Jun 17 2010

A “pro-choice” measure I can support

Category: abortion — harmonicminer @ 8:18 am

Pro-Life Legislation That Truly Aids Choice

A Pro-Life legislative measure which is gaining traction throughout many of the states is commonly known as “the ultrasound bill”. Basically it is a measure aimed at aiding the decision making process of women who are considering abortion. The bill makes it a requirement for abortion clinics to give their clients the option of viewing an ultrasound of their unborn child before making the decision to go through with the abortion. If the client does not wish to see the ultrasound, they are free to sign a waiver declining their option to do so.

Choice is the operative word here in every instance. With the ability to see an ultrasound, women can now choose to avoid the situation which so many women have unjustly experienced since Roe vs. Wade, that situation being their abortion doctor telling them their child is “just a blob of cells” and believing that what they are terminating is not really human. An ultrasound definitely enhances the accuracy and completeness of information a woman takes into account while considering abortion. In addition to this the measure leaves room for any woman to choose to not view the ultrasound. No woman is forced by law to subject herself to more psychological turmoil. Also, the vast majority (82% in Florida for instance) of abortion clinics already perform an ultrasound before performing abortion procedures and include this cost in the abortion fee so complaints of the bill monetarily penalizing women are relatively unfounded.

The ultrasound bill presents itself as a measure which serves to really test if a person is truly in favor of choice or if they are simply interested in protecting unmitigated legalized abortion, as provided by Roe vs. Wade. At its heart, it seeks to help women be more accurately informed about making a decision with a dizzying amount of consequences. It cannot be painted any other way. Ultrasounds are tools which aid doctors performing medical procedures (hence why so many abortion clinics already use them!) In the end, an ultrasound doesn’t show anything except what is truly inside of the pregnant womb: a developing human life. Why would anyone claiming to be pro-choice or pro-woman have a real, fundamental issue with such a measure?

The answer to that question is very simple.

Jun 16 2010

Murdering in the right place is important to protect the guilty

Category: abortion — harmonicminer @ 8:47 am

I deliberate scheduled this post to come up over a week after the events that it reports. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you can ask yourself why this horrific event is not well-covered in the media. If you have heard of it, ask yourself where you did hear of it, and where you didn’t…  and why.

Girl performs at-home abortion; Polk Township man, 30, charged with rape, concealing death of child

A 30-year-old Polk Township man has been arrested for his role after a 13-year-old girl performed a self-induced abortion using a pencil. Michael James Lisk has been charged with rape and concealing the death of a child.

State police were alerted to the case on Sunday after staff at Lehigh Valley Hospital treated the girl, who said she conducted the “home abortion” on herself using a lead pencil last Wednesday.

She subsequently became violently ill and began having contractions before ultimately delivering a baby at her residence.

The girl had been in contact with Lisk while she was in labor, police said. Lisk allegedly arrived at the her residence and removed the baby in a plastic shopping bag, later burying it in a wooded area along Middle Creek Road.

The baby’s body was later discovered by a state police forensic services unit.

During their investigation, police learned that Lisk had been having a sexual relationship with the girl since June 2009. The girl believed he was the father, according to police.

Lisk was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Michael Muth and sent to Monroe County Correctional Facility, where he is being held on $50,000 bail.

An autopsy on the baby is scheduled for later this week. The girl is still receiving medical treatment.

How can burying a dead fetus by “concealing the death of a child”? Everyone knows they aren’t “children” until they are born. Is it only a “child” because the girl didn’t manage to kill it in the womb? So, since the murder wasn’t carried out by a professional fetus killer (who has all the tools and skill necessary to do it in the womb, and the “medical” license to do so), is it now a child, worthy of legal protection?

Of course, easy access to abortion would have solved the whole problem, from the perspective of the “pro-choice“.

We all know, however, the way the law now stands, and the way abortion clinics do business, that easy access to abortion for this girl would simply have resulted in a continuation of her sexual abuse by a 30 yr old man.  And we already know that a huge percentage of “under age” girls who get pregnant are made so by men who are years older, so that easy abortion access simply protects the men, not the girls.

