Radical Reversal

Yesterday I said that perhaps after the Orlando massacre of gays the LGBT community might rethink their support of the Obama administration's policy of bringing in masses of Muslim refugees with little or no screening. First indications are that I was probably too optimistic. Prominent activists in the LGBT community have been busy blaming American imperialism, conservatives, the NRA, Donald Trump, and even, in a remarkable feat of rhetorical contortionism, Christians - everything and everyone but a religious ideology that holds not just that homosexuality is a sin, but that it's a sin deserving of death. And not just execution but execution carried out in the most horrifying manner available to the executioner.

Not all gays are so purblind to reality, however. One anonymous individual, if indeed this isn't spurious, claims to be a gay activist, a progressive leftist who voted for Hillary in the primary, but in the aftermath of Orlando, is convinced that that was a mistake. Given the virulence of the homophobia among Islamists, the writer claims, Trump is the only responsible choice for gays: He (or she) writes:

[W]e progressives here in America still labor under the delusion that the religion we need to combat is Christianity. But that's a strawman opponent, and has been so for decades. Since the 1990s, Christian extremists have essentially lost all their power, and are now toothless nonplayers in the "culture wars." Meanwhile, Muslim extremists, with guns, murder us, and on the left our only response is to bleat about "Islamophobia" and jump through hoops trying to explain away the self-evident religious motivation for the killings.

Oh sure, all year I've been playing the "Bernie or Hillary?" game with all the other default-Democrats in my social and professional circles. But this is no longer some kind of game. Our lives are on the line. Although I voted for Hillary in the primary, I now cringe inwardly with shame and embarrassment at having done so, and in November I will vote for Trump.

Why? Yes, I know that Trump is an a**hole, Trump is a clown, Trump is a motormouth buffoon. You don't have to convince me of that. But he's also the only person saying anything about putting the brakes on Islamic extremism, and in light of what happened last night in Orlando, suddenly that is the only issue that really matters when it comes to the health, well-being and safety of the queer community.

As an aside, Trump has never said anything homophobic, and has always gotten along well with the gay community in New York, so there's that in his favor as well.

I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays. Every pundit and politician -- and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV -- who today have said "We don't know what the shooter's motivation could possibly be!" have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team.

I'm just sick of it. Sick of the hypocrisy. Sick of the pandering. Sick of the deception.

Indeed, so are many others, but there's more reason to be sickened with which this writer, having been himself/herself guilty of in the past, is quite familiar:

And you know what makes me angrier still? The fact that I have to hide my identity and remain anonymous in writing this essay. If I outed myself as a Trump supporter, I would be harassed and doxxed and shunned by everyone I know and by the Twitter lynch mobs which up until yesterday I myself led.

I am ashamed. I am angry. And I am sad. I don't want to vote for Trump, but I must. And if you care about the safety of the gay community in America, so must you.

Why Are We Doing This?

In the wake of the horrific murders of over fifty homosexuals at a gay club in Orlando, a crime perpetrated by Omar Mateen, the Muslim son of Afghan immigrants, Americans need to ask themselves why we are bringing into this country millions of people who hold as a matter of course the view that gays must be killed.

Coincidentally, perhaps, an Iranian Imam recently gave a talk at an Orlando Mosque in which he stated flatly that gays must be killed and that doing so is an act of compassion:

This is a requirement enjoined by Islamic law, i.e. sharia. An article in Breitbart points out that nearly 30,000 Afghan migrants have been permanently resettled in the U.S. and that nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) support sharia as official law.

The article goes on to say that,

As legal immigrants, these migrants will be granted lifetime resettlement privileges, will be given automatic work permits, welfare access, and the ability to become voting citizens.

Between 2001 and 2013, the United States permanently resettled 1.5 million Muslim immigrants throughout the United States.

In the next five years, without changes to our autopilot visa dispensations, the U.S. will permanently resettle a Muslim population larger than the entire population of Washington D.C.

Hillary Clinton has made clear that under a Clinton Presidency, these numbers will grow substantially higher. Based on the minimum numbers Clinton has put forth thus far, the U.S. will resettle 730,000 permanent migrants from the Muslim world during her first term alone.

Perhaps after this most recent act of savagery the gay community, which has a lot of influence in the Democrat party, will demand that the rush to fill North America with people who want to kill gays be reconsidered.

Perhaps, too, people on the left will now start to wonder what the Obama administration's rationale for the massive influx of Muslim immigrants might be.

As I asked in a previous post, what's the difference between the views of the average Muslim who supports sharia and the average Klansman or white supremacist? Would this administration be as eager to import several million deeply committed white supremacists into the country? Is there no way we can help refugees and others who wish to leave the hellish abattoirs their co-religionists have created in the Middle East without bringing them here?

Gay young men about to be hanged for violating sharia in Iran

Some think that a compassionate nation must perforce open its doors to these wretched people, but if there are unfortunates in your neighborhood who need relief is the only compassionate way to render them aid to bring them into your home? Would you permanently subject your family to people who hated you for your convictions about freedom and equality, who were prone to sexually abuse boys (as Afghans are), who thought your daughters were second class citizens, and who thought you should be required to pay them a tax (jizya)?

We must, to the extent that we can reasonably do so, come to the aid of those who suffer, but helping people in distress does not require of us that we be willing to commit national suicide or to sacrifice the lives and well-being of our sons and daughters on the altar of a distorted notion of compassion.

Some Reasons Why Atheism Is Philosophically Untenable

At Uncommon Descent William J. Murray lists ten reasons why atheists are "delusional." I'd prefer the word "inconsistent, or perhaps "irrational," but nevertheless, his ten points make for a compelling case that whichever descriptor one chooses, atheism is intellectually untenable and very difficult, if not impossible, to live out in consistent fashion.

Here are the first four of Murray's ten reasons in italics with my comments added:

1. They [atheistic materialists or naturalists] dismiss morality as nothing more than strongly felt subjective preference, but admit they act as if morality is objective in nature. They tacitly act as if morality is objective, for instance, every time they make a moral judgment of someone else's behavior.

2. They speak, act and hold others responsible for their behaviors as if we all have some metaphysical capacity to transcend and override the deterministic effects of our body’s physical state and causative processing (free will), yet they deny any such metaphysical capacity exists. In other words, if materialism is true there's scant grounds for believing in something like free will, yet every time someone uses the words "ought" or "should" in a moral sense they're implying that a person is free to have done other than what they did.

