Category: veganism

Adopting a Vegan Diet

Rainforests are not merely the metaphorical lungs of the planet; they literally convert carbon emissions to oxygen. Burning the Amazon rainforest to scorched earth to provide feeding lots for cows can be compared to allowing a chain-smoker to direct nicotine into your lungs. Like burning live carrots on a bbq grate? No. It is not.

Yesterday, I encountered a baconist on Facebook who suggested these very points. By this morning, my response had been deleted. So I shall post my thoughts on this blog.

Pigs and cows are fellow mammals who possess spinal columns and complex nervous systems. They have the same sets of organs that they use to see the world, reflect upon it, experience the same emotions, and feel inflicted pain. Their reproductive systems are quite similar. Their eyes and ears work in the same way that mammals have employed since the Cambrian Explosion 541 million years ago.

Animals with eyes that developed in that Cambrian Explosion do not want to live in the squalor of a factory farm, to live short lives, to die violent deaths, to find out they are wanted because a supermarket scanner beeps when each dead animal’s product code is recognized. Under separate cover, I have suggested that the familiar beep be replaced by a scream. Specifically, the kind of scream it makes upon completion of its time in the slaughterhouse. At the kill station.

Currently, the non-mammal “food” animals eaten by discerning foodies with demanding palates are chicken and fish. These are touted as economical alternatives to “beef and pork.” Fish provide essential oils that you cannot obtain otherwise unless you happen to know about flaxseed oil. The center of a meal must be a dead animal in our society.

From Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary

Speaking now of our educational foundations, why are school field trips never scheduled at the local abattoir? If bacon, another euphemism, defines the so-called most important meal of the day why does it not seem proper to schedule regular school trips to a slaughterhouse? See it happening firsthand, such that you may understand and learn that a homo sapiens’ personal predilection must never be associated with the blood and death of billions of land animals every year and trillions of fish per year. If only to exorcise something I learned in the Catholic educational system — a meatless Friday is canonically defined as a day when you eat no cows, no pigs, and no chickens. Fish must then have more in common with carrots. A healthy mind remains healthy when it questions presumed authorities. A fish has eyes that see in much the same manner as we do, but definitions can be heartlessly arbitrary. Does a fish have eyes in the way that a potato has eyes? An eye for an eye?

Eat these on meatless Fridays? Something from the Cambrian Explosion?

Critical thinking is something that gets thoroughly discouraged in Western society. Take a deliberate look at our food-processing system and ask yourself if it is a morally healthy and God-fearing kind of thing. You don’t need to visit a slaughterhouse to know what happens there, but the distance from the deadly source numbs your mind into submission at a critical level. Take a field trip to your local Kroger, the largest supermarket in the United States, and take a close look at every place where dead animals are to be found. Do not simply look at the bloody slabs wrapped in plastic on styrofoam trays. Look at the cans and the boxes and the frozen “foods.” Beeps at the checkout lanes determine if a reorder gets cut for more “products” from the slaughterhouse.

A final thought: slaughterhouses pay low wages to those whom we deem illegal. They dare not question the death-dealing, and no one applies for a job there. They do it because you want to continue to call the fellow souls that die there by a wholesome name: MEAT.

Thanks for reading.

Meat Eaters

Although a vegan for many years now, I cannot name a single person whom I have persuaded to adopt a vegan lifestyle. Why is veganism so thoroughly resisted?

Roman Catholics still consider fish to be a healthy choice for a no-meat pro-life diet. How can a faith with such an ostensibly large membership not see the eyes on a no-meat, Lenten-friendly fish-fry fish with their own eyes? These are persons who consider themselves to be enlightened agents operating for good on a shared planet. Has anyone ever asked a self-identified enlightened person why they continue to eat meat? Is personal enlightenment such an exclusionary process?

Animal sacrifices to a deity of choice is an act of faith, a personal sacrifice, and a thank-you gesture for every participant but the sentient being who gets to enter a dead state of existence due to diet choices. Animals were already identified as “live stock” in the Book of Genesis. Presumably, they were popped into stocks at their instant of creation.

There is no other being “created” by a god who wants to be loved so much that he will waste the flesh of tasty individuals by the million in the name of love. We are absolutely the only ones who have such a self-generated sense of entitlement. Yet a vegan choice is an unthinkable, dreadful, disgusting, and demeaning option.

Sport is often a metaphor for sacrifice. Even after leaving football with multiple deadly injuries to their brain, players get identified as heroes. No attendee in a stadium or arena is brought to a permanent state of hell, PTSD, and suicide. They just cannot stay away from a sport that offers them unlimited opportunity to murder opponents at the command of a coach. Getting a player back on the playing field is the prime directive.

The last extinction event came at an instant when hit by a six-mile-thick rock from outer space wiped out nearly all life on Earth. The current extinction event is already predicted to occur during the lifetimes of Earth dwellers. A pandemic is not enough to convince self-denying people that a change of lifestyle is not an option. We can’t seem to resist airports enough. No sacrifice is enough of a sacrifice for a member of homo sapiens.

