READ & COMMENT

​It may sound perverse for a pro-choice advocate, which I am, to suggest that overturning Roe v Wade would be the best outcome from the current round of anti-abortion cases being heard by the SCOTUS. 

I believe that when it comes to existential issues like abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia et al, anyone who believes in the principle of liberal democracy should want decisions made based on the will of the majority of their fellow citizens. Not the will of an ‘almighty’, nor the adjudication of 9 Supreme Court Justices who are neither accountable to, nor representative of, the men, women and children on both sides of the issue whose lives they are literally 'messing with'. 

A few days ago I was sitting at home breathing a sigh of relief that it looked like our village had put Covid behind us when I saw something alarming on our neighbourhood watch RING video security system. There was a gang of men surrounding our next-door neighbour’s house.

Then the phone rang. It was my neighbour Bob. “High Tom, you might have noticed we have a problem” he said. “A heavily armed group of thugs from the village down the road have surrounded us and demanded we hand over our home to them. They say they used to own the home and now want it back! We aren't prepared to just lay down and walk all over us. We wont give up without a fight but we are short on guns and ammo, so would you mind sending some over?”

It occurred to me that this threat had been with us for a while, and that maybe we had been short sighted in not building better relations with the village these guys came from. Indeed, we may have miscalculated and been over aggressive in expanding our own village boundary.

Still, when a neighbour is under attack, don’t we have a moral duty to help out?

A new year seems like a perfect time to contemplate a world without a pandemic.  Our leaders are now telling us that Covid is now endemic. A virus we have to live with. Not live in fear of. We can finally get ‘back to normal’.

Alas, it may be premature to start popping the champagne corks. I’m not sure the global political and corporate elite are done with us yet! Infact I’m pretty confident that ‘Climate Change’ will be the next impending disaster that the powers that be will use to coerce us into significant and dubious behaviour change.

I have always thought that politicians, bureaucrats and individual citizens are neither creative enough nor competent enough, let alone discrete enough, to conceive and execute grand conspiracies. The moon landings never happened? Princess Diana’s death and 9/11 were inside jobs? Really?

Overturn Roe V Wade!

It may sound perverse for a pro-choice advocate, which I am, to suggest that overturning Roe v Wade would be the best outcome from the current round of anti-abortion cases being heard by the SCOTUS. 

However, when it comes to existential issues like abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia et al, anyone who believes in the principle of liberal democracy should want decisions made based on the will of the majority of their fellow citizens. Not the will of an ‘almighty’, nor the adjudication of 9 Supreme Court Justices who are neither accountable to, nor representative of, the men, women and children on both sides of the issue whose lives they are literally 'messing with'. 

I came to this belief after immersing myself in dozens of podcasts and commentary pieces that have been written in the last few weeks as a result of the recent challenges to abortion 'rights' being heard by the SCOTUS.

One of these was advocating for the 'Consistent Life Ethic' (CLE). A movement of passionate, sincere and well-intended activists who believe that "abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide and euthanasia, unjust war, cruelty toward immigrants and refugees, and police brutality are all equally wrong because they stem from the same dehumanization: the belief that certain human beings are disposable and can be treated like objects or property instead of people. The unborn child, the incarcerated person, the chronically ill or disabled person, the pregnant sexual assault survivor, and the Haitian refugee all have equal and immeasurable human dignity."*

It's hard to disagree with this thesis. Getting distracted by the debate as to when human life begins, or a Constitutional right to privacy, really doesn't solve the intractable problem. That pro-life and pro-choice evangelism is not based on logic or reason, but profound impregnable beliefs.

However, the more I thought about CLE it became clear to me that such a universal thesis is very 'western-centric' and comes from a place of unique privilege. 

If we walk in the shoes of the 3.5 billion women and 2 billion children who don’t live in the so called ‘western world’, the admonition of pro-life supporters seems quite self-serving.  

Their shoes walk through a world where an adequate healthcare system let alone neonatal care is a distant dream. A world where education is rationed and rudimentary. A world where some mothers’ have so little hope of a viable economic future for their children that they permanently disable them at birth, so they have a good physical reason to beg for the rest of their lives as a ‘way of living’. A world where children scavenge among the rubbish dumps of Lagos or Mumbai to find something to eat or sell before they find a place to sleep in slums with no sanitation. 
 
I could go on. I’m sure you get the picture. It is a world where our rhetoric seems idealistic at best and a potential life sentence of poverty and subsistence living at worst.
 
In an ideal world, and outside of the force field of religious belief, the pro-life position would be understandable, even defensible. Even with the deficiencies of parental leave, child support, inadequate education etc. you and I might live in something approaching an ideal world.

