Why is Trump Winning Evangelicals?

The head-scratcher of the day is a piece at Time on line called "Why Trump Is Winning Over Christian Conservatives?" by Alex Altman and Elizabeth Dias (Jan. 21, 2016). It's a head-scratcher because one wonders how anyone can be puzzled over it.

He's not a values conservative, knows less than squat about the Bible (although the flap over his saying "2 Corinthians" instead of "Second Corinthians" is a nontroversy stirred up by people who never set foot in church, because you hear "2 Corinthians" all the time among churchgoers). So why is he so popular among evangelicals?

It's a cliche among paranormal debunkers that scientists are the easiest people to hoax, because scientists expect experiments to be conducted and data reported honestly. They don't expect someone to say "Look over there" and switch test tubes or microscope slides on them. Likewise, well-informed and sincere religious leaders can often be blind to the darker aspects of their fellow believers. They take that "love your neighbor" and "judge not" stuff seriously, and can be blindsided by people who say the right things but actually hold wholly different viewpoints.

First, the pons asinorum. The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is that fundamentalists insist on the most literal interpretation of scripture possible. They will flex somewhat, for example, accepting that the Sun only appeared to stand still for Gideon, but the global flood was global and the seven days of Creation were seven literal days. Evangelicals are conservative but willing to admit a fair amount of flexibility in interpretation. Wheaton College, Billy Graham's alma mater, has a fully functional geology program, complete with grants and research published in mainstream outlets. Needless to say the two systems grade into one another.

So why do conservative religious believers go for Trump? Richard Dawkins once said “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).” Well, I've read enough stuff from the far Religious Right to say I'm absolutely not reluctant to apply the label "wicked."

They're Really Driven by Anger

For a lot of people, conservative religion serves as an outlet for anger. They eat up all that stuff about judgement and damnation.

Many of them are really angry at God, first of all, for forbidding them from doing things they'd like to do, but worse yet not punishing people who do the forbidden things. God betrays them by expecting them to behave a certain way, but not punishing people who disobey. That explains all the wish-fulfillment rants about how, any day now, God will summon America to judgement. Others make God in their own image. They're angry people so they create an angry God.

Trump is verbalizing all the things that make them angry. And he's pretty much promising, unlike that slacker God, to punish all the people who make them angry, or at least not interfere if they do it themselves.

They Trust Trump Won't Legislate Against Their Values

Trump himself lives a decidedly non-Christian, even anti-Christian, lifestyle. And that's okay. Lots of politicians have been caught having affairs, getting their mistresses abortions, trolling for gay sex, and gotten re-elected. The issue is not how they behave, but what sorts of behavior they are willing to impose on others. It's not whether they have an affair, but whether they're willing to penalize others who do. It's not whether they get an abortion for their mistress, but whether they're willing to legislate against abortion. It's not whether they have gay sex, but whether they're willing to vote against gay marriage.

One major reason why so many people are willing to forgive sins of the wealthy is the idea that they can bear the costs of their transgressions. The $1000 a night call girl probably won't rob her client or hassle passers by on the street. The powder cocaine dealer probably won't randomly spray a neighborhood with gunfire in a turf battle. If the politician's mistress gets pregnant, the public won't be stuck with the child support costs. If the politician gets hooked on drugs, the public won't have to worry about him mugging someone for a fix, or paying for his rehabilitation.

Trump's lack of concern for values issues is a plus, because his supporters believe they can trust Trump to throw gays, women, and minorities under the bus.

Religion is a Mask for Magic

Beyond science and religion is a third force, equally inimical to both: magic. Science asks, how can I conform my thinking to physical reality? Religion asks, how can I conform my thinking to God? Magic asks how can I get God and physical reality to conform to my thinking?. A scientist might want to know how to achieve a certain result, working within the framework of natural laws, but he knows energy can't be created from nothing, and no amount of wishful thinking will make it so. A magical believer looks for a way to make the universe behave the way he wants it to regardless of physical laws, simply because he wants it to. A religious believer asks God to intervene on his behalf, but knows God won't allow him to have an affair or get away with murder. Believers in magic think it's possible to bribe, trick, or propitiate God into allowing such things.

The vast majority of what passes for "religion" is really magic. And a lot of people apparently believe that uttering the right words or being angry about the right things serves as a substitute for actually obeying the Commandments. Hating gays buys enough karma to make up for adultery and stealing. And a lot of conservative Christians believe that mouthing a mantra about accepting Jesus is a lifetime free pass into Heaven.

Forever. You Keep Using That Word

"Someday soon, we'll have techniques that will allow us to live forever."

"We need to set up safeguards so this sort of thing never happens again."

You see stuff like this all the time. Well make some change that will last forever, or we'll prevent some bad thing from happening forever. I'm a geologist. Don't use words like "forever" to me. They do not mean what you think they mean.

Even in historic times, the spans involved can be stunning. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That event is closer in time to us than it is to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. The Golden Age of Islam can roughly be dated between 632 AD, when Mohammed died, and 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad. That's 626 years. If we date our scientific epoch from the time of Copernicus (died 1543), 626 years takes us to 2169 AD. Cleopatra (died 30 BC) is closer in time to us than to the building of the Pyramids. We are closer in time to the Battle of Hastings (1066 AD) or the Crusades than Jesus was. 

When we talk about geologic time, things get even more extreme. Compress a single year into a second and count backward. Your own life is barely a minute. Count backwards at the rate of one year for every second. Fifteen seconds takes you back to 2000 AD. If you're retiring soon, a minute takes you back to the time you were born and ten seconds more takes you back to World War 2. Three and a half minutes takes you back to the Declaration of Independence and roughly half an hour (33 minutes) takes you back to the time of Christ. It takes over an hour to get back to the building of the Pyramids and three hours to get back to the end of the Ice Age. 

