Recommended : Qassams Fired on Central California

I recommend Linda Halderman's latest post: Qassams Fired on Central California: What happens when terrorism comes to a small town.

There are those who see war crimes in every accidental civilian death that accompanies the actions of Western armies. Strange that they don't seem to see such war crimes in the deliberate and planned random civilian killings by the terrorists, or those NGOs and states that support and arm them.

Pseudo-science and intelligent design

In all the fuss over creation “science” and its new alias, intelligent design, one point keeps getting missed. The essential difference between real science and a pseudo-science like creation science is that proponents of real science are seeking the truth, while proponents of creation science are certain they already know the truth.

For real scientists, the theory of evolution is simply the best guess we have now that seems to fit the evidence. No doubt it is wrong in some details, if not wholly, but as more evidence accumulates and alternative theories get tested whatever errors there are will eventually get sorted out. Scientists are humble (well, most of them are) about what they think they know, and willing to change their minds and adjust their theories on the basis of new evidence.

Believers in creation science, however, think God has revealed the truth to them, and they are just trying to cherry-pick the evidence to support what they already believe to be true and give it some respectability. There is no evidence that would change their minds (well, maybe if God herself spoke to them….).

Followers of creation science and intelligent design are like peddlers of fad diets – they cite evidence that supports their product but carefully ignore the greater body of evidence that wouldn’t support it.

If we in America are foolish enough to force our schools to teach our young people this sort of religion-based pseudo-science, we will deserve the unpleasant consequences of letting ignorance rule our lives.

Moral hazards

“If you are continually willing to protect people from the consequences of their own errors, your benevolence will be factored into the future decisions of the persons rescued. In the long run, they will make even more errors.........(You are) creating a moral hazard.” This quotation from Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute summarizes quite well the essential problem with many of the government’s social and international aid programs, and the reason why, despite the best intentions of well-meaning people, such programs more often than not exacerbate problems instead of solving them.

If the government will take care of me in my old age, why should I save money now for my retirement? If welfare will pay my bills, why should I work? If hospital emergency rooms have to treat everyone, regardless of ability to pay, why should I spend money on insurance? If colleges give scholarships on the basis of need rather than aptitude, why should I put any money aside for my children’s college bills? If government policies make it hard to fire me, why should I try to excel in my work?

The problem with the sort of cradle-to-grave “nanny state” that many European countries have, and that some would like to emulate in this country, is that protecting people from the consequences of their own shortsightedness does nothing to encourage them to improve.

But the situation is far worse than that. Such programs are unsustainable in the long run. These days the demographics (an aging population) work against us. So having lured people into depending on the government instead of their own foresight and efforts, we will someday (perhaps soon) have to pull the rug out from under them because we can no longer afford to maintain these programs. That is the real immorality of such programs!

Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions…….

Recommended: High Anxiety

I recommend Bruce Thornton's recent piece "High Anxiety: How Modernity feeds Arab anti-Semitism".

It has always seemed to me that Israel isn't treated evenhandedly in the US or the world press, or by the international community. Not that Israel hasn't made some mistakes, just like every other nation. But the number of times, for example, that the UN has tried to condemn Israel for some action while completely ignoring the Arab attack that provoked that action shows the one-sidedness of much of the world on this subject.

Our worst nightmare….

Imagine one of our worst nightmares – a nuclear-armed Muslim superpower, immensely wealthy from its vast natural resources, led by a government publicly committed to religious principles, advised by fundamentalist theocrats, absolutely certain that its way is the best and its religion the only true religion, determined to impose its culture and its system of laws on the rest of the world, and willing to send its troops anywhere to further that cause. Sounds pretty terrifying, doesn’t it?

Now change the word Muslim to Christian and you can begin to understand how some of the rest of the world sees us. We are some other people's worst nightmare.

Think about it. These days we fit that description a little too close for comfort.

The importance of assimilation

America’s great success, up to now, has been the ability to absorb masses of immigrants from all over the world and assimilate them within two or three generations into a more or less homogeneous American culture, with reasonably common shared values and cultural expectations and world views. Immigrants often preserve and contribute to the rest of the American culture wonderful parts of their own cultural heritage such as second languages, local customs, and regional cuisines, but at core they eventually become Americans.