3. They deny truth can be determined subjectively while necessarily implying that their arguments and evidences are true and expecting others to subjectively determine that their arguments are true. If truth really is nothing more than a subjective preference then there's no point in an argument nor in stating any proposition with the expectation that anyone else should believe it.

4. They deny that what is intelligently designed can be reliably identified when virtually every moment of their waking existence requires precisely that capacity. Put differently, the extremely complex structures and information that must have existed in even the earliest cells they impute to chance but would never attribute to chance the ability to create the even more complex information contained in the operating systems on the computers they use every day.

Follow the link for the last six of Murray's reasons.

I said above that I prefer the word "irrational" because, as Murray points out with his ten reasons, naturalists can't live, or don't live, consistently with their fundamental assumption of atheism. To ignore the logic of one's fundamental assumption and to live as if its contrary were true, i.e. to live as if God exists while denying that he does, is a tacit admission that one's basic metaphysical assumptions are unlivable, if not incoherent.

Parenthetically, atheists of both a modern and postmodern predilection have an interesting relationship with reason. Modern man argues that reason is our most trustworthy guide to truth while the postmodern argues that reason is a failure as a guide to truth. Yet both must employ reason in order to make their respective cases. So, the modern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's trustworthy, which is surely question-begging, and the postmodern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's not trustworthy at all, which is surely self-refuting.

In neither case, can it be said that the modern or the postmodern is thinking rationally. We can have confidence that our reason generally leads us to truth, especially metaphysical truth, only on the assumption that God exists, is himself rational, and has created us in his image.

If we assume that God does not exist then we must conclude that our rational faculties are the product of processes which have produced those faculties to suit us for survival, not for the attainment of true beliefs, in which case there's no basis for thinking that they're trustworthy guides to truth. C.S. Lewis was one of the first to point this out as a trio of philosophers discuss in this video:

The same argument is an integral part of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism which he discusses in this video:

Major Democrat Implies Obama Unqualified for Presidency

Former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell declared Wednesday that Hillary Clinton should not pick Sen. Elizabeth Warren as her running mate, citing Warren’s lack of foreign policy experience as making her unsuitable for the office:

I know Secretary Clinton pretty well,” Rendell said on 1210 WPHT Philadelphia radio. “I’m not an insider in the campaign but I know her pretty well. I think she will not pick somebody that she feels in her heart isn’t ready to be president or commander-in-chief and I think Elizabeth Warren is a wonderful, bright, passionate person, but with no experience in foreign affairs and not in any way, shape, or form ready to be commander-in-chief.”

Rendell, the chairman of the Philadelphia Host Committee for the Democratic National Convention, later called the station back to clarify that he didn’t mean to single Warren out.

“I didn’t want it to leave it hanging out there about Elizabeth Warren,” he said. “Elizabeth Warren’s problem would be the same problem I’d have. Let’s assume someone said consider Governor Rendell for vice president. I have no experience militarily, no experience in foreign affairs, and would be a difficult choice because if anything happened in week one and I became president, I would be lost.”

Now Rendell was the mayor of a major city and the governor of a major state. If he would not have been qualified for the presidency what in the world qualified Barack Obama who had no foreign policy experience and no other governing or administrative experience to speak of besides a brief two year stint in the Senate? Indeed, Elizabeth Warren has more experience in Washington now than Barack Obama had when he was elected president in 2008.

Rendell's deprecation of Elizabeth Warren's qualifications for vice-president and his devaluation of his own qualifications to serve as president is, a forteriori, a clear acknowledgement that Barack Obama was not qualified to be president either.

On this, if not much else, a lot of conservative Americans would find themselves in hearty agreement with Mr. Rendell.

Life's Meaning (Pt. II)

This is the second of two posts on an article by former pastor and now atheist Ryan Bell on his claim that life can be meaningful without there being a God. In yesterday's post (scroll down to view) it was observed that not only do most theists disagree with him but so, too, do a lot of notable atheists. Today's post continues the discussion:

I have a friend who is a talented illustrator and also a high school biology teacher. He draws wonderful pictures with colored marker pens on his whiteboard - pictures of living creatures of all sorts that are so well drawn it can take your breath away to look at them. Then, when the lesson is over, he takes a rag and erases the board and it's as if those beautiful works of art were never there. On atheism death is like that rag. It's the big eraser that blots out all that we've done in this life and renders it all nugatory.

Bell, of course, doesn't see it that way:

Popular Christian theology, on the other hand, renders this life less meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now. Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn't matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day.

This is just incorrect. Christians are not apathetic about suffering. Indeed, Christians believe that there's meaning to suffering. Such a belief is alien to atheism, however, which sees suffering as the pointless consequence of living in a cold, impersonal world. Here's atheist biologist Richard Dawkins on the subject:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Bell continues:

It struck me this year that nihilism is a disease born of theism. Some people have been taught to expect meaning outside of this world beyond our earthly experiences. When they come upon the many absurdities of life and see that it's "not as advertised," an existential despair can take hold.

But if this is true why does that existential despair afflict atheists but not theists? Theists do not succumb to that despair because the absurdities of life, on theism, are the result of man's repudiation of God. Life is indeed absurd for the atheist. It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. But for the theist there's a theme to history, a denouement. God has a plan, the theist believes, and in the end all will be made clear, it will make sense. The atheist believes that there is no God and none of it makes sense:

• "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." – biologist Will Provine
• "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?" - Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy describing the thoughts that plagued him in his atheist years.

"The problem is not solved by inventing a God in which to place all our hopes," Bell adds, "but rather, to face life honestly and create beauty from the absurd."

The solution Bell urges upon us is to just make the best of an inexplicable existence and then die. This is a prescription for hopelessness in the face of the absurdity of life. One way to frame the absurdity is to understand Bell's advice as adjuring us to live as if God existed even though he doesn't.

He concludes with these thoughts:

Without dependency on a cosmic savior who is coming to rescue us, we are free to recognize that we are the ones we're waiting for. If we don't make the world a fair and habitable place, no one else is going to do it for us. Our lives matter because our choices affect others and our children's future.

Life does not need a divine source in order to be meaningful. Anyone who has seen a breathtaking sunset or fallen in love with another human being knows that we make meaning from the experiences of our lives; we construct it the way we construct any social narrative.

