M. Little : Cold Fusion: Fact or Fantasy?

Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 407–409, 2009
0892-3310/09

Cold Fusion: Fact or Fantasy?

MARISSA E. LITTLE AND SCOTT R. LITTLE

EarthTech International, Inc. at Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
11855 Research Boulevard, Austin, TX 78759

e-mail: marissa@earthtech.org

When Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their initial
announcement about cold fusion in 1989, the scientific community was unusually
open toward incredible discoveries. A few years earlier a team of scientists had
announced the discovery of high temperature superconductors. Alex Muller
and Georg Bednorz were considered outsiders in the area of superconductor
research, their laboratory had no reputation in the fi eld, and they provided no
theoretical explanations. These facts, combined with previous failed attempts by
dedicated superconductor researchers, caused the announcement to be received
with skepticism. However, within a few short weeks nearly every replication
of the experiment was successful and improvements had been made (Nowotny &
Felt, 1997). In an almost parallel set of circumstances, Fleischmann and Pons,
neither of whom were specialists in the fi eld of nuclear physics, announced their
extraordinary results with no theoretical underpinning. But at this point the stories
diverge. Most of the efforts to replicate their experiment failed and the furor died
almost as quickly as it started (Simon, 2002).
One possible explanation for this turn of events is that cold fusion is not real.
In this case, the positive results obtained by numerous researchers (LENR-CANR
Library, n.d.) over the past 20 years would have to be due to some combination of
measurement error, misinterpretation of results, or even confi rmation bias, which
is “. . . the inclination to recruit and give weight to evidence that is consistent with
the hypothesis in question, rather than search for inconsistent evidence that could
falsify the hypothesis” (Risen & Gilobich, 2007). While this may not seem likely
due to the volume of published positive results, it should be noted that there are
countless null experiments that have remained unpublished. Several null results
were published shortly after the announcement when interest in cold fusion was
widespread (Browne, 1989), but the vast majority of null results after the initial
announcement have fallen victim to the “fi le drawer effect,” a phenomenon
that causes less emphasis to be placed on papers that prove the status quo. The
research behind these papers is simply stored in a fi le drawer and it never reaches
publication status. In an effort to combat this effect, we are belatedly publishing
pertinent null results in this issue of the Journal.

The other possible explanation is that cold fusion is real but diffi cult to
reproduce for reasons that are yet to be fully understood. Fleischmann and Pons
did not provide a complete specifi cation for the experiment. Subsequent efforts to
discover this specifi cation have not resulted in the usual narrowing of experimental parameters accompanied by increased reproducibility and strength of effect.
Instead, the cold fusion parameter space has exploded into an assortment of
loosely related methods and phenomena. In contrast to the original experiment,
which involved electrolysis of heavy water with a Pd cathode, cold fusion
experiments now include light water electrolysis, a variety of cathode materials,
gas-loaded metals, ultrasound cavitation, exploding wires, high-temperature
plasmas, etc. (Storms, 2007). This diversity can be optimistically interpreted as
evidence that the phenomenon is robust and rather reproducible. But it also can
be a symptom of confi rmation bias: evidence of cold fusion is found in any
suffi ciently complicated experiment.
It is quite diffi cult to judge which of these two scenarios is true. The fi eld of
cold fusion suffers greatly from the Experimenter’s Regress—a term coined by
Harry Collins (1981). Experimenter’s regress has two pertinent consequences in
this situation. First, “it is impossible to know by objective criteria alone whether
one or another experiment has been performed competently. Thus, rather than
providing an unambiguous way out of controversial affairs, experiments can only
serve to reinforce the apparent confl ict” (Saulson, 2001). This aspect of experimenter’s regress does not allow conclusions to be drawn about the positive results from cold fusion experiments, nor about the null results. One is unable to
determine the merit of an experiment if the expected outcome is not known. If
cold fusion is real, then the experiments with positive results should be lauded as
well performed. However, if cold fusion is nothing but the result of measurement
errors, then the null experiments were obviously correctly performed. Because of
the controversial nature of the claims, the results cannot be interpreted objectively.
Additionally, experimenter’s regress, combined with confi rmation bias, leads a
person into a feedback loop where they assume that the results obtained are the
correct ones since it is diffi cult to determine otherwise. This further polarizes
the two sides as experimenters with positive results become more convinced of
the veracity of cold fusion and experimenters with null results become more
convinced of the fantasy of cold fusion.
All doubts could be put to rest by the development of a commercial energy
source based on cold fusion. But before this development can begin, a robust
demonstration experiment is required to convince scientists, engineers, and investors.
A cold fusion cell that produced enough power to run itself would certainly
suffi ce. Several researchers have claimed such large quantities of excess heat; a
self-sustaining device should be possible even with the ineffi ciency of converting
heat to electricity. But no such device exists.
A cold fusion experiment that reproducibly produced strong, unambiguous
evidence of nuclear reactions would be the next best thing. Martin Fleischmann
lamented the lack of such an experiment in his opening remarks at the Seventh
International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-7) in 1998. Apparently, this
situation has not changed in the ensuing decade. Some cold fusion researchers
will claim to have such experiments in hand but the world has not yet seen the
expected consequences, namely large-scale investment and research in cold
fusion. Possibly some researchers are keeping their success a secret. Solving the
world’s energy problems would certainly bring both fame and fortune.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the mainstream scientifi c community
still does not accept cold fusion as a means of creating nuclear reactions.
This situation will persist until a robust demonstration experiment is developed
and publicized. If no such experiment ever appears, cold fusion will slowly fade
away and become nothing more than a footnote in the history of science.
About the Authors: Marissa and Scott Little work at EarthTech International,
a company dedicated to investigating new energy ideas. We have spent countless
hours on cold fusion experiments, with a great deal of emphasis on accurate
calorimetric measurements (Little et al., 2008). Despite this effort, we have never
seen a successful cold fusion experiment. We are still dedicated to this fi eld and
watch for new announcements with anticipation. Unfortunately, the null results
obtained in our laboratory have fostered the undeserved reputation that we
are trying to disprove cold fusion. Nothing could be further from the truth. This
reputation has lessened the interests of other scientists in being open and cooperative with us. However, our laboratory remains open and we remain optimistic that someday we will have the opportunity to make measurements on an experiment that irrefutably demonstrates the phenomenon known as cold fusion.

