Category: Uncategorized

Here are some interesting statistics, from before the COVID era: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/

On average 41% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient.  DOUBLE that–82%–of black Americans are deficient.

These statistics are from 2011.  There have been no public health campaigns I have heard of to change this, so those numbers still likely hold.

To my mind, given the many benefits we know about with respect to D, and the many unnecessary ailments that deficiency carries with it, this should have been treated TEN YEARS AGO as a matter of high national urgency.

Why wasn’t it?  I don’t know, any more than I can even hazard an intelligent guess as to why even the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration had nothing to say about D and zinc (and magnesium).

And it does not differentiate, in the part I can read, between winter and summer.  Vitamin D deficiency is known to be a seasonal problem above a certain line of latitude that runs somewhere through America, and includes just about all States north of Kansas or so.  Obviously it gets worse the farther north you are, and conversely, deficiency at any time in Florida is likely rare, so the rates must be REALLY bad up north.

In, say, Chicago, rates among black folks might approach 100% in the winter time.  Given that D is also a mood regulator, could that not have social effects?  I think so, and think I have argued that here.

And as I have mentioned, but will mention again: D deficiency among black folks is more common because their skin does not absorb it as well as paler skin.  The rate is also much higher among Hispanics [by the way, would the Latinx thing not be better solved just by alternating Latino and Latina, as smarter folks alternate he and her when talking in the abstract about when “one” does something or other?  Or hell, use Latina exclusively for a time if it floats your boat.]

And here is an analogy that occurred to me: Vitamin D is like having sprinklers in a building.  If you have a fire, it helps put those fires out.  It is a hormonal regulator that affects the immune system.

If there is a Vitamin D deficiency, as it touches COVID, it is unable to stop the cytokine storm we all read so much about a year ago.  It is unable to put out the fire, which burns uncontrollably.  By actual measurement (where I cannot recall and will not look up now, but I think it was Spain), 80% of people in the hospital for COVID were Vitamin D deficient.

Zinc would be water pressure.  If you are zinc deficient, your immune system is already compromised.  You might get water out, but not enough.  Enough zinc at the outset, bolstered by regular intake of zinc while ill, creates even and sufficient water flow, which is to say a nutritionally optimized immune system.

Zinc is consumed by the immune system.  If you are not taking it while you are sick, it may suck it all up.  As I have no doubt said, this is most likely why people wind up losing their sense of smell and taste: both are dependent on zinc.  What is enough zinc when you are not sick (I won’t pretend to know what that is, but I don’t think it is very much) is not even remotely enough when you ARE sick.

As I have said, I take 30 mg of zinc a day.  That is likely significantly more than I need, but less than what it seems to me is even remotely likely to be unhealthy.  And when I may or may not have had COVID a month or so ago, I took 100 mg the first day, and 50 mg a day thereafter until I had full remission of symptoms, which took 4 days or so.

My symptoms, by the way, were excessive fatigue and achiness, a chill in my back, and a mild dry cough that lasted 3 days.  I couldn’t decide if I was sick, since I was working hard, but the chill decided me.  I never took any medicine but my vitamins (I think I’ve got some Advil or something around, but I literally go years, and the plural is accurate, without taking pain killers) and it was nothing more than a mild annoyance.  I stayed home until I had been symptom free for three days, but it was nothing.

The only reason I think it may have been COVID is a guy on my job site tested positive, and I had been working near him; and I also DON’T EVER GET SICK with anything.  Ever.  I don’t get colds.  I have only had the flu once in my life, and have never had a flu shot.  So whatever it was must have been a bit more potent than the usual stuff floating around.

And as I’ve shared, my life changed as little as possible in the past year.  I’ve been hanging out in crowded bars since they reopened last summer, and most of the places I work nobody gives a shit in any way.  No masks, no distancing, no weird paranoid femboy crap.  A lot of the guys have had it, but it wasn’t much for any of them.  I’ve heard by now dozens of stories, at least.  The existence of this disease changed nothing.

