Kirsten Powers on the Planned Parenthood Debacle

The videos of Planned Parenthood higher ups negotiating deals for baby body parts and, in the most recent example, joking about wanting the buyers to sweeten the deal so she can buy herself a Lamborghini, are pretty awful. In response, Planned Parenthood (PP) and it's media apologists have come to the defense of PP and its employees, but none of their responses have much of anything to do with the deplorable state of PP's ethics or concern for the law.

Kirsten Powers, a liberal, mind you, who worked in the Clinton administration, pillories some of the more egregious excuses that PP's defenders have employed in a column at USA Today. I'd like to add a couple of thoughts to what she writes.

She begins by noting that Cecile Richards, the CEO of PP, found nothing objectionable in the Dr. Deborah Nucatola videos other than the doctor's "tone":

Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards apologized last week for the uncompassionate tone her senior director of medical research, Deborah Nucatola, used to explain the process by which she harvests aborted body parts to be provided for medical research.

Nucatola had been caught on an undercover video talking to anti-abortion activists posing as representatives of a biological tissue procurement company. The abortion doctor said, “I’d say a lot of people want liver,” and “a lot of people want intact hearts these days.” Explaining how she could perform later-term abortions to aid the harvesting of such intact organs, she said, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

People who can insouciently discuss killing a baby by crushing it in such a way as to leave internal organs salvageable for sale, and those who find nothing disgusting about this except, perhaps, the tone, have, I fear, lost at least some of their humanity.

A second undercover video released Tuesday shows another Planned Parenthood official talking about using a “less crunchy” way to perform abortions while preserving salable fetal tissue.

This is stomach-turning stuff. But the problem here is not one of tone. It’s the crushing. It’s the organ harvesting of fetuses that abortion-rights activists want us to believe have no more moral value than a fingernail. It’s the lie that these are not human beings worthy of protection. There is no nice way to talk about this. As my friend and former Obama White House staffer Michael Wear tweeted, “It should bother us as a society that we have use for aborted human organs, but not the baby that provides them.”

Indeed. If the baby has grown to the point where it has well-developed internal organs then we're not talking about a blob of undifferentiated tissue, we're talking about a living human being.

Richards worked to discredit the video by complaining it was “heavily edited.” But the nearly three-hour unedited video — a nauseating journey through the inner workings of the abortion industry — was posted at the same time as the edited video. Richards intoned menacingly that the video was “secretly recorded.” So what? When Mitt Romney was caught by “secret video” making his 47% remarks, the means of attaining the information was not the focus of the story.

Planned Parenthood’s public relations firm also portrayed the crushing and organ harvesting as a “ humanitarian undertaking,” and tried to tarnish the maker of the video with a white paper that deemed him unfit because he once wrote an article for the “opposition” outlet The Weekly Standard, a well-respected conservative magazine. Let’s talk about anything except the information disclosed by Nucatola.

Yes. Change the subject. Deflect attention away from the grisly butchery that PP is engaged in and complain instead about the nefarious tactics used by the imposters who surreptitiously recorded the conversation. It was so unfair, so sneaky, it was a form of entrapment. Never mind what the video reveals about what's really going on in abortatoriums around the country.

It’s a measure of how damning the video is that Planned Parenthood’s usual defenders were nowhere to be found. There was total silence from The New York Times editorial board and their 10 (out of 11) pro-abortion rights columnists. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi — both recipients of Planned Parenthood’s highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award — have been mum. But a few loyalists took up the cause, including Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak, whose column was headlined: “Planned Parenthood deserves to be supported, not attacked.” Actually, it's fetuses who are under attack. By Planned Parenthood.

On what grounds does PP deserve to be supported? Because they sometimes help troubled women? Even if that were true, it's a bit like saying Bill Cosby deserves to be supported, not attacked, because he sometimes helped young actresses.

Dvorak invoked a common defense against the barbarism of late-term abortion: “The details are gruesome, as are many medical procedures and how doctors and nurses tell stories about the operating room.” But nobody is morally repulsed by stories of heart transplants.

True enough, but then neither is the patient intentionally crushed to death when given a heart transplant.

Mississippi abortion doctor Willie Parker — who was lauded by Esquire for his “ abortion ministry” — ran with the trope that direct quotes from a Planned Parenthood doctor constitute a vicious attack, but went a step further: He compared Nucatola to Jesus. “It's no secret that my frame of reference for the work that I do and in terms of generating compassion is related to my religious understanding and, in particular, my Christian religious understanding,” Parker told Cosmopolitan magazine. “I'm thinking about a strong parallel between what's happening to my colleague (Nucatola) and the trial week of Jesus before he was crucified (as) he was marched from place to place, asked to answer allegations.”

When abortion doctors are elevated to gods who may not be questioned or held accountable, society has officially gone off the rails.

And when a Christian doctor can compare a colleague who callously destroys the lives of helpless infants and then seeks to profit from the sale of the child's organs to the One who said that it would be better for a person who harms a child to have a millstone tied around his neck and dropped into the sea than to face the judgment that awaits him, that doctor has a very peculiar understanding of the person of Christ and has forfeited whatever moral authority he may once have had.

Modern Slavery

Slavery was once practiced by the most advanced civilizations on earth, but in modern times is found only in retrograde, morally depauperate societies where slavery is still very much alive and apparently thriving.

In June 2015 ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) held a slave auction in eastern Syria. On sale where 42 Yazidi women, who were offered to ISIL men for between $500 and $2,000. Since the slaves were not Moslem they could not be married, so their owners would use them for sex, housekeeping or whatever.

ISIL was depending on Moslem scripture to justify this. Actually, ISIL is not alone as there is still a lot of slavery in the Islamic world. There is also a lot of hatred for non-Moslems especially those they consider pagans. ISIL considers the Yazidis pagans. It was with Yazidis that ISIL reintroduced slavery (of non-Moslems, especially “pagans” like Yazidis) into their new Islamic State. This may appall many in the West and to placate foreigners most Arab nations have outlawed slavery, despite the fact that it still exists and continues to exist with much local support.

Slavery is also found in Mauritania, Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia and almost always involves the enslavement of black Africans to Islamic Arabs:

The divisions in Mauritania, with a population of less than four million, are between the Arab (about a third) and "former slaves" (black Africans from the south). Mauritania exists on the border between Arabs and Bantu (the ethnic group that predominates in Africa south of the Sahara). Blacks were the slaves, and slavery was formerly abolished only in 1981. But slavery still exists in Mauritania. In Sudan the pro-Arab government has used slavery to encourage Arab tribes to make war on darker skinned “African” tribes. The government allowed any captives taken to be enslaved.

It’s not just Mauritania and Sudan that have problems with slavery. In 2010 Yemeni anti-slavery groups forced their government to investigate families living in the countryside that were still keeping slaves. At least 500 Africans are believed to be enslaved, some of them recent migrants, others the descendants of slaves.

Slavery was outlawed in Arabia in the early 1960s, but that only eliminated the more obvious cases in urban areas. The practice continued in more remote areas. It's been going on for thousands of years, during which Arabs are believed to have enslaved up to 20 million Africans. As a result, up to twenty percent of the people in Arabia appear to have African ancestors and genetic studies have confirmed this.

Why is it that throughout history it has predominately been black Africans who wind up in shackles? Why is it that the Muslim practice of slavery, condoned by the Koran, is not more vociferously condemned by the leaders of the Western world? Could it be that the juxtaposition of the three facts contained in the foregoing two questions holds the answer?

Consider that the victims are mostly black Africans, the perpetrators are mostly Muslims, and the Western elites have largely embraced a moral and cultural relativism that saps them of any ability to make moral judgments and perhaps we have the germ of an answer as to why the world expresses so little outrage.

