Count Mazz's Blog

Ann Coulter: George W. Bush

Count Mazz — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:18:45 +0000

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For those easily duped by media propaganda, there would be no more staggering surprise than George W. Bush’s masterful response to a devastating terrorist attack seven months after he took office. Never was the myth of a “dumb” Republican shattered with such dispatch. Stupid old Reagan won the Cold War, but that took time. It was the gradual, if inevitable, outcome of Reagan’s massive defense buildup, military invasions, support for anti-communist insurgents around the globe, and, finally, walking away from the table at Reykjavik.
     Unfortunately for liberals, a surprise attack on America on September 11, 2001, would test George W. Bush like no other president in United States history. It was precisely the risk of something like a terrorist attack happening that sent the media into anxious reveries about Bush’s performance on Andy Hiller’s pop quiz. How on earth could Bush be expected to handle a national crisis if he couldn’t name the Prime Minister of Swaziland?
     Bush’s alleged weaknesses — subjected to side-splitting ridicule throughout the campaign — were precisely those that would be most severely tested in the crucible of war. Contrary to urgent news bulletins throughout the campaign, Bush was a masterful leader. War was where the rubber met the road and Bush was the consummate wartime commander. The media’s campaign portrayal of Bush as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” was not simply wrong in the sense of being untrue. It was the opposite of true. The media had lied and now everyone knew it.
     Far from smirking bravado, Bush exuded calm deliberation. He didn’t overreact with a quick ostentatious display of pyrotechnics, as Democrats are wont to do. Indeed, in a direct rebuke to the Clinton administration, Bush pointedly said: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”
     The very opposite of an incurious frat boy, Bush inspired the nation and showed the world America’s resolve. In one of the most eloquent speeches in American history, he proclaimed, “As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world.”
     Describing a new and confusing enemy, Bush said we have “seen their kind before”: “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”…
     In word and deed, the president emboldened a jittery nation: “The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them… Fellow citizens, we will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States of America.”

Ann Coulter
Chapter Seven: The Joy of Arguing with Liberals
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

Tom Bethell: Incorrect Teachings about Evolution

Count Mazz — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 04:37:06 +0000

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Haeckel’s embryos
     Darwin thought that “by far the strongest single class of facts” in favor of his theory came from embryology. He relied on German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose drawings of embryos from various classes of vertebrates showed them to be virtually identical in their earliest stages. They become noticeably different only as they developed. This was the pattern that Darwin found so convincing.
     Biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos in fact never do look as similar as Haeckel drew them. It turned out that in some cases, Haeckel simply used the same woodcut for embryos that were then represented as belonging to different classes. In other cases, he doctored his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than they really were. Haeckel’s own contemporaries were critical of his work, and charges of fraud abounded in his lifetime.
     In 1997, British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team compared Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclusively that the drawings misrepresented the truth. Richardson was quoted in Science: It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology” [9].
     Yet some version of Haeckel’s drawings could be found in most current biology textbooks when Wells’ book came out (and possibly still can today). Stephen Jay Gould wrote that we should be “astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks” [10].

Peppered moths
     Darwin had no direct evidence of natural selection when he wrote the Origin of Species, so he gave imaginary illustrations. Then, in the 1950s, Bernard Kettlewell seemed to find conclusive evidence of natural selection in Britain. During the previous century, most peppered moths in England had shifted from being light-colored to being dark-colored. It was thought that the dark coloring gave them better camouflage on pollution-darkened tree trunks, protecting the darker moths from predatory birds.
     To test this, Kettlewell released light and dark moths onto nearby tree trunks in polluted and unpolluted woodlands, then watched as birds ate the more conspicuous moths. As expected, they caught more light moths in the polluted woodland, and more dark months in the unpolluted one. In Scientific American, Kettlewell called this “Darwin’s missing evidence.” Peppered moths soon became the best example of natural selection in action, and the story was retold in biology textbooks, illustrated by photographs of the moths on tree trunks.
     In the 1980s, however, researchers found that peppered moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks. They fly at night and apparently hide under branches during the day. By releasing them onto tree trunks in daylight, Kettlewell had created an artificial situation, and many biologists now consider his results invalid. As for the photos of moths on tree trunks, they were all staged. Photographers even glued dead moths to trees. The people who staged them thought they were representing the true situation, but they were mistaken. Yet they are still used as evidence for natural selection in current biology textbooks [11].

