More from California

It looks like all blogging is going to be indefinately suspended until 2006 and probably until February. Blogging will resume once I get everything set up in California.

Bonus!

Another article dealing with issues of cosmology and the anthropic principle that was published today: String Theory Versus Intelligent Design.

An obsession with the anthropic principle

Vox Day's latest WorldNetDaily column continues the trend of Christian writers to demonize the "multiple universes" theories of cosmology:

Fortunately, science and religion need no longer be at war, as developments in modern physics have shown, (especially those relating to the significance of the fundamental constants), which may indicate that the time for hostilities may finally be over. It is interesting to note that the "multiple universes" concept which has inspired so many short stories in the past decade is a purely hypothetical theory developed without any experimental basis in an attempt to answer the "anthropic principle," which not only has a solid foundation in current scientific method, but threatens to demolish the entire notion of a random, mechanistic universe.

The anthropic principle is essentially the logical necessity that any cosmological theory must be consistent with observations including the observation that life exists. If we assume that the known fundamental constants and laws of physics are truely universal in scope (let's call this the "single universe" concept, to make my life easier), the anthropic principle allows constraints (presumably rather stringent ones) to be placed on the permitted values of the fundamental constants. On the other hand, the "multiple universes" concept is that the fundamental constants may vary in different domains of the Universe, with the variation of the fundamental constants being such that at least one domain of the Universe consistent with observations is guarenteed to exist.

The "single universe" concept seems to appeal to Christians who see a role for God in the Universe as the being who chooses the fundamental constants for the entire universe. The "multiple universes" concept, by offering an explanation for the value or values of the fundamental constants, thus draws attacks from Christians for presumably denying this role for God. But it's hard to see why the anthropic principle should allow one to favor one of these concepts over the other; both concepts seem to accept that at least the observable part of the Universe should be consistent with what we do observe.

Setting the legitimate scientific criticism of "multiple universes" aside, it also isn't clear why God, assuming that He did create the Universe, could not have choosen to create a Universe in which the "multiple universes" concept is true. Both concepts agree with the anthropic principle, so aside from the scientific evidence there is no rational way of determining which method God used to create the Universe.

Smoking crack about Iraq

As my friends know, one of the things I find fascinating is how political debate sometimes leads to elaborate, almost ridiculous neoogisms. A case in point is the word "Finlandization" that I encounted in the old game "Balance of Power", which is intended to refer to the submission of a weak nation towards a powerful neighbor (for example, Finland and the Soviet Union during the Cold War). Another favorite is "Liebermanization", referring to the process by which a Democratic Politician destroys his or her political support by adopting a hawkish stance on the use of military force.

A New York Times article (hat tip: Ann Althouse) reporting on the symbolic defeat of a bill calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq offers another interesting neologism: the word "Swift-boat" is now a verb.

The article is interesting in another respect:

On Thursday, Mr. Murtha called for pulling out the 153,000 American troops within six months, saying they had become a catalyst for the continuing violence in Iraq. His plan also called for a quick-reaction force in the region, perhaps based in Kuwait, and for pursuing stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

Let's think about this for a second. The terrorists in Iraq are, at the very least in part, functional elements of Al Qaeda's global terror network. Al Qaeda certainly views American troops in Iraq as a catalyst for more violence. Al Qaeda views American troops in Kuwait, or anywhere in the Arabian peninsula for that matter, as a catalyst for more violence. Al Qaeda views me, the overweight American non-muslim who has nothing to do with Iraq, as a catalyst for more violence. The war on terror is being fought in Iraq, like it or not. Until the Iraqi government is stong enough to suppress the terrorist insurgents on its own, a total withdrawal of America's military from Iraq can only be construed as a defeat in the war on terror.

