Sgt Barnes: Boy, Whachew Know About Farming?

There is a great scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen produces the author some proverbial gasbag has been pontificating about and enjoys the moment as Marshall McLuhan completely refutes the man's loud and unsolicited opinions about his work.

An AEI magazine article by a farmer named Blake Hurst is an updated version of that scene. As you will read, Mr. Hurst handled it in a polite manner. Part of me wishes he could have pulled in the Tom Berenger character in Platoon, Sgt Barnes, to handle the exchange; 'Boy, whachew know about farming?' The switchblade knife being optional. Here is an excerpt from Mr Hurst's version:

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

In looking up the Tom Berenger link, I came across a great post about the movie Platoon in the MoneyLaw Blog by Jim Chen - great stuff - an excerpt:

Notwithstanding The Last Temptation of Christ, Platoon was the movie in which Willem Dafoe got his first opportunity to play the role of Jesus. Dafoe's character went by the name Elias and represented good in the form of marijuana and ethical warfare. Dafoe's foil, Tom Berenguer, depicted the crafty but corrupt Barnes, a ruthless survivor who treats war crime as another day at the office. These sergeants fought for the soul of Pvt. Chris Taylor (depicted by Charlie Sheen) and the rest of their platoon. Yes, it's allegory of the bluntest sort. But MoneyLaw is partial to allegory, and "good versus evil" is really the only story in the world.

The AEI farming article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

By Blake Hurst Thursday, July 30, 2009

Filed under: Lifestyle, Big Ideas, Culture, Science & Technology
Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

Young turkeys aren't smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown.

He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.

Industrial Farming and Its Critics

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.

The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.

The biggest environmental harm I’ve done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides.

Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play.

On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming. Farmers are often given a pass in these books, painted as either naïve tools of corporate greed, or economic nullities forced into their present circumstances by the unrelenting forces of the twin grindstones of corporate greed and unfeeling markets. To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.

Finally, consumers benefit from cheap food. If you think they don’t, just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices. Only “industrial farming” can possibly meet the demands of an increasing population and increased demand for food as a result of growing incomes.

The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming.

So the stakes in this argument are even higher. Farmers can raise food in different ways if that is what the market wants. It is important, though, that even people riding in airplanes know that there are environmental and food safety costs to whatever kind of farming we choose.

Pigs in a Pen

In his book Dominion, author Mathew Scully calls “factory farming” an “obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous it would leave us ashen.” Scully, a speechwriter for the second President Bush, can hardly be called a man of the left. Just to make sure the point is not lost, he quotes the conservative historian Paul Johnson a page later:

The rise of factory farming, whereby food producers cannot remain competitive except by subjecting animals to unspeakable deprivation, has hastened this process. The human spirit revolts at what we have been doing.

Arizona and Florida have outlawed pig gestation crates, and California recently passed, overwhelmingly, a ballot initiative doing the same. There is no doubt that Scully and Johnson have the wind at their backs, and confinement raising of livestock may well be outlawed everywhere. And only a person so callous as to have a spirit that cannot be revolted, or so hardened to any kind of morality that he could countenance an obvious moral evil, could say a word in defense of caging animals during their production. In the quote above, Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread.

Lynn Niemann was a neighbor of my family’s, a farmer with a vision. He began raising turkeys on a field near his house around 1956. They were, I suppose, what we would now call “free range” turkeys. Turkeys raised in a natural manner, with no roof over their heads, just gamboling around in the pasture, as God surely intended. Free to eat grasshoppers, and grass, and scratch for grubs and worms. And also free to serve as prey for weasels, who kill turkeys by slitting their necks and practicing exsanguination. Weasels were a problem, but not as much a threat as one of our typically violent early summer thunderstorms. It seems that turkeys, at least young ones, are not smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown. One night Niemann lost 4,000 turkeys to drowning, along with his dream, and his farm.

Food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we've learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs.

Now, turkeys are raised in large open sheds. Chickens and turkeys raised for meat are not grown in cages. As the critics of "industrial farming" like to point out, the sheds get quite crowded by the time Thanksgiving rolls around and the turkeys are fully grown. And yes, the birds are bedded in sawdust, so the turkeys do walk around in their own waste. Although the turkeys don't seem to mind, this quite clearly disgusts the various authors I've read whom have actually visited a turkey farm. But none of those authors, whose descriptions of the horrors of modern poultry production have a certain sameness, were there when Neimann picked up those 4,000 dead turkeys. Sheds are expensive, and it was easier to raise turkeys in open, inexpensive pastures. But that type of production really was hard on the turkeys. Protected from the weather and predators, today's turkeys may not be aware that they are a part of a morally reprehensible system.

Like most young people in my part of the world, I was a 4-H member. Raising cattle and hogs, showing them at the county fair, and then sending to slaughter those animals that we had spent the summer feeding, washing, and training. We would then tour the packing house, where our friend was hung on a rail, with his loin eye measured and his carcass evaluated. We farm kids got an early start on dulling our moral sensibilities. I'm still proud of my win in the Atchison County Carcass competition of 1969, as it is the only trophy I have ever received. We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I've seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.