Earth’s population has quadrupled since I was born, but the yearning of some of its holiest members — particularly the Catholic Christians — is enough to state that a 400% increase on their only planet is not enough. How many of the sacred unborn would have created more offspring of highly entitled humans by now. Yet, it would seem to be the only vital alternative for these most wealthy and resource-hungry Earthlings.

The Catholic Church is essentially a one-issue religion, and they voted for a political party that did not have a single issue on their platform in 2020. They are awful people and they need to be identified as such. They voted for Trump, his wishes as emperor god were enough to satisfy the qualifications that make a president Great. Great!

Thanks for reading.

Thinking Outside the Asylum

I have been an iconoclast since first discovering that word; a nonviolent anarchist by nature; a veganist because it’s only genuine avenue to peace, enlightenment, and reality. Life outside the asylum.

How do viruses jump from a non-human to an human?

IMPERIALIST, n. A political thinker to whom neither a kingdom nor a republic offers the hope of political preferment or other substantial advantage.

FORK, n. An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth. Formerly the knife was employed for this purpose, and by many worthy persons is still thought to have many advantages over the other tool, which, however, they do not altogether reject, but use to assist in charging the knife. The immunity of these persons from swift and awful death is one of the most striking proofs of God’s mercy to those that hate Him.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot…for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

Marshall McLuhan

In the land of the blind, enucleation is corrective surgery.

Bill Ziegler

I draw your attention to rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone, a touchstone source for independent thinkers. She is tenacious enough to separate truth from the spewing firehoses of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and conventional wisdom: How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human.

My mother believed that Hindus would not be a starving lot if they would just partake of the sacred cows lording it up in India. She was hardly the only person to arrive at such solution, many meaters will tell you that releasing animals from a slaughterhouse would precipitate incredible confusion for the animals and for all the commuters prevented from bringing home the bacon by enormous traffic jams, such as all those chickens crossing the highway. More realistically, a scan of animal parts at the checkout lane electronically initiates a replenishment order.

The Wild West myth is whitewashed to sanctify wanton lust for land and riches, justified as a divine right in Holy Lands myths. In some cases at least, the pig receives more than a Thanksgiving-Day pardon: a stake in the Middle East (itself a Eurocentric term) with a white visage geographically located in “The Holy Land.” A holy place that deliberately excludes one of the three Monotheistic faiths, Islam, as an eternal enemy

White-centric history books thoroughly propagandize the role of animal “agriculture,” the fencing in of the plains for “livestock”, the cowboy drives of cattle to market, the railroad cowboys who would stop to slaughter bison for the sheer sport of it. To tell the truth is to share the obvious, to follow the conventional wisdom is to justify the protracted torture and slaughter of highly sentient creatures for appetite and fashion. A single field trip to any factory farm is unthinkable, it really is incomprehensible what occurs there, yet a single trip to a supermarket should suffice to inform a customer that something very wrong happened, and not just in that single marketplace.

Here is an account of someone’s “insight” into the connection between the cuddly farm animals brought to your table, and how it all wonderfully comes together full circle to become a perfect moment for delivering a life-lesson at an idyllic family-friendly farm.

Samantha told us how a lot of the reasoning behind these visits is due to how much misinformation there is in the world, especially in social media, regarding what she referred to as “animal agriculture,” the literal farming of animals. We turned a corner to see some cows happily grazing at a trough as they waited to be milked, and learned about the economics of the situation. In particular, it currently costs more to milk a cow than it does to sell the milk itself, which makes the business a little difficult. We would later learn that the farm sold some cows in the past to help make ends meet due to this pricing crisis.

Jeff Raymond, “GRIST FOR THE MILLS: Down on the farm”

Thanks for reading.

The Carnivore in the Room

Veganism is a way of being that threatens the biosphere the least while threatening the destroyers of the biosphere the most.

The largest contributors to climate collapse are fossil-fuels, the consumption of sentient-animal body parts, consumption of sentient-animal byproducts, and their related purchases in the marketplace — including the fuel exhausted to get you there or the fuel exhausted to bring those purchases to you.

My suggestion to replace the familiar cacophony of beeps at the checkout lane with bleats, oinks, moos, clucks … no bites so far. Kroger headquarters are in a town just north of us, perhaps they could set up a trial to test my modest proposal.

Part of a serenity prayer : changing the things you can — do not consume the flesh, non-human breast milk, or the eggs of a sentient being and you cast one vote for preventing catastrophic climate change. It’s not just a concern expressed for creatures living near a coastline. See Humpty Dumpty for more on this principle.

I’ve been a climate watcher since the 1960s and have had the privilege of teaching climate vagaries back then. Nixon approved creating of the EPA in a political swap, he was never anything wiser than a consummate politician. Our current POTUS is a climate-change denier, doncha know.

When you encounter an article on climate change, search for the word “vegan.” It usually does not even get mentioned.

Thanks for Reading.

%d bloggers like this: