished confidence that he would so rule by deciding as he did in 2012).

Richard Hasen at the LA Times thinks Roberts might decide against the White House in the current case by arguing that the Congress wrote what it wrote and that if they didn't say what they meant to say in the ACA then it's up to them to change it. This would certainly be a reasonable position, but it would almost certainly be the end of Obamacare because there's very little chance that a Congress now controlled by the Republican party, not a single member of which voted to make the ACA law, will now vote to save it.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.