Alas, the vast majority of women on our planet who choose to have an abortion do not. That applies to the US as well, where according to the Guttmacher organization, 49% of the 862,320 women who chose abortions in 2017 live below the poverty line.
 
Which is why I hope Roe V Wade is overturned and the issue handed back to the States and their legislature. The Founding Fathers held a profound belief in the principle that democracy required elected representatives to be as close to voters as possible. Hence the 10th Amendment. 'We the people' should choose through a democratic process where elected politicians represent our interests and are held accountable for doing so. Not everyone will like it, yet this principle is central to a functioning democracy. If the minority can persuade enough fellow citizens to their way of thinking/believing, they can prevail. For now, pro-choice advocates can rest assured that, if polling data is correct and the matter is returned to the States, abortion within reasonable parameters will remain legal in States that represent well over half the US population.

On the other hand, we should also remember that The SCOTUS decision in Roe v Wade "regulated abortion". During the second trimester, the state could regulate (but not outlaw) abortions in the interests of the mother’s health. After the second trimester, States could regulate or outlaw abortions in the interest of the potential life except when necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

Related to this it is worth noting that 65% of Americans believe abortion should be illegal in 'all or most cases' during the second and third trimesters. (AP-NORC Poll November 2021).
 
To those who profoundly and understandably remain pro-life, by all means follow your own beliefs and advocate for them. However, for as long as we live in a liberal democracy where the people get to elect representatives to make laws rather than an unaccountable elite or an even more abstract divine being, I hope pro-life campaigners appreciate that those of us who don’t share their belief would rather the choice on such matters remained a personal decision protected by the ballot box. 

* Sophie Trist https://www.readtangle.com/posts/consistent-life-ethic-sophie-trist/ 

The fight for the mind, heart and soul of the American Dream has come out of the shadows of guerilla warfare onto the battlefield of a full-fledged culture war. As with all things American, this battle will be more dramatic and globally important than any political skirmish in Europe. It will make Brexit look like a playground scuffle.
 
What we are witnessing now is a culture war between the AOC/Bernie Sanders wing and core supporters of the Democrat Party and their GOP & Alt-right/Tea Party counterparts.
 
After 4 years of frustration trying to combat what they saw with some justification as ‘The Cult of Trump’, AKA MAGA; with Biden’s victory, Georgia in the bag and the scurrilous scenes in DC this week, the left smells blood. All is fair in love and war and from their perspective Trump was trying to undo all the progress they thought had been made toward equality and multiculturalism exemplified by President Obama.

I condemn yesterday's behavior of The President and a small group of violent activists. I also wonder if the editorial leadership of The Tribune recognize that their blatant editorial bias played a role in the toxic fissure in America that led to the disgraceful violent protests in DC?
The editorial decisions that accept the constant denigration of people and ideas they don’t agree with? Their overt disrespect of elected representatives and other community leaders who they don’t agree with? Their insistence on failing to serve the 60% majority of SLO residents who are not Democrats?
The paper has been littered with examples of this over the last few years. Some of the blood and tears  of yesterday is on your hands, and the hands of any media or political leaders who seek to inflame the toxic partisan politics that infects our communities.
If any good comes out of this tragic and disgraceful attempt at sedition, it must be this. That all those with a voice that has been used to propagate such partisanship, now use it to promote ideas not ideology. To seek a higher middle ground of compromise and compassion. 

I have always thought that politicians, bureaucrats and most individual citizens are neither creative enough nor competent enough, let alone discrete enough, to conceive and execute grand conspiracies. The moon landings never happened? 9/11 was an inside job? QAnon? The evidence for these is as scant as the evidence of massive electoral fraud in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections.

​On the other hand, recent history proves that private enterprises and their agents are more than capable of conspiring to take advantage of us, generally in pursuit of bigger profits and greater power. Witness the efforts of big tobacco, big pharma and big energy to hide from us the health hazards associated with tobacco, opioids and fossil fuel emissions. More recently it is clear that big tech companies are conspiring against the principles of free speech, not to mention manipulate global tax codes, to pay as little tax as possible. The latter two are at least not illegal, yet they are certainly immoral.

I am a capitalist. I believe in the innate value of market-based economies. However free markets that are not fair markets are an indelible stain on capitalism.

So when I read about the ‘Great Reset’ my suspicions were raised, especially as such a bold and global initiative hasn’t received much coverage in the main-stream media. 

​We pretty much knew this year’s Thanksgiving was going to be different, didn’t we? Despite our blind compliance and commitment to wash our hands, socially distance and wear masks we somehow knew it was likely to require continued sacrifices on our part. Little did we know.
 
