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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Listen, I admired PETA for putting forth the vegetarian agenda as a healthful and slightly more moral lifestyle and for pointing out how unnecessary it is to wear the fur of another animal.
But I draw the line at PETA tying vegetarianism in with an environmental message. Give me a f***king break! Pamela Anderson and Paul McCartney suck up more resources in one month they my whole family does in a year, vegetarian or no. Paul McCartney has not adhered to a replacement level of family planning, and if the pregnancy rumors are true, neither has Pam Anderson. So please, PETA, don't go down this road, unless you get new spokespersons.
Don't get me wrong, I have always loved McCartney's music (with the Beatles) and I have nothing against him personally, and I am indifferent to Anderson. I just don't think that most celebrities, with a very few exceptions (Ed Begley, Jr. comes to mind), are the people to be telling ME that I am using too much of the Earth's resources.
Which is only a small part of the problem. The U.S. no longer has any moral authority to tell other countries how to manage their resources. That's like a person who has been rich for years telling a poor person, "Take it from me, you really don't need money to be happy." What hubris. Besides, since Shrub has not signed or cooperated in any global initiatives on global ecology or birth control our "bully pulpit" (Shrub's favorite term) has been splintered beyond repair.
Americans can tend to our own house, but please, let's not embarass ourselves with the lecturing. Even the other posters on the boards who claim to be forgoing children in the interest of ecology sound a little nuts to me. Really? Are you sure there are no other reasons? If so, fine, your decision is further reinforced by ecological concerns, but don't try to fool people into thinking this is your only motive.
Do you or do you not, sir, own a car or fly in commercial airplanes?
And do you or do you not ever miss the flavor of meat? Or is it something you never liked much in the first place?
Do you or do you not think that global cessation of meat production is a feasible goal worthy of your energies? Would you be willing to engage that industry and challenge it to make positive, environment-friendly changes in the ways it gets its much-demanded product to market, or do you "not negotiate with evil"?
You guys need to hire a couple of Hare Krishnas in your PR Department. They manage to make vegetarianism look cool and enlightened. PETA makes it look like a series of tired rants animated by sophomoric anger and self-righteous hypocricy.
Yes, the world population continues to grow but only half as fast as it did in 1963. The reason is that the population of European countries has been dropping significantly since the 1990s. The big gains in population are in big Asian countries as well as the southern hemisphere of the Americas. The United States has increased only slightly, mostly due to the red states who continue to have more than replacement numbers of children. The blues states populations are falling at near-European levels.
The point isn't so much the raw number of breathing bodies born on the planet as the life style these bodies practice. We all know how much more planetary energy it takes to live a "developed world" life than a rural tribal existance. The amount of red meat we consume has significant impact. Other huge issues are how many cars and homes we own, how many travelling we do, how much stuff we surround ourselves with, how many taxes we are assessed to keep our society going, and how many services we demand.
People can sip their beer and argue for population stabilization till the cows come home (so to speak) but that's just so much verbal methane . The issues raised are complex and not easily addressed. Beware the simplistic bromide.
and I've never heard of a disease "silenced" claims she has. I suspect it's all in her head.
it is well accepted by the (mainstream) medical community that vegetarian diets are completely nutritionally adequate, even for children and the ill or elderly, and that overall, people who adhere to them tend to be healthier.
I might be able to accept that meat production is implicated in global warming if we are just talking about fossil fuels burned in its production, but claiming that the livestock themselves contribute to the problem seems to me to miss the point.
Any carbon dioxide or methane emitted into the atmosphere by livestock necessarily has to come from feed. When more feed is grown to replace that consumed by the livestock, the carbon (and nitrogen) in that feed comes from ... you guessed it, the atmosphere! This is, in simple form, the carbon cycle, and it is a zero-sum process.
The true problem of global warming is the release into the atmosphere of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years in fossil fuel deposits. All this noise about cows polluting is an ill-informed distraction by people trying to piggyback their pet obsession onto a real global crisis.
Anyone who thinks that the global human population can be reduced from its current level of around 6 billion within the next 50-100 years simply by controlling the human birth rate hasn't done the math.
And anyone who insists that it's imperative for the human population to be halved, quartered, or reduced to 1 billion or lower within the next 50 years is implicitly supporting "death control": the engineering of genocides and megadeath casualty counts- which is the only effective strategy for achieving such goals.
Find the stats, do the math. A couple of links with which to begin: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html
http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Population/Statistics/
I do not understand why people are willing to kill animals for food when healthy vegetarian alternatives exist. Animals want to live as much as people do, and to take their lives when it is not necessary strikes me as cruel.
The meat industry is a contributor to global warming. It depletes our water resources, especially out West. Cattle ranchers shoot and poison prairie dogs, coyotes, and any other animal which they feel interferes with their operations. On top of all of that, you have intelligent and sensitive animals like cattle and pigs and goats and chickens enduring terrible living conditions, or in the rare case, adequate living conditions, and then being forced onto trucks and train cars and having their throats slit in slaughterhouses while their fellow "livestock" look on in fear.
All of this pain and suffering could be eliminated if people would only go vegetarian.
For those who argue that animals kill and eat animals, since when have people patterned their behavior on the law of the jungle? We're supposed to be capable of better things, like compassion.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
