Throwing coconuts at Stephen Meyer

Bradford at Telic Thoughts makes a great point about the convulsive response in the ape section of the science park to Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, a book that argues the case for Intelligent Design, in response to the most recent review of the book by Darrel Falk:

Here's a challenge for those of you who agree with Falk. Cite something Meyer said in his book, show that there is a problem with Meyer's citation of facts or his reasoning from them and then back up your claim with links to papers supporting your position. This might be difficult for many of you because it requires that you actually take the effort to read Signature in the Cell. Then you would have to use your brains to analyze a specific passage from it and support your arguments with outside references. But why not break from the mold and give it a shot. Don't be afraid to lock horns with harmless tards. You have nothing to lose but your pride.

Just go around and look at the reviews of the book by its detractors and see if you can find much evidence that the people who criticize it actually read the book. Instead what you will find is the usual howling and chest beating characteristic of those who think they are merely a form of higher ape and who seem enthusiastic about proving it.

Flying the unfriendly skies

Ann Coulter on the increasingly ridiculous security procedures travelers are forced to endure in the nation's airports:

For the past eight years, approximately 2 million Americans a day have been subjected to humiliating searches at airport security checkpoints, forced to remove their shoes and jackets, to open their computers, and to remove all liquids from their carry-on bags, except minuscule amounts in marked 3-ounce containers placed in Ziploc plastic bags -- folding sandwich bags are verboten -- among other indignities.

This, allegedly, was the price we had to pay for safe airplanes. The one security precaution the government refused to consider was to require extra screening for passengers who looked like the last three-dozen terrorists to attack airplanes.

Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.

Read the rest here.

Decline in heart attacks

Researchers almost had a heart attack recently when a study purported to show that anti-smoking bans caused a huge reduction in heart attack admissions to hospitals. As Michael Siegel explains:

In October, Dr. David Meyers and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in which they reported the results of a meta-analysis of published studies on the effect of smoking bans on heart attack admissions. The paper concluded that smoking bans were associated with a 17% decline in heart attack admissions in the 11 studies that were reviewed.

These results were disseminated widely in the media and heavily touted by anti-smoking groups as supporting the conclusion that smoking bans immediately and dramatically reduce heart attacks and that brief exposure to secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants causes a large number of heart attacks.

But then, like so many of these anti-smoking pronouncements, it went bust:

As it turns out, the study findings were due to a careless error. In the original study, the authors had inadvertently reported the Pueblo study has having reported a 70% reduction in heart attacks (a result that is completely implausible and clearly should have been noticed as having been in error). Instead, that study actually reported a 34% reduction in heart attacks. The meta-analysis authors published a correction in which they re-analyzed the correct data.

It turns out that the 11 studies did not find a 17% reduction in heart attacks, but only found an 8% reduction in heart attacks.

In other words, the increase was overstated by over half. That would seem to suggest that these bans might still be effective, even if not as pronounced as before. The study, however, like so many politically motivated studies, apparently did not contain a control. But you can get the rough equivalent by going outside the study to see what the total national decline is:

This level of decline in admissions for heart attacks is obviously not significantly different from the levels of decline in heart attacks that are being observed in the absence of smoking bans, which have varied between 5% and 10% per year in many communities.

For example, in the United States as a whole, heart attack admissions declined by 8.2% in 2004. The decline of 8% in communities/nations with a smoking ban is comparable to this. Therefore, the meta-analysis result fails to provide any evidence that the smoking bans resulted in a decline in heart attacks.

That's what you call the research equivalent of an exploding cigar. You would think the Science Integrity Patrol would be all over this kind of thing. But when it comes to the War on Tobacco, just one front in the Politically Correct Health Crusade, we must are all instructed to just go on as if nothing unusual had happened.

Funny how that works.

Record low U.S. temperatures

According to Anthony Watts, numerous cold records have recently been set across the country. Here is his rundown:

Record Events for Sun Dec 6, 2009 through Sat Dec 12, 2009
Total Records:	2601
Rainfall:	992
Snowfall:	815
High Temperatures:	36
Low Temperatures:	304
Lowest Max Temperatures:	403
Highest Min Temperatures:	51

We are going to charitably assume that these record low temperatures are a result, as is every climate phenomenon, of Global Warming.

