Checksum Arcanius

I watched a video on John Kerry’s campaign website that showed the senator at a “women’s rights” rally getting endorsed by various groups because he has a “pro-family-planning” voting record and would support a woman’s right to “choose.”

And it made me sick to my stomach, really. What is so sick about it is that all of these people – mostly the fairer sex – were rallying behind abortion as if it were a good thing to have around. I can acknowledge that there are arguments that abortion appears to be, from some perspectives, a better option than going through with birth, even if I don’t agree with such arguments.

But why do all these people gather around and act as if we want more people to have more abortions, as if abortions are good and wonderful and help us all live better lives. Maybe we should force everyone to have at least one abortion, so they can experience the positive results of that “right.”

Then the speakers at the rally go on quote meaningless statistics, like that 87% of counties don’t even have abortion clinics. Oh the horror! Well, did you ever stop to think that maybe 87% of counties don’t have much demand for abortions? So maybe we should use tax dollars to pay for abortion clinics to go into those 87% of counties so that even more people can be coerced into having abortions by ativist “family planners.”

I do believe that it is true that some of the sentiment that “abortion is good” among pro-choice activists is really just a knee-jerk reaction against the strong pro-life sentiment that “abortion is bad.” I also believe that if the pro-life crowd were to focus more on making abortions less needed than on making abortions illegal (which won’t solve the problem), then more babies would be born than are today, and, just maybe, some of the “abortion is good” sentiment would go away as well.

So, clearly, I do not think abortion is good, nor do I think it should be made illegal at the national level. On the other hand, the federal government most certainly should not fund any group that condones or encourages abortion either – I think the so called “gag rule” is a good compromise between funding “planned parenthood” type groups and funding abortion. However, the real solution is to stop public money from going to these organizations at all.

Just because I would not support federal legislation outlawing abortion doersn’t mean that support it. My stance against such federal legislation is a result of my strong views on liberty and the need for as few laws as possible to preserve liberty. I think, in fact, that abortion is akin to murder, and that the “choice” argument is fatally flawed. Let me explain:

My stance that abortion is akin to murder stems from my understanding of biology as opposed to some religious notion of life. An egg in a woman is not unique in the world – it is wholy derived from the woman, and as such, I would consider it a part of her body. Let her do with it what she will. The same goes for a man and his sperm. However, after fertilization, the zygote is no longer a simple combination of the man and the woman. Due to the process called crossover, the DNA of the zygote is unique in all the world. This is what defines a new individual – we have what is indeed a unique human being. To snuff this indivual out on purpose seems little different to me than to snuff out any unique person’s life on purpose.

In fact, fertilization is the single place where an event occurs that causes a distinct change – after that its all just one continuous process. I do not understand how passing through an orfice in birth suddenly makes someone a person that can’t be snuffed out legally (except in the case of partial birth abortions, which somehow are different, I suppose because the baby has a vacuum in the brain). While birth is a significant event, there is no justifiable reason to make this the boundary any more than, say, teething, or sexual maturity. Maybe we should let mothers kill their children until they start noctural emissions or ovulation. Or maybe menopause and middle age is a better indicator. At least then kids might behave…

Now, onto the argument that this is about a woman’s reproductive right to choose. I’m sorry, but the reproductive choice was made when the woman choose to have sex. After the sex comes reproductive responsibility, namely carrying any potential product of the sex to term and ensuring that the potential child is cared for and nurtured into a productive adult. The man shares in this responsibilty, have no doubt, since he also made the choice. I am of course aware that this doesn’t not account for sex that the woman does not choose to have – namely in cases of rape. I think reasonable people could disagree on this topic. I personally lean towards killing the rapist, not the baby.

As for Roe v. Wade, it is fairly clear to me that the ruling was not legally justified, and is probally the single best example of the damage activist judges with radical agendas can do in this our system of common law and judicial review, an extremely flawed paradigm for a judicial system.

Well, thats all for now. I’ll get off the soapbox for just a while now.

From Blake Ashby’s Campaign Website:

“My name is Blake Ashby, and I am running for President on the Republican ticket. I have never run for office before, and I will likely never do it again. But I had to do something.

Please, be a Republican and stand up for our beliefs, and the future of our country. Do what you can to help. Write in Blake Ashby when you vote in the Primary. Forward this email to friends and associates. Call your elected officials and let them know how unhappy you are with the Administration. If you are interested, visit ashby2004.com and sign up for our email list. But whatever you do, please do something – this is the future of the United States we are talking about.”

There is also a convincing essay on the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq… Go ahead and read it.

Since I pretty much agree with it all, and I don’t think higher gas taxes are a bad idea in general, and I am certain that gay marriage, abortion, and flag burning should not be outlawed at the federal level, you might wonder why I’m still likely to vote for Bush this November.