The completely bizarre aspect of this is that abortion clinics legally do what in any other circumstance would be called “concealing evidence of a crime”, both of sexual abuse and of killing a baby.

When was the last time you heard of someone convicted of statutory rape because an abortion clinic reported the prenancy of an underage girl to the authorities?

Jun 15 2010

The USA’s intrinsic values… sometimes caught, but rarely taught anymore

Category: election 2010,God,government,Group-think,left,liberty,military,religion,right,society,university,USA,virtue — harmonicminer @ 6:34 am

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Jun 14 2010

Submerging truth in emergence

Category: church — harmonicminer @ 10:12 pm

I’ve had other comments to make about the “emergent church” or the “emerging conversation” or whatever they are calling themselves these days.  (Funny how much they care what they are called, when words with specific meanings are so post-modernly passé.)

So I think I’ll just let Mike Adams say his piece without much comment.

Jun 14 2010

Changing the rules?

Category: science — harmonicminer @ 8:25 am

Distant gas blob threatens to shake nature’s constants

The basic constants of nature aren’t called constants for nothing. Physics is supposed to work the same way across the universe and over all of time. Now measurements of the radio spectra of a distant gas cloud hint that some fundamental quantities might not be fixed after all, raising the possibility that a radical rethink of the standard model of particle physics may one day be needed.

The evidence comes from observations of a dense gas cloud some 2.9 billion light years away which has a radio source, the active supermassive black hole PKS 1413+135, right behind it. Hydroxyl radicals in the gas cloud absorb the galaxy’s radio energy at certain wavelengths and emit it again at different wavelengths. This results in so-called “conjugate” features in the radio spectrum of the gas, with a dip in intensity corresponding to absorption and an accompanying spike corresponding to emission.

The dip and spike have the same shape, which shows that they arise from the same gas. But Nissim Kanekar of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India, and colleagues found that the gap in frequency between the two was smaller than the properties of hydroxyl radicals would lead us to expect.

The gap depends on three fundamental constants: the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron, the ratio that measures a proton’s response to a magnetic field, and the fine-structure constant, alpha, which governs the strength of the electromagnetic force. The discrepancy in the size of the gap thus amounts to “tentative evidence” that one or more of these constants may once have been different in this region of space, Kanekar says.

The change in these constants, if genuine, is tiny. For example, if a change in alpha were solely responsible for the discrepancy, the measurements suggest alpha would have been just 0.00031 per cent smaller 3 billion years ago than today (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 716, p L23). But even such a small effect would require “a new, more fundamental theory of particle physics” to explain it, says Michael Murphy of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Measurements by Murphy and colleagues of visible light from distant quasars absorbed by intervening gas clouds have also hinted alpha was smaller in the past. But it was never certain that the light measured all came from the same region. “That’s a critical assumption,” says Murphy.

“Radio measurements currently appear to be the most promising avenue for a secure detection of fine-structure constant evolution,” says Jeffrey Newman of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I wouldn’t call this more than a hint, though. It’s the first application of a new technique.”

The subtle discrepancy found by Kanekar’s team might be caused by “contamination” from light from another patch of gas. Last month, the team began using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to rule this out.

Maybe there’s a Supreme Court for physical constants of the universe, and maybe recent appointments haven’t included enough originalists…. so they’re just changing the rules.

Or not.

Seriously, all the basic determinations of physics and astronomy depend on the assumption that the rules haven’t changed.  So let’s all be watching this one with great interest.  Of course, if the changes over time have been as tiny as suggested here, it may turn out that the universe is only 13.72222 billion years old, instead of 13.73 billions years old.

Jun 13 2010

I was just kidding, man… lighten up

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 8:10 pm

Dominican University evacuated Wednesday after bomb threat

The River Forest Police Department has charged Saudi Arabian foreign exchange student Mohamed Mahdey S. Al Shria, 20, with disorderly conduct. Al Shria has been released on bond.

