Vox Popoli

Raging Bee buzzes angrily:

And while I’m asking dumb questions, what’s so “Christian” OR “libertarian” about condemning women for feeding their children in public places? Didn’t Jesus go on a lot about forgiveness, tolerance, and helping fellow humans in need? Or did the Gospels get rewritten while I wasn’t looking?

I don’t recall condemning women for anything, as I did not imply that the rudeness implicit in asserting that you have the right to breastfeed a child anytime and anywhere was grounds for either a prison term or eternal damnation. And forgiveness requires repentance, and all I’ve heard from the anytime, anyplace crew so far is a complete disregard for the opinions of others. Nor do I consider it necessary or even the least bit appropriate to bring the Gospels into what is nothing more than a question of etiquette.

This discussion has, however, offered strong support for my personal theory that mothers of young children are the rudest human beings on the planet, if one reduces the sample in question to the sober population. I suppose this is understandable, because combining the difficulty factor inherent in accomplishing tasks while accompanied by one or more children with the maternal stress factor and the Mama Bear syndrome is bound to lead to difficulties.

But seriously, even a hardened Long Islander is more likely to apologize for running over your foot with a shopping cart than a harried mother of three.

Throw your hats in, if you like. Include URL and blog name.

Lactivists envision a Bourbon Street world:

In interviews and Internet discussions, hundreds of women recount being asked to stop nursing in public spots, including the Children’s Museum in Huntsville, Ala.; a knitting store in the East Village; a Radisson Hotel lobby in Virginia; a public bus in Los Angeles; and a city commission meeting in Miami Beach.

“It’s nothing against breast-feeding, it’s about exposing yourself for people who don’t want to see it,” said Scotty Stroup, the owner of a restaurant in Round Rock, Tex., where a nursing mother was refused service last fall.

But the new generation of lactivists compare discomfort with seeing breast-feeding in public to discomfort with seeing interracial couples or gays holding hands.

I remember being at dinner one night with a group of couples, all of whom had recently had babies. The one single guy was amazed at how all the new mothers could pick out the cry of their child, as they were sounding off regularly about every five minutes.

But he wasn’t the only one disgusted when two of the women insisted on talking about birth and breastfeeding at the dinner table. When I finally told them to knock it off, they came back with the inevitable protest: “but it’s natural!”

As the men at the table were quick to point out, so is defecation, urination and sex, but no one, least of all these two women, were likely to be inclined to think it proper were someone to begin regaling the table about the joys of the oral service they had received the night before, or in the case of Big Chilly, the magnitude of his morning excretion.

(Big Chilly does rightfully find a certain degree of fascination with regards to this matter. One morning, I made the mistake of giving into his enthusiastic blandishments to view a particularly monstrous specimen; my immediate impression was that calls to Guiness and a plumber were in order.)

I have no sympathy for the lactivists. If, as a society, we are going to decide that everything goes in public, so be it, but until that day, a visit to the ladies room is in order.

From NRO:

A 19-year-old accused of causing his teenage girlfriend to miscarry two fetuses by stepping on her stomach was convicted Monday of two counts of murder.

Gerardo Flores received an automatic life sentence because prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, which was available under the state’s 2003 fetus protection law.

Erica Basoria, 17, acknowledged asking Flores to help end her pregnancy; she could not be prosecuted because of her legal right to abortion…

I’m pleased that the young man was rightly found guilty of murder. But I think it is an absolute travesty that the woman who was arguably a party at least as responsible was not.

So much for equal rights.

The Sports Guy’s Intern on Michael Vick:

Pretty good rundown of the best and worst NFL draft picks over the years. Of course, picking Bradshaw over Vick as the best overall number one is a joke. Four Super Bowl rings, you say? Please. We’re talking about Mike Vick, the greatest football player of all-time; the modern day Troy; the man who will lead us all to victory against the rise of the machines; quite possibly the most remarkable human being who’s ever lived or ever will. Mike Vick eats Super Bowl rings for breakfast, and then spits them back out because they aren’t refined enough for his palate.

I nearly swallowed my tongue reading that. THE MAN WHO WILL LEAD US ALL TO VICTORY AGAINST THE RISE OF THE MACHINES. Yeah, but he still sucks as a quarterback. I just wish I played in a fantasy league where someone was dumb enough to believe the hype.

LITTLE BROTHER: “Why can’t I join your league? I’ve won my league three years in a row!”

VOX: “Because you won in a league where the first pick was Kordell Stewart.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences. But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

Kerry was quite the looker too. Is there ANYONE who seriously believes our system is meant to bring the best and brightest to the fore?

Rallymonkey sees the opportunity for a federal grant:

Another story about the military mishandling the Koran in Guantanimo today. Yahoo reports that a soldier splashed it with urine. Why is this even news? Whatever happened to this equation? Holy Item + Urine + Federal Money = Art

I always find it interesting how these bold, unflinching rebel artists somehow only have the courage to urinate all over Christianity. Where is Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Mohammed? Where are the portraits of the prophet’s wives painted in elephant dung? Where, for that matter, are the Hollywood terrorists that aren’t Nazis, still plotting nefariously, lo, these sixty years post-mortem.

For all that the artistic Left cries wolf about fears of a Christian theocracy, they know full well that they’re full of Marian painting material. If their fears were genuine, they wouldn’t dare do as they do today.

Cowards.

From dictionary.com:

Science: The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.

Well, at least the evolutionist True Believers have the latter down. One and four are totally absent, while two and three mutate more rapidly than anything proposed by the grand faith itself.

I barely consider economics to be an actual science, but at least there are some replicable experiments that can be performed which reliably support its basic laws. Perhaps you can’t test C+I+G+(x-m) very effectively, but you can test the Law of Supply and Demand and you’ll always receive the same result if you control for variables.

In fact, I suspect that Biblical principles are more reliable than evolutionary principles, albeit in a distinctly different arena. Spare the rod with 100 children, apply it firmly to another 100 and the firm foundation revealed by the experiment will have more genuine scientific support than Darwin’s landmark defense of racial eugenics.

As with democracy, no one actually believes in evolution. This is clear by the way that its supposed champions always shy away from the straightforward applications of its logic. Ironically, if recent demographics are any guide, the survival of the fittest points very strongly to a world without college-educated feminists, Europeans or atheists, all evolutionary dead-ends who cannot be troubled to reproduce themselves.

Paul Jacob points out a pair of uncompassionate liberals:

When Kerry was in a tough 1996 race for his U.S. Senate seat, Jeff Jacoby reported, “During the previous six years, it turned out, Kerry had given less than $5,000 to charity — a minuscule seven-tenths of 1 percent of his gross income for the period.”

The Democrats’ 2000 standard-bearer, Al Gore, proved no better. His 2000 tax return on an adjusted gross income of $197,729 listed charitable donations of $353. When eyebrows were raised, Gore’s spokesman explained, “Contributing financially to charitable organizations is certainly noble and should be encouraged and is something that the Gores have done when the resources were there. However, to truly judge a person’s commitment to helping others, you need to consider what they have done with their lives and how they have spent their time — and by that standard the Gores are extraordinarily committed.”

And yet, both men love to tell you how much they care… and imply how morally superior they are. What a pair of despicable jokes. Anyone dumb enough to have supported these charlatans should be deeeply, deeply embarrassed.