A Sobering Comment From Andrew Ross Sorkin On 60 Minutes: "A Crash Is Coming"

 

Jason Zweig writes in his recent WSJ column (‘Why It’s So Hard To Spot A Stock Market Bubble):

“If the stock market’s a bubble, that’s dangerous. If you’re positive it is—or isn’t—a bubble, that could be even more dangerous.

In April, semiconductor stocks rose more than 38%, their highest monthly return since February 2000. Google’s parent, Alphabet GOOGL -0.32%decrease; red down pointing triangle, gained 10% on April 30, adding more than $421 billion in market value in a single day—the second-largest one-day gain for a stock in history, according to Dow Jones Market Data.”

Mr. Zweig goes on to note that in a recent issue of his Newsletter he asked readers: "Are we in a bubble?"

According to Jason: "Readers from the U.S. and across the world replied."

The examples he gave were nearly evenly split between those forecasting a bubble, e.g. "In short, YES. We are definitely in a bubble"  And:

"No, it's not a classic bubble".

And:

"While the increase in prices is extraordinary, prices continue to rise because earning continue to rise. Earnings are the mother's milk of the market".

To which Mr. Zweig replied:

"Sorry, folks, as I've warned before, bubblespotting is a lot harder than it seems. If identifying a bubble were easy then we could all do it."

But for sure some can do it better than others, because they factor history into the mix, like Andrew Ross Sorkin - author of the recent book 1929 delves . A lengthy tome that delves into the lead up behind the worst stock crash in history.  Below is Sorkin's 60 Minutes interview with CBS Leslie Stahl:

Andrew Ross Sorkin on worrying similarities between Wall Street today and 1929's pre-crash market

Sorkin in the interview noted several disturbing parallels between today's market behavior and that leading up to 1929. When asked if we are in a bubble his response was terse and to the point:

"It's hard to say we're not in a bubble of some sort. The question is when is the bubble going to pop. The economy today is being propped up almost entirely by an AI boom.  This is either a gold rush or sugar rush and we likely won't know for a couple of years which one it is."

Leslie Stahl then notes that 1929 was a sugar rush caused by speculation and debt.  Adding:

"People that really didn't have much money were lured by Wall Street bankers to invest. They used a newfangled concept to take on debt called credit. You only had to put down 10 percent of the stock price borrowing the rest from your broker."

As Sorkin interjects: "Before 1919 most people did not use credit to buy anything. It was considered a mortal sin. It was General Motors that first came up with the idea that we're going to lend you money so you can buy our cars. Then the bankers came in offering to lend money so people could buy stocks."

Hence, a whole vast house of cards was crated mostly using money the average person didn't have. A bubble was the result, and a very unstable one. Sorkin again:

"In good times if stock went  up, it was free money. In bad times, you're on the hook in a very bad way."

Why be on the hook so badly? Greed! People wanted more and more, beyond what they could reasonably afford- whether to purchase expensive 'goodies' on credit, or buying expensive stock shares on margin. (Buying on margin: Using money from a broker to invest while putting up existing securities as collateral.)  So focused are the latter on magnifying their buying power and potential gains they foolishly ignore the magnitude of the potential losses - including that they had to pay interest on the borrowed money.  Thus, the spectacle of so many of today's stock buyers' willingness to go into debt to continue the sugar rush. 

In a 2020 WSJ column the same Jason Zweig warned about chasing yield in today's fiscal environment, writing:

 "Fooling yourself into thinking you can find absolute safety in any asset yielding more than 1 percent is a terrible idea. We live in a 1 % if not a sub-1% world right now.  Nothing you can do can change that. "

He then cited inflation-protected  U.S. savings bonds earning 1.06 %   and CDs that "earn a pinch more"  but "anything above that comes with risks and risks have consequences".

Now, back to my 1999 book, The Elements of the Corporatocracy where I wrote in Chapter 5 (The Market Corporatocracy):

"By the October 19, 1987 Market crash, the speculative economy had sucked nearly $1 trillion from people who had invested, and could least afford to lose money. However, they were constantly besieged with the 'buy and hold' mantra to ready them for the next plucking.