So I’ve been exposed.  That much is certain.  I’m either immune, or I’ve had it, and it wasn’t anything to worry about. It really doesn’t matter either way.  I feel exactly zero anxiety about this fucking thing.  It’s my government that keeps me awake at night.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  I’m sleeping pretty well these days.  And having some interesting dreams that will not be shared here.

But every day I am asking: what the hell is REALLY going on?  I don’t know, and if you are honest, neither do you, unless you are in the small elite that either is controlling it, or thinks it is controlling it.

What matters is what the average standard of living is.  Do you own a car?  A house?  Indoor plumbing?  Hot water?  Clean water?  A refrigerator?  Internet access?  Etc.

What does not matter much at all is income disparity, if everyone is doing relatively well.

And in most Socialist nations you still have an elite who run the thing and have vastly more prosperity, meaning income inequality remains high, with the major and significant difference that it cannot be corrected.  The peons cannot rise, because in an anti-meritocracy (which might be a useful synonym for “egalitarian”) no amount of work or talent is sufficient to improve your lot.  Kissing asses is the only way to get ahead.

And since such Kleptocrats are members of the government and not “Capitalists”, their being more equal than the rest is easy for them to justify to themselves.

In any major, complex disaster, should the first thing not be to solicit all qualified opinions, debate them publicly, then choose the best, while keeping minds and eyes open for ways to improve?

To my mind one of the most conspicuous features of all this is the refusal of so many people to LEARN, to adapt, to look at the landscape and notice it is changing.

We know vastly more than we knew a year ago.  We now know Sweden’s approach worked, or at least worked vastly better in absolute metrics of death and disease than ours, and with vastly less tyrannical overreach and psychological and economic damage.

I was talking with someone today who is on the other side, and asked do you know what the estimated death rate is for those who are infected?  She didn’t want to know.

How could you not want to know?  The world has been shut down over this fucking thing.  Is it 1 in 10?  1 in a 100?  1 in 2?  What is it?

So many people just seem to have entered the Twilight Zone, and have no plans to leave until they are told by the government to leave.  That is scary to me.

And regarding Sweden specifically, I saw the argument repeatedly in the past week that “Sweden had a death rate TEN TIMES that of their neighbors”.  It was repeated so often, you have to wonder if they created a macro for it.

Here is the FACT: Sweden had a lower death rate than we did, but it was still ten times that of Finland and Norway.

This means, logically, that WE, the UNITED STATES also had a death rate that was ten times that of Finland.  I think it is actually 12x, if memory serves.

Is the logical question not “what are they doing so much better?”  If reason were involved, would we not be more concerned with what Norway and Finland are getting right than what Sweden is supposedly doing wrong?

Do you know?  I don’t.  I don’t have enough data to be smart about it, but I do recall reading that Vitamin D deficiency in Finland is less than 1%, even in the winter, since they supplement D heavily.  I think they put it in many foods, including all dairy products, which I think they consume a lot of.  In the United States in contrast, in some populations–like the black population–80% or more might be deficient, particularly in the winter.  It’s about 41% in the population as a whole, I assume on average across a year, and presumably higher in the winter and lower in the summer.

Here is one study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/

There is so much intelligence about all this which is possible, but absent.

I just discovered this idea and article, which I will excerpt at length:

“In 2006, at the order of the Bush administration, some computer science programmers with a small group of public health officials began to resurrect a premodern idea of quarantines, closures, and measured lockdowns. This way of thinking is not just premodern; it turned the logic of modern medicine on its head. It was based on a theory that we should just run away from viruses, whereas Dr. Henderson’s whole life had been devoted to implementing the great discovery of modern virus theory that we need not flee but rather build immunity through science, either natural immunities or via vaccines.

“At the age of 78, Dr. Henderson swung into action and composed a masterful response to the new fashion for quarantines and lockdowns. The result was Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. Henderson, though listed last, was the primary author along with co-authors  Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole.

“Here is the riveting conclusion:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”

Is this more or less not what Tegnell did in Sweden?  They apparently have high spike protein injection compliance because the Swedes trust their authorities, who did not fuck with them, or change their mind every five minutes for nakedly political reasons.

