Africa’s pushback against war with Russia provides some oscillation in the faulty circuit of American hegemony ~ilana

While offering meek opposition to the Ukraine project, the ostensibly “sane” wing of the GOP is ready with an alternative war: China. The base seems on board with the batty buildup in American belligerence toward China. I am, however, buoyed by Africa’s resistance to US foreign-policy diktats, the direction taken by African leaders with Putin, to be precise.

“Uganda will not succumb to pressure from former colonizers in the West to turn against Russia,” stated the Ugandan foreign minister, “as longstanding bilateral relations with Moscow are too important.”

The clownish “colonizer” riff aside, African leaders’ sentiments pertaining to the Russia-Ukraine, American-courted quagmire are apt: America has “cancelled countries, and killed the ancient, civilizing concept of neutrality.” That Africa, but not Europe, is demanding the freedom to choose its alliances is commendable.

Africa’s pushback against war with Russia provides some oscillation in the faulty circuit of American hegemony.

Skepticism is duly in order—“Laughing Out Loud” emojis, rather—when the FBI, apparatus of an “Empire of Lies,” embraces the intentional-leak theory with respect to COVID’s origins.

As it happens, “FBI Director Christopher Wray,” reports the BBC News, “has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.” You don’t say. That settles it, now, doesn’t it? Well, no, it doesn’t. Not with the FBI’s lousy track record for veracity, neutrality and reliability.

Coming from the FBI, the intentional-leak theory seems rich—certainly as “intuitive” as Russia blowing up “the Nord Stream pipelines, also some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.” By no coincidence, the FBI is currently running interference in a kinetic war with Russia and in a ramp-up to confrontation with China. (Leaks in biosafety level-4 laboratories have occurred both in the USA and in China.)

So, who gave COVID to the world? The bat-eating, Chinese people thus gifted the world. The plague-delivery pedigree of the Chinese is solid. Courtesy of the Chinese, the West got the H2N2 virus in 1957 and the H3N2 virus in 1968. Granted, the Chinese viral supply chain was broken with H1N1 flu; it came from Mexico. But, with the bird flu, SARS and SARS-Cov-2, the Chinese had fully reestablished their conventional disease-delivery credentials.

As conservatives tell it, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for COVID, rather than the many millions of Chinese, who capture, torture—boil alive—and consume wild animals in ways that beggar belief.

Going by such COVID culpability theories, the steady stream of “China plagues” has had nothing to do with the noble Chinese people, who were just hanging—being the freedom-loving, civilized sorts they are; going about the business of making the world a better place—when, lo and behold, their scheming, communistic government sprung the COVID on them—and the world.

The clincher: If we know anything about the Chinese it is that, unlike the Americans, they do tend to act in the national interest. Covid was, very plainly, not in the national interest.

Jane Goodall, a wise woman, is not the only scientist who has warned one and all against the brutal, barbaric manner in which animals, wild and domestic, East and West, are being husbanded, creating the conditions and the opportunities for viruses to jump from animals across the species barrier to humans.

To me, the fact that the little Covid RNA strand has progressed quite conventionally from virulent to harmless further supports the supposition that SARS-Cov-2 has not been humanly engineered to resist such biologically predicted evolution.

Predictably, the Left chose to forsake animals to the tortures of the Chinese wet market, rather than campaign to close these. And no, Tucker Carlson, wet markets are not only for fish, as the host asserted in the first week of March of 2023. China’s wet markets, set up by immigrants in the US, too, are hell on earth for animals; places where mammals and feathered friends are tied up, stacked in cages and slaughtered on the spot for “freshness.”

“China plagues” was Donald Trump’s delicious coinage. Trump at CPUKE 2023 promised he’d stop the war in Ukraine, this, as he voiced a decided lack of neutrality in the conflict, even a vested interest in the outcomes for the one side. Mr. Trump continues to offer the same purely fiscal, utilitarian line on NATO, which is an excrescence of US foreign policy and has been instrumental in the latest war: less funding.

