Reproductive Freedom 

The term "Reproductive freedom" is being mis-used.   Men and women have had reproductive freedom for at least decades.   Now it is being used as a euphemism  for the term "abortion" because the reality of abortion is so horrible.   Pro-abortionists say that women should have control over their own bodies.   Those who oppose abortion agree, but if a woman does not control her body and produces a child, she should not have a right to kill it.

                                                                                                               2024Election 

After the 2024 election, the headline "Abortion:  Pro-choice victories in seven states" was published.

                             It should have read   "Abortion:  Pro-child losses in seven states".

                                                                                            Laws 

 In response to a book by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch & Janie Nitze:  Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law:      

Laws should be oriented more toward freedom, not coercion. For example, transgender:  People should be free to try to live like the other sex.  Other people should not be legally forced to believe or support the transgender's status.  Our nation is supposed to be built on freedom.  It may be the only way our nation can survive.

                                                                                                                        Biden 

Biden was a major disappointment.  In 2020 he got a significant number of Republican votes and a large number of independent votes.  They saw Biden as the only person who could bring our country back together.  He could have made the Democratic Party into a long-term dominating force.  Instead he made things worse, replacing Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion with censorship and coercion.  And he missed his major opportunity to press hard for a mid-East solution, instead of accepting the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

                                                                      Health Care 

(In response to “Reproductive Justice is a Civil Rights Issue that Goes Beyond Abortion—and It Must be Won at the Ballot Box”      By Regina Davis Moss, President and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda)

As she says, Black maternal health is an important issue.  So are the lives of black unborn children, who are now dying by abortion at about 5000 per week (while we self-righteously claim that Black Lives Matter).  Health care needs to be provided to both the mother and the child.

                                                                                                               Cosmology

 It takes incredibly blind faith to be an atheist.  It is preposterous for an atheist to believe in the "big bang", that this unimaginably huge, incredibly complex universe started out as a point and just accidentally popped itself into existence with all the right physical and chemical laws to make life possible.  And in violation of the 1st and 2nd laws of science.  If a big bang actually happened, it only makes sense as an act of creation.  Atheist’s belief in “Big Bang” is a belief in magic.

And life is so incredibly complex it could not possibly have originated randomly, without design, in violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the law of biogenesis.  The simplest living cells known are Mycoplasma, with DNA about 800,000 base pairs in length and about a billion highly organized atoms, with cell walls, hundreds of different proteins, and the ability to eat, digest, do repairs, monitor their environment, and reproduce.  They could not have come into existence by accident.  Life is not just randomly generated genetics.  The cells of our body all have the same genes, but become muscle cells, brain cells, skin cells, bone cells, eye cells, liver cells, etc. through the influence of what is now called epigenetics, which program the whole integrated development of the bodies of living things.  Complex systems require design of all the components, in order for the systems to work together successfully.  Our hearts would be of no value without our circulation and respiratory systems. Brain cells are apparently further highly organized to produce the instinctive behaviors of each group of organisms.  Atheists are so biased that they don't recognize the absurdities of their beliefs, and they don't have any choice but believe them.

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                                                              Homosexuality and transgender are serious sexual problems, not “rights.”  

The present damaging “LGBTQ” groupthink is based on the belief that these problems are hopeless, unchangeable, conditions.  So, we do “Pride” events.  And pass 

mis-named “non-discrimination” laws that actually discriminate on both sides of the issue. 

That is not how we treat alcoholism.  We don’t try to shut down Alcoholics Anonymous.  For drug addiction we have groups like drugfree.org.  For the blind and deaf we research treatments to help them.  LGBTQ should stand for Let’s Get Better Treatments Quickly.   We should quit censoring efforts to deal with these sexual problems.  We are supposed to be a country based on freedom, and that includes freedom of speech, freedom of science, freedom of research, and freedom of experimentation.  People and organizations who have done something always have more credibility than those who say it can’t be done.

We need to face these realities:

1.  Male homosexuality is an incredibly efficient way of spreading sexually transmitted diseases.

2.  If bi-sexuality exists, then for those individuals, practice of homosexuality is a matter of free choice.

3.  Changing sex is biologically impossible.  A man can try to live like a woman and use hormones and body surgeries, but the cells of his muscles will still be male, the cells of his bones will still be male, and his voice will likely remain male. Such men should not be allowed to participate in sporting events meant only for women.

