How I intend to vote

As I wrote in the previous post, I am likely to be one of the 30 million people to be murdered by the human cloning ban passed in 2001 by the then Christo-Fascist ("Republican") majority in Congress, and signed into law by President George W. Bush. As a matter of principled, personal justice, I will do everything I can to remove the Christo-Fascists and their collaborators from power. If there had been the least doubt about the Presidential result in California, I would not have hesitated to bring a barf bag with me into the voting booth, voted for Obama as a way of voting against McCain, and barfed afterward. Fortunately now it looks like I won't have to. Other than that, I will vote against every Republican on the ballot, and against every Christo-Fascist of any political party that I can vote against, and against their collaborators. I will vote against every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists favor, and for every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists, qua Christo-Fascists, oppose.

I must add that my specific adversaries, in the current political context, are only the Christian and Islamic religious Fascists: those who believe that they have a divine mandate to stifle my exercise of reason - the human means of survival. I consider all supernaturalism and all religious faith to be arbitrary and mistaken, but in the political context, the dividing line is between those who, whatever their religious beliefs, are willing to respect my individual right to act on the judgment of my own mind - and those who don't. In the debate on the cloning ban, some religious organizations - the United Church of Christ (Obama's church,) the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Rabbinical Council, and others - supported therapeutic cloning. I have strong disagreements with all of them, but in the context of the ongoing struggle against Islamo- and Christo- Fascisms, all of them are welcome to shake my hand as allies and friends. The others - those who collaborate with the Islamo- and Christo- Fascists to shackle science and hinder the exercise of reason - are enemies of my life, and of all Human life on Earth, and I will treat them accordingly.

Election 2008: Why cloning still matters

I originally posted the article below in another forum, more than 3 years ago, in September 2005. Sadly, the democide continues, with 30 million people already murdered by the ongoing delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies. I am now 3 years older, with just 11 years to go before I'm living on what will be, statistically, borrowed time. And with every year of the on-going ban I become more likely to be one of those already murdered. There is no guarantee that even a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president will reverse the ban on therapeutic cloning. There is only a certainty that a Christo-Fascist president, or a Christo-Fascist majority in either house of Congress, will continue the democide.

Why Cloning Really Matters (September 18, 2005)

I am about to discuss a topic of intense personal self-interest. I am 59 years old. My father died at 73 from heart failure. I have another 14 years before I start living, by biological prediction, on borrowed time. I follow medical news, of advances in treatment of organ failure, as though my life depended on it. Because it does.

On 28-Oct-2004, the Medical Procedure News section of News-Medical.Net published an article under the title "Fetal tissue restores lost sight from retinitis pigmentosa." It started, "Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life." Two and a half years ago she received a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells from an aborted fetus. Her vision has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 since, and she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.

Bryant was the first of six patients in whom the lost function of an important organ was restored with fetal organ transplants. Some people have a problem with this:

One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. A few countries, such as the UK, already have clear guidelines to ensure this does not happen. "The guidelines are meant to prevent the deliberate conception and termination for treatment of a particular person," says Stephen Minger, head of the stem cell laboratory at King's College London.

In much of the world therapeutic cloning is banned because of the superstitious belief that embryos and fetuses -- even those without a developed brain -- are possessed of some ghostly version of a brainless, incorporeal consciousness. To the extent that any research on therapeutic cloning is permitted at all, it is permitted only to the point of collecting undifferentiated stem cells from a very early-stage embryo. Yet, as News-Medical notes, "the few attempts to treat degenerative eye diseases with stem cells in animals have failed, as have attempts to transplant unstructured groups of cells into the retina ... no one is anywhere near recreating the complex structure of the retina using stem cells."

Cloning is seldom mentioned in connection with the spectacular success of fetal retina transplants. Yet this proof-of-concept work bears heavily on the ethics of banning therapeutic cloning and the growing of cloned fetuses for transplants. The retina is literally the thinnest important organ in the human body. Because it is only a few cells thick, transplanting a retina from a genetically different fetus does not provoke the massive immune rejection that would greet a transplanted heart or liver or lung. Yet there is a natural way to prevent immune rejection from happening at all: grow a fetus from an embryo that was cloned from the patient for the express purpose of making organs for transplantation. For Homo sapiens, the animal that lives by the mind, there is surely nothing more natural than to use its intelligence to defeat death from organ failure.