As people like Martin Kulldorff have pointed out, the disingenuousness, incompetence, outright lies, and continual policy vacillations of the CDC and NIH have caused a very high percentage of  Americans to lose trust in those institutions entirely.  I have.  I trust the National Enquirer as much, and perhaps a bit more, than Anthony Fauci.

This makes all policy recommendations harder to get into place, at least in conditions of freedom, and conditions of authoritarian coercion are going, in this country, to get people shot if they go too far beyond what the Constitution allows our government to legally do.

And as I have pointed out, if you are diagnosed with COVID THERE IS NOTHING MOST DOCTORS CAN LEGALLY DO until you get really sick.  In many places they can’t give you Ivermectin or HCQ, and for whatever reason nobody anywhere is pushing Vitamin D and Zinc supplementation, which likely help as late as being symptomatic, although having sufficient amounts at all times is better.

And even though Ivermectin and HCQ are SAFE, and KNOWN to be safe, they were sidelined in really sketchy ways; in my view patently corrupt and scientifically indefensible ways which scream corruption and politics and knowing lies.

And is it not INTERESTING that all this was being gamed out 15 years ago?  From what Judy Mikovits and others have testified, the NIH or CDC had all the patents on some of the coronaviruses back then.  I think they patented SARS-CoV-1.  It’s in this documentary: https://www.thriveon.com/media/plandemic-ii-indoctornation-full-movie

So you have the guy who ended Smallpox more or less anticipating 2020 and calling bullshit on nearly everything that has been done; you have the guy who invented PCR saying it should not be used for medical testing; and you have Dr. Robert Malone, who invented mRNA technology, saying that we need to do a LOT more research on these shots before offering them, much less forcing people to take them.

Oh, and you have the Nobel Laureate who discovered HIV saying the shots are going to make things WORSE, possibly MUCH worse, and you have the fact that the two discoverers of Ivermectin won the Nobel Prize for it, but that it is being called horse dewormer by people who would know better if they wanted to know better.

I’m not going to pontificate any more.  It’s tiring.

And I am well aware of my own flaws.  Judge not lest ye be judged applies not just to God but human beings.  Everybody wants the bombastic asshole to get in trouble.  I get that.  I have been told to get bent countless times, by I have no idea how many people.  About 10% of them were on solid ground.

But I wanted to add some more territory.  Some fertilizer, perhaps, depending on your viewpoint.  But there needs to be more greenery in the middle, more flowers, more PEOPLE.

Another Facebook post I saw–and its conceivable this person knows about this blog, although I have not advertised it in many years and can count on one hand the number of people I’ve told about it face to face–had it that men would care a LOT more about getting women pregnant if they had to pay half the expenses for everything, including half the insurance.

This could be true.  I don’t know.  Here is the thing: I am ALL FOR all the ancillary negotiations.

There is room to write laws about fatherhood and paternity. There is no reason abortion restrictions cannot come with increased legal liability (in effect) for men who knock up women.

There is room to provide State money for birth control, and to mandate basic sex education by a certain age before puberty (although I think the Left is way ahead on this curve, since they seem to be trying to sexualize our young).

There is room to make girls who are in a certain demographic carry around those fake kids for a week–or at least give them incentive to.

We have a reasonably good idea who is most at risk: it is mainly the children of single mothers in poor homes, particularly if the mother is uneducated.

I have read stories about this experience: it scares the crap out of a lot of these girls because it gives them a REALISTIC idea what it is like to have a baby.  I think many of them think a baby will give them the love they lack–and which the father of the child lacked–but of course babies feed on love, they don’t give it.  That is not their job, even though bad parents corral them into it.

So there is tons of room for compromise.  You give me this, and I will accept that.  Negotiation.  Middle ground.  Politics in its pure form is the art of compromise.

But the Left has largely pissed away its negotiating leverage.  They have been calling anyone, lately, who opposes abortion at ANY stage–even the 2nd trimester, even at BIRTH–horrible names.  Most pro-lifers got tired of getting insulted and yelled at, oh, around 1995.  The heartbeat bill could perhaps just as easily have been the first trimester, but the authors probably said, in their own Christian way, FUCK those people.  We are doing this the way WE want, and they can go sit on a fucking pole.

