Recently in Society & Culture Category

This is quality.

As John Hinderaker helpfully explains, The "Green Revolution" Is Impossible due to constraints on input materials (among other reasons). Courtesy of Professor Simon Michaux:

The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls.

All this posturing is about control, not the environment or the earth. The long-term future of energy is space-based solar and nuclear.

(HT: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Louise Perry writes that she was betrayed by the lies of the sexual revolution. As a father of daughters this is heartbreaking to read.

It's precisely because I'm a feminist that I've changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It's an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.

The problem is the differences aren't trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era. ...

The new sexual culture isn't so much about the liberation of women, as so many feminists would have us believe, but the adaptation of women to the expectations of a familiar character: Don Juan, Casanova, or, more recently, Hugh Hefner.

It's almost as if our ancestors were wiser than we realized.

I recently wrote that Facebook should be regulated like a utility, but maybe social media is more like an addictive, harmful drug than a utility. The companies that push social media on us are like drug dealers. Given my libertarian sympathies, adults should generally be free to use the drugs they want, but society should regulate promotion and distribution of the substance and protect children from being preyed upon by the dealers.

The real problem with Facebook's behavior is the revelation of its rampant institutional lying. In the XCheck story, we learned that after Facebook spent more than $130 million to create an Independent Oversight Board to oversee its content-moderation decisions, Facebook executives routinely lied to that board. Facebook told the Oversight Board that XCheck was only used in "a small number of decisions," even though the program had grown to include 5.8 million users in 2020.

"We're not actually doing what we say we do publicly," and the company's actions constitute a "breach of trust," reads a confidential internal review done by Facebook.
We also learned -- shockingly -- that the CEO and COO of the trillion-dollar behemoth are regularly involved in decisions of what posts to remove when such posts are made by certain people who are exempted from Facebook's community guidelines and content-moderation procedures. This is all while Facebook asserted that it applied the same standards to everyone.

Apparently, XCheck was created to mitigate "p.r. fires" or negative media attentions when Facebook takes the wrong action against a high-profile VIP. Even worse than the existence of the XCheck program was Facebook's dishonesty about it, reflecting the state of mind of a company that knew it was doing something wrong -- and still did it anyway.

These revelations strengthen the case that Facebook likely serves increasingly as the censorship arm of the US government, just as it does for other governments around the world.

That last sentence gets to the heart of the matter, and explains why collective action against social media dealers has been so slow: the elite class wants to control our speech, and is happy to use social media dealers to do it.

Facebook is soma.

What is soma in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? In the context of the novel, soma is a recreational drug that several of the main characters take throughout the story. The government in Brave New World strongly encourages individuals to take soma as a way to increase the happiness and complacency of the population. Soma can be taken as a pill or as a powder and can also be released as an aerosol. It is freely available to everyone in the novel. Its inclusion in the text is central to the novel's themes of complacency and resistance in society as well as the theme of escapism.

It's hard to know where to start with this. Internal Facebook documents confirm that the company "whitelists" powerful establishment people and permits them to post anything on the platform without censorship, while "normal" users are monitored, censored, and punished for "unacceptable" speech. This is possibly the most unAmerican business practice I can think of. Special speech rights for powerful, famous, rich people, and limited speech rights for everyone else. Disgusting and shameful.

The program, known as "cross check" or "XCheck," was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company's normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are "whitelisted"--rendered immune from enforcement actions--while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come. [...]

For ordinary users, Facebook dispenses a kind of rough justice in assessing whether posts meet the company's rules against bullying, sexual content, hate speech and incitement to violence. Sometimes the company's automated systems summarily delete or bury content suspected of rule violations without a human review. At other times, material flagged by those systems or by users is assessed by content moderators employed by outside companies.

Regardless of its profitability, Facebook is a national disgrace.

The company agonizes to an absurd degree over how its services are used and by whom -- an agony that telephone, electric, water, and trash-collection companies seem to manage just fine without.

Facebook's stated ambition has long been to connect people. As it expanded over the past 17 years, from Harvard undergraduates to billions of global users, it struggled with the messy reality of bringing together disparate voices with different motivations--from people wishing each other happy birthday to Mexican drug cartels conducting business on the platform. Those problems increasingly consume the company.

Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook's own researchers have identified the platform's ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn't fix them.

Obviously all good people are united against drug cartels, teen depression and anxiety, and human trafficking -- but Facebook is no more an enabler of these ills than are the electric or telephone companies. In their absurd compulsion to lock out bad users, Facebook is shamefully restricting the free speech rights of all people everywhere in the world.

Human civilization needs to change how we see social media and internet communication more broadly -- it's a utility that should be required to serve all comers. We shouldn't burden these services with the moral responsibility to discriminate between good and evil, and the services shouldn't take that responsibility on themselves. Leave that burden to the People and their elected representatives, as protected by the Constitution and our God-given rights and dignity.

California is paying more than $2 million dollars to settle two cases in which the state infringed on the right to worship freely while favoring "essential businesses" -- i.e., giant corporations.

The State of California has agreed to pay more than $2 million to a San Diego church and a Catholic priest who challenged Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom's unconstitutional COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, which violated the Christian leaders' religious freedom. In two separate settlements, the state agreed to pay $1.6 million to South Bay United Pentecostal Church and $550,000 to Catholic Priest Father Trevor Burfitt. Judges also granted permanent injunctions to protect their religious freedom rights. ...

"Restrictions on churches cannot be more severe than restrictions on retail. We are pleased with the final results in these two important cases," Paul Jonna, another South Bay lawyer, added.

Many people are actively hostile towards religious believers and searching for ways to use government power to persecute them. This should be no surprise to Christians. Near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus told his audience:

Matthew 5:10-12

10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Christians are commanded to pray for all our leaders, that they would come to Christ and that they would lead our country in a way that promotes peace.

Don't miss the significance of Facebook's humiliating free speech disaster just because Politico tries to minimize it by calling it a "policy tweak". The point isn't merely that Facebook and many "experts" were wrong, the point is that the only way to discover truth is through speech. When we limit free speech we cripple our ability to find the truth.

Some people are ascribing political motivations to Facebook's censorship.

While it is welcome news that Facebook has reversed its policy, perhaps the bigger issue here is that Facebook's policy was wrong. Not just because it was incorrect but because Facebook shouldn't be in the business of curating content and making decisions as to what people can and cannot read. This reversal is an indictment of Facebook's entire content-moderation effort, which they say is meant to curb the spread of fake news when, in actuality, it was meant to curb inconvenient news.

This is a pretty easy hypothesis to test. What proportion of Facebook speech restrictions limit left-wing talking points as compared to right-wing talking points? I don't know the answer, but I can guess.

This isn't rocket science: if you're the censor, you're the bad guy. If you're burning books, you're the bad guy. If you ban music and dancing, you're the bad guy. If you ban the former president, you're the bad guy.

Facebook removed an interview with former President Donald Trump conducted by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, from her Facebook page Tuesday night, citing content policy. ...

"In line with the block we placed on Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts, further content posted in the voice of Donald Trump will be removed and result in additional limitations on the accounts," the email read following a notice that the video had been removed.

The solution to bad speech is good speech, not banning. Banning never works.

Maybe part of the problem is that Trump's opponents aren't very appealing. Instead of improving themselves (which would benefit all Americans), they want to silence the opposition.

But seriously, when you're this unpopular, what do you do?

Easy answer, guys: you cover it up.

Hit up your boys over at Google like brah, do me a solid here, I look like a bozo.

Well, certainly YouTube cannot make it so Joe Biden isn't a bozo.

But here's something they can do:

Is YouTube hiding dislikes to help Joe Biden? Maybe the timing is a total coincidence. You be the judge.

I've written about class recently, and Astral Codex Ten has pulled together a bunch of class-related suggestions for the Republicans that are very intriguing.

Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment. But which establishment? Not rich people. Trump is rich, lots of his Cabinet picks were rich, practically the first thing he did was cut taxes on the rich. Some people thought that contradicted his anti-establishment message, but those people were wrong. Powerful people? Getting warmer, but Mike Pence is a powerful person and Trump wasn't against Mike Pence. Smart people? Now you're burning hot.

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won't even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, "expertise", mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, "fast food", SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

The parties are realigning. It's political musical chairs, and some people who are used to sitting in thrones may get stuck with footstools. How can you tell who is most likely to be left without a good seat? Check who is angriest. Then assume that no matter what they say they're mad about, they're actually upset and frightened at the prospect of losing status and power.

Eamon Javers is right that the r/WallStreetBets and GME battle is the latest round of the class war. Just like Trump, GME is an effect not a cause of the ongoing disruption of America's class system.

Josh Holmes spent much of Wednesday in Washington watching the populist uprising over GameStop in the stock market with fascination - and a growing sense of familiarity.

He has seen this movie before.

Holmes, president of the issue management firm Cavalry, is best known as the former chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Holmes has spent his career among the Republican establishment, which has spent the past five years getting steamrolled by the populist force of Trumpism - a grassroots movement that stormed the ramparts of the GOP, ousted the establishment and remade the party in its image.

Almost no one in the party saw it coming. When it did, few of the establishment players understood just how vast the force was that suddenly lined up against them.

On Wednesday morning, as GameStop shares continued to surge, Holmes took to Twitter and typed out a simple message: "Wall Street, welcome to our world."

Trump didn't cause the political realignment he benefited from -- he was just willing to ride it faster and harder than anyone else. Trump was an effect. Similarly, the self-described "retards" and "smooth brains" at r/WallStreetBets didn't cause the resentment between hedge funds and retail investors. The GME squeeze is yet another manifestation of the class war.

The old coalitions were (broadly) centralization/populist Left and Democrat vs. liberty/elitist Right and Republican. If the realignment continues, the new coalitions will be liberty/populist Right and Republican vs. centralization/elitist Left and Democrat. Basically, the populists and elites are swapping sides. Of course each individual is more than a simple category, which is why so many people feel "politically homeless" right now.

The parties are also in flux because they aren't sure what combination of positions will yield a winning coalition. The Left seems to be exerting itself to enforce uniformity on its members, while the Right seems to be opening itself up to socially-liberal libertarians and populists. Who knows how this will shake out.

Nathanael Blake writes that America's problems are due in part to the millions of ghosts in the cradle that haunt us.

The corruption of abortion goes far beyond unpalatable political choices, however; making abortion-on-demand part of the culture changes the culture. Its evil effects are systemic, as well as individual, and they do not end with the violent killing of the unborn.

Our nation is haunted by what abortion does to the living. Trying to solve our problems by killing developing human beings makes us worse, individually and socially. If elective abortion seems necessary, it is because our sexual appetites exceed our willingness to care for the children who are the natural result of sex. Elective abortion is a violent form of birth control, which is used either instead of, or as a backup to, the proliferating array of modern contraceptives.

Abortion thus damages the fundamental relationships of our humanity, shattering the primeval union of mother, father, and child. Instead of the family solidarity that is foundational to human society, the begetting and bearing of new human life become a battleground of competing interests.

Pray for the unborn. Pray for America. Pray for mercy and not justice; justice would destroy us all.

The biggest companies in the world worked together to destroy President Trump and upstart free-speech platform Parler. You can love Trump, hate Trump, or be extremely conflicted about Trump, but you can't deny the fact that the richest, most powerful corporations in the world have claimed the right and power to decide who can speak and who can't. What's playing out is completely bizarre.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months -- banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts -- so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. "Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs," reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don't like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies -- Amazon, Google and Apple -- abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

Big Brother claims that Trump and Parler are inciting violence, but the truth is that the Capitol Hill riot was planned on Facebook and Twitter. (I condemn all political violence in America.)