We can now understand the perverse fear that free individuals blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, or their mothers or daughters or sisters, "might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives." If they were permitted to save their own sight, or the sight of a relative, they might get the idea of gestating a cloned fetus to save their own lives, or the lives of their relatives, from death by heart failure, by liver failure, by lung failure or by kidney failure. Hence therapeutic cloning -- even to save one's own life, or the life of a sibling or parent or child -- must be strictly prohibited by the authorities. If people are permitted to save their own lives, they might think that they individually, and not the state over them, are their own lives' proper owners. People in positions of power -- even if they themselves are free of superstitious beliefs about some ghostly consciousness in a brainless fetus -- cannot allow such a thing.

We do not know, at this point, to what stage of gestation, or post-gestation age, a fetus may need to be grown before a specific organ is harvested. However, unless the fetus becomes a conscious human, there is in objective ethics no conceivable problem with growing one to whatever stage is needed. As long as the fetus is surgically decorticated before its brain develops a capacity for consciousness, the fetus remains an artifact -- created by a free individual for a purpose of her choice -- and, having been decorticated, never becomes a person. So-called "ethical concerns" with therapeutic cloning are the politicians' mask -- an instrument for obtaining "popular assent" to mass murder.

Democide, as we know from history, does not require gas chambers or killing fields. It is enough to prevent the victims from doing what they would have done, if free, to continue their lives. In the great famine, Lenin murdered between 4 million and 9 million Ukrainian peasants by prohibiting, as contrary to Socialist Morality, the practice of trade in food. Through prohibiting what is required for men to keep on living, one can murder millions without the cost of gas or bullets or executioners. A less frequently discussed example is the current worldwide ban on DDT, by which some 50 million people have been murdered when denied the means to protect their lives from malaria. Let us calculate the dimensions of the democide that the ban on cloning amounts to.

In 2002 -- the most recent year for which government statistics are available -- 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths. Therapeutic cloning was banned in the United States in July 2001. Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the Bush Administration, it was banned nearly everywhere around the world.

President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.

Darkness made visible in Michigan

Every time I think that I have seen the outer limit of America's ongoing headlong rush to the dark ages, I soon find that what I had hoped was the outer limit is seen by promoters of the new theocracy as a mere provocation:

The Kovacses want to give their embryos to science, but they cannot donate them in Michigan because a 1978 state law prohibits the destruction of embryos for research. Michigan voters on Nov. 4 will decide on a constitutional amendment that would allow researchers to create new stem cell lines using embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

The effort faces stiff opposition from Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science & Experimentation, a coalition of interest groups that say Proposal 2's language is overly broad and that passage could lead to unregulated research and even human cloning.

Unregulated research. In America. Can you imagine that? What would Benjamin Franklin think?

Greenspan, Philosophy, and Homo Economicus

I am braking my pre-election-political-activism hiatus from this blog because something happened today that merits blogging about.

Former US central banker Alan Greenspan, the public figure most closely - and falsely - associated in the minds of many Americans with the intellectual legacy of Ayn Rand, admitted his - and nearly the entire economic profession's - error in assuming that economic actors will act, automatically and intuitively, without any need for principled thought or for philosophy, in their actual self-interest. This has been the most fundamental assumption of economics for centuries: that Man is Homo Economicus, given to automatic optimization of his actions, in any context, for his own interest. According to the thesis of Homo Economicus, the economist need not concern himself with questions of cognition, conceptual skill, principles, epistemology. The Central Banker needs only to create a catallactic context in which economic actors can maximize their returns by acting as the Central Banker wishes them to act, and they will automatically do so.

What is wrong with this picture?

Ayn Rand's most profound insight is that Homo Sapiens does not have any kind of inborm "ethical intuition" or "economic instinct" that would enable humans to maintain and enhance our lives automatically. To act in the best interest of one's life requires cognition: focus, measurement, concepts, principles, logic. To do cognition right, requires philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing in philosophy and cognition applicable to life on Earth is inborn, intuitive, or automatic.

The thesis of "Homo Economicus," the idea that right, self-interested action requires neither cognitive skill nor philosophical knowledge, was not truly tested until recent times. Between the birth of the science of economics, a child of the Enlightenment, and the last quarter of the twentieth century, few people were wealthy enough to influence economic calculations who did not have some education in conceptual thought. It was only the generation of what Randian philosopher Leonard Peikoff calls "Johnny can't think" that brought about the tragedy of a country whose citizens, bankers and business leaders would test the thesis of "Homo Economicus" upon themselves. Now that experiment is over. And we know the result: Rational self-interest is not automatic. It requires reason. It requires focus. It requires principles. And it requires philosophy.

Apart from "educators" raising a nation of Johnnies who can't think, the worst result of the anti-conceptual pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism is that it brought philosophy into disrepute in America. Americans, bankers and all, and (especially) American economists, have come to believe that philosophy does not matter, that it is not needed in "real life." We are now living the result of that belief.

