It’s mystifying, but an Oklahoma state Senator has introduced a bill which

prohibits the manufacture or sale of “food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.”

As crazy as it sounds, there may be something to this cannibalism issue. State Senator Ralph Shortey

may be acting on claims that the San Diego-based company Semonyx used proteins derived from human embryonic kidney cells to test artificial sweeteners, NPR reported. The cell line, known as HEK 293, was created from a human embryo in 1970 and has become a staple in biochemistry labs around the world.

If this is true, our society has become so disgusting and decadent that, really, I think it’s about time Christians start praying for fire and brimstone, a la Sodom and Gomorrah.  Are we willing to cannibalize babies so that we may cut calories while still enjoying sweets?

The “any other product” apart from food prohibition is intriguing. Disgusting as it is, we already have beauty products containing placenta.  It baffles me that some women are sufficiently vain as to use something like that, but they’re out there.  (I’d add a Tom Cruise placenta joke here, but if I think on that too long I’ll gag.)   Given that people are willing to use and consume placenta for those purposes, I think going that extra step and consuming aborted fetuses is quite realistic.  It’s just small step away from embryonic stem cell research.

I oppose embryonic stem cell research.  Not only are adult stem cells are leading to remarkable cures, ASC research lacks the ethical issues of embryonic stem cells. I think that’s where we should focus our attention.  Although I disagree, I do at least sympathize with the arguments ESC proponents make for investigating every possible avenue to save lives and cure illnesses.  But the idea that we might use embryos – from any source, including abortions – purely for vanity or convenience is repugnant.  ”Slippery slope” arguments can be facile.  But the slippery slope arguments that pro-life proponents have been making since Roe v. Wade   are being fulfilled all the time.

It’s discouraging, but not really surprising, to have yet another confirmation that Romney’s not going to go to the mat on getting rid of Obamacare.

Is Newt working from the Saul Alinsky playbook?  It’s hypocritical for him to run against the establishment given his longtime establishment credentials, and I do not support class warfare. But the Alinsky techniques work.  My main problem with the Alinsky rules is that the left has routinely used them against us, for decades, and we never respond in kind and have never formulated an effective defense. So I’m heartily enjoying seeing someone on the right “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” And it’s high time we make the left live up to it’s own book of rules.  So if Newt wants to go Alinsky, that’s fine with me – as long as he does so against the left and not people on his own side.

Jon Stewart throws the right a bone from time to time, but he’s also abundantly clear about which side he really works for. Ace sums up Stewart’s clown-nose-on mugging about Romney’s outrageously outrageous income: Straight-Shooter Jon Stewart: I Can’t Believe Mitt Romney Makes $57,000 Per Day That’s So Much More Unbelievable Than My Own $41,000 Per Day

Yes, that certainly is shocking – I can see why Stewart has his panties in a wad over the sheer decadence of it.  Even more shocking is how many people watch his show as a substitute for the news. Oh wait – it’s really not any more biased than network news, is it?

Everyone’s (and by everyone, I mean the left) is shocked to pieces about Romney’s 15% tax rate. I think 15% is ample – in fact it’s 5% more than we give to the church – but now everyone who’s stressed about it can stand down.  The WSJ calculated Romney’s actual rate, and it’s 44.75%.  There. Feel better now?

Here’s an interesting career track for you: Megadeath bassist –> Lutheran pastor.  This is old news, but along those lines, Queen guitarist Brian May branched out into astrophysics.

More on the Megaupload story – and of course, it’s political.  If Ayn Rand were alive, she’d be laughing hysterically right about now.

And in alt-universe news of the day, Obama corroborated Breitbart’s claims about Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading.  Evidently he is so determined to run against Congress he is willing to throw his own people under the bus.

Okay, break’s over, back on my head…

I replied, “I think about binge drinking.”

So I’m ignoring it all for the time being and taking a Star Trek break – watching The Captains on Netflix.

I’ve posted a couple of times about “Windmill Guy” William Kamkwamba.  His new children’s book is out!  The book looks great – nice art, and of course Kamkwamba’s story is incredible for readers at any age. From his blog:

After my primary education, I was accepted at and began secondary education in Malawi. I began first form (equivalent to a high school freshman in America) and took two trimesters out of three. After the second trimester, I was forced to drop out of school because my family and I did not have enough money to pay the school fees.

I was out of school for five years.

Our family is poor like many families in Malawi and Africa, and as a result, we have no electricity in our village or my home. For many years we had only paraffin candles to light my home at night. They are expensive, smoky, smelly and have to be purchased about 8 km from home.

During that time I decided to try to get as much education as possible by reading as many books as I could find. An organization called the Malawian Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a project of USAID contributed a large quantity of books to the primary school library near my home. I read many of them.  One of the books I read was called Using Energy, a primary school textbook about how energy is made. Inside the book there were plans for a windmill. I decided to build a windmill to provide power for my family.

(Here’s his book for adults.)  So at 15 years old, he built a windmill out of scrap parts, including a bicycle frame. Then another, larger one.  People started talking, journalists came out and did a story on him, and funds were raised so he was eventually able to go back and finish high school.  These days Kamkwamba is here in the United States. He is a sophomore at Dartmouth and has an NGO called Moving Windmills which is improving the lives of many people in Malawi.  Here’s a short film, which is being expanded into a full documentary, about William.

I just love his story – how he overcame adversity, worked hard and creatively and made something that is generating wealth for himself, his family, and his town… it just keeps spreading.

(And for more positive info on Africa, don’t forget the documentary, Africa – Open for Business, which powerfully illustrates that the continent houses, in addition to thatched huts and starving babies with distended bellies, modern cities with high rise buildings and thriving stock exchanges.)

Consider this my 2012 kind word for Mr. O’Reilly: well done, sir.

Unless you’ve subscribed in the last couple of weeks, you are receiving the old format emails, sent out by Google’s Feedburner system. And you can continue doing that indefinitely if you like. But the new WordPress system sends out emails which are better formatted and include screenshots of video so you can at least see if you’re interested in clicking through to watch.  It also includes options of how often you want to receive email – with each new post, once a day, or once a week. If you want to switch, all you need to do is unsubscribe to the existing emails (there is an unsubscribe link in each one) and type in your email address on the PH home page in the sidebar where it says Subscribe to Blog via Email. You’ll get an email with a link to confirm, and voila! You’re all set.

 (Though, of course, the sex has already happened when the Plan B is purchased, so really, people who float this argument are just arguing that it’s better for the 11-year-old in question to be pregnant than not, which seems really cruel.) The reality is that fewer than 1 percent of 11-year-olds are sexually active,

According to the US Census, there are 10,097,332 girls between the ages of 10 and 14, so 1% of that is 100,973. While her example is of 11 year olds, I don’t believe any state’s age of consent is 14 or less.  She suggests that our opposition is because we think “that it’s better for the 11-year-old in question to be pregnant than not.” I’m not sure if Marcotte is just being stupid or if she’s being dishonest in order to dismiss our concerns and get on with something she thinks is more important, but there are actually some pretty reasonable arguments for opposing giving Plan B to children under the age of consent. One is that those children need protection and guidance from adults simply due to the fact that they are too young to engage in sexual behavior.  Another is that this is a strong medication, recently only available by prescription, and we do not judge children capable of self-medicating.   And if my daughter were 11 years old and trying to purchase Plan B, I’d be mightily curious where she got about $50 to spend on it.  An 11 year old – or any child 14 or under – wanting Plan B would naturally lead to a whole host of questions any decent parent would want to ask. She continues,

so the real people hurt by these restrictions are the 15- and 16-year-olds having sex with age-appropriate partners and those 17 and older who have a legal right to the pill but find that having to ask for a pharmacist to fetch it  is too much of an obstacle, because either the pharmacy counter is closed or because the pharmacy staff won’t hand it over, either out of ignorance or malice.

