Some harsh facts for chicken eaters, like me.

Have you ever been to a children's science museum, where the children get to see chicks hatching from eggs? At these educational facilities, we teach our children about the innocence and beauty of the baby chicks. In addition to looking at them hatch, I like to eat chickens and their eggs. I always have. But this article and the undercover video that follows have really put me in a moral quandary.

An animal rights group publicized a video Tuesday showing unwanted chicks being tossed alive into a grinder at an Iowa plant and accused egg hatcheries of being "perhaps the cruelest industry" in the world.
I promote this ghastly system whenever I eat the chickens and eggs sold at most grocery stores in the U.S. There's no way around it. Perhaps one solution is to open up chicken factories to school groups, so that the children and their families can learn about the process leading up to that admittedly delicious meal of chicken strips. Then, we can make more informed decisions at the grocery store.

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How to slash the cost of sending astronauts to Mars: Don’t bring them back.

How do we cut the cost of sending astronauts to Mars? Lawrence Krauss dares to make this suggestion:

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive. There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?
Krauss suggests that we could get many volunteers for a one-way mission, but that we should choose older astronauts, who have already lived most of their lives. Many people would be aghast to read this. But consider that it's a matter of degree, in that we do tolerate consistently high death rates for some jobs, such as combat soldiers and, of all things, pizza delivery:
On-the-job accidents and homicides claimed the lives of 5,524 Americans last year . . . Of that 5,524, only 104 were timber-cutters, but those fatalities represent a death rate nearly 30 times that of a typical workplace. Loggers died at a rate of 117.8 per 100,000 workers, the BLS said, with most of them killed by falling trees. Fishing was the second most dangerous occupation, with 71.1 deaths for every 100,000 workers, followed by pilots and navigators, 69.8, structural metal workers, 58.2, and, perhaps surprisingly, drivers-sales workers, which include pizza delivery drivers at 37.9.

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The U.S. War on Drugs by the numbers

In the current edition of Esquire Magazine, John H. Richardson mentions the:

startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin.

In his article, Richardson describes the drug war in the U.S. with some staggering numbers. For instance, every year the U.S. "war on drugs" costs:

15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.

One can't help but think of Einstein's well-used definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

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Tortured logic, tortured justice

Sometimes, I cannot comprehend how the United States of America has come to occupy the landscape that it has in the year 2009. Growing up, I learned in school about all of the wonderful things that the United States had done for the world. Out of the tyranny that the British Empire had become, our forefathers had the temerity and the moral fortitude to announce to the world that we would be building a new kind of nation-- one in which the rights of the individual would trump government power. People were inherently vested with natural rights, inalienable rights. Our First Amendment- the right to speak freely, to worship (or not) as one pleases, free press, who could ask for a better check on governmental power? Can the government force the citizenry to quarter soldiers? Not here, we've got the Constitution! Governments stopping people for no reason, or on trumped-up charges? No way, we've got the 4th Amendment! To be sure, there were some stark contradictions, but I didn't realize those until I was a little older. I mean, it's a little hard to take seriously those that would lecture on the topic of liberty while being slave-owners, but the overall idea was pretty great. We were the force for truth and justice and all that is right. We proved it, too. We fought tyranny in World War II, the most recent (winning) war. We saw the evil that was done in the name of National Socialism, Fascism, or whatever label you want to use. We saw the evil in those Nazi bastards and we would have none of it-- and rightly so. The indescribable acts of torture and dehumanization were enough to turn anyone's stomach. I read Night, as well as some other works by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and was moved to tears. I looked at the photographs of the concentration camps and saw the shivering, starving groups of people blankly staring at the camera lens. I saw the piles of bodies- massive piles of them! What kind of people could order (or commit?) these horrible, despicable acts? What kind of person could so callously cause the suffering of their fellow human beings? The Nazi experiment was a singular example of the brutality that one group could inflict on another. There is no crime so heinous that it could compare to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The scale of the suffering defies understanding-- we named it The Holocaust. [More . . . ]

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The torture done by the United States, in detail.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the torture done in our names, and it's sickening. You can read succinct descriptions of the sort this terrible conduct. There's a lot of wailing and whining by conservatives that disclosing our own reprehensible conduct is inappropriate. That's because they can't justify this behavior in the least. How was it that we now know about the torture done by the United States? No thanks to Congress:

[I]t should be emphasized that yet again, it is not the Congress or the establishment media which is uncovering these abuses and forcing disclosure of government misconduct. Rather, it is the ACLU (with which I consult) that, along with other human rights organizations, has had to fill the void left by those failed institutions, using their own funds to pursue litigation to compel disclosure. Without their efforts, we would know vastly less than we know now about the crimes our government committed.

If any other country tortured Americans, most conservatives would be making sure that everyone knew about the torture and many of them would be trying to declare war on that country.

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