Echoes of non-vegetarian grocery shopper hilarity were heard throughout big box supermarkets nationwide as Whole Foods Markets announced they will discontinue sales of live lobsters and soft crabs, saying they could not guarantee the decapod crustaceans are treated with compassion and respect.

"We place as much emphasis on the importance of humane treatment and quality of life for all animals as we do on the expectations for quality and flavor," John Mackey, Whole Foods' co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

"The ways that lobsters are treated would warrant felony cruelty to animals charges if they were dogs or cats," said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA].

In making its decision, Whole Foods pointed to a November report from the European Food Safety Authority Animal Health and Welfare panel that it said concluded all decapod crustaceans, including lobsters and crabs, appear to have some degree of awareness, feel pain and can learn. (Fox News)

PETA has always had a partially reasonable position towards animals, "that animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment," but the eating part is what is most confusing for many people, especially how PETA vehemently advances the idea through pure shock value.

The idea that animals should not be eaten because they feel pain (or to further along the logic, are nearer to humans in many important similarities unlike plants) is a mainstay argument for vegetarianism which is quite valid, as with Gandhi making a conscious ethical choice to not eat meat.

However, that's not going on with the majority of vegetarians today. One can deduce that from their belief in vegetarianism and then their "choice" to abort babies so "women can have sex with men they don't want to be pregnant by." (Ann Coulter) How selfish and uncaring towards others is that?

Most vegetarians have absolutely no clear argument on why they are vegetarian, even though a decision to be vegetarian can have merits if properly understood and applied. Modern vegetarians, in keeping with modern liberalism, base their beliefs on shock value and immediacy such that the pain, or the blood, or the crying out of slaughtered animals, is immediately emotionally shocking and thus abhorrent.

If a modern vegetarian were to watch animals being slaughtered while snacking on Paul Newman's organically grown red beet chips, then the emotional trauma might well associate over to the eating of beet chips (because they are red) and perhaps ultimately applied to all vegetables. The person would then protest the eating of any vegetables because they too, like animals, are living and the mineralist would have to subsist on a diet of powdered rock. This is where we are headed.

To single out inhumanity towards crabs and lobsters, essentially big insects and pretty far down the human similarity ladder, is how Whole Foods plays into the hands of feel good hypocrites. If Whole Foods wanted to take a proper look at the treatment of animals they would either eliminate all animal sourced food sales, or they would ensure better treatment of all animals harvested for their stores. Whole Foods has taken steps for better animal care but their overreaction towards decapod crustaceans is taking the humane argument too far. To be fair, they did try "lobster condos" which were evidently not enough. 

This is a case of corporate management caving in to the demands of bean eating (and probably dope smoking) abortionists. Catering to these folk may be in the interest of Whole Foods since these hypocrites are a significant portion of their customers.  However, the continued association of companies that have ethical policies with customers that are corrupt of mind stigmatizes the company and products as seeming problematic, and the high prices as elitist.

Overall, Whole Foods should be commended for being one of few companies among grocery stores to responsibly treat animals and provide healthy foods.  This revival of caring for the land and animals in a responsible and sustainable way should be encouraged on its own merits, not only as a profit making enterprise as much of agricultural and animal farming is today.

World's leader in news, CNN, has announced in their "top story" section of their website that:

Pop princess Britney Spears, whose marriage and parenting skills are under a media microscope, tearfully admitted being "an emotional wreck" in excerpts of an interview [with Matt Lauer] aired on Thursday.

Intermittently weeping and chewing gum throughout, Spears denied she is estranged from her husband, Kevin Federline, saying on NBC's "Today" show that Federline is helping her weather the hormonal ups and downs of her second pregnancy.

Who cares?

Millions of similarly emotionally wrecked and confused Americans looking for any justification to their own befuddled lives, that's who.

Britney Spears and Matt Lauer should be arrested, fined for indecency, possibly jailed, and certainly prevented from influencing respectable Americans and those hoping to be so.

