Vegans Suck

Devilishly Handsome 
Red-blooded American Omnivore

Skinny-fat Vegan Sissy-boy

Today I met a vegan, and I believe he may have been the most misinformed and stupid person I have ever met.  He observed me eating my lunch, which was a leftover flank steak that I grilled last week. I was eating it cold, out of a plastic sandwich bag, without the aid of utensils as I often do.  Caveman-style, if cavemen had had plastic sandwich bags, that is.  It was delicious, but apparently this guy thought it was pretty offensive, which actually accentuates the flavor to me.  He began talking to me about the dangers of red meat consumption, the horrors of the livestock industry, and the wonderful benefits of the vegan lifestyle.  He did this with complete sincerity, even though he looked to be suffering from some sort of rickets or scurvy or some other major illness.  I don't want to brag, but I'm a pretty healthy-looking guy.  I lift weights, and can generally hold my own in most physical endeavors.  I'm pretty sure that in an arm-wrestling contest with this particular vegan, I could rip his arm completely off his body and stick it up his sanctimonious ass.  Which is what I fantasized about the entire time this little vegan spoke to me.

You may wonder why my musings suddenly turned so violent.  Well, let me explain why I hate vegans so much.  First of all, vegans are almost always hippies, and you know I hate hippies.  Second, veganism is more than a choice they have made to not eat meat or use animal products.  It is a philosophy that they have adopted that is, frankly, retarded. They also almost always choose to then project that stupidity onto me.  That's when I get upset.  If you want to go off and eat a weird diet of bean-sprouts and kale, go ahead—knock yourself out.  But don’t try to ruin my lunch, you anemic little turd.

I like to examine both viewpoints...

I can respect vegetarians.  They are wrong, of course, but all they are doing is choosing not to eat meat, and I respect people's personal choices.  You can choose to live off a diet of nothing but Twizzlers and Cool-Ranch Doritos if you want.  Just keep it to yourself.  It’s like being gay—it’s fine with me, as long as you don’t try to make me be gay with you.

MMM...Fortified soy alternatives.
That sounds delicious.
Read this guy's blog...

How do I know the vegetarians are wrong?  Because you have teeth in your head that are called canines, and they wouldn't be there if you hadn't evolved to eat meat, dumbass. 

Canines are the pointy ones.
The ones that wolves and bears also have.
You know who doesn't have canines?  Cows.

The Circle of Life.
Simba knows what I'm talking about.

Just how exactly do you suppose that people got by in the days before farming?  Before we had corn to make into Doritos and Twizzlers?  If you think people wandered around in the Stone Age finding berries and melons under every bush, you are very mistaken.  Go out into a forest sometime and take a good look around.  Take a close inventory of everything you find that you can eat.  It isn't going to look like the produce section at Wegmans, I promise you.  If you are lucky, you might find a grape vine or a nut-producing tree, maybe a rotten log full of grubs (those are animals too, by the way) but that's about all.  There's lots of grass and leaves and acorns, stuff like that, but you can't digest it very well, even if you cook it.  But you know who CAN digest that other stuff?  The insects can.  The deer can.  And your digestive system is perfectly designed to digest the deer.  You can eat nearly every single part of that delicious little bugger.  And you know how to make weapons to kill the deer.  See my point?  It's the friggin' circle of life, for goodness sake.  Watch The Lion King sometime.  This is how people lived for eons until they learned how to farm about 10,000 years ago, which is just about a heartbeat in evolutionary terms.

Explain to me again how the banana is spiritual.

So, like I said, even though it is obvious that vegetarianism is fundamentally wrong, and our ancestors evolved to eat meat and animal products as the primary source of calories, I can respect the views of other people.  I will not force them to eat meat.  I may make fun of their skinny-fat appearance and general weakness, but I won't make them eat dead animals.
-----------Now, as if that's not dumb enough... Vegetarian Spiritualism...Follow this link for proof that I'm not just making this up.  Apparently they think you can taste the cruelty in your food.  If you can, I must think it is yummy.

Doesn't he look absolutely delicious?
Just imagine how tender the meat must be.

I have never really gotten the basic idea of vegans, or of vegetarianism.  I mean, if you are against the killing and exploitation of living things, why is it okay to kill plants?  Are they not living things, too?  If your argument is based on self-awareness, I would say that a shrimp or an oyster (or a chicken, for that matter) is not too much more intellectual than a cabbage.  Can we eat the stupid animals?  What is the maximum IQ for being considered edible?  Do you hear how stupid this sounds?  

Nice tattoo.  

The fact is, we as human beings are consumers in the food chain.  Do you remember that from your science class in middle school?  We have to get our energy from food, and that food is made from other living things that are either producers, or other lower-level consumers.  You must kill another living thing and eat it, or you will die.  This is the way the world works.  So unless you are going to learn to photosynthesize, you better get used to it.  I for one did not fight my way to the top of the food chain to eat lettuce.

The main  reason I hate vegans is because they are almost all very militant about their weird dietary choices.  As if they are saving the world.  They think this is the Holocaust and they are Schindler.  I guess the cows are the Jews.

This is a real cartoon I found on a vegan website.
I think it is pretty offensive to equate farming with murder and rape.
Not to mention how incredibly naive it is...

Bacon makes the strongest argument.
Mmmmm....Bacon.

Kindergarten Environmentalism Part II: Global Warming

There are more things about popular environmentalism that anger me than I could reasonably put in one blog post.  I got into a bit of a Facebook discussion with some guys about global warming (aka climate change), and decided I should elaborate here, where I have a little more space (and privacy, sadly).

Don't watch this without coffee.

NOT a Climatologist.

