The problem of abortion

No issue compels me as much in both of its opposite directions as much as the question of abortion. It pits the individual rights of an adult female against the individual rights of an unborn person. Making the wrong call is the difference between murdering an innocent and denying female citizens their bodily rights.

Last week, I had a chicken abortion for breakfast…

…and I came to a conclusion on this unique ordeal.

Before I present it, I’d like a chance to argue both sides of the equation.

As adult citizens, women hold full legal equity with men and can do things such as vote, own land, start a business, run for political office, and eat whatever they so desire. So much for their legal position, though. As mammals, human females alone possess the only possible means for propagating the species through reproduction. Sure, this does require an injection of semen at some point, but the point remains that men’s bodies don’t contain incubators for their heirs.

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Pro-choice: This peculiar piece of natural biotechnology endows women alone with the ability to make other humans. Unsurprisingly, ancient civilizations considered their women to be more of an asset for producing sons rather than persons in-and-of themselves. Certainly there existed exceptions to this rule, but modern societies now regard women as legal equals who themselves have rights. One of these rights is autonomy over the body – tattoos, piercings, hair of any length, and any sort of clothing is permissible so long as it poses no harm to others.

As such, it is only natural that this autonomy covers the uterus as well. Women should have the full authority to terminate any pregnancy she so desires simply because it is in her body. Neither the father of the child nor the doctor should have any say in the matter. However, if the child has developed to the point where it may viably grow with little to no assistance beyond the standard tasks of a caregiver for a newborn, she is obliged to give birth to the baby and either keep it or give it up for adoption.

Pro-life: As stewards of the next generation, pregnant females have a moral duty to maintain their children in the bodies from conception until birth. No disease or complication can forego them from this obligation – unless it threatens the life of the mother herself, because fetuses do not develop well in corpses. The primary duty of a nation is to propagate and sustain itself and its values, and since the first step of this is biological reproduction, abortion runs contrary to this goal and must be discouraged if not outlawed as murder.

Far from being a religious appeal, this argument works best in a secular context. Around half of all fertilized eggs are terminated by the body as a miscarriage or “spontaneous abortion”. Aside from making Nature or God the most egregious abortionist of all, this merely highlights the vital urge to protect and nuture those eggs which are viable by not terminating those pregnancies. The only possible exemption from this obligation would be in cases of forced impregnation through rape or incest. Consent to sex is meaningless if the other party does not understand the implications of “doing it”.

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Now that you’ve read the arguments, I shall present my opinion on the matter. I am pro-life, but against outlawing certain methods of abortion. Given the wide availability of 99+%-effective contraceptives and the materials on how to use them properly, there is really no excuse to have an abortion on a whim. Even though I utter it in a deep male voice, I would recommend any pregnant girls or women thinking about getting an abortion to consider adoption instead.

That being said, accidents do occur. Some are relatively benign – Trojan sold you a defective product, for instance. Others are more sinister – religious fundamentalists damaged your teenage mind with faulty sex education; you were just sexually harassed in a back alley at night. While these actions alone (except the rape) do not excuse an abortion, I as a male do not have any business dictating what females do with their own equipment – so long as they exchange the favor. I would implore that expectant-but-unwilling mothers consider every other other before the coat hanger, even if it is the MA pill.

Well, I feel like writing again

Welcome back, everybody! I’ve been on hiatus since before the New Year, where I had many a merry celebration, and I hope the year++ treated you just as well.

I’ve been off for over half a month, but I am ready to get back into the groove of writing again. Expect articles at least once a day from here on out – and I’ll do my best to inform you when I’ll be away from the keyboard as well.

Our own worst enemy

In modern American parlance, socialism refers to the teachings of those such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. While I am against Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, I also find myself repulsed by the boilerplate response given by the American right for this opposition – they are un-American. Giving this response proposes another form of socialism called Americanism to counter those other forms of socialism.

For this reason, I shall broaden the definition of socialism to bring it closer to its root concept of the society, a related term. As used in this discussion, socialism encompasses any system of political order which subjects the individual to the whims of society in order to conform his behavior to the benefit of others. Another candidate word for this definition is “collectivism”, but I would argue for the existence of benign collectives. The Star Trek fandom, birdwatching clubs, and the gaming community are examples of benign collectives, individuals who unite out of a common self-interest. Socialism differs by thwarting individuality. This does not need to occur by matter of force: nurture and peer pressure alone seem to generate these results quite effectively. Nurture squelches out bouts of youthful rebellion through negative reinforcement so that the youths become adults who maintain these behaviors and customs through peer pressure, passing it onto their children as well.