The real problem is, I’m scared of Democrats. Even if they arrive at some good ideas, they do so starting out from a completely different set of basic assumptions that distinguish liberals from conservatives. And when someone comes from those sets of assumptions, I don’t feel like I can trust what they will do in a given situation. I certainly was no fan of Clinton – even though we did pretty well under him. I attribute this mostly to the fact that the presodency and congress were split. Basically, very little got done, and the less government does, the better off we all are.

Now that government has decided to go all proactive for a while, we’re all giving up more freedoms and waiting longer at the airport for a false sense of security. Its pretty sad really, how hapily we give up our freedoms because someone wearing a white shirt tells us that its for our own good.

Check out is a very detailed, and as far as I can tell, objective, sumary of the Iraq WMD question. There are many declassified documents that, from my cursory look, show that while those who had access to them could not be sure that Iraq had WMD, made it pretty clear that Iraq had the capibility and will to make them, and free of inspectors (as it they were from 1998-2002), could have restarted many of its WMD programs.

My conclusion: The Bush administration was not precise with the facts – many unknowns were portrayed as truths, and counterevidence was concealed. These tactics were undoubtably to bring the American people around to support the initial invasion. However, it is also easy to see what the administration was afraid of, and why they thought it was so neccesary to go to war in the first place. Certianly, they didn’t know that there were WMD in Iraq, but I think they did believe in the existence of the WMD. Furthermore, give me one politician today who hasn’t overstated the facts and I will be forever endebted to you. This is not an excuse, simply a political reality in today’s America.

The real questions that need to be asked are these:
“Is the world better off for Operation Iraqi Freedom?” (I say yes; if you disagree let me know why)
and
“If so, was it worth the price?” (We have yet to see the real price, and real gains that might come of this… the jury is still out).

Today, I woke up at 1:00, moved some things at Orson Clay’s house, did a bit of yard work, played a little bit of CS, and then worked the rest of the night. So it wasn’t too eventful. Instead, you get this wonderful morsel that I posted in response to the topic “Is there a God?” on the silverfir.net forums:

People have wondered for a long time about issues such as why children in Africa starve. The thought is summed up well in this quote from a play whose name I do not remember, but the play is loosely based on the book of Job from the bible.

“If God is God, he is not Good,
If God is Good, he is not God,
Take the even, take the odd.”

In other words, if God were good, he would prevent bad from happening if he could. But bad things still happen, so he must not be all powerful, and therefore isn’t “God.” On the other hand, if God is all powerful, then he must not be “Good,” because of all the bad stuff that happens in the world.

The logic seems strong at first, but in fact it suffers from the fallacy known as a false delima. Take a college logic or philosophy course for the full explanation, but basically this means that the question presents a limited number of choices when there are in fact more choices. Another possibility is that God is both all-powerful and very good indeed, but that there are more important good things that outweigh preventing starvation in Africa.

What could possibly be more important than that, you may ask – and to that I have one word: freedom.

If there is a God – and if he is good (although I think a God who was not good would be rather pointless) – then the reason that he doesn’t prevent bad things from happening in this world is that it is so much more important for him to allow us our freedom to make our own choices – even if those choices lead to the death of innocent children in Africa, or the slaughter of millions in wars.

Anything that is more important than that is VERY important indeed, and knowing this you have the responsiblity to make your choices carefully. After all, look at the price paid for you to have that choice.

Its much more than the “freedom” puchased by the blood of revolutionary soldiers or preserved by patriots throughout the years. It is a true freedom to choose purchased by the suffering and death of billions of human beings. Use your power to choose responsibly.

In another attempt to delay studying for calculus, I was visiting Passive Digressive, the blog of a friend of a friend (of a friend?)’ Anyway, it’s often interesting, as was the case today. Today, Chris was promoting theworldvotes.org, a worldwide initiative designed to give “people all around the world a voice in the forthcoming U.S. Presidential Election.” While of course unofficial, the idea is interesting. I left the following comment at Passive Digressive, and will repeat it here for those, like me, who are be too lazy to click on over:

According to the website, right after I registered to vote:
People registered to vote:

Africa 137
Asia 181
Australia 109
Europe 4712
North America 493
South America 28

Europe seems to be much more politically active than any other region… but then, this initiative started in Europe, so I guess that is to be expected. For a worldwide sampling, Asia, Africa, and South America are terrible underrepresented, and as far as North America is concerned, the location of the only people that actually get a real vote, its odd that we are outnumbered by our friends in Europe 10 to 1.

Furthermore, it seems as if a given person can sign up however many times he or she wants as long as they have enough email addresses to go along with the sign-ups. And of course, people with shared email addresses or no email addresses are disenfranchised.