This is what you get when you destroy the middle.

[I have lost opportunities personally I can’t know how many times because I have a pronounced tendency to be overbearing and rude.  I know why it happens, psychodynamically.  I could give you a 20 minute or 20 cent lecture on it.  But nobody cares.  I’m much, much better than I used to be, but there are definitely some train wrecks in my past.]

If, however, the Left would just admit BABIES ARE PEOPLE, then they could get a lot more of the stuff they WOULD want if they were actually trying to improve the world.

As I say, they really aren’t.  They are trying to burn the world down.

But I wanted to put this on the table.  Saying that fathers should play a larger role is not an anti-abortion argument.  It is an argument for better laws, laws which could and should be discussed, analyzed, debated and–if they make sense–passed into law by sober, honest, intelligent, public spirited, and fair people.  That is the theory.

Vaccines, to my mind–for reasons I have discussed if anything too much–are neither necessary nor sufficient for a recovery to a condition roughly equal to the freedoms we took for granted as late as January 2020.

Natural immunity is fully sufficient, and in my view it is NECESSARY.  I think that is what Sweden has.  My reasoning was that lockdowns mess people’s immune systems up in general, and the spike protein injections seem to be specific to each variant; and the more widespread these specific immunities without general immunities are–the more jabs have been dealt out–the more likely more variants become.  The more shots you give, the more you need.

As I have said, Luc Montagnier, who is smarter and more knowledgeable than either of us, has been pointing to this likelihood, using both an understanding of the processes involved, and the history of epidemiological science itself, as evidence for the better part of a year.

So the science is not being followed now, any more than it was at the outset.  Assuming a base level of competency, then politics, not science, is obviously the dominant factor.  Then the question becomes logically: Cui bono?  Who benefits from this thing, and who has the money and power and connections to drive rational scientists in irrational anti-scientific directions?

To my mind, we are in the end game of a chess match, at least with regard to the specific tyranny of COVID, although our freedoms globally may well be on the chopping block too.  The core goals have been accomplished.  The main one was ensuring that the one superpower in the world was not controlled by someone who was not a reliable pawn of a global elite, whose membership in detail I will not try and guess.  They are more or less inferable from their influence, like black holes are inferred by their effects on visible things around them.  Some of them are likely politicians, but the core elite most likely is not.  They BUY politicians, who more or less work as shop foremen for the work they direct them to do.  They buy worker bees. Myrmidons.  They grade them and give them reviews, and they fire them if they don’t do the work to their satisfaction, and replace them.

So the main goal was getting rid of Donald Trump, whose victory in 2016 was due entirely to their overconfidence in their ability to cheat, and in their rigged polls, which they forgot were rigged.  Being psychopaths, they easily assumed they were invincible.  They had a 5% swing, and Hillary was ahead in the polls.  How could you lose?

Secondary goals including testing the limits of people’s tolerance for tyranny; putting most small business out of business, or putting severe stress on it, such that many could be bought for cheap, as could real estate in some places and much else; stealing a lot of money from the Treasury in the “stimuluses”; and making a lot of money for their pharmaceutical “subsidiaries”.

What they need to avoid, as I have commented, is a public reckoning with the sheer irrationality and pointlessness of the past year of tyrannical overreach, trauma, stress and destruction in many forms.

And as I have commented, their most obvious play is to create the perception that vaccines, and vaccines ALONE, enabled a return to normality.  This accomplishes, obviously, the main policy aim of making the past year seem regrettable but necessary, which is a lie; but they also create a template for coerced vaccination, for government control of people’s lives in detail (with one dystopian model being tested in Australia); and of course they stand to make tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

I personally don’t think the vaccines contain anything but dodgy lab created compounds which may or may not be safe.  But at some future point, as technology increases, and COMPLIANCE increases, they may actually have some of the things in them people fear, up to and including agents which effect our cognition and volition directly.

