How to stop spree shootings

Another spree shooting, at a college campus in Oregon. At least ten people dead, and many wounded. Please pray for the victims and their families.

There is a simple way to stop this. To stop it completely. Two things:

1) Stop reporting spree shootings in the media. These bastards are imitators, and they vent their hate and anger in a way that will give them total power (for 15 minutes) and will make them famous. Stop making them famous. The press should agree: The scumbag's name should never be mentioned. No name, and no pictures. Make the killer an non-person. Tear up his manifesto--never let it see the light of day. Never mention his name. Report about the shootings once, briefly, and then never again. The media is driving this. The media is a hateful psycho's ticket to immortal fame. Take that away and the shootings will stop.

2) Eliminate gun-free zones. Gun-free zones are spree-killing magnets--nearly all spree killings are committed in gun-free zones, for the obvious reason. A spree killer wants two things: immortal fame, and 15 minutes to vent his hate with complete power over his victims. Deny him the power. Make sure there will be people around him who will shoot back--immediately. And he won't know who. Bad guys with guns are only stopped by good guys with guns (they don't quit voluntarily), and gun-free zones simply ensure that the good guys with guns will arrive at least 15 minutes late--time to kill, time to have complete power. Take that power away. Allow responsible citizens to be armed in schools and other places where spree shooters choose to kill.

Of course the media will never stop reporting on this stuff, and as long as there are dumb-fuck Democrats there will be gun-free zones.

But don't believe for a minute that spree shootings can't be stopped. They can be stopped, quite easily. We just choose not to. 

Kim Davis and Gaystapo hypocrisy

Ed Brayton, recently famous for his racial slur against Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, demands his pound of flesh from Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis. Davis is a devout Christian who refuses to obey the Supreme Court's unconstitutional imposition of gay marriage on our country. Davis will not issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples.

Brayton relishes the civil and criminal penalties she faces:

...these people are too dumb to understand that the state legislature passing ... a law [protecting religious freedom] would be absolutely meaningless. This is not a matter controlled by state law and state legislatures do not get to negate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution because they don’t like it. And the Supreme Court has already denied her request for an additional stay.
I think they’re right, she isn’t going to back down. I think she’s absolutely intent on becoming the next Christian martyr du jour...

Here’s what is going to happen here, I think. She’ll continue to refuse to do her job and at some point, the state will find a way to remove her from her position. Whether that happens before Judge Bunning gets fed up and puts her in jail (that’s a ways down the road; it would start with fines for civil contempt and would need to escalate to criminal contempt in order to get jail time) is an open question.

I am unable to find any criticism by Brayton of California governor Jerry Brown's flouting of the California Proposition 8 law banning gay 'marriage' and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome's defiance of state law by issuing illegal marriage licenses to homosexual couples.

Heck, entire cities flout federal immigration law and allow illegal alien felons to walk free and commit murder--not a peep out of libtards like Brayton.

Question for Ed: if a lowly Christian county clerk should be hounded off to jail for disobeying a court order, why shouldn't California city and state officials be jailed for disobeying state law banning gay marriage (in the past) and state and federal immigration law (today)?

Somebody call Anthony Kennedy! Seems like a violation of Equal Protection, huh, Ed?

Novella invokes the Lemon test

In defending the "separation of church and state"-- an unconstitutional phrase inserted into Constitutional law by a former Klansman who used it as part of the KKK initiation oath in Alabama-- Steven Novella invokes the Lemon Test:

The Lemon Test 

Based on the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13, the Court will rule a practice unconstitutional if: 

1) It lacks any secular purpose. That is, if the practice lacks any non-religious purpose. 

2) The practice either promotes or inhibits religion. 

3) Or the practice excessively (in the Court’s opinion) involves government with a religion.

The Lemon Test has been described as unconstitutional gibberish by a number of legal scholars and Supreme Court justices.

The Lemon test has been criticized and revived numerous times by the Court. Justice Scalia likened the Lemon test to a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” It is “easy to kill,” allowing the Supreme Court to apply the test when the Court wishes to condemn a particular practice, ignore the test when the Court wishes to allow a practice, or simply refer to the test as a helpful guide. Lamb’s Chapel v. Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398-99 (1993) (Scalia, J., concurring). The inconsistent application of the test led to great uncertainty, and concomitantly chilled legitimate religious expression clearly outside the legitimate boundary of the Establishment Clause.

Is the Lemon Test unconstitutional gibberish?

Consider this: apply the Lemon Test to the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of religion or prohibiting the Free Exercise thereof

The Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment clearly promotes religion. This violates prong #2 of the Lemon Test, which rules unconstitutional any law or government practice that "either promotes or inhibits religion".

According to the Lemon Test, the First Amendment is unconstitutional.

The Constitutional separation of church and state

Atheist attorney Doug Indeap, with my commentary:

Doug:

You observe that the Constitution founds the government on the power of the people and says nothing about god(s), but fail to recognize that that is a reflection of the very separation of church and state you otherwise deny. As I said earlier (and you largely ignore in your post), separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of our Constitution much like the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. In the Constitution, the founders did not simply say in so many words that there should be separation of powers and checks and balances; rather, they actually separated the powers of government among three branches and established checks and balances. Similarly, they did not merely say there should be separation of church and state; rather, they actually separated them by (1) establishing a secular government on the power of the people (not a deity), (2) saying nothing to connect that government to god(s) or religion, (3) saying nothing to give that government power over matters of god(s) or religion, and (4), indeed, saying nothing substantive about god(s) or religion at all except in a provision precluding any religious test for public office. Given the norms of the day, the founders' avoidance of any expression in the Constitution suggesting that the government is somehow based on any religious belief was quite a remarkable and plainly intentional choice. They later buttressed this separation of government and religion with the First Amendment, which constrains the government from undertaking to establish religion or prohibit individuals from freely exercising their religions. The basic principle, thus, rests on much more than just the First Amendment.

You misrepresent the Founders motives for the Establishment Clause and the near silence of the Constitution on religion at the federal level. The clear intent was to prevent the federal government from interfering in religious expression. The American people were (and are) deeply religious, and most of the states had de jure or de facto extablished churches, and the Founders were intent on ensuring that freedom of religious expression was protected. There was obviously no intent to prevent government officials from invoking God, or in any way suppressing religious speech, either for government officials or for private citizens.

Here is President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued in part to give God thanks for... the Constitution:

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to thethe service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;-- for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our sasety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;-- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;-- and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;-- to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

(signed) G. Washington

A similar God-full Thanksgiving Proclamation was issued by Washington in his second term, two by President Adams, and two by President Madison. Jefferson declined, and Lincoln was the next, with similar proclamations thanking God issued by every president since.

Here are the eight Proclamations thanking God issued by the Contenential Congress from 1777 to 1784.

Doug's argument that the Framers intended to enjoin religious expression by government officials is piffle. In fact, the founders celebrated the Constitution and the founding of the nation with repeated government issued prayers and the passionate invocation of God's blessings.

The constitutional wall of separation between church and state is a rhetorical fiction employed by anti-Christian (and often anti-Catholic) bigots to expunge Christianity from the public square. It is a deep violation of the text and the spirit of the Constitution, which prohibits an Establishment of Religion explicitly to preserve the Free Exercise of religion.

Anti-Christian bigots have been using federal power-- a power specifically denied them in the Free Exercise clause-- to censor religious expression in schools, in courthouses and public buildings, and on public property. The goal is obviously not to protect religious expression but to extinguish it.

In place of genuine free religious expression, only secularism-- anodyne atheism-- will remain, the Establishment of which is the obvious goal of the anti-Christian/anti-Catholic bigots who assault religious exercise in every venue that will have them. 

Justice John Paul Stevens is back at work

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens weighs in on the Second Amendment:

Following the massacre of grammar-school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, high-powered weapons have been used to kill innocent victims in more senseless public incidents. Those killings, however, are only a fragment of the total harm caused by the misuse of firearms. Each year, more than 30,000 people die in the United States in firearm-related incidents. Many of those deaths involve handguns. 