Police said that Al Shria was arrested yesterday at his host home on the 1200 block of Ashland in River Forest, and soon after they determined there was no credible threat to the school.

Dominican University evacuated its Priory campus about 2:30 p.m. yesterday after a student enrolled in a program renting space from the university allegedly threatened to blow up the school. The student had allegedly received a bad grade in a class.

OK. From now on, I’m giving all A’s.

River Forest police immediately identified and quickly arrested a Saudi Arabian foreign exchange student legally living in River Forest, who was enrolled in an English education program, ELS, that rents space on the campus.

Between 75 and 100 people were evacuated from the Priory campus at Harlem and Division, including four preschool classes from Dominican’s Goedert Center, ELS students and staff, as well as a handful of religious, and university faculty and staff, according to Dominican spokeswoman Kristin Peterson.

The Goedert Center’s students were moved across the street to Grace Lutheran School soon after the threat, and the center’s staff called students’ parents and asked them to pick up their students as soon as possible.

Police searched the school’s campus, as well as the student’s host house, but did not find any bombs or bomb-making materials. Because the suspect was not a native English speaker, police called the FBI for help translating Arabic.

I wonder if there is a general tendency for people from that part of the world to make bomb threats as an expression of more or less random discontent.

You know. Americans jokingly say they’re going to shoot each other, but Saudis say they’re going to blow you up.

I suppose that’s unfair. Although no more so than the caricatures that pass for observation of Americans in the middle eastern media.

Jun 12 2010

Obama not so cool anymore?

Category: left,Obama,politics,society — harmonicminer @ 8:00 am

Obama loses the Left: suddenly, it’s cool to bash Barack

Well, at least he’s still got Sir Paul McCartney. At the White House last week, the 67-year-old crooner was gushing in much the same manner as his own groupies did at Shea Stadium in 1965. “I’m a big fan, he’s a great guy,” McCartney told American critics of President Barack Obama. “So lay off him, he’s doing great.”

Later, McCartney serenaded the First Lady with a rendition of Michelle and, receiving a prize from the Library of Congress, took a cheap shot at President George W Bush that was as unfunny as it was unoriginal. “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.” Bush. Doesn’t read books. Stupid. Geddit?

Imagine. A universe without puerile pop stars who think their ability to turn a tune translates into insight into the great game.

The problem for the President is that even if the former Beatle does speak for billions, the overwhelming majority of those are overseas. Polls show that around 10 per cent of those who voted for Obama in 2008 now disapprove of his performance and the heavy turnout of young people and black voters among the 69 million who back him will not be repeated again.

McCartney’s banalities were an example of a transatlantic dissonance that is all too apparent these days. Whereas Europe is stuck in November 2008 and still hopelessly in love with Obama, Americans have got over the historic symbolism of it all and are now moving on as they live with the reality.

That reality has now begun to dawn on some of Obama’s natural constituency – Hollywood and the Left. The “no drama Obama” demeanour that served him so well on the campaign trail is now becoming a liability.

This coincides exactly with my earlier point.

Obama takes action precisely where and when he shouldn’t, and does little or nothing when he should.

And the USA is catching on, even if the rest of the world’s left hasn’t, yet. Of course, they are perfectly happy for Obama to do anything that weakens the USA, and to avoid doing anything that will help it… it is an article of faith for them. But perhaps at least some of the USA’s homegrown left aren’t quite so lemming-like.

November 2010 is coming.

Jun 11 2010

Britain R.I.P.? Part four

Category: guns,justice,liberty — harmonicminer @ 8:00 am

The previous post in this series is here.

The extreme nature of British gun bans has still not protected the people from the occasional mass murderer with a gun.  In fact, even in the USA, they only tend to happen where virtually everyone is known to be disarmed by law, like in schools, government offices, universities, post offices and military bases [go figure, but they’re disarmed].  When was the last time you heard of a mass murder at a gun show?  Or a gun range?  Of course, in Britain, everyone is disarmed all the time everywhere, by law…  so mass murder can happen anywhere at all.  According to Peter Hitchens, Perhaps these deadly rampages aren’t so ‘inexplicable’ after all:

Yet another gun massacre is followed by yet another typhoon of psychobabble,
sentiment and bogus declarations that ‘this must never happen again’, when everyone knows that it will.

