Satan’s Garden

Just when you thought that the morons at PETA couldn’t get any more stupid than they already were, they prove that their idiocy knows absolutely no bounds.

PETA’s Executive Vice President, Tracy Reiman, wrote a letter to Ben & Jerry’s, urging them to switch from cow to human milk in the production of their ice cream.  Read the story here.

Well Tracy, I urge you to put your teats where your mouth is!  That’s right, I want you to be the first to volunteer for the milking machines at Ben & Jerry’s.  It’s one thing to talk the talk - I want to see you walk the walk - or perhaps in this case milk the cow.

After all, how can you expect others to follow your foolishness, er…advice, if you’re not leading the way?

Once more, this really has nothing to do with animal abuse or animal rights and everything to do with the mistaken idea that humans should all be strict Vegans - ignoring all of the evolutionary traits which prove us to be omnivores.

Makes me want to go out for a big steak dinner…

There are so many problems with the official story of what happened on September 11th, 2001, that several books have been written about it all. From time to time you find tidbits of information leaking through which just have you scratching your head. This is one of them.

Former Air Force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg, who flew for Pan Am and United for over 30 years, actually operated two of the aircraft in question. His statement here is something to consider.

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.

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:

• Vegetarians are the ones making justifications for their diet.
• They have to do this, because they are in a minority, roughly 6%. (Vegans make up a paltry minority of 1-2.8%.)
• Vegetarians are pretty much the only ones, outside of fad weight loss mannequins, who are proselytizing their diet to others.

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.

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?

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.

R.M.S. Titanic Passenger List

After careful, painstaking research (read as, five second Google search,) the crack science team at Satan’s Brothel (now Satan’s Garden) has found perhaps the most definitive video yet, describing the nature and dangers of Global Warming.

(Note: YouTube has deleted the video. I’m still looking for the clip.)

Hide your thermometers people!

The event I mentioned about the chocolate Jesus exhibit has been cancelled.

Full story here. About the only redeeming action in the entire affair was, “Matt Semler, the gallery’s creative director, resigned in protest.”

Excellent, Matt! Thank you.

‘Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.”‘

Try this on for size Bill, “So many Christians, so few lions!” Yeah, you can quote me.

No matter how you may arrange your morality, whether you think it is from a higher power or by societal constraints alone - there are going to be those who don’t follow that morality or simply don’t believe you.

You will always have the factor of someone deciding that this set of atoms has every right to disassemble that other set of atoms. It does not matter how they are raised or what they are taught, unless you are willing to murder those who do not agree with your “objective” morality, they may wander away from it and in doing so come up with their own version of right and wrong. The foundation of a God inspired morality only holds as long as the belief in that God is intact. Without a belief in that God, the whole moral framework becomes suspect. This does not happen in a morality framework decided upon by men alone, because faith is not involved and the loss of faith cannot affect the moral system.

The atheist morality has more substance, ultimately.

The only objective morality I see in the universe is the law of nature - which is both cruel and kind, vicious and gentle. Eat, breathe, live, defend, kill, die. Everything else is an illusion or construct we’ve assembled via consciousness, giving us our ability to quantify such. You can believe that killing another is utterly wrong, but you’re going to have a damn hard time arguing that with the tiger bearing down on you.

Ultimately, there are no divine rights, for that matter. There is only force. How and why we decide to use that force is determined by societal constraints alone. Any “higher” morality guiding such is simply a mind game. The Bill of Rights is set aside, for example, as a list of inalienable rights. You can claim up and down the fence that these are “God given”, but if the government doesn’t believe in your version of God, you’re screwed. The only way to keep civil rights of any kind is to be willing to use force to keep them. A “right” only exists because the masses are willing to die to keep them. Which is why we have no rights in this country anymore.

All of this, however, does not mean that developing morality has no benefit. There are benefits to preventing anarchy, as a structured and peaceful society will have the means to advance science, art, etc. An anarchy will not be able to have the comfort of doing the same. Forming rules of conduct among a group is necessary to allow each to not only live, but to thrive, since protection from nefarious forces en mass has always worked, because there is simple safety in numbers.

However, having examined societies in general, I believe this starts to fall apart when two things come to pass: overpopulation and rules being made for the simple purpose of having another rule.

When a group becomes too large to be able to know each other as neighbors, you start to lose sight of the damage a new rule or law put into place does to them - it will not affect you personally anymore, because the damage you’ve done will not come back to you in the form of a lost service or lost revenue by any other definition (comfort, food, shelter, aid…) Once you can make the affect of a law be something which happens to “other” people, you have effectively de-humanized a segment of the population and your group morality starts to fail as some feel victimized.

Laws made for the sheer purpose of having another rule, will always cause damage to someone. No thought of consequence occurs in this type of behavior, and if the group is small it will be held in check by others wielding power against the lawmaker run amok. If the population is too large and the lawmakers have managed to distance themselves from the rest, then they become in a sense, untouchable and are propped up as more-than-mortal, of higher consequence than the rest. The lawmakers in turn start to think of everyone outside of other lawmakers as sub-human and you have a snowball rolling down a sharp incline.

I think the Framers understood this dynamic, which is why they wanted a strong local government system in comparison to the federal. Local governments would be in tune with their neighbors, far more than some federal branch ever could be. The federal branch was only to provide the slightest needed cohesion to pull the union of states together under one umbrella of protection from other nations and that’s it.

But once the fed became distanced and empowered as more-than-mortal, it fell apart.