In Defense of Taco Bell: An apologia for the burrito supreme

My first job was at Taco Bell. It was a little store in Lomita, California, and I got the job right after I turned 16--in 1975. When I showed up for the interview, I was ushered by "Mrs. B" (which everyone called her--at her own request) into her closet-sized office near the back of the store.

"Martin," I remember her saying, "you need to remember one thing." I nodded, waiting for the words of wisdom to usher from her lips. "We sell Cadillac food at Volkswagen prices," she declared, proud of her little food establishment.

This, of course, was back in the days when every fourth car was a Volkswagen Bug, and didn't cost much--and when Cadillacs were the luxury cars of choice.

I worked there for a year, and I made more tacos, burritos, enchiritos, and cups of frijoles than I care to remember. In fact, if I were put on the food line once again, I could still do passable job of making most things on the menu. In fact, I have had many excuses over the years for giving the people behind the counter a lecture on how a burrito should be folded, but so far have resisted the temptation.

I acquired a taste for tacos and burritos when I worked there and Taco Bell is my favorite fast food joint.

When I later worked as a short order cook for a coffee shop while working my way through college, I remember thinking how favorably Taco Bell compared with where I was working as far as cleanliness and a few other things were concerned. I saw things there I would never have seen at the Taco Bell I had worked for--and some of those thing moved of their own accord.

One of the things I always took comfort in in eating the food at Taco Bell was that all of it was made there and was pretty basic stuff. A burrito supreme, for example, is just a flour tortilla with beans, meat, sour cream, grated cheese, diced tomatoes, and shredded lettuce.

When I saw the lawsuit that now claims that Taco Bell's meat is only 34 percent beef, I ran back the tape. I remember making the stuff. We'd take basic ground hamburger, put it in a large tray and turn on the gas heat. We would add a packet of seasoning and cook it. When it was done, I would draw off the fat and it was ready to go.

If you had asked us "Where's the beef?" we could, with a fairly high degree of plausibility, have pointed to the meet tray and said, "It's right there." So when I see people claiming that it's not beef, I'm thinking that that can't even be 34 percent true.

Now I'm sure that there have been some changes, but the stuff I get now in a burrito or a taco tastes pretty much the same as what I made when I was a teenager. So when I heard Taco Bell's counter-claim--that its meat is 88 percent beef with "3 percent water, 4 percent Mexican spices and seasonings, 5 percent is made up of oats, yeast, citric acid and other ingredients"--I thought that that pretty much comports my own experience cooking the stuff.

I think this is really just the first skirmish in a larger war against fast food that the Health Nazis are now preparing. They've already taken out trans fats, and they won't stop at that. My theory is that it isn't a lack of beef that really bugs the food activists, but the fact that people are eating beef at all--and french fries, and onion rings, and pizza.

This is a ploy to ultimately eliminate fast food altogether.

These are people won't be happy until we're all non-smoking vegetarians subsisting on tofu and bean sprouts, who power walk in broad daylight with those silly white visors, who won't live in a community without a bike trail, who have small, annoying dogs with foreign names you can't pronounce, and who give their children names like "Weatherby" and "Millicent."

Well listen up, 'cuz I've got news for these Swedish car-driving namby-pambies: I will defend my right to a taco with my life. And if you touch my chalupa, you're goin' down. And my burrito supreme?

You'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

Queer Liberation Front's lunch counter moment

The "Queer Liberation Front" has announced a sit-in in Middletown, CT. The group is sick and tired of the media fawning over the gay rights movement, celebrating it as some sort of mainstream phenomenon, and trying to prove its relationships are just as normal as traditional marriages through smarmy feature stories and ridiculously unrealistic television characters that have little relation to what actually goes on in the gay subculture.

This wasn't about being normal; this was about questioning the whole idea of normality. This wasn't about becoming conventional; it was about defying the conventions. This wasn't about making the gay lifestyle look traditional to outsiders; it was about upsetting the whole traditional applecart and subverting the entire marriage culture, remember?

This was about tearing the mask off the whole Ozzie and Harriet lie.

We changed our names to alternate spellings, not to be the same, but to be different. We talked different, we dressed different, we lived different. Don't you remember, "We're here, we're queer!"? Remember when we were in society's face with a subversive message about they're whole way of life?

So stop salivating all over us and trying to make us into some conventional caricature of what we are really about. Stop trying to co-opt our whole ...

