What PETA says...

Here’s something rather unexpected.  You would hope to expect better, from an organization that claims to care for animals.

The following story is from This is True dated 17 July 2005. It is Copyright 2005 Randy Cassingham, all rights reserved, and reprinted here with permission:

“Ethical” Defined

After more than 100 dead dogs were dumped in a trash dumpster over four weeks, police in Ahoskie, N.C., kept an eye on the trash receptacle behind a supermarket. Sure enough, a van drove up and officers watched the occupants throw in heavy plastic bags. They detained the two people in the van and found 18 dead dogs in plastic bags in the dumpster, including puppies; 13 more dead dogs were still in the van. Police say the van is registered to the headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the two occupants, Andrew B. Cook, 24, and Adria Joy Hinkle, 27, identified themselves as PETA employees.

I’m glad to see that the Election did not devolve down into a mess.   We’ve not heard of any rumors following up on the Obama Birth Certificate controvery, for which I’m glad.

I believe it’s time for everyone to pull together, and work together, to get past the two years of negative campaigning.   

A lawsuit filed in August of this year, by Pennsylvania Democrat Philip J. Berg is the ticking time bomb hidden in this year’s election madness.

The constitution of the United States requires that the president must be over 35, in the country for at least 14 years, and a natural born citizen.

Today is Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers take time out from whatever their normal subjects are, to focus a spotlight on attention on issues that matter.  This years subject of Poverty is entirely appropriate, considering the fact that the US economy, and the World economy, seem to be spinning out of control.

But, before we consider our shaky financial situation to be impoverished, think about all those people in the world, who don’t even have a roof over their heads.   The teeming crowds of Calcutta’s street people, who’s only “valued possession” is their meter and a half of sidewalk, at a specific location on the street, where they and their family have been sleeping for the past 3 generations.  We don’t have it bad, by half, yet.

  

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson after talking with Congress, last Thursday.

Not ask for another hand-out.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Take away economic regulation, and let “conservative” financial players run things, and you wind up with over-extended, over-leveraged economies, just waiting to collapse.   Add in the Fed keeping interest rates low to fuel the housing bubble, just to convince everyone that they too can become rich in the superheated housing market.

The only problem with superheated markets, is people get burned.  

People got mortgages that they couldn’t afford, just to put money into the hands of the mortgage brokers, the investment bankers, and the credit rating agencies.  

When the housing bubble cooled, it started to collapse under it’s own weight, and the people least able to own their own homes, were the first hurt by it.  The fast shuffle to make those sub-prime mortgages look like some hot new derivative helped to offload some of the pain overseas, but now our trading partners can’t trust us anymore.

Identity theft is evil.

SPAM is evil.

LifeLock is a company who provides a $1 million guarantee that they can protect you from identity theft.
So far, sounds great, right?
Well, the two largest threats on the Internet are Identity Theft, and SPAM.

Of these two, SPAM is worse, because SPAM affects everyone, and SPAM is one of the enabling technologies for Identity Theft. In February 2007, it was predicted that 90% of all email passing across the Internet’s backbone would be SPAM, and in December, an Information Week article reported SPAM levels had exceeded 94% of all email sent.

Well, with SPAM being such a pervasive threat, and being a direct vector for Identity Theft (via phishing, malware delivered via email, etc), you’d like to think that it might be one of the things that LifeLock would understand. And might choose to avoid, as a marketing tool.

Updated:

Cinderella Castle at Disney

Has anyone noticed how recently Disney has the power to literally over night take an unknown person (usually kids) and turn them into superstars.

My younger siblings all are obsessed with shows like Cory in The House, Hanna Montana, and lets not forget this odd sensation called High School Musical.

Most of those shows and the plethora of other movies and shows Disney has created recently, all star people that we’ve never heard of before, but yet these people (90% of them kids) go from nobodies to household names.

How is this? How can is it possible for people you haven’t heard of one day to in 3 days time be people known all over the world?

Ive heard a lot of strange but true things, some good, some bad, but this one tops the bad list.

As a lot of people have sadly come to realize, Obesity kills your kidneys.

Bad news is there aren’t a lot of people willing to give up a vital organ to a stranger. P

icture if you will; a poor country, where thousands of people daily look for a job.

Now, what if people were going around offering these poor people a job, only to lure them to a house, and either using drugs to knock them unconscious or using guns to force them, make them sell a kidney for say $1200.