Free from false expectations we are free to create purpose, share love, and enjoy the endless beauty of our world. We are the fortunate ones. There is no need for fear to have the last word.

This is all difficult to understand. How does the fact that our choices affect others and our children's future make them meaningful in any but a trivial sense? They're no more meaningful than the decision by the band on the Titanic to keep playing while the ship sank.

Woody Allen was quoted in an article in Time magazine as he reflected on the question of the meaning of life:

"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker." If anything, there's something refreshing in [Allen's] resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself; it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption. "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."

Unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't really matter at all. If the existence of humanity has no meaning then it's hard to imagine how the existence of individual human persons can have meaning. As the novelist Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus an individual's] life has no meaning.

These are gloomy ruminations, but if atheism is true so are Maugham's words. The atheist can refuse to think about it or pretend that it's not so, but both alternatives seem to be examples of what Sartre calls bad faith. They're forms of self-deception. The thoughtful, honest atheist is in an awkward position since he really should be hoping with all his heart that he's wrong.

Life's Meaning (Pt. I)

Since ancient times philosophers, poets, and other thinkers have pondered the question of what purpose there is, if any, to human existence, what meaning there is to individual human lives.

Meaning is a difficult notion to define. We usually think of it as a purpose or significance that endures and gives us satisfaction. If that's a helpful description then perhaps we can think of meaning as either proximal or ultimate. Watching daytime television may provide the viewer with a temporary or proximal purpose and satisfaction but it's ultimately empty.

The important question is, can there be ultimate meaning if death terminates our existence? Both theistic and atheistic thinkers have tended to reply in the negative. Both agree that if there is no God then there's no ultimate meaning to life. They differ, though, in that theists tend to think that if there's no ultimate meaning then the proximal meanings we impart to life are, at bottom, illusory. Unless what we do matters forever, the theist argues, it doesn't really matter at all. A lot of atheists agree with this, but not all. Some atheist thinkers want to assert that even if there's no ultimate meaning to our lives we can still have a satisfying life while we're here, and that's meaning of a sort, indeed it's all the meaning they need.

An example of this view can be found in a column by a former Seventh Day Adventist pastor by the name of Ryan Bell who discusses why he gave up belief in God and why he's convinced that one can have a meaningful life without God. I'd like to examine Bell's reasons for his latter claim in the next couple of posts.

He writes:

One question I've been repeatedly asked is how my life has any meaning without God. While I had heard dozens of Christian apologists claim that meaning cannot be found without God, I had a curious experience. My appreciation for life and its potential increased when I stepped away from my faith.

Atheists are often accused of being nihilists or absurdists. Absurdism is a school of thought arguing that humanity's effort to find inherent meaning in life is futile. Nihilism goes further and in doing so becomes a mood or a disposition as well as a philosophical frame of mind. Nihilism says that nothing matters at all.

"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose," writes William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist.

Craig is a Christian and might be expected to hold this view, but there are dozens of thoughtful atheists who have voiced essentially the same melancholy sentiments. Here, for example, is Czech writer Milan Kundera:

A life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible or beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Nor is Kundera an isolated example. A sampling from the pens of other atheist writers could include the following:

• "Life is a short day’s journey from nothingness to nothingness." – Ernst Hemmingway
• "The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless." - Woody Allen, filmmaker (Hannah and Her Sisters)
• "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life." – Theodosius Dobzhansky, biologist
• "Our only significance lies in the fact that we can look out on the universe and it can’t look back on us." – Will Durant, historian
• "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher
• "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." Albert Camus, novelist
• "Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." – Clarence Darrow, lawyer
• "Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." – Bernard Rensch, biologist
• "I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher (Nausea)
• "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Sigmund Freud, psychologist

So how does Bell respond to such depressing views held by his fellow atheists? He writes:

But my experience is that acknowledging the absence of God has helped me refocus on the wonderful and unlikely life I do have. This realization has increased my appreciation for beauty and given me a sense of immediacy about my life. As I come to terms with the fact that this life is the only one I get, I am more motivated than ever to make it count.

I want to experience as much happiness and pleasure as I can while helping others to attain their happiness. I construct meaning in my life from many sources, including love, family, friendships, service, learning and so on.

Yet if atheism is true the things he lists are nothing more than electro-chemical reactions occurring in his brain. How can chemical reactions generate true meaning rather than just the illusion of meaning? Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick disabuses us of our pretensions that our feelings and emotions are in any important sense meaningful:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

Moreover, if death is the end, the most that the things Bell mentions can provide is some sort of proximal meaning, they cannot give our lives ultimate meaning. On atheism the universe is a random whirl of impersonal and purposeless atoms, but nothing comprised solely of the impersonal and purposeless such as ourselves can have any purpose or significance. Conscious beings can while away the hours engaged in diversions like work, collecting stamps, gardening, doing crossword puzzles, loving our families, or learning about how the cosmos works, but it's hard to see how any of it matters much if the footprints we make in life get washed away at death, as they assuredly do if death is the complete annihilation of the conscious self.

It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote about this stark truth in an apologetic for his atheism titled A Free Man's Worship:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

So far from life being meaningful, Russell argues that, in the absence of God, our lives are built on a foundation of despair.

More on this topic tomorrow.

Trump's Inner Democrat

Donald Trump has found yet another way to reveal his inner liberal Democrat. When speaking about the court case concerning Trump University which is currently before a federal judge of Mexican descent, Gonzalo Curiel, he opined that he doubted he could get a fair hearing before a jurist of that ethnicity, given the antipathy he's aroused among Hispanics during the primary campaign season.

This comment has sent the media talking heads into a flurry of self-righteous censure of the billionaire bigot's bigoted remark. He's so divisive, they moan. He's racially hateful, they pontificate. His remark disqualifies him from the presidency, they asseverate, and, in a heroic effort to deliberately miss the point, some commentators have intoned with supercilious solemnity that Judge Curiel isn't Mexican anyway, he's American.

Yet, this eruption of disapprobation directed at Mr. Trump seems to indicate an obliviousness among lefties that what the GOP candidate said is simply the logical extension of what liberal Democrats have been saying for decades. Every time it's insisted that a man can't understand what a woman goes through in pregnancy, every time an African-American deigns to instruct whites that they can't speak about the black experience because they've never been the victims of racial oppression, every time an African-American declares that blacks can't get a fair trial in racist white America, or every time some academic implies the same thing whenever the racial composition of a jury doesn't adequately reflect the race of the accused - every time statements like these are made and greeted with sage nods and sympathetic tsks at the injustice of being judged by someone of a different race or gender, the predicate is tacitly being laid which validates Trump's resentment at having his case decided by a Hispanic judge.

