Animals are for Eating.

If tradition means anything, this will be the last post of the year.  But I am in a Sociology class that is so big and boring that I can see myself writing every week, like I’m doing now.

So about a year ago there was a minor upheaval about a biologist telling conservationists to give up on attempting to save the pandas.  Pretty much his argument was that the immense difficulty and expense within the conservation efforts are futile and would be better spend on other species.  The anger that arose revolved largely around pandas being so “cute” and “lovable,” that they have a cultural and humanistic impact on our world, more so than for example insects, rodents, etc.  He was being pragmatic, by criticizing public sentiments for placing value based upon abstract concepts rather than their importance to an ecosystem.

For me, I was wondering what the point of conservation was at all.  There are many cases where the abuse by human populations has clear effects on the ecosystem and could lead to massive problems.  Things like overhunting/fishing, deforestation, mining, drilling for oil, etc.  Those are clearly human problems that need to be stopped in order to preserve our resources, but that’s more for our benefit than for the sake of the animals in and of themselves.  I wonder whether we should be going any further.  Species have been faced with extinction for the entirety of their short-lived existence.  Even before humans were around species became extinct with regularity, and people forget that unless something changes we will as well.  There comes a point where natural selection has to come into play to ensure the strength of the Earthlings of the future.  If pandas aren’t able to compete and are bound for extinction than we would be remiss to devote critical resources to prevent it.  The priority of the human race should be the welfare of the human race; every dollar spent by organizations such as PETA could be better spent in Haiti.

Why am I saying this, when it seems ultraconservative when I’m clearly not?  Watch Home the depressing brother to Planet Earth.  The world is changing in ways that we don’t even realize.  Natural landmarks won’t exist with mountains getting shorter every year and seas drying up.  The world’s history has been marked by the rise and fall of its mountains.  When Everest becomes a hill there’ll be another Everest somewhere else, the world is constantly changing.  I guess we don’t need to learn how to embrace change since realistically we won’t see much of them for a few decades in some extreme cases, and this is a language of centuries rather than years, but maybe we need to learn to let go of the inherency of the Earth.  I’m not saying we can pollute all we want and completely disregard our impact on the ecosystem, but whether we like it or not the world is in constant motion, and maybe its time we let the pandas rest in our memories rather than in a pen forced to mate.  Brad Pitt said that the God’s envy our mortality, that our flashes of existence are ultimately more beautiful in its brevity.  Unless the Buggers attack and we acquire their advanced technology and harness the speed of light we’re not going to last forever.  We don’t have an ansible, we have reality, and I’ll admit that saddens me more than pandas do.  Space travel would be sweet.

We should all be bald vegans…

Alright I’m going to give this another try, and by try I mean do it half-assed maybe two or three times before petering out into nothingness, since that’s what happened last semester.  But to a new decade here goes another doomed attempt to rise out of mediocrity into a cycle of an actual life.  I hate when people who write blogs start off with self-deprecation, it actually comes off as sort of pretentious, but it’s so hard not to.

Anyways, today I want to write about two laws that I don’t think should exist, sort of.

So about a year ago I was getting a haircut at a barbershop that I’ve been going to since junior year in high school.  Mid-cut this heavyset Caucasian woman walks through the door and asks to see a license; apparently she’s a government official and was checking to see if the barbers were licensed to cut hair.  Now the owner of the shop had a license, he has it framed next to his mirror, but I could tell from the start that the one cutting my hair, let’s call him Jack, didn’t have one from the way that he looked at the owner.  So while the store-owner was distracting the government official with a stream of broken English, Jack was slowly inching his way to the door mumbling something about having to go to his car.  Throughout all of this I’m sitting in a chair with half my hair cut, and I have to admit I cared more about what was going to happen to my head than Mr. Jack.  Long story short Jack did not have a license, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t here legally, but the white lady let him finish cutting my hair before taking him away.  Honestly, I’m sure he wasn’t really punished since he was back a few months later, but that’s not the point of my story.