Europe seems to be having trouble doing this. Immigrants, especially North African and Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants, seem to be settling into European countries in enclaves where instead of assimilating they preserve their culture and their languages intact, becoming small offshore extensions of their own home countries. In some places the national police can’t even operate safely within these enclaves. In some places repugnant customs from the home country, such as honor killings or blood feuds, have been transplanted wholesale into a European country.

If this persists, these European countries face a difficult, divisive and dangerous future. Such enclaves, usually with very high rates of unemployment, become nurseries for breeding dissatisfaction, radical movements, and revolution.

We in America need to pay attention to this, and not let this separatism breed here as well, or we will face the same sort of dangerous and divisive future. On the one hand we need to be sure that our immigrants can get jobs, have equal access to the American dream (whatever that may be), and are not hampered by prejudice and bias. On the other hand we need to insist that if people want to immigrate to America, they are willing to become part of the American culture, learn English, and abide by American laws and customs, rather than walling themselves off from the rest of America.

Language is one of the key factors here. We certainly ought to encourage immigrants to maintain their own language as a second language if they want to. Far too many Americans speak only one language as it is. But we ought to have one and only one common nationwide official language to bind us as a nation. Well-meaning attempts to give Spanish or other languages equal official standing are, in the long run, dangerous and lead to the sort of separatist problems Canada has with Quebec.

Education is another key factor. We ought to be careful that large numbers of immigrants aren’t opting to educate their children outside of the American mainstream so as to preserve their original national identity instead of assimilating. This too in the long run will lead to the difficulties and divisions of separatism.

Multiculturalism, though it is promoted by people with the best of intentions, is a danger here. Certainly we ought to celebrate the diversity of our roots, but that is not the same thing as encouraging people not to assimilate but rather retain a separate identity as something other than Americans.

America is a large nation. Its strength is that despite its great size it is culturally one nation, though with some regional differences. If it ever succumbs to separatism it will fracture and divide, and a Balkanized America will no longer be a superpower.

Pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee

I enjoy “hard” science fiction, meaning stories based on believable science rather than on fantasy. Some years ago I skimmed one of Terry Pratchett’s “Diskworld” books and thought it was fantasy, full of magic, and not of interest to me. Some years later I happened across the “Science of Diskworld” series of books co-authored by Pratchett and two brilliant scientists, the mathematician Ian Stewart and the reproductive biologist Jack Cohen. In these books a Pratchett Diskworld story is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with Stewart and Cohen’s witty but ultimately profound observations about science. And that’s when I finally realized (duh!) that Pratchett’s stories are not really fantasy at all, but brilliantly done humorous explorations of ideas and concepts in science and philosophy, using the magic in Diskworld as a foil for the scientific method.

In The Science of Diskworld II: The Globe the authors introduce “narratvium”. Narrativum is an element in Diskworld that gives events their story. Humans love stories. In fact, human minds organize everything into a story, or narrative imperative. That’s what, for example, feeds conspiracy theories. Something awful happens and there doesn’t appear to be any reason for it, so we construct a plausible conspiracy theory to explain it, and then believe our theory because it is so logical and believable (just as we constructed it). We organize everything about our lives and our world into plausible stories, filling in the gaps with assumptions and changing or forgetting the inconvenient parts that don’t fit so that the story hangs together and is believable, whether it is true or not. Stewart and Cohen wryly suggest our species ought to have been named pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Why is this observation important? Because in fact there is always a great deal we don’t know or understand about the world and events around us, so the stories we create are always wrong to some degree, if not wholly. But because they hang together so well, just as we fashioned them, we tend to believe them anyway.

This is not a defect we should or can train ourselves out of. It is simply the way we are wired, and it serves useful purposes. It seems likely that stories provide the mental scaffolding upon which our minds can hang facts and memories and later retrieve them. Memory courses often teach people to remember names and faces and facts by associating them with something else, and plausible stories are one of those things one can remember and associate other things with.

