Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal

Sasha Stone's Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal is a remarkable essay written by a former leftist who once felt it her moral duty to "Always vote blue, no matter who."

She's a "former" leftist because she realized at some point that the Democrat left, including its media arm, has been thoroughly corrupted by power and that she could no longer remain a part of it.

Here are a few excerpts from her piece:

[For] most of my life.... I was a devoted Democrat, a good soldier for the Left. I went along with everything, even when I knew it was wrong, even when I knew I was lying, because I had convinced myself that winning meant more than just putting a president in power.

I have been a willing participant in taking us to this desperate moment we now face, where both political parties seem crippled and bottle-necked, but only one of them has turned to corruption to stay in power. Only one of them has blocked any challengers to their preferred candidate. And unfortunately, it’s the one I chose to support.

I supported a party that became corrupt over time, and in supporting them, I became corrupt too. If you’re wondering how seemingly respectable people like Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, or Stephen King can go along with such obvious corruption of our trusted institutions, that’s why. They are who I used to be.

Stone goes on to compose a scorching indictment of her former political affiliation:

Corruption is the last resort when you can’t get voters to turn out, you can’t beat a charismatic Reality-TV star, and you can’t fix what ails the people. Corruption is easy. Just get everyone to agree, silence dissent and no one will be the wiser.

Who’s going to call them out on it? NPR? PBS? The New York Times? The Washington Post? MSNBC? Not a chance. They’re complicit.

Corruption can be the cozy relationship between corporations and politicians. It can be taking bribes from foreign leaders. But it can also be weaponizing our justice system to turn it into something that looks more like a Soviet-Union show trial, the Jim Crow juries, the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, or Nazi Germany.

Corruption can be declaring attacks on your political party as attacks on Democracy. It can force all major Big Tech institutions to do your bidding. It can be deciding that the people of the United States don’t have the power unless they choose the candidate they force upon them.

It can be overt censorship by the state via Big Tech and a lying media that refuses to ask the hard questions because they know they’ll get a call from the White House. It’s a president who is failing on the job but with a media that needs polls to tell the people the truth because they can’t do it themselves.

That we’re now watching a political party attempt to take down their chief rival by fast-tracking legal cases in hopes of a conviction, maybe jail time, because that will finally move the needle for Joe Biden, is terrifying.

Stone, a committed leftist, was moved by the corruption she saw infecting the left to abandon it altogether:

All of this corruption, exposed to anyone who cares about the truth, has turned me into a Trump supporter. But more than that, I vow to devote what’s left of my life to helping to undo some of the damage I helped cause.

On some level, I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I convinced myself I was serving a higher purpose - climate change, racism. That is the danger here. It isn’t that they see themselves as dirty-dealing cheaters. Would that they were that honest. No, they see themselves as the new Puritans who have a right to claim this country, this internet, this Republic for themselves.

I think it should be pointed out that the reason Stone has found so much corruption on the left is that secular moderns, especially those who have rejected any serious religious commitment and who are politically involved, have no basis left for any ethical standards. Consequently, many of them have simply adopted a Machiavellian pragmatism that says that whatever works to help one acquire power and hold on to it is ethically right.

If the corrupt practices Stone enumerates above work to help the Democrats grasp and hold power then they're ethically justified.

She adds that, "What should make all of us concerned is the desperation they feel in trying to jail Trump BEFORE the election. Why? Because they are afraid he will win. Imagine thinking you had more power than the American people to decide who should and shouldn’t win an election. And then force everyone to go along with it."

There's much more that I couldn't include here at the link, and I recommend reading the entire essay. It's worth the seven minutes or so that it takes to read it. Thanks to HotAir.com for the tip.

Why the Bipartisan Border Bill Was Unsatisfactory

There's been a lot of controversy over the Republicans' failure to support the supposed bipartisan Senate bill that would have provided funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, which the Democrats wanted, in exchange for legislation that would secure our borders against illegal immigration, which the Republicans wanted.

The Republicans looked at the border provisions and decided that although there were some good elements, the overall effect of the bill would be to make legal what President Biden and Secretary Mayorkis are already doing illegally.

To get an idea of why the Republicans balked at the recent bill, here's a comparison of the recent proposal with the bill the Republicans passed in the House of Representatives last May (HR 2) but which the Democrats refused to take up in the Senate:

 

Where Are Memories Stored?

Most of us have been told all our lives that everything having to do with our cognitive experience is controlled by our material brains, but an increasing amount of research and an increasing number of scientists and philosophers are coming to doubt that the physical brain is all there is to us.

One area of research that's casting doubt on the material view of the human self has to do with the storage of our memories. Our memories are immaterial but our brains are material, so how is an immaterial memory of, say, your mother's face stored in a material object like a brain?

Does the brain store memories the way a computer stores information? Despite a lot of looking, no one has been able to locate where in the brain memories would be stored.