Trump also asserted that he never started wars. Well, he was certainly active in Niger, and it only took tears from Ivanka to drop a daisy cutter on Assad, who is an Alawite and friend to the Christians of Syria. Houseboy Jared was likewise overjoyed at Trump’s backing for Riyadh.

As to the Saudi’s Sunni-against-Shia religious war in Yemen, a “U.S.-backed, Saudi-led endeavor: No tears were shed over Yemeni babies dying of starvation due to US-aided blockades of that country’s ports by Saudi Arabia.

ALL THIS AND MORE is discussed on the latest HARD TRUTH PODCAST, “Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords,” https://rumble.com/v2c2npk-oh-what-wonderful-wars.html, with David Vance and your columnist. WATCH. We appreciate your SUBSCRIBE.

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 9
Unz Review, March 9
The New American, March 10

* Image: With thanks to Wet-Markets-Courtesy-Jo-Anne-McArthur-1024×680

The post Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

It cannot be denied that Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory partook in the decision to support the unchecked majority rule of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, my homeland.

Like her Majesty at the time, most politicians and public intellectuals thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Yet any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a hand-bagging.

The Iron Lady had ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to “living in cloud-cuckoo land.” (Into The Cannibal’s Post: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. 147.)

But what do you know? Queen Elizabeth did just that! Over Mrs. Thatcher’s objections, in 1987 the queen had bullied Prime Minister Thatcher to sanction South Africa.

And in 1979, noted British paleolibertarian Sean Gabb, the queen also muscled Mrs. Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to another bunch of white-hating black Marxists.

Most disquieting to decency: Although search engines are energetically scrubbing this fact from the Internet—the Queen had knighted Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was chief warlord of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia (may that country rest in peace).

To quote Into the Cannibal’s Pot, the book aforementioned:

“By the time the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1994)—and given honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh (1984), Massachusetts (1986), and Michigan (1990)—he had already done his “best” work: slaughtering some 20,000 innocent Ndebele in Matabeleland (1983). Western conventional wisdom was no wiser. (And the United Nations responded invariably by … condemning Israel.)” P. 134.

Sidebar:

Mugabe was nothing if not consistent in his contempt for all life.

Question: What do you call a “person” who butchers and barbeques baby elephant?

Answer: A motherf–ker. Lowbrow Robert Mugabe, as Foreign Policy magazine had reported in 2015, “celebrated his 91st birthday followed by a lavish party with an exotic menu, reportedly including barbequed baby elephant.”

Is it any wonder Dr. Gabb took a different measure of her Majesty in 2012, dubbing her “Elizabeth the Useless“? Gabb’s “Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp” unfurls a list of her Majesty’s acts of constitutional omission, if not unconstitutional commission.

“Although the Queen is without executive function,” argues Gabb, “she never protested the theft of our ancestral rights. It was her duty to resist that theft, and to resist without regard for the outcome – and it was in her power to resist without bringing on her head any of the penalties. At no time in the past [seventy] years, has she raised a finger in public, or, it is probably the case, in private, to slow the destruction of an order of things she swore in the name of God to protect. … she has done nothing to sustain that identity in any meaningful sense.”

By Dr. Gab’s telling, the queen could have also vetoed any parliamentary bill she disliked – and her veto could not have been overridden by any weighted majority vote of Parliament. As could she have protested that her subjects were lied into the European Union. She didn’t:

“The Queen has not sustained our national identity. … she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it.”

And:

“The Queen should have resisted the Offensive Weapons Bill and the Firearms Bill, that effectively abolished our right to keep and bear arms for defence. She should have resisted the Bills that abolished most civil juries and that allowed majority verdicts in criminal trials.”

“She should have resisted the numerous private agreements that made our country into an American satrapy. She should have insisted, every time she met her prime minister, on keeping the spirit of our old Constitution….”

That the queen had enormous moral and political sway is incontrovertible. Observe the impact of her passing on members of the British commonwealth and beyond.

The role of the monarch in England’s constitutional monarchy demands that, “Once the politicians make themselves, as a class, irremovable, and once they begin to abolish the rights of the people, it is the duty of the Monarch to step in and rebalance the Constitution. It is then that she must resume her legal powers and exercise them of her own motion.”

Had they been functioning as they were intended to; the monarchy and the House of Lords could have served as checks on the demotic and demonic forces of the United Kingdom’s “mass-democracy.”

ILANA and David Vance discuss the matter further on the Hard Truth Rumble podcast. WATCH “Monarchy in Mourning — But Did Queen Elizabeth Drop The Ball?”

SUBSCRIBE please.

https://rumble.com/v1k2ar5-monarchy-in-mourning.html

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 15
Unz Review, September 15
The New American, September 20
Free Life: September 21

* Screen-picture capture via Daily Mail

The post Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

BLM? HOW ABOUT BEE: BLACK-AND-YELLOW LIVES MATTER ~ilana

Plastic straws are the stuff for which conservatives, who tinker only at the philosophical margins, reserve the ‘best’ of their straw arguments ~ilana

Our mountain neighborhood is blessed with a unique layout. The lower-neighborhood stretch faces green embankments, angled at approximately 60 degrees. Abutted each side by the road, this lovely midsection divides the lower and upper homes of a boulevard-like neighborhood. Neighbors must maintain their embankments.

I prefer my incline to be natural, which means that right about now, the embankment is supposed to be blanketed with wild flowers.

But not if the local, progressive, statist tyrant has his way. And he always does.

It has been decreed that a close shave of the neighborhood’s green stretches be the rule, for fear of “fa-fa-fa-fire,” as Basil Fawlty of the eponymous “Fawlty Towers” would have screeched. Patently ridiculous, of course, because the grass is predominantly green in the Emerald State. And, you know, … asphalt: It acts as a firebreak.

Progressive statists are not good at loving thy neighbor as thyself, as commanded in Leviticus (19:18). Practicing the live-and-let-live motto is constitutionally alien to Mr. Wokester. Neither is the progressive an environmentalist. When it comes down to brass tacks, progressive don’t much like the natural world.

But I do.

So, mow we do, but with a difference. To drive Mr. Batty battier, I leave our lovely embankment dotted with alien-like little crop-circles of wild flowers and grasses. And, I had a signpost (pictured) made so as to place alongside my wild flower crop-circles. It reads:

“Help The Bees Pollinate
Black-And-Yellow Lives Matter”

Two things have been achieved with laughter and levity:

In one fell-swoop, this local progressive vigilante is being taunted for his lack of brotherly bee love. With the same degree of mirth, his Black Lives Matter catechism has been mocked into perspective. Flouting BLM is a heresy that drives this leftist more loco than he already is.

For the Left, love of the environment amounts to an anti-intellectual, atavistic ritual, the kind performed by Homo species, say, when lightning struck. Primitive man would have looked to the heavens, and promised a sacrifice, to appease the particular god in control. In our times, the pagan pantheon has been replaced with the Almighty God of Climate Change.

What about conservatives? Conservation is conservative. At least it ought to be.  But are conservatives better custodians of nature than progressives?

Everywhere you look conservatives are rejoicing that the world population count broke 8 billion this month. Population explosion is to be celebrated! You can never have too many people, for people, in conservative thinking, are only ever a positive sum; never zero sum. Resources are endless—or, so conservatives seem to assume.

Animal life and habitat? Who cares? Kill the good-for-nothing critters. Deforestation? Bring it on. Forests are overrated. Ditto oxygen. Besides, we are on our way to being an anaerobic species. Ask Mr. AI (Artificial Intelligence). He was on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” so he knows. (By the way, it’s beyond silly to believe in the autonomy of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than meta-programing by mega-programmers.)

And, of course, the most populated places on earth are also heaven on earth. Oh, for the glories of Calcutta, Cairo and Gaza, already upon your little American hamlet.

The conservative overpopulation enthusiast could easily borrow the utilitarian arguments advanced by the open-border crowd, when touting the advantages of high-population density.

