The Tobacco Institute assured many generations that smoking brought many positively wonderful benefits to many millions of people around the world. They blew billows of smoke clouds to win addicts to their sacrosanct product by documenting what a smoker liked to hear, to hear about research on low “tar” tobaccos, microfiber filtration, dust-free packages, outstandingly mild puffs — all smoke screens to direct attention away from the addictive nature of nicotine.
Within a statistical error range of 3%, you can find as many climate-change deniers among scientists as there are round-earth deniers.
Advertising suggested that most doctors chose Camel cigarettes. The brand that helps them keep alert to their patients’ concerns — a demanding practice according to Tobacco Institute polls. Doctors don’t smoke many Camels these days, but Big Pharma does not reward many physicians for prescribing vegan diets to their patients, do they?
My high school restricted smoking to seniors, it felt like a classy perk, a mark, a rite of passage for seniors on the school’s front steps: their own “smoking lounge.” When at university in 1965 smoking was allowed in classrooms — no wasted time standing outside. The University of Cincinnati Main Library routed smokers to a single facility: the rare-book room. It was a nice warm study hall with southern exposure.
Meat marketers played the same con game to the same slick tune, vegans (our number also within an error range of 3% of round-earth deniers).
The merchants of addictive substances know that lifelong customers are lifelines to large profits — for generations of tobacco lovers. Meat keeps doctors in the big friendly hands of Big Pharm reps. A lump of meat, a slug of dairy, a bite from an incredible, edible egg may gradually lead to a need for replacement organs, artery stents, insulin pumps, cholesterol medications… Yes, poor health contributes to the Gross National Product as undeniably as expended bullets trigger bullet-replacement orders. GNP remains a popular means for comparing a nation’s economic prowess and presumed happiness…
Bloodthirst is an addiction. It’s a dependency that is as firmly rooted in the fundament of “civilized” life as smoking, drinking, and fossil-fueling.
Fossil-fueling is an addiction to the instant energy stored for eons underground, packets of pure energy drawn from the biomass of a previous extinction event. Dinosaurs lived in a verdant environment. Dead flora and fauna pressed intensely under the rocks of ages yields instant energy. Those reptilians might still be around had fortune not dealt them a joker, a big-ass asteroid. A few mammals survived mere inches beneath protective insulation from the firestorm above the ground: planet-wide scorched earth.
Sowing the seeds of our own destruction is a bad habit, but its return on investment is massive. The science is indisputable, but so is the indisputable reflex to put fingers in your ears. Scientists who accept the Big bucks accumulated by petrochemical manufacturers don’t miss a paycheck.
Thanks for reading.
billziegler1947 
Great post 😁
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I am very glad that you liked it, #1. Thanks for reading 🙂
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We’ve been lied to and deceived since birth. And too by the people who were supposed to protect and guide us. Gradually, some of us, our numbers within an error range of 3% of round earth deniers, begin to question the stories. Discovering that there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, no verifiable gods, angels, or demons, no caring industries or governments, and really no caring people beyond superficiality. Because all these self-serving industries and governments aren’t some alien monster, they’re comprised of flesh and blood people; people who consciously make decisions to deceive. Well, and maybe a few Annunaki thrown in the mix. I doubt we have yet to unveil the totality of lies.
Well done, Bill. Thanks for writing.
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Thanks for the thoughts, Peter.
Meat, dairy, and eggs are comfort foods, children’s books bright memories of dependably idyllic barnyard animals, cartoons comforting and amusing, animal voices a consistently comforting moo, cheep, baa, oink, peep, cluck…
Death camps, slaughterhouses, torture, and inconceivable violence? Parental Guidance Advised.
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You are probably right meat could be addictive but mainly because people like the taste. I have been a vegetarian for 62 years as I started when I was 16. I have only been to hospital once a year ago as my wife insisted I get my nose put back to its original location after a painful badminton accident. I do believe that there is no one diet for everyone. There are enough interesting articles written on personal diets since scientists found that the microbiome works like the firmware in an electronic device and controls what the body does with what we eat. Personally I don’t believe our body is meant to eat meat but that is my opinion as our design falls within the group of animals that do not eat meat. If you suffer from diabetes I would suggest you take a look at the DAY TWO site and if I ever had a problem with my intestines I would definitely find a place to change my microbiome. I drink whisky and whines eat lots of eggs and butter but only non-wheat bread and lots of smelly tasty cheeses. Everyone has to find their own way but meat farming is rapidly destroying our planet faster than global warming is ever going to do.
interesting links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z03xkwFbw4 and https://www.daytwo.com/
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Cigarette marketers like to distinguish their brand according to an advertised better “taste.” Actually, *anything* to deflect the customer’s attention from the influence of nicotine. Tobacco appears in a myriad of forms and a multitude of variations, but the presence of nicotine is not a negotiable ingredient. Adult beverages are marketed just as multitudinously, but alcohol is “the” non-negotiable on the list of ingredients. Meat makers don’t draw many customers if blood is not included with their myriad products. A marketing slogan you may not hear any time soon: “Where’s the Blood?”
