When someone punches you unprovoked, what moral rule should you follow?

While riding my bicycle past a housing project in the city of St. Louis yesterday, six teenaged boys ran up to me. I suspected trouble. One of the teenagers ran alongside me. I was concerned that he was going to push me off my bicycle, so I hopped off. He looked nervous, and we all froze for a couple seconds, with the other five teenagers standing about 20 feet away. The teenager closest to me suddenly reached back and took a swing at me, punching me on my right shoulder. I wasn’t hurt much, even though this kid was trying to hurt me. Though I had previously been in only one other fight in my entire life (a minor scuffle when I was about 10), I assumed that I could handle two or three of these teenagers (assuming that they didn’t have weapons), but not six of them. Instead of lunging for the attacker, I yelled, “Cut it out!” He immediately backed off, then all six young men scampered about 150 feet away, taunting me as they went. I crossed the road toward a restaurant and they stayed away. This all happened along a well-traveled road.

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Is USDA Organic Certifiably Insane?

I saw a very brief and hurried post from ERV on ScienceBlogs. In it, she noted that organic farmers let their animals die from treatable diseases, because to do otherwise would deny them the valuable 'organic' label. WTF? In Europe, organic livestock MUST be treated humanely, and may receive therapeutic medication (including antibiotics) - to do otherwise is a complete denial of everything science and medicine has learned in the past three hundred years. But, apparently, that's what Organic means in the US! As ERV says

'Organic' farmers? All concerned about their free-range, cage-free, at harmony with the Mother Goddess animals? They let their fucking animals die from treatable diseases, because if they treat them with even one dose of antibiotics, the animals are no longer 'organic'.
She quotes Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association
Allowing one-time therapeutic antibiotics is "a slippery slope", and would "undermine consumer confidence in organics. It's the same position [I have] as on human vaccines. They are dangerous, and that's why I didn't vaccinate my kid."
Never mind the epic FAIL in Ronnie Cummin's statement about the dangers of vaccines - that woo is worthy of a post all by itself! The issue is that animals are allowed to die, often painfully, from completely preventable and treatable diseases. Why is this so? ERV linked to her source (this article at the blog "In These Times"). According to that article,
Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations defining organic standards mandate that if [a] calf had gotten one dose of antibiotics, even to save her life, she could never give organic milk—even after the two years it takes for her to become a milker, and even though neither she nor her milk would retain any trace of antibiotics.
So why would the USDA have such nonsensical standards for 'organic'?

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Read more about the article CEOs Earn More When They Fire People
John D Rockefeller - Archetype of today's CEO

CEOs Earn More When They Fire People

John D Rockefeller - Puck Magazine 1901 The Institute for Policy Studies has just released their 17th annual review of CEO salary. It makes for scary reading. While the rest of us suffer through the double-dip-recession-that-never-actually-lifted-off-the-bottom, CEOs, who are not only some of the wealthiest people in the country but are also the most handsomely paid to boot, have seen their income rise in real terms, while their employees have seen a reduction in real income and a significant contraction of job opportunities. According to the Institute

Corporate executives, in reality, are not suffering at all. Their pay, to be sure, dipped on average in 2009 from 2008 levels, just as their pay in 2008, the first Great Recession year, dipped somewhat from 2007. But executive pay overall remains far above inflationadjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.
Their employees, meanwhile
are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate in the 17th annual Executive Excess, CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers. CEOs are clearly not hurting.
But reality is even worse:
In 2009, the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies
The market, and the embedded compensation committees, are rewarding CEOs for destroying livliehoods, for shipping jobs overseas, and for eviscerating the american workplace. These are the same people who lobby our politicians to create business friendly legislation (aka legislation that will protect their bonuses and options) and to fight against social programs (that would level the playing field a little) What was so wrong with the vibrant, growing, energetic America of the 70s and 80s? Why do CEOs hate America, so?

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ASCAP attacks Creative Commons

No, this is not a comical make-believe headline from The Onion. ASCAP has lashed out at Creative Commons.

At this moment, we are facing our biggest challenge ever. Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote "Copyleft" in order to undermine our "Copyright." They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.
This smear campaign is a staggering display of ignorance. Did ASCAP actually hire a lawyer to advise them here? Do they have the faintest idea of what Creative Commons is all about? Here's the response of Creative Commons:
Last week, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely claiming that we work to undermine copyright.* Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses. Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should absolutely not use CC licenses.
Here's more analysis, from Techdirt.
ASCAP's blatant attack on Creative Commons (and EFF and PK; both of whom focus on consumer rights, but not undermining artist's rights at all) shows their true colors. They're not about artists' rights at all. They're about greater protectionism -- which is not (at all) the same thing.

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…Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others…

I got into a stupid flame was the other day on Facebook with a friend (and her commenters) She [A] posted the following to her wall:

If you think that putting up a mosque 600 ft. from ground zero and have the opening of the mosque on the anniversary of 9/11/11, is immoral, inhuman and a complete lack of respect for the memories of all that perished on that day and their survivors & that politicians are doing a grave injustice to the fallen heroes, their families and the people of New York City, THEN PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THIS TO YOUR WALL
The first commenter followed with
[B] its digusting its even a thought in someones head.....
I saw this and saw yet another vile, right-wing sponsored attack on civil liberties. I am not religious, and abhor religion. I think it perpetuates an evil upon the world that does incalculable damage to current and future generations. However, I do support the rule of law, and the Cordoba House people have the right to build there.

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