The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.

Stevens goes on with the usual liberal gun-grabber twaddle, a mix of fact-free and logic-free moral preening that would be risible if it weren't so lethal. Stevens argues, bizarrely, that the heavily-armed colonial delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who just finished fighting and defeating the most powerful government on earth with their personal weapons, really intended the "right to keep and bear arms" to apply only to government-approved organizations. They merely forgot a few words that would have made their real intention (coincidently exactly the same as Stevens' personal opinion) clear.

Stevens goes on to quote Chief Justice Warren Burger on Burger's hatred of the NRA (which, one presumes, Stevens hates also, but couldn't find any impressive-sounding quotes of himself saying so).

Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Chief Justice Burger had to include the modal 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud' no doubt because he had in mind his own vote in 1973 for Roe vrs. Wade, which was the actual greatest piece of fraud ever promulgated by the Court. Actually, literal fraud-- McCovey lied about her "rape", and the seven justice majority that overturned the abortion laws of fifty states lied about the Constitution.

The NRA, an organization of law-abiding citizens who are intent on defending our Second Amendment Rights, are labeled "frauds" because they make the argument (invited by the Court) that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention meant what they said about keeping and bearing arms, which Chief Justice Burger, who was protected by armed security at no cost to himself, personally finds distasteful.

Anyway, back to Stevens. Stevens insists that federal judges have no Constitutional authority whatsoever to be telling states and localities what guns they may ban or not ban. It should be left up to the states! One presumes that Stevens' newfound solicitude for federal judges' valuable time is because federal judges are too busy telling states and localities that they can't pass laws about abortion or pray in schools or question Darwin in biology classes and that they must use racially discriminatory schemes in state college admissions, stuff that Justice Sevens believes the states should have no say in at all. With all of those Constitutionally-mandated responsibilities (none of which can be found in the Constitution), federal judges just don't have the time to enforce the Second Amendment!

So here's Stevens' five-word correction for the Second Amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

No doubt the delegates of the Constitutional Convention, fresh from risking their lives to win our freedom with their personal arms they kept and bore, would have ratified a better Second Amendment if they had input from a sinecured pencil-pushing veteran of the Washington cocktail party circuit. But at least it's inspiring to see Stevens, retired from the Court for a couple of years now, back on the job doing what he did on the Court for three decades-- rewriting the Constitution.

Population control in India

Robert Zubrin in The New Atlantis on the population control holocaust in India, with my commentary:

India

Since the time of Malthus, India has always been a prime target in the eyes of would-be population controllers. Both the British colonial administrators and the high-caste Brahmins who succeeded them in power following independence in 1947 looked upon the “teeming masses” of that nation’s lower classes with fear and disdain. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party (which controlled India’s national government for its first three decades without interruption) had been significantly influenced by pre-independence contacts with the pro-Malthusian British Fabian Society. Notable members of the native elite, such as the influential and formidable Lady Rama Rau, had been attracted to the ideas of eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Thus during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Indian government allowed organizations like the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to set up shop within the country’s borders, where they could set about curbing the reproduction of the nation’s Dalits, or “untouchables.” The government did not, however, allocate public funds to these organizations, so their programs remained relatively small.

Zubin points out that private population control organizations-- the Population Council (packed with ideological refugees from the post-Nazi eugenics movement), the Ford Foundation, and Planned Parenthood-- blazed the trail for the massive government programs of genocide and deprivation of basic human rights.

Things changed radically in 1965, when war with Pakistan threw the country’s economy into disarray, causing harvest failure and loss of revenue. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — Nehru’s daughter — assumed office in January 1966, India was short twenty million tons of grain and lacked money to buy replacement stock on the world market. She was left with no choice but to go to the United States, hat in hand, to beg for food aid.

There was a lot that the United States could have asked for in return from India, such as support for the Western side in the Cold War (India was non-aligned), and particularly for the war effort in nearby Vietnam, which was heating up rapidly. One of President Lyndon Johnson’s aides, Joseph Califano, suggested in a memo to the president that the United States move rapidly to commit food aid in order to secure such a pro-American tilt. In reply he got a call from Johnson that very afternoon. “Are you out of your f***ing mind?” the president exploded. He declared in no uncertain terms that he was not going to “piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”

President Johnson decided to blackmail starving people to force them to fall in line with "population control science", or starve to death.

Indira Gandhi arrived in Washington in late March and met first with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who handed her a memo requiring “a massive effort to control population growth” as a condition for food aid. Then, on March 28, 1966, she met privately with the president. There is no record of their conversation, but it is evident that she capitulated completely. Two days later, President Johnson sent a message to Congress requesting food aid for India, noting with approval: “The Indian government believes that there can be no effective solution of the Indian food problem that does not include population control.”

The Indian government believed (correctly) that the United States government would withhold food so tens of millions of Indians would soon starve to death if they did not succumb to population control.

In accordance with the agreement, sterilization and IUD-insertion quotas were set for each Indian state, and then within each state for each local administrative district. Every hospital in the country had a large portion of its facilities commandeered for sterilization and IUD-insertion activities. (The IUDs, which were provided to the Indian government by the Population Council, were non-sterile. In Maharashtra province, 58 percent of women surveyed who received them experienced pain, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent severe and excessive bleeding.) But hospitals alone did not have the capacity to meet the quotas, so hundreds of sterilization camps were set up in rural areas, manned and operated by paramedical personnel who had as little as two days of training. Minimum quotas were set for the state-salaried camp medics — they had to perform 150 vasectomies or 300 IUD insertions per month each, or their pay would be docked. Private practitioners were also recruited to assist, with pay via piecework: 10 rupees per vasectomy and 5 rupees per IUD insertion.

"Sterilization camps"...

To acquire subjects for these ministrations, the Indian government provided each province with 11 rupees for every IUD insertion, 30 per vasectomy, and 40 per tubectomy. These funds could be divided according to the particular population control plan of each provincial government, with some going to program personnel, some spent as commission money to freelance “motivators,” some paid as incentives to the “acceptors,” and some grafted for other governmental or private use by the administrators. Typical incentives for subjects ranged from 3 to 7 rupees for an IUD insertion and 12 to 25 rupees for a sterilization. These sums may seem trivial — a 1966 rupee is equivalent to 65 cents today — but at that time, 2 to 3 rupees was a day’s pay for an Indian laborer.

Population controllers, to dirt-poor people on the brink of starvation: "You wanna eat? Lay on the table."

When these pittances did not induce enough subjects to meet the quotas, some states adopted additional “incentives”: Madhya Pradesh, for example, denied irrigation water to villages that failed to meet their quotas. Faced with starvation, millions of impoverished people had no alternative but to submit to sterilization. As the forms of coercion employed worked most effectively on the poorest, the system also provided the eugenic bonus of doing away preferentially with untouchables.

Population control has always been about the suppression of specific populations. There were no sterilization camps in Hollywood or Cambridge or Georgetown. Planned Parenthood sites their abortion clinics in poor black neighborhoods. Black children in the United States are aborted at three times the rate of white children.

Purveyors of population control: wealthy white European elites.

Targets of population control: The poor. The Wealthy. Blacks Whites. Chinese Europeans. Indians. elites.

See a pattern?

The results were impressive. In 1961, the total number of sterilizations (vasectomies and tubectomies combined) performed in India was 105,000. In 1966-67, the yearly total shot up to 887,000, growing further to more than 1.8 million in 1967-68. No doubt LBJ was proud.

Blackmailing starving people works!

But while ruining the lives of millions of people, the steep rise in sterilization figures had little impact on the overall trajectory of India’s population growth. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self sufficient in food by 1971, if ever,” thus justifying his explicitly antihuman call that “we must allow [India] to slip down the drain.”

I have to catch my breath.

Please understand what Ehrlich said--  “we must allow [India] to slip down the drain.”

“we must allow [India] to slip down the drain.”

He means that despite the fact that we have the means to feed them 'we should let them starve'.

