Sexual Engineering and Social Consequences

As of August 2022, the Irish government has been providing contraception to women aged between 17 and 25 for free¹. Will the IVF treatments be free, too ? Mark Hickey asks. 

Modern Western society seems to be waging a never-ending war against nature. The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought the introduction of contraceptives – artificial means seeking to completely and artificially suppress fertility : sex without babies. More recently, Western medicine has sought to offer the high-tech lottery of reproductive procedures and treatments as a consolation prize to the lost years of fertility : babies without sex. We seed to be lurching between two extremes, throwing human nature, natural law and divine design under a bus. Why is Ireland now implementing this programme of social and sexual engineering ? I think the immediate answers come from two places. 

Firstly, since acquiring our civic and political freedom as a nation, we have been perpetually on the look-out of how the wider world sees us. Since we’ve been pegged in the past as being in thrall to servile obedience to Catholic morality, we appear to be going out of our way to show that we have a new master – the secular, socially liberal framework of hedonistic individualistic autonomy, isolated from consequences or the common good. Secondly, we tend to import the bad aspects of foreign cultures. Consider the good influence of the good cultural aspects of putting the customer first in retail from the USA. The influence of this is probably not as popular as the popularity of junk food, another import from the same country. It’s not surprising that the bad aspects of our culture of pub-going and drinking has made its mark as an export from Ireland. We are, in the meantime, catching up with the latest and the worst, as the rest of the world, in its turn, is gleaning examples from our bad habits.  It could be said that, when an Irishman docks into a foreign town, he looks for the nearest pub, and when the Americans land abroad, they look for the nearest pharmacy. Chemicals and materials are sometimes used to suppress the body’s proper functioning. The warped and unnatural mechanics of birth control (the term birth prevention, with its connotations of population control is more accurate) were best described by John F. Kippley in his book “Sex and the Marriage Covenant” ² where he likens the use of a prophylactic in obstructed sexual intercourse to the use of a plastic bag to trap and discard ingested food by a bulimic. Maybe this description can help to realise that it is disordered enough, in bodily terms, as to make David Cronenberg blush. 

Secondly, the regarding of contraception as necessary seems to have been part-and-parcel of feminism from the very beginning of the modern version (from the late 1950s) of the movement, which, in its original form could perhaps have been considered as a reaction against male chauvinism, but which has come to mean a determined equalisation of the sexes in a way that is detrimental, I think, to the welfare of the fairer half of humanity. There are some things worth saying about social and personal consequences of contraception. Postponing a woman’s most fertile period to some uncertain future indicates the presence of a particularly ideology that puts work, career and individual freedoms above children, family and marriage. According to the economist Timothy Reichert, in his article “Bitter Pill” (First Things)³, the introduction  of contraception has bifurcated the dating market in which men and women would otherwise find each other. There are two markets – one is the short-term relationship market and the other is the marriage market. Contraception enables short-term, deliberately sterile and commitment-free relationships in which women have all the bargaining power (women, especially when they are young and free are the gate-keepers of sexual relations), but have little to gain in terms of what they ultimately want. I’m going to go out on a very short limb here and state that women want commitment. But they are not going to get it in the short-term relationship market. They will only get breakups, hook-ups and heart-ache. The sexually-transmitted diseases that come with the territory have much more serious consequences for women than men. Take for example the fact that the majority of human papilloma viruses are  undetectable harmless in males but can lead to cervical cancer in females. Contraceptive technologies don’t prevent them, quite the opposite. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly surely knows all of this, yet why does he promote a lifestyle which endangers women ? This lifestyle promotes promiscuity by signalling to every lusty male around that hook-ups are ok. It’s as if the government started handing out recreational bullet-proof vests. It would encourage, not dissuade, recreational shooting. In fact, two Arkansas men were arrested for shooting each other while wearing flak jackets (after a night of heaving drinking, admittedly). Ironically, the contraceptive mentality likely encourages the bad behaviour whose consequences its promoters seek to avoid, such as, for example, out-of-wedlock pregnancies. According to the National Vital Statistics Report of the United States, there has been an eight-fold increase in the number of out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies since the early 1950s (when teenage marriage was more common).  

There’s no biological clock for most careers but there is, in every case, and expiry date of female fertility. The government’s programme ignores that completely and only looks to the short term goal of increasing the participation in the work-force outside the home (and the corresponding tax-take). How expensive, both financially and personally, with its low success rate, does IVF and other treatments have to become for the government to realise that making an enemy of nature is a bad idea with bad consequences ? The female body is geared towards bearing and nursing the young. Government policy flies in the face of that fact and works on the premise of a radical equality of sameness between the sexes – a concept with no bearing in reality, plucked completely out of thin air.  

The widespread instruction of contraception doesn’t serve even the short-term goals of women. The consequence and commitment-free promise of the contraceptive mentality enables sexual predators the likes of whom we have heard so much about in the MeToo movement. It’s perhaps a simplification to say that men want sexual activity and women want commitment, but there is something to it. The contraceptive culture robs women of that commitment by ensuring that there is no danger of a baby coming along. A certain kind of man will say to himself ‘why commit ?’ Contraception makes it far more easy for men to treat women as objects of sexual gratification and facilitate a kind of misogyny that says ‘Why buy the cow when the milk is free ?’. Instead of questioning the usage of sexual relations purely for recreation and personal fulfilment, the feminists of that movement pointed the finger of reformation and correction to men in general (“toxic masculinity”). But it is contraception which is toxic. Taking the sexual act out of marriage is toxic. It’s bad for women, it’s bad for men, it’s bad for babies caught up in the middle of it all.  I don’t know when we are going to learn this. 

Simone De Beauvoir famously stated that the capability and responsibility for bearing children in the womb made them a “plaything of nature”. One could update that to say that contraceptives make women into “playthings of men”.