The point of my story is that you need a license to cut hair.

Now I’m pretty sure there are thousands of reasons for why this is necessary, but it still boggles my mind that you are required to obtain a license and that there is an agency actively enforcing that you do.  He’s cutting hair, the most damage he could inflict upon a client would be ruining his week.  Even if he went AWOL I doubt he could have seriously injured me, especially since now a days most salons and barbershops don’t use actual razors.

The reason I get so riled up about this is that every time I’m in that same barbershop I watch some Korean channel on the TV.  It seems that 95% of all Korean commercials have to do with some supplement or pill that claims to cure any ailment.  It also seems that 100% of Korean commercials feature non FDA approved products.  So with some simple math that I am totally making up there is a stream of substances that are not government regulated available for purchase, and it’s not just Koreans since there are thousands of weight-loss drugs that are not FDA approved either.  So while barbers need a license to prove their abilities at wielding an electric razor, there is a multi-billion dollar industry based upon false promises and placebos.

Conclusion: whenever I see a product that is not FDA approved I assume it does nothing, but then again I don’t know anything about the FDA either.  Also, before buying anything look it up online, just type in “acai berry scam,” and you’ll see what I mean.

Second thing I want to talk about is Michael Vick, which gives you a good measure of how much I procrastinate.  All in all I think it was wrong for him to be sent to jail, I don’t think he should’ve even been punished or suspended for that matter.  I love dogs and I think animal cruelty is a horrible thing, but can I honestly say that I’m innocent of the same crimes as Vick?  Now I haven’t gone Peter Wiggin on any squirrels but I did pay for someone else to bludgeon a cow over the head with a sledgehammer.  It seems ludicrous for a country to publicly ridicule a man for dog fighting while eating more meat per capita than any other, not really sure if that’s true but I would be surprised if we weren’t.  Now for all you vegetarians out there don’t get all uppity either.  Anyone who owns a house or a car has displaced thousands of animals and permanently altered the ecosystem.  In essence our very existence is a symbol of animal cruelty, because although we may be animals too I’m pretty sure we’d fall into the parasite category (Agent Smith).  I don’t know if it was PETA or some other organization that had that campaign saying “animals are people too,” but that was the biggest load of crap I ever heard.  If you really wanted the government to consider the rights of animals equally with those of humans we’d all be screwed.  Environmentalism and animal advocacy are two different things.

Conclusion: I love meat, and I can’t see myself abstaining from it, even for pseudo-moral reasons, and I hate vegetarians who look down their noses at those who don’t follow their insane way of life while ignoring how they have benefitted from the exploitation of animals.  I see it as justified if Michael Vick be punished only if the rest of the nation was punished as well, and since I doubt I could last long in prison, definitely the big fish, I’d rather go with no punishment at all (Heywood).

Next time: Pandas

Usually my titles are amazingly profound in their combination of simplicity and depth I promise…

I guess that once a week plan didn’t really pan out, but once a month seems all right with me.  In my understandably weak defense, I didn’t have internet at my place until last Thursday.

I’ll probably write more regularly now that school’s started and I’ll have something to do.  Usually I do most of my writing when I have something else due within the next 12 hours; so basically when I shouldn’t be writing stuff like this.

This first part is more for my benefit and not something I really care if people read or not so feel free to skip this part.