As in so many other things, Ehrlich was wrong; India did achieve self-sufficiency in food in 1971 — not through population control, but through the improved agricultural techniques of the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution was led by one of the great heroes of the 20th century-- Norman Borlaug.

Borlaug was a plant scientist who developed and taught new methods of increasing crop yield. For decades in the mid-20th century he traveled the Third World, teaching local officials and scientists and farmers how to markedly increase crop yields.

He worked especially hard in India. Instead of organizing sterilization camps, he brought the Green Revolution to Indian farmers. Within a few years, India was self-sufficient in food production.

It has been observed that Borlaug's travelogue through the Third World is a record of the end of famine. Where Borlaug went, famine ended. If the rate of famine prior to Borlaug's work had continued, there would be one billion (with a "b") fewer people in the world.

One billion people are alive today because of Borlaug's work. He probably saved more lives than any man in history.

But enough of moral goodness and superb science. Let's get back to to the topic of population control.

[The Green Revolution] did not matter. The holders of the purse-strings at USAID demanded even higher quotas. They got them. By 1972-73, the number of sterilizations in India reached three million per year.

Then, in the fall of 1973, OPEC launched its oil embargo, quintupling petroleum prices virtually overnight. For rich nations like the United States, the resulting financial blow was severe. For poor countries like India, it was devastating.

But India was sterilizing everything that moved... why didn't it help... ?

In 1975, conditions in India became so bad that Prime Minister Gandhi declared a state of national emergency and assumed dictatorial power. Driven once again to desperation, she found herself at the mercy of the World Bank, led by arch-Malthusian Robert S. McNamara. McNamara made it clear: if India wanted more loans, Gandhi needed to use her powers to deal more definitively with India’s supposed population problem. She agreed. Instead of incentives, force would now be used to obtain compliance. “Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance,” she said, “for the human rights of the nation, the right to live, the right to progress.”

The West held a gun to Gandhi's head: "sterilize your people, or we'll let them starve".

Well, when you put it like that...

Gandhi put her son Sanjay personally in charge of the new population offensive. He took to his job with gusto. Overt coercion became the rule: sterilization was a condition for land allotments, water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, pay raises, and rickshaw licenses. Policemen were given quotas to nab individuals for sterilization. Demolition squads were sent into slums to bulldoze houses — sometimes whole neighborhoods — so that armed police platoons could drag off their flushed-out occupants to forced-sterilization camps. In Delhi alone, 700,000 people were driven from their homes. Many of those who escaped the immediate roundup were denied new housing until they accepted sterilization.

These attacks provoked resistance, with thousands being killed in battles with the police, who used live ammunition to deal with protesters. When it became clear that Muslim villages were also being selectively targeted, the level of violence increased still further. The village of Pipli was only brought into submission when government officials threatened locals with aerial bombardment. As the director of family planning in Maharashtra explained, “You must consider it something like a war.... Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”

Population control advocates insist that there is no coercion. It's all voluntary, you see...

The measures served their purpose. During 1976, eight million Indians were sterilized. Far from being dismayed by the massive violation of human rights committed by the campaign, its foreign sponsors expressed full support. Sweden increased its funding for Indian population control by $17 million. Reimert Ravenholt ordered 64 advanced laparoscope machines — altogether sufficient to sterilize 12,800 people per day — rushed to India to help the effort. World Bank president McNamara was absolutely delighted. In November 1976, he traveled to India to congratulate Indira Gandhi’s government for its excellent work. “At long last,” he said, “India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”

Unfortunately, the West has not addressed its "we blackmailed and sterilized starving people" problem.

Prime Minister Gandhi got her loans. She also got the boot in 1977, when, in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India defied three decades of precedent and voted her Congress Party out of power in a landslide.

Maybe if Prime Minister Gandhi had promised free Gandiphones...

Unfortunately, in most Third World countries, people lack such an option to protect themselves against population control. Equally unfortunately, despite the fall of the Gandhi government, the financial pressure on India from the World Bank and USAID to implement population control continued. By the early 1980s, four million sterilizations were being performed every year on India’s underclasses as part of a coercive two-children-per-family policy.

It's all voluntary, of course.

Since in rural India sons are considered essential to continue the family line and provide support for parents in their old age, this limit caused many families to seek means of disposing of infant daughters, frequently through drowning, asphyxiation, abandonment in sewers or garbage dumps, or incineration on funeral pyres. More recently the primary means of eliminating the less-desirable sex has become sex-selective abortion, skewing the ratio of the sexes so that 112 boys are born for every hundred girls in India (far beyond the natural ratio of 103 to 106), with the ratio even more skewed in some locations. A sense of the scale on which these murders were and are practiced, even just in the aspect of gendercide, can be gleaned from the fact that in India today there are 37 million more men than women.

There are 37 million men in India without hope for a wife or a family, and little girls are often disposed of like human waste.

Coincidently, India is experiencing an epidemic of rape.

Malthusian ideology. Junk science. Totalitarian control of the most intimate aspects of family life. Genocidal blackmail targeted at defenceless starving people. Femicide in the tens of millions. Men without hope or families. Endemic rape. Self-evident crimes against humanity.

Population control.

We need more blacklists

There's a hue and cry from conservatives about the blacklist that got Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich dumped because of his 2008 vote against gay marriage in California. I certainly understand where conservatives are coming from here-- obviously Eich did nothing wrong-- in fact did good-- by voting against enshrining a lie about marriage into law.

But I don't agree with the "blacklists are unfair" trope.

Blacklists are damn good things-- we are in the mess we're in precisely because we haven't had enough blacklists, the right kind of blacklists, that is.

Blacklists are a society's immune system. Blacklists-- widespread private (non-governmental) agreement to exclude people who hold certain views from certain jobs-- are society's way of protecting itself. We blacklist active Nazis, vociferous segregationists, emphatic anti-Semites etc. from all sorts of positions of societal trust. Is there a job opening in a film studio for a screenwriter? David Duke need not apply. Is there a high school principal position open? The head of the American Nazi Party need not apply.

Damn good thing, that blacklist.

I like blacklists. I don't want a whole bunch of disgusting ideologies infesting our public life. The Hollywood blacklist of commie-loving scum in the 1950's was a great thing: it was our society's way of saying that you can choose between loving Stalin or making our movies. Not both.

The problem our society faces now isn't "blacklists". The problem is a rotting leftist secular culture that, unsurprisingly, enforces bad blacklists. What the hell did we think that bastards would do when we let them gain power? Were we really stupid enough to think that the left would protect free speech or a pluralistic society?

We got that rotting leftist culture in significant part because we didn't enforce good blacklists.

But there are still more of us then there are of them. We still have power, if we have the brains and guts to use it. Here are the blacklists we need:

1) No one who has publicly endorsed Marxist or communist or totalitarian socialist political or economic systems should be employed in any position of public trust, like education, entertainment, journalism, etc.

2) No one who has been involved with any act of political violence should be employed in any position of public trust, especially as an educator (are you listening, Bill Ayers?).

3) No one who has endorsed government-mandated racism should be employed in any position of public trust. If you support race-based discrimination in employment or admissions, you are a racist and you are unfit to any position of trust.

4) No scientist who has endorsed the global warming hoax or has failed to demand accountability from global warming scientists who are engaged in massive fraud should be employed in any institution of research or teaching. Scientific integrity matters, and overt or tacit endorsement of global warming science is endorsement of obvious fraud. Scientists who practice or who tolerate fraud should be removed from the profession. Like they say at West Point-- "I will not cheat, nor tolerate those who do". Silence is complicity, and disqualifies a scientist from any work in the profession.

5) No individual who has endorsed population control in any form that involves compulsion or coercion should be employed in any position of public trust. Population control that entails coercion is a crime against humanity, endorsement of which is repellant and renders one unfit for many kinds of employment (e.g. in education, entertainment, journalism, etc).

