Friday, September 02, 2005

POLITICALLY CORRECT CUISINE

Have pity on all those innocent vegetables

We meat eaters are under attack from a number of quarters these days- vegetarian activist groups decrying our cruelty, doctors warning of health effects and burying us in an avalanche of numbers- cholesterol scores, obesity statistics, arterial plaque alerts. One of the most vociferous of the vegetarian groups is the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Here is an excerpt from their website, 'Fight for Their Rights.

Animals deserve rights, regardless of how they taste or how convenient it is to experiment on them. Like humans, animals are capable of suffering and have an interest in leading their own lives. They are not ours to use for food, clothing, experimentation, or entertainment.' But if you think that's off the wall, check out this quote from the Militant Vegetarian website, 'Join the ranks of the new underground joining forces to end world hunger by violently opposing the fascist tyranny of the meat eating population. No longer must the non meat eating sit by non violently watching the meat eating savages continue to cover the planet in a deepening layer of cow waste. 'The time of the new world order is at hand, as our leaders have told us, and we may now violently take our place as masters of the planet, while meat eaters inbreed themselves out of existence in an orgy of disease, grease and insects.'

Don't these people realize that, every day across America, tens of millions of innocent tomatoes are slashed to pieces simply to satisfy their voracious vegetarian appetites? Countless billions of blameless bean sprouts, who never had the opportunity to twine their tender tendrils to the sun, will literally be eaten alive. Guiltless green beans, potatoes, and carrots- perfectly capable of reproducing new, viable offspring- are plunged headlong into boiling water, extinguishing any hopes for their future generations. Harmless eggplants are being eviscerated and baked in ovens at high temperatures. ... I can't go on.

Because of these epicurean outrages, it has become necessary to establish the Vegetable Rights Organization (VRO). Our logo will be a tomato cringing under the shadow of a knife with a circle with a line through it. Our pledge is to continue to consume large quantities of T-bones and prime rib in order to leave little room in our bellies for veggies. Barbequed pork, smothered in sauce will become the mainstay of our diets, thus sparing as many hapless vegetables as possible. Hot dogs, sausages, meatballs, the possibilities are endless.

Of course, some certain grains and fruits, which are used in the production of beer, wine, or other spirits, will necessarily have to be excluded from VRO protection. And the watermelon will have to be reclassified as an animal by Congressional legislation. We must unite now if we can ever hope to save our little green buddies before these gluttonous vegans strip this planet bare and brown. Help stop the senseless slaughter. Join the VRO today!

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Thomas Sowell: Immigration reform on list of politically correct taboos

Immigration has joined the long list of subjects on which it is taboo to talk sense in plain English. At the heart of much con fusion about immigration is the notion that we "need" immigrants — legal or illegal — to do work that Americans won't do. What we "need" depends on what it costs and what we are willing to pay. If I were a billionaire, I might "need" my own private jet. But I can remember a time when my family didn't even "need" electricity.

Leaving prices out of the picture is probably the source of more fallacies in economics than any other single misconception. At current wages for low-level jobs and current levels of welfare, there are indeed many jobs that Americans will not take. The fact that immigrants — and especially illegal immigrants — will take those jobs is the very reason the wage levels will not rise enough to attract Americans. This is not rocket science. It is elementary supply and demand. Yet we continue to hear about the "need" for immigrants to do jobs that Americans will not do — even though these are all jobs that Ameri cans have done for generations before mass illegal immigration became a way of life.

There is more to this issue than economics. The same mindless substitution of rhetoric for thinking that prevails on economic issues also prevails on other aspects of immigration. Bombings in London, Madrid and the 9/11 terrorist attacks here are all part of the high price being paid today for decades of importing human time bombs from the Arab world. That in turn has been the fruit of an unwillingness to filter out people according to the countries they come from. That squeamishness is still with us today, as shown by all the hand wringing about "profiling" Middle Eastern airline passengers. No doubt most Middle Eastern airline passengers are not carrying any weapons or any bombs — and wouldn't be, even if there were no airport security to go through. But it is also true that most of the time you will not be harmed by playing Russian roulette.

Europeans and Americans have for decades been playing Russian roulette with their loose immigration policies. The intelligentsia have told us that it would be wrong, and even racist, to set limits based on where the immigrants come from. There are thousands of Americans who might still be alive if we had banned immigration from Saudi Arabia — and perhaps that might be more important than the rhetoric of the intelligentsia.

In that rhetoric, all differences between peoples are magically transformed into mere "stereotypes" and "perceptions." This blithely ignores hard data showing, for example, that people who come here from some countries are 10 times more likely to go on welfare as people from some other countries. The media and the intelligentsia love to say that most immigrants, from whatever group, are good people. But what "most" people from a given country are like is irrelevant. If 85 percent of Group A are fine people and 95 percent of Group B are fine people, that means you are going to be importing three times as many undesirables when you let in people from Group A.

Citizen-of-the-world types are resistant to the idea of tightening our borders, and especially resistant to the idea of making a distinction between people from different countries. But the real problem is not their self-righteous fetishes but the fact that they have intimidated so many other people into silence. In the current climate of political correctness it is taboo even to mention facts that go against the rosy picture of immigrants — for example, the fact that Russia and Nigeria are always listed among the most corrupt countries on Earth, and that Russian and Nigerian immigrants in the United States have already established patterns of crime well known to law enforcement but kept from the public by the mainstream media.

Self-preservation used to be called the first law of nature. But today self-preservation has been superseded by a need to preserve the prevailing rhetoric and visions. Immigration is just one of the things we can no longer discuss rationally as a result

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