Warmers getting it wrong again

Anthony Watt's points out that David Viner at the CRU (that's the Climategate people) predicted in 2000 that winter snowfall would, within a few years, become "a very rare and exciting event."

Fast forward to 2010, where, in December 27th's Telegraph, which is warning of snow and ice that is to hit Britain during New Year celebrations. These people also failed to predict the plight of my mother, who is now snowed in on her farm in Kansas.

I'm thinking to myself, if these people can't even get short term predictions right, then how can we trust their long-term predictions?

The Classical View of Nature [Part I]

This article is the first part of a more extended version of the article "The Classical View of Nature" that appears in the newest issue of "The Classical Teacher" magazine.

There are some questions so basic they seem unnecessary or superfluous. The question “What is nature?” is one of these. We never ask it because we think the answer is self-evident.

But is it?

What many of us do not realize is that the nature of nature is far from a settled question. We think it is settled because we live in a time dominated by the physical sciences, which are commonly attended with certain mechanistic assumptions about the natural world which we imbibe by osmosis from our educational and cultural surroundings. We catch them, to use the words of Samuel Johnson, like we catch the common cold: by contagion. We are unfamiliar with how these assumptions came to be and with the ideas they replaced. We know little about the reasons the older assumptions were abandoned or why the new ones took their place. In fact, the older view of nature has, among most of us, been completely forgotten.

Did the understanding of nature change because the new idea was better, or because it better fit with the cultural presuppositions of the time? Was the old idea of nature refuted or did it simply fall out of intellectual fashion?

Two Senses of the Word 'Nature’
The early 20th century British philosopher R. G. Collingwood pointed out, in his book, The Idea of Nature, that there are two senses of the word ‘nature.’ The meaning of the word with which we are most familiar is that which signifies the cosmos or the external world: the sum total or aggregate of natural things. The other, older meaning is that which originates with the Ionian Greek philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines—which signifies the essence or intrinsic principle of a thing. It is the intrinsic source of behavior. Alexander Pope writes,

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, "Let Newton be" and all was light.

Here Pope is using this newer sense of the word 'nature.' Then we have the anonymous author of
a nursery rhyme, who advises:

Dogs delight to bark and bite …
for ‘tis their nature to.

In this case, the word 'nature' is being used in its older sense. The older sense of the word—
nature as essence—started with the Greeks, who considered it the primary sense of the word:

This [intrinsic principle of nature] is the only sense it ever bears in the earlier Greek authors, and remains throughout the history of Greek literature its normal sense. But very rarely, and relatively late, it also bears the secondary sense … [Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, p. 44]

And even when the sense of nature as cosmos came into use, the earlier sense informed their notion of it. We might call the older sense of the word the philosophical sense, and the newer,
the scientific sense. This older, classical view of nature tended not so much to ask how nature worked so much as it asked why nature worked the way it did. "Interest was now directed to the how, the manner of causation" said Basil Willey, "not its why, its final cause." [Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, p. 14] What has happened in modern times is the philosophical sense has been subordinated to the scientific sense—if not eliminated entirely. The shift in terminology—and in world view—is easily visible in the hindsight of history.

What is the Classical View of Nature?
Every world view operates on the basis of some basic metaphor or analogy. For the Greeks, the analogy by which they viewed nature was the analogy of an organism: a living whole with a purpose, each of whose parts contained within it a purpose of its own, ordered toward the whole of which it was a part. Each thing, whether it was living or not, was like a heart, or a kidney, or a set of lungs: it served some purpose in the whole, and functioned in a way commensurate with
that purpose.