The following 6 minute video discusses why a lot of people who study this problem think that memories must actually be stored outside the physical body, in an immaterial soul or mind. It's a novel way to think of human memory storage. Take a look:

Does the Queen of Diamonds Refute the Fine-Tuning Argument? (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post featured a response by Casey Luskin to astrophysicist Paul Sutter's rebuttal to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

Luskin wrote that Sutter's argument would, if generalized, destroy science since it could be employed to defeat any scientific theory, and he's right about that, but there's another problem with Sutter's argument. Before I state it, it'd be helpful to repeat what Sutter says about cosmic fine-tuning:

To that line of thinking [cosmic fine-tuning] I [Sutter] have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.

We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.

Sutter is asserting that in order to say whether the fine-tuning of our universe is improbable we have to be able to compare our universe to other universes, but since there are no other universes (that we know of) such a comparison can't be done. His objection is not quite correct, however.

What we can do is ask how much different this existing universe could possibly have been. How much different, for example, could the strength of the gravitational force have been? Or the strong nuclear force?

Given a range of possible force strengths, we can conclude that there must be far more ways that any possible universe would be life-prohibiting than that it be life-permitting, and it's thus far more probable that a life-prohibiting universe exist than that a life-permitting universe exist.

Our universe must be very improbable, and no other universe needs to actually exist in order to draw this conclusion.

Sutter's objection would only work in the case that our universe with its particular set of properties is the only universe that could possibly exist, but why think that? What reason do we have for thinking that any universe other than the one we inhabit is not possible?

Maybe Sutter has an answer to that, but if not, his Queen of Diamonds analogy just doesn't work.

Does the Queen of Diamonds Refute the Fine-Tuning Argument? (Pt. I)

At the site Evolution News Casey Luskin responds to astrophysicist Paul Sutter who believes he has found a fatal flaw with the argument for a cosmic Designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe.

Sutter first frames the fine-tuning argument this way:

Some argue that the way the universe is constructed is a little too particular. That if any one small thing were to change, from the speed of light to the amount of atomic matter assembled during the big bang, life as we know it would be outright impossible.

Perhaps some other form of intelligence could rise up in that strange cosmos, shuddering at the impossible thought of creatures anchored to a planet and swimming in its water oceans. Perhaps not. Either way, it appears that our universe is especially tuned for the appearance of life as we know it, indicating either divine intervention or some conspiracy of physics too far beyond our comprehension to grasp.

He then responds to the argument as follows:

To that line of thinking I have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.

We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.

In other words, Sutter is claiming that we can't conclude that our universe is improbable because it's the only universe we know anything about. We have nothing else to compare it to. Maybe there's an infinity of other universes out there, but we don't know. So without something to compare ours to we can't say whether ours is improbable or not.

Luskin offers an interesting counter-argument to Sutter's Queen of Diamonds analogy he calls the Cancer Cluster:

Imagine that 100 percent of an entire town of 10,000 people got cancer within one year — a cancer cluster. It turns out the chemical plant in the town produces carcinogenic chemicals, so the townspeople sue the chemical plant.

During the trial, the townspeople hire scientists as expert witnesses who testify that the odds of this occurring just by chance are 1 in 10^10,000. Under normal scientific reasoning, they argue, such low odds establish that chance cannot be the explanation, and that there must be some physical agent causing cancer in the town. In this case, the best explanation is that chemicals from the chemical plant caused the cancer.

The chemical plant has a lot of money, and they hire a wily defense attorney who invokes the multiverse defense, saying:

"Yes, 1 in 10^10,000 is a very low probability. But there could be 10^10,000 universes out there in the multiverse, and our universe just happens to be the unlucky one where this unlikely cancer cluster arose — purely by chance!

"You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right? That means you can’t conclude that my client’s chemical plant had anything to do with this — the whole thing could have happened as a chance occurrence!"

Should the jury trust the scientists and conclude the cancer cluster is highly improbable and caused by chemical plant, or should they trust the lawyer and invent 10^10,000 universes where this kind of cancer cluster becomes probable enough to happen by chance?

The shady attorney deflects criticism saying: “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” Right — but that’s the point. There’s no way to test the multiverse, and science should not seriously consider untestable theories.

Multiverse thinking makes it impossible to rule out chance, which essentially eliminates the basis for drawing many scientific conclusions. What we have before us is a cancer cluster and a chemical plant, and that’s enough to make a sound scientific conclusion.

In the same way, Sutter doesn’t argue that there is necessarily a multiverse. Rather, he argues that if we can’t know that there isn’t a multiverse then we can’t draw a conclusion of design.

This isn’t all that different from the shady attorney who says, “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” But as the hypothetical cancer cluster shows, we could extend multiverse logic and appeals to unknown causes to destroy virtually any scientific conclusion. But that’s not how science works.

What we have before us is a universe that is, to all appearances, finely tuned for life. That’s data, and that’s enough to draw a sound scientific conclusion: design.

Read Luskin's whole piece at the link.

I'll offer a slightly different response to Sutter tomorrow.

