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Hobby Lobby granted temporary injunction from Obamacare abortion mandate

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The Daily Caller reports.

Excerpt:

A federal appeals court granted The Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. a preliminary injunction against the Obamacare contraception mandate, Friday.

The ruling prevents the government from enforcing the mandate against the Christian craft company, which has resisted the healthcare law’s requirement that companies provide employees health care plans that cover contraception on religious grounds.

In a decision read from the bench the court ruled, “There is a substantial public interest in ensuring that no individual or corporation has their legs cut out from under them while these difficult issues are resolved.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Hobby Lobby, considers the ruling to be a major victory.

“We were extremely pleased that the court granted [the preliminary injunction],” Adele Keim, a an attorney with the Becket Fund on the Hobby Lobby’s case said in an interview with TheDC. She explained that the Justice Department has until September 25 to decide whether to appeal the ruling.

“The tide has turned against the HHS mandate,” Kyle Duncan, general counsel with the Becket Fund and lead attorney for Hobby Lobby, said in a statement.

If the government were to enforce the mandate against the Hobby Lobby, failure to provide contraception in their plans would cost the company $1.3 million a day in fines, according to the Becket Fund.

There are currently 63 lawsuits challenging the contraception mandate, according to the Becket Fund.

The Weekly Standard had an article about the Obamacare abortion mandate a while back.

Excerpt:

As of August 1st of next year, the morning-after pills that must be provided free of charge, from coast to coast, will include Plan B and ella. Both drugs arguably act, in part, as abortifacients — by keeping a fertilized egg (or a newly conceived being) from implanting in the uterine wall. (“Pregnancy” is no longer medically defined as commencing with conception, but days later, at implantation.) None other than Planned Parenthood — a favorite of President Obama — admits that taking a morning-after pill not only helps prevent ovulation but also “thins the lining of the uterus,” adding, “In theory, this could prevent pregnancy by keeping a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.”

[…]CBS News notes ella’s “chemical similarity” to RU-486 (which will not be “free” under Obamacare). The New York Times describes it as being RU-486’s “chemical relative.” The Washington Post describes it as being RU-486’s “close chemical relative.” WebMD says that it works to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg — in other words, as an abortifacient.  Dr. Justo Aznar writes that between 50 percent and 70 percent of the time, ella “will act by an abortive mechanism.” The European Medicine Agency acknowledges that the drug has the “ability to delay maturation of the endometrium likely resulting in prevention of implantation.”

Far from denying that ella can prevent implantation of the fertilized egg in the womb, the FDA observes that it could potentially cause an abortion even later.  It notes that there “are no adequate and well controlled studies in pregnant women” pertaining to ella, while the drug has been found to cause abortions in pregnant rats and rabbits:  “Embryofetal loss was noted in all pregnant rats and in half of the pregnant rabbits,” the FDA declared.

Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council writes that, like RU-486, ella not only works to prevent implantation but also causes embryos to be aborted post-implantation. She writes, “Plan B can prevent an embryo from implanting in the uterus, thereby causing its demise.  However, Plan B cannot terminate an already implanted embryo…. Ella can cause the demise of an embryo that is already implanted in its mother’s womb, in addition to preventing implantation after fertilization.”  Dr. Rich Poupard of the Life Training Institute (who doesn’t think that Plan B likely acts as an abortifacient) says that “ella is basically RU-486.” He explains that both drugs act to block implantation, and, if implantation does occur, they act to prevent progesterone from adhering to the uterine lining, thereby denying the embryo the nutrients it needs to survive.

Obamacare forces pro-life individuals and businesses to subsidize abortions.

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Why did Detroit go bankrupt? Who is to blame? Whose fault was it?

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This article from Front Page magazine traces the history of the city of Detroit.

Excerpt:

Beginning in 1962, Detroit has endured a steady diet of Democratic mayors and their social welfare agenda. Beginning in 1962, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh ushered in a “Model City” program to a nine-square-mile section of the city. It was based on a Soviet Union-style approach, aimed at rebuilding entire urban areas all at once. The effort was funded by a commuter tax and a new income tax that Cavanagh told residents would be paid by “the rich.” Yet the same central planning that that formed the heart of the Model City program was extended to the people themselves, who eventually resented being told by government how to run their businesses and their lives in exchange for government goodies. Unsurprisingly, the program was a monumental failure.

Then there were the riots. In 1967, police broke up a celebration at a “blind pig.” Blind pigs were after-hours clubs that featured gambling and prostitution and had been part of the traditional black culture in Detroit since Prohibition. The political leadership considered them antithetical to the Model City program. An enraged neighborhood did not. People took to the streets, igniting the worst race riot of the decade. Black-owned business were looted and burned to the ground. Forty people were killed and 5,000 were left homeless. Thus began the “white flight” out of the city center, totaling 140,000 people over an eighteen month period, ensued. The city never recovered.

None of this stopped the progressive agenda from continuing to be implemented. Public employees were given precisely the exorbitant wage and benefits packages that are coming back to haunt the city now. This Democrat-fostered attitude extended to private sector unions, whose equally exorbitant packages, along with efficiency-strangling work rules, made the cost of doing business in the Motor City prohibitive. As a result, much of the car industry that formed the city’s employment backbone left for right-to-work states that provided a far less hostile — and far more affordable — business climate.

As chronicled here, the same progressive-inspired insanity destroyed the Detroit public school system (DPS), which itself stands on the brink of bankruptcy. This tragedy is highlighted by several sad realities. In 2009, DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. The state of Michigan, led by Detroit, has one of the highest black-white achievement gaps in the nation. As of June 12, only 1.8 percent of the system’s students were capable of doing college level work.