... Wait a second. Let me read this story more carefully. Oh, shoot. I'm sorry. That's not right. Actually, it's just a group of gays protesting at a Javapalooza after some over-reactive employee having a bad hair day roughed up a gay customer who had brought in a Dunkin' Donuts drink against policy.

Never mind.

Belmont University includes gay-friendly language in discrimination policy

In moral capitulation news today, Belmont University announced that it is adding "sexual orientation" to its non-discrimination policy. The university had been under fire for removing its women's soccer coach who had announced that she was a lesbian and that her partner was having a baby.

At the same time it announced it was officially adopting gay rights language, Belmont changed the preamble of its anti-discrimination policy to say that it is a "Christian university and that the university strives to uphold Christian standards of morality, ethics and conduct."

Just in case anyone might wonder.

Observers speculate that Belmont might also give its future official stamp of approval to unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Should such policies be adopted, it is expected that the university will amend the expression of Christian commitment in its preamble to include the words, "Honest, no joke," or possibly, "Cross our hearts, hope to die, stick a needle in our eye."

Joel Osteen and the Thought Police: A Cautionary Tale

I believe it was the theologian Donald Grey Barnhouse who, when asked what he thought about Norman Vincent Peale, the previous generation's feel good ambassador and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, responded, "I find Paul appealing and Peale appalling."

Joel Osteen is the newest incarnation of Peale--who spouts a sort of warmed over version of the power of positive thinking with a light Jesus coating. So he's not exactly Jeremiah. In fact, he's a pretty good approximation of Pollyanna. So it is a bit surprising that Osteen would become the latest target for the verbal truncheons of the Tolerance Police.

What caused the Brown Shorts to take to the streets was Osteen's remark on Piers Morgan Tonight that homosexuality is a sin. It apparently came as a surprise to the Thought Monitors that this is a Christian position. Such is the state of Biblical literacy. But perhaps they can be excused for being surprised that Osteen said it.

But it wasn't just surprise that resulted in all the liberal goose stepping. It was the remark itself. So now we have all of these angry champions of Tolerance and Diversity running around, pointing their fingers at Osteen, trying to expel him from civilized society for espousing a view different from theirs.

These people have passed the point of self-parody and have now entered the realm of utter ridiculousness.

Piers Morgan himself, apparently outraged that someone would have moral beliefs that diverge from the official Diversity position, rent his black robe and declared Osteen "judgmental." I missed the last part of the interview, but I wouldn't be surprised if Morgan's last words on the program were something akin to, "take this man away!"

Pretty soon we'll all be asked to extend our right arms out straight in front of ourselves and salute the PC flag as we are forced to march by in perfect formation, chanting peace slogans and singing Diversity songs.

So anyway, I gotta go. There's a knock at my door. They're probably here to install the telescreen.

Rand Paul on Obama and cutting the budget

Rand Paul announces his plan to cut $500 billion from the budget and responds to the drunken sailor now posing as the President:

Evil puppet masters at Jefferson County teacher's union about to embarrass the school district again

The evil education puppet masters at the Jefferson County Teachers Association are trying to reassert their control over the Jefferson County School Board by trying to reinstall Sheldon Berman as the superintendent after Berman was voted out several weeks ago.

I'm thinking Stromboli here (from Pinocchio, the guy who runs the puppet show and collects the money).

Not that they ever really lost control. The strings still mostly control the board marionettes. But still Berman's ouster had to be embarrassing for them. Here they had succeeded in running the district into the ground and frightened off most of the families who could afford to send their children somewhere else, and all of a sudden several of the puppets went off script and actually held someone accountable for it.

Accountability? Board members thinking for themselves? How could these quislings even think of doing something so utterly reasonable?

So the JCTA doesn't want Berman to leave the education show and now they're going to embarrass the district further by trying to force a vote to keep Berman. If they do this, the district will become an utter laughing-stock.

Oh, wait. I forgot. They already are a laughing-stock. If the JCTA succeeds here, what has up until now looked like a comedy will start to look more like what it really is: a tragedy.

Is P. Z. Myers a sorry excuse for an atheist?

In his "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," C. S. Lewis' senior devil Screwtape addresses a banquet of tempters in training and apologizes for the poor quality of the souls on which they are having to dine. "[I]t would be vain to deny," says Screwtape, "that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid."

Screwtape compares the souls of contemporary sinners unfavorably to those of bygone days:

Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there, something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down.

Scott Stephens makes a similar point--a point made earlier this year by David Bentley Hart--about the intellectual quality of modern atheists.