The pretext for singling out Parler is that some people have posted threats there, which is a violation of Parler policy. There is no claim that the riot at the Capitol on January 6 was coordinated through Parler -- not even Apple, in its letter terminating services, made that claim. USA Today, citing other sources, gave examples of calls for violence prior to the Capitol Hill riot -- on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and a single video on Parler:

Violent rhetoric including threats against elected officials and police officers flooded all social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube, not just online forums popular with extremists.....

On Facebook, pages and private and public groups urged civil war if Democrats were not arrested for election interference, alleged police officers were assisting "Antifa" and claimed "Antifa" members were impersonating "patriots" at the Capitol. A video encouraged protesters to bring pepper spray, tear gas, batons, tasers and knives.

A Facebook page called Red-State Secession shared addresses of "enemies" including members of Congress. One post urged people to prepare "to use force to defend civilization." Facebook removed the page Wednesday.

Even the president of anti-conservative Media Matters points to Facebook as the main organizing site:

Facebook had much bigger role in creating conditions that led to as well as organizing for January 6 event. We tracked people using FB to organize attendees to bring guns to the Jan 6 event. FB did nothing.

So why aren't Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit being deplatformed? Why are they picking on Parler? [...]

So the claim that Parler represents some unique risk to safety is a lie. It's a lie driven by politics, exploiting the justifiable national outrage at the Capitol Hill riot to purge political rivals through unprecedended collusion among the internet oligopolies, furthered by isolation tactics to cut Parler off from legal and other services.

To top it off, Twitter just had the balls to write this.

The response to Twitter has been widespread mockery, as it should be. Will the people behind this behavior come to realize that they've cast themselves as the villains?

As Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin right before the destruction of Alderaan: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Tarkin didn't care about public sentiment because he believed he could force submission through fear. He destroyed Parler Alderaan as a warning to any other uppity planets that might object to Imperial domination.

While we're making Star Wars references, remember that Obi-Wan Kenobi told Darth Vader: "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Well... Gab has already brought Trump back from the dead.

Gab CEO completely backed up President Trump's Twitter account before it was deleted and recreated him on Gab! What's even more impressive is he did this while traffic was up 700% and under attack from leftists. Gab is currently having servers upgraded to handle the large influx in traffic but we're told it should stabilize soon.

Will he be more powerful than we can possibly imagine? (I hope not.)

The Left doesn't realize that it's reifying -- acting out -- making real -- bringing into existence -- an instance of the Hero's Journey, and they've cast Trump as the Hero (e.g., Simba) and themselves as the Tyrannical King (e.g., Scar). Note: I'm not saying Trump's a Hero -- the Left is putting him into that role. I'm not saying the Left is the Tyrannical King -- they're taking that role on themselves. I can only speculate why the Left is doing this, but it looks like a foolish plan.

An eternity ago, right after the election, Brian Riedl and Sean Trende made an important observation: the election polls were so far off that all public polling must be garbage.

I don't care *that much* on how horse race polls are off (except that perhaps it forced a misallocation of resources), but a skew in public opinion polling is potentially a big deal. https://t.co/PVFBWGyQwL

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) November 6, 2020

Politicians rely on public polling for many of their decisions (right or wrong), and polls influence judges and bureaucrats also. If polls can't remotely predict the highest-profile election ever, why should we have any confidence that anything they say is accurate? This goes way beyond politics.

Said Judge Amy Coney Barrett in 2019. Erika Bachiochi writes about as a new feminist icon.

In recounting how she decided to go through with their second adoption, Barrett said: "What greater thing can you do than raise children? That's where you have your greatest impact on the world." And when a justice of the Supreme Court showcases this truth by her very life, this long-abandoned insight can finally begin to reemerge across our culture.

