Dude, I Want My Semisesquicentennial Back

What happened? By every measure, life in 2026 is far better than life in 1976. In 1976 lead had not been banned in paint, and we were only one model year into cars with catalytic converters that required unleaded gasoline. Real (constant dollar) median family income is up 55% over the last 50 years. Real personal (individual) median income is up 60% over the last 50 years. The median new home in 2019 was 2,500 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet in 1970. In 1975, 13.9% of adults in the U.S. had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2024 38.7% of U.S. adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, a 2.78X improvement. For Black Americans, the numbers are 4.8% in 1975 and 27.7% in 2024, a 5.77X improvement.

Some things have collapsed in price. A $500, 25-inch television in fall of 1975 cost the equivalent of $3,000 today.

When a 25-inch television was "big"

But today a 55-inch, 4K, QLED TV can be found for less than $300.

We have all the information in the world available at our fingertips. We have an advanced GPS navigation system in our pocket. We can literally video call someone anywhere in the world for free from a smartphone app or from a laptop web browser in Facebook or in Google Contacts. Back in 1976, a ten-minute phone call from Los Angeles to New York would have cost $3.75, or $22.60 in today’s dollars.

Back in 1976, to find a book in the library you used a card catalogue. By the time I was in college in the mid-1980s, you could search for a book on a mainframe terminal, but most students still used the card catalogue, because that is what they were used to. Looking up financial information on a business required poring over encyclopedia sized volumes of financial data, published quarterly, by organizations like Moody’s Analytics. Today, people day trade using smartphone apps with real-time financial data.

Before the Apple "Stocks" app, there was Moody's

We can answer our door from the other side of the world via a video doorbell and smart phone app. If we forget to adjust our thermostat before we leave on vacation, we can do that from an app. We can start our car in the airport parking lot to get it warming up or cooling down while we are getting our luggage at the baggage carousel.

Despite all this advancement, more is to come. We are on the cusp of a technological revolution. You can take a Waymo robotaxi in Midtown Atlanta. Delivery robots meander on the sidewalks in Midtown. Commuters in Teslas relax as their car drives itself to their office. We lived through the Internet “dot-com” boom, and now we are in the AI boom. AI is still and infant, and but it will grow up fast. Early adopters like software developers are seeing significant productivity improvements.

We have a lot to celebrate this year. But for many, the 250th anniversary of America does not seem to be a cause to celebrate. We must ask, why?

I was born in 1966, a month to the day after America’s 190th birthday. As a result, I experienced the wide-eyed awe of an elementary school aged child in the 1970s. And perhaps the biggest event I remember from the 1970s was America’s Bicentennial celebration. For those not around back then, a little background. First, they called it “America’s Bicentennial Year”, and the celebration started not on July 4th, 1976, but a year earlier, on July 4th, 1975, and culminated on July 4th, 1976. The “Bicentennial” (as most called it) became a pop-culture phenomena. On a handful of airplanes Delta Air Lines changed its red, white, and blue “widget” by the boarding door so that the red base had alternating red and white stripes, and the large blue portion had white stars. The modified airplanes were featured in all the print materials back then, such as postcards and timetables. Braniff Airways went a step further and had artist Alexander Calder, who had previously developed a special scheme for one of their aircraft, design one for the Bicentennial.

Bicentennial airplanes

In the 1970s, restaurants and gas stations often had promotions that included collectables such as drinking glasses. The Bicentennial opened that up significantly. Glassware commemorating each state.

Congress authorized the U.S. Mint to produce Bicentennial quarter, half-dollar, and dollar coins featuring “1776-1976” instead of the minting year. As a result, there are no quarter, half-dollar, and dollar coins with “1975” or only “1976” embossed on them. Over 1.6 billion Bicentennial quarters were minted. 

