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Breathing New Life into Dead Meat

[Download this book for free on Amazon Kindle now through Wednesday, September 25th.]

Well, it took a lot more work than I’d anticipated, but I’ve finally revamped and completely rewritten the old book and given her a new face [note: the actual size was too big to upload here, so I had to truncate the cover a little. Sorry, baby; but you’re beautiful still]:


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Back cover:

An incomprehensible admission, a horrifying deed … A secret with the power to destroy, and a superhuman father with beast-like brilliance …

At age thirteen, five years after his mother’s death, Joel Gasteneau is beaten so brutally by his father that he almost doesn’t survive. Yet he makes himself live, his strength of will extraordinary even then, and he runs away from home.

Alone and comforted only by running and the bloodless beauty of math, he makes his own way, rising eventually to the Green Berets: an elite athlete who nevertheless cannot quite outdistance himself from the torments of his childhood.

Now, at thirty-three, consumed by doubt and a growing sense of hypochondria, he resolves at last to follow through on an idea he first thought of when he was a child: to seek out a piece of evidence that shows with certainty God’s hand at work upon the earth. But in seeking this evidence, he’s stricken by an enigmatic illness that almost kills him: and there, inside the fevered meat of his brain, he unearths a memory so chilling that his life is forever altered.

One of the most challenging novels of the last decade, Pale Criminal is at its core an inquiry into godless morality and human virtue, an exploration of how we live, part mystery story, part literary crime novel combing the surreal imagery of Nabokov with the psychological complexity of Dostoevsky — a metaphysical thriller of mind-spinning intrigue and a philosophical odyssey into the most fundamental questions.

This book is an inquiry into human virtue.

The title is a direct reference to a chapter from Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra — and the idea of the Pale Criminal indeed appears, in context of Nietszche, in Chapter 10 of the novel.

The original version of this book took me nearly nine years to write — the rewrite took another year — but I’ll be eternally grateful if YOU, reader, with your confounding, beautiful, golden silence, download loaded it now (for free through Wednesday, September 25th).

Pale Criminal on Amazon Kindle






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Sweatshops: A Dream Come True?

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On January 14th, 2009, Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, wrote a rather provocative piece entitled “Where Sweatshops Are A Dream.”

In this article, Kristof begins by sensibly saying that before Barack Obama and his team act upon their endless discussions of “labor standards,” we should all of us take a more than cursory glance at a vast rubbish heap in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

This dump, says Mr. Kristof, “is a Dante-like vision of hell,” where “even the rats look forlorn.”

Kristof continues:

“It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires…. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

“Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well [debatable!], for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.”

Mr. Kristof then goes on to tell us how if you talk to the families who mine these dumps, they’ll describe in no uncertain terms how very much they cherish so-called sweatshop jobs. He even quotes one Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old girl who scavenges for plastic:

“I’d love to get a job in a factory. At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”

Vath Sam Oeun is another young lady Nicholas Kristof features.

Vath Sam Oeun hopes her 10-year-old boy, “scavenging beside her,” will grow up to one day get a factory job. Her child has seen neither doctor nor dentist, not ever in his life, and the last time he bathed was when he was 2-years-old.

“A sweatshop job by comparison,” says Mr. Kristof, “would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.”

The rest of the article is primarily a discussion of economics — one that specifically laments the poor working conditions of sweatshops, but one that also realizes what many of us have known for a long, long time: namely, that the poor working conditions in factories are not a cause but a symptom, and “banning sweatshops” will not help but HURT the poor of these Third-World countries.

“At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade…. When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom…. My views on sweatshops are shaped by years living in East Asia, watching as living standards soared — including those in my wife’s ancestral village in southern China — because of sweatshop jobs.”

Mr. Kristof closes his article by describing a 13-year-old girl named Neuo Chanthou, who, in a “Playboy” shirt she found in the dump, earns less than a dollar a day from picking through this smoking Cambodian rubbish heap. He quotes her: she worries about her sister “who lost part of her hand when a garbage truck ran over her,” and says furthermore:

“It’s dirty, hot and smelly here. A factory is better.”

