Seriously, enough with the Obama trip price tags

In my perusal of the news a couple days ago I ran across yet another story on Drudge that had a headline something like this:

"Obama trip to Ohio costs taxpayers $365k, plus several first born males!!!111!!11!! Oh Noes!"

When I clicked to the story, I found an article on Obama visiting Ohio with British Prime Minister David Cameron. They both watched a NCAA tournament game with Ohio Governor John Kasich, who lobbied the President on developing natural gas production in his state.

"During the first half, Mr. Kasich talked to the president and White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew at length about promoting the safe development of shale gas in Ohio....The president ate a hot dog at the game, chatted with students and appeared to be explaining the finer points of basketball to Mr. Cameron."

All the way at the bottom was this fact.

"At a cost of roughly $180,000 per hour to operate Air Force One, the trip cost taxpayers at least $365,000, not including the staff costs and other expenses."

Since I am a Conservative, I suppose I'm legally obligated to respond something like this.

"That darn dirty communist bastard! How DARE he entertain the leader of our closest ally by watching an American sporting event! How could he even think of spending taxpayer dollars to improve relations with a foreign dignitary!? Who does he think he is, the leader of the free world or something?! He's clearly out of touch and/or insensitive to the budget crisis!"

Unfortunately, I also am capable of independent thought. So, to my Conservative brethren I feel obligated to say: Chill out. Seriously, just sit down and stop talking.

News flash: The President is the public face of the Nation to those abroad. Sure, we have a Secretary of State, but when the President visits someplace, it means something. Moreover, if we received the Chief Executive of a close ally with anything less than our own Chief Executive, it could (and should) be considered a slight. Like it or not, the Office of the President has power, and with power necessarily comes the trappings of power.

What alternative would you prefer? The President to have received Mr. Cameron in a rented taxi, driven all the way to Ohio college student style, and slept in the Wal-Mart parking lot while dining on that fancy Scottish place down the road, McDonald's? Perhaps they should have listened to the game on the radio for free in order to save taxpayer dollars? What sort of image of power and prestige does that project for America?

Don't get me wrong, I am all for cutting the budget. I am all for starving the beast of government spending till it's thinner than the Olsen twins. At the same time I understand that there are some expenditures that are reasonable, and entertaining foreign dignitaries is one of them.

Oh, and also, his gift to the Prime Minister of a custom grill with custom cooking outfits, made with the British and American flags and seals with Mr. and Mrs. Cameron's names on them, was actually quite thoughtful and completely appropriate (and also not terribly expensive, by the way).

So seriously, lay off the guy for the one time he actually did his job right. Rest assured he'll give you plenty of reasons to bash him tomorrow.

Destroy the Earth for fun (and other cool stuff)

Since it's the weekend I thought we all could use something a bit more lighthearted. A good way to relax for the weekend. And what better way to relax than to drop a thermonuclear device on your neighbors house?

For years this has been out of reach of just about everybody (except for the US that one time. Go us.) But now you, too, can destroy your least favorite city from the comfort of your own house. Using the Nukemap by Alex Wellerstein, you select where you want the nuke to go, what size you want, and it shows you on an interactive map the level of destruction you plotted. Here's what it looks like if we hit DC with the biggest nuke in our arsenal:



Maybe human caused destruction isn't your preferred diversion. Maybe you like it better if our annihilation comes from the void of space. Well you're in luck! Impact: Earth! is a nifty web program developed by the Imperial College in London (and hosted in a better looking, more graphic form on Perdue's website). Kinda like the nuke thing, you pick where you want the meteor to go, and give it the variables (like composition of the asteroid, angle of strike, whether it hits water or rock when it lands) and it'll tell you the destruction. It will even tell you if you managed to knock the Earth off it's axis, or ripped a giant chunk out of it, in addition to the size of the crater you left.

Before we get blown up or smashed into oblivion, we're doing some pretty cool stuff in science. The first example of this is Taylor Wilson, who at 14 became the youngest person in the world to ever independently achieve fusion. Read this article for the whole story of how he started (and continues) to brew yellow cake in his garage. He intends to use his fusion know how to make it so that hospitals can make the necessary isotopes for treatment in house, instead of needing to fly them around the world, which would make it much easier to treat cancer. He also has dreamed up a possible application for scanners in airports that would detect bombs and nuclear material by beaming it with particles and seeing what happened on the other side.

