Human Health Care vs. Animal Health Care

Government Terrorism During Prohibition

Deborah Blum at Slate.com has the story:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

Read the full article here.

Republican Scott Brown Already Voting Like a Democrat

From Reuters:

A modest job-creation bill advanced in the U.S. Senate on Monday as the chamber's newest Republican bucked his party and sided with Democrats on a $15 billion package of tax cuts and highway spending.

Republican Scott Brown joined four other Republicans, 55 Democrats and two independents to overcome a procedural hurdle that sets up a final vote later this week.

Brown, in a statement following the vote, said, "I hope my vote today is a strong step toward restoring bipartisanship in Washington."

It certainly didn't take long for the new "conservative" hero to show his true colors.

Terrorism Is Not a National Emergency

Tom Engelhardt of Antiwar.com looks at the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. from a different perspective:

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y., that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)

And yet the underwear bomber (which was most likely a false-flag operation anyway) had people panicking about another 9/11. Perhaps we should all try to keep the threat of terrorism in perspective.

A Brief Thought on "Enemy Combatants"

I don't know about you, but I just don't feel comfortable with a government that imprisons and tortures individuals without due process thinking it can tell me who my enemies are.

Christian Libertarianism

Bojidar Marinov, who took part in the forming of the Libertarian movement in his native Bulgaria, explains why he could not be a libertarian without Christ:

When a dear friend of mine shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with me, he knew nothing of my intellectual struggles. There was one thing that caught my attention that night when he talked to me about his faith: "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." And then Jesus adds: "And if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed."

There was the solution to my problem! I was blind to search for an impersonal Truth, an inexorable, merciless entity that holds the universe in an iron grip. And I was blind to search for Freedom that was focused on myself so much that would make the rest of the world irrelevant -- and make me irrelevant in the process. Truth was possible to know only if it was itself a Person; and Freedom was possible to have only if it was itself a Person. That Person couldn't be a mere man -- or I would be in slavery. He must be a god, or rather, God, the Creator of the Universe. And if the Bible was true, then my problems had one reason: I was a stranger to God, and thus I was a stranger to Freedom, Ethics, and Justice. I had to come back to Him, through the redemption He provided in Jesus Christ. Only then I had...everything.

If He was the Creator, He was the Truth. Knowing Him, I would know the Truth. He was Freedom too: He created my very nature and He knew what I should do to be in harmony with my real nature. And He was Justice for He gave me the rules for a just society that has liberty and justice for all. What all the philosophers wanted but couldn't find, He had it, and He was it.

Therefore I couldn't be a libertarian without Christ. I tried, and it was impossible -- philosophically and ethically. It was self-contradictory, it was against the very nature of things, and it was believing in a set of assumptions that had no discernible connection with reality or with each other. Only in Christ I had them all brought together in a coherent whole. And only in Christ did it make sense to be willing to die for your freedom -- without Him death was the ultimate judge of things, and slavery was preferable to facing death. "Give me liberty or give me death" was folly in a world without Christ -- but now it is divine wisdom in Him.

Read the full article here.

Guilty of Not Committing a Crime?

It used to be that in order for a crime to have been committed one person had to willfully violate another person's right to life, liberty, or property. In other words, harm had to have been intended as well as inflicted.

Today, however, a crime is merely an action that violates any one or more of the countless arbitrary rules and regulations implemented by the state, regardless of whether or not the action in question actually brings harm to anyone. This was seen most recently in the case of Daryl Fleck, a Crookston man whose drunken driving conviction was upheld by the Minnesota State Supreme Court.

(Read the full article here.)

Your Children Are Property of the State

You may think you have the right to raise your children as you see fit, but you don't. Your children are property of the state, as this recent story demonstrates:

A Montgomery County couple has been arrested on child endangerment charges for failing to register their children with the school district as they were home-schooled, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said Monday.

Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff's Office.

The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, Richard Hoffman, confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.

"From what I can gather, it sounds like there was education going on, so I don't know if they really slipped through the cracks," Hoffman said, "[but] they didn't fulfill their legal responsibility to file with the school district to be home-schooled."

Just business as usual in this once-free nation.

The problem with compulsory education laws, like most laws in this country, is that they force otherwise law-abiding citizens into the position of having to take action in order to prevent themselves from becoming criminals. There was once a time when it had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that one intended harm when committing a particular act. Today, that isn't good enough.

Those in government love such laws because they no longer have to prove motive. The mere act itself is criminal. The end result is that you are considered a criminal if you do not first seek the state's permission for what was once accepted as a God-given right.

Going Along to Get Along

Ever wonder why people continue to vote for the same incompetent fools year after year? This may help explain...

We Don't Need No Education

Just when you think public schools couldn't dumb things down any more than they already have, you run across a story like this:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

If you wanted more proof that the main purpose of the public school system is to indoctrinate rather than educate, there it is.