Socialism attempts to establish a perception of majority so that the members of that majority stand in union against those splintered minorities, which the perceived majority feels is threatening to unravel their social fabric. The self-identification of this majority as a majority has severe political implications, especially when combined with democratic systems of representation. Using their majority, the Majority elects themselves to all of the government positions available so that it represents the interests of the Majority. This Majority might only need to be an actual plurality so long as that plurality considers itself a Majority. This is how socialism attempts to oppress dissent, both by excluding minorities from the public sphere as well as weeding out inconsistent behaviors among mostly-Majority members to improve cohesion.

This is evil. Socialism bonds humans with yolks of faith, ready for their shepherds to manipulate their puppet strings to fulfill their own Machiavellian motives. Individual freedoms are not nearly as important as individualism, but socialism threatens to extinguish both of them.

To be fair, every human settlement of a certain size requires a certain dosage of socialism to succeed. The alternative is an anarchy guided only by the laws of nature. The freedom to rob another person is the freedom to sack and pillage your house. The freedom to murder is the freedom to die at a moment’s notice. The freedom to take someone’s freedom is the freedom to lose your freedom! Justice cannot tolerate these acts of immense depravity without raising a significant fight, because they are actually more immoral than the socialism which protects their rights to property from thieves.

Socialism becomes worse the closer its majority dips below 50%, but it gets better the closer it lies to 100%. Every one of us is 99% similar to each other on the genetic level, and no amount of primeval faith can separate a Them out of Homo sapiens – Us.

The union of one male and one female

Children are the currency of the Universe, at least here on Earth. Ecology measures an individual organism’s worth by its ability to extract the energy and nutrients from its environment required to maintain its body as well as avoid elimination from nature’s many hazards, including the mouths of children from different species. Evolution judges that same organism’s worth by its ability not just to produce children, but to produce grandchildren. A individual members of a species can produce as many children as it so desires, but only when those children themselves produce children does the cycle of life complete and the species perpetuate.

Obstacles abound throughout the natural world to impede and test the fitness of every individual. Inorganic hazards such as floods, blizzards, landslides, droughts, hurricanes, and solar flares inundate individuals plenty. However, these alone would make for a stoic survival experience. Organic obstacles make the task a challenge by introducing competitors and predators, ready to either take away Earth’s scarce resources for themselves or just take all of your resources for their own use. Very recent Terran history even introduced a new creature which uses the power of its brain to convert matter into bizarre new arrangements such as fire, metal, and alcohol. Species must use their builds and chemistry to prove to this world their ability to mete out existence both by using the elements and evading their destructive wrath.

The Universe contains an inherent scarcity of resources thanks to its limited amounts of matter and energy. Earthly creatures only get to reap a tiny portion of that through the Sun and the rocky planet itself: more than enough to sustain a worldwide ecology, but limited nonetheless. Forests have only so much sun to photosynthesize and so much fertile soil to reap, and so individual trees must fight leaf and root to make sure their leaf catches the photon and their root absorbs the nutrient-rich groundwater. Together, these criteria compel the successful trees to grow taller and taller while planting deeper and deeper roots. Nature provides many stunning examples of this arboreal arms race: the Amazon Rainforest, the Congo, and the Siberian taiga are just three.

A few factors determine an individual organism’s ability to survive and thrive. Much of it has to do with genetics, the inheritance of its overbearing parents who placed them on Earth to eat or be eaten. To that effect, parents of jaguars pass down their jaws and claws so that their children may eat deer, whose parents passed down their leg muscles so that they may run away from jaguars and chew on nutrient-poor leaves all day long, coupled with the occasional battle for mates. Genetics combined with nurture and the balances of ecology ensure that not too many deer get to escape from the jaguars, but not too many jaguars get to enjoy the tasty flesh of live deer. Part of winning this battle is being in the right place at the right time, as some omega male deer discover when they encounter a passive female watching two alpha males lock antlers in battle.

Faced with no other prospect in an eighty-one element Universe whose lighter element show the ability to construct intricate molecular machines, I am left with no other prospect than to conclude that the struggle for these machines to establish their space and perpetuate their kind throughout time in increasingly complex arrangement is one purpose of this Universe, 15 billion years of which generated me.