Black Lives Matter

Do all lives matter? Evidently not to liberal progressives, they don't. When former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley suggested such a heretical notion at a recent Netroots convention he was roundly booed by the attendees, forcing him to embarrass himself with an abject, ignominious apology for inadvertently uttering the outrageous notion that all people, not just blacks, have value.

Notwithstanding the remarkable stupidity of the reaction to O'Malley's "gaffe" and his grovelling clarification, black lives do, of course, matter, but those who insist on the slogan and shout down those who would like to be rather more inclusive, are generally focusing their energies in the wrong direction. The implication of "Black Lives Matter" is that whites don't place a sufficiently high value on black lives, that whites, especially white policemen, hold black people in low esteem. But those who truly believe that black lives matter need to take a harder look at the black community itself. Of course, to people who spout slogans facts are often irrelevant, but we need to consider them nevertheless.

Consider a few: In 2011 there were 6,309 black homicide victims in the United States. As a share of the population the murder rate of blacks is four times that for other racial groups, and over 90% of those victims were murdered by other blacks. Many of the remainder were murdered by Hispanics in gang-related activity.

Furthermore, despite the fact that blacks are only 13% of the population and whites comprise over 63%, blacks murdered whites twice as frequently as whites (including Hispanics) murdered blacks in 2013.

What about black deaths at the hands of white cops? Of all the people killed by cops in the decade ending in 2011, most of which were justified, 49% were white and 30% were black.

The 30% figure may seem disproportionately high since blacks constitute only 13% of the population, but given that blacks also constitute the largest cohort of perpetrators of violence against police it's not surprising that a disproportionate number would wind up being shot.

And blacks are indeed the worst perpetrators of violence against police, murdering cops at rates out of all proportion to their percentage of the population. They comprise 13% of the population but in 2013 they were responsible for 42% of the murders of police officers.

In other words, blacks suffer far more grievously at the hands of other blacks than they do from either whites in general or white cops in particular. Moreover, in cases of interracial murder, not counting other assaults from which injury results, blacks murder whites much more frequently than whites murder blacks. If it doesn't seem that way it's only because the media generally downplays or ignores black on white violence and goes wall-to-wall with stories of white on black violence on the rare occasions when it occurs.

In fact, to paint the picture more vividly, although the United States ranks third in the world for murder, according to this source, if Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans were deleted from the United States' homicide statistics, the U.S. would drop to fourth from the bottom for murders.

If black lives matter, and they do, then those who are concerned about the carnage, especially among young black males, should focus their attention not on white racism or white police who have probably saved far more black lives than they've taken, certainly more than they've taken without justification, but on the real source of the problem, the awful dysfunctionalities which exist in the black community - dysfunctionalities that only blacks themselves can cure.

Stem Cell Progress

Stem cell researchers originally used cells extracted from human embryos, a process which resulted in the death of the embryo. This, of course, was an intolerable situation for those who hold to a high view of human life, and it was a great relief a few years ago when technology advanced to the point where other types of cells, notably skin cells, could be made pluripotent without destroying embryonic human beings.

Now researchers working with skin cells are beginning to see their work bearing fruit as this article in the UK Independent notes:

Scientists have made tiny human hearts that can actually beat from nothing — and they’re so small that they can barely be seen with the naked eye.

The hearts have been grown using only stem cells, for the very first time, the New Scientist reports. As such, it mimics the processes that happen when humans hearts’ grow for the first time — except it happens in a lab, at the prompting of researchers.

The new hearts were created using stems cells that were made by reversing human skin cells, so that they turned back to something like an embryo. Once that was done, the scientists encouraged the cells to grow into the right formation, changing their shape and then eventually forming first into the cells that help hearts beat, then into those that connect the heart up and after that into tiny ventricles.

The techniques could eventually be used to create a full-sized heart, scientists suggest to the New Scientist. “Our model is the first step towards building a heart relying on self-organisation of cells, without any external three-dimensional supporting materials,” says Zhen Ma, from the University of California at Berkeley, told the magazine.

The same technique might also be used to create other parts of the human body. It has long been difficult to encourage lab-created organs to grow into the right thing — but the new research gives a new insight into how stem cells turn into the right cells.

But in the shorter term, the tiny hearts can be used to study how humans’ bigger ones work. The “highly defined human cardiac microchambers”, as the scientists call them, could also tell us more about how embryos and early hearts are formed, as well as how certain drugs affect babies before they are born.

Great prospects for creating other organs from skin cells in the future. No dead embryos. It's a development that only Deborah Nucatola, the current occupant of Planned Parenthood's Dr. Mengele chair, wouldn't appreciate.

Special Ops

An article at Strategy Page relates some interesting details about American and British commandos operating in Syria against ISIL. The article starts out talking about how British SAS forces are being beefed up in Syria as a response to the recent murders of dozens of British tourists on a Tunisian beach by an ISIL attacker and then goes on to discuss a bit about how American and British special operations forces are operating in ISIL controlled territory in Iraq and Syria.

Britain has had aircraft bombing ISIL since late 2014 but no ground troops fighting ISIL. The SAS and SBS operators join American SEALs and Delta Force in Syria and Iraq, along with commandos from several other nations (some of them Arab) who prefer to remain unidentified just now. The only reporting on the activities of these commandos is when they stage a raid and capture or kill someone.

In fact, most of their time is spent on reconnaissance and seeking out high-quality targets for the bombers and UAVs overhead. In some cases a commando team will find a target and immediately call in a missile or smart-bomb strike. Keeping quiet about these operations protects the operators (who do not want their tactics and methods known to the enemy) and increases the fear among the Islamic terrorists being sought.

Islamic terrorists would like nothing better than to capture or kill some of these commandos, but they rarely have the opportunity. The commandos are highly trained, experienced, thorough and careful. The commandos go in with plenty of backup, especially aircraft overhead and fellow commandos as well as dependable non-commando troops available to help out. The commandos practice what to do if spotted and pursued and this generally involves quickly calling in air strikes on all their pursuers. Some commandos consider such dangerous and desperate situations to have some benefits.

Such a pursuit creates a “target rich environment” as the Islamic terrorists call in all the reinforcements available in the area. This means many vehicles full of gunmen headed for the scene. For those the commandos cannot see, aircraft overhead have targeting pods to look at these vehicles up close, confirm who they are and use a missile or smart bomb to eliminate the threat. More experienced terrorist leaders try to halt this stampede which nearly always creates more targets for the bombers rather than making it more likely to capture or kill some commandos. This is especially true when the terrorists believe the myth that Western sensors cannot see through sand storms.

Despite all these advantages Western commandos prefer to remain undetected and find targets quietly rather than using themselves as bait. Since there are only a few hundred commandos in Syria at the moment the addition of the British contingent is a substantial increase and should show up in the news as more spectacular air strikes against ISIL, especially ISIL leaders.

The ISIL jihadis are caught in a Catch-22. Spotting the special ops guys is bad luck, but then not spotting them is also a misfortune. Perhaps that's one reason why they're showing up here. It's a lot easier to kill Americans on military bases and recruiting centers which for some peculiar reason the authorities have declared to be gun-free zones.

Now if these wise men and women could just find a way to convince the Islamic shooters to obey the signs.

Peace in Our Time

Jennifer Rubin at the WaPo compiles a list of seventeen ridiculous or factually incorrect things President Obama said at his press conference in defense of his Iran nuclear deal. Here are several of his statements (in quotes) with her response:

• “With this deal, we cut off every single one of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program.” Not true. After eight years, the precise restrictions end. Oops, he says it himself: “And Iran’s nuclear program will be under severe limits for many years.”
• “With this deal, if Iran violates its commitments, there will be real consequences, nuclear-related sanctions that have helped to cripple the Iranian economy will snap back into place.” False again. The deal spells out laborious inspection procedures that include a 24-day notification period. Parchin, for example, is not even included. To snap back sanctions, a committee including Russia and China must agree by a majority.

