Tag Archives: Animal Rights

News

Take a half-hour and watch this Discovery Institute documentary on environmental extremism

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It runs for 31 minutes.

Description:

Are humans the enemy? Should pigs and peas have constitutional rights? The War on Humans is a 31-minute documentary that critiques growing efforts to disparage the value of humans in the name of saving the planet. The documentary investigates the views of anti-human activists who want to grant legal rights to animals, plants, and “Mother Earth,” and who want to reduce the human population by up to 90%. The video features Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith, author of a companion e-book with the same title.

Fascinating!

Podcasts

And there are some podcasts to go with it for those who like podcasts:

Podcast 1:

On this episode of ID the Future, hear from bioethicist Wesley J. Smith as he talks about his new book The War on Humans, also adapted as a documentary film. In this first podcast of the series, Smith discusses what makes humans unique among the creatures of the earth, and why it matters: “Universal human rights are at stake. The intrinsic dignity of human life is at stake. The understanding of our unique place in the world, both in terms of or value and in terms of obligation, they are at stake.” Listen in!

The MP3 is here.

Podcast 2:

On this episode of ID the Future, hear from bioethicist Wesley J. Smith as he continues his conversation on his new book The War on Humans, also adapted as a documentary film. In this second podcast of the series, you’ll hear about how the conservation movement turned into an anti-human movement, and how this affects humans, especially in the developing world and in marginalized people groups.

The MP3 is here.

Podcast 3:

On this episode of ID the Future, hear from bioethicist Wesley J. Smith as he continues his conversation on his new book The War on Humans, also adapted as a documentary film. In this third podcast of the series, you’ll hear about the legal movement to establish legal rights for animals, and even plants. Smith examines the meaning of the term “personhood” and its implications for human rights.

The MP3 is here.

A recent story about eco-terrorism was in the news.

 

News

Are green energy sources like solar power and wind power good for the environment?

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Green energy harms wildlife, especially birds
Green energy harms wildlife, especially birds

Investors Business Daily explains how green energy hurts birds, even rare, endangered species of birds.

Excerpt:

What do you call an energy source that consumes vast tracks of open land and fries birds that cross its path? If you’re the president, you call it “safe,” “reliable,” “green” and worthy of massive taxpayer subsidies.

That, at least, is the case with the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station that covers a vast area of desert outside Las Vegas and, thanks to the generous support of the Obama administration, has officially opened.

The plant points hundreds of thousands of mirrors at three towers to boil turbine-spinning water. But the heat rays aren’t very friendly to the area’s birds, including falcons, hawks, warblers and sparrows that have shown up dead near the towers.

One of the inconvenient truths that global warming fanatics and renewable energy purists try to ignore is that wind and solar energy are not so environmentally friendly. At least, not if you care about wildlife and land preservation.

First, these energy sources are massive land hogs. Ivanpah requires more than 5 square miles of mirrors to produce enough electricity to light 140,000 homes. It would take roughly 3,600 Ivanpahs to supply all the country’s electricity needs, with mirrors covering New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and a chunk of Massachusetts combined.

Wind power is hardly much better. According to the Nature Conservancy, it takes 30 times the land for windmills to produce as much electricity as a nuclear power plant.

And their turbines amount to bird Cuisinarts. To keep wind farms spinning, the Obama administration recently issued permits letting them kill protected bald and golden eagles for 30 years, provided they take some steps to mitigate the slaughter.

People who friend me on Facebook know that I love birds very much and I keep them as pets – they are my favorite animal. So this just gives me another reason to be disgusted with the policies of the secular left. When you add this wholesale slaughter of birds to the fact that we could be creating many more new jobs by investing in traditional sources of energy at home, it makes me even more angry.

News

What do PETA and animal rights activist Meredith Lowell have in common?

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Here’s Meredith Lowell, the main character in a very weird story.

Excerpt:

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show.

[…]Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.

The affidavit says an FBI employee posing as a possible hit man later began email correspondence with Lowell, and she offered him $730 in jewelry or cash for the killing of a victim of at least 12 years but “preferably 14 years old or older” outside a library near a playground in her hometown.

“You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes,” says an email reprinted in the affidavit.

She told the undercover employee she wanted to be on site when the slaying took place so she could distribute “papers” afterward, the affidavit says.

[…]Reprinted emails also say Lowell wrote that she sees nothing wrong with “liberating” animals from fur factory farms and laboratories since “soldiers liberated people from Nazi camps in World War 2.”

She also criticized a new aquarium in Cleveland – saying “it is wrong for animals to be taken against their will and put into their (equivalent) of a bathtub” – and research by the Cleveland Clinic, where she said animals should be “liberated and put somewhere where they are not tortured.”

And here’s what PETA believes:

The graphic campaign and exhibit “Holocaust on Your Plate,” devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.

The exhibit opens Friday in San Diego, California, and went up Thursday at the University of California at Los Angeles. It also is posted on a PETA Web site, http://www.masskilling.com, which calls for support for the campaign from the Jewish community.

The comparisons prompted an angry statement from Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League national director and a Holocaust survivor.

“The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent,” the statement said. “PETA’s effort to seek approval for their ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.”

Lisa Lange, PETA’s vice president of communications, told CNN’s “American Morning With Paula Zahn” on Friday that the idea for the public relations effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, she said, wrote: “In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka” — a death camp in Poland.

Lange said the campaign is appropriate because “Nazi concentration camps were modeled after slaughterhouses.”

One more thing about PETA. PETA is not a pro-life organization. Every single animal rights person I have ever spoken to is pro-abortion. I find it so weird that an organization that worries so much about animals has nothing at all to say about protecting humans.