References

Browne, M. W. (1989, 3 May). Physicists debunk claim of a new kind of fusion. New York Times.
Collins, H. M. (1981). Son of seven sexes: The social destruction of a physical phenomenon. Social
Studies of Science, 11(1), 33–62. doi: 10.1177/030631278101100103.
LENR-CANR Library. (n.d.). Available at: http://www.lenr-canr.org.
Little, S. R., Luce, G. A., & Little, M. E. (2008). MOAC—A High Accuracy Calorimeter for Cold
Fusion Studies. Presented at the 14th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear
Physics. Available at: http://www.earthtech.org/experiments/ICCF14_MOAC.pdf.
Nowotny, H., & Felt, U. (1997). After the Breakthrough: The Emergence of High-Temperature
Superconductivity as a Research Field. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Risen, J., & Gilobich, T. (2007). Informal logical fallacies. In Sternberg, J., Roediger, H. L., &
Halpern, D. F. (Eds.), Critical Thinking In Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saulson, P. R. (2001). Life inside a case study. In Labinger, J. A., & Collins, H. M. (Eds.), The One
Culture?: A Conversation about Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Simon, B. (2002). Undead Science: Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion. Piscataway:
Rutgers University Press.
Storms, E. (2007). The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation
of Evidence and Explanations about Cold Fusion. Singapore: World Scientifi c Publishing Co.
Pte. Ltd.

REGINALD FIREHAMMER : Religion and Absolute Moral Values

The Liberal Institute

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ANALYSIS IN DEPTH

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Religion and Absolute Moral Values   by REGINALD FIREMAMMER   Religious people frequently claim religion is necessary because without it there would be no absolute moral values. They explain it by saying things like "without absolute moral values mankind would be morally rudderless," or "without absolute moral values mankind has no fixed direction by which to set their moral compass." While such expressions result in mixed metaphors, there is an important truth in them. Without absolute moral principles mankind truly is morally more mixed up than religion's metaphors. The peculiar thing is, while it is primarily the religious who are clamoring these days for a return to higher moral standards and true moral values, what the religious provide as absolute moral values is neither moral nor absolute.


God's Laws are Arbitrary, not Absolute
When the religious talk about absolute moral principles, they are referring to what they call "God's laws." God's laws are absolute, they say, because God is...well God, and whatever God says is absolute, because He says it. This may seem like a circular argument, but it isn't, because it is not presented as an argument at all. To the religious, it is an autoschediastic asserveration. Since you probably do not know what those words mean, you may be tempted to accept on faith that they are true -- that is how faith usually works. At the risk of endangering your faith, I will tell you autoschediastic asserverations are "self-listing truths," which means truths which are obvious, or what the bad philosophers call a priori knowledge.
(Note: A priori knowledge is the kind of knowledge you have without learning anything. It is the kind of knowledge people have if they receive their education in any modern public (government) school.) 

The problem with "obvious truths" is they are mostly incorrect. They are not the same thing as "common sense" which, as a matter of fact, should make us very suspicious of any so-called "obvious truths," especially those that contradict plain facts. Take, for example, the so called "obvious truth" that whatever God says is absolute. 

Since absolute means always true under all conditions, irrespective of anyone's wish or will nothing that depends on any authority's choice or declaration, whether that authority is a human or a god, is absolute. Anything that depends on anyone's whim, choice, or declaration is arbitrary and contingent. All dictated law is arbitrary because a dictator is not bound by any law or principle (else he could not dictate) and may declare, by fiat, anything he chooses. It is also contingent because it is not determined facts, but the whim or mood of the dictator at the moment the declaration is made and, of course, the dictator is free to change the "law" whenever a new whim or mood strikes him. Anyone who knows much about the history of religion, particular the Judaeo/Christian varieties, knows God frequently changes His mind -- which means His absolute laws are only absolute temporarily. 


True Moral Principles Absolute
True moral principles are neither arbitrary (dictated or pronounced by the fiat) nor contingent (dependent on any agencies, whims, or moods). Moral principles, like all truth, are determined by the nature of reality itself; and, like all truth, are discovered, not decided or chosen by anyone, not even God.

