Friday Awesome: Penny for Your Thoughts

The local paper reports:

A Massachusetts man who pledged to make the last mortgage payment on his home with pennies has fulfilled that promise.

After warning his bank, Thomas Daigle in April dropped off about 62,000 pennies weighing 800 pounds in two boxes for the final payment on the Milford home he and his wife, Sandra, bought in 1977.

He tells The Milford Daily News he just wanted to make his last payment ‘‘memorable.’’

He started saving his pennies when he moved in.

The optician says his wife laughed whenever he would pick up a penny he found on the ground and say it was going to the mortgage.

Daigle says he’s just glad to have the coins out of his house.

That reminds me....

and....

Allan Sloan: Five Myths of the Financial Meltdown

We are about five years and one month past the financial meltdown, when America's largest and most prestigious banks could no longer hide the fact they were in big trouble--and were taking everyone else with them.

Fortune Magazine columnist Allan Sloan recalls:

It's hard to believe, but it's been five years and a day since the U.S. financial system's problems surfaced, and we're still not even remotely close to being able to feel good about the economy. My admittedly arbitrary start date is June 12, 2007, the day the Wall Street Journal reported that two Bear Stearns hedge funds that owned mortgage securities were in big trouble. At the time, things didn't seem all that grim -- in fact, U.S. stocks hit an all-time high four months later. But in retrospect the travails of the funds, which collapsed within weeks, were a tip-off that a crisis was afoot. Problems kept erupting, efforts to restore calm failed, and we trembled on the brink of a financial abyss in 2008-09. Things have gotten better since then, but still aren't close to being right.

There's a long way to go before the economy, and people, recover from wounds inflicted by the financial meltdown. The value of homeowners' equity -- most Americans' biggest single financial asset -- is down $4.7 trillion, about 41%, since June 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The U.S. stock market has lost $1.9 trillion of value, by Wilshire Associates' count. Even worse, we've got fewer people working now -- 142.3 million -- than then (146.1 million), even though the working-age population has grown. So while plenty of folks are doing well and entire industries have recovered, people on average are worse off than they were. Bad stuff.

Sloan observes that only five years away from these shattering events, myth is already displacing reality (and some people wonder why I distrust the reliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus and such.)

Sloan reminds us of the facts. I'll just list them here. Go read the article.

Myth No. 1: The government should have done nothing.
Myth No. 2: The government bailed out shareholders.
Myth No. 3: The Volcker Rule will save us.
Myth No. 4: Taxpayers are off the hook for future failures.
Myth No. 5: It's the government's fault.

Sloan's article generated reaction. In a follow-up article, he brought out more facts and reasoning to deal with the rabble. First he deals with the cries over Myth #1, the myth that the government shouldn't have done anything:

Dozens of commenters said that cleaning up the mess should have been left to the private markets, which would have done things better than the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and rest of the government did.

What most of those people probably don't realize, though, and what I had no room to discuss in my last column, is that private markets took the first big swing at recapitalizing troubled financial institutions -- and struck out.

Other objectors told Sloan the government should have done something else. He dispenses with this line of thinking, too.

The alternate complaint -- that the government should have nationalized troubled institutions -- sounds plausible too. But that strategy stood no chance of working, regardless of how things played out in other countries. First, seizure would have resulted in endless litigation. Second, there were practical problems. For example, when I looked into the consequences of the government nationalizing Citi, I discovered (from independent third parties) that Citi most likely would have had to surrender lucrative franchises in several foreign countries that don't allow banks there to be owned by foreign governments.

A third complaint made to Sloan dealt with Myth #5, that the government was really to blame for the financial meltdown. Sloan explains why this is bunk:

The other widespread criticism was of my last point: that although the government lowered some mortgage loan standards, the debacle is primarily the private sector's fault. I was attacking the oh-so-convenient myth that private markets are blameless and pure, that the whole problem comes from misguided government efforts to help "those people" get homes they couldn't afford. Many commenters were, shall we say, displeased.

Well, let's see. Most of the bad mortgages were made to supposedly qualified borrowers, without pressure from the government. Lenders required little in the way of down payments or credit checks; they wanted to juice up their loan volume. Credit-rating agencies gave AAA ratings to trash, to keep fee income flowing. Yield-hungry investors snapped up garbage that bore the agencies' imprimatur. Private enterprise all the way.

Sloan closes by reminding all of us just how bad it was five years ago.

Credit default swaps and other esoterica spread the problems worldwide, magnified losses, and put even the soundest institutions at risk. That's because if giant, less sound institutions had failed en masse, they would have defaulted on their obligations to their sounder trading partners.

We also need to remember that for all the criticism (including mine) of particular tactics, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke bailed out the U.S. financial system at no net expense to America's taxpayers. An impressive achievement.

Instead of a discussion about what happened, we've gotten into a government-vs.-free-market shoutfest. These fragmented days, many people tend to see things in black and white terms, in ways that reinforce what they want to believe. The real world is more complicated than that. Black and white have their places -- but to understand the financial meltdown, you need to see some gray.

To me, the big takeaway is that the financial meltdown was caused and magnified by bad business and poor regulation. And although the crisis was mitigated by cooperation between business and government, we still need lots of partnership, transparent decision making, and cool-headed leadership on both sides.

We need business to step up and we need government to stay involved and proactive.
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I'm Dreaming of Some White Christians

I mentioned recently that I was all "meh" on religion these days. It's true. I don't feel inspired to comment on matters of religion and atheism right now. Part of the problem is that I very much want to say something original. I want to get into issues. I don't simply want to link to stories or other blog posts, and I don't want only to point and laugh at religious beliefs.

Here is a story worth thinking about, an advertisement for a "white Christians" gathering in Alabama. MSNBC reports:

A three-day whites-only religious conference — which will conclude with a flaming cross — in Lamar County, Alabama, has some residents upset at the racist implications while the minister complains that his freedom of speech is being violated.

"Yes, we believe that the Europeans and their descendants are the chosen people of God," according to the website for Christian Identity Ministries, which is holding the event with Church of God’s Chosen. "We believe this, not because we think that the white race is superior, but because there is overwhelming proof in support of this belief. We do not back down from this belief, because we are certain."

Some local residents learned of the July 4-6 gathering after the group posted fliers promoting their fourth annual pastors conference, announcing "All White Christians Invited," according to a report by WBRC in Birmingham.

"It was put up throughout the town in the middle of the night. (It was) when everyone was asleep without the permission of the business owner," said Tyler Cantrell, manager of Norris Music in nearby Winfield, Ala., the report said.

According to the flier, the three-day conference, being held in a rural area, will end with a "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony."

