Bah.

Grumpy Cat, the face of thousands of internet memes, has died

Taken by a UTI at the age of seven.

Bah.

Due to laws being passed in Alabama and Georgia and the like that greatly curtail the legality of abortion, discussion of the general topic seems much more common in recent days. Listening to NPR today, there was a piece on the debate on when human life begins, largely focusing on various religious views on the subject. My own views are pretty straightforward and are not religion based: human life begins at conception. Why? Because:

1) It’s obviously alive. Sperm is alive, egg is alive… fertilized egg is alive. At no point in the process is it non-alive, unless it has died.

2) Obviously it’s human. What, is it a Komodo dragon?

That said, the point at which a living human fertilized egg becomes something to give a damn about is a much trickier question. For those who believe that give-a-damn begins at conception… well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer. Others believe that *birth* is when human rights are magically bestowed upon what had previously been a simple expendable mass of tissue. This is much less sensible, because a fetus can be removed from the womb prior to birth and can survive.

My own view: I dunno. You terminate (for no medically necessary reason) a baby that’s seconds from birth… that to me is murder. But you take a Day After pill and the undifferentiated blastocyst gets flushed from the system… meh. But somewhere in between, things get fuzzy.

The pro life people almost invariably come at this from a religious angle, and that is a good way to irritate me. But their hardline view on “at conception” is consistent and a position worthy of respect. The pro abortion people, however, come at this from a non-religious position, which yo would *hope* means a scientific one. But it almost never is. Instead, it’s usually internally inconsistent and sometimes downright terrifying.

On the one hand, they tell us that this is all about “womens health” or “womens rights,” because the fetus is little more than a parasite which is threatening or even merely inconveniencing the mother. Yeah, ok, but… she remains inconvenienced *after* birth. The “parasite” remains every bit as dependent upon human assistance for the basic of life after birth as before. Even so, you can’t just toss a baby in the trash. Nor can someone wander through a neonatal unit and stab all the preemies and not get charged with something rather substantial. Not just the legal system, but actual humans look down on infanticide. Even if the infants not only weren’t actually born, but were not even due to be born for several months yet.

For a legal system to be a *good* legal system, it has to treat people consistently. What’s “murder” for one person is “murder” for another, if the circumstances are the same. But with the unborn, it’s different. If someone attacks a pregnant woman and intentionally assaults her unborn child with the intention of killing it, that’s murder or attempted murder. But if the mother gets an abortion… it’s not murder. And this disturbs the bejesus out of me: someone can decide that what is recognized as a human *isn’t* a human, and the legal system accepts that. I’m cool with the legal system accepting Person A intentionally killing Person B if it’s a matter of self defense or defense of another, but at no point does the legal system decide that it was ok for A to kill B because B wasn’t a human and did not deserve human rights.

The new laws that have been passed basically make abortion illegal except in the case of the mothers life being in medical risk due to the pregnancy. The people I’ve heard argue against these laws have often used a very similar argument… that these new laws will ban the “great majority” of abortions, thus openly accepting that abortions are not about the life of the mother, but because she simply wants it done. For those people who truly believe that even the smallest blastocyst is a human life worthy of protecting, the knowledge that some people can rather nonchalantly chose to murder their babies in the interest of convenience must be maddening.

The NPR piece ends with this:

“… they don’t see it as just property, and they don’t see it as fully human, but somewhere in between.”

Cuz, yeah, declaring someone to be somewhere between human and property… gosh, when has *that* ever been a bad thing?

I’ve posted much this sort of rambling incoherent post before, largely because the subject keeps coming up and keeps not being resolved. Seems to me that science can provide some solutions:

1) A modernized Norplant that not only can be easily implanted, it’s *mandatory.* It could be mandatory for all women who:

A) Are on government assistance, in jail, on parole, in the country illegally, etc.

B) Are over the age of 13 (or whatever) and have not yet passed Motherhood 101 and received their Parenting License. Sure, the idea of the government licensing people to be able to have babies is a fairly terrifying thought, but they want to license other Constitutional rights, so why not?

2) Perfect the artificial womb, and come up with a way to extract a fetus from a womb and implant it within the robo-womb. The procedure would have to be on par with an abortion in terms of safety and time consumed, but that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. I’m sure Bubbles Cortez would be perfectly happy to let the Green New Deal wait on hold while the resources for it are devoted to this project. Once the baby is extracted and implanted in the artificial uterus, adoption can begin. Fetuses that are sufficiently early on that they can be safely frozen can be put into long term storage for the day we need easily transported workers for the Off World Colonies, or for after some horrifying plague rubs out a large fraction of the population.

Let’s say Mars gets terraformed with all the bells and whistles. Oceans worth of added water and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere with more or less 1 standard atmosphere pressure at “sea level.” Since the gravity of Mars is substantially lower than Earth, to get that same pressure, the atmosphere will have to be substantially heavier in order to provide the same pressure, and thus be properly breathable. And that heavier atmosphere will be necessarily thicker… not denser, but extended much further out into space: “scale height.” With about 3/8 the gravity, it seems you’d need 8/3 the mass of air per unit area to get the same pressure.

I’ve little doubt that numerous people have run the math on what all would be needed and what all would be the result. Anybody know of examples of such results? What would be the temp and pressure at various altitudes for such an atmosphere? What the lowest stable satellite orbit would be? How tall and how high clouds could get? How freakin’ high the birds would fly?

