Frederic Bastiat, Call Your Office!

     I was powerfully struck by this evisceration of California’s anti-wildfires posturing and similar expressions of left-liberal “do-gooderism” by the great Richard Fernandez. Here’s the gut punch:

     Knowledge inequality makes "magical" solutions inevitable because an ever-smaller fraction of the public know how things work or are paid for. Healthcare woes? Medicare for All. Housing crisis? Make affordable housing a "right." Students choking under loans? Write it off. Graduates without literacy or numeracy? Teach Woke Math.

     Fix the wildfires by tightly regulating development sounds like a solution. Following Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," many things are now solved by linguistic legerdemain....

     There's no objection to magic because many people, especially in or from the Third World, are surrounded by found marvels like cell phones, machine learning, GPS, CRISPR therapies, etc. They are used to things that simply work -- though none but the sages know how. Immigrants can be forgiven for thinking, as they wander in their misery through the technological wonders of California, why the magi have simply not waved their wands and created the same level of comfort for them. In a world of magic, what's one more spell, because that's all it takes, right? It must be because -- and the politicians never tire of telling them -- the wizards are selfish and holding back.

     Please read it all. At first glance, I was inclined merely to point and clap. Then my analytical gears started to turn.

     What accounts for the sort of knowledge asymmetry Fernandez fingers in this essay? Is it a remediable condition, or has the advance of technology and other forms of specialized knowledge made it ineluctable?

     The answer may be “yes” to both clauses.

---

     The past few decades’ explosion in ever more scientifically and technologically rarefied forms of knowledge has caused a kind of intellectual galactization of the human race. Clusters of us who share particular pockets of knowledge, usually owing to the occupations we’ve chosen and have been educated or trained for, can communicate about it with one another but with no one else. For example, my own former field of computer programming was once integral, untroubled by internal compartments or divisions among practitioners. Programmers moved freely among software’s various undertakings; indeed, our employers demanded it of us. It certainly isn’t that way today; specific sectors within the software field have ramified and specialized to the point that their practitioners can’t speak conprehensibly about it to anyone not a member of their set. The divisions are highlighted by the help-wanted ads, which specify the expertises candidates must possess in great, jargon-laden detail.

     In that sense, an asymmetry in the distribution of knowledge is inevitable. Life is too short for any but the highest of geniuses to master a great many scientific or technological disciplines...and in case you haven’t noticed, supergeniuses are in rather short supply relative to the demand. But that’s far from the whole of the problem.

     The distribution of knowledge across a population is confronted by various mediating agencies: the education system, the media, the political system, language barriers, and others. Those agencies and institutions act as filters and gatekeepers, determining to a large degree who may learn what. Moreover, none of them can be regarded as a disinterested participant.

     Virtually any institution that has persisted for some time acquires an overriding objective: its own perpetuation. If the institution is involved in the dissemination of knowledge, its masters may come to see its perpetuation as dependent upon the suppression of certain kinds of knowledge and the substitution of propaganda for it. This has been the case with American education for at least thirty years, especially in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and history.

     Add to this:

• The inherent inequality of men: our varying abilities to absorb knowledge and put it to use;
• Mankind’s propensity for wishful thinking;
• Politicians’ inherent incentive to tell us what they think we want to hear.

     Mix well, serve cold, and retreat swiftly.

---

     More could be said about this subject, though I doubt my Gentle Readers, being a highly intelligent bunch, need to read more about it. Population dynamics, especially the migration-powered intermixture of more intelligent with less, and more educated with less, are certainly involved. The power of government to conceal the actual costs and consequences of its actions also plays a role. But the largest factor yet to be discussed is the prevalence of third-party decision-making and the bases upon which it proceeds:

• Certain persons are nominated as decision-makers, typically through political processes;
• The decision-makers are charged with the solution of some “problem;”
• They decree rules or rule changes they claim will “solve” the “problem,” often after considerable public pressure, log-rolling with ideological or political adversaries, and “melon-slicing” to distribute consequential gains;
• The decision-makers then turn their attention in some other direction.

     Note what’s missing from the above:

• Deadlines for performance;
• Objective metrics for improvement or deterioration;
• Accountability for the decision-makers, who seldom if ever pay any costs for the consequences of their decisions.

     The general public is told that if we will only have patience, all will be well. And, as we are seldom equipped to thresh our way through the curtains of lies, misdirections, and obfuscations erected by the decision-makers, their pet “experts,” and their media handmaidens, we stand back, do what we can to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and try not to be too horrified by what follows.

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader, but I can’t go on from here. My blood pressure is spiking. Perhaps I’ll be back later with a joke or some cartoons. In any event, do have a nice day.

Broken Bridges

     Apologies for the lack of a piece yesterday, Gentle Reader. I was too consumed by the sense of loss to write intelligibly.

     In pondering how best to memorialize my friend Joe, about whom I wrote here, I decided that a subject to which he returned often – one that animated many of his own efforts to learn and to master new fields and skills – would be my choice. That subject is the severance of the bridges of knowledge and skill that link contemporary civilization to the preceding ones that brought it forth.

---

     Virtually everyone with an interest in freedom and the economics thereof – capitalism, free enterprise, and the free market – is familiar with Leonard E. Read’s classic essay I, Pencil. This simple yet piercing essay about the division of labor illustrates better than many a Nobel laureate’s lecture what the uncoerced cooperation of free men can achieve: improvements to our common lot that no single individual could possibly replicate.

     Yet, as inspiring a vision as that is, it’s equally a warning. It addresses the “horizontal” division of labor: the distribution of specialties among men at a given point in time, which when combined can produce something no individual could make unaided. But it also points silently to the vertical division of labor: the aggregate of knowledge, skills, and effort that, as time has passed, has advanced our technologies to the betterment of all.

     Consider, if you will, the transistor. This indispensable device required extensive knowledge of physics to envision. It required still more knowledge of materials science to evolve a practical concept for it. And it required great skill at fabrication to produce it reliably, and to ensure that it would be reliable in operation.

     Today, we make transistors out of small clumps of molecules and pack many millions of them onto a single integrated circuit. We can thank such multi-million transistor ICs for our computers and much else that we use, freely and without thought for their provenance, every day. But the knowledge and skills that gave birth to the transistor are much harder to find.

     I could not bring this essay to you without the transistor. Before the transistor and the “solid-state revolution” it enabled, computers were huge, unwieldy devices that could do very little. It was unthinkable that an individual would own one. Were some atavistic millionaire to purchase one, he’d find that a word processing program for it was unavailable.

     Today, the knowledge and skills required to produce a transistor from a standing start are so rare as to be essentially unavailable. Let’s not even think about the personal computer.

---

     That’s not all. The conditions that allowed John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley to converge and to produce the first practical transistors rested on a technological foundation of great depth and complexity. The transportation and communications capabilities that brought them together had to be invented by prior generations of visionaries and innovators. Those earlier ones had to know a great deal, too. Even if we omit consideration of the electrically powered starter motor, the automobile unites a huge amount of knowledge and innovations based upon it. As for the telephone, parts of that story are well known. However, they don’t address the range of bits of knowledge Alexander Graham Bell had to master to produce it.

     Much of that foundation of knowledge is no longer taught anywhere. Neither is the knowledge that preceded it. Those who mastered it are steadily dying off. Their deaths are breaking the bridges to the world that gave birth to the one in which we live.

     In the event of a major catastrophe – global nuclear war; impact by a “world-killer” meteorite; virus of 99% lethality; election of Bernie Sanders to the presidency; take your pick – the reproduction of the technological base that gave rise to the above items, each of them critically important to the civilization of 1968 would be problematic, to say the least...and that, for the arithmetically averse, was fifty years ago and innumerable innovations before today.

---

     “We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere, and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” -- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

     The world of Idiocracy was doomed before Joe Bowers climbed out of his suspended-animation pod. Not all the electrolytes in a million gallons of Brawndo could have saved it. The critical knowledge he restored to that world had been lost.

     It’s not possible for any one individual to know enough to recreate civilization as we know it from a standing start. But not even by searching the whole world could we amass the knowledge and skills that produced the first transistor, the first automobile, the first telephone, the first lead-acid battery, or much else upon which we rely without a moment’s appreciation. That bothered Joe greatly. His lifelong effort to acquire more knowledge and more skill at more things was in part powered by the realization.