Nooks and crannies of space-time

I wish you a Merry Christmas, and my present to you is a new thought.

One of the major foundations of a quantum universe is its lack of perfectly smooth gradients. Sure, you encounter many phenomena which give the appearance of gradual change, such as the slopes of a mountain or the transitions of the color wheel. But if you zoom in onto these things at the molecular and sub-molecular level, you will see that the properties of their structure resembles staircases, not slides. I’ll take the color wheel example: photon do not have the freedom to smoothly flow between wavelengths, but rather are forced to occupy discrete wavelengths which determines their color. Changes in color must occur by nudging the value by a set value – in other words, walking up or down a stair as opposed to slipping up and down a smooth slide. The technical term for a specific step in this scheme is a quantum.

We owe much of our knowledge of this quantum universe to Max Planck, whom physicists honored by naming a series of units which measure the distance of several types of quanta. They represent the “smallest possible” difference the Universe allows between the properties of its contents. No distance can be shorter than a Planck length, no instant of time can dwindle a Planck time, and no particle can experience a jump in its energy smaller than the Planck constant. This realization of the universe gives real meaning to distance, which among other things discredits Zeno’s paradox that nothing in the Universe experiences motion and makes Earth just a pale blue dot in the skies of an alien planet.

The sizes of the Planck units beggar considerable belief. The Planck length is 16.162 × 10^-36 meters, about twenty orders of magnitude smaller than a proton – a tiny length indeed. Even more startling is the brevity of a Planck time, defined as the duration required for the fastest object in the Universe to travel this distance. The object is a beam of light in a vacuum, and that time is too small for our much slower instruments to even detect. Current estimates place it at roughly 10^-43 seconds. About 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of these fit into a single minute.

Allow me propose a twist to the story, because I have a proposition as to what happens in “times” smaller than Planck times and “distances” shorter than Planck distances. At the heart of this mathematically-defined Universe lies a great processor, taking in all of the states and conditions of the present to calculate and generate the future. In order to do this, it must first “freeze” the present into a static frame of time so that it can perform this calculation without interference. This elegant standstill of matter and energy holds fast until this processor spits out the next present, which we experience until it uses that present to repeat the whole process over again.

I’ve barely touched the surface of this idea, though. To say this processor only generates a single present for every present fed into it would not only insult its computational prowess, it would deny any possibility for variable outcomes. Here is where the distances smaller than space come into play: just like how a raindrop that lands on the Continental Divide must choose to roll either west or east, subatomic and even superatomic forces might compel a certain object to change its position or properties among several different quanta. These discrepancies might be barely noticeable right around when they occur, but they are liable to induce drastic shifts when played out over many iterations of the grand processor’s calculations. It is why we talk about marizpan today, but never marchpane – but our contemporaries in a parallel present may very well know it as marchpane because their history shifted in the other direction.

From this essay, I extract two conclusions. The first is the realization that not only is most of our body made up of empty space, but most of our lives consist of motionless time, and there is where history is made. I propose calling the empty space “nooks”, and the standstill times “crannies.” The second realization is far more profound: our consciousnesses can morph the world into our dreams simply by converting our thoughts into the right behavior.

While you chew on this fat for thought, I once again wish you a Feliz Navidad from a parallel present of one grand fractal Universe.

Restricting restrictions on freedom

The laws of physics imprison every being of this universe to obey certain geometric and mathematical principles. Jaguars cannot walk upright because the angles of their bones limit their locomotion to four paws. Whales cannot walk on land whatsoever because their ancestral leg bones are buried deep within their bodies to the point of uselessness. Humans cannot fly because their skeletons are too dense to float on air, but they can use their brains and hands to construct aluminum tubes with wings, fill them with hydrocarbons, and achieve a comparable effect with technology.

In recent history, humans also seem to set boundaries on their freedoms which transcend mere physical limits. Many of these laws have strong moral justifications because they forbid humans from restricting the freedoms of others. Yet many more serve as arbitrary limitations of the imagination and creative spirit. The specious arguments used to justify these unnecessary measures are nearly as silly as the restrictions themselves. Men shouldn’t grow their hair long because of “cultural custom”, citizens of free societies may consume alcohol but not psilocybin because it disrupts “middle class values”, and God forbid that anyone feels lust in his hearts upon watching the Erin Andrews video!

