Do They Really Think It's Not Alive?

Thirty years ago some embryos were produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the mother had them frozen. Recently, one of those embryos was brought to term and born. It's a fascinating, and in some ways troubling, development, but some of the commenters to the report, in an apparent attempt to dump snark on pro-lifers, displayed alarming ignorance of basic biology.

One commenter wrote that "Since right wingers think life begins at conception is this baby old enough to go to war?" Another asked if "people who believe life begins at conception would sell liquor to this baby."

Implicit in these questions is the assumption that it's preposterous to believe that an embryo is a living entity, but of course it obviously is. Do these people think that the cells that comprise an embryo are non-living cells? Are the cells inert? Are they dead? It's simply absurd to imply that metabolizing, replicating cells are not alive.

If those who made these comments meant to suggest that the embryo is not really human then perhaps they'd be willing to tell us what sort of embryo it is. What sort of being was it that ultimately grew into a human baby? It wasn't the embryo of a cow or a frog or a tulip. Obviously, the being, or entity, which was frozen thirty years ago was a human entity. It was a living human being.

Another point: The assumption throughout the X thread that forms the basis for this article is that this newborn baby is actually thirty years old, but of course, it's not thirty years old. Everyone's age is calculated from the date of his or her birth, not the date of one's conception. This baby (its name is Thaddeus Daniel Pierce) was born on July 26th of this year and thus, as of this writing, is a little over one week old.

Blaise Pascal once stated that our first responsibility is to think clearly. That's good advice in any case, but in discussions that have life and death implications it has special salience.

80 Years Ago Today

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. An old article by Max Hastings offers some thoughts on the bombing upon which we might reflect. He argues that there are good arguments both to justify and to condemn the use of the atomic bomb on Japan and anyone interested in the continuing debate on this historical watershed should read his column. He closes it with an important observation:

Those who today find it easy to condemn the architects of Hiroshima sometimes seem to lack humility in recognizing the frailties of the decision-makers, mortal men grappling with dilemmas of a magnitude our own generation has been spared.

In August 1945, amid a world sick of death in the cause of defeating evil, allied lives seemed very precious, while the enemy appeared to value neither his own nor those of the innocent. Truman's Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.

It's hard to disagree with what Hastings writes. I think we have an obligation to try to understand the circumstances in which the men who made the decision to drop the bomb found themselves. Even so, there is something Hastings omits from his column which I think is of overriding importance in judging what happened, not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also at Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg and many less-noted cities.

In all of these, there was a conscious decision to deliberately target civilians for death. It doesn't much matter, in my opinion, whether the death was administered by conventional or nuclear explosives, the salient point is that the intentional killing of non-combatants, women and children, is prima facie morally unjustifiable.

I am not saying that it is absolutely wrong. There may be circumstances which would make such a measure necessary, and perhaps such circumstances obtained in August of 1945, but it's not obvious that they did.

We were outraged on 9/11 when 3000 civilians lost their lives to Islamic terrorists. We were incensed that the hijackers targeted innocent people. We called them cowards (which they certainly weren't). We called them evil (which they certainly were), but in what morally significant ways did their deed differ from the fire-bombing of thousands of children in Dresden or Tokyo?

I sympathize with the difficulty of the decision those men had to make during WWII. I don't know what I would have decided myself, especially if I had a son slated to take part in the impending invasion of Japan. But I do think we can spare those men harsh judgment without withholding moral assessment of their choices.

If we seek to justify deliberately killing innocents now it will only make it easier for us to yield to the temptation to do it again.

We are fortunate to be in possession of precision weapons today that our fathers did not have and which enable us to target combatants without deliberately harming non-combatants. We have, as best as can be discerned, used these with great care and effectiveness. They have relieved us somewhat of the moral burden previous generations of Americans carried.

Even so, there are many times in war when the temptation to kill indiscriminately must seem overwhelming. To the extent we excuse what was done in WWII we make it more likely that it will happen again today in the war against Islamic terrorists.

If you'd like to learn more about the history of the American air war against the Japanese homeland, I highly recommend James M. Scott's book Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb.

Dragonflies

All of us have seen dragonflies around ponds and lakes but there's a lot more to these fascinating creatures than perhaps we realized. They really are amazing and their anatomy and behavior is unique as the video below illustrates.