     Joe Flamini might not have been able to reproduce the technologies of 2018 singlehandedly. He’d have been doing phenomenally well to recreate the technologies of 1948. Nevertheless, I think that even if he couldn’t have done it all, he had what it would take to do quite a lot of it. He’d certainly have given it one hell of an old-school try. With his passing unto the next life, one more reservoir of knowledge and skill – to say nothing of the optimism and energy that powered them – is lost to us.

     How many more remain?

Heuristics For The Masses

     You’ve seen me exercised over the misuse of words. You’ve seen me exercised over the arrogation of unearned authority; there’s certainly enough of that going around. You’ve surely seen me exercised over unfounded assertions of expertise. But today, I’m going to mount my high horse over the mistreatment of an important concept.

     I’ve grown tired of seeing it misstated, especially as the misstatement undercuts the most important of all human mental processes: the one that makes learning possible.

---

     “Entities ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” – William of Occam

     The above quote is generally known as Occam’s Razor. (It’s also been called the principle of parsimony.) Few are the statements that have been misinterpreted more often than that one. The most common misinterpretation is that if a given phenomenon can be explained in a number of ways, the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

WRONG!

     The laws of the universe do not favor simplicity over complexity. (Trust a specialist in general relativity to know that.) Nor is there any reason why they “should.” What, then, does Occam’s Razor “do for us?”

     The answer is both more complex and more revealing than one might suppose. However, what it reveals isn’t some aspect of natural law, but rather the process by which we investigate causes and acquire knowledge.

     The conceptual envelope in which Occam’s Razor belongs is called heuristics.

---

     Herewith, a statement nonscientists will regard as rather shocking:

It is impossible to determine the cause of any natural phenomenon with absolute confidence.

     As natural is one of the worst-abused words in the English language, allow me to clarify what I mean by it in the above. For the purposes of the coming diatribe, a “natural phenomenon” is distinguished from all other such phenomena in that no sentient agency deliberately brought it about. For the unbalanced pile of dirty dishes on the kitchen counter to fall and shatter is a natural phenomenon; for Mom to sweep up the shards, muttering about the laziness of the ingrates she keeps house for, is not.

     Under this application of the word, natural phenomena are the consequences of the operation of natural laws, independent of human action or opinion. We probe those laws by the use of the scientific method:

1. Collect data about the phenomenon and the surrounding context.
2. Propose an “explanation:” i.e., a hypothesis about the cause.
3. Use the hypothesis to make a prediction that can be tested in a controlled experiment.
4. Perform the experiment and observe the results.
5. Did the result conform to the prediction?
   • If so, make further predictions premised upon the hypothesis and return to step 4.
   • If not, return to step 1.

     Examine the above procedure very carefully. Note that if the scientist’s predictions are all confirmed by a properly controlled experiment, the hypothesis could be tested indefinitely. Only if an adequate experiment should fail to fulfill the associated prediction will the hypothesis be rejected.

     An infinite number of successful predictions does not “prove” the “truth” of a hypothesis; it merely increases our confidence that “we’re on to something.” One failure of prediction blasts the hypothesis to pieces. This is the way scientists work, ever since Francis Bacon.

     Keep this segment in mind as you proceed.

---

     Occam’s Razor, while it doesn’t tell us anything about which of a group of alternate hypotheses is “correct,” does tell us something extremely valuable. In short, it establishes the order in which those hypotheses should be tested: simplest first.

     This isn’t because “the simplest explanation is probably the right one;” it’s because the simpler the explanation, the easier it is to test! A simple explanation involves fewer causal elements than a complex one; therefore, designing an experiment to test the simple hypothesis is easier, and more likely to produce unambiguous results. Doing the investigation in that order improves the probability of quickly getting demonstrably wrong hypotheses out of our way.

     Now, testability is critical. There are always untestable explanations for an event. This is particularly important in the case of irreproducible events. But scientists don’t concern themselves with things that happen only once. If it can’t be reproduced, we’ve got no shot at determining why it happened.

     This leads us to the underlayer to Occam’s Razor: what William of Occam had in mind when he propounded it.

---

     If you’ve been wondering why I’m so confident about the large-font assertion from earlier:

It is impossible to determine the cause of any natural phenomenon with absolute confidence.

     ...it’s because I can always propose an explanation that cannot be tested:

The phenomenon was not “natural,” but was brought about by the deliberate action of a conscious and purposeful actor.

     The short form of the above explanation is “God did it.” And indeed, William of Occam was deeply concerned about that approach to the world. He was a Franciscan friar and theologian, a devout Christian man. He believed in God and His ultimate authority, but he disliked flip appeals to divine agency as explanations for the behavior of the natural world. Though he preceded Francis Bacon and the formulation of the scientific method by centuries, he had a sense for the importance of “keeping it simple.” To say of an event that “God did it” is to claim a gnosis. That assertion is unfriendly to the assumption that the laws of nature are knowable by investigation – and without that assumption, human knowledge cannot advance.

---

     To sum up, Occam’s Razor is not a “law about natural law,” but a heuristic tool: a device that assists us in learning about the natural order. It doesn’t “privilege” simpler hypotheses over more complex ones; it merely sorts them into a preferred order for testing. While that order might mean that the investigator will hit upon the “correct” explanation later rather than sooner, it puts the odds in his favor.

     But don’t imagine that simplicity is some organizing principle of natural law. All it takes is a semester of quantum physics to blast that notion to smithereens. Erwin Schrodinger would surely tell you so, but unfortunately, he’s dead.

Decision-Making: Some Thoughts

     The political news is all froth and blather, and there are certainly enough willing froth-and-blather miners out there to deal with it, so today I’ll spend a few minutes on a subject that’s been much on my mind lately: how to know whether you have command of the important aspects of a pending decision.

     If you’re familiar with the enormous unwillingness of persons in public offices to make clear, consequential decisions, you’ve probably wondered what could be done about it. As sad a subject as it is, the problem isn’t confined to public officialdom. It exists in virtually any hierarchical structure that grows beyond a certain threshold size. Atop the unwillingness problem, the decisions issued by such persons tend to be of the nebulous sort that can be word-minced a posteriori, such that the issuer can qualify his statements afterward to avert any responsibility for what followed. The unwillingness problem and the ambiguity problem proceed from the same set of incentives, disincentives, and constraints.

     However, solving the problems of sloth and evil is beyond the scope of this tirade. Instead let’s look at the bare bones of decision-making: generically speaking, what a responsible decision-maker should assure himself of before committing to a course of action.

---

1. Who has the authority?

     “Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.” -- Robert A. Heinlein

     A common observation about hierarchies is pertinent:

In any hierarchical structure,
Authority is pulled upward,
While responsibility is pushed downward.

     The dynamic of power guarantees this. Persons avid for power want it for its positive features, most notably its perquisites, the admiration of the crowd, and the propitiations of the importunate. They’ll do what they can to shed its negative features, which can be summarized as responsibility for the consequences of decisions made. As a man rises in such a hierarchy, both his incentive to avert responsibility and his array of tools and methods for doing so will increase.

     But Heinlein’s observation comes into play. If Smith has the authority but Jones has the responsibility, Jones will lack the power required to effectuate a decision once made. Smith will lack a personal commitment to the consequences of the decision. Should disaster and mutual finger-pointing follow, Jones is the more easily and cheaply sacrificed scapegoat. Any chastisement Smith will experience will be far less.

     A typical case arises in matters of estimation. Imagine that Smith has asked Jones to prepare an estimate for the duration of an effort. Jones does his research and returns with an estimate of one year. Smith immediately demurs and says “It must be complete in six months.”

     Who owns the estimate? More to the point, should the effort take more than six months, who will be treated as owning the estimate?

     Similar cases can be found in all kinds of decision-making, and in all kinds of hierarchies.

---

2. Does the decision-maker know what he needs to know?

     There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. – Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

     Knowledge is never absolute nor complete. What we hope for, in facing a decision with significant consequences, is to know enough, and with enough confidence. Yet these, too, are difficult thresholds to satisfy...in part because no one really knows where they are.

     Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was often ridiculed for his “known unknowns” versus “unknown unknowns” formulation. The adversary press treated his statement as gibberish. Yet this is among the wisest things to come from a public official in my lifetime.

     Among the most important bits of knowledge one seeks before making a significant decision are the breadth and depth of the risk factors:

• Do we know all the risk factors?
• Do we have a sense for the downside, should those risks materialize?
• Have we thought about what could be done to mitigate or eliminate those risks?

     Sometimes it’s possible to know all the risk factors that pertain to some undertaking. Sometimes it’s possible to be braced for all of them. But if the project is large, neither condition can be satisfied without serious study. Indeed, sometimes neither condition can be satisfied, period.

     Consider a contractor who must subcontract parts of a project. If he’s fortunate, he’ll be well acquainted with the abilities and histories of all his subcontractors. He’ll have a good sense for the quality and reliability of their work. Yet there are aspects he’ll never be able to control: for example, whether particular artisans will remain available for the duration of the job. Unless he’s far better informed than most persons in his position, he won’t know whether all his subcontractors are financially sound. And of course, many a subcontractor will hedge against future idle periods by overloading itself with current commitments, often to the detriment of promised delivery dates.

     The acknowledgement of known risk factors, and the admission – to oneself, at least – that there could be “unknown unknowns” as well, is a spur toward risk management planning: i.e., what to do if the more plausible unfavorable possibilities should come true. While no amount of risk management planning can be genuinely comprehensive – try to concoct a risk-mitigation tactic for the emergence of a volcano in the middle of your conference room – the risks most likely to reify should be addressed frankly. “Unknown unknowns” can be met, to a degree, with insurance.

---

3. What is the objective?

     I left this for last because it’s more pertinent to the mid-level decision maker than to the CEO or the private individual acting alone. In addition, it synergizes with topic #1: the problem of authority decoupled from responsibility. It’s far too often the case that no matter how clear the decision-maker’s vision of his objective, persons hierarchically above him will be seeking far different things. When this is the case, the support from above that any mid-level manager needs will be uncertain, perhaps even at cross-purposes to the overt objective of the effort.

     Governmental hierarchies are beset with this problem all the time. Consider the Veterans’ Administration scandals of recent years. I have no doubt that some of the persons involved in the corrective efforts were sincere in wanting to clean up the VA’s act. Yet I also have no doubt that there were persons involved who merely wanted to “display good intentions,” but leave the status quo essentially untouched. We can also see this effect in the shuffling of incompetent or morally deficient public school teachers and administrators to “turkey farms” out of the public eye, thus satisfying the political needs of the higher-ups while mollifying the private parties who forced the matter into the light.

     A decision-maker who suspects that those to whom he reports have a divergent agenda will be powerfully tempted to “sit on his hands,” delaying a decision in the hope that what is hidden might, given time, be revealed. Though such hopes are not often gratified, even less often is there anything else he can do.

---

     I’ve been fascinated by decision-making approaches for decades: approximately since I went into software engineering. While nothing so diverse can be reduced to a formula, there are generalizable aspects to the thing. Were it otherwise, no one would concern himself with procedure analysis, the therblig, or operations research.

     He who takes a deep interest in this subject is likely to want much more than the surface treatment of its most general aspects. That gets mathematical pretty quickly. However, the windy generalities addressed here might be enough to stimulate a few Gentle Readers into looking deeper.

“But It Violates The Laws Of Physics!”

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. The news is all bad, except for this bit:

     Interplanetary travel could be a step closer after scientists confirmed that an electromagnetic propulsion drive, which is fast enough to get to the Moon in four hours, actually works.

     The EM Drive was developed by the British inventor Roger Shawyer nearly 15 years ago but was ridiculed at the time as being scientifically impossible.

     It produces thrust by using solar power to generate multiple microwaves that move back and forth in an enclosed chamber. This means that until something fails or wears down, theoretically the engine could keep running forever without the need for rocket fuel.

     Say what? A completely enclosed propulsion system? A device that produces thrust without ejecting matter in the opposite direction? A drive that ignores the sacred Law of Conservation of Momentum?

     Hey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:

     The drive, which has been likened to Star Trek’s Impulse Drive, has left scientists scratching their heads because it defies one of the fundamental concepts of physics – the conservation of momentum – which states that if something is propelled forward, something must be pushed in the opposite direction. So the forces inside the chamber should cancel each other out.

     Note the charming use of my favorite word: should.

     However in recent years Nasa has confirmed that they believe it works and this week Martin Tajmar, a professor and chair for Space Systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany also showed that it produces thrust.

     The drive is capable of producing thrust several thousand times greater than a standard photon rocket and could get to Mars within 70 days or Pluto within 18 months. A trip to Alpha Centauri, which would take tens of thousands of years to reach right now, could be reached in just 100 years.

     While all over the world, physicists and people who fancy themselves scientifically literate are muttering “What’s next, perpetual motion?” “Pons and Fleischman ride again” and “Just wait until someone figures out the scam.”

     But it’s not quite that simple. I’m here to tell you.

---

     It’s a commonplace rejoinder – among engineers, at least – to ask a skeptic about some proposition under discussion “Does it violate the laws of physics?” It expresses the conviction, popular among our sort, that “the laws of physics” are the sole serious constraint upon human technology and what it makes possible. In at least one sense, that conviction is a reliable guide to the possible. In another, it’s rather misleading.

     Physics is the name we give to the most fundamental of the sciences: the one that purports to study and elucidate the bedrock rules of existence. And indeed, those we call physicists have propounded marvelous theses over the centuries: “laws” from which they can predict the behavior of objects of specified characteristics within specified contexts. Some of those “laws” have yielded massive technological breakthroughs and consequent improvements to human life.

     But something else has been happening all the while: current physicists have disproved the “laws” propounded by prior physicists by testing them in realms of mass, size, and speed their predecessors could not explore. These supersessions of previously sacred “laws” proceeded under a principle of science sometimes called the Correspondence Principle: The replacement for an existing theory must perform as well or better in all the contexts in which the existing one seemed to function adequately.

     And since we’re talking about science here, perform actually means predict.

     Theory has followed upon theory for centuries, old ones falling by the wayside as new theories, inclusive of a wider range of conditions of mass, size, and speed, have out-predicted them. From this we infer an important limitation upon human knowledge:

We can never be sure we know
what the laws of physics are.

---

     Science fiction writers play along the margins of our physical knowledge all the time. I’ve done so myself:

     “So what did Martin haul us up here to show us?” Patrice said as they settled into seats in her sleeping area.
     “Actually, the showing comes a wee bit later,” Althea said. “First, a lot of telling.” She leaned against the lumpy nickel-iron wall and waved a hand mock-casually. “We think we’ve cracked it.”
     No one spoke, or grunted, or even breathed audibly, yet the spike of surprise that passed through the visitors was impossible to miss.
     “You...think,” Teodor said.
     Althea nodded. “The experimental results from our test crystal are consistent with a fifteen percent increase in the speed of light.” She grinned again. “That’s fifteen percent over the speed of light in a vacuum.”
     A gasp circled the group.
     “What can you do with that?” Teodor asked.
     “With that alone? Not much. But that’s just from the power we have from one eighteen-century-old fission reactor that spends most of its juice keeping us alive up here. If my equations are sound, with a terawatt of power I can get raw space to accept passage at approximately Michelson eighty. Give me a terawatt more, and I can drag a fifty-ton mass up to that speed in about two months.” She pulled a mock innocent face. “Hope to Earth in four months or a little better. That fast enough for you?”
     She swept her eyes over the stunned guests.
     “Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer,” Valerie breathed. “You actually did it.”
     Althea nodded. “We think so, Mom.”
     “Wait a moment,” her mother said. “What about reaction mass?”
     “Don’t need it.”
     “How, then?”
     “Basically, the same technique that allows me to increase the speed of light,” Althea said. “Alteration of the permittivity constant, applied differentially—a front-to-back gradient—over an ovoid volume enclosing the mass to be propelled. A properly distributed effusion of gamma rays and W-plus bosons is all it takes to get the process started. Put a negative charge on the outer surface of the vessel, and you're off. That gives you a reactionless drive and the next best thing to perpetual motion. Only works in a hard vacuum, though, so don't expect to use it for anything groundside.”
     The genesmith appeared near to apoplexy. “You altered a fundamental constant of physics?”
     Althea nodded again. “Should I have asked permission first?” She grinned. “I had to, Granduncle. The only way to breach what we call the lightspeed barrier is to alter the conditions that determine lightspeed. The only way to do that is to increase the permittivity of the vacuum. And the only possibility of doing that lay in Althea's Axiom.”
     “Which is?”
     “Constants...aren't.”

