Could this be the end of the Great Corn Conspiracy

The Great Corn Conspiracy may just be foiled after all. Ethanol subsidies, a huge federal boondoggle and nothing more than corporate welfare, are now getting some heavy duty opposition in the form of The New York Times and the Washington Post.

These subsidies not only promote an inefficient source of energy, they also put increased demand on corn, driving up food prices.

Kill the Ethanol Monster!

WSJ on pork barrel Hal

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday on the drunken sailor the House Republicans just put in charge of the nation's fiscal sobriety. It seems that the appointment of "Pork Barrel Hal," who the House Republicans just put in charge of the House Appropriations Committee, isn't exactly, well, popular with the Tea Party crowd, who thought they put Republicans in power to, you know, change things.

Rogers is the Kentucky congressman who had the Daniel Boone Parkway renamed after ... himself. Why? Because of the service he has rendered his community by funneling taxpayer money into his district. Yeah, Daniel Boone discovered the place, but it was Rogers who paved it.

Mark Meckler, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, added, "You couldn't possibly choose to send a worse message to the people who just drove this election."

Over the past three years, Mr. Rogers has obtained 135 earmarks worth $246.4 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. He was the fourth-biggest earmarker among lawmakers last year.

... Mr. Rogers, in an interview with Ed Lane, publisher of a Kentucky business newsletter, responded to his critics in 2006. "Pork is the bad word for making good things happen," he said.

If there has ever been fiscal restraint in Mr. Roger's neighborhood, no one has ever noticed it before. Mr. Rogers has been saying "would you be mine" to countless federal programs and getting his way for years now, and now claims, in the wake of the election, that he is a Tea Party convert.

Why will Hal Roger's appoint as House Appropriations chair be "good for Kentucky"?

The fox the House Republicans have put in charge of the nation's financial hen house received plaudits today from fellow Kentucky congressman Ben Chandler. Chandler said that the appointment of 5th district congressman Hal Rogers by House Republican leaders to head the House Committee that doles out federal money, would be "good for Kentucky."

Now why, do you suspect, might Roger's appointment be "good for Kentucky"? It will only be "good for Kentucky" if Rogers really hasn't sworn off federal earmarks like he says he has.

If Rogers, the quintessential pork barrel politician, really is a convert to the anti-earmarks cause, then he WON'T be good for Kentucky because he WON'T be bringing home the bacon like he has for virtually his whole career.

The only way he will be "good for Kentucky" is if he's the same Hal Rogers he has always been which he's now not supposed to be.

If I'm a chicken in this hen house. I am not sleeping tonight.

Why did BBC take down "Coldest December day on record" headline

Now you see it, now you don't.

It's still available on a screen capture, but the BBC's story on the "Coldest December day on record" suddenly got turned into "Record cold continues." Strange how that works.

If we said the former, of course, it would not adequately communicate the Global Warming idea that The End Is Near. The knowledge that The Sky Is Falling might not be entirely clear.

Personally, I am comforted to know that there are attentive monitors on hand to make sure that we do not deviate from the party line on these things.

HT: Anthony Watts

Any reason for repealing DADT apparently will do

We want to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" because ... we will lose Arabic translators.

I'm wondering what the Arab countries, who are notoriously intolerant of homosexuality, think of this reason for pushing gays in the military.

NEWS FLASH: Republicans didn't really mean it on fiscal restraint

The incoming Republican congressional majority leadership had its first big test of whether it really meant what it said about changing the big spending culture in Washington. It failed. Big time.

After telling Americans that it had marked earmarks for elimination, House leadership just put the poster boy for federal earmarks at the helm of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, the body that doles out federal cash. Hal Rogers (R-KY), who has funneled millions in taxpayer money back to his eastern Kentucky district has been selected as committee chairman by the House Republican Steering Committee.

When it comes to drunken sailors, Rogers ranks an admiral:

This fiscal year, Rogers sponsored or co-sponsored 50 earmarks totaling $93.4 million, ranking 10th out of the 435 representatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan research group that tracks money in politics.

There are all those newly elected Tea Party candidates? They should be screaming bloody murder about this.

Can the revolution be over this soon?

Other posts on this issue:

Take that, Sean Hannity: What conservatism really is

Time magazine's 1953 review of Russell Kirk's classic work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. This book should be required reading for those who would mistake some of what passes for conservatism today:

Russell Kirk* has news for most Americans: "Conservatism is something deeper than mere defense of shares and dividends, something nobler than mere dread of what is new." The American asks: "Is it? And if so, what?" The question has a special interest to a nation which is the reputed champion of a position that has almost dropped out of its own conversation.

Neither Kirk nor any other expounder of conservatism can blueprint the conservative mind or doctrine. Blueprints belong to the radicals, the Utopians, the innovators who drew the plans for new societies in the solitudes of their own minds. The history of conservative thought is found unpackaged, warm with the lives of men, glimpsed by the poets and novelists, hammered out by practical politicians who turned from immediate experience to distill the principles of experience.

Read the rest here.

Prichard Committee challenges the CJ on the facts about Louisville schools

The Prichard Committee is calling the Louisville Courier-Journal on the carpet for factual inaccuracies in its editorial last week attacking the Jefferson County School Board for firing Superintendent Sheldon Berman. Prichard apparently thinks the CJ has some obligation to truth in its editorials.

We're not sure where Prichard got that idea.

The CJ, which on education issues plays Charlie McCarthy to the Jefferson County Teachers Association's Edgar Bergen, had stated that "percentages of students testing proficient in basic academic skills have risen steadily." Not so, says Susan Weston at Prichard:

I respectfully submit that since 2007, proficiency levels in Jefferson County Public Schools have risen steadily only in high school writing. In every other tested subject at every level, proficiency declined in one or more of the last three years.

And that's not all:

I turn to another claim in the same editorial, this time the one that says "students rated novice have dropped sharply."

For that statement as well, I respectfully submit that the editorial has not accurately described the facts.

Far from dropping sharply, the percent of Jefferson students scoring at the novice level increased from 2007 to 2010 at every level in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies and at the elementary level in writing. The only novice results that have a net three-year decline are middle and high school writing, and while the 14.5 percent decline for high schools is a large one, the 0.24 percent shift for middle schools is not a drop to which the modifier "sharp" can reasonably be applied.

Ouch.

This is interesting (and a little ironic), since, in the old days, it was the Prichard Committee who played the role of Tokyo Rose in the war on ignorance in Kentucky. When I was the one battling Prichard on education issues, they were the ones misleading the public on education issues, trying to conceal problems in the implementation of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) and actively trying to suppress the public release of important information showing problems with the state tests.

Could it be that they have now come over fully from the Dark Side?

Is philosophy really dead? Ed Feser responds to Stephen Hawking

I have always wondered what it be like if some fisherman, gloating over his catch, were to be standing next to the giant great white shark he had just landed, and, while cameras were flashing, the thing just turned and swallowed him in one bite and then flopped back into the water. This is sort of what has happened to Stephen Hawking and and Leonard Mlodinow, whose book The Grand Design, declares that philosophy has become a casualty of modern physics, and that, because of this, we know God did not create the world (much less exist).

But reviewers on both sides of the philosophy/science divide have found much wanting in The Grand Design, perhaps because, as the reviewer for the Economist put it, after summarily declaring philosophy dead, they then go on to acknowledge its significant contribution to the discussion of laws of nature, and then make an attempt to engage in it for a good part of the book. "It soon becomes evident," says the reviewer, "that Professor Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles."

The scientists who have reviewed the book seem to largely think that what Hawking and Mlodinow have to say about physics is not particularly new, and anyway is not as widely accepted as they seem to suggest. The philosophers likewise have not been impressed, pointing out that, despite their dismissal of philosophy, the two scientists don't seem to even understand what they are condemning, and demonstrate their ignorance of what they purport to have rendered irrelevant by their own sloppy and confused attempts to treat philosophical issues.

And by the way, why is it that when someone makes bold public statements about science, they are asked for their credentials, but any random person off the street is allowed to make philosophical proclamations unmolested?

In fact, a cursory review of the reviews of the book reveals an interesting thing: the less qualified the reviewer is in either field (physics or philosophy), the more positive his review. I wonder what that suggests.