According to both errant sides—made from the serenity of their stately homes—Mumbai and Manila must be models for the specialization and division of labor that come with population-dense living conditions.

However, if American history (circa 1894) is anything to go by, the scarcity and high cost of labor helped propel this country into its position as the world’s leading industrial power. These factors, historian Paul Johnson has observed, “[G]ave the strongest possible motive not only to invent but to buy and install labor-saving machinery, the essence of high productivity, and so mass production.”

This conservative celebration of the 8 billion and growing is obscene. It conjures one of the more profound—but contradictory—monologues by Tucker Carlson, in extolling the concept of “community.” Millions-upon-millions of people can never form community, mused the host, wisely. Too much. Too big.

All the more so, I would contend, when the millions do not cohere and do not instantiate those Burkean little platoons. For gigantism is the opposite of community.

Small is beautiful. Only small makes for community. And here, Mr. Carlson contradicted himself and his achingly beautiful sentiment: For he loves population growth. Every baby born Tucker considers a gift and a gem.

By the numbers, and so you know: In celebrating overpopulation—conservatives are calling for the Third World, whence the numbers come, to be fruitful and to multiply. Own it!

Moreover, if you are celebrating population explosion, please spare us the pretense at spirituality, transcendence and love of nature. For your actions are phony. Rudderless. They amount to a performative contradiction.

True, mine is not the rote conservative position, or that of textbook libertarianism. I wager, however, that new-generation conservatives and libertarians are not necessarily on board with the old school’s kill-everything-that-moves-for-profit, and fill-the-oceans-with-plastics political gangs.

To coincide with ocean currents, every one of our oceans has gyres of garbage as big as Texas, much of it plastic.

“The GOP for growing the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre” is not every young person’s idea of an attractive campaign slogan. Neither is being for growing oceanic plastic gyres a chic magnate.

Much of the plastic is single-use plastic. Yet plastic straws are the stuff for which conservatives, who tinker only at the philosophical margins, reserve the “best” of their straw arguments.

In particular, Canadian conservatives are picking on Il Duce Trudeau not so much for trashing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but for not wishing to trash the environment with plastic cutlery.

Still—and despite the fact that conservatism conserves nothing—environmental conservation is conservative. We ought to claim it as our cause.

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 4
Unz Review, August 4
The New American, August 5

The post Conservation IS Conservative: BLM? Black-And-Yellow Lives Matter appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

China’s plague-delivery pedigree is solid.

Courtesy of China, the West got the H2N2 virus in 1957 and the H3N2 virus in 1968. Granted, the Chinese viral supply chain was broken with H1N1 flu; it came from Mexico. But, with the bird flu, SARS and SARS-Cov-2, China has fully reestablished its disease-delivery credentials.

Alas, going by the COVID culpability theories advanced by conservatives, the steady stream of “China plagues,” in Trump’s words, has had nothing to do with the noble Chinese people.

Blame the ignoble Chinese Communist Party for all these lethal, little RNA strands unleashed on the world. Some have even taken to calling SARS-CoV-2 “the CCP virus.”

As this Disneyfied neoconservative narrative goes, the Chinese were just hanging, being the freedom-loving, civilized sorts they are; going about the business of making the world a better place, when, lo and behold, their scheming, communistic government sprung the COVID on them—and the world.

Without fail, American pundits and pols, conservatives, in particular, apply to China the same theories of culpability that have undergirded America’s invasions of the illiberal people of the Middle East.

The bifurcation globalists love to effect is of the noble Chinese people up against the ignoble Chinese government.

It’s the Chinese government, not the people. Liberate the Chinese and they’ll show their Jeffersonian propensity for enlightened self-interest, not to mention a palate for cuisine less craven and cruel.

What I wrote in 2006 about Iraqis applies in spades to the Chinese and their responsibility for COVID. I’ve substituted Iraq with China here:

“The government of [China] doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them.” (Nov. 6, 2006)

Look, the Chinese government is no good, but the people get the government they deserve. If anything, when it comes to COVID, the Chinese state here is likely covering for the people’s despicable habits—habits which caused previous epidemics and have heralded the coronavirus.