Nature had a purpose, and this purpose in nature was like a mind:

Greek natural science was based on the principle that the world of nature is saturated or permeated by mind. Greek thinkers regarded the presence of mind in nature as the source of that regularity or orderliness in the natural world whose presence made a science of nature possible ... They conceived mind, in all its manifestations, whether in human affairs or elsewhere, as a ruler, a dominating or regulating element, imposing order first upon itself and then upon everything belonging to it, primarily its own body and secondarily that body's environment.

Since the world of nature is a world is a world not only of ceaseless motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or regular motion, they accordingly said that the world of nature is not only alive but intelligent; not only a vast animal with a 'soul' or life of its own, but a rational animal with a 'mind' of its own ... a plant or an animal, according to their ideas, participates in its own degree psychically in the life-process of the world's 'soul' and intellectually in the activity of the world's mind. [Collingwood,p. 3]

It is a view, Collingwood points out, that seems alien to us, inured as we are to the mechanistic view of the world, which assumes that the order and repetition in nature is evidence not of any life in it, but of dead mechanism. It is a view which Chesterton argues is based on a false assumption:

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. [G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 107-109]

These repetitions in nature were not the effects of the dead clockwork which the modern mechanistic view articulated through its "laws of nature," but of something seemingly alive. You may have been a pagan who interpreted this as evidence of things being gods or a Christian, like Chesterton, who thought that God permeated nature by having created it and being immanent in it:

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. [Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 109-110]

Part II of "The Classical View of Nature" will appear tomorrow at Vital Remnants...

Another from the Vault: The "Two Jones" Thesis on Intelligent Design

In response to my critique of the reasoning of Judge John Jones in the Dover v. Kitzmiller decision, which purported to have shown, among other things, that Intelligent Design was not science, Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb and Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars both responded. This is the response to them that ran as the companion piece to the original critique. I rerun these because the state of the arguments has not changed appreciably over the last two years. There are still two Jones. Furthermore, this bipolar logical malady--whereby one affirms a blatant contradiction on the way to his preferred conclusion--is taken as a sort of logical presupposition in the argument that Intelligent Design is not science which must not itself be analyzed, as the article below demonstrates. Instead of actually defending this illogical maneuver, its practitioners merely restate it over and over, hoping by mere repetition to establish its legitimacy.

Well, it appears that my article about the inherent contradiction in an important section of the Dover vs. Kitzmiller decision is making evident some potentially dangerous developments among Darwinist opponents of Intelligent Design. Both Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb ("The Disco 'Tute's New Man") and Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars ("ID and Testability") have offered arguments against my position, and with each other--and, it turns out (at least in Brayton's case), with themselves.

I had pointed out that Judge John Jones affirmed a blatant contradiction in his opinion. He argued that the alleged unsoundness of the argument from irreducible complexity is a blow to Intelligent Design, since it is "central to ID", and then later argues that even if irreducible complexity were true, it wouldn't confirm ID because it isn't central to it, but "merely a test for evolution, not design".

I also said that this kind of argument falls into the trap of affirming two more general contradictory positions: that ID is not falsifiable, and that it is false.

I argued two points:

1. That Judge Jones both affirmed and denied that irreducible complexity is "central to ID"; and
2. That, as a consequence, he only allowed irreducible complexity to count against ID, but not for it.

This was completely lost on Hoppe, who just ran on about how ID makes testable claims he says are false, and untestable claims that can't be judged true or false:

What Cothran is apparently unable to comprehend is that while ID proponents occasionally make testable empirical claims, ID theory itself does not.

No, sorry. Cothran comprehends Hoppe, but Hoppe doesn't comprehend Cothran. I understand Hoppe's point. In fact, I understand it so well that it is very plain to me that it doesn't address my argument. It's a convenient distinction to make, but it isn't a distinction the Dover decision makes.

Hoppe agrees with Jones--and he doesn't. He agrees with the Jones who says that irreducible complexity is not central to ID, but disagrees with the Jones who says that it does. But nowhere does he deny my central thesis: that there are two Jones', and that they disagree with each other.

So what does Ed Brayton say to this? First, that he has heard my argument "many times" before. Shucks. And I thought my "Two Jones" thesis was my very own discovery. Turns out, claims Brayton, that someone beat me to it, although he doesn't say who it was.

