Month: September 2002

Leslie Alexander: Another Hypocrite PETA Celebrity

Leslie Alexander might not be a household name, but the former securities trader who is the owner and president of the NBA’s Houston Rockets is a major contributor to animal rights groups. He and his wife Nanci are major contributors to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and were guests of honor at PETA’s 21st anniversary celebration. Nanci Alexander’s Animal Rights Foundation of Florida played a major role in the signature drive to place a ban on confinement cages for pigs on the Florida ballot.

But, for these wealthy vegetarians, business is still business. When the Houston Rockets start playing later this year at a brand new arena, Alexander won’t let his animal rights views get in the way of a quick buck — the arena will continue to sell lots and lots of meat.

Alexander actually had the gall to tell the Associated Press that, “In this particular case I have no choice” calling a meatless arena “unreasonable.”

At the current arena the Rockets play, Alexander has no control over the concessions and receives no money from the sale of hot dogs and other items. At the new arena, however, Alexander will have direct control and receive the profits from the concession. Alexander does plan to offer meatless options at concession stands.

Interestingly, PETA is behind Alexander’s decision to vend meat 100 percent. Dan Shannon told the Associated Press,

He’s in charge of his money and his first interest is making sure his investment pays off. I think if he’s offering other options, that will be very exciting and will be a huge step forward in itself.

Everything is becoming clear now. Animals have rights unless some animal rights activist needs to recoup his investment. Sounds like what PETA is really concerned about is that it keeps getting some of Alexander’s money. Wouldn’t want to put principles ahead of wealthy donors.

Source:

Rockets’ animal rights-backing owner to sell meat in new arena. Mark Babineck, Associated Press, August 27, 2002.

Avoid Deadbeat Parent Problems by Enforcing Visitation Orders/Joint Physical Custody

The Christian Science Monitor’s Marilyn Gardner wrote an interesting article about ‘deadbeat’ dads that acknowledged the problem with parents failing to pay child support but balanced it with a look at the obstacles that stand in the way of noncustodial fathers and mothers.

One of the interesting statistics Gardner cites is how the likelihood of a parent failing to pay child support increases when the noncustodial parent’s ability to visit the child is cut off by the custodial parent. Gardner writes,

Some fathers want an end to what appears to be a double standard in the legal system.

“They throw fathers in jail for not paying support,” [Fathers’ Rights Foundation founder Ronald] Isaacs said. “But they don’t throw mothers in jail for denying visitation. If the courts would enforce visitation orders with the same vigor that they enforce child support, they would get a lot more money than they do by going after these few people.”

As Gardner notes, custodial parents sometimes have what they believe are very good reasons to violate court-ordered visitation. But those sorts of issues should be addressed by independent mediators and/or the courts, not the custodial parent. Courts should enforce visitation orders just as they enforce child support and other orders.

Going even further, courts should have a presumption of joint physical custody. Joint legal custody is already common, and several states have a presumption of joint legal custody. With joint physical custody, the child spends time living with both parents on an agreed upon schedule, typically with the child residing with one parent 70 percent of the time and with the other parent 30 percent of the time (50/50 arrangements are also common). This keeps both parents active in the life of the children.

Now obviously there are many circumstances in which joint physical custody is simply not possible or feasible, but courts should presume joint physical custody unless and until circumstances of the individual case suggest that a different arrangement would be better for the children involved.

Source:

Making ‘deadbeat’ parents a thing of the past. Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2002.

Kevin Kjonaas on SHAC-Related Violence

In July the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an extensive story on the harassment that workers at Huntingdon Life Sciences have faced from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and its supporters. The article included quotes from SHAC’s Kevin Kjonaas highlighting his view of SHAC-inspired violence and revealing an interesting (if typical) hypocrisy.

On the issue of violence, not surprisingly Kjonaas has no problem with it. Kjonaas told the Inquirer,

If a car being blown up in a driveway or animals being liberated from a lab scares them, then I would say that fear pales by comparison to the fear that the animals have every day. The kind of true violence that these animals endure at the hands of people at Huntingdon leaves me with little sympathy.

The Inquirer even reports that Kjonaas “speaks favorably” of British animal rights activist David Blenkinsop. Blenkinsop was one of three activists imprisoned for beating HLS director Brian Cass. Blenkinsop was also charged with a series of arson attacks on cars. The Inquirer quotes Kjonaas as saying,

David is a very passionate person, and what he did was with the best intentions. I don’t feel any sympathy for people in England or America who have had their cars tipped or torched, because those cars were paid for out of blood money.

But perhaps the most revealing part of the story was Kjonaas’ explanation of why he has sometimes uses the name “Kevin Jonas.” According to the Inquirer,

He [Kjonaas] says he uses the alias to spare family members outside Minneapolis from harassing phone calls from people who oppose the tactics and aims of his group.

So the man behind a group that specializes in harassing family members of people even tangentially linked to HLS is a hypocrite who himself tries to shield his family from the ire of his opponents. Of course, you will note that there are no anti-animal rights sites that lists the phone numbers and addresses of Kjonaas or any of his family members next to slogans like “go smash them.” Apparently Kjonaas’ violent ways have also bred a bit of paranoia.

Source:

A harsh animal-rights campaign targets N.J. firm, workers. Chris Mondics, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 14, 2002.

To Defend or Not to Defend Animal Research

Following on the heels of the departure of Michael Podell from Ohio State University, the New York Times featured a long article on the debate within animal research circles on how vigorously to defend animal research against animal rights protests.