People of good will in positions of influence and power need to SEE what is happening, and need to oppose it.  I can’t do much but try and see better than most, and describe what I see, but there are more good people out there than psychopaths.  We will not lose if the honest people do their jobs en masse, particularly in an organized mass.  But that also requires courage, of the sort this guy displayed, and I am far from confident such courage will prevail.  The land of the cowardly cannot long remain the land of the free.

Consider, with respect to my previous post, that for the Left “Black Lives Matter”–that is their official story, and they are sticking to it–but “All Lives” do NOT matter.  That sentiment and idea is racist.

The fundamental illiberality of objecting to the saying “All Lives Matter” is instinctively obvious to people steeped in the AUTHENTIC American tradition.  It is obvious to genuine Liberals, which is to say to people possessing genuine goodwill; to people capable of articulating a principle and applying it honestly even to people different from themselves.

And BLM at its root, is just a ploy.  A propaganda meme.  One more means of dividing the country into Us and Them to create usable political will on the one side, animated into an ugly anger against the other side, understood to be sub-human, if human at all.

As I have said often, black lives IN REALITY do not matter to the Left.  They are not trying to HELP them.  On the contrary, vegan white fem-boys from the suburbs helped burn down black neighborhoods last year, then left, seemingly without regret, or realizing or thinking or caring in any way about what they had done.

Breonna Taylor’s mother eventually called such people out, saying in effect “most of you don’t even know who the fuck I am, or care”.  The protests in Louisville kind of fizzled after that, or so I read.

And as I keep saying, if you CARE about someone, you THINK about them.  You make honest and sincere efforts to help them.

Has the Left done this with respect to blacks?  Perhaps in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  But even in the 60’s, encouraging riots–which left wing agitators DID DO–was counterproductive.  It created white flight and created most of the blighted zones in inner cities which continue to this very day.  As I have pointed out often, in 1960 or so, Detroit had the highest per capita income of any city in the WORLD.

Many factors changed this.  Global competition and union intransigence certainly played a role too.  But to my mind the CORE problem was crime, and the white perception that black people were dangerous.  You can call this racist–and certainly it is applying perceptions to all which are true of only a few–but they all saw the footage of buildings burning, and were well aware of the crime rate.

Are black people intrinsically dangerous?  Of course not.  They were, then, reacting in emotionally understandable ways to distressing and terribly unfair situations.  They are, however, NOW reacting in ways which have been programmed by the Left and which serve NOW to impoverish, not enrich, their lives.  Most of them are stuck in prisons–mental prisons–they can’t see.

People who CARE would work to alleviate real problems.  Black folks do not really have a problem with “systemic racism”.  This is a propaganda meme created by white people to use as a club mainly against other white people.  As I have pointed out, it is culturally solipsistic, in that it shuts ACTUAL black folks out, really doesn’t want or value their input, and has not even a remote ambition of intelligent policy, or policy analysis.  They simply stipulate as true whatever feels momentarily right to them, refuse to debate it–since questioning the Apostles of the Holy Church of Sanctimonious if also Insincere Anti-Racism, is itself racist.–and move on.

That their policies have made black lives WORSE for 40 years is a matter of indifference to them.  Making black lives better is really not a concern of theirs.  Feeling morally superior is.  Also, most of them are effectively on the take, and even if they could honestly say they are not engaging in outright graft, the System, writ large, provides many benefits, including political office–which is to say power and attention–and money.  None of us truly objects to more money and all it will buy.

From my perspective–and as an honest liberal I am open to feedback, and certainly willing to change my views as needed–what the black community mostly needs is schools which provide ACTUAL educations, better jobs, and some means of increasing the number of two parent homes.

As I have pointed out often over the years, with regard to two parent homes, the outcomes of white kids and black kids (and for all I know all kids of all races) are equal when it comes to being raised by single parents.  Such kids are at higher demographic risk of all the bad stuff, and are less likely to do all the good stuff.  They are at higher risk of being incarcerated, of getting a woman pregnant in their teens/being a woman impregnated in her teens, of dropping out of school, of abusing drugs/alcohol, and of being unemployed.