     [From Freedom’s Scion.]

     We regard the “fundamental constants of physics” as constants because we don’t know how to alter them...today. However, it’s merely my fiction-enabling speculation that we’ll eventually learn how to do that. One of the most important of all breakthroughs in physical thought arrived with early high-energy physicist Arthur Compton, who argued that certain interactions of light and “fundamental particles” could not be explained without postulating violations of the Conservation of Mass-Energy. Such violations disturbed many physicists of his time. Isn’t that illegal? they chorused. Werner Heisenberg proved that under certain circumstances it was not – that particles with nonzero mass-energy could spontaneously come into existence for time intervals too short to permit them to be observed. From this and other insights, modern quantum physics was born.

     The deep lesson here is one about the “laws of physics.” We believe there are such laws. At any given time we think we have a decent grip on them, at least for those ranges of mass, size, and speed for which we can perform experiments. But by reason of our inherently limited ability to manipulate reality, we can never know them with complete inclusivity and perfect certainty...if they exist at all.

     The EM Drive appears to have challenged the Conservation of Momentum. No doubt a barrage of tests is being planned for it as we speak. We shall see.

---

     What we posit as “the laws of physics” at any given moment are statements about observable regularities that appear to have no exceptions. That’s how all of science is done:

1. Researchers note a regular, reproducible phenomenon;
2. They propose a theoretical structure that would explain it;
3. They use that theory to make predictions about relevant objects in a relevant context;
4. They design experiments to test those predictions:
   1. If the experiments produce results that conform to the predictions, they perform further experiments;
   2. But the first time an experiment produces non-conforming results, they abandon the theory and look for another.

     Should Shawyer’s EM Drive withstand rigorous, worldwide testing, it will compel physicists to look beyond the “classical” Law of Conservation of Momentum for still deeper laws that include the “classical” law but explain the EM Drive as well. Human knowledge will be advanced and refined. But it will still be incorrect to say that we know the laws of physics in some absolute sense. Nature doesn’t permit such arrogance.

Knowings

Recent events, including one with more personal significance than the others, have caused the nature and varieties of knowledge to bubble to the top of my priority list. How about that, folks: two quasi-philosophical pieces in one week! I hope this doesn’t constitute an overdose.

---

What we mean when we say we “know” something varies according to the kind of knowledge being claimed.

An acquaintance once argued to me that it’s impossible to “know” anything – that even our most fundamental observations are “too theory-laden” to constitute knowledge of a reliable sort. This...person is a “Unitarian pastor” who specializes in “feminist theology” and thinks muckraker Ida Tarbell was an objective and trustworthy reporter. Despite an advanced degree in the sciences, he disbelieves in scientific method as the most reliable technique for amassing knowledge about the universe, because he rejects the notion of objective reality, though he knows better than ever to say so outright.

My acquaintance’s fundamental failings – in this regard, that is – are an inability concede the requirement for premises and a corresponding ignorance about the varieties of knowledge.

Let’s look at a typical problem in required premises and the varieties of knowledge.

It’s impossible at this time to determine a man’s true beliefs and affinities with absolute assurance. For example, I could tell you that I love my wife, but you could never be absolutely certain that that statement is true. The truth of the matter is locked inside my head, where you cannot examine it. What you can do is test my assertions against my behavior, according to patterns you believe to be reliable. Do I treat my wife with affection, consideration, and loyalty? Most important: am I consistent about it, especially when I’m unaware that I’m being observed?

Much will depend upon your choice of premises. Will you assume that I always speak the truth? If so, the syllogism runs:

1. Fran always speaks the truth.
2. Fran says he loves his wife.
3. Therefore, Fran loves his wife.

If you refrain from making that assumption, preferring confirmation by experimentation after the fashion of the sciences, your syllogism will run:

1. A man who consistently behaves in fashion X loves his wife.
2. Fran consistently behaves in fashion X.
3. Therefore, Fran loves his wife.

When we look closely at those arguments, we note the following:

• In each case, statement 1 is accepted as true without question, which makes it either a premise (first argument) or a previously inferred item of knowledge (second argument).
• In each case, statement 2 is about an observed fact: what a scientist would call data. Whether or not the fact in question was independently witnessed, it could have been witnessed.
• In each case, statement 3 is the implication of statements 1 and 2: we infer it from our premises / previous knowledge and our observations.

In any case of inference, regardless of the particular premises chosen, at the conclusion of it there are two questions of importance:

• How certain are you of your conclusion?
• Why does that matter?

In point of fact, certainty about inferred knowledge – i.e., knowledge other than awareness of an observed fact – is barred to us. We can have a degree of confidence in such knowledge, that degree being proportional to its observed reliability in practice, but we cannot be certain that it will always hold true.

Robert A. Heinlein made an important point about this in Stranger In A Strange Land:

    "...You know how Fair Witnesses behave."
    "Well . . . no, I don't. I've never had any dealings with Fair Witnesses."
    "So? Perhaps you weren't aware of it. Anne!"
    Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, "That new house on the far hilltop - can you see what color they've painted it?"
    Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered, "It's white on this side." She did not inquire why Jubal had asked, nor make any comment.
    Jubal went on to Jill in normal tones. "You see? Anne is so thoroughly indoctrinated that it doesn't even occur to her to infer that the other side is probably white too. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't force her to commit herself as to the far side . . . unless she herself went around to the other side and looked - and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed whatever color it might be after she left . . . because they might repaint it as soon as she turned her back."

Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses make an absolute distinction between observable facts and inferences. The two constitute completely different kinds of knowledge. The former are utterly reliable – always assuming one’s own perceptions are reliable, of course – while the latter are propositions in cause and effect which can never be proved beyond all possibility of exceptions.

---

Quite recently, Rudy Giuliani kicked over a hornet’s nest by saying that he doesn’t believe that Barack Hussein Obama loves America. In the classification system established above, Giuliani’s assertion is an inference from observable facts, founded upon a simple premise: i.e., that one who loves America would speak and behave quite differently from Obama’s record. Because “love,” in whatever context, occurs in the mind of an individual, Giuliani cannot be absolutely certain of the accuracy of his inference. Additional uncertainty arises from the tendentiousness of claims about “love.”

Many persons agree with Giuliani, but there are many others who don’t. The former persons accept his premise, while the latter persons reject it. What cannot be disputed is the pattern of facts from which he drew his conclusion; the conclusion itself is open to disputation.

When a reporter ambushed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by asking him “Do you think President Obama is a Christian?” Governor Walker faced a comparable problem. Obama claims to be a Christian. He attended a supposedly Christian church for some twenty years. If Obama’s statement is all that’s required to establish his Christianity, the inference is automatic...but a sincere Christian such as Governor Walker has good reason to infer from Obama’s conduct and the nature of the “Christian church” he attended that there’s quite a bit of doubt about it.

Full disclosure: I agree with Rudy Giuliani that Obama does not love this country. My premises and observations match Giuliani’s, which leads me to agree with his inference. More, I do not accept Obama’s claim to be a Christian. Obama’s observable conduct, and the statements and behavior of his odious pastor Jeremiah Wright, utterly contradict all established Christian doctrine. Make of that what you will.

---

Those who aim to confuse you, to misdirect your attention, or to make damaging imputations about others, will routinely attempt to confuse the two kinds of knowledge.

The reporter who tried to corner Scott Walker wanted the governor, a promising candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, to assert a kind of knowledge that that reporter could thereafter misrepresent. Whatever answer Governor Walker might have given would have been an inference from his observations and premises. The reporter, regardless of whatever beliefs he might hold, would have trumpeted it as Governor Walker’s certainty about a matter locked deep within Obama’s self. Had Walker said that he accepts Obama’s claim to Christianity, the reporter would have used it to divide him from the many Republicans who have been offended by the clash between Obama’s claim and his observable conduct. Had Walker said that he rejects Obama’s claim to Christianity, the reporter would have implied that Walker allows himself to be contemptuous of Obama’s faith – a faith that the reporter, strictly by unspoken implication, wants his readers to accept as beyond question. That’s the nature of “journalism” in our hyperpartisan age.