Speaking about blogging, or writing for that matter, there was about a month period this past summer when I was big on the Flesch-Kincaid test.  Essentially, the Flesch-Kincaid test is something you can do on most word processors that reports the level of writing of the piece that is opened.  The test gives two values: the first being the reading ease (the higher the more difficult to read), and the second being the grade level of your writing (the higher the better); using some formula involving the average syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence, in some vague fashion.  So, being the conceited arrogant prick I love being, I went back and ran the test on all of my old papers.  I found out that the papers I received the highest-grade level for I also received the highest readability level; but the thing that surprised me was that they were also the most boring.  What determines the effectiveness of a piece of writing?  It reminded me of the greatness graph in The Dead Poet’s Society that determines the greatness of any work of poetry.  For me the ideal results in the Flesch-Kincaid test would be to have a high grade level, but also a low readability score.  If you write something with the purpose of raising your grade level at the cost of readability and style, than you lose the integrity and essence of communication.  All of the writing I’ve done for blogs has had a very low grade level, but also a low readability level.  The reason being is that blogging is conversational, whereas papers are expository in nature.  Blogs engage heavily with the perceived audience, namely because feedback is immediate relative to that of papers.  Right when a blog is posted it is open for all to see and criticize; there is a certain drama to the writing of blogs, especially when involving sensitive topics, because it opens up a chess match of sorts.   What I mean by that is for every sentence that is written a reaction has to be considered.  If I say this, than what will the reader think of me?  How will they feel?  Will this hurt his or her feelings?  Should I give a rat’s ass about their feelings?  When writing about political or religious issues, which tend to be more sensitive, and therefore volatile, for every point possible counterarguments need to be accounted for.  Blogging for me is argument or debate that is in some ways more intense and dramatic and in others less so.  Intense and dramatic in that my words can literally be read back in my face, if I end up revealing how stupid I am it would be visible to everyone (even if it is only an audience of 1); however less so in that if I wanted to I could ignore any feedback and ultimately have the power in any possible future discourse.  Pretty much, what I’m getting at is that although there’s a billion things that I disagree with and dislike concerning the internet driven generation, I forgot the letter, blogging surprisingly warms my stone heart a few degrees, as it becomes more legitimate I see it possibly bringing writing back to a more communicative form.

Wow, that was probably the most boring thing I’ve written, but I feel it’s important so tough beans.  And just for your information, this has received a lower grade level that any paper I’ve written for school, just to reiterate my point.

Unless you went to Oxford you probably didn’t hear about how this past Sunday Marial Yak died in a car accident: http://www.ajc.com/news/marial-yak-130733.html.  Honestly speaking I wasn’t his friend, and I say it like that because it’s different than saying we weren’t friends.  I had two or three classes with him and he ate lunch with me twice.  I wasn’t his friend and he ate lunch with me, because frankly speaking he initiated contact and I didn’t respond, he sat down next to me and I couldn’t muster up anything further than a mumbled “hey.”  Way back in my head I probably felt that his struggle with English was too much of a hassle for me to attempt some form of meaningful conversation.  All I know about him came from the article posted online, and the general consensus from other people from Oxford was that they had no idea about his story either.  As a religion major, or practically any other major in the humanities, stories are the lifeblood of scholarship.  Religion is not a set of rules that a group of old men wrote down a thousand years back; religion is the storied lives of humankind.  That’s one of the most important things that was inscribed in my head throughout the admittedly minimal amount of courses I have taken, that struggling to develop a sophisticated theology has no meaning, purpose or reason if not done with people in mind.  Not people as a generalized group, but faces and names, and most importantly their stories.  Regardless of major, exchanging stories is one of the most universal, invaluable and meaningful interactions between any number of individuals.  I sat across the table from a Lost boy of Sudan, and I never learned out how he was found because I was clinging to the shell I had pulled around me too tightly.  I have always thought that living in the suburbs, going to a university in the United States, that I was born in a bubble; but I have realized that the bubble I reside in is one of my creation.  I considered the plate of food in front of me to be a higher priority.  Rest in Peace Marial Yak, the world missed out on an amazing story.

Brave New World

I always thought blogging was a little pretentious, sort of shouts out: “my thoughts are so interesting READ ABOUT ‘EM.”  But then looking at facebook and twitter, it seems as if people are so dependent on social interaction that they’ll respond to the increasingly dramatic one word facebook statuses like “tired, sad, hello.”  I’m not gearing up to do another facebook rant, if you want to read one you can check my old xanga, from a couple years back, which I still feel applies.