Meanwhile, a host of factors contributed to the speculative frenzy and fed it such as: the passage of the 401k as a substitute pension plan which would replace defined benefits (in real money) that had been received until then. Thus, workers were now expected to place their savings - whatever they could muster - at the mercy of a market that was anything but merciful.

This based future retirements on 'phantom money' and the shenanigans of shysters on Wall Street (see e.g. 'License to Steal: The Secret World of Wall Street Brokers and the Systematic Plundering of the American Investor' , 1999). Then add to this morass the constant shrinkage of bank (pass book) interest rates, as well as CDs - forcing vulnerable people to chase yield in risky vehicles for which they were never prepared.

 These items drove herds of common ordinary people into the 'market' who otherwise may never have ventured there. Just as before 1929- millions of ordinary folk were driven into the infamous 'investment trusts' that caused them to lose everything. These 'investment trusts' were the forerunners of today's mutual funds) and then - as now - touted as "the little guy's way to enter the stock market".

 The more recent piling into the market with 401ks, IRAs, etc, resulted in a never before seen phenomenon. What mass speculation did was to drive P/E ratios (the price to earnings of stocks, and averaged out, for mutual funds) to incredible overpriced magnitudes. Some stocks and funds were trading at over 30 times earnings just before the '87 crash, and all during the 90s the average was at 45 times earnings. This was nuts, disclosing grossly overvalued stocks. "

There you have it in a nutshell and why we are also in a bubble now that may cause even vaster consternation when it bursts.  Excessive borrowing on credit has gone into fueling stock purchases - especially of the AI offerings - promising riches that may never arrive based on posts I have made earlier, i.e.

Is A 'Wave of Pain' Headed Our Way From the Ongoing Strait of Hormuz Blockage?

Sorkin's take on this year's stock boom echoes similar worries, and warnings. As when he tells Leslie Stahl: 

"We are either in a remarkable boom, or everything's overpriced."

Well, everything IS overpriced because the prices have been magnified along with the stock buying power using leverage.  This is in addition to the fact that the consumer protections after the last big crash don't exist anymore, including the Consumer Protections Bureau (as Sorkin pointed out). As he spells it out in terms of his concerns:  

"There is speculation in the market today, there is an increasing debt in the market today, and all of that's happening in the wake of the guard rails coming off."

Including guard rails that had earlier allowed only the wealthy to invest in private companies - like AI startups - before they go public. Why the big deal? Because private equity outfits don't need to adhere to sundry disclosure rules, so those who invest are basically gambling.  Historically, average Americans of marginal wealth weren't allowed to invest in these private companies but now - "in this era of democratizing finance there's a lot of people who want access to that" (in Sorkin's words).

So basically, we are set up to see one of the biggest stock crashes in history. You can bet your sweet bippy on it. Especially as so many now flocking into the risky investments are of the mind the former guard rails were just "protecting us from getting rich".

Now they will learn they were actually being protected from losing their asses and having to eat Alpo the rest of their days.  As Sorkin put it at the end: "I wish I wasn't saying this, but I can assure you we will have a crash."

See Also:

A.I.-Bubble Angst Spills Into Bond Market - What It Means

And:

Brane Space: A Brief History Of Bear Markets For (Primarily) Younger Investors

And:

Markets "Whipsawed By War Shifts?' When Will They Learn They Can't Trust Trump's Trash Social Blabber?

And:

Are Small Fry Biotech Investors Really Getting "Hosed" In The Equity Markets? Looks Like It To Me

And:

Pope Leo's First Encyclical Merits Props For Not Re-Hashing The Vatican's "Pelvic Sins"

 

Pope Leo at the presentation of his first encyclical letter ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ yesterday

To his credit, Pope Leo XIV, like his predecessor Pope Francis, is trying to shift Catholicism away from the near fixation on “pelvic theology",” the obsession with sexual morality, that has come to define Catholicism, especially in the United States. The concern is that decades of focusing on “sins below the waist,” in Pope Francis words, has fueled the church’s culture war agenda and driven many people away from the central teachings of the Gospels. 