The tree of life
If all living things are gradually modified descendants of one or a few original forms, Darwinism predicts that the history of life should resemble a branching tree. But this has turned out to be wrong in important ways. The fossil record shows the major groups of animals appearing fully formed at about the same time in a “Cambrian explosion,” rather than diverging from a common ancestor. Darwin knew this, and considered it a serious objection to his theory. But he attributed it to the imperfection of the fossil record and believed that future research would supply the missing ancestors.
But almost 150 years of fossil collecting has made the problem worse. Instead of slight differences appearing first, the greatest differences appear right at the start. Some fossil experts note that this “top-down evolution” contradicts the “bottom-up” pattern predicted by Darwin’s theory. Yet most biology textbooks don’t even mention the Cambrian explosion, much less point out the challenge it poses for Darwinian evolution…

“Building blocks”… in a flask
     In 1953 it was widely reported that scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey had succeeded in creating “the building blocks of life” in a flask. Mimicking what were believed to be the natural conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere, and sending an electric spark through the mixture, Miller and Urey had formed simple amino acids. As they are the “building blocks” of proteins, and proteins are the “building blocks” of life, it was thought that scientists might soon create living organisms.
     It appeared to be a dramatic confirmation of evolution. Life wasn’t a “miracle” after all. No outside agent or divine intelligence was necessary. Put the right gases together, add a jolt of electricity, and life was bound to happen. Carl Sagan could confidently predict on television that the planets orbiting those “billions and billions” of stars out there must be teeming with life.
     There were problems, however. Scientists were never able to get beyond the simplest amino acids in their simulations, and the creation of proteins began to seem not a small step or a few steps. It involved a great, perhaps impassable divide. An amino acid is to a living organism what a letter of the alphabet is to a Shakespearean play.
     Then, in the 1970s, scientists began to believe that the Earth’s early atmosphere was nothing like the mixture of gases used by Miller and Urey. Instead of being a hydrogen-rich environment, it probably consisted of gases released by volcanoes. But put those gases in the Miller-Urey apparatus, and the experiment doesn’t work at all.
     Nonetheless, textbooks continue to use the Miller-Urey experiment to argue that scientists have demonstrated an important first step in the origin of life. This includes The Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by the National Academy of Sciences president, Bruce Alberts. They omit to say that the researchers themselves now acknowledge that an understanding of the origin of life still eludes them [13].

[9] Elizabeth Pennisi, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,” Science, September 5, 1997.

[10] Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! Atrocious!” Natural History, March 2000.

[11] H. B. Kettlewell, “Darwin’s Missing Evidence,” Scientific American, March 1959; see also Wells, Icons of Evolution, chapter 7.

[13] Wells, Icons of Evolution, chapter 2.

Tom Bethell
“Evolution: The Missing Evidence”
Chapter 14, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

Tom Bethell: Intelligent Design, Evolution

Count Mazz — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 03:49:06 +0000

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Remarkably, evolutionists often use theological statements to oppose intelligent design. In Time magazine, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker writes: “Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree…”
     The designer was incompetent, in other words. No self-respecting deity would use such improvisations. Stephen Jay Gould often made the same argument. In his lengthy diatribe in the New Republic, “Unintelligent Design,” Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago relied heavily on presumptous claims about what an intelligent designer would or would not do.
     This is theological criticism masquerading as scientific know-how. The fossil record itself discloses no such “history” of trial and error. That was all in Professor Pinker’s imagination. Eyes work perfectly well as they are. Engineers tinkering with cameras haven’t been able to produce anything remotely comparable or compact. Microbiologists haven’t come up with anything at all. By Darwin’s own criteria, our bodies, including the seminal duct, are well-designed. If they were not, we wouldn’t be here to comment on them.
     First produce a better-designed body in your Harvard lab, Dr. Pinker. We’ll see what you and your colleagues come up with, then we’ll pay attention to your criticisms.