A million years? That will take you 11-1/2 days, counting at one second equals a year. To the time of the dinosaurs will take you over two years of counting. Our numbering system is so efficient it conceals the true sizes of things from us. 10,000 years to the end of the Ice Ages and the last mammoths (1), and 65,000,000 years to the time of the dinosaurs, don't look terribly different in size. One number looks only a few times bigger than the other. The reality is the last dinosaurs are 6500 times older than the last mammoths. And the age of the dinosaurs wasn't just an instant - it lasted about 150 million years. Everyone's favorite dinosaur bad boy, T-Rex, lived toward the very end of the Cretaceous Period about 65 million years ago. Anyone who has seen the original Fantasia by Walt Disney has seen the famous duel between a T-Rex and a Stegosaurus, the herbivore with the bony plates on its back. Stegosaurus lived in the previous period, the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago. That means that not only could they not have fought as in the movie, but T-Rex is actually closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus. As Tim Urban put it on waitbutwhy.com, a T-Rex had a better chance of seeing a Justin Bieber concert than a live Stegosaurus.

The first abundant fossils appear about 540 million years ago. That will take you over 17 years to count off at the rate of one year per second. A billion years - and there are many places with rocks that old, like the Adirondacks - will take you 31 years. Two billion years, the age of many of the rocks in northern Canada will take over 63 years to count off. That means if you start counting when a baby is born, you'll hit two billion about the time he retires. Most people will never live long enough to count off three billion years (the age of some rocks in southern Minnesota) - 95 years.

And nobody will live long enough to count off the 4.6 billion year age of the earth - almost 146 years. That means if you started counting when the Golden Spike was driven on the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, you would just now be counting off the age of the earth.

On a geologic time scale, even rare events become commonplace. In a million years, there will be about 7000 magnitude 8 earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault, and the Mississippi river will change course maybe a couple of thousand times. No, our flood control structures will not last long enough to delay it significantly. Any given spot on the U.S. Atlantic coast will see thousands of hurricanes. No human structure made with steel will last that long and even the Pyramids will probably collapse, since they're steeper than the angle of repose.

Let's assume we eliminate all disease. That still leaves accidents, and some will destroy you no matter what miracles our medicine can perform. The death rate from unintentional injury in the U.S. is about 41 per 100,000, or roughly one chance in 2500 of dying in a year. Your chances of living 1000 years at that rate are about 2/3. You have about a 44 percent chance of making it 2000 years and about 1.6% of making it to 10,000 years. You probably won't make it to the next Ice Age. Your odds of making it to 20,000 years are 0.03%. A million years? A lousy million years, not even close to the time of the dinosaurs? Decimal point, followed by 176 zeroes, followed by a one, per cent (2).

And we aren't anywhere close to forever. We haven't even scratched the surface of how big numbers can get. The universe is about 13.6 billion years old, but the tiniest speck of dust you can see has more atoms in it than that. Atoms have relative weights, called atomic weight. Hydrogen is 1, carbon is 12, oxygen is 16. That many grams of each (1 hydrogen, 12 carbon, etc) contains 6.02 x 10²³ atoms. That's 6 followed by 23 zeroes. Counting those atoms, one per second, will take you about 140,000 times the age of the Universe. 

You have about 30 trillion cells in your body and the DNA in each cell is about a meter long. Strands of DNA are only a dozen or so atoms wide, and very tightly crinkled. That means if you could take all the DNA out of your body, well, you would die. But it would total 30 trillion meters or 30 billion kilometers in length, enough to wrap around the orbit of Pluto. Which is so awesome it would be a real shame you wouldn't be there to contemplate it. You probably have around 2 x 10²⁷ atoms in your body. The total number of atoms in the earth is around 1.3 x 10⁵⁰ atoms. Scientific notation is even more compact and efficient than ordinary numbers and is even better at concealing the true sizes of things. The difference between the number of atoms in your body and the number in the earth isn't the difference between 27 and 50, it's about 1 followed by 23 zeros. 

The sun is 300,000 times as massive as the earth, but the earth is largely made of iron and silicon. The sun is made up mostly of light hydrogen and helium, and it takes a lot more of those atoms to equal the same mass. The sun has about 10⁵⁷ atoms. The difference between 50 and 57 doesn't seem great but it translates to the sun having ten million times as many atoms. In the whole universe, the number of elementary particles - protons, neutrons and electrons, is estimated to be about 10⁸⁰. 

According to some theories, the Universe is running down and will eventually expand to a cold inert place where everything is at the same low energy. This "heat death" is estimated to be about 10¹⁰⁰ years in the future. That's about the largest number used in science for actually counting discrete objects. How long is that? Take the age of the universe, spend that amount of time contemplating every single individual subatomic particle in the universe. Then do it ten billion times. 10¹⁰⁰ years isn't just a bit longer than the age of the universe, it's incomprehensibly longer. I can write the numbers and do the math. I can't actually picture it.

It's clear that when people say "live forever," they don't mean insane quantities like 10¹⁰⁰ years, or even a million years. A million years would allow you to spend a thousand years as a doctor, as a politician, as a teacher, as a soldier, as a farmer... Then you could spend a thousand years living in each country on Earth and still have time left over. No, "forever" likely means "until I get tired of it." It means going out on your schedule and nobody else's.