It's a bit long (18 minutes), but if nature is an interest of yours, once you start watching you'll probably want to watch the whole thing. It's certain that you'll never look at dragonflies quite the same way again, and you won't take them for granted.

One question you might keep in mind as you watch is how such amazing engineering ever could've evolved through chance and fortuitous genetic mutations as the modern Darwinists claim.

Is England Facing Civil War?

Writer Mark Steyn is predicting that there will be a civil war in England within the next fifteen years. His reason is that over the next decade Muslims will have gained decisive political clout and will begin imposing Sharia on the rest of the English who by that time will be fed up with the two-tier justice system that already prevails in England.

They will also be fed up with the criminalization of speech, especially speech critical of immigrants. You can read more of Steyn's thinking on this here.

Relatedly, Powerline's John Hinderaker notes a very disturbing trend in England. Whereas in recent years Muhammad has been the most popular name given to boys, Hinderaker cites a story from The Telegraph which tells us that another name is rising in the rankings:

Imagine if in 1945 hundreds of Brits christened their newborn sons Adolf. That might have rattled us as a nation, right?

I feel similarly about the news that, last year, 583 baby boys in the UK were given the name Yahya.

Yes, hundreds of families saw fit to bestow on their little ones the name shared by the one-time leader of Hamas and the architect of the worst mass murder of Jews since Adolf’s days – Yahya Sinwar.

The Top 100 Boys’ Names of 2024 were released this week, and Yahya has really blown up.

It reportedly enjoyed a larger spike in popularity than any other male name. It leapt a staggering 33 places up the rankings, to become the 93rd most popular boy’s name.

Hinderaker comments that,

No doubt some would argue that it is good, or at least acceptable, that large numbers of “British” babies are named Muhammad. But I don’t know how a positive spin can be put on the fact that a considerable number of Muslim parents are naming their male babies after the architect of the October 7 massacre.

How are actual Englishmen supposed to share their country with people whose values are literally as evil as Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s?

The Left has been telling us for decades that Muslim immigration into the West will have a meliorating affect on their religious fanaticisms, that they'll assimilate into the larger culture and adopt the values of the larger culture.

Well, in England, France, Germany, and The Netherlands Muslims are well on the way to becoming the larger culture and there seems to be scant indication that they have any desire to assimilate.

What Are They Afraid Of?

The Office of Personnel Managementsent out a memo the other day instructing federal workers that religious expression in the workplace will henceforth not be forbidden. The memo is reproduced here:

🚨Just in: The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to safeguard religious expression in the workplace, allowing employees to display crucifixes, carry Bibles, and pray with rosary beads pic.twitter.com/FZPwcpB7ya

— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) July 28, 2025

As anodyne and sensible as this directive is, the folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) considered it an intolerable breach of the "wall of separation" between church and state. Exactly how this memo violates that principle isn't clear but here's the memo they sent out:

An outrageous memo the United States Office of Personnel Management released yesterday says “during a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the nonadherent should rethink his religious beliefs.” https://t.co/8ExblnsKOe

— FFRF (@FFRF) July 29, 2025

What exactly are these people afraid of, that someone might have a meaningful conversation about what is perhaps the most important topic anybody could discuss? That someone might actually find themselves learning something important?

If two federal workers during their break got into a discussion on politics would that be considered "outrageous"? Since politics is an ersatz religion for some people, since some individuals are so zealous for their particular political beliefs that they're willing to estrange themselves from family and friends over their disagreements, why are the folks at the FFRF so allergic to the possibility that someone might bring up the topic of God in the workplace but not, presumably, to the possibility that someone might mention Biden or Trump?

Part of what it means to be an intellectually mature individual is being able to hear with equanimity opinions at variance with one's own. The person who cannot abide the knowledge that someone might disagree with them about something as important as religion is like a child who sticks his fingers in his ears while loudly insisting that he can't hear you.

Not only is the FFRF reaction childish, it also seems to be a symptom of insecurity. It's the sort of reaction one might expect from people who deep down fear that the views they've spent their lives believing and promoting simply cannot withstand scrutiny, and the only way to keep them from collapsing altogether is to avoid any discussion of their rationale.

Good for the Trump administration for treating federal workers like intellectually mature and psychologically healthy adults.