The answer to the “why?” question of the lack of interest in the 250th anniversary of the USA comes down to one, simple answer: Some people have poisoned it. It did not happen yesterday. It has happened over the last 20 plus years. The last time the country was united was September 12th, 2001. Just ten months earlier, the country was divided over the 2000 election. An election between southern Democrat, the sitting vice president, and a Republican southern governor, the son of the immediately previous Republican President, became a divisive election. Bill Clinton and Al Gore defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992. 2000 would relitigate the 1992 election, but additionally, Democrats sought to avenge the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. Presidential elections were sometimes close, and sometimes not prior to 2000. But starting in 2000, most presidential elections were much closer, and repeatedly litigated. Close elections bring claims of voter impropriety. Claims voter suppression on one side and claims of vote fraud on the other. And the story flip-flops depending on which side won. Each side seeks to motivate its most extreme elements to turn out to vote, and each side claims every election is a existential event. And each side claims life is horrible and this upcoming election represents salvation. In 1984, Ronald Reagan ran for reelection on the slogan “Morning in America.” I know of no presidential reelection campaign since where an incumbent has run on a positive promotion of their record. Every reelection campaign since has run on demonizing the opponent, which was the norm of a challenger’s campaign.

But it is more. In 1976 the second Monday of October was Columbus Day. Today, the statue of the namesake of Columbus, Ohio, a gift from the people of Genoa, Italy, is sitting in storage, removed from public display for fear of vandals. Every person, every event, now must be deconstructed through a lens of oppressor and oppressed. Nothing done by the United States can be considered “good” because the United States inherently bad. This is not new. At one time some progressives felt the German rocket scientists brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip meant we could not be proud of beating the Soviets to the Moon. Some were disappointed and wished the Soviets had beaten the U.S. Never mind the Soviets had Operation Osoaviakhim and did the same thing as the U.S., brining German scientists to the Soviet Union. Like I said, this is not new, but it is much bigger now. A fringe philosophy found only in the most hard-core leftists in the 1960s is now the mainstream position of the majority of the political left. Even “center-left” politicians modify their speech to not trigger the majority of the political left.

The city of Buffalo, New York had a large celebration of Somalia’s independence day on July 1st, and the next day cancelled the planned July 4th fireworks. While progressives wring their hands about the United States independence day, there is no hand-wringing about the disturbing history of Somalia, its oppression of the northern territory (the former British protectorate), which included the Isaaq genocide of perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians in the Northern Territory.

Several years ago, an HOA in California banned the flying of the American flag. Progressives looking to buy homes are turned off when they see the U.S. flag displayed on houses in a prospective neighborhood. It blew up this month as people started putting up flags and the HOA started fining them. Progressive Texas state representative James Talarico, now running for the U.S. Senate, calls the U.S. Flag “a complicated symbol.” Talarico’s denomination, the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA), fresh off of a 433 to 44 vote against a resolution that would have banned ministers from practicing polyamory, then voted against commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States and alternatively passed a resolution “Standing Against White Christian Nationalism,” which conflated the semiquincentennial with [checks notes] “White Christian Nationalism”? Pastors in polycules is totally normal but celebrating the 4th of July is “White Christian Nationalism.” Got it.

How on Earth did it get to this? One might say: “Yes, but we have been through a lot recently. COVID. The failure in Afghanistan. Political infighting. Significant inflation. People are feeling beaten down. Defeated. You can’t expect us to celebrate.” Except, if you recall, the Bicentennial celebration started on July 4th 1975, sixty-five days after the Fall of Saigon. So don’t give me the failure in Afghanistan as an excuse. “But the political environment”, one might reemphasize. Do you remember something called “Watergate”? How about the resignation of President Richard Nixon, which happened less than one year before the start of the Bicentennial year? The Watergate Hearings consumed 1973, and impeachment hearings consumed much of May and June of 1974. “Fair points but look at how expensive life is in America today with all of the inflation over the last several years.” I suggest you Google “Arab Oil Embargo.” In October 1973, OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo on the United States after we started Operation Nickel Grass to resupply the Israeli Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. Gasoline shortages caused long lines to buy gas. President Nixon asked stations to voluntarily not sell gas on the weekends. 1974 saw some states implement gasoline rationing using the “Odd/Even system” where you could only buy gasoline on certain days based on the last digit of your car’s license plate.

Brother, can you spare a gallon?