And we've just stumbled onto a fascinating theological point. Whatever happens after we die, it cannot involve linear time as we experience it. What would you do with a million years' worth of memories? "Oh, but I believe in the Bible." Funny thing, check this out:

“What no eye has seen,
    what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
    the things God has prepared for those who love him— (1 Cor. 2:9)

When it says "no human mind has conceived," do you suppose it actually means "no human mind has conceived," as in, nobody can possibly imagine it?

As long as I have the pulpit, a lot of religious believers seem to picture that they're five or six feet tall, and God is maybe eight or nine feet. But consider this: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9). So the reality is, there's the floor, with bacteria and mold and stuff the dog tracked in, and there's us, a fraction of an inch above that, and there's God, beyond the roof, beyond the Solar System, beyond the galaxy, beyond the remotest quasar. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "Infinity is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

Surely 10¹⁰⁰ is the biggest number anyone would ever actually use, right? Not even close. There are numbers so big they're even hard to write. What's the biggest number you can write with three 9's? 999, right? What about 99⁹ ? That equals 9.1 x 10¹⁷. But we can do way better. 9⁹⁹  = 2.5 x 10⁹⁴. But what if we take nine to the ninth power (387,420,489) and raise the third nine to that? Exponents do screwy things to documents, especially if they're stacked, so we can use the alternate notation 9⁹  = 9^9, and the biggest number we can write with three nines is 9^9^9 = 9^387,420,489 = millions of digits. The rule is you start with the outermost exponent and work down. 2^2^2^2 = 2^2^4 = 2^16 = 65,536.

Numbers get really huge when you start calculating the number of different ways things can happen. For example, the number of different sequences you can deal a deck of cards is 52 for the first card, times 51 for the next and so on down to one for the last card. That's 52x51x50x49....x1, and that sort of thing crops up often enough to have a name and a symbol. It's written 52! and called 52 factorial. (It suggests that people who claim to have seen a perfect bridge deal where everyone gets all cards of one suit are - putting it delicately - mistaken. At the very least they failed to shuffle and deal properly.) Going back to three nines, care to contemplate how big (9^9^9)! is? Let alone ((9^9^9)!)! or ((9!^9!^9!)!)! ?

How many possible chess games are there? Information scientist Claude Shannon estimated a possible paltry 10¹²⁰, chicken feed compared to some of the numbers we've just discussed. Of course, you could ignore the rules about stalemate and simply repeat the same sequence of moves forever, but that's trivial. But to study the quantum mechanics of materials, you have to calculate the possible number of energy states of the material, which means some number for each atom times all the others. For example, how many atoms in a room are moving slower than 10% of the average velocity? There could be 10^30 atoms or molecules of air in a large room, so the number of possible energy states of those atoms is something like 10 raised to the power of the number of atoms. That is 10^10^30. In quantum mechanics, it is possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle; the odds are so mind-bogglingly tiny that "impossible" barely does it justice.

These are about the biggest numbers I know of in physics. In abstract math, you can obviously write arbitrarily large numbers like 9!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.... But in "serious" math, where someone is actually trying to solve a real problem, they can still be stupendous. 

Tim Urban  has a great discussion of large numbers on the site "Wait But Why" (waitbutwhy.com). Consider the first few levels of making big numbers:
9 = 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1
10 x 9 = 10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10+10
10^9 = 10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10
10^^9 = 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10
10^^^9 = 10(10^^9 terms)
etc.
Graham's Number, at one time the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof, defined a number g₁ = 3^^^^3, then g₂ = had g₁ up arrows, then carried that process out to 64 levels. 

As Urban put it: "Imagine living a Graham’s number amount of years.  ... it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier."

So don't use the word "forever" around anyone who deals with large time spans or numbers. You have no conception what it means.

Notes

1. There were some holdout mammoths that survived on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia until 4000 years ago. They lived until the time the Pyramids were being built. Fascinating and poignant, but not really relevant here.
2. The way to calculate odds like these is to calculate the odds of something not happening. If you have 41 in 100,000 odds of dying in an accident each year, you have 99,959/100,000 or 0.99959 odds of surviving. Your chances of surviving 1000 years are 0.99959¹⁰⁰⁰  = 0.6636, and so on.

Comets, Meteor Showers and Science Denial

So it's mid-December and the internet is busily hyping the Geminid meteor shower, supposedly the best of the year. Meteor showers, to me, are one of the most irresponsibly hyped celestial phenomena. And the damage is far from harmless.

Meteor Showers

Meteor showers happen when the earth crosses the orbit of fine debris, shed by a comet or asteroid. In some cases, we know the specific source. In other cases the parent object is long dead or had its orbit perturbed. The meteors appear to radiate from a single point just like snowflakes in your headlights do. It's a perspective effect - their paths relative to you are actually parallel. Meteor showers typically peak after midnight because that's when your location on earth is facing forward in its orbit. 

Yes, there are daytime meteor showers. How do we know? Because the ionized trails of the meteors affect radio signals and can be detected on radar.

The Geminids are expected to display about 120 meteors per hour, and by meteor shower standards, that's pretty intense. To get an idea what it's actually like, say "whee!" then count slowly for 30 seconds and say "whee!" again. And that's assuming you'll see every meteor. You won't. Many will be outside your field of vision, Expect more like one every two minutes. 

If you're a non-scientist, imagine someone promises you a great fireworks display, but you have to get up at 3 AM to see it. Then, every two minutes, someone tosses a sparkler in the air. And worse yet, he seems genuinely impressed. Will you trust that person next time he promises something?