Despite the fact that things seemed to get better for while we are now caught in another surge of COVID 19 cases. Positivity rates are rising. Hospitalizations too. Faucie told us this was probable. “A tough fall and winter,” he said. “Expect it.” Well of course we did. Colder weather means more people spending time inside. It’s flu season. And the Cal Poly kids are back like so many other students at colleges and universities around the country. Did we honestly expect  18 and 19 year old kids living on their own for the very first time to socially distance and quarantine themselves in their dorm rooms? Really??  Sucker!

Clive shares his thoughts on how he'd vote in State & local elections....if he had a vote!

Here at iSoS we view ourselves as 'Independents' and despise partisan politics. Yet at election time democracy, by definition, means choosing one party or individual over another. At least if you have a vote it does. I don't even though I pay taxes. That's another story - see my earlier blog https://www.insearchofsanity.org/blogs/taxation-without-representation-is-tyranny-thats-a-real-political-opportunity. 

Most importantly we urge our listeners and readers, hell we urge everyone who can, to exercise their democratic right and vote. As Independents, we vote based on the evidence of outcomes and values that align with our own, rather than tribal loyalty.

So it's time to make a choice. As you consider who to vote for at State, County & City level, here is what I am thinking about. Remember, it is perfectly reasonable to vote one ticket nationally and another locally.

So let's think about the 'state' of California?

Clive checks in from his home on Zanzibar.

Salamu (Swahili for Greetings) from Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania best known as the birthplace of Freddie Mercury, where we are bathed blissfully in sunshine, trade winds and best of all, mask free. 

While many countries in Africa locked down, Tanzania realised very quickly that with a median age of 20, half that of Europe, the cure being worse than the disease would be an inevitable consequence of shutting down the economy. They kept their economy open. 
 
It was a wise decision. In a country of 56 million people, only 516 cases of CV19 have been registered and 21 deaths. Given that there is no formal healthcare reporting system, it is inevitable that these numbers are under-reported. However, as 2.5 million people die every year in Africa from another infectious disease (Tuberculosis), the Tanzanian Government and healthcare community thankfully enjoy a sense of context about risk management sadly lacking among the bureaucrats and government advisers our taxes pay for.

​A little over a year ago California’s Assembly passed an ethnic studies bill, AB 331, and handed it off to California’s Education Department (CED) to write and deliver the curriculum. The CED did just that, and then attempted to get it adopted by quickly and very quietly soliciting public comments just after the school year ended when parents were less likely to be paying attention.
 
Did you hear about it? Probably not. 

“Holy hyper-partisanship Batman!  Our democracy is seriously dysfunctional and we’re in danger of losing our nation because our system is broken.  Can you fix it Batman?”
 
​It’s that time again folks. It occurs every four years. The nation looks for someone we can believe in….a superhero that can heal the unprecedented level of political animosity that’s turned us into warring tribes rather than united Americans who go about their lives in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. 
 
Enter the political candidates. This time it’s Trump and Biden.  Different people saying the same things every four years.  Mostly bullshit by the way and I confess that, I too, like many of you, tend to throw caution to the wind and get sucked into the belief that there is someone out there who can heal the polarization that has become America’s Achilles heel.  The usual promise is to unite us; to bring the warring factions together because, well, only they have some kind of superpower that the other candidate doesn’t.  And we find ourselves hopeful yet again.

In what seems like a classic case of failing to see the forest from the trees; friends, neighbors and social media seem to be more exercised by the morality and principles of mask wearing than with the far more consequential health and socio-economic consequences of Coronavirus.

To get your attention, and to prove the delinquency of our puerile debates on masks, here are a few alarming numbers. As a result of distressed socio-economic systems around the world, predictions are for an additional 6.3 million cases of Tuberculosis resulting in an additional 1.3 million deaths. An additional 769,000 deaths from malaria, and 550,000 HIV related deaths in sub-Saharan Africa alone. (1). Worst case scenarios suggest that an additional 100 million people will fall into poverty living off less than $1.90 a day. (2)

To put those numbers in context, as I write, there have been 766,393 deaths worldwide from CV19, with 172,301 of those in the US and 41,361 in the UK.

​Yet the most vociferous, hostile and divisive debates are about wearing masks!

Mark's thoughts on School Closures.

Masks or no masks, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are more impenetrable barriers between us these days than a piece of cloth. Rabid political partisanship is rampant among our communities and infecting all of us.
 
How does a Re-Open SLO Facebook Group transform into a ‘Freedom Rally? What has re-opening local businesses got to do with giving a platform to speakers that rant about the supremacy of Judeo-Christian religion? Or promoting a university academic called Thaddeus Kozinsky who claims that 9/11 was a conspiracy theory and Bill Gates is part of a global cabal trying to take over the world? Why invite a “Christian Conservative Activist” from Fresno called Ben Bergquam who believes “homosexuality is sin” and that “liberalism is a plaque on society”?