Moreover, any contracts signed after sanctions are lifted are grandfathered in if sanctions are reimposed. No one in the world seriously believes that if Iran cheats, which they will, that this president will seek to reimpose sanctions. Indeed, nobody but the most credulous believes much of anything any more that this administration tells us.

• “And my hope is that building on this deal, we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave. But we’re not counting on it.” This is the most bizarre comment of all. What basis is there for hope? And if we don’t count on it, we are giving an aggressive regime access to conventional arms, billions of dollars and an industrial-size nuclear infrastructure.
• “And for all the objections of Prime Minister Netanyahu or, for that matter, some of the Republican leadership that’s already spoken, none of them have presented to me or the American people a better alternative.” This is categorically false. Others have suggested increased sanctions, a more credible threat of force and inflicting damage on Iran’s surrogates.
• “If 99 percent of the world’s community and the majority of nuclear experts look at this thing and they say ‘this will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,’ and you are arguing either that it does not or that even if it does, it’s temporary, or that because they’re going to get a windfall of their accounts being unfrozen that they’ll cause more problems, then you should have some alternative to present. And I haven’t heard that.” Actually, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other allies in the region don’t believe this at all.
• “As for the fact that it may take 24 days to finally get access to the site, the nature of nuclear programs and facilities is such — this is not something you hide in a closet.” This is part of a long and rambling answer on why we gave Iran 24 days notice. He concedes, “This is the most vigorous inspection and verification regime, by far, that has ever been negotiated.” But that was not what he promised — go anywhere and anytime was what he said would be obtained.
• “The only argument you can make against the verification and inspection mechanism that we’ve put forward is that Iran is so intent on obtaining a nuclear weapon that no inspection regime and no verification mechanism would be sufficient because they’d find some way to get around it because they’re untrustworthy.” That is precisely correct which is why he blew it by letting them keep their nuclear infrastructure.

Read the rest of them at the link. The president is very misinformed or delusional if he thinks the only alternatives were complete capitulation or war. He's also extraordinarily naive if he thinks that Iran is not going to do everything they can to produce nuclear weapons or that the rest of the region will not do likewise.

It's hard to see how this deal cannot but guarantee that Iran's influence will grow, that terrorism will increase, and that the region will become a nuclear tinderbox. Mr. Obama's willingness to acquiesce to an Iranian nuclear infrastructure, to give them the ability to cheat on the agreement, to free up tens of billions of dollars that'll allow them to subsidize terrorism around the world, and to accept that the U.S. gets nothing out of it, not even the four Americans being held in Iranian prisons, looks from this vantage point like one of the worst deals in history. Even the Indians who sold Manhattan to the Dutch got $24 worth of trinkets for it.

No Lives Matter

For much of the past year we've heard that "Black Lives Matter." Many have understandably wished to amend that slogan to proclaim that "All Lives Matter." Tragically, we're quickly learning that in a secularized nation the truth is that No Lives Matter.

A human life matters only to the extent it has value, but given the naturalistic materialism that reigns among our cultural elites today, any value assigned to a life is purely arbitrary. On naturalism, human beings have value only insofar as they're useful to someone else. Otherwise, they're little different from cattle - suitable for manipulating, herding and even slaughtering when it suits the purposes of those in power. The notion that an individual human being has an inherent right not to be harmed is a useful fiction, a Noble Lie we tell ourselves to enable us to live more securely with each other.

In fact, it only makes sense to speak of inherent rights if those rights are conferred by a transcendent, personal source. Indeed, what else could possibly ground them? On naturalism, however, there is no such transcendent source and thus human beings have, on this view, no intrinsic rights because they have no intrinsic worth and no intrinsic dignity.

It is this view of human beings that from time to time manifests itself in what Hannah Arendt once called, when describing the ordinariness of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the banality of evil. To witness a contemporary illustration of the banality of evil watch Planned Parenthood's Dr. Deborah Nucatela work on her salad and sip wine while she casually describes how she butchers unborn children in order to procure their organs to sell to those who traffic in human tissue.

The left is outraged that Christian businesspersons for religious reasons would decline to participate in a gay wedding. They're outraged when animals are vivisected for medical studies. Are they outraged by what Dr. Nucatola does in her abattoir? How many liberal news outlets have had anything much to say about Dr. Nucatola's starring role in this surreptitiously filmed video?

David Harsanyi at The Federalist writes:

In America, it’s illegal to donate money to a candidate without first reporting it to the government. Even then, if you give more than is permissible you might end up in jail. In this country, you can’t add trans fats to your foods or smoke cigarettes in your own bar. Here, Little Sisters of the Poor can’t tell the state they’d rather not buy condoms and bakers can’t tell a couple they’d rather not participate in their wedding.

But it’s completely legal to kill an unborn baby for convenience and then sell its parts for cash.

Let’s forget the legality of the issue for a moment. And let’s forget religion and politics, if that’s possible. Let’s forget the disconcerting economic incentives inherent in these types of transactions and ask: what kind of person nonchalantly describes “crushing” the life from another living being—a being that might have already been named and loved; a loss that might have a tremendous negative impact on a person or family or community—over a glass of wine and some giggles?

Well, an executive at euphemistic Planned Parenthood, that’s who. We can tell ourselves that a life can simply be written off whenever we deem it inconvenient. We can celebrate the right to end life. But the depravity of Deborah Nucatola’s conversation betrays where it all leads—and also where it started.

If this was a video of some product researchers talking about the same process, but describing the vivisection of a monkey or a cat for organ harvesting instead, most Americans would be justly repulsed. Yet, because this is Planned Parenthood, an organization fulfilling its eugenicist founder’s goal of population control, it will be treated as just another dispute in the culture wars, completely devoid of scientific and moral context.

Because this is Planned Parenthood, most of the media will frame this as a political tug of war rather than explore the politics and ethics of allowing Americans to terminate a life and then harvest organs. Some in the media will probably have a difficult time even comprehending why anyone would deem this much of a story at all. You’ll recall how a number of politicians and reporters struggled to explain the distinction between a run-of-the-mill late-term abortionist and Kermit Gosnell. (Answer: one has a license.)

John Locke declared that human beings have a right to life because we are created in the image of God and are His property. Thomas Jefferson inserted that principle into the Declaration of Independence when he wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Alas, those men lived long ago and they were white and patriarchal and therefore oppressors whose words are no longer relevant for the enlightened and humane 21st century.

Is Multiverse Theory Scientific

In their book The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow start off declaring that philosophy is dead and then for some reason proceed to spend much of the rest of the book doing philosophy. One chapter addresses the nature of reality and another discusses the multiverse, a prediction of what is called cosmic inflation. According to the theory, extremely early in the birth of the universe space expanded from the size of a marble to at least ten million times the size of the Milky Way galaxy in an infinitesimal fraction of a second.

The mathematics of this expansion leads to the prediction that at the edges of this inflation other universes would form completely isolated from ours, and that, indeed, there may be a near infinite number of such universes comprising what is called a multiverse.

The multiverse may exist or it may not, but the claim that it does, though informed and supported by science, is not itself a scientific claim. It's a metaphysical (philosophical) claim. A questioner at the science web site Ask Ethan inquires whether the multiverse idea is a scientific hypothesis or whether it's a metaphysical or philosophical theory and receives this answer:

Now there’s a whole lot we don’t know about those other universes, including:

• Do they have the same physical laws, particles, and fundamental constants as our own?
• Do they have similar densities, properties histories to our own?
• Are we in some way entangled, quantum mechanically, with these other Universes?