I have said many times before that the New Atheists are a pale imitation of the old atheists of late 19th and early 20th centuries who were not simply cultural barbarians, but men widely learned beyond science, most of whom actually understood much of what they criticized. The Thomas Huxleys and H. L. Menckens have, alas, been replaced by the likes of Myers and Richard Dawkins.

Huxley, of course, claimed to be an agnostic, an intellectual character George Barnard Shaw once called an atheist without the courage his convictions. But Huxley was just as much an enemy of the Church.

Where are the atheists now who can come with lines like Huxley's, "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science like snakes around the cradle of Hercules"? Or Mencken's "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"?

They were wrong, of course, but they were magnificently, gloriously wrong--unlike Myers and his ilk, who, when they go wrong (which is not infrequent), do it with an unfortunate lack of rhetorical sophistication. If you're going to be wrong, you should at least provide your audience with something to marvel at. To read Mencken's Treatise on the Gods is, if not to be philosophically impressed, at least to be wondered at for its creativity (he basically makes up the history of religious belief as he goes along).

When the old atheists missed, you could at least admire the impressive explosion, but when the New Atheists miss (which they do at least as often), you find yourself standing there disappointed, gazing on a logical dud.

When the old atheists fired a barb, you often found yourself tipping your hat. With the New Atheists, you just find yourself shaking your head. To read Myers is to have to wade knee high through sophomoric vitriol that someone like Mencken would scorned as juvenile, if not simply insipid.

They also had stouter constitutions, these paleo-atheists. Today's atheists--like the ones now suing the state of Kentucky over God language in its Homeland Security statute--have even taken to claiming to be emotionally traumatized by mentions of God. The expression "put on your man pants" suffered severe overuse in the last election, but if it has a legitimate use, it would be here.

No self-respecting atheist of yore would claim he experienced "mental pain and anguish" because of theism. He would instead have tried to inflict it on his theistic opponents.

Hand it to Myers, he at least tries to do this, if he doesn't exactly succeed.

In a new post at his blog, Myers complains about these unfavorable comparisons of him and his fellow New Atheists to the Great Atheists of Old:

This is such a dreary and dishonest approach; it involves puffing up dead or less popular atheists into demigods who strode the earth with cosmic seriousness, while anyone new and slightly less moribund is sneered at as inferior, the weak and enfeebled scions of a diminished age, and therefore deserving nothing but dismissal.

Well, at least he produced a mildly competent alliteration in that first sentence. And I do like the "strode the earth" bit. Oh, and the "scions of a diminished age" isn't too bad either.

Maybe there's hope.

But it's all downhill from there. Myers retorts that he and his New Atheist friends place greater stress on science--something he apparently thinks the old atheists knew nothing about:

I disagree — these New Atheists are simply basing their ideas more strongly on science, something the theistic critics don't seem to comprehend — and I don't consider them less than the Old Atheists, just different, and even there, we're all making the same argument that gods don't exist.

The point Myers seems to miss is that at least the Old Atheists knew enough about science to know the difference between science and philosophy, a distinction people like Myers, Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking run roughshod over without apparent notice. In fact, Myers seems to have a generally troubled relationship with philosophy, the one discipline competence in which is required to conduct the kind of discussion in which he thinks he is competent to engage.

So Myers, seemingly unequipped with a philosophy gland, beats his chest and let's loose the atheist yell which he hopes will resound throughout the religious forest, attracting an opponent:

And if the New Atheists are such scrawny, flabby specimens, why aren't you simply clobbering us with those powerful arguments you developed to crush our predecessors?

Um, maybe because he wouldn't recognize a powerful argument if it had a sign saying "Powerful Argument Here" on it? There are a multitude of arguments offered by thinkers far more substantive than Myers that have been presented over the last 2,000, and the fact that Myers isn't impressed with them tells us very little about the quality of the arguments themselves. They tell us more about Myers.

Myers has confronted the theistic enemy before, only to come away scratching his head. He complains that Stephens doesn't offer any real arguments and then compares him in this regard to Terry Eagleton and David Bentley Hart.

It's interesting that he should mention Hart, who is one of the theists Myers has ham-handedly tried to confront, only to walk away thinking he has encountered the enemy successfully when in reality he has only encountered his own philosophical inadequacies.

The technique Myers and others (I'm thinking especially of Ed Brayton here) use is this: they troll the Internet for stupid things Christians say, present them to their readers as representative of theistic thought, shoot them down, and then high five each other as if they had really accomplished something. Call it the Shooting Fish in a Barrel Method of atheistic apologetics.