6) No individual who has taken action to deprive any American of his/her First Amendment free exercise rights-- that is, no one who supports a ban on public prayer etc-- should be allowed to have any role in education or any position of public trust. Anti-Christian bigots, like anti-Semites and racists, need not apply.

7) No proselytizing sodomite should be employed in any position of public trust-- not in education, not in entertainment, not in journalism. Don't ask- don't tell was a fine idea. If you engage in sexual sin, shut up about it and pray for help and forgiveness. If you want to spread your filth in our society through our educational system or our entertainment industry or our news media, we're gonna make sure you can only spread it on the unemployment line.

I could go on. We are rapidly slipping into a leftist totalitarian gulag precisely because we have not enforced our own blacklists. We have been criminally unwilling to defend the good from the bad-- we have allowed leftists and racists and anti-Christian bigots and dishonest scientists and sodomites to gain control of our education and our entertainment and our media and many of our businesses (not to mention our government). They have gained control because we didn't fight them-- because we didn't enforce rational moral blacklists against manifest evil. Now the leftist scum are ascendant, and they are enforcing their own blacklists against us.

A fine example of fighting back that works is the recent response of conservative Christians to Cracker Barrel restaurants and A&E network who tried to censor Duck Dynasty because Phil Robertson told the truth about sodomy. Customers blacklisted the cowards at Cracker Barrel and at A&E, and the bastards folded overnight.

The best way to beat a bad blacklist is a bigger good blacklist.

We good guys have lost all conviction. We need to regain our passionate intensity. How about blacklisting Mozilla? Fight back, hard. Let's show the bastards what a real blacklist is.

People who are defrauding you demand that you be prosecuted!

Global warming assholes are getting fed up:

A writer for the website Gawker recently penned a self-described "rant" on the pressing need to arrest, charge and imprison people who "deny" global warming.

Well it's just some jerk named Weinstein at Gawker, I guess. Not that there's any mainstream sentiment among AGW frauds to prosecute deniers... Ummm... well... ooooo....

Weinstein says that this "is an argument that's just being discussed seriously in some circles." He credits Rochester Institute of Technology philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello for getting the ball rolling. Last month, Torcello argued that America should follow Italy's lead. In 2009, six seismologists were convicted of poorly communicating the risks of a major earthquake. When one struck, the scientists were sentenced to six years in jail for downplaying the risks. Torcello and Weinstein want a similar approach for climate change. 

This is a great standard for free speech in America. Let's just agree that the First Amendment reads, "Nothing in this clause shall be considered binding if it contradicts legal practices in the Abruzzo region of Italy." 

The truth is this isn't as new an outlook as Weinstein suggests. For instance, in 2009, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that "deniers" in Congress who opposed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill were committing "treason" while explaining their opposition on the House floor. (That same year, Krugman's fellow Timesman Thomas Friedman wrote that China's authoritarian system was preferable to ours, in part, because it lets "enlightened" leaders deal with climate change.)

Now my friends here in the blogsphere will no doubt expect that I, Champion of Free Speech, will speak out passionately against criminalization of the AGW debate.

Actually, I won't.

There is massive criminal activity here, and quite a few people belong in jail. The Climategate e-mails were smoking-gun evidence of fraud, conspiracy, evasion of FOIA laws, intent to destroy data, rigging of peer review, (have I forgotten anything else...?). If global warming scientists were government contractors or businessmen, a significant portion of them would be facing felony indictments and years in federal prison for massive corruption. Their business associates (e.g a certain former vice-president) who have stolen billions of dollars by manipulating markets with manifestly fraudulent science would be joining them in the slammer.

Oh... oh... wait... actually, AGW scientists and their cronies are government contractors and businessmen.

So I emphatically endorse criminalization of this debate, just like I endorse the criminalization of the debate about about Enron's finances and criminalization of the debate about Bernie Madoff's investments.

Bring on the prosecutors. Investigate everyone. Climate scientists and their entrepreneurial buddies should be served with search warrants across the board, and the rampant fraud that is the hallmark of their scam (you already have written confessions in the Climategate emails-- imagine if you had all of their e-mails) should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

AGW is a crime syndicate. Please-- let's criminalize the debate.  

Libs bemoan taking down a wall that doesn't exist

A post, based on a hilarious Los Angeles Times op-ed, with my pellucid commentary.

The relationship between government and religious liberty is... at issue this [Supreme Court] term. The town of Greece, N.Y., begins its monthly City Council meetings with a prayer. From 1997-2007, every prayer was a Christian one. After a lawsuit was filed in 2008 challenging this practice, the town invited clergy from other faiths, but it still allows the prayers to refer to specific deities instead of limiting them to nondenominational references. The lawsuit brought by two residents of the town will be argued Nov. 6.

Ironically, the purpose of the Establishment Clause was to get the federal government out of the "religion regulation" business. It is a non-incorporation Clause. The explicit intent and effect was to allow states and localities to balance religious expression in the public square, without interference from the federal government. Many States actually had established churches, and all states and municipalities allowed public religious expression, including prayers at civic meetings. The regulation of civic religious expression by the federal government (e.g. the Supreme Court) is precisely what the Establishment clause was ratified to prevent.

Here again, there are a host of amicus briefs filed by conservative organizations seeking to drastically move constitutional law to the right.

Prayer at civic meetings is ubiquitous, and has an uninterrupted history in America dating to the 17th century. The Establishment clause was ratified to keep the feds out of the religion-regulation business. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support civic prayer.

That would seem to place this viewpoint in the center, not the "right".

The last time a prayer case involving a government entity reached the Supreme Court, in 1983 in Marsh vs. Chambers, the justices upheld nondenominational prayers by a Christian chaplain solely on the basis that throughout American history, such prayers have been allowed (never mind that discrimination against women and gays has also been allowed throughout U.S. history and is now generally prohibited). 

If you don't work "discrimination against women and gays" into your op-ed somehow, you don't get liberal coupons.

But many conservatives are not content to simply urge the affirmation of or even extension of Marsh to the prayers at issue in Greece. They want the court to broadly hold that government endorsements of religion never violate the 1st Amendment's establishment clause unless the government is actually coercing religion.

Coercion is a part of what Establishment means.  The Framers and voters who ratified the Constitution weren't voting to preclude a federal Establishment of Religion because they disliked the hymns in the Anglican Church. They disliked that fact that membership in and compliance with the Anglican Church in England was mandated by law.

Such a finding would create a "coercion test," long the wish of Justice Antonin Scalia, which would allow the government to place religious symbols on public property without limitation and permit overtly Christian (or any other religious) prayers at legislative sessions without any judicial check.

We have a Constitutional right to free exercise of religion, and that includes the right to exercise it in our civic affairs.

This test would also largely prohibit only what is already foreclosed by the free exercise of religion clause of the Constitution, thereby rendering the establishment clause obsolete. 

The Establishment  Clause isn't obsolete. We don't have an Establishment of Religion, and never have, and never will, so it is very much in effect.

There are probably four liberal votes against such a radical interpretation and four conservative votes in favor, with Kennedy the likely deciding voice.

Why are the conservative votes "radical"? Aside from the oxymoron-- what the hell is a "conservative radical"?-- wouldn't the fact that logic, history and massive public opinion support the conservative view make the conservative view centrist and make the liberal view "radical"?

Should he turn to the right here, the wall between church and state, a wall that Scalia doesn't think exists, will be dramatically lowered.

You can't lower something that doesn't exist. There is not, and never was, a wall of separation between church and state. There is the Constitution, which plainly permits free exercise of religion and plainly prohibits federal religion-regulation.

The free press ain't free

From Michael Hanby:

The totalitarian myth of the free press

The best insight I've ever read on the sins of the press. From a Thomist perspective, no less.