The answer may be “no” or “yes” to any or all of these questions; the conservative assumption is that the answers are “yes” “yes” and “no” respectively, but this brings us to the main point of John’s question: is this a scientific theory?

The thing is, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, this is something you’re pretty much bound to wind up with.

But the Multiverse isn’t necessary to explain anything about the Universe we live in. It solves none of the outstanding problems that we presently have. (And if you say things like “landscape,” “vacuum energy,” “anthropic principle” and “cosmological constant,” you don’t understand what “solve” means.) And worst off, it makes no concrete predictions for something we can necessarily observe.

So what does that mean, when we put it all together? It means that the Multiverse — assuming that our current picture of the Universe and its history is valid — is probably real. There probably is much more Universe out there beyond what’s observable to us, and there probably are other Universes that began with other Big Bang that will never interact with our own.

But it also means it’s beyond the realm of testability, even in principle. The only way I could conceive of doing it is catastrophic: to restore the inflationary state, entangle multiple observers that get stretched into different inflating regions, and see if inflation ends and gives rise to different things at different times, presuming you can learn something when you break the quantum entanglement. (And I’m not sure you can.)

This necessitates surviving a hot Big Bang, mind you, so good luck with that. Unless you can, I’m with John on the skeptical front: the Multiverse may be interesting and a seemingly inevitable theoretical consequence of physics. But until we can test it scientifically — and it may be that we never can — it is not quite good enough to be science. It’s a theoretical conjecture, one that makes sense, but it isn’t a scientific theory, and thanks to the limitations of the Universe, it may never be.

What is it, then? It may be a new class of topics that we’re coming to understand: the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of our Universe, the information in it and what that means for what we can learn about it. Beyond that? After that? Perhaps that’s truly where metaphysics begins, and perhaps that’s where the Multiverse will forever reside.

But if the multiverse is a metaphysical idea it's in the same class of ideas as other scientifically informed and supported ideas which cannot be tested. Among these are, well, the existence of a personal, transcendent Creator of the universe. This hypothesis is certainly scientifically supported and informed, as the second premise in the following brief video makes clear, and it's a far simpler explanation of why our universe exists with the properties it has than the idea that there are an infinity of universes so one like ours just has to exist.

Exit question: If the claim that the universe is the product of a personal transcendent agent is considered religious because it's untestable and has to do with ultimate things and is therefore subject to restrictions in our public life, why is not the claim that there is a multiverse which is also untestable and has to do with ultimate things not also subject to similar restrictions in our public life?

A Mini-Ice Age

Having scared the wits out of us for twenty years with dire predictions of global warming, rising sea levels, desertification, wildlife extinctions, large-scale starvation, and massive demographic dislocation, scientists are now telling us that, well, maybe not. We may instead be headed for a mini-ice age such as hasn't been seen in over three hundred years.

According to an article in the UK Daily Mail the sun appears to be on track to reach a minimum of solar activity by 2030 although the effects of the trend may be felt well before that. Here's the gist:

The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat. It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

The last time the sun experienced this type of minimum was 1646 - 1715, a period which has been called a mini-ice age during which England's River Thames froze over for the only time in its recorded history.

If this global cooling actually does come to pass perhaps we'll be reading about how fortuitous it is that the atmosphere is laden with greenhouse gases keeping the planet insulated against the cold. We may even be treated to the spectacle of frantic environmentalists and politicians demanding increased production of atmospheric carbon dioxide to reverse the effects of the solar minimum before agricultural production around the globe is diminished by the lower temperatures and much of the northern latitudes become uninhabitable.

Petty Tyrants

You may recall the frightening - and sickening - abuse of power exercised by Wisconsin prosecutor John Chisolm against supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. We discussed it here. You are also doubtless familiar with the frightening - and sickening - abuse of power exercised by the IRS' Lois Lerner against conservative advocacy groups. Both were attempts to use state power to silence and punish political opponents, attempts which are toxic to a free people but applauded by the progressive left.

Anyway, it turns out that there's a fascinating coincidence connecting these two outrages. Mr. Chisolm's "enabler," a fellow by the name of Kevin Kennedy who heads up something called the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), and Ms Lerner, would you believe it, are long-time BFFs. Hot Air has the story of this remarkable happenstance here.

The left's aversion to freedom of opinion and conscience and the conviction that the way to prevail in a democracy is to squelch opposing voices, impose your views by force, and punish whomever has the temerity to disagree reminded me of the story of a friend who was a Resident Assistant (RA) during his undergrad days at the hyper-progressive University of Wisconsin. Here's his account of what happened:

I was an RA (or as they call it at UW-Madison, "House Fellow") from 2000-2002. I was also a member of the UW-Madison College Republicans and part of the Knights of Columbus. At first I was quite excited when I found out that I got the House Fellow position. The post paid for my university housing, provided a food stipend, and also provided a nice paycheck for an out-of-state undergrad.

One of our principal responsibilities as House Fellows, according to our training (or as I called it the second time around - indoctrination) and official handbook, was to "promote an inclusive community" among the students living in the residence halls. I witnessed the ugly reality of that phrase throughout much of my junior year in 2001.

It turns out an "inclusive community" is exclusively one that supports and promotes a homosexual lifestyle. One afternoon after class I checked my House Fellow mail. Upon walking into the office, I immediately noticed what appeared to be a campaign button in my mailbox. There were actually two buttons - one with a rainbow on it, the other black with a pink triangle on it - both promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) activities and lifestyle.

I was informed by an accompanying letter that I was supposed to display these buttons prominently, either on my person, on my hall door, or on my backpack. I noticed that my immediate supervisor (or "Residence Life Coordinator") was in her office, so I asked her simply "do we have to wear these, are we required to wear these?" She responded no, but that we would have to talk about why at a later time. In her plain view, I put the buttons back in the bag that had at least 25 others in it and walked out of the office.

To make a long story short, that decision quickly made the rest of my year a personal living hell. I eventually filed a discrimination complaint against a female co-worker (who happened to live directly above me in our dorm), citing her private and public displays of making me feel uncomfortable due to my race (Caucasian), gender (male), sexual orientation (heterosexual), religion (Roman Catholic), as well as political affiliation (conservative Republican).

Turns out that she was in the office with my supervisor when I asked about the buttons, and she took offense to my (in)action. Residence hall leaders surprisingly took my complaint seriously enough to hold a series of small, closed door meetings. The meetings got quite uncomfortable, as my co-worker submitted testimony that I later found out she gained by listening through the floor vents of her room. She found instances of my disciplining my own residents to be "disturbing displays of domineering, masculine power."

One incident occurred about 3:30am on a Thursday morning, a couple of my male residents were screaming drunk down the hall after returning from a night on the town. In response I just opened my door and stood there in my boxer shorts and muscle t-shirt. I said nothing, only stood there. They looked at my face and my bed hair, immediately apologized, and went to their room. We spoke the next morning on the incident when I returned from lecture, and they apologized again. I commented in my testimony that I thought it was a sign of "powerful mutual respect" that I had built with my residences. It seems all my co-worker caught was the "powerful" part and took it from there.

That whole year I prayed a lot, and thank God I got through it. There were moments, though, when I actually called home to Pennsylvania fearful that I would lose my job. I kept my mouth shut about the situation around my non-House Fellow friends because most of them lived in the dorms. I could not tell my girlfriend anything, because she, too, lived in the same dorms that I did. My House Fellows, friends I worked with, confided in me that I was right, but they did not feel comfortable sticking their necks out like they thought I was.

The co-worker was politely asked to leave at the end of the year. I got transferred to another building with increased responsibilities, meaning instead of 50 residents the following year I had over 100 and the second largest student/House Fellow ratio on campus. By luck my immediate supervisor was moving to another residence hall location on campus.