It triggered a lengthy recession that lasted from November, 1973 to March 1975. And while recessions usually do not cause inflation, that was not the case this time. In 1973, inflation was 8.7%, in 1974 it was 12.3%, in 1975 it was 6.9% and in 1976 it was 4.9%. So gas prices and inflation in the years leading up to 2026 are not that significantly different from the years leading up to 1976. So, what changed?

Mindset is what changed. Too many people think things are currently bad. The number of people on mood altering medications and the number of people in counseling have exploded. I think a lot of this is driven by the very technological advances that have made life easier. We saw news go from a few events a day phenomenon, a morning paper, an evening national television news broadcast, followed by a local television news broadcast, to 24/7 cable news in the 1980s, news websites in the 1990s, to social media in the 2000s, to smartphone apps and alerts today. No wonder anxiety is up. But this is not recent. A decade ago, my wife and I were on a European river cruise. All the passengers on the cruise were Americans. The day after the Brexit vote happened almost everyone knew the outcome because of their smartphones. The demographics of European river cruise customers is narrow: High earning, politically active, over age 65 Americans. There was a pall over these people, combined with uncertainty and anxiety. They thought the U.K. staying in the EU was a given. How would Brexit affect an upper middle-class retired American? It wouldn’t. But these people found cause to worry.

Hope, and Caution.

In April 2024 at UNC-Chapel Hill, when pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to lower the American flag so they could raise the Palestinian, a large group of fraternity members, fearing the protesters were intending to vandalize and destroy the American flag after they removed it, grabbed the flag to prevent it from touching the ground, then surrounded and protected the flag and the flagpole as the protesters pelted them with water bottles and other debris.

The future belongs to bold.

The positive about this is there is an entire cohort of Gen Z, mostly young men, who are increasingly patriotic and increasingly religious. Christianity is rebounding in Gen Z men. At the same time, we see a virulently anti-American cohort of Gen Z Democratic Socialist politicians being elected by a large number of Gen Z supporters, Starbucks socialists and MacBook Marxists sitting in coffee shops posting on their iPhones about how bad they have it. These same Democratic Socialists who on July 4th think America is some kind of crime against humanity are always silent on November 7th which is the Victims of Communism Day. Of course, they will say real communism has never been tried. This likely means the “Culture Wars” will continue, as will political fracturing. But the hope is political fracturing is usually temporary, and births a new cycle of more normal politics. FDR had to purge the communists and socialists from his administration, the 1970s were more politically normal than the radical 1960s, and we will get through this too.

In 1975, a beaten down country, licking its wounds from an unwinnable war, suffering from hostility due to its support of Israel, coming out of the worst presidential political scandal in the country’s history, economically coming out of a long, 17-month recession, politically deeply divided, decided it was time to celebrate. And we did it big. That we can’t today is not an indictment of America. It is an indictment of all those malcontents who poisoned the well.

250 years ago brave men dared to put in writing the document that set the course for what would become the United States of America. A country born in an act of treason to the British crown. They concluded that document with the following sentence: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." And that is worth celebrating.

Happy Birthday American, and I hope your 300th is better than your 250th.

On Sean M. Carroll's Arguments Against the Fine-Tuned Universe Hypothesis

Sean M. Carroll is a theoretical physicist, with a PhD (1993) in astronomy and a B.S. (1988) in astronomy and astrophysics with minors in physics and philosophy. His academic career was exclusively in physics until 2022, and now he is a professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

In 2014, Sean Carroll posited five reasons the "Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis" does not work.

1. We don't really know that the universe is tuned specifically for life, since we don't know the conditions under which life is possible.
2. Fine-tuning for life would only potentially be relevant if we already accepted naturalism; God could create life under arbitrary physical conditions.
3. Apparent fine-tunings may be explained by dynamical mechanisms or improved notions of probability.
4. The multiverse is a perfectly viable naturalistic explanation.
5. If God had finely-tuned the universe for life, it would look very different indeed.