Time, August 15, 2005;
New Republic, August 22 & 29, 2005

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     Darwin’s book had been in print for several decades before biologists began to see just how insubstantial his mechanism was. “For it may appear little more than a truism,” wrote eminent Columbia University geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, “to state that the individuals that are the best adapted to survive have a better chance of surviving than those not so well adapted to survive” [13]. Morgan won the Nobel Prize for his work on the chromosomes of fruit flies.
     That problem has never gone away. Logically, no criterion of fitness can be identified that is independent of survival itself. In the end, Darwin’s theory of natural selection boils down to the bare claim that some organisms leave more offspring than others…
     Consider the prodigious variety of the millions of sexually reproducing animal and plant species on earth, with their complex adaptations, modes of existence, life cycles, instincts, and means of providing for their young. We learn in school that the great naturalist Charles Darwin discovered the mechanism whereby this great profusion and complexity evolved. Darwin’s idea was “the single best idea anybody ever had,” said Daniel Dennett, reveling in his hyperbole.
     But when that mechanism is more closely analyzed, we find that it amounts to the bare claim that some organisms leave more offspring than others. It surely does leave something to be desired.
     The weakness of the Darwinian theory was also recognized by Sir Karl Popper, the preeminent philosopher of science in the twentieth century. The theory is “not testable,” but “metaphysical,” he wrote:
     “To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological… Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival alone, and can be measured by actual success in survival: there is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this” [15].
     Any outcome in nature can be regarded as a “confirmation” of Darwin’s theory — even the extinction of species. It is sometimes reckoned that 99 percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. In that light, Darwinian evolution can be seen as the meager claim that species are well adapted — until they are not. When they fail to adapt, they are “unfit,” and cease to exist. So Darwin’s theory is once again confirmed. Feeble is the word.

[13] Thomas Hunt Morgan, Evolution and Genetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), 120, 127.

[15] Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Routledge, 1992), 199.

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“Everybody has it in the back of his mind that the animals that leave the largest number of offspring are going to be those best adapted also for eating peculiar vegetation, or something of this sort, but this is not explicit in the theory… There you do come to what is in effect a vacuous statement. Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and, you ask, which leave more offspring than others? And it is those that leave more offspring, and there is nothing more to it than that. The whole real guts of evolution — which is how do you come to have horses and tigers and things — is outside the mathematical theory.”

C. H. Waddington

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Tufts University professor Daniel C. Dennett discussed the evolution of the eye recently in the New York Times. It is something that laymen have often found difficult to accept. After a brief discussion of the difficulties — “megabytes of information going into the visual cortex every second for years on end — Dennett swept them all aside: “But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work — all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half billion years ago — we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while. We can’t yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.”

Mathematicial David Berlinski responded:

“It is perfectly plain that Dennett has given up reading the literature. There are eyes throughout the animal kingdom. It’s not at all obvious how any of them arose; and still less is it obvious that they arose by any known Darwinian mechanism. To explain the evolution of the eye by appealing to visual systems throughout the animal kingdom is a little like explaining the appearance of War and Peace by pointing out that Homer also wrote a war poem, and that Virgil also appealed to patriotic sentiments. True enough. But hardly to the point. There is no natural progression that we can trace throughout the paleontological record that begins with a light-sensitive spot and that ends with the eye. If for a moment one allows one’s Darwinian faith to lapse, then those so-called intermediates of which Dennett writes so optimistically do not look like intermediates at all. They look like variants against a central type. The Darwinian progression is, of course, entirely an inferential artifact.”
“This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim — Dan E. Nilsson — has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye’s development.”

Daniel Dennett, “Show Me the Science,” New York Times, August 28, 2005;
David Berlinski, e-mail to the author, August 31, 2005;
David Berlinski, “Has Darwin Met His Match,” Commentary, December, 2002, and letters, July 2003

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“By Chance, or By Design?”
Chapter 13, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

Tom Bethell: Definition of AIDS

Count Mazz — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 03:09:23 +0000

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The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) eats away at the T-cells of the body’s immune system, thereby exposing it to infections. Twenty-six diseases are now on the list of these “opportunistic” infections. Some of them are not actually infectious — Kaposi’s sarcoma and cervical cancer, for example. Others are — tuberculosis, herpes, pneumonia, and candidiasis among them. So, if you have one of these diseases, and you are HIV positive, and, in time, your T-cell count dips below a certain level, then you have AIDS.
In Africa, however, the WHO — under the supervision of the CDC — put together a quite different “clinical case definition” of AIDS. It really is very different, in three crucial respects:

(1) None of the opportunistic diseases has to be present.
(2) No HIV test has to be conducted.
(3) No T-cells are counted.