Those who claim there are no objectively discoverable moral values mean they have not discovered any. Human beings have a specific nature and live in a world of a specific nature and it is these facts that determine the moral principles by which human beings must conduct their lives to live successfully and happily in this world. 


Morality Determined by Principles, Not Codes
The moral systems of the religions all consist of moral codes which are nothing more than lists of prescriptions (things we must do) and proscriptions (things we must not do). While many of the things on these lists are things a moral individual would observe, no moral code can possibly be a good ethical system for at least three reasons:

• Moral principles and a moral code are opposites and contradictory. Moral values are not commandments, they are principles which one uses to judge which actions are morally right in any given circumstance. Morality pertains only to choice. A commandment eliminates choice. Those who accept the authority of commandments (or the dictator who issues them) have removed themselves from the sphere of morality; they exchanged choice for obedience, surrendering their choice to the will of the authority.
•  
• A Code of any kind takes the place of judgement. Choices are made by applying principles to circumstances to determine the appropriateness of an action. Principles enable one to determine consequences and to base choices on the reality of which actions will produce which results. A moral code eliminates the very essence of moral choice, judgement, by dictating action in all circumstances without regard to consequences or reason. 
•  
• A Code that does not cover every possible circumstance (no code can) provides no means of determining behavior in those cases not covered. There will always be more situations in the life of any human being requiring choices with moral consequences than any code, however extensive, will ever cover. With only a moral code and no moral principles, the individual is left with no moral guidance whatsoever in most of the moral issues of life.

When actual moral codes are examined their limitations as moral guides becomes apparent. The most common and well known of religious moral codes is the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The Ten Commandments are presumed to be absolute, at least in the abstract. In practice, however, there is some question about this presumption.


The Ten Commandments
Except for two of the ten commandments, all are prohibitions, that is, "thou shalt nots." Of the two that are not prohibitions, almost no one keeps the first, "remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,"; and the second, "honour thy father and thy mother," while loosely observed, is not even possible to many people, whose parents have passed away or who, for various reasons, have no idea in the world who their mother and father are. It is odd that an absolute moral code would include a requirement that, at least for some people, is not only impossible to keep, but totally without meaning. 

Another odd thing about the ten commandments is that there are not ten. In addition to the two "thou shalts" there are seven "thou shalt nots" summarized as follows: thou shalt not (1) kill, (2) steal, (3) lie, (4) make up your own religion, (5) fornicate, (6) covet, or (7) swear. But seven "thou shalt nots" plus two "thou shalts" only add up to nine. To get ten you must either turn the "make up your own religion" commandment into two, "have no other gods," and "make no graven images," as the Protestants do, or turn the "covet" commandment into two, "do not covet your neighbors house" and "do not covet your neighbor's wife," as the Catholics do. There really are only nine commandments, but ten seems much more impressive and significant, so why worry about exact truth when we're talking about God and absolute moral principles? 

These nine commandments, passed off as ten, are touted as the source and foundation of all Western civilization and the moral code that made America what it is today. One would expect anything responsible for so much would be very profound. When we examine these "ten" commandments, however, particularly the prohibitive commandments (you shouldn't kill, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear) there is not one profound thought among them.
They might seem profound to some aboriginal tribe in some backwater third-world nation, but to those who have spent their lives wrestling with moral issues in a modern advanced country like the United States, the assertion that murder, theft, and promiscuity are wrong are hardly earthshaking revelations. They are such simple concepts they are assumed everywhere there is civilization and intelligence. Even though they are regularly violated, their violation is always "justified" by some supposed "political necessity" allowed in the name of some kind of "rights" or excused as some kind of social or psychological "necessity" (they can't help it), and the justification is always vehemently argued. Even in their violation, their validity is admitted, else there would be no attempt to justify their violation. There is really nothing particularly profound about them. 

As for the other two prohibitions, do not covet or swear, far from being profound they are inane. To covet something only means to desire something which belongs to someone else. A desire itself cannot be immoral, even a desire, that if fulfilled, would be immoral. A wrong desire is only a temptation. What virtue is there in not doing wrong if one is never tempted to do wrong in the first place? So long as one only desires what another has, and neither murders them to get it, or steals it in some other way, there is nothing immoral in the desire. There is frequently a perfectly moral way to acquire the desired object anyway. 

Coveting is not only moral it is an absolute necessity to the economy of a free society. If no one ever "coveted" anything there could be no economy as we know it, or any other kind of economy for that matter. The local grocery, hardware, or drug store owners are our neighbors. If none of us ever coveted what is their property we would never go to their stores to purchase anything. It is only because we covet our neighbor's food (in his grocery store) or our neighbor's lawn mower (in his hardware store) or our neighbor's medicine (in his drug store) that we go to their stores and purchase the things we covet. 

Nevertheless, those who accept the ten commandments as an absolute moral code will swear that it is wrong to covet. They will also explain to you that the ten commandments do not prohibit what we normally call "swearing," only taking God's name in vain is prohibited. What they will not explain is what that means, because they are very likely to have a bumper sticker that reads "God is my co-pilot," and see nothing vain in that use of God's name. We are left wondering what in God's name they mean by swearing. 


Some Commandments More Absolute Than Others
Maybe the most peculiar thing of all about the ten commandments is that those who insist most vehemently they are absolute do not themselves regard them as absolute. If the commandments are absolute it would be no more immoral to break one of the commandments than another. 