I found over the deliberations, however, I had "gained a name" for myself among the residence hall leadership. One administrator in particular later made it his mission to provoke me into a fire-able offense. After letting a trouble-making resident of mine off the hook for "only smoking marijuana," he admonished me for disciplining my residents according to "my conservative beliefs." He informed me that I "should have been doing better things like busting people for drinking" rather than "imposing my values" on my resident.

After informing him that marijuana possession is not just against housing regulations but also federal law, I asked him to explain to me what he meant by "conservative beliefs." Turns out that as an openly-gay activist, he considered conservatives hateful homophobes. I immediately informed him that my own beliefs did not reflect that characteristic, citing John Paul II "condemn the sin, not the sinner." I then went on for the next five minutes outlining my personal worldview, supporting it with the words of such notables as Ronald Reagan, C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, even G.K. Chesterton (although I doubted he ever heard of him).

I noticed that he increasingly blanched throughout, then turned very red in anger. He told me that the meeting was over. I ended the meeting by telling him that I guess I was not what he defined as his average "token conservative."

When I first read my friend's story it occurred to me that if conservatives choose to attend a school like the University of Wisconsin they better either keep their mouth shut or have a parent who's a lawyer. I thought at the time that it was deeply distressing that the very institutions which are supposed to be temples of free speech and independent thinking are actually training grounds for censorship and petty tyranny. I wondered what kind of nation our children will inherit if people like some of those with whom my friend had to deal were ever to ascend in large numbers to positions of political leadership?

Lo and behold, fourteen years later many of them have. You can read about some of the more odious examples at the links.

All for Show

Jonah Goldberg is, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining political writers on the current scene. He's very bright and witty, has a phenomenal memory for cultural allusions, and is politically conservative. In his most recent column he explains in his inimitable way why Donald Trump supporters are making an understandable, but nevertheless grave, mistake.

He starts off the piece with a humorous riff on various issues that may at first glance seem tangential to why conservative support for Trump is misplaced:

There have been times in the past when I’ve gotten crosswise with certain segments of the conservative base and/or with the readership of National Review. And, because, like the Elephant Man, I am a not an animal but a human being, I have always had at least some self-doubt. That’s as it should be. People who share principles should not only hear each other out when they disagree; they should be able to see each other’s points and hold open the possibility that one’s opponents have the better argument.

This is not one of those times, at least not for me.

I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.

Anger Is Not an Argument

Now, before I go on, let me clarify a few things. I get it. The base of the party is angry. They’re angry about Obama’s lawless chicanery on immigration. They’re angry about the GOP’s patented inability to cross the street without stepping on its own d*ck and then having to apologize for it. They’re angry that the Left’s culture warriors are behaving like an invading army that shoots the survivors even after they’ve surrendered. They’re angry that Republicans have to bend over backward so as not to offend anyone, while Democrats have free rein (and at times free reign) to do and to say as they please.

Enter Trump, stage left. He makes no apologies. He’s brash. I can understand why some see him as a breath of fresh air. If you want to give him credit for starting a worthwhile debate about sanctuary cities and illegal immigration, fine. I think that argument is way overdone, but certainly reasonable enough.

Maybe you just like him. On that, we can respectfully disagree, as there is no accounting for taste. Perhaps you just like his musk and the way it assaults your nostrils, which is fitting, given his line of cologne. Fine.

I, on the other hand, find him tedious, tacky, and trite. He’s a bore who overcompensates for his insecurities by talking about how awesome he is, often in the third person. Jonah can’t stand that.

You see the next Teddy Roosevelt and all I see is someone who talks big and carries a small schtick.

‘Sup Britches?

In words George Will shall never write, this is a good moment to talk about my pants. Earlier this week, Donald Trump attacked Charles Krauthammer and me. By the way, I don’t blame Trump one bit for his hostility. I’d hate me too, if I were him. Still I do marvel at how this supposed Master of the Universe can be unnerved by such criticism. If it takes so little effort for me to set up shop in his head, by all means, let’s give him thermonuclear weapons.

Anyway, when asked about me, he said:

I’m worth a fortune….I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand….Then I get called [a failure] by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?

As the intern said to Bill Clinton, this puts me in a weird position. I don’t like to brag, but I’m actually quite adept at buying pants. I don’t enjoy it. But I can do it. It never occurred to me to put it in my bio or anything — “Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a successful pants-buyer” — but maybe I should.

Now, I will say that I sometimes choose not to wear pants, and not just because I’m so fond of my spaghetti-strainer codpiece (which affords me the satisfaction of telling really attractive women, “Hey, my eyes are up here. Thank you very much.”) But these are my choices. If I want to identify as a pantless American, who are you to say otherwise?

More to the point, what I find so gaudy about Trump is his constant reference to the fact that he made a lot of money, and his expectation that it somehow makes him immune to criticism or means that he’s a better person than his GOP competitors, never mind yours truly.

Following this excursis Golberg lays out the reasons for thinking that Trump is in fact a progressive masquerading as a conservative. It's well-worth reading, especially if you're attracted to Trump because you find some of his rhetoric refreshingly un-PC. If Goldberg is right, the rhetoric is all for show. It's not what he truly believes. Read it and in between laughs decide for yourself.

Information Degradation

One reason for the growing persuasiveness of arguments for an intelligent architect behind the structure of the universe and of life is that modern technology affords some very helpful analogies to design arguments. For example, living organisms are coded for by information systems - including, but not limited to, the DNA/RNA complex - which in many respects are similar to computer software programs. This creates difficult conceptual problems for naturalists since the principle that like effects can be assumed to have like causes leads to the conclusion that information, which is always in our experience the product of intelligent agency, points to an intelligent provenance.

Another difficulty biological information poses for naturalism is the problem of information degradation. In an article at Evolution News and Views Dr. Kirk Durston, who holds advanced degrees in biophysics and philosophy explains how this phenomenon militates against any naturalistic view of life's origin. Here's the centerpiece of his argument:

In the neo-Darwinian scenario for the origin and diversity of life, the digital functional information for life would have had to begin at zero, increase over time to eventually encode the first simple life form, and continue to increase via natural processes to encode the digital information for the full diversity of life.

An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase over time.

Interestingly, a prediction of intelligent design science is quite the opposite. Since information always degrades over time for any storage media and replication system, intelligent design science postulates that the digital information of life was initially downloaded into the genomes of life. It predicts that, on average, genetic information is steadily being corrupted by natural processes. The beauty of these two mutually incompatible predictions in science is that the falsification of one entails verification of the other. So which prediction does science falsify, and which does science verify?

Ask computer programmers what effect ongoing random changes in the code would have on the integrity of a program, and they will universally agree that it degrades the software. This is the first problem for neo-Darwinian theory. Mutations produce random changes in the digital information of life. It is generally agreed that the rate of deleterious mutations is much greater than the rate of beneficial mutations. My own work with 35 protein families suggests that the rate of destruction is, at minimum, 8 times the rate of neutral or beneficial mutations.

Simply put, the digital information of life is being destroyed much faster than it can be repaired or improved. New functions may evolve, but the overall loss of functional information in other areas of the genome will, on average, be significantly greater. The net result is that the digital information of life is running down.

Durston goes on to cite research showing that the information for both bacteria and humans, so far from increasing as would be expected on Darwinian principles, is actually decreasing. He closes with this:

We continue to discover more examples of DNA loss, suggesting that the biological world is slowly running down. Microevolution is good at fine-tuning existing forms within their information limits and occasionally getting something right, but the steady accumulation of deleterious mutations on the larger scale suggests that mutation-driven evolution is actually destroying biological life, not creating it.

This is hardly a surprise, as every other area of science, except for evolutionary biology, grants that natural processes degrade information, regardless of the storage media and copying process. For neo-Darwinian macroevolution to work, it requires something that is in flat-out contradiction to the real world.