No meteor shower shower should be described as strong unless it displays 1000 or more meteors an hour. What shower is that? Well, there isn't any. There are rare "meteor storms" that exceed that rate, the most famous being the Leonid shower in November. The Leonids were spectacular in 1833 and 1866, and produced a spectacular burst in 1966. Astronomers have had some success in predicting the orbits of dense swarms of particles and predicting outbursts. Unfortunately, the bursts tend to be short and geographically localized. But at least it can be worth getting out of bed to check.

Comets

Rivaling meteor showers for irresponsible hype are comets. Comets are generally discovered far from the sun and travel long eccentric orbits. So there's a long lead time before the comet passes close to the sun or earth. Once upon a time we wouldn't know about a major comet until it became pretty obvious, but now sky patrols pick them up when they're quite faint.

Sometimes a comet lives up to the hype. Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 was detected far from the sun and was visible to the unaided eye for over a year. It set records for duration and distance of visibility. And it won't come back for several thousand years. It was brilliant in a dark sky and, for the first time in human history perhaps, billions of people were able to see a comet as a thing of beauty instead of a fearful portent of disaster.

And there are surprises. Comet Holmes had been plodding uneventfully through the inner Solar System every 6.9 years since its discovery in 1892. Then, in October, 2007, it had the greatest outburst ever seen in a comet, and brightened half a million times from a faint object visible only in large telescopes to something easily visible to the unaided eye. It actually attained a diameter greater than the Sun, though the total amount of mass was tiny. Payoffs like that are why amateur astronomers watch "dull' comets.

But for the average non-scientist, the experience is more like Comet Kohoutek in 1973. Kohoutek was believed to be a visitor from the remote Oort Cloud on its first visit to the inner Solar System. First time comets are a notorious crap shoot. They can release spectacular amounts of gas and dust and be dazzling. Or they can be so tightly frozen that they release little material. That's what happened with Kohoutek, and after the media hype, Kohoutek became a synonym for spectacular failures. Something similar happened to Comet ISON in 2013. ISON was discovered far from the sun and was following the orbit of numerous other comets that had close passages by the Sun. So a year out, the astronomical community was buzzing about the potential show. But ISON failed to brighten as hoped, and worse yet, it evaporated passing the Sun. Images taken after closest encounter showed a short-lived diffuse cloud that rapidly dissipated.

Even comets that put on spectacular displays can disappoint if their brightest appearance is so brief that bad weather can blot it out. Or a comet can appear briefly and unfavorably for one hemisphere and be spectacular in the other. Perversely, they seem to favor the Southern Hemisphere.

One comet I recall was Hyakutake in 1996, one of the closest comets to earth in centuries. Unfortunately, my observing site was a floodlit compound in Bosnia. A few weeks earlier, my team had been out after dark under a dazzling sky, but not when Hyakutake came by. Armed with only vague descriptions of the location in Stars and Stripes, I tried my best to view it from the shadows and saw nothing. But I bet that was the experience of most urban dwellers who tried, as well.

Based on my own experiences being disappointed by comets, I think a comet should be reported in the mass media only if it will be brighter than magnitude zero (a very bright star) in a dark sky and at least 30 degrees above the horizon. Report it only if the comet would be obvious to an urban resident with no knowledge of the constellations. And report it when and if it happens, not a year out like ISON or Kohoutek.

So What's the Harm?

If people can't trust science to tell them accurately what they can expect to see from their own back yards, why should they trust science when it tells them about climate change, GMO's, vaccination or evolution?

Forget the Second Amendment: This is the Critical Amendment

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Has this ever been a problem? Well, During the War of 1812, Sackett's Harbor, New York was a major military base and the buildup of forces rapidly outstripped the supply of housing. So soldiers were quartered in private homes, presumably by law. Since the town was a likely target of British attack, probably consent wasn't a large problem. There were quite a few instances of private homes being used during the Civil War. Apart from that, about the only court case in U.S. history involving this amendment was a case where prison employees in New York went on strike (Engblom v. Carey). National Guardsmen were called in as temporary prison guards and the striking prison guards were evicted to provide quarters for the Guardsmen. A Federal court agreed that the tenants counted as owners and sent the case back to a lower court, which dismissed the case because the State could not have foreseen the higher court ruling and there were no legal guidelines to use for compensation. So they simultaneously won and lost. No Supreme Court decision has ever directly involved the Third Amendment. At most, the amendment has been cited in passing only to show how deep American concerns about privacy and property run.

Nobody does life support like the U.S. military, and almost any situation requiring temporary quarters for troops will probably make use of public buildings or large private spaces like warehouses or hangars. Note that there's absolutely nothing to prevent troops from being housed with consent, so a family putting up a visiting family member in the military doesn't apply. Nor is there anything to prevent people from voluntarily housing troops from patriotic motives or for compensation.

So what's relevant about perhaps the least-applied Amendment in the Constitution? A few court cases have invoked the Third Amendment, most of which have been described as "far fetched" or "silly." One of the most widely quoted was United States v. Valenzuela (1951). Gus Valenzuela (who was serving in Korea at the time) was sued by the Federal government for violating the 1947 House and Rent Act. He asked a Federal Court to dismiss the case on Third Amendment grounds. The Court ruled:

Reference will be made to only one of defendant's constitutional contentions. In his brief, the defendant states, "The 1947 House and Rent Act as amended and extended is and always was the incubator and hatchery of swarms of bureaucrats to be quartered as storm troopers upon the people in violation of Amendment III of the United States Constitution."

"This challenge" to quote from defendant's brief, "has not been heretofore made or adjudged by any court, insofar as our research discloses."

We accept counsel's statement as to the results of his research but find this challenge without merit.

The motion to dismiss is denied.