When greater numbers of us understand the cultural priority of caregiving, a movement will grow strong enough to challenge the dominant market mentality that disfavors family obligation for both women and men. Ginsburg's brand of feminism will give way to something new, a society in which we will no longer fight over abortion because it will have become irrelevant.

Barrett's feminism is inspiring to me as the primary earner of my family and as the father of four daughters.

Joel Kotkin is one of my favorite writers on city and class issues, and his "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass" is worth reading in full. I want to highlight one element that I think is critical for understanding the psychology and politics of the Millennial generation. Kotkin certainly makes this point in his essay, but I want to connect the dots in a different order than he does.

Near the end of his essay he calls out Millennials for not respecting America's founding principles:

Not surprisingly, then, Millennials tend to support massive government programs as a way to address social and economic problems by wide margins. A poll conducted by the Communism Memorial Foundation in 2016 found that 44% of American Millennials favored socialism while 14% chose fascism or Communism.

Perhaps because they no longer respect the basic founding principles, Millennials are also far more likely than their elders to accept limits on freedom of speech. Some 40% of Millennials, notes the Pew Research Center, favor suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities--well above the 27% among Gen Xers, 24% among baby boomers, and only 12% among the oldest cohorts, many of whom remember the fascist and Communist regimes of the past.

Many people recognize this sentiment in the Millennial generation and attribute it to ungratefulness and poor character, but earlier in the essay Kotkin points to a remarkable fact:

America's economic regression is best understood in generational terms. About 90% of those born in 1940 grew up to earn higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. The same is true for only 50% of those born in the 1980s.

A Deloitte study projects that Millennials in the United States will hold barely 16% of the nation's wealth in 2030, when they will be the largest adult generation by far. Gen Xers, the preceding generation, will hold 31%, while Boomers, entering their eighties and nineties, will still control 45% of the nation's wealth.

The reason Millennials are angry is because America's promise of upward mobility has been broken. I was sure that George W. Bush would be America's last Baby Boomer president, but even now in 2016 no one but Boomers got close to the nomination for either party. The Boomers' grip on power is strangling their children and grandchildren.

Millennials are foolish to clamor for socialism, but can you blame them? They're badly educated and inarticulate -- again, thanks to political correctness foisted onto them by Boomers -- but their grievances are real.

Twitter's hateful conduct policy now forbids dehumanizing and hateful speech targeted at age groups. Presumably this includes unborn humans, who by virtue of their age are continually assaulted with dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric on Twitter.

You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.

A quick survey reveals that there are innumerable Twitter accounts whose primary purpose is to advocate for the right to slaughter very young humans. This hateful conduct needs to stop.

We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.

Tropes like "a fetus is just a clump of cells" are clearly and intentionally dehumanizing towards unborn babies.

Note: individuals do not need to be a member of a specific protected category for us to take action. We will never ask people to prove or disprove membership in any protected category and we will not investigate this information.

You don't need to be an unborn baby to take action. Even if you are not a member of the category you can still stand up for the dignity of the unborn.

I thought the Babylon Bee was supposed to be satire? "Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments":

U.S.--The increasingly secular nation has replaced its outdated religious ideas with more advanced, enlightened ideas, like telling you what behavior is immoral and predicting when the world is going to end.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just predicted that the world will end in 12 years if you do not give the government more power over your life. Leftists across the country agreed this is a big improvement on outlandish religious claims that the world will end and you will be judged for your sin one day soon.

I thought the Babylon Bee was supposed to be satire? "Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments":

U.S.--The increasingly secular nation has replaced its outdated religious ideas with more advanced, enlightened ideas, like telling you what behavior is immoral and predicting when the world is going to end.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just predicted that the world will end in 12 years if you do not give the government more power over your life. Leftists across the country agreed this is a big improvement on outlandish religious claims that the world will end and you will be judged for your sin one day soon.

I'm on the phone for work every day, but apparently telephone calls died in 2007. I don't miss phone calls at all -- I never answer a call from an unknown number, and when I do have to call someone I generally feel bad for interrupting them. Texting has numerous advantages, not least of which is that it's less disruptive because it's asynchronous.