Will China Invade Taiwan?

There's been a lot of concern expressed in recent years about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan is an independent island off the coast of China which China claims as its own territory and which it has repeatedly threatened to invade and annex.

The U.S. has a defense agreement with Taiwan, which is the world's chief producer of quality computer chips, and the fear is that a Chinese move against the island would draw the United States into a major war with a nuclear-armed China.

Whether an invasion is imminent or not an article published by the Council on Foreign Relations outlines the enormous difficulties China would face in trying to take Taiwan.

The article features some excellent graphics and lots of helpful information so I recommend that interested readers check it out. Here are a few excerpts:

[I]nvading Taiwan or mounting a successful blockade would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades.

To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronizing air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare.

The Taiwan Strait [which separates Taiwan from mainland China], over ninety miles wide, is incredibly choppy, and due to two monsoon seasons and other extreme weather events, a seaborne invasion is only viable a few months out of the year.

Transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Taiwan Strait would take weeks and require thousands of ships. Each crossing would take hours, allowing Taiwan to target the ships, mass troops on potential landing sites, and erect barriers.

Some questions remain about whether China has the naval vessels it would need to invade Taiwan successfully. China’s amphibious fleet is relatively small, and although Beijing will likely turn to civilian ships to sustain and supplement an invading force, those take longer to unload and would be more vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles.

Even if Chinese troops successfully cross the strait, few deep-water ports and beaches in Taiwan could accommodate a large landing force.

Beijing would also have to assume Taiwan could destroy its major ports at a conflict’s outset to prevent an invader from using them.

Taiwan’s west coast has shallow waters extending from most of its beaches, meaning they are not ideal for an invading force. Due to the shallow water, China would have to anchor ships far from Taiwan’s coast and move equipment to the shores slowly, making the ships vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles and artillery.

Taiwan’s east coast is lined by cliffs that are too steep for an invading force to scale. Moving to Taiwan’s major population centers is only possible via a few narrow passes and tunnels, which Taiwan can destroy or defend.

To prevent China’s military from seizing the capital [Taipei], Taiwan can choose to destroy the city’s major port and the tunnels and highways leading into the city.

Read the rest at the link. It's a good response to claims that China will almost certainly invade Taiwan in the next couple of years.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts I argued that Philosopher Peter Atterton failed in his attempt to show that there's a contradiction between God's goodness and the evil in the world and that his conclusion that the theist's concept of God is incoherent is unwarranted.

Atterton is not finished, however. He next turns his attention to another alleged contradiction, the supposed incompatibility between God's omniscience and His moral perfection:

What about God’s infinite knowledge — His omniscience? Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum.

Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.

But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.

But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

Atterton is here committing the fallacy of equivocation, slyly using the word "know" in two different senses.

He first uses "know" propositionally, e.g. as someone might "know" who won the 1980 World Series, but then he gives the word an experiential meaning, as in one may "know" the pleasure of a fine wine.

When philosophers talk of God's omniscience they're speaking of propositional knowledge. God knows all true propositions. Omniscience doesn't entail that God knows what something like guilt or lust feels like experientially.

Nevertheless, I'd argue that it certainly seems possible that God knows very well what lust feels like without himself ever having experienced it, just as he can know what sweetness is like without ever having tasted anything sweet or what red would look like before he ever created light or eyes to see it with.

After all, if God designed and created man's emotions and sensations it's reasonable to think that He has an exhaustive understanding of what he has created even if he himself never has the experiences that give rise to those sensations in humans.

If this is possible then Atterton has not demonstrated a contradiction between God's omniscience and moral perfection and has therefore failed again to show that there's an incoherence in the theist's concept of God. His argument is very unpersuasive.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we discussed an attempt by philosopher Peter Atterton to show that God's goodness is incompatible with the evil we find in the world. He concludes that this incompatibility renders the concept of God held by most theists incoherent.

Atterton concedes that moral evil can be explained by God having granted human beings free will, but, he insists, human free will cannot account for natural evils such as result from tsunamis, disease, etc.

Here's Atterton:

However, this [human free choice] does not explain so-called physical evil (suffering) caused by nonhuman causes (famines, earthquakes, etc.). Nor does it explain, as Charles Darwin noticed, why there should be so much pain and suffering among the animal kingdom.

Actually, however, the Judeo-Christian theological tradition does explain it. According to this tradition the world and all that is in it was created good and given to Man as a gift for him to superintend, much like a husband might out of love build a house as a gift to his new bride.

God was in some sense present in this "home," and His presence acted as a governor on the laws of nature, holding them in check, overriding them and restraining them from producing the cataclysmic events which cause the awful pain and suffering we see today.

Man, however, chose to rebel against God in an act of cosmic betrayal akin to a much-loved wife cheating on a good and faithful husband. That act of infidelity resulted not only in the estrangement of Man from God but also the estrangement of Man's world from God.