This is a debate that I’ve never quite understood. It seems obvious that universities should vigorously and publicly defend animal research being conducted at their universities, especially in the case of something like Ohio State University where Podell was the researcher but the grant was actually to the university.

On the contrary, as several people cited in The Times article said, the general consensus is to say as little as possible and hope the animal rights protesters will go away. Dr. Richard Bianco, who is in charge of laboratory animal care at the University of Minnesota (which has actively defended its animal research), told The Times,

We should be proud of what we do and talk about it. We’re scared to death. That’s our problem.

In the Ohio State University case, the officials at OSU were so afraid of inciting yet more protests, that they even refused to write an opinion column for local newspapers defending their research. That’s just pathetic.

What is genuinely shocking is this view that seems to prevail both in business and academia that if you ignore them long enough or cancel one program here or divest your stock there that the animal rights movement will be appeased and just go away. That is never going to happen.

First, in case these folks haven’t noticed we are now living in an age where instant communication over the Internet is all-but ubiquitous. Fringe and special interest groups are able to quickly communicate, share information, and get their version of the story out to reporters. If an institution just responds with silence, both the activists and the general public are going to assume that it’s because the activist claims are correct. Left unchallenged, activist claims about medical research will become the dominant narrative.

Second, even minor victories energize these sorts of movements. After all, the animal rights movement isn’t exactly used to winning very often, so little victories mean a lot. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has really shown how to run an animal rights campaign, focusing on an already vulnerable target, then attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of its employees and associates. In the real world, convincing some small, marginal market maker to abandon an HLS stock listing is not a major victory, but SHAC does a good job of spinning these sort of events as major victories in the battle for the animals (although SHAC also risks a backlash with its hype that HLS is on the edge of collapse).

What after all were the lesson that activists learned from the OSU debacle? That some academic institutions will not bother to defend their own research grants, and that a professor working at such an institution can be isolated and harassed until he decides that fighting on is no longer worth it. If I were the leader of an animal rights group, I’d be scanning animal research grants at universities looking for a researcher with a family at a university that has historically not stepped up to defend its researchers. That’s always going to be a winning strategy.

Institutions doing animal research need to be proactively reaching out to their community to explain what they do and why they do it. They also need to at least discuss contingency plans on how to deal with animal rights activists. There are groups such as Americans for Medical Progress and The Foundation for Biomedical Research that are uniquely suited to help out and advise institutions under attack from animal rights activists, and such institutions should at the very least consult with them to better understand exactly what they are facing.

Universities and businesses do not have the luxury of pretending that the animal rights movement is some loose, disjointed collection of a bunch of fringe idealists. Today the animal rights movement is relatively sophisticated with the capacity to use modern technologies to leverage the actions of disparate activists across the country into a coordinated attack on a given institution. Trying to ignore the activists is easily the single worst thing any institution could do.

Source:

Debate over whether to defend animal tests. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, July 23, 2002.

Why Michigan Doesn’t Have a Death Penalty

Michigan, where I live, does not have capital punishment and was one of the first government’s in the world to ban capital punishment for all crimes except treason (the state later abolished the potential treason punishment as well). And a story in The New York Times illustrates why — a Detroit man was just released after spending more than 17 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit.

Eddie Joe Lloyd was convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl and the evidence at his trial was more than enough to convict him. After all, the jury got to hear an audiotape of a detailed confession that Lloyd gave to police (he also signed a written confession) and Lloyd knew details about the crime not released to the public.

Lloyd became a suspect in the case when he wrote to police from the mental hospital where he had been committed asking to see the case file for the murder of the young girl. In his letter, Lloyd mentioned that the girl had been sexually assaulted with a green bottle. That was in fact correct, but it was a detail the police had not made public.

Police interviewed him three times, made the audiotape of his confession, and Lloyd was convicted. But Lloyd maintains that he only made the confession as part of an effort to trip up the real killer. Lloyd’s mental illness apparently led him to confess to the crime out of some bizarre view that by doing so he would help capture the real killer.

DNA tests on both that bottle and on the underwear used to strangle the victim showed that Lloyd was not the killer and he was released after prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that his conviction should be overturned.

After he was released, Lloyd said,

I consider myself lucky. Seventeen years? If Michigan had the death penalty, I would have been through, the angels would have sung a long time ago.

Michigan originally banned capital punishment after the wrongful execution of a man in the early 19th century. Even if it is acceptable for the state to kill its own citizens in cold blood (which I firmly maintain it is not), the risk of executing innocent individuals is an intolerable risk.

Source:

Man freed after DNA clears him of murder. Jodi Wilgoren, The New York Times, August 27, 2002.

When Hypocritical News Corp. Executives Attack

Okay I’m a little late to the party here, but a couple weeks ago News Corp. president Peter Chernin lashed out at the Internet at a conference sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Chernin said,

The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it’s benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content.

. . .

The prevalence of pornographic Web sites and e-mails is a lot more than an insult to common decency. It’s an increasing reason to keep kids and families off of the Internet. And these are only part of the virtual logjam of valueless clutter.

Huh? Has Chernin ever actually watched Fox Television, which News Corp. owns? What, we need to get rid of all the porn and piracy so we can have “Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire: The Broadband Internet Edition”? Or “When Poorly Designed Web Sites Attack”?

To see Chernin criticizing the poor taste of Internet content is a bit like Ted Kaczynski complaining how violent American schools have become.

Source:

Media chief decries Net’s moral fiber. Declan McCullagh, CNET News.Com, August 21, 2002.