So metaphorically equating regulators with occupying troops doesn't cut it in court. The courts in general take a dim view of sweeping curtailment of government authority based on someone's novel reinterpretation of the Constitution. And given the very narrow wording of the Third Amendment, unless someone houses a squad of Marines in your rumpus room, the courts aren't going to take your Third Amendment case seriously. You can argue the EPA are like storm troopers and regulating products you use in your home amounts to being quartered in your house. Just don't expect a court to take you seriously.

What's the Real Issue?

Before the American Revolution, Britain had a problem. The Colonies demanded protection from Indian attacks, but refused to put up the money for barracks and rations. Staying in private homes, of course, wouldn't be an issue in the field because there weren't enough settlers to make it practical, and soldiers permanently stationed on the frontier would stay in forts. So quartering troops in private homes only became an issue in garrison. It's important to note three things in defense of the British:

• The need for military protection wouldn't have been so acute if settlers had respected Indian lands and restrictions on settlement.
• The colonists wanted military protection, but didn't want to pay for it. Sound familiar?
• The regulations on requisitioning quarters called for occupying public and unoccupied buildings first and private homes last.

Simply refusing to send troops until the Colonies ponied up wasn't an option. It would effectively abandon the Colonies and make resistance to calls for independence a lot less defensible. Allowing voting representation in Parliament would have created a plethora of problems because the Colonies had a population roughly half that of Britain. The Colonies couldn't out-vote the home country, but they could certainly ally with sympathetic members of Parliament and seriously upset the political balance of power. And as tensions rose in the Colonies, British troops assumed more the role of an occupying force, costs rose, more taxes were imposed, tensions rose still further and the rest, as they say, is history.

We can see tons of counterfactual ways Britain could have defused the situation. Giving each colony (plus those in Canada and maybe Jamaica) a voting member would have kept control firmly in British hands but allowed a much freer exchange of information. Parliament could have gotten much more accurate understanding of colonial grievances, and the colonists might have gotten a clearer picture of how much their defense was costing. As fun as it can be to write counterfactual history, that's not the point here.

So the real issue is, the government (in this case Britain) didn't have the money to solve a problem, and solved the problem by dumping it in the laps (or living rooms) of citizens. And that is a contemporary issue. No, it's not soldiers. But government at all levels dumps the costs of programs on everyone else. The Federal government wants secure identification. So it dumps the costs of creating secure ID on the States, who in turn dump the costs of gathering the necessary documents onto private citizens. We solve the need for equal opportunity by restricting the rights of employers and landlords. We provide access to the handicapped by requiring business owners to pay for ramps, elevators, rest room stalls and so on. States decide the schools must provide services to students and passes the costs on to school districts, who, in turn, pass on the costs to taxpayers.

If we were drafting the Constitution today, we might see the Third Amendment expressed in these terms:

No unit of government shall impose any unfunded mandate on any lower level of government or private person.

Three Things the Confederacy Got Right

The Confederate Constitution is available on-line, and incorporates a lot of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights is incorporated bodily into the CSA Constitution. There are changes that appealed to sectional interests, including limitations on tariffs and a prohibition on spending to facilitate commerce (meaning roads, railroads, and so on). And there were provisions that locked slavery into place. Article I, Section 9 (4) said "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." Not only is slavery enshrined up there with no bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, not only is Congress forbidden to interfere with it, but it's described as a right. Wrap your heads around that.

Still, they'd had 73 years of experience under the Constitution, and they saw a few things that needed tweaking, and a few they even got right.

Line-Item Veto

Article I, Section 7 (2) The President may approve any appropriation and disapprove any other appropriation in the same bill. In such case he shall, in signing the bill, designate the appropriations disapproved; and shall return a copy of such appropriations, with his objections, to the House in which the bill shall have originated; and the same proceedings shall then be had as in case of other bills disapproved by the President.

The President can veto selected appropriations, which Congress can then override. This is called a line-item veto, and Presidents since Eisenhower have called for it. (The issue hardly arose before Roosevelt. Roosevelt oversaw the huge increase in spending between the Depression and World War II, and Truman, as his successor, carried on Roosevelt's policies. By post-1945 standards, budgets before 1933 were miniscule)

Single-Subject Bills

Article I, Section 9 (20) Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.

This would eliminate the practice of passing "Omnibus" bills that cover a plethora of subjects, and seriously crimp the practice of attaching riders to bills.

Constitutional Amendments

Article V Section I. (I) Upon the demand of any three States, legally assembled in their several conventions, the Congress shall summon a convention of all the States, to take into consideration such amendments to the Constitution as the said States shall concur in suggesting at the time when the said demand is made; and should any of the proposed amendments to the Constitution be agreed on by the said convention, voting by States, and the same be ratified by the Legislatures of two- thirds of the several States, or by conventions in two-thirds thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the general convention, they shall thenceforward form a part of this Constitution.

This measure departs from our own Constitution in several ways. First, there is no mechanism for Congress to propose amendments, although with only three states required to call a convention, it seems likely that Congress might be able to persuade states to propose what it wanted.

It eliminates the worst concern about calling a Constitutional Convention. Under the U.S. Constitution, there are absolutely no restrictions on what a Convention can consider. The process is spelled out more explicitly here. The Convention is limited to the amendments proposed by the states, and has the power to decide whether the amendments are to be ratified by legislative act or state conventions.

The most important change is that only three states need concur to launch a convention. Given that the Confederacy had only thirteen stars on its flag (one for each seceded state, plus pre-approved stars for Missouri and Kentucky), this measure effectively means that about a quarter of the states can call a convention (as opposed to two thirds under the U.S. Constitution). Only two-thirds of the states (as opposed to three fourths) are needed to ratify. The reason for the differing limits in the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the same states that called for an amendment from ratifying it as well.

