Berkeley, CA  TEXAS – In the hills above the University of California’s Berkeley Texas campus, nine protesters gathered in front of the home of a toxicology professor abortion doctor, their faces covered with scarves and hoods despite the warm spring weather.

One scrawled “killer” in chalk on the scientistdoctor’s doorstep, while another hurled insults through a bullhorn and announced, “Your neighbor kills animalsbabies!” Someone shattered a window.

Borrowing the kind of tactics used by anti-abortion animal rights demonstrators, animal rights anti-abortion activists are increasingly taking their rage straight to scientists’ doctors’ front doors.

Over the past couple of years, more and more researchers who experiment on animals kill babies have been harassed and terrorized in their own homes, with weapons that include firebombs, flooding and acid.

Scientists Doctors say the vandalism and intimidation threaten not just themselves and their families but the future of medical research women’s freedom to choose.  Specialists in such fields as addiction, eyesight and the aging brain All clinic workers have been targeted.

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Accompanying the attacks is increasingly tough talk from activists such as Dr Jerry Vlasak Pope Benedict XVI, a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front press office Catholic Church. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said he is not encouraging anyone to commit murder, but “if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.”

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You should read the whole article. All kidding aside, I was curious as to how in the world the journalist writing the story could make the connection between the pro-life (anti-abortion) tactics and those of the animal rights protestors. As a graduate student, I have vastly superior research skills …(more after the fold) and tools available at my fingertips to find and flesh out porn information. So, I made use of the most important of these tools, and found a few articles about controversial pro-life tactics: here, here, here, and here.

Now, I’m impressed. Who in the world would have thought that the pro-life movement is so well-organized and powerful that it would be able to suppress the use of firebombing, flooding, acid, and other forms of vandalizing a home in such a way that I wouldn’t be able to dig up anything? The most I found was that they were showing pictures of a dead fetus to the doctors’ children.

Oh, yes, I know, the writer was merely connecting the protesting in front of the scientists’ houses with similar tactics used by anti-abortion protestors. However, someone reading the article would never know the difference in the tactics. I’m not saying that some anti-abortion protestors don’t go too far, including the ones who resort to violence (which, like it or not, includes the blowing up of abortion clinics). Yet, I have never heard of a prominent leader in the pro-life movement EVER say that it is justifiable to KILL or get violent with an abortionist. The Animal Liberation Front is certainly not representative of the animal rights movement as a whole, but they are prominent enough that this type of stuff has to be taken seriously. They are very much a part of the “mainstream” of that movement.

My main issue is with the AP writer making the connection between the two groups in the first place. It’s a way of legitimitizing the tactics by saying “look at the other side doing the same thing.” One can easily point out that harrassment (and that’s exactly what this tactic is) occurs with lots of protest groups, but nope – we have to connect to a right-wing cause in order to make sure that the sympathetic left has something to point to in order to defend the tactic. It never occurs to the writer that the levels of violence being done by the two groups are orders of magnitude different. One allows the kids and family to “carry on normally”, even playing in the front yard, while the other puts their lives in danger.

So why do pro-lifers and animal rights activists picket homes? Because the tactic works. Of course it works – if I made a person fear for their safety and the safety of their family, I can pretty much convince them to do anything I want. I don’t even have to go that far. I just have to continually disrupt their personal lives to the point that their friends don’t want them around.

That’s what both groups achieve with these tactics. They do NOT bring about real change. They only make those who disagree live in a state of fear. That’s not only a form of censorship, which I detest, it’s also taking away the basic liberties that we are entitled to. The animal rights hippies should all be made to bathe and then shot (sorry, been a long week) protestors should be arrested and jailed for the violence. The pro-lifers should be beaten with their signs until they realize how much they’re hurting our cause. Harrassment of individuals and families should NEVER be tolerated.

If you want to change the world, do it by changing a person’s mind and heart. Convince them that your idea is better. Don’t bully them until they give in and pretend to agree with you. That’s what communists, facists, socialists, emasculating feminists, and Islamic terrorists do….yea, well, even if the Animal Liberation front falls under four of those five categories in some shape or form, my point still stands.