The philosopher Edward Feser points out that Stephen Hawking's assertion--in his new book, The Grand Design--that "philosophy is dead" is not true simply by virtue of Hawking trying to kill it by doing it badly:

The English philosopher C. D. Broad once noted that “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.” You might think there could be no better illustration of Broad’s dictum than Richard Dawkins’s unhappy forays into the philosophy of religion. If so, you should take a look at the latest volume from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

To be sure, the bulk of The Grand Design is devoted to a fairly lucid exposition of the central theories of modern physics. Had Hawking and Mlodinow stuck to science, there would have been little to object to. (Though also little reason to take notice. Did we really need yet another popular account of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory?) But they have grander ambitions: a new philosophy of science, in the service of a new theory of the origins of the universe, one that will forever put paid to the claims of natural theology. “Philosophy is dead,” Hawking and Mlodinow assure us, for science can now do what philosophers have tried to do, only better. Unfortunately, their attempt at one-upmanship proves only that Cicero’s famous quip about philosophers may have been misdirected; for The Grand Design demonstrates conclusively that there is nothing so absurd but some scientist has said it

Before nemesis comes hubris, and in the case of Hawking and Mlodinow, that means a basic failure to grasp the philosophical ideas they airily dismiss. Like the village atheist whose knowledge of theology derives from what he saw last Sunday on The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, our authors assume that when philosophers have argued for God as cause of the world, what they mean is that the universe had a beginning, that God caused that beginning, and that to rebut their position it suffices to ask “What caused God?” But from Aristotle to Aquinas to Leibniz to the present day, most versions of the First Cause argument have not supposed that the universe had a beginning in time, and none of them is open to so simple a refutation. Their claim is rather that even if the universe were infinitely old, it is still the sort of thing that might in principle not have existed at all. That it does exist therefore requires explanation, and this explanation cannot lie in some other thing that might in principle have failed to exist, since that would just raise the same problem again. Accordingly, the explanation can be found only in something that could not have failed to exist even in principle — something that not only does not have a cause, but couldn’t have had one, precisely because (unlike the universe) it couldn’t in theory have failed to exist in the first place. In short, any contingent reality, like the universe, must depend upon a necessary being, and this necessary being is what defenders of the First Cause argument mean by “God” ...

You can read the rest in National Review.

Michael Shermer, Pretend Skeptic: Why scientific reductionism doesn't work

Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, seems to be skeptical of all things but one: science. Somehow, the power of the skeptical criteria he applies to everything else is strangely extinguished when he encounters his own preferred belief system.

In a recent article published at Big Questions Online, Shermer says:

It would certainly seem so if you are reading these words online, but in fact you are not actually “seeing” the computer screen in front of you. What you see are photons of light bouncing off the screen (and generated by the internal electronics of the screen itself), which pass through the hole in the iris of your eye, through the liquid medium inside your eye, wending their way through the bipolar and ganglion cells to strike the rods and cones at the back of your retina ...

His account of the act of seeing continues for several excruciatingly detailed paragraphs in which we are taken on a tour of the brain that we can easily imagine being narrated by Ben Stein and in which we expect at any minute to be asked to stay outside the rope and not to touch the exhibits.

This process proceeds until, says Shermer, we reach the neuron level, where particular neurons fire in particular circumstances. Shermer points out that several neuroscientists have even "found a single neuron that fires when the subject is shown a photograph of Bill Clinton and no one else!"

Unfortunately, this neuron frequently gives long boring policy speeches and attempts to mess around with other nearby female neurons and can create extremely embarrassing situations, so scientists have decided it's best not to study this one too closely.

But we finally arrive at this little gem:

The models generated by biochemical process in our brains constitute "reality." None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is at it appears.

Shermer calls this idea "belief-dependent realism," about which he promises to enlighten us in a future book, where, presumably, we will be treated to a series of letters, words, and sentences the perception of which will be routed through a long, involved neuroscientific process that will take us back to the neurons which his book will argue don't have any necessary connection with reality.

So one wonders why we should believe him.

This is the problem will all such accounts of experience that try to reduce conscious experiences to physiological processes: they undercut the very arguments used to support them, since the thoughts that produced the arguments and the thoughts that resulted from reading or hearing them are the very things the arguments have attempted to show aren't really real.

The way we derive a truth, in other words, is the truth itself. But if this is so, then isn't the truth "the way we derive a truth is the truth itself" only its own arbitrary derivation? And if so, how can we believe it's true?

Shermer, in fact, seems to be aware of this:

I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science. Flawed as it may be because it is conducted by scientists who have their own set of beliefs determining their reality, science itself has a set of methods to bypass the cognitive biases that so cripple our grasp of the reality that really does exist out there.

"Is there a way around this epistemological trap?" he asks later. "There is. It's called science."

In other words, we must be skeptical of everything--except scientific skepticism. But why does science get a pass? Science is a cognitive process like any other, and must therefore suffer from the same solopsistic fate. Why are scientific thoughts not "models generated by biochemical processes" that "none of us can ever be completely sure" about just like the ones Shermer finds around him so ready at hand?