How Not to Find a Good Man

Nathanael Blake, writing at The Federalist, discusses a New York Times column titled "The Trouble With Wanting Men," by a writer named Jean Garnett. Blake writes that Garnett's piece,

portrays the sexual and relational landscape as a hellscape, or at least a dreary purgatory in which Garnett longs for men who are just not that into her. She is, as she eventually explained, on the dating scene because she recently divorced after her “open” marriage fell apart partially because she fell in love with a paramour who had no interest in a relationship.

One writer on X was quick to point out that Garnett had written a long, positive piece about said open marriage only a few years ago.

Now, Garnett is learning a painful lesson, as seen in her account of how she and her friends commiserate together, wondering, “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?” The answer should be obvious: Ladies, you’re competing with younger women — and endless internet porn — for the attention of guys who do not want a relationship.

Even if you were once irresistible to men, did you really think you would remain so forever?

It must be very difficult for women to understand that men are not like women. Men, quite often, are averse to commitment to one woman, and they're especially so if the women who desire a commitment are willing to give men what they do want without any serious conditions attached. Blake continues:

It is darkly humorous how these men have learned to use therapy-speak to dull the edge of the proverbial fury of a woman scorned. Garnett recounts one guy she hooked up with texting her the next week, “I was really looking forward to seeing you again … but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.” She reports that she replied, “Totally understand,” but tells her readers that she “didn’t. Feeble, fallible ‘looking forward’ is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all.”

Well, this guy clearly doesn’t want her — not really.

But Garnett doesn’t seem to get this, writing that, “lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want.” Again, they’re not confused. They’ve just learned that saying they are anxious and confused provides cover when they want to keep women of Garnett’s type at arm’s length.

It's just another way of saying, "It's not you, it's me" when in fact it's probably both of them.

It seems to be working. Though she wants to blame men for her miserable dating life, Garnett still writes that “the men my friends and I are feeling bleak about” are “the sweet, good ones. Dammit.” Of course, they aren’t sweet or good. They are selfish through and through. They’ve just learned that they can get away with that selfishness as long as they cover it with therapeutic language while telling women not to expect much from them.

And yet Garnett and her friends are somehow disappointed when the little they are promised is all they get.

Actually, "the sweet, good ones" are often the men most accomplished at play-acting. Their sweetness is a mask that hides both selfishness and arrested development, but they know that women like Garnett are easily fooled by the act.

In truth, the “good guys” aren’t the ones using anxiety as an excuse to ditch their middle-aged hook-ups. Indeed, the really good ones are, by Garnett’s age, mostly off the market. They aren’t hooking up with bitter writers. Rather, they are going to church and raising their children and are still married to their first wives. Those are the good ones. What Garnett is sifting through are the dregs — maybe superficially attractive dregs, but still the dregs — and dregs that have no intention of settling down with her.

This reality almost breaks through when Garnett reflects on the affair that ended her marriage:

“[T]hroughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

"It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who ‘can’t.’ Have these men not heard of ‘don’t want to?’"

Oh, they know about it. “Don’t want to” is indeed at the root of their refusal to commit to women such as Garnett. But anxiety and helplessness are palatable excuses, ones that women such as Garnett buy, or at least lease, because the alternative — realizing that she just isn’t that desirable and most of the good men are long gone anyway — is too painful.

If Garnett wants to find a good man, she should try joining a large, independent Christian church. She may find a good one through an online dating service, of course, but if she wants commitment and character in her man, especially at her age, she's going to have difficulty finding it amongst a secular demographic that hasn't ever made such virtues a priority in their lives. She's certainly going to have difficulty finding trust, respect, and faithfulness among acquaintances who've dabbled in open marriages which allow each spouse the freedom to "leave the house" to seek sex.

Blake concludes with this:

Garnett’s present unhappiness is a result of the ideology and behaviors she has promoted. The immediate cause of her unhappiness is that she’s a middle-aged woman hooking up with noncommittal men. The more comprehensive cause is the culture she has marinated in and furthered. She obviously yearns for the “old-fashioned man-woman stuff” she wants to dismiss. And she should — she was made for it.