The naturalistic evolutionist may be able to come up with ad hoc answers to these apparent falsifications of their theory, of course, but the problem is that informational degradation is a direct prediction of almost any intelligent design theory, especially those that involve "front-loading," but is contrary to what one would expect on the basis of Darwinian naturalism.

This result is reminiscent of the finding that much of what's been labelled as "junk" DNA clogging up the nucleus actually turns out to have a function in the living cell as predicted by ID theorists and formerly scoffed at by Darwinians. It's fascinating that where the two theories generate opposite predictions which can then be tested ID's predictions keep being confirmed.

So Is Trump Wrong?

Set aside for the moment your personal feelings about Donald Trump and/or the party whose nomination for the presidency he seeks. Set aside any squeamishness you might have at hearing something said that may sound even faintly un-PC. Set aside for a moment, too, Mr. Trump's inartful imprecision and, like Supreme Court Justices contemplating Obamacare, consider just what he meant to say and not what he actually did say. Then reflect objectively on this question: In what sense is the following Trump statement wrong:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

His comment and subsquent follow-ups have created a media feeding frenzy as well as difficulties for other GOP candidates who want to talk about almost anything other than Donald Trump and immigration. One of the problems Trump has created for the GOP is that voters who have yearned for someone in politics to say unapologetically, without deferential genuflections to political correctness, exactly what they mean are giving Trump a second look, and he's sucking all the media attention away from everyone else (Not that Hillary minds not having any media attention on her, though).

So, the question is in what extent, if any, was Trump right? Breitbart has done some homework and here's what they've turned up

While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

One GOP aide expressed shock at the numbers, emailing Breitbart News, “These statistics blew me away, and they blow a hole through the oft-repeated line that people only want to come to America to work. It’s tragic so few politicians are willing even to acknowledge the true extent of this problem, but until more do, more Americans will keep getting harmed.”

The USSC data only deals with federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA) and does not include other categories like state cases, death penalty cases, or “cases initiated but for which no convictions were obtained, offenders convicted for whom no sentences were yet issued, and offenders sentenced but for whom no sentencing documents were submitted to the Commission.”

The data does include immigration violations, of which illegal immigrants represented by far the greatest number of cases: 91.6 percent, or (20,333 cases), out of a total 22,204 cases.

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.2 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.

The Washington Post, citing data from 2010, protests that the vast majority of illegals are not felons, but I'm not sure how to interpret that. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but there are an awful lot who are.

In any case, every one of those crimes committed by an illegal alien, particularly those having been deported multiple times and harbored in "sanctuary cities," every one of the murders committed by an illegal alien and the heartbreak and grief suffered by the victim's families at the loss of their loved one, is on the hands of those politicians, including most prominently the President of the United States, who refuse to enforce our border and immigration laws.

Why Greece Is in Trouble

Jim Geraghty explains at NRO one reason why Greece is in default and why so many in the Eurozone have very little sympathy for their plight. Greece is a vivid illustration of Margaret Thatcher's famous aphorism that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. Greece has tried to create a socialist paradise, but has instead shown that there probably is no such thing. Here's Geraghty:

This may seem harsh to the Greeks. But they willingly and knowingly tried to build a society where everyone was allowed to retire early – really early:

Early: “Trombone players and pastry chefs get to retire as early as 50 on grounds their work causes them late-career breathing problems. Hairdressers enjoy the same perk thanks to the dyes and other chemicals they rub into people's hair. Then there are masseurs at steam baths: They get an early out because prolonged exposure to all that heat and steam is deemed unhealthy.”

Really Early: “The Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men… The law includes dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers radio and television presenters, who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones.”

Really, really early: “In the public sector, 7.91 percent of pensioners retire between the ages of 26 and 50, 23.64 percent between 51 and 55, and 43.53 percent between 56 and 61.”

Each of these assertions is linked to the original source in Geraghty's article. It's interesting that one of the reasons states like California and Illinois have experienced fiscal difficulties and may continue to do so is that their public employees have been given six figure pensions at tax-payer expense. After a while the number of retirees pulling down these benefits grows to the point where it's simply unsustainable.

Nevertheless, states managed by liberal Democrats refuse to halt the gravy train. As you read this, for example, the Pennsylvania legislature is trying to reform the state's pension system but the governor, a progressive Democrat and therefore beholden to the public employees unions, refuses to go along with any reforms. I hope he's watching the goings on in Greece.

This graphic shows the fiscal health of each state in the U.S.:

Why is it that most of the states in greatest difficulty are "blue" states, i.e. they consistently vote Democratic in presidential elections? Why is it that most of the nation's cities that are in the gravest condition, both economically and socially, are cities run by Democrats? Why is it that so many Americans don't seem to care much about these "coincidences"?

Culture War 4.0

There's an excellent essay at The Federalist on the current state of the struggle on the part of progressives to "fundamentally transform" the culture and on the part of conservatives to try to preserve some vestiges of what it once was. Benjamin Domenech and Robert Tracinski offer an optimistic view of what they call the "culture war" and suggest that the pendulum of popular opinion is even now swinging back toward the side of sanity.

Well, perhaps. Here's their lede:

For those Americans who hoped the culture wars would finally end, the month of June reminded us they’re just getting started. Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage—the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists—some were already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs.

We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides, and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe.

On college campuses and in the workplace, across mass media and social media, for American celebrities and private citizens, every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs. It is now an unavoidable fact of life that giving money to the wrong cause, making a “clumsy attempt at humor,” or taking the wrong side on a celebrity, religious debate, or magazine cover can lead to threats of violent death, end your career in an instant, or make you the most hated person in America for 15 minutes—longer if you bungle the apology.

Whether you care about the culture war or not, it cares about you. How did we get here?

What follows is a brief history of the various stages of the "culture war" over the last fifty years. It makes for very interesting reading, and for those who find the current state of affairs alarming, it offers hope that things will not remain as they are.

The piece concludes with the claim that having gone through three iterations of kulturekampf we are now entering culture war version 4.0 which augurs to be the most "bloody":

History teaches us two clear lessons about the ebb and flow of the Culture War: first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public. The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars — whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.

Notice how a triumphalist Left can go from reasonable to totalitarian in what seems like five minutes. Should we take down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse? You will get a lot of Republicans to agree, including Gov. Nikki Haley. So the Left immediately demands that every last vestige of the Confederacy be wiped from history, from public sculptures to “Gone With the Wind” to educational Civil War games in iTunes. From now on, apparently, only re-educational games will be permitted. Or the Supreme Court mandates gay marriage and #lovewins—followed by an immediate hatefest, with people spitting on priests and demanding we revoke the tax exemption for churches.

If history repeats itself, it is good news for traditional Americans and bad news for the Left, which has taken on the role of Grand Inquisitor so rapidly that overnight civil liberties have become a Republican issue. Slowly but surely, the American Right is adopting the role of the cultural insurgent standing up for the freedom of the little guy. They crowdfund the pizza shop, baker, and photographer; they rebel against the establishment in the gaming media and at sci-fi conventions; they buy their chicken sandwiches in droves. The latest acronym that came out of the Sad Puppies movement says it all. They describe their opponents as CHORFs: cliquish, holier-than-thou, obnoxious, reactionary, fascists. This is their description of the cultural Left.

There is significant potential for a new, diverse coalition that responds to this overreach. The religious Right, libertarians, and even the moderate Left are already being drawn together by their refusal to be cowed into conformity by social justice warriors. The comedians who rebel against an audience that calls every joke racist or sexist, the professors who refuse to be cowed by the threat of Title IX lawsuits, the religious believers who fight for their right to practice their beliefs outside the pew represent a coalition that will reject the neo-Puritanism of the Counterculture, rebel against its speech codes and safe spaces, and reassert the right to speak one’s mind in the public square. Atheists and believers alike can unite in this belief—as we, the authors of this piece, have.