I would have loved for Walker to respond to the reporter as follows:

Reporter: Governor, do you believe that President Obama is a Christian?
Walker: Do you?
Reporter: Yes, of course.
Walker: Why?
Reporter: He says he is, and he attended a Christian church.
Walker: Do the words and deeds of pastor Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ match Christian teachings? Does Obama’s conduct in office reflect Christian allegiance?

A smart, on-his-toes reporter would refrain from answering. He’d know that the initiative had passed to Walker, and that there would be nothing to be gained by proceeding. But let’s imagine that Walker has caught him off-balance:

Reporter: I don’t know enough about Christianity to say.
Walker: But you expect me to say – to testify to what lies within another man’s heart, which no other man is privy to. That’s a degree of arrogance I leave to you and your colleagues. I’ll have no part of it.

There’s a win for you. Perhaps Governor Walker will read this and agree.

---

A relevant personal vignette, arising from events of yesterday: Have a look at this listing at Amazon:

I did not publish that story through Amazon. The only place I published it is here, at Smashwords. More, note that the price listed at Smashwords is Free. Believing that Smashwords simply must be the originator of the listing, I contacted its support center and asked what had happened. Here’s the reply I received:

Thanks for your email. We don't distribute to Amazon so you would need to contact them directly.

Amazon is one of the most reliable, and reliably ethical, retail organizations in the world. More, its security arrangements have never been breached. Yet Smashwords’ staff would have me believe that Amazon lifted my story from its Smashwords listing, entirely without my permission, listed it at Amazon’s site, and attached a price to it to which I did not assent – all while listing it under my full and correct name, such that I would be certain to encounter it!

What are the facts in this matter, and what inferences, if any, do they support?

Food for thought.

Investing Your Credulity

What to believe? is among the eternal questions. So many people are propounding so many dramatic claims about so many different subjects -- often in stark contradiction to one another -- that the most common reaction is to dismiss them all, draw into one's own protective shell, and spend one's attention solely on reruns of Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

The critical word in the above is believe. The propositions of which I speak are ones which resist objective verification. Some are about things that happened long ago; some are about things to come; and some are about things supposedly going on right now under a thick cloak of concealment. Whatever the case, the claimant is passionate about his claim and wants you to invest in it equally.

Is this wise? Seldom. As I wrote just yesterday, Man is highly fallible. We screw up a lot. We keep damaged, tendentious records; we forecast on the basis of insufficient knowledge and insight; and we tend to believe lurid fantasies over banal facts.

Yet it is in the nature of things that now and then a wild-eyed type actually gets one right and surprises us all...all of us, that is, except for whatever tiny group took him seriously. Sometimes, being a part of that tiny group produces a payoff. And we like payoffs. So: when confronted with such a dramatic proposition, how should we allocate our credibility?

Hmmm...

---

In case you were wondering, this subject is on my mind because of a flock of recent Web articles. The Web has become the preferred outlet for outlandish claims, a phenomenon that should require no explanation. The mere fact that such claims appear on the Web and not in "respectable" organs is often cited as a reason to dismiss them with prejudice. Yet now and then, a claim will prove correct, startling the more skeptical and reinforcing the credulity of the credulous.

Here are three such articles:

• The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory
• DHS Insider Gives Final Warning
• Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

Note the epistemological commonalities among the three pieces:

• All three forecast a looming disaster;
• All three rely upon imputed authority over the subject matter;
• All three imply that drastic action on the part of individuals is necessary to ensure our survival.

These pieces are about as lurid as lurid gets before we enter alien-invasion territory. Yet any one of them could be correct in its claims. The average reader has no way to know.

Assuming you haven't adopted the turtle-defense measures I mentioned above, how do you cope, Gentle Reader?

---

I'm a skeptical sort. I prefer to deal with verifiable facts and causal mechanisms that I can confirm from observation. That's my front-line defense against being panicked about some development or some representation being urged upon me by crisis-mongers. Were I present in Seldon's Trantor, I'd have been one of those reluctant to put stock in his forecast.

But skepticism is a play on probabilities. It's not guaranteed to be correct; unlikely-seeming things happen all the time. Inasmuch as some of those unlikely-seeming things have had significant, wide-ranging consequences in the past, giving some attention to those who prognosticate about them is a reasonable investment of a modest fraction of one's time...always with the proviso that one be on the lookout for evidence at all times, and ever mindful of the major wisdoms about human credulity:

• We tend to believe that which favors our prejudices;
• We tend to believe that which would benefit us personally;
• We tend to believe that which issues from persons we like or admire;

...to some degree independent of the plausibility of the claim involved. Which makes mechanisms for "tuning" one's degree of credibility investment important enough to ponder at some length.

---

"Proportion your belief to the evidence." -- David Hume

Facts trump theories, always. If facts relevant to a claim are available, they should be gathered and measured against the representations of the claim. This is particularly important in gauging claims based on trends -- and the most dramatic claims are all based on trends.

Trends are important. Trends can have a significant impact on our decision-making. But trends are neither universal nor eternal. Indeed, by their very existence they tend to evoke damping mechanisms of equal intensity.

Financial trends are a good example. If you haven't heard the term contrarian investing, it's proved to be one of the surest routes toward modest but steady gain. Contrarian thinking proceeds from the postulate of fallibility, as confirmed by the evidence: Nearly all forecasts are wrong nearly all the time.

The contrarian must have a stolid disposition, inclined to walk, not run. He doesn't bet on the exact opposite direction of the current trend. Rather, he prepares for its eventual dissipation. He looks for "irrational optimism" and cautiously takes a stake in the opposing view. Speculators riding the trend, looking for a "big score," are the contrarian's natural feeding ground. It's an approach that requires patience and an imperturbable nature, but it's solidly founded on the facts: No trend lasts forever. Equilibrium always triumphs.

Which leads to the next yardstick for gauging the plausibility of a claim.

---

"Action equals reaction." -- Sir Isaac Newton

As I stated above, a strong trend is likely to evoke a damping mechanism of equal intensity. The nature of the damper will depend on the nature of the trend; it need not be of identical form.

In the late Nineteenth Century, when a largely free market, the rapid industrialization of the cities, and a little political favoritism gave rise to the first very large enterprises, a critical damper arose in the form of the Progressive movement. This rapidly swelling movement, founded upon envy and inherently fallacious in its claims, was the counterweight to the great industrial fortunes. It was a political response to an economic and technological phenomenon. And it largely succeeded in reining in the industrial development of the United States.

Compare that development with its contemporary analogues. The Eighties and Nineties saw a second huge burst of capitalist enterprise, resulting in a new crop of major commercial firms and figures. The most effective counterweight in recent years was political environmentalism, only modestly buttressed by old-style "compassionate" Progressivism. (The latter had been weakened by rampant "compassion fatigue" from the Great Society and its sequelae.) Some who bet on the speeding elevator of Eighties capitalism gained from their gambles, but more others lost their shirts as the countertrends kicked in.

Consider in this light the massive gun purchases by private citizens since 2008, the Tea Party response to Obamunism, and the flood of new interest in preparationist writers, non-traditional schooling, concierge and other alternatives to traditional medicine, and the precious metals.

Keeping an eye peeled for asymmetrical responses to a development is among the most prudent ways to gauge the credibility of a claim founded on a trend.

---

"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." -- Origin unknown

There's nothing quite as confounding as a claim premised on "inside information." The claimant might actually have it; you have no way to tell. What, then, are we to make of dramatic claims founded on such knowledge?

These are the cases that demand the most reliance upon our knowledge of Mankind. In particular, we must lean upon the aphorism at the start of this segment. No matter the stature of the claimant, the mere fact that he claims knowledge or insight unavailable to others casts a pall over his representations. Why him and no one else? Alternately, If others also know, why has he alone spoken of it?

The principle is most significant in assessing claims that imply a degree of conspiratorial action. There have been real conspiracies in the past, and no doubt there will be others in the future. However, the larger a conspiracy becomes, the more visible it becomes, both from the impact of the coordinated actions of its participants and from the inability of most people to keep their mouths shut.

We've all read about "conspiracies in plain sight" such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger Group, and so forth. Those are all real organizations, each with a moderately coherent agenda. But the public nature of such groups gives rise to the forces that dampen their influence. To be genuinely important, a conspiratorial organization would have to fly under the radar, working its will without being detected until it was too far along to be thwarted. This isn't impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult, for reasons already stated.

Besides all that, a completely secret conspiracy of power and skill sufficient to impose its will on the nation against all countervailing forces would therefore be unopposable. There'd be nothing to be done about it. So believe in it if you please, but take Bobby McFerrin's advice to heart and tend your own garden.

---

This ramble proceeded from that part of my psyche wherein resides my faculty for amusement at Man's follies, including my own. I recognize my own credulity -- mostly after it's gotten me kicked good and hard -- as typical of the human race. I've believed enough absurd things in my sixty-plus years to have taught me the value of amiable skepticism: a let's-wait-and-see attitude that gives way to others' assertions only after amassing significant evidence and slow-roasting it on the rotisserie of reason and history.

This isn't a brief against ever believing any dramatic claim. It's an exhortation to a degree of imperturbability: not absolute immovability of conviction but a preference for reposing confidence in the laws of equilibrium. Yes, things change; that's absolute and inevitable. But swift, dramatic changes are fairly rare, are normally preceded by visible harbingers, and are predicted consistently by more than a few prognosticators at any given time.

And now that that's off my chest, on to more practical matters. I must pay the dues for my memberships in the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati today, and buy another quarter-ton each of rice, beans, and peanut butter before DHS and FEMA close the stores. After that, perhaps I'll have time to clean all the guns. The voices have become most insistent about that lately.

Sunday Sadness

I really have to stop reading National Review Online. It no longer stands for anything wholesome, or genuinely conservative. Even its leading lights run from demonstrated, well confirmed facts in fear for their reputations -- their reputations, that is, among slanderers, antisocials, and rabble-rousers.

Have a gander at this deplorable passage from a piece by Victor Davis Hanson, written in reply to an attack by some scrofulous clown at the New Yorker:

Pace Sanneh, I did not have to mention John Derbyshire’s essay on race, because long ago I had already objected to it.

Any sober reader can see why I did, and why Derbyshire’s essay was far different from my own: I do not share, inter alia, his thoughts on the relationships between race and IQ and the suggestions of genetic inferiority, and on more than one occasion I objected to his blanket generalizing about all African-Americans. As I wrote of Derbyshire’s essay: “As for Mr. Derbyshire, he surely must have known that what he wrote was way over the line, and, besides, did not follow his own usually rigorous standards of statistical logic. He knows that purported IQ per se is not necessarily proof of competency; if it were, the stellar Steven Chu would be a great cabinet secretary rather than on his way to be the James Watt or Earl Butz of our age. And if crime rates for young, black urban males prove disproportionately high, why would one use them as probable cause not to lend assistance to blacks in general when stuck on the side of the road? That it is statistically iffy to walk alone in downtown Detroit at night is certainly no reason to pass by a black person on the road in dire need of assistance, given the vast majority of blacks are not urban/young/male/with criminal records, and to treat them as if they all were by virtue of their shared race seems not merely wrong and racist, but, to someone of Mr. Derbyshire’s intellect, statistically illogical.”

Until today, I hadn't read Hanson's "objections" to Derbyshire's now famous piece: "The Talk: Nonblack Version." Nevertheless, I think I qualify as a "sober reader," and I found nothing of substance to object to in Derbyshire's piece. All of it was founded on established statistics and observable phenomena.

In particular, it's clear from the above passage that Hanson, for all his achievements in his own field, is no statistician.

When conscription was imposed upon the nation for the purposes of World War I, persons of Ashkenazi Jewish descent -- i.e., Jews from Eastern Europe -- measured statistically well below other Americans on IQ tests. That difference in the means was reversed within two generations. It might yet come to pass that American blacks achieve similar gains. Nevertheless, the current facts are as Derbyshire has stated them.

Hanson tosses up an egregious straw man in supposed refutation of Derbyshire:

[Derbyshire] knows that purported IQ per se is not necessarily proof of competency; if it were, the stellar Steven Chu would be a great cabinet secretary rather than on his way to be the James Watt or Earl Butz of our age.

No, IQ does not correlate 100% with one's academic or professional altitude -- at any point in life. But statistically, it correlates strongly with success in the "symbolic occupations," whose practitioners deal principally with abstractions rather than with raw materials or subassemblies. Concerning Steven Chu, the man's problem isn't his intellect, but rather his assumptions, priorities, and prejudices. No amount of raw intelligence will get you anywhere good if your premises are mistaken and you're averse to questioning or correcting them.

Hanson is also afflicted with a version of "the knowledge problem." Specifically, he dismisses the costs and risks involved in learning more than one already knows, on the chance that the added information might alter his decision making. Yes, yes, yes: "the vast majority of blacks are not urban/young/male/with criminal records." But how is one to know this as one passes a "black motorist in distress" at highway speed? Atop that, how many of us, black, white, red, or yellow, in this era of the ubiquitous cell phone would be incapable of summoning professional assistance in such circumstances? Surely it's a very low figure, so why take an unnecessary risk? Especially given recent, well documented incidents of black violence against white motorists?

In a crowning irony, the bulk of Hanson's piece attempts to defend Hanson's own factual observations and statistical citations against Kelefa Sanneh's imputations. But then, Hanson is the one Sanneh has most recently called a racist; Derbyshire, his reputation irretrievably blackened by National Review Online among others, isn't much concerned with such accusations these days.

It is appropriate to end this brief, sad piece with an observation from Sir Harold Bowden: "Facts that are not frankly faced have a habit of stabbing us in the back." Victor Davis Hanson, a historian by trade, has no excuse for not knowing that.

Religious Tests?

It's not that long ago that I repeated, for the uncountableth time, that all knowledge propositions fall into one of three categories:

• Mathematics: In principle provable or disprovable.
• Science: Only disprovable.
• Religion: Neither provable nor disprovable.

Anyone who takes a serious interest in religion, or in propositions about religion, or in the history of religions and religious affiliation, must accept ab initio that he's dealing with propositions for which neither proof nor disproof is available -- ever. That postulate imposes some strict rules upon his undertaking:

• He is forbidden ever to advance a religious proposition as a matter of incontestable fact.
• He is forbidden to characterize a religious proposition as "unreasonable" or "debunked."
• He is forbidden to exalt himself over others, by word or deed, whose religious convictions differ with his.

(Of course, in enumerating those rules, I've leaned heavily upon my partition of the categories, which some persons would reject. That doesn't trouble me; all such objectors are either idiots or aspiring tyrants. Bear with me; we'll get to that.)

Consider, for example, a test proposition about the death of a religious figure. If that death was witnessed, and the witnesses can be certified as both honest and not deluded, the contention about the death is a statement of fact. It is not a proposition about knowledge; a knowledge proposition is a statement of implication, most commonly about cause and effect. But the manner of that death and what it implies might qualify: for example, the proposition that since Jesus of Nazareth was returned to life three days after His Crucifixion, He therefore possessed the authority to proclaim His New Covenant for Mankind.

Note well: Christ's death and His Resurrection could have been closely and unimpeachably witnessed, beyond all possibility of doubt, yet the proposition that He is therefore the Son of God with Divine Authority would remain neither provable nor disprovable. There is no clear chain of reasoning from the fact to the implication that can be either established as logically and empirically sound, or refuted on the basis of bad logic or faulty evidence.

Therefore, no matter how passionately we Christians believe in the Divinity of Christ, our convictions fail to provide a basis for demanding that those who dissent must admit to error, or to submit to us in any other way. Similar proclamations about the Authority of this or that figure -- Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius -- being neither provable nor disprovable, are equally incapable of compelling agreement or submission from those who disagree.

Keep all that in mind while I fetch some decaf.