As a writer for The Agonist put it:

Rightists were happy making bat-eating jokes and mocking the ‘filthy’ Chinese back when Covid was an Asian problem. But now that it’s become an epochal event, only the grandest of explanations will suffice. Surely Covid was cooked up in a commie mad scientist’s lab, or perhaps in the lair of a genocidal James Bond villain like Ernst Blofeld or Hugo Drax.

But a bunch of common Chinese selling wild animals in a stinking, filthy market slum? A bunch of scummy gluttons who take pride in the fact that they’ll eat anything that moves, and they’ll eat it raw? These people ravaged the world, just by eating animal testicles and anuses? No way, man.

Jane Goodall, a great lady, has warned one and all against the brutal, barbaric manner in which animals, wild and domestic, are being husbanded. This creates the conditions and the opportunities for viruses to jump from animals across the species barrier to humans.

Currently, we’re not only importing into our midst immigrants from monstrous, animal-abusing cultures, who perpetrate atrocities on innocent creatures in America—but we’re conjuring conspiracy to universally spare members of these depraved societies of the blame for COVID:

We’re alibiing the Chinese people.

Accordingly, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for COVID, rather than the many millions of Chinese, who capture, torture—boil alive—and consume wild animals in ways that beggar belief.

Culture counts. Deeply disturbing though our livestock husbandry may be, we in the West love animals. Without the West, wild life would be decimated. The love westerners have for animals originates, very plainly, in a certain goodness.

The West cares for animals and has codified that care in law—not because animals have human rights, but because of our own humanity.

Or, as a reader of the Economist put it, “Laws protecting animals are perfectly justifiable, not because animals have rights, but because we value their welfare and are repulsed by acts of cruelty against them. Upholding such laws does not require the cascade of nonsense that would ensue from pretending that animals have moral or legal standing.”

Said Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): “Since compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”

By separating the Chinese and their culinary preferences from the zoonotic diseases these practices cause—conservatives are practicing multiculturalism, as well as alibiing the Chinese for atrocities against animals ongoing.

• Bat soup, courtesy NAEBC

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 22
Unz Review, October 22
Quarterly Review, October 25
Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens, October 25

The post Actually, COVID Comes Courtesy Of The Chinese PEOPLE appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
October 14

The post Is A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) The Fall Guy For The AG (Attorney General)? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Let us begin with a species correct, English-language primer:

Illegal alien Jose Carranza (“allegedly”) executed three American college students (the fourth survived). NFL quarterback Michael Vick did not “execute eight dogs,” as members of the media fulminated, he put them down, albeit inhumanely.

The same Peruvian (Carranza) probably also raped his victims, but not before practicing on a 5-year-old child. Despite what Nancy Grace alleges, Vick was not rapin’ on his bitches, he was breeding them.

Anthropomorphism is the practice of attributing human characteristics to an animal. Dogs have small brains, devoted mainly to smell and other instinct-driven behaviors. The love and loyalty dog lovers see in their mutt’s eyes is a projection of the owner’s large, cerebral cortex. (You’ll learn more about sharks from Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller “Jaws,” than from our idiot, radically ideological “experts.” When sharks feed on folks, it is not a case of “mistaken identity.” The reason these powerful, flesh-eating animals with pointy teeth don’t tuck in more frequently is because there are more fish in the sea than people.)

PETA’s ethos has prevailed: Vick is being treated like an animal and his dogs like human beings. “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” is to animal rights what the Sierra Club (and Al Gore) is to the environmental movement. Both these radical-left organizations are bent upon using state power to further curb property and production. To be fair, PETA is philosophically more consistent than those who’ve hounded Vick for dogfighting, yet spare the manufacturers of pate de foie gras.

As PETA sees it, all animals ought to have rights. Be it for beef or bloodsport, their “exploitation” should be prohibited. To PETA, man and beast exist along the same continuum, their faculties and feelings differing in degree, not in kind. In the words of PETA’s founder: “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” To adapt Voltaire’s quip to Rousseau, whom he hated (me too): One longs, in hearing PETA’s rants against the human race, to walk on all fours.

Like PETA, I don’t distinguish between the pig farmer and the dogfighter. Unlike PETA, I believe all animals are property. Man is the only top dog. Although people will go to great lengths to distinguish their preferred form of animal use from Vick’s, the distinction is nebulous. One either owns a resource or one doesn’t. Whether one kills animals for food or for fun, the naturally licit basis for large-scale pig farming or game hunting is the same: ownership of the resource.

Arguably, commercial pig farming is crueler than dispatching dogs, then-and-there, as Vick did. These “Babe” look-alikes wallow for ages in their own waste, in pig pens so cramped, the creature cannot even collapse when exhausted. The animal’s skin often ulcerates and its muscles and bones atrophy. Food farming can involve practices such as tail docking, tooth-clipping, “castration, branding, debeaking, and other painful processes.” I solve this ethical problem by patronizing farmers whose animals roam and graze, not by agitating for government to criminalize commercial farmers and hurt the multitudes they feed.

Contrary to PETA, there is a reason animals are ineligible for rights. Rights arise from man’s unique nature. Man and man alone has moral agency—only man possesses free will, the capacity to tell right from wrong, and to reflect on his actions and beliefs.

“Given that non-human animals aren’t moral agents—not in the general and fundamental sense that we take human beings to be—there is no conceptual basis for ascribing them the kind of rights human beings are said to possess,” writes ethicist Tibor Machan. “Rights not founded on the moral agency of the rights holder are not the sorts of rights that … require protection in a just legal order.”

Animal-rights advocates counter by claiming that not all human beings have the capacity for moral agency. They don’t mean Michael Moore, but poor Terri Schiavo, RIP. Remember how far-left (and far-gone) liberals fought like rabid dogs to slowly starve and dehydrate her? One philosophical argument they deployed to justify Terri’s torture was that she had lost what made her uniquely human.

But, as Machan emphasizes, “To complain that moral agency is lacking while someone is in a coma or asleep is to misunderstand the point of a definition, a statement about the nature of something.” An elk doesn’t stop being an elk if without antlers. The criminal Carranza consciously used his capacities in choosing to kill. And while a baby doesn’t have moral agency, it will develop it in time. However damaged or depraved, a human being is still a human being.

Easily the most salient aspect about human beings is that they live in moral communities. When the lunatic left and a few “Crunchy Cons” abandoned the weak and the enfeebled Terri Schiavo, others (Sean Hannity, Thomas Szasz, Alan Dershowitz, WND, and this column, etc.,) stepped in to fight for her rights. This is not the case with animals. Members of the canine community have yet to deliver disquisitions against dog fighting. However, when the day arrives and Fido fights tooth and nail for more than Kibbles ‘n Bits, he will indeed have earned his rights.

While animals are still regarded as property under the law, if heavily circumscribed, the trend in tort law cases is, increasingly, toward treating them as PETA prescribes. Given the public and popular press’s sentimental slobbering over Vick’s dogs, this lobby’s power is sure to increase.

Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people. As it is, deputized agents of the Humane Society and the SPCA have the power to turn you into a felon for “the crime of a skinny dog.”

So far, public pressure, not the law, has brought about the termination of Vick’s lucrative, promising career. Civil society is clearly quite capable of censuring Vick. The law should have left him be.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

Appeared on WorldNetDaily.com (August 24)
(See the Orange County Register & “In Defense of Michael Vick, for Part 1“)

* I deeply regret the position I took here on animal rights. An honest thinker admits when she is wrong. I hang my head in shame. While intellectually rigorous; the position I took is morally impoverished.

The post In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2* appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

HOUNDING VICK

While ranting about NFL quarterback Michael Vick for his alleged dog fighting activities, CNN talker Nancy Grace added another charge to her brilliant “legal” brief: Vick’s been rapin’ on the bitches. By that she meant inseminating bitches that “refused” to breed. The exact crazy quote has Grace say the following to her equally indignant guest: “You left out the rape stand, where female dogs that don’t want to breed are raped, essentially.”

In Graceland, canines must consent before being bred, or is it “having sex.” Nancy didn’t indicate whether she was as passionate about the “violations” visited upon thoroughbred racehorses and artificially inseminated cows. The frightening thing is that judging by the frenzy over Vick’s alleged infractions against our furry friends, I suspect all too many Americans agree with nutty Nancy.

Dog fighting, which has been outlawed in all 50 states, is certainly uncivilized and cruel (although not everything that is immoral ought to be illegal). But even more uncivilized than Vick’s alleged dogfighting violations has been the zeal among media pack animals to convict him. Vick is not a thief, a murderer, or a rapist. Neither has he defrauded anyone. He is a gifted athlete—and an obviously aggressive young man, who may have channeled his abundant aggression into a blood sport, as men have done throughout time.

The English relished dog fighting for centuries. Fox hunting is still a much cherished way of life in rural England, and, some argue, beneficial to conservation “and a method of pest control.” The same animal rights activists who’ve successfully lobbied to have dog fighters declared felons are gunning for hunters. These activists consider hunting a blood sport too. To them, the torero— the Spanish bullfighter—is worse than a terrorist.

Animal rights activists share a humanity-hating agenda with environmentalists. The first would like ultimately to see the State proceed against anyone who slaughters, markets, experiments on, or even eats and wears animals; the latter wish to subordinate man to nature through codified law.

Human beings ought to care for and be kind to animals. But a civilized society is one that never threatens a man’s liberty because of the callousness with which he has treated the livestock he owns. Members of a society in which peace and liberty are valued above all would have settled for boycotting Vick’s games and merchandize. They might have urged the NFL to discipline, even fire, him. But they would not have called for his incarceration.

DESPERATELY SEEKING BOLLYWOOD’S BRANGELINA

Always on the lookout for those jobs lazy American won’t do, I’ve taken to watching a fabulous Discovery-Channel program: “Dirty Jobs.” (Another of my guilty pleasures involves a sports car with a six-gear, stick shift, manual transmission.) Host Mike Rowe explains the show’s raison d’être: “It’s a fun, foul look at some of the grimiest, grungiest, grossest jobs around.” Rowe joins “sewer inspectors, garbage collectors and other unkempt heroes” in keeping “the world clean for the rest of us.” So far, the show’s professional garbage collectors, sewer inspectors, and tanners—they do the filthiest job by far—have been good old Americans. In fact, everywhere you look, these much-maligned men are making, maintaining, and repairing stuff. (That goes for my own WASP.)

Or doing the world’s good works. According to Forbes Magazine, the largest charities by revenue in the US (which, I suspect, means the largest in the world) are the Mayo Clinic, Salvation Army, YMCAs in the United States, United Way, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, American National Red Cross, Catholic Charities USA, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Goodwill Industries International, and The Arc of the United States.

Who were the worthies who founded these magnificent, munificent organizations?

Mayo was founded by William Worrall Mayo (hint: he was not from Bangalore or Beirut). The Salvation Army by William Booth (another Englishman). Ditto the YMCA (George Williams). Two ministers and a rabbi midwived the United Way. Drs. George Crile, Frank Bunts, and William Lower founded the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1921, and Clara Barton the Red Cross. And so on.

There is a lot to dislike about the self-aggrandizing Brangelina of Benetton (Brad and Angelina). But where is Bollywood’s match for these giving, gullible, American do-gooders?

Appeared on WorldNetDaily.com & the Orange County Register
(See “In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2“)
August 17, 2007

* I deeply regret the position I took here on animal rights. An honest thinker admits when she is wrong. I hang my head in shame. While intellectually rigorous; the position I took is morally impoverished.

The post In Defense Of Michael Vick, Part 1* appeared first on ILANA MERCER.