Now, the issue of abortion specifically touches black lives more than white lives.  Vastly more black babies are aborted, proportionately, than white babies.  As I understand the data, it is not unreasonable to view abortion as a means of birth control.  If you get pregnant, why would it matter?  You can get that thing cut out of you for free.

And of course reducing black birth rates was a key Eugenic goal–and stated clearly as such–by the founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger.

[I should try and reconcile my post on abortion with the patent fact that more black babies will be born, many of them into poverty, many of them to young single mothers.

This seems likely.  All I can say is that the FACT of this law needs to be broadcast, and we can hope it changes behavior.  Most people act mostly rationally when there are real consequences.]

To to me Charter Schools are an OBVIOUS and long overdue first step.  These increase educational outcomes exponentially.  And longer term, smarter people make smarter decisions, don’t they?  Is helping people make smarter decisions not SUPPOSED to be a key goal of education?  You educate people to help them do better in life.

And economically, President Trump showed clearly that the best way to reduce black unemployment rates, and increase their overall prosperity, was to increase prosperity across the board through intelligent policies of the sort Democrats reliably oppose.

And with regard to two parent homes, they are vastly easier to maintain when times are good, and money readily available.

All our problems have solutions.  Our MAIN problem is that we have many people in our midst who BENEFIT from the problems of the many, and particularly the problems of black folks.  They have every reason to resent and resist actual black advancement.

And ponder how ludicrous it is in California that the white guy is supposed to be the one who protects and cares about black folks–even though he just locked them in their homes for a year, and is trying to get rid of their police protection even in a time of increasing crime; and the guy who is ACTUALLY BLACK is the face of the KKK.

For those with eyes, the landscape is covered with a thick fog of lies which, like most lies, are not intended to help anyone but those telling them.

Not only did they do the best job of balancing common humanity with policy, but their response was also just about the only SCIENTIFIC one.

And it WORKED: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-remove-most-remaining-pandemic-restrictions-this-month-2021-09-07/

https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se

1,400 new cases but no new deaths.

As I said a year ago, locking people down fucks their immune systems up. It might prevent those in younger children from developing properly outright.

Masks don’t do shit.

And Herd Immunity is most solid and safest based on NATURAL immunity.  Sweden was very open relative to most of the world for most of 2020, and even though they are using the vaccinations, in my own view those vaccinations are secondary to the fact that nearly every man, woman, and child was EXPOSED to COVID.

As Tegnell confessed, their failed to protect their elderly properly, but that was an issue of execution, not planning.

For all intents and purposes, they did the Great Barrington Declaration, which was the obvious SHORTEST PATH BACK TO NORMALITY, as well as the one least abusive to common decency, which is to say the one least contemptuous of human suffering and indignity.

Sweden, which never masked up, and never cancelled school for most kids under 16, and never locked down anything like most of Europe, has the best health right now, and are ending all restrictions outright.

Science is about congruence between stated aim and result.  What we have been using in America is not science.  It is absolute bullshit, that is only being bought by people because our media has been bought, and because most Americans were never educated properly.  They were taught compliance and obedience to authority–to officially anointed “experts”–not critical thinking and the scientific method.

And by the way, their death rate was lower than our own.  I did the math the other day.  They were about 1 death in 615 I think it was, and we are at 1 in 512.  By literally every metric, numerically and morally– and this will eventually include mental health indicators and economic indicators–their response was superior.

And as said, their number SHOULD be lower.  They failed in some specific tasks, but even in failure they are significantly better than us.

They should give themselves the Nobel Prize.

The following will most likely be a bit disjointed since I had a long day, but I want it out of my head tonight, so it won’t bother me tomorrow.

The following started with a Facebook post by a friend of mine, who is very left wing, but who I am not responding to since I genuinely like her otherwise.  I think she is misguided, even though I would never say something that patronizing to her and expect to be able to hug her again.

It was a meme saying essentially that we don’t hesitate to pull the plug on brain dead people, particularly old people, so how can anyone say anyone able to do that values the human heartbeat.

