• “It is categorically not legal to own a tiger within the Houston city limits.”
• “Human trafficking” is a real thing and it is, really, a Very Bad Thing. And it is true that some portion of it does involve sex workers. Most of it doesn’t. Most of it involves, rather, things like the exploitation of undocumented workers at luxury golf resorts run by failed casino magnates. It involves sweatshops and factory farms and meat processing plants. Or the enslavement of men and boys on the fishing boats that provide our seafood.
In other words, most of the problem — and nearly all of the solution — isn’t even on the radar of the loudest voices recently enlisting “human trafficking” as an increasingly popular what-about-ism “cause.” These folks read Batman: The Ultimate Evil and thought, “Yes, that’s what I need. An ultimate evil against which I can cast myself as an ultimate good and thereby attempt to reclaim the moral high ground I’ve lost due to my endorsement of oppression and injustice on literally every other issue.”
It’s a revival of the “white slavery” panic from 100 years ago. It’s Satanic baby-killer-ism by another name.
So if you hear anyone declaim about “human trafficking,” and they’re unable to tell you what that means and unable — or uninterested — in how that relates to larger issues like, say, immigration and “deregulation” as a purported good in itself, then shake the dust off your feet and walk away from that person. Quickly.
• I’m afraid I don’t know much of anything about Harvest Bible Chapel, other than it’s a white evangelical megachurch in suburban Chicago. Anyway, they just ousted their Founding Very Top Senior Pastor guy and this seems like big news in some circles.
This story involves some of the same cast of characters we met last year following the convulsions at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute — see: “Moody People” and “Moody’s critics lament liberal shift away from biblical white supremacy.” Since the same awful people who celebrated that are now celebrating this (celebrating by means of elaborate feigned lamentation) I suppose my main response here is Feh.
Anyway, Warren Throckmorton has more if you’re interested.
• Twitter denizen StoneCold2050 is pretty good with PhotoShop and “wanted to see what would happen if I took the natural skin color from around [Trump’s] eyes and applied it to the rest of his face and took away the comb over and hair dye.” And it turns out that without the orange makeup, the long-reigning Most Ridiculous Person in New York looks like Gordon Jump’s evil twin.
And now I’m unable to look at him with or without the unnatural bronzer without thinking, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
• “You’ll be keeping all your money in the kingdom now / And you’ll only drink milk from a Christian cow.”
• Sophie Yeo asks, “Can Sustainable Agriculture Survive Under Capitalism?” (Wendell Berry has long argued that the answer is No. Not because he’s a Marxist or socialist, but because he’s a conservative and a good farmer and, therefore, anti-capitalist.)
For a grasp at how important this question is to those of us who, you know, eat food, just flip it around: Can Capitalism Survive Without Sustainable Agriculture? Therein lies the problem.
The title of this post comes from one of his biggest hits, a soulful song that’s also full of good advice for Valentine’s Day and the rest of the year. The video here isn’t great, but the voice — as always — is transcendent:
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