The Disease of 2017

       There is a very real problem in America today.  People are starting to mistake feeling for thinking, and it is a part of a controversy burning up the internet today.  There was some millennial science fiction writer who created an analogy about abortion that most liberals are treating like the best philosophical argument ever.  It goes like this:  you have several hundred fertilized embryos, as you would in a fertility clinic, and one baby in a burning building.  You can only save the embryos or the baby.  The conclusion is that obviously you would save the baby, ergo, the embryos aren't human;  thus, no one really thinks life begins at conception.
       There are several things wrong with this analogy.  First, the people who think life begins at conception aren't also people who think it's fine to create frozen embryos by the hundred.  Being Halloween, Estase would refer the reader to the movie or book Frankenstein.  Second, it's an artificial dichotomy when you suggest that only the embryos or the baby can be saved.  Logically speaking, the argument would be just as confusing if one substituted an eighty-nine year old man for the embryos;  or a cancer patient for the embryos;  or a convicted murderer for the embryos.  The problem is that all these substitutes for the embryos are obviously human--all the same, you could make perfectly reasonable arguments for why they shouldn't be saved in favor of the baby.  So this argument basically comes down to emotion.  A person feels a baby can feel pain.  A person feels a baby counts as a human being.  Any philosopher who evaluates arguments on feelings alone should move to a field like womens' studies.
       There is a lesson learned from this other than that science fiction writers don't make good philosophers.  If this gentleman was the only person who mistook feeling for thinking, we would have an entirely different world.   Contemporary political arguments have the unerring tendency to be based on emotion, and not logic.  The common ingredient for Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Alt-Right is anger.  Anger is not conducive to compromise.  Anger is not conducive to discussion.  Anger is not helpful in reaching mutually beneficial arrangements.  Estase thinks every presidential election from 2008 on was an emotive decision.  Slogans like "Hope and Change" and "Make America Great Again" are emotional appeals, not logical ones.  It is very discouraging that people have spent the last week debating whether or not they feel embryos are people.  No better example exists of how much America feels the lack of a philosophical spirit in its public life.

Selective Usage of Aristotle

       In its decision in Roe v. Wade, the Court of King's Bench cited Aristotle's approval of abortion in support of abortion on demand.  What the proper interpretation of Aristotle is has been cause for the spilling of oceans of ink.  (Averroes versus Avicenna being just a small part of that controversy.)  It is a sign of how little the black-letter Constitution counts for in the deliberations of King's Bench when the Praetors start invoking 3,000 year-old philosophy in their opinions.  Just to show how phony and selective the Court of King's Bench's interest in Aristotle is, will be demonstrated by this quote occurring a few paragraphs after the passage on abortion.

"The Directors of Education, as they are termed, should be careful what tales or stories the children hear, for the sports of children are designed to prepare the way for the business of later life, and should be for the most part imitations of the occupations which they will hereafter pursue in earnest.  Those are wrong who (like Plato) in the Laws attempt to check the loud crying and screaming of children, for these contribute towards their growth, and, in a manner, exercise their bodies. . . .For until they are seven years old they must live at home;  and therefore, even at this early age, all that is mean and low should be banished from their sight and hearing. . . .A freeman who is found saying or doing what is forbidden, if he be too young as yet to have the privilege of a place at the public table, should be disgraced and beaten, and an elder person degraded as his slavish conduct deserves.  And since we do not allow improper language, clearly we should also banish pictures or tales which are indecent. . . .And therefore youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate."  Aristotle Politics Book VII 1336-1337.

So, obviously, if King's Bench legalized abortion because Aristotle thought it best, King's Bench should also censor speech, music, and pornography, because Aristotle favored that too!