It's sort of like going down to the local pay lake, catching a big fish and thinking that you're God's gift to sportsmanship.

If he were really interested in competent theistic opposition he could go over to Frank Beckwith's blog--or Ed Feser's. But no. That would require some actual intellectual exertion. Or maybe it's because every time he does do this, he simply embarrasses himself.

As soon as Myers encounters a competent thinker like Hart, he seems to experience some sort of intellectual breakdown that causes him to rhetorically wander around mumbling imprecations against his target that indicate he knows nothing about what the person is talking about or simply become oblivious to what the person is saying, not understanding the person' simplest statements.

Myers recent responses to two of Myers posts on Hart have been dealt with in detail by my co-blogger Thomas here and here. But suffice it to say they are not exactly inspiring intellectual displays.

Nope. Stephens is right. They just don't make atheists like they used to.

P. Z. Myers needing a designated logician on the Gaskell case

Oh my, it looks like we have really upset Internet atheist P. Z. Myers once again. At least that is what I conclude from all the snarling in his response to my opinion piece today in the Lexington Herald-Leader on the University of Kentucky's Gaskell Affair over at his blog "Pharyngula."

But maybe it's not a sign of his being upset. He does, after all do this all the time. Maybe its just a part of his genetic make-up to act this way. Or possibly it was something in his upbringing. I have heard of young children taken when they were young and raised by wolves. Although, in Myers' case, I'm not sure even the wolves would have taken him.

Myers' post seems to have been penned on the principle that a sufficient number of epithets and pejorative adjectives at some point constitute an argument.

No, wait. I'm sorry. I may have spoken too soon. After removing several layers of vitriol, and dusting away a large quantity of vindictiveness, I think I may have discovered some actual attempts to make a logical case against my arguments. Okay, so they're not exactly impressive, but let's see what we can make of them.

Here is Myer's main argument, such as it is:

He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I'm sure, just as there are believers on every committee I've ever worked with at my universities, and the atheists are usually the minority. So to claim that this committee thought that the idea of a candidate going to church was grounds for exclusion is absurd.

Does Myers really believe that you have to have a policy of discrimination "against the Christian majority in this country" to run afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Does he think the only way someone can sue for racial discrimination is because a university has a "policy," spoken or unspoken, against a whole racial minority?

Who's being absurd?

You violate the Civil Rights Act when you discriminate against one person. If you're black and a university discriminates against you, you don't have to prove there's a general conspiracy against blacks. All you have to prove is that they discriminated against you because you're black.

Let's just be glad Myers isn't an attorney. And for crying out loud keep him away from racial discrimination issues. No telling how many African Americans have been filing false discrimination cases.

The case showing UK discriminated against Gaskell because he was an evangelical Christian was a dream case for an attorney. The e-mail documents in the case referring to him as "potentially evangelical" by one committee member and other e-mails from other members of the committee with first hand experience of what went on alleging that he was, in fact, being discriminated against are about as hot as smoking guns get. It just don't get any better than this--or worse, depending on your perspective.

Gaskell's employment was questioned, not because he is a Christian, but because he is an evangelical Christian who used his authority as an astronomer to mislead the public about biology.

Where? What precisely did Gaskell say about biology in any professional capacity that was professionally out of bounds?

In fact, the whole rest of his post goes on under the assumption that Gaskell held some view in his professional capacity that violates basic tenets of biology. But he never says what this is.

He wasn't turned away because he was a Christian, but because he actively uses Christianity as an excuse to peddle falsehoods and doubts. And the objection wasn't to the "Christian" part, but to the "false doubts" part.

Myers' appears to be completely ignorant of this case. The e-mail from Sally Shafer that must have had the UK administration scared enough about the eventual outcome of this case to want to settle didn't say that Gaskell was a "potential peddler of falsehoods and doubts." It said he was a "potential evangelical."

That makes Sally Shafter a potential bigot. And it makes Myers' a potential ostrich, sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the actual evidence in this case. If this case doesn't constitute religious discrimination, then nothing does.

He should have just stuck with the epithets. They would have been more logically compelling.

My op ed on UK's Gaskell Affair in today's Herald-Leader

My article on the Gaskell Affair at University of Kentucky was published in today's Lexington Herald-Leader.

It highlights the university's doublespeak on diversity, as evidenced by its actions toward Gaskell, who was up for the position of observatory director at UK until it was discovered he was "potentially evangelical."