Excerpt:

The myth of the free press is... trivially true and seriously false. Our press enjoys unrestricted freedom of movement, but this is really only a superficial semblance of freedom. Journalism is essentially un-free because it is unintelligent, because it systematically precludes thought about the kind of truth which ultimately makes truly human freedom possible. The myth that a free press is the indispensable guardian of a free society is therefore equally false. It is false because a blind, or stupid, or uncomprehending press cannot finally be a free press. It is false because a press with the absolute, unaccountable power to mediate reality cannot but induce blindness and stupefaction and incomprehension in the rest of us. It is false because a society that is deprived of its ability to see and to think is also finally robbed of its ability to act with any consequence in the face of apparent fate. And it is false because a society that is unable to act upon what is true and good is no longer free and, conversely, because a society that is robbed of its sight and the freedom to think will eventually be unable to recognize what is true and good.

Please read it.  

Can butterflies be intellectual snobs?

Jerry Coyne asks an amusing question:

Are atheists intellectual snobs?

Coyne asks the rhetorical question while commenting on a review of Peter Watson's book The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. I'm reading Watson's book now, and I recommend it highly. Watson, an atheist, is a fine writer with impressive historical and cultural knowledge. He recounts the cultural and intellectual rise of atheism, focusing on the late 19th and 20th centuries. He discusses Nietzsche, pragmatism, phenomenology (which is as far as I've gotten). Watson is metaphysically clueless-- he seems to have no grasp nor interest in the actual truth of the atheistic claim-- but he is fascinated by the social and cultural working-out of the "death" of God. Watson repeatedly discusses in fascinating detail the odious unfolding of various atheist lunacies (the back-to-nature movement and its relation to Nazism in Germany is one of many examples), but in each chapter he concludes with the blithe inference that atheism does wonderful things for man and culture, despite a few little detours.

A great read, if you keep in mind that Watson has nasty inferential and metaphysical lacunae.

Anyway, Coyne asks "are atheists intellectual snobs". He answers, of course, no, because atheists have the better argument, and if you have a better argument you just can't be a snob.

I would agree with Coyne's conclusion: atheists aren't snobs, about intellectual matters anyway, and they can't be snobs about intellectual matters. But my reasons for this conclusion differ from Coyne's. Snobbery depends critically on actual excellence-- a rich person can be a snob about wealth, but a poor person can't. An art connoisseur can be a snob about his collection of paintings, but a blind man who knows nothing of painting can't. A good writer can be a snob about good writing, but an illiterate man can't.

In intellectual matters, atheists (of the New Atheist sort at least) are the poor blind illiterates of intellectuality. How can third-rate "intellectuals" like Coyne and Dawkins and Krause and Atkins and Myers and Moran be intellectual snobs? Can they lord their deep knowledge of metaphysics or theology or the philosophy of free will over the rest of us?

The question answers itself.

Mary Midgley, a superb philosopher quite capable (but innocent I think) of snobbery, quipped about why she was reluctant to criticize Richard Dawkins' forays into philosophy: she had "not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to 'break a butterfly upon a wheel'.

Butterflies cannot be snobs. New Atheists are any number of things, but intellectual snobbery is, as a matter of definition, denied to them.

In response to rising gun violence, U.S. declares Afghanistan a Gun-Free Zone

[Dissociated Press] In response to an epidemic of gun violence, the United States has declared the violent Asian nation of Afghanistan a Gun-Free Zone.

At the State Department, Thom Davies, Assistant Undersecretary for Policy Futility, explained the new public safety program to reporters.

"We realized that since we were imposing gun-free zones in the United States to protect our schoolchildren against mass shooters, why not use the same policy to protect our sons and daughters in the military from such wanton gun violence."

Davies pointed out that every month several American soldiers are killed by mass shooters toting semi-automatic and automatic weapons.

"It's the easy availability of these assault weapons that makes gun violence in Afghanistan possible. By reducing the number of these weapons on the streets, and requiring background checks for jihadis attempting to purchase assault weapons at tribal gun shows, we can stop gun violence in Afghanistan. It's worked in Chicago and Newark, and it's kept our children safe in schools, so why can't it work overseas?"

General Mark Warren, commander of military security for American forces in Afghanistan, held an impromptu press conference for reporters.

"We received this... this... policy memorandum two days ago", said the general, who looked as if he hadn't slept in a couple of days. "We have ordered our troops to... to... surrender their firearms by noon today."

The general had to steady himself at the podium.

"For each weapon surrendered, the soldier will receive a... a... stuffed teddy bear and a citation for working in solidarity for gun safety." The general appeared to be ill, and his hands were trembling.

In response to a reporter's question about the response of the Afghani insurgents to the new policy, General Warren grew even more pale. "The insurgents have turned in quite a few weapons." The general pointed to a box of water pistols and nerf-guns on the stage. "We are a bit concerned, as you might imagine, about the disproportionate response between the defenders and the aggressors to gun regulation."

"We are hoping, of course, that people who are intent on mass murder will pause to obey these new statutory restrictions. I'm sorry to say that our stricter enforcement of parking regulations hasn't prevented car bombs, so I'm not hopeful about the gun regulations" the general said, his voice barely audible.

In the United States, gun control advocates were enthusiastically supportive of the new firearms regulation. Nestor Moron, president of the gun control advocacy group Defenseless Schools are Safe Schools, hailed the laws as a huge step forward for gun safety. "We have been lobbying for years for the Pentagon to require safety locks on all soldiers' weapons. It is imperative that we stem the tide of violence in combat zones."

Moron, who for decades has been instrumental in school gun safety programs in Littleton Colorado and Newtown Connecticut, and who was a gun-control safety advisor to Century Movie Theater in Aurora Colorado (the only theatre in Aurora that was a gun-free zone), touted the Afghanistan gun-free zone as a major step forward in the prevention of mass shootings. "It's a matter of the heart. How could Americans be so callous as to allow our sons and daughters in the military to be the victims of gun violence? We must take action."

Afghani insurgents seem to be broadly supportive of the new gun control laws. Mulla Adan Lanzaa commented on the new gun safety regulations at his arsenal in Kandahar. "We very happy American decision" Mulla Lanzaa proclaimed, smiling while his men gleefully fired machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades into the air. "Yankee assault rifle very danger to us. So sad. Now much safe!"

Meanwhile, officials conducted a candle-light vigil at the American Marine Base at Kandahar, where yesterday 26 American soldiers who had just surrendered their weapons to gun control authorities were gunned down by a mass shooter. Mourners had placed teddy bears with peace symbols and solidarity candles at a hastily prepared memorial.

"These tragedies shouldn't happen", one young woman with a "Imagine No Guns" button on her shirt. She sighed. "If only we had been more defenseless..."

Philosophy and why science "progresses"

James Chastek at Just Thomism:

From Van Inwagen’s critique of Colin McGinn (ht) 

Here are some things we understand, at least pretty well: planetary orbits, cell division, rainbows, electrical conductivity. Here are some things we don’t understand at all: conscious awareness, knowledge, free will, understanding things. That is, we are, as a species, pretty good at mathematics and science and no good at all at philosophy. Why is this?

Van Inwagen must have realized the irony in his position: we can claim to understand things but not the very understanding by which we do so. We know all sorts of things, except for the small detail that we don’t know what it means to know. This is fine as an observation of fact, but it also seems to point to the futility of trying to separate “science” from “philosophy” and claim the first is successful whereas the second is a failure. All “science” is on this account is a doctrine that grounds itself on naive, operationalist principles and which tries to explain as much as it can on this unexamined and provisional basis. We are pretty good at explaining the causes of rainbows, so long as we don’t ask what we mean by “cause” (!); we have a total theory of the universe, but are totally confused about what theories are. For that matter, our account of the “universe” cannot determine whether it is all things or not (since whatever we mean by universe appears to allow for the possibility of a multiverse). Even if we had a theory of everything, it would only be a something-or-other about something-or-other. It might be a “better” something or other than the one it replaces, and it would certainly give us more power to do stuff, but any ultimate certitude we might feel in pondering it would be an illusion we created by forgetting the naive foundations that it rests on. We think we have certitude, when all we have is the consensus of the forgetful. 

The success of science rests on forgetfulness, i.e. a group of people agrees to shelve the discussion of the basis of things and work on something else. Philosophy refuses to do this, but the cost of doing so is lack of consensus and therefore of progress.

