Category: Uncategorized

A failure of narrative

Conservatives increasingly distrust scientists:

Just over 34 percent of conservatives had confidence in science as an institution in 2010, representing a long-term decline from 48 percent in 1974, according to a paper being published today in American Sociological Review. That represents a dramatic shift for conservatives, who in 1974 were more likely than liberals or moderates (all categories based on self-identification) to express confidence in science. While the confidence levels of other groups in science have been relatively stable, the conservative drop now means that group is the least likely to have confidence in science….

Less-educated conservatives didn’t change their attitudes about science in recent decades. It is better-educated conservatives who have done so, the paper says.

In the paper, Gauchat calls this a “key finding,” in part because it challenges “the deficit model, which predicts that individuals with higher levels of education will possess greater trust in science, by showing that educated conservatives uniquely experienced the decline in trust.”

The left-liberal narrative wants to push the idea that conservatives have turned away from the scientific method for ideological reasons and are willing to do so because they are less educated. But that won’t fly, since it is the more educated conservatives who don’t trust “science as an institution”. Which, of course, is very different than science as a method.

And the reason is obvious. Science as an institution is increasingly abandoning science as a method, so much so that it is often not even appropriate to refer to “science” or “scientists” when one is discussing some of the various quasi-sciences such as econometrics, the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, and what presently goes by the name of “climate change”.

Power struggles in China

The fact that the battle is taking place behind the scenes and away from the news cameras doesn’t mean that it won’t have a serious impact on the geopolitical situation:

After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People’s Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party’s history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, Wen foreshadowed Bo’s political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China’s political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen defined Bo as man who wanted to repudiate China’s decades-long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo’s legacy as a choice between urgent political reforms and “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution,” culminating a 30-year battle for two radically different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs. In Wen’s world, bringing down Bo is the first step in a battle between China’s Maoist past and a more democratic future as personified by his beloved mentor, 1980s Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang. His words blew open the facade of party unity that had held since the massacres of Tiananmen Square.

This October, the Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career.

The vicissitudes of civil war amongst the Chinese nomenklatura aside, I thought this was a particularly illuminating, if ironic, comment. “Hu taught his children to resist the idea, wired into the Communist Party psyche, that they had any particular hereditary right to high office.”

And thus we see the Ciceronian political cycle at work, as democracy, aristocracy, and tyranny all represent temporary phases rather than stases.

A Rooney Rule for players

Surprisingly, an unemployed black coach believes that professional football teams should have to interview black coaches before even thinking about who they want to hire:

Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry Rice was seated next to Edwards on the SportsCenter set when the subject came up, and Rice questioned whether any minority candidate would agree to interview for the Saints’ interim head coaching job. All indications out of New Orleans are that if the Saints go outside the franchise for an interim head coach, they’re going to hire Parcells. And that means any minority candidate they interview would know in advance that the purpose of the interview is to satisfy the letter of the Rooney Rule, even after they’ve already violated the spirit of the Rooney Rule.

“I know for me, I would not want to go do an interview if I’m not going to get that job,” Rice said.

Edwards added that the Saints have already, by reaching out to Parcells but not reaching out to any minorities, indicated that they’re going to go after the coach they want and not broaden their coaching search to include minority candidates, which the Rooney Rule is designed to make teams do.

“They’re making a mockery of the rule right now,” Edwards said.

Given that there are far too many black players in the NFL compared to their percentage of the American population, why isn’t there a Rooney Rule for players? Why isn’t the NFL addressing the problem of insufficient Asians and women on the football field? I think the Saints ought to comply with the rule by bringing in a drug-addled Negro crack whore and interviewing her before hiring Bill Parcells, thus complying with the rule while treating it with all the seriousness that it deserves.

Mailvox: awaiting enlightenment

I am sure we all await, with no little interest, the enlightenment that Freddy, the Calvinist, is sure to shed upon the arrogant, and yet somehow feeble little brains of the “Arminians” here at Vox Popoli:

The Arminians here act just like Jehovah Witnesses. They deny Trinity and the Diety of Christ because they can’t wrap their feeble little brains around those concepts…just like what the fundy Arminians do with the Sovereignty of God. The height of arrogance and intellectual pride.

