Ever wanted to know the latest or past trend of end-of-the-world scenarios? This site has it all. A very entertaining read on just how wrong we’ve been and how scary things really are.
Visit Exit Mundi and kill some time before we all go.
Further evidence that Utah is a black hole of earthshaking stupidity comes from a recent convention of the Utah County Republicans, debating Satan’s role in illegal immigration. (Sadly, I was not invited…)
You read that right. Get the full story from the “Daily Herald“, including some choice quotes;
Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.
[...]
Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald, said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because “they are not going to become Republicans and stop flying the flag upside down. … If they want to be Americans, they should learn to speak English and fly their flag like we do.”
As if the Republican party couldn’t look worse with all the crap Bush has been pulling since 2000.
In any case, this is a clear cut example of why Utah needs more people from the outside moving in, to offset the inbreeding that’s been rampant here since 1847.
I’ve seen some interesting Mac vs. PC debates, as well as Windows vs. Linux, etc. Most are clearly biased one way or the other.
However, this Ubuntu vs. Vista showdown is the clear winner of intelligent OS comparisons. In a single page, BBspot sums it all up.
So, while I was busy pissing off Lackhead by clouding the issues with fact, I dug around for further research on vegetarian diets and actual health benefits thereof. I’ve visited the issue before, but always fell back on anthropology as a guideline, rather than modern studies. I like seeing very long term studies and human evolution is cut and dried on the issue: we are omnivores.
The modern debate, however, is like the global warming debate - want an opinion? What’s it worth to you?
This study says vegetarians live longer. This study says there is no difference. This study says that eating red meat causes cancer. This study of the Maasai tribe (almost exclusive carnivores) shows that they have almost no incidence of cancer, heart disease, or supposed meat-eating ailments. This study shows that vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. This study shows they have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
I think I’ll stab myself through the heart with a carrot, just to put a little spin on the “meat kills” argument…
Three things stand out in all of this:
I’ve been told that the consensus of global warming makes the anthropogenic global warming argument valid over those who disbelieve the consensus. With 94% of the country as active omnivores, I guess that makes the omnivore diet consensus correct as well?
I personally don’t care about the issue until the proselytizing starts. Why I seem to be a target of this, I don’t know. Maybe its my damn charming personality and general goodwill toward man. (Note: that was sarcasm, for those who can’t recognize such things. Ergo, I’m pretty much the opposite.) Aside from Lackhead’s cool and mostly unpretentious broach of the subject, just about every other grazer who’s opened their mouth on the issue to me (and I’ve met quite a few,) has done so in the same kind of self-righteous religious fervor that you get with a Jehovah’s Witness on their first house call.
“How can you eat that? Don’t you know that meat is murder?” “That is so bad for you!” “Do you have any idea how much food is wasted on the cow you’re eating?” “How can you eat a corpse?” “You shouldn’t feed a dog meat, it’s bad for their health.” (That last one was straight from my brother’s mouth, an avid Vegan.)
I’ll answer these probes in kind: Meat isn’t murder, it’s animal tissue. “Bad for you” is still being debated and anthropology doesn’t agree with you. The cow eats grass and hay that I can’t, often on land we can’t grow food crops on. Corpses don’t bother me, I’ll eat you if I have to. Dogs are omnivores, not a cud chewing bovine.
A friend of mine once made the statement that if more people had to prepare their own food, from start to finish, there would be a lot more vegetarians. Coming from an animal loving omnivore, that statement had a lot of weight to it.
Perhaps it is the fact that I’ve helped butcher chickens and pigs on a farm, dressed deer, killed and dressed rabbit, squirrel and various game birds, eaten insects, grubs and mealworms and thought nothing bad of any of it - that my perspective is a little different that the typical grocery store consumer, who’s never even seen a live cow. I never took pleasure in killing, but conversely saw to it that the kill was quick and painless. I hunted for food, not trophies - and went for kill shots, as all good hunters do. From these experiences, I never saw the killing of animals as being an inhumane thing. It was certainly more humane than the typical fate of prey animals, most are eaten alive. Just ask Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, who’s death throws of a bear attack caught on audio were cut off, only because the tape ran out after six minutes. Nature is a bitch!
I don’t like modern industrial farming methods on animals. Much of it is just plain wrong, no matter what your diet is. I can’t trust “free range” food to be honest either, as there are no regulations as to what constitutes the labeling. My eventual goal is to have my own farm, raising animals and growing plants for my personal consumption, of which I’ll be certain of everything that went into the production of my food, but that’s a ways off in the future for me, as it stands. Even this farm doesn’t meet my true desire, but that desire can no longer be practical. Call me old fashioned, but give me that hunter-gatherer society any day!