If it is righteous and acceptable for the left to protest when members of one racial, ethnic, or gender group make judgments about the behavior of members of another group, if the argument that the race, etc. of the first group biases them against those of the second group, why is it objectionable for Trump to offer the same argument?

The media and others would do well, rather than faulting Trump for expressing the same concerns about being judged by someone likely to be biased against him on ethnic grounds, concerns that liberals have expressed at every opportunity for the last fifty years, to instead desist from their destructive attempts to split our society along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, and to end their practice of pitting one group against another.

If Judge Curiel is to be presumed a fair and objective arbiter of the law because he's "an American" then that same presumption should be extended to every American in similar position, and the politically correct racial and gender qualifiers we use to pigeon-hole people should be considered to be just as illegitimately applied to everyone else as they are to Judge Curiel.

Liberals who find Trump's comment distasteful and divisive should look in the mirror. Trump's racial rhetoric is no different than what they themselves have been employing for decades, and it's a bit hypocritical of them to complain about it now when someone other than a member of one of our privileged minorities resorts to it.

How We Can Help in Fallujah

A lot of us read stories of the horrors and suffering Iraqis and Syrians are enduring at the hands of the savages who go by the name of ISIS (or ISIL or Daesh) and wish there was something we as individuals could do to help them. Well, there is. Preemptive Love is an organization doing great work in Iraq helping people who've been terrorized and displaced by ISIS, and they rely almost completely on the support of donors. If you're interested in doing something meaningful to help the victims of Islamic extremism I urge you to visit their website here.

Over the years Preemptive Love has been committed to bringing medical care to children in desperate need of surgery, particularly heart surgeries, but recently they've undertaken to deliver food, water and medical supplies to thousands of people caught in the current battle to retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS.

As soon as the Iraqi military liberates a suburb from ISIS control, Preemptive Love moves in behind them to deliver life-saving aid, all of which is provided by ordinary people who contributed because they wanted to do something to make a difference.

It's a great organization doing wonderful work to alleviate human suffering. I hope you'll check them out.

Boosting the Trump Vote

Wonder why anyone would support Donald Trump? Watch the video of what happened to people leaving his rally in San Jose on Thursday and perhaps you'll gain a better understanding why so many Americans are eager to see him elected:

People see this riot, they see the Mexican flags waving and American flags being burned, they see innocent Americans being splattered with eggs, spit upon, punched in the head, and otherwise terrified by a largely Hispanic mob, some members of whom may well be here illegally, and they reflect that though they might not like Trump, a vote for anyone else means these thugs win.

It's depressing, sickening even, to see our politics taking on the aspect of those of a third world thugocracy, but the descent into violence is typical of such regimes, and, though Trump himself is not innocent of the rhetoric of violence, it's the Left that aspires to large-scale mayhem and promotes riots.

Vox editor Emmit Rensin, for instance, took to Twitter to urge people to riot when Trump comes to their town. Any violence short of murder, he tweeted, is justified. This from the same people who have, rightly, criticized Trump for encouraging his supporters to rough up demonstrators. Vox has suspended Rensin, but one can't help thinking the penalty was more for having the bad judgment to urge publicly what they're all secretly hoping for, than for the sentiment he expressed.

The mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo, a Clinton Democrat, pronounced in the wake of the riot in his city - a riot his police seemed totally unprepared to handle - that Trump, Trump, has to accept responsibility for it. In a vivid instance of defining deviancy down, Liccardo implicitly absolved the thugs and knuckleheads who punched people, damaged cars, and pelted women with eggs of any accountability. Apparently the mayor thinks those actions are understandable given that Trump is a political candidate his constituents dislike.

And indeed, the actions are understandable if the goal is to turn the United States into a third-world socialist banana republic.

New Hope for Stroke Victims

We're fortunate to live in a time and place where scientific knowledge and technology seems to be snowballing. A recent article in the UK Daily Mail, if accurate, reports on an amazing advance in medical science, one that will be an enormous blessing to countless people.

Here's the gist of it:

Doctors have reversed the symptoms of stroke in a major medical breakthrough. Patients regained the ability to walk, speak and have a normal family life, thanks to a procedure requiring only local anaesthetic and a single night in hospital.

Eighteen patients underwent the procedure in an initial trial - with stunning results. Despite the long gap between stroke and treatment, all 18 patients in the pilot showed increasing improvement for the 12 months they were tracked after the operation. Nearly half showed ‘clinically meaningful’ results - which meant the procedure had a significant impact on their lifestyle.

One patient who relied on a wheelchair, unable to properly use her legs, has since taken up jogging. Another woman, who could barely get to her feet before the operation, has since walked down the aisle and is now expecting a baby with her new husband. And another, completely paralysed apart from the use of her left thumb, has regained the ability to walk.

The treatment, carried out by scientists at Stanford University in California, is thought to be so effective because it triggers the rapid regeneration of brain circuits damaged during a stroke.

One researcher was quoted as saying that:

The notion was that once the brain is injured, it doesn’t recover — you’re stuck with it. But if we can figure out how to jump-start these damaged brain circuits, we can change the whole effect. We thought those brain circuits were dead. And we’ve learned that they’re not.

The article goes on to explain that the treatment involves the implantation into the brain of stem cells and that the treatment was shown to work even three years after the stroke. Moreover, the stem cells are taken from bone marrow, not human embryos:

The new therapy uses stem cells called SB623 cells, extracted from the bone marrow of donors and then modified to make them suitable for insertion into the brain. The stem cells - ‘blank’ cells capable of acting as a repair kit for the body by replacing damaged tissue - are thought to encourage the regeneration of blood cells and blood vessels.

Bone marrow donations from two people were sufficient to provide enough stem cells for 18 patients.

Previous trials have also been controversial because they use embryonic stem cells from aborted babies – but this trial avoids those ethical issues because it uses adult stem cells available ‘off the shelf’ from a commercial provider.

