You should be aware that the PRC is currently in the delusional phase of the business cycle where everything's growing quick and people invest in more and more idiotic things. Factory labor prices are rising fast and that's always the point where you know there's going to be a recession soon. When the crash hits, the CCP will have defaulted on its rock bottom promise of keeping the good times rolling. Things will get *very* interesting at that point as the CCP has not done the work necessary to prepare for a recession. We might end up with 4 or 5 Chinas after the unrest dies down and warlords take over sections. It's the multi-century chinese pattern.
Not only is it a huge advantage, unraveling it is going to roil the world economy for years. The eurodollar market dwarfs the actual currency needs of the US. Were the US to be stupid enough to repudiate, we'd be paying for it for centuries.
This is not, and has never been the US system. Prior to the New Deal, a plethora of private charity dealt compassionately with the poor. Today the poor care system includes a number of public components. By law nobody may be denied emergency medical care and hospitals stagger under the load of people who get lots of care and don't pay. You just don't have a right to chronic care, the thinking being that predictable medical expenses should be worked into everybody's budget. There are huge reduced cost pill programs run by the major pharma companies that make most medicines affordable as well.
Just so you get a few basic facts of the US system under your belt.
US law mandates emergency medical treatment for everybody. If it's life-threatening, you can be a criminal illegal alien and you're going to receive care in the same system everybody else has. If it's a chronic problem, people are expected to make arrangements if they can afford them and the public system picks up poor care.
There are public funds made available for elderly care in a confusing alphabet soup of programs that is an inevitable artifact of our federalist system with 50 sovereign state governments plus a national government. Some of these funds are conditioned on prior payments into their work systems (Social Security for instance) while others not (SSI).
Like every other 1st world nation, the politicians have promised more than the fisc can deliver in order to gain re-election. There's going to be a nasty reset of all these 1st world programs in the next few decades, a lot of it driven by population reproduction rates. At 2.08 TFR, the US is doing not so good. Compared to the EU's 1.5 average, we're doing very well.
The US political system currently has the world's longest run of paying its debts bar none. This is a patrimony given by previous generations of americans to us. It would be pure idiocy to fail to keep the streak going as it gives us the lowest cost to borrow rates on the planet.
1. We don't have an empire. 2. We don't want an empire 3. Repeating falsehoods doesn't make them true.
Out of our foreign possessions I thin Puerto Rico is the largest and if they'd just ask for either statehood or independence, we'd give it to them. Ditto for just about any other significant piece of turf that we own but doesn't get Senate votes.
And if our empire is commercial, build a better airplane, hamburger, movie studio, et al and you've dethroned *that* "empire" without a shot being fired. What sort of empire is that? This is all very nice bumper sticker BS but it doesn't stand thirty seconds of critical examination.
One does not preclude the other but it's absurd to call the US a police state. I very much doubt you've ever been to an actual police state. You feel the difference quite quickly.
I'd rather arrive a decade later with something that is long-term sustainable than just plant a flag and go home, government checklist item marked off. Plant a flag and go home missions suck.
Thanks for illustrating the quality of Reagan's present enemies. I won't bother rebutting the flaming conspiracy theories you hint at unless you want to embarass yourself by spelling them out.
Had steady state actually been proven (and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that at least the jesuits were keeping a watch) just such a movement would have happened. Steady state never got past the "looks good" stage and thus, just like Galileo, the Church sat down firmly on the "maybe" camp. The two cases were handled exactly the same. In one case, the evidence came in. In the other case it didn't. You're mistaking the results for the methodology. I'm defending the methodology, as were those who convicted Galileo.
If this were only about suicide rates you might have a point if you were actually correct about dentists being particularly high for suicide. Among medical professionals they're beat out by MDs and psychiatrists apparently.
More on point, happy, well adjusted homosexuals seem to be a lot rarer on the ground than pedophilia and incest victim homosexuals. Of the homosexuals that I've met, the number of reasonably well adjusted homosexuals who are healthy are a distinct minority. And I'm sorry but I'm not part of the problem when it comes to hepatitis and other diseases that run rampant through the homosexual community. You can wave away some of the problems as society induced but certainly not all of them, not unless you have an ideological ax to grind. It's not a happy community, never was, likely never will be.
