Burn, baby, burn
Comes the news that Britain’s dreaded National Health Service — a dreamboat to American lefties who have obviously never experienced British “medicine” and a nightmare to conservatives who have — has been incinerating the body bits of aborted babies as “medical waste.” Coming from the folks who gave Ireland the Drogheda Massacre, this should be no surprise, since a healthy regard for human life has never been characteristic of the former colonial power that left trails of dead bodies in its wake from China to India to Africa to Ireland. To wit:, this eyewitness narrative from the year 1649:
A number of the townspeople fled for safety to St. Peter’s Church, on the north side of the city, but every one of them was murdered, all defenceless and unarmed as they were; others took refuge in the church steeple, but it was of wood, and Cromwell himself gave orders that it should be set on fire, and those who attempted to escape the flames were piked. The principal ladies of the city had sheltered themselves in the crypts. It might have been supposed that this precaution should be unnecessary, or, at least, that English officers would respect their sex; but, alas for common humanity! it was not so. When the slaughter had been accomplished above, it was continued below. Neither youth nor beauty was spared. Thomas Wood, who was one of these officers, and brother to Anthony Wood, the Oxford historian, says he found in these vaults “the flower and choicest of the women and ladies belonging to the town; amongst whom, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to him with tears and prayers to save her life.” Touched by her beauty and her entreaties, he attempted to save her, and took her out of the church; but even his protection could not save her. A soldier thrust his sword into her body; and the officer, recovering from his momentary fit of compassion, “flung her down over the rocks,” according to his own account, but first took care to possess himself of her money and jewels. This officer also mentions that the soldiers were in the habit of taking up a child, and using it as a buckler, when they wished to ascend the lofts and galleries of the church, to save themselves from being shot or brained. It is an evidence that they knew their victims to be less cruel than themselves, or the expedient would not have been found to answer.
Lovely folks, then and now; why the English are heroes to anybody but themselves is beyond me, since I am entirely immune to the strange phenomenon of Anglophilia that seems to infect so many Americans. Still, even the Brits seem to understand that murdering babies and then sending them skyward as a burnt offerings to a dark and savage god is probably not a good idea, pr-wise. Notes the BBC:
Hospitals should cremate or bury aborted foetuses rather than incinerating them, the medical director of the NHS in England says. The move by Prof Sir Bruce Keogh comes after it emerged that some hospitals have been burning foetuses as clinical waste. Channel 4 Dispatches programme says 10 NHS trusts have been burning remains alongside rubbish. It claims two more disposed of bodies in incinerators used to heat hospitals. Health minister Dr Dan Poulter said this practice was “totally unacceptable”.
As my National Review colleague, Kevin Williamson, noted succinctly: “Some days, you pray for a meteor.” Meanwhile, continuing our violent narrative:
Doing the only thing it’s good at — murdering wildlife
No less an authority than the New York Times has finally gotten behind the #fluffybunnyfund and pointed out the bleeding (as the Brits say) obvious: that the domestic cat is a public menace of epic proportions. There’s too much good stuff in this piece — “The Evil of the Outdoor Cat” — by Richard Conniff to fully quote, so be sure to read the whole thing and savor every paragraph as if you were the killer cat in the photo above, enjoying the entrails of some hapless tweety bird. Here’s a taste:
Using deliberately conservative assumptions, federal researchers recently estimated that free-ranging cats killed about 2.4 billion birds annually in the Lower 48 states, a substantial bite out of the total bird population. Outdoor cats also kill about 12.3 billion small mammals a year — not just the proverbial rats and mice but also chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels — and about 650 million reptiles and amphibians. In some cases, they are pushing endangered species toward extinction… If you have ever seen a cat toy with its victim, you know these are not quick, or pretty, or painless deaths. So you might expect animal welfare groups to be ardently campaigning against outdoor cats, and particularly against the care and feeding of feral or stray cats, which do most of the killing…
As the author points out, the bleeding-heart “solution” of trap, neuter and return (TNR) doesn’t really solve the problem, since the newly sprung killers quickly turn recidivist. Even worse, of course, is the cat’s effect on humans — the little beasts bring with them all manners of disease:
Cats are three to four times more likely than dogs to carry rabies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also share many other parasites or infectious microbes with humans, including roundworms, hookworms, giardia and campylobacter. When cats live outdoors it is almost impossible to predict what they will bring home next. In Massachusetts and New York, for instance, cats recently turned up infected with a worm normally found in raccoons. One owner pulled four of them, about six inches long, through her cat’s skin, “which isn’t the best idea,” says one of the Cornell University scientists who reported the cases. Most insidiously, outdoor cats are the primary hosts of toxoplasmosis, which is estimated to infect almost 30 percent of all humans worldwide. Toxoplasmosis produces lifelong parasitic cysts in the brain, and though it is generally asymptomatic it has been linked to neurological impairments, depression, blindness and birth defects. Even in asymptomatic individuals, the infection is associated with significant loss of memory in later life, according to a study last month in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
The #fluffybunnyfund is dedicated to stopping this massacre in our streets, byways and back yards. If you don’t know what it is, please join me on Facebook (“David Kahane”) or follow me on Twitter @dkahanerules, especially if you have absolutely no sense of humor and wish to vent your outrage at my flagrant contempt for our murderous feline “friends.” And don’t forget that the White House is now using cat pictures to try and sell the abomination of Obamacare. Evil in the service of evil: I rest my case.