The phone call always was an invasive form of communication, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that as soon as a plausible substitute presented itself we grabbed it. What was the very first phone call, on March 10, 1876, if not an urgent human demand? "Mr. Watson," said Alexander Graham Bell, "come here--I want to see you." That Thomas Watson, situated in the next room, would comply was a given, because Bell was his employer. For the next hundred years, phones continued to boss people around. A loudly ringing telephone demanded its owner's immediate attention because you never knew who it might be. It could be the president! Or news that you'd inherited $1 million from a relative you'd never heard of! Or (God forbid) your teenager wrecked the car and was in the hospital! Octogenarians still tend to respond to a ringing landline with terrific urgency, risking hip fracture as they lunge to answer it. ...

The telephone's rule was absolute until the mid-1980s, when the rising popularity of answering machines and caller ID began to undermine it. Baby boomers wielded these tools against their telephones like a lion tamer's whip. If it was important, the caller could leave a message just as if they weren't there, a deception their World War II generation parents could never countenance. The advent around the same time of call waiting similarly made human agency a deciding factor in whether you were available to talk. Sometime around 2010, my then-teenage daughter was trying to call a friend. Something's wrong, she said. This phone has gone berserk. She handed it to me. I listened, then explained patiently what a busy signal was. She'd never heard one before.

In an utter disgrace for our justice system, pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt have been found guilty and will be punished for their work uncovering Planned Parenthood's business of selling dismembered baby parts.

A jury in San Francisco district court has found pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, breach of contract, and trespass and violation of state and federal recording laws. Daleiden, Merritt, and their Center for Medical Progress obtained undercover footage of abortion-industry workers, including from Planned Parenthood, discussing arrangements to illegally profit from the fetal body parts of aborted babies.

One can easily imagine the outcry if undercover activists were similarly punished for exposing, say, the routine mistreatment of animals.

The videos -- the first of which CMP released in the summer of 2015 -- showed all sorts of horrifying things. Planned Parenthood medical directors haggling over prices for fetal body parts over a lunch of salad and wine, another joking about upping the cost for certain organs so she could afford a Lamborghini. Abortionists admitting to altering late-term abortion procedures (which is illegal) in order to improve their odds of obtaining intact, and thus more valuable, fetal body parts. Industry workers conceding they had contracts to sell fetal tissue and describing in graphic detail their efforts to conduct post-viability abortions without violating the ban on partial-birth abortion. A former clinic worker saying she had been tasked with harvesting organs from an infant whose heart was still beating.

Pray for an end to abortion.

Genesis 4:9-10

Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?"

"I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"

The Lord said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.

Climate activists are advancing an argument that is incoherent for a leftist: we have to save the climate for the benefit of future generations -- future generations we are free to kill in the womb if we so choose.

Can a court find that the government's climate policies have violated the constitutional rights of "future generations" when, to legalize abortion, our courts already have explicitly denied that unborn human beings possess those rights at all?

Consider, too, that most climate activists are concerned with what they call an overpopulation crisis, suggesting that people ought to have fewer children to conserve environmental resources. Some even say that abortion might be a necessary means of curbing population growth: Asked about overpopulation and "climate catastrophe" at last month's climate-change town hall, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said the U.S. ought to provide funding for abortion and contraception "in poor countries." His comment was hardly the first time someone has suggested such a policy.

Once again, we are faced with the incoherence of the modern progressive movement, which advocates both more stringent climate regulations for the sake of the children and the unlimited right to abortion throughout pregnancy, both consideration for the rights of future generations and a willingness to kill the unborn to enable a cleaner future.

If unborn children have no rights, then what rights can rationally be had by "future generations" whose members haven't even been conceived yet? This incoherence illustrates the fundamental logical failing of group-based morality. You can't claim that a group has rights as a whole while denying the same exact rights to individuals of the group.