     This redefinition was worked out in October 1985, at a meeting in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. About sixty officials were present, including Americans from the CDC who had organized the meeting. A document was produced, and the curious may view it on the web. Titled “Workshop on AIDS in Central Africa,” it spells out the medical conditions considered sufficient to identify an AIDS case in Africa. (To view it, type “Bangui1985report” without spaces into your search engine.) [1]
     What prompted the meeting was the claim that AIDS or something resembling it had “recently appeared” in hospitals in Zaire and elsewhere. The “biological features of AIDS in Africa” had to be identified. That would not be easy, however. “Adequate laboratory facilities are often lacking,” as those in attendance were reminded. Instead, a “surveillance” definition was needed. It had to be “simple, universally acceptable, and usable by all health service personnel.”
     Given these limitations, here is what the participants finally agreed was needed to count AIDS cases in Africa. Four “major” symptoms had been found to be associated with AIDS in the Western world:

Weight loss of 10 percent or more
Pronounced weakness or lack of energy (called “asthenia”)
Diarrhea lasting for more than a month
Fever, either prolonged or intermittent

In addition, several “minor” symptoms were often found, among them:

A cough persisting for more than a month
Chronic ulcerative herpes infection
Swollen glands (called “generalized adenopathy”)

     From these symptoms, a new “definition of AIDS in adults in Africa” was derived by mixing and matching from the two lists:
     “AT LEAST THREE OF THE FOUR MAJOR SYMPTOMS ASSOCIATED WITH ONE OF THE MINOR SYMPTOMS” [caps in original].
     That was it. There was no mention of HIV.
     Overnight, millions of Africans now had AIDS, by these criteria.   The definition was so broad that “almost anyone in any African hospital could be said to have it,” says Rian Malan. Let’s say you’re in the Congo. You go to a doctor because you’re feeling weak. You’ve lost weight and have had a recurring fever for a few weeks and a persistent cough. Doctors are now free to say that you have AIDS. For a child, all they need is weight loss, diarrhea, and a cough…

     In Africa, “as in the United States,” the report stressed, “sexual transmission is the main way in which AIDS is spread.” No evidence was offered for that sweeping claim. Nonetheless, “in the absence of treatment or of a vaccine, health education aimed at changing sexual behavior is an essential means of controlling AIDS.”
     Finally, the media was enlisted to get the word out on the threat of AIDS in Africa:
     “The mass media should be urged to play a part in this health education. Media personnel could receive training for this role.”
     The media duly reported whatever the authorities told them to report. Evidence gleaned from sick patients in African hospitals, physically resembling American patients, became the harbingers of a world pandemic. Pictures of emaciated Africans lying on cots were transmitted, printed, and reprinted. The sub-Saharan continent was flooded with condoms, pamphlets, and AIDS educators. Money flowed in by the boatload from aid agencies all over the world.
     The new AIDS definition was reported in WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Record [2], in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and in Science [3]. Bit it has not been visibly reported by the major news media in the United States…

Conditions that define AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are caused by many germs, not just HIV. And the other diseases caused by these germs also produce a “positive” result in the HIV test. Charles Gilks wrote in the British Medical Journal that persistent diarrhea with weight loss can be associated with “ordinary enteric parasites and bacteria,” as well as with opportunistic infection. “In countries where the incidence of tuberculosis is high,” he added (and it is high in Africa) “substantial numbers of people reported as having AIDS may in fact not have AIDS.” He concluded that the Bangui definition “is inherently unworkable and incorrect” [13].

[1] WHO, “Workshop on AIDS in Central Africa,” October 22-25, 1985.

[2] WHO, Weekly Epidemiological Record, No. 10, March 7, 1986.

[3] Science, November 21, 1986.

[13] Charles Gilks, “What Use is a Clinical Case Definition for AIDS in Africa?”, British Medical Journal, 303 (1991), 1190.

Tom Bethell
“African AIDS: A Political Epidemic”
Chapter 7, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

Tom Bethell: Extinction

Count Mazz — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:39:48 +0000

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     There have been five great extinctions, and the political enviros of our time claim that we are now living through a sixth — caused by human rapacity.
     A special “biodiversity” edition of the politically correct National Geographic, published in 1999, claimed that the “sixth extinction” is here and now. “Half of all species could be annihilated in the next century,” the magazine claimed, without warrant. Biologist Stuart Pimm was quoted: “It’s not just species on islands or in rain forests or just birds or big charismatic mammals. It’s everything and it’s everywhere. It is a worldwide epidemic of extinctions” [4].
     Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and its president from 1977 to 1979, tried to find the evidence for these dramatic claims. A graph in National Geographic, showing the number of taxonomic families on earth over the past 600 million years, depicted a steady increase despite the previous waves of extinction. But when it reached the present day, it turned abruptly downward, indicating the losses due to our own “mass extinction.”
     Moore wrote to National Geographic, asking the magazine to identify any families known to have gone extinct in recent times. He himself did not know of “any families of ‘beetles, amphibians, birds, and large mammals’ that have become extinct as implied in the text.” The reply came from a researcher who had worked on the article. She thanked him for “sharing” his thoughts “on this complicated and controversial” issue but offered no answers. She wrote:

Rest assured that… the many members of our editorial team… worked closely with numerous experts in conservation biology, paleobiology, and related fields. The concept of a “sixth extinction” is widely discussed and, for the most part, strongly supported by our consultants and other experts in these areas, although specific details such as the time frame in which it will occur and the number of species that will be affected continues to be debated [5].