Borne out of the insecurities of a fearful public, these handicaps of the mind shun individualism and promote socialism in order to generate a false sense of comfort rather than tackle human nature head-on. Things were not always like this: before the dawn of civilization, humans felt the rawness of a cruel physical world which constantly threatened to freeze or poison or eat their bodies. They did not have to work long hours to sustain a bustling civilization, leaving them with a considerable amount of free time to wonder about the cosmos around them. Throttled by nothing more than their imaginations, they could travel to the stars and witness the regular descent of the generations. Even though they did not have the blessings of science, humans knew the power and extent of the mental faculties far better without the thick clouds of deeply ingrained histories and symbols.

From this account, it might seem as though I advocate returning to this state of affairs. No, I don’t support neo-Luddism. The power of modern science vastly increases the technology, mobility, and therefore potential freedom of modern humans. Yet even with the expansion of these potential freedoms, our actual freedoms remain a fraction of their past expanse. Most people today do not have the luxury of waking up whenever they want thanks to the demands of a diurnal society, must devote several hours of their day to work to sustain their energy-hungry civilization, and find the ability to explore new dimensions of the consciousness through meditation and intoxication severely restricted not only by the laws of their countries, but also the sheer noisiness of everyday life.

Humans today should not thank their governments or their gods to thank for the protection of their freedoms. To the contrary, modern governments and gods limit their freedoms to a profound extent based on whichever cult is lulling the most minds at the moment or whoever can raise the most money to legislate their wills. The only way out of this tangle is for citizens motivated by nothing but their sheer willpower to scorn the government and celebrate their freedoms, even (especially) if they end up breaking the bad laws. Only their dissent will hold their representatives accountable to the independent volition of freethinking minds and freemoving bodies.

May freedom yet prosper!

My complaints with the Presidential candidates

Yesterday, I wrote an endorsement for Gary Johnson to be America’s next President because I found all of the other options unpalatable.

With less than three minutes to spare before the date changes, I will today explain my arguments against them. I will start and end with our two “inevitable” candidates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney comes with a similar list of credentials to Gary Johnson, being the former Governor of Massachusetts and a businessman himself. Nevertheless, he shows a disturbing inconsistency on key issues without bothering to explain his shifts in opinion to the public. Without him giving any sort of rationale behind his changes of mind, the citizenry cannot trust this man to hold true to any of his promises or policy positions. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Gov. Romney is that in 2006, he proposed a statewide health insurance plan which mandated Massachusetts citizens to buy themselves health insurance. This law is the direct inspiration for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as Obamacare, many of whose architects were themselves Romney advisors. Based on the history of Gov. Romney as an executive, I cannot endorse his candidacy.

Newt Gingrich recently experienced a sudden surge of support in the Iowa polls, but it has since diminished, and for good reason. He achieved his main claim to fame in 1994, when he assumed the role of Speaker in the first Republican-controlled house since 1954. Under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, his supporters boast that he passed a balanced budget which generated some of the most recent government surpluses in history. Yet despite these considerable credentials, it is apparent that the curse of Washington turned him into a lackey of Big Government. He profited immensely from his consulting work with the bureaucratic mess known as Freddie Mac, earning at least estimated $1.6 million per Bloomberg News. In addition, he appeared with then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in an ad promoting increased government action against climate change. The subject of its scientific validity is an essay for another subject, so what bears mentioning here is that the ad was funded by none other than breather of hot air, Al Gore. To the credit of Gingrich, he is keenly aware of the threat presented to America by radical Islam, but only at the behest of a Christian worldview which also rejects atheism as equally unpatriotic. This is not enough for me to support Newt Gingrich as this country’s President.

Rick Perry currently holds his third term as Texas Governor while running for President. He saw a large wave of initial support entering the race thanks to flaunting his “job-creating” credentials as Governor. Further scrutiny of his record portrays Perry in a less flattering light, most notably by issuing an executive order mandating the vaccination of schoolgirls with Gardasil, which protects against a sexually transmitted disease called human papillomavirus. Social conservatives opposed this move as promoting sexual immorality, but the true tragedy here is the expansion of government and the loss of freedoms which Perry helped engineer, for which he seems barely apologetic. Even though I endorse his proposal for taxpayers to reject the current mess of a tax code and opt for a one-size-fits-all flat tax, his suggested rate of 20% is exorbitant and will almost certainly hurt the still-shaky economy. Also like Gingrich, he bears a dubious tie to Al Gore: then a Democrat, Perry emerged as an ardent supporter of Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign in opposition to eight years of Ronald Reagan as President. All of this notwithstanding, he is now a Strong social conservative as evinced by his latest campaign ad. Given that social conservatives do not mind government expansion so long as it legislates their own morality, I express no support for Rick Perry’s presidential bid.

