Category: animal rights

Interview with a Vegan Assassin

A remarkable tale by the inimitable Peter Schreiner, it’s a story told in the spirit and with the fun of noir — A parable for our times.

Forked Tongues

It’s always a good day to learn something you did not know before, but it’s a better day when you learn things that confound your complacency and introduce you to post-Santa compassion.

There is a soundbite for every event taught in American classrooms — 90% of history curricula are either grossly twisted, are outright sanctified falsehoods, or are events not complimentary to sensitive Whiteous feelings: the eighth deadly sin.

Genocide on American soil is slathered over with sugary white icing before it can meet publishing standards established in Texas. Before Columbus, Indigenous Americans were a tapestry of tribes. Should they be thankful for Western Evilization?

Blacks lived in the tapestry that was Africa before the Europeans arrived. Should they be thankful for being saved by the generous very nice plantation system that offered better? Better Lives Through Slavery?

Somehow most White genealogies trace back to families that were very very nice to their slaves. Who the hell ever learns about the Black Stock Market of Greenwood, OK that was burned to cinders in 1921? What of their American dream?

“According to eye-witness accounts, the scope of the attack was equal to warfare: homeowners shot dead in their front yards, planes dropping turpentine bombs onto buildings, a machine gun firing bullets on a neighborhood church. It was a living nightmare, and for many decades Tulsa treated it as such, a dark apparition of the mind that might fade from memory so long as it was repressed.”


Fox News doesn’t have to be your only source for faux news, you can turn the channel, change the dial, read a “newspaper of record” and mislearn about current regime changes in the process. Perhaps you watch, perhaps you hear, perhaps you think you know about what happens in Venezuela. Here is something by Greg Palast that inspired me, something I promised to post: In Venezuela, White Supremacy is a Key Driver of the Coup.


Additional unnerving, disturbing, real-time coverage is available at Shelby Courtland dot com. Truth can be unsettling sometimes.

…”The New York Times, NPR and other mainstream outlets in the US reported on marches against the Chavez government, describing the tens of thousands of Venezuelans calling for Chavez’s removal. The light-skinned protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy — and they wanted you to know it. Many of the women marched in high heels, the men peacocking in business suits, proudly displayed in the uniforms of their privileged class. The Chavistas wore patriotic yellow, blue and red T-shirts, sneakers, jeans.”

Most people do not even participate in their own lives, life happens in an autonomic way — if you prefer that the cranium function as autonomically as breathing, it will do so. Existing-While-Black, Existing-While-Palestinian, Existing-While-LGBQT+, Existing-While-Living InMyNeighborhood? Cognitive dissonance happens. I think myself a cognitive dissonancer because I am a lightning rod for the cognitively dissonanced. You must learn to expect such when you speak for the most exploited among us, and I even include all sentient animal beings among the most exploited. Factory farms really are death camps. It’s always a good day to eschew blood-laden “resources” — for all parties involved, both the muncher and the munched.

Avoiding television frees up the time to think independently, in my opinion. The tube/screen has always been a popular passive way to address boredom, a popular alternative to thinking, a stress-reducing mechanism. Propagandists, marketers and people like DJT know how to direct their messages to target audiences by any means possible, such as eye-scanning apps that detect minute movements in a supermarket, process the scanned data at the checkout, and follow you home. Technology is very good. Technology is very bad.

Thanks for reading.

Is Meat Addictive?

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.

Lucky Strike

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.

The Meat Investor: Serving Man

The year in review

Livestock stocks ended the year strong as the present and futures markets overwhelmingly outperformed vegan stocks to bring a hefty profit to all our investors. “Serving Man” remains out motto for 2019, it affirms a self-serving stance that is forward-looking and alert to market opportunism.

The meat of the matter is making and marketing meat — the profitable products obtained from the slaughter of nonhuman animals — and finding more ways to counter the criminal activities of animal-rights lunatics that make our job more difficult. These threats range from legally preventing animal-rights protesters from gathering at markets to keeping a lid on anti-meat vested interests in the media. We must counter insipid insistence on truth-in-advertising, it hampers our efforts. Eternal vigilance is our sacred vow. Our guiding principle — separation of meat and animal — is a social contract that has kept meat-keeping successful for many generations.

To Serve Man

On the good-news side, ever more creative and diversional ways help keep the social contract of deception alive, well, and thriving. We are promoting a “Chikens protesting Kows” campaign to protect our bovine-blood lover markets as a balancing measure within the meat sector. Of course, we are continuing to bulwark the processed bird distributors in their efforts. Opportunists find themselves in a win-win circumstance, fevered fervor healthens all bottom lines.

On the production side, we witness a record number of calls to the death camps for more body parts and body byproducts. Dead animals are getting snapped up in the supermarket at an extraordinary rate, but the death mills are still able to keep up with those snappings.

Once again, turkeys flocked to the extermination camps to assure body-counts sufficient to sate demand for Rockwellian Thankfulness. More than a few smart shoppers took advantage of super carload lots of corpses-sans-heads to grace holiday tables on Turkey day. Benjamin Franklin would have been proud to know that his Grade-A choice for the national bird would find a way into the stomachs of the Americans who honor patriotic fervor, fanfare and fulsomeness.

Our commitment to dollars über alles maintains product issuing from our many wholesome death chambers. Participation by workers without papers help assure that warm bodies be recruited to work the dead bodies along the carcass hook lines. Our mission is to sate family expectations where it counts: at the checkout line.

Temporary workers without papers are silent partners who generously manned the death stations this year. Public shrugs have been many, they are helpful and they are much appreciated. We also thank those huddled masses for manning stations despite faster carcass production times. All who benefit from significantly higher kills per hour will find a bonus check available in mid-February, bonus amount depending on the number of processed byproducts consumed during the Super Bowl — increased product available in November and saved for the Big Game in February might otherwise find inadequate consumption in the school lunch lines that accept our lower-grade carcasses. Death means dividends for all that decaying flesh you have frozen since Black Friday.

Unpapered Workers in a Slaughterhouse

Remember that climate change offers unexpected opportunity — stockpiling is as traditional as drive-through backups for Big Macs. So stockpile for more than snow emergencies to restock, reinvest and redouble advert efforts. Shopper-inducement software is doing an even better job at tracking eye-movements in the highest crave aisles — it’s where the eye meets the meat, where the software captures consumer movements toward product and movement of product into the shopping cart.

Eye-movement tracking

Watch for even fatter profits in 2019, and who cares how we get there.

Thanks for reading.