Category Archives: Current Affairs

Who Will Save Our Bacon? China Is Winning Its War With The U.S.

The Smithfield Packing Company has its main meat processing plant in Tar Heel NC, a hamlet just off Interstate 95 near Fayetteville.

This photo hardly does justice to the ginormous megascale of the operation. The plant covers 973,000 square feet. Inside it approximately 32,000 hogs per day are slaughtered and processed, more than 3-million plus per year. It’s credibly reputed to be the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world.

That’s a heck of a lot of bacon. And it’s owned by a Chinese company, the WH Group, which snapped it up in 2013 for a mere $4-plus billion.

Read more →

Update: Shooting Holes In Justice — Emmett Till & Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorials

Jackson was buried in a small cemetery near Alabama Highway 14 on the outskirts of Marion. His headstone is impressively carved with a figure of Jesus keeping vigil.
It too has been hit  by numerous bullets, from the one that knocked a chunk off the top, to seven or eight that close examination here reveals.
Emmett Till’s killers walked completely free. The Alabama trooper who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Fowler, shot and killed a second unarmed young black man in 1966. But forty-five years later, Fowler was convicted of manslaughter, and served several months in jail, before being released due to ill health.

Read more →

Friends Central School Lawsuit: The Fired Teachers Begin to Make Their Case

“At first blush, this matter deals simply with a motion to dismiss a civil rights case with pendent claims as Defendants claim protection under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution. However, the attack amounts to something much more, something dangerously precedent-setting were it to be approved, namely that a private school and those affiliated with it are exempt from the reach of Federal and State Civil Rights Acts. This is all despite Friends Central’s professed adherence to notions of responsibility, equality and diversity. When the rubber meets the road, these Defendants are insisting that they are untouchable and above it all.

However, Defendants fail any applicable test.  In no way do Plaintiffs’ claims require inquiry into religious tenets of Quakerism. Plaintiffs do not make any claims or counts based therein. Rather, Plaintiffs Complaint references guidelines and policies set forth by the school so as to depict the environment in which Plaintiffs worked and to justify their adherence to those guidelines and policies. . . .

Should this Court accept Defendants’ arguments, then there is nothing to keep any purportedly religious school from claiming immunity from the Civil Rights laws, or any other laws for that matter, taking us back to the dark ages in American jurisprudence. . . .

Read more →

New Split, Old Issue: Same Sex Marriage Rends Wilmington YM

(AFL):  Let me try to be clear on this: was the key point of contention at WYM, at least as stated, not the issue of same sex marriage itself, but more what the YM should do about meetings that were willing to tolerate being in a yearly meeting where some other meetings do support same sex marriage? [Note: An extensive collection of minutes from meetings in WYM is in Attachment #4: : INDIVIDUAL MEETING STATEMENTS ON SAME SEX MARRIAGE AND/OR WYM UNITY” of the 2017 WYM Minutes, online in full here.]

SA: Great question. While that seems generally to be true, let me hasten to add that, among the constellation of areas of disagreement, there is no consensus among the Friends staying and those disaffiliating as to which area of disagreement is paramount. Many Friends disaffiliating see the lack of fidelity to a literal interpretation of Scripture, at least as they understand it, as a paramount issue. When addressing the grounds for the current set of disagreements, an initial draft of the WYM Epistle specified that “Biblical interpretation is at the heart of our uneasiness and distrust.”

Read more →