Anyway, if people think not even daily but constant updates on their lives are necessary, and others are actually reading ‘em, than maybe me posting once a week more or less won’t be too much.  If you do have a twitter account or you’ve posted a one word status and I’ve offended you I’m not sorry and I don’t apologize; and you know what?  I am a little pretentious and arrogant, but I think I’m good at hiding it , so deal with it.

Right now I want to talk about a hypothetical I thought of a couple of weeks ago, which I’ve been playing around with:

For the sake of argument and the hypothetical let’s assume that everyone believes that premarital sex is a sin or immoral, I don’t care what you believe that’s between you and your god, but just bear with me.  Well, Jack and Jill, two unrelated individuals, are stranded on an island with no hope of rescue.  They have everything that they need to survive on the island and it looks as if they will be there for the rest of their lives.  Luckily, for their sanity, the two fall deeply in love and develop a deep and strong relationship.  At what point would it be OK for them to start having sex? Technically speaking what determines if they are married or not?  If you think that they can never officially be married and therefore can never have sex without it being immoral or sinful than you need to worry about something other than this hypothetical because you’ve probably got a whole different set of issues.

Who determines their marital status?  Can it just be an agreement between two individuals?  Therefore religiously speaking, are all the ceremonies and intermediaries even necessary?  I’m not saying that everyone go have premarital sex and forget about the consequences, what I’m asking is if marriage is even a religious issue.  I guess this technically isn’t a hypothetical because for me there is a clear answer.  Marriage is defined by society, on that island society consisted of Jack and Jill, so therefore the definition of marriage could not involve more than two people or else it would be impossible.  So applied to our society, what is really necessary?

If you’re talking about marriage as a legal issue, then I feel all religious sentiments need to be thrown out the window.  Do you think God actually cares about a piece of paper or what a court thinks?  When you throw in marriages for convenience, arranged marriages, etc, who’s to say which one God would approve of.  A lot of people who are against gay marriage, I guess you could tell that’s where I was headed the whole time, bring up the sanctity of marriage as an argument.  Since when was sanctity or morality handed out by the government?  If you believe that religion has to play a role in marriage as a legal issue, than you are basically making a pope out of the government.

Whether homosexuality is a sin or not, marriage is a social construct.  I’m not married so I can’t say for sure how I will feel, but I’m confident that those who are in a healthy and meaningful marriage draw the “sacredness” of their marriage from things and places other than what the government tells them.  Also, I know I assume a lot, and I don’t know as much as I think, but I do know that it is better for the Church that it is separate from the State.  I love the US and I believe in the possibilities of the system, but I also believe that the government has done way too many things that Christians would not want to be associated with.

All in all, I’m not against marriage, I do believe there is a sanctity within each marriage, but that it is drawn not from the sake of their marriage but the relationship between two people brought before their god, with their own faith.  And, believe it or not, I’m not against the Church but for those who keep pushing for the US to be a Christian nation, or to bring prayer back into schools, etc etc; I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.

Fshoo, I didn’t plan on the first one being so heavy, the next ones should be lighter.

I guess I’ll let you guys in on a little secret to lighten up the mood.  I’ll tell you guys the recipe for me and Eddie’s special hotdog, we don’t have a name for it yet it’s still being debated upon.

Ingredients:

1 baguette, don’t spend more than $2 at Publix/Kroger, if you are you’re spending too much.

1 Summer Sausage, the ones that come in the plastic wrap and it’s shaped like a horseshoe, i guess you could try the other varieties b/ the generic one works fine.

1 Microwave

Directions:  Cut the baguette down the middle longways, but don’t cut all the way through, it’s a hotdog, not a sandwich.  Cut the sausage longways too, like the baguette, and put it into the bread.  Microwave for I’d say 1:30.  Cheese optional but greatly appreciated.  It shouldn’t cost you more than $5.  Don’t use any sauce, i.e. ketchup, etc.  That’s what all the juices from the sausage are for.

And that’s how we pass the time when we’re bored.