First, for those unfamiliar, the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis proposes the fundamental physical constants, fundamental physical laws, and fundamental forces of the universe are so narrowly defined that a very small change in any of them would result the failure of the universe to exist in a stable form, and therefore, life could not emerge. Notice these are all physics based. Beyond those, there are things like the Galactic Habitable Zone and the Circumstellar Habitable Zone which suggest where life can emerge in a physically fine-tuned universe. But such "Goldilocks zones" are not fine-tuning. The process that creates carbon in stars was not well understood, and when it was discovered (the triple-alpha process) its was also discovered its energy state must be extremely fine-tuned (the 7.656 MeV Hoyle resonance) for carbon to be created, is considered to be evidence of fine-tuning critical for carbon based life. Fred Hoyle, an atheist astronomer who discovered this, had his atheism shaken by this improbability. In 1961, atheist astrophysicist Robert Dicke examined the physical laws of the expansion of the universe and determined they were finely tuned. In his 1988 book, "A Brief History of Time", atheist astrophysicist Stephen Hawking stated the laws of science "seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life." The fine-tuning argument is not something that originated in the apologetics community. It originated in the astrophysics community. Scientists saw it as a mystery needing a scientific explanation, not something to dismiss.

To be honest, for someone with a minor in philosophy, Carroll does not make good arguments, and it is a little surprising he is holding a position as a professor of philosophy. The above arguments Carroll made were made in a debate with William Lane Craig, who has a masters and PhD in philosophy, and is known for deeply thought out arguments. But more disturbing are Carroll’s arguments above are intentionally deceptive, filled with omissions, misdirection, and fallacies.

We don't really know that the universe is tuned specifically for life, since we don't know the conditions under which life is possible.

This is irrelevant. Because the fine-tuning is not only about life, it is about the very existence of the universe. Fine-tuning is far more about physics than biology. Even if no life emerged in our current universe, the very fact there are stars and galaxies show the fundamental forces and laws of physics are narrowly focused, and if they were slightly different, the universe itself would not exist.

But we also do know the conditions under which life is possible on Earth. We have studied many different types of life to include life in various environmental regions, including very harsh environments like deep under the sea, and in the arctic. We have control planets like Mars and Venus which we have explored and continue to explore. We are planning to explore moons like Titan and Europa which could harbor primitive life. We have meteorites that originated from Mars that some scientists believe contain fossil evidence of primitive life, but we obviously are looking for something that looks like life on Earth, such as bacteria. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover took a sample that contained potential biosignatures. But we are able to observe these potential fossils and biosignatures because the appear similar to the kinds of evidence of life on Earth. Also, for decades scientists have hypothesized about possible life forms that are not based on carbon. But we have not found evidence of non-carbon life. In fact, the very term "organic" when applied to molecules or compounds when scientists look for signatures of life means those compounds contain carbon. Could this be a scientific "blind spot" in that we look for organic molecules, fossils that look like bacteria, and biosignatures similar to what we see on Earth? Possibly, but unlikely, because while different biochemistry is possible, chemistry is constant. And scientists have enough speculation on alternative biochemistry to speculate the conditions where such alternative biological processes make sense (such as life on a very cold planet that uses liquid ammonia as its solvent rather than liquid water). We are also at a point where astronomers can accomplish spectral analysis of exoplanet atmospheres to look for evidence of organic compounds. Finally, while the idea of silicon instead of carbon being a building block for life is possible, the Earth's crust has 925 times as much silicon as carbon, but there is no evidence of current or past silicon based life on Earth, even though some carbon based life forms have integrated silicon into their shells. Another thing to consider is not if a life form could exist based on alternative biochemistry, but if the alternative biochemistry would be capable of adaptation and evolution. A less adaptable alternative biochemistry based life form might quickly go extinct.

Fine-tuning for life would only potentially be relevant if we already accepted naturalism; God could create life under arbitrary physical conditions.

I do not think this is an argument. The first sentence appears to accept fine-tuning as a possible explanation for the natural universe. The second sentence is a logical fallacy (affirming a disjunct). It is true an omnipotent God could create a sentient robot, or a supernatural being that can live in any environment. Then again, many religions believe in created supernatural beings like angels and lesser gods. But that does not in any way disprove that an omnipotent God would not have created the universe we inhabit. It does not change the fact the conditions for known biological life in our universe are very narrow. It does not change the scientific observations of the very narrow path Earth based biological life has followed.

Apparent fine-tunings may be explained by dynamical mechanisms or improved notions of probability.