Well, Freddy, since you have apparently been able to wrap your powerful and enormous, yet humble and not-at-all intellectual brain around the Trinity, the Diety of Christ, and the Sovereignty of God, I can’t imagine that you will have any trouble whatsoever in explicating the true and correct theology of those three concepts, slowly and patiently, for the edification of the less capable minds here.

I certainly look forward to hearing your explanation of how a man can be held responsible for something he cannot do, for how God can simultaneously know and not know the hour, (still less forsake Himself), and to hear your opinion on whether it was God, in His Sovereignty, who personally contemplated the issue before finally deciding how many times your pair of anal sphincters would constrict in the process of your daily defecations over the previous 24 hours. I am also curious to know if you believe a Calvinist, who by his own assertion cannot choose to worship God, will be damned or saved in the event that human action is required for salvation. Perhaps we can call it Jamsco’s Wager, the idea that the Calvinist who claims he is incapable of making a choice has nevertheless made it in the event that he is wrong about his incapability.

We’ve long assumed that Calvinism isn’t a salvation issue, but I am not so sure in this one regard. After all, how can someone claim to have done something they simultaneously claim cannot be done? Perhaps it was this dichotomy, and not his panoply of evil actions, that explains why the Robispierre of Geneva went to his grave wondering if he was not one of God’s Elect after all.

The “Arminian”, after all, needs fear nothing. What is it to him if God laughs at his illusion of ability and tells him, “you did not choose me, my friend, I chose you!” The Calvinist, on the other hand, is once more in exactly the same position as the atheist, in attempting to explain to the Almighty why he did not choose to submit himself to the Lord Jesus Christ when he had the opportunity.

The atheist will say: “It’s not my fault! I didn’t choose to worship you because I didn’t believe you existed!” The Calvinist will say: “It’s not my fault! I didn’t choose to worship you because John Calvin, and RC Sproul, and John Piper told me I couldn’t!”

Why Tebow matters

It’s because he understands that the real game that matters isn’t on the football field. After the upset playoff victory over the Steelers, Rick Reilly confesses that despite his initial doubts, he has become a believer:

Remember last week, when the world was pulling its hair out in the hour after Tebow had stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers with an 80-yard OT touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas in the playoffs? And Twitter was exploding with 9,420 tweets about Tebow per second? When an ESPN poll was naming him the most popular athlete in America?

Tebow was spending that hour talking to 16-year-old Bailey Knaub about her 73 surgeries so far and what TV shows she likes.

“Here he’d just played the game of his life,” recalls Bailey’s mother, Kathy, of Loveland, Colo., “and the first thing he does after his press conference is come find Bailey and ask, ‘Did you get anything to eat?’ He acted like what he’d just done wasn’t anything, like it was all about Bailey.”

More than that, Tebow kept corralling people into the room for Bailey to meet. Hey, Demaryius, come in here a minute. Hey, Mr. Elway. Hey, Coach Fox. Even though sometimes-fatal Wegener’s granulomatosis has left Bailey with only one lung, the attention took her breath away.

“It was the best day of my life,” she emailed. “It was a bright star among very gloomy and difficult days. Tim Tebow gave me the greatest gift I could ever imagine. He gave me the strength for the future. I know now that I can face any obstacle placed in front of me. Tim taught me to never give up because at the end of the day, today might seem bleak but it can’t rain forever and tomorrow is a new day, with new promises.”

I read that email to Tebow, and he was honestly floored….

For the game at Buffalo, it was Charlottesville, Va., blue-chip high school QB Jacob Rainey, who lost his leg after a freak tackle in a scrimmage. Tebow threw three interceptions in that Buffalo game and the Broncos were crushed 40-14.

“He walked in and took a big sigh and said, ‘Well, that didn’t go as planned,'” Rainey remembers. “Where I’m from, people wonder how sincere and genuine he is. But I think he’s the most genuine person I’ve ever met.”

There’s not an ounce of artifice or phoniness or Hollywood in this kid Tebow, and I’ve looked everywhere for it.