The Fall of Man corrupted everything associated with Man and consequently the goodness of creation was distorted and altered. God withdrew from the home He had built for Himself and Man, the laws of nature were no longer constrained, and the world became a much less hospitable place.

Pain and suffering in both the moral sphere as well as in the natural world, according to this view, are ultimately a consequence of Man's free choice. The fault lies with Man, not God.

Now one may believe that this tradition is wrong. One may believe that nothing like it ever happened, but the starting point of Atterton's argument is the stipulation that God created the world. If that stipulation is accepted then something very much like this narrative is possible.

Moreover, if this account of the Fall of Man is approximately correct, then it's possible that the world as we find it today is not at all the world that God originally created. The present suffering of the world, given this scenario, is a result of Man's betrayal, not God's will, and there's therefore no contradiction between God's goodness and human suffering.

And if there's no demonstrable contradiction then, pace Atterton, there's no demonstrable incoherence.

More tomorrow.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. I)

Peter Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, had a column in the New York Times a few years back in which he argued that the concept of God as held by most theists is incoherent and thus not credible.

Atterton is not the first to advance this argument, it's been around for a long time despite the fact that it fails to establish what it claims to establish.

In order to show that a concept is incoherent there has to be an explicit or implicit contradiction in the concept. For example, the concept of a square circle is incoherent since a figure cannot be both square and circular at the same time.

Here are some excerpts from Atterton's argument in the Times:

I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?

You’ve probably heard the paradox of the stone before: Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.

Surprisingly, Atterton admits that there's a possible solution to the paradox, but why mention the stone paradox as an objection to the coherence of theism if there's a plausible solution to it?

The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible.

Having answered his own argument Atterton then says that, well, there are other difficulties which make the concept of God incoherent:

[E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, Aquinas’ explanation, there are other problems to contend with. For example, can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible.

Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?

This is not much of an argument. It certainly doesn't show that there's a contradiction between God's attributes of omnipotence and goodness. Atterton is asking the question, if God could do something that He might've been expected to do, why didn't He do it? To which the answer is simply that He evidently had good reasons for not doing so.

As long as it's possible that God had sufficient reason not to create the world Atterton envisions then he has failed to show a contradiction in God's attributes. What Atterton needs to do to show a contradiction is to demonstrate that it's impossible or at least unlikely that God could've had good reasons for allowing evil to exist, and this would be a very difficult philosophical task. After all, how could anyone know such a thing?

The rest of his attempt to find a contradiction between the attributes of God fares little better. We'll look at another of them tomorrow.

Border Facts

This week the House of Representatives has released two articles of impeachment of Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkis for failure to do anything to prevent the flood of illegal immigrants across oure southern border.

Jim Geraghty at National Review has a good summary of some of the issues surrounding the calamity occurring on our southern border.

He opens with this:

Let us first dispense with the absurd accusation that the United States of America is a xenophobic country or that it does not welcome immigrants. Every year since the millennium, between 703,000 and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence, a process also known as getting a green card.

Green-card holders are permitted to live and work in the country indefinitely, to join the armed forces, and to apply for U.S. citizenship after five years — three years, if married to a U.S. citizen.

No other country comes close to welcoming this many legal immigrants per year. The U.S. now has roughly 50 million immigrants, or foreign-born residents. The next-highest is Germany at about 15 million. In other words, we have welcomed 35 million more people from other countries than any other country on Earth. (Keep this in mind the next time you hear the accusation that U.S. does not accept enough refugees.)

One frightening aspect of the complete breakdown of border enforcement is the number of criminals who have come across. The number that have been caught give us an idea of how many have eluded our authorities:

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, since the beginning of the 2021 fiscal year (October 1, 2020), CBP has arrested 31,542 individuals who have been convicted of one or more crimes, whether in the United States or abroad, before their run-in with CBP. Out of that total, 3,834 had convictions for assault, battery, or domestic violence; 2,755 had convictions for burglary, robbery, larceny, theft, or fraud; 6,424 had convictions from driving under the influence; 1,191 were convicted of “sexual offenses” including rape; and 161 were convicted of homicide or manslaughter.

Of course, CBP can only measure the criminal histories of those it catches; since the beginning of the Biden administration, CBP sources have confirmed more than 1.7 million known “gotaways” at the southwest border — cases where a person illegally entering the country was spotted but not apprehended. In public testimony in March 2023, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol Raul Ortiz conceded that the actual number could be 10 to 20 percent higher than the official figures.

Allowing these people in to our country where they may prey upon Americans is a dereliction of the duty of the federal government whose responsibility it is to protect American lives and property. There's more:

At U.S. land-border ports of entry, since October 1, 2020, 1,195 individuals stopped and detained by CBP were in the terrorist-screening data set, colloquially known as the terrorism watch list. Between ports of entry, since October 1, 2020, 336 individuals stopped and detained by CBP were on the terrorist watch list.