From this story, the feature that strikes me first is the distinction:

• European Christians (and descendants) are God's Chosen.
• European Christians are not superior to Christians of other races.

My Jewish background gives me some perspective on the "chosen" issue. The teaching from the rabbis was always that "chosen-ness" was a bad use of terms. God honored Israel by giving the Torah to them, and through them to humankind. They told us that being Jewish was not a matter of superiority but a matter of priority: we were the first to know God and His Holy Law, and to know a mission for ourselves to be a light unto the nations.

Now, this ministry says that Israelites (and by extension, modern Jews) have been replaced by European Christians. Co-opting the chosen-ness idea is hardly new. I once attended a speech by Louis Farrakhan that claimed Black Americans were chosen. The DNA of Abrahamic religions seems to hold this pernicious idea that a single swath of people has more of God's favor than other peoples.

While it's not surprising that this group claims the mantle of God's favor, it is unexpected that they insist not to be racist. There is "progress" here, in a sense. They seem not to conceive of Black people as the enemy. They seem not to consider Jews, Muslims and Asians to be lower or lesser humans. In the Alabama flier, the "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony" reads to me as a specific attempt to divest cross-burning from its associations with KKK and their anti-Black terror campaigns.

Is the ministry racist? Of course. But they certainly are conflicted. They like being white and feel it's pretty cool. They may even feel as though the world-at-large doesn't (or no longer, to put the matter into narrative form) value racial whiteness as it should. Yet they also sense the moral wrongness of racism. They want racial coherence and perhaps insularity; they also tolerate the diversity of the world beyond their group. And so, they bury their racism by downplaying how great it is to be white and chosen--it's the "Mo' money, mo' problems" argument.

That tolerance has ugly limits, though. This ministry is fully certain that it stands closest to God's favor and intentions. It has "overwhelming proof." I wonder: If you are a Christian and you think this ministry is wrong, how do you go about showing them? How do you refute their "overwhelming proof," and how do you know that you are not the one who's wrong?

Let's close by hearing some of the comments on the story. One person says:

Alabama. 'nuf said.

This, of course is not helpful, although we all get the joke. I think the good thing that atheist criticism can add here is to ask whether this event is strictly provincial. We atheists ask whether the exclusion of this group is really so different from exclusive practices that are normal to mainstream Christianity: exclusion of women, homosexuals; the insularity of church leadership; the place of Christians generally at the top of the holy heap, above Jews and Buddhists and atheists.

Another comment:

These people obviously didn't get what Jesus was trying to say.

Riiiight. Because Jesus was saying what YOU say he was saying.

But let's continue. Here's the inevitable tu quoque:

And did the Black Caucus or The Black Law Students Association get the message too. Or maybe you need to attend a meet of the African Americans For the re-election of Obama and ask them if they got his message. Don't tell me you don't know of all of these organizations. Maybe you know the Black Panthers then. This is just the same people doing their usual racist things....but they are not whites...Right!

So tell me I am racist now....I'm not black and I am tired of everyone like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton telling me I'm racist because I'm white and not black too......get over it. We are not all black here it this country. Just look at the President....he's not all black either. Is he?

Here's the history buff chiming in:

Overwhelming proof? Really? Don't know how to break this to you Rev, but "the white race" (my ancestors) were pagan until they were dragged kicking and screaming into Christianity; ever heard of Charlemagne? Charlemagne, or "Karl the Butcher" as he was lovingly known by the Saxons, force converted Western Europe just as Jesus would...by torture and murder. So tell me, with that history, and being that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam originated in the middle-east, and each of the three claim to be God's "chosen" people...what could possibly be your overwhelming proof...ROFLMAO!!!

One more comment on how one bad Christian group does not Christianity make:

There is no such thing as a All white Christian gathering. If your not reaching out to all... your not reaching out at all.

All they are doing is trying to get news. That church (if you can call it that) been around for awhile and now they made front page on a left leaning site... wow.

Don't even try to associate all Christian with this ... All real Christians denounce this and so do I. It their deal not Christs.

There are more comments I could post, including the ones on how Jesus was dark-skinned and Jewish, on how we all came from Africa, and inroads to Obama/Romney. But it's time to sum up.

The takeaways from the story are (1) that co-opting earlier identities, narratives, and status (as in connecting myself or my group to Israel at Sinai) is part of what religion enables; (2) that overt, hostile racism and bigotry may be on the decline; and (3) we have lots of stock responses to stories like the "white Christians" gathering, but the gathering is really just one manifestation of what groups do (setting 'in' and 'out'-group boundaries) and of what seems endemic to Western religious thinking.

Why I Love Jazz and Why You Should Too

The first jazz album I really liked was Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. "Blue Rondo a la Turk," the opening number, sold me. It was exciting, playful, shifting, artsy, adventurous, smart, swinging, and crisp. Like the album, that tune was a picture in sound: group sound, yet individual sound, too.

The balance of group and individual, of vision and sound, is what makes jazz special. The group plays together, yet each one has a unique, foundational role. Each musician listens to the others, responds to them and lifts them. Any one may also have a turn (or more) to step out as an individual and explore the boundaries of song, sound, and group cohesion.

As a listener, I traveled these boundaries with Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Evan Parker, and other innovators of the avant garde and free jazz movements. Their music was not always my favorite, but I heard beauty there. I heard effort. I heard space. I heard myself waiting for the next step.

When I was a teenager, I gravitated to the big, classical guys: Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Errol Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Dexter Gordon. Their cassette tapes would go into my alarm clock, and they would play me to sleep. To me, theirs was Kerouac's night music, the music for those of us who wanted more...more night.

Of all, the piano players were my favorites. I collected a ton of Keith Jarrett, whose solo concert album from Bremen and Lausanne changed me profoundly. How a man walked out and played and went on the way Jarrett did was amazing. So many of the pianists also moved me, and they continue to do so: Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bobo Stenson, Marilyn Crispell, Irene Schweitzer, Paul Bley, Horace Silver, Vijay Iyer, Esbjorn Svensson, Ethan Iverson, Michel Petrucciani, Marcin Wasilewski, Hiromi, Brad Mehldau, and many others. All of these musicians are superb alone, yet they also mesh in group contexts.

Jazz, to me, has never been about sitting to receive a work of art delivered by musicians. Instead, it is about witnessing and maybe even being part of a process. In ensemble settings, the players communicate with one another. They don't just play the number or present it. They don't just imitate the song as it is on an album. They don't give a packaged product. No, jazz musicians build a song. They pass it amongst themselves like a beach ball in the bleachers, but seriously enough. They dialogue. They converse. They elaborate. They customize.