It seems that our food problems are the same as our fuel problems, pollution problems and just about everything else. We have too many people on Earth. We could resolve that problem by simply deciding to replace just one of each couple, until the population becomes manageable. We have a hard time agreeing not to fight over imaginary gods, let alone practical issues, so my hope isn’t high on this one.
More likely, nature will resolve the problem for us. Like I said, she’s a bitch.
Daniel Meyer has a style of writing that’s easy to get into. His ramblings are more than just entertaining, they’re down right philosophical. Of course, since most of his work is devoted to motorcycling, I’m biased in his favor.
You can catch his online work here.
Radical Vegans piss me off.
The worst I’ve seen from these morons is the claim that feeding their pet cats, er, companion felines, a Vegan diet is not only healthy, but more healthy than feeding them meat based food.
I’ve heard some fucking ludicrous shit in my life, but this one takes the cake! Even the goodly portion of the Rational Vegan crowd don’t agree with this idea.
The argument from the MV’s is that if you provide any animal with the proper nutrients, then the base of what the food is made from is irrelevant. Taurine, which cats cannot produce at all, is normally only found in animals, never in plants, but taurine has been synthesized for some time now and therefor can be added into the food, providing the nutrition needed by the animal.
Synthesized taurine? I thought the whole goal of Vegan ideals is to “return to the natural order”?
This is not the only problem with the idea, however. Cats also need vitamin B12, vitamin A, arachidonic acid, niacin and thiamin supplied in their diets to be healthy. Vitamin B12 is only found in meat, produced by bacteria that lives in animals, but not in plants, unless they’re rotting. Cats cannot digest the provitamin A of vegetables, only the retinol version of vitamin A found in meat. Humans can produce arachidonic acid from linoleic acid present in vegetable fat, but cats lack the enzymes needed to do this, thus requiring arachidonic acid directly from their food - which is only found in meat. Cereal, milk and eggs don’t provide enough niacin for the feline diet, but meat does. Though thiamin is found in cereals, it is no where near as good a source as meat and cats are very susceptible to deficiency of this vitamin. Lastly, cats require at least 25% of their food intact to be protein, which is very hard to do with a vegetarian diet.
All in all, there are some very profound reasons why forcing a human idealism onto this obligate carnivore is plainly stupid, from the top down. Stupid, almost beyond belief.
Yet, there are many out there insisting that not only is the Vegan diet better for the cat, but that they live longer on it! (No study has ever been done to support this retarded claim, but they keep parroting it.)
Their real reason for this atrocious violation of nature, whether they want to admit it or not, is that they feel distress in using any products derived from industrial animal slaughter. I’m fine with that and fine with these folks taking whether steps they want to, to remove animal products from their lives. More power to you. The Rational Vegans don’t upset me any.
But forcing an obligate carnivore to follow suit, is animal cruelty in my not so humble opinion and if there is a god, I hope it one day shrinks these assholes down to mouse size, so that their companion animal can take appropriate steps toward revenge. I hope the cat plays with them a long time before the coup de grace at that.
It is one thing to take on a philosophy for your own life and take steps accordingly, but quite another to force those desires onto animals which are not designed for such. This is no less cruel than any other form of animal abuse.
My advice is simple: either give your companion animal what it truly requires in diet, or adopt another needy animal which is a natural herbivore and leave the cats to those of us who are not squeamish over their food source.
Bah! The Vegan goal is ultimately moot anyway. When you consider the millions of animals which are chewed up by combines every harvest, you haven’t avoided the blood no matter what you may fool yourself into thinking.
Or are the lives of cows more important than the lives of field mice?
The dangers our country faces right now seem to be overwhelming, if you believe the reports coming from our government. While the average citizen worries about the next terrorist attack, or even the next school shooting, behind the veil of outside aggression, there is another attack against us in the works.
This one is far more subtle, but very, very real - it is the attack against our liberties, by our own government, salivating at the thought of total societal control.
There have been many articles written on the subject of our eroding liberties, but few seem to lay it all out as well as recent article in “The Guardian”. I would strongly suggest that you take the time and read this.
Take time to digest what is being said here. It’s quite an eye opener.
I can’t stop laughing at this. We’re not satisfied until we’ve screwed up every portion of the ecosystem that we can possibly screw up. We’re not satisfied until we control the uncontrollable.
I’ve ranted about the Church of Global Warming before, with no end of their dogmatic, unsupported stupidity in sight; but this just might take the crown for the moment. The problem is, too many trees may increase global warming!
You can read all about the bad, bad trees for yourself.
The gist of this latest assault on intelligence: trees may take in CO2, but they emit methane at a staggering rate, accounting for a third of the atmospheric methane - which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is.
Coupled with cow farts, we must be doomed!