     Nowhere in the National Geographic article was there any recognition that the “sixth extinction” is controversial. It was simply presented as a known fact. It was also clear from the reply Moore received that the “mass extinction” was actually still in the future.
     “In other words,” Moore wrote, “there is no evidence that a mass extinction is actually occurring now, even though the article plainly implies that it is. The reply also refers to the sixth extinction as a ‘concept,’ implying that it is just an idea rather than a proven fact.”
     This is the level to which environmentalism has sunk. It is astonishing that it should have taken root within mass-circulation, once mainstream magazines such as National Geographic…

[4] “The Sixth Extinction,” National Geographic, February 1999.

[5] Patrick Moore, “Environmentalism for the 21st Century,” http://www.greenspirit.com, 16-18.

Tom Bethell
“Biodiversity and Endangered Species”
Chapter 6, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

Gerald Schroeder: Macro-Evolution

Count Mazz — Sun, 01 May 2011 18:34:05 +0000

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An accurate description of macro-evolution as presented by the fossil record is that it usually takes place somewhere else and all we are left with is the punctuations. Darwin realized this far better than his overly enthusiastic followers. On no less than seven occasions in the Origin of Species, he implored his readers to ignore the evidence of the fossil record as the refutation of his concept of evolution or to “use imagination to fill in its gaps.” The record’s leaps and bounds, he claimed, were the result of its being incomplete…
     The magnificent Natural History Museum in London devotes an entire wing to demonstrating the fact of evolution. They show how pink daisies can evolve into blue daisies, how gray moths change into black moths, how over a mere few thousand years, a wide variety of cichlid fish species evolved in Lake Victoria. It is all impressive.
     Impressive, until you walk out and reflect upon that which they were able to document. Daisies remained daisies, moths remained moths, and cichlid fish remained cichlid fish. These changes are referred to as micro-evolution. In this exhibit, the museum’s staff did not demonstrate a single unequivocal case in which life underwent a major gradual morphological change…
     The validity by which the fossil record presents the history of evolution cannot be tested. The closest hints to such a test are the similarities in genetic material (DNA) across divergent forms of life and the ontogeny of embryos. The former is a mixed blessing, with some genes showing great similarity among diverse animals and others — in which similarity is expected — showing little. Ontogeny indeed produces what appears to be an evolution. In the human embryo, for example, there is a transition through stages found in embryos of fish, then reptiles, and finally mammals. Though this tells nothing of how these changes were first induced and at what rate they occurred, it is suggestive.
     Among professionals active in evolutionary biology, such as Gould and Dawkins, Eldredge and Smith, a battle rages over whether gradual evolution ever occurred and if it did, why it is not evident in the fossils. The ferocity of the battle sometimes suggests that sudden leaps in the record would imply God’s direct role in evolution while gradualism would mean randomness and no role for God. This is nonsense. Contrary to popular lay opinion, the Bible is mute concerning the driving mechanism behind macro-evolution. A few basic animal body plans are created on day five and that is the last mention of creation for animals. Six sentences later, part way through day six, the account of the evolution or development of life is complete.
     Biblical time before Adam is so highly compressed that there is simply no opportunity to describe the process (or even the sequence except in the broadest terms) that caused life to advance from the simple to the complex. The Bible is eager to get on with the story of humankind. From Adam and forward, biblical time is the time as we know it, no longer compressed…
     Evolutionary biology and biblical theology by their very natures are retrospectives, theories of history. Both are bounded by our incomplete knowledge of history.

