Sunday, December 06, 2015

The sanctity of life

Some things in this country never seem to change.

We've been arguing about birth control and abortion for over fifty years, and, unless popular mythology falls by the wayside, it looks like we'll never stop.

One group of people deplores all the daily gun deaths, the weekly mass shootings, the wars of aggression and greed, and the slow but sure murder of the poor and disadvantaged by legal robbery to fatten the already thriving powerful and rich. These deplorers of daily gun deaths are usually the same people who value a woman's right to choose when to become pregnant and whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

Another group of people, in apparent opposition to the other, cares only about the unborn. To them, children are women's proper punishment for having sex. They insist that women go through the pain of childbirth as many times in their lives as possible to expiate Eve's sin. I guess Jesus' death wasn't payment enough. These champions of only the unborn will kill or applaud the murder of already-living people to prove how serious they are about the sanctity of life.

Excuse me while I go duct-tape my head.

Yes, the champions of the unborn are all about guns and wars and killing to show that killing is wrong. They practically celebrate when an unarmed Black kid in an inner city is gunned down by police or a Muslim anywhere is executed. They excuse themselves by saying, as God did of the Canaanites and Hitler did of the Jews, that the victim deserved it. It was a thug (Black) or a terrorist (Muslim) or a slut (woman) or a slut-loving baby killer (abortion provider). Yessiree, those are "good deaths." You see, only the unborn are innocent; once you breathe air for the first time, you are guilty of original sin and are thus fair game for the slaughter.

But what about the people who champion everyone but the unborn?

Nobody I've ever spoken to who supports a woman's right to choose thinks abortion is "great." Not one. Every one--to the last woman or man--will tell you that, even though it's not something to be sought for fun, as religious conservatives seem to think women do, it is often the best solution to a bad situation. Every last one will say that it is not up to him or her to decide for the next person what to do with his or her body or life. According to a recent study, the vast majority, 95%, of women who have had abortions "do not regret" it (more quote the figure as 95%, so I think Daily Beast's 99% was a typo).

It is important to realize that a conception, a fertilized egg, is not a human being. Taken out of the woman, a fertilized egg cannot survive on its own. A fertilized egg is not even a pregnancy unless it implants in the uterine wall. At least two thirds of all fertilized eggs fail to implant and are discharged during menses.

A Tea Party Christian roundly told me that at least 80% of fertilized eggs do not implant, yet, in the next breath, he still proclaimed the fertilized egg to be equivalent to a fully-formed adult human being.

Wait, I need more duct tape....

Of the fertilized eggs that do implant, 31% spontaneously miscarry.

And there are also all the stillbirths:

But stillbirths—when a fetus dies after 20 or more weeks of gestation—have remained relatively steady—and account for almost as many deaths as those of babies who die before their first birthday. About one in every 160 pregnancies in the U.S. ends in a stillbirth, which adds up to about 26,000 each year nationwide."

So not even a pregnancy is a human being. A fertilized egg is not a baby. An implanted embryo is not a baby. A fetus is not a baby. Only after it breaths air for the first time (and thus becomes guilty of original sin) it is an actual baby.

The best we can say is that a fertilized egg has the potential to become a human being. A pregnancy has the potential to become a human being. But the woman is already a full-fledged human being...well, not according to Christians or their Bible, which is why we're having this conversation in the first place. But that's another discussion. Let's assume, as rational reasonable people the world round do, that women are fully human, equal to men. This gives them the right to decide what happens to their bodies--the same right men take for granted. We must also take into account that pregnancy isn't a simple process, like clipping your toenails. It's a whole lot more than the "ten minutes of pain" some religious conservatives oversimplify it to be. Pregnancy changes women's bodies for life. It can cause life-changing complications in women. It can even kill them:

The number of women in the U.S. who die in childbirth is nearing the highest rate in a quarter-century. An estimated 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in 2013, compared with 7.2 in 1987. 
The Post reports that this translates to, quote, “a woman giving birth here is twice as likely to die than in Saudi Arabia and three times as likely than in the United Kingdom.”
Worldwide, WHO cites sobering statistics:
In 2015, an estimated 303 000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. In addition, for every woman who dies in childbirth, dozens more suffer injury, infection or disease.