Brayton, it turns out, is not only unimpressed by my argument (or the one I thought was mine before Ed informed me it wasn't--although, in a Jonesian logical maneuver, he's going to hold it against me anyway) but is less than impressed with Hoppe's refutation of it, saying that he gives my argument "too much credit":

I think he's actually making things more complicated than they are. There is no "ID theory" and there never has been. What ID proponents call "ID theory" is nothing more than a set of bad arguments against evolution, all straight out of the creationist jokebook. They all take the form of a basic god of the gaps argument: "not evolution, therefore God."

Note carefully what is going on here. Neither Hoppe nor Brayton addresses the two central points of my argument. Hoppe agrees with the Jones who says that arguments against evolution are not central to ID, and disagrees with the Jones who says they are, while Brayton agrees with the Jones who says that arguments against evolution are central to ID and disagrees with the Jones who says that they aren't.

Neither, however, denies there are two Jones': they simply disagree on which is the better Jones. In fact, when you put them together, not only do Hoppe and Brayton not address my argument, they actually confirm it: in agreeing with different Jones' they implicitly recognize that there are two of them.

Yet, in the final analysis, even Brayton can't resist the apparently contagious logical schizophrenia that is increasingly infecting opponents of ID:

ID argument like this can be falsified because they are tests of evolution, not of the non-existent "ID theory." ID is a purely negative argument that invokes supernatural causation, and that is why it cannot be tested on its own merits.

In other words, Brayton too argues that ID is both false and unfalsifiable. Not only are there now two Joneses, there are two Braytons.

Is it only a matter of time before Hoppe too--and all the other ID opponents--begin to experience this peculiar form of alogical reproduction? Considering the consequences (such as the potential twofold multiplication of bad reasoning), let's hope not.

From the Vault: The Key Fallacy in Dover v. Kitzmiller

In honor of the 3rd anniversary of Dover v. Kitzmiller, the decision in which a judge, with a wave of his jurisprudential hand (a scientific procedure much favored by the those who, under any other circumstances, would criticize such an action for not being scientific), rendered Intelligent Design non-scientific--I am rerunning my analysis of the core logical flaw in the decision which ran on Dec. 4, 2007, the first anniversary of the decision. I will be re-running the companion post, "The Two Jones Thesis," on Monday.

In the Dover decision, Judge Jones unwitting lays a trap for himself, and then spends a good part of the decision falling into it. On p. 64 of the decision, Jones gives three reasons for determining that ID is not science:

1. It permits supernatural causation
2. It assumes a "contrived dualism" in the argument for irreducible complexity
3. Its negative arguments against evolution (like irreducible complexity) have "refuted by the scientific community"

In all of this discussion, there is a particular view of how to demarcate science from non-science. It is philosopher Karl Popper's demarcation criterion: that in order for something to be science it has to be falsifiable, or testable. We see this in the following comment by Jones:

Accordingly, the purported positive argument for ID does not satisfy the ground rules of science which require testable hypotheses based upon natural explanations. (3:101-03 (Miller)). ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world, forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test, which have produced changes in this world. While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory. (p. 82, emphasis added]

It is in his statement of the second point where Jones sets himself up. He says that the argument for irreducible complexity is "central to ID". Otherwise, why would he include it in a discussion of whether ID is science? And, in reason 3., he also says it has been "refuted": in other words, falsified. But if the argument for irreducible complexity is, as Jones later determines, falsified, then ID is falsified, since irreducible complexity is "central to ID".

But if ID is not falsifiable, then (if you assume Popper's criterion, which is far from noncontroversial among philosophers of science) it is not science--and it cannot therefore be falsified. So how does Jones get around the fact that he just said both that ID is not science because it can't be falsified, and that an argument "central to ID" has been falsified?

His method is simply to skip back and forth between the two arguments hoping the reader will not notice.