Both liberals and conservatives freak out at the idea of calling a Constitutional Convention, solid evidence that it's a great idea. Look at what happened the last time we had a convention consider modifying the basic law of the land, they warn. We got a whole new Constitution. Yes indeed, look. The new Constitution was approved by Congress and sent to the States. It took nine states to ratify, a process that took two years and generated intense debate. It's not like the Constitutional Convention simply rolled out a new law on its own and said "obey." That requirement that three fourths of the states ratify any proposed amendment is a very high bar.

So they did indeed get this one  - mostly - right. Having Congress able to propose amendments is still a good idea. Three states is setting the bar a bit too low, but ten or fifteen is reasonable. In fact, let's bypass conventions altogether. If ten states pass resolutions calling for an amendment, the amendment goes directly to the states for voting. It will still take three fourths of the states to pass.

Treason of the Intellectuals, Volume 3

Treason of the Intellectuals

Or, How to Get Kicked Off "Little Green Footballs"

Treason of the Intellectuals was the title of a 1928 book by Julien Benda, originally published in French as La Trahison des Clercs. The term Clerc has an obvious relationship to the word cleric, and Benda used it in the sense of people who devoted their lives to ideas and thought without necessarily being concerned with practical applications. (I have come to the conclusion that I need to explain that "treason" here means betrayal of the ideals of intellectual inquiry, not political treason). Benda was distressed at the way intellectuals of the early 20th Century had been increasingly seduced by the appeal of power, and by the possibility that men of ideas might have a real role in shaping human events. Some devoted their energies to justifying nationalism, others to fanning class rivalry. One group would soon furnish an intellectual basis for fascism, the other had already been swept up by early Marxism, dazzled by the Russian Revolution. Benda presciently warned that if these political passions were not reined in, mankind was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war the world has ever known."

Society and intellectuals had been jointly responsible for this process. Particularly in Germany, universities had been redefined as institutions for producing skilled scientists and engineers, and the increasing success of science and technology in producing practical results had led to a shift from a belief in knowledge as good in itself to knowledge as good for practical purposes. Universities discovered that people who doled out money grudgingly for abstract knowledge were quite happy to spend money for knowledge with practical uses. The intellectuals of whom Benda wrote had aspirations of being philosopher-kings. Not philosopher-kings in the ancient sense, kings who used the insights of philosophy to rule more wisely and justly, but philosophers who were elevated to the rank of kings simply and solely by virtue of styling themselves "philosophers," and who would be able to use the power of the state to advance their own philosophical agendas (and presumably quash opposing views).

Volume II: Marxism

Volume II, of course, would be a study of the way Western intellectuals prostituted themselves to Communism during the Stalinist era and the Cold War. Innumerable books on this subject have been written. Most of those of Cold War vintage were derided as mere anti-Communist hysteria or, ironically, "anti-intellectual." When I was growing up in the 1950's, I got a fairly standard view of the horrors of Communism. By the mid 1960's, I had come to regard a lot of that information as mere propaganda. Then, early in my college career at Berkeley (1965-69, no less) I got a revelation. I was browsing in the library stacks and came across a section on Soviet history. I discovered that everything I had been taught to regard as propaganda was in fact true, and moreover, the documentation was massive and easy to find. Then I read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and discovered that what I had been told in the 1950's wasn't the whole truth. The reality was far worse. Only the most massive and willful denial of reality could have accounted for the mind-set of Western intellectuals.

The Soviet Union is gone, and while nominal Communism lingers in Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea, Communism as a global magnet for intellectuals is gone. One preposterous claim, seriously advanced by some intellectuals, is that they played a role in the downfall of Communism, when in fact they obstructed and ridiculed opposition to Communism at every turn. But surely the most wonderful irony is that the CIA set up front foundations during the Cold War to fund leftist intellectuals and thereby provide an alternative to Marxism. Bertrand Russell, the archetypical anti-Western Cold War intellectual, was actually covertly subsidized by the CIA. I love it. Russell, to me, symbolizes everything that made the Twentieth Century a scientific golden age and a philosophical desert, a thinker whose reputation was based solely on his own hype machine. With his colossal ego, he never for a moment suspected that his funding was anything other than richly deserved. The karmic irony is beautiful.

Volume III: Islamic Fascism

But a new magnet for intellectuals is emerging: radical Islam. It's not that intellectuals are likely to embrace radical Islam themselves anytime soon - for one thing, the requirement of believing in God would deter many of them. But what they can do is obstruct efforts to combat radical Islam and terrorism, undermine support for Israel, stress the "legitimate grievances" of radical Islamists, and lend moral support to the "legitimacy" of radical Islamic movements.

This is a phenomenon at first glance so baffling it cries out for analysis. Both fascism and Marxism censored, harassed, and imprisoned intellectuals, but they also gave lip service to intellectualism. Russia and Germany both had great universities. Both fascism and Marxism appealed to their respective nations' cultural heritage in support of their ideologies. Our mental picture of fascism is now mostly colored by images of Nazi book burnings and bad art, but before World War II fascism was quite successful at passing itself off as a blend of socialism and nationalism. 

Marxism in particular offered an intellectual framework that many intellectuals bought into. Marxism presented a facade of support for culture and science, paid intellectuals highly and created huge academic institutions. True, intellectuals in the Soviet Union were well paid mostly in comparison to the general poverty of everyone else rather than in real terms, the economy was so decrepit that the money couldn't purchase much of value, and a lot of the academic institutions were second-rate in comparison to any American community college, but at least the Soviet Union could put forth an illusion of fostering intellectual inquiry. (I once sent a letter to the Soviet Embassy inquiring about films on the Soviet space program. This was after word-processors had become universal in American offices. I got a reply - a couple of years later - typed on a manual machine that looked as if Lenin had typed his high school term papers on it, and the embassy was still using the same ribbon.)