But nobody says anything about pro-life, abortion, or the sanctity of life better than George Carlin.

You can't have it both ways, cherry pickers--put the WHOLE OT in, or take the WHOLE OT out!

Christians are such cherry pickers!

They love to cherry pick science, arbitrarily deciding that gravity, electricity, and germs are real but evolution, the age of the universe, and vaccines are not (hum--maybe they don't believe in germs after all).

But did you know that they cherry-pick the Bible, too?

They love-love-love denouncing homosexuality because Leviticus, a chapter in the Old Testament of the Bible, says that it is an abomination. But what about everything else that's in the Bible that they flat-out ignore?

"Oh, that's the OLD Testament," they retort.

Did they forget that so is Leviticus?

A lot of them, while loudly proclaiming the Bible to be literal scientific truth, openly dismiss as inaccurate all the Biblical descriptions of the earth as being flat, the sky as being hard, and outer space as being water, just to name a few.

Um, ex-squeeze me?

So, which Old Testament abominations are still abominations, which Old Testament scientific facts are still facts, and which parts of God's eternal unchanging word and LAW do you think it's ok to ignore?

Which ones do you insist on imposing on the rest of the world, whether they like it or not?

Does it even matter that the Bible is riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies?

Does it even matter that you can't tell me exactly what happened on Christmas? Or Easter?

Can you even tell me exactly when Jesus was born?

I'm serious here.

Was Jesus born before 4 BCE, as suggested in Matthew 2:1, or was Jesus born after 6 CE, as Luke suggests in Luke 2:1?

Matthew 2:1
"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem..."

Herod the Great died around 1-4 BCE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herod_the_Great

Luke 2:1-2
"1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)"


When Cyrenius was governor of Syria, the census occurred around 6 or 7 CE. (Think about this, too: the Romans, being nothing if not practical, would never have decreed entire populations to schlep to their birthplaces from wherever else they were living. That would have been as much of a zoo as Noah's fabled ark.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius
 
How can you call such a book factual at all?
 
News flash: objective reality is a thing.
The laws of physics are not subject to your beliefs.
 
God doesn't work in mysterious ways, but some Christians' minds sure do!

From AlterNet: Wayne LaPierre's solution to all the gun deaths and mass shootings is way more gun deaths and mass shootings

Editor's note: America is already exceptional for per capita gun ownership and the number of gun deaths we tally daily. (We're also exceptional for our poor-but-expensive health care and education systems, including our growing ignorance of math and science compared to the rest of the developed world. But who's counting?)
 
But 30,000 gun deaths per year are just not enough for Wayne LaPierre. He wants more more more more. More guns, blood, and death. More life-changing maimings. More traumatized survivors. More torn-apart families. The new normal isn't normal enough for him. He won't be happy until every man, woman, child, and sperm has a gun in each hand 24/7. And even then, he'll want to sell us more guns. Maybe he'll start branching out to designer colors or something.
 
So now LaPierre has put out a new gun-mongering commercial...just in time for Christmas. Perfect time of year to give the gift of DEATH to your friends and loved ones.
 
That's right, boys 'n' girls--we won't all be safe until we're all constantly in deadly danger.
 
He won't be satisfied until every American except him has been shot dead. Then, I guess, he'll go sell his guns to the Chinese since there are so many of them. Wonder how well that will go over with the peace-loving, non-violent Buddhists over there....
 
I don't need Mr. LaPierre to tell me about "demons at our door." They've already announced themselves loud and clear: Wayne LaPierre, the NRA, and the Republicans who let them run the country.    

NRA’s New Fearmongering Ad Campaign Equates American Exceptionalism to More Guns

In the wake of Colorado Springs and San Bernardino, the NRA warns of "demons at our doors" to promote membership.
 