I have some hope. Someday, one of these worried eggheads my actually look up into the sky, see that large hydrogen explosion being held in check by it’s own gravity, and realize that it might have something more to do with climate changes than we do. At 3.86e33 ergs per second or 386 billion billion megawatts per second, even a 1% change in energy output is absolutely staggering at our orbital distance. After all, if it wasn’t for our magnetic field, we might as well be sitting in a microwave oven - all life as we know it would die. Even the atmosphere itself would be stripped off of the planet by solar wind, as has been happening to Mars since it lost it’s magnetic field.
Speaking of the Earth’s magnetic field, hasn’t it been dropping in strength over the last 100 years, in a pattern fitting the next magnetic pole flip? Far be it for me to suggest that a weakening magnetic field could have any play in our warming up.
Or what about this study? Or this one?
My point; we don’t understand all that drives our climate, from “greenhouse” gases to the sun itself. Since we don’t have all the variables at hand, our computer models are simply wrong.
Not that it matters. Even if I had absolute proof that the CO2 scare is all hype, the IPCC wouldn’t listen.
Perhaps IPCC should stand for International Paranoid Climate Crackpots?
Addendum: Sheryl Crow is promoting global warming by protecting trees in the call for limiting use of toilet paper. Bad, bad Sheryl Crow!
Note: All updates are in orange.
Brace yourselves, America - the next round of draconian guns laws are just around the corner. Actually, they’ve been sitting on Capital Hill since the Democratic party takeover of congress, but were stalled until now.
These bills, coupled with worse waiting in the wings, are going to flood the legislature after today’s horrible shooting in Virginia - the largest mass shooting in US history. Even if the Bush administration doesn’t support the gun control bills coming, look for them to expand their police state accordingly. Parties irrelevant, government lusts for power and control, and incidents like this hands it to them on a silver platter.
Thirty one Thirty two Thirty three people, including the shooter, are confirmed dead, with twenty twenty six more injured, from the incident on Virginia Tech’s campus. Apparently, this lone shooter, armed with a .22 and a 9mm pistol, strolled without words through a dorm and then a class building, shooting apparently selected targets; at least to a degree. Full story here.
I work at the University of Utah, which imposed an un-Constitutional firearm rule that bans those with valid carry permits from carrying on campus, which the courts have been battling over ever since. One of the primary concerns held by the University President and others here who are incapable of understanding not only the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but common sense; is that if those who go about the task of obtaining carry permits and passing background checks are allowed to carry, it will make people somehow unsafe to be around them. Funny, Virginia tech had equivalent rules and it did nothing to help out when this illegally carrying and criminally acting shooter took to the campus grounds. On the other hand, if one of those living in the afflicted dorm or in the classrooms had been legally carrying, things might have worked out differently.
The basic premise of gun control is flawed: it is the belief that by making a rule, you will prevent crime. If this was the case, we could just outlaw murder and have nothing to worry about. The fact of the matter is, criminals don’t obey the law, any law - which is why we call them criminals. They don’t care what rules you put in place, what punishments they might suffer should they live through their actions; they are only concerned with carrying out their goals, whatever they may be. Rules prevent nothing. Expecting those of nefarious intent to abide by the rules, is plainly stupid. Laws exist to outline society’s punishments for transgression, they cannot prevent any criminal activity in and of themselves. They are structure to provide for government imposed punishment for criminal events after they occur.
There is but one proper reaction to the criminal use of force, lawful use of force in return, when and where it happens. This is why the police carry firearms and not feather dusters. The People have the same rights that police officers do, to preserve their own lives in the face of attack. Certainly the police have every justification to carry on the job, as they are setting themselves up to be possible targets by putting on a badge. That same badge also weighs in for the People, as criminals take considerable caution not to commit crimes when the police are around. Conversely, that means it’s likely that when something bad happens, the police are not going to be there to protect the public. If the police were everywhere, we’d be living in a certified police state.
What choice do we have then, but to protect ourselves? No discussion can be made over the duty of the protection of one’s life, without taking into consideration the obligations of the intended victim. The one and only person who has any duty or obligation to protect that person, is themselves. No one else has the duty to protect them, not even the police. The courts have unanimously ruled that the police have no obligation to protect anyone in particular. Read that sentence a couple of times to yourself and then reflect on how you feel about lawful carry of firearms for self protection.
What incidents like this show is not that we haven’t gone far enough to control firearms, but that we’ve gone too far. We’ve disabled the innocent from protecting themselves, while enabling the criminals to commit their evil intent without obstruction.
For a limited time, the entire passenger list of the ill fated R.M.S. Titanic is online for public viewing. Though over a morbid subject, it is good to see this material finally made available.
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all material of whatever
nature created
