Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a blog post by Fred Thompson. If anyone figures out how to have Fred’s posts e-mailed, please let me know.

John Stossel takes John McCain to task for succumbing to global-warming hysteria.

Here is Michelle Malkin’s latest column. In my immediately preceding post, I said that one form is racism is holding individuals of different races to different standards. If the mainstream media are going easy on Barack Obama because of his race, they are racist. Affirmative-action programs are racist. For every person who gets an undeserved advantage on account of race, someone gets an undeserved disadvantage on account of race. (It’s a zero-sum game.) We tend to focus on the beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, but there are always losers as well as winners. The mainstream media ought to apply the same standard to all candidates, regardless of race, sex, and political party. If Republicans are made fun of for making gaffes, then so should Democrats be made fun of. If whites are made fun of, then so should nonwhites be made fun of. If men are made fun of, then so should women be made fun of.

One form of racism is holding individuals of different races to different standards. New York Mets manager Willie Randolph suspects racism in some of the criticism he has received as manager. Has anyone followed the Mets closely enough to know whether there is anything to this?

Chuck Finley. (For an explanation of this feature, see here.)

Here is a scene from today’s stage of the Giro d’Italia. Here is tomorrow’s stage.

Here.

If this isn’t the best album ever made, then I don’t mind not being able to torment Yankee fans.

Addendum: Here is a live version of “Black Cow.”

Of the many dense prejudices through which, as through a snow-drift, Vegetarianism has to plough its way before it can emerge into the field of free discussion, there is none perhaps more inveterate than the common appeal to “Nature.” A typical instance of the remarkable misuse of logic which characterises such argument may be seen in the anecdote related by Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, of the incident which induced him to return, after years of abstinence, to a flesh diet. He was watching some companions sea fishing, and observing that some of the fish caught by them had swallowed other fish, he concluded that, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we may not eat you”—a confusion of ichthyology and morals which is ludicrous enough as narrated by Franklin, but not essentially more foolish than the attempt so frequently made by flesh-eaters to shuffle their personal responsibility on to some supposed “natural law.”

(Henry S. Salt, The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 36)

Note from KBJ: Here is Franklin:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Never underestimate the human capacity for rationalization!

To the Editor:

William Kristol would have us believe that John McCain is something other than a conventional conservative Republican. This is a difficult statement to accept since Mr. McCain has taken the old party line of teaching intelligent design in public schools, support of conservative judges, being a military hawk, and the list goes on.

A vote for John McCain will be a vote for the Bush administration, make no mistake.

Robert L. Taylor
Park Hills, Ky., May 19, 2008

Note from KBJ: George W. Bush defeated not one, but two Democrats. If he could run again, he would win again.

Wanna marry your cousin? Here is a map for you. Excerpt:

So, Kentucky does not allow cousin marriage, and Massachusetts does? That is SO not what I expected. Are we talking first cousins? That’s pretty funny, that blue-state Massachusetts types could, in theory, be more inbred than red-state hillbillies.

Mark Spahn, from the hillbilly state of NY

Note from KBJ: I wonder why no states require cousin marriage.