1. “Minister Donnelly secures free contraception for women aged between 17-25 years in Budget 2022”. Gov.ie. Department of Health. October 22, 2021. Retrieved June 7, 2022.
2. “Sex and the Marriage Covenant : A Basis for Morality”, John F. Kippley, Couple to Couple League International, 1991 ISBN : 0960103694, 9780960103690
3. “Bitter Pill”, First Things, May 2010, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/bitter-pill
4. National Center for Health Statistics, “Births to Teenagers in the United States, 1940-2000,” National Vital Statistics Report, 2001, Vol. 49, No. 10.

Contrary impressions on John Kerry’s Fulbright Distinguished Lecture, 9th of December 2022

Just before last Christmas, the Distinguished Fulbright Lecture was given by John Kerry, the United Nations Envoy on Climate. The lecture was entitled “The Urgency of the Climate Crisis”. Reading that title, I started to think there are only so many ways of raising the alert before a law of diminishing returns applies. I was reminded of those emails one gets with a red flag indicating ‘high priority’, replete with an exclamation point, or with ‘important’ emblazoned across the subject line. Once, I got an email that said, in its subject line, in bold capitals : “READ THIS NOW”. The presumption of the title indicated that those in attendance would be already convinced that there is 1) a climate crisis and that 2) that something would have to be done about it, and presumably soon.

It was with some hope for encountering or stimulating a more balanced, perhaps contrarian view that I went along. Perhaps I would find reason to see my contrarian scepticism challenged and refuted. Maybe I am wrong about man-made or anthropogenically-driven climate change ( what used to be called Global Warming). I went in through the Romanesque pillars of Bush House where the name of the place is etched in sandstone and in which the ‘U’ looks reassuringly like a ‘V’ as is usual in buildings of Roman antiquity. It was in Aldwych, in Central London, and it was hosted by the Policy Institute at Kings College London.

There were some security-related delays in getting to our seats, and as the crowd shuffled in, the rows were filled from the middle with alarming speed and I was left to muddle along to the front to get a seat typically left vacant by those in the crowd who don’t want to be seen. You certainly see this type of thing in religious services. However, when I got to the front, almost every seat was draped over with a large piece of paper indicating the name of some worthy, except for one seat at the edge. I thought to myself that I might take that, only to realise that it was next to the Principal of Kings’s College and only two seats away from John Kerry himself ! I thought of the line from the Gospel “he who exalts himself will be humbled” and thought better of taking that seat of privilege.

So it was the balcony for me or ‘up in the gods’ as some call it. Godly by height perhaps, but not by obstructed and abstracted view. As is usual these days with public lectures of this kind, the speaker had to be introduced by someone who themselves has to be introduced. In this case, the duty fell to my would-be fellow seating companion, Prof. Shitij Kapoor, of King’s College London. He trotted out various CO2-oblitertating initiatives and programmes being handled by the college, much to the applause of those gathered. There was ubiquitous mention of ‘Sharm El-Sheikh’, which was subsequently abbreviated to ‘Sharmel’ and, by the time we got to hear Mr. Kerry’s address, he was simply calling it ‘Sharm’. It was charming. The way they were saying it reminded me of Mount Carmel of Israel and that was fitting since they were talking about the location of the recent COP27 climate conference in Egypt, of which a sizeable contingent of the crowd were in attendance, as if they had come back from a holy gathering of brethren, as if it were some kind of haj or pilgrimage, but with 4-star+ hotels and first class flights.

Mr. Kerry took to the podium with great applause, after the Fulbright Programme coordinator introduced him, having made mention of the his public service record in the U.S. Navy during Vietnam, including two purple hearts, in his role Secretary of State, in his run for president. Mr. Kerry elaborated on his Vietnam days with a story about his return from Vietnam as a young veteran campaigning for the end of what he saw was a losing war, at the steps of the Washington Monument, and being given, to his surprise, a platform by none other than Senator William Fulbright himself, so that he could address the troops on this impassioned issue at the time. Then he told some rather amusing ice-breaker anecdotes, one involving an introduction by Clarence Pugh of U.S. President William Howard Taft. John Kerry mentioned the size or ‘girth’ of Mr. Taft at that stage in his life. He would have had to have stood back from the podium about a half a metre more than the lean-as-greyhound Mr. Kerry, as was demonstrated by the speaker. It didn’t seem to go over well with the Millenials in the auditorium, “was he fat-shaming ?” half of them were probably thinking ? Mr. Pugh was reported to have said “We await here a man – pregnant, pregnant with hope, pregnant with courage”. When Mr. Taft took to the speaking stage, he said “Well, if the baby turns out to be a boy, I’ll call him courage, if it’s a girl, I called her Hope, but if, as I suspect, it’s just gas, I shall call it Mr. Clarence Pugh !”. Thus concluded the opening remarks regarding the dangers of over-doing introductions. I was thinking of how difficult it is to make jokes in public in front of these new Fulbrighters. Jokes are not so welcome, because jokes might be found offensive. You can’t laugh either, because laughing presumes you are laughing at someone or something someone holds dear.

There seemed to have been one central statement of the damage wrought by climate change in Mr. Kerry’s address. This was the contention that 10 million people are now dying annually from ten heat. I immediately thought that surely it is the cold that kills more people, because of Jack Frost’s particular preference for lowering the body temperatures of elderly people such that they get the cold or ‘flu’ or whatever else that will kill them. Sure enough, as Ross Clark pointed out in the Spectator article, Mr. Kerry was referring to an article in the Lancet, written by an Australian research team which reported 5 million deaths due to weather extremes generally, not just heat, but also cold. In African countries, the number of cold deaths outnumber those due to extreme heat by a factor of 40. No wonder political pundits have swapped the term global warming for climate change. I suppose we’re expected to believe that CO2 cools the planet as well for political purposes ? We were told that rivers in France were running dry this years in places, too dry to cool the nuclear reactors. Does this happen every year ? Has it happened in the past. What is the quantitive baseline so that these claims can be evaluated ? Even if an event like this was due to atmospheric warming, we are still a long way from proving that it is CO2/greenhouse gas-driven. What is Mr. Kerry role in all of this ? As the evening wore one, I found the answer. He is an evangelist for the gospel of bad news that a tiny fraction that is our industrial CO2 of the 0.03 % of the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to regulate global temperature for many years to come.

He kept on saying that, at bottom, his stance was not coming from anywhere political, but was ultimately coming from Math and Physics. I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I found myself wondering at another statement he made – that half of the global warming that is happening (assuming it is happening) is due to methane. But Methane occurs in even more minute trace amounts that CO2. Its heat capacity (35 J per mole per Kelvin) is similar to water vapour(33.5) , and slightly less than CO2 (37) which is orders of magnitude more abundant. Perhaps, if you could tax clouds, that would have been included as a greenhouse gas. An audience member and chemist with whom I was chatting afterwards said that these rogue climate change agents have special rotational or vibrational states in them that allow for more efficient infra-read absorption. No they don’t. Not any more than humble old water vapour, whose heat you’ll feel on a warm day in Florida and in any greenhouse. Water absorbs right across the infrared with absorption coefficient of nearly 1. There’s only so much infrared energy a molecule can store. And methane is no different. So cows should be allowed flatulate in peace. And cow farmers of developing countries (and New Zealand and Ireland) should be allowed to let them and earn a living. In the middle of all of this apocalyptic prophesying, Mr. Kerry dropped in a Biblical quotation “The truth will set you free”. Yes, but for this “truth”, I would have some questions.

After the lecture was over, there followed immediately afterwards “a conversation” which often takes place nowadays instead of a robust and challenging Q & A segment. This conversation usually involves the host sitting down in a comfy chair only to lob even more soft and cushy questions at the speaker. During the conversation afterwards, Mr. Kerry re-affirmed his pseudo-evangelical mission “I need to proselytise you …with the truth I have spoken”. At that point, I felt a weakness and a cloying manner in his rhetorical demeanour. When the host finally turned things to the audience, we were told that, owing to the constraints of time (Mr. Kerry in fairness lamented this with the phrase – “you are such hard-arses for time !”), there was only going to be two questions. One allowed from the young and fresh cadre of eager Fulbrighters and the other picked out at random from a the back row.

As the crowd broker up afterwards, I was thinking about another statement from the talk, namely that the IPCC have been making accurate climate predictions going back as far as the Rio Summit in 1992, an event which made it’s way into the narrow confines of my teenage heavy metal interest in the opening lyric (if you could call it that) of Sepultura’s very popular and very well-known ditty by the name of “Biotech is Godzilla” from their album Chaos A.D. Accurate predictions ? I turned to the audience member who was shuffling out of the row beside me, a studious and conscientious looking fellow, to whom I said : “You can’t predict the weather next week with any accuracy, how can they say that they can predict it in the next ten years to the nearest half a degree ?” He retorted that I was confounding weather and climate. He elaborated that, while we might not be able to predict the weather with any accuracy after 7 days, since climate represents aggregations of weather patterns, averaged over time, we could still get the trend right overall. He made the analogy of predicting loaded dice falls in a casino. Which we would not be able to get every dice fall right, we would nevertheless, because of the loading, be able to predict the general trend. I wondered about this. Let’s say, for argument sake, that the weather is like a casino, and our models know how the dice are loaded to bias a warming trend, we’d still on average be able to predict the weather from next week. Not everyday would be right, of course, because of the inherent randomness, but because of the loading, the predictions would be more often right, or close to being right, than not. On average then, the forecasts would tend to the measured temperature. But this doesn’t happen, weather predictions (and hence the aggregated trends we call climate) are so unreliable and far from the measured reality, that meteorological services don’t even publish them. How can we be expected then, to believe that we can predict, never mind attribute warming to the nearest half a degree in 10 years’ time. Models don’t suddenly become accurate when you dispense with the advantage of trying to predict only a few days out, quite the opposite in fact.The weather system of the Earth’s atmosphere is not like a casino. In mathematical language, it is not stochastic, it is deterministic. It is governed by as-yet-analytically-unsolved (The Millennium prize in mathematics is going a-begging for a correct solution) Navier-Stokes, named partially after Gabriel Stokes from Co. Sligo in Ireland. The trajectory of weather and hence of climate, is a strongly non-linear system – a chaotic system. We are living in Chaos A.D. after all. One of the key features of such a system is an exponential dependence on initial conditions. Once a tiny change is made in the beginning, windly divergent trajectories (time evolution of some measurable such as wind vorticity or temperature) emerge. This can be seen very starkly in a table-top experiment with a double pendulum, set the system swinging at one angle, and then again an another ever-so-slightly different angle and two highly divergent trajectories emerge. And that’s plainly what we are seeing in the comparison between what we can be sure are the best of climate models (see Fig.1) and the Remote Sensing Systems satellite data (arguably the most accurate, although we don’t know how accurate because there are no error bars on the graphs data points). The actually measured data is falling out of the very bottom of the 5 % low end range of model output, meaning that the models are over-estimating the amount of warning – what a surprise . Was it the case the the yellow confidence band has been expanded over time to cover up the embarrassment of this divergence ? The spikes in the measured data that catapult the temperature anomaly briefly into the yellow model territory of the graph are cyclical El Nino and La Nina event – nothing to do with greenhouse gas warming. What the public would really like to see is Fig plotted with the model calculations involving our CO2 and our methane levels and then same plotted again without CO2 and methane, showing the error bars. I would bet that, if the error bars were shown, they would all overlap, therefore rendering and claimed trends statistically meaningless. That would give the public a sense of what can be predicted, and what can be attributed and what can be controlled. Then we talk about cow farts.

I got talking to two young students afterwards, one of them a student of philosophy. We were remarking on Mr. Kerry saying that China, despite building new coal plants every month, are at least ally’s in the Climate war in respect of producing most of the West’s solar panels. “And bigger eejits are we for buying them”, we agreed amongst ourselves.

Fig. 1.  Global (70S to 80N) Mean TLT Anomaly plotted as a function of time.  The black line is the time series for the RSS V4.0 MSU/AMSU atmospheric temperature dataset.  The yellow band is the 5% to 95% range of output from CMIP-5 climate simulations.  The mean value of each time series average from 1979-1984 is set to zero so the changes over time can be more easily seen.  Note that after 1998, the observations are likely to be in the lower part of the model distribution, indicating that there is a small discrepancy between the model predictions and the satellite observations.(All time series have been smoothed to remove variability on time scales shorter than 6 months.) Source : https://www.remss.com/research/climate/

You cannot predict the average weather, therefore you can’t predict the climate, which is just an average of weather. The hottest temperate every recorded was in Furnace Creek at a face-melting 57 degreee Celsius. The only inconvenient truth about that measurement, is that it was taken in 1913, not 2013. And most of the heat in the Earths’ climate is stored in water vapour, which comprises about 3-4 percent of the Earths’ atmosphere. “But we can’t control that” remarked an academic chemist I spoke to after the talk. Yes, we can’t, but then it’s out of our control and we shouldn’t craft policy as if it is. Climate Change policies are damaging for the economies of developing economies. Conflation with aspects of CFC Ozone hole scare. What about the global warming pause ? “It was shown not to have taken place”, I was told by the same man. Well, Fig 1. Tells a different story. “Disappeared” I suppose like the ‘censored data’ folder few heard about from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit regarding the medieval warming period ?

One of the commissioned pieces of this Distinguished Lecture was a booklet produced in cooperation with the Ipsos polling company, which found that about 40 % of the public in the U.S. figured there had more important things to worry about than global warming, whereas in the U.K. this number was about half. It should count for something that I’m not coming from a place of ignorance or inexperience, I’d like to think my degrees in applied maths and physics would put me in the category educated outsider with legitimate concerns about the veracity of the whole climate change narrative.

Yes, it’s about Math, yes, it’s about Physics, and on those bases, the climate change narrative doesn’t stack up. “Follow the science”, we’re told. Since the science is all-over-the-place in it’s messy measurements and predictions, this slogan usually ends up meaning “follow the politics”.

References
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/john-kerrys-climate-blindspot/
https://www.remss.com/research/climate/

“This is something you can do !”, my mother said to me as the concluding remark to her exhortation to “get the jab” as my father put it. In a complex world of unforeseen and unforeseeable dangers, we should exercise prudential caution and take those steps which are in our power to take and let go of those things beyond our control and against which we can’t protect ourselves.

I took my mother’s point, but there’s more to the story than mere medicine. The jab we’re talking about are the mRNA- or DNA-based vaccines to curb the dangers of the Wuhan ‘flu’ (the single quote are not cynical scare quotes, but represent omitted letters). I don’t call it ‘Covid-19’ or ‘Coronavirus’. I don’t work in a virology lab and if I did I wouldn’t refer to the virus in public by whatever was on the label by a Petri dish. I don’t work as an epidemiologist in a clinic where a team might internally refer to the virus as a corona virus. “Spanish ‘Flu'” was apt for the generation that dealt with it, and I don’t think they could or should be accused of harbouring anti-Spanish sentiment in ear-marking the origin of its location. The only groups I might annoy with my common Wu’flu’ nomenclature are perhaps the World Health Organisation, vicariously-sensitive P.C. liberals or the Chinese Communist Party. For the sake of consistency and continuity with Zika, German measles, and many other sanely-named viruses, I’ll just have to take the risk.

I’m reluctant to take the vaccines (at least those available in Ireland – Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna, Atra-Zeneca, and Jahnsen) simply because of the bio-ethical issues involved. More specifically, it’s the tissues involved. Fetal tissues. As with a lot of connections to the grisly underworld of how medicine is done these days, the facts around the matter are hard to come by and often completely suppressed, as we saw recently, when Pfizer recently fired Melissa Strickler for leaking emails of senior executives suppressing the connection of the testing of the Pfizer vaccine against the 40-year-old fetal stem cell line HEK-293. The testing of the Moderna vaccine has a similar connection, while the other vaccines mentioned above have a stronger dependency on fetal cell lines in development and/or production. Again, HEK-293 sounds like another abstractly clinic cover-word. I was shocked to find out that HEK stands for Human Embryonic Kidney. No wonder it’s an acronym. Apparently, that kidney cell line was ‘harvested’ from a live baby (one of many because 293 refers to the number of ‘experiments’ – here I am using scare quotes), delivered by C-section before being murdered for medical science. In the Netherlands, ground zero for plummeting value of human life in its vulnerable stages. Those little babies didn’t give consent for their bodies to be used for medical science, much less to be killed for it. What happened to them is a double undermining of human dignity.

Now, there have been several analyses (one such analysis of advice from Catholic clergy is here) of the moral ethics around availing of vaccines (or any other medicines for that matter) that rely on HEK-293. A comprehensive review of the moral positions of conscience given the background of directions published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was done by Dualta Roughneen here. A reasonable starting point is to admit that there’s no sense in which we are cooperating with what happened in the Netherlands 40 years ago. You can’t cooperate with a fait-accompli. The issue I see, is the tacit endorsement of that way of doing medicine with the widespread acceptance of these vaccines. Apparently, there are other medicines which are tested against these cell lines, and I for one would not have become aware of these dependencies (are they necessary dependencies ?) if these issues of conscience around the Wuhan ‘flu’ vaccines had not been brought up. And nobody is asking me whether I took ‘Advil’ for pain relief recently (which is, according to some sources, reliant on testing with HEK-293) so there’s no consciousness-raising value to refusing a tablet like that (although we should push back there too). However, there is a lot of pressure coming from family, friends, medical practitioners to get the jab. There’s a lot of pressure for everybody to get 100% vaccinated. And that’s the time for a cohort of us who can and should say ‘No’, to do so. Try again. Without the fetal stem cell lines. There are some of us (elderly, immo-compromised, etc.) who can’t reasonably be asked to do this. If the vaccines are really effective (and that is still an ‘if’ to my mind), then it would not make much sense to add another likely death to the deaths of babies from whom the cell lines were taken. But there is a cohort of us in a low-risk category for whom mRNA vaccines apparently provide extra immunity to a not-particularly fatal disease. Our opposition to the culture of death may be bought out, but hopefully not that cheaply.

Most of us won’t be able to resist, in our everyday lives, the culture of death which treats human beings as either experimental tissue or garbage. But there is a medically low-risk cohort of us who are being bothered by others to get jabbed, and getting hassled enough to be in a position to raise awareness about this grisly aspect to the vaccine industry. If we resist, the manufacturers will think twice about generating a new cell line like this, if the original ones become deteriorated. If we don’t resist at all, they’ll just barge ahead, and assume because nobody said anything or refused anything, the market place gave them a green light for such activity. It is an irony of this age of information that some of it, which is of pressing ethical salience, is suppressed. That’s why we should consult sources like the Lozier Institute who have put together a comprehensive review of the ties of Wuhan virus vaccines to fetal stem cells. We should make our choices with the most comprehensive information and context we can get. Those of us who can so so, should send the message to big pharma and big governments.

“This is something you can do”, after all.

Bubbles of denial about the 2020 U.S. presidential election are a matter of perception. Evidence,  transparency and critical scrutiny are the best tools to burst them. 

There are two opposing views of the U.S. presidential election outcome. Each is seen by the other as indulging an alternative reality, a fantasy, a bubble. Bubbles exist, and usually get popped, shrink or fizzle out in the face of evidence and investigation. One side claims that the U.S. election was free, fair and secure and produced Joe Biden as the winner. The other side calls foul and says that the election was rigged, stolen and fraudulent. However, there is only one side, increasingly with every passing day, who are refusing to even countenance that the other side has any evidence or any tenable case. It is the same side who have been, in general, decrying Donald Trump presidency as one defined by racism, narcissism and undiplomatic bullying. If there’s a fear of transparency and investigation, is there something being hidden ? This lack of scruple around due-process goes hand-in-hand with the Democrats’ ever increasing departure from law-and-order which has seen looting, rioting and violence across North America this summer with little explicit condemnation in name (Antifa) by the Democrat Party. It goes hand-in-hand with the resistance to voter-id,  legality when it comes to immigration and the promotion of defunding the police. It should have been no surprise to anyone that the shops in U.S. cities were boarded up prior to the election in case Trump won – not in case he lost. Add to this the irony that the Democrats and their supporters like to think they are defeating fascism. 

The media don’t declare the who becomes the President – the electors do. The process by which this is done is guaranteed by the U.S. constitution, whose writers and framers constructed to protect from the exact  kind of wilfully ignorant mob-rule corruption we are seeing now in Democrat-run cities. One of the grievances of Democrats about the 2016 election was that Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote and that she should have been elected on that basis. But this sidelines the fact that the U.S. is a federal republic which protects the franchise of each member state. If the election fraud claims of the Trump’s lawyers hold water, it may transpire that he won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. It would mean that many would wake up from a dream into a nightmare, but if the truth of it is brought to light, then that is what we have to accept. 

Now, we have something of a media and big-tech ‘platform’ black-out on election fraud. It is a general extension of the kind of shadow-banning, correction-tagging and outright censorship of political views about election fraud by social media platforms on-line. These platforms (who are really more like publishers) care as much about Republican views and pro-Trump opinions as a corrupt anti-Trump election official for a voting ballot with a black dot next to Trump/Pence’s names. One of the things democracy needs to function well is the free-flow of information. I would argue that, along with the shirking of due-process for establishing election integrity the main-stream media and the social media platforms have a lot of answer for in suppressing information (some true, some false, but let’s let it flow and be debunked or confirmed in due time). It’s similar to the way defence of Trump’s presidential record gets shut down in supposedly polite conversation (if it’s even allowed to start). 

The outer membrane of the liberal, progressive, anti-Trump, pro-Democrat bubble is undulating and ready to pop. According to Sidney Powell, the well-respected (with a 70 % overturn rate) appellant lawyer on the Trump campaign, they have enough evidence “to overturn the election result in several states”. Another senior member of the team (who until he went to bat for Trump, was well-regarded in the mainstream press) Mr. Rudolph Giuliani says that they have hundreds sworn affidavits in Michigan alone (including military personnel, Democrat election officials and counting machine-technical support whistleblowers). At least six of those are public – do investigative journalists want to read them ? The rest are not public yet, because there is fear that if they are made public, the signatories would be on the receiving end of intimidation as some of the six have been. The same is true of the lawyers who had to leave the Trump campaign. They didn’t abandon the case because it was untenable, they had to abandon it because it is ! The same is true, I would imagine, of the justices. If they ruled in such a way that would recognise as much fraud as would overturn the election, would be effectively declaring civil war and would be signing their own death warrant.

Members of the public don’t have access to the ballots to inspect them and likely never will (even courts, observers and justices have been having a hard time trying to access them). But what we do have access to are numbers and the numbers tells a very fishy story. The application of Benford’s Law is a technique used by forensic accountants to detect fraud in, for example, expense reports. Benford’s law gives the probability of the occurrence of a given leading digit in a steam of data. The digit ‘1’ would occur on average the highest number of times in a given range of data, simply because, if you measured the length of randomly (when I used the word random here, I mean uncorrelated) collected objects with lengths between 0 and 2 metres, you would expect to get measurements with the leading digit equal to ‘1’ about 55 % of the time. This is just because half of all of them measurements would lie between 100 and 200 centimetres and therefore would all start with the first digit. Then add to that any of the measurements from the 10 cm to 20 cm range, and you have 55 % of the numbers. The trend is downhill from there, because as you cumulatively expand the ranges to account for more data, the lower-range data still has an edge in terms of counting and you get the following idealised trend P(d) = log₁₀(1+1/d) . This is what an ideal Benford’s Law graph would look like this :

Departures from that indicate something or someone feeding in numbers non-randomly (i.e. in some correlated fashion) like some one submitting the same receipt again and again to syphon off money from a business. Or if someone is dropping large ballot drops of the same size for one candidate. So, when it came to light that Biden’s vote total data didn’t follow Benford’s Law, but Trumps did, there was a bit of worry from media outlets sympathetic to the Biden cause (or perhaps just antagonistic to the Trump campaign). The explanation they offered was that there was nothing to see here which was said up front and loudly by any number of podcasts and fact-checkers. The reason for the dismissal ? Benford’s Law doesn’t apply. Go elsewhere. Buried at the bottom of these fast fact checks and supposedly final-word correctives is the idea that, since in urban districts voting precincts are broken up into electorates of the same size – say 1000, so that in a two-horse presidential race, vote totals would cluster around numbers with leading digits of 4,5,6 (and same would apply to Trump’s totals per precinct anyway). For Benford’s Law to apply, you need to collect the data in an uncorrelated way, not broken down by packets of the same size, but collected in random buckets like counties (which are of randomly varying sizes). So, if you collected the votes that way (and votes are collected and reported that way in the final analysis), you can see a marked divergence from Benford’s Law in Biden’s data, but not in Trumps. And it is at the level of the county, and not at the level of the precinct, that the fraudulent votes were injected. Left-wing, pro-Biden, pro-Democrat, liberal media outlets played to many people’s confirmation bias with an appeal to authority and a flimsy excuse which crumbles under closer analysis. Many were satisfied, I suppose, that these forays into numerical analysis were enough not to look at the matter further. “Carry on” many were told, “nothing to see here”. But there is more to see here, and it’s ugly.

Trumps’s data follows Benford’s Law and actually serves as a guide curve to show how clearly Biden’s county totals diverge from it. That divergence is present in all swing states.

The main difference in features between Biden’s Benford graph and Trump’s is that, in almost every swing state, there is a bump or knee at d=4 and d=6 and you can see it clearly in the graph above which shows summed vote totals in terms of leading digit – it’s a persistent, common feature across all swing states and it could well be due to the non-random skewing of the vote totals per county in volumes big enough the affect the value of the leading digit in those reported vote totals. Doug Ross’ vote difference analysis (see below graph) shows periods of time where Trump’s vote totals stay static with respect to Biden, but that Biden ‘jumps ahead’ in very similar-sized jumps of around 6,000 (in PA) and 4,800 (in GA), due, according to Ross, to switches from Trump to Biden performed in the ‘smartmatic’ software components which the Dominion voting machines purportedly use. Take a look at the time-series of published vote totals by the N.Y. Times (hardly partial to Trump) collected in a spreadsheet here and tabulated for vote differences over time by Ross :

Source : https://directorblue.blogspot.com/2020/11/dna-level-statistical-proof-smartmatic.html

The flimsy explanation offered by many media outlets at the time (to account for delay if not stoppage) was centred around the fact that mail-in voting was much more popular with Democrat voters and that counting rules were different in the states like Pennsylvania and Arizona, so that vote had to be counted much later than Election Day, whereas states like Florida could count mail-in ballots straight away (and hence could report that Donald Trump had won outright very early on). However, Florida has exactly the same processing/counting rules as Arizona (see https://ballotpedia.org/When_states_can_begin_processing_and_counting_absentee/mail-in_ballots,_2020) and Ohio had well over 3 million mail-in ballots to count (which is far more than the 2.6 million reported in Pennsylvania and has similar counting/processing rules to that state) yet Ohio turned solidly red (again, on election night – why couldn’t those states like PA, GA, MI, WI, AZ, NV finish up in the same timely fashion ? ). Why did we have to wait days on end for these cluster of swing states to reporting their counts. To play catch-up, probably.

I remember looking at how results were shaping up on election night and even the morning after election night, I remember thinking – wow – this is turning out to be a landslide for Trump – Florida, Ohio, Texas and Iowa all in the bag and quickly called for him. Then I saw a broadcast from Trump election HQ saying with the president saying ‘we’re not going to let them get away with this’. Get away with what ? You’re winning ! But then, as the overnight vote counting stoppages in PA and GA and other swing states became apparent, and the day-by-day delays in calling each state ensued, it was clear that some kind of shenanigans were going on. The time series of the reported vote totals are helpful to flesh out the picture (again from the NY Times data) :

On the morning of the 4th in Pennsylvania, Trump’s vote count loses almost all momentum, and Biden’s creep forward until, finally, at about midday on the 6th of November, he catches up and barely overtakes him, but appears to come out 50 K ahead in the end. I suppose this is where accusations of back-dating ballots, sending out, receiving and counting mail-in ballots on the same day come into the picture, and the whole situation around having one set of rules for one state but not another, but I digress. The situation in Georgia is even stranger. It took until about 2 am on the 6th of November for Biden to ‘catch up’. At that point, the vote totals were exactly the same – an exact, numerical, dead-heat for a whopping 20 hours ! No vote different between then at all. They were locked in that numerical embrace for all that time, until finally at about 10 pm at night, Biden pushes ahead with a 4,969 vote lead until, 40 minutes later another stray vote comes in to put in at a 4,970 lead. He finished up at 2:50 am on the 10th of November (hmmm…the slow boat to China ?) with a 9976 vote lead. These graphs look less like impartial come-what-may vote counting in a very drawn-out and extremely close race and more like someone tying off the end of a bag with the Biden twisties pointing up.

The Trump votes had to be all counted, then the fraudsters likely had to scramble to make up the difference in Biden votes from whatever sources they had fabricated (including software-driven changes). It was a panic because they had underestimated the margins by which Trump was going to win. That things were done in a rush would also explain why the senatorial/house candidates were not picked in accordance with the presidential candidate picked on the ballot (indeed sworn affidavits from Sydney Powell attest to the presence of disputed ballots which were only filled out for the presidential candidate). That Biden is the supposed winner and that there was a red wave in the senate/house races doesn’t tally anyway. Far from it being an indicator that if fraud took place, it must only take place perfectly and coherently and play consistently to Democrat Party interests. Quite the opposite. Fraud, like lies, are rarely perfect and that makes them detectable. Furthermore anti-Trump animus tends to transcend Democrat Party concerns, so I don’t think it’s that surprising that the fraud doesn’t extent to the candidates in other races down the ballot. The N. Y. Times data is available in JSON format here :

https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/race-page/<state>/president.json

where <state> stands for pennsylvania, georgia, etc. – all lower case.

Trey Trainor, the Federal Electoral Commission has questioned the legitimacy of the election. Philadelphia election officials refused to obey a court order from Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito to allow Republican monitors meaningful access to the vote counting there. There are also highly problematic aspects to the way voters in Democrat-strong counties were allowed to submit or verify their ballot days after the election itself, in violation of the constitutional equal protection under the law.  Are the the anti-Trump media going to cover this properly ? Or are they going to stick their heads in the sand in case they bring to light the reality they thought was the alternative one ? When they pointed the finger at election interference in 2016, they might now have to come to terms with the fact that this was just projection, that there are four fingers pointing back at themselves. They are themselves guilty of the charges they have been levelling at Trump and his campaign. 

Why Humanae Vitae is right and why contraception is wrong

(preliminary note : Happy birthday Humanae Vitae ! Although I was delighted that the Google doodle recently celebrated the contributioons to our understanding of natural science by Fr. Georges LeMaitre, the Belgian priest who was a colleague of Albert Einstein’s and who first formulated the theory of the big bang, I somehow doubt Google would put a doodle honouring the 50th anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae. Although the social ills of ignoring this great and prophetic encyclical are many, I am not going to dwell on them in this article, I am merely addressing why artificial contraception is wrong. )

It’s been exactly fifty years since Pope Paul VI sat down at his type writer and wrote out what the philosopher Peter Kreeft called the most controversial, ignored, despised, ridiculed and rejected papal encyclical written in modern times – Humanae Vitae. It affirmed the existing magisterial position against artificial contraception. It landed with a tremendous impact that left a quake in its wake, causing a virtual schism within the Catholic Church, splitting those who, consciously or otherwise, take an integrated view of the body and the spirit from those who wish to assert control over the body’s natural design in matters of the transmission of life, separating those who wish to work with nature from those who set the mind against the body through technology, to further the dualist rift in Western thinking between the spiritual and the material, probably set in motion by philosophy of Decartes.

Faithful Catholics, who accept and strive to practice all that the Church teaches as essential are often characterised as being fundamentalist or extreme. Either they are right, or it is the Church which holds extremes in balance, and it is the world which lurches this way and that about the truth of the matter. Balance, in most contexts of life, is held to be a good thing. A balanced diet is said by nutritionists to be very healthful. The automation of monotonous tasks by artificial machines is held in high regard and is seen by most to be of value. Totally artificial clothing is perhaps less desirable. Artificial food is positively frowned upon by most decent people who care about physical well-being and the proper functioning of the body. That something is artificial is not in and of itself bad. Artificial limbs help recover what was lost. Artificial optics enhance and extend eyesight. Contraception is bad because it is ‘contra’ nature, natural design and therefore it is against the designer of nature. Selfish intentions seek to override and frustrate the design. Furthermore, the closer we get to the personal, the more we eschew artificial things which go against nature, except when it comes to the really personal, the really intimate – the sexual act. Our designs over-rides natural design, if natural design is even admitted or recognized. But nature is a mold in which we live and move, if not perhaps have our ultimate being. It is a basis for growth, both spiritually and physically. It is a book of words, but we have been ignoring and confounding it, and we ought to take heed of the words of the Smiths’ song Ask, Ask, Ask – “Nature is a language, can’t you read ?”

There is the very reasonable assumption abroad that the use of technology has, in general, made our lives better and that the technology itself, however ingenious, has no moral dimension to it, that the goodness or otherwise, comes from its intended use, what it’s directed towards and the circumstances of it’s use. The intended use of most things is well understood. The intended use of our sexual faculty is less considered. When people speak of reproductive technologies, whether it be sterilisation, contraception or abortion, there is a violence and a contradiction, because our selfishness and weakness refuses to be at peace with nature and therefore with nature’s designer when it comes to something so intimate and personal as sexuality even though we are in the context of something so precious and important as the essence of human biological life.