I warned you that farming is still dirty and bloody, and I wasn't kidding. So let's talk about manure. It is an article of faith amongst the agri-intellectuals that we no longer use manure as fertilizer. To quote Dr. Michael Fox in his book Eating with a Conscience, "The animal waste is not going back to the land from which he animal feed originated." Or Bill McKibben, in his book Deep Economy, writing about modern livestock production: "But this concentrates the waste in one place, where instead of being useful fertilizer to spread on crop fields it becomes a toxic threat."

In my inbox is an email from our farm's neighbor, who raises thousands of hogs in close proximity to our farm, and several of my family member's houses as well. The email outlines the amount and chemical analysis of the manure that will be spread on our fields this fall, manure that will replace dozens of tons of commercial fertilizer. The manure is captured underneath the hog houses in cement pits, and is knifed into the soil after the crops are harvested. At no time is it exposed to erosion, and it is an extremely valuable resource, one which farmers use to its fullest extent, just as they have since agriculture began.

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it's easier, and because it's cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons.

In the southern part of Missouri, there is an extensive poultry industry in areas of the state where the soil is poor. The farmers there spread the poultry litter on pasture, and the advent of poultry barns made cattle production possible in areas that used to be waste ground. The "industrial" poultry houses are owned by family farmers, who have then used the byproducts to produce beef in areas where cattle couldn't survive before. McKibben is certain that the contracts these farmers sign with companies like Tyson are unfair, and the farmers might agree. But they like those cows, so there is a waiting list for new chicken barns. In some areas, there is indeed more manure than available cropland. But the trend in the industry, thankfully, is toward a dispersion of animals and manure, as the value of the manure increases, and the cost of transporting the manure becomes prohibitive.

We Can’t Change Nature

The largest producer of pigs in the United States has promised to gradually end the use of hog crates. The Humane Society promises to take their initiative drive to outlaw farrowing crates and poultry cages to more states. Many of the counties in my own state of Missouri have chosen to outlaw the the building of confinement facilities. Barack Obama has been harshly critical of animal agriculture. We are clearly in the process of deciding that we will not continue to raise animals the way we do now. Because other countries may not share our sensibilities, we'll have to withdraw or amend free trade agreements to keep any semblance of a livestock industry.

We can do that, and we may be a better society for it, but we can't change nature. Pigs will be allowed to "return to their mire," as Kipling had it, but they'll also be crushed and eaten by their mothers. Chickens will provide lunch to any number of predators, and some number of chickens will die as flocks establish their pecking order.

In recent years, the cost of producing pork dropped as farmers increased feed efficiency (the amount of feed needed to produce a pound of pork) by 20 percent. Free-range chickens and pigs will increase the price of food, using more energy and water to produce the extra grain required for the same amount of meat, and some people will go hungry. It is also instructive that the first company to move away from farrowing crates is the largest producer of pigs. Changing the way we raise animals will not necessarily change the scale of the companies involved in the industry. If we are about to require more expensive ways of producing food, the largest and most well-capitalized farms will have the least trouble adapting.

The Omnivores’ Delusions

Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century, the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by lightning strikes. The amount of life the earth could support was limited by the amount of nitrogen available for crop production.

In his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't I think of that?

Well, I did. I've raised clover and alfalfa for the nitrogen they produce, and half the time my land is planted to soybeans, another nitrogen producing legume. Pollan writes as if all of his ideas are new, but my father tells of agriculture extension meetings in the late 1950s entitled "Clover and Corn, the Road to Profitability." Farmers know that organic farming was the default position of agriculture for thousands of years, years when hunger was just around the corner for even advanced societies. I use all the animal manure available to me, and do everything I can to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizers I use. When corn genetically modified to use nitrogen more efficiently enters the market, as it soon will, I will use it as well. But none of those things will completely replace commercial fertilizer.

Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with "natural" fertilizer. That would play havoc with global warming. And cows do not produce nitrogen from the air, but only from the forages they eat, so to produce more manure we will have to plant more forages. Most of the critics of industrial farming maintain the contradictory positions that we should increase the use of manure as a fertilizer, and decrease our consumption of meat. Pollan would solve the problem with cover crops, planted after the corn crop is harvested, and with mandatory composting. Pollan should talk to some actual farmers before he presumes to advise a president.

Pollan tells of flying over the upper Midwest in the winter, and seeing the black, fallow soil. I suppose one sees what one wants to see, but we have not had the kind of tillage implement on our farm that would produce black soil in nearly 20 years. Pollan would provide our nitrogen by planting those black fields to nitrogen-producing cover crops after the cash crops are harvested. This is a fine plan, one that farmers have known about for generations. And sometimes it would even work. But not last year, as we finished harvest in November in a freezing rain. It is hard to think of a legume that would have done its thing between then and corn planting time. Plants do not grow very well in freezing weather, a fact that would evidently surprise Pollan.

And even if we could have gotten a legume established last fall, it would not have fixed any nitrogen before planting time. We used to plant corn in late May, plowing down our green manure and killing the first flush of weeds. But that meant the corn would enter its crucial growing period during the hottest, driest parts of the summer, and that soil erosion would be increased because the land was bare during drenching spring rains. Now we plant in early April, best utilizing our spring rains, and ensuring that pollination occurs before the dog days of August.

A few other problems come to mind. The last time I planted a cover crop, the clover provided a perfect habitat in early spring for bugs, bugs that I had to kill with an insecticide. We do not normally apply insecticides, but we did that year. Of course, you can provide nitrogen with legumes by using a longer crop rotation, growing clover one year and corn the next. But that uses twice as much water to produce a corn crop, and takes twice as much land to produce the same number of bushels. We are producing twice the food we did in 1960 on less land, and commercial nitrogen is one of the main reasons why. It may be that we decide we would rather spend land and water than energy, but Pollan never mentions that we are faced with that choice.

His other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. But it will not do much to solve the nitrogen problem. Household compost has somewhere between 1 and 5 percent nitrogen, and not all that nitrogen is available to crops the first year. Presently, we are applying about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre to corn, and crediting about 40 pounds per acre from the preceding years soybean crop. Let's assume a 5 percent nitrogen rate, or about 100 pounds of nitrogen per ton of compost. That would require 3,000 pounds of compost per acre. Or about 150,000 tons for the corn raised in our county. The average truck carries about 20 tons. Picture 7,500 trucks traveling from New York City to our small county here in the Midwest, delivering compost. Five million truckloads to fertilize the country's corn crop. Now, that would be a carbon footprint!

Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons. Nitrogen quadrupled in price over the last several years, and farmers are still using it, albeit more cautiously. We are using GPS monitors on all of our equipment to ensure that we do not use too much, and our production of corn per pound of nitrogen is rapidly increasing. On our farm, we have increased yields about 50 percent during my career, while applying about the same amount of nitrogen we did when I began farming. That fortunate trend will increase even faster with the advent of new GMO hybrids. But as much as Pollan might desire it, even President Obama cannot reshuffle the chemical deck that nature has dealt. Energy may well get much more expensive, and peak oil production may have been reached. But food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we have learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs.

Farming and Connectedness

Much of farming is more "industrial," more technical, and more complex than it used to be. Farmers farm more acres, and are less close to the ground and their animals than they were in the past. Almost all critics of industrial agriculture bemoan this loss of closeness, this "connectedness," to use author Rod Dreher's term. It is a given in most of the writing about agriculture that the knowledge and experience of the organic farmer is what makes him so unique and so important. The "industrial farmer," on the other hand, is a mere pawn of Cargill, backed into his ignorant way of life by forces too large, too far from the farm, and too powerful to resist. Concern about this alienation, both between farmers and the land, and between consumers and their food supply, is what drives much of the literature about agriculture.

The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming. It's important to our critics that they emphasize this alienation, because they have to ignore the "industrial" farmer's experience and knowledge to say the things they do about farming.

But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri. In a few days he will spend the next six weeks on a combine.
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Art Imitates Economic Philosophical Goals?

In a way, a good political satire is kind of like a campaign promise, you don't necessarily have to believe it [not one dime!], for it to be effective. But a good political satire should exploit the target's weakness. The image below accomplishes that very effectively.

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Why Is Tomorrow Promised To No One?

Why is tomorrow promised to no one?

In the New Testament, the letter from James 4:13-15 -- who was not one of the two disciples names James -- says the following:

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain" whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that."

There is also a mathematical formulation for more secularized mindsets about why tomorrow is promised to no one:
P(t) \approx e^{-0.003 e^{(t-25)/10}}

Fortunately, the blog Gravity and Levity also puts the formula into a readable format.

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minuscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

And if my mortality rate (the probability of dying during the next year, or during the next second, however you want to phrase it) is rising exponentially, that means that the probability of me surviving to a particular age is falling super-exponentially.

Currently, I'm at 1 in 375.

Next blog post, we will explore the phrase, 'better you than me.'

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Our African-American and Calibrated President

While I'm no fan, I have to give President Obama some credit. He fought giving the appearance of wanting to be the first African-American president as long as he could. He fought it at times I thought he shouldn't, namely his nomination speech on the 45th anniversary of MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech. That's discipline, a real and important skill which I put at the top of his attributes which most impress me.

But the temptation in the form of the arrest of an Ivy-league college employed, African-American intellectual in his own home was borderline unfair. It's like making 365 gambling-free days while working at an online-betting service, a condition of Pete Rose's return to MLB.

I actually agree that it is messed up that someone could end up being arrested in their own home. But the particulars of the arrest itself does not interest me as much as the politics involved. In fact, the details of the incident are so delicious, I briefly worried that I actually brought about the incident through some bizarre form of telekinesis. Only when I was able to confirm that the person who accompanied Gates that evening wasn't Cornell West, was I sure that the event occurred on its own and not some wacked-out, Billy Mumy inspired, Twilight Zone-ish contrivance of my imagination.

You see Henry Louis Gates Jr. is not just any African-American intellectual from any Ivy-league school. No he is the most prestigious African-American scholar from Harvard. This from his Wikipedia page:

As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. He has insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism."

The underlined stuff basically means that he reserves himself the right to give anything whatever meaning he prefers and if you disagree, ... well, y'know. In short, he is an expert in all things 'victim.' The odds that Mr Gates would had seen anything but racism in the actions of the police were non-existent.

And who was the arresting police officer? Before we answer that, put yourself in the shoes [sandals?] of every non-God-fearing liberal you know. 'Please, please, [insert a spiritual, but non-religious symbol], let him be a racist. Let him make Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor look like a Black Panther sympathizer.'

That the arresting officer appeared a reasonable sort in early interviews was bad enough. When it was revealed that he had spent the past five years teaching police cadets about how to avoid racial profiling, that was a vicious blow to their solar plexus. Think of the truly primal scream uttered by The Enemy at the conclusion of The Passion of The Christ, and you would be at about 60% of the disappointment level felt by liberals at that news.

Enter the president, stage left. This was one issue he would have no use for a teleprompter [he initially assumed]. In giving his thoughts, he would be in effect summarizing the conversation at every other dinner party he attended during his adult life. So spoketh President Obama:

... the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Obama, a few days later, his non-apology apology [hey wasn't that Bush's problem?]:

... I wanted to make clear that in my choice of words, I think, I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically,” Mr. Obama said. “And I could have calibrated those words differently.

But we still have not gotten to my favorite part of the incident. Obama further calibrates through his 'people':

Mr. Obama called his senior adviser, David Axelrod. “I’m going to call Sergeant Crowley and then I think I ought to step into the press room and address it,” Mr. Axelrod said he said.

In other words, his senior adviser wants us to believe that the president didn't call his senior adviser for advice, but merely to inform him of what he was about to do. [Note to Editor: Let's hold off on that Axelrod genius piece.]

Because you know, the president wouldn't want to give the impression that he finds himself under the biggest microscope in the world with the least amount of executive experience than all his predecessors. All in an impossible job whose potential for achievement is front-loaded. In other words, his best opportunity for achieving his goals comes at the time when he is least prepared. To paraphrase Leon Wieseltier:

... the learning curve of an American president is the insult that history adds to their injury.

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When Today's Headlines Were Yesterday's Jokes

There was an old joke about how a socialist [or centrally planned] economy worked:

What would have happened had the first socialist country been established in the Sahara desert instead of the Soviet Union? It would have run out of sand.

The joke reflects a basic economic truth about why socialist economies fail. There is a real item in Reuters news recently which reminds us of the truth in that joke.

Venezuela to Import Coffee 1st Time Ever

Caracas, July 22 - Venezuela, a traditional coffee exporter that boasts one of the best cups of java in South America, may have to import coffee for the first time ever this year or face shortages, industry experts said.

Producers say rising costs and prices fixed by the government have caused production to fall and illegal exports to rise. The government says poor climate and speculation by growers and roasters is to blame.

I googled whether any government had ever responded to poor economic news by confessing, 'Man we are so over our heads here ... we're actually OK with those disastrous figures.' Nyet. And so it goes with Latin America's Petro-dictatorship.

Hey, did you hear the one about the supposed savings in government-run health care?

Soviet jokes compiled by David Frum are copied in full at end of post.

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Commie Jokes, Another Round - David Frum - 06/27/08

Ben Zycher of the Manhattan Institute sends this:

Stalin decided to honor the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin by erecting a monument to Pushkin in his home town. What was the monument? It was a huge bronze statue of Stalin reading from a book of Pushkin's poetry.

Peter Bogucki, associate dean at Princeton, sends these from Poland's Solidarity period:

The express train is running from Warsaw to Legnica (site of a big Soviet Airforce Base in the communist years) when it suddenly jumps the tracks and runs off into the woods. After a while going through the woods, it returns to the tracks and somehow gets back on. The conductor goes up to the engineer and says, "What are you, nuts? Running off into the woods like that." The engineer replies, "There was a Russian general standing on the tracks." The conductor berates him, "Then why didn't you just run the #%$$^%$ over?" to which the engineer replies, "That's just it, he ran into the woods."

and

Edward Gierek, first secretary of the Party from 1970 to 1980, goes down to Silesia to visit the miners and see how they live. He goes up to one block of flats, and goes to the door of one on the ground floor.It's open, so he enters and finds that it's furnished very luxuriously: color TV, refrigerator, plush sofas, and a little boy is sitting on the couch. Gierek says to him, "Son, do you know who I am?" The little boy shakes his head no, looking scared. Gierek spreads his arms and says, "Son, thanks to me, you have all this!" The little boy's face brightens and calls out to his parents in the next room, "Mommy, daddy, Uncle Hans from West Germany is here!"

Finally - and I think this is final - Prof. Jay Bergman who teaches Soviet history at the Central Connecticut State University sends this collection:

1) What do you call a Soviet quartet that goes abroad? A trio.

2) One day in the 1970's the Politburo was discussing a plan to send Soviet cosmonauts to the sun. When someone expressed the concern that if they did so, they'd be burned alive, Brezhnev casually responded: "Don't worry. They'll land at night."

3) Three men in a Soviet labor camp are sitting around the barrel stove one night and the subject of what they are incarcerated for comes up. The first one says: "I am here because I voted for Comrade Petrov in 1934." The second one says: "I am here because I voted against Comrade Petrov in 1934." The third one says: "I am Comrade Petrov."

4) A Frenchman, a Brit, and a Russian are admiring a painting of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The Frenchman says, "they must be French, they're naked and they're eating fruit." The Englishman says, "clearly they're English. Observe how politely the man is offering the woman the fruit." The Russian notes, "they are Russian of course. They have nothing to wear, nothing to eat, and they think they are in paradise."

5) Two Muscovites, Ivan and Piotr, are waiting in line on a Moscow street in the Gorbachev era, waiting to buy bread. The line is long and it hardly moves. Finally, Piotr says to Ivan in exasperation, "I've had it. I'm going to shoot Gorbachev." Off he goes to shoot Gorbachev. Several hours pass. Ivan is still in line. At last Piotr appears and Ivan asks him if he's shot Gorbachev. Piotr replies: "I couldn't. The line was too long."

6) In Moscow there are two workmen with shovels walking along the edge of a city street, stopping every five yards so that one of them can dig a hole in the dirt. As soon as it is dug, his comrade fills the hole back in. Then they move along another five yards and repeat the exercise. A Soviet citizen observing this scene loses his temper and stomps up to the two workers. "Comrades," he shouts, "what kind of craziness is this? You dig a hole, then the other fellow fills it right up. You're accomplishing nothing at all. We're wasting good money paying you." "No, no", one of the workers replies, "you don't understand. Usually we work with a third lad, Volodya, but he's home drunk today. Volodya plants trees. I dig the hole, he sticks in the tree, and Ivan here fills the hole back in. Just because Voldoya's off drunk, does that mean Ivan and I have to stop working?"

7) Brezhnev and Kosygin are discussing what would happen if the Soviet Union truly adhered to the Helsinki Accords and adopted an open emigration policy. Brezhnev says to Kosygin that "you and I will be the only two citizens left in the Soviet Union." To which Kosygin replies, "Speak for yourself."

8) There was the Russian who bought a car and was told it would be delivered ten years from the purchase date. "Morning or afternoon?" he inquired. "What does it matter?" asked the salesman. "The plumber is coming in the morning."

9) A train stalled on the Trans-Siberian Railway. On board were Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin.

Tsar Nicholas stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He gets off the train, mounts his horse, and rides off to Paris.

Lenin then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later. "I've instituted a new 8-day work week." The train doesn't move.

Stalin stands up and says, I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later." "I've shot the engineer." The train doesn't move.

Khrushchev then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He leaves the car and returns a few minutes later. "I've reinstated the engineer posthumously," he says as he sits down. The train still doesn't move.

Brezhnev then stands up and says, "I shall make this train move." He then instructs everyone on the train to act as if it is moving. The train doesn't move.

Chernenko and Andropov then stand up and say, "We shall make this train move." They then get off the train. The train still does not move.

Gorbachev, with a sigh, then stands up and says. "I will make this train move." He stands up, and pulling the window open, yells outside, "This train doesn't move." The train still doesn't move.

Yeltsin, quite put out, stands up and says, I Shall change this train for one that works." He leaves and returns shortly with a new train. As the passengers board it, they notice that it is an old American steam train which is owned by the Germans and has no wheels. Is this train going to move."

10) A group of rabbits appear at the Soviet-Polish frontier in the 1930's, applying for admission to Poland. When asked why they want to leave the Soviet Union they say that the NKVD has given orders to arrest all camels in the Soviet Union. "But you are not camels," the border guards say to them. They reply: "Just try telling that to the NKVD."

11) Asked in 2004 whether Russian democracy under Putin was dead or dying, Gregorii Yavlinskii, the head of the liberal party, Iabloko, repeated an old joke about an ambulance driver taking a man to the morgue. "Why," the man asked. "I'm not dead yet." "well," the driver replied, "we're not there yet."

12) What's the difference between perestroika and chess? In chess you think before you move.

13) There are two ways for resolving the crisis in the Soviet economy. One of them is realistic, the other is fantastic. The realistic way is to call on people from outer space. The fantastic way is to let the Soviet government do it.

14) Stalin was having a meeting in his office with the Central Committee one afternoon. After they all left, he realized that his pipe was missing. He called Beria and told him to question every member of the Committee about his pipe. The next day, Stalin found his pipe and called Beria to tell him to stop the questioning. Upon hearing this, Beria answered, "I am sorry Comrade Stalin but half of the Committee already admitted to taking the pipe, and the other half died during questioning."

15) A conversation in the GULAG. How many years did they give you? Twenty. How about you? Also twenty. What are you in for? Nothing. Liar. For nothing they give you ten.

16) Define a secure Soviet border. One with Soviet soldiers on both sides of it.