In the United States this was, at one time, taken quite seriously. It was felt the dictum to observe the Sabbath was just as important as the prohibition against stealing. In most places "blue laws" were passed to prevent Sunday (the Christian substitute for the Sabbath) from being desecrated. Today the blue laws are all but gone, and while some Christians do sincerely believe they ought to be brought back, none of them are seeking laws to put people in jail for working on Saturday or Sunday or whatever the latest change to that absolute unchangeable law is. 


Missing From the Ten Commandments
The point of ethics is to tell us how we ought to live in this world. One of the first things one notices about the ten commandments is, except for the two mentioned, they are all negative. It's fine to tell us what we should not do but the real question of ethics is what should we do? To that question the ten commandments provide no answer. 

If you tried to live strictly by the ten commandments the only thing you would be required to do is honor your parents and spend Saturday doing nothing (to keep it holy). The ten commandments do not require you to do anything else, and so long as you never kill anyone, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear, you are perfectly moral. Of course, you won't be worth a blessed thing to yourself or anyone else in the world and will starve to death if someone else does not undertake to feed you but, according to the ten commandments, those, apparently, are not moral issues. 

Perhaps the most blatant contradiction of the absoluteness of the ten commandments is the way Jews and Christians, especially those who truly understand and practice their religions faithfully, live their lives. I do not mean they "break" the commandments, although they observe some more loosely than others. On the contrary, in their day-to-day lives they exhibit a decency, reasonableness, and moral rectitude that is much higher than simply observing the ten commandments would produce. Most are productive, self-supporting, honest, ambitious, responsible, and reasonable people who seek to excel and achieve the highest levels of virtue and accomplishment that they are able. In spite of their outward declaration of a belief in an absolute code they live by an absolute principle that "to do less than your best is a sin." 

This is not to be taken as an endorsement of Christianity or any other religion. With extremely few exceptions almost all religionists embrace and promote some form of superstition. Nevertheless, there are degrees of dangerousness in superstition. 

A Christian of the Reformed branch is much to be preferred to that anti-religious movement called Humanism for example. The Reformed Christians believe their God predestines the majority of mankind to eternal torment in hell but that hell, at least, is in the next world. In this world these same Reformed Christians are great defenders of individual liberty and moral values. The collectivist, statist, altruist, anti-moral, pseudo-intellectual ideology of the Humanists, however, if actually put into practice, would make a hell out of this world, here and now. 


REGINALD FIREHAMMER is the founder
and editor of The Autonomist

http://www.liberalinstitute.com/ReligionAndAbsoluteMoralValues.html

WILLIAM DWYER : The True Meaning Of "Civil Rights"

The Liberal Institute

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ANALYSIS IN DEPTH

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The True Meaning Of "Civil Rights" 
by WILLIAM DWYER    The term "rights" first appeared in the American political context in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence, which referred to rights as “unalienable” and applying to "all men," i.e., to all people (even though the founders didn't always practice what they preached), but the term "civil rights" did not appear until 1791, when it was used by Thomas Paine to whom it meant no less than what the term "unalienable rights" meant to Thomas Jefferson. "Civil rights", according to Paine, are based on the natural rights of every member of society. In his essay The Rights of Man, he states:

"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have less rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all of his civil rights. . . . Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. . . . Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent."

Moreover, in "A Serious Address to the People of Pennsylvania," Paine states that "[w]henever I use the words freedom or rights, I desire to mean a perfect equality of them. "It is this broad base, this universal foundation," he says, "that gives security to all and every part of society." It is only an equality of rights that promotes harmony among human beings and inspires one person to defend the rights of another. If, as was true under Jim Crow and is true again today, I have less rights than you, because you are a beneficiary of mandatory racial and ethnic preferences, then why should I care about defending your rights? Your rights are not my rights. It is only the repeal of mandatory preferences and a return to equal rights that can foster a mutuality of interest among different ethnic groups within society.

The term "civil rights" appeared in American law for the first time in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was designed to extend to blacks the same rights that whites already possessed. One of the principal sponsors of the Act described civil rights as "the absolute rights of individuals, such as the right to personal security, the right of personal liberty and the right to acquire and enjoy property." Civil rights were thus construed not only to apply equally to every individual, irrespective of race or gender, but also to include the fundamental rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. The principle underlying liberty and property rights is that no one may gain values from others without their voluntary agreement -- that just as people have the right to associate with others by mutual consent, so they have the right to dissociate from others through personal choice. 

For instance, if two people of different races want to marry, a law against miscegenation would violate their civil rights, but so would a law compelling them to stay married, if either party wants a divorce. If two people of different races want to do business, a Jim Crow law preventing them would violate their civil rights, but so would a law compelling them to do business, if either party refuses. 

Thus, to force a black worker to labor for a white employer (as was done on the Southern plantations) would violate civil rights, but so would forcing a white employer to hire a black worker (as is done under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts). To threaten a business with closure for serving blacks (as was done under Jim Crow) would violate civil rights, but so would threatening a business with closure for refusing to serve blacks (as is done under Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts). The proper function of government -- and the fundamental purpose of civil rights -- is to protect and defend freedom of choice, not violate it -- to protect people from being enslaved to others, not enslave people to others. 