Whoever wrote it, I think, thought it was a mike drop, but I of course was appalled that someone would conflate someone who had lived a full life and had no prospect of future consciousness, which is to say life; and a fetus which had yet to draw its first breath, much less a baby which was born viable, and still in danger in some places, or so I understand.

I commented on my own page that a metaphor occurred to me that a seed is different from a sprout, itself different from a seedling, then a tree, then wood.

Teasing that out a bit, I will offer another analogy that I posted elsewhere, but not, I don’t think, here: the situation as regards abortion with the Left is that a fetus is more or less in an indefinite, Schroedinger’s Cat situation: it is human if wanted, but not human if not wanted, and it can switch from human to non-human and back again as often as the woman changes her mind.

There, I called this philosophically unacceptable, as indeed it is.

Within the first analogy, the baby converts from a sapling to wood and back to a sapling, depending on the whim of the woman.

And it then struck me that the underlying notion is that HUMAN LIFE GENERALLY has to be subject, within such a paradigm, to the same logic.  Why is the Left so murderous?  Well, some people it wants, and some it doesn’t.  And the people it doesn’t want aren’t people, so killing them is no crime.

Then it hit me that the reason for this dogmatism is that the same rigid and unempathetic mindset is applied to the political discourse itself: people who have the right opinion are human, and those who do not are not.  No point in talking to them.

Where and when have you seen a Leftist EVER admit that a baby is a human being, in PRINCIPLE?  They won’t do it.  Emotionally, they live with the contingent, Schroedinger’s Cat image.  They only know if the death of a baby is a tragedy if they know how the mother felt.  If her boyfriend punched her in the stomach in a drunken rage and she miscarried, oh the tears and wailing.  But if she herself chose to abort that same baby at the same time, then it was her choice.

Do you see the problem here?

And here is the perspective that occurred to me, that I am calling a new argument.

It is not technically true that the government’s laws are “on” the woman’s body.  The laws concern the DOCTORS who perform the procedures.  No one is telling her she can’t have an abortion: they are saying she can’t use the COMMUNITY to do it.  She cannot ask the rest of us to tacitly endorse her decision.

Now, the argument all of us have lived with since we ourselves were not aborted long ago is that if “abortion is illegal then we will return to back alley abortions”.

In important respects, this is a ridiculous claim. Most importantly, no one is proposing banning ALL abortions.  They are still legal.

And women KNOW how to prevent pregnancy, outside of rape, which is really not anything anyone is talking about any more any way.

For a woman to get pregnant, she has to have insufficiently protected sex.  If it is voluntary, then the risk which led to pregnancy is something she could and should have controlled.

I see people say “the man should have too”, but the man does not get pregnant.  If he wants to wear a condom, that’s great, but the ultimate responsibility OBVIOUSLY lies with the person who bears the consequences.  This is simple fact.  It is plain moral logic, that would be comprehensible, I think, in any non-decadent culture.

And here is the analogy I will offer, whose direct validity I have not decided on.  It is perhaps not exact, but I will offer it anyway.

The fact is that because heroin is illegal, much of the heroin that is on the street is dangerous.  If it were legal, and sold by pharmacies (and by the way, I would most likely not oppose this), then a lot less people would get bad stuff and die.

The argument could then be made, using roughly the same logic, that heroin MUST be legalized, since people using it will die if it isn’t.

But heroin is illegal.  Should the law be concerned with what happens to people who break the law?

All public laws reflect moral norms that are sufficiently common that our elected politicians see fit to encode them in law.  Our system, by design, is intended to allow for many moral norms.  As I have pointed out often, there is no reason Minnesota cannot try and replicate Sweden (complete with Islamist crime and terror), and Texas, well, be Texas.

Differing understandings, within the broad rubric of the Constitution, which as I have said OBVIOUSLY  does not speak to abortion.

{Roe v. Wade, if you study the history, was a set-up.  Effectively it was left wing radicals intentionally and by long design creating bench legislation.  It was a planned operation, controlled and directed by a group of people to the explicit purpose of getting the Supreme Court to affirm a “right” which did not exist in the Constitution.]