American soldiers bravely fighting to protect America from Islamic fascists and to help Iraq govern more democratically are being held in a brig in cesspool California, unaccused and treated worse than the detainees at Guantanamo Detention Center. (Michelle Malkin)

My husband is one of the seven Marines and one sailor that are being held without being charged over accusations about the incident in Hamandiya that has been in the news for the past few weeks. Whenever he leaves his cell, he is shackled, handcuffed, and escorted by two guards. He is kept in solitary confinement and let out for exercise only 1 hour a day. When I visit him, he is presented to me behind a thick glass barrier and still shackled. We can’t even touch each other. (Defense Fund for my Hero)

…My son spends 24 hours a day locked in a small 8×8 cell with only a small bed, a small stainless steel toilet, and a shelf for some of his personal belongings. He is not allowed to write letters because pens or pencils are considered "weapons." He is allowed to walk out of his cell only when he showers or visits with his family and attorneys. But when he does, he is shackled hand and foot. To visit him means to sit on the other side of a glass wall without being able to touch him. Remember, John has not even been charged. John is innocent and he needs your help. (Innocent Marine)

What a terrible way to treat American soldiers who are uncharged with any crime and not yet found guilty. Military leaders are sending a message of condemnation before the facts of the case are presented and decided, much like Aljazeera news assumes prior to the facts that "Israeli artillery fire kills Palestinians" on a beach in Northern Gaza.

American soldiers are not in Iraq to abuse women, cut off heads, and target innocent civilians, as is the common theme in Middle Eastern thought. A few soldiers will stray from the path of freeing Iraq from an abusive regime, but the majority of these soldiers are decent people. Let's not forget that.

Now, if only they could also free the Iraqi people from their religion and culture… What would be the replacement, though? American culture that has been hijacked by a debase and perverted modern liberal agenda?

The seemingly distant truth is that decent men and women of America do not want pornography at every "quickie mart," they don't want their sons to grow up to be sodomites or their schoolchildren to be transvestites; respectable Americans want loving committed relationships and not divorce, abortions, and broken families—but this isn't what the Iraqis are seeing because only the anger, greed and decadence of American culture is being promoted to the rest of the world.

Even so, most American soldiers can smile at an Iraqi kid and offer her some candy in a way that Hussein's henchmen could not: he's free and he wants the same for her.

"Henry Louis Mencken['s] …prose is as clear as an azure sky, and his rhetoric as deadly as a rifle shot." (Gibbons Burke)

On newspapers:

"All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else."

On zoos:

"All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling."

The insightful observation:

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

Which leads to:

"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

FBI statisticians pouring over reams of numbers have concluded violent crime in America this year has made the greatest progress since 1991.

Senior Justice Department officials struggled to make sense of the new figures, and said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had ordered them to try to find out what may account for the increases.

Richard Hertling, deputy assistant attorney general for legal policy, termed the new crime figures "troubling," but stressed the numbers are preliminary, and do not lend themselves to easy conclusions.

The director of the Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics, Jeff Sedgwick, said, "It's certainly a matter of concern. But the question is this — 'Is this a real increase or is it … statistical noise [?]…' " (CNN)

"Statistical noise? It's one of many signs that society is falling apart," said a man who calls himself Lil' Pimp.

"When the Supreme Court and media outlets hold up and promote disrespect and anti-family values, what do you expect? Broken families and transvestites are what's pedalled these days!" he elaborated.

"You better get right with Jesus, and I'm not talking about getting scammed by Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) or going on a holy roll with Jesse Jackson."

Three detainees were found dead at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, apparent suicides from choking to death on their Korans.

Military officials released a statement saying, "a cultural adviser is assisting the Joint Task Force to ensure that the remains are handled in a culturally and religiously appropriate manner."

When asked what that manner might be a spokesperson said, "an older model Ford pickup truck is being flown in with bumper attached chain to drag and fishtail the corpses around detention facility grounds. After guard personnel are tired of dragging them, the bodies will be piled together, lit on fire, and poked and prodded."

The cultural advisor spokesperson announced that U.S. Army Muslim psychotherapists will be available to console those suffering from separation anxiety at the terrible loss.

In response to a threatened civil rights lawsuit by the ACLU over the detainees' right to suicide, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has been contracted by the U.S. government to issue cyanide tablets to detainees along with their Islamic Halal meals.

"This will be our final attempt to appease them. We tried to be culturally correct with the arrows pointed to mecca, prayer rugs, Korans, Muslim meals, and soccer practice. Maybe the international countries of the world will have more respect for us now," Rear Admiral Ben D. Over bewailed.

Switzerland, Belgium, and Netherlands representatives will be consulted about the proper administration and ingestion of the cyanide pills.

Planned Parenthood expressed approval at the detainees' many requests for a proper suicide, calling it a "convenient late term abortion."

Detainee Akheemen Al Jahareetto Akna Bennahoujoud in an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC News said, "I saw [one of the detainees] stuffing the Koran down his throat and I could see the last page he had turned too. It was sura 56 verses 12 -40."

Lauer reached in his back pocket and pulled out Sohaib Sultan's The Koran for Dummies to verify the passage. "The 87 virgins are to be his in exchange for his blessed sacrifice against the infidels," Akheemen intoned.

"How do you know that's what he'll get?" Lauer replied.

"…Well, we don't…really. That's just what they tell us."

Abortion has fully captured America's minds as another exciting "lifestyle choice" for those inconvenienced by others. The once riveting debate over what point in time the blob of tissue becomes a human being is best left to the statisticians to muddle over ad infinitum—apart from the realistic understanding of abortion. To really understand abortion you have to include the parents and society in any meaningful discussion of it.

Abortionists, and modern liberals in general, believe that each circumstance of life that they happen to "find" themselves has a justifiable outcome based on their own particular feelings. No reflection, no reason, no consideration of others—just individual feelings. Welcome to the Age of Convenience!

A minimally functioning mind can find that there is meaning apart from ourselves and even greater meaning than ourselves. People form meaningful connections to one another as friends or spouses, and taken together form the arrangements of society, all absolutely essential to an individual's well being.

To speak of individuals as apart from greater meaning is ludicrous. Indeed, the certain actions taken up by an individual show him to have a higher accountability and greater meaning than himself which he follows.

However, modern liberals' "if it feels good do it" mentality works by isolating events such as the following, taking them individually and not as a meaningful whole or of a greater accountability:

1. The girl has a vigorous riding upon an erect penis.
2. The girl is pregnant.
3. The fetus is aborted.

The first event is 'good' for the modern liberal because the event makes her feel good. The second event is 'bad' because it is inconvenient for her. The third event is 'good' because she can go back to more efficiently doing the first event.

Overlooked is the overall connection between these events or stated simply, the reality of them. The girl should become more responsible and understand the consequences of her actions. She should know that the proper place of sexuality is between a man and woman lovingly and committed together, that their greater meaning together through sexual expression is intended towards the wonderful creation of life and its nurturing, and that this forms the basis of human civilization and society. That's the truer form of what is 'good'.

Because she chooses to ignore the greater meaning she is accountable to does not mean that society should validate her lifestyle by assisting her in aborting a healthy child. The factual circumstances of what a man and woman do together does not take away the greater principles they are held accountable to.

The modern liberal argument of "individual rights" and "if it feels good do it" resulting in a pregnancy which, let's not kid ourselves, is the nurturing of an-other human being does not spoil the greater goodness that the rest of us try to follow. That greater goodness is revering life, especially one just starting to have a go of it.

Then the modern liberal intelligentsia protests, "But, what about abortion in cases of rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother?" This is a good point, and considerable debate should occur on these issues, but these cases are a tiny minority that pale to the fact that the immense majority of abortions are perpetrated on a healthy child from consensual sex.

This lopsided way of thinking, that the few exceptions ruin the greater rule, has even entertained the legislative bodies of many countries. Rather than err on the side of life, which would occur if abortions on healthy uncomplicated pregnancies were unlawful, rational argument was discarded when laws were passed to allow abortions on all children regardless of their viability.

Properly understanding pregnancy and the child it nurtures as not an MTVish flashing by of isolated "events" or "feelings" reveals the greater meaning and goodness we are within and responsible to: having some dignity, respect, and commitment when relating to other people, especially sexually. The role of society is to uphold these higher principles, the very least of which should be protecting young human life through mandate of law.