If an owner or employer has liberty and property rights -- if he has rights to freedom of choice and freedom of association -- then he has the right to choose his employees and patrons on any basis he wishes, even one that is racially discriminatory. 
Although capitalism discourages invidious discrimination in the markeplace and would tend to create an economic system free of such discrimination, people still have the right to associate with, or dissociate from, anyone they choose, regardless of the person's race, religion, sex or national origin, and regardless of the reason for their choice. The right to dissociate from others, to be free from bondage to others -- which is clearly implied by the 13th Amendment -- does not mean that one is free to dissociate from another person only if one has a good, non-discriminatory reason for doing so. It means that one is free to dissociate from another person, irrespective of one's reasons for doing so. 
 Freedom of choice does not apply only to choices that are deemed rational by the government, nor does it depend on the particular reasons for one's choice. All that matters is that one be free to choose. 

In fact, the practice of racial and gender preference by businesses and private universities is already sanctioned by law, even though it constitutes discrimination on the basis of race and gender and is technically in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 
This kind of private discrimination was recognized by a Supreme Court decision in which the Virginia Military Institute was barred from discriminating against women, if it continued to accept state funding. The implicit premise on which the Supreme Court based its decision is that discrimination is permissible in institutions that are privately funded but not in those that are publicly funded. Just as we allow private universities, like Notre Dame, to favor a particular religion but not public universities, so we allow private universities, like Mills College, to favor a particular gender, but not public universities. 

To be sure, this distinction is not adhered to consistently, given the practice of affirmative action in public institutions, but the principle is defensible nonetheless. The separation of race and state and of gender and state is as justifiable as the separation of church and state. By the same token, just as we do not deny parochial schools freedom of religion, neither should we deny businesses and private universities freedom of association and freedom of choice. 
If a private school or business has the right to discriminate in favor of a particular religion, then it should have the right to discriminate in favor of a particular race or gender.

To allow a person the freedom to practice discrimination does not, of course, imply that one sanctions his conduct, any more than to allow him the freedom to express a racist viewpoint implies that one sanctions its content. Just as someone who opposes racist propaganda has no right under freedom of speech to ban it, so neither does someone who opposes racial discrimination have a right under freedom of association to ban it. The point is that one may not interfere with another person's freedom of choice simply because one disagrees with the way that he or she exercises that freedom. 

Defenders of the First Amendment often point out that the true test of one's belief in freedom of speech is whether or not one allows freedom for speech that one finds offensive. By the same principle, the true test of one's belief in freedom of association is whether or not one allows freedom for associations that one finds offensive (e.g., those based on racial discrimination). 

In fact, he who has no right to freedom of association -- no right to determine whom to associate with -- has no right to refrain from practicing racial discrimination, should the government decide to make such discrimination mandatory. It is just such mandatory discrimination to which the old miscegenation and separate-but-equal laws bear grim testimony, and of which the contemporary statutes on affirmative action and racial quotas are a modern expression.

Observe that whereas the original intent of Title VII was to make racial discrimination illegal in private business, that statute has subsequently been interpreted to authorize affirmative action, making racial discrimination mandatory in private business. And this, despite assurances by proponent's of the statute that no such thing as quotas could ever be inferred from it. Consider, for example, the "famous last words" of Senator Hubert Humphrey when the Civil Rights Bill was being debated in Congress:

"Contrary to the allegations of some opponents of this title, there is nothing in it that will give any power to the Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial 'quota' or to achieve a certain racial balance...."

Even more outrageous is that affirmative action violates explicit disclaimers included in Title VII itself. Section 703 (j) reads as follows:

"Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this title to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex or national origin of such individual or group on account of any imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentages of persons of any race, color, religion or sex, or national origin employed by any employer . . . ."

Once the government can violate freedom of association in order to prevent discrimination, it can do so in order to mandate discrimination, even to the point of perverting and explicitly transgressing its very own civil rights statutes! 

In addition to violating freedom of association, Title VII violates freedom of choice in the use of one's property. If the government may dictate the use of one's property, then the government is the effective owner of the property, and you, the legitimate owner, merely its rightless, dispossessed custodian. The essence of ownership is the right of the owner to control his or her property (consistent with the right of others to control theirs). As the Supreme Court declared in 1917:

"Property is more than the mere thing which a person owns. It is elementary that it includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it. The Constitution protects these essential attributes of property.... There can be no conception of property aside from its control and use, and upon its use depends its value."

Furthermore, without property rights no other rights are possible. If people have no right to control their own property, then they have no right to control their own lives, in which case, there can be no such thing as civil rights. 
People whose lives are at the behest of a higher authority do not act by right but only by permission. 
Nor are the interests of blacks and minorities any more secure under a government that can function as either friend or foe, depending on the winds of political change -- a government that can dole out favors or demand sacrifices on the premise that people's lives and property belong, not to themselves, but to the state. 

A person who has no right to control his own life and property is a slave -- a status that cannot be any more reassuring for blacks than for whites. As 19th Century liberal Auberon Herbert observed, "no man can have rights over another man, unless he first have rights over himself.... and if we grant him the latter right, this is at once fatal to the former." (The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, LibertyClassics, 1978, p. 46.) 

