Libertarians generally favor relaxing criminal laws. They want to eliminate capital punishment (which deters violent crime). They are pro-choice on abortion. They want to decriminalize sex work of all kinds. And they want to decriminalize highly-addictive hard drugs. Let’s take a look at that last one and see if it’s produced results.

Here’s Reason magazine writing in August 2021. They are far left / libertarian on social issues:

In 1973, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize marijuana use, setting in motion a movement that has unraveled much of the disastrous U.S. drug war—with far-reaching consequences.

Today, Oregon is once again at the vanguard of reform: In February, it enacted Measure 110, a law ending prison and jail sentences for all types of drug use and possession, whether it be cocaine, meth, heroin, or psychedelics.

[…]Haven Wheelock, who runs a needle exchange in Portland called Outside In, says delaying decriminalization would have been morally unacceptable.

[…]Wheelock says that even if Oregon’s decriminalization gets off to a bumpy start, in no small part because the pandemic has exacerbated substance abuse problems nationwide, that Oregon voters have made the right choice.

“I think we’re going to see systems improve. I think we’re going to see people have access to care that they currently don’t have access to. I think we’re going to see less people getting saddled with convictions that harm them for the rest of their lives. And to me, all of that is a win,” says Wheelock.

And, here is the Cato Institute, a libertarian advocacy group, crowing happily about legalizing hard drugs:

In November 2020, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession for personal use of small amounts of all drugs, including cocaine, heroin, LSD, methamphetamine, and oxycodone. Oregon is the only U.S. state to have implemented this policy.

[…]The problem, however, is that 110 did not go far enough.

While 110 eliminated serious penalties for personal use, it did not legalize production and sale of drugs.

When you make something legal, more people use it. And that’s exactly what happened.

Libertarians seem to think that when you legalize something addictive, then no one will commit any crimes to feed their addictions. Of course people will be able to keep their jobs with a cocaine addiction. And OF COURSE cocaine addicts will be able to make enough money legally from that job to support their habit. Libertarians think that crime will go down, because people with addictions can just work at their white collar jobs, and pay for their cocaine. No problem.

So, what happened next? Something that was a great surprise to libertarians.

The far-left The Atlantic noted:

But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession.

Libertarians like to point to Portugal as a model for successful drug decriminalization, but again it’s just wishing and hoping.

The far-left Washington Post explains:

Portugal decriminalized all drug use, including marijuana, cocaine and heroin, in an experiment that inspired similar efforts elsewhere, but now police are blaming a spike in the number of people who use drugs for a rise in crime. In one neighborhood, state-issued paraphernalia — powder-blue syringe caps, packets of citric acid for diluting heroin — litters sidewalks outside an elementary school.

[…]A newly released national survey suggests the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages. Portugal’s prevalence of high-risk opioid use is higher than Germany’s, but lower than that of France and Italy. But even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.

Going back to Oregon, the article also notes that “overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.”

I think that libertarians are great on fiscal policy. But I don’t think we need to listen to them on social policy. Or on foreign policy, but that’s for another post.

A useful thing about getting older is learning which groups in America are conservative and which ones are leftist. For example, lawyers, teachers, school boards tend to be leftist. Certainly teacher unions are leftist, judging from their political donations to Democrats. Librarians also tend to be leftist. They tend to champion secular left values to kids, against the wishes of parents.

Here’s an article from The Federalist that discusses a new report about the goals of the American Library Association’s president, Emily Drabinski:

The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, published a video and memo this month compiling radical quotes from Emily Drabinski, the president of the powerful American Library Association (ALA), a nonprofit that receives some of its money from member libraries, many of which are taxpayer-funded. The ALA, the oldest and biggest library association boasting nearly 50,000 members, coordinates programs at local libraries across America.

The report documents Drabinski, a self-described lesbian Marxist, attacking conservatives and parents as “far right, white supremacist, fascist,” an “angry white mob,” and the “Christo-fascist right.”

Being a Marxist, Drabinski said, is “very much who I am and shapes a lot of how I think about social change.” She has criticized the idea of “gender as a binary system with only two acceptable gender markers” and championed LGBT books in children’s sections. Drabinski, who supports drag queen story hours, also whined in a 2013 academic paper that religious books under the Dewey Decimal System are “overwhelmingly Christian” and present heterosexuality as “normative.”

[…]Libraries are “good places that do all kinds of things that people on the right don’t like,” Drabinski said on the “Citations Needed” podcast in March, according to the report.

Anyone who wants to disagree with Drabinski about using libraries to do things that people on the right don’t like is typically called a “book banner” – someone who likes to ban books. That’s what people on the secular left like to when parents express their desire for their children to learn computer science, instead of women’s studies, gay studies, Marxist studies, etc. I prefer that libraries stock “Code Complete, Second Edition” by Steve McConnell, instead of “Why your feelings determine your gender”. And that makes me a book banner, according to the secular left.