Nevertheless, regardless of the strange numbers, and the decidedly skewed results this will produce (as would most any attempt; the problem is much too large and complex), the results of Theworldvotes poll will be interesting to see…

So of course this gets me onto the topic of politics, which is not something I’ve discussed much on this here Blog, despite my very opinionated nature on the topic (just ask any of my friends who have ventured into the realm with me). And having an opinion on politics is as good as having an opinion on just about anything and everything else, because politics is really about everything. Sure, its about taxes and foreign policy and transportation (or the lack thereof) in a given metropolitan area; those things that are covered by the media as political topics that ‘the people’ care about. But its also about what you can do in your backyard, what you can learn in your school, how much money you can make, why you get paid the same as the guy next to you when you do the job three times better, why criminals get better in jail, and why rape victims suffer for the rest of their lives in private hells. Politics includes whatever you’re thinking about now, touches on the music you might be listening to, influences the tv show you’re not watching because you’re reading this; it even played a major role in forming my ability to think and write about this, and your ability to access and view it. Anyone who claims to be uninterested in politics either doesn’t know what politics really is, or is genuinely uninterested in life. For most people, I suspect the former reason.

I think that’s a good taste of what is to come if I am to really get onto the topic, which will be more and more likely to happen as the major elections of 2004 grow closer. But back to the reason I started talking about politics in the first place, that ‘theworldvotes.org’ website. From that site: ‘Who can vote? All citizens around the world who are committed to building a democratic international system of governance that is based on respect for universal human rights.’

Wow, what inspiring words! A democratic international system of governance! Respect for universal human rights!
What do those phrases mean?

Who determines if a particular right is universal or not? For example, there are some, perhaps many, who believe that universal healthcare is a right. I don’t agree (To remain more concise, I won’t go into specifics why here). There are others, perhaps the same people, who believe that people have a right to work. Again, I don’t agree. Who is right? Are these false ‘rights’ to be included in the ‘universal human rights’ that this ‘international system of governance’ is based on? If so, am I not allowed to vote because I am not committed to building such a system? Is then the system still democratic, having excluded me?

Food for thought until next time’ I have more, but I also have a calculus test.
Oh yeah, go sign up and vote, we need to represent the good ole USA.

Linux kernels before version 2.4.23 had a security hole that would allow a non-privileged user to gain administrative privileges on any Linux system. Version 2.4.23 was released on November 28, 2003. Silverfir.net had been running with no significant changes to its setup since May, 2003. The kernel hole, along with a security hole in the gallery software I use on this site, PHPix, allowed attackers to gain privileged access to the silverfir.net machine. Apparently, one succeeded. But whoever it was, the attacker must have been disappointed at the level of machine he or she gained access to. A Pentium Pro 180 with a nice but unremarkable Internet uplink isn’t exactly a conquest worth bragging about. Furthermore, nothing even remotely commercial happens on the machine, and all of my email is boring. Besides, something seems to have gone wrong: with the privileged status, the attacker seems to have replaced my INIT — the program that starts up before all other programs and guides the system though its startup routine — a common first step once a root kit (the tools used to crack open a system once administrator privileges have been gained) has been installed. However, this seems to have made my system quite unstable, and with several convenient power outages (thanks Amy, and Puget Power), the problem soon manifest itself with silverfir.net becoming unstable and generating all sorts of errors. In due time, after I got around to reading the logs, and reading security news bulletins, I was able to piece the story together. Of course, I am dumb, and I haven’t updated my (extremely changed by me) version of PHPix yet, but I figure as long as users can’t gain root with a kernel exploit, I�ll let them run strange commands on my system until I get around to getting the real replacement server working (probally FreeBSD or OpenBSD on the dual Pentium II). But at this point, that is a ways off.

After watching the movie last night, I stayed up even later to, among other things, update this site. The result is that I slept in until 1:00pm today, just long enough to completely miss church. That wasn’t planned, mind you. I had breakfast, read some, and then watched the New England Patriots narrowly defeat the Carolina Panthers in Superbowl XXXVIII. I was cheering for the Panthers simply because they were the underdogs; things looked grim in the first quarter for them, but both teams picked up the offensive pace towards halftime…

Another aside: At BYU, I took an introduction to economics course that covered basic micro- and macroeconomic theory. One of the books I read for the class was called “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.” Written by Alan Blinder, a liberal economist from the Clinton administration, the book is about how liberal fiscal policies could also be economically grounded. I hope that all politicians in this country, both “conservative” and “liberal” (although the differences these days are slight) would read the book and follow the advice. The reason I think of this now is that in the introduction to the book, Blinder declares that you can tell if someone is liberal if they root for the underdog team in a sports contest when they have no personal loyalties to either team. But he is wrong. I am one of the least liberal people I know (not necessarily to be confused with classic conservatism), and I enthusiastically root for the underdogs, as long as the one projected to win is not the UW, BYU, or a Seattle team. Take that, Mr. Blinder! But seriously, especially if you are liberal, read the book, then we can have a decent conversation about our politics.

And back to the main story: despite the slow start, the game turned out to be quite good, except for the fact that we had the same ending that we had two years ago (although I did not watch that game, to be honest) and the fact that the Panther’s should have tried something really wild on that last play. Getting tackled should�ve been the last thing they let happened � I mean, seriously, who cares if you let the Patriots score again, you still loose, but try some laterals and pull your entire team back for some voodoo magic and at least make the final moments an exciting bang instead of a lackluster whimper. Oh well, I guess that’s what we have college football for.