He says first that the truth or falsity of arguments for ID are irrelevant:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

Judge Jones then goes on an extended argument explaining why he thinks the argument or irreducible complexity fails (the argument for which essentially consists of the fact that lots of evolutionists say so). But then, obviously cognizant of the inherent contradiction in his argument (that the court takes no position on the truth of the arguments for ID and that it does), he points out that irreducible complexity is an argument against evolution, not an argument for Intelligent Design:

Irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution, not proof of design, a point conceded by defense expert Professor Minnich. (2:15 (Miller); 38:82 (Minnich) (irreducible complexity “is not a test of intelligent design; it’s a test of evolution”). [p. 68, emphasis added]

He says this, in fact, in several places:

As irreducible complexity is only a negative argument against evolution, it is
refutable and accordingly testable, unlike ID, by showing that there are intermediate structures with selectable functions that could have evolved into the allegedly irreducibly complex systems. [p. 76, emphasis added]

Jones' argument is that the alleged failure of irreducible complexity can be charged to ID's account only if irreducible complexity is not a part of Intelligent Design theory itself, since ID itself is not science and therefore not falsifiable. And yet, if it isn't a part of ID, then it obviously cannot undermine the theory itself.

Importantly, however, the fact that the negative argument of irreducible complexity is testable does not make testable the argument for ID.

How can this be if irreducible complexity is "central to ID"? He wants to use the alleged refutation of irreducible complexity against Intelligent Design, but he doesn't want to do it at the cost of his argument that it isn't science. And he does this by employing an explicit contradiction: that irreducible complexity is both central to ID and not central to it.

He then complicates his position even further:

...[E]ven if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design. [p. 79, emphasis added]

In other words, what Jones is saying is that the falsity of irreducible complexity can be held against ID since it is "central" to it, but that, even if it were true, it wouldn't count in favor of it, since it is not central to ID!

It is a clever bit of sophistry. No, take that back. It's just sophistry.

If anyone was in any doubt as to whether the debate over Intelligent Design was rigged, Jones dispels it here. In the duel between the scientific mystics and the advocates of Intelligent Design, the scientific mystics are the only ones allowed a loaded gun.

How can Jones justify this? The short answer is that he can't--not, at least, if he wants to maintain any kind of rational credibility. But if it is not clear how he can do this and remain within the bounds of reason, it is clear why he does it.

ID is science insofar as irreducible complexity (and other similar arguments) is part of it, and unfalsifiable insofar as it is not. And Jones knows this, but wants to have his cake and eat it too.

If opponents of ID want to hold irreducible complexity against ID, then they will have to abandon their argument that ID is not science. And if they want to preserve their argument that ID is not science, they will have to stop using arguments against irreducible complexity against ID.

Until they do, they are simply being irrational.

These are the people who want to control the climate?

The people who want to control the world's climate can't even competently run a conference:

The arrival of President Barack Obama and over one hundred other heads of state in Copenhagen for a photo op at the UN global warming conference has buried the really big story here. No, it’s not the fact that no agreement will be reached on a new international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That outcome was foreseen months ago.

The big news is that the grand alliance pushing global warming alarmism and energy-rationing policies has started to break apart here in a spectacular way. The official United Nations global warming bureaucracy have thrown out the twenty to thirty thousand environmentalists who traveled to Copenhagen to attend the meeting as officially-accredited delegates of non-governmental organizations (or NGOs). The environmentalists are extremely angry and have every justification for being angry.

This is potentially momentous because the two wings of alarmism are totally dependent on one another. The UN’s Kyoto bandwagon has been pushed along by the environmental movement and no new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol, when it expires at the end of 2012, will have a chance of being adopted without the continuing and unremitting backing of the environmentalists whom the UN has unceremoniously booted out this week. For the environmental groups, Kyoto and its successor treaty are the only viable vehicles for achieving their goals of reducing emissions and putting the world on an energy starvation diet.

What has happened this week in Copenhagen is not based on any ideological disagreements. It’s all the result of four things: the size of the room, the number of attendees, total incompetence, and poor manners. The UN chose to hold what was billed as “the most important meeting in the history of the world” in a conference center that only holds fifteen thousand people. The environmental NGOs sent lists of delegates that added up to over thirty thousand. The UN looked at these two numbers and decided everything would work out fine.