Ayn Rand asked, "Philosophy, Who Needs IT?" Alan Greenspan, I hope, just found out that he does. So does the science of Economics. So does America, and, come to think of it, so does the entire human civilization on Earth.

Hiatus in blogging

I anticipate a hiatus in blogging until after the elections. The elections are an opportunity for Objectivist activism, and also a chance for me to make a real difference in my life and in the lives of people I value. Working with young people as a university teacher, I am directly aware of the threat posed by California Proposition 4 to their right to chart the course of their lives by the judgment of their own minds. And, more than any other matter in which I can make a difference, Proposition 4 is still too close to call. However small the number of minds I can change, I have a realistic hope of influencing the outcome. My OpEds on Proposition 4 have been printed in newspapers (the largest being the Orange County Register) covering 8 million people - but this is only one-sixth of California.

After the elections I'll blog about lessons learned and about strategy for the future.

Bush-Appointed Judges Exempt Earmarks from First Amendment

The title (above this text on my blog) links to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a ruling by Bush-appointed Seventh Circuit judges. The ruling upholds a federal earmark grant of taxpayer funds for a Catholic university program of "opportunities for spiritual growth, including prayer services, Mass, course work, and retreats." With Theo-Republican judges, the United States is rapidly becoming one more banana republic, just like the one that first gave vent to an observation increasingly applicable under such "non-activist" courts: "Constitution c'est papier."

Adolf Hitler anticipates Sarah Palin

Jim Walker has an interesting page about matters related to the frequently heard allegation that Hitler was an Atheist. In everything that Hitler is known to have said or written, Herr Uber-Adolf always emphasizes his allegiance to Christianity and to the ideas of Jesus. The only source for Hitler's alleged anti-religious sentiments is the Martin Bormann version of Hitler's "Table Talk." The original notes by Heinrich Heim and Henry Piker, on which the Bormann version is supposedly based, were destroyed. And the problem with believing anything written by Martin Bormann, is that Martin Bormann was a notorious, pathological liar. Henry Piker wrote explicitly that "no confidence can be placed in Bormann's editing of it," and that the extant version is full of "Bormann's alterations, not authorised by me." There is, however, an alternative (and reasonably reliable) record of Hitler's private thoughts: Wagener, Otto. Hitler--Memoirs of a Confidant. Ed. by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Trans. by Ruth Hein. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, c1985.

Here is Hitler's view of Socialism, Christianity and Jesus, from pp. 139-140 of those memoirs:

Socialism is a question of attitude toward life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung!

But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets and imagine myself back in the era of the Roman and late Hellenistic, as well as the Oriental world, I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! For they transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite! They killed it, just as, at the time, the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross; they buried it, just as the body of Christ was buried. But they allowed Christ to be resurrected, instigating the belief that his teachings too, were reborn!

It is in this that the monstrous crime of these enemies of Christian socialism lies! What the basest hypocrisy they carry before them the cross-- the instrument of that murder which, in their thoughts, they commit over and over-- as a new divine sign of Christian awareness, and allow mankind to kneel to it. They even pretend to be preaching the teachings of Christ. But their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and their Creator and a defamation of God!

We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!

Herein lies the essential element of our mission: we must bring back to the German Volk the recognition of those teachings! For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them! The suppression of freedom of opinion, the persecution of the true Christians, the vile mass murders of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, the armed campaigns against the people of free and true Christian faith, the destruction of towns and villages, the hauling away of their cattle and their goods, the destruction of their flourishing economies, and the condemnation of their leaders before tribunals, which, in their unrelenting hypocrisy, can only be described as balaphemous. That is the true face of those sanctimonious churches that have placed themselves between God and man, motivated by selfishness, personal greed for recognition and gain, and the ambition to maintain their high-handed willfulness against Christ's deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations. We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts, who give alms in order to remain undisturbed as they themselves throw their money around, who invoke the Fatherland as they fill their own purses by the toil of others, who preach peace and incite to war....

Change the German stuff to its middle-American equivalents. If the result sounds a lot like what we have been hearing lately from Sarah Palin - essentially everything, except only that Hitler was explicit about Christian Socialism while Palin sticks to euphemisms - it probably isn't plagiarism (I've never heard Palin accused of reading books from Yale University Press) - just similar minds thinking alike.

California Proposition 4 and the Self-Lobotomy of the Pragmatist Left

Our totalitarian Christianists are pushing not one but two constitutional amendments in the coming election: Proposition 8, which would outlaw marriage for Gays and Lesbians, and Proposition 4, which would mandate parental notification and impose a de-facto parental veto of young women's abortion plans. And because GLs vote, and 17-year-old women don't, the fund-raisers of the left have already handed a victory on the latter to the National-Christianist mob.