And yet, in spite of this, about sweatshops there is very little disagreement in this country: sweatshops exploit the poor.

But do they actually?

The short answer to that question is no.

In fact, the thing most responsible for exploiting the poor is the authoritarian, often Marxist or neo-Marxist governments of the third-world, who keep their good people in a state of grinding poverty. And when will these governments, rather than American “corporations,” be held accountable by our progressive elites? When?

Quoting economist Walter Block:

“There’s nothing wrong with sweatshops, per se. The difficulty, rather, is poverty. The total wages are so low that the employees want to economize on the accoutrements of the factory, rather than on their take-home pay. And why, in turn, are wages so low? This is because in many third-world countries, worker productivity is very small.”

And why is the third world plagued by poverty?

Because third-world countries are all, virtually without exception, governed by regimes who “regulate” the economy.

Recall the infamous case of Kathie Lee Gifford:

“Suppose Kathie Lee goes into a poor country, such as Peru or Bangladesh. The people there, say, are earning $3 per day, which is approximately their productivity level. Kathie Lee has three choices. She can offer these workers less than $3 per day, exactly $3 per day, or more than $3 per day. If she tries to recruit a labor force at, for example, $2 daily, the workers will spurn her. They may be poor, but they are not stupid. Even at $3 per day in total wages (including take-home pay plus the amount that goes into working conditions) this task will be difficult. Why should the employee leave his present position for an upstart, who will not at all improve his financial situation?

“No, the only way Kathie can attract workers is by offering them better terms of employment than they now enjoy. If the students in the US who are so bitterly protesting poor Kathie’s economic initiatives really had the best interest of the poor workers in the third world at heart … instead of opposing her, they would carry her around on their shoulders in a ticker-tape parade, the way they treat winning athletes…. As in the case of the sweatshops, good old Kathie pays the kids more than they were earning from their domestic employers” (Protest! by Walter Block).

The American anti-sweatshop campaigns (so-called) are ultimately motivated by a glut of economic misunderstanding and naiveté — a naiveté which comes mostly from those who do not realize that without factory work, these poor folks would be forced back into prostitution, selling their teeth, literal starvation, or scavenging through vast Cambodian garbage heaps.

Naiveté, however, is hardly a legitimate excuse.

For those who insist that American corporations are to blame for working conditions in the third world because they pay third-world workers “exploitative wages,” consider the exhaustive study recently published in the Journal of Labor Research, conducted by Ben Powell and David Skarbek, who surveyed “sweatshops” in eleven third-world countries:

“In nine of the eleven countries, sweatshop wages in foreign factories located there were higher than the average. In Honduras, where almost half the working population lives on $2/day, sweatshops pay $13.10/day. Sweatshop wages are more than double the national average in Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras….”

Given academia’s long history of neo-Marxist socialistic propaganda and economic jargon, it should come as no surprise that the anti-capitalist rhetoric we hear on every college campus today pushes for “anti-sweatshop” legislation. In fact, though, what the student body and faculty ought instead to be calling for, rather than a world-wide dismantling of “sweatshops,” is a pat on the back of the American businesspeople who provide the third-world poor with gainful employment. Furthermore, there should unanimous support for foreign investment in the third world – if, that is, a genuine concern for the poor is really what American protesters care about. Which they don’t.

“It is never the actual workers in countries like Honduras who protest the existence of a new factory there built by a Nike or a General Motors. [On the contrary] the people there benefit as consumers as well as workers, since there are more (and cheaper) consumer goods manufactured and sold in their country (as well as in other parts of the world). Capital investment of this sort is infinitely superior to the alternative – foreign aid – which always empowers the governmental recipients of the ‘aid,’ making things even worse for the private economies of ‘aid’ recipients. Market-based capital investment is always far superior to politicized capital allocation. Moreover, if the foreign investment fails, the economic burden falls on the investors and stockholders, not the poor of the third-world country” (How “Sweatshops” Help the Poor, Thomas Dilorenzo).