It’s too bad that Drabinski never studied anything useful, like computer science. Computer science is harder than “library science”, but it would probably have thought her how to think critically, how to solve problems in the real world, and how to think through her beliefs rationally. As it stands, we just need to understand that secular leftists like her are opposed to parents, and they should be kept away from children. They are dangerous to children.

Personally, I would just just privatize all the libraries, and force them to appeal to customers if they want to get paid. As long as they are getting taxpayer money, they can do as they please. No more student loans for non-STEM degrees. No more public sector unions. No more taxpayer-funding of the secular left. Instead, we need to privatize everything, give parents more control of their children’s education, and people who want to work in schools should have to complete 5 years in the private sector, first.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer is my favorite defender of Christianity these days. His first book covered the origin of life. His second book covered the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record. And his third book covered the origin of the universe and fine-tuning. In this post, we’ll see a recent popular-level article he wrote for The Federalist, and 6 new short videos he made for Prager University.

Here is latest article from my favorite news source – The Federalist. He explains how scientific discoveries provide evidence for a Creator of the universe:

From the first astronomical investigations about the early history of the universe, light, and other forms of radiant energy, have yielded the most important clues about cosmic origins. During the 1920s, astronomers discovered that the wavelengths of light coming from distant galaxies were stretched out, or “red-shifted,” as if the galaxies were moving away from us. Just as sound coming from a train whistle drops in pitch as the result of the sound waves being stretched out as the train recedes, light coming from a distant galaxy changes color (becomes more red) as light waves are elongated as galaxies move away from Earth.

Soon after the discovery of the red shift, Belgian priest-physicist Georges Lemaître and Caltech astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies farther away from Earth were receding faster than those close at hand. That suggested a spherical expansion of the universe in all directions of space like a balloon inflating from a singular explosive beginning—from a “Big Bang.”

Then in 1965, physicists discovered a different kind of light they thought provided further evidence of the Big Bang. While working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently discovered an extremely low-energy radiation on their highly sensitive, large antennas. This radiant energy, now known as the Cosmic Background Radiation, is postulated to be a remnant of the earliest moments after the Big Bang when the universe was immensely hot and densely compacted.

Those are the 3 most common pieces of evidence for a cosmic beginning – and therefore, a Cosmic Beginner. And this evidence is likely to be enhanced by NASA’s newest telescope, which Dr. Meyer talks about:

[O]n December 22 NASA will launch a new satellite capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang—a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of the universe and, in their own ways, reveal God to the world.

NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope will be carried into space this week from French Guiana on the back of an Ariane 5 rocket. The $10 billion, 21-foot telescope features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope—NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time.

The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes, not from those very earliest moments after the beginning, but from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later. Detecting that light will nevertheless provide further confirmation of an expanding universe.

Since the new telescope can detect infrared light—invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths—it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang.

[…]This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.” If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning—as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest—it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy—no physics—would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

Instead, whatever caused the universe to originate must not have been material and must exist beyond space and time. It must further have been capable of initiating a great change of state, from nothing to everything that exists. Such considerations have led other scientists—former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gerald Schroeder and the late Caltech astrophysicist Allan Sandage, for example—to posit an external creator as the best explanation for the origin of the universe as revealed by modern cosmology.

This new telescope creates an interesting situation for Christians and atheists. Christians are excited about this telescope, and anxious to get back the results that will confirm a supernatural Creator. Atheists are nervous about this telescope. They are committed to an eternally existing universe. One that doesn’t implicate any kind of supernatural first cause of the natural world. If the universe has a beginning, then by definition, the cause of the universe must be supernatural and eternal. Because it existed causally prior to the beginning of the universe. It is not material, because it created matter. It is not in time, because it created the physical universe that marks the passage of time.

Anyway, to share this information, Dr. Meyer has created six new short videos for Prager University. I’ve embedded the 6 videos below, and each title is a link to Prager University where you can find a transcript. These are perfect for busy people to get the big picture.

1. ARE RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN CONFLICT?

2. SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR GOD AND WHY IT MATTERS

3. HOW DID THE UNIVERSE BEGIN?

4. ALIENS, THE MULTIVERSE, OR GOD?

5. DNA AND THE EVIDENCE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN

6. EVOLUTION: BACTERIA TO BEETHOVEN

If you’re looking for a longer lecture, delivered to an audience of students, this one from 2015 is 95 minutes long, and has over 900,000 views:

What I’d like to see is parents and pastors stop worrying about how Christians feel,and whether we are like. Step one of being a Christian is knowing and showing that God exists. It’s not about feelings, community or peer approval. This is not Disney. This is not romance novels. What we need is young Christians who can have productive conversations about Christianity. And those conversations are easy – if we are trained in the mainstream science that confirms the existence of the supernatural Creator / Designer.