[The following commentary generated such a spirited discussion in the forum that I’m letting it run for a second day. If you haven’t yet added your two cents’ worth, it’s time to jump in! RA]
Rep. Ron Paul’s proposal to cut spending and taxes by $1 trillion during his first year in office was the most e-mailed story yesterday at Wall Street Journal online. In a perfect world, perhaps his campaign would get as much attention from the Journal’s editorialists as it does from the paper’s readers. Ditto for TV coverage, where Paul seems to get respect only from, of all people, Jon Stewart. Stewart is one of the few commentators who seems to have noticed how well Paul scores with voters even as reporters and news editors continue to ignore him (or rudely disdain him, as is the case with Fox blowhard Bill O’Reilly, who presumed to go toe-to-toe with Paul on a subject — economics — that O’Reilly clearly knows nothing about). Most recently, alas, the newsies have been so busy tearing into Herman Cain’s elemental 9-9-9 tax plan that they will have had little time to ponder Paul’s trillion-dollar idea. Most of the savings the Texas congressman seeks would come from eliminating five cabinet-level departments – lumbering bureaucracies that millions of Americans would doubtless agree we can do without: Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior and HUD. Other than the vast army of civil service workers employed by these FDR-era throwbacks, who would ever miss them, right?
Paul’s plan sounds like a winner to us, but we would urge him to consider adding to his hit-list the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is not merely counterproductive like the agencies listed above, but nefarious. If you don’t know why the USDA deserves to be deep-sixed, the documentary film Farmageddon will open your eyes. It begins with a woman recounting the frightening details of an invasion of her home by heavily armed men in flak vests. Her first glimpse of an intruder came as she started down a hall stairway. At the bottom, a black-gloved hand wielding an automatic pistol protruded from behind a living-room wall. Turns out a veritable SWAT-team of USDA agents, armed with automatic weapons and decked out like the troops that stormed bin Laden’s compound, had come on official business. Their mission? To confiscate samples of raw milk being sold, via a food co-op, from a large pantry in the back of the home. This they did, guns drawn, after rounding up the family, including several children, and sequestering them in the living room for four hours.
Health Not the Issue
The woman had organized the co-op in order to dsitribute food produced by local farmers to her neighbors at a reasonable cost. As it happens, raw-milk products are high on the USDA’s list of foods it would rather we did not produce or sell to each other. And if you think that sanitation and health issues are the agency’s key concerns, you are mistaken. As the film makes clear, these factors are just an excuse for USDA agents to break down the doors of co-ops and other small-time food producers and sellers who would deign to compete with the giants of agribusiness. For at least one sheep’s milk producer, the outcome was far worse than having their door busted down. The USDA assault team showed up one morning to confiscate their entire herd — imported from Europe at great expense and with miles of red tape. All the animals – scores of them — were killed and autopsied for mad cow disease. Test results eventually came back negative, which was no surprise, since the disease has never appeared in sheep. But it took years for a team of lawyers working gratis for the co-op to have the autopsy results released. At the time of the film’s release, the couple had not been compensated for the sheep.
Someone ought to send a copy of Farmageddon to Rep. Paul, since he may be the last best hope we Americans have of retaining the right to eat whatever we damned well please.
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“Assaults are broken down into degrees. Assault by penis, assault by breast, assault by mouth, assault by toe, pencil, broom, club, bottle are all tools that have been investigated by police. The issue of entering the ’space’ where a child grows is deemed especially heinous.”
I don’t understand your point with these sentences. Sexual assault (of an adult) is defined as the penetration of the vaginal or anal orifice by any means, or of the mouth by the sexual organ of another. A vaginal sexual assault is not treated as “especially heinous” versus the mouth or anus; they are all the same degree of felony (my apologies if there is a state that does classify them differently — no state working off the Model Penal Code does so, and that is the majority of states).
But more to the point, you did not explain how one can insist that the lining of the uterus is an exterior surface when the uterus is open to the abdominal cavity via the fallopian tubes. The corked bottle analogy is not really accurate, since the bottle has three openings, two of which open to the abdominal cavity and one of which opens to the exterior of the body. Only the latter is plugged during pregnancy; the tubes are always open. Hence my Mobius strip analogy: if the vaginal canal and uterine cavity or an external surface, then that external surface carries right over and out the fallopian tube openings per your donut rationale, and every surface of the female reproductive complex is exterior — there is no interior surface. And then the transition from/juncture between the uterine tissue and all surrounding tissue inside the abdominal cavity must be exterior surface, etc. You’ve rendered a woman a Mobius strip, with all surfaces external.