A great deal of Reagan speeches, done for GE radio and written in his own hand, have been found and published to general acclaim. Like his policies or not, the idea that Reagan just delivered somebody else's lines is just flat out not true. The man had a good brain and used it.
Donation implies that the embryo is property. For a lot of people that's very objectionable.
Your supply/demand curve is off by a few factors. You rarely implant one embryo. It's an expensive procedure and often they don't take. This is why you have so many stories of multiple births due to IVF. So out of those 10 embryos, the original donor would probably use 2-4 and if they had excess implantation, selectively reduce (which is one of the major reasons why the Church is against IVF, it promotes abortion). You would then only need about 2-3 women willing to carry snowflake babies to use up that set of embryos.
The supply of women is currently quite small but that's because an awful lot of people don't even know about the possibility and few organizations are pushing the concept. A huge cadre of post-menopausal birth mothers is available that nobody's even considered and efforts to make artificial wombs continue apace.
In short, there's no reason except a lack of love and ingenuity why voluntary supply and demand would necessarily doom large numbers of these embryos. We can do better.
NIH is spending $147M this year alone on embryonic stem cell research. It is spending about $400M for adult stem cell research. This administration has radically shifted funding ratios so that embryonic gets more funding yet the number of therapies from adult cells keeps growing while approved embryonic therapies (I hope you don't want to count the snake oil guys) are still stuck at zero.
I am not actually addressing the moral argument in this post, just the pure utilitarian one that so far as we know, embryonic stem cells might not work in reality, no matter how well they work in theory (and that happens a lot). The continued disparity in progress in favor of the adult cell approach would lead a prudent person to eventually abandon embryonic research even if they were a card carrying atheist and believer in 4th trimester abortion.
There's also a powerful moral argument besides the utilitarian one but if you can't even get past this one, why bother bringing God into it?
The ratio of adult to embryonic research by the NIH is about 3:1. There are 73 stem cell treatments out of which 73 use adult cells. Were even 10 of those treatments from embryonic stem cells, I would concede that the embryonic funding was about reasonably productive. But that would be a different world.
There are zero restrictions on private money going into embryonic stem cell treatments. States do fund and private groups can fund what the federal government does not want to fund. But the private money generally isn't going to embryonic because the private money has to earn a rate of return and people get tossed out of work if they fund too many unproductive research proposals.
I like Michael J Foxx just as much as the next guy. I hope that he gets a cure for his disease. I think that it's a tragedy that he's spending so much time and effort to lobby on behalf of type of therapy that has not given any positive results in terms of actual therapies. And yes, he's manipulative as hell.
If you think a christian life is one of risk avoidance, you are woefully undereducated about christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Risk should be managed which means sometimes it should be embraced, other times avoided. Which formula for risk management is reasonable is what we're discussing, though you don't seem to recognize it.
The sex as russian roulette thing I first got in public school sex ed, not in religion classes. It was the 80s, AIDS was new, scary, and killing lots of people. Before the retrovirals came out, it was a pretty ugly decline and you died in lots of interesting ways. You may find the comparison ridiculous but don't automatically assume that it's coming from the Church because it strikes you as ridiculous.
You missed a stitch there, the part where you explain how the Church was determining what books were available to you in the library? Otherwise it just doesn't make much sense.
ha, ha, suicide jokes, yeah, that's the ticket. Homosexuals have a high suicide rate. Male homosexuals especially have high disease rates. The "lifestyle" seems to be paired with an awful lot of markers of an unhappy life. That's not propaganda, just CDC data. Just take a look at the stats and say you'd want that for your daughters if mom could take a few pills and avoid the hormonal imbalance in vivo (if that actually is what's causing homosexuality).
Most of what you're conjecturing is contradicted by the CDC data sets. For policy, anecdotes make nice stories but poor guidance.
If somebody would like to adopt those 9 embryos, implant them, and bring them to term, what is the problem with that? Look up snowflake babies and you'll see that there is pro-choice resistence to the practice.