Not only that, the obsession with these absurd “natural law” violations have driven millions of us from the RC church entirely. True, most popes since Leo’s predecessor, Leo XIII, have published encyclicals about social teaching. But the subject has remained overshadowed by the absolute moral law regarding sins of the flesh. Which is absurd, because absolutist moral laws against sexual sins are inherently contradictory. 

This is why it was gratifying to read about Leo’s  encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity.”  According to the NYTimes: “this  document is inspired by the teachings of Leo’s eponymous predecessor, Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” responded to the plight of exploited workers in the Industrial Revolution.” 

Leo warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered."

As a sign of the subject’s importance, the pope made an appearance at the news conference presenting the encyclical. He thereby emphasized the importance of placing social justice issues over the ‘mock’ morality of personal chastity. In Leo’s own words, replying to a reporter’s question last month:

“We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.”

 In truth, sexual sins, like masturbation and premarital sex, were favorites because they were easy to judge — you either had sex in some grievous way (i.e. fornication) or you didn’t. Figuring out when a corporate honcho has exploited his workers to reap profits was harder. As a result, sexual sins became the gravest by virtue of being ‘low hanging fruit’. The trouble was this elevated them into a category by themselves - that assumed an outsize place in the hierarchy of truths that ordered beliefs.

As I wrote in my first atheist book, The Atheist’s Handbook To Modern Materialism’ (p. 185):

“Consider: If it is an equally grievous sin to kill twenty people with an AK-47 as it is to manually induce a single orgasm in oneself, then where is the proportion? The equalization of gravity in terms of postulated penalties (“eternal damnation”) leads to an inherent logical inconsistency that permeates and weakens the entire moral foundation. It’s as if the nature of an action (e.g. sexual) automatically elevates it into the realm of severe moral unlawfulness, despite the fact no evidence exists that anyone was harmed. Yet the credulous Catholic is asked to balance this on the Vatican’s scales of eternal justice, with twenty lives lost to an AK-47.”

 This hearkens back to a conversation 15 years ago between my atheist friend Rick, and Krimhilde, my Eckist sister -in law. Both basically agreed that sin is a Macguffin invented by conventional religions to keep humans in an inferior state as opposed to attaining mastery over their lives. Sin is also a ridiculous concept.

As Rick put it, "How can a finite tiny flesh being 'offend' a supposed infinite Being? It's totally ludicrous.”

 As Krimhilde then added: “How could eating meat on a Friday be an insult to the divine, or cause it grief and pain?”  And Rick, not to be one-upped, added: "How could a teen jacking off in his bedroom to a Playboy centerfold do the same?"

Further, both agreed that the Church’s natural law invention was likely at the root of most sexual sins. Much of the sin obsession, at least since Pope Paul VI, has focused on artificial birth control. I can even recall a Loyola Ethics professor (Fr. Alvin Holloway):

Referring to it in one lecture as "mutual masturbation".  Also worthy of capital Catholic punishment, i.e. damnation to Hell. So one must ask what keeps this looney tune obsession so stoked?  As recently as 3 years ago, Francis X. Rocca, the Wall Street Journal's Vatican correspondent, warned in his Dec. 30 column:

  "Conservatives warn that lifting the categorical ban on artificial birth control would open a Pandora’s box by contradicting the reasoning behind other prohibitions."

Contradicting the "reasoning" behind the other prohibitions? There isn't any, only knee jerk moralistic reactions.Let's note that Rocca’s term "conservatives" refers to that faction of the Church that had basically been under the hegemony of Joseph Ratzinger, or Pope Benedict XVI. But since his death it might well be the case, as Rocca surmised, that the RC Church re-examines the morality of contraception (by which I will always mean the artificial form, not the 'rhythm' method).  But in truth that was only a half-hearted gesture at best.

I did predict (see my Jan. 2, 2023 post) a tentative allowance of artificial contraception would be considered by Pope Francis for married couples.  This in contravention of the encyclical Humanae Vitae - which was more a declaration of unthinking dogma based more on a specious pseudo principle ("natural law") than a reasoned moral argument.  Rocca in his original WSJ piece goes on:

"The church has traditionally taught that it is wrong to prevent procreation except through abstinence from sexual intercourse. The explanations for this teaching have varied over time in accordance with developments in theology, philosophy and science, as recounted in John T. Noonan, Jr.’s book, “Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists.”

But in her chapter 'The Lessons of Zoology' in the book Contraception and Holiness (p110) Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty asked:

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

She's referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original anti-contraception encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do was reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs.

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

This then, is what the Catholics' “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time!

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

What confirms that the Church's focus on "pelvic theology" is actually steeped in ignorance, comes from the repeated citations of Thomas Aquinas, i.e. from another WSJ columnist:

“the first argumentation against the unnaturalness of contraception rests on its contradiction of the natural purpose of the genital organs and the genital act.”

Aquinas views in this reference to the 'natural purpose of the genital organs and the genital act' betrays an allegiance to Aristotelian modes of thought. These tend to fix behaviors to mistaken 'norms' of the time and fixed definitions of the 'normal' construed as 'natural' but which are not. Indeed, as contributor Julian Pleasants observed in the same monograph Contraception and Holiness (p. 88) the RC Church has always been hostage to:

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.) So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?   The abiding question for me is: Why should 21^st century rational adults- Catholics or not -    be yoked  to Aristotelian modes of thought regarding the so-called "pelvic sins". 

Viewed from a scientific Materialist’s perspective, Aquinas’ (and similar RC clerics’) statements reflect an exaggerated, over solicitous concern for the biology of one higher ape relative of the chimpanzee, on one ordinary planet.  Worse, it signifies a brazen attempt to intrude in personal affairs that don’t concern Catholic moralists or theologians.  Especially after the RC sexual abuse scandal (which Ratizinger helped to conceal) that essentially deep-sixed the Church’s “pelvic” sins moral offense category one time.

Natural law then was invented purely as a theological sophistry; a device to control and manipulate people's lives. Hence, Pope Leo was quite correct to ignore these pelvic transgressions in his encyclical. Incidentally, Leo also merits plaudits for renouncing the Church's support for slavery based on the natural law bunkum. Maybe now, the entire concept of a theological 'natural law' can be consigned to the dustbin of history.

 See Also:

Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical - The New York Times

Excerpt:

Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

• government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
• protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
• education to help students think critically about the technology
• action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
• safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.

And:

Conservatives and the Right

Is the Right to Contraception About To End in America?

by Thom Hartmann | January 5, 2023 - 6:35am | permalink

— from The Hartmann Report

Excerpt:

To paraphrase Pastor Niemöller, first they came for our abortion rights. Now they’re coming for our birth control.

Psychologist Dr. Marty Klein notes at Psychology Today that there are typically only a few reasons why people oppose birth control. They are:

— Fundamentalist religions fear sexual pleasure, which birth control facilitates

— Contraception effectively limits family size, empowering women

— Contraception promotes personal autonomy [making women more likely to challenge male authority]

— Birth control may make abortion more acceptable to society

And:

Educating A Catholic Convert On Artificial Birth Control- And 'Humanae Vitae'

And:

WSJ's William McGurn's Criticism of Notre Dame Is Misplaced Foolishness.

And:

WSJ Writer Rips Notre Dame U. - She Needs To Examine Her Own Hollow Morality

Basic Mensa Algebra Problem

 

The Problem:

Find all values of x that satisfy the equation:

x²  -   x³     = 36   

How The Radical Right Goes Off The Rails In Its Anti-Abortion Crusade

 

                Protesters confront their post-Roe fate after SC abomination

With the SC 'shadow docket' order late Thursday, May 11th,  staying the extremist 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling to block mifepristone from distribution by mail, American women can now breathe a sigh of relief.  They can now continue to receive this abortion pill by U.S. mail without interference by the Xtian Right's renegades who want to shut down all access to abortion - which had been guaranteed until the Dobbs SC decision in 2022.

Though the WSJ editors bitched about progressives' "silence on the court's use of the shadow docket" ("more about politics than the law"), this was just blowing hot air by the Journal editors. John Oliver thoroughly skewered the use of that SC device in this delivery the following Sunday night:

The Shadow Docket: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

The fact, however, is that mail distribution of mifepristone is still on life support, and there is no assurance women will be able to continue to access it. After all, the Supremes' conservos - excepting the usual two renegades (Thomas and Alito) - never gave any reasons for their decision to stay the lower court (5th circuit) order.   Besides, the core objection (of the SC conservo majority) still remains: that abortion violates the "personhood" of the fetus.

 Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that no sane person in his or her right mind can possibly regard a "zygote" as a person, or a fetus as an "unborn child". There is simply no standard by which that passes even elemental laws or tests of logic, or science.  A child cannot be "unborn" because by definition it is already born!  Thus, we send the 'child' to school, to take his medicine and so on. If unborn, it's a fetus, not a "child". Don't these ignorant twits know any better?

Meanwhile, a person, a human person, must have at least minimal capacity for basic cognition and rudimentary choice. It must possess a brain, at the very least, which evinces definite brain waves. Anything that doesn't is a quasi proto-human entity, but clearly not a person. The logical error made is called the "genetic fallacy" as first pointed out by Antony Flew in his marvelous monograph, 'Thinking About Thinking'. . That is, arguing that because a thing is going to become something, it IS something. It would be like me picking up an acorn and claiming it's an oak tree. Nope. No way.

Then there is the aspect of unintended consequences.  Consider here, that if Alito's brainchild of "fetal persopnhood" is ultimately confirmed the destruction of ALL fertilized eggs is outlawed .  Then that would mean wholesale banning of all birth control devices as well as Mifepristone. For example, it would ban the use of all IUDs, or intra-uterine devices, by virtue of the fact that while they permit fertilization they impede the attachment of the fertilized egg to the uterine wall. Hence, any woman using one would -by the letter of the law- be eligible for imprisonment, perhaps up to five years or more. The morning after pill would also be criminal to use, because its primary benefit is to interfere with the fertilization. The pill delays ovulation or thickens cervical mucus to prevent sperm from reaching the egg, meaning that fertilization can't occur. (In one 2014 Colorado personhood amendment it was condemned as 'premature murder')

Examples cited for the original Colo. amendment, included:

-        -In 2004, Melissa Ann Rowland was charged with murder in Utah after one of her twins was stillborn. Doctors had warned her to get a C-section and she refused. She eventually received 18 months probation for the lesser counts of child endangerment.

-      - In 2009, Samantha Burton showed signs of premature labor at 25 weeks pregnant. Her doctor found she wasn’t in labor  but refused to allow her to leave a Florida hospital for a second opinion and obtained a court order requiring Burton to undergo all medical procedures the doctor advised. The baby, which was then removed by C-section, was stillborn. Only later did a higher court agree the woman’s rights were violated.

-      -  In 2010, Christine Taylor fell down the stairs after feeling lightheaded. After confiding to a nurse she considered abortion at one point in her pregnancy she was arrested for attempted suicide.   

           - In October, 2021, Brittney Proclaw was charged with feticide after a medical examiner found traces of meth in the liver and brain of her miscarried fetus.

       This sort of  religio-political insanity - inanity is possible when the promoters (like the misguided whitey females shown below - after the SC overthrow of Roe:

    

don't grasp the basics of principled ethics. Fortunately, Cheryl Mendelson - former Ethics professor -  does, which is why she has written ('The Good Life', p. 157):

    "The premoral mind confuses the disgusting with the wrong and retains an infantile fear of things sexual. Its rationality is overcome by emotion, fantasy, wish and projection. The belief that extracting a 10-week fetus from a woman's womb is murder rests to a large extent on the sense of disgust aroused by the thought of destruction of living tissue.

"When fundamentalists insist on risking the life of the mother to deliver an anencephalic fetus they take this tendency to an extreme. People who think this way are unable to override disgust with rational appreciation of the objective characteristics of the fetus. The ability to do so is an indispensable trait of the moral mind."

