Category: Pontification
President Obama is 48 today. So happy birthday Mr. President. Happy Birthday to you.
May the next year bring you wisdom and a sense of patience.
President Obama having a smoke, compliments of Reason.
And for the love of Vice President Biden, I hope you have many, many more Birthdays infront of you.
I clipped this from the National Review Blog: The Corner
Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights [Wesley J. Smith]
Eating meat is a natural human activity — that is, we are biologically omnivorous. In my view, this makes it entirely moral for human beings to eat meat. How that meat is obtained is important. Human exceptionalism — a concept denied in animal-rights ideology — holds that we have a duty to treat animals humanely. Arguments can certainly be made that factory farms are not humane, although they do provide important human benefits of inexpensive and nutritious food. Many opponents of factory farms don’t have to worry about food prices when feeding their families. Still, there is “humane meat,” advocated by Matthew Scully in Dominion, which is more expensive but is raised on Old McDonald–type farms with humane methods of slaughter.
I consider vegetarianism for moral reasons akin to a vow of chastity by monastics: It eschews a normal human activity for higher moral purposes. That is to be admired. But no monastic would or should say that his vow of chastity makes him morally superior to married married people who have sex. Similarly, vegetarians’ decision to refrain from eating meat does not make them morally superior to people who do eat meat.
In Dominion, Scully does indeed come at his advocacy from an animal-welfare (as opposed to an animal-rights) perspective. But he is barely on the right side of the line because he is indifferent to the human good derived from animal industries and animal use.
He also claims that the ideology doesn’t matter in this debate. That is absolutely wrong. Animal-welfare philosophy supports human exceptionalism; animal-rights philosophy disdains that approach and rejects human exceptionalism as “speciesist.” There is a huge difference between the two. Whether we believe human beings have a unique moral status in the world has tremendous implications for human rights and human flourishing. Indeed, it could be the most important ethical and moral issue of the 21st century.
— Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow in human rights and bioethics for the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His next book, to be released in the fall, will be an exposé of the animal-rights movement.
Harry Alford is the creator and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. He is also a veteran US Army Captain. But this is not why Alford is an American Hero. Alford is a hero because he speaks truth to power.
Let the record show, not all Americans who happen to be Black support the policies of Mr. Obama.
Check out this great visualization of the national debt.
Thanks to 10000Pennies and Political Math!
Gan is probably right about Transformers part deux, but I will probably get around to seeing it anyway.
Yesterday, Sarah Palin announced she is stepping down as Govenor of Alaska. While the political wonks do what wonks do, I think the esteemed Mark Steyn has the right of it.
Cutting bait [Mark Steyn]
With respect to many of the Palinologists below, I think they’re getting way too hepatomantic over the entrails.
As a political move for anything other than the 2010 Senate race, today’s announcement is a disaster. And I’m not sure it’s a plus for the Senate – and, even if it were, the manner and timing suggest it was not a professionally planned event and therefore is unlikely to have any grand strategy behind it.
So Occam’s Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?
In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You’re a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they’re tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who’d never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a “cancer”.
Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it’ll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You’ve got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who’s given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.
Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to – what’s the word? – “empathize”? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you’d have to turn into under that scenario?
National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.
Why do people make excuses for stupid movies?
No, seriously. When I see a blatently idiotic and bad movie, then flat out declare it with an itemized list which indisputably proves, point by point, why the film is an abomination, inveritably somebody I like and admire chastizes me for taking it to seriously.
After seeing the junkyard vomit that is Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, I’m striking back. That’s the line in the sand. For those that claim that a desire for at least mediocre filmmaking is “taking entertainment too seriously”, my only reply can be “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?!”
