Monday Miscellany, 7/7/25

That law requires schools to show students in grades five to twelve a video or ultrasound that depicts each stage of fetal development. Teenagers will learn about when the heart and brain develop, for example, and exactly how the unborn child goes from a fertilized egg to the crying human being that enters the world upon birth.

This strikes directly at the heart of pro-abortion-rights reasoning. For decades, those who favor abortion on demand have emphasized the centrality of a woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body. That has a strong moral appeal, as anyone who believes in the right to individual liberty can grasp.

The problem has always been that abortion destroys another human being’s body, that of the unborn child’s. No one’s right to liberty gives them an excuse to unjustifiably deprive another person of their right to liberty — or to life itself.

“Fetal development laws like Iowa’s put pictures with words,” writes Olsen. “That can only help persuade the heart of what the head already knows — and thereby increase the resolve that even a fetus or embryo is a real human being deserving of our sympathy and legal protection.”

Reportedly, pro-abortionists are outraged.  But why?  How can they be opposed to the presentation of simple facts?  I have heard pro-abortion policies defended in the name of “science.”  So why not teach students what science tells us about fetal development?

The Iowa law should be a model for all states.  The videos and ultrasounds should be part of every biology and sex-education curriculum.  Olsen says that this policy should be defined and implemented carefully, so as to protect it from being politicized and overturned by a court:  Be rigorously unbiased.  Abortion should not so much as be  mentioned.  Just show the facts.  That’s all pro-lifers need to persuade the new generations that children in the womb are human beings who deserve protection and care.

Quantum Computing and the End of Cybersecurity

The computer industry is on the verge of yet another breakthrough.  Not just AI but another technology that brings with it still more unintended consequences: quantum computing.

By taking advantage of quantum properties, such as superposition and entanglement, computers can be made to operate exponentially faster than current models.  This would mean computers with the ability to make extremely complex calculations at a high rate of speed.

That would mean quantum computers could break every known encryption system.  Politico‘s Sam Clark reports:

Modern-day digital communications, internet traffic and data collections are secured using a system called public key cryptography, which relies on complex mathematics that regular computers can’t solve. But quantum computers — which are many times more powerful than today’s computers — could crack those codes easily, experts have warned.

“Everything breaks,” said Nigel Smart, a professor with the computer security and industrial cryptography department at KU Leuven, a Belgian university. “Your phone, the internet, everything breaks. Not break as in doesn’t work, breaks as in, it’s not secure.”

Once quantum computers reach the inflection point, it would effectively mean that most of today’s data zooming around on internet wires would be readable to anyone tapping in.

A particularly eerie problem is what’s known as “store now, decrypt later,” where threat actors — notably intelligence agencies — take data that’s encrypted with public key cryptography, retain it and then unlock it once quantum computing technology is sufficiently advanced.

The European Union is trying to address this by developing guidelines, regulations, and technology that could provide quantum crypto-security.

Though it’s good to prepare for this eventuality, in researching this post, I learned that quantum computing is presently mostly theory and experimentation. See the Wikipedia article on quantum computing for the challenges, limitations, and skepticism about this technology.  As always when it comes to technology, beware the hype!  And, as always, beware the unintended consequences.

Dems Trying to Decide Whether to Fix Public Schools or Defend Them

Public schools are in a bad way, with ever-declining test scores, safety issues, and the public’s loss of confidence.  Democrats, who are in charge of most big-city school systems, are reportedly debating what their policy should be:  try to fix the schools or defend them as they are?

Matt Barnum writes about this in his Wall Street Journal article, Debate Over Improving Public Schools Is Dividing Democrats.  He writes,

An insurgent faction of Democrats—including some elected officials and parents, nonprofit executives and wealthy donors—says the party has lost its way on education, as test scores have declined and Republicans have made the issue their own. These Democrats are pushing ideas more often advanced by conservatives, including accountability for test scores or alternatives to public schools. . . .

Advocates on the other side—including teachers, their unions and some parents—say progressives need to focus on defending and supporting public schooling. “Democrats should be championing public education and further investment in public education,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said in an interview.

This is odd on the face of it.  Who could be opposed to improving schools?  Most proven approaches have no political implications.  If children learn how to read better using phonics as opposed to the whole language method–as research has established–why not teach reading by means of phonics?  Why would a Democrat be against that?

There seem to be two reasons:  One, conservatives have been calling for many of these reforms, so that’s reason enough for many liberals to oppose them.  Second, the Democratic party is heavily in thrall to the teachers’ unions, whose members don’t like to be told that they have been doing some things wrong.

As we have blogged about, in the case of teaching reading, phonics have been decisively proven to outperform other pedagogical approaches.  To the point that the method of teaching children to read by attending to the sounds symbolized by the 26 letters of the alphabet and their combinations has been re-christened “the science of reading.”

And it’s black families and other disadvantaged minorities, frustrated that the educational establishment has not taught their children even the most basic skills such as reading, who have been lobbying their school districts to make changes.  Democrats keep claiming to be champions of the underprivileged, and yet many of them are resisting doing things to actually help the underprivileged.