Gerald L. Schroeder
Chapter 2, “The New Convergence: Science, Scientists, & the Bible”
The Science of God

Antonin Scalia: Money Spent as Free Speech

Count Mazz — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 23:00:59 +0000

In any economy operated on even the most rudimentary principles of division of labor, effective public communication requires the speaker to make use of the services of others. An author may write a novel, but he will seldom publish and distribute it himself. A freelance reporter may write a story, but he will rarely edit, print, and deliver it to subscribers. To a government bent on suppressing speech, this mode of organization presents opportunities: Control any cog in the machine, and you can halt the whole apparatus. License printers, and it matters little whether the authors are still free to write. Restrict the sale of books, and it matters little who prints them. Predictably, repressive regimes have exploited these principles by attacking all levels of the production and dissemination of ideas. See, e.g., Printing Act of 1662 (punishing printers, importers, and booksellers); Printing Act of 1649 (punishing authors, printers, booksellers, importers, and buyers). In response to this threat, we have interpreted the First Amendment broadly. See, e.g., Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963) (“The constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press embraces the circulation of books as well as their publication…”).
Division of labor requires a means of mediating exchange, and in a commercial society, that means is supplied by money. The publisher pays the author for the right to sell his book; it pays its staff who print and assemble the book; it demands payments from booksellers who bring the book to market. This, too, presents opportunities for repression: Instead of regulating the various parties to the enterprise individually, the government can suppress their ability to coordinate by regulating their use of money. What good is the right to print books without a right to buy works from the authors? Or the right to publish newspapers without the right to pay deliverymen? The right to speak would be largely ineffective if it did not include the right to engage in financial transactions that are the incidents of the exercise.
This is not to say that any regulation of money is a regulation of speech. The government may apply general commercial regulations to those who use money for speech if it applies them evenhandedly to those who use money for other purposes. But where the government singles out money used to fund speech as its legislative object, it is acting against speech as such, no less than if it had targeted the paper on which a book was printed or the trucks that deliver it to the bookstore.

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In the modern world, giving the government power to exclude corporations from the political debate enables it effectively to muffle the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy and the most passionately held social and political views. People who associate — who pool their financial resources — for purposes of economic enterprise overwhelmingly do so in the corporate form; and with increasing frequency, incorporation is chosen by those who associate to defend and promote particular ideas — such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association… Imagine, then, a government that wished to suppress nuclear power — or oil and gas exploration, or automobile manufacturing, or gun ownership, or civil liberties — and that had the power to prohibit corporate advertising against its proposals. To be sure, the individuals involved in, or benefited by, those industries, or interested in those causes, could (given enough time) form political action committees or other associations to make their case. But the organizational form in which those enterprises already exist, and in which they can most quickly and most effectively get their message across, is the corporate form. The First Amendment does not in my view permit the restriction of that political speech: A candidate should not be insulated from the most effective speech that the major participants in the economy and major incorporated interest groups can generate.
But what about the danger to the political system posed by “amassed wealth”? The most direct threat from that source comes in the form of undisclosed favors and payoffs to elected officials — which have already been criminalized… The use of corporate wealth (like individual wealth) to speak to the electorate is unlikely to “distort” elections — especially if disclosure requirements tell the people where the speech is coming from. The premise of the First Amendment is that the American people are neither sheep nor fools, and hence fully capable of considering both the substance of the speech presented to them and its proximate and ultimate source. If that premise is wrong, our democracy has a much greater problem to overcome than merely the influence of amassed wealth. Given the premises of democracy, there is no such thing as too much speech.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003)
Chapter Nine, “Free Speech”
Scalia Dissents, by Kevin A. Ring

Mark Bauerlein: Young Narcissists

Count Mazz — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:58:30 +0000

Without the anchor of wise and talented men and women long gone, of thoughts and works that have stood the test of time, adolescents fall back upon the meager, anarchic resources of their sole selves. They watch a movie… and see it in the light of real and imagined romances… Asked for a political opinion, they recall the images they catch on television, not the models of Washington, Churchill, and Pope John Paul II. Instead of understanding the young adult rollercoaster of courtship and rejection with the help of novels by Jane Austen, they process their miasmic feelings by themselves or with sympathetic friends. And why should they do otherwise when the counsel of mentors, not to mention the avalanche of movies, music, and the rest, upholds the sovereignty of youth perspective? The currents of social life press upon them hourly, while the pages within The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Wuthering Heights seem like another, irrelevant universe. They don’t know much about history and literature, but they have feelings and needs, and figures from Shiloh and lines from Donne don’t help.
     No wonder psychological assessments show rising currents of narcissism among Americans who haven’t yet joined the workforce. In one study publicized in early 2007, researchers analyzed the responses of more than 16,000 college students on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory going back to the early 1980s. Undergraduates in 2006, it turned out, scored 30 percent higher than students in 1982 on the narcissism scale, with two-thirds of them reaching above-average levels. The researchers traced the rise directly to self-esteem orientations in the schoolroom, and lead author Jean Twenge groused, “We need to stop endlessly repeating, ‘You’re special,’ and having children repeat that back. Kids are self-centered enough already.”
     The behavioral features of narcissism are bad enough, but a set of other studies demonstrates just how disabling it proves, particularly with schoolwork. One consequence of narcissism is that it prevents young people from weighing their own talents and competencies accurately. Narcissists can’t take criticism, they hate to hand power over to others, and they turn disappointments into the world’s fault, not their own. These are the normal hurdles of growing up, but for narcissists they represent a hostile front advancing against them. It’s a distorted and destroying mirror, as Narcissus himself showed when he fixed upon his own reflection in the pool and snubbed the calls of love and caution he’d heard before, unable to leave his lovely countenance until the end. Education requires the opposite, a modicum of self-doubt, a capacity for self-criticism, precisely what the narcissist can’t bear.
     The attitude is even more harmful than the knowledge deficiencies we’ve seen earlier. An ignorant but willing mind can overcome ignorance through steady work and shrewd guidance. Read a few more books, visit a museum, take some classes, and knowledge will come. An unwilling mind can’t, or won’t. It already knows enough, and history, civics, philosophy, and literature have too little direct application to satisfy. For many young Americans, that translates into a demoralizing perception problem, a mismatch of expectation and ability.