This really is amazing, hopeful news. Stroke victims often suffer moderate to severe debilities of speech or movement as a result of a ruptured or blocked blood vessel in the brain. If further tests prove the treatment to be consistently effective over the long term it would be a marvelous, life-changing development for millions of people.

Liberal Education

Once upon a time a liberal education meant that one studied, and desired to study, the best that had been thought and written in the humanities. One was deeply enriched by his or her encounter with the classics in literature, philosophy, history, etc. Times have changed, however. The term "liberal education" has taken on a rather different signification today than it had a few decades ago. Take Oberlin College, for example, a liberal arts school in Ohio where students a couple of years ago submitted a list of 50 "non-negotiable" demands to the administration described in a New Yorker column.

The Daily Caller has distilled the New Yorker's essay to a few of the more absurd aspects of the students' "concerns." Here is a sample of their complaints (The text in italics is from the Daily Caller, the rest is my commentary):

This institution [Oberlin] functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. In addition to wondering what some of this actually means, one might also wonder what the school would look like if it "functioned" on the basis of the contraries of these premises.

The students' demands included a request for an $8.20-an-hour "activism wage," the firing of nine Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students, and the tenuring of black faculty. How, exactly, does one demonstrate "insufficient support"? Are the students saying that if these nine employees don't agree with their concerns they should therefore be fired? Is it the students' idea of justice to deprive someone of their livelihood because they don't agree with their opinion? If so, it is Stalinesque.

A student wanted trigger warnings on required reading. The book which triggered the demand for triggers was Antigone. This student activist had wrestled with suicidal tendencies and so does Antigone. One can sympathize with the student's apprehensions while nevertheless thinking that "trigger warnings" are, in general, a concession to emotional adolescence. Any student can google any book and find out what its basic themes are if he's concerned that he might suffer an emotional or psychological ambush while reading it.

The students wanted the removal of a “harmful” multicultural mural. The former chair of the Student Union Board reports that students ordered a mural featuring people of a number of different races destroyed because they feared that it “exoticized” minorities. I'm not sure what it is to be "exoticized," but it sounds bad. Whatever it is, though, it's hard to imagine a depiction of anyone which could not be said to "exoticize" that individual, or his or her race, gender, or class.

A Jewish student was told he cannot have certain opinions because his “culture has never been oppressed.” After he criticized a sexual harassment policy that would have classified “flirtatious speech” as harassment, Aaron Pressman reported, “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male.” He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand — your culture has never been oppressed.'” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?'”

This criticism of Pressman was odd in light of the fact that one Oberlin professor reportedly posted anti-Semitic messages on Facebook. “[Her] posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that Isis was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” This professor wasn’t terminated and perhaps shouldn't have been, but evidently had she been as insufficiently supportive of black students' concerns as she apparently is of Jewish students' concerns, there'd have been calls for her dismissal.

In any case, the notion that unless you belong to a group that has suffered you cannot understand their angst and are not entitled to speak out about their problems is one of the oddest flowers in the ideological greenhouse. Besides, who cannot lay claim to membership in some group that at some point in history has been "oppressed"?

One student leader is “tired” of listening to dissenting opinions. “I do think that there’s something to be said about exposing yourself to ideas other than your own, but I’ve had enough of that after my fifth year,” she said. Apparently she thinks there should be a statute of limitations on free speech and dissent. Perhaps students should have to suffer disagreeable opinions for four years and then after that grace period every opinion should agree with hers.

Students wanted to eliminate bad grades. “More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail.” According to the New Yorker they didn't want their grades to decline while they were devoting their time to activist causes.

They hate capitalism at Oberlin. A student leader stated that higher education is a “tool of capitalism” that “can’t be redeemed,” even though capitalism is closely associated with the kind of free speech that allows students to become activists in the first place. Meanwhile, socialist and communist countries — think Mao’s China or Lenin's Russia — frequently throw dissenters in jail, although many of these students may not even know this, given how open they seem to learning new things.

These students don't see their university years as a wonderful opportunity to learn but rather as an opportunity to vent. They wish to turn universities into summer camps for radicals where they can gather to rage against the machine and all that. And when they graduate what will they have prepared themselves to do in life, other than to become themselves poorly educated college professors who will continue the cycle of educational malfeasance and decline?

Permit me to suggest a modest proposal for disaffected students. It's similar to the course of action what people are advised by progressives to follow if they find that they don't like salacious television programming, or movies, or the laws regarding abortion. It's this: "Don't watch, don't go, don't have one."

University students who don't like the curriculum, who don't like a college's atmosphere, who don't like having to pass courses, simply should not go to a school which features these characteristics in the first place, or, having made the mistake of enrolling, they should transfer out.

Better yet, they should realize that their anxieties often appear peevish, self-absorbed, and childish to those who work for a living or who don the nation's uniform, that to these folks many of the concerns expressed by the Oberlin students seem akin to a child's fear of the goblin under the bed at night, and that the students should work harder to outgrow these preoccupations.

The Democratic Ticket

It seems from all outward appearances that the contest for leader of the free world will be between a mendacious, fabulistic, venal, incompetent, corruptocrat and a maturationally stunted, authoritarian, prevaricating, know-nothing caudillo.

But maybe not. A cloud the size of a man's hand hovers on the horizon which could bring a political hurricane.

John Fund limns the totally plausible scenario:

Smart Democrats began dusting off copies of their Plan B for the 2016 fall campaign this week. They were prompted by a devastating report from Department of Justice inspector general, who found that “significant security risks” were raised by Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private e-mail server at the State Department. Democrats know that an FBI report, potentially even more damaging, may be leaked in the coming weeks.

Even if Hillary faces no criminal liability, she could find the number of Americans who view her as honest and trustworthy dropping below Donald Trump’s numbers.

People around her will tell you that in private if you really get them behind a closed door. I spoke to a number of top Democratic officials, and they’re terrified, including people at the White House, that her campaign is in freefall because of this distrust factor. And, indeed, Trump has a similar problem. But she’s the one whose numbers are going south. “Trump lies about his businesses and changes with the wind,” one former Democratic senator told me. “But if Hillary is found to have compromised national security, that will be viewed as more relevant to the job of president.”

Democrats will carefully watch the polls in the next few weeks. If Hillary stays slightly ahead of Trump or is competitive, she will become the Democratic nominee at the Philadelphia convention. But if her numbers slide, watch for super-delegates now in her camp to consider the possibility of substituting Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate — with the possible addition of Senator Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, as political balm for the party’s not nominating a woman for president.