4.  In a free country, individuals should be free to try to live like the other sex.  But no one should be legally forced to pretend that an individual has actually changed sex.

5.  Children need both a father and a mother.  

6.  Birth certificates should be totally accurate and trustable.  That would still allow a notice that the individual has “transgendered to ….”

7.  Research is badly needed to determine the causes of homosexuality and transgender.

                                                              Was life created or did it originate naturally?

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”            Neil deGrasse Tyson

In 2023, material from the asteroid Bennu was collected and brought to earth.  Some scientists thought that could give us clues as to how life originated on earth.  The sample contained both carbon and water, but carbon and water already exist on earth.  So nothing more has been learned about how life originated on earth and nothing more should be expected.  The environment of an asteroid is very different from the conditions needed for life. 

From:  https://www.space.com/33374-odds-of-life-emerging-new-equation.html

When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence — and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be… The switch from nonliving to living organisms — may not be understood anytime soon…   We don't know the mechanism whereby nonlife turns into life, so we have no way of estimating the odds.

A living organism has to have a “shell” to protect itself from its surroundings and hold itself together.  It needs to be able to get energy, many specific proteins, amino acids, lipids, RNA and DNA. It needs to eat, digest its food, grow, transport materials within itself, repair itself, repair its DNA, get rid of waste products, and reproduce.  It needs to monitor and respond to its environment.  

The simplest form of life that we know of:   Mycoplasma, which includes cells as small as 0.3 (micro)m in diameter and genomes that consist of loops of double-stranded DNA about 800,000 base pairs in length.  Some of these cells contain only a billion atoms, yet fulfill all our criteria for living organisms.         From What is Life?  Now is the time to Find Out.   1993.      Harold J. Morowitz, Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, George Mason University.

Proponents of intelligent design believe that the many components required for life are so complex, that they could never have been produced by an evolutionary process.  So life must have been designed.

“Is the universe the produce of design and purpose, or is it the result of an undirected process, purposeless universe?  That’s a big important question that science is now addressing.  It’s a fascinating thing …   Darwinism says the appearance of design is illusory; intelligent design says it’s real.  You have two competing hypotheses trying to explain the same piece of evidence.  How is one scientific and the other religious?  They’re competing explanations for the same thing.”                               Dr. Stephen Meyer, Ph.D. in Philosophy of science, University of Cambridge.                                              

A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism:   https://dissentfromdarwin.org/about/

Signed by more than a thousand scientists.

The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”     Albert Einstein

Nobel Prize winner Friedrich August von Hayek in his The Pretense of Knowledge warned against "the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific."  (Actually taken from The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo.)

"There has never been more arrogance and smugness" than in today's self-congratulatory scientific culture.  David Gelernter, pioneer of artificial intelligence and Professor of Computer Science at Yale.   From Time magazine, March 7, 2016, page 49.

The Big Bang theory increasingly involves the assumption that our universe simply evolved out of nothing, by means of a "quantum fluctuation in the primeval state of nothingness." Such explanations are considered by (cosmologists) to be preferable to believing that, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth". While it is true that one cannot prove that God created, neither can anyone prove that the universe created itself.  At least the concept of God as Creator presents a reasonable First Cause, able to account for the complex of myriad effects that comprise the cosmos, whereas the assumed primeval nothingness explains nothing!  Creationists thus have a reasonable faith, based on good evidence, whereas cosmic evolutionists have a highly unreasonable faith, based on the omnipotence of "nothing".    "A universe evolving out of nothing would contradict the law of cause and effect, the principle of conservation of mass/energy, the law of increasing entropy, and the very nature of reason itself."   Henry M. Morris,  Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering, University of Minnesota

“Atheism for a scientist is really hard to defend because it’s the assertion of a universal negative, and scientists aren’t supposed to be able to do that.”   Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health.    In Putting Faith in Science, Time magazine, Feb 15-22, 2021 issue.   Collins was the leader of the international Human Genome Project.  The “universal negative” means science can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.

There can be no survival of the fittest until the arrival of the fittest.