And quoting economist Vedran Vuk, in his article “Common Sense in Sweatshop Cents”:

“It is not only technology that the poor countries need, but the culture of capitalism. Without it they will never dig their way out of poverty” (“Common Sense in Sweatshop Cents,” by Vedran Vuk).

It should be noted also here (not quite parenthetically) that in order to exist, unions require that non-union labor be done away with, both at home and abroad. This is why labor unions in this country have waged interminable wars, via a relentless propaganda campaign, against factory work. Indeed, labor unions have long stood at the forefront of this anti-factory campaigning, and yet there is an absolutely crucial point everyone should understand about wages:

“Wages are determined by worker productivity. Worker productivity is determined by the availability of capital goods(tools) to the worker to help him in his production. The availability of capital goods is determined by the prospect of profiting from such an investment. And the appropriate mix of investment in capital goods results from freedom in the marketplace. Thus anyone concerned with the welfare of workers should be the greatest advocate of free markets” (source).

And:

“Historically, real wages (wages adjusted for the effects of inflation) rose at about 2 percent per year before the advent of unions, and at a similar rate afterward” (Morgan Reynolds, Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America,1984).

Quoting again Thomas Dilorezo:

If labor unions were responsible for the historical rise in wages, then the solution to world poverty would be self-evident: unionize all the poorest nations on earth. [And yet] private-sector unions reached their peak in terms of membership in the 1950s, when they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, they represent barely 10 percent of the private-sector workforce. All during this time ofdeclining union memberships, influence, and power, wages and living standards have risensubstantially. All of the ‘declining industries’ in America from the 1970s on tended to be the highly unionized ones, whereas the growing industries, especially in the high-technology fields, are almost exclusively nonunion. At best, unions can improve the standards of living of some of their members, but only at the expense of other, nonunion workers, consumers, and others. When unions use their power to go on strike, or threaten to strike, and succeed in increasing their members’ wages above what they could earn on the free market, they inevitably cause some union members to lose their jobs.

What is the reason? When wages rise, it makes labor more costly, so that in order to keep turning a profit, employers can’t keep as many workers.

So-called sweatshops may be bad by our standards, but to the Third-World poor, who face prostitution and rubbish heaps as the only way to eek out a living, sweatshops are a godsend.





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The Most Amazing Thing

The most amazing thing happened to me today.

I read the following from my friend Jacinda, who posted it on her website:

I finished reading Ray Harvey’s More and More unto the Perfect Day more than a year ago – for the third time. I had intended to write a review of the book immediately following each reading, but couldn’t gather my thoughts into a neat pile. Instead, I was left with crooked, overlapped, often torn conclusions of how the book had affected me. I have taken notes. I have made an outline in order to follow the storyline. I still find myself unable to write a standard type review, so instead, I’ll submit to my visceral reactions…as a human being; not as a writer, critic, or editor.

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First, it pissed me off because it attempted to challenge the beliefs that I have held dear for the entirety of my 38 years. For this, I commend it. A religious man’s faith is tested. The pages where this occurred in real-time are now filled with dry gorges — valleys that were formed by the weight of my tears. Old tears.

Second, the crooked, yet parallel, line it draws with my own life had me looking over my shoulder with the turn of every page. From things as provocative and significant as sourceless anger and spontaneous illness to spooky similarities like Cherokee heritage, acne scars, stretch marks, the names and appearances of family members…I experienced what I would call a one-dimensional, reflective haunting.

Here’s where I stop counting and fall into what flirts with a search for words. This book reached deep within in me. I am a deer that is not yet dead, but being prematurely field-dressed due to her poacher’s anxiety, guilt…something. A hand grabs at my trachea, cuts off the air, and pulls downward, to a place outside my own body. This book has found places within me that have been injured. Some of them have been healed. Others are now bleeding.