But what about Senator Bernie Sanders who seems to have sucked up almost all the energy in the Democratic primaries?

If Democratic delegates decide that Hillary is too much of a political liability to nominate, don’t expect them to turn to Bernie Sanders. Despite polls showing him with a bigger lead over Trump than Hillary has, few prominent Democrats believe that Sanders could survive sustained attacks on his record as a self-proclaimed “socialist.”

That’s where Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would come in. Biden would be sold as a steady hand who would energize President Obama’s supporters, and Warren would be pitched to delegates as someone who could keep Sanders progressives on board. “The implication would be that, at age 74, Biden might serve only one term and Warren would be a natural successor,’ a former Democratic congressman told me.

Hillary operatives and supporters are not ready to bail just yet and many of them are saying for public consumption that her legal problems are just so much ado about nothing. But, according to Fund, that's not what they're saying in private:

They know that the inspector general’s report is a preview of coming revelations in the upcoming FBI report, and they are laying the groundwork to implement Plan B if they think it will be necessary.

Biden and Warren have both insisted they aren't interested, but if Hillary's numbers against Trump continue to slide, and both of the old warhorses know that the grueling primaries are over, they could surely be persuaded for the good of the party, and country, and history, and all that, to run.

Trump could probably beat Hillary (or Sanders), but it's not so clear that he could beat a Biden/Warren ticket. A lot of Democrats are probably hoping with all their might that such a race materializes.

Realists and Idealists

As everyone knows, words mean different things in different contexts. In philosophy, if one is a "realist" she believes that some entity under consideration - e.g. the physical world, moral values, numbers - has objective existence independently of us. The entity exists whether we perceive it, or believe it, or not. There are those, however, who believe that the physical world, for example, is a construct of a mind, that it has no objective reality. These folks are called "idealists." The color, flavor, odor, texture, and coolness of an apple are all ideas in the mind, and since the apple is simply the sum of these ideas the apple, too, is an idea in the mind of the one who is experiencing it. In other words, for idealists the world is like pain in the sense that it's reality is subjective.

In politics, though, the words "realism" and "idealism" take on a somewhat different meaning. A friend and colleague sent me an interesting article from the UK Telegraph which explains the distinction between realists and idealists in a foreign policy context:

How do you distinguish a foreign policy "idealist" from a "realist," an optimist from a pessimist? Ask one question: Do you believe in the arrow of history? Or to put it another way, do you think history is cyclical or directional? Are we condemned to do the same damn thing over and over, generation after generation -- or is there hope for some enduring progress in the world order?

This is one of the defining distinctions between liberals and conservatives. Liberals tend to see mankind as potentially perfectable and progressing toward a quasi-utopian historical Omega point. Conservatives tend to see mankind as quasi-incorrigible and thus caught in a kind of Nietzschean eternal recurrence:

For realists, generally conservative, history is an endless cycle of clashing power politics. The same patterns repeat. Only the names and places change. The best we can do in our own time is to defend ourselves, managing instability and avoiding catastrophe. But expect nothing permanent, no essential alteration in the course of human affairs.

The idealists believe otherwise. They believe that the international system can eventually evolve out of its Hobbesian state of nature into something more humane and hopeful. What is usually overlooked is that this hopefulness for achieving a higher plane of global comity comes in two flavors -- one liberal, one conservative.

Not all idealists are liberals or progressives. Some are "neo-conservative." These believe that man's nature, though bent toward evil, can be moderated by the imposition of liberty and democracy. Here's how the Telegraph puts the distinction:

The liberal variety (as practiced, for example, by the Bill Clinton administration) believes that the creation of a dense web of treaties, agreements, transnational institutions and international organizations (like the U.N., NGOs, the World Trade Organization) can give substance to a cohesive community of nations that would, in time, ensure order and stability.

The conservative view (often called neoconservative and dominant in the George W. Bush years) is that the better way to ensure order and stability is not through international institutions, which are flimsy and generally powerless, but through the spread of democracy. Because, in the end, democracies are inherently more inclined to live in peace.

Liberal internationalists count on globalization, neoconservatives on democratization to get us to the sunny uplands of international harmony. But what unites them is the belief that such uplands exist and are achievable. Both believe in the perfectibility, if not of man, then of the international system. Both believe in the arrow of history.

So what's the realist view?

For realists, this is a comforting delusion that gives high purpose to international exertions where none exists. Sovereign nations remain in incessant pursuit of power and self-interest. The pursuit can be carried out more or less wisely. But nothing fundamentally changes.

The Telegraph article goes on to give examples - most pertinently, President Obama:

Barack Obama is a classic case study in foreign policy idealism. Indeed, one of his favorite quotations is about the arrow of history: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." He has spent nearly eight years trying to advance that arc of justice. Hence his initial "apology tour," that burst of confessional soul-searching abroad about America and its sins, from slavery to the loss of our moral compass after 9/11. Friday's trip to Hiroshima completes the arc.

Unfortunately, with "justice" did not come peace. The policies that followed -- appeasing Vladimir Putin, the Iranian mullahs, the butchers of Tiananmen Square and lately the Castros -- have advanced neither justice nor peace. On the contrary. The consequent withdrawal of American power, that agent of injustice or at least arrogant overreach, has yielded nothing but geopolitical chaos and immense human suffering. (See Syria.)

The article concludes by noting that Mr. Obama seems to have been at least somewhat disabused of his idealism by his encounters with the intransigent and incorrigible leaders in Syria and China who don't seem to share his progressive view of things.

Be that all as it may, the liberal version of idealism seems so divorced from our historical experience and so contrary to human nature as to be literally incredible. The neo-conservative version of idealism that holds that people yearn to be free and would enthusiastically embrace democracy if only given the opportunity seems in the aftermath of the Iraq war to be almost equally at odds with the way the world is.

By way of personal confession I acknowledge that prior to the Iraq war I agreed with the neo-con view but have since accepted the bitter fact that democracy and freedom aren't as highly prized by Muslim Middle-Easterners as they are by Christian and secular Westerners. Some soils just don't seem suitable for the germination of democratic institutions based on individual freedom.

Thus, despite the promptings of our heart to embrace the optimism and hope of the idealist, reason urges us to shun the naivete that idealism requires and look at human beings as the realist sees them - flawed, fallen, often irrational and even more often prone to disappoint our most romantic, idealistic hopes.

On Memorial Day We Remember

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but it's appropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

Terrorism and Drone Strikes

One of the frequently-heard objections to the policy of using drone strikes to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere is that such strikes sometimes collaterally kill innocent civilians, a misfortune which only inspires hatred among the population and serves as an effective recruiting tool for terrorist organizations.

I always thought this argument, like it's cousin - the argument that keeping terrorists in Guantanamo Bay prison enrages Muslims around the world to the point where they want to blow themselves up - was ridiculous (how does Guantanamo Bay compare, for example, to the average prison in the Muslim world?).

Now there's confirmation of my suspicions, From The Daily Caller:

Surveys of a Pakistani population closely affected by U.S. drone strikes found overwhelming support for the strikes, along with a belief drones are accurate and rarely result in civilian casualties.

The findings stand in stark contrast to larger surveys that have found widespread opposition to U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, and to the “blowback” theory that the strikes lead to further radicalization of local populations and too often result in civilian deaths.

Writing in The Washington Post, professor and scholar Aqil Shah explains how he conducted 147 interviews with adult residents of North Waziristan in 2015 in an effort to find out what the people located close to the strikes think about the program. Shah found a 79 percent of the tribal elders, reporters, lawyers, activists and others interviewed support U.S. drone strikes, and that 64 percent believe the strikes accurately target militants.

“Most respondents support drone strikes,” Shah wrote in The Washington Post. “This is not to say that America’s drone campaign is ‘winning hearts and minds,’ to borrow that imperious slogan of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Instead, locals approve of drone attacks because they viscerally hate the militants and feel betrayed by their own government.”

As for non-militants caught in the crossfire, according to one key part of Shah’s write up, “Over two-thirds of respondents said that most of the non-militant civilians who die in drone attacks are known militant sympathizers or collaborators who may already be radicalized.”

The survey is not statistically representative of the whole population, but does represent the most comprehensive survey of a local population actually affected by the strikes, according to Shah. Most of the polling and information on Pakistanis opinions of the program are based on much broader surveys that disproportionately vocalize the opinions of urban residents largely unaffected [by drone attacks].

The article goes on to make another interesting point. If having one's family members killed moves one to be radicalized, why hasn't the population in Waziristan and elsewhere been radicalized against the militants who've probably killed more Muslims than has the Western coalition?

Anyway, the proponents of the "blowback" theory might well be asked to state their alternative to surgically decapitating the terrorist leadership from the air. There seem to be only three other options: 1. Seek to negotiate with the bad guys; 2. Do nothing; 3. Send in massive numbers of ground troops to root out the bad guys. Alternative 1. seems doomed to failure. Alternative 2. amounts to surrender to terrorism, and alternative 3. would be extremely costly in American blood and treasure, globally unpopular, and would probably result in far more innocent deaths than have coalition drone strikes.

MQ-9 Reaper

President Obama has dropped the ball on numerous occasions in his conduct of foreign policy, but his tactic of using drone strikes to kill the enemy seems to make more sense than any of the available alternatives.

Summer Reading

Thinking of some books to read over the summer, maybe while lolling about on the beach? If you like crime novels, mystery, and intellectual stimulation all wrapped in one package why not consider In the Absence of God and/or its companion novel Bridging the Abyss? Both of them offer an array of philosophical/theological ideas for you to ponder while you get drawn in to the drama that threads through both stories.

You can click on the buttons at the upper right of this page for more information on these books. I hope you'll give them a look and that, if you do, you'll share your thoughts about them with me. Thanks, and best wishes for a great summer.

Not Enough Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably want to exempt this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity. This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 1930s and 40s among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink. The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it. Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world. When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult task, if not impossible task, for an inconclusive argument to accomplish.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise. Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe. This is what Jesus himself alluded to in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Above the Law

Guy Benson at Townhall dissects the State Department's Inspector General's disclosures concerning the IG's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server. It turns out that she didn't just flout a few State Department regulations, she also violated federal law and has thereby is in jeopardy of having committed a felony:

The new, damning report directly refutes a number of insistent statements Mrs. Clinton and her allies have issued over the last 15 months. Many of her assertions at an initial press conference in March 2015 have been demonstrably proven to be inaccurate and deceitful. The list of falsehoods has now expanded.

The report concluded that Clinton violated the agency’s email rules when she chose to exclusively use a private email server during her four years at State Department and did not promptly turn over records after she departed the agency.

“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

An official at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the former acting director of the CIA, and the former Secretary of Defense have all said that it's a virtual certainty that hostile foreign governments were able to access Clinton's unsecure server.

I'll leave you with a few refreshers: Hillary Clinton claimed none of the emails on her bootleg server were classified, and that she personally didn't send any classified materials. There were, in fact, more than 2,000 classified emails on that server, including top secret and above top secret information -- with dozens that were classified at the time (she signed a sworn agreement to protect all secret data, regardless of whether it was marked as such). She personally sent more than 100 of them.

Hillary Clinton was explicitly warned, and acknowledged the warning, that her improper and vulnerable email arrangement endangered sensitive material in 2011. Undeterred by the clear threat her behavior posed, she carried on with her reckless system through the end of her tenure. Hillary Clinton has lied about nearly every facet of this story, from start to finish. Soon, the Obama Justice Department will have to determine whether her conduct was grossly negligent, and therefore criminal.

By using a secret, unsanctioned, and unsecured private e-mail server, housed in a bathroom, for official State Department correspondence, Clinton put the lives of numerous Americans at risk, the IG report found.

We also learn from the IG's report what we already knew, viz. that she lied to just about everyone about almost every aspect of her use of this private server and utterly refused to cooperate in the investigation.

One final observation: The Clinton's have consistently imputed accusations of their wrong-doing to partisan political enemies trying to smear them, the "vast right-wing conspiracy" as Mrs. Clinton famously described it, but that dodge isn't open to them on this one. This is the Obama State Department.

Exit questions:

1. Will the Obama Justice Department set ideology and politics aside and abide by the rule of law and indict Mrs. Clinton?

2. If Mrs. Clinton is convicted after she's elected president can she pardon herself?

3. If she's convicted would Senate Democrats have the moral fiber to take a stand on principle and vote against her if the House impeaches her?

I suspect the answer to all three questions is No. Is it unreasonable to think so?