Moloch

The Death Cult

       Now that it has come to light that not only does Planned Parenthood sell abortions, they sell body parts, the morally deficient among us are either ignoring the revelations or making banal excuses for the eugenic organization.
       Has Citizen Kane (i.e.--Donald Trump), who we are all told is so conservative, so much as mentioned this disgusting practice?  In spite of the fraud's non-position on harvesting fetal body parts, fellow reality-show star Sarah Palin calls him a "hero."  Trump is a hero for pandering to those who are hysterical about illegal immigrants?
       Bowling-for-abortion CNN host Sally Kohn complains that these complaints about the Margaret Sanger cult are the result of "patriarchy" and "white supremacy."   Let me get this straight:  75% of black pregnancies end in abortion, but those who object to this statistic are white supremacists?  I know that Atlantic magazine thinks that pro-lifers are racist, but it still beggars my mind how reducing the black population is pro-black.  Is it simply that racism is the favorite cri de coeur of CNN, or does Sally Kohn actually believe such an outrageous claim?  It is often hard to discern, in this age of sound bites and Twitter accounts, whether people are in earnest when they say things, or whether they simply need attention from an easily distracted public.
       It was something of a scandal a few years ago when a mortician and a dentist ran a scam selling bone and tissue from dead bodies for use in plastic surgery.  At least the victims of that scam were already dead.  Profiting from death not once, but twice, looks morally abominable to those with a sense for such things.  Sally Kohn just sees feminism and non-racism.

Making It Personal

        Many northern abolitionists were reluctantly willing to cooperate with the United States government that allowed southern states to practice slavery.  That is, before the Fugitive Slave Act came along in the 1850s, and meant that even those for whom slavery was an obnoxious evil, returning escaped slaves to their owners was now a legal necessity.  In other words, it was then a legal duty to assist slavery.
       Similarly, many pro-lifers had been living an uneasy truce with the U.S. government between 1973 and the present, assisted by the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited Medicaid from funding abortion.  These people were personally uninvolved in abortion, and were thus individually blameless from the legalization of abortion.  The HHS mandate of Obamacare has changed this.  And, in the same way the Fugitive Slave Act made abolitionists criminals if they refused to return slaves, Obamacare makes pro-lifers finance abortion.  Could slavery have existed many more decades had the Fugitive Slave Act not required people to violate their consciences?  Perhaps it might have.  But one thing is certain.  Either Obamacare will smear the blood on everyones' hands, and thus make everyone an accomplice to abortion, or it will serve to galvanize opposition to a practice that, had this step not been taken, may have existed without the same revulsion.  Either the liberals win, and everybody accepts abortion and infanticide, or we enter an even more acrimonious chapter in the culture war.

The New Church

       Dr. Janet Smith has come up with an argument about how the Archdiocese of New York did nothing wrong by covering abortion and contraception in its contract with health workers.  Estase won't bother with reading it.  Why?  Because Dr. Smith is engaging in a high level casuistry to justify cooperation with evil.  And the bizarre thing is that it is the same kind of cooperation with evil that the Catholic bishops have been protesting against in terms of the HHS mandate of Obamacare for a year!  Cardinal Dolan (Oh Blah Blah's good friend, who likes to hang out with the President and have dinner with him, and who refuses to endorse refusing communion to pro-abortion politicians, as does Cardinal Wuerl of Washington) has vitiated the argument that the Church cannot fund abortion and contraception, because he already has funded abortion and contraception.  So what has all this huffing and puffing about not complying with the HHS mandate been about?  The Catholic church can pay for abortion and contraception in some cases, but not others? 