I’m not a philosopher, and don’t wish to be. I’m not an intellectual, though I sometimes envy those who are. That’s why it’s so difficult to qualify how and why this book affected me so profoundly. I’m still not sure I understand all the material. Maybe I never will; maybe it’s not intended to be fully understood.

I have found myself wishing I had never read it. Yet, I have read it numerous times. I have attempted to rid my mind of the images it imparts. Yet, I revisit them and curl up into the places they have hollowed out for me. Its lyrical prose is like a song. Its imagery is dark, shapely, and at times, far too real.

Thank you, Mr. Harvey. I don’t know if you intended to do this to me, but it has been done. I doubt I will ever read another book like yours, but if one comes along, the will power to keep my hands off of it will have to be strong. Thank you for demonstrating how good literary fiction distracts the conscious mind while implanting belief systems into the subconscious and unconscious minds. You have reminded me why I love the written word and why I am addicted to its effects – even if those effects are those which I’d rather not endure.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is NOT impressed by predictability, pedestrian prose, shallow characters, and ignorance as an ultimate form of contentedness. If you fit the profile, hold on. There’s no telling how deep this one will take you.

(Source)

Jacinda is a beautiful lady and a beautiful writer, as you can see. When you read something like that about your own work, you’re left a little staggered.

The book divides people. Many hate it, and I’ve been surprised at the amount of hate-mail I’ve gotten over it. It is flawed — I see that now — and it’s also explicitly philosophical. Yet it took me almost a decade to write, and I really typed my soul into it. I believe that for all its flaws, it succeeds on the level I most wanted it to, and that its thematic point is important — a case for godless morality. There are a certain number of readers, however few, who hook into what I was after, and I thank you.





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The Raven Chides His Blackness?

AJAX: Can he not be sociable?

ULYSSES: The raven chides his blackness.

(Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, Scene 3)

Earlier today, in a particularly paradoxical press conference — one in which Barack Obama really got down to brass tax — Obama said of Russian president Putin:

“He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

This for some reason recalled to me that straight-laced and model student, with the perfect military posture, whom we’ve all come to know so well:

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B O Doper (1)

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Obama’s Tacit Sanction of Dictatorial Islamists Regimes

Here’s another mind-bender I’d love to hear Obama supporters defend:

Egyptians in the millions [are] out on the street, trying to bring down an Islamist government, increasingly dictatorial, increasingly intolerant, arresting journalists and judges, trying to Islamicize the military and the people are saying no, and what does the president of the United States do? He takes a position of studied neutrality, says he is not supporting either side. And yet, as you point out in the Mubarak revolution, he obviously strongly took the side of the people. He demanded that Mubarak had to go, he was not neutral.

This reminds me of the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 when the same thing happened. Islamists, dictatorial government, the people out in the street, and they were shouting Obama, Obama, are you with us or against us. And he took a position that was essentially supportive of the regime, and the reason was he wanted to negotiate a nuclear deal which he thought he could do and he didn’t want instability.

That was a shameful episode. But there’s also idea of national interest. Mubarak was pro-American, he was an ally of ours, he helped us in all kinds of ways. Obama worked against him. Morsi represents a movement which is essentially deeply anti-American, and deeply anti-democratic, yet he is neutral on this.This is a shocking position for a president to take. (Charles Krauthammer, Special Report, July 1, 2013)


I would remind readers of something I wrote back in November of 2012:

Mohamed Morsi — first Islamist president in Egypt’s history and a member the Muslim Brotherhood which openly advocates violence against women much like the unspeakable deed we see in this photo — is supported and sanctioned by Barack Obama and his administration.

Barack Obama recently welcomed the election of the first Islamist president in Egypt’s history.

This is a man who during his campaign, a campaign the Obama administration openly supported, said: “The Koran is our Constitution, the prophet is our leader, jihad is our path, and death in the name of allah is our goal.”