I love jazz because nothing else is so creative and diverse. I love jazz because it is what it is, and it lets me be what I am. Other music, which I love too, is not the same as jazz. Rock is image, ideology, and performance. Classical is architecture. Blues is real. Hip Hop is a relentless beat that can become anything from a heart to a gun to a sob to a confrontation. Disco is escape. Funk is wild and fun. Folk is private.

But jazz is democratic. It's not a spectator sport for either the player or the listener. Indeed, the listener is a player in a way that simply is not so for other musics. In my opinion.

I love jazz for the democracy, for the opinions it offers, and for opinions like mine it allows. If you don't love jazz, you don't love participation.

But if you want to hear and be heard, you must love jazz.

(For Eric Jackson, whose weeknight radio program on WGBH Boston has recently been scaled back.)

The Plan Is Launched

Excellent!

This past weekend, I was elected to the Executive Board of my local parent-teacher organization. The group supports enrichment programs for students, runs events to encourage parental involvement, and keep lines of communication going between parents and teachers.

I am grateful for the chance to be a voice for quality educational programs and standards. As the parent of an autistic child, I will represent many more who want the system to reach out to their children too. Finally, the participation and networking will help me gain local notoriety as I work toward future involvement in the town's school committee and board of selectmen.

Hasidic Pedophiles and Pederasts. Yep, It Can Happen Here.

Hey rabbi, check out the sexy boy in the third row.

Crimes against children by adults who claim to live the word of God are not new. Many religions have demons, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews are no exception. Most deny it could happen in their midst. Child rape and molestation don’t fit their pious image.

"The (ultra-Orthodox) Jews are no exception." That's the point. And by understanding that point, abuse of children and minors can be stopped everywhere.

On the CNN pages, the following part of the story is the most interesting:

The Hasidim in Brooklyn are a powerful voting block. That’s why District Attorney Charles Hynes is accused by victims’ rights advocates of going easy on alleged Hasidic child molesters and rapists. He’s been elected six times, and is accused of appeasing the rabbis in order to get their support and keep his position.

Hynes strongly denies the allegations. In 2009, he established a program and a hotline to help victims called Kol Tzedek (“Voice of Justice” in Hebrew). But critics are outraged because he refuses to disclose the names of the men arrested through the initiative. The Jewish Daily Forward’s request for the records filed under the state’s Freedom of Information Law was denied.

Hynes claims that revealing the names of the suspects could lead to the community identifying the victims and intimidating them. That decision raises concerns about the rights of the public, the legality of shielding the men, and the DA’s motives.

Tuchman asked Hynes how he reconciles instituting a policy for the Hassidim, but no other groups, like the Roman Catholic Church. He says because “there’s never been any intimidation by priests.”

In a May 16 op-ed, Hynes wrote:

Since the inception of Kol Tzedek, we have made 95 arrests; 53 cases have been adjudicated, with a conviction rate of 72%.

I stand by these numbers.

The statistics show how absurd it is to suggest that we cover up, downplay or in any way “give a break” to sex offenders in the Orthodox Jewish community. Like any other defendants, they are often arrested in public by the police, and their court appearances are open and available to the public as part of the public record. I welcome scrutiny of these cases.

The suggestion that I have ever condoned the practice of first seeking a rabbi’s advice before an Orthodox Jewish community member reports sexual abuse is a distortion of my record. I have never suggested that someone seeking the advice of a rabbi is then relieved of the obligation of reporting sexual abuse to the appropriate authorities.

While some may persist in protecting the community ahead of justice for the young victims, there are signs of progress. On June 10, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews held a meeting in Crown Heights to talk about combating child sex abuse. Hynes was on the panel. Some rabbinic leaders have said anyone with knowledge of abuse should go to the police and do not need to talk first with a rabbi. It will take the courage of the victims and the compassion of the community to make lasting change.

Hynes ought to disclose names of people arrested through Kol Tzedek because ultra-Orthodox Jews are no exception. What's more, the interests of a single community do not outweigh justice for our society's most vulnerable.

The Children's Crusade, Then and Now

When I saw the video below of a child being applauded in a church (namely, the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church in Greensburg, Indiana) for singing "“Ain’t no homos gonna make it to Heaven”--

I was reminded of the Children's Crusade of 1212. Wikipedia introduces it as follows:

The Children's Crusade is the name given to a disastrous Crusade by Christian children to expel Muslims from the Holy Land said to have taken place in 1212.

The traditional narrative is probably conflated from some factual and mythical notions of the period including visions by a French or German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery.

The 1213 Chronica Regiae Coloniensis relates events this way:

In this year occurred an outstanding thing and one much to be marveled at, for it is unheard of throughout the ages. About the time of Easter and Pentecost,4 without anyone having preached or called for it and prompted by I know not what spirit, many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts which they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing. This they did despite the wishes of their parents, relatives, and friends who sought to make them draw back. Suddenly one ran after another to take the cross. Thus, by groups of twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, they put up banners and began to journey to Jerusalem. They were asked by many people on whose advice or at whose urging they had set out upon this path. They were asked especially since only a few years ago many kings, a great many dukes, and innumerable people in powerful companies had gone there and had returned with the business unfinished. The present groups, moreover, were still of tender years and were neither strong enough nor powerful enough to do anything. Everyone, therefore, accounted them foolish and imprudent for trying to do this. They briefly replied that they were equal to the Divine will in this matter and that, whatever God might wish to do with them, they would accept it willingly and with humble spirit. They thus made some little progress on their journey. Some were turned back at Metz, others at Piacenza, and others even at Rome. Still others got to Marseilles, but whether they crossed to the Holy Land or what their end was is uncertain. One thing is sure: that of the many thousands who rose up, only very few returned.

Today, it seems the foundational events are apocryphal and the crusading group was made up of poor people in Germany and France, some of whom tried to reach Jerusalem. It's not clear how many, if any, bona fide children launched or participated in the crusade.

Now, there is not much connection between the video and the crusadeoutside of the shared idea, "children," which, as we know, probably doesn't really attach to the Children's Crusade.

In both cases, however, Christian belief establishes a context for seeing the "homos" or the Muslims as "other." The other can be the object of jokes, even jokes that delight in the idea of a group of people eternally receiving punishment and being denied love. The other can be the object of military and political action, as in influencing others through force to change their opinions and way of life.

And although the Children's Crusade of 1212 may not have involved children centrally, we have no doubt that religious communities of all sizes love to put children on the front lines. Get the children believin' and prayin' and preachin' while they still accept doctrine on authority. While they still believe in magic. While they still care about gaining approval. This remains true today as it did in 1212.

DOMA Unconstitutional

If you know and respect the US Constitution, then of course DOMA is unconstitutional.

Saw this news item earlier today:

An appeals court ruled Thursday that the heart of a law that denies a host of federal benefits to gay married couples is unconstitutional.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, discriminates against married same-sex couples by denying them federal benefits.

The law was passed in 1996 at a time when it appeared Hawaii would legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have instituted their own bans on gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004.

The appeals court agreed with a lower court judge who ruled in 2010 that the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage and denies married gay couples federal benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns.

Yes, arbitrarily denying federal benefits to some married couples and not others is unconstitutional and immoral.

Eventually, all US states will either come to recognize "gay marriage" (and it will just be "marriage") or they will be forced to. I hope for the former but I'm comfortable with the latter.

Disturbing yet Unsurprising

Banks back Romney.

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments.

"There’s no doubt that there’s been a big diminution of support for the president," said William M. Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff and a former top JPMorgan Chase executive. "People in the financial services sector are saying, 'The president has been too tough on us, both in policy and on rhetoric.'"

Romney promises banks unfettered operation as they buy labor, dress it up, sell it, pocket the profits, and leave taxpayers with the heaviest financial burdens. Romney knows all about "making money."

The graphic below suggests the difference between Romney and Obama. The former's backers seek to accumulate and consolidate. The latter's seek to innovate and improve.

The Jews Are a Race, Geneticist Says

Bar Refaeli: She's my race.

Harry Ostrer is a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His new book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, argues that Jews exhibit a distinctive genetic signature that is central to Jewish identity. Jews are, in other words, a race of people.

Personally, I am not surprised at this because insularity seems to be a common historical factor across Jewish populations worldwide. Yet, the book aims partly to counteract a general uneasiness with the concept of "race." In particular, Ostrer seems to argue against a view that racial differences are purely social constructions. Yes, Ostrer says, human beings are 99.9 percent similar, but that 0.1 percent difference is important because that's where Jewish distinction emerges in physical features, ancestral origins, genealogies, communities, traits, and shared identification.

I have no problem with the notion of race as "population" and "region of ancestral origin." The problem with race is the problem of using it to express ideas that some human populations are superior or inferior. Ostrter seems to be operating in a post-racial sense of race, where we can talk about race without making it a human competition.

I also think there's no need to attach religious significance to the racial homogeneity of the Jews. It's not as if biological relatedness tells us anything about the patriarchs, the Bible, or God. If the Jews are a race, they are one of many races and sub-races. Humanity is internally diverse. The Jews, too, are racially diverse, and this is perhaps the most interesting and valuable lesson of the subject.

The genetics of the Jewish people (or peoples?) are fascinating. I highly recommend Razib Khan's assessment of a 2010 paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The paper, in which Ostrer has an author credit, demonstrated "that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD [identity by descent] genetic threads" (see figure, right).

The paper is very detailed, and Khan does a nice job explaining it. Let me first quote from the paper, where its findings are summarized:

The Middle Eastern populations were formed by Jews in the Babylonian and Persian empires who are thought to have remained geographically continuous in those locales. In contrast, the other Jewish populations were formed more recently from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from individuals who were converted to Judaism during Hellenic-Hasmonean times, when proselytism was a common Jewish practice. During Greco-Roman times, recorded mass conversions led to 6 million people practicing Judaism in Roman times or up to 10% of the population of the Roman Empire. Thus, the genetic proximity of these European/Syrian Jewish populations, including Ashkenazi Jews, to each other and to French, Northern Italian, and Sardinian populations favors the idea of non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestry in the formation of the European/Syrian Jewish groups and is incompatible with theories that Ashkenazi Jews are for the most part the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars or Slavs. The genetic proximity of Ashkenazi Jews to southern European populations has been observed in several other recent studies.The paper here challenges the hypothesis, based on an historical interpretation, that Ashkenazi Jews descend from eastern Europeans and Eurasians who converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages. The paper's genetic findings indicate that Semitic Jews gained massive Greco-Roman converts much earlier.

The early history matters greatly, and Khan neatly encapsulates the paper's cultural and historical assessment:

In the time of Augustus Jews were divided between different sects and persuasions, and there was a welter of diversity. Additionally, in the marketplace of Roman religion Jews were a moderately entrepreneurial group. The dynasty of Herod himself was of convert origin. There was a wide spectrum of Jewish religious practice and belief, from the near monastic isolation of the Essenes, to the engaged but separatist Pharisees, and finally to the wide range of more syncretistic practices which fall under the rubric of “Hellenistic Judaism.” Many scholars assert that it was from the last sector which Christianity finally arose as a Jewish sect, and that Christianity eventually absorbed all the other forms of Hellenistic Judaism. Judaism of the Pharisees, which became Rabbinical Judaism, and more recently Judaism qua Judaism, was shaped in large part by having to accommodate and placate the dominant Christian and Islamic religious cultures in which it was integrated by the early medieval period. Conversion to Judaism from Christianity or Islam was often a capital crime (though conversion from Christianity to Judaism was not forbidden in Muslim lands, while presumably conversion from Islam to Judaism in Christian lands would not have been, though few Muslims lived in Christian lands). So after 500 A.D. it seems that what may have occurred was that a Jewish Diaspora characterized by geographically determined genetic diversity, despite some common original Levantine origin, was genetically isolated from surrounding populations. This explains why there seems relatively little influx of Slavic genes into the Ashkenazim despite their long sojourn within Poland-Lithuania and later the Russian Empire. In contrast, the Roman Jewish community was already large in the days of Julius Caesar, and presumably intermarried with the urban proletariat of diverse origins. In an ironic twist these data suggest that modern Jews, in particular the Ashkenazim, but to a lesser extent the Sephardim as well, share common ancestry with gentile Europeans due to the unconstrained character of the pagan Greco-Roman world which Jews were to a great extent strident critics of.

Genetics, culture, history: all are intertwined. The lesson is that to call a human population a race is not--or should not be--tantamount to calling them a different species of human. We all know, however, that race has often been used precisely to separate and politicize groups of people. Postmodernist analyses of race focus on the ways race is politicized and used to political ends. The political, politicized race is often the fiction pointed to by postmodernists. I am, like many, a postmodernist about the interpretations, not about the facts. Now, a postmodernist might snidely question how/whether one separates interpretations from facts--and it is an interesting philosophical discussion that may amount to little else than sophistry--but the clear target is interpretation.

I would be interested to read informed challenges to Ostrer's thesis.