And in fact a scientific theory is really nothing more than a plausible story we have constructed to explain the facts and data we have accumulated to date. In science, we keep changing and adjusting the story as we get new data, in hopes that we are getting closer to the truth. In most fields people don’t do that – they just keep believing the old story and try to ignore the new data if it doesn’t fit. In fact, humans hate to give up a good story, especially if they created it.

But what is important here is that we should always be aware that just because we have constructed an appealing and plausible story about something, that doesn’t mean it is correct. In fact, given the fallibility and limited knowledge of humans, it probably is at best a very rough approximation to the truth and at worst completely off the wall. It’s a well known trick in the intelligence field to feed one’s opponents misinformation as a plausible story – the strength of this approach is that if one’s opponent detects any inconsistencies in the story, they are very likely to simply adjust the story in their minds to fit their preconceptions, rather than to question the whole story. And con men know that a good story is an essential tool to drawing in the mark.

So just because a story or an explanation seems plausible, or fits what we would like to believe, that doesn’t mean we should believe it. In the real world, because of our imperfect knowledge, accurate stories will have lots of gaps and ill-fitting parts and vague sections and inconsistencies. If the story all hangs together too neatly, distrust it.

Are we a Christian nation?

A friend of mine was in a bookstore the other day and wished a Jewish friend of hers a ”Happy Holiday”. This set off the man in line behind her, who grumbled loudly about why she hadn’t wished her friend a Merry Christmas, acknowledging Christ’s birth. When she explained that her friend was Jewish, the man went into a tirade about how that didn’t matter, because America was a Christian nation.

A lot of people think that, though most aren’t as boorish and insensitive as that man.

In fact, we are not a Christian nation, despite having a Christian majority. We are very explicitly a nation of religious freedom. We were founded by people who felt strongly about religious freedom, and for good reason. They had lived through the centuries of religious wars and persecutions in Europe, and wanted no part of such strife here. And lest we forget, we can look around at the massacres and religious wars going on every year around the world and see why they didn’t want them here.

Our Constitution explicitly prohibits us from become a nation of any religion. The First Amendment begins “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…..”. Separation of church and state has been a fundamental guiding principle of our government up until recently, when there have been ill-conceived attempts to scrap it.

Protestant Christians may think that it would be a good idea to have more religion in the government, so long as it is their religion and not someone else’s. If they breach the church-state separation when they are in the majority, are they prepared to have the government controlled by some other religion when they become the minority, as they probably will eventually?

If Catholics eventually outnumber Protestants are they prepared to have the government acknowledge the Pope’s control over government policy? I doubt it.

If Muslims eventually become the majority (a real possibility, given the current demographics), are they prepared to have Sharia laws imposed by the government on everyone? I doubt it.

If secularists eventually become the majority are they prepared to have church’s tax-exempt status revoked? I doubt it.

If those who are pressing for more religion in government would just step back and think about it, they would recognize that separation of church and state protects their religion just as much as it does other religions, and they would be foolish and shortsighted to abandon that protection.

Teachers and survival

Think about it. Civilization is always just one generation away from losing everything we have gained and falling back to the stone age. Fail for just one generation to pass on what we as humans have learned at such cost over the millennia and we lose almost everything. Even the books we might leave behind would be unintelligible to descendents who didn’t understand the complex context as well as the words.

Look at the African countries where war has disrupted the passing of cultural knowledge for a generation or two. Whole cultures are disappearing, and the children who are left (often abducted and forced to fight in one of the armies) are feral. It could happen to us too.

Could you, starting from scratch, make even the simplest, commonest thing on your desk? Could you make a paper clip, for example? Do you understand the metallurgy required to make the metal? Do you understand the geology required to find the ores, or the mining engineering required to mine them, or the chemical engineering required to smelt and refine them, or the mechanical engineering required to make the tools to draw the wire and bend it to shape, or the electrical or mechanical engineering required to provide the power for these processes? And how much more complex are antibiotics and automobiles and computers and radios and printing presses and electric generators and rubber and plastics and ……

Could you, starting from scratch and with no tractors, no iron tools, no oil-based fertilizers or pesticides, no fancy packaged seeds, grow and store and prepare enough food year in and year out for yourself and your family, summer and winter? Could you keep them warm and clothed just with what you could grow or hunt without a rifle or factory-made bow? Could you keep them healthy and nurse them back from illness just with what you can grow or find growing wild?