Photo Credit: Vartanov Anatoly/Shutterstock.com

In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting on Wednesday, the second high-profile attack in less than a week, the usual cycle of debate over gun laws has included an increased scrutiny of the NRA’s political spending and now the gun lobbying group is using its moment back in the spotlight to tout America’s exceptionally horrid history of gun violence to promote the NRA. Shocker.

The ninth installment in the NRA’s “Freedom’s Safest Place” campaign features the group’s leader, Wayne LaPierre and is titled, “Demons At Our Door.” The ad was released just days after 56-year-old Robert Dear entered a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood and shot 12 people, killing three, and days before this latest shooting rampage in San Bernardino. In it, La Pierre makes specific reference to “the age of terror” and goes on to fear-monger over the threat of terror and violence to promote the NRA. The ad is currently running prominently on Fox News.

“Innocents like us,” LaPierre says, addressing his NRA members directly to camera, “will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes.”

Innocents like you? Excuse me, a-hole--you ain't no phuquen' innocent. You have BLOOD on your filthy hands!

“They will come to where we worship,” LaPierre warns as ominous music waves over blurred images of American everyday life, “where we educate and where we live.”

Yes, they'll come to places where you worship your GUNS--the altar at which you sacrifice the lives of everyone else. Except that they won't because YOU are the terrorists. YOU are the mass shooters.

“But when evil knocks on our doors, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share,” LaPierre proudly proclaims, touting the Second Amendment. “Let fate decide if mercy is offered to the demons at our door.”

Watch La Pierre fear-monger over terror to equate American exceptionalism with an individual right to bear arms:

           

From AlterNet: China isn't the economic competitor it seems...China actually supports millions of US jobs. Who knew?

Why China Isn't the Looming Economic Competitor We Think It Is
 
Believe it or not, China is actually a huge potential job-creator for Americans.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com / William Potter
The following is an excerpt from the new book  Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth About China's Economic Miracle  by Jeremy Haft (Polity, 2015): 

The proof of China’s might is in your waistband. And in the collar of your shirt; the chair you’re sitting on. The mug on your desk. The phone in your pocket. The toy your child is chewing on.
Just look around you. Everything seems to be “Made in China” these days. So it must be “the China Century.” And as China rises, America falls.

The logic goes something like this. It’s a global economy, a flat world. If China can make anything we can, only cheaper and at the click of a mouse, then we surely haven’t a prayer. We’re on a race with China to the bottom – in wages and, ultimately, quality of life.

The flat world is tilting east, and all our good jobs are flowing to China.

The pundits agree. Just look at today’s paper. There’s a story on the front page about surging Chinese imports, flooding our markets with cheap goods and killing US jobs.

Then there’s an op-ed on the back page. It says that China is already the world’s second-largest economy. And that major financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund predict China will overtake the United States economically in just a few short years.

...

Interestingly enough, before 2012, the typically pro-labor Democratic candidates were the China hardliners and the pro-trade Republicans the China softies. Now, talking tough on China was the bipartisan goose that laid the golden eggs. In both Democratic and Republican campaigns, the focus-group Svengalis told the messaging mavens to hit China early and often.

The polls show why. A recent Pew survey asked which is the world’s leading economic superpower – today, not at some point in the future. More Americans than not said China.

Think about that. More Americans today believe that China, not America, is the world’s leading economic superpower. You may be nodding your head in agreement.

So you probably won’t be surprised to learn that nearly 60 percent of British said China, too. And across 21 countries, the majority of respondents voted China over America as the world’s leading superpower.

No surprise, right? China’s might, and its dominance in the coming century, are just obvious. The ubiquitous labels on our products are proof enough of this irrefutable truth.

And if you square that truth with America’s jobless recovery, our cratered-out industries, shrinking middle class, crumbling infrastructure, paralyzed government, uncompetitive wages, and thicket of regulations, then the corollary to China’s rise is also an irrefutable truth. America is in decline.

But you don’t need a poll to tell you which way the wind is blowing.

To be sure, China’s rise is an emotional issue. Millions of Americans have lost jobs, homes, and pensions since the Great Recession of 2008. When the news media, politicians, and pundits almost universally blame China, it’s hard not to get angry.