There are two types of people in the world:

1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

Protect the solar system from a mining ‘gold rush’ by creating a ‘space wilderness’ that preserves 88% of planets, moons and other heavenly bodies, scientists urge

Sure, because a pristine dead rock is more important than the living world it could be used to produce.

‘Once you’ve exploited the solar system, there’s nowhere left to go,’ he added.

Really. REALLY. Because a civilization that utterly uses up an entire solar system, converting every last gram of matter into a freakin’ Dyson swarm, is incapable of wandering off to, say, Alpha Centauri, I suppose?

‘And what about the rings of Saturn? They are beautiful, almost pure water ice.

‘Is it OK to mine those so that in 100 years they are gone?’

Umm… YES. The rings mass ~ 1.5X10^19 kilograms, and if that was all water, it’d be fifteen million cubic kilometers. That would be a square ocean one kilometer deep by 3872 kilometers on a side. Why, that would be just DANDY on the surface of Mars. I’d gladly trade Saturns rings, which I cannot see with the naked eye, for turning Mars from red to blue-green. Not only is that a win in the aesthetics category, it’s a win in the practicality category: the rings are doing nothing. Move that water to Mars, you bring the planet to *life.*

Still more.

Three views of Thatcher, Utah. Two show what is essentially my front yard, looking north. Anybody interested in this sort of thing?

Most of human history has featured sloooooow progress. Occasional fast jumps forward, occasional shocking drops backwards, but overall a slow progression towards higher technology and better outlooks. The last two or so centuries, though, have been a virtual rocket launch upwards in terms of standards of living, life expectancy, the power available to individuals, the distance a person could travel, etc.

It’s always fashionable to wonder if we are in End Times. Stories like this tend to make me thing that we might actually be:

California Could Go Dark This Summer to Prevent Wildfires

Short form: California has a had a problem in recent years with wind blowing down power lines into trees, sparking massive wildfires. So the idea is, during windy periods shut down electricity to some cities that had the poor manners to be out in the wilderness. One might wonder “wouldn’t it be better and safer to simply cut down the trees near power lines? To make sure that there is a low risk of fire in lanes around the lines?” That way cities wouldn’t need to go dark, cutting off not only economic activity, but also shutting down air conditioners and refrigerators. Cutting off cities will shorten lives.

Ah, but this is California. Cutting down trees might upset some spotted owls or giant garter snakes or some such. Someone might cut down a tree and make a buck by selling it to a lumber mill or, GASP, burning it for heat.

Better to just tell people to get used to a New Normal of standards of living revising *downwards.* Sure, the article says that people are planning on setting up solar panels and banks of batteries to take up the slack when the power goes down, but let’s face it: if people start living *better* on alternative power, regulators will simply come along and tack on enough red tape and taxes to make it nightmarish. Witness Illinois plan to make owning electric vehicles prohibitively expensive. This will hit supposedly life-improving technologies like self-driving autos, which will doubtless have either corporate sponsorship (the windows will display ads rather than letting you look outside), or the government will add onerous new fees… or, quite likely, both. And in any event, making cars self-driving will mean that fewer and fewer people will actually pay attention to what’s going by outside, and will pay more attention to their pads and phones, meaning that smaller “sights” will go by unseen, and will fall into disuse and decay.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and California and Illinois will lead America into a prosperous new era of freedom and expanded options and increased-yet-cheaper power available per person. I’ll get right on looking forward to that.

But it’s a missile with fookin’ swords.

Secret U.S. missile kills terrorists with knives instead of explosives

The R9X is a modified version of the Hellfire. The warhead is removed and replaced with six deployable sword-sized blades. It kills the target not with an explosion, but with a hundred pounds of missile moving at the speed of sound slamming into the guys head, the blades just making sure that the target is super-dead.

NEW – @WSJ confirms the @CIA & @DeptofDefense have a new "secret" missile – the R9X, or "flying Ginsu" – which kills a selected target with 6 blades, but no explosive payload.

— "To the targeted person, it's as if a speeding anvil fell from the sky."https://t.co/DIQfnfJYDq pic.twitter.com/iM87WUFLhg

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) May 9, 2019

Anyone remember those weird strikes, probably by US forces, mostly on cars, where there didn’t seem to have been an explosive payload, but everything inside the car was very dead?

Well, here it is, a secret kind of Hellfire:https://t.co/kTx8s5r4kB

— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) May 9, 2019

The purpose of this is to limit collateral damage so that individuals can be targeted in urban areas without too much risk to surrounding civilians. Perhaps Representative Swalwell will consider using these rather than nuclear weapons when he fantasizes about murdering American citizens who dare exercise their constitutional rights.

A pretty detailed layout of the SR-71 pilots instruments.

I have uploaded the full resolution scan of the illustrations to the 2019-05 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

… is about to go up in Illinois if the Legitimate Businessmen’s Social Club that runs the state government get their way:

Illinois residents could be charged $1,000 a year to own an electric vehicle under new legislation

The current annual fee to register an electric car in Illinois is $17.50. The claim is that dastardly electric car drivers are not paying into the gas tax base, and thus not holding up their end of the deal in paying for road repair.

Bonus round: Illinois gas tax is proposed to go up from $0.19 to $0.44 per gallon.

I have an alternate approach: Illinois should secede from Cook County. Let Chicago run things their way, let the rest of the state look to Iowa or Wisconsin for how to run things. Build a wall around Cook County and charge fees for products going in and extremely large fees for residents who wish to emigrate. Probably unconstitutional… but this is Chicago. That’s how things are done there.