Footnote: The image of model Bar Rafaeli and the caption are an ironic--and attempted humorous--comment on the racial politics I discuss in this post.

"What Must Be Said" and the Nuclear Threat Posed by Israel

In the US, it is National Poetry Month. So I offer a controversial poem by Nobel laureate Günter Grass.

"What Must Be Said" looks at how close we are to a nuclear conflict in the Middle east and criticizes Israel's current government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has responded to the poem awfully by banning Grass from visiting Israel. The government evidently takes umbrage at even the suggestion of moral equivalency between Iran, which is also a subject of the poem, and Israel.

Joseph Kugelmass renders the following English translation. I am interested in readers' responses to the poem: good or bad. I can hardly think anyone will react indifferently.

Why am I silent, silent for too long,
about that which has obviously been practiced
in war games where we, the survivors,
are footnotes at best?

The alleged right to a pre-emptive strike –
against a subjugated people,
compelled into obedience,
acting in pageants orchestrated by bullies,
and now, under their influence,
suspected of constructing nuclear weapons –
threatens the Iranian people with annihilation.

Why do I stop short of naming
that other country
which for years, in secret,
has been developing nuclear capabilities
not subject to inspection or control?

My silence is part of what I now recognize
to be the greater silence, the constraining lie
enforced by the familiar threat
that we will be judged guilty of anti-Semitism.

And now, my country
(because it is still held to account
for its unprecedented crimes)
can describe as “reparations”
what it does in its own commercial interest:
delivering another U-Boat to Israel,
one capable of deploying devastating warheads
against targets inside a nation that has not, so far,
been proven to possess a single atomic bomb.
Fear is serving as a substitute for evidence.
I say what must be said.

But why have I been silent until now?
Because of my own background,
and ineradicable shame –
which, as well it should,
binds my fate to Israel’s.
I was too ashamed to state the facts.

Why should I say, as an aged man,
down to his final drops of ink:
“Israel’s nuclear capability
is a threat to this world’s
already fragile peace?”
Because it must be said;
tomorrow it may be too late.
We Germans, already so burdened with guilt,
may become complicit in a crime
that we can foresee
and for which the usual excuses
will not suffice.

Granted, I am also speaking now
because I am tired of the West’s hypocrisy,
and because I wish
to free many others from their silence.
I appeal to you who have created this danger
to renounce violence, and to insist upon
the unhindered, permanent control
of Israeli nuclear capability
and Iranian nuclear research
by an international agency
authorized by both governments.

For Israelis, and Palestinians
and all of the people, ourselves included
living as enemies, in territories
occupied by delusion:
This is the only aid.

If, like me, you wish to have the original German version, I give you "Was gesagt werden muss":

Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.

After-Birth Abortion and the Solomon Problem

After-birth abortions? Really?

The Coming Brouhaha
Two medical ethics philosophers have recently published a paper favoring "after-birth abortion." Allow the sense of that first sentence to kick in, and then have a read of the paper's abstract:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

This paper will generate lots of controversy, and I've never read anything like it. It has already attracted attention to the Journal of Medical Ethics, which has started to post defenses and reactions online.

Predictably, anti-abortion advocates see the article as proof that legitimizing pre-fetal or fetal abortion opens a society to rampant, sanctioned killings and euthanasia. Thus, our general value for human life is being diminished and we all are becoming very sad.

Atheists Will Be Blamed
While I have objections to the paper, described below, I also sense it will be used to vilify atheists.

Some people will look at atheism, materialism, secularism, and science as the sources from which such a paper could spring. Without the Christian God, they'll say, people will be killing one other and having sex with animals--and it will all be legal!

I predict this paper will henceforth come up in roughly 1 of 5 atheist conversations with believers. Over and again, we will be asked to explain why people shouldn't just kill newborns. If you don't believe in God/Jesus/Ramen, you have no basis for objecting to infanticide, they'll tell us.

If You Can Dodge a Wrench, You Can After-Abort a Newborn

So what does the paper actually say, is there any merit to it, and what's the proper response?

Briefly, the paper says the reasons one might abort a fetus hold as well for newborns up to at least a few weeks: If you can abort a fetus, you can after-abort a newborn.

The merit of the paper is in raising some important issues: personhood, rights, burden, prevailing concerns, and so on. These issues deserve to be discussed, especially in an age where high technology, long life-spans, uncertain economics have all converged. It's not an easy or straightforward matter to know what defines a person and when sociopolitical rights attach.

That said, I cannot accept the argument put forth by the authors. I think the best actions to take are to read the article and to discuss it soberly. Therefore, having read the article I want to examine the argument in the paper I object to most: that "both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons." I will focus on this case in the rest of my comments, and I'll be concerned only in the matter of newborns.

Why Kill Babies? Because They Ain't People (Says the Paper)

No reason to live?

First, the authors make some careful terminological distinctions. They separate newborns from "children," who have high enough moral status to prohibit their being killed. The authors also define "after-birth abortion" apart from "euthanasia" because the best interest of the one who dies is not a factor in the case of after-birth abortion.

The authors' opening argument on the moral status of a newborn hinges on the concept of personhood:

Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means that many nonhuman animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal. (Emphasis added)

After reading this, I had to check the journal website because I thought (I almost hoped) it was a tasteless joke. Personhood amounts to awareness that one is alive. If and until a being has the capability for such awareness, one can find sufficient cause to kill that being in clear conscience.

The "if and until" part is important, so the authors deal with it head-on:

Our point here is that, although it is hard to exactly determine when a subject starts or ceases to be a ‘person’, a necessary condition for a subject to have a right to X is that she is harmed by a decision to deprive her of X. There are many ways in which an individual can be harmed, and not all of them require that she values or is even aware of what she is deprived of. A person might be ‘harmed’ when someone steals from her the winning lottery ticket even if she will never find out that her ticket was the winning one. Or a person might be ‘harmed’ if something were done to her at the stage of fetus which affects for the worse her quality of life as a person (eg, her mother took drugs during pregnancy), even if she is not aware of it. However, in such cases we are talking about a person who is at least in the condition to value the different situation she would have found herself in if she had not been harmed. And such a condition depends on the level of her mental development, which in turn determines whether or not she is a ‘person’. (Emphasis added)

In other words, a newborn doesn't have the requisite mental capacity to know whether he or she would be not want to be killed. The authors develop this argument further:

Those who are only capable of experiencing pain and pleasure (like perhaps fetuses and certainly newborns) have a right not to be inflicted pain. If, in addition to experiencing pain and pleasure, an individual is capable of making any aims (like actual human and non-human persons), she is harmed if she is prevented from accomplishing her aims by being killed. Now, hardly can a newborn be said to have aims, as the future we imagine for it is merely a projection of our minds on its potential lives. It might start having expectations and develop a minimum level of self-awareness at a very early stage, but not in the first days or few weeks after birth. On the other hand, not only aims but also well-developed plans are concepts that certainly apply to those people (parents, siblings, society) who could be negatively or positively affected by the birth of that child. Therefore, the rights and interests of the actual people involved should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.