UPDATE: The AP is reporting that two people in Britain have contracted tuberculosis from their pet cat:
England’s public health agency says two people have caught tuberculosis from a pet cat, the first time the bacterial disease has been documented to spread from cat to human. In a report published Thursday, Public Health England said it concluded TB samples taken from the cat and from two people in contact with the animal were “indistinguishable” and that the cat was considered to be “the likely source of infection.”
Between December 2012 and last April, veterinarians identified TB in nine pet cats in Berkshire and Hampshire, west of London. Public Health England said the two people who caught TB were recovering and said the risk of further spread from cats to humans is very low. TB is a bacterial disease that kills more than 1 million people annually worldwide.
Color me unsurprised. In other outrages:
Rap sheet? No problem!
The criminal organization that masquerades as a political party — that would be the Democratic Party, for those new to this racket — is now transforming itself into a criminal organization that masquerades as… a criminal organization! It’s just that they’re now calling ex-cons “returned citizens,” as in “returned from the Big House,” not that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris. It’s like TNR for humans, minus the “neuter” part! The Washington Post reports on the ongoing shenanigans in its home town:
Above an official portrait of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, crisp silver lettering spells out a welcome to one of the shiniest new places in D.C. government — the Office on Returning Citizen Affairs. And on a flier lying nearby: “YOU CAN LEGALLY VOTE!” The bustling facility is designed solely for convicted criminals, a center for training, job placement, housing services and other programs for a slice of the population growing by thousands each year. Ex-offenders account for at least one in 10 D.C. residents and perhaps many more. That makes them a potentially pivotal, if uncertain, voting bloc — and a highly coveted target that no political campaign has ignored in the tightening April 1 Democratic primary for mayor. Every mayoral candidate has promised something. Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away in favor of winning a few thousand votes that could tip the balance in a close race.
I bet it could. The new bureaucracy is called ORCA for short, and you can check it out at the link. Here’s a handy clip-‘n-save:
Somewhere, Alexander Hamilton wishes he’d won that duel with Aaron Burr
As I wrote here at PJ Media:
The Democratic Party has always appealed to the basest instincts of the American people, molting and changing shape as the political winds dictated but solely devoted to its raison d’être: the accumulation and retention of political power. As it evolved over the course of the late 19th century, its chief mechanism became, in essence, bribery – not simply of civil officials but of the public itself. It’s unclear who said, “A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only last until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” But that may as well be the party’s animating ethos: “social justice” disguised as sympathy or, worse, compassion. Always wrapping itself in the false cloak of righteousness and celebrating the folk wisdom of the demos, the Democrats have consistently championed class envy, social division, and often – quite nakedly – racism, if they thought it would buy them votes. Only the Democrats could reinvent themselves so effortlessly, molting from the party of the Ku Klux Klan to the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From the party of the aggressive atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who destroyed school prayer and helped set the country on its downward moral spiral in 1963, to the party of Bible-toting Baptist presidents (Bill Clinton) and the racist ravings of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When your only principle is power, it’s easy to embrace flexibility and nuance. This amoral relativism raised to a high art of hypocrisy – for such it is – at the party’s core has long posed the most potent threat to its continuing existence; therefore, it is the one aspect of its nature that must be most assiduously concealed and obscured.
So I, for one, welcome this exciting new development in potential electoral chicanery. The franchise was once so sacred that it was restricted to people with skin in the game. Today, it’s a right — to be exercised as often as possible, with no untoward legal consequences. Unfortunately for our representative democracy, it’s become the right to keep the Democrats in power by, in the words of their famous phrase, “any means necessary.” Hey, it works for them. What works for us?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member