This same man, Mohamed Morsi, belongs to an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood, which among other things explicitly pledges in its charter to “infiltrate western society and destroy it from within.”

This same man, to whom Barack Obama sent $450 million taxpayer dollars, also supports forced female circumcision, genital mutilation, and the absolute rejection of women’s rights.

If, therefore, you believe, as I do, in women’s rights, gay rights, and the inalienable rights of all human beings regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, please note that if you backed Barack Obama, you backed a man who backs a man who sanctions this. Because when the Obama administration says, as it recently did: “We look forward to working with President-elect Mohamed Morsi, and the government he forms” — they were not, I assure you, kidding (though in reality it sounds like a very sick joke indeed).





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Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Four Year Anniversary

Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was over two decades ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-four year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.





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Union That Supported ObamaCare Now Calls For Its Repeal

This is from the Washington Wire:

A labor union representing roofers is reversing course and calling for repeal of the federal health law, citing concerns the law will raise its cost for insuring members.

Organized labor was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but more recently has voiced concerns that the law could lead members to lose their existing health plans. The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is believed to be the first union to initially support the law and later call for its repeal.

The Union’s statement, which can be found here, in part reads:

United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International President Kinsey M. Robinson issued the following statement today calling for a repeal or complete reform of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA):

“Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms in office.

But regrettably, our concerns over certain provisions in the ACA have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored. In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the Act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer sponsored coverage could keep it.

In a perverse sort of way, it’s funny that people actually believed Barack Obama when he said “If you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Now the lie comes home to roost.

Unions, you got what your deserved.





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Of Easter, Eggs, Ovulation, Bunny Rabbits, And the Resurrection of Christ

[The following is a repost:]

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: Why do rabbits and eggs represent Easter, which also celebrates the resurrection of Christ?

— Peter

Dear Peter: Easter primarily represents the advent of springtime, just as Christ’s resurrection does. The Old-English word Eastre derives from an Anglo-Saxon Pagan goddess named Eostre, about whom very little is known. What we do know about her comes to us from the Benedictine monk Bede (672-735 A.D.), also sometimes referred to as the Father of English History.

In Bede’s On the Reckoning of Time, he mentions a goddess named Eostre, and he tells us that the Anglo-Saxons had at one time worshiped this goddess during the spring equinox.

Apart from Bede, no other reference to Eostre exists. Indeed, even in Bede’s time, she had long since faded away. The fact, however, that Eostre was worshiped during the spring equinox does suggest something significant.

Quoting the genius priest-poet Gerard Hopkins:

What is spring?
Growth in everything.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod and sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, “May Magnificat”)


As you of all people would know, Peter, rabbits and hares are notorious breeders, and no doubt you’re familiar with the saying “to fuck like bunnies.” This sedate and venerable expression comes about because lagomorphs mature sexually at very young ages. They are also capable of superfetation, which means they can conceive a second time while still pregnant, and thus they are able to give birth to two litters. This actually happens many times throughout the year, although spring seems to make these little girls and guys particularly crazy. The females are extraordinarily fertile, and that is eggsactly why they symbolize springtime.

Rabbits and hares represent breeding and birth. Eggs also have obvious fertility-birth-and-blood connotations, and for this reason, they have represented fertility and spring since the dawn of humankind.

Do rabbits produce eggs? No, they do not. The good lady Eostre did, however, once putatively save a freezing bird at the end of winter, by turning this bird into a hare, which hare because it had once been a bird could then lay eggs, whereas I can only suck them, as you can see.

Dying Easter eggs and the source of this eggsellent tradition is a mystery, though the Ancient Greeks did color eggs green (to symbolize new grass) and red (to symbolize blood).

Birth. Blood. Death. Winter. Resurrection. Rebirth. Spring. Life.

“There is nothing greater than life,” said Voltaire.

That is what Easter is about.

The early Christians understood this. So they kept many of the Pagan symbols of spring; they absorbed them, as it were, in part, perhaps, because these symbols are so primal and so beautiful.

It is, after all, a beautiful world we live in.

Happy Easter, Peter.





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Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail (Part 4): Whiskey

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Whiskey — or whisky, if you prefer — is a distilled spirit that’s usually made from corn, rye, barley, wheat, or, very often, a cross combination of some or all those.

Whiskey is almost always aged in wooden casks which almost always consist of charred white oak.

The word “whiskey” is an anglicized version of the Gaelic uisce beatha (in Scottish Gaelic: uisge beatha) which means “living water,” or “water of life.”

Irish whiskey, Scottish whiskey (i.e. scotch), Canadian whiskey, and American whiskey (i.e. bourbon) are by far the most popular whiskeys in the world. But these days virtually every country produces some sort of whiskey.

In bartending, whiskey is the new vodka. It has never been more popular.

So I made the following:








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Strident Gun-Control Advocate And Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein Thinks It’s ‘Legal To Hunt Humans’

What’s that, you say? No intelligent person would ever utter that?

Well, don’t watch this:





(Hat tip Doug Powers via Michelle Malkin)

“The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons,” Feinstein said. “The other very important part of this bill is to ban large capacity ammunition feeding devices — those that hold more than 10 rounds. We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines. Limiting magazine capacity is critical, because it is when a criminal, a drug dealer, a deranged individual has to pause to change magazines and reload that, the police or brave bystanders have the opportunity to take that individual down.” — Senator Dianne Feinstein, March 10, 2013

Draw your own conclusions.





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Kevin


Unknown



My name is Kevin. I’m Kevin Mathew Haas.
My last name does not rhyme with moss.
It does not rhyme with floss.
To say so makes me cross.
Many regard me as the motherfucking boss.
I enjoy a little of the sauce.
In fact, my last name — Haas —
rhymes with gauze.
(This should give you pause.)
It also rhymes with laws.
I, Kevin Mathew Haas,
liked The Wizard of Oz
but did not particularly care for Jaws,
which I saw when I was seven.
My name is Kevin.


Editors note: the preceding was a poem I wrote about my co-worker Kevin — the Bob Ross of bartending, the Meatloaf of mixology, the William Shakespeare of sauce-slinging, the Kenny Chesney of the craft cocktail.

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Love, And Be Silent (Happy Valentine’s Day!)

The man named Valentinus (which comes from the Latin valens, meaning “powerful, brave, valiant”) was a martyred Christian of ancient Rome, about whom virtually nothing is known.

His name does not appear in the earliest redaction of Christian martyrs (354 AD), and it was Pope Gelasius who first included Valentinus — or Saint Valentine, as Pope Gelasius canonized him — “among those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”

The origins of the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day are equally murky, and it’s not actually known for certain if the feast of that day is meant to celebrate one saint or several saints with that same name.

The link between Valentine’s Day and romantic-sexual love probably came about in a time now called the High Middle Ages (HMA), when courtly love and all its dog-and-pony-show rituals propagated like bunny rabbits.

The English word love is sourced in the Old High German (OHG) luba and the Gothic lub? and the Latin lub?re — all (like the archaic lief) meaning “pleasing,” “treasured,” “desirous,” “dear.” Even now, the German word liebling, directly related to lief, essentially means that same thing: “dear.”

The word agape, on the other hand, which is the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, and means “To esteem highly.”

Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.

According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”

It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”

The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”

Indeed, also to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.

In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.

Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”

Etymologically, this is all significant because later biblical translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity, so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using “love” and “charity” interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.

Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.

Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.

Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”

(It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.)

From a New Testament perspective, it is, I think, beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, I believe that if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can in my opinion reasonably deny that.

And yet (as I wrote, last Valentine’s Day) if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?

Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:

Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature… Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.

Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.

Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers this way:

According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.

But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.

Here are two different translation of what is probably the most famous codification of love:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4, King James).

And:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (1 Corinthians, New International ).

Yet in both instances this strikes me not so much as a definition but more as a manifestation — a by-product, a side-effect.

A side-effect of what?

Of happiness, and the verdict in your eyes when you look up at me.

CUPID by Spinerette:





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ObamaCare: The Resistance Endures

cannonMichael Cannon is Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies and an indefatigable crusader against socialized medicine. Recently, he wrote an excellent article concerning the continuing resistance against ObamaCare, the need to maintain that resistance, and the relative success of that resistance so far:

Former Romney adviser Avik Roy now advises conservatives “to accept the defeat of the movement to repeal Obamacare.” Conservatives should instead shift their energies to “the most desired conservative outcome of all: a fiscally sustainable, fully reformed set of health-care entitlements.”

National Review, that conservative icon that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” seems a strange venue for encouraging conservatives to accept defeat. Roy also has a curious understanding of conservatism’s goals, which as I recall have more to do with protecting freedom than with administering the entitlement state. But when Roy likened ongoing Obamacare resistance to Teruo Nakamura, “the last known holdout from the Imperial Japanese Army, [who] finally surrendered” on a Pacific island some 30 years after his team lost World War II, I nearly spat out my sushi.

Perhaps I can bring my friend around to the view held by most Obamacare opponents:This thing is still vulnerable. And even if we fail to stop it, trying to stop it will do more to protect liberty and improve social welfare than a strategy of accepting, legitimizing, and “redeeming” it.

After three years, Obamacare remains unpopular. Both the raw numbers and the intensity favor its opponents. Last month, for the first time ever, Gallup found that a majority of Americans oppose a government guarantee of health insurance for all. The ongoing resistance to Obamacare is a grassroots phenomenon. It has probably intensified since the election, as many disappointed voters (and non-voters) have sought an outlet for their frustrations.

Resistance will grow later this year as a result of “sticker shock” at Obamacare’s “startling rate increases” of 30 to 40 percent in the individual market and 100 percent (!) for young adults.

Officials in nearly half the states have joined the resistance thus far, by declining to establish the health-insurance “exchanges” essential to the law and/or to implement its costly Medicaid expansion. If states hold the line, then insurers, hospitals, and such — who were counting on those subsidies to offset Obamacare’s taxes and Medicare cuts — will join the chorus demanding that Congress reopen the issue.

The Obama administration probably won’t be able to get exchanges up and running by October in those two dozen states. A Xerox official who makes money implementing those exchanges for states said of the logistical task HHS faces, “These are systems that typically take two or three years to build. The last time I looked at the calendar, that’s not what we’re working with.”

Obamacare still faces a barrage of lawsuits. Those challenging the contraceptives mandate and the Independent Payment Advisory Board won’t kill the law. But they might improve it. Either way, they will keep its negatives high. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s challenge to the individual mandate could take down the entire statute. Kaiser Health News says Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt’s lawsuit is “by far the broadest and potentially most damaging of the legal challenges” related to Obamacare, and “even some health law supporters concede [it] seems correct as a literal reading of the most relevant provisions.” If Oklahoma prevails, “the whole structure [of] the health care reform law starts to fall apart.” Look how panicked the law’s supporters are. Tell me again why now is the time to “accept defeat”?

Continuing to insist on repeal can also help to avoid the looming debt crisis. Congress desperately needs to cut spending. The easiest stuff to cut is (a) unpopular spending that (b) hasn’t started yet and therefore isn’t protected by the kind of organized constituencies that protect existing spending. Obamacare fits both criteria. Since the administration won’t be able to implement it on time anyway, Congress should enact a two-year delay of its new entitlement spending. That would be a huge victory and reduce federal deficits by $160 billion. Opponents are more likely to get that delay if they keep demanding full repeal.

Following Roy’s advice would prevent opponents from capitalizing on any of these opportunities. Obamacare’s entitlement spending will begin flowing in 2014, and we will never stop it.

Fortunately, as I travel the country speaking about this law, I find that Obamacare opponents are solidly in the Frederick Douglass camp: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

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