I suppose we can take some solace that the authors limit permissible killing time to only a few weeks after birth! Sigh. Let's get to the conclusion of the personhood argument, where burden of the newborn on actual people (i.e., not the newborn) overrides consideration for the baby's life:

It is true that a particular moral status can be attached to a non-person by virtue of the value an actual person (eg, the mother) attributes to it. However, this ‘subjective’ account of the moral status of a newborn does not debunk our previous argument. Let us imagine that a woman is pregnant with two identical twins who are affected by genetic disorders. In order to cure one of the embryos the woman is given the option to use the other twin to develop a therapy. If she agrees, she attributes to the first embryo the status of ‘future child’ and to the other one the status of a mere means to cure the ‘future child’. However, the different moral status does not spring from the fact that the first one is a ‘person’ and the other is not, which would be nonsense, given that they are identical. Rather, the different moral statuses only depends on the particular value the woman projects on them. However, such a projection is exactly what does not occur when a newborn becomes a burden to its family. (Emphasis added)

The bolded part avove identifies the place from which a strong and sensible rebuttal can be made of the entire paper. What the bolded part reminds us is that moral value depends completely on projection. But this presents a problem to the authors' argument because the nuclear family need not have the prevailing say over the newborn's value.

The Solomon Problem
Once we ask whether a biological parent's or someone else's valuation of a newborn matters more, the baby's welfare becomes decisive.

Forgive me for bringing in the Bible here, but we have the old judgment of Solomon problem: the real mother attributes value to the baby and wants it to live. The real mother attributes moral status on the baby. The real mother, therefore, does not have to be the biological mother. Indeed, moral status can conceivably be conferred by almost anyone--a grandparent, a distant relative, a doctor, or a stranger. Many, not just the baby's family, can project value on a newborn.

If a mother or father forfeit the initial valuation of a newborn, then there would be actual people (to use the authors' expression) who could be consulted. And if the interests of actual people should prevail--as the authors argue--then certainly there are people beyond the newborn's nuclear family who have reasonable standing to advocate for the baby's moral status.

This argument overcomes the weak objection the authors make to adoption causing more psychological trauma to the mother than would after-birth abortion.

Dealing with It
I can see this paper changing the landscape of the abortion debate in the US. Many people will be rightfully repulsed with the paper's argument. Unfortunately, many will also politicize the paper and blur the distinctions it makes from abortion and euthanasia. Opponents may stifle productive and profound debate by failing to employ proper nuance toward the real and limited scope of this paper. I can see a future in which to support any form of abortion is be to be tarred as an advocate of newborn-killing.

I don't think the authors are bad people for writing this paper. In fact, I think they are brave, for I personally would fear for my safety if I were them. But ultimately their argument fails to make its case, and it will fail to make after-birth abortion more palatable. 

A free society needs to be able to deal with awful topics, and this is one of them. I hope many people read the article, understand its argument, reject that argument, and use that reasoning in productive ways for the future of the personhood debate.

Burn My Books. I Won't Kill You in Retaliation.

You may have heard that copies of the Qur’an were incinerated by Americans at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. I don't know how many copies were burned or whether it was intentional, but I know that people have been killed in response.

Yes, whoever did the burning was stupid and wrong. However it happened, it is inexcusable. But to kill and threaten people with harm over it? I don't understand.

Listen, I own a copy of the Torah. If you have a copy, please feel free to burn it without fear of physical retribution from me. I think it's a waste of a book and a waste of fire, but go ahead.

I have a nice copy of the Tanakh. I have an interlinear version (Hebrew-English) of the Psalms. I have the Tanya. I have an English version of the Koran. I have the Analects by Confucius. I have the Tzo Te Ting. Burn your own copies, if you must.

I also have books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris--yes, atheist books. I have a Charles Darwin collection and Prothero's book on evolution and fossils. I have a Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, and several scientific and non-scientific works of Richard Feynman. Drive a hot spike through copies of these. You have my permission.

I have a complete Plato, a selected Aristotle, a full Shakespeare, and complete works of Chaucer and Milton. Incinerate your versions, accidentally or on purpose.

I have several novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Milan Kundera, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Mann, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Bronte, Marcel Proust, Cynthia Ozick, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and others. These works are yours for the flames.

I have poetry collections by Byron, Donne, Frost, Whitman, Olson, Oppen, Neruda, Homer, Keats, Yeats, Jabes, Machado, Rimbaud, Langland, Walcott, Williams, Zukofsky and more. Brand them, shred them, discard them.

I have books on Auschwitz and Anglo-Saxon England, on the history of ancient Israel and the history of Jews in America. I have books on wikinomics and personal finance; on German, Yiddish, Swedish, and Chinese; on reading, writing, visualizing, and decision-making; and on architecture, Picasso's art, Coltrane's jazz, and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Take them, take them.

I have books by Derrida and Foucault, Hume and Max, Marcus Aurelius and the Venerable Bede, Boethius and Churchill, Lincoln and Jefferson, Herodotus and Virgil, Aquinas and Augustine, Maimonides and Keith Richards. I would be heartbroken if you thought it was cool to burn these books, but you may do it if it gets your rocks off.

Destroy it all. I love all my books, but I won't call for your death. I won't threaten your family or your countrymen and countrywomen.

Whatever you do to books will not stop me from reading. You won't prevent me from learning. Whatever symbolic point you might be making does not affect me. You burn because you fear, because you are consumed. Your fire doesn't touch me.

Go on and incinerate books in full knowledge of your safety. Your burning only pollutes the environment and symbolizes your final impotence.

Rick Santorum Is Dangerous--and Electable

For Santorum, the laws of faith and family--his laws--make freedom.

Rick Santorum seems like a front-runner. Not so presidential as Mitt Romney, Santorum nevertheless comes across as aware of and unfazed by the executive role. At one time, I thought he might be too crazy to be a serious candidate, but now I think he has a real shot at being the Republican nominee. It's going to be either Mitt or Rick, and my bet's now on Rick.