Our civilization’s infrastructure is now dependent upon tens or hundreds of thousands of specialties, each of which takes years to master. Fail to pass all those specialties on to the next generation and we promptly die back to small, ragged, starving bands lead by the nearest thug.

If we really thought about it, we would encourage our best and brightest people to teach the next generation, give them the best infrastructure support we can, pay them handsomely and accord them the highest status, because the future of our whole civilization depends on them.

At higher levels of education (college and beyond), we do this reasonably well. But for the very critical early years, up through high school, we entrust this vital task to underpaid, overworked people endlessly hassled by bureaucracy (No Child Left Behind), manipulated by unions, and used as pawns by politicians and school boards. And as a result something like half our high school graduates can’t even make change correctly or identify our country on a world map, let along master the more advanced skills needed to keep our civilization going.

Clearly we have our priorities wrong!!

Asymmetric warfare

We are in a worldwide battle with Islamic fascist forces, and it looks to me like we may well lose. How could this happen when we have overpowering military and economic might, and our opponents are disorganized fanatics with a medieval mindset?

We constrain our military and intelligence forces to operate within civilized rules of engagement. Our opponents feel no such compunction. We wouldn’t use a nuclear or biological weapon on them. They will happily use such a weapon on us if/when they get their hands on one. We worry about the civil rights of our prisoners; about whether it is legal or moral to sleep deprive them during interrogation. They use electric drills on their prisoners and don’t worry about the legalities.

Our opponents have hardy any economy to speak of, but that doesn’t matter because we ourselves fund their war for them with our addiction to their oil and drugs, and our generous aid programs. We give them many billion each year, which they use to feed and arm themselves, to spread their recruiting messages worldwide, and to wage the crucial media war.

Our opponents have hardly any indigenous technology to speak of, but that doesn’t matter because we ourselves provide them with cell phones and internet connections, computers and weapons, and all the technology training they need in our finest schools.

Our opponents care enough about their mission to die willingly for it. Their have little to lose and (they passionately believe) much to gain by dying for the cause. We agonize over every death, and as Vietnam proved, our public has little tolerance for even low casualty rates among our troops. Our opponents believe, perhaps rightly, that as soon as we lose a few soldiers, we will withdraw. We have given them enough evidence in recent years to support that belief, and we may be about to give them more in Iraq.

Our opponents are content to battle us for decades, even centuries. Our public has a short attention span, and cannot seem to pursue any political goal consistently for more than a few years. Our opponents think in terms of generations. We think in terms of quarterly reports.

We have an open and free society. They don’t, but they have learned well how to exploit our openness and freedom and use it effectively against us. We can’t reach their people on their media, but they can and do use our media to manipulate our public.

Our opponents use media consistently to advance their cause and spread their message and rally their supporters. We use the media to nitpick and criticize and denigrate our own government and humiliate our troops. If one of their suicide bombers deliberately kills 50 civilians, our media report it as a simple fact. If one of our tank shells accidentally kills a couple of children, our media reports it with the maximum of heart-sob guilt overtones. If the New York Times finds out about something effective the intelligence community is doing, they don’t hesitate to publish it and render it ineffective, since that sells more newspapers. Some of our media might as well be on their payroll. We haven’t lost the ground war yet, but we lost the media war a long time ago.

Demographics is on their side. Although America’s birthrate is holding (just barely) at replacement rate, much of Europe has birthrates well below replacement rate, and so their indigenous populations are declining precipitously even while their Muslim immigrant populations are exploding. Soon enough some of our important European partners will have Muslim majorities in their governments and will turn against us.

In the end, I fear we will lose because, while we were a strong determined society in World War II, over the past few decades we have grown soft, hedonistic, and purposeless, preoccupied with liberal niceties and legalities, while our opponents are tough, passionate about their cause, and focused, and far more pragmatic.

