'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' case limits student rights - CNN.com

'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' case limits student rights - CNN.com

Well, that's pretty much what I would expect out of a court that sees interstate commerce in the absence of state lines crossed and the absence of money changing hands, all the while involving a legal activity in the state in which it occurred.

Ridiculous.

Why Horses?

Take Action: Shut Down Horse Slaughter

No, I don't think so.

Why horses? Why not pigs? Pigs are smart and can make good pets.

Why not cows? They're sacred to more people than there are US citizens.

Why horses? Just because some affluent Americans like them more than they like cattle and pigs?

The Humane Society's role should be to promote the humane treatment of all animals. They should go after operations that allow idiots to play football with live chickens, or those that immobilize animals for extended periods of time for reasons of practicality or product.

They should go after those who cause animal suffering or don't reduce it when they could.

The Humane Society should work to make sure that slaughter operations are as humane as possible. I stop listening, though, when they promote this kind of emotional nonsense.


Update: The Senate and House Bills are all about slaughter for human consumption, which makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. The Humane Society seems to be mixed up. Animal suffering is one thing. Human diet is another. Only one of those is within their purview.

BBC NEWS | Health | Using drugs as weapons 'unsafe'

BBC NEWS | Health | Using drugs as weapons 'unsafe'

I certainly don't know everything about what happened during the Moscow theater siege several years ago, during which several dozen Chechen fighters took eight hundred or so people hostage. Apparently, in addition to explosives planted at various places throughout the building in such a fashion as to collapse it on the hostages' heads, individuals wearing explosive devices had dispersed among the hostages in order to maximize the killing if the moment came.

Some 130 hostages died (meaning that 600 or more survived) when the Russians gassed the place with a drug of some kind, possibly something called Kolokol-1, supposedly a weaponized variant of Fentanyl.

It seems that many of the dead hostages died as a consequence of the physical position into which they collapsed when gassed, positions that obstructed breathing or caused them to drown in vomit. They were all physically stressed by three days of confinement, discomfort, thirst and so on, which probably also contributed to mortality. There were other contributors to mortality, such as lack of patient care preparations and secrecy about the nature of the gas.

It's certainly no less lethal to die this way than by explosion or gunfire, but there is a difference.

I'm open to argument, but I admire the Russians for what they did at that theater. I'm aware of insinuations that the Russians themselves instigated the event but, frankly, anybody can say anything and I don't know what's true. In any event, such arguments don't bear on the logic or morality of using drugs as weapons.

Weaponized drugs are primarily weapons. If you're in need of weapons, it makes sense to have ones that will work in the situation in which they're needed.

Raising the Moscow theater hostage event in opposition to weaponized drugs strikes me as akin to raising the spectre of Chernobyl in opposition to nuclear energy. It doesn't follow.

What we all know to be true?

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Personhood and Planned Parenthood:

what we all know to be true

Make that, "what we all know to be True," with a capital "T". And strike the "all" part. In fact, strike the "know" part, too. Just strike the whole thing.

Jim Sedlak insists that a person exists from the moment of conception. Since that's a capital T, there's no reconciling my contrary view with his.

In the last congress, 100 members of the House of Representatives supported a bill that simply said:

The Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being.

Sound reasonable?

Of course.

No, not "of course". No, not reasonable. Disingenuous.

I eat scrambled eggs for breakfast. Though some of those scrambled eggs may bear the fruit of a rooster, they are not scrambled chickens.

I wonder how many of those right-to-life Representatives would immediately object to the use of their disingenuous bill in opposition to capital punishment? My guess would be most of them.

Mr. Sedlak is apparently a religious man. He doesn't seem to invoke God very much in his writing (he mentions God, mostly in passing, in only four of the 13 articles listed here), but it seems obvious that his world view is rooted in a firm belief in the existence of a supernatural soul implanted by a God at the moment of conception.

In contrast, as far as I'm concerned, Mr. Sedlak's is a highly implausible stance stemming from myth.

Whereas I'm content to let him be, Mr. Sedlak would impose his views on me by force of law. That's part of the reason I'm giving $910 (minus United Way's handling cut) to Planned Parenthood this year.

Ooooo, he probably doesn't know that United Way can serve as a conduit for money to Planned Parenthood. Maybe I'd better shut up lest he make trouble for them, too.

Naaaa...

Supernatural Superstition

Al Jazeera English - News:

'We don't want to expose Muslims to supernatural and superstitious beliefs,' the Berita Harian newspaper quoted [Abdul Shukor Husin, National Fatwa Council chair,] as saying.

Cliff Kincaid is full of shit

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This guy Cliff Kincaid is, at best, overly self-assured.

But the dangers associated with marijuana go far beyond mental confusion and acting like a buffoon. It destroys a person’s productive capacity and can help make people either wards of the state, unable to take care of themselves, or criminals.

Oh, no!! Not only that, but Richard Allen Davis murdered Polly Klass while he was high!

Cliff Kincaid is full of shit.

Along with the Independent, maybe Cliff ought to read from the Guardian across the street:

Alcohol is ranked almost as harmful as heroin in a controversial new drug classification system proposed by a team of leading scientists. ...

Cannabis, recently downgraded to class C, occupies a middle position. It is rated more dangerous than Ecstasy, LSD and the dance floor drug GHB, but less harmful than tobacco [and much less harmful than alcohol].

The table, published in The Lancet medical journal, was drawn up by a team of highly respected scientists led by Professor David Nutt, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council.

Cliff should have read the Forbes piece:

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

Hey Cliff, since you're such a conservative, I bet you support the Court's decision approving Interstate Commerce Clause application in the Raich case (about legal medical marijuana, "commerce" involving no money, and "interstate" crossing no state lines). You must think civil forfeiture is the best thing since flush toilets. As a good conservative, you must think $60B down the drain, every year, is a good use of your tax money.

I think I'll stop before I type something impolite.

Voting for Catholics

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Catholic politicians get strict orders from pope - International Herald Tribune

BOLOGNA: Pope Benedict XVI strongly reasserted Tuesday the church's opposition to abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage, saying that Catholic politicians were "especially" obligated to defend the church's stance in their public duties.

"These values are non-negotiable," the pope wrote in a 130-page "apostolic exhortation" issued in Rome, forming a distillation of opinion from a worldwide meeting of bishops at the Vatican in 2005.

"Consequently, Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce laws inspired by values grounded in human nature."

So, if a politician is a good Catholic, he's got to vote against three positions I hold:

• that gay and lesbian people are people entitled to all the rights I enjoy
• that euthanasia can be the most humane option in certain circumstances
• that every woman has the right of abortion

If the politician is not a good Catholic, why is he or she a Catholic at all? Such a person ought to bolt the Church in favor of another. The Unitarians would let them enjoy the sorts of social benefits attributed to churchgoing while indulging particular spiritual needs.

I happen to think the honest politician would acknowledge his or her non-theism, politically suicidal though it might be (I'm pretty sure many, maybe most, US politicians are closet non-theists).

"Non-negotiable". Right.

Shelbyville Times-Gazette: Story: Readers respond to global warming issue

Shelbyville Times-Gazette: Story: Readers respond to global warming issue:

...evolutionary ecologist Eric Pianka told a Texas audience that 90 percent of the world's population should be eliminated by an airborne Ebola virus.

He received a standing ovation for his 'humane' remarks.

That is not true. What's it called when you repeat an untruth? A lie? Yes, that's it. A lie. It's a lie that Pianka advocates genocide by ebola, and it's a lie that his standing ovation was for any such suggestion.

People like Reid say they care about the future of humanity, but their ideas are usually at the expense of individual humans.

Well, of course! It's the mass of individual humans that is the source of the problem, so how could it be otherwise?

Public Prayer Power

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These catholics and muslims supposedly worship the same god. Haggling over permissions for muslims to worship in a church, or catholics to worship in a mosque, is the same sort of bullshit involved in the school prayer issue here in the USA.

It's not about prayer. It's about power.

Let the population grow | Chicago Tribune

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Let the population grow | Chicago Tribune

So, there's literally too much food in the world, there's plenty of room for lots more people, productivity will continue to trump reproductivity, sustainability means consigning billions of poor people to lives that threaten the environment, while the usual boogeymen Malthus, Sanger and Ehrlich, the Holocaust, eugenics and gas chambers, ...

These days, overpopulation is primarily a hang-up for environmentalists, though suburbanites and feminists occasionally whine about it too. And an important part of the argument has changed. While before, Progressives were worried about the "muck" at the low end of the global population, they're now vexed by the fat cats at the top.

Americans consume more of the earth's resources, they complain, and produce piles more greenhouse gasses. At the environmentalist fringe, there's even a growing movement to convince eco-friendly Americans to voluntarily reduce or eliminate their own reproduction in order to ease the strain on Mother Nature. Since the political orientation of your parents is the single best determinant of your own politics, you can expect a lot fewer environmentalists in a couple of decades if this idea catches on.

So be it. The meek and the assholes shall inherit what's left of the earth.