            Several groups have been warning us over the last 10 or 12 years about the coming catastrophe of climate change, brought on by the sudden increase in global average temperature, brought on by the exponential increase in carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other “greenhouse gasses.”  The most famous of these was Mr. Excitement, VicePresident Al Gore in his famous movie adaptation of a slide presentation, An Inconvenient Truth.  Now, apart from featuring the mind-numbingly boring former VP, this was an interesting documentary, and really helped to get the message out there, revitalizing the environmental movement and the study of climate.  The beef I had with it was that the producers of the film (and several other people before and since) have put forth the notion that the science for this is rock-solid, that there is no debate within the academic community, and that there are no other possibilities to prevent the apocalypse besides the ones they propose.  That’s dangerous talk, from people who should know better.  The idiot media gets a dose of rhetoric like that, and they absolutely propagandize it.  Take a look at one of the more yuppie-type TV channels sometime, and count how many times you hear some metro-sexual on HGTV mention his "carbon footprint" in an hour.  Now I'm getting advice on environmental issues from a guy with enough gel in his hair to kill all of the fish in a small pond.  

Disagreement and debate in the academic community is the very thing that will save us.  It exists, luckily, even though it mostly goes unreported.  Here's a link to a good debate among some scientists on NPR.  The day that every scientist agrees with a complex theory in a complex (and really young) field like climatology is the day we have lost our only real hope.  If there is one saving grace for humanity, it is its relentless search for knowledge and truth.  This is the pursuit that our academics need to stick with.  I hate seeing scientists clamoring about political and economic changes.  It only makes them less credible and paints them into corners dogmatically.  Politics and bullshit should be left to the professional bullshit artists, namely politicians.

Not all hazards are man-made...

Environmental issues are often very complicated.  Our planet is not the unchanging, stable platform that the hippie environmentalists would have you believe.  It orbits its star, narrowly misses other celestial objects (occasionally doesn't miss), wobbling slightly on its axis, part of a solar system, which is in turn part of a larger galaxy, which is all turning around a black hole, which is also moving.  All of these interactions are pretty complicated and interactive and important to our climate here on Earth.  And that doesn't even begin to comment on the interactions within our atmosphere and oceans.  It is super-extra complicated, and our measuring methods are sort of unreliable and VERY recent.  I do not discount everything that Al Gore has to say.  It is probably true that we have drastically increased the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution, but it is important to remember that our climate is an incredibly complex system, with multiple feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative.  The Gore camp tends to focus solely on the positive ones, the ones that will accelerate the warming trend, and discount the negatives that would slow down the trend. 

            For instance, the former-VP pointed out the retreat of several glaciers and the melting of the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland, presumably due to the increase in CO₂ over the last 150 years or so (we’ll just ignore all the possible other factors for now).  This melting and loss of white reflective surface will reduce the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet and cause the earth to absorb more of the sun’s energy and release it as heat, which will cause the earth to warm, which will cause more melting.  The warmer temperatures will cause more water vapor to be held in the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect and cause even more melting until, SHAZAM—the set for Waterworld is created.

If this is what acting will be like after global warming,
somebody get me an electric car right now.

Which is it?  Freeze or melt?
Make up your minds, guys.
(I didn't even notice this wasn't in English at first)

            Apart from being a pretty shitty movie in general (kind of a Road Warrior rip-off, only with jet-skis) and yet another pathetic Hollywood attempt to make a good action hero out of Kevin Costner, Waterworld is a good illustration of what the Al Goreites (does that work?  “Al Goreians,” maybe?) were initially selling with the global warming idea.  Problem is, this theory kind of forgets about the other side of the coin, and all of the negative feedbacks that would also kick in to stabilize the temperature.  For example—when the ice packs melt, there is more fresh water dumped into the northern ocean, which affects the salinity balance between the surface ocean currents and the deep ocean currents, which slows them down, which in turn reduces the amount of heat brought into the polar regions and slows melting.   Remember the other apocalyptic climate-change movie with Dennis Quaid, The Day After Tomorrow?  That movie’s premise is that global warming actually triggers an ice age by disrupting the ocean currents, but is just as silly and unlikely as the Kevin Costner abortion.  There are numerous other negative and positive feedbacks that I won’t get into, lest this blog turn into a geography text book.  Suffice it to say that it is really freaking complicated. So even though I began this rambling with a claim that change is normal, we now see that there are plenty of dampeners between us and oblivion.  The pendulum never swings too far one way or the other, which is how this place has managed to survive this long.

Speaking from anal defilade...

Truth is, nobody knows what the overall effect of doubling CO₂ in the atmosphere will be.  We don’t have really accurate computer models of the Earth’s climate, mainly because of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of the oceans.  So anyone who claims to know the answer for sure or who says that “every scientist agrees” is speaking from what I like to call “anal defilade,” and is letting his political views cloud his perceptions.

The way I see it, even if the worst case happens, and there is a major and rapid planet-wide climate shift, it is hardly curtains for the human species.  The truly maddening argument is the one over whether or not this is a man-made problem.  As if the extermination of half the existing population is fine, as long as it's not anthropogenic.  I don't care where it came from, only the best way to fix it.  We humans are a very inventive bunch, and when necessity comes calling, inventions will result.  Sure, the population is going to take a hit, and a lot of things will have to change, but as long as we can keep our panicky little hands off the nuclear button, it is hardly an existential threat.  This little planet we have will only support a certain number of us, that is the most inconvenient of truths.  Eventually, we will have to compete even more for resources, regardless of sea level or climate shifts.  And that's where my job comes in.  So settle down, Beavis.  It's going to be okay.

If the worst happens, you can bet it won't be America that goes hungry.