Once you believe in scientific reductionism, you can't believe it anymore. If you accept it, you must therefore reject it. Once you accept its presuppositions, you are forced in short order to abandon them. It is Chesterton's "thought that stops all thought," a universal intellectual solvent which, despite its pretensions to rationality, is the most anti-rational of all theories.

Anyone who decides to accept Shermer's argument passes under a sign that reads: "Abandon all truth, ye who enter here." But Shermer himself just averts his gaze whenever he encounters the admonition.

In fact, Shermer can't even get through is own article without having to assume the opposite of what he's just told us:

Even when two models appear to be equally supported by observations, over time we accumulate more precise observations that tell us which model more closely matches reality.

Whoah. Hold on there. Weren't we just told that reality was only a model in our brain? How, then, can we use it to assess the models in our brain?

Chesterton had already refuted Shermer as long ago as 1908:

That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." [the early 20th century equivalent of Shermer's The Believing Brain] In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason ... For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Shermer takes note that he himself is more optimistic about the effects of drinking the reductionist Kool-Aid than is Stephen Hawking, who at least has the decency to keel over from the philosophical concoction and admit that scientific reductionism leads to an epistemological dilemma from which there is no escape: all facts are theory-laden, and there are cases where no observation can prove one model necessarily right or another wrong.

So what does Shermer propose as the way out of the trap he has set for himself? He has none. In the final analysis, we find him being slain in the Scientific Spirit:

[E]ven though there is no Archimedean point outside of our brains, I believe there is a real reality, and that we can come close to knowing it through the lens of science — despite the indelible imperfection of our brains, our models, and our theories.

So this is where he ends up: swinging from the chandeliers at the scientistic version of a Holy Ghost Revival, crying, "I believe!" Which, of course, is very unbecoming for a scientist.

More Darwinist agression on Kentucky theme park

Critics of the Creation Museum are in an uproar over a Noah's Ark theme park to be built in northern Kentucky. Gov. Steve Beshear, interested in tourism dollars from the project, announced a tax break today for the construction of the theme park. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader:

State involvement in the $150 million project brought outrage from groups focused on the separation of church and state, but Beshear said there was nothing "remotely unconstitutional" about the proposal.

I am happy to have been quoted in one of the stories on this issue, but did not mention to the reporter that I have been observing the behavior of the Darwinists and Civil Libertarians," another group with close kinship relations, for some time. I always take careful notes when I make these observations, then carefully look at what I have written under a microscope. Then I subject my words to careful chemical analysis to figure out what I actually said, just to be sure. In the process, I have come to some conclusions about the response of these groups to outsiders.

My studies indicate that the aggressive traits of Darwinists and civil libertarians whenever they encounter anyone who disgrees with them seems to stem from a curious cultural intolerance intrinsic to their genetic makeup. Among their more aggressive members, this even takes the form of attempts at complete elimination of dissent.

This penchant for cultural aggression was demonstrated again by a member of one of the more hostile tribes of civil libertarians, who told interpreters, "The Constitution doesn't prevent you from putting up a water park ... It does prevent you from putting up Noah's water park."

Members of both Darwinists and civil libertarian groupings have made frequent use of the Constitution ever since the document was introduced into their tribal culture. It now serves as a cultural totem in their society, although the form of it they worship is a corrupted form of the original, lacking the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, and missing the Second Amendment altogether, which, in fact, some members use for target practice.

Gay soldier cause of WikiLeak, but nobody's asking and nobody's telling

The man who engineered the leak of classified information that has compromised American diplomacy--not to mention intelligence--was not only gay, but an activist who was calling for a change in military policy on gays.

Omigosh. Did I really just say that?

Did I really say that at the very same time that advocates of changing the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy are arguing that there is no downside to gays in the military that a gay soldier just committed one of the most serious breaches of security in modern times--for reasons directly related to his sexuality?

I can't believe I said that. I must be a homophobic bigot.

As penance, I will now go and beat my head against a wall and repeat Diversity slogans over and over again until I have convinced myself that these stories have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

And by the way, please, if you want to avoid committing any anti-gay rights Thought Crimes, under no circumstances should you read the following articles:

• Basic Cable, by George Neumayer
• Pfc. Manning: Poster boy for 'don't ask, don't tell', by Anne Coulter

Just don't do it.

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