There is nothing inevitable about discarding embryos.
The problem is that omni-potential cells might not be a good thing. Embryonic stem cell treatments seem to have a lot of extra problems with tumor formation which is one of the reasons why we don't have any such treatments approved by medical bodies. Cancer is radical change in cell function. Change is not always good.
All the productive therapies are coming out of the adult side, not the embryonic side. Had we concentrated our funds on adult stem cell research, we might be even further ahead. Instead we got a lot of inaccurate tear-jerking testimony that emotionally manipulated the process and lots of funding ended up supporting what has largely been a "dry hole" of scientific exploration.
Over time, millions may die because we funded embryonic stem cell research to the level we are doing so today instead of concentrating on the more productive adult cell approaches. Millions of lives hang in the balance on a lot of speculative decisions and they can be lost no matter how you choose. We do our best and cut our losses as much as we can if we're ethical.
Actually, the sin is non-procreative sex not any sense of attraction or love. You can get a hard on looking at your niece. She might be gorgeous. It's a purely heterosexual attraction and your desire might even be procreative. There isn't any sin so long as you don't do anything about that but boffing your niece is a sin.
Homosexuals don't sin because of who they are, who they are attracted to just as some confused teen doesn't sin because he got a hard on looking at a close relative. They sin when they engage in sexual acts that aren't on the narrow approved list, just like everybody else who strays off that list.
Homosexuality, no matter what else it is, is incredibly hard to satisfy because you're a distinct minority and you're going to be facing a lot of rejection even in a perfectly homosexual-friendly environment vis a vis your otherwise identical heterosexual twin. No parent really wants to set their kids up for that sort of pain if they can help it so if homosexuality does end up being determined as biologically determined, a "cure" will be found, and in the vast majority of cases used.
No matter what your sexual desire, the Church has the same rules. It happens that those rules tend to frustrate homosexuals more. Sorry about that but there's divine revelation for you.
We've gone very far afield from the Pope's economic writings (which haven't even been written) so excuse me if I don't open up yet another can of worms with the transsexuals.
I think you can't support that thesis without coming to the conclusion that Jeshua ben Joseph is not worth following. Jesus' teachings are either those of a liar, a madman, or the Son of God. No other interpretation is sustainable and people have been trying to find a 4th alternative for 2 millenia. If his claims are true, Jesus is worthy of being followed, the Church really is imbued with the Holy Spirit that protects it from error in faith and morals, and Paul, no matter his flaws (and I agree that he had some), was correct in the main in his teachings that are accepted into the canon of the Bible.
You're doing the same thing. Galileo did not prove that the earth was not at the center of the universe. He made a really good argument that eventually carried the day over all objections... two centuries later. At the time of his trial and the subsequent papal bull you're referring to, it was still just that, a really good argument that looked like it might just turn into uncontroverted fact someday.
You don't change biblical interpretation in a definitive way because something happens to look good at the time. The steady state universe was really popular for quite some time in scientific circles. Should the Church have spent a lot of time reinterpreting Genesis in a strained way and then flipped right around when the Big Bang came around as a popular theory? That would be stupid and the Church doesn't do that.
Should the Church have believed Galileo's comet theory (which he held with just as much vigor but was entirely wrong)? I don't think so but how is a churchman to decide that sort of thing?
Irrespective of the truth value of the theistic viewpoint and Catholicism in particular, how the Church should have responded is actually pretty close to how they did respond. There were problems with the Galileo prosecution for which the Church eventually repented and paid a penance (during JP II). The fundamental questions were decided correctly. Had Galileo stuck to the evidence that was available, he would not have had his writings banned and when the heliocentrists eventually did that, the Church let them publish in areas they controlled. Copernicus was published prior, while, and after that papal bull was out and about. The bull doesn't say what you assert it says. It's about defending the Church's right to interpret its own scripture and not be drawn into endorsing scientific speculation via mandatory theological interpretation. The Church, rightly, says that they will not be used.
