Tom Shakely
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  • June 27, 2022

    In Italy for the summer

    In Italy for the summer

    We arrived in Rome this morning and will be in Italy for the next six weeks, other than a brief trip back to Washington in mid-July for work. MaryKate and I are spending this week in Rome and will be heading to Florence next month. I’ll be working remotely and she will be completing a summer program in painting.

    We took the train in from the airport and walked the few blocks from Rome Termini to Saint Mary Major Basilica and arrived just in time for Mass at noon. We walked a bit more before taking an Uber to Vatican City, near where we’re staying.

    It’s good to be back in Rome for the first time in a few years and to see the Eternal City returned to life post-pandemic. The World Meeting of Families 2022 just ended yesterday, and so it feels like there’s a special changing of the guard in terms of pilgrims and visitors.

    We’re staying at the Palazzo Cardinal Cesi on the Via della Conciliazione, a hotel with a fascinating story:

    The Palace was built in 1400 and was bought by Cardinal Pierdonato Cesi who had it restructured and refurbished, turning it into an antiques and art museum, and installing a well-endowed library. Today, the Generalate of the Salvatorians has converted part of the building into an elegant and exclusive “welcoming home”, with 29 rooms all fully equipped with every amenity. Each room is a small cosy haven, furnished with taste and style.

    Here the guests can personally experience the spirituality of this unique place, drenched in history at the very heart of Christendom. …

    Located on Via della Conciliazione just a stone’s throw away from St.Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Garden, the Tomb of John Paul II Karol Wojtyla and also Auditorium Conciliazione, Castel Sant’Angelo Fortress, Bambin Gesù Hospital, the Monumental Complex of S.Spirito in Saxia, you can easily join the Hospital Policlinico Gemelli.

    The Vatican district is a quiet and elegant area of the city centre of Rome adjacent to the Vatican City, world ’s smallest independent country. The area includes such resplendent sights as St. Peter’s Basilica (the largest Christian church), Castel St. Angelo and the astonishing Vatican Museums, one of the most beautiful and popular museums in the world.

    By crossing the bridge on the Tiber you can easily reach on foot the historical centre of Rome including Piazza Navona, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish steps and the Coliseum. Also, five minutes walking you will find the charming Prati district: via Cola di Rienzo and Via Crescenzio with their countless boutiques represent a true paradise for shopping lovers.

    The area is also very well served by public transports which provide a fast connection to Rome’s major historical sites and districts. The typical Trastevere neighborhood full of trendy bars and quality restaurants is reachable with a 20-minute walk along via della Lungara, once the private street of the Pope. Yet this is another fantastic and convenient location to discover all Rome’s wonders on foot.

    We won’t be visiting all of these sites, but we hope God gives us a good week.

  • June 24, 2022

    Imagine if, in the build up to the Cold War…

    Palmer Luckey, inventor of Oculus who was later fired by Facebook for opposing The Current Thing, spoke last week about Anduril and the importance of reinvigorating America’s military dynamism:

    “The situation we’re in is pretty weird. This is gonna sound hyperbolic, but bear with me. [Imagine] if in the build up to World War II, General Electric had said, ‘You know what, we really like the United States, but we’re actually really bullish on Imperial Japan. We think it’s going to be a huge growth opportunity for us. And our metrics just aren’t going to look the same if we wipe those off our roadmap.’

    Imagine if in the build up to the Cold War, you had had Westinghouse and other major U.S. technology companies say, ‘Ah, we love manufacturing in the United States, but we actually think Communist manufacturing is a really interesting experiment that we need to see through and we’re not sure we really want to take a side on this.’

    The situation that we’re in today is as dire or worse. The only reason it seems ridiculous, the only reason it seems hyperbolic, is because conflict hasn’t broken out yet. If a conflict does break out, we are going to look at the current situation where we are hugely strategically and economically dependent at the highest levels of our technology industry and government on an adversary that is literally committing genocide and enslaving millions of people—we are going to look back on ourselves and feel really stupid.

    The good news is that, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, defense is now The Current Thing.”

    That’s where Anduril comes in.

  • June 23, 2022

    There was never a right to an abortive act

    Clarke Forsythe writes on the history of the “born-alive rule” in Anglo-American law, highlighting the importance of its history and application for refuting any historically-alleged right to abortion:

    Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion could be even stronger in refuting the notion that Anglo-American law ever recognized a right to abortion. The draft addresses the common-law history in detail and is powerful in assembling the historical data and describing the contemporary medical context.

    But nowhere does the February 10 draft discuss the common-law born-alive rule. The rule — and, more important, its prenatal application — demonstrates conclusively that Anglo-American law never recognized any right to abortion, even before quickening. This is particularly relevant in rebutting the claim of the U.S. solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who told the Supreme Court that “at the Founding and for decades thereafter, women generally could terminate a pregnancy, at least in its early stages.”

    As the draft opinion shows, abortion law was necessarily limited by contemporary medical understanding. The era of the common law — before 1803 when the first English abortion statute was adopted by Parliament — was a time of primitive medicine and high infant mortality. (The stethoscope, for example, wasn’t invented until 1816.) Before modern medicine, the mother’s first sense of fetal movement — called quickening — was the most reliable evidence of a viable (progressing) pregnancy and a live child in utero. That generally occurs around 16 to 18 weeks of pregnancy.

    Before quickening, all “signs” of pregnancy were ambiguous, evanescent, and unreliable. The law focused on quickening as the most reliable evidence of pregnancy and fetal life. The quickening rule was an evidentiary rule, as numerous treatises and common-law cases confirm, not — as abortion advocates claim — a substantive rule of humanity or personhood. …

    [T]he born-alive rule was adopted as a standard of sufficient evidence of homicide. Live birth — showing signs of life outside at any time of pregnancy — was necessary at the time to connect the dots, to show that an abortive act killed a living prenatal human being. Evidence of live birth was accepted at any stage of pregnancy. There was no gestational limit. …

    The born-alive rule, like the quickening rule, was an evidentiary rule. And if the infant was born alive, that evidence of life outside eclipsed the need for the quickening rule.

    Some common-law writers mention the born-alive rule as early as the 1300s. And it was confirmed by cases and legal authorities such as Coke for centuries, but the clearest statement was by William Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760s. He held: “To kill a child in its mother’s womb, is now no murder, but a great misprision: but if the child be born alive, and dieth by reason of the potion or bruises it received in the womb, it is murder in such as administered or gave them.” This is the clearest statement of the prenatal application of the born-alive rule.

    The born-alive rule shows two things of legal importance that utterly refute Roe v. Wade. First, there was no “right” to an abortive act. An abortive act that resulted in death after birth was a homicide. Second, it shows that the connection of the prenatal act in utero to the death after birth from the prenatal act proved the elements (corpus delecti) of homicide. It showed that the prenatal being and the child after birth were the same individual. If the child was not a human being until after birth — as Justice Blackmun suggested in Roe — then no prenatal act could be relied upon to prove homicide. The prenatal application of the born-alive rule showed that the human entity inside and outside the womb was the same entity in the view of the common law.

    The U.S. Supreme Court finally appears set to reverse Roe v. Wade. When it does so, it will be ending one of the most tragic experiments in the history of constitutional law—a 49 year experiment to see whether the strong might get away with denying the very humanity of their most vulnerable brothers and sisters.

  • June 22, 2022

    Let’s not instrumentalize our dead

    Brian Heater reports that “Alexa will soon be able to read stories as your dead grandma”:

    At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech.

    In the scenario presented at the event, the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story. Prasad notes that, using the new technology, the company is able to accomplish some very impressive audio output using just one minute of speech.

    “This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio,” the executive notes. “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path. We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fictions are becoming a reality.”

    We have a right to reality. Any technology that would don the image or likeness of our dead loved ones for the purposes of amusement, sentiment, or companionship is a deeply inhumane sort of technology.

  • June 21, 2022

    A majority of Americans support personhood rights for preborn children

    Alexandra DeSanctis reports on our latest AUL/YouGov national poll, which finds that American majorities agree that abortion ends the life of a human being before birth:

    Americans United for Life (AUL) has partnered with YouGov to survey 1,000 Americans on their opinions about abortion, fetal personhood, and legal rights for the unborn. YouGov conducted the survey between May 6 and May 13, shortly after someone leaked a draft opinion in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

    The poll sample included Americans with a wide range of views about abortion. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they are pro-choice, 32 percent said they are pro-life, and 29 percent said they identify with neither label.

    According to the poll results, a copy of which was provided exclusively to National Review, majorities believe in fetal personhood and believe that unborn children have a variety of rights. For instance, a combined 55 percent of respondents said they believe an unborn child is a person either from the moment of conception or within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only 14 percent of respondents said they think an unborn child becomes a person at birth. An overwhelming majority (86 percent) say that the unborn child is a person by the time he or she can survive outside the mother’s womb.

    Meanwhile, supermajorities believe unborn children have a number of rights, including the right to be born (80 percent), the right to be protected from violence or assault (89 percent), and the right to be protected against substance abuse (90 percent).

    A slight majority (51 percent) said that abortion ends the life of a human being before birth, and 52 percent said they would support the Supreme Court “extending legal rights of personhood to unborn children.”

    I think all of these are important findings. As encouraging as many of these results are, these findings also underscore why human rights shouldn’t ultimately be put to a vote—and why human rights aren’t won or lost simply because majorities shift.

    Human rights are natural rights, meaning inherent in our nature as rational creatures. Our natural rights are naturally accessible to us by our rational, that is, reasoning, capacities.

    A constitutional democracy like ours exists not for the purpose of enshrining ever-shifting majority preferences, but rather for upholding and safeguarding a political order that points to reality and to the rights we possess by our nature.

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