But if his views are any indication--and they may not be--Santorum is dangerous. His positions are "philosophically reasoned prejudice, based on centuries of Roman Catholic natural law." The quote comes from a recent piece on Santorum in the New York Times. From that article, we get one example of how Santorum applies natural law to his positions on social issues:

“Human beings have a purpose, or ‘end,’ a telos,” Santorum writes in his book. According to the tradition of natural law, every part of our bodies has a telos too. In the case of our genitalia, that natural end is heterosexual sex for the purpose of procreation. It follows that marriage between a man and a woman “is fundamentally natural,” Santorum writes.

Readers of this blog may hear echoes of Edward Feser, who must be positively delighted at Santorum's ascent. Readers of this blog will also know that Santorum basically makes up what the telos is. Santorum will get lots of agreement that the natural purpose of human genitalia is reproductive sex, but most thinking people will quickly realize three issues:

1. It is not a fact that the natural purpose of human genitalia is reproductive sex. Even with a nice argument, it's not a fact. Even if the Catholic Church teaches what the natural purpose is of genitalia, it's not a fact. The fact is that human genitalia serve several purposes. On the point of purposes, I can do no better than recommend you to Leah at Unequally Yoked. My take is that only belief confers purpose on anything. If you think wet is the purpose of water, then it is so.
2. The connection between reproductive sex and the social institution of marriage is arbitrary. Even if the telos of cocks, balls, and pussies was only reproductive sex--that would have no bearing on marriage. At best, it would dictate that when when people has sex they would do it heterosexually and with the intent of producing children. Beyond that dictate, anything goes.
3. Something that is "fundamentally natural" is not fundamentally good or right. Neither is something bad or wrong that is not fundamentally natural. This issue is, of course, the naturalistic fallacy.

After considering these three issues, Santorum's next statements appear ridiculous:

“The promise of natural law is that we will be the happiest, and freest, when we follow the law built into our nature as men and women. For liberals, however, nature is too confining, and thus is the enemy of freedom.” Later on, he elaborates on his jaundiced view of freedom with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites.”

Yet Santorum himself continues to gain support, and he cannot be dismissed. He delivers his message with a distinctly American idealism and coolness:

Santorum is not a fundamentalist frothing at the mouth, screeching out biblical commands (he cites “Divine Providence” often in his writing, but rarely turns to scripture). When liberal students booed after he expressed his views on same-sex marriage at an event in New Hampshire, he did not shout them down, but tried to engage them in a philosophical discussion.

Each point that Santorum makes follows logically from the preceding premise. Along with Catholic public intellectuals like Robert George, a political theorist at Princeton, and the political commentator and the Lutheran minister-turned-Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus, Santorum embodies the renaissance of Catholic natural law in American political life—and the apotheosis of its seductive effect on conservative Protestant evangelicals.

I am grateful for this NYT article. It's profile of Santorum and his views is interesting and important. But it never talks at all about Santorum's performance as a leader. I'd really like more details on his leadership and the relationship between his personal views and the diverse constituencies he must represent.

So while I agree with the NYT's conclusion that Santorum is dangerous, I think they fail to provide the most useful content to their readers. Here is how the article closes:

Natural law is a noble tradition that has shaped Western jurisprudence, but in the hands of conservative activists like Santorum it has become a dangerous cult of first principles. Santorum’s positions are perfectly logical if you accept his founding presuppositions — but, in his view, those presuppositions are not open to question. The genius of this emphasis on foundational assumptions is that if you can dismiss your opponent’s first principles, if you can accuse him of denying humanity’s “natural purpose,” you can claim to win the debate without ever considering the content of his argument.

This tactic destroys the possibility for real political dialogue, since one need only engage with those who share one’s own presuppositions. Despite Santorum’s calm debating style, his preference for home-schooling his children and rants against modern higher education suggest he has little genuine interest in open argument and free inquiry. Thomas Aquinas would not approve of such separatism: the theologian honed his most important ideas while in the thick of 13th-century heterodoxies, debating radical followers of Aristotle at the University of Paris.

The pundits are right about one thing: Santorum is the rock-ribbed anti-Romney candidate, the antidote to the bogeyman of “flip-flopping” and moderation. A half-century ago, evangelical voters worried that a Catholic president would take orders from the pope. Now they are worried instead about Romney reporting to a sinister Mormon cabal in Salt Lake City, while Santorum’s Catholicism has made him the candidate of universal “moral truth” and “divine reason:” the philosopher-king who can reclaim American liberty in the name of moral law, and package the Christian Right’s agenda in a respectable guise

If the NYT is correct, as the Republican nominee or as president Santorum may be no less a polarizing figure than President Obama. Santorum's views are parochial, if not scary. Yet he is gaining charisma where Romney is growing mold. Do not doubt that Santorum will be able to mainstream his views and gain fervent support.

And remember why the philosophical tradition of Aquinas faltered: Ockham showed it was impossible to make the leap from nature to the divine; that is that the reality of final causes was unable to be proved without revelation (He was a monk, after all). Later, the new science drawn from Bacon confirmed the superfluity of divine and supernatural explanations.

The 2012 presidential election may revive this centuries old philosophical clash. If Aquinas can be pressed into service for a modern conservatism he would not understand, Ockham can make a reluctant comeback too.

Chomsky on America's "Conscious Self-Inflicted Decline"

Noam Chomsky's take on American history since Vietnam presents a maddeningly recognizable story about the country we are and the country we could have been.

Here's the key part for me:

From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled Failure by Design. The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based. There is no failure for the designers. Far from it. Rather, the policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movements -- and for the country, which has declined and will continue to do so under these policies.

One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of sophistication in production, design, and invention. That, too, is being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.

Ah, but it's Valentine's Day. This, for my lovely wife:

James Barham Knows Whether You Are Normal or Sick

James Barham is a philosopher who runs a higher-education ranking site called The Best Schools. He also has a blog that recently has become little more than a mouthpiece for fading ID advocate William Dembski and professional debater William Lane Craig.

Barham's "Medicalizing Normality" is an ugly and irresponsible piece on proposed revisions to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), scheduled for publication in 2013.

I have been monitoring the DSM-5 because Autism Spectrum Disorder is up for revision. My son was diagnosed with Autism when he was two years old. Now almost four, he has made wonderful advances thanks to school services and support. Despite these advances, if he were to stop receiving therapy today then he would suffer intellectually, emotionally, socially, and more. His present and future happiness would be at risk, even with a loving and supportive family.

Barham, however, sees the revisions as taking the US further along the path of "labeling essentially normal kids as sick." This is his thesis, and it's ugly enough--as I'll discuss shortly--but Barham's underlying (emphasis on lying) point is that "the trend toward medicalizing normality is a doomed effort to cure with science what is essentially a spiritual disease."

Pause on this quote for a moment because it really is disgusting.

Barham is not arguing on behalf of healthy people. He cares nothing for the tolls that illnesses exact on people, let alone their families. Any benefit that "science" delivers to autistic people and their families are only so-so to him. But what matters to Barham? What does he see as the most pressing issue for every child, woman, and man? Why, the biggest and baddest problem of all is that people don't believe in magic:

Why do we, as a society, seem to have this deep-seated need to medicalize normality? Why do we think we can—never mind should—take scientific control over every aspect of the human condition, including normal suffering, sadness, and even mortality itself?

I submit that this trend is partly a reflection of our widespread loss of religious faith. When most people believed in a divine order of things, human frailty and the inevitable suffering involved in human existence were much more readily accepted. Now, as so many have nothing else to believe in, and as they see no other point to human life than the maximization of pleasure, it is not surprising that they expect science to exempt them from all the less pleasant aspects of the human estate.

What?

First of all, there really is no trend to medicalizing normality; it's been there for a long, long, time--and not just in medicine. That term "normal" is suspect anyway, but my point is that medicine, science, and religion--yeah, religion too--have all sought to define and prescribe the bits and pieces of human experience: grief, friendship, love, sex, jealously, anger, and so on. These experiences and attitudes have all been religionized and medicalized over and again throughout the course of history. They all get -ized because we people are interested (maybe too much) in the things that happen to us.

So spare us the sanctimony, Barham: what's wrong with maximizing pleasure? With maximizing happiness? With living longer, with being pain-free, with having healthy and close relationships with others?

Secondly, the opposite of "essentially normal," whatever that is, is not "sick." The opposite of "essentially normal" is "essentially abnormal," and the opposite of "sick" is "healthy." If there is a legitimate danger for Barham to write about, it's the danger of treating healthy people as if they were ill. In his article, Barham's examples are people who were mistakenly thought to be less healthy than they actually were. It happens, and it is a problem to mind carefully.

My experience in distinguishing unhealthy behavioral conditions comes from not only my son's Autism but also my wife's depression. In both cases, the standard we use is whether the behavior or emotions have a sustained negative impact on functioning in daily life. Is it a perfect indicator? No. That's why we consult with physicians. But I would rather be able to get help when I need it than worry about being mis-labled.

Barham apparently lives in a world where people are "normal" or "abnormal." I bet he considers himself normal. His friends, too. How convenient. But the world of normal is gone. The world of normal is the world where you get to crush me, in the name of your god, into your template. You get to feel moral while forcing me to play with G.I Joe "action figures," pushing me to my knees before a pulpit, deciding what makes a legitimate course of study, dictating who I can and cannot marry, defining what demographics are proper for my neighborhood, and so on until I die. The world of normal is the world where your authority is accepted unquestioningly.

Fuck your normal, fuck your world, fuck your authority, and fuck you too.

Barham's hierarchy of ills makes our "spiritual" sickness the most important one of all. Forget about that diseased internal organ. Screw your pain and discomfort. Got a mental disorder? It's not a priority. Barham scoffs at medicine and science for their vain attempts to lessen pain and prolong life. Medicine and science are alright, he says, but it's more important to address our all-pervasive spiritual ailment. I don't know why he doesn't come right out and say explicitly that we need Baby Jesus^TM to make us whole and happy.

Fortunately, we don't need Baby Jesus or religion. There is no spiritual ailment. Spiritual ailment is merely another way of saying "people aren't listening to me." Barham's Uncommon Descent-like site offers no content to take seriously.

On the other hand, we should take seriously that plenty of people would agree with Barham that "science" (and government) want to control absolutely every aspect of human daily experience. Many already pin science and government as nefarious partners in a liberal/communist plot to enslave all humanity. And many want to push religiosity on us--not to help anything at all, but rather to promote their parochial version of happiness above all others. They want people to be happy, after all, but only on their terms.

However, those of us on the side of reality, equality, equity, and individual liberty must continue to correct disinformationsists like Barham and to better them with facts and reason.

Inspiration? No, Thanks.

A Facebook friend approvingly posted this picture.

With chubby cheeks, pigtails, and overalls, an innocent little girl prays for the repair of the US economy. Then she laments that a shadowy "some" have "taken" God/Jesus "out of our schools, government and even Christmas" [emphasis added]. Finally, the darling asks God/Jesus to return, arguing that more people want God/Jesus here than don't.

Many Christians think this nonsense is inspirational, yet it's obviously propagandist. Using the image of a sweet, praying child to comment on the price of gasoline is disgusting enough, but we all know what is meant by the "some" who want to take out God/Jesus--some liberals, some atheists. Vile secularists are the reason for the sluggish economy and for social unrest.

Once upon a time, say the inspired Christians, God/Jesus was in our schools. In those perfect days, God/Jesus was in our government and in Christmas. Those were the days when Jews didn't belong to our country clubs, blacks didn't go to our schools, gays didn't use our word "marriage," and women didn't work outside our homes.

Those were the days when we could dictate what happened in the oil markets, when the state could sponsor Christianity, and when we didn't have to acknowledge that some believed in a different god or had no god at all. --You can read my sarcasm here, right?

Then let me be serious and straightforward: go away with your fake prayers and your god-bothering. You want America's problems to disappear magically. You want it all fixed, but without any cost to you or your friends. Most of all, you want to appear pious and stoic.

Your inspiration, summarized: see a problem, cry about it, and start wearing a crucifix.

Pissing on the Dead: A Question for Opponents of Moral Relativism

We use words like honor, code, piss. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline!

In response to the recent news item of U.S. Marines videoed urinating on what appear to be the corpses of Taliban fighters, many commenters have echoed and agreed with this defense:

To all of you that are ‘outraged’ or consider this barbaric I say this: Put your boots on and climb into the sand box. When you have been in combat for a few weeks, and you smell of urine, sweat, and the blood from you or a fellow soldier then talk about the humanity of war. When you see children and corpses used as road blocks for IEDs, then talk about the humanity of war. When the stench of death permeates the air around you day in and day out, then talk about the humanity of war. Urinating on a deceased enemy that a few minutes earlier was trying to kill you is somehow minute in the scheme of things. Lopping off heads and slitting throats is somehow not barbaric?

In the past, I took some heat for sympathizing with moral relativism and nihilism. Interlocutors offered different moral scenarios and asked me if moral relativism would allow me to call certain scenario actions "wrong."

Well, now I want to hear from you moral realists and those who talk about objective morality. If the individual Marines did what they are accused of doing, did they violate an objective moral law? Which law(s) specifically?

And what flaws do you see in the defense of the Marines's alleged behavior? Why do the defenders get it wrong?