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You should be aware that the PRC is currently in the delusional phase of the business cycle where everything's growing quick and people invest in more and more idiotic things. Factory labor prices are rising fast and that's always the point where you know there's going to be a recession soon. When the crash hits, the CCP will have defaulted on its rock bottom promise of keeping the good times rolling. Things will get *very* interesting at that point as the CCP has not done the work necessary to prepare for a recession. We might end up with 4 or 5 Chinas after the unrest dies down and warlords take over sections. It's the multi-century chinese pattern.
Not only is it a huge advantage, unraveling it is going to roil the world economy for years. The eurodollar market dwarfs the actual currency needs of the US. Were the US to be stupid enough to repudiate, we'd be paying for it for centuries.
This is not, and has never been the US system. Prior to the New Deal, a plethora of private charity dealt compassionately with the poor. Today the poor care system includes a number of public components. By law nobody may be denied emergency medical care and hospitals stagger under the load of people who get lots of care and don't pay. You just don't have a right to chronic care, the thinking being that predictable medical expenses should be worked into everybody's budget. There are huge reduced cost pill programs run by the major pharma companies that make most medicines affordable as well.
Just so you get a few basic facts of the US system under your belt.
US law mandates emergency medical treatment for everybody. If it's life-threatening, you can be a criminal illegal alien and you're going to receive care in the same system everybody else has. If it's a chronic problem, people are expected to make arrangements if they can afford them and the public system picks up poor care.
There are public funds made available for elderly care in a confusing alphabet soup of programs that is an inevitable artifact of our federalist system with 50 sovereign state governments plus a national government. Some of these funds are conditioned on prior payments into their work systems (Social Security for instance) while others not (SSI).
Like every other 1st world nation, the politicians have promised more than the fisc can deliver in order to gain re-election. There's going to be a nasty reset of all these 1st world programs in the next few decades, a lot of it driven by population reproduction rates. At 2.08 TFR, the US is doing not so good. Compared to the EU's 1.5 average, we're doing very well.
The US political system currently has the world's longest run of paying its debts bar none. This is a patrimony given by previous generations of americans to us. It would be pure idiocy to fail to keep the streak going as it gives us the lowest cost to borrow rates on the planet.
1. We don't have an empire.
2. We don't want an empire
3. Repeating falsehoods doesn't make them true.
Out of our foreign possessions I thin Puerto Rico is the largest and if they'd just ask for either statehood or independence, we'd give it to them. Ditto for just about any other significant piece of turf that we own but doesn't get Senate votes.
And if our empire is commercial, build a better airplane, hamburger, movie studio, et al and you've dethroned *that* "empire" without a shot being fired. What sort of empire is that? This is all very nice bumper sticker BS but it doesn't stand thirty seconds of critical examination.
One does not preclude the other but it's absurd to call the US a police state. I very much doubt you've ever been to an actual police state. You feel the difference quite quickly.
I'd rather arrive a decade later with something that is long-term sustainable than just plant a flag and go home, government checklist item marked off. Plant a flag and go home missions suck.
No tact, no class, no facts, all insults.
Thanks for illustrating the quality of Reagan's present enemies. I won't bother rebutting the flaming conspiracy theories you hint at unless you want to embarass yourself by spelling them out.
Had steady state actually been proven (and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that at least the jesuits were keeping a watch) just such a movement would have happened. Steady state never got past the "looks good" stage and thus, just like Galileo, the Church sat down firmly on the "maybe" camp. The two cases were handled exactly the same. In one case, the evidence came in. In the other case it didn't. You're mistaking the results for the methodology. I'm defending the methodology, as were those who convicted Galileo.
If this were only about suicide rates you might have a point if you were actually correct about dentists being particularly high for suicide. Among medical professionals they're beat out by MDs and psychiatrists apparently.
More on point, happy, well adjusted homosexuals seem to be a lot rarer on the ground than pedophilia and incest victim homosexuals. Of the homosexuals that I've met, the number of reasonably well adjusted homosexuals who are healthy are a distinct minority. And I'm sorry but I'm not part of the problem when it comes to hepatitis and other diseases that run rampant through the homosexual community. You can wave away some of the problems as society induced but certainly not all of them, not unless you have an ideological ax to grind. It's not a happy community, never was, likely never will be.