But radical Islam is openly hostile to intellectual inquiry. Iran under the Ayatollahs banned music. In the United States, the work Piss Christ ignited a fierce debate - not over whether such work should be allowed, but whether it should be publicly supported. In parts of the Islamic world, dissident works invite not debate over public funding, but death sentences. Fascism and Marxism at least offered the illusion that they supported intellectual inquiry. Radical Islam offers intellectuals nothing. In fact, it is openly hostile to all intellectual inquiry except for a sterile Koranic pseudo-scholarship on an intellectual par with memorizing Jack Chick tracts. It makes no secret of its desire to extirpate all intellectual life. So why aren't Western intellectuals whole-heartedly behind any and all diplomatic and military attempts to combat radical Islam?

Not only do some intellectuals oppose any defense against radical Islam, but they oppose any attempt to label it accurately, in particular, the term "Islamic fascism." No doubt part of the hostility is due to George W. Bush using the term in the aftermath of 9/11, and the man who beat Al Gore can do nothing right. But the salient feature of classical fascism was its emphasis of collective and national rights over individual rights, and "Islamic fascism" is the precisely correct technical term to describe it.

Hatred of Democracy

When we try to discover what fascism, Marxism, and radical Islam have in common, the field shrinks to a single common theme: hatred of democracy. Despite all the calls for "Power to the People" from radical intellectuals, the reality is that no societies have ever empowered so many people to such a degree as Western democracies. Fascism, Marxism, and radical Islam are all elitist movements aimed at putting an ideological elite class in control.

The problem is that people in democratic societies usually end up using their empowerment to make choices that would be intellectual elites hate. How can we reconcile the fact that the masses, whom intellectuals profess to support, keep making wrong choices? I've got it - they've been duped somehow. Those aren't their real values; they've been brainwashed into a "false consciousness" by society. If they were completely free to choose, they'd make the "right" choices. But of course we have to eliminate all the distractions that interfere with the process: no moral or religious indoctrination, no advertising or superficial amusements, no status symbols, no politically incorrect humor. "False consciousness" is a perfect way of professing support for the masses while simultaneously depriving them of any power to choose; a device for being an elitist while pretending not to be.

The post-Soviet version of "false consciousness" is "internalized oppression." If you're a woman who opposes abortion, a black with middle class values, or a person with a lousy job who nevertheless believes in hard work, those aren't your real values. You've internalized the values of the white male power elite and allowed yourself to become their tool. You don't really know what you believe. When the enlightened elite want your opinion, they'll tell you what it is.

Democracy confronts radical intellectuals with a threat more dangerous than any censor, secret police, or religious fatwa - irrelevance. An intellectual working on behalf of a totalitarian regime can imagine himself as an agent of sweeping social change. If he ends up in a labor camp or facing a firing squad he can at least console himself that his work was so seminal that the only way the regime could cope with it was to silence him. He made a difference. A radical intellectual in a democracy, on the other hand, finds the vast majority ignoring him. They never heard of him. His most outrageous works go unknown or are the butt of jokes. He watches in impotent rage as the masses ignore art films and go to summer blockbusters. Worse yet, things that are noticed get co-opted, watered down and trivialized. Works that are supposed to shake the System to the core are bought by fat cats to decorate corporate headquarters or stashed in bank vaults as investments. Fashions that scream defiance of everything the society holds dear end up being the next generation's Trick or Treat costumes. Protest songs end up being played on elevators twenty years later.

Eric Hoffer, the longeshoreman-philosopher, nailed it perfectly:

The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

Little Green Footballs

Somehow, a post very similar to this got me suspended from "Little Green Footballs." My previous post had a +19 rating, but a few days after I posted this, it was deleted and my account was suspended. And they have not had the courtesy to reply to any of my inquiries.

Three Scientific Maxims that are Pure B.S.

Absence of Evidence isn't Evidence of Absence

Did Indians ever live on my property? I do a careful search for pottery and arrowheads, don't find any, and conclude the answer is no.

But even substantial habitation sites go unnoticed because artifacts get scattered and buried by later deposits. I just read of a couple of quite large settlements found in the newly expanded part of Petrified Forest National Park. Also, before my home was built, the area was probably farmland, which means the surface was disturbed, and artifacts that were noticed were picked up. Then the lot was disturbed when the house was built. Finally, even with millions of people over thousands of years, habitation sites made up only a tiny fraction of the landscape, so there is a very good chance that my home never was part of a habitation site (except mine). Therefore, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Suppose we try a different hypothesis. Indians had technology comparable to our own. They had good highways, flight, electricity and large cities. We just can't find any evidence because "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." In this case, the maxim is ridiculous. An advanced civilization on a par with our own would have left gigantic amounts of evidence. The fact that we don't find it is solid evidence that it doesn't exist.

And of course absence of evidence is used all the time in science as evidence of absence. We say the dinosaurs went extinct 67 million years ago, instead of simply hiding like in Dilbert, because we just don't find dinosaur fossils after that time. We are sure humans didn't come to North America before perhaps 20,000 years ago because of the total lack of evidence for human remains and artifacts from before that time. Absence of even rare things like dinosaur fossils and artifacts, becomes significant if it extends over a large enough area.

So the real principle is pretty clear. Failure to find something that's normally uncommon may mean you simply missed it, or by chance it never occurred in your search area. Failure to find something that should have left widespread and obvious evidence, is actual evidence of absence.

