Will the hypocrisy ever end?

PETA Killed 95 Percent of Adoptable Pets in its Care During 2008

Hypocritical Animal Rights Group’s 2008 Disclosures Bring Pet Death Toll To 21,339

WASHINGTON DC – Today the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) published documents online showing that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) killed 95 percent of the adoptable pets in its care during 2008. Despite years of public outrage over its euthanasia program, the animal rights group kills an average of 5.8 pets every day at its Norfolk, VA headquarters.

According to public records from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, PETA killed 2,124 pets last year and placed only seven in adoptive homes. Since 1998, a total of 21,339 dogs and cats have died at the hands of PETA workers.

Despite having a $32 million budget, PETA does not operate an adoption shelter. PETA employees make no discernible effort to find homes for the thousands of pets they kill every year. Last year, the Center for Consumer Freedom petitioned Virginia’s State Veterinarian to reclassify PETA as a slaughterhouse.

CCF Research Director David Martosko said: “PETA hasn’t slowed down its hypocritical killing machine one bit, but it keeps browbeating the rest of society with a phony ‘animal rights’ message. What about the rights of the thousands of dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens that die in PETA’s headquarters building?”

Martosko added: “Since killing pets is A-OK with PETA, why should anyone listen to their demands about eating meat, using lab rats for medical research, or taking children to the circus?”

CCF obtained PETA’s “Animal Record” filings since 1998 from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Members of the public can see these documents at PetaKillsAnimals.com.

(Skeptical? Click here to see the documents.)

In addition to exposing PETA’s hypocritical record of killing defenseless animals, the Center for Consumer Freedom has publicized the animal rights group’s ties to violent activists, and shed light on its aggressive message-marketing to children.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies, and consumers, working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices.

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To read this article off the original site click here.

Quote of the Day: Kathleen Norris

"Dakota is a painful reminder of human limits, just as cities and shopping malls are attempts to deny them."

"Silence is the best response to mystery. 'There is no way of telling people,' Merton reminds us, 'that they are all walking around shining like the sun.'"

- from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Quotes of the Day: Madeleine L'Engle

From her chapter "Icons of the True" in Walking on Water.

"[W]e do not find [wisdom and grace] in many places where we would naturally expect to find it. This confusion about because much so-called religious art is in fact bad art, and therefore bad religion."

"Christ has always worked in ways which have seemed peculiar to many men, even his closest followers. Frequently the disciples failed to understand him. So we need not feel that we have to understand how he works through artists who do not consciously recognize him. Neither should our lack of understanding cause us to assume that he cannot be present in their work."

"We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to."

When speaking of the new book of common prayer and how we confess our sins of commission before those of omission, she writes, "It is the things I have left undone which haunt me far more than the things which I have done."

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation."

Quotes of the Day: Mark C. Taylor and Cardinal Suhard

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist." - Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard quoted by Madeleine L'Engle in "Icons of the True"

"It is the unsaid in all our saying that undoes all we do." - Mark C. Taylor from Disfiguring:Art, Architecture, Religion

Quote of the Day: Frank Burch Brown

I am going to be doing a succession of posts entitled "Quote of the day." They may show up every day or every few days. While I would like to say that I am a connoisseur of quotes, it is more like I am a collector of them. That is to say, I have more than enough to post every day for the next year or two, but I won't tax your patience quite to that extent. When they are short I may do more than one. Think on them, enjoy them, and please, feel free to comment on them.

"The artistic capacity to envision, and in vision to transfigure this world or some hypothetical counterpart, evidently responds uniquely to an abiding human need. That is the need to discover, imagine, and come to grips with a world that can be thought and felt to matter, both in its goodness and beauty and in its evil and horror....Precisely because we are embodied, thinking, passionate beings who want meaning and meaningfulness, truth and emotional satisfaction, we cannot be engaged wholly except through forms that imaginatively encompass and orient us within something like a world: something, moreover, as purposeful in its apparent purposelessness as we hope and trust life itself can be." - From Religious Aesthetics, A Theological Study of Making and Meaning