You would think that my University colleagues would have something to say about that. Most students at the university where I teach are the first generation of their families to attend college. Many of their parents are immigrants, often from collectivist cultures that have no notion of individual rights - nor sympathy with the American idea that a young woman has an individual right to chart the course of her own life. We know from statistics that some of our students were pregnant in their teens. If Proposition 4 had been law, some of the most talented would not be studying at a university. They would be working in a menial job, supporting an infant or child carried to term against their will.

But my University colleagues have been silent. Even to have a motive for speaking out would imply an endorsement of the principle of individual rights, and of the superiority of the American culture of individual rights against the collectivist cultures of the rest of the world and of the growing Christianist movement at home. It would contradict the dogma of multiculturalism, and this is what the Christianists appeal to and exploit.

No one, inside or outside a university, dares to identify the issue that separates a parental veto of abortion, from a requirement for parental consent to treatment at a tanning salon. I did try to do so in op-eds I sent to several newspapers, but none has been printed so far (Subsequent note: now one has been. See the bottom of this posting.) As I wrote in the submitted op-eds, Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives." What a young woman does about an unintended pregnancy may affect the course of her life for the next 19 years. Most of those years will come after she becomes an independent adult. Those years - indispensable years in which to complete her education and start a productive life - are rightly hers to decide about. This puts her decision on abortion into a different category from short-term decisions whose consequences - like the risk of needing the care of a dermatologist after a visit to a tanning salon - are limited to the immediate future, when her parents will still be paying the bills. Her decision on abortion is rightly hers alone: she is the one, who will bear the burden of care for a child if she is forced to continue her pregnancy and to give birth against her will.

It is obvious why the more Christianist editors would reject my op-eds. But why would the supposedly secular ones? I suspect that it is because the principle here, is the principle of responsibility - and it is the Pragmatist left that has been fighting to sever the link between decisions and consequences. The Christianists know this, and they smell the blood from the secular Pragmatists' self-inflicted lobotomy.

Proposition 4 was written to deceive the voters into believing that it is "filled with caveats and exceptions." The young woman could seek a waiver from a court - but only by presenting "clear and convincing evidence" for her case. This is not the "preponderance of evidence" standard normally used in civil courts. "Clear and convincing" is a much more demanding standard, so demanding that it is used in civil courts to justify the imposition of punitive damages. No lawyer has ever met the standard of "clear and convincing evidence" without weeks, months or years of preparation. No lawyer that I know can even imagine this standard as something that a teenage girl might meet in a brief hearing held on a single day's notice.

Proposition 4 pretends to exempt from its requirements those young women whose pregnancy carries serious medical risks. But this exemption is limited to a risk of immediate death, or of "a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." A non-immediate risk, even as severe as a family history of post-partum depression and suicide, would not qualify.

Proposition 4 also seems to create a narrow exception for young women who claim to have been severely abused by their parents. When such allegations are made, the notice may be delivered, with a written allegation of abuse, to a "grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, half-sibling, or first cousin." Most young women don't have foster parents or step-parents, and everyone else on this list is a blood relative of the young woman's parents, and is not likely to take the young woman's side against them. In some cultures the young woman's pregnancy is enough to discredit her. Few young women have adult relatives whom they can trust to keep the pregnancy secret from the rest of the family, even if that pregnancy resulted from abuse.

If read carelessly enough, Proposition 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Proposition 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force - against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. As I wrote in the rejected op-eds: those who hear Proposition 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.

Existing California law protects the young woman's individual right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind. If Proposition 4 were to pass, that individual right will become California history. This is what happens when militant religion is given all the room in the world, by the secular side's self-inflicted philosophical lobotomy implicit in Pragmatism.

This November I will hold my nose and vote for the Democratic ticket, because I agree with Leonard Peikoff's analysis: a vote for the Republicans will bring even more Christo-Fascist oppression than we already live under today, and with Palin on the ticket, a realistic threat of National Christianist theocracy in the United States within the next 4 years. A Democratic victory will buy time for a counter-revolution. Perhaps as long as two decades' time. This is a fight in which we have no allies but zombies, and no weapon except our naked minds.

(P.S. The _Daily Breeze_, the local newspaper of the Coastal Southern Los Angeles County and nearby communities, covering a population of about 1.5 million people, just published the op-ed I sent them. Yippee!)

(P.P.S. Other versions of my OpEd were printed in the Press-Telegram (Long Beach and surrounding communities, population a half-million or so, and the Orange County Register, one of the world's largest newspapers, covering a county of 3 million people. And there are more left to try - I haven't covered all of California yet!)