---

Some of the most brutal events in Mankind's long and bloody history were propelled by religious propositions advanced as if they were incontestably factual. The usual citations begin with the Spanish Inquisition, beyond all question a terrible, criminal undertaking. But far more blood has been shed by Muslims' military sallies at compelling the whole world to submit to Islam. Those slaughters continue today; indeed, they might have reached their apex in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century.

Islam, alone among the world's major religions, teaches that it is Muslims' right and duty to spread their faith "by the sword." Don't bother to cite me the superseded "Meccan" Koran verses about tolerance of others' beliefs; all of them, under the Islamic doctrine of naskh (abrogation) have been nullified by the later, Medinan verses that exhort the believer to use any and all means, including force and fraud, to impose Islam upon the whole world. This proposition makes Islam a totalitarian scheme founded upon a religious proposition -- i.e., the proposition that Muhammad, the Prophet of Allah, possessed divine authority to promulgate Islam and its dictates, and that that authority included the sanctification of deeds by Muslims that would be condemned as criminal if performed by a member of any other faith.

That religious proposition, like all others, can neither be proved nor disproved. Yet in Islamic theology it is considered impermissible for anyone to question the divine origin of the Koran or the absoluteness of any of its decrees. Those things are advanced as incontestable facts, along with all their moral and ethical implications.

Which should help to explain the following.

---

Recently, Fox News's Lauren Green interviewed Reza Azlan about his recent book on Christianity:

Lauren Green is probably the last of the religion correspondents in the news media. Religion is now taboo unless you are a Muslim.

After Green interviewed Azlan, the liberal media went on a Green-bashing tirade that is growing legs. It should prove another worthless distraction from the Obama scandals and the economy.

One of the obvious and harmless questions she asked of the author [Azlan] was:

“Now, I want to clarify: You are a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

Azlan’s response was condescending and obnoxious but that seems to have escaped the left’s notice....

Among the accusations made by Azlan in his book are that Jesus Christ is not the son of God and the Crucifixion was the result of Jesus Christ’s attempts to foment violence. Azlan said ‘what a trouble maker he [Christ] must have been’ to have been crucified; crucifixion was reserved for insurrectionists, he said.

Azlan also wrote that the historical Christ and the Catholic Church’s mythical Christ are nothing alike.

No one cares that those statements by Azlan are very insulting to Christians. They only care that he was asked questions about the book.

Azlan also claimed his research was based on 1,000 books. Really? Seriously? I want the bibliography.

This issue brings up serious First Amendment issues. Does a journalist have the First Amendment right to free speech any longer? Green’s real crime was asking a Muslim why he wrote a Christ-bashing book which Azlan condescendingly claimed is not what it obviously is.

We can omit consideration of the left-wing media's attacks on Miss Green. They seize on every pretext, however flimsy, to mount such attacks. What's more significant here is that Azlan claimed to have been insulted -- at close to a mortal level of offense -- for Green's having challenged his authority, however indirectly, to make the Christ-denigrating statements in his book.

Azlan is merely adhering to one of the ethical precepts of Islam: No matter who does so, to question Islam or any of its dictates is blasphemy against Islam, which is a crime deserving of the severest imaginable punishment.

Naturally Azlan and Islam refrain from granting Christianity and Judaism the same degree of authority; as all the execrable "Highlander" movies say, "there can be only one."

We're not talking about something that happened centuries ago. We're talking about the present-day contentions of Islam's imams, its mullahs, its ayatollahs, and its muftis. Every last authority in the Islamic world maintains that Islam is incontestably true, suffused with Divine Authority, and entirely within its rights to subjugate the whole world by force, fraud, or whatever other means come to hand. Azlan is merely conducting himself in accordance with those preachments. No one who accepts Islam can publicly argue otherwise without fearing for his life.

What other scheme of thought or belief claims such latitude...such altitude above the ethical precepts that bind the rest of us?

---

It is true, and well verified historically, that various powers and populations of self-nominated Christians have also used force against unbelievers and "blasphemers." The last of those crimes occurred in the Sixteenth Century. Note that I call the perpetrators "self-nominated Christians:" Every last one of them violated the explicit teachings of Christ himself:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [The Gospel According to Matthew, 5:43-48]

To use force to impose the Gospels upon anyone, for whatever reason, is the most blatant violation of that teaching anyone could possibly devise.

Christians have learned better, but then, it's one of our precepts that Man is "fallen," and therefore must rise above his natural, sinful state. Muslims, clearly, have not: They persist in maintaining that it is their right and duty to put "the black flag of Islam" over every nation on Earth, by whatever means come to hand. Not all take an active hand in that effort, to be sure, but rare is the professing Muslim who willingly says that he believes otherwise. Indeed, it is Islam's "religious test" for authority of any sort, from the lowest degree to the highest, that the wielder must be a Muslim.

That representation is so clearly vile, so clearly premised upon a religious conjecture about the will of God, that it can only be maintained by force -- including the heaping of denunciations and vilifications upon anyone, of any faith whatsoever, who dares to question it.

Which is why I advocate the swift expulsion of all professing Muslims from these United States, and the immediate closure of our borders to any others, including the ambassadors of Islamic states. We Christians might be enjoined to love them, but for the sake of our societies we must contrive to do so at a distance -- and the greater that distance, the better.

A Day On The Road

Forgive me, Gentle Readers. I'm headed out of town in less than an hour and won't have time for a new post today. However, I find myself in an exceptionally good mood, and I want to leave you with something, so have an old favorite of mine from the early days of Eternity Road.

---

Totalities

As with most wage earners, my early-morning routine is essentially invariant: get up, get clean, feed the livestock, gulp down some coffee, and drive to work. It's so regular that I sometimes wonder if I'm awake when I do it. My conscious record of the day's events doesn't really start until I'm ensconced in my office and pounding away at the keys.

Now and then, I do wake up...if what I'm about to describe isn't in some larger sense a kind of dream.

I'd had an unusually good night's sleep, and woke free from the usual complaints of an aging male body. The morning routine proceeded smoothly, with no hassles. I packed my lunch and other impedimenta, kissed the C.S.O., and got into Chrissy the Chrysler feeling as good and relaxed as a middle-aged man can feel on a Thursday morning. Out of the garage, onto the road, and light the afterburners: the workday looms ahead.

There's a flat, straight stretch of divided highway, starting not far from my house, which is part of my commuting route. Long Island being the traffic nightmare that it is, even at the early hour at which I travel (5:30 AM), that road is usually quite full. Hundreds of cars go clipping along at 65 MPH while their drivers attend to such last-minute needs as shaving, toothbrushing, or checking their investments in the Wall Street Journal.

Not today. By some coincidence, everyone in the area slept late this morning, except for your humble Curmudgeon.

There was no one else on the road. The darkness was a blanket of peace. By another coincidence, the road had been resurfaced only a few days before; the humming of the tires against the asphalt was a perfect, smooth hum, a single low cello note played by a bow of infinite length. I was doing what I was meant to do, in an appliance perfectly mated to its application, under conditions that could not have been better.

I broke free of time.

What meaning has time, when all is exactly as it should be? What function has the time-binding element in human consciousness, when there's nothing to think about, worry over, or work on? At such a moment, those things, seemingly an inseparable component of Man's earthly experience, cease to trouble us. For that brief space, they are not.

Where do they go? No one can say. But go they do.

It didn't last long. How could it? Eventually, I encountered traffic lights, and other drivers, and ultimately, my destination. But it was real: a moment clipped free of the bondage of time and stretched out to eternity.

A moment of bliss on Eternity Road.

---

If you've ever had such a moment, no doubt its character has posed you some problems in recollection. It's an unnatural state for human consciousness. Our dominant mental mode is time-bound: memory, prognostication, and cause-and-effect reasoning. One cannot apply that mode to an experience that utterly omits the time element from its matrix. Such a moment will remain forever opaque to our understanding.

Yet it was real. It had its own character, distinct from the sequential progression of the instants we experience in normal reality. It left traces in my psyche that I can still feel. In some ineffable sense, I remember it, though describing it seems impossible and I could not recreate it by any purposive means.

Do all persons have such experiences? What do they mean? Is it even fair to ask if they have a meaning?