In my personal view, the window should be the first trimester, but what for me is not at issue is that if a baby is born breathing and crying, it should not be murdered.  If you grant that infanticide is wrong, then it becomes a question of where to draw the line.  Fetal heartbeat is one such place.

So to sum up, getting pregnant is something which only happens after a decision is made by the woman.  If she is drunk, she chose to get drunk.  If it was a bad decision, it was her bad decision.  If this sounds unfair, perhaps it is, but only women can get pregnant.  Life is not fair in many ways.

She takes a risk.  The risk is pregnancy, and currently in Texas, the risk is that if she does not abort the baby, if she does not want it, before it has a heartbeat, then she either can’t abort it legally, or has to go out of State to get it done legally.  She can also legally abort it herself, but that is of course dangerous.  What she wants is safety, not unreasonably.

But if we grant that the State has the right to set a timeline from when the act of abortion becomes infanticide and thus murder, then that is a law she needs to be aware of, and take into consideration.

Not often commented on, but one key aim of such legislation is REDUCING THE NUMBER OF ABORTIONS.

It is the same aim with banning heroin: we want less of it used.

And if she knows what the law is, is there not reason to suppose her behavior WILL CHANGE?  That her decision patterns will change?  That she may do a better job of preventing pregnancy, with any number of options, including the pill, IUD’s and others?

Again, I am tired and perhaps offering some non sequiturs, but I don’t think so.

Let me try my logic again:

1. The 4th Amendment does not guarantee a right to abortion on demand.  Specifically, it does not require States to permit medical professionals to perform abortions for any period of time.
2. This logically means that communities who want to do so can ban DOCTORS and nurses and other medical professionals from performing this procedure, within specific constraints, such as how far along the baby is.
3. If a woman KNOWS this–and she obviously should–then she KNOWS she is risking creating problems for herself if she a) gets pregnant; and b) takes longer than 6 weeks to abort the baby.
4. The fact that she is at higher risk of health complications should she decide to abort after 6 weeks is not the problem of the law, which deals in personal behavior and individual responsibility.

To my mind, the big red flags in all this are the denigration of personal responsibility–which is reinforced by allowing the negative consequences of bad decisions to manifest, and reduced by sheltering people who make bad decisions from the consequences–and the refusal of the Left to admit to any consistent and non-ironic definition of when life begins.

The latter refusal, as I have commented, has led logically to the rationalization of infanticide, and to the political theater of televised abortions which have the specific aim of incensing those who view fetuses as human beings.

There is plenty in here to make people mad, and I probably should not post it without sleeping on it, but shit, I’ve already posted lots of stuff to make people mad in the past.

The net is that discussion should be possible, but it is not possible on this topic because the whole thing requires sincerity with respect to what human life is and its value.  You cannot have a values based debate with people who just want to keep their options open.  For them, some human life has value, and some doesn’t, and it varies, depending on their political goals and current needs.  That is more or less the root of it.

But the whole “My body my decision” involves a doctor.  They don’t want government taking their hands of them, but rather keeping them off of the doctors, so the doctors can put THEIR hands on the babies.

One last thing: infants feel pain after a relatively short period.  Anyone who would not torture a mute puppy–that can’t make a noise so you know you are inflicting agony on it–should consider that human fetuses are just as sensitive after a certain point.

Again, if we were trying to share a common humanity which differed in specifics, that would be one thing.  But we aren’t.  The people we are fighting don’t believe in our humanity in important ways at all.  I honestly believe this, because I see it.

One last, last thing, only tangentially related: ponder how you NEVER, NEVER hear people like Fauci and Walensky talk about the human consequences of their policies, of the screaming and miserable children, the suicides, the depressions, the old people dying alone, all of it.

Contrast this with Tegnell of Sweden, who actually DID agonize, more or less publicly, about balancing policy with common humanity. I personally think he did a great job.  He is virtually the only one on Planet Earth that I can recall making such an effort.