PETA follies

Reading over this post at Hot Air, a sudden illumination came over me about PETA. Beyond the fact that they delight in being PITAs, PETA is devoted to the destruction of reason.

It’s really very simple when you think about. PETA is premised on the idea that animals are morally equivalent, or even morally superior, to human beings and therefore must be accorded equal rights with humans. The only way this is possible is to ignore the primary faculty which distinguishes homo sapiens from any other species now alive on the planet: the ability to reason.
Therefore PETA thinks that reason is either trivial or morally bad.

On the Flag

A nice meditation on the flag.
short, but too many good ideas to pick out any single one as a summary quote.

If you didn’t know what to call Pluto…

Now you know. It’s a plutoid.

Here’s the official new definition:

“Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit.”

In short: small round things beyond Neptune that orbit the sun and have lots of rocky neighbors.

The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris, the IAU stated. The organization expects more plutoids will be found.

The history, linguistics, and science of hangovers

From the New Yorker:

Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.

Hats off, however, to the Ukraine:

The Great Filter

Through a post at Topmost Apple, I found this article dealing with the so-called Great Filter, the theory that somewhere there’s an evolutionary bump in the road so big that almost no species can get over it, but instead become extinct. The article poses it as a reason why we have no evidence that other species are “out there” somewhere in the universe; Topmost Apple takes it as a pointer to Divine Guidance of which we are the unique benificiary. But I would propose my own version of the Great Filter.

This version has one advantage over that discussed in the post and article: it doesn’t require that species become extinct.