A crying need for real statesmen

I used to be a moderate Republican, in favor of small government, fiscal responsibility, just enough regulation to keep the playing field level for everyone, and many liberal social ideas. The Republicans, however, seem to have slipped their moorings and become an undisciplined, free-spending bunch of political hacks pandering to the religious right, who apparently would like to scrap separation of church and state, emulate the mullahs of the Middle East and have the government impose their own version of Christian sharia law on everyone. They certainly aren’t anything Republican that I recognize anymore.

The Democrats, to the extent they are anything at all these days, seem to be in the grip of the loony left, who would still like to emulate the “postmodern” welfare states of Europe so that we too could have permanent high unemployment, slow growth, low worker productivity, high taxes, terrible health service, a wildly expensive cradle-to-grave welfare system, millions of pages of bureaucratic regulations on everything, and immigrant riots in the streets every Saturday. Not an appealing alternative.

Of course underneath the public disagreements the two parties are really pretty much alike. Both have colluded to gerrymander their congressional districts so that they can face as little opposition as possible. Both are on the take big time from lobbyists, though only a few are crass enough to take outright bribes to store in the freezer. Neither party is willing to step up and make hard choices. Both will promise anything the focus groups say will win them an election, whether they could deliver or not. Neither in recent times seems to have been able to field a presidential candidate I would buy a used car from.

Politics has never been easy or clean anywhere in the world – there is too much power and money involved. But if there was ever a time when we needed a few real statesmen to emerge, this is it.

We face really, really serious problems, like the Medicare and Social Security icebergs that look likely to bankrupt us, like the massive national debt we have accumulated that puts us at the mercy of our enemies if they decide to stop buying our bonds, like our economy’s overdependence on petroleum from volatile parts of the world, and I am sure you can think of a dozen more.

In the face of this, we certainly need something better in leaders than either political party has shown us yet.

The clash of civilizations

This problem in the Middle East is not about Islam. If the Middle East were Christian instead of Muslim, it would be just as easy to cherry-pick passages from the Bible to motivate and justify suicide bombers and wars against infidels as it is to cherry-pick them from the Qur'ān. The crusades proved that point.

The Middle East’s core problem is that they are stuck in the middle ages culturally, but with access to modern technology. They are still ruled by religious leaders or hereditary autocrats. The populace is still mostly poorly educated, and driven by age-old feuds and hatreds and tribal loyalties and mythologies. Populations are exploding but opportunities for jobs and the self-esteem that goes with jobs are not.

Some Middle East nations got a one-time bonus. They got oil. If their leaders had been wise, they would have used all the bonus wealth to educate their people and move their nations into the modern age. Instead they have mostly squandered it, and when the oil runs out (soon enough) they will be back where they started, except with more people than they can feed.

This is not a war between Christianity and Islam. Islam is just a handy lever for ambitious leaders in the Middle East to manipulate a credulous and restless population to their own ends, which is mostly about gaining and holding power. And modern technology – cell phones, TV, the internet, modern weapons – just expand their reach.

If we divert ourselves into thinking this is about religion, we miss the point, and the counter-policies we develop will be ineffective.

Mental child abuse

In our first world culture at least, we strongly disapprove of physically abusing children – starving them or sexually exploiting them or severely beating them. Try that in America or Europe and you will be arrested and prosecuted, if you aren’t lynched first by angry parents.

So how come we let people mentally abuse our children in the name of religion? How come we let them terrify our little children with images of hellfire and damnation? How come we let them implant guilt feelings and feelings of unworthiness and sinfulness into our children that will haunt them for the rest of their lives? How come we let them teach our daughters that they are less important than our sons? How come we let them teach our children that there are questions they don’t dare ask and thoughts they don’t dare explore?

I don’t doubt that these teachers sincerely believe what they teach, but that is no excuse. I’m sure the priests who ran the Spanish Inquisition were sincere in their beliefs as they tortured and burned dissenters. I’m sure the 9/11 terrorists were sincere in their beliefs, and the daily suicide bombers around the world are sincere in their beliefs. But that sincerity doesn’t make them right or justify their actions.

If we were good parents we wouldn’t allow people do this to our young children. It’s wrong. It’s child abuse!