In other words, the basis for a truly moral mind presumes the capacity for rationality to assess choices objectively - as opposed to emotively.  This is something I've written about a number of times before.  Mendelson again (p. 159) reminding the zealots how often nature aborts:

"Nature sloughs off early pregnancies at a high rate and we do not hold funerals for these embryos and early fetuses.  As many as 60 to 70 percent of fertilized eggs are lost overall, usually silently - without anyone ever knowing fertilization took place. Up to 15 percent of known pregnancies miscarry in the first trimester. Were we to take seriously the morbid pseudo-moralism of the fundamentalist Right, we would recognize these countless millions of miscarried embryos and fetuses as lost lives and be sunk in a vast and permanent sea of endless mourning for the unending deaths of innocents."

Why don't the anti-abortionists have this endless mourning for the dead embryos, fetuses? Well, first - because there are too many and they'd never have an end to funerals or morbid grief - as Mendelson points out. Second,  because the premoral mind only makes a federal case out of it when individual women are seen trekking to Planned Parenthood for abortions!  IF those were carried out silently, discreetly in private (like nature does),  say using an abortion pill-  none of this would be known and no anti-abortion hysteria could exist.  Mendelson also goes on to make a point regarding the false moral righteousness of those like Alito, e.g. Mendelson,p. 160.

"To equate the termination of an early pregnancy with the death, indeed the murder, of an infant or child is not merely morally uncalled for but dangerous. It implicitly demeans the value of real people's lives, both adults' and children's, and confuses the reasons why we protect them so vigilantly. If our moral obligations to one another are abstracted from our capacities for feeling, thinking, intending and wanting - from everything that makes us human and forms the ground for our care and protection of each other- we are thrown back into a premoral kind of thinking.

To regard the destruction of insensate agglomerations of cells that contain human DNA as the destruction of a person's life is to step outside the moral into the brutal and dangerously irrational kind of thought that substitutes taboo for reason. It is a regression to quasi-magical thinking."

But this is exactly the 'doctrine' of fetal personhood is total twaddle. It is morally reprehensible,  garbed in false piety, and subject to overzealous prosecution of millions of innocent women.  What will it take to get these fanatics - like the women shown protesting abortion- to see the light?  It will take acceptance of the fact that neither the fertilized egg, embryo or fetus are "ensouled" or "sacred" entities.  They are simply early biological manifestations of another primate species on one planet.  In view of all this, Mendelson's final words are perhaps most trenchant:

"Do those people who oppose abortion or contraception on the basis of religious tenets have the right to impose their religious views on people who reject them?  

 The moral answer, emphatically, enshrined as law in the United States Constitution, is no. People are within their rights to attempt to persuade others to adopt and live by their religious ideas but not to force them to do so using laws and the power of government."

More apropos and relevant words have not been spoken.  But whether any of the pro Life hypocrites inLousiana - or other former Confederate states -  will respect them is another matter.  For now women should perhaps stockpile as many bottle of Mifepristone as they can in case the Supreme Court allows the Louisiana order prohibiting distribution to stand - say next month.

Recommended book: The Shadow Docket: How The Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings To Amass Power And Undermine The Republic, By Stephen Vladek

See Also:

Abortion Rights

Anthony Comstock is Reaching Up Out of the Grave for the Necks of Women

by Thom Hartmann | May 20, 2023 - 7:57am | permalink

— from The Hartmann Report

You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.

And:

Abortion Rights | Medicine & Biology

Abortion Pill Decision: Medical Abortions Will Just Be More Painful

by Amanda Marcotte | April 12, 2023 - 7:18am | permalink

— from Salon

The most crucial thing to understand in the aftermath of Friday's decision to rescind the FDA approval of Mifepristone by Donald Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is this: It is not a ban on medication abortion in the U.S. Pill-induced abortions will still be available, even if this decision is allowed to stand. They will continue to be safe. But aborting a pregnancy without Mifepristone will just be a more miserable experience than it was before the far-right district court judge ignored all law and science to impose his anti-choice ideology on the health care access of millions of Americans.

And:

Could Revival Of An 1873 Law Really Make Medicated Abortion Illegal Nationwide Now?