Finally, consider this. The police search your home for drugs and child porn. After an exhaustive search, they don't find any. But the DA takes you to trial anyway, arguing that "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." How do you feel about that maxim now?

The Plural of Anecdote is not Data

What on earth is data if it's not a large collection of individual observations, any one of which could be called an "anecdote?"

The problem with anecdotal evidence is that, to be valid, the anecdote has to be true and it has to be representative. The true part seems self-explanatory, except the world is full of urban legends (and a salute here to Jan Harold Brunvand for introducing the concept) that people pass along and embellish because they sound plausible. For example, I heard of a small child who was allowed to go to a public rest room by himself. There was a scream and a man rushed out. The parents found the child sexually mutilated. I heard the same story twice, years and half a dozen states apart. Then, during the Gulf War, I heard of a U.S. serviceman who had an affair with a Saudi woman. They were found out, the serviceman was quickly spirited out of the country and his hapless lover was executed. By this time, I knew about urban legends and recognized this tale as one immediately. My suspicions were confirmed when I heard the same story a second time, with a few details changed. So it pays to check sources.

However, it's my experience that when people demand sources for an incident, they rarely care anything about accuracy or intellectual honesty. Two minutes on Google will usually reveal whether a story is based on reputable sources or not, although even reputable media outlets regularly get conned. Much more often, a demand for sources is a cheap and lazy way of discrediting something the hearer doesn't want to accept.

Then there are what I call "gee whiz" facts. Things that sound impressive at first but turn out to have no substance when you look closer.

• "A million children are reported missing every year." That means that 18 million children, roughly one in four, would disappear by the time they reach 18. I suspect we'd notice that. Yes, a million children are reported missing every year, but the vast majority are found within 24 hours. And most of the long-term disappearances are due to non-custodial parents.
• "Suicide is the --th leading cause of death among teenagers." Without in the least making light of this issue, what kills teenagers? They're beyond the reach of childhood diseases and not vulnerable yet to old age diseases. That leaves accident, suicide and homicide, and anything but that order means there's a real problem. So suicide will always be a leading cause of death among teenagers because they die of so few other things.

Representative is another matter. Yes, there are millionaires who pay no income tax, but a visit to the Statistical Abstract of the United States will show that the average millionaire pays roughly three quarters of a million dollars. So the stories are true but they're not representative. Yes, there are welfare mothers with many out of wedlock kids, but the average welfare family has two kids. True, yes. Representative, no. Yes, there are people who stay on welfare for years, but most stay on a year or two. True, yes. Representative, no.

So instead of blowing off evidence as "anecdotal," ask whether it's true and representative. Yes, this may mean going to Google and getting your widdle fingers all sore from typing, but you might actually learn something. Oh, have you also noticed that conservatives tell "anecdotes," but liberals tell "narratives?"

Correlation Isn't Causation

Okay, then, what does demonstrate causality if it's not observing similar results time and time again? If you repeat a cause, and observe the same effect, especially if you can change details and predict how the results will change, you have a pretty ironclad case for causation. The laboratory sciences use this approach as the conclusive proof of theories. The problem arises when we look at one of a kind situations or events in the past and try to use data to figure out why things happened as they did. In those cases we can't reproduce all the potential causative factors at will.

Now a plot of my age against the price of gasoline shows a pretty linear trend, so either my getting older is making gasoline more expensive, or gasoline getting more expensive causes me to age. Interestingly, the big drop in prices in late 2014 didn't make me any younger (sob). And there are tons of joke examples. A site on spurious correlations shows graphs of:

• US spending on science, space, and technology <---> Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation
• Number people who drowned by falling into a swimming-pool <---> Number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in
  
• Per capita consumption of cheese (US) <---> Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets
• Age of Miss America <---> Murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects
• Per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese (US) <---> Civil engineering doctorates awarded (US)

Listing stuff like this is like eating potato chips; it's hard to stop. The Nicolas Cage and Miss America examples are especially nice because there are a number of peaks and valleys in the graphs. But all these graphs have correlation coefficients near or above 0.9. If I produced a similar graph showing, say, incidence of spanking versus psychological problems in later life, any social science journal would accept it. (If I had a similar correlation between spanking and success in later life, I'd have a lot more trouble.)

In order to be at least plausible evidence for causation, there has to be a plausible causative link. Maybe people get so distraught at spending money on space that they hang themselves. Maybe some movie goers disliked Wicker Man or Con Air so much that they drowned themselves in their swimming pool. But I doubt it. On the other hand, I recently plotted up vote tallies, race and poverty in the Deep South and found that they had insanely high correlation coefficients. There's no doubt about the connection there. Poverty is concentrated among blacks, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

No, nobody cares if you don't like the implications. If someone plots usage of pot or pornography against some negative social outcome and finds a strong correlation, and suggests a causal link, that's evidence for causation. The fact that you may not want to believe it is irrelevant. And your acceptable counter-strategies boil down to:

• Discredit the data. Show that the data are wrong or cherry-picked.
• Discredit the correlation. Show that the correlation doesn't hold in other, similar settings, or if you broaden the time or space range.
• Discredit the causal mechanism. 

Correlation, in and of itself, doesn't prove causation. But correlation, coupled with a reasonable causal explanation, does constitute strong evidence that there may be causation. And merely blowing off the connection with "correlation is not causation" is lazy and intellectually dishonest. Both of which are plausible reasons for disqualifying you from the debate.

And "Correlation doesn't prove causation" doesn't even apply to unique events. "I inoculated my kid, and she developed webbed feet and grew horns." That's not even correlation because there's nothing else to relate the event to. That's more like "Coincidence isn't causation."