But something deeper is at play here, too. There’s a thought-provoking psychological study that was conducted during the 2004 US presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Scientists wired electrodes to the skulls of Republicans and Democrats and showed them left-and right-leaning political statements, monitoring their brain functions. Each time a partisan statement was flashed on the screen, the areas of the subjects’ brains that lit up were not the centers of reason, as you’d expect. They were the emotional centers. Feelings, not logic, tend to drive our responses to political issues.

So it goes with China. One mention of “Made in China,” and the feelings just come spilling out. The problem with basing beliefs on feelings, of course, is that feelings are sometimes immune to facts.

Just ask the Chinese. Remember that Pew poll? The one that asked which is the world’s leading superpower? The only country that overwhelmingly replied that China is not the world’s leading economic superpower today... was China. They said America.

Could the Chinese know something about their fabled rise that we don’t?

Yes. Because to stand on the ground in China and actually make things – make shirts and toys and apples and oil rigs– there is a reality that contradicts every widely held notion about China’s so-called rise. Seen from the inside looking out, China is not a manufacturing juggernaut at all. It’s a Lilliputian. China is not a lethal competitor. It’s an economic helpmeet. China is not a killer of American jobs. It’s a big job creator.

That’s right. China actually supports millions of jobs in the United States.

But in order to see this, you’ve got to do more than watch the news or visit a couple of factories or talk to some Chinese businesspeople. You must walk the line where raw materials are formed into products. You must see for yourself how these products are made, step by step, from inputs to outputs. And ideally, you must try to wring safe products out of this system.

What you’d see would surprise you. You’d discover that nearly everything we’re told about China’s rise is wrong; that, in fact, the very core of China’s supposed might – how China makes things – is riddled with risk.

China is deceptive that way. It looks like a manufacturing powerhouse until you draw back the curtain. Then, you see risk everywhere.

Consider the “Made in China” safety scandals. In the past few years, we’ve seen baby formula spiked with melamine, an industrial chemical that caused renal failure in over 300,000 Chinese infants and killed six. We’ve seen melamine- laced pet food, too, that killed hundreds and injured thou- sands of dogs and cats in the United States. We’ve seen bad batches of the blood thinner, heparin, administered in American hospitals, killing 81 patients and sickening hundreds more. We’ve seen lead paint on Mattel toys. We’ve seen rotting Chinese drywall, installed in tens of thousands of US houses. We’ve seen exploding tires; faulty ignition switches; poison toothpaste and cough syrup; cracked welds on the San Francisco Bay Bridge; even “honey laundering,” in which more than one third of the honey that Americans consume is now deemed counterfeit – smuggled from China and laced with unsafe additives.

Whether it’s food, drugs, toys, tires, or bridges – pick any Chinese import – there have been big safety breaches. And this is not to mention the safety lapses in China – which are even more frequent, widespread, and deadly. Exploding watermelons, glow-in-the-dark pork, resold gutter oil, tainted seafood, scraps of animal skin in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, cadmium in rice, paraffin and ink in noodles, bleach in mushrooms, resin and starch to make fake eggs, poison gel caps and lethal antibiotics, collapsing roads and bridges.

There have been thousands of safety scandals in China just over the past few years. You can track them on a popular iPhone app called “The China Survival Guide” and on the website “Throw it out the window”. Most of the “Made in China” safety scandals go unnoticed in the United States. But when a story is newsworthy enough, our media tend to seek a villain – a nefarious criminal ring, a factory with lax quality control, a corrupt bureaucrat. When the Mattel lead paint story broke, for example, the media spotlight shone on the owner of the Chinese paint factory. With the poisoned baby formula, it was employees of the Chinese dairy firm, its middlemen, and suppliers that were the culprits. The underlying assumption in these news stories is that China’s frequent safety breaches are caused by a discrete set of bad actors.