A great deal of Reagan speeches, done for GE radio and written in his own hand, have been found and published to general acclaim. Like his policies or not, the idea that Reagan just delivered somebody else's lines is just flat out not true. The man had a good brain and used it.
I wasn't aware that they approved miscarriage stem cells. Do you have a source?
Donation implies that the embryo is property. For a lot of people that's very objectionable.
Your supply/demand curve is off by a few factors. You rarely implant one embryo. It's an expensive procedure and often they don't take. This is why you have so many stories of multiple births due to IVF. So out of those 10 embryos, the original donor would probably use 2-4 and if they had excess implantation, selectively reduce (which is one of the major reasons why the Church is against IVF, it promotes abortion). You would then only need about 2-3 women willing to carry snowflake babies to use up that set of embryos.
The supply of women is currently quite small but that's because an awful lot of people don't even know about the possibility and few organizations are pushing the concept. A huge cadre of post-menopausal birth mothers is available that nobody's even considered and efforts to make artificial wombs continue apace.
In short, there's no reason except a lack of love and ingenuity why voluntary supply and demand would necessarily doom large numbers of these embryos. We can do better.
NIH is spending $147M this year alone on embryonic stem cell research. It is spending about $400M for adult stem cell research. This administration has radically shifted funding ratios so that embryonic gets more funding yet the number of therapies from adult cells keeps growing while approved embryonic therapies (I hope you don't want to count the snake oil guys) are still stuck at zero.
I am not actually addressing the moral argument in this post, just the pure utilitarian one that so far as we know, embryonic stem cells might not work in reality, no matter how well they work in theory (and that happens a lot). The continued disparity in progress in favor of the adult cell approach would lead a prudent person to eventually abandon embryonic research even if they were a card carrying atheist and believer in 4th trimester abortion.
There's also a powerful moral argument besides the utilitarian one but if you can't even get past this one, why bother bringing God into it?
The ratio of adult to embryonic research by the NIH is about 3:1. There are 73 stem cell treatments out of which 73 use adult cells. Were even 10 of those treatments from embryonic stem cells, I would concede that the embryonic funding was about reasonably productive. But that would be a different world.
There are zero restrictions on private money going into embryonic stem cell treatments. States do fund and private groups can fund what the federal government does not want to fund. But the private money generally isn't going to embryonic because the private money has to earn a rate of return and people get tossed out of work if they fund too many unproductive research proposals.
I like Michael J Foxx just as much as the next guy. I hope that he gets a cure for his disease. I think that it's a tragedy that he's spending so much time and effort to lobby on behalf of type of therapy that has not given any positive results in terms of actual therapies. And yes, he's manipulative as hell.
If you think a christian life is one of risk avoidance, you are woefully undereducated about christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Risk should be managed which means sometimes it should be embraced, other times avoided. Which formula for risk management is reasonable is what we're discussing, though you don't seem to recognize it.
The sex as russian roulette thing I first got in public school sex ed, not in religion classes. It was the 80s, AIDS was new, scary, and killing lots of people. Before the retrovirals came out, it was a pretty ugly decline and you died in lots of interesting ways. You may find the comparison ridiculous but don't automatically assume that it's coming from the Church because it strikes you as ridiculous.
You missed a stitch there, the part where you explain how the Church was determining what books were available to you in the library? Otherwise it just doesn't make much sense.
ha, ha, suicide jokes, yeah, that's the ticket. Homosexuals have a high suicide rate. Male homosexuals especially have high disease rates. The "lifestyle" seems to be paired with an awful lot of markers of an unhappy life. That's not propaganda, just CDC data. Just take a look at the stats and say you'd want that for your daughters if mom could take a few pills and avoid the hormonal imbalance in vivo (if that actually is what's causing homosexuality).
Most of what you're conjecturing is contradicted by the CDC data sets. For policy, anecdotes make nice stories but poor guidance.