The authors have much more to say that's worth reading, and I commend the entire article to you. I have just a couple of thoughts. As I wrote to the friend who sent me this column I hope Domenech and Tracinski are right, but I wonder if the inertia of the left, the institutional resources at their disposal, and the low state of public character and awareness make it a bit difficult to be optimistic. Even if the left's hostility and aggressiveness were to become unpopular and subside for a while, the proper metaphor for our circumstance is not the pendulum but the ratchet. Every success by the left becomes permanent. There's no undoing it. So even if the next battle is deferred until a decade down the road traditionalists keep losing ground which they never get back and the turf they seek to defend keeps shrinking. We've gone from being a shining city on a hill to being Sodom and Gomorrah in the brief span of two generations.

In any case, I really don't like the term "culture war." It creates the misleading image of two sides locked in mortal conflict when in fact only one side is really waging war. The other side is simply trying to get the leftist aggressors to stop their assault on the traditions and institutions of this country.

What's actually happening is more like serial arson than warfare. The arsonist goes from institution to institution trying to burn them down, and conservatives are like people running out of the buildings shouting at them to put down their torches and gasoline cans and stop what they're doing. The left is lighting the fires and the right is running around with water buckets trying to put them out and this is called a "war"?

Perhaps, if ever the right produces leaders who refuse to be content to fight rear-guard battles, who refuse to accept the status quo established at every turn of the ratchet, who set about educating the American people about the need to actually reverse course, and who have the courage to lead the way, perhaps then there'll be a genuine "clash" of visions of what the culture should be, but to call what has been going on for the last fifty years or so a "culture war" is, in my view, to misunderstand the nature of what's been happening.

About Time

Augustine wrote in his Confessions that as long as no one asked him, he knew perfectly well what time is, but as soon as someone asked him to explain it, he hadn't the faintest idea. I sympathize. Time is a very puzzling thing. Not only is its exact nature an enigma so is the question of the difference between time itself and our measures of time. It's hard to think of time apart from some measurement of it yet it makes sense to ask what it is that we're measuring when we measure time.

In any case, Buzzfeed lists 17 interesting facts about time that perhaps you didn't know. Here are a few of them:

1. A second isn’t what you think it is. Scientifically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “ the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom”.
2. When the dinosaurs were alive, there were 370 days in a year. The Earth’s spin is getting slower because the moon’s gravity is acting as a drag, so days are getting longer, by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.
3. The smallest standard scientific measure of time is the “ Planck time”. It takes you about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion trillion trillion Planck times to blink once, quickly.
4. There’s no such thing as “now” as far as physics is concerned. Space and time are fluid, affected by gravity and your speed. Einstein put it like this: “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
5. Because light takes time to reach us, everything we see is in the past. The sun you can see out of the window is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 years old.
6. New experiences really do seem to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It’s called the “ oddball effect”, and it seems to be why time feels like it’s going faster as you get older – because more stuff is familiar to you.
7. Time passes slower the faster you move. If you flew to the star Sirius at 99% of the speed of light, then flew back again, the people you left behind on Earth would have aged more than 17 years. But you would have aged less than two and a half years.

Philosophers have two different views about what time is like. One theory is called the dynamic view of time. This says that the only existing time is the present moment. The past is gone and the future is not yet. This is the common sense view.

The other theory, the static time theory, holds, like point #4 above says, that all moments of time - past, present, and future - exist simultaneously and that the temporal flow of time is an illusion of our consciousness. Imagine the frames of a movie on a reel of film or the same movie stamped onto a DVD. Every event exists simultaneously with every other event, but our minds experience those events serially.

One of the great questions in cosmology today is whether time had a beginning. On the dynamic theory it seems that it would have, on the static theory perhaps not.

Whatever the case, it is true that, as many scientists and philosophers have noted, the nature of time is one of the universe's greatest mysteries.

America the Beautiful

Here's the Hillsdale College Choir to help make your Fourth of July more meaningful. Given the events in Washington of the last fortnight the lyrics of the second stanza are especially moving:

If you get a chance today, explain to someone why we celebrate on July 4th. Many Americans, particularly younger Americans, have no idea.

Dred Scott Redux

Yesterday's post focussed on Rod Dreher's Benedict Option for conservative Christians whom Dreher, in the wake of the Obergefell decision (inter alia), predicts will soon become exiles, perhaps persecuted exiles, in their own land. On the other hand, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton Robert George, is not yet ready to capitulate to the Zeitgeist. In a symposium at First Things sparked by the Obergefell decision George writes:

How shall we respond to a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court by the barest of majorities usurps authority vested by the Constitution in the people and their elected representatives? By letting Abraham Lincoln be our guide. Faced with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln declared the ruling to be illegitimate and vowed that he would treat it as such. He squarely faced Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s claim to judicial supremacy and firmly rejected it. To accept it, he said, would be for the American people “to resign their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Today we are faced with the same challenge. Like the Great Emancipator, we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation. We must, above all, tell the truth: Obergefell v. Hodges is an illegitimate decision. What Stanford Law School Dean John Ely said of Roe v. Wade applies with equal force to Obergefell: “It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” What Justice Byron White said of Roe is also true of Obergefell: It is an act of “raw judicial power.”

The lawlessness of these decisions is evident in the fact that they lack any foundation or warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution. The justices responsible for these rulings, whatever their good intentions, are substituting their own views of morality and sound public policy for those of the people and their elected representatives. They have set themselves up as superlegislators possessing a kind of plenary power to impose their judgments on the nation. What could be more unconstitutional—more anti-constitutional—than that?

Be that as it may, there are few politicians of the stature of Lincoln roaming Washington in our day. Republican legislators feel helpless to prevent the Supreme Court from usurping the role of the legislature as long as the Democrats actively support the usurpation, and they do. The only way Democrats can impose their agenda upon the nation is by doing an end-run around the people and getting it passed through the courts, so that's been their tactic for the last half-century or more. As long as the American people continue to vote into office people who hold Constitutional principle in low esteem, or waste their vote on marginal third-party candidates, it's hard to see how there can be a political solution to the problem.

George concludes:

The rule of law is not the rule of lawyers — even lawyers who are judges. Supreme Court justices are not infallible, nor are they immune from the all-too-human temptation to unlawfully seize power that has not been granted to them. Decisions such as Dred Scott, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell amply demonstrate that. In thinking about how to respond to Obergefell, we must bear in mind that it is not only the institution of marriage that is at stake here — it is also the principle of self-government. And so we must make clear to those candidates for high offices who are seeking our votes, that our willingness to support them depends on their willingness to stand, as Abraham Lincoln stood, for the Constitution, and therefore against judicial decisions—about marriage or anything else—that threaten to place us, to quote Jefferson, “under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

Unfortunately, a "despotism of an oligarchy" is precisely what at least half of the people who take the trouble to vote apparently want. The task ahead is to re-instill in the American soul a love of freedom, and that's a task that, if it succeeds at all, will take generations to accomplish. Have a happy Independence Day.

The Benedict Option

The Obergefell ruling by a 5-4 Supreme Court has a lot of conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, wondering what can be done to rescue a culture that seems determined to cut itself loose from every philosophical and theological anchor and become completely unmoored. Some think that, short of miraculous intervention, there's nothing that can be done to reverse what has transitioned from a drift in the direction of sexual antinomianism to a headlong rush toward its total embrace. Others think that resistance is possible. An example of the former is journalist Rod Dreher, who advocates what he calls the Benedict Option. An example of the latter is Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton.

This post features a recent column by Dreher and will be followed tomorrow by a look at what George has to say. Both men offer some very provocative thoughts on how to respond to the current state of our cultural collapse.

Here's Dreher:

No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically. It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.

I think he's right about that last sentence. Placing our hope in politicians of either party seems futile at this point. Few Republican presidential candidates and legislative leaders seem inclined to do much to stem the current collapse, and most Democrats are actually cheering it on.

Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America. The alarm that the four dissenting justices sounded in their minority opinions is chilling. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia were particularly scathing in pointing out the philosophical and historical groundlessness of the majority’s opinion. Justice Scalia even called the decision “a threat to democracy,” and denounced it, shockingly, in the language of revolution.

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

I'm not a Supreme Court historian, but I can't remember language like this ever being used by the minority to describe a majority SCOTUS ruling. If these Justices are correct, and I fear they are, where do we go from here? Dreher says that first we have to recognize three relatively new realities:

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

The culture, though perhaps still nominally Christian, is in fact neo-pagan. That is, it has adopted for all practical purposes an unreflective pagan morality of "to each his own" without really thinking hard about the consequences of that principle.

For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8.

The concern is this: It's no longer a matter of being asked to simply tolerate lifestyle choices one disagrees with. It's that disagreement is now deemed bigotry and will soon be regarded as hate speech. Those who dissent can expect to be the target of vicious verbal attacks and economic punishments. The LGBT community, or at least the more virulent members of it, will demand complete acquiescence and acceptance and they'll be abetted in this effort by compliant judges.

Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it. This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage, or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage inevitably loses its power.

Long time readers will recall that we've been making the argument here for over ten years that if the gender of the people in a union no longer matters there's no non-arbitrary basis for insisting that the number of people in the union matters. The door is now wide open for the legalization of any arrangement any group of people wishes to call marriage and is willing to push through the courts. If five men, or five women, or three men and one woman wish to call their relationship a marriage, there's no longer any rationale for denying them the right to do so. This, of course, means that marriage is no longer a meaningful institution.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today. One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities.

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option [after] Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray.... Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization. I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

Dreher is suggesting a kind of retreat into a pseudo-monasticism to preserve the flame of a Christian heritage that the mindless, hedonistic neo-paganism of the last three decades is trying so hard to extinguish.

He might be right that the situation really is that dire, but perhaps not. Tomorrow we'll look at a different proposal from Robert George.

Plan B

Politico has an interesting piece on the military options available should the nuclear talks with Iran break down completely. You'll have to pardon my cynicism but a) I'm inclined to think that the Politico story was encouraged by the White House in order to try to scare the Iranians into not demanding our complete and utter capitulation to their demands, b ) I don't see this president allowing those talks to fail even if it means ceding to Iran everything between D.C. and Los Angeles, and c) I can't imagine him resorting to these options if those talks do fail.

In any case, here are some of the salient points of the article:

President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran may yet fail. On Tuesday, exactly one week before a June 30 deadline for an agreement, Iran’s Supreme Leader delivered his latest in a series of defiant statements, setting conditions for a deal—including immediate relief from sanctions, before Iran has taken steps to limit its nuclear program—that Obama will never accept. Secretary of State John Kerry warned last week that the U.S. is prepared to walk away from the talks. And even if a deal is reached, the story is not over. The Iranians may break or cheat on an agreement, and try build a nuclear weapon anyway.

That’s why, at least three times in the past year, a B-2 stealth bomber has taken off from an Air Force base in Missouri and headed west to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. For these missions, the $2 billion plane was outfitted with one of the world’s largest bombs. It is a cylinder of special high-performance steel, 20 feet long and weighing 15 tons. When dropped from an altitude likely above 20,000 feet, the bomb would have approached supersonic speed before striking a mock target in the desert, smashing through rock and burrowing deep into the ground before its 6,000 pounds of high explosives detonated with devastating force.

“It boggles the mind,” says one former Pentagon official who has watched video of the tests.

Those flights were, in effect, trial runs for the attack on Iran that President Barack Obama, or his successor, may order if diplomacy can’t prevent Iran from trying to build a nuclear weapon. Think of it as Plan B for Iran. The failure of diplomacy might lead the U.S. to turn to a weapon finally ready for real-world action after years of design and testing. The so-called “Massive Ordnance Penetrator,” or MOP, represents decades of military research, dramatically accelerated in recent years, focused on the problem of destroying targets buried deep underground.

                                 Massive Ordnance Penetrator

I've stated on numerous occasions on Viewpoint and elsewhere that I believe an attack on Iran would be the second most calamitous course the United States could pursue. The only thing worse would be to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. An attack on Iran may be the prelude to Armageddon. Allowing them to have nuclear devices almost surely will be. It would almost certainly precipitate an arms race in the Middle East and almost certainly result in a nuclear attack on Israel. After a lot of interesting discussion of the development of MOP the Politico article continues:

Imagine that the nuclear talks do collapse. Iran’s Supreme Leader insists that outsiders will never be allowed onto Iranian military bases to conduct spot inspections. John Kerry throws up his hands and flies back to Washington. President Obama issues a grave statement expressing his hope that peace is still possible. Perhaps Iran then begins accelerating its uranium enrichment at Fordow and Natanz, and intelligence reports suggest that Tehran has decided to try and build a bomb faster than the world can mobilize to prevent it. Or perhaps Obama is succeeded in 2017 by a Republican hawk who decides it's time to end the uncertainty about Iran’s program once and for all....

If the order came from the White House, it would most likely summon Whiteman Air Force Base to action. Crews there would load the internal weapons bays of several B-2 bombers with MOPs. The giant stealth planes would then depart for their nearly 7,000-mile flight to mountainous western Iran. By the time the planes actually took off, the mission would likely be old hat to the pilots: A massive flight simulator at Whiteman includes a full-size replica of a B-2 cockpit mounted on hydraulics to mimic flight motion. Its realistic wraparound cockpit computer screen can be preloaded with highly detailed graphics showing the topography and target areas the flight crew would see during the flight, allowing them to practice the bomb run—or even the entire flight—under different weather conditions or times of day.

Once over Fordow at an altitude of 20,000 feet or more, the bombers would release their massive payload. As the enormous bombs fell, they would accelerate to phenomenal speeds of perhaps 700 miles per hour or more. Guided by satellite positioning, flexible tailfins would steer the MOP to a very precise impact point likely identified by the UFAC. The bomb would strike the rock with the tip of its sharply pointed nose. Its supremely reinforced casing would protect the fuse and explosives inside from the initial impact. In effect, a 15-ton, 20-foot nail would pound into the earth at the speed of sound.

Violent as that impact may be, it would hardly be enough to get the job done. The goal is for the MOP to drill dozens or even hundreds of feet through rock before exploding. That is made possible by smart fuses, whose blasts are triggered not by impact but by conditions like time, depth, or the presence of a void indicating that the bomb has broken through an interior ceiling.

Fordow is buried deep enough that a single MOP probably would not penetrate to the centrifuge hall deep inside. That’s why several bombers would likely drop their ordnance in succession, gradually smashing a tunnel of devastation towards mountain’s soft interior. GPS precision would enable several MOPS to be landed on virtually the exact same spot in rapid succession: the most powerful jackhammer in history. “You create a hole and then you drop another one down the hole,” says Long. Ideally, one of the MOPs would break through to the centrifuge hall and completely destroy it. But even short of a bulls-eye, multiple concussions could damage the delicate centrifuge cascades, or even collapse the interior chamber. “Several hitting in the same spot could probably defeat the facility,” Long says.

Let's hope (and pray) this scenario never comes to pass, but let's also hope that if it's the only way to prevent Iran from achieving its ambition to develop nuclear weapons that whoever is the president will have the courage to do what's necessary to prevent what would surely be the first step to nuclear holocaust.