Second, a pair of fellas have discovered that not having a pulse might not be a bad thing. Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn have developed what they believe may be the best replacement for the natural heart. All they had to do, they said, was get rid of the heartbeat.

One of the reasons artificial hearts are so difficult to make is that the beating motion, constantly forever is very hard on artificial materials. Small turbines implanted inside existing hearts have been helping patients with heart problems for years by giving the heart a little boost. They found, though, that some patients who had this procedure later had hearts that had ceased to function entirely, and yet were completely healthy since the turbine was enough to push the blood through their body. Might we be able to survive with no heart at all?

Ever had one of those times when you're in the grocery store check out line and the person two spaces behind you in line is talking so loudly on her cell phone that you can't concentrate on flirting with the hot cashier, and you tried to politely tell her that you didn't need to hear about why Timmy is, like, the greatest guy ever, but she just wouldn't listen so you finally had no choice but to bludgeon her to death with a jar of spaghetti sauce?

Yeah, me too. Fortunately, a couple of clever fella's in Japan have a better solution: Use a gun! A speech impeding gun!

"The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second.

Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a speaker that does just that: it records a person's voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun.

In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: "The system can disturb remote people's speech without any physical discomfort." "

Finally, what is possibly the coolest website I've ever seen in my LIFE, is this neat little gadget that lets you trace the route of your web info from any site to your computer. In seconds it'll show you, on google maps, how many jumps the Internet had to take to get from, say, the Chinese Government's website, to their servers and then ultimately to you (23 hops, 3 seconds, travelling 13,093 miles), or from Starbuck's website (23 hops, 20.8 seconds, travelling 10,445 miles), or from...

The People's Islamic Republic of Pennsylvania

Here's a situation: You have a man (guy A) who wore a t-shirt that another guy (guy B) thought was very insulting. So, guy B takes it upon himself to attack guy A in the streets. The entire incident is caught on tape. Guy B is arrested, charged, and admits that he committed the crime.

You're the judge. What's your verdict?

I'm going to guess nigh on 100% of those polled would answer guilty. You would be incorrect, according to the People's Islamic Republic of Pennsylvania. The very same incident occurred there, with two differences:

Guy A was dressed as the Prophet.

Guy B was Muslim.

Oh, well I guess that changes everything. Innocent it is, then!

The "Pennsylvania State Director of American Atheists, Inc., Mr. Ernest Perce V., was assaulted by a Muslim while participating in a Halloween parade. Along with a Zombie Pope, Ernest was costumed as Zombie Muhammad. The assault was caught on video, the Muslim man admitted to his crime and charges were filed in what should have been an open-and-shut case. That’s not what happened, though.

The defendant is an immigrant and claims he did not know his actions were illegal, or that it was legal in this country to represent Muhammad in any form. To add insult to injury, he also testified that his 9 year old son was present, and the man said he felt he needed to show his young son that he was willing to fight for his Prophet."

[NOTE: Many articles you may read about this case may indicate the judge was Muslim himself. This is incorrect, and stems from an isolated sentence in his ruling that was unclear and seemed to be him admitting to being Muslim.]

Judge Mark Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war, and uses that as justification for his ruling.

Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam. In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead.

Perhaps Judge Martin might want to invest a little less in Islamic studies and bit more in humor, particularly an understanding of satire.

Martin goes on to berate the assaulted victim, saying that he should think before he insults a religion, and basically saying it's his fault he was attacked. He also says that he's lucky, cause if he were in a Muslim country he'd be put to death...

...cause that's a good thing...

This ruling is completely inane, and I hope it is appealed so this whacko can be paraded on the world stage as the idiot he is. Here are the facts:

• "ignorantia legis neminem excusat" or "Ignorance of the law excuses no one": The defendant is a Muslim immigrant who claimed he was ignorant of the fact that you can't assault people in the streets of America. While I understand it may be difficult for him to get cable, what with living under a rock and all, the fact remains that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
• First Amendment protects speech, not assault: The assaulted atheist was clearly not attacking anyone. Regardless of how offended the Muslim man was, he does not have the right not to be offended. He could have left. He could have heckled. He could have explained to the 9 year old son he had with him that the man was violating God's law and would be punished. He cannot, however, simply attack someone because he feels like it, and if he chooses to do so, ought to pay for it under the law.
  