But our culture encourages people to give their bodies quickly and their hearts slowly, if at all. This divides the person and precludes genuine love, which requires the gift of the whole self. This is why Christian sexual morality — and the marital sexual exclusivity it requires — is not a killjoy. Rather, it is a protector and promoter of human well-being. It directs us toward our good and the good of others.

The freedom, pleasure, and authentic flourishing the sexual revolution promised were lies and are why sexual liberation has hurt so many people. Sexual liberalism presumes that we thrive as autonomous pleasure seekers, unconstrained by norms or obligations. But this is false. We thrive through love, and real love, including romantic and sexual love, requires real commitment.

This, in turn, protects people by directing them toward their long-term fulfillment and happiness.

One hopes that Garnett and others like her find the happiness and fulfillment they're seeking, but until they realize why they're having trouble finding it the dating scene will, for many of them, largely remain a romantic hellscape.

The Democrats' Popularity Problems

Frankly, I don't believe the polls that say that the Democrats' approval rating is lower than the remains of the Titanic, but given their liabilities it probably should be. Jim Geraghty summarizes some of those liabilities at National Review.

He begins with a question: "What have Democratic leaders delivered to their constituents, at the national, state, and local levels in recent years?" To start with there's inflation:

Early in Biden’s term, former Harvard president and Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers warned the Democrats that excessive stimulus spending was creating inflationary conditions, but his party ignored him.

In July 2021, President Biden insisted, “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” When he said that, the inflation rate was 5.4 percent; it peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and remained above 3 percent until June 2024.

The Biden administration boasted of gargantuan, inflation-fueling spending bills, but by the end of Biden’s term, the results were thoroughly underwhelming — most famously, spending billions but only building 58 new charging stations. Even Democratic senators called the progress “pathetic.”

Biden himself complained to staffers in December 2023 that there were still no major construction sites for photo opportunities to tout the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill he signed into law in November 2021.

The Democrats have also been on the wrong side of the immigration issue:

It took a while, but Democrats also gradually soured on how the Biden administration was handling illegal immigration; when Biden was elected, Democrats largely believed immigration was not a threat, the proportion who believed controlling and reducing illegal immigration to be an important goal was near its all-time low, and opposition to increased border patrols and opposed border wall construction was near its all-time high.

By the end of the Biden years, Democrats had started to sound more like the Republicans they had demonized as xenophobic.

Then there was the dishonesty surrounding President Biden's obvious mental incapacity:

If every elected official in the Democratic Party except for Dean Phillips was ready to play along with the idea that the doddering octogenarian was doing just fine and all the footage of him looking out of it were “cheap fakes,” why should Democratic voters trust them? Why should anyone trust them?

On the state and local level Democrats are facing a crisis due to what could be called Blue flight:

Looking beyond Washington . . . sure, lots of people still enjoy living in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois, as long as they can afford it. Even with a small increase in 2024, California’s population is lower than it was before the pandemic; at best, it’s now a slow-growth state. “Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6 percent; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15 percent to nearly 30 percent.”

California is losing middle-class families and businesses and gaining illegal immigrants. As I’ve written before, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s popularity outside of his state appears to be based on a completely inaccurate sense of the quality of life in the Golden State:

U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.

The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

Can anyone point to California’s high-speed rail project — $15 billion spent so far over 16 years, with not a single stretch of track laid down — and conclude, “Yes, this is good government?”

Doesn’t it trouble Illinois Governor JB Pritzker that on his watch, Boeing, Caterpillar, and the hedge fund giant Citadel all chose to move their headquarters to other states, lamenting the state’s business environment and Chicago’s inability to get crime under control?

Doesn’t it bother Governor Tim Walz that the Minnesota state government keeps getting robbed blind, for billions of dollars’ worth of fraud, in every major state spending project?

Karen Bass apparently thought being mayor of Los Angeles was a form of semi-retirement. The county government is no better; we’re almost at the end of July, and Los Angeles County has issued 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson got what he wanted and now enjoys a job approval rating of 14 percent.

And New York City is on the cusp of electing a communist Islamist antisemite who wants to abolish prisons, defund police, have the city run the grocery stores, and "globalize the intifada," i.e. kill Jews wherever they're found.

There's more of Geraghty's column at the link, but it's little wonder that people, even many Democrats, are beginning to doubt that the Democrats have any idea how to run a city much less the country.