Of course, one suspects that Mr. Murtha suspects this himself, which is why he offers up the smokescreen of a quick-reaction force based in Kuwait or some other host country in the area. If I remember correctly, the idea of a quick-reaction force of American troops based in Kuwait was a Clinton-era proposal designed to deter Saddham Hussein from launching another invasion of either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Obviously, that strategic underpinning of a quick-reaction force no longer exists. I'm also not convinced that a quick-reaction force in Kuwait can intervene in Iraq more rapidly than, say, forces stationed in Iraq proper. And, of course, when the terrorist insurgents shift their attacks from Iraq to Kuwait to counter our quick-reaction force -- they are puported catalysts for violence, after all -- our withdrawal from Iraq to Kuwait will have accomplished exactly nothing.

Random Thoughts

Every blogger, sooner or later, needs to clear out those ideas that didn't quite make it into full posts but that didn't quite get dismissed either.

• Betsy Newmark (hat tip: michellemalkin.com) discusses the progressively increasing wimpiness of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. It's hard to disagree with that assessment given that Frist instinctively plays the Elmer Fudd to Senator John McCain's Bugs Bunny. The only good aspect to Frist's wimpiness is that he is likely to be relatively harmless in the Republican 2008 primaries. Does anyone really believe that the "Frist for President" campaign could survive losing the Iowa primary to McCain (or anybody, for that matter)?


• George Will recently assessed the future of conservatism and concisely expressed a neglected truth about the conservative movement:

  But, then, the limited-government impulse is a spent force in a Republican Party that cannot muster congressional majorities to cut the growth of Medicaid from 7.3 percent to 7 percent next year. That "cut'' was too draconian for some Republican "moderates.''
  
  But, then, most Republicans are moderates as that term is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates are people amiably untroubled by Washington's single-minded devotion to rent-seeking -- to bending government for the advantage of private factions.

  Incidentally, this is another reason why conservatives shouldn't be backing McCain's presidential bid in 2008. Remember how McCain broke with the Senate Republicans to support President Clinton's publicly waged shakedown of Big Tobacco?


• Charles Krauthammer also agrees with George Will that creationism and intelligent design are political embaressments for Republicans.


• By the way, it occurred to me today that intelligent design is self-refuting as a scientific theory. The only way to empirically prove intelligent design would be to observe the postulated "Intelligent Designer" in the act of creating a new species. But as the proponents of intelligent design take pains to admit, intelligent design theories provide absolutely no information about the identity of the Intelligent Designer.

String theory and religion

Professor Lawrence Krauss discusses how religion is similar to string theory in certain respects. This comparison, for the most part, is essentially a matter of human nature for Professor Krauss, which he speculates is itself a byproduct of human evolution:

In my own field of physics, theorists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature.

School boards, legislatures and evangelists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying purpose to nature that similarly may or may not exist.

It seems that humans are hard-wired to yearn for new realms well beyond the reach of our senses into which we can escape, if only with our minds. It is possible that we need to rely on such possibilities or the world of our experience would become intolerable.

And as Cosmic Variance points out in its discussion, Professor Krauss does not surrender the position that falsifiabilty is an essential difference between science and religion.

The really interesting thought that this article evokes is prompted by the statement that "Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation." One form of athiest thought is that religious belief can be refuted, at least in the sense that one can demonstrate such beliefs to be irrational. Or to put it another way, the proposition that god exists could be demonstrated to be false on purely logical grounds even if one accepts that the existence of god has no material consequences. It seems, then, that the real difference between science and religion, in this light, is that science accepts physical experimention as a decisive method of falsifying hypotheses.

Another revitalization plan for Democrats

The column Dems Can Revitalize Party gives a new plan for rebuilding the electoral fortunes of Democrats. The author deserves credit for outlining a slate of policy proposals to accomplish this goal instead of assuming that the Democratic Party's problems are all essentially a matter of "framing". Unfortunately, this slate of proposals is flawed and in some cases mutually contradictory, and would most likely torpedo the Democratic Party if adopted in full. The author's first point touches on a perpetual Vacuum Energy topic:

First and probably most important, Democrats must restore and articulate the idea that there is a common good and that it entails a commonwealth. That is to say, we all benefit when those who have prospered acknowledge that in addition to their hard work, they have benefited from public investments as well as from their origins and luck. The rich are not entitled, therefore, not to contribute to the common good. This understanding involves repeal of the Bush administration's tax breaks for the richest Americans and a willingness by legislators to forswear pork.

Most of this is just smokescreen for the bald assertion that the current Bush administration's tax breaks should be repealed (with a hat tip to the recently revived anti-pork fad). If you look carefully, you'll see the false assumption made by liberals that one can only contribute to the public good by contributing to an action of government. Conveniently ignored is that fact that the average law-abiding citizen contributes to the public good simply by engaging in his or her ordinary, honest commerce and self-improvement. The author continues with:

Second, Democrats must insist on mandatory public financing for elections. There are two reasons for such a policy: So that rich corporations and individuals cannot hijack the democratic process, buying candidates who are therefore indebted and will serve their interests; and so that public servants do not have to be wealthy or in the pockets of the wealthy to run for office.

The author makes a glaring contradiction with the first point here. The reason the author gives for raising taxes on the rich is that public expenditures for the common good make people indebted to goverment, and thus obligate them to repay the government for its investment. But the author asserts the exact opposite reason for public financing of election campaigns: government financing of an election campaign -- a government expenditure presumably made on behalf of the common good -- frees the recipient from indebtedness of any kind.

Aside from being a new program for revitalization, these proposals are more or less standard Democratic Party beliefs with some standard anti-Bush proposals tacked on. But the real death blow to the Democratic party would be inflicted by one of the later proposals:

Democrats must move swiftly to design and press for the adoption of a national, single-payer health care system that is not beholden to health insurance or drug companies. There is plenty of experience among industrialized countries to help us do this and plenty of evidence that Americans would support such a system, which would reduce health care costs and make health care available to all. Lawmakers would have to be clear that certain kinds of rationing would be required.

I'm not sure if the author realizes how difficult this is going to be. Democratic Presidents since Woodrow Willson have been unsuccessfully trying to enact some kind of national single-payer health care system. FDR at the height of the New Deal could not do it. LBJ at the height of the Great Society could not do it. President Clinton could not do it and what he did try to do almost destroyed his Presidency. A national, single-payer health care system is the closest thing there is to a "kiss of death" from Democrats.

The rest of the article is basically the same mixture of anti-Bush proposals we've been hearing for the past five years along with standard Democratic boilerplate we've been hearing for the past five decades.

Cultural Tinkering

Slashdot has a recently posted thread discussing the tinkering of cultural history. The examples given are the edits made to feature films by their directors (with George Lucas' changes to the Star Wars saga being a case in point) as well as the practice of publishing posthumous novels.

Obviously this kind of thing has been going on for much longer than the twentieth century. The biblical book of Revelations, for example, contains a dire curse invoked against anyone who introduces changes when rewriting the book. The Byzantine Empire was wracked by violence and persecutions over and over again whenever the orthodox Christian doctrines were called into question by sufficiently influential proponents of reinterpreted doctrines. As both seventh century Christian monks and twentieth century publishers of comic books could testify, making radical changes to the existing storyline is a good recipe for producing a bitter schism.

The cause célèbre of the anti-Lucas heretics is the notorius "Greedo shoots first" edit to the original Star Wars Episode IV. The Country Pundit has a good summary of the controversy, which also mentions the critical flaw introduced by the edit: Han shooting Greedo first is a more natural reaction of self-defense than is Han waiting for Greedo to shoot and miss before returning fire.

From a more expansive point of view, another critical flaw with this edit is that it contradicts a cultural trend of the twentieth century to depict heroes and villians as more similar to each other by purposefully, and painfully obviously, distinguishing Han Solo from his criminal associates. That is not to say that a director cannot do such a thing; a similar and much more successfully handled distinguishing of hero and criminal counterparts occurs in the recent movie "Batman Begins", for example. The mistake is that Han Solo's forbearance from violence is too strong in the new version, thus making Han Solo more akin to the cliched "Christian Hero" (see my post The pertinent Pertinax for a discussion).

In hindsight, one suspects that it was precisely this effect that Lucas had in mind. Re-editing Han Solo into a hithertoo unsuspected "diamond in the rough" gives a certain fairytale character to Solo's romance with Princess Leia that small children (i.e. the primary end users of those billions of dollars worth of Star Wars merchandise) could appreciate.

The next stop is...

California. But not until early December, so no blogging hiatus quite yet.

Constitution? What Constitution?

Judge Janice Law wrote a brief recap of the use of foreign law by the Supreme Court in adjudicating cases. I think she gets the conservative consensus pretty well (author's italics):

Scalia, who has the timing of a professional comic, spoofed his colleagues. To paraphrase: They think we [conservatives] are country bumpkins who just fell off a turnip truck. "Au contraire!" he deadpanned in perfect French, joining his audience in raucous laughter.

Of course, the real surprise is not that the activist justices are resorting to foreign laws in their reasoning, but that they haven't resorted to such documents as the "The Charter of the United Federation of Planets". After all, practically every country in the world has aired "Star Trek" by now, a fact which must be telling us something. And one would think that liberals could get a lot of mileage by grounding their foreign policy views on the prime directive.

In reality, resorting to foreign law to decide domestic cases is really an act of desperation by the liberal faction on the Supreme Court. Activist Supreme Court justices seem reluctant to dictate legislation overtly, instead preferring to arrive at their preferred outcomes for cases through the usual process of adjudication. But sometimes the decision that these justices would prefer to adopt just cannot be logically reached through any kind of orthodox legal reasoning. Since something, no matter how ridiculous, must be used as a cover story, judicial activism has always been associated with a certain intentionally sloppy reasoning. The most notorius example is probably the "emanations and penumbras" of the Roe v. Wade decision.

The use of foreign laws in adjudicating domestic court cases is thus a symptom that the usual techniques of justifying an activist ruling (see "The Tempting of America" by Judge Bork, for example) are beginning to fail.

Smiling happy Evil, holding hands.

This is just plain wrong: two teen girls with their own white supremicist hate-rock group. Aside from the obvious evil of celebrating Hitler-esque race warfare, the implication of Prussian Blue is that the White Supremicist movement has finally managed to adapt to the new reality of America's media culture. The growing preception of the mainstream media is that young, photogenic, white women are absolutely irresistable candidates for nation-wide, hyper-obsessive media attention. The article itself can barely hold out for a single sentence before comparing them to the Olsen twins, even though the comparison is largely ridiculous (it's pretty hard to avoid a "fun-loving, squeaky-clean image" when you make your acting debut at age 2). These two young women are really victims or sacrifices of a fundamentally inhuman movement and shouldn't be treated like they're celebrities.

Those useless high school classes

An student article in the Daily Iowan discusses the useless knowledge taught in high schools (hat tip: Evolutionblog). The author's point is that:

A problem exists within the high-school education system: It doesn't prepare students for their careers. When I decided in high school that my major was going to be journalism, I took the only class offered by my school in hopes of learning the journalistic writing style. I didn't learn anything from that class. My teacher was not a journalism teacher; she was an English teacher. We spent every class silent reading instead of learning about the inverted pyramid.

I suppose that everyone has certain aspects of their educational background that they feel to have been a waste of time. This alone is a fact of life and not an indictment of the American high school system. And of course there is no such thing as useless knowledge. But it is possible that knowledge of certain things can be relatively unimportant in furthering one's ambitions, although I'm certain that buiding a system of mass education that can be all things to all people is going to be much more difficult than the author seems to believe.

To some extent, high-school teachers already try to take this criticism into account. The ideal of the liberal education, for example, is not that you, the individual, should be taught only those things that you need to know to be a reliable cog in the machinery of society. Instead, this ideal is that the individual should be taught the skills and knowledge to allow him or her to freely advance his or her ambitions in any field of endeavor. At the very least, high school cirricula are at least going to try to expose students to enough common knowledge to enable them to have intelligent conversations without looking like idiots.