• "Hate" is not a crime: It's unlikely that Mr. Perce saw his costume as anything other than a harmless mockery of religion in general. Regardless, even if he is a hate-mongering Koran burning Islamaphobe, the fact remains that hate is not a crime. This is the problem with defining "hate" crimes as separate from other sorts of crimes. If we punish people for simply feeling a certain way, for holding a certain opinion, you are giving the government the ability to define what is an acceptable opinion to have and express.

Think that the government would never abuse such an authority?

I bet Mr. Perce did too.

As a show of solidarity to Mr. Perce, I leave you with this picture of the Prophet with his turban on fire, painted in central Asia.

Horror from down-under: Ethicists argue in favor of infanticide

With the Personhood bill being effectively defeated (It was technically only tabled until next year, but might as well be defeated in the near term for all practical purposes) I thought it might be appropriate to feature a paper written by a pair of ethicists out of Australia that was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. They tackled the sticky issue of killing newborns. (I had no idea this was even a debate. Silly me.)

The paper was written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Here's the abstract:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

I highly recommend reading the entire paper (It's only a few pages long and an easy read), which you can find here. It's very interesting, and by interesting I mean mind bendingly horrific.

The paper contends that newborns, while human and alive, are not persons, but "potential persons". Because only persons have a moral value, and because fetuses are not considered persons as evidenced by abortions being allowable in some situations, they show that newborns are not definitively different that fetuses. Therefore, they are not persons either. So, let the slaughter begin!

Alberto Giubilini, teaching kangaroos to shoot children at the range

What makes a person, you may ask?

The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.

We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life...

They go on to say that while the mother may assign value to the infant, this is only a projected and "subjective" quantity that does not depend on the infant itself.

In essence because the infant is not capable of attaching any value to its life it cannot be harmed by being deprived of it. So, since an infant can experience pain it has a right not to have pain inflicted upon it, but since it cannot value life it has no right to it. They note that one does not have to be aware of the harm to be harmed; someone who has a lottery ticket stolen from them and never finds out it was the winner has been harmed despite their ignorance, because they are in the condition to appreciate what they would have had, had they been aware of it. Infants are too stupid to appreciate their life no matter how hard you try to explain it to them, so they don't have a right to it.

Stupid baby! Why won't you understand my abstract arguments about life!?

Naturally, this sort of thing should only be permitted in a situation where abortions would be acceptable. Like, if the baby has a horrible defect that isn't revealed till after birth. Or if society could be burdened by having to support another baby. Or if the newborn's parents might be slightly inconvenienced by having it around.

You see, the newborn's existence might harm real people's plans. The financial and emotional well-being of those affected by the baby's life could be worse off, so therefore the rights of real people trumps that of potential people. Because the future person the baby will become doesn't exist yet, and won't if we kill it now, that future person can't be harmed and therefore has a value of zero.

"Indeed, however weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people to become actual ones, because this latter interest amounts to zero."

Emphasis mine. I'll go ahead and draw the conclusion the authors didn't here: Since the potential person's moral value is 0, and any positive number is by definition greater than 0, that means that no matter how tiny the inconvenience or upset is to actual people, the baby's "alleged" right to life is trumped by it.

I was gonna have that baby...But that burger looks really good...

The authors naturally wouldn't want to call this practice infanticide. Infanticide has so many negative connotations!

"We propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk."

Also, the definition of infanticide is REALLY confusing. Just look at the Merriam Webster entry:

Definition of INFANTICIDE

1: the killing of an infant

So much grey area.

Francesca Minerva, putting the "bright side" back into "infanticide"!

The thing is, if you accept their premise of how personhood relates to the right to life, and their definition of a person, everything else falls into place. This paper shows why one should be completely pro-life. It references its justification of infanticide to the acceptability of abortions at least half a dozen times.

As the National Catholic Register states, "The second we allow ourselves to become the arbiters of who is human and who isn’t, this is the calamitous yet inevitable end. Once you say all human life is not sacred, the rest is just drawing random lines in the sand."