Ah, those pesky numbers. Turned out they didn't add up:

... [T]he approximately thirty thousand NGO delegates who traveled from around the world to Copenhagen to attend COP-15 were limited to seven thousand on Tuesday and Wednesday and to three hundred for the last two days.

... Consequently, there are many thousands of environmental activists in Copenhagen without a lot to do. Many of them are extremely angry. It snowed Wednesday night and gusting winds have made Thursday bitterly cold. The news reports say that four thousand protesters tried to push their way past police barricades and into the conference center. Two hundred sixty were arrested. I don’t know what might happen on Friday outside.

Warmers, left out in the cold by their own people. Maybe managing a political movement really is harder than managing the weather.

Read the whole story here.

Global Warmism in the service of Liberalism

The very heart and soul of modern liberalism is placing more and more power in the hands of people further and further away. Thomas Sowell pointed this out in A Conflict of Visions. He called it the "locus of discretion." For liberals, the locus of discretion--the place where power should be placed--is in the hands of bureaucratic elites. And the further away these elites are from any kind of real accountability, the better.

State bureaucrats are better than local bureaucrats; federal bureaucrats are better than state bureaucrats; and international bureaucrats are better than federal bureaucrats. And this has the extra added benefit that it gets liberals out of the uncomfortable position of having to vote for unpopular legislation that the voters don't like: they can just have faceless bureaucrats do it without anyone noticing.

The other aspect of all this is the money involved. We want more money going to further away as well, and this helps in another liberal goal: the redistribution of wealth. Liberals want to take money from taxpayers in wealthy nations and send it to poorer nations. Ostensibly, the money goes to poor people in these countries, but in reality it goes to bureaucrats in those countries who are even further outside any working system of accountability than the bureaucrats here.

Charles Krauthammer tells us how this is not working out in the age of Global Warming Alarmism:

WASHINGTON -- In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques ...

Read more here.

Church/state separatist agrees that Christian legal group can exclude gays

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars disagrees with his fellow church/state separatists on Hastings Law School's denial of recognition of the Christian Legal Society for excluding students who do not agree with its beliefs:

My position on this issue tends to be at odds with most of my fellow advocates of church/state separation. In a press release, Americans United is urging the court to rule in favor of the college. My friend Barry Lynn, for whom I have enormous respect, says:

"This case is about fundamental fairness. If the student religious group wins, it will mean some students will be compelled to support clubs that won't even admit them as members. That's just not right."

I must disagree. Well, I agree that this means some students are compelled to support clubs that won't admit them, I just don't think this is a big deal. In fact, it's true of any student club that is based on a common set of ideas. By the usual funding arrangements for student groups -- usually a small amount of money is given to each club out of student activity fees or some other similar fund -- Democratic students are "compelled" to support Republican student groups and vice versa; white students are "compelled" to support Hispanic and Asian student groups; anti-environmentalists are "compelled" to support student environmental clubs; and so forth.

All student groups that are formed on the basis of a common set of beliefs -- whether they advocate environmentalism, a political party, an ideological position like Students Against Sweatshops, etc -- are allowed to restrict their membership to those who share those beliefs. I see no reason to treat religious students groups any differently.

This is a logical result of the Court's open forum analysis. The university establishes an open forum by allowing students to form groups and get recognition. A student who is not allowed to join one group has the option of forming his own group and getting all the same benefits. A non-Christian can form their own student group; I see no reason why a Christian group should be forced to grant them membership (or an atheist group be forced to admit a Christian either).

Read more here.

Caveman-induced Global Warming

We are shivering here in the Midwest, not just in light of the prospect that the government may be about to take over our health care system--or because Obama's representatives are in Copenhagen right now discussing ways in which international bureaucrats can control the weather system, but because it is really cold.

I any case, here is what ice core data say about how warm it is now compared to previous times throughout history: