“This gives a blank check to industrial agricultural facilities to essentially define what a felony is,” said Matthew Dominguez, a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States, an animal welfare group.
His group and others argue that the measure would make criminals out of whistleblowers who expose the truth about unethical agricultural practices.
This, via an Indianapolis Star story, is a comment on this year’s AgGag bill in the Indiana Legislature.
Don’t know what “AgGag” is? Well, big Agribiz don’t want people to know about the conditions in which beef, pork, chickens, eggs, maybe even milk, is being produced. So they don’t want people taking pictures of their operations and publishing them. And they want the state to make it a crime – and not just any crime, but a felony – if anyone exposes their inumanity toward the brutes bound for our tables.
Groups representing farmers and businesses said last year the bill was needed to prevent people from making surreptitious videos that could damage their reputations, and that they claim can be misleading.
Well, doh! If you do disreputable stuff and someone exposes it, your reputation may suffer.
The twist on this year’s bill is that it doesn’t just make videotaping or photography a crime, but allows big Agribiz to post a sign saying what “that may compromise the agricultural operation’s trade secrets or operations” is allowed and what isn’t, whence “gives a blank check to industrial agricultural facilities to essentially define what a felony is.” (How does one “compromise … operations”? Sounds Orwellian to me.)
By tying it to the concept of trespass they make it semi-plausible, but it seems to me that when you let someone on your property, on the condition that they refrain from X, Y and Z, and they do X anyway, they’ve exceeded the license they were given and you kick them out. They’re not felons.
So as we’re making dope legal, we’re making whistleblowing a felony.
Tell me again the story about how our swell democratic system isn’t rigged to keep us placid and ignorant. (More, including more links, here.)
At least the journalisti are shining harsh light on the AgGag bill. Whistleblowers make for good reading.
Elsewhere, however, they’re joining the forces that want to keep us ignorant, religious consciences suffering coercion being so trivial compared to CAFO suffering:
[I]n 1965, the American Congress (then the “College”) of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) changed its definition of [conception] to denote implantation of a human blastocyst in the uterine wall, rather than the union of spermatazoon and ovum to form a unique single-celled human organism. Under this new definition of “conception,” any drug or device that destroys the new human being after fertilization but before attachment to the mother’s uterus is a contraceptive rather than an abortifacient.
But doctors are not above being wrong. And with a moment’s scrutiny, even the average citizen can tell that this definition is absurd.
First and foremost, one can find ample scientific evidence that human life begins at fertilization. Likewise, embryology textbooks declare fertilization, not implantation, the beginning of a human’s existence.
One can also simply apply common sense: are we human beings because of what we do (implant in our mothers’ uteruses), or because of what we are (living organisms with human DNA)? The latter definition resonates on a fundamental level — indeed, advocacy groups from abolitionists to suffragettes have used it to push for rights and privileges based on common, inherent humanity, not on actions or behavior.
(American Thinker) I thought it was important to note that (and “If fertilization does occur, the IUD keeps the fertilized egg from implanting in the lining of the uterus” according to HHS’s own Office of Women’s Health) because the media have imposed a blackout on such facts, the better to make plausible the lie that companies like Hobby Lobby are lying, hypocritical ignoramuses when they claim that the “Contraceptive Mandate” is not akin to, but in raw fact, an Abortifacient Mandate.
I shall, accordingly, continue to call a spade a spade: Abortifacient Mandate! Abortifacient Mandate! Abortifacient Mandate!
As an evening breeze sweeps across the Jordanian capital of Amman, dozens of Iraqi refugees file out of the Jesuit Fathers church, touching or kissing the cross on their way out.
Among them is Mofed, an Arab Christian who recently fled the turmoil in his native country. A year ago, Mofed (who, like other refugees, would only give his first name out of fear of retribution) was running a photo shop in Baghdad. Then one day several men came into his store and gave him three options: become Muslim; pay a $70,000 per capita tax (jizya) levied on non-Muslims; or be killed, along with his family.
“You pay, or get killed,” says his wife, Nuhad. “There is no in between. If you say, ‘OK, I’ll become Muslim,’ there is no problem. That is their aim, to get you to change your religion, to be Muslim.”
Mofed and Nuhad decided to exercise a fourth option: flee their homeland, bringing their three children along with them.
(What the Middle East would be like without Christians) More recently, at the Center for Law and Religion Forum, some suggestions for helping Mideast Christians.
I want to step back a bit, or perhaps provide a “30,000 foot view.” We should stop destabalizing Mideast governments, which, however authoritarian, maintain some semblance of order. The biggest losers in U.S. imperial pretentions efforts to extend democracy in the Mideast are Mideast Christians and America’s own core values.
Way to go, team America! You’ve found the hubristic road to Lose-Lose foreign policy.
The First Church Atheist has undergone schism, producing, presumably, True Church Atheist, not Second. (Impertinent question: Is Sanderson Jones, failed entertainer, hence aspiring Atheist megachurch pastor, trying to look like a modern Whitebread American version of Jesus?)
Anthony Sacramone of Strange Herring offers FCA (Oops! Taken already! My bad!) the Atheists a bit of advice.
Meanwhile, Oklahoma Satanists are hell-bent on getting equal time with the Ten Commandments. Or playing dog-in-the-manger. Whatever. You’ve got to admire their lurid design.
We must draw a line! If they allow this sort of thing on TV, next thing you know they’ll be doing something really vulgar!
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
While there is a smattering of libertarians or, perhaps more accurately, near-libertarians among Catholic conservatives, my sense is that almost all Catholic writers and thinkers who are most self-conscious about their Catholicism—particularly those associated with this journal—all are in principle fully reconciled with the notion of the social market economy. All would feel at home in, say, Germany’s Christian Democratic Party. Indeed, I would suggest that most would feel more at home intellectually and politically in something akin to Germany’s Christian Democracy Party than they do in today’s Republican Party.
…
But many religious conservatives—mostly Catholic conservatives but with a smattering of Protestants (including a small but influential Kuyperian wing among Reformed Protestants)—have largely been committed not merely to moral conservatism, but to social-market conservatism as well. As a result of the grand conservative bargain and the social nature of ideological identity, religious conservatives have been welcomed to articulate their moral conservatism, but to sublimate their social-market commitments in order to preserve the grand bargain.
(James Rodgers, Conservatism, Evangelii Gaudium, and the Social Market)
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
(Alexander Pope via Pat Buchanan, Is America Going to Pot?) We’ve grown familiar with the face of other vices, too, as Buchanan notes.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 