The Right to Choose

In the absence of a volition enabling ambiance/environment, what could Freedom mean?
In the presence of terrestrial gravity, freedom to fly is meaningless for the wingless because hurdling off of high places is not a meaningful option.
If the surround disables the exercise of “unalienable rights”, one is not free to exercise those “rights”.
Freedom means Choice.
Freedom means being able to exercise the right to choose.

If the domain of our self-determination does not include our bodies and our bodies’ medical care, where can we say our freedom begins?
If there are rational limits to our bodily autonomy, can they include sanctioning the invasion by foreign DNA into one’s womb?
How may we call an individual sovereign if such uninvited trespass may not be repulsed?

In this real world where unwanted pregnancies will create choices about abortions, how are these choices to be decided? Should they be decided by the woman, with her doctor’s and family’s support or by The Government?

Your underage daughter comes to you in tears to tell you she is pregnant.
She has made a tragic mistake.
She is too young and she is scared.
She comes to you because she knows you love her and she trusts you.

If she does not want to have a baby, do you help?

Or do you call the police?

“Sorry, Honey, but the government says you have to have that baby anyway.” ?

I don’t think so.
Because that would be immoral.

my dad

dad would have been 89 today.
he was born in Newcastle, Indiana on January 18, 1918.
he died June 11, 2002 from injures from an auto accident.
he was 84.
my mom, his wife of 59 years, died in the crash a week before Dad.
she was 81.

i was blessed with very good parents.
i was doubly blessed that dad and i got to be great friends in his later life.

i am rightfully proud of my dad for many reasons.
one is his early adoption of computer technology.
dad was a computer enthusiast and advocate from the earliest days of consumer computers.
he was the leading innovator in our family, when it was very rare for the older generation to be so advanced.

by the time we, at my house, finally got on-line in 1995, dad was way out ahead of all of us.
and the internet hooked he and me up for a marvelous and delightful correspondence.
i would send him books and we would read and debate them.
we shared an interest in physics and an admiration of Richard Feynman.
and we liked mathematics.

the double tragedy for me is that i lost my dad And my best friend.

whenever i see the latest advances in cosmology or particle physics, i miss him.
he would have loved all this.
he was so skeptical.

i miss my old man.

(jack kennedy (b. may 29, 1917) was older than my dad.)

happy birthday, Dad.
Love, james


...

snow in Austin

with sleet and freezing rain.

Martin Luther King

my father was in the air force and we were stationed at maxwell air force base in 1955.
i was four years old.
maxwell is adjacent to montgomery, alabama.

i can recall my mother admonishing me sternly to Not go Near the bus stops.

i believe young children were allowed a much wider range in 1955 than in 2007.
that OR my parents were insane.
i was allowed to wander anywhere within three or four blocks from home.
we don't let our eight year-old out of our (or our substitutes') sight.
of course back then children roamed in vast herds of booming babies across the prairies and over the mountains, from sea to shining sea. sorta.
now our son is one of maybe eight kids in our neighborhood.
well, our parents had four and five kids.
we have one.

anyway, i was a bad boy.
as soon as i got a chance, i went to see what was going on at the bus stop!
for a while i watched from a distance, just in case.
but since the coast was clear, i walked over to see what would happen.
nothing.
nobody was around.
what was the deal?

then an empty bus stopped.
and opened its doors.
for me!

we are blessed that my mother hadn't said to Not get On a bus!
heck, i didn't even know How to climb the few stairs To get on a bus.
i had never been on a bus and this was more of a bus than i had seen before
and after seeing my uncomprehending blank stare
the driver drove away.

so i supported the boycott.
my brush with history.

then, in 1957, the bigots began bombing black churches.

we were transfered to randolf AFB outside of san antonio.
just as Martin Luther King rose to prominence.

dad later told me how he had stormed out of a PTA meeting
(older brother and sister were in middle school in montgomery) when it became clear
that it was a segregated organization dominated by segregationists
plotting strategies for maintaining school segregation against the federal authorities.
he received recognition from the chair, took the floor and said,
"I took a solemn oath as a commissioned Air Force officer
to Defend the Constitution of the United States of America against
All Enemies, foreign And domestic. You are enemies of the Constitution Domestic! And
I will have no more to do with you!"

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2006/01/a_script_for_th.html#comment-12830852

http://www.army.mil/cmh/faq/oaths.htm
The wordings of the current oath of enlistment and oath for commissioned officers are as follows:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)

"defend the Constitution of the United States" comes meaningfully before "obey the orders of the President".

WE Shall Overcome.
someday.



...

Lar has left the blog

i must have missed the announcement.
and so soon after Pink had to walk.

i only noticed just now that psychoRabble was down to one contributor.

we will miss you (too) Lar.

so,
now we are taking applications for contributor(s):
must be
a progressive Democrat
and
smarter and hipper
than me
and write better.

carry on.

from Austin Cline at Jesus' General's

Agenda of the Authoritarian Right:

The "Freeper Viewers Rave" quotes are all genuine, by the way, but they are about the Saddam Hussein execution video.

real nice guys there.

too kay seven

yeah
like
happy new year
whichever.

(hows abouts we celebrate the Big Bang and count the years since then?)

(tricky:
we'd want some shorthand for the persistent and uninteresting leading digits for the tens of billions (okay, the ten of billion, singular), billions, hundreds of millions ... anything over tens of thousands:
so the first six leading digits could have their own insignia or digit just to keep it manageable.)

honestly, we have been here such a pathetically short time.
we might want to have observances every six months.

once a day.

good morning

and good luck.