Mark Bauerlein
Chapter Five, “The Betrayal of the Mentors”
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein: Twixters

Count Mazz — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:29:32 +0000

A cover story in Time magazine (24 Jan 2005) profiles a new youth phenomenon, an unforeseen generational sub-cohort termed the “Twixters.” This curious social outcropping rests in a novel cluster of demographic traits. Twixters:

are 22 to 30 years old;
have a college degree, or substantial college coursework;
come from middle-class families; and
reside in cities and large urban centers.

These features embody nothing unusual, certainly, but where they lead is surprising. What makes the Twixters different from other people with the same demographics from the past is the lifestyle they pursue after college. Consider the typical choices they have made:

Instead of seeking out jobs or graduate studies that help them with long-term career plans — internships, for instance, or starting low in a company in which they plan to rise — they pass through a series of service jobs as waiters, clerks, nannies, and assistants.
Instead of moving into a place of their own, they move back home with their parents or into a house or large apartment with several Twixter peers. In fact, Time reports, 20 percent of 26-year-olds live with their parents, nearly double the rate in 1970 (11 percent).
Instead of forming a long-term relationship leading to marriage, they engage in serial dating. They spread their significant personal contact across many friends and roommates and sex partners, who remain deeply important to them well beyond college.

     Despite their circumstances, Twixters aren’t marginal youngsters sinking into the underclass. They drift through their twenties, stalled at work and saving no money, but they like it that way. They congregate just as they did before college, hopping bar to bar on Friday night and watching movies on Saturday. They have achieved little, but they feel good about themselves. Indeed, precisely along the lines of [Charles] Reich’s understanding, they justify their aimless lifestyle as a journey of self-discovery. Yes, they put off the ordinary decisions of adulthood (career, marriage), but with a tough job market and so many divorced parents, their delays mark a thoughtful desire to “search their souls and choose their life paths,” to find a livelihood right for their “identity.” So Lev Grossman, the author of the story, phrases it. Social scientists quoted in the article, too, ennoble the lifestyles, judging Twixter habits (in Grossman’s paraphrase) “important work to get themselves ready for adulthood.” These young people take adulthood “so seriously, they’re spending years carefully choosing the right path into it.” University of Maryland psychologist Jeffrey Arnett dislikes the “Twixter” label, preferring “emerging adulthood.” They assume no responsibilities for or to anyone else, he concedes, but that permits them “this wonderful freedom to really focus on their own lives and work on becoming the kind of person they want to be.” Sociologist James Cote blames their delay on the economy: “What we’re looking at really began with the collapse of the youth labor market,” he says, which persists today and means that young people simply can’t afford to settle down until their late twenties. Marshall Heskovitz, creator of the television shows “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life,” gives the problem a social/emotional angle: “it’s a result of the world not being particularly welcoming when they come into it. Lots of people have a difficult time dealing with it, and they try to stay kids as long as they can because they don’t know how to make sense of all this. We’re interested in this process of finding courage and one’s self.” And a Dartmouth neuroscientist backs the economic and social resistances with brain chemistry: “We as a society deem an individual at the age of 18 ready for adult responsibility. Yet recent evidence suggests that our neuropsychological development is many years from being complete.”
     Their comments apply a positive spin to what less sympathetic elders would call slacker ways. But even if we accept the characterizations — their brains aren’t ready, the cost of living is high, they take marriage too seriously to plunge into it — there is something missing from the expert observations in the article, an extraordinary absence in the diagnosis. In casting Twixter lifestyle as genuine exploration and struggle, neither the author nor the researchers nor the Twixters themselves whisper a single word about intellectual labor. Not one of the Twixters or youth observers mentions an idea that stirs them, a book that influenced them, a class that inspired them, or a mentor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, or politics a helpful undertaking. Grossman speaks of Twixter years as “a chance to build castles and knock them down,” but these castles haven’t a grain of intellectual sand in them. As these young people forge their personalities in an uncertain world, they skirt one of the customary means of doing so — that is, acquainting themselves with the words and images, the truths and beauties, of the past — and nobody tells them they have overlooked anything. Social psychologists don’t tell them so, nor do youth experts and educators, but the anti-intellectual banality of their choices is stark. What is the role of books in the Twixter’s world? Negligible. How has their education shaped their lives? Not at all. This is what the Twixters themselves report. One of them remarks, “Kids used to go to college to get educated. That’s what I did, which I think now was a bit naive. Being smart after college doesn’t really mean anything.”
     In a word, the Twixter vision aligns perfectly with that of their wired younger brothers and sisters. It’s all social, all peer-oriented. Twixters don’t read, tour museums, travel, follow politics, or listen to any music but pop and rap, much less do something such as lay out a personal reading list or learn a foreign language. Rather, they do what we expect an average 19-year-old to do. They meet for poker, buy stuff at the mall, and jump from job to job and bed to bed. The maturity they envision has nothing to do with learning and wisdom, and the formative efforts that social scientists highlight don’t include books, artworks, ideologies, or Venn diagrams. For the Twixters, mature identity is entirely a social matter developed with and through their friends. The intellectual and artistic products of the past aren’t stepping-stones for growing up. They are fading materials of meaningless schooling.