Science "progresses" because it takes as it's task the easier stuff-- the measurement and prediction of limited aspects of the natural world. That is not to say that science is easy. Hardly. But by its nature science takes on that which is tractable.

The tougher problem raised by the question "how can we know the mass of Jupiter?" is not "what is the mass of Jupiter?" but "what is it to know?" Philosophy doesn't shirk the profound questions. The easier disciplines of philosophy-- natural philosophy for example-- calve off when they make progress with the tractable questions.

Philosophy retains the disciplines-- metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science for example-- that are not easy, yet are themselves the basis for science.

Science progresses because it has absconded with the tractable questions. That's fine, but it's no reason to denigrate philosophical disciplines that didn't take the easy road and continue to struggle with the more profound questions.

"Bake me a cake, boy"

Matt K Lewis has a post on the efforts by gay activists to suppress Christians:

When ‘leave us alone’ became ‘bake us a cake!’

This is really a surrogate battle. A much bigger one is coming.

Opponents of these [religious freedom] bills score points when they argue that florists and bakers aren’t exactly granting their imprimatur when they make a cake or put together a flower arrangement for a gay wedding. Additionally, they are correct in assuming that most Christians, whether they agree with same-sex marriage, or not, would still bake the cake. In fact, this could be seen as an example of Christian love.

But this is another example of how this schism cannot be easily brushed aside like so many wedding cake crumbs. In recent years, libertarian-leaning conservatives have largely sided with the gay rights argument. Proud members of the “leave us alone” coalition were apt to side with a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to love the person they love (and what happens in the bedroom is nobody’s business). 

At some point, however, “leave us alone” became “bake us a cake. Or else!” 

And that’s a very different thing, altogether.

The reason conservative Christians are fighting this fight today is because it’s a firewall. The real danger, of course, is that Christian pastors and preachers will eventually be coerced into performing same-sex marriages. (Note: It is entirely possible for someone to believe gay marriage is fine, and to still oppose forcing people who hold strong religious convictions to participate — but I suspect that is where we are heading.)

Think of it this way. If you were a congregant in a church, wouldn’t you expect the pastor to marry you? Why should you be treated different?

Any pastor — if he or she wants to maintain the church’s tax status, that is — had better grapple with this now.

Whether the analogy is fair, or not, refusing to officiate a gay wedding can just as easily be called “denying service.” And it will predictably also be compared to the bad old days of Jim Crow — where racist Christians opposed interracial marriage (until the courts struck down state laws prohibiting biracial marriage).

Gay rights and religious liberty are on a collision course.

We make a mistake to infer that this campaign on the part of gay radicals to impose gay marriage on American society has anything to do with marriage, gay or otherwise. This is about sandblasting Christianity from our society, nothing else. This rather obvious denial of the human rights and right to free exercise of religion is merely a tactic drawn from Alinsky's rule number four:

“The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

They're making us live up to our faith, and this is going to put us in a position where we are forced to deny our faith or suffer persecution. This is not new for Christians. We've been ordered to "sacrifice to the gods or else" before. They've been doing this kind of crap to us for 2000 years.

You have to give the bastards credit for the audacity and guile. It's an old tactic, but it's working remarkably well. 

We should have no illusions about what gay marriage means or about their motives for imposing it on our society. And don't forget that the bastards imposing it on us-- Progressive Democrats-- are the same scum who wrote the Jim Crow laws a century ago.

"Bake me a cake, boy."

Reno on "Our Secular Future"

R.R. Reno has a must read on the redefinition of religious liberty in America.

Excerpt:

The Heart of the Conflict 

To be blunt: Religious people who hold traditional values are in the way of what many powerful people want. We are in the way of widespread acceptance of abortion, unrestricted embryonic stem cell research and experimentation with fetal tissue. We are in the way of doctor-assisted suicide, euthanasia and the mercy-killing of genetically defective infants. We are in the way of new reproductive technologies, which will become more important as our society makes sex more sterile. We are in the way of gay rights and the redefinition of marriage. We are in the way of the nones and the engaged progressives and their larger goal of deconstructing traditional moral limits so that they can be reconstructed in accord with their vision of the future. 

And Reno could have mentioned that we Christians are in the way of what modern capitalist/market civilization wants-- a shattering of inhibitions that preclude incessant voracious consumption. I am not here advocating a Marxist view or anything like it: I am observing that the forces aligned against Christian praxis go beyond the mere atheists and secularists who have always hated us. There are economic reasons to suppress Christianity, and our economic foes may prove to be our most obdurate. I think that this is a central part of Pope Francis' message.

Reno:

Traditional religious people are in the way, and many of our fellow Americans are doing their best to push us out of the way. The outspoken among us have been largely expelled from higher education and other institutions of cultural authority. This exclusion should not surprise us. Traditional Christianity and churchgoing no longer define the social consensus in the United States. The Protestant era is over, and in its demise we have not seen the Catholic moment that the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things, hoped for. Instead, we seem to be heading into the secular moment, which is almost certain to find ways to redefine religious liberty, or at least try. 

In Islamic states, a dhimmi is a non-Muslim who is tolerated, but whose social existence is carefully circumscribed to ensure no threat to Muslim dominance. Have we reached the point at which our secular elites envision something similar for religious people with traditional values? We will be free to worship, but not to run universities or hospitals or social service agencies in accord with our principles. We will be free to believe as we wish, but not to run our businesses in accord with our beliefs. We will be permitted to exist as long as we do not openly challenge the progressive consensus.

But, Reno notes, there is more to Christian resistance here than eliding dhimmitude. 

Last summer a young Dominican brother studying for the priesthood served as an intern for First Things. He is an impressive man, one of a remarkable cohort of 20 who entered the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph a few years ago to begin formation. As I walked with him on the streets of New York City, I noticed that people often stare at his white, ankle-length outfit. Unlike the often-wild fashion statements that people parade as great expressions of protest or individuality but blend into the city as just another pose or posture, his simple habit represents something dangerously real. People intuit, however dimly, that he embodies a vision of the future that collides with the spirit of our age, and does so with frightening force. 

Seeing these reactions I was reminded that our faith goes deep, very deep. And as the guardian and servant of this faith the church has tremendous power. As I contemplate the coming battles over religious freedom, I am consoled by this thought: Our secular challengers are right, very right, to see our faith as a dangerous and disruptive dissent.

Please read Reno's whole essay. It's brilliant, and difficult to excerpt without leaving out so much of his insight.

Secularists rightly understand the threat we Christians pose to their hegemony. We know a different world. We live by different standards. We serve Someone else. We are very dangerous to the secularist agenda, and they fight us with a fury and a resolve commensurate to the actual danger we pose to them.   This is going to be a very nasty fight.

"A vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions"

Philosopher Ed Feser has a great post on the fallacies of contemporary neuroscience:

We’ve had several occasions... to examine the fallacies committed by those who suppose that contemporary neuroscience has radically altered our understanding of human nature, and even undermined our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, rational, freely choosing agents. In a recent Spectator essay, Roger Scruton comments on the fad for neuroscientific pseudo-explanations within the humanities, labeling it “neuroenvy.” 

Here’s an especially insightful passage from the piece:

[Scruton] Neuroenvy… consist[s] of a vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions. And the answers are encased in neurononsense of the following kind:

‘The brains of social animals are wired to feel pleasure in the exercise of social dispositions such as grooming and co-operation, and to feel pain when shunned, scolded, or excluded. Neurochemicals such as vasopressin and oxytocin mediate pair-bonding, parent-offspring bonding, and probably also bonding to kith and kin…’ (Patricia Churchland).

As though we didn’t know already that people feel pleasure in grooming and co-operating, and as though it adds anything to say that their brains are ‘wired’ to this effect, or that ‘neurochemicals’ might possibly be involved in producing it. This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions.