What can be done? Geraghty cites the 2017 congressional testimony of Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council — the labor union that represents U.S. Border Patrol. Among his comments:

I want to emphasize first off, I will not advocate for 2,000 miles’ worth of border [wall]. That is just not necessary. But what I will advocate for is a border wall in strategic locations, which helps us secure the border. . . .

As an agent who worked in two of the busiest sectors in the history of the Border Patrol, I can personally tell you how effective border barriers are. When I got to the Tucson sector, we had next to nothing by way of infrastructure, and I can confidently say that for every illegal border crosser that I apprehended, three got away.

The building of barriers and large fences, a bipartisan effort, allowed agents in part to dictate where illegal crossings took place and doubled how effective I was able to be in apprehending illegal border crossers.

As an agent who has extensive experience working with and without border barriers and as the person elected to represent rank-and-file Border Patrol agents, I can personally attest to how effective a wall, in strategic locations, will be. . . .

With a barrier, it’s estimated that all we need is one agent per three, four linear miles. Without a barrier, I need one agent per linear mile. So, the cost effectiveness of a barrier in manpower is — it’s extremely successful. . . .

In addition to the 353 miles of primary fencing that we already have, we believe that we need an additional 300 miles of primary fencing. This fencing should be strategically placed in areas such as Del Rio and Laredo Texas and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation in Arizona.

When Trump proposed a border wall the Democrats complained of the expense. Geraghty puts the expense into perspective:

Back in 2017, the United States Government Accountability Office and the CBP estimated that average cost per mile for primary pedestrian fencing was $6.5 million, and $1.8 million per mile for vehicular fencing. In today’s dollars, that comes out to $8.21 and $2.27 million per mile.

For $2.4 billion, you could complete 300 additional miles of the primary fencing that Judd says the country needs and that would make CBP’s job much easier.

For perspective, the federal government spent $3.3 billion on office furniture during the pandemic. In the last three years, the U.S. government provided $3 billion in subsidies to one company to provide internet service to low-income households. This December, Nancy Pelosi boasted that she had secured $3.07 billion in federal funding to support construction of “a two-track electrified high-speed passenger rail line connecting the cities of Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield.”

There's much more of interest in Geraghty's column and I urge anyone concerned about what's occurring on our southern border to check it out. The refusal to stop the flow of illegal immigrants is unconscionable, deliberate and criminal. Mayorkis deserves to be impeached. So does his boss.

Arctic Tern Migration, Pt. II

Last week Illustra Media offered up the first video in a two-part series on animal migration. Part I, which you can watch here, featured the amazing ability of the Pacific salmon to return after a two-year hiatus in the mid-ocean to the very stream in which it spawned.

Today's 8 minute follow-up looks at the equally amazing ability of the Arctic tern to make an annual non-stop migration from the Arctic circle to Antartica over the Atlantic ocean and then back again.

It's an astonishing feat and one that points to an intelligent design of these fascinating birds. Take a look:

Abstract Thoughts and Substance Dualism

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience but stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

Penfield's work is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and is certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

Transgender Incoherence

Dan Hitchens, writing at First Things, raises an interesting point about the logic of the transgender folks. He begins the relevant section of his article by noting an irony in the postmodern mindset which on the one hand insists that one's conviction concerning his gender identity is "the truth" and on the other hand denies that truth, at least objective truth (which is actually the only kind of truth there can be), really exists.

He goes on to observe that regarding transgenderism,"There are two narratives, wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause."

The first narrative holds that both maleness and femaleness exist and that some people have the misfortune of being one of these while inhabiting the body of the other:

Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.

Call it the “wrong body” narrative.

The second narrative, Hitchens claims, contradicts the first. This narrative...

asks whether maleness and femaleness are, in fact, real. It queries whether the kaleidoscopic diversity of human self-experience really can be squeezed into so restrictive a binary; it contends that language is always conditioned by the power structures of the day, that it rarely grasps life as it is actually lived; and it concludes that ultimately—to quote the very same memoir by Jan Morris—“there is neither man nor woman.”

This is the skeptical trans narrative which, of course, demolishes the “wrong body” one. If the ultimate reality has no place for gender, then Morris’s original epiphany was false: To “realize” that one has been “born into the wrong body” must be, not realization, but illusion.

The first narrative holds that there are both males and females ("wrong body" narrative) while the second narrative ("skeptical" narrative) denies this.

Literary scholar Jacqueline Rose wonders whether “a time will come when the distinction between woman and man will finally disappear, a metaphysical relic of a bygone age.”

It has a kind of logic to it, Hitchens admits, but it also shatters the idea that (as the much-repeated slogan has it) “trans women are women.” How can they be, if nobody is a woman?

Hitchens asserts that the "wrong body" narrative is ultimately unsustainable. The oft heard assertion that "I feel like a woman" is actually meaningless if there's no such thing as a "woman." How does one know if he feels like a woman if no one can even say what a woman is?

The transgender enthusiasm can survive only so long as logic is not allowed to play a role in the discussion. If and when our cultural elites ever demand logical coherence the movement will doubtless implode.