       When Jesus made the analogy of giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, the meaning was (in my view) that money can be given to the government, but that's all government can expect from us.  The government doesn't own us.  The government doesn't control our will, our intellect, our soul.    This is why the Catholic Church once thought it should be in the health care business in the first place.  Once, the Catholic Church saw fostering human life as a part of its ministry.  The behavior of Catholic bishops today is quite different.  Now, handing out free stuff to the poor is the only criterion.  This is why Sister Carol Keegan sees nothing wrong with fostering Obamacare even as it will run her Scranton hospitals out of business.  All that's important is that people get free health care.  It matters not a bit if formerly Catholic hospitals now provide abortions.  It matters not a bit if Catholic hospitals offer contraception and abortion to their employees in New York.  What does the revelations about New York demonstrate?  One, Catholic health care is dead.  Nowhere in America does a Catholic hospital actually act according to Catholic morality, or if it does, Estase hasn't heard where.  Second, the bishops have been complaining that they can't do something that the Archbishop of New York has already agreed to.  And the leading Catholic ethicist has come up with a moral justification!  So does the government have the right to expect more than money from us?  If the Church is in the process of ceding its role in health care to the government, is the government the new Church? 

Ural I've Got Tonight

        Estase (as long-term readers recollect) works in a restaurant.  Today he overheard an elderly couple discussing their big plans for the afternoon-- watching closing arguments in the Jodi Arias trial.  Estase felt like saying that the Kermit Gosnell trial is more important.  A doctor runs an abortion clinic/live infant murder center that makes a Vincent Price movie look tame and unoffensive.  Meanwhile, what are Americans encouraged by CNN/Headline News to obsess over?  Some bimbo who offed her husband.  And pro-abort Dr. Drew Pinsky is on hand to analyze the day's events!  Reminds me of "The Wizard of Oz."  "Don't look at the man behind the curtain."   Estase is unsure whether to believe Google Blogger stats which indicate Russia is where most of my readers originate.

       Kudos to Murphysboro Representative Mike Bost, who, unlike many Republicans, actually showed he has a pair of testicles when he exploded on the floor of the General Assembly when Chicago Democrats eviscerated the Concealed Carry Bill under consideration.  The Dems made an amendment that would have given the county sheriffs and state police veto power over concealed carries, a move that makes the bill meaningless.  The juxtoposition with the Plan B abortifacient being made available (without parental permission) to 15 year old girls shows the hypocrisy.  Make it easy to abort a embryo, but give your local sheriff the option to deny your gun rights (which they always will).  The president says "God bless you" to the godless zealots of Moloch known as Planned Parenthood.

Satanic Abortion Murder

          The funeral of Pearl Bryan was held at Greencastle, Ind., and the services were spoken over a headless corpse.  While the relatives were in the vault there was a meeting of the young and middle-aged men of the city, and it was said later that some twenty-five or thirty of these pledged themselves to each other to avenge the girl's death if the murderers were not hanged by the law.  The organization thus formed is said to be regarded simply as the nucleus of a larger one which will take the law into its own hands if Scott Jackson, Alonzo Walling and Wm. Wood escape the extreme penalty in the Cincinatti courts.
       The morning of Saturday, Feb. 1 {1896} there was found at Fort Thomas, Ky., the headless corpse of a young woman.  For a time, identification was impossible.  But inquiry was being made for Pearl Bryan, a Greencastle girl, who had left her home with the avowed purpose of visiting a friend at Indianapolis.  She was accompanied to the train by Wm. Wood, son of a Methodist minister, and went to Indianapolis, stopping there only between trains.  She then went on to Cincinatti.  Nothing was thought of her temporary absence from home;  but when the time came for her return, and she came not, the family began to wonder.  Then came the account of finding the headless body of a woman near Cincinatti, and the announcement that the corpse wore shoes that had been purchased from Louis & Hays, of Greencastle.  After that identification was quick and certain, and investigation led to the arrest of the three men named.  Jackson and Walling were students at the Ohio Dental College at Cincinatti.  They and Wood are said to have been intimate with the girl.  But a maze of contradictory confessions by all of them has made impossible the fixing of direct responsibility:  and thus confusion is complicated by the assertion of Lulu May Hollingsworth, of Indianapolis, a friend of Pearl's.
       In the series of confessions Jackson says Walling carried the woman's head in a valise to the Covington suspension bridge, and he believes Walling threw it into the river, or he may have taken it to his home at Hamilton and thrown it from the Miami bridge at that place.  Jackson says he did not go with Walling on the trips.  On the contrary Walling says Jackson buried the head in a sandbar in the Ohio river opposite Dayton, Ky., or dropped it in the sewer on Richmond street, Cincinatti.  Each affirms the belief that the other administered a fatal drug to produce a criminal operation, and neither confesses knowledge of time or place of decapitation of the corpse.  Each charges young Wood, of Greencastle, with responsibility for the girl's condition, and Jackson says he was the medium through whom Wood was to remit $50 to Walling for performing the operation.  On the other hand, young Wood denies his responsibility, but admits knowledge of the girl's predicament, because Jackson, who was responsible for it, told him of it.  He says the only part he took in the matter was to advise Pearl to undergo an operation.
       To make the matter more unintelligible, Lulu May Hollingsworth, of Indianapolis, who was arrested, suspected of complicity in the murder, said:  "I shall be able to clear Jackson.  He is responsible for Miss Bryan's condition, but he was not responsible for her death.  I don't think, either, that Wood had anything to do with this case.  I became interested in the girl because I had once known her and chanced to meet her at the Union station.  She told me what had happened, and said Jackson was to blame.  When I told her what drugs to get she said. . . and die there and then so as to throw suspicion upon Jackson and get him into difficulty." 
       Miss Hollingsworth afterward said she administered the fatal drugs at the request of Miss Bryan.  The police discredit this.  Miss Hollingsworth is regarded as a notoriety seeker.  She once figured in an elopement from Terre Haute.
        Cincinatti police found Jackson's bloody coat in a sewer. Jackson claims that Walling wore his clothing on the night of the murder.