It’s difficult to argue for tighter gun laws, since they’re already so tight, though I’m sure the authorities will think of something suitably irrelevant and futile, as they did after Hungerford and Dunblane.

They are determined to make sure nobody in this country is armed, apart from criminals and terrorists, the invariable effect of ‘tough’ gun laws that trouble only the law-abiding and have no impact on illegally held weapons at all.

The truth is that until 1920, Britain’s gun laws were so relaxed they made Texas look effeminate, but we had virtually no gun crime. That only really began to increase here after we abolished hanging.

But that truth doesn’t fit the Leftist dogma which has ­everyone, including the Tories, the media and the police, in its grip, so the facts will be ignored.

What can we learn from the Cumberland murders? Well, first of all that the police are no use to anyone once a crime has been committed. They never were and they never will be, except if they can do first aid.

It’s such a pity they’ve forgotten their job is to prevent crime rather than hold verbose Press conferences afterwards and festoon the countryside with silly scene-of-crime tape copied from American TV shows.

It’s possible an old-fashioned village constable, on the spot, might have done something to halt Derrick Bird, or have realised something bad was going to happen before it did.

It’s ­certain that the modern fire-brigade approach to policing with its sirens, helicopters, computers and flash cars was no use.

This is another area where the “mother country” of the USA has simply lost its mind.  Hitchens goes on to conjecture that anti-depressant drugs are at the heart of some of these mass murders.

Maybe.

The next post in this series is here.

Jun 10 2010

Genocide of Black Babies

Category: abortion — harmonicminer @ 8:27 am

As Christians, we are called to Value Life and All of God’s Children. Here are some observations from Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union.  I wonder which major Christian university will be featuring her as a “diversity” speaker in the near future?

Today in America, we all would like to believe racism no longer exists, but that is just not the case.That fact is most evident to me every night when I turn on the evening news and hear the stories, night after night after night, about beautiful 2-year-old or 5-year-old little white girls either missing or brutally murdered. My heart breaks and aches for them and their families, beautiful children! Yet I know little black girls have disappeared or died the same horrible, tragic deaths, and the media silence regarding them is deafening!

In America, we subconsciously devalue black babies. We are tricked into thinking a black child has less value than a child of another race.

Though U.S. law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in various contexts, including employment, education and housing, black babies are still openly targeted and discriminated against.

Where’s the proof? It’s right in front of our faces. In recent YouTube videos there were several instances where Planned Parenthood representatives were willing to accept racist donations, even to the point of being “excited” at the possibility of taking money specifically earmarked to kill a black baby.

Planned Parenthood’s eager acceptance of these donations reflect the racist and eugenic principles of its founder, Margaret Sanger. This business mainly profits from the large number of abortions it provides, 37 percent of those abortions are performed on black women. Black America needs to face reality. We need to understand what this business is really all about.

Many pro-life people refer to abortion as genocide. You may agree or disagree. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group defined by the exterminators as undesirable. It could be a racial, religious group, cultural, ethnic, or some other distinct group.

Most people find it easy to understand what genocide is as it relates to the Holocaust. To justify that genocide, Adolf Hitler and his followers did their very best to make whole races of people appear less than human. The targeted groups were deemed “undesirables” and “subhumans,” which made it easier for Hitler to carry out the killing of millions of people.

Today, the abortion industry would have all of us believe that unborn children are less than human. They make sure to only refer to these children as fetuses or embryos. They use these words to dehumanize the child. Planned Parenthood views the killing of innocent preborn babies, especially those who are black, in a very similar way. Most abortionists and abortion providers insist the child in the womb is not yet fully human. They want women and girls who walk through an abortionist’s doors to believe the child they are killing is not yet a child, as Hitler believed, it was “easier” to kill that which was not fully human.