17) What would have happened had the first socialist country been established in the Sahara desert instead of the Soviet Union? It would have run out of sand.

18) Why is communism superior to capitalism? Because it heroically overcomes problems that do not exist in any other system.

19) What are the main obstacles obstructing Soviet agriculture? Spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

20) Brezhnev instructs his clever assistant to write him a ten minute speech. "Remember, just ten minutes," he admonishes. After returning, Brezhnev is furious and berates the assistant mercilessly. "You fool, I told you to write me a ten minute speech but it took twenty minutes to deliver. The assistant replies: "But comrade general secretary I gave you two copies.
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Read more!

The Zero-Star Toss

I am a political conservative and a baseball fan. Knowing that our ubiquitous President would be all over the All-Star game [first pitch and part of the Fox broadcast] was in effect a tax placed on my viewership, but one I would willingly pay to watch the Midsummer Classic.

The tax turned into a rebate. How to describe the pleasure in watching President Obama's version of a first pitch. He exhibited the most feminine pitching motion ever displayed by a heterosexual. In comparison, his bowling skills would now equate to a Don Carter level of excellence. His pitching motion can only be described as pure Hyde Park, aka 'Berkeley with snow.' To be more precise, it was exactly how you would expect someone who never played baseball in his life and had recently suffered extensive ligament damage in both wrists to throw a baseball.

You can't really blame him though. It was tough getting his Hyde Park neighbors to go to a game. His friend and literary consultant, Bill Ayers, was always terrified he'd run into a former bombing victim at the games. He'd stop asking Louis Farrakhan a while back, he couldn't get a hot dog without hearing a speech from that guy.

But perhaps there are more innocent explanations for 'The Toss.' Maybe he misread his teleprompter, mixing up something to do with 'bender' and 'gender'. He threw left-handed. Maybe he's actually right-handed and was reaching out to the left-handed community, ensuring them that their blood runs through him as well. He empathizes like most people breathe, this guy.

My sources across the web have gathered the following unconfirmed reactions to 'The Toss':

• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Kim Jong-il and asked, 'Kimmy, are you watching this? Brother, I say we move on those weak infidels TOMORROW!'
• David Cassidy, watching at home is said to have jumped off his Misty Pink Folding Bed and yelled, 'I can take that bitch.'
• Jack McFarland, from Will and Grace, is said to have muttered at a sex-toy party, 'Jeez, grow a pair why don't you.'

A note about the classiest move of the All-Star game that went unnoticed on the Fox broadcast

Fittingly it came from the game's MVP, Carl Crawford. In the top of the 5th inning, when he was on first, Ichiro hit a ground ball which Utley bobbled, but still tried to get the force out at 2B. Crawford purposely slid past the base to avoid hurting an exposed Hanley Ramirez, who was forced to wait for the throw while standing on 2B. Classy move by the deserved MVP. Note to Jimmy Rollins, watch your back [or knees].

Read more!

Who is Francis Collins?

If you don't know who Francis Collins is, a better question would be why don't you? He was recently nominated to the position of Director of the National Institutes of Health by President Obama. On occasion [sarcasm intended], I have criticized the President, but I give him credit here, the selection is not a popular one in leftist circles.

Some highlights from Dr. Collins life and scientific accomplishments.

• His parents came from New York City but checked out of urban life to run a back-to-nature farm, and to produce a professional summer Shakespeare theatrical company.
• Folk singers often showed up when he was a boy, and Bob Dylan spent his 18th birthday in the Collins farmhouse.
• He was was home schooled by his mother until the sixth grade.
• Initially trained as a chemist, he changed fields and earned an M.D.
• At the University of Michigan, his interest in DNA earned him a reputation as a gene hunter.
• Collins' team at Michigan discovered the gene mutations responsible for cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease and other diseases.
• Collins oversaw the Human Genome Project, the multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, international effort to map and sequence the 3 billion letters in the human DNA instruction book. Many consider this project to have been the most significant scientific undertaking of our time.
• In 2007, President Bush awarded Dr. Collins the Congressional Medal of Freedom -- along with Milton Friedman protege, economist Gary Becker and Cuban Human Rights activist Oscar Elias Biscet [if I had known, I would have paid to be there for that crowd].

An atheist as a young adult, his experience with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He familiarized himself with the evidences for and against God in cosmology, and used Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis as a foundation to re-examine his religious view. Collins is now an evangelical Christian who believes strongly in evidence-based science and evolution. How strong? Below is a portion of a Collins interview in Discover magazine:

The media often portray the religious right in the United States as antiscience. Is that a fair characterization?

I don't think it's fair to blame believers for getting defensive about attacks on the Bible when they see their whole belief system is under attack from some members of the scientific community who are using the platform of science to say, "We don't need God anymore, that was all superstition, and you guys should get over it." Believers then feel some requirement to respond, and this has led to an unfortunate escalation of charges and countercharges. As a result of the tensions over evolution, I think we see an increasing tendency for believers to dig in about things like Genesis 1 and 2, claiming that there is just one acceptable interpretation. That's not a strong position. St. Augustine, for example, came to the conclusion that we really don't know what the writer of Genesis was trying to describe in the creation story, and we should be careful about drawing conclusions about the nature of the world based on what those verses say. He was concerned that science would ultimately prove specific narrow interpretations to be incorrect, and then faith would be put up to scorn. It was as if he was sending us a warning 16 centuries ago, saying, "Guys, watch out for this."

What motivates those who polarize the debate?

I think the people who are most fervently opposed to evolution are not doing so on a political basis. I think that many of those folks have been brought up to believe that if you accept evolution, you lose your faith. If you're presented with only that option, then as a believer you have to resist Darwin with every fiber of your being. You'll congregate with people who believe as you do, you'll listen to radio shows that agree with you, and you'll try to hold it together against what's perceived as an onslaught of Godless, secularized science that threatens your core beliefs.

Do you believe that personhood begins at conception?

You mean, is that when we get a soul?

Now we're into theology, and it's an area where science isn't really going to give you an answer. The only thing that science can say is that whatever line you draw between the fusion of sperm and egg and the birth of the baby is somewhat arbitrary. On the other hand, that doesn't prove that the soul exists right at that moment of fusion. Identical twins do not have the same soul, yet they started out as the same union of sperm and egg.

We keep hearing that the middle ground between science and faith is increasingly difficult to maintain. Do you feel that your position is precarious?

I think it's rock solid. If God chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create human beings, who are we to say He wouldn't have done it that way? It's unfortunate that this potential harmony between worldviews is perceived by some as delicate or fragile. Much of what seems to threaten this view are the ultraliteral interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2, as I mentioned, which are fairly recent arrivals on the scene and which many other theologians down through the centuries have not been comfortable accepting anyway.

Doesn't Scripture sometimes explicitly contradict science?

I don't find any troubling examples of that in the Bible, as long as you recognize that the point of Scripture was not to teach science. Can you imagine God lecturing to his chosen people about radioactive decay?

And yet people have been burned at the stake over this issue.

Before we start trashing religion, we should recognize that religion down through history has been misused by lots of people in terrible ways. But it's also done some profoundly good things. What has atheism done to help people? The worst examples of human carnage in the 20th century came from the atheist regimes of Stalin and Mao. The principles of faith are generally altruistic, gentle, and loving. The problem is when someone takes those principles and twists them to suit their own purposes—that was the Inquisition, and that is suicide bombers.

So what would you say to the scientists who are fervently opposed to religious thought and practice?

Is there any dogma more unsupported by the facts than from the scientist who stands up and says, "I know there is no God"? Science is woefully unsuited to ask the question of God in the first place. So give the religious folks a break. They are seeking the kind of spiritual truths that have always interested humankind but that science cannot really address.

It's 5 minutes long, but I would highly recommend watching the video from Collins' 2007 Commencement at the University of Michigan. If a Congressional Medal of Honor winning, DNA-decoding geneticist and dedicated defender of people of faith doesn't take himself that seriously, who should?

Collins debate with Richard Dawkins in Time Magazine from 2006 is copied in full at end of post.

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Sunday, Nov. 05, 2006 - God vs. Science - By Dan Cray

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor's role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates--in color!--the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you've got 300 billion universes, why not?)

Roman Catholicism's Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of "scientism" or "evolutionism," since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone. It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls "unprecedented outrage" at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush Administration science policy to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists to intelligent design's ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab: the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds--or, as Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written bluntly, "Religion and science will always clash." The market seems flooded with books by scientists describing a caged death match between science and God--with science winning, or at least chipping away at faith's underlying verities.

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.

If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins' devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God--it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been--may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues ...

COLLINS: It's not so private. It's rather public. [Laughs.]

DAWKINS: ... It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity's moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132,00.html
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Marlins Comeback, Irrational Fears and Rick Camp

Try and understand my irrational habit involving MLB specifically, and local team affiliations in general. I enjoy following, listening, but not always watching, MLB's Florida Marlins. I also enjoy the emphasis in the field of economics which assumes that human behavior is rational and based on incentives and trying to find that logic in everyday activities. Fandom and efficient use of my time has long represented one of those RAM-memory eating concerns which David Allen tells me to write down and figure out the next action step to resolve.

But the now vicious habit -- whose inculcation began through an old Zenith radio [it's not the one pictured, but close] which I now equate to the method of attacking civilization in Stephen King's novel, 'Cell' -- had idyllic origins [don't they all?] in the early 1970's, as I sat by myself and carefully calibrated the radio dial to pick up WKAT-AM which carried the Atlanta Braves games. My favorite scenario was when they were on the road to play the LA Dodgers, as I had the kitchen to myself with no pesky human witnesses to impede my assault on the fridge [the roaches were unamused]. That's two more bad habits if you're keeping count, so let me confine this post to just one and not digress.

The habit which began next to that radio was cemented on cable television in the early morning hours of July 5th 1985. The glorious baseball game which began with and endured two hours of rain delays, lasted an actual six hours, ended at 4 am, had a player hit for the cycle and saw the Atlanta Braves hit two two-out game-tying home runs in extra innings. Afterwards, the Braves stadium people, clearly in a sleep-deprived decision-making mode, went ahead and emptied out their fireworks, which resulted in numerous 911 calls in the Atlanta area.

The second of those two-out home runs was hit by a middle relief pitcher who had the worst career batting average of any active MLB player when he stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the 18th inning, his name was Rick Camp. Camp hit the home run on an 0-2 count. Often, when I hear one of those jokes about people wasting their Genie-granted wishes on less than miraculous things, I think of that home run.

I was watching and I knew I had just seen one of the most amazing sports-related things ever. But it must have been around 3:30 am, there was no one who I could turn to or call. I walked outside my Little Havana house on the possibility that there was someone else watching who needed to have another human being confirm what they had just seen. There was no one and besides that, I was quickly reminded that I didn't live in the safest of neighborhoods.

What I saw when I walked back inside made this the greatest game ever. The Mets scored 5 runs in the top of the 19th inning. Now I know the Camp 18th inning home run is the main thing here, so if the game had ended with the Braves going 3-up and 3-down, it's still gotta be one of the top 5 games ever, no doubt. But what happened next makes it #1 and if you disagree you're probably the type of person who thinks public employee unions are a good thing for democracy.

The Braves had two outs with a runner on second. Then, walk, walk, single and the tying run comes up to the plate in the person of Rick Camp. Again an 0-2 count. This time he strikes out. I was standing up and not breathing during his at-bat. Greatest game ever, case closed.

The unproductive activity I alluded to earlier is watching or listening to the end of sporting events involving teams I root for which will almost certainly [98% probability] result in defeat, i.e. I'm not even counting close or interesting games. The irrational fear is the fear of missing any comeback. Missing any comeback is annoying, missing a great comeback is anathema. Fortunately, I have only one other irrational [plenty of rational ones] fear in life, that is being outside of Miami the day Fidel Castro suffers a violent and agonizing [OK, ... any kind of] death.

Recently the Marlins had one of those comebacks against the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was a comeback on steroids with 14 unanswered runs, culminated with a 10-run eight inning. It was the 3rd time in MLB history that a team had come from 7 runs down and won by at least 7 runs. I missed the comeback. I didn't just miss it, I missed it in the most egregious of manners. I gave up on the game based on the time and score [down 7 in the 5th]. I turned my back on what may be the highlight of the season for what? A little extra sleep? Taking the easy way out has left an empty feeling. This must be what it feels like to vote for Democrats.

Thank goodness Bluto and Otter weren't around to see it:

D-Day (Bruce McGill): War's over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.
Bluto: Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter (Tim Matheson): [whispering] Germans?
Boon (Peter Riegert): Forget it, he's rolling.
Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough... [thinks hard] the tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go! [runs out, alone; then returns] What happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer -
Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.
Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.
D-Day: Let's do it.
Bluto: LET'S DO IT!!
[Chaos ensues--for most of the rest of the movie]

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The Blood Within Us: Name That Plasma

President Obama declared that he "has the blood of Africa within" him. This raises a number of troubling, but interesting, questions. How can he differentiate the plasma running through him? Is that part of his specialness or just a gift which most bi-racial or bi-cultural or bifurcating people are born with? Or is this something they test presidents for specifically? Is this a thinly veined slap in the face of those who have had blood transfusions, since they are ignorant as to the origins of their blood? Does he have the blood of Islam running in him as well? Does it hurt? Is it too much blood for one man to bear, even Obama?

My parents and I were born in Cuba and I forcibly exiled [with retroactive assent] at the age of 2. I became a proud US citizen in time to vote for Ronald Reagan in the Republican primary of 1980. Since then, as a O negative blood type, I have given blood on average at least twice a year. The tally of the blood my body has had to reproduce as as an American citizen must be over 50 pints. The average male human body holds about ten pints of blood. Is the blood of the Caribbean which initially ran through me gone forever? Or does some blood not circulate as readily, sticking to certain areas or arteries like mayonnaise to the round part near the top of the jar which cannot be reached with a knife? Is this why my wife thinks I need an EKG? Could a good frijoles diet bring it back?

But enough about me. Can Obama sense when his Kansas blood is trying to take the lead? Can he will it back to a secondary role? Does he fear black people when that happens. Does he regret criticizing his Grandmother for electoral benefits when his own K-blood is ascendant? Which Continent's blood typically doesn't boil? Can Michelle tell what kind of bloody mood he's in? Is he literally paler on those occasions? Deep down, is he afraid of Michael Jackson comparisons at that point?

Can Obama have cleverly stumbled upon a new ad campaign to encourage blood donations? Say someone has Spanish blood, but wish to be rid of it, to protest Alberto Contador's attack on Lance Armstrong at the end of the 7th stage of the Tour de France. Could Blood Banks pretend to assure that person that they would only withdraw that Spanish blood? Who could prove otherwise?

It is so much fun having a transformational leader as president. The possibilities -- like his need to speak in somber tones in front of people who aren't really listening, but just thinking, 'holy shit, that black guy is the President of the United States!' -- are endless.

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