The Conservative Case for Black History Month

I just saw a conservative quidnunc argue against the whole idea of Black History Month as being anti-American.  While such tendencies are always to be guarded against, the fact of the matter is that the Republican Party was the party of black people until FDR stole them away.  Witness Governor Charles Deneen, who was one of the few people who stood up for black people in the mess that was the 1908 Springfield Race War.  One may read "Something So Horrible" by Carole Merritt at www.alplm.org/events/aa_history/Race_Riot_Catalog_2008.pdf.  The fact of the matter is that white Americans do have a history to answer to, and as one who holds up the mantle of Charles Sumner, Estase is hardly going to pretend that black people have not been abused.  Conservatives should celebrate Black History Month, proud that it has often been Republicans who stood up for blacks.

Update:  Estase recommends www.nationalblackprolifeunion.com for blacks who recognize the sanctity of human life.

Tu Quoque

Several caveats must be stated aforehand with regards to this story.  One, Estase's partner first heard this story on CNN, hardly the friend of Catholicism.  Two, a Google search led to a write up on the athiest channel of Patheos by Hemant Mehta, who is apparently still burned up by the Indian lady who died in Ireland due to the pro-life laws there.  With these caveats stated, the case of the Scranton hospitals run by Sister Keenan and the Catholic Health Association show that Catholic hospitals are often run with scant regard to Catholic human life ethics.

       The facts are supposedly as follows.  Lori Stodghill, a third trimester mother brought to St. Thomas More Hospital in Colorado, died of a heart attack, and her doctor was responsible for the death of the twins Stodghill carried because he failed to perform a caesarian section.  The wrongful death lawsuit filed by Mr. Stodghill was argued against by the hospital's parent company, Catholic Health Initiatives, on the grounds that fetuses are not people, a clear disavowal of everything Catholics believe about pregnancy.  While many would say this is merely legal cynicism, the obvious ramification is that Catholic Health Initiatives has opened the door for pro-aborts to claim (as they are already doing) that Catholics do not really believe that fetuses are people.  Estase will wait for further coverage of this story, but is not sanguine that the Colorado case will do anything but hurt the pro-life position of the Church, and will only bolster the pro-abort argument that conscience rights for Catholics are not warranted.

Estase has been thinking about the 1908 Springfield Race War again. A might-read is James Krohe's Summer of Rage. The horrible thing about this event is the impunity with which it met in the courtroom, as none of the perpetrators were convicted.  Such will probably also be the case with New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who petasus-tip to Riehl World View, engages in sex tourism for underage girls in the Dominican Republic.  I am sure that CNN, in between coverage of The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, will make no mention of this scandal.  Incidentally, Estase is starting to think conspiratorially.  Most Congressmen are Republican right now.  But on C-SPAN the other day, it turned out that both Aurora, Colorado and Sandy Hook, Connecticut are both served by Democratic Congressmen.  Hmmm. . . almost like whoever planned these attacks did so with an eye to having gun-control friendly Congresswomen speak on behalf of the already-named bill (which, if the truth be told, was probably already written and on the shelf!).

Update:  As of February 4th, LifeNews.com reports that after consultation with three Colorado bishops, Catholic Health Initiatives has decided not to use the argument that fetuses are not persons.  This is good news, but one wonders why it took the intervention of the episcopate to convince Catholic Health Initiatives not to make this utterly amoral argument.

Bullying the Church

Liberal Canadian education minister Laurel Broten announces that Catholic schools may not teach abortion is wrong without violating anti-bullying Bill 13.  Broten claims abortion is a settled issue, and claims that opposing abortion is a form of misogyny.  Estase thinks it should only be about ten years before it becomes illegal to oppose abortion in the United States.

Update:  Facebook suspends comedianne Victoria Jackson for posting a grisly abortion photo.  This brings Estase back to a point he has made before.  Why is it OK for ASPCA to use footage of abused animals to raise money, but the same television networks that make it possible for ASPCA to use photos of sick and mutilated animals would NEVER, NEVER allow a pro-life advertisment to use pictures of mutilated fetuses.  Why the double standard?  Also, Robert Spencer's engagement to speak at a Catholic college canned by local Bishop of Worcester McManus at behest of Boston Globe's Lisa Wangness.  Apparently, all one needs to do to get a Catholic bishop to cave is make a few phone calls accusing some one of Islamophobia.  When will the Saudis allow a Catholic Church to be built there? Or any other Muslim country, for that matter?

Defoe, Gay, and Snoop Dogg

Having read a internet news story about how Snoop Dogg has endorsed Obama, Estase will, as usual, relate it back to the eighteenth century.  John Gay's The Beggar's Opera is the origin of what may be called hip hop Whiggery, along with that remarkable Daniel Defoe novel Moll Flanders.  These two works are a celebration of criminality, where the thieving Moll Flanders (we never learn her actual name) describes her life of thievery.  The Beggar's Opera celebrates a whole society on the take, from the simply corrupt lawyer to the king of the thieves, Bob Bluff (Walpole).  Are these works designed to turn morality inside out?  Or is the point simply that people who cannot profit in legitimate ways will find other ways to profit?  Estase tends to believe the second explanation, particularly in the case of his fave Daniel Defoe, champion of the tradesman.  Unlike Jonathan Swift, who held shopkeepers and tradesmen in low esteem, Defoe exalted this new commercial middle class.  So when Defoe explored the criminal underbelly of Britain, it was perhaps with an eye towards what might happen when the legitimate commerce of a nation becomes impossible.

On a totally unrelated note, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has sent out a threatening note discouraging churches from participation in the 2012 election, which would have absolutely nothing to do with the current president's obsession with gay marriage and abortion.  The letter promises that any church that involves itself with politics will lose non-profit status with the IRS.

Atlantic:"Pro-Lifers Racist"

Tip of the petasus to Father Z of What Does the Prayer Really Say.  Brian Fung of Atlantic Magazine says that the pro-life movement is aimed at harming poor minorities.  Whereas Brian Fung of Atlantic thinks killing the offspring of poor minorities is helping them.  Reminds Estase (as most things do) of Eighteenth Century England.  In his Importance of the Guardian Considered, Tory firebrand and general asshole Jonathan Swift attacked a letter written by Richard Steele.  Steele's crime?  By suggesting that the Harley/Bolingbroke ministry should demolish the port of Dunkirk (which the ministry Swift wrote on behalf of actually wanted to do anyway), Steele was ordering about Queen Anne.  Make sense?  No, me neither.  And this is why Fung's argument is dung.  Just as how Swift was berating someone for insulting the Queen just because they advocated a policy, Fung is implying race animosity based on a policy position.  The only difference is that two hundred years after his death, Jonathan Swift is recognized as a master literary figure and Brian Fung, well, he just writes for a liberal magazine.

Update:  In reviewing election results on MSNBC, Nancy Giles comes to the same erroneous conclusion as Brian Fung.  Giles theorizes that pro-lifers want "to build up the white race," neglecting the fact that it is by and large future black and hispanic voters whom abortion eliminates.

Update:  An education weenie theorizes that the term "PB&J Sandwich" is racist because, get this, non-English speakers don't use the term sandwich to refer to materials between bread.  In a related vein of idiocy, Shiitetown Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is under attack by. . . Salon.com?  Yes, oddly enough, now the salonistas consider the President's former attack dog to be a terrible right-winger for opposing the almighty teacher's unions by asking for, gasp, accountablity for the best paid teachers in America.  By the way, it isn't Chicagoans who will pay the bill for the nonfunctional Mercedes-Benz that is the Chicago Public Schools, it is we benighted downstate Illinoisans who will really subsidize this nonsense.  But then again, an Accuracy in Media story by Mary Grabar details how a friend of Bill Ayers, bomber-educator, named Linda Darling-Hammond is instituting, with the support of the Obama Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, a new national education standard called Common Core.  Contrary to what its name suggests, Common Core is intended to replace the literary tradition with popular culture, replace the founding documents with radical texts, and in general indoctrinate the students of America with Oh Blah Blah's social values.  So perhaps the teacher's unions are unaware of what their mayor really intends for their job to be--Democratic party recruiters.

Friendly Fire, Part Two

Toure (don't you love people with only one name) has opined that Herman Cain making advances on a blond should be scary.  Yeah, if you're the Grand Wizard and you live in Missisippi.  What kind of a brother (oh yeah, the kind with one name!) brings up nasty racial and racist stereotypes?  Need I say, friendly fire?  Hat tip Adrienne's Corner.  Father Zuhlsdorf has another example--John Courtney Murray and Robert Drinan, both Jesuit priests and intellectuals, confabed with the Kennedys in 1964 to advise them on how to reconcile their opportunistic pro-choice positions with their ostensible Catholicism.

Illinois' Entirely Wonderful Governor

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn gives an award to a woman who attacked the pro-life Republican opponent Bill Brady in the 2010 race.  The only hitch is it is an award for the pro-abortion Personal PAC.  This is another sign that Illinois will continue its official hostility to all opposed to abortion, a trend that kicked into overdrive when previous Governor Rod Blagojevich made an executive order that all pharmacists be required to dispense abortion drugs, conscience claims notwithstanding.  Cardinal George and the bishops of Illinois have registered their complaints, which count for very little in Illinois.

Is Abortion a Tenth or Fourteenth Amendment Issue?

Lisa Graas blogs today about Rick Santorum being better than Rick Perry, which she is right about, although the constitutional argument she uses may not be right.

Lisa says that Rick Perry says that states have the right to make abortion legal or illegal, whereas she says that the Fourteenth Amendment trumps the Tenth Amendment.  But if everyone agreed that unborn children were covered under the Fourteenth Amendment, there never would have been a Roe v. Wade or legalized abortion in the first place.  Is abortion killing?  Of course it is.  But the reason why abortion is a Tenth Amendment issue is because you will never get states like New York, Illinois, or California to sign on to the theory that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the unborn.  This idea, the idea of a constitutional amendment that will protect the unborn, is a political impossibility.  It can never happen.

Wouldn't it be much better for the future of the pro-life movement, if the Supreme Court were to respect Luther v. Borden, and invoke the political questions doctrine (which is what it should have done instead of Roe v. Wade), and let at least the most conservative states (Montana, the Dakotas, Tennessee) make abortion illegal?  That way, it would at least be in the public mind that not everybody condoned legal abortion, some states deigning to outlaw it, and no one could any longer use the fallacious argument of "If abortion were really immoral, it wouldn't be legal in all 50 states?"  I don't think Lisa Graas is more pro-life than I am;  what Estase says is that if it is all or nothing--nothing is what you will get.

BBC Endorses Comic Who Calls Palin's Kid "Retard"

Hat tip to Biased BBC.

The BBC recommended a film clip of a Doug Stanhope (Who apparently isn't as cool as James Stanhope, the eighteenth century Whig), who refers to Sarah Palin's vagina as a "retard-launcher," which obviously means that the BBC endorses abortion, as that's the only way Trig wouldn't have been born with Down's Syndrome.  It is good to know where the BBC stands.

Michele Bachmann and the Question of Antichrist

It is very amusing to see the same left-wingers who mocked conservatives by questioning how many of them believed Barack Obama was the Antichrist (Fu*king Nascar retards:  there's no such thing!) bringing up Michele Bachmann's childhood Lutheranism.  They believe the Pope's the Antichrist, after all! 

Pitiful, isn't it?  The press thinks they can hoodwink pro-lifers into not voting for Bachmann by pointing out Lutherans don't like the pope.  Neither do the neo-Marxist press, who, unlike Bachmann, think that abortion is terrific, controls overpopulation, and is fun to blog about.

And if you think I'm being insulting to developmentally disabled people or racing fans, that little gem above was what Eric Alterman called those of us who believe that the non-Fox media only lets one side present its case.  The same goes about blogging abortions:  a liberal did that too.

Abortion:  the big liberal issue since the days of J.S. Mill (who would have approved of it had he been consulted).

Update:  As of May 29, 2013, Michele Bachmann announces she will not run for reelection.  Ms. Bachmann still has apparently not resolved the many disputes about unpaid bills from her unsuccessful presidential run, and continues to be the subject of liberal hatred from her work against Rep. Keith Ellison and Huma Abadin.

Ramen Noodles--Worse Than Death

The Other McCain reports that Rep.  Gwen Moore of Wisconsin has said that the horrible alternative to Planned Parenthood is, drum roll and ominous music, eating Ramen noodles because of poverty. 

I intend to spend more time on epistemology in the coming weeks, not because Estase has to, but because the current political scene is becoming so dark and unreasonable that philosophy seems better for one's mental health.  I don't know what to make of a world where people can actually argue that dismembering fetuses is better than eating ramen noodles.  I don't know what to make of a world where a left winger with a gun becomes a reason for villifying right wingers.  Estase does not want to sink into the habit of thinking that politics is everything, or is a justification for being hateful. 

Real Life Hannibal Lectors

Hat tip to Father Zuhlsdorf, from whom the following comes.  This creature is polluting the internet with his evil, and ask yourself if this pro-abort doesn't sound like a serial killer.

First, never quote Mother Theresa at me--she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to recieve the accolades of the gullible.  I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.  Second, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I'm a biologist. I've guillotined rats.  I've held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors.  I've used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog.  I've opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I've been elbow deep in blood, I've split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle.  I've extracted the brains of mice. . . with a pair of pliars.  I've scooped brains out of buckets, I've counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.  You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures?  I look at them unflinchingly and see meat.  And meat does not frighten me.--PZ Myers

Well, I think that if Dr. Gosdell ever reopens his abortion mill in Philadelphia, PZ Myers would be more than willing to help him collect more baby feet.  "When your daughter is lying on the slab, Senator, what part of you will feel pain?"  Hannibal Lector has nothing on PZ Myers.