5.26.2013

miscellany

An illuminated new op-ed by George Lucas:  "The Events Depicted In ‘Star Wars’ Actually Happened To Me" 

7.5 oz soda cans are the only way to drink soda.  Soda, being a mostly useless beverage, is not usually appealing to me, especially in its 12oz form.  I never finish the whole can, and I always feel gross afterwards. But shrink the portion size?  Genius. And as annoying as it is, it makes sense that they charge more for the small guy than its heavyweight 12oz counterpart.  After all, they make far fewer of the 7.5 oz ones.  But we can change that America!  Increased demand for 7.5 oz will change the supply and make it cheaper.  Join the 7.5oz movement!

Go Bruins!

 Apparently Billy Joel never actually got a DUI?  You learn something new every day.

 Betty Duffy is great.  I wish she would move her writing back to her blog-of-record, but she's probably making a least a little bit of money now.  Writing on the internet doesn't get much better than her page, so check it out.


5.04.2013

On the largely ignored Kermit Gosnell

Robert George at Mirror of Justice:
I just finished watching the Fox News special ("See No Evil") on abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for multiple murders and other crimes. Gosnell can't understand how it can be that he is facing prison and possibly even the death penalty for killing the babies whose necks he snipped after they "precipitated" (i.e., emerged from the womb.) The women who came into his clinic came in to have the babies they were carrying killed. That was the point of the exercise. "Terminating" the babies' lives was the service he offered and performed. Had he killed the babies while they were still in their mothers' bodies (by, for example, inserting a needle to inject a poison into their tiny hearts) that would not have been a crime. He merely would have been assisting his patients in exercising what the Supreme Court deems a constitutional right. So why, he would like to know, is he being prosecuted for killing the same babies moments later after they precipitated? I must admit that I am no less puzzled by that question than Gosnell is. How can it be that killing a baby inside the womb is perfectly acceptable while killing the very same baby (or even a baby that is a few days or even weeks younger) outside the womb is first degree murder? Of course, in my view we should not permit the killing of babies inside or outside the womb. A baby's status as a precious member of the human family, possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity, does not depend on something as morally arbitrary as his or her location. But if we permit the Gosnells of the world to kill babies inside the womb, it seems odd to charge them with murder for killing them outside the womb. This is especially true in view of the fact that inducing delivery and then killing babies marked for "termination" eliminates the risk to women involved in the common abortion practice of dismembering babies inside the womb and removing their severed body parts.

lost the last couple of years to work

and what for?!:(