How can you not admire that equanimity? “Well, that didn’t go as planned.” The fascinating thing about Tebow, the polarizing thing about Tebow, is that in much the same way as Jesus Christ, the radiance of his actions shines a light upon us and forces us to look ourselves and our own actions in comparison. And we react in different ways. We can be inspired and attempt to go forth and do likewise, we can simply admire him while remaining personally unmoved, or we can react with hatred and anger for the way in which he causes us to lose righteousness in our own eyes.

Tebow matters because our instinctive response to him tells us, and others, an awful lot about our hidden inner characters.

This is why a mere backup quarterback for the New York Jets, not even worthy of so much as a third-round draft pick, commands such attention. It is part of why a team with a chaotic coach and a dysfunctional locker room brought him on board. And whether he replaces the Sanchize for three Wildcat plays a game or as the starter, who isn’t looking forward to the upcoming season, where the success or failure of Peyton Manning in Denver will tell us a lot about whether it was the Denver defense that should have gotten the credit for the Broncos’ unexpected playoff run.

Speaking of Peyton Manning, Peter King provides a detailed chronicle of his decision-making process, which is fascinating in light of his otherwise inexplicable choice of Denver over a stronger San Francisco team.

The real persecution today

Remember that some atheists are treating Christians and others deemed “irredeemables” in this manner today, right now, as their co-godless in the West whine that religion is somehow oppressing them:

His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole….

The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea’s labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining camps are “complete control districts” where “irredeemables” are worked to death.

It’s an incredible story. It is arguably the most horrific situation on the planet today. And yet, none of the “Never Again” crowd appears to give even the slightest damn about what is happening in the Hermit Kingdom; they’re too busy worrying about the persecution inherent in a Christmas greeting.

As for Christians, this is what real persecution looks like. The martyrs of North Korea have stubbornly held to the faith for decades despite it. How many of us could do so? The Cambridge Medieval History reminds us:

In the middle of the third century the Emperor and the Empire learnt to dread this organised force within their midst. The despised “third race” had become indeed a nation within the Empire. The first impulse was to exterminate what seemed to be a source of danger. One well-organised universal persecution followed another. From each Christianity emerged with sadly diminished numbers (for the lapsed were always a larger body than the martyrs), but with spirit unbroken and with organisation intact and usually strengthened.

The Church will always survive. But note that the lapsed always outnumber the martyrs. So when you pray for the persecuted of North Korea, remember both the fallen and the fallen away.

Working mothers harm children

Working mothers are quite literally damaging their children by chucking them into childcare rather than raising them:

The study, being presented today at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference, suggests that childcare leads to a substantial drop-off in parents’ involvement in their children’s upbringing. The damaging effects are most marked for boys and for youngsters aged from birth to two, prompting the researchers to suggest that childcare may not ‘be suited for children aged zero to two’.

Children were assigned a series of scores for their development and behaviour, based on the results of assessments and questionnaires. Childcare was found to significantly improve development for disadvantaged children. But the ‘lion’s share of the population experienced significant declines in motor-social development and health measures as well as increased behavioural problems’, the study found.

In other words, unless you’re a dysfunctional single mother who spends her days living off the state, doing drugs, and entertaining thugs, in which case the minimal childcare provided by indifferent minimum-wage workers is actually an improvement, your kids will be worse off.

The tragic thing is that most of these absentee mothers historically did not work and the main reason they are working now is in order to provide what they imagine will be to their children’s advantage. But what is the point of being able to afford an extra car or give your child a computer and a smartphone if you’re going to handicap him with “significant declines in motor-social development and health” from an early age?

Throw in the reduced wages produced by the entry of middle class women into the labor force and the 30 percent increase in female labor force participation from 1950 to 2010 and it’s not hard to understand why the USA is now facing a perfect storm of children’s issues combined with marital and familial problems.

NRO turns against the Afghan occupation

Are these cracks in the neocon dam or just a sign that their attention is turning to Iran and/or Syria?

Today, in another war – as Mark noted — there’s been a spate of Afghan “friendlies” assassinating American and U.N. troops in the wake of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’s alleged murder of 17 Afghan villagers while they slept. This comes on the heels of widespread rioting over the incineration of Korans, which were used by Taliban prisoners to pass messages — and for which the U.S. profusely apologized. Restrictive rules of engagement hamper our troops even as a group of foolish senators – all of them irrelevant to today’s politics — proclaim the fight worth continuing.

This is not a Good War.

In other words, I’m with Andy: It’s time to wrap up this decade-long farce, time for both civilian leaders and military brass to take a long, hard look at the demoralizing mess we’ve made in Afghanistan, and to ask how America can avoid such mistakes in the future.

We might start by forgetting the concept of “nation-building” in places where there are no nations to build. The nation-state, it should be remembered, is very much a Western concept, forged over 1,000 years of often painful European history.

Of course, it is as foolish to believe that non-Western barbarians are going to magically be transformed into civilized Westerners by virtue of physical residence in the West as it is to think that barbarian societies will be magically transformed into Western civilizations by virtue of military occupation.

But since it’s taken 11 years for these brilliant commentators to recognize the obvious in Afghanistan, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for them to do the same in America.

Chains of stars and science

Most humanists completely fail to understand that the current scientific hypotheses that free will does not exist are not a conceptual step forward, but rather a giant leap backward to the fifth century AD. This can be seen in David Boorstin’s explanation of the importance of the Christian concept of free will in The Discoverers:

The popular claims of pagan astrologers disturbed the early prophets of Christianity. Church Fathers who declared their own power to forecast everyman’s fate in the next world begrudged the powers of prophecy to those who pretended to know any man’s destiny on earth. If the astrologers’ horoscopes meant what they said, where was the room for free will, for freedom to choose good over evil, to forsake Mammon or Caesar for Jesus Christ?

The very struggle to become a Christian—to abandon pagan superstition for Christian free will—seemed to be a struggle against astrology. Saint Augustine (354–430) recalls in his Confessions: “Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations. ‘ And he was tempted by the astrologers’ counsel: “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven; this did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars: That man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame.”

Astrology remained the bête noire of the Christian Church Fathers. Faith in a star-written destiny had dissuaded Romans, such as Emperor Tiberius, from paying homage even to their pagan gods. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230) warned against astrology because “men, presuming that we are disposed of by the immutable arbitrament of the stars, think on that account that God is not to be sought after.”
– The Discoverers, Chapter 3, “God and the Astrologers”

Here we see the link between a variety of belief systems that are united in one object, in their opposition to free will. Astrology, secular humanism, rational materialism, Islam, and even Calvinism are all opposed to what is ultimately the core basis of Christianity, which is the free and voluntary decision to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

I find it both ironic and telling that Calvinists and a collection of cutting-edge atheist scientists are united in claiming that Man has no ability to choose to worship God. For is it not the Adversary who claims that Man is a helpless prisoner of fate and Jesus Christ who declares that he came to set Man free?

The astrologers blamed the Creator instead of the individual. The scientists blame – well, their theories aren’t formulated yet and are still self-contradictory and incoherent – a variety of things. The Calvinists follow, to varying degrees depending upon the Calvinist, the astrological lead in assigning blame to the Ordainer of heaven and the stars rather than the individual. It isn’t necessary to resort to the fallacy of guilt by association to question the way in which so much Calvinistic thinking tends to harmonize so comfortably with that of atheists and pagan astrologers.

I readily grant that St. Augustine is usually cited on the Calvinist side of the debate and that John Calvin derived many of his doctrinal positions from Augustine. It is worth remembering, then, that Augustine had previously found the astrological arguments to be persuasive.

Who needs economists?

Just ask the bookies:

In a candid admission to MPs, Professor Steve Nickell said he turned to the betting shop to find out whether Euro is likely to fail in the course of his work at the Office of Budget Responsibility.

Professor Nickell is one of the independent experts brought in by George Osborne, the Chancellor, to make sure Britain’s economic estimates are robust. Asked whether he thought the euro was likely to fail, he told the Treasury Select Committee the department itself did not “attach probabilities”.

“I go and look at William Hill and they actually have the odds of these sorts of things,” he said. “Last time I looked, the odds of Greece not using the euro by the end of the year were of the order of 40 per cent.”

This reminds me of the time that I talked with an acquaintance about a meeting he’d had the day before in London. He was lamenting the sheer idiocy of the men with whom he had been meeting and I was a little shocked when he happened to mention that he’d been meeting with the Bank of England. Totally confidence inspiring.