Do Democrats Really Believe What They Say about Trump?

At every opportunity Democrats are hammering the electorate with the claim that Trump is a danger to Democracy and that if he were to return to the White House a fascist dictatorship would be upon us, but do they really believe this?

Charlie Cooke at National Review writes that if they do believe that Trump is a threat to Democracy then they're exceedingly reckless. If they don't believe it then they're exceedingly deceitful.

Why are they reckless? As an Axios piece notes, a lot of Democrats are hoping that Trump is the Republican nominee because they think his candidacy would "energize" and "motivate" their voters and donors and that he'd be the easiest opponent for Biden to beat.

But Cooke points out that this hope is incredibly irresponsible if one truly believes that Trump is a threat to our Democracy.

Here's his argument:

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot.

There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning.

The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.

Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.

It is not the Democrats’ fault that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. That honor goes to the party’s primary electorate, which, of its own free will, has made this call.

But it is the Democrats’ fault that so many within their party are asking the public to accept two contradictory messages at the same time. One cannot expect the electorate to believe both that the Republican candidate for president ought to be disqualified from consideration because he is an insurrectionist and that you hope he is the nominee because it helps energize your donors, voters, and volunteers.

That’s not “counterintuitive”; it’s deceitful. How many times, I wonder, does the party expect to play this game and get away with it?

I doubt that many Democrats really believe that Trump is "a threat to Democracy." I suspect that they're simply lying about it because the threat he poses is not to Democracy but to their power.

How Do You "Negotiate" with These People?

Khaled Mashal, a Palestinian political leader and former head of the militant organization Hamas was interviewed recently about Hamas' intentions in the Middle East, and said this:

I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the River to the Sea and from the north to the south has been renewed. This has also become a slogan chanted in the U.S. and in Western capital cities, by the American and Western public.

Palestine is free from the River to the Sea—that’s the slogan of the American students and the [students] in European capital cities. The Palestinian consensus—or almost a consensus—is that we will not give up on our right to Palestinian in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea and from Rosh Hanikra to Eilat or the Gulf of Aqaba.

Why he thinks the Palestinians have a "right" to the land of Israel is a mystery. It has no basis in historical fact, but as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air.com:

It’s not as if Hamas has kept this ambition a secret. Its charter still proclaims that mission to this day, and its actions ever since its 2006 electoral win in Gaza continually prove it. They didn’t run for election to govern through the Oslo-based Palestinian Authority, Mashal explains, but to use it as a cover for its terrorist war to destroy Israel.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Arabs Hamas represents will settle for a two-state solution. They want it all and will continue their war against Israel, encouraged by their supporters in the West, particularly university faculty and students, as long as they survive.

Here's Morrissey again:

It’s difficult for Hamas to make this any clearer. They don’t want peaceful coexistence with Israel in a separate Palestinian state. And just to make that even more clear, Mashal also scoffs at an alternate plan of returning to the 1967 borders to determine the boundaries of a two-state solution.

Why should Hamas accept 21% of ‘the Palestinian state’ when it can have 100%?

This is from the interview Mashal gave:

MASHAL: Why should the Palestinian agree to a fifth of Palestine, and accept it as a final solution?

Q: A fifth of Palestine is the 1967 borders?

MASHAL: The 1967 borders. The ’67 borders are 21%, a fifth of Palestine, so no.

Q: So what you are telling me is that after October 7th we don’t agree to ’67 borders? We want Palestine from the river to the sea?

MASHAL: No [i.e. they will not accept the '67 borders. They want 100% of Palestine].

Morrissey asks why Hamas would accept President Biden's two-state solution when...,

...throngs of useful idiots in America mindlessly chant their genocidal slogans in support of Hamas terrorism? When the streets of London fill with Hamas fellow-travelers in terror to demand Israel’s surrender to Mashal?

When the US and UK keep applying pressure on Israel to stop fighting back against Hamas and give them a sovereign base from which to continue their genocidal actions? Hamas went on a rampage of slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, and while it resulted in punishing losses in war, it has also bolstered their standing in the West.

Mashal’s not inaccurate in that assessment of the political outcome of October 7.

In case this hasn't penetrated the minds of some of the left-wingers demanding that Israel "negotiate" with these people, Morrissey cites Israeli journalist Hen Mazzig who tries to spell it out for "those still under the Hamas spell":

How many times must we tell you [Mazzig asks]: Hamas has one goal and that is the complete and utter destruction of Israel.

When you scream “from the river to the sea,” you are chanting for the genocide, erasure, and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Jewish people, from their land.

You are siding with an evil that would not hesitate to do the same to you.

Morrissey concludes,

Indeed, and that’s literally true about America too. Hamas’ sponsors in Tehran routinely promise “death to America.” Only Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and their Obama-administration minders refuse to take that either seriously or literally.