"A vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions" is a stunningly accurate way to describe the modern fallacy of attributing mental acts to physical brain processes. No one doubts that mental states are associated with brain states. But it is breathtakingly naive to assert that the mental state is "explained" in any meaningful way by the brain state. Regional changes in brain blood flow measured by fMRI scanning don't explain the love (or hate or anger or joy) we feel at the moment the changes are measured.

Thoughts and emotions are mental acts that inherently entail intentionality (reference to something other than self), qualia (the subjective experience of things) that transcend mechanical explanation. Crude materialist reductionism has little real explanatory power.

Modern neuroscience has provided so many answers that we've forgotten the questions. 

Feser suggests the antidote to neuroenvy:

Materialists typically assume that the Cartesian move is what anyone who criticizes their reductionism must be committed to. (See chapter 4 of Aquinas for a detailed account of the differences between the Aristotelian-Thomistic and Cartesian views of human nature.) And so deeply and unreflectively have they imbibed reductionist thinking that they fail to perceive that the arguments that they think provereductionism really only assume reductionism -- begging the question, and none too subtly at that. In particular, they fail to see that the stuff about increased dopamine levels “proves” that addicts lack moral responsibility, or that Libet’s experiments “prove” that we lack free will, only if we already assume that human action is entirely reducible to the neural phenomena in question, which is of course precisely what is at issue. And they would also beg the question were they to insist that categories like formal and final causation are acceptable only if they can somehow be reduced to those recognized by physics, chemistry, biology, or neuroscience.


Meanwhile, critics like Scruton and Raymond Tallis, while they rightly denounce reductionism of both a materialist or Cartesian sort, fail to put in its place a systematic rival metaphysics like the Aristotelian one. Powerful as their criticisms are, their positive account of human nature is bound to seem obscurantist to those who cannot see any plausible alternative to materialism as a general conception of the natural world. For it takes a metaphysics to counter a metaphysics. Until materialism, scientism, and naturalism are not only criticized but replaced with something better, they will not lose the baneful grip on modern culture that Scruton and Tallis rightly deplore.

Materialist reductionism of the mind is a foolish mistake. A rudimentary mistake.

The Aristotelian hylemorphic understanding of the mind is a correction for that mistake, and seems to me to be closest to the truth. 

Cake rights

From Fox:

Oregon ruling really takes the cake -- Christian bakery guilty of violating civil rights of lesbian couple

The owners of a Christian bakery who refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple are facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines after they were found guilty of violating the couple’s civil rights. 

The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries said they found “substantial evidence” that Sweet Cakes by Melissa discriminated against the lesbian couple and violated the Oregon Equality Act of 2007, a law that protects the rights of the LGBT community. 

Last year, the bakery’s owners refused to make a wedding cake for Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman, of Portland, citing their Christian beliefs. The couple then filed a complaint with the state. 

Aaron Klein told me there will be no reconciliation and there will be no rehabilitation. 

“The investigation concludes that the bakery is not a religious institution under the law and that the business’ policy of refusing to make same-sex wedding cakes represents unlawful discrimination based on sexual orientation,” said Charlie Burr, a spokesman for the Bureau of Labor and Industries. 

Cake discrimination. The amorous ladies obviously were unable to obtain cake elsewhere, there being no other bakeries in Oregon. Which explains the pressing state interest in baked-goods rights.

The backlash against Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of the bakery, was severe. Gay rights groups launched protests and pickets outside the family’s store. They threatened wedding vendors who did business with the bakery. And, Klein told me, the family’s children were the targets of death threats.

No violation there. Free speech.

The family eventually had to close their retail shop and now operate the bakery out of their home. They posted a message vowing to stand firm in their faith. It read, in part: 

“To all of you that have been praying for Aaron and I, I want to say thank you. I know that your prayers are being heard. I feel such a peace with all of this that is going on. Even though there are days that are hard and times of struggle we still feel that the Lord is in this. It is His fight and our situation is in His hands….Please continue to pray for our family. God is great, amazing and all powerful. I know He has a plan.” 

Under state law, the complaint against the bakery now moves into a period of reconciliation. If they can’t reach an agreement, formal civil charges could be filed and the Kleins could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. 

Looks like they're cooked.

Last August, Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian told The Oregonian, their desire is to rehabilitate businesses like the one owned by the Christian couple. 

“Everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that folks have the right to discriminate,” he told the newspaper. “The goal is never to shut down a business. The goal is to rehabilitate.”

"Rehabilitate." Officially, in the State of Oregon, Christianity is a disease.

Do you now understand gay rights?  

Population control and vincible ignorance

Patrick Alllitt has a review of Paul Sabin's new book The Bet, about the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon on whether the apocalyptic scientific predictions in the 1960's of famines and collapse of Western civilization because of "overpopulation" would come to pass.

Excerpt:

Paul Sabin’s excellent new book tells the whole story, linking it to larger issues in American political and intellectual life. He argues convincingly that Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon represent the two poles in this late-20th-century debate, which echoes down to the present. He shows that Ehrlich’s exaggerations, and the steady failure of his prophecies to come true, eventually led conservatives to conclude that environmental “crises” were really no more than minor annoyances. Ehrlich unwittingly helped lay the groundwork for the global-warming skepticism that is widespread on the American right today. 

Sabin is good on the naïveté with which the two men entered their bet. The metals market is too volatile to act as a proxy for world trends in resources. Certain years a decade apart could even have led to an Ehrlich victory, as price spikes and plunges respond to short-term shifts in supply and demand. Simon was lucky to win as handsomely as he did, although Sabin agrees that the long-term trend in prices is indeed downward. 

He also reminds us that environmentalism, at least for a while, was good politics for Republicans as well as Democrats. President Nixon and California’s Governor Reagan, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, both spoke out against pollution, waste, smog, and oil slicks, and in favor of an enhanced respect for nature. The squalor and pollution, along with the eye-stinging smog, were real. A bipartisan consensus supported the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It also supported a flurry of congressional acts to achieve clean air and clean water, to protect endangered species and their habitats, and to discontinue the use of lead compounds in gasoline. 

Sabin did not have a chance to meet Simon, who died in 1998. But he did meet Ehrlich, and to judge from the book’s photographs, socialized with him as well. Aiming for even-handedness, he kept discovering that Simon was right and Ehrlich wrong, which put him in the awkward spot of having to judge harshly a man who had become his friend. He tries to cover up his discomfort by looking for a bright side, as when he claims that “Ehrlich and other scientists helped avert genuine ecological disasters.” It would be more accurate to say that some scientists helped avert genuine ecological disasters, but that Paul Ehrlich was not one of them.

This caveat aside, The Bet very capably explains how we got to today’s political impasse over environmental questions. It also shows how the interplay of ideas and personalities can have serious consequences when a feud goes public.

Finally, like all good histories, it reminds us that the past is a foreign country. It takes us back to a time and place in which the prevailing orthodoxy about overpopulation, famine, and exhaustion of resources was so powerful—and its antithesis apparently so implausible—that its principal spokesman could enjoy decades of almost complete immunity to refutation.

The overpopulation hoax was only one in a series of science apocalypses to afflict humanity over the past couple of centuries. The whole business began with Malthus, whose "scientific" fact-free hysteria became the template for anti-human social policies, and even totalitarian policies, for the next two hundred years. The British reluctance to provide assistance in the Irish famine in the 1840's-- the British exported food from Ireland during the famine, and the fatal complacency of the British in the Great Indian Famine of 1876-1878 (again the British exported food from regions experiencing famine) were both due in significant part to the influence of Malthusian junk science on the elites who declined to intervene with vigor in what appeared to be a natural, and even scientific, culling of humanity.