The "right to enslave others" -- to control their lives and property -- is, therefore, a self-contradiction. Quoting Ayn Rand:

"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others [to the rightful property of others], it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. "Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
"No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as 'the right to enslave'." ("Man's Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 96.)

If a black business owner prefers the company of black employees but is forced to hire members of other ethnic groups in order to avoid charges of racial discrimination, then he is deprived of freedom of choice and freedom of association, the very rights that black workers were deprived of in being forced to labor for white employers. 

This does not mean, of course, that the violations of civil rights inflicted on business owners today compare in severity or degree to those inflicted on blacks centuries earlier. But it does mean that these latter day violations entail a rejection of the same principle of individual autonomy as did slavery in the antebellum South. George Santayana observed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It is equally true that those who cannot grasp fundamental principles are condemned to repeat their violation. 


WILLIAM DWYER writes for Rebirth of Reason
and other Objectivist publications

http://www.liberalinstitute.com/CivilRights.html

GENNADY STOLYAROV II : National Self-Determination vs. Individual Self-Determination

The Liberal Institute

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ANALYSIS IN DEPTH

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National Self-Determination vs. Individual Self-Determination   by GENNADY STOLYAROV II  Opponents of any kind of American military intervention in the affairs of other countries will frequently cite the concept of national self-determination as a justification for their position. In their view, it is the right of “the people” of a particular country to “choose” what political arrangements will exist in that country. But this, by itself, is a muddled claim. When encountered by it, the best approach is to ask, “What is meant by ‘the people’?” and “Who is doing the choosing?” 

There are two fundamental and mutually incompatible ways of interpreting the term “the people.” Either, “the people” could mean “each and every individual, in his own capacity as a decision-maker” or it could mean “the government, using as the justification for its actions some kind of mandate from the people -- be it the decision of a majority or some other claim to legitimacy.” A somewhat different, but related, formulation of the second case might be “the majority of the population of the country, insofar as it tolerates the existing government by not rebelling against it or by not having already overthrown it.” 

If we take “the people” to mean each and every individual, then the right to choose means the right to take whatever actions a given individual sees fit to further his life, liberty, and property -- without infringing on the identical rights of all other individuals. If this premise is granted, it follows that there are certain courses of action that the government cannot take -- such as killing or expropriating an individual who has not taken anyone else’s life or property -- no matter how many people or how many officials want this action to occur. The right of an individual to life implies a prohibition on killing that individual for everyone else -- governments and majorities included. This is the basic formulation of the concept of individual self-determination. 

On the other hand, if governments have the right to do whatever course of action is sanctioned by majority rule, claims to divine right, “reasons of state,” “the common good,” “the greatest good for the greatest number,” or political expediency -- then it follows that there exist cases in which individual rights can be infringed by governments in order to obtain these allegedly “higher” ends. The government can justify killing an innocent man because the majority of his hateful neighbors wanted this to happen -- or it can justify killing him because the dictator wanted to take his property without his further resistance. Once “the people” is equated with “the government,” it becomes all too easy for the men in power to follow the example of Louis XIV and proclaim, “L’état, c’est moi!” (I am the state.) This, in essence, is the explicit formulation and implication of the idea of national self-determination -- although its proponents would certainly never put the matter so bluntly. 

Indeed, advocates of national self-determination have recently been heard to claim that “the Iraqi people” “chose” to live under the murderous, sadistic regime of Saddam Hussein. How did “they” “choose” this? Did “they” love Saddam Hussein? Probably not, considering how many of “them” he killed. Did “they” at least not attempt to rebel against him? In fact, thousands of them did -- on multiple occasions. He just happened to have more resources at his disposal than they did -- so he crushed the uprisings and killed them. What national self-determination has come to mean is -- in essence -- that the lack of a successful internal rebellion against any form of government necessarily legitimates that government. Indeed, by accepting the premise that the government can have legitimacy apart from protecting the inalienable rights of every individual under its jurisdiction, the proponent of national self-determination will often be led to argue the old Leibnizian optimist position that “What is, is right.” They may not want to advocate this position, but national self-determination taken to its logical conclusion necessitates that they do so -- and many fall into this trap. 

While national self-determination can provide a justification for any government on the basis of its mere existence, individual self-determination imposes more rigorous criteria; it requires that the government in question actually be just by protecting every one of its constituents without itself infringing their rights. If any government violates this purpose, then -- in the words of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson -- “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” What, then, is meant by “the people” in this formulation? To remain consistently within the framework of individual self-determination, “the people” means “each and every individual, in his own capacity as a decision-maker.” 

Consider this: if you individually had the abilities of Superman and the resources of Bill Gates, by the theory of individual self-determination, you individually would have had the right to go into Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein, and remove any other unambiguous violations of individual rights that you observed. You would, of course, not have any moral or legal obligation to do so -- because to impose such an obligation on you would be to violate your own right to liberty. Besides, you could not possibly fulfill such an obligation consistently -- as there are also major individual rights violations in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and tens of other countries and minor individual rights violations virtually everywhere in the world. 

