Come to your Census

3/16/10 11:14 PM

This will be brief because I want this post to mimic how long it will take you to fill out your Census. The Census only happens once every ten years, and like the ads say, it’s probably the best way to take a snap shot of our nation (by the way, their ad-campaign is simply fantastic). You should be getting a letter in the mail informing you that the Census is on the way. Shortly thereafter, you should get your Census to fill out. A lot of people are averse to filling out the Census because they see it as a breach of privacy. What do you give up? A few rather innocuous pieces of information, nothing you couldn’t already find out about yourself in a Google search (I know that’s a creepy thought, but it’s a discussion for another time). What do we get? Data. Data that...

W.W.E. Raw Milk

3/15/10 5:34 AM

The University of Wisconsin lies in America’s true dairyland, that is for certain. So I can’t blame my colleague Qi Gu for advocating looser laws on the sale of milk in our lactose loving state, in this case concerning the legal sale of raw milk.However, I can take issue with some of the reasons she brings up that the, for lack of a better term, raw milk lobby apparently has for legalizing un-Pasteurized milk. I for one can’t see why people have a problem with killing pathogens in milk, but apparently these people exist. Now if Qi wants people to have the option to live the “envied pastoral life,” that’s fine. I’m all for nostalgia. But what I’m not for is some romantic mistrust of science that seems to go along with that same envied...

Abortion article significantly adds to debate

3/11/10 2:07 AM

Alyssa Lochen’s Wednesday column in The Daily Cardinal was surprising to say the least. Not only did she offer a brand new view on the issue of abortion, she also managed to write about her opinion in a respectful way without attempting to monopolize “the truth.” But I can’t sit quietly after reading her opinion. Alyssa, a pro-choice advocate, readily admits that human embryos are alive. She is correct. Cells are indeed living, and humans of any size or age are made of cells. The rest of her argument seems to contradict itself. Alyssa admits the cells that compose a human embryo are truly alive. Yet, if aborting such life is still acceptable, then there must be a trivial point of development regarded as “alive enough” to constitute protection from...

It's hard to be civil in a debate over manure

3/9/10 10:07 PM

The excrement keeps flying in this DNR/ factory farm fiasco. After publishing a couple of articles dealing with how the DNR is letting factory farms get away with too much, we got some responses. The first was an invitation to visit a factory farm, Rosendale Dairy in Kaukauna. Green Room columnist Stephen Collins and I will be visiting the farm to see for ourselves what goes on there. I’ve never been to a place that manufactures life, so I’m going to suspend as much judgment as I can until I go there. We’ve also gotten some letters trying to rationalize that big dairy does not necessarily equate to unethical practice. In a letter from Kim Buehl of Stone Mill Construction, she pointed out, “bigger dairies are not run by non-caring slugs; but real families with the...

Lasee, the Legislature and Llamas

3/8/10 9:44 AM

Here at The Daily Cardinal, we were all deeply saddened when state senator Alan Lasee announced his retirement. Not for any political reasons, most of us barely agree with him on anything (with the exception of the occasional fiscal issue now and again), but because of just who Lasee was. You see, Alan Lasee is a pretty wacky guy. I’m not just talking about how he raises llamas and fainting goats on his farm (though according to a recent interview he had with Jamie Stark, apparently all of the fainting goats have gone to that big pasture in the sky) or the fact that he constantly wears his ubiquitous cowboy hat, but he’s a pretty dead-set conservative who would make most mainstream liberals blush. What’s so good about that, you may ask? Well, what’s so good about...