The modern era's second worst atrocity (after the Holocaust)-- the One Child Policy of China which selectively exterminated tens of millions of baby girls and and violated the most intimate human rights of billions of men and women-- was conceived in Malthusian passion. Ehrlich's junk science was a significant factor in the planning and implementation of China's totalitarian population policy. The unconscionable deprivation of DDT and other safe and effective pesticides to the Third World, which has cost the lives of tens of millions of poor-- mostly women and young children-- has been defended by some environmentalists on the basis of Malthusian science. During the 1966 crop failure that threatened massive famine in India, American policy-makers decided to withhold food aid until India instituted draconian population control measures, which included coerced sterilization of millions of men and women-- they were offered the choice of fertility or food. Even eugenics had Malthusian, as well as Darwinian, origins-- sterilizing the defective supposedly over-proliferating races was given the scientific imprimatur of "taking control of evolution" to save mankind from overpopulation of the wrong kind of people (notice that it's never the population of Palo Alto or Berkeley that seems apocalyptically large).

There are even Malthusian shadows in environmentalists' current fact-lite hysteria over "global warming", which entails the belief that carbon-based human flourishing will lead to apocalypse lest we impose policies sure to bear the hardest on the world's poor, for whom industrialization is the best chance for food security and a decent standard of living. The bill for remedies for science apocalypses is invariably paid by the poor, in lives more than specie.

Only the nature of the apocalypse seems to change with the times. That unscrupulous third-rate scientists like Ehrlich would cynically profit from science apocalypticism is no shock. The real atrocity is that such vincible ignorance would be the basis for so much cruel and lethal public policy.
  

Did Benjamin Libet's experiments show that free will is an illusion?

Materialists such as Jerry Coyne often invoke the experiments of Benjamin Libet when they deny free will. Libet was a neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco during the latter half of the 20th century who did pioneering research on the neurobiology of consciousness.

Specifically, Libet was interested in the correspondence of electrical signals from the brain (measured by electrodes taped to the intact scalp in awake volunteers) and the contents of consciousness. His most famous experiments involve measuring electrical activity in the brain when volunteers were asked to move their wrist. The volunteer would look at a moving clock and note the exact time (to the millisecond) that he consciously decided to move his wrist. Libet compared the timing of the brain activity with the timing of the volunteer's decision to move. He consistently found that the brain activity (he called it the readiness potential) preceded the conscious awareness of a decision to move by a couple hundred milliseconds. The timing typically went like this:

Readiness potential... 400 milliseconds... awareness of intent to move... 200 milliseconds... move wrist.

Other researchers have repeated Libet's experiments, with similar results, and recently researchers have used fMRI to carry out Libet-like experiments. The fMRI studies show that there are often brain activations that precede the conscious decision by several seconds.

Free will-deniers like Coyne have cited Libet's experiments as scientific evidence that free will is an illusion, and that "voluntary" decisions are really generated by electrochemical processes in the brain, without our consent of knowledge. Our sense of free will is an illusion- a post-hoc belief imposed by our brain, which is really making the "decisions".

Coyne:

The experiments show, then, that not only are decisions made before we’re conscious of having made them, but that the brain imagery can predict what decision will be made with substantial accuracy. This has obvious implications for the notion of “free will,” at least as most people conceive of that concept. We like to think that our conscious selves make decisions, but in fact the choices appear to have been made by our brains before we’re aware of them. The implication, of course, is that deterministic forces beyond are conscious control are involved in our “decisions”, i.e. that free will isn’t really “free”. Physical and biological determinism rules, and we can’t override those forces simply by some ghost called “will.” We really don’t make choices—they are made long before we’re conscious of having chosen strawberry versus pistachio ice cream at the store.

Coyne and his materialist allies couldn't be more wrong.

Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will. He noted that his subjects often vetoed the unconscious "decision" after the readiness potential appeared.

Libet:

Do we have free will?




I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act

but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility.


But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and ‘truly free’? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites...

Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or
vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues.
Conscious-will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even
though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will
might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs. 

The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt. The subjects in our experiments
at times reported that a conscious wish or urge to act appeared but that they sup-
pressed or vetoed that. In the absence of the muscle’s electrical signal when being
activated, there was no trigger to initiate the computer ’s recording of any RP that may
have preceded the veto; thus, there were no recorded RPs with a vetoed intention to
act. We were, however, able to show that subjects could veto an act planned for per-
formance at a pre-arranged time. They were able to exert the veto within the interval
of 100 to 200 msec. before the pre-set time to act (Libet et al., 1983b). A large RP pre-
ceded the veto, signifying that the subject was indeed preparing to act, even though
the action was aborted by the subject...

The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but
rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives
for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain. The conscious-will then selects
which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort,
with no act appearing.

Libet even observed that his experimental confirmation of free will accorded with the traditional religious understanding of free will:

This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical stric-
tures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself ’. Most of the Ten Com-
mandments are ‘do not’ orders.

How do our findings relate to the questions of when one may be regarded as guilty
or sinful, in various religious and philosophical systems. If one experiences a con-
scious wish or urge to perform a socially unacceptable act, should that be regarded as
a sinful event even if the urge has been vetoed and no act has occurred? Some relig-
ious systems answer ‘yes’... But any such urges would be initiated and developed in
the brain unconsciously, according to our findings. The mere appearance of an inten-
tion to act could not be controlled consciously; only its final consummation in a motor
act could be consciously controlled. Therefore, a religious system that castigates an
individual for simply having a mental intention or impulse to do something unaccept-
able, even when this is not acted out, would create a physiologically insurmountable
moral and psychological difficulty... 

Indeed, insistence on regarding an unacceptable urge to act as sinful, even when no
act ensues, would make virtually all individuals sinners. In that sense such a view
could provide a physiological basis for ‘original sin’!

Libet concludes:

My conclusion about free will, one genuinely free in the non-determined sense, is
then that its existence is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its
denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and
non-determinist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some
real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does). Such a view would at least
allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling
that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in
a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws.

Coyne and his allies misrepresent Libet's findings. Libet concluded from his experiments that we do have free will-- the ability to veto pre-conscious intentions-- and he noted that the veto appeared to be freely chosen, without any neurophysiological evidence for neurophysiological determinism.

Libet's finding that there appear to be pre-conscious intentions that sometimes precede conscious intentions is unsurprising. We experience such intentions constantly. We walk from place to place without consciously thinking of the intricate details of the walk-- the path, the coordination of muscles, etc. We often get where we're going with remarkably little conscious attention to the process-- think of how often you drive home from work without consciously thinking much about the route, or even about other cars, traffic signals, etc. When we type, as I am doing now to write this post, we typically don't think about the individual motion of our fingers. In fact, performing a skillful act like typing or playing a musical instrument or driving requires that our actions be automatic and unconscious. That doesn't mean that our typing or walking or driving is not freely chosen. It means that much of our deliberate behavior is the result of a combination of a free choice to act and an elaborate preconscious and unconscious system of intentions that enable the freely chosen act to happen efficiently.

Libet proposes (based on his work) a common-sense model of free will: our unconscious is a bubbling sea of velleities. We freely choose the impulses we wish to enact by prescinding from a veto, and we freely choose the impulses we wish to suppress by vetoing the act. Libet found experimental traces of the unconscious impulses (the readiness potential) and experimental confirmation of the freely-chosen veto (the conscious choice unaccompanied by corresponding electrophysiological activity). He even noted that his experimental results validated a particular traditional religious understanding of moral choice-- that sin is in the act, which is freely chosen, not in the temptation, which can arise without our choice. He even proposed a neurophysiological model of original sin!

You may ask, at this point: why do Coyne and his materialist allies utterly misrepresent Libet's experiments? Why would materialists cite the work of a researcher who scientifically confirmed free will, and even confirmed the traditional religious view of culpability for sin? Why would materialists cite experiments that confirm the opposite of their claims? Perhaps materialists don't understand the science, or perhaps they never bothered to try.

Whatever their reason for misrepresenting Libet's work, materialists' invocation of research that validates free will is likely a consequence not of their acquaintance with the science itself (Coyne seems blissfully unaware of Libet's actual experiments and conclusions), but a consequence of the metaphysical biases that materialists bring to the issue. You can see the same metaphysical bias and denial of the plain implications of the science in their denial of teleology in evolutionary biology.

For materialists, it's metaphysics first, and evidence later, if at all.