Category Archives: Philosophy

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

To Those Who Oppose The Constitution

5 Comments

A response:

…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.

But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.

Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.

It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.

…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.

The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.

Health, Philosophy, Science And Society

The Secret Of Immortality

4 Comments

From a jellyfish?

[Update a few minutes later]

I posted this without reading it all, because it’s a long. But I found this telling:

Even some of Kubota’s peers are cautious when speaking about potential medical applications in Turritopsis research. “It is difficult to foresee how much and how fast . . . Turritopsis dohrnii can be useful to fight diseases,” Stefano Piraino, a colleague of Ferdinando Boero’s, told me in an e-mail. “Increasing human longevity has no meaning, it is ecological nonsense. What we may expect and work on is to improve the quality of life in our final stages.”

My emphasis. This is a religious belief, not a scientific one.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: life extension through gene therapy:

Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals’ health, delaying the onset of age-­‐related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.

The gene therapy consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-­modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extreme ends or tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell’s and therefore the body’s biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.

This study “shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-­based anti-­aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer,” the authors affirm. “Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage,” they add.

It’s from May, but I don’t recall seeing it.

[Update a while later]

Must be early-onset Alzheimers. I posted about it at the time.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Politicians’ “War On Science”

24 Comments

Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses were nonsensical — both parties have ideologies that are opposed to scientific reality.

But I disagree with this:

So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.

Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.

Business, Economics, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Lies Of The Left

15 Comments

Romney was, and most Republicans are, amateurs when it came to explaining them:

Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.

Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum-wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.

Yes, I face palmed when I heard that. Romney was no Reagan, because it was clear that he had spent too much time learning business, and far too little understanding policy and its effects (otherwise, he’d have never done RomneyCare). He had no core political philosophy, and it showed. He is smart, and a quick learner (he actually did start to speak conservatism like it wasn’t a second language in the waning days of the campaign), but he didn’t learn fast enough.

I wonder if he may try again? He’s a very determined man.

Then there’s this as well:

One of the secrets of Barack Obama’s success is his ability to say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.

Since most of the media will never expose Obama’s fallacies and falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.

Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.

For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm, and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are readily available from a number of sources.

Another example would be space policy. I know someone who’d be happy to do it, if I could raise funds for it. But it’s not important enough, apparently.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Michael Walsh:

Principles, not programs, should be the battle cry. Romney’s foolish complaint that Obama won by giving away free stuff plays right back into the hands of the konsultant korps that lost him the election in the first place. If Mitt had a vision for America wider than the cramped, pinched and perpetually gray New England horizon, he sure didn’t show it. He didn’t show it because he was incapable of conceiving it, and there clearly was no one on his insular Boston team capable of supplying one. Instead, we got the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor, which in the end proved to be the candidate’s epitaph.

Yes. He was a principled man in his personal life, perhaps more so than most politicians, but he had no political principles.