Abortion hurts women and inflicts a horrendous and brutal death on the children. If we were talking about animals all of Hollywood and the rest of the nation would demand an immediate halt to the killing. But we’re not talking about defenseless animals here, only defenseless children.

Today, for every black baby born, another black baby is killed by abortion. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion chain. It has planted its clinics strategically in our urban and minority neighborhoods. This is no accident!

The Alan Guttmacher Institute and with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that a huge majority (experts estimate more than 75 percent) of abortion clinics are located in minority neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider. It raked in $1 billion last year, including more than $350 million in taxpayer funds. That’s right. Tax dollars, in part, fund an organization that gets excited about taking donations earmarked to abort black babies.

Last year, thousands of Americans lost their homes due to foreclosed loans. Many homes could have been saved with $350 million. Many of our schools, especially inner city schools, are in shambles; $350 million could have paid for more teachers, and computers and other school supplies.

We have men, women, children, and entire families living on the street. I’ve seen them, you’ve seen them, fellow Americans, destitute and homeless. And $350 million could have provided many of them housing and shelter.

Taxpayer dollars spent to support the racist agenda of Planned Parenthood could have been spent in various other ways to support and protect people in need, the homeless, elderly and unborn. Why are we forced to give our tax dollars to a racist organization that was founded to limit the numbers of Negroes in America?

For too long, our black leaders have walked with blinders on, we have ignored the screams and tears of our children being ripped from the womb. We have been guilty of looking the other way while our children were targeted for death.

But we are coming together and we realize abortion will not go away until we bring this travesty out into the light and act to protect the very lives being disregarded. The hateful agenda of Planned Parenthood must be stopped, and we as a society must not sit by and allow children to be killed.

Those of us who serve God acknowledge we are all made in his image. For us, blessed is the fruit of the womb. If God says children are a reward, a gift and our heritage, then we must uphold that all children are greatly valuable and desirable, indeed.

Jun 09 2010

Why Turkey, NATO member, is siding with Iran against Israel

Category: Islam,Israel,jihad,national security — harmonicminer @ 8:19 am

Fareed Sakaria thinks he knows why Turkey is siding against Israel in the Gaza blockade. You guessed it: it’s Bush’s fault.

On the other hand, people who actually understand a bit more about the facts on the ground in Turkey see that the shift in Turkish foreign policy is a matter of demographics, as pointed out by Mark Steyn in Israel, Turkey, and the End of Stability

Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc. You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla. Much of what went on, the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies, was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks. In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war, more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the State of Israel.

Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry. I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay. Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day what was formerly the Zionist entity’s staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.

As the think-tankers like to say: “Who lost Turkey?” In a nutshell: Kemal Ataturk. Since he founded post-Ottoman Turkey in his own image nearly nine decades ago, the population has increased from 14 million to over 70 million. But that five-fold increase is not evenly distributed. The short version of Turkish demographics in the 20th century is that Rumelian Turkey, i.e., western, European, secular, Kemalist Turkey, has been outbred by Anatolian Turkey, i.e., eastern, rural, traditionalist, Islamic Turkey. Ataturk and most of his supporters were from Rumelia, and they imposed the modern Turkish republic on a reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. Now they don’t have to accept it. The swelling population has spilled out of its rural hinterland and into the once solidly Kemalist cities.

As is often the case, Mark Steyn makes an elegant argument from demographics that the days of a western looking Turkey are probably over. We should have known when Turkey would not allow us to stage troops into Iraq in 2003. But it is now clear that Turkey is rapidly become just another Islamist state, and the demographic forces at work seem likely to continue its motion in that direction.

Don’t get me wrong:  I don’t think Fareed Zakaria is ignorant of the demographic changes in Turkey.  He surely knows.   Your speculations are as good as mine about why he doesn’t find that knowledge worthy of mention in his conjectures about what has led to changes in the Turkish political situation.

Click the link above and read Steyn’s article.

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