The Chinese authorities agree. They repeatedly insist that each lapse in safety represents “one bad apple in the bunch,” and that “more than 99 percent of Chinese exports are safe.” So China’s crackdowns typically hinge on criminal prosecutions. When ten people died from poisoned antibiotics, China executed its chief food and drug regulator.

But these diagnoses miss the deeper problem. The sheer volume and variety of safety lapses, which number in the thousands and span every Chinese industry, indicate that something deeper is going on than mere one-offs. The “Made in China” safety scandals cannot be blamed on a group of wrongdoers. They are endemic. China’s entire system is to blame for these ongoing safety failures.

The risk that Chinese goods will be unsafe begins in the very ground, where crops are grown and livestock fed. Then it moves through China’s firms and farms to the long supply chains that link them up to the regulators that govern them. With each node of production, risk is baked into the system. Systemic risk in China has major implications for America.

It’s a major threat but also a major opportunity. The threat is easier to see than the opportunity. We hear about the threat often enough from many quarters. Chinese imports are unsafe. Despite a hundred years of evolving safety regulation in the United States after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed nauseatingly unsanitary conditions in slaughter-houses, the jungle is back! And it’s our biggest source for imported food, drugs, and consumer products. But, given the scope of systemic risk in China, how it permeates every level of manufacturing and agriculture, if anything, we’re still underestimating how dangerous Chinese imports are, and we need to do a much better job defending ourselves.

Yet systemic risk in China also presents a major opportunity. As China struggles to make safe goods reliably, it must import them. Imagine you’re a parent in China. You live in a brutally competitive, Darwinian economy with no social safety net to speak of. So if you’ve got some money in your pocket, you’re going to spend it on products that you think will be safe for your family. Increasingly, that means Chinese are buying American.

Though we rarely hear about it, China imports hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of US manufactured goods, services, and agricultural products each year. In fact, China has shot up to become our third-largest export market behind Canada and Mexico.

And we’re not talking about a handful of multinational corporations selling China airplanes and semiconductors. In nearly every congressional district across America, exports to China have been skyrocketing for the last decade. Between 2003 and 2012, in 401 out of 435 congressional districts (that’s 92 percent), American exports to China doubled, often tripled, or, in some cases, grew tenfold and more.

So “Declining America” is selling products to “Rising China” hand over fist. With all that’s famously wrong about our economy, we’re still able to sell our wares to China from almost every congressional district. Exports support jobs. When China buys goods and services from US firms and farms, it employs Americans. But exports are only part of the jobs story. Chinese imports support American jobs, too. All those products need to be transported, warehoused, and retailed. And Chinese investments in American firms support jobs, as well.

But America is not alone. China also supports lots of jobs in Europe. The Chinese market is one of the fastest-growing export destinations for European goods and services. In fact, the EU is China’s number-one source of imports today, beating Taiwan, Japan − and America, which ranks as China’s fifth-largest source for imports. These exports to China support over three million European jobs.

Wait a sec. China, a job creator? Many of you are shaking your head: No. That just can’t be.

Everything we see and hear about China tells us the opposite is true. But stay with me.

Forget the pundits and politicians. Exploring China’s secret supply chain is the only way to get a clear picture of China’s competitiveness. For when it comes to accurate economic data, China is a black box. Its official metrics are highly unreliable, partly because they’re politically moti- vated and partly because comprehensive research on any given topic in China is either rare or non-existent. So the aggregate data are untrustworthy, and the small case studies are misleading.

That’s why China’s own government officials disregard measurements of China’s economic size, trade volume, and exports as untrustworthy. Yet US academics, media, and politicians swallow these false numbers whole and regurgi- tate them as fact. A lack of good economic data has contrib- uted to our China myopia. China looms much larger in the world because we are looking at it through a false lens.

This cockeyed view of China’s economy causes many problems: bad governmental policies; squandered job oppor- tunities; ignored risks to our health and safety; and, above all, a false sense of self. We see a distorted image of America through the refracting lens of China. We seem puny. Uncompetitive. On the decline. Yet to stand on the ground in China and see how things are actually made, you’d realize that the opposite is true. America is still vital. We’re still competitive. And China really needs what we make.