Under that cloak of timelessness, do we devolve to some lower, animal-like state from which Reason must win free, or do we approach a higher one, in which all things are complete, all knowledge is known, and eternity is revealed as a single event?

Only one thing about it is certain: it is good. That's not a conclusion drawn from any rational evaluative process, but a direct perception of quality, a news flash hot off the nerve wires. In all other ways, it teases at our reason, being the very antithesis of the faculty that strains to encompass it.

---

It is good, but it is not a good. It cannot be grown, mined, manufactured, or hunted down. It comes on its own schedule, and its own terms.

It's a brief immersion in totality.

M. Scott Peck observed in his book The Road Less Traveled that the experience of reality as a oneness is the goal of all mystical and spiritual yearning. This corresponds exactly to the obliteration of time. But if such an experience is beyond our powers to produce by conscious effort, then what is its genesis? Is it coincidental, a product of the fortuitous collision of just the right temporal elements at just the right moment? Is it entirely subjective, a matter of possessing a particular mental state independent of one's objective circumstances? Or is it a teaser? A foretaste of the totality to come when we have at last shuffled off this mortal coil?

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.

A Moment's Halt -- a momentary taste
Of Being, the Well Amid the Waste --
And Lo! -- the phantom Caravan has reach'd
The Nothing it set out from -- Oh, make haste!

---

From here on out it will be an ordinary Thursday, I'm sure. I have meetings to attend, memos to write, and assorted persons to wheedle and cajole. If I'm lucky, I might even get to write a little code; it's a blessing I don't often have in these latter years. But however the trials and travails of today or tomorrow might eventuate, I have my gift from this morning: one instant of timeless perfection, when all was exactly as it should be. I shall savor that gift for as long as I may.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.

---

And may God bless and keep you all.

The Unity Con

The following might seem a bit scattered, because the theme I plan to address has quite a lot of facets. Please bear with me as I try to stitch them together.

---

The emergence of the great, multi-polity domain once known as Christendom proceeded from a relatively compact set of formative influences:

1. The coalescence of regionally dominant military powers, each capable of defending its borders against comparable aggressors;
2. The development of aristocracies generally trustworthy at maintaining peace and order within their domains;
3. The Peace of Westphalia, which provided the basis for the modern concept of national sovereignty and self-determination;
4. The perfusion of Europe, including its royal and noble houses, with Christian ethical norms.

Not one of those ingredients could have been removed. All were vital to the formation of Christendom, the largest generally successful political project in the history of Man. From the Westphalian treaties of 1648 to the outbreak of the First World War, it made Europe the source of virtually all technological, economic, and social advancement. Mind you, it wasn't an unblemished entity; it knew various periods of warfare, and miscellaneous varieties of institutional evil. But it stands head and shoulders above all other, similarly large political undertakings.

Why? Or rather: How? What made Christendom such a relative success?

Hold that thought. We'll get back to it.

---

Regard closely this bit of reportage on Barack Hussein Obama's recent trip to Northern Ireland:

President Obama wasn't kidding in March of 2012 when he told then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" after the election. We got a chilling look at what Obama meant by that during a speech in Northern Ireland for the G8 Summit when he declared religious schools divisive:

If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.

Note that Obama singles out Catholic and Protestant schools, and not Islamic schools.

Leftists like Obama loath parochial schools because they put children outside of the reach of government. The left sees public schools as breeding grounds–the place where they can insert themselves into their favorite spot: between parent and child.

It is all about influencing our kids–Borging them into conformity in an environment void of Bibles and trans-fat but loaded with condoms and victimhood.

The author of the above, John Nolte, has discerned an important aspect of modern left-liberalism: the drive to homogenize beliefs and attitudes through universal subjection to conformity-inducing institutions such as the "public" schools. "Division," you see, is the left-liberal's enemy...especially a "division" on political subjects. Left-liberalism is innately hostile to political dissent -- and to the Left, all things are political.

Given that Obama feels so obviously hostile toward Christian educational institutions, one must wonder how he feels about homeschooling...and what he would like to do about it, were he able.

---

The great Gilbert Keith Chesterton emitted many an incisive statement, but the one dearest to me is this:

“There exists… a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I do not see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, “If you do not see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it…”

Some person had a good reason for thinking (the gate or fence) would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. … The truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served.

But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion…” [from The Thing]

Tradition has been described as "the democracy of the dead:" the less-than-formal means by which those who have preceded us have passed down what they think they know, for our edification and protection. Edification of a sort that cannot be arrived at through the "ivory tower" style of abstract contemplation; protection, in the all-important domain of protection from our own vagrant impulses and failures of humility.

Man has done much erring over the millennia. Yet his accumulated mistakes have left a residuum of wisdom...wisdom conveyed to us largely in the form of traditions.

Mind you, not all traditions are utterly sound and to be cleaved to without thought. Traditions deserve to be reflected upon, their origins studied, and their practice supplemented or modified when appropriate with more recently acquired knowledge and experience. But they are not to be cast aside heedlessly, as would the "modern type of reformer" in Chesterton's statement above. History teaches that we're more likely to suffer than prosper from such radicalism. Besides, the dead wouldn't like it.

Each thing exists for a reason...including our differences.

---

Porthos: You know, it strikes me that we would be better employed ringing Milady's pretty neck than shooting these poor devils of protestants. I mean, what are we killing them for? Because they sing psalms in French and we sing them in Latin?
Aramis: Porthos, have you no education? What do you think religious wars are all about?

[From Pat Wollaston's screenplay for the Four Musketeers.]

Note that in an earlier segment I referred to Christian ethical norms. The Peace of Westphalia was in large measure an effort to end internecine warfare that arose from religious differences among Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Calvinists.

Those four divisions of Christianity differed on many things, some of them so sharply that they were unable to discuss them in civil tones. But they agreed on the core of Christian ethics:

Then someone came up to him and said, "Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?" And He said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." He said to Him, "Which ones?" And Jesus said, "You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and your mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." [Matthew 19:16-19]

Christendom would not have been possible, had the various Christian sects differed on any of Jesus's commandments to the "rich young man." For it is these that make peace and public order possible at all. A nation in which "tolerance" (rapidly becoming one of my least favorite words) is extended to persons who differ with the Savior on those essentials, whether generally or with reference to certain groups, is doomed to vanish, "in a spread of ruins and slaughter." [Ayn Rand]

It is possible to form great and peaceable assemblages conducive to human flourishing only on the basis of Christ's instructions above, which are sometimes called the Noachite Commandments. Christendom functioned well only while it maintained coherence around those six absolutes. In the early Twentieth Century, when the nations of Europe began to discard them in a quest for territory, profit, prestige, colonies, or what-have-you, Christendom itself ceased to exist. Fragmentation and the concomitant violence became inevitable. Only America, separated from the ensuing turmoil by two great oceans, retained any prospect of cohesion in general peace.

Europe's present-day turmoil, as the "post-Christian" EU teeters and staggers toward its doom over international tensions and divisions, is a reminder that among peoples who differ on all else, the commonalities that flow from the Noachite Commandments are indispensable.

---

Frank Burns: Normality is everyone doing and thinking the same thing.
Trapper John: But what about individuality, Frank?
Frank Burns: Individuality's fine...as long as we all do it together!

[From the TV show M*A*S*H.]

We cannot agree on all things. Indeed, it's Satan's whisper that we should try. For what does it imply?

• That there are final answers to all questions;
• That there is a coterie of absolute authorities among men who deserve utter deference on all things;
• That dissent from any of those authorities' dicta amounts to treason against humanity, harmony, and knowledge itself.

We are all human, and therefore must agree on those things that experience has proved utterly necessary for social peace and species survival. But individuals are designed to be individual: to differ in many ways, some critical to their health and well-being. Beyond our mandatory agreements, divergence is essential and must be respected and protected.

There will be many episodes in which our differences will seem both critical and irresolvable. I maintain that it is at those exact moments that the Unity Con -- that we must agree on something beyond the Noachite Commandments -- is most dangerous. No other agreements are vital; accordingly, no other agreement should be allowed to incur a cost in blood, even in potential. When politics is invoked in an attempt to forge such an agreement, a sword hangs over our heads regardless of whether we can sense it. They who would wield that sword are unlikely to respect anyone's convictions or opinions except their own.

Pray.