Anyone who is old enough (mature enough) to have sex is old enough to brave the pharmacy counter. If they can’t manage that, we should be thinking up ways to discourage them from having sex, not thinking up ways to enable them to avoid the consequences of it.  But don’t worry about children and teens too immature to be having sex. According to Marcotte, there’s a bigger problem.  On at least two occasions, adults have had difficulty buying Plan B.

I give you the story of Jason Melbourne of Mesquite, Texas. Melbourne went to the Mesquite CVS to buy Plan B for his wife, who had to stay home to look after their two small children. The reward he got for being a good husband who goes to the drugstore to buy lady things for his wife was resistance from the pharmacy staff, who refused to sell him the drug…

[...] Melbourne is the second man in Texas who has reported being denied Plan B at a CVS to the ACLU. Considering how many people don’t contact the ACLU after having their rights violated—or who would believe the pharmacy staff’s claims—that suggests this could be a widespread problem.

It is absolutely ridiculous for children whom our society insists cannot be trusted to take a Midol at school on their own to be able to buy medication with potentially serious side effects to deal with an issue they need help in dealing with – whether they realize it or not.  These are not short adults. They are children. But even if it actually is a widespread problem instead of a couple of anecdotes, it’s a problem easily solved by adults without making this medication available to children.

Anthony Watts has a nearly textbook example of shameless global warming propagandizing – this time by Business Insider. They use fabricated quotes and scary headlines – and I mean that literally; the original headline included, “Another Scary Sign That Global Warming Is Real” to blame hybrid sharks on global warming. And when called out for it, they changed the article without noting the correction, and still included the warming propaganda – they just soft-pedaled it.  As Watts wrote, “No duty to the truth or scruples with these folks I guess.”

I’m no scientist, but is it really possible to accurately assert that there has never been a hybrid shark before? Scientists have been able to study and catalog ocean life and share data internationally for, what? Maybe a hundred, or 150 years?  And in the millions of years before that, they’re quite sure there has never, ever been a hybrid shark?

Added: More over at Sister Toldjah’s.

Harold Camping

Harold Camping has made quite a few lists, from Time’s Top 10 End-of-the-World Prophecies, to Colin Hanson’s (The Gospel Coalition) Top 10 Theology Stories of 2011, to John Hawkins’ Pajamas Media post on The 10 Biggest Failures Of 2011. Errr… way to get the message out, Mr. Camping! Sure, part of his “success” can be attributed to the media latching on to a nutjob who ostensibly represents Christianity. They do that all the time, even as they go far out of their way to disassociate Muslims from honor killings and acts of terror. But as satisfying as it is to gripe about the media, they are just selling a product that people want to buy. Non-Christians enjoy snarking about those idiot Christians, and Christians enjoy a warm, fuzzy, “more-discerning-than-thou” moment. I’m not above that, myself.  I also had a good time joking about rapture pranks, such as leaving full sets of clothes arranged on sidewalks around town.

An interesting catch from the Top 10 Theology Stories of 2011 was that Rob Bell did, in fact, win.  He parlayed his heresy into a TV series and is the hot new “evangelical” for the media. And yes, the scare quotes around “evangelical” are deliberate. And no, Mr. Bell, you’re no e.e. cummings. People who don’t use proper capitalization and punctuation annoy me. And how many times do I have to tell you whippersnappers to stay off my lawn!

What movies are most pirated? TorrentFreak has the scoop in their list of  2011′s top ten pirated movies.  I’ve only seen two of those movies – the Deathly Hallows, and The King’s Speech, but I did purchase both.  In fact, of the remaining movies on the list, I’ve only heard of 1, 2 and 3. That’s probably because I spend so much more time reading than watching TV. So here’s Amazon’s Best of 2011.

Lifehacker has their most popular Top Tens of 2011. I especially enjoyed the Secret Agent list.

And finally, a special point of pride for me: New Orleans was voted #1 in a survey to identify America’s Strangest People. We do like to fly our freak flag.