Yet by far the most telling indictment of the system is this mind-bending reality: a full 47 percent of city residents are functionally illiterate.

The governor of Michigan Rick Snyder has just come out and said that he will not ask for a bailout from the federal government of Detroit.

Excerpt:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the bankruptcy specialist he appointed to fix Detroit’s unprecedented financial problems put the blame Sunday squarely on the city and defended their decision to file for Chapter 9.

The Republican governor said Detroit created the problems and stood steadfast behind his decision to file Thursday for bankruptcy, with the city roughly $19 billion in debt.

“This is a tragic, difficult decision, but a right one,” he said. “It’s not about just more money, it’s about accountable government.”

He said corruption and city leaders ignoring warning signs for 60 years contributed to the problems. Among his biggest concerns, Snyder said, is the decline of municipal services for Detroit’s remaining 700,000 residents, including police response times of nearly one hour.

Thank God. Maybe now they will start to elect Republicans for the first time in over 50 years.

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Can computers become conscious by increasing processing power?

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There is a very famous thought experiment from UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle that all Christian apologists should know about. And now everyone who reads the Wall Street Journal knows about it, because of this article. (H/T Sarah)

Searle is writing about the IBM computer that was programmed to play Jeopardy. His Chinese room example shows why no one should be concerned about computers acting like humans. There is no thinking computer. There never will be a thinking computer. And you cannot build up to a thinking computer my adding more hardware and software.

Excerpt:

Imagine that a person—me, for example—knows no Chinese and is locked in a room with boxes full of Chinese symbols and an instruction book written in English for manipulating the symbols. Unknown to me, the boxes are called “the database” and the instruction book is called “the program.” I am called “the computer.”

People outside the room pass in bunches of Chinese symbols that, unknown to me, are questions. I look up in the instruction book what I am supposed to do and I give back answers in Chinese symbols.

Suppose I get so good at shuffling the symbols and passing out the answers that my answers are indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker’s. I give every indication of understanding the language despite the fact that I actually don’t understand a word of Chinese.

And if I do not, neither does any digital computer, because no computer, qua computer, has anything I do not have. It has stocks of symbols, rules for manipulating symbols, a system that allows it to rapidly transition from zeros to ones, and the ability to process inputs and outputs. That is it. There is nothing else.

By the way, Searle is a naturalist – not a theist, not a Christian. But he does oppose postmodernism. So he isn’t all bad. But let’s hear from a Christian scholar who can make more sense of this for us.

UPDATE: Drew sent me a link to the full article by Searle.

Here’s an article by Christian philosopher Jay Richards.

Excerpt:

Popular discussions of AI often suggest that if you keep increasing weak AI, at some point, you’ll get strong AI. That is, if you get enough computation, you’ll eventually get consciousness.

The reasoning goes something like this: There will be a moment at which a computer will be indistinguishable from a human intelligent agent in a blind test. At that point, we will have intelligent, conscious machines.

This does not follow. A computer may pass the Turing test, but that doesn’t mean that it will actually be a self-conscious, free agent.

The point seems obvious, but we can easily be beguiled by the way we speak of computers: We talk about computers learning, making mistakes, becoming more intelligent, and so forth. We need to remember that we are speaking metaphorically.

We can also be led astray by unexamined metaphysical assumptions. If we’re just computers made of meat, and we happened to become conscious at some point, what’s to stop computers from doing the same? That makes sense if you accept the premise—as many AI researchers do. If you don’t accept the premise, though, you don’t have to accept the conclusion.

In fact, there’s no good reason to assume that consciousness and agency emerge by accident at some threshold of speed and computational power in computers. We know by introspection that we are conscious, free beings—though we really don’t know how this works. So we naturally attribute consciousness to other humans. We also know generally what’s going on inside a computer, since we build them, and it has nothing to do with consciousness. It’s quite likely that consciousness is qualitatively different from the type of computation that we have developed in computers (as the “Chinese Room” argument, by philosopher John Searle, seems to show). Remember that, and you’ll suffer less anxiety as computers become more powerful.

Even if computer technology provides accelerating returns for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t follow that we’ll be replacing ourselves anytime soon. AI enthusiasts often make highly simplistic assumptions about human nature and biology. Rather than marveling at the ways in which computation illuminates our understanding of the microscopic biological world, many treat biological systems as nothing but clunky, soon-to-be-obsolete conglomerations of hardware and software. Fanciful speculations about uploading ourselves onto the Internet and transcending our biology rest on these simplistic assumptions. This is a common philosophical blind spot in the AI community, but it’s not a danger of AI research itself, which primarily involves programming and computers.

AI researchers often mix topics from different disciplines—biology, physics, computer science, robotics—and this causes critics to do the same. For instance, many critics worry that AI research leads inevitably to tampering with human nature. But different types of research raise different concerns. There are serious ethical questions when we’re dealing with human cloning and research that destroys human embryos. But AI research in itself does not raise these concerns. It normally involves computers, machines, and programming. While all technology raises ethical issues, we should be less worried about AI research—which has many benign applications—than research that treats human life as a means rather than an end.

Jay Richards is my all-round favorite Christian scholar. He has the Ph.D in philosophy from Princeton.

When I am playing a game on the computer, I know exactly why what I am doing is fun – I am conscious of it. But the computer has no idea what I am doing. It is just matter in motion, acting on it’s programming and the inputs I supply to it. And that’s all computers will ever do. Trust me, this is my field. I have the BS and MS in computer science, and I have studied this area. AI has applications for machine learning and search problems, but consciousness is not on the radar. You can’t get there from here.