Irreducibly complex – a phrase non-evolutionists use to explain the way in which a number of crucial parts must all work together for a structure or process to function. (such as heart and blood and veins)

In the Beginning    8th edition, 2008.    by Walt Brown   Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT

p.16    Concerning “design” occurring by accident, “The paper and ink did not write the book” …

Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides.  In living things, nucleotides are always “right-handed”.    (a description of how the molecule is organized.  Why always right?)

.18: “How did the genetic material for both larva and adult develop?  Which came first, larva or adult?  What mutations could transform a crawling larva into a flying monarch butterfly that can accurately navigate 3,000 miles using a brain the size of a pin head?  Indeed, why should a larva evolve in the first place because it cannot reproduce?”     

p19:  “The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have completely and independently evolved at each stage at about the same time and place.  Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reproductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct.”   

p.79g: “a body that can reproduce itself cannot first make itself.”

September 2023

Every adult should read this book:   

Our Final Hour -  A scientists warning:  How terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankinds’s future in this century- on earth and beyond.                                By Martin Rees, Professor, Cambridge University, England. 2003.

This book got major attention in 2020, because Rees made a prediction that a major biological event would occur by the year 2020.  

It is a short book; I had to order it through an inter-library loan. 

August 2023

In our Electoral College system, presidents are chosen by the Electors.  In most states, the winner of the state election gets all the electoral votes of that state.  In Maine and Nebraska, the winning presidential candidate in each congressional district wins one elector, and the winner of the popular vote statewide gets an additional two electors.

July 2023

The primaries start soon.  Unfortunately, in the presidential election, we will likely end up with only two choices, who were chosen by parties who are prisoners of their own groupthinks.  A third party candidate has almost no chance of being elected.

There are better methods.  Alaska by an initiative established a single non-partisan primary, where the top four candidates who receive the most votes advance to the general election.  In the general election, Ranked Choice Voting is used to determine the final winner.  Details of Alaska’s system are described in https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php     Non-partisan primaries have also been used in other states, but really need to include the top 4 or 5 candidates, to give voters a real choice  (https://www.uniteamerica.org/sections/the-solution-nonpartisan-primaries).

Maine also uses Ranked Choice Voting for Primary and General elections:  https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/rankedchoicefaq.html    Ranked Choice Voting is presently used in 2 states, 3 counties, and 46 cities   https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting-information/#where-is-ranked-choice-voting-used 

It is too late to make changes for the 2024 elections, but initiatives like these should be started in other states.    Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that states should be “laboratories of democracy”.   (The Week magazine, July 21, 2023)

Ord

9 March, 2022

Democrats are presently proud that they are “following the science” on COVID 19 and vaccination.

But they are not following the science on abortion (ignoring the child) and transgender.   It is biologically impossible to change gender.  A man can “transgender” to a “woman”, but the cells of his muscles are still male, his bones are still male, and his brain is still male.  In a nation built on freedom, the transgendered should be free to practice the life they want to lead, but others should not be forced to pretend they have actually changed sex.

Ord

24 Feb, 2022

People who use terms like homophobia and xenophobia immediately reveal that they are shallow thinkers with closed minds.  If they were not shallow thinkers, they would realize that those are complex subjects, not simple phobias.

Ord

17 Jan, 2022

The present controversies are not about voting rights, they are about how we conduct our elections.  For democracies to survive, elections must be trusted.  Fraudulent voting should not be made easy.  Voting laws should be designed to facilitate voting but also make cheating difficult, to restore confidence in our elections.  Trusted elections are essential to survival of a democracy. Untrusted elections lead to demonstrations and violence.

Laws should require:

1.  Registration in advance, to allow sufficient time for verification.  Two weeks?
2.  Signature checks (and associated verification of signatures)
3.  Voting only at your single, registered polling place. Mail-in ballots should only go to the place of registration.
4.  Polling place registrations should be audited to remove duplications with other locations
5.  Not accepting votes received after the polls close, which are inherently suspicious.

Before the 2020 election, I received 3 requests from a state where I previously lived, asking whether I wanted a mail-in ballot.  And a relative who tried to change her location of residence, ended up being registered at both her old and new location, a problem which she found difficult to get corrected.