Why our leadership can't see what's so obviously the genocidal nature of Hamas is a question, I suppose, for psychologists to answer. Meanwhile, as has been said in a different context, negotiations with people like Hamas, or any of the similar groups in the region, is like four wolves negotiating with a sheep about what to have for lunch.

Salmon Migration, Pt. I

There are several phenomena that any naturalistic version of evolution has an exceptionally difficult time explaining. Among these are the origin of life, the origin of human consciousness, insect metamorphosis, sexual reproduction, and animal migration.

The latter problem is the topic of a two-part series of short videos put out by Illustra Media on animal migration. The salmon life cycle is fascinating, but that it's able to return to the exact stream in which it spawned after having been off in the middle of the Pacific ocean for three years is just astounding.

How does it do it? The answer is by detecting and following the gradient of minute amounts of chemicals characteristic of that particular stream. This beautiful video explains how it does this.

As you watch the video ask yourself how this or any of the processes mentioned in the first paragraph, could have ever evolved by blind, unguided, purposeless mechanisms like Darwinian evolution. No Darwinian scientist has an answer to that question. They just believe in an act of blind faith that they did:

Illustra Media will release Pt.II next week.

Religion in America

A RealClear Opinion Research poll of Americans’ religious views surveyed 1,000 U.S. residents on December 19-21. The findings were interesting. Susan Crabtree discusses them in an article at RealClear Politics.

She notes that despite "steep declines in attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques – trends that have captured far more headlines in recent years than the nation’s enduring faith," America remains a very religious nation.

Before proceeding I want to quibble a bit with terminology. Crabtree seems to conflate being "religious" with belief in God or some deity, but in fact, my sense is that even though a significant number of people claim to believe in God and even identify with some religion, I suspect that many of these folks are functionally secular.

The survey's statistics appear to support this suspician since only 30% of those surveyed who consider themselves members of a religion regularly attend worship services once a week or more. Another 12% reported attending once a month, 19% said they go a few times a year, and 11% said they show up once a year. Twenty-nine percent reported never attending formal worship services.

Their belief, I would guess, has little impact on how they live.

But setting that aside, she also notes that the survey shows that America is still a majority Christian nation, though other religious groups and affiliations and those identifying as non-believers are growing.

Here are some other interesting excerpts from her summary:

Respondents were asked a series of questions about their beliefs in religious, spiritual, and mystical entities: God, the devil, miracles, heaven, hell, reincarnation, ghosts, witches, and aliens.

Of the topics listed, respondents were most likely to believe in God, with 85% reporting they believe in a creator, compared to just 15% who don’t believe. The exact amount – 85% – also reported a belief in heaven, with just slightly less – 83% – believing in miracles. Of those surveyed, 80% also reported that they believe “Jesus is God or the son of God.”

A smaller majority of those surveyed – 72% – say they believe in hell, while 70% report belief in the devil. “Self-reported belief in God is highest in the South, at 89%, followed by the Midwest (85%), Northeast (83%), and West (81%),” said Spencer Kimball, who directed the survey.

A solid majority of Americans surveyed – 58.3% – identified as Christian, with 36.3% saying they consider themselves Protestant and 22% identifying as Catholic. Americans who said they belong to other religions or were non-believers were all in the low single digits: 3.2% said they are Muslim; 2.9% consider themselves Mormon; 1.9% identified as Jewish; Buddhists made up 1.6%; and Hindus accounted for just 0.5%. Meanwhile, 3.8% reported they are atheist and 3.7% identified as agnostic.

There's much more in her column. One rather surprising statistics that she cites is that, an overwhelming majority of all Americans – 94% – said they believe religious freedom is a fundamental human right. That figure is 10 points higher than those who view healthcare as a basic human right.

Anyway, although the numbers are encouraging to those of us who believe religion is a crucial aspect of a healthy society, stating a belief in the basic tenets of Christianity is not, unfortunately, the same as living by them. Hopefully, the apparent gap between the two will close in the years ahead and American society and culture will recover some of the moral vitality it seems to have frittered away over the last century or so.

About Those Civilian Deaths

The media frequently report that Israeli military action in Gaza is responsible for 23,000 dead Palestinians. Our President, as expected, is beginning to go wobbly in his support of Israel as his political left flank turns up the heat to persuade him to stop providing aid and comfort to our ally because of the toll.

Progressive supporters of the Palestinian cause - a cause adumbrated in the chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," i.e. Israel will be exterminated - demand a cease-fire in Gaza, citing the 23,000 casualties as their proximal reason, but also wishing, perhaps, to prevent Israel from destroying Hamas.

So what are we to make of the figure of 23,000 fatalities?

First, it's a number provided by Hamas itself, a group willing to commit the most horrific atrocities. It's hard to believe that this group would draw the moral line at lying if it would be to their benefit to inflate the number of deaths.

Second, the figure does not distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians. The Israeli Defense Force estimates that 9000 of the deaths have been militants killed in combat.