Easy as the click of a button

When I was reading over one of the essays I had to write for my many applications this week, I right clicked on the highlighted changes Mom had suggested. It gave me the option to either "accept change" or "reject change." If only life had such buttons. With one click I could accept the enormous changes in front of me (transferring schools, moving home, commuting, working, changing majors, rearranging friendships) and have them settle in as if they were no change at all. Or, I could reject those changes altogether and have things continue on as previously planned. Of course, as with the paper, in doing so I would risk unfulfilled potential, mediocrity which never reaches the goal, meaning left undisclosed. Every piece of writing is better for a little editing--even life stories. But in editing you must discard one ending for another. There is always the possibility that the first one would have been good too. Unfortunately, in life there are no buttons. So, while we do either accept change or reject it, thwarting it entirely is out of the question and nothing about the decision to do either is going to be so easy or instantaneous. I have mostly accepted my current changes--the existence and inevitability of them--but for now I am back at Gordon, living in the possibility of an ending that isn't going to happen, while word by word I edit for a different conclusion.

Good News in this Economy???

I saw this on yahoo news and thought it was pretty cool....

A Head with a Heart

It was the kind of meeting that is taking place in restaurant kitchens, small offices, retail storerooms, and large auditoriums all over this city, all over this state, all over this country.

Paul Levy, the guy who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was standing in Sherman Auditorium the other day, before some of the very people to whom he might soon be sending pink slips.

In the days before the meeting, Levy had been walking around the hospital, noticing little things.

He stood at the nurses' stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food chatted up the patients and their families.

He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

And so Paul Levy had all this bouncing around his brain the other day when he stood in Sherman Auditorium.

He looked out into a sea of people and recognized faces: technicians, secretaries, administrators, therapists, nurses, the people who are the heart and soul of any hospital. People who knew that Beth Israel had hired about a quarter of its 8,000 staff over the last six years and that the chances that they could all keep their jobs and benefits in an economy in freefall ranged between slim and none.

"I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I'd like to get your reaction to it," Levy began. "I'd like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners - the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don't want to put an additional burden on them.

"Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice," he continued. "It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits."

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.

Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn't think he could go on.

When the applause subsided, he did go on, telling the workers at Beth Israel, the people who make a hospital go, that he wanted their ideas.

The lump had barely left his throat when Paul Levy started getting e-mails.

The consensus was that the workers don't want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3 percent raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.

"I'm getting about a hundred messages per hour," Levy said yesterday, shaking his head.

Paul Levy is onto something. People are worried about the next paycheck, because they're only a few paychecks away from not being able to pay the mortgage or the rent.

But a lot of them realize that everybody's in the same boat and that their boat doesn't rise because someone else's sinks.

Paul Levy is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible: He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.

Italy Update

This update is a little on the tardy side, but I have been putting it off. The good news is that I was accepted into the Orvieto program on Friday. At this point, there should be lots of jumping and screaming, but I just can't get that worked up about it because of the bad news. There isn't enough money for me to return to Gordon next year, unless I opt for massive loans that will land me in debt for the next twenty years. I've gone through all the financial aid information and I'm 99% sure that it isn't going to work. As soon as I got this news (two weeks prior to today) I began looking at schools to transfer to. My top choice is currently is UNH. I would get in-state tuition and they have both of my majors. There is the possibilty of me commuting or I have been offered an apartment there by a friend. Tomorrow I go to take a tour of the campus and hopefully get some questions answered. So that's about where everything stands. Despite being heartbroken about leaving everything and everyone at Gordon, some excitement is beginning to well up in me for this new adenture. Nothing about my college experience has been predictable thus far, I guess there is no reason for it to start now.

10 Reasons to Become a Philosophy Major

1. Capitalizing the first letter of any noun gives it abstract existence.
2. You get to use words like "thatness" and "whatness" and they actually mean something.
3. People automatically defer to your superior intelligence without bothering to find out if you actually have any.
4. Every word is open to redefinition...even that one.
5. You will never take another exam again.
6. The departments are so small they are just happy you're there. If you are female, they may set up a shrine and enter the room kowtowing.
7. If you run out of time to write a paper, you simply channel Descartes and posit the non-existence of deadlines. You're only dreaming after all.
8. There really is no wrong answer. You just have to be able to take enough text out of context to support whatever absurdity you are claiming.
9. It is expected that you will babble inchoerently, forget the mundane niceties of everyday life, spend massive amounts of money on an education and books normal people don't understand, smoke cigars, and spend the majority of your time in pubs (mostly doing the incoherent babbling thing and smoking the cigars).
10. When you write papers, if your classmates don't understand it you'll probably get a B. If you don't understand it, you're edging toward an A-. If your professor doesn't understand it, you just put yourself on the presidential honors list.