How would you know which would be the best way to prioritize among these competing deeds of benevolence? Which people would you need to save first? While this question cannot be answered in an abstract, morally unambiguous way, it is clear that if you chose to save any person from political oppression, you would be doing a good, generous, benevolent deed for that person. More basically, it is clear that you have the right to do this -- just as courageous individuals in the antebellum North had the right to shelter escaped slaves and conscientious citizens in Nazi Germany had the right to protect Jews from deportation. 

Indeed, while virtually no one among us has the ability to individually liberate an entire country, we know numerous instances of courageous private persons who have saved tens or even hundreds of people from misery, oppression, and death at the hands of unjust governments. These people are typically praised as heroes, not condemned as violating any kind of alleged self-determination. 

Where does the recognition of the right of individual self-determination put American military intervention? All that can be said is that it is the right, but not the obligation, of the American military to remove oppressions of individual rights wherever they can be found. For instance, opponents of the Iraq occupation may cite other prudential reasons for opposing the occupation, but they cannot say that the U. S. military had no right to occupy Iraq in the first place. Serious objections can be made to the planning of the occupation, its duration, its management, and its continuation – but recognizing individual self-determination implies conceding that the occupation was at least legitimate from a theoretical natural rights perspective. It is still possible to oppose any particular proposed military intervention -- in Iran, North Korea, or elsewhere -- as unwise, counterproductive, or an undue expenditure of resources. But it is not possible to say that there exists no right for anybody -- America’s military personnel included -- to remove or correct oppressive governments wherever they may be found. 

GENNADY STOLYAROV II is a writer and artist in almost every genre;
more information is available at his literary-intellectual review
The Rational Argumentator

http://www.liberalinstitute.com/NationalVsSelfDetermination.html

BRAD TRUN : On Ayn Rand On Racism

The Liberal Institute

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ANALYSIS IN DEPTH

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On Ayn Rand On Racism
by BRAD TRUN

Ayn Rand repudiated collectivism in all forms, but she reserved her most strident and sweeping condemnation for what she regarded as collectivism applied to racial identity. She wrote, "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage..."

This oft-quoted passage from The Virtue of Selfishness is, of course, intended to be an affirmation of individualism. But, as I shall argue forthwith, Rand's overly broad conception of racism affirms premises of political correctness that stifle independent thinking.

According to Rand, asserting that race carries moral or social (which subsumes political) significance constitutes racism. A Black Panther who advocates killing white babies is surely, then, a racist, insofar as he regards whites as morally less deserving of a right to life than blacks.
But a racist in Rand's lexicon, as in the Orwellian lexicon of political correctness, can also be anyone who studies racial variation honestly and in full context, taking into account aspects of it that are socially significant. An evolutionary biologist who offers an explanation for the disproportionate success of sub-Saharan Africans in sprinting, based on their longer limbs and higher centers of gravity as compared to other races, risks facing the same charge as a militant Black Panther: racist. (Though for political correctness' most militant adherents, only the scientist would be considered racist. Blacks, they say, can't be racist, and ethnocentric blacks are automatically deemed civil rights activists.)

Racial variation in athletic ability arguably doesn't -- or shouldn't -- carry much social significance. But racial variation in intelligence -- the very attribute that distinguishes the human species from all others and makes wealthy, free societies possible -- surely is socially significant. A geneticist who seeks to identify markers for East Asian aptitude in mathematics, or for Europeans' higher scores on tests of verbal ability as compared to Africans, will be branded a racist regardless of whether the findings are objectively true.

The geneticist will be condemned not for ascribing moral superiority to any one race over another, but simply for making an assertion of fact pertaining to the distribution of genes that code for intelligence. The only way a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist can be sure to avoid being the target of a "racist" epithet coming from the politically correct thought police or a strict adherent of Rand's definition of racism is to profess a belief that cognitive capacity is distributed roughly equally among all branches of the human species, in spite of:

• the fact that biogeographical branches, or races, of humanity possess characteristic, measurably distinguishable skull morphologies that affect brain size and structure;

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• the impossibly low probability in evolutionary theory that cognitive adaptations would be exempt from the same adaptive processes that formed variations in physical traits;

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• the consistency and persistency of racial IQ orderings around the world that no real-world combination of cultural, political, and economic influences has proven capable of reordering.

It's not that the weight of the evidence augers against the premise that all races are equally equipped cognitively. It's that there is no evidence to weigh in consideration of the equalitarian hypothesis even being plausible. Equalitarianism is pure idealism.

There isn't a single nation, a single city, a single school district anywhere in the world where black students perform at or above white and Oriental students on average. Yes, some individual blacks do excel academically. Cognitive capacity, as with height, nose width, vocal strength, and other phenotypes, is distributed in a range that approximately takes the shape of a bell curve for both blacks and whites, respectively. The bell curves for blacks and whites overlap, so there is a fair chance that a random black person would be more intelligent than a white person selected at random. But there is virtually no chance that a large population of blacks would be endowed with mental hardware that functions on par with a large population of whites.

The average IQ score of blacks in the U.S. is slightly more than one full standard deviation lower than the average for whites. The IQ gap has held steady for as long as it has been measured -- even going back to the days of segregated schools -- increasing modestly in some years and decreasing modestly in others. Averages matter because they have long-term predictive power. If a black population were to completely replace a white population in a geographic area (as has nearly occurred in Detroit, for example, which went from 90% white to 90% black in the latter half of the twentieth century), the social consequences would necessarily be significant.