This may be his best argument. If we get to a point where we can simulate the early universe, we could observe the mechanisms of the formation of the fundamental forces and the laws of physics, and we could find these forces and laws naturally coalesce to the what we observe in our universe. However, then we would have another argument that something tunes the process that causes these forces and laws to form. So we end up with a regression. As for improved notions of probability, I am not sure what that means. Probability is math, which doesn’t change, so perhaps it is the entering arguments of a probability analysis. However, much of the fine-tuning hypothesis is based on a century of probability analysis by some of the smartest physicists in human history.

The multiverse is a perfectly viable naturalistic explanation.

Certainly the Infinite Monkey Theorem suggests random things can align given enough monkeys, but what came first? The monkey or the typewriter? A multiverse created from the Big Bang event still requires narrow parameters in the process of the Big Bang. The most widely accepted Multiverse hypotheses build off of inflationary cosmology. And that means the physical processes from the initial singularity to cosmic inflation would need to be "just right" to produce enough universes for at least one to be like the one we live in. The right question here is two-fold. One is how many universes are needed so the probability at least one of them has the conditions we see in our observable universe, and the second is, what is the probability a Big Bang event can create at least that number of universes? What if cosmic inflation created only ten universes, or one-hundred? But realize the very idea behind a multiverse hypothesis to explain the low probability of a stable universe might say we need to have 10¹⁰⁰ universes fail to get one that works. There is one way the math may work in favor of a multiverse, and it is because if there were equal probabilities of one universe, two universes, etc., as we approach infinity there is much greater probability of there being at least 10¹⁰⁰ universes or more, than  10⁹⁹ universes or fewer. But I would need to leave that to the physicists, because those probabilities may not be equal. Dr. Carroll calls it "viable", but is it? "Viable" is a testable statement. "Perfectly viable" is a very serious claim. What evidence does Dr. Carroll have that a Big Bang event and cosmic inflation could create enough discrete universes to counter the improbability of a single universe being fine-tuned by chance? As chemist Dr. James Tour likes to say: "Go to the blackboard and show me how this works." Also, it only solves the fine-tuning problem, and it does not address the origin problem. Add to that, the multiverse hypotheses is an unobservable and unfalsifiable hypothesis and as such can never be proven.

If God had finely-tuned the universe for life, it would look very different indeed.

This is not an argument. It is a logical fallacy (affirming a disjunct again). And it is grossly unscientific. It is unobservable and unprovable. One might say this statement is not a scientific statement, but a philosophical one, but philosophy requires logic, and we would need a logical statement on how life would look, or why it would look different.

It is also nonsensical, because life exists, and life has fragility, in addition to adaptability. We would not worry about things like the impact of humanity on the environment and how that impacts other life forms if life was not fragile, and it is the fragility of life that makes us observe Earth is well-suited for life. In fact, things like extinction suggest fine-tuning, in that minor changes in the environment, combined with an inability to adapt, result in life failing.

But this argument also fails on another point. It assumes an ideal, or good. If there was an omnipotent God, He would make life that didn’t feel pain, was immortal, etc. But that is an opinion. It is like saying an abstract painting is not art because to your eye it is not beautiful. To say true art would look very different indeed. But in addition to an opinion, it points to a universal standard of "good", or "better", or "more moral." Which again is an argument for logic or intelligence that exists beyond the physical world. Carroll doesn't realize it, but he is suggesting there is a morality that exists outside of our universe, which could be used to judge the goodness of various universes.

Finally, physics is a mature and well-understood science, and the physical constants, physical laws, and fundamental forces of the universe are measurable and understood. And physicists know a minor change of a physical constant would result in a very different universe. Such a change can be mathematically modeled. For a physicist such as Carroll to ignore this is really disturbing. It suggests a physicist can deny the narrow window in which the physical constants, physical laws, and fundamental forces operate in our universe. Stephen C. Meyer recently stated the multiverse hypothesis only exists and gets any interest because the fine-tuning hypothesis is so strong. In other words, most scientists, including atheist scientists, accept our universe is fine-tuned. They see it as something that needs to be scientifically investigated, not disparaged. One might say: "The science is settled." That would make Sean M. Carroll a science denier.