That leaves 14,000 "civilian" deaths. I put "civilians" in quotes because many Palestinian "civilians" took part in the horrors of October 7th and have assisted and cheered Hamas as they've perpetrated their atrocities.

In any case, as British Colonel Richard Kemp says in a recent tweet, the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.

In the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.

Given that Hamas has hidden behind civilians, killed many of their fellow Palestinians themselves, built their tunnels under civilian buildings, used civilian structures such as schools and hospitals as sites from which to launch their rockets and store their weapons, it's really commendable that the IDF has been able to keep the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths so low. It's a testament to Israel's commitment to do all they can to protect Palestinian civilians.

It's too bad our media doesn't do a better job of letting people know Israel's side of the 23,000 dead Palestinians all of whom would be alive today if Hamas simply surrendered at the outset and gave back it's hostages.

Not Enough Time

Biologist Ann Gauger, co-author of Science and Human Origins, argues in this video, and in her book, that the time necessary to fix the number of mutations necessary to evolve a human from a chimp-like predecessor is greater than the age of the universe.

In other words, even if it were possible to coordinate the needed mutations so that they bring about the desired effect, it would take billions of years for these mutations to occur in just the right sequence, at least if they were to occur by chance.

Gauger is not saying that man did not arise from an ape-like ancestor, but rather that if he did, it is astronomically improbable that his evolution was driven solely by physical mechanisms like chance mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection. In order to make such an evolution plausible there must be something else, something in addition to the physical processes, that can drive biological change toward a goal, something that has foresight and engineering genius. In other words, a mind.

Apart from a mind, or something like mind, behind the process there's very little reason to think that Darwinian evolution is anything more than a materialist fairy tale.

Gauger's book is a good read and very informative, especially her chapter in which she discusses all the changes that would need to take place to derive a human from an ancestral ape.

Types of Antisemitism

Gary Saul Morson, a professor at Northwestern University, begins an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) with this:

If you ask students why they support Hamas’s call to eliminate Israel and murder Jews, many will deny—sincerely—that they are antisemitic. How is that possible? Some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may also sign statements condemning antisemitism and resent accusations that they hate Jews.

We can’t move them by showing the harm antisemitism has done because they don’t regard themselves as antisemitic.

Why not? Well, according to Morson it's because there are actually three types of antisemitism: The core type, which most people have in mind, is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. Reasons may be advanced, but the hatred isn’t based on reasons. Rather, the reasons stem from the need to justify the hatred. If one justification won’t do, another will be sought.

The readiness to switch between divergent, even contradictory, justifications is usually the best indicator of this incorrigible antisemitism.

This is the version of antisemitism evinced by the architects of the holocaust, for example. Not all of the students who've participated in the recent protests, however, are of this first type. The second type is a consequence of the near-universal inculcation on campuses of the doctrine of intersectionality which has the pernicious effect of,

[dividing] people into good and evil: racists and antiracists, victimizers and victims, colonizer and colonized. Once such thinking becomes routine, it is almost inevitable that opponents in any new conflict will be pigeonholed. And so Jews become colonizers and Palestinians, represented by Hamas, become their hapless victims.

Since one side is entirely evil, anything done to them is justified. One must prevail “by any means necessary.” That is why Hamas’s brutality can be accepted, even praised.

People who think this way believe they aren’t antisemitic because they didn’t start with some preconceived hatred. Rather, they applied a familiar, widely approved framework. Today the evil party is Israel; tomorrow another great Satan may be designated. Under different circumstances, Jews could have found themselves in the victim category.

So the first type of antisemite hates Jews just because they're Jews. The second type hates Jews because they see them as oppressors. The fact that many Jews are white amplifies their culpability in the minds of the intersectional zealots.

In a third type of antisemitism, hatred is based on specific reasons, which aren’t merely excuses....if one really believes that the elders of Zion plot to enslave the world or that Jews have constructed a state based on apartheid and genocide, then militancy against Israel will seem rational.

These antisemites may really imagine they are drawing rational conclusions from the facts. The problem is that their “facts” are entirely spurious.

Morson asks rhetorically why these ignorant antisemites don't see the real facts. His answer is that they've simply shut themselves off from any source of information that doesn't support their ideological worldview:

In [today's America] educated people voluntarily silo themselves. They close themselves off from any unapproved voice and commonly favor censorship of “misinformation.”

It is, he asserts, willful ignorance.

"[All] three [types] can lead to the same horrors," Morson avers. "Antisemitism is a big tent, and in any group of antisemites we can find all types hating Israel."

In his conclusion Morson says that intersectionality must be eliminated from university curricula. I agree. Intersectionality, or perhaps more accurately, the critical theory upon which it's based, is a spawning ground for all sorts of hatreds - ethnic, religious, economic, racial, et al.

Young people are being taught that good and evil are properties of races, ethnicities, or economic classes, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Morson quotes, was much closer to the truth when he explained that "The line between good and evil runs not between classes, nations, or parties, but through every human heart."