They would be as predictable as the consequences of lowering that population's average IQ by one full standard deviation: more poverty, more crime, more corruption, more dysfunction, and less freedom for generations to come. From Detroit, to Rio de Janeiro, to London, every non-African city on Earth that has attempted to integrate African populations has experienced varying degrees of these very predictable consequences.

Under the regime of political correctness, welcoming more African diversity is deemed to be a moral virtue. But proffering an accurate prediction of the effects of African diversity is verboten.

Given that the United Nations projects the population of Africa will triple in this century, growing by 2.6 billion people while the developed world shrinks, citizens in countries that will be subject to massively increasing immigration pressures from Africa should know what to expect.

The equalitarian idealists expect what they've been expecting for decades: that which never has been and never will be. Ever since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the idea of achieving substantive racial equality has trumped recognition of racial realities.

Leading up to the Brown decision, the neologism "racism" popped into popular discourse. The invention of the term coincides with the rise of political correctness, which renders the pursuit of truth inseparable from and subservient to ideological imperatives.

A racist in popular parlance is anyone who says anything about race that is socially unacceptable. What makes one a racist is vague, subjective, ever-changing, and ultimately ungraspable. The arbitrariness of the term means anyone can hurl an accusation of racism against anyone on virtually any grounds.

If the term ever functioned as a valid concept, Rand failed to articulate it. Instead, she conceived of racism as being anything that ties race to moral or social significance. This amounts to a mis-integrated package deal.
The reason why is illustrated by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. The man who penned, "All men are created equal" didn't intend to imply what modern-day egalitarians believe: that nature endowed all races with equal attributes. To the contrary, Jefferson believed that blacks were "in reason much inferior" to whites. But he regarded blacks as the equals of whites morally, as far as their basic rights as human beings were concerned.

Jefferson would have found the attempt to lump into a single concept a principle establishing moral equality with one prescribing innate equality in intelligence to be strange and unenlightened. Observations of human attributes are either accurate or inaccurate, irrespective of any notions of morality. As Jefferson urged, "Follow truth wherever it may lead."

Does age have social significance? Does gender? One's being eight years old versus eighteen carries social significance in terms of one's suitability to obtain employment, to serve on a jury, to engage in sexual relations, etc. An eighteen year-old will be treated differently in social situations than an eight year-old, but not because being eighteen makes one morally superior. Similarly, being male or female carries social significance not because one gender is superior to another, but because there are important physiological differences between the two. Does recognition of such differences make one a sexist? Does recognition of age differences make one an ageist? Or does recognition of objective age, sex, and race differences make one a realist?

A conclusion that racial disparities in intelligence are explainable by racial genetics is not a normative assertion. It either corresponds with reality, or it doesn't. Either the adaptive process over hundreds of thousands of years created unique physiological variations within geographically isolated branches of the human species that extend to their respective brain development, or it didn't.

The truth can't be deduced from moral proscriptions against racism, however one wishes to define it. The truth about race is that which corresponds to the reality of race. Efforts to demonize discussions of the social significance of racial lineage are tantamount to efforts from religionists of centuries gone by to prevent astronomers from informing the masses that Earth isn't the center of the universe.

Those who hurl the charge of "racist" against those who merely identify biological origins and properties of human races are, in effect, declaring that they regard nature itself as racist. They take their idea of racial equalitarianism as a metaphysical starting point and condemn those whose grounding is in a reality that doesn't conform to idealistic impositions.

Metaphysical realism is the foundation of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Rand made a number of normative assertions that Objectivists widely regard as non-essential to her philosophy. For example, she infamously remarked that it would be improper for a female to run for President of the United States. She also held that homosexuality was disgusting and immoral. Rand's moral proscriptions on female political ambitions and particular sexual expressions can be rejected as being at odds with more fundamental principles she espoused and with what science now tells us.
We know, for example, that homosexuality is innate to some people's genetic makeup. They cannot be judged morally for the sexual orientation that nature gave them.

We also know that racial differences that are more than skin deep inevitably do manifest in ways that are socially significant. Black sub-Saharan Africans aren't immoral for carrying genes that code for relatively low general intelligence; nor are people who identify this fact of reality. Blacks aren't heroic for carrying genes that give them superior running speed; nor are those who substitute an idea of innate racial equality for the racial variation that is metaphysically given.

Just as Ayn Rand was mistaken to morally impugn homosexuals, she was mistaken to apply a term of condemnation to those who seek the truth, wherever it leads, about the nature and social implications of racial variation. In attempting to package two disparate standards by which racism could be identified -- ascription of moral or social significance -- into a single concept, Rand created an anti-concept. Without an objective criterion for differentiating a racist from a non-racist, "racist" has no clear meaning other than that of a vacuous insult, which is what the term as it's popularly used, overused, and abused to no end today, functions as.

It's time for serious advocates of reason and liberty to ditch the anti-conceptual epithets, ditch the unfounded idealism, and pitch any remaining vestiges of political correctness into the ash heap of their personal intellectual history. For too long, too many within and without Objectivist and libertarian circles have felt bound by ideology to evade the realities of race. Evasion is, as Rand herself might well have put it, the lowest, most primitive form of irrationality.

 http://www.liberalinstitute.com/OnAynRandOnRacism.html 

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