Events

Advice for organizing a protest against Planned Parenthood on Saturday, August 22nd

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Young pro-life women defending unborn children's right to life
Young pro-life women defending unborn children’s right to life

This Saturday, protests are being held at Planned Parenthood abortion clinics across the nation. One of the people I mentor wanted to organize an event in her home state. So, I arranged a conversation between her and an expert pro-life debater, who has a lot of experience with these things. I listened in and contributed to the discussion, and I took notes, as well. They gave me permission to type up the notes on this blog. I think it makes for an interesting post.

So the first thing the expert said was that it’s a good idea to contact someone at City Hall, in order to get the permit to hold a protest. If you have a protest with more than X people, you need a permit. X depends on where you are doing the protest. The permit normally takes a week or so to get.  Permits cost money, and you have to say the time period during which you will be protesting. Expert also said that it was a good idea to get the name and number of the person at City Hall, in case the police arrive and ask questions. Expert also recommended talking to the police and asking about what the law says, and then getting the officer’s name, phone number and badge number. Expert said that the person at the station will likely outrank any police officer who shows up, which is good because it really shows that the demonstrators have done their homework.

Expert said it was a useful thing to know whether there was going to be a counter-protest. The way these things work is that you have to stand on the sidewalk, and you can’t block access to anything, and you have to not use wood handles on your signs. If you run out of space, you can stand on the other side of the street, on the sidewalk. Expert said it was a good idea to have a coffee / snack event after the protest is over and debrief.

Expert recommended that Organizer have many copies of a press release from a national organization like Created Equal in case anyone from the media asked what the protest was about. Expert suggested that copies of the press release be sent to the local media – newspapers, radio and local TV news. Expert wanted to spend the rest of the time doing mock interviews with Organizer, where he would be the journalist and she would answer his mock questions.

Basically, Expert said that the media would show up and ask the following questions:

  1. Who are you? Organizer would reply with name
  2. Why are you here? Organizer would explain that because of the Center for Medical Progress videos, there were allegations that Planned Parenthood was breaking the law, that she wanted to raise awareness about the videos, that she wanted Planned Parenthood investigated, and then if the investigations found evidence of misconduct, then she wanted Planned Parenthood to be de-funded.
  3. Where do these allegations come from? Organizer will mention where the videos can be found online, and urge the journalists and the people hearing / seeing this on the news to watch the videos. Expert recommended mentioning the place where the videos can be see in all answers from now on in the interview, since that is the main point to make and that we did not want it to be cut out during the editing process.
  4. What did you see in the videos? Organizer says that she saw attempts to maximize how money is being charged to buyers rather than just recovering costs, abortion procedures being altered to maximize revenue, partial-borth abortions being performed, and mother’s refusal to consent being disregarded.
  5. Respond to critics’ charge that videos are highly-edited. Organizer should reply that the full videos for many of the clips are posted online at the CMP web site, and that people should go and watch the videos.
  6. What do you want people to do about this? Organizer wanted to urge people to watch the videos, and then contact their local legislators and governor to get the investigation and possible de-funding started.

There is a good Newsbusters article that I tweeted earlier that has all the videos in one place, so if you haven’t watched them, do it. And if you want to organize or attend a protest this Saturday, hope this post helps you.

Resources for the #ProtestPP event are here, including a sample press release.

And here is a quick primer on debating the abortion issue:

It’s actually not as scary as you think to debate it, you just have to stay calm, and be used to hearing different points of view. Reading “The Case for Life” by Scott Klusendorf is more than enough background to debate this issue.

News

Seventh Planned Parenthood video: cutting through living baby’s face to get intact brain

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A pre-born baby delivered intact so they could take his brain
A baby delivered intact so they could cut open his face and and sell his brain

Blogging has always been a challenge for me, because it takes up my time for leisure. But recently, I’ve had a new problem where what I want to write about is so depressing that it makes it even harder to write than normal.

Well, here we go again, with the seventh video:

Anika Smith writes about it at The Stream:

O’Donnell tells the story of a woman seeking an abortion at the Alameda Planned Parenthood clinic who was very upset. “Finally she calmed down and the doctor went in to perform the abortion. It takes a little while, and I’m in the hallway. I see the jar come out, goes into the path lab, and Jessica [her coworker] I can hear is preparing it, rinsing out the jar, rinsing out the linen … then I hear her call my name… ‘Come over here, I want you to see something kinda cool, this is kinda neat.’ The moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.”

Then her coworker takes an instrument, “just taps the heart, and it starts beating.”

[…]Those who harvest these baby parts seem unashamed. One lab official, the executive director of Novogenix, is recorded saying matter-of-factly, “There are times when after the procedure is done the heart is still beating.”

O’Donnell’s coworker’s response to a still-moving child was merely clinical: “OK, this is a really good fetus and it looks like we can procure a lot from it…. We’re going to procure brain.”

O’Donnell clearly struggles as she describes a coworker ordering her to cut open the child’s head. “I remember picking it up and finishing going through the rest … and Jessica picking up the brain … and I’m just sitting there, like, what did I just do? And that was the moment I knew that I couldn’t work for the company anymore.”

[…]“It had a face. Its nose was very pronounced. It had eyelids. And its mouth was pronounced.”

Today’s video made Amelia Hamilton cry, and she explains why at The Stream:

After six videos from the Center for Medical Progress, I have heard and seen such horrifying things that I made it almost 6 minutes into this seventh video, third in the Human Capital series, without reaction.

The descriptions of a “huddle” in which the employees look at a list of abortions to be done that day to determine what to harvest didn’t surprise me. When Procurement Manager Perrin Larton described a baby that “just fell out” because it was already in the vaginal canal, I was disgusted, but I didn’t cry. I made it through Melissa Farrell and Dr. Nucatola talking about altering the process to ensure that the brain is saved. I was angry that they would turn a baby in the womb, forcing it out breech to serve their bottom line, but I wasn’t surprised. I listened with growing horror as former StemExpress employee Holly O’Donnell described the first time she saw an aborted baby with a heartbeat.

I made it through things that would have made me cry in earlier videos, but that I’ve now come to expect.

But, at 5:59 I cried.

At 5:59, I saw footage of a living baby in a pie plate, waiting to have its life ended. I saw a baby with a heartbeat, a baby who was moving. I saw its little legs stretching and kicking as it would have done in the womb. I thought about how the mother must have felt her baby moving inside the womb, and probably didn’t know it would still be moving after the abortion. She can’t have known that they would put scissors through the baby’s chin to end her life while preserving the parts that would yield the most profit. And, so, I cried.

The people who did this were once babies the same size as this little baby, but they cut through his face and took his brain so they could sell it. His future – all that he would ever be, and all that he would ever do – wasn’t as important as the money they could make by selling his brain. They were strong, and he was weak, and they didn’t think that God was watching. They didn’t think that they would have to explain what they were doing to anyone on Judgment Day. Atheism is a necessary pre-condition to perform barbaric acts like this one.

Anyway, in light of these videos, I think Planned Parenthood should be investigated, and de-funded if necessary. And if they are found to be breaking the law, then they should be prosecuted criminally. The Democrats from top to bottom disagree with me on this – they want this business to continue, with taxpayer funding, no questions asked. That’s Barack Obama’s view, that’s Hillary Clinton’s view. There’s money in selling these baby parts, and the Democrat Party gets a cut through political donations.

This post at Newsbusters has all the videos in one post, if you haven’t seen them, including this new one.

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News

Biomimetics again: scientists reverse engineer the design of snake scales

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Apologetics and the progress of science
Apologetics and the progress of science

Today, I have an example of biomimetics.

But first, here’s what that is:

Biomimetic refers to human-made processes, substances, devices, or systems that imitate nature. The art and science of designing and building biomimetic apparatus is called biomimetics, and is of special interest to researchers in nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), the medical industry, and the military.

This is from Science Daily. (H/T Fuz Rana)

It says:

A snake moves without legs by the scales on its belly gripping the ground. It generates friction at the points needed to move forwards only and prevents its scales from being worn off by too much friction. Researchers of KIT have found a way to transfer this feature to components of movable systems. In this way, durability of hip prostheses, computer hard disks or smartphones might be enhanced.

“Friction and wear are two of the biggest challenges in systems of several individual components,” Christian Greiner of the Institute for Applied Materials says. A solution is found in nature: Snakes, such as the ball python, or lizards, such as the sandfish skink, use friction to move forwards, but can reduce it to a minimum thanks to their scales. Together with Michael Schäfer, Greiner developed a process to transfer the scale structure of reptiles to components of electromechanical systems: With a fiber laser, they milled scales into a steel bolt of 8 mm in diameter.

With the help of two different structures, the materials researchers tested whether the distance of the scales influences friction behavior. In the first structure, the scales overlap and are located very closely to each other, such as the scales on the belly of a ball python. The second structure consists of scales arranged in vertical rows at a larger distance, such as the skin of a sandfish skink. “The distance between the rows in our experiment was the smallest possible distance we could produce with the laser. The structure, hence, does not entirely correspond to that of the sandfish skink,” Greiner says. In the future, however, the researchers plan to produce structures that are closer to the original in nature.

[…]To find out whether scales reduce friction, Greiner and Schäfer fixed the structured surface of the bolts to a rotating plate. The experiments were carried out without and with a lubricant (1 ml of mineral oil). For the experiments with oil as lubricant, the scientists used steel disks. Under dry sliding conditions, sapphire disks were applied. The disk diameter was 50 mm.

Experiments under lubricated conditions revealed that both narrow and wide arrangements of the scales increase friction compared to the unstructured bolt: By the wide scales, friction is increased by a factor of 1.6. The narrow scales increase friction by a factor of 3. In the non-lubricated state, the wide scale structure reduced friction by more than 40 percent, while friction was reduced by 22 percent in case of a narrow scale structure.

The finding that the narrow scale structure increases friction under both lubricated and non-lubricated conditions had not been expected by the researchers: “We assumed that the narrow structure is more effective, as it is closer to nature,” Greiner says.

See the related posts for more examples of humans learning from the engineering designs in nature.

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