Pro-abortion statements we're not making up

What was it that accounts for the environment in which the "House of Horrors" that a Pennsylvania abortionist was running went virtually unregulated by the state in Philadelphia, where babies were routinely delivered alive and then killed?

Too much regulation. So says the nation's chief institutional death lobby, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL)

You can't make this stuff up.

HT: Verum Serum

Should even the health of women be sacrificed to the gods of "pro-choice" ideology?

While liberal commentators are still, albeit more discreetly now, spinning the Tucson murders in order to lay them at the feet of conservatives despite absolutely no evidence that the Jared Loughner was ever inspired by Sarah Palin, the smoking gun for the responsibility for the murder of many more young children by a Philadelphia abortion doctor has been found.

Dr. Josef Menge ... er, rather Dr. Kermit Gosnell was arrested for murdering seven late term babies by various means including ripping their spinal cords out after they had been born alive and for causing the death of one mother. Turns out he had been doing this kind of thing for years thanks to the fact that Pennsylvania's health bureaucracy was looking the other way.

Why did the state's health authorities look the other way? Could it have been that there was a climate of permissiveness caused by "abortion rights" ideology so marked that not only babies, but, it turns out, even the health of women was sacrificed to the gods of "choice"?

Make your own judgment. Here is an excerpt from the Grand Jury's report on the Gosnell death camp indicating how Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) official Janice Staloski viewed the matter based on the "pro-choice" ideology of the Tom Ridge administration:

Staloski said that DOH's policy during Gov. Ridge's administration was motivated by a desire not to be "putting a barrier up to women" seeking abortions.

If you have a strong stomach, read the rest of the report for a grisly accounting of the ultimate results of pro-choice ideology.

Not only did Staloski and other officials make sure health authorities looked the other direction, they even ignored reports of harm to women from procedures performed by Gosnell.

But don't hold your breath for the liberal media commentators who have blamed Sarah Palin for the Tucson shooting upon a total lack of evidence to pay any attention the clear indication here of why a medical butcher was allowed to operate for years free of any state oversight whatsoever.

Abortionist caught killing babies. What's the world coming to?

Most people have now heard about Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist who was charged Wednesday with killing seven babies.

Abortionists killing babies? What is the world coming to?

Pretty soon murderers will start killing people and thieves will start stealing, shoplifters will start taking things from stores and arsonists will begin setting fire to stuff. Before you know it, you'll have burglars breaking into houses and forgers faking signatures. And rapists: who knows what they might do to women?

Gosnell is accused of "delivering seven babies alive and then using scissors to kill them." Part of the problem was apparently that Pennsylvania health regulators completely stopped inspecting his clinic in 1993 and his medical practice went completely unregulated for 17 years. This was unfortunate. If health inspectors had done their job, they might have made sure that Gosnell cut the babies up inside the womb instead of outside it.

And then no babies would have been killed.

Gosnell also performed many late-term abortions, which are illegal in Pennsylvania:

Gosnell sometimes joked about the babies, saying one was so large he could "walk me to the bus stop," according to the report.

Late term fetuses aren't babies, of course, even though they look like babies, and feel pain like babies, and are virtually identical with babies in every way. So aborting them isn't anything like killing a baby, except for the fact that is exactly the same.

"In a typical late-term abortion," says the AP story, "the fetus is dismembered in the uterus and then removed in pieces." This method of abortion is much different than the procedure used in early term abortions, where, instead of dismembering the baby in the uterus and them removing it in pieces, the baby is dismembered in the uterus and then removed in pieces.

Except, of course, those early term abortions which use the much more humane procedure of sucking the baby out with a hollow plastic tube into a bottle.

But Gosnell went much further than this. He killed babies.

Prosecutors estimated Gosnell ended hundreds of pregnancies by cutting the spinal cords, but they said they couldn't prosecute more cases because he destroyed files.
"These killings became so routine that no one could put an exact number on them," the grand jury report said. "They were considered 'standard procedure.'"

As an abortionist, Gosnell should have known better.

Authorities raided Gosnell's clinic early last year in search of drug violations and stumbled upon "a house of horrors," Williams said. Bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses "were scattered throughout the building," the district attorney said. "There were jars, lining shelves, with severed feet that he kept for no medical purpose."

Maybe we should just be glad that these bags and bottles contained fetuses that had been aborted--rather than babies that had been killed. Just imagine how much worse that would be.

As assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore put it, Gosnell "does not know how to do an abortion." You can say that again. The guy apparently was incapable of doing an abortion without killing a baby.

And we can't have that.