If somebody would like to adopt those 9 embryos, implant them, and bring them to term, what is the problem with that? Look up snowflake babies and you'll see that there is pro-choice resistence to the practice.
There is nothing inevitable about discarding embryos.
The problem is that omni-potential cells might not be a good thing. Embryonic stem cell treatments seem to have a lot of extra problems with tumor formation which is one of the reasons why we don't have any such treatments approved by medical bodies. Cancer is radical change in cell function. Change is not always good.
All the productive therapies are coming out of the adult side, not the embryonic side. Had we concentrated our funds on adult stem cell research, we might be even further ahead. Instead we got a lot of inaccurate tear-jerking testimony that emotionally manipulated the process and lots of funding ended up supporting what has largely been a "dry hole" of scientific exploration.
Over time, millions may die because we funded embryonic stem cell research to the level we are doing so today instead of concentrating on the more productive adult cell approaches. Millions of lives hang in the balance on a lot of speculative decisions and they can be lost no matter how you choose. We do our best and cut our losses as much as we can if we're ethical.
Actually, the sin is non-procreative sex not any sense of attraction or love. You can get a hard on looking at your niece. She might be gorgeous. It's a purely heterosexual attraction and your desire might even be procreative. There isn't any sin so long as you don't do anything about that but boffing your niece is a sin.
Homosexuals don't sin because of who they are, who they are attracted to just as some confused teen doesn't sin because he got a hard on looking at a close relative. They sin when they engage in sexual acts that aren't on the narrow approved list, just like everybody else who strays off that list.
Homosexuality, no matter what else it is, is incredibly hard to satisfy because you're a distinct minority and you're going to be facing a lot of rejection even in a perfectly homosexual-friendly environment vis a vis your otherwise identical heterosexual twin. No parent really wants to set their kids up for that sort of pain if they can help it so if homosexuality does end up being determined as biologically determined, a "cure" will be found, and in the vast majority of cases used.
No matter what your sexual desire, the Church has the same rules. It happens that those rules tend to frustrate homosexuals more. Sorry about that but there's divine revelation for you.
We've gone very far afield from the Pope's economic writings (which haven't even been written) so excuse me if I don't open up yet another can of worms with the transsexuals.
I think you can't support that thesis without coming to the conclusion that Jeshua ben Joseph is not worth following. Jesus' teachings are either those of a liar, a madman, or the Son of God. No other interpretation is sustainable and people have been trying to find a 4th alternative for 2 millenia. If his claims are true, Jesus is worthy of being followed, the Church really is imbued with the Holy Spirit that protects it from error in faith and morals, and Paul, no matter his flaws (and I agree that he had some), was correct in the main in his teachings that are accepted into the canon of the Bible.
You're doing the same thing. Galileo did not prove that the earth was not at the center of the universe. He made a really good argument that eventually carried the day over all objections... two centuries later. At the time of his trial and the subsequent papal bull you're referring to, it was still just that, a really good argument that looked like it might just turn into uncontroverted fact someday.
You don't change biblical interpretation in a definitive way because something happens to look good at the time. The steady state universe was really popular for quite some time in scientific circles. Should the Church have spent a lot of time reinterpreting Genesis in a strained way and then flipped right around when the Big Bang came around as a popular theory? That would be stupid and the Church doesn't do that.
Should the Church have believed Galileo's comet theory (which he held with just as much vigor but was entirely wrong)? I don't think so but how is a churchman to decide that sort of thing?
Irrespective of the truth value of the theistic viewpoint and Catholicism in particular, how the Church should have responded is actually pretty close to how they did respond. There were problems with the Galileo prosecution for which the Church eventually repented and paid a penance (during JP II). The fundamental questions were decided correctly. Had Galileo stuck to the evidence that was available, he would not have had his writings banned and when the heliocentrists eventually did that, the Church let them publish in areas they controlled. Copernicus was published prior, while, and after that papal bull was out and about. The bull doesn't say what you assert it says. It's about defending the Church's right to interpret its own scripture and not be drawn into endorsing scientific speculation via mandatory theological interpretation. The Church, rightly, says that they will not be used.