Hat tip to conservative grapevine

Why is it that it takes 10 shocks from two cops to bring down a wheelchair bound, 56 year old woman? Are cops getting too lazy? I mean, two against one in a wheelchair. All they had to do was let her keep swinging those knives around and she’d had gotten tired before too long, but noooo. The conversation probable went something like this (imagining the two cops off of the movie Superbad): “Grandma, we have donuts waiting. Please drop the knives…We’re gonna taser you…HAHA! Watch her shake! Do it again!…Damn, maybe she is a tough old lady. Shock her again!…Not so tough now grandma!…Grandma? Ooops…”

How many shocks did it take to bring down this Ron Paul supporter at a John Kerry rally (video here via IMAO)? Was she really that much tougher than him? Do we need to turn up the juice on these tasers to make them more effective?

(Click below to read more)

Actually, why bother with tasers? Why not just shoot more people instead? I’m referring, of course, to Ron Paul supporters, hippies, and anyone on the Looney Left, including the terrorists, and Christians who want to take away my alcohol. Shoot them and let the old ladies in wheelchairs live, please.

Execution by electrocution is no longer considered a “humane” way of killing a murderer, but apparently it’s ok to use on old handicapped ladies with mental problems…ten times. What does this say about the people we value in society?

The obvious, most important moral of this story is that a single, crazy, handicapped, old lady is a bigger threat to society than all those Ron Paul supporters who believe in crazy conspiracy theories. And they wonder why we dismiss them so easily…maybe they should take some lessons from grandma…

Now, scientists are pretty close to creating the first totally artificial life form since Hillary Clinton started running for president. Here’s the article (and if the article from the link differs from this one, it must be because they changed it earlier to hide their evil conservative bias):

WASHINGTON –Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

“Creating [wet life] has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste, and most importantly: they will provide a necessary labor source for doing jobs that true Americans don’t want to do.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

– A wall to keep bad wet-life out, allow good ones in, and the ability for them to multiply.

– A system that controls the functions of the wet-life, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

– A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment and food, then changes it into something to sell very cheaply.

One of the leaders…… in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a wall — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using Mexicans in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting the wet-life agree on a working system.

His idea is that once the wall is made, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over and wet-life will accept thier roles in society.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem. One only has to look at the pre-civil war era through to the 1960s to see the best ways to prevent a take-over.

“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in this heat we’ve been experiencing,” he said. “But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.”

(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to “shed new light”)

I think it is clear that the Iraqi’s have a better sense of right and wrong and unselfish sacrifice than we do. We unfairly force young, poor, minorities to join our army and send them over to fight an unjust war, while the Iraqi’s all-volunteer insurgency sacrifice their lives to repel the invaders.

And considering they don’t have the high rates of teen pregnacy and single mothers caused by the lie of abstinence-only education and propaganda claiming that a fetus is a human life, they must be on to something. Maybe we should adopt some of their strategies? Take for example this story about a 17 year old Iraqi girl who was publicly stoned to death for committing a most heinous offense: she was…dating a boy of the wrong religion. Well, HeLL! I’d have stoned my daughter for dating a religious man as well! He might have tried to have sex with her and then prevent her from aborting the unwanted thing since we know he wouldn’t have allowed her to use a condom! It is much better to die from a stoning than to ruin one’s career and education by becoming pregnant or worse: religious. I’m sure he would have insisted on getting the child raised in his religion, thus corrupting both the girl and the child to believe that morals aren’t relative and what makes a human isn’t a social construct. Next thing you know, he’d convince her that slavery is ok and that Christians and Jews don’t deserve to die. And yes, I am aware that the ones doing the stoning were of a religion, but since that religion is a minority religion, it deserves to be equally protected as Christianity. Besides, Stoning Women was used long before Christianity came and destroyed the practice. If it was good enough for the ancients, why can’t it be good enough for us? Christians have no right to impose their warped sense of morality on any of us! I say stone away. Good sports and practices never go out of style.

I’m sure glad we’re losing this War. With any luck, our immoral war won’t give the Iraqi’s the idea that morality is anything but relative. It would sure suck for those Iraqi women to have to go through the sexism and discrimination that our women face!