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No one thinks for themselves; herd mentality, I think it is called. Go with the flow. Don’t buck the trend. Be a ‘conformist’. Don’t you want to hang out with the ‘in crowd’? I have learned something or maybe I just knew it all along in that I prefer to think for myself, never go with the flow, buck the trend, be a non-conformist and never hang with the ‘in crowd’. People will do as they are told which is why we are seeing what appears to be mass hypnosis playing out all across America…..and the world, in fact. Just as the government employees were told to report to work, but don’t expect to get paid for it, many did just that and so is it any wonder that people have not a single thought of their own in that grey matter between their ears? And if something sounds too good to be true, as in sitting in the midst of a cloud of smoke and being told that it is healthy for you and you look good doing it, why millions of people did and still do just that despite obvious signs to the contrary.
And likewise, eating a dead animal is going to give you lots of protein, so enjoy that ‘get up and go’ straight to your doctor’s aka pill pusher’s office and load up on what you need to counter the effects from eating dead animals that were filled with growth hormones and antibiotics and who stood in their own feces which was swept up with them when they were slaughtered for ‘human’ consumption. Don’t worry, there’s a pill for that. And when you suffer side effects from that pill, why there’s a pill for that but it too causes death. Now pay the undertaker.
This is truly a most excellent post, Bill!
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Very well elucidated, Shelby. Trillion-dollar segments of the economy do not welcome opposing viewpoints or the jibes of independent thinkers. The Fifty Corporations of Amerigo do not like it when you criticize their raison d’être. Every meal, every between-meal snack, every and any bloody fashion whim goes better with a nonhuman product. I like your mention of instant protein available in a diet focused on nonhuman lifetimes; literally, a creature’s entire lifespan graces your appetite with instant protein — there’s an interesting parallel with the long-lived primitive biomass compressed under sedimentary rocks: fossil fuels. And not a small twinge of irony there too.
Thanks, as always and as sincerely, for reading 🙂
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The pleasure was ALL mine! Thank YOU for posting this!
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Reblogged this on shelbycourtland and commented:
Bill knocked this one out of the ballpark! Is meat addictive or are you just addicted to doing what you are told? Apparently, it is just too exhausting to think for oneself.
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I very much appreciate the honor, Shelby. Independent and critical thinking always inconveniences comfortably parroted and enormously devious lies.
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Bill, I am ever the one for making ‘humans’ feel uncomfortable. That is the problem for too many people, especially Americans is the fact that they are too comfortable because someone has told them how to live and they just accept the status quo without question. Ever the lazy ones Americans are despite their attempts to look the contrary by rushing back and forth everywhere, but going where? Do they even know? And one thing people quite obviously love is to be lied to because then they don’t have to face the truth because then they’d have to actually ‘DO’ something. Perish the thought.
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Recognition of the inalienable rights of any sentient being occurs at the level of eye contact. If you are willing to kill a fellow sentient upon making eye contact with them (comfortable with it), you are responsible for their murder. Purchasing its body parts by proxy does not absolve you of the crime. When a scanner at the supermarket checkout line beeps recognition of a barcode you become a coconspirator in two ways:
1. receiving stolen goods,
2. responsibility for sending another fellow sentient being to a death camp to replace stolen goods.
If the sentient being volunteered its self for your appetite or fashion statement, you are not purchasing stolen body parts; however, most body parts are *not* donated body parts.
Comfort foods are not comfortably obtained.
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Yet another direct hit! Bill, keep it up! I think you are making some ‘humans’ very uncomfortable. That ‘truth’ thing, you know! It does not go over very well with the masses whom it would seem swore an oath to never acknowledge the truth but rather adhere only to the lies for they are ever so much easier to deal with since people live the lie everyday that ‘fellow sentient beings’ were actually grateful to be slaughtered in a most horrendous way in order to feed a population of ‘humans’ their daily supplement of ‘protein’.
And what problem have they for ‘receiving stolen goods’? Why that is what ‘humans’ do best, ‘receive stolen goods’, stolen people, stolen lands. Why should they stop there? ‘They’..didn’t. Hence, stolen and slaughtered animals.
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Ditto–great post bill!
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Hello Henry, very pleasant to receive your response at the very moment that I was was formulating a reply to your most recent post. Wonderfully small world 🙂
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I find it interesting that the clean meat industry has shied away from urging people to switch for moral or environmental reasons. The magical ingredient? Plant HEME. It hits on our predilections and (some could say) addictions to animal blood; it gives clean meat that same iron-y taste and feel as a slab of bloody flesh.
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I remember a camping trip about 40 years ago when I actually got to discover the taste of ground-bovine flesh without blood. The ice in the cooler had melted and the blood got separated by the water. We cooked the remains and found that “burgers” were absolutely tasteless. I wrote about something similar here:
https://billziegler1947.com/2017/09/16/hedonic-hyperphagia/
Thanks again for the kind comments you made on that post. Dang if it isn’t going on 2 years since then. Time flies when you’re getting old, I guess 🙂
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