Mark Bauerlein
Chapter Five, “The Betrayal of the Mentors”
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein: Online Non-Learning

Count Mazz — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:10:30 +0000

With so much abundance, variety, and speed, [internet] users key in to exactly what they already want. Companionship is only a click away. Congeniality fills their inboxes. Why undergo the labor of revising values, why face an incongruent outlook, why cope with disconfirming evidence, why expand the sensibility… when you can find ample sustenance for present interests? Dense content, articulate diction, and artistic images are too much. They don’t challenge young users to learn more and heighten taste. They remind them of their deficiencies, and who wants that? Confirmation soothes, rejection hurts. Great art is tough, mass art is easy. Dense arguments require concentration, adolescent visuals hit home instantly.
The Web universe licenses young Americans to indulge their youth, and the ubiquitous rhetoric of personalization and empowerment — MySpace, YouTube, etc. — disguises the problem and implants false expectations well into adulthood. They don’t realize that success in popular online youthworlds breeds incompetence in school and in the workplace. With no guidance from above, with content purveyors aiming to attract audiences, not educate them, young users think that communications come easy. With fewer filters on people’s input and output, young users think that their opinions count and their talents suffice. They don’t realize what it really takes to do well. Bill Joy’s remarks at the Aspen Institute pointedly identify this unfortunate combination of open access and mistaken self-evaluation:

People are fooling themselves that they’re being creative in these spaces, that the standard of creativity in the world to be competitive and to be a great designer is not very hard. You have to go school, you have to apprentice, you have to do hard things. It’s not about your friends liking something you did… The real problem is, by democratizing speech and the ability to post, we’ve lost the gradation for quality. The gradation for quality always was based on the fact that words have weight, that it costs money to move them around, so there was back pressure against junk.

The back pressure is waning, and even if nobody looks at their blog entries and self-made videos, if nobody heeds their talkback, young people nonetheless may spend after-school hours in an online youthworld, running up opportunity costs every time they check their MySpace page and neglect their English homework, paying for them years later when they can’t read or write well enough to do academic work or qualify for a job, or know enough to answer simple questions about scientific method, Rembrandt, or Auschwitz. Kids will be kids, and teens will be teens. Without any direction from the menu, they stick with what they know and like. They have no natural curiosity for the historical past and high art, and if no respected elder introduces them to Romanticism and the French Revolution, they’ll rarely find such things on their own. With the read / write / film / view / browse / message / buy / sell Web, adolescent users govern their own exposure, and the didactic and artistic content of smarter sites flies by unseen and unheard.

Mark Bauerlein
Chapter Four, ”Online Learning and Non-Learning”
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future