Ron Paul is also a Texan and derives his government experience from twelve non-consecutive terms as a House Representative. Nicknamed “Dr. No” due to his incessant opposition even to key Republican platforms, in addition to advocating for $1 trillion in tax cuts if elected President, his record trumps all of the other Republicans in fiscal sanity. Unfortunately, this is at the cost of his diplomatic sanity: thanks to a blind fealty towards isolationism, Paul rejects any notion that the Middle Easterners resent the United States because of their own culture, but only because of America’s military involvement in the region. I agree with the full withdrawal of troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq, but this foreign policy regards the citizens of the Middle East as children who are incapable of being political actors themselves. With the Muslim Brotherhood and the hardliner Salafists sweeping the recent elections in Egypt, Ron Paul is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Rick Santorum is a former two-term Senator from Pennsylvania and outspoken Catholic who often champions socially conservative causes. I do not know much about him or his legacy, but I give him a mixed critique based on my preliminary research. To his credit, Santorum defended capitalism by stating his support for “income inequality” because certain individuals are more talented and willing to work harder than others. As I wrote in a previous entry, this is how capitalism is supposed to work. My major concern with Santorum boils down to his social conservatism, which he expresses through his fight for government to restrict free love (among other positions) based on his religious convictions. Given these thoughts, hearing the words “President Santorum” only elicits a lukewarm reaction from me.

Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favorite and Representative from Minnesota, possesses some traits which set her apart from the rest of the field. She is one of the most vocal critics of the government’s size and influence in economic spheres as evidenced by her offering a full repeal of the Dodd-Frank law, a measure which grossly expanded the power and reach of the federal bureaucracy, at the beginning of her third term. She also expressed strong opposition to bailing out Wall Street for its financial mistakes in 2008. Despite these strong marks, she carries with her the baggage of her social conservatism, including a support for the teaching of creationism in public science classrooms and her joint ownership of a Christian law firm with her husband, Marcus. Most alarming is her support for a group opposed to the Iranian mullahcracy called the Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization, who are themselves radical Islamists. She possesses strong credentials for limited government, but her follies are too great for me to enthusiastically support her.

Jon Huntsman has the unique distinction of serving under our current President in an official capacity as the Ambassador to China until April 30 of this year. He also claims executive experience as the 16th Governor of Utah, where he showed off his mixed record of economic policy: despite replacing the progressive income tax with a 5% flat tax rate and lowering taxes on certain commodities, in addition to relaxing Utah’s strict laws on alcohol, he also endorsed a failed 400% increase on cigarette taxes in addition to supporting government meddling in the pollutant market through cap-and-trade. While I credit him for endorsing the scientific validity of evolutionary theory, this and his tax policies alone do not make him a good statesman and I do not support his candidacy.

Barack Obama, the current incumbent from the Democratic Party, is the worst option for President in 2012. On the economic side of affairs, he demonstrates his belief that the government’s role is to centrally plan the economy as well as siphon funds from the rich to give to the poor. The hazards of these policies are clear as moonlight: he oversaw a $4 trillion rise in the national debt, the largest of any U.S. president. He calls upon millionaires and billionaires to “pay their fair share” in taxes, even though their contributions already subsidize 46.4% of American households, who effective pay negative taxes. (Bonus: New York’s top 1% pay 43% of the city’s taxes despite only representing 34% of the total income.)

In regards to foreign affairs, Obama displays a disdain for American influence in defending the freedoms of the world’s citizens against despotism. In 2009, Iran saw a youth-fueled revolt against the repressive theocratic regime and its fixing of an election they claimed would have deposed of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama responded with silence. In 2011, Egypt saw a Muslim Brotherhood-fueled revolt against the repressive secular regime and the four-decade hold of power by U.S. ally President Hosni Mubarak. Obama responded by telling Mubarak to step down immediately, then afterwards in its own words to world conquest.

Barack Obama is a dangerous person for America to have as President and must not be re-elected.