Drunken Pumpkin

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement.

I have some seriously mixed feelings about PETA. My wife is studying neuroscience and therefore will at some point have to chop up some animals. It is my firm belief that when that happens it will be for a good reason. And I know for a fact that any rat in her care will be the happiest little rodent on the planet, up until the end, that is. We used to have a pet rat that got better medical care than either of us, so I’m not just making stuff up here.

When I think of PETA that is one of the main things that comes to mind, the welfare of lab animals. I’m often reminded of Berk Breathed’s Night of the Mary Kay Commandoes when I think about lab animals. Do companies still test out cosmetics and household cleaners on rats and rabbits? I never could understand that. It doesn’t take any testing to realize that a chemical meant to clean an oven will wreak havoc on organic tissue. So, I’m with PETA there.

I’ll even go so far as to say that animals should have relatively ok lives until we eat them. KFCs reported tactic of boiling chickens alive creeps me right out, because I can’t see any benefit in that. However, boiling lobsters alive doesn’t bother me, as there is a reason behind that (it directly effects the taste and toxicity of the food, I think).

I’m not even opposed to their stance on the treatment of pets. But I’m not sure exactly where they stand on that. They seem to dislike the idea of treating animals as some form of property, but promote spaying and neutering of animals, which would be the equivalent of a forced sterilization program in humans. And I can certainly think of a few people that need to be sterilized so they don’t “piss in the gene pool” as it were.

I guess the only really good thing about PETA is that they aren’t the Animal Liberation Front. Actually, after looking at the ALF site, they might be. And I have serious issues with any group that thinks vandalism and terrorist tactics are the way to a solution. After all, once you “free” lab animals and destroy the instruments the facility will just start over again with a new batch of critters and pass the cost on to consumers and tax payers.

I think the best thing that PETA has ever really done is to provide Penn and Teller with a lot of fodder to give them a hard time. And that is surely worth something.

Tune in tomorrow for more activist antics. And if you have an idea for stuff you’d like to see on the site feel free to leave a comment or send us an email from our about page.

The most common examples of book censorship are in schools and public libraries, and all those examples are most often involving children’s literature. Political groups attempt to remove books from library shelves because those books use ‘naughty’ words, do not have happy endings… or because they have too many rainbows. Rainbows are considered a sign of ‘New Age’ religiosity. Little Red Riding Hood was the 24th most banned book in the early 90’s mostly because she had a bottle of wine in her basket. Many organizations demanded a non-alcohol Little Red. They were successful sometimes in their efforts, by the way.