Astrobiology

A wit once described astrobiology - the study of life elsewhere in the universe - as a discipline without a subject matter.

Be that as it may, prolific science writer and cosmologist Paul Davies has a short piece at the Scientific American blog in which he demurs to the prevailing Zeitgeist on the question of life elsewhere in the cosmos. He writes:

When I was a student in the 1960s almost all scientists believed we are alone in the universe. The search for intelligent life beyond Earth was ridiculed; one might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. The focus of skepticism concerned the origin of life, which was widely assumed to have been a chemical fluke of such incredibly low probability it would never have happened twice.

“The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle,” was the way Francis Crick described it, “so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Jacques Monod concurred; in his 1976 book Chance and Necessity he wrote, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance.”

Today the pendulum has swung decisively the other way. Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. The biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from non-life to life as Darwin was when he wrote, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.”

It is interesting that so many people have come to believe that life is common in the universe even though so much of what we've learned about the conditions necessary for life to exist anywhere has actually decreased the likelihood that it exists anywhere but here. There are two reasons, I think, for the change in opinion on this question. One is philosophical and the other is scientific, and the latter is pressed into service to reinforce the former.

Davies touches on the scientific reason:

There is no doubt that SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – has received a huge fillip from the recent discovery of hundreds of extra-solar planets. Astronomers think there could be billions of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone. Clearly there is no lack of habitable real estate out there.

The fact that there are so many planets, some of which might be habitable, floating about in the ether has caused scientists and others to hope that, given so many opportunities, life just has to exist on some of them. This, however, is not necessarily so. If the chances that life could arise through purely mechanistic, physical processes is astronomically high, as some have alleged (though Davies argues that such probabilities can't be determined), then even if there are billions of habitable planets that's still not enough to guarantee that life exists on any of them. Here's Davies:

Another common argument is that the universe is so vast there just has to be life out there somewhere. But what does that statement mean? If we restrict attention to the observable universe there are probably 10^23 planets. Yes, that’s a big number. But it is dwarfed by the odds against forming even simple organic molecules by random chance alone. If the pathway from chemistry to biology is long and complicated, it may well be that less than one in a trillion trillion planets ever spawns life.

There's more at the link. I said above that there were, in my opinion, two reasons why many think life exists elsewhere - one scientific, the other philosophical. The philosophical reason is that materialism would be given a shot of adrenalin were life to be found throughout the cosmos, and, since many scientists are materialists, they dearly long for that shot.

If it could be shown that life can be confected wherever suitable conditions exist it would give a psychological boost to the materialist's fundamental claim that no intelligences, divine or otherwise, are necessary to explain life. Of course, logically, even if life were to be found on every other planet in the entire universe it would do nothing to dispel the claim of theists that a divine intelligence was indeed necessary to produce it, but what materialists are hoping for is psychological support for their non-theistic metaphysical assumptions, not logical proof, which is probably unattainable in any case.

The State of the War

Ronald Tiersky, at Real Clear Politics, draws on Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese war strategist, for advice on defeating ISIS. One particularly informative excerpt in a very interesting piece overall is this:

The war against the Islamic State turned in favor of coalition forces late last year. Right now it’s probably going better than the public is being told. An outsider such as this writer can be provocative: In spite of several spectacular terrorist bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere, the Islamic State’s situation in the Middle East looks grim. Possibly fewer than 20,000 or even 15,000 fighters with a decimated leadership structure are hunkered down in defensive occupation positions over a large territory, essentially waiting to be attacked and killed.

Only specialists remember the frighteningly plausible map issued two years ago revealing ISIS’s ambition to conquer most of the Middle East, Eurasia, and North Africa, or its plan to overthrow the House of Saud and incite internecine war in Muslim countries. The likelihood of such events unfolding has abated to zero, and even the mediatized individual and mass beheadings no longer keep international opinion awake at night.

What advice would Sun Tzu give concerning a plan for anti-Islamic State coalition military operations? A few more aphorisms from “The Art of War”: Instill confusion and conflict in the enemy, “throw them into disarray … Wait for them to become decadent and lazy … Cause division among them,” and disorganize their internal unity by working to intensify conflicts among their leaders, their fighters, and among each other.

Disorient leadership and chain of command and communication (which is already being done rather successfully). Sun Tzu also advises disrupting their “system of rewards and punishments.” Act surreptitiously to encourage killing among them. If punishments are immoderate, “there will be slaughter that does not result in awe.” Crucially, encourage conflict between those who, abandoning the ideology of martyrdom, at this point want to live, and those who will insist on being killed.

Use old tactics and new: Drop leaflets and use social media to demoralize fighters and give heart to the local population. Hack and troll their social media operations -- this is much more important than de-radicalization propaganda. Emphasize over and over again that the cause is lost and that ISIS has become a historic disgrace of Islam rather than its resurrection.

Detail how many top leaders have been killed and give names. (Local fighters may be uninformed.) Emphasize the decline in number of new recruits (now reportedly 200 monthly, down from 2000 in 2014-2015). Emphasize the dismemberment of ISIS’s international terrorist network in Europe. Show that the strategic retreat to Libya is not succeeding. Emphasize deadly drone strikes by the United States, with dozens killed at a time.

The strategic goal is to eliminate the choice the leaders set at the beginning: only victory or a martyr’s death. Denying Islamic State this “success” -- i.e. they win even if they lose -- is the formula for getting them to move, to do something. Sitting under siege with no hope of new success [is a] drag on fighters’ enthusiasm.

It certainly seems to be true that ISIS is a spent force struggling to hold on to a portion of the territory they conquered in Iraq and Syria two years ago, but a spent force can still perpetrate horrors on the populations they do control. To get an idea of the depravity of the savages preying on helpless victims under the banner of the Islamic State see here, here, and here.

In case you don't have the time to check out the links the first describes how ISIS executed 25 suspected spies by lowering them into a vat of nitric acid. The second describes how they tortured children who were suspected of having insulted Allah, which is ironic since the greatest insult to Allah has to be their invocation of him to justify their atrocities. Indeed, there's no evil so extreme that these loathsome orcs are not capable of it.

If even pacifists like Albert Einstein thought it was important in the 1930s and 40s to defeat Hitler, how much more important is it that the world unite to defeat the Islamic barbarians whose cruelties would have repulsed even the Nazis.