For many, the encyclical reads like a prophecy, logical and beautiful, and its widespread rejection has led to much heartbreak, despair, sorrow and even bloodshed. There is bloodshed because the demand to make the sexual act sterile is insisted upon, even after the fact in the case of abortion and because, as the encyclical predicted governments would use abortion and sterilization to control population growth. When G. K. Chesterton asked, in the face of the advent of modern “birth control”, (which he more truthfully called “birth prevention”) when would those in favour of it ask for any unwanted babies to be killed, I’m sure he was dismissed as a cantankerous curmudgeon, leaping to wild conclusions. But in reality, he already saw the latent evil behind the movement. Indeed, anywhere abortion-on-demand has been legislated for, it was hot on the heels of legislation or institutional approval for access to artificial contraception as witnessed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Griswold Vs. Connecticut 1965 prior to Roe Vs. Wade 1973. In Britain, the Abortion Act of 1967 followed the approval for dispensing oral contraceptives by the Family Planning Association in 1961. Ireland didn’t follow the legislation for contraception in 1980 with an Abortion Act because of something called the Eight Amendment, proposed by and voted for by people who were able to connect the dots. The expanding culture of promiscuity and contraception has unconsciously collaborated with lethal amounts of sympathy for women in crisis pregnancies to ensure its recent repeal.

For many, although the encyclical was an re-affirmation of perennial Catholic teaching, the encyclical was a moral bridge too far – too far into our private lives and bedrooms, too far into the most intimate physical act, the most pleasurable shared experience, a realm in which decent people cannot and should not be told what to do. Shining the light of truth, of reason, of revelation might unsettle, embarrass, re-evaluate, and stir our conscience into realizing that there is a third party in the sexual act, if only through the silent design of our bodies, and realizing that to act in discord with the body’s design is to act in discord with the body’s designer, that the body is not an object, but a subject. The unitive nature of marriage and the procreative nature – the openness to new life – makes marriage and family a kind of icon of God’s love, showing especially the diffusive character of that love. The proponents of the sexual revolution and those of the “have-it-all’ mentality, the two career spouses who feel they have to freeze eggs or in-vitro fertilize are rallying around on opposites sides of a central truth. As Peter Kreeft again pointed out – the former want the sexual act without any possibility of babies, the latter want babies without the sexual unity.

The philosophical truth behind the encyclical is clear. It’s clear because it’s not an abstract philosophy (i.e. it is not bad philosophy), it is philosophy based on truth, a personal truth, and a personal reality. A denial of that truth reveals something truly wrong and truly ugly. The acceptance of deliberately sterile acts has left us powerless to defend our regard for marriage and the human body against those who promote a whole slew of sterile acts, such as masturbation, sodomy or homosexual activity.

Like bad architecture, the ugliness can become acceptable, and therefore difficult to perceive. The reason for the difficulty for many of not being able to seeing the wrongness of artificial contraception (and therefore the rightness of Humanae Vitae) is because of the lack of willingness to look at the problem of the act itself in all of its gory detail. The unnaturalness and disorder of it can be seen with an analogy to another natural appetite – the desire for food. The following analogy was put forward by John F. Kippley in his book “Sex and the Marriage Covenant”. Imagine that a bulimic were to employ a certain technology, a plastic bag, to allow him or her to forego the nourishing aspects of a repast by shoving a plastic bag into the stomach, collecting all of the food there, and pulling it out afterwards. Surely everyone, except perhaps the bulimic, would have no trouble seeing the wrongness of this act and disordered mentality around it. Imagine if these bulimia bags were on sale at ever pharmacy, convenience store and airport shop. We would do well to conclude that things had gone awry for us as a society in matters of eating, food and the body. Yes, when these become little rubber bags which are used to do for those engaged in the sexual act, what the plastic bag would do for the bulimic. The context of sexual engagement consists not of bread or milk or cereal, as important as these things are, but of our biological essences, our fertility – the very stuff of life. They ought therefore to command our greater respect.

What the Church is proclaiming is a respect for our nature and the directedness of the sexual unity towards life. We cannot guarantee that a new life will result, but neither should we artificially extinguish the procreative or unitive dimension of the sexual act. We respect natural cycles eating and resting. We don’t respect natural cycles of fertility. That there are natural cycles imply that natural methods of planning a family or regulating gaps between births cannot be equated with artificial contraception. When it comes to food, we promote the natural and reject the unnatural. We don’t do that when it comes to sex. Many will insist that the sexual appetite is good because it is natural. But if it is natural, the design should also be respected for the same reason. If we are respecting the design, we are respecting the intention of the designer, who knows us better than we know ourselves.

If we bury this encyclical, we are going to be further dulling the conscience of humanity and become less aware of the painful questions of today for which the Gospel is the healing answer. In the refusal to act in harmony with nature, a reliance on technology has developed that resembles the selfish and closed via the use of artificial contraception, and one that relies upon it as it were a near miraculous intervention such as sterility treatments. If we frustrate natural design’s good ends by technology, we are not giving grace the chance to perfect that which was also given by grace – our bodies, our selves (as Simone De Beauvoir would not have put it).

The Catholic Church is unfairly castigated for proclaiming the truth about natural law. But it is natural and predates the Church, as much as the electron or the atom does. The Church merely points the way. But it would seem that a Sola Natura approach is insufficient and that we need is an interpretive authority to make plain the language of nature and of natural design. That interpreter could be the instructions on a packet of Durex. The amount of truth there might be limited as their motivations are largely monetary. The interpreter could be the man opening the packet or more pointedly his lust, libido and his momentary objectification of a woman. Or it could be St. John Paul II, the pope who wrote Theology of the Body in which he shows that marriage consists of a mutual gift of self, without anything held back, without any lies, physical or verbal. It is a surrender of control to God of the big things in life and of life itself.

The fact that much of the world rejects and mocks the Church for these doctrines and that the Church upholds a supernatural perspective on mankind, confirms another thing Chesterton said – “When you remove the supernatural, what’s left is not the natural, but the unnatural”.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton