Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.

Fuck anyone who isn’t rolling with PETA.

Lets jump start this animal revolution! We have millions of animals slaughtered left and right every day even in America! More chickens have been killed by Americans than all the Jews by Hitler and all of the people in Stalin’s Great Purge combined. We need to rally these poor souls and get them to throw off the shackles and chicken coops of human oppression and finally make a stand together.  Then and only then can we finally construct a perfect utopia where animals have as much rights as humans. When the conflict is finally over we will hunt down the person responsible for these hate crimes against animal kind and bring them to justice. This is why we will need a great leader, one who understands what it’s like to be persecuted as animal.  He spent five years in a chicken coop of his own and the only feed he got was the gospel of our Lord. One who will do what is best for all animals everywhere. Here is our proposed leader, and his plan for hunting down and  bringing to justice whoever orchestrated this travesty.

Our leader is also affected by the ongoing animal holocaust and vows to hunt down those who perpetrated it.

In Defense of PETA

Let’s Get PETArded

It’s official, 17 September is now contemporary misgivings’ bash PETA day.  Before we all grab our pitchforks and torches and take to the streets, though, I think I’ll say a few words on their behalf.  While I disagree with their goals, I don’t think what they do is necessarily stupid – actually, I have a bit of a difficult time justifying to myself why I should eat meat, etc. 

The justification I hear most frequently is that we human beings, as animals, should not be so concerned with eating meat since so many other animals do it too.  That’s true enough.  But since when did other animals, which I think most people would acknowledge are inferior to us in reference to the faculties we tend to value, become the oracle we consult for our moral behavior?  Male ducks violently rape female ducks.  So by the same reasoning, rape shouldn’t be that big a deal to humans.  From flinging shit at each other to wantonly raping members of their own (hell, maybe even other) species, animals do lots of things we disapprove of as humans. 

We hold ourselves to a higher ethical standard than we do animals.  Why that is, I’m not exactly sure; maybe it’s a remnant of our evolved psychology.  There are no ways around it, though, we are inescapably moral creatures.  But why is this just limited to our fellow humans?  To borrow an example from David Hume, let’s say there is a race of weak and pathetic creatures who are equipped with some higher level of consciousness akin to ours, but we don’t know that because they have no real way of effectively communicating that to us and ultimately they don’t pose any threat to us either (No, this isn’t a gotcha! where I try and claim that this is actually the mental state of animals we are familiar with).  Are these weaklings subject to our ethics?  Although there would be some who would say no, we can kill them indiscriminately with no ethical repercussions and they only are treated kindly because of our own benevolence (Hume’s own position as I recall), I would think – and hope – most people would say our ethical principles do extend to them in some fashion or another, at least in a degraded form.  So having some kind of mind seems to entitle these weaklings to not be killed.  Where does one draw the line, then?  Undersatnding of one’s own mortality, of the future?  Ability to feel pain?  How about just not wanting to die?  I am inclined to think that most animals, in their own way, agree with the latter every minute they are not killing themselves. 

When I think about it, there are a great deal of situations where holding oneself to a higher standard is considered more ethically sound.  Gandhi would not be so widely respected outside of India if this weren’t true.   It seems reasonable to me that part of the responsibilities associated with being a higher life form could include treating our fellow stupider species with a respect they would not treat us with.  Parents, after all, treat their children that way.  I know how fun it is to stamp on puppies, but when I see a cat tormenting a mouse, I have to wonder – what is it exactly that makes me morally superior to that cat over there? 

Millions of humans meet an unnaturally early death at the hands of disease, war, starvation and a multitude of other things each year.  I don’t take this lightly.  In fact, I’m probably going to spend the next ten years of my life pursuing a degree in which the study of genocide and war will play a significant part.  The criticism, then, that PETA is wasting its time on animals when so many humans are still suffering is the one I probably take the most seriously.  All I can offer in response to that is that I don’t think it’s silly, stupid, or unworthy necessarily to support a cause that may seem of less importance.  Some doctors dedicate a lot of their time to going around repairing cleft palates, pro bono.  The effects of this are mostly cosmetic of course, and you could make the argument that these doctors could be spending their time doing more important things like finding the cure to cancer or Crohn’s disease or something.  But I’m not entirely comfortable with that – I think we have time for both.  Similarly, I think some time can be made to treat animals a little less cruelly.  PETA’s reaction to a Palestinian terrorist group using a donkey as a suicide bomber may have been a little ridiculous (they, of course, condemened the use of the donkey without any mention of the humans that had died) but their response to the subsequent and widespread criticism was insightful: essentially, they said that there are plenty of groups that look after humans already, and that someone had to look after the unwilling animals-turned-jihadists. 

In closing, I ask you: would you kill a Pakled?  Or that thing that clung to the side of the Enterprise because it thought it was its mother?  If so, would you think it equally fair if a Tholian or a Species 8472 killed you?

 

And Now For Something Completely Different

Look on ye mighty and despair, fellow authors:

More about PETA

Peta as an organization is quite corrupt, and virtually ineffectual at it’s self-proclaimed goals.  Ho Yu made this clear, and presented some good stats I didn’t know about.  Thanks!

The number that is really bugging me is the 30 million USD a year they get in donations.  30 million? Really? REALLY? Are people that fucking stupid?  If you’re reading this, and you’ve ever donated to PETA, you’re an asshole.  And I don’t mean because you didn’t research what a piece of horseshit PETA was as an organization.  What I mean is this:

1. Millions of people die each year who didn’t need to.

2. The cause of these deaths is addressable NOW.  They are caused by diseases that could have been cured by now if medial R&D received enough funding.  There are people starving to death worldwide.  Oh, and let’s not forget my personal favorite: Genocide! Yay!

3. You gave money to help animals instead.

4. You fucking asshole.

 

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  How could giving to a charity stop a genocide?  Well, it can’t, but it sure as hell can make it a hell of a lot less potent than it would be without relief.  And guess what?  There are still genocides happening, still people dying from disease and starvation, and until those problems are SOLVED no one has any business worrying about animals.  We can think about that shit after we’ve solved our own problems.

Except pigs and dolphins.  We must exterminate them, because they’re already getting to smart.  The day they evolve thumbs…*poof* later Humanity.

In closing, I applaud Ho Yu for calling PETA out on their bullshit, and I do believe I will write them a letter too.  Something along the lines of, “in a slightly more intelligent world, you would have been hanged as war-criminals by now.”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

PETA.

Interesting concept seeing how they don’t even care for animals.

The co-founder and president of Peta is Ingrid Newkirk. Being of European decent, of course, has helped fund and found the largest organization for animal rights.

Now this so far sounds like an extreme sense of thoughtfulness and generosity. Oh, wait, she’s absolutely insane.

PETA is known for it’s “act of kindness” by fooling the public that they shelter and allow the animals that they attain be put up for adoption. They are disgusted by leather, milk, wool, and other necessities of every day life. It seemed that if they would have cooled their jets and just became vegans who stopped flapping their lips, things would be better. But like all activist groups, they need to be heard. They have aid campaigns with celebrities, are getting involved with mass media, and even waiting outsides of schools for children as young as six to walk home so they can give them a better understanding that “your mom kills animals!”

And this isn’t the only way they try to grab attention from the general public either. The CIA has proclaimed them to be a “domestic terrorist” from the numerous amounts of death threats and arsenic bombings they have committed. The bombings are mainly pertained to labs where studies using animals take place.

So, I guess Peta would rather have all mankind die from diseases that we are capable of curing using a few mice and rats and the rare monkey and guinea pig because animals are more important or we are more inferior to them? Well this doesn’t seem all that intelligent.

I wanted to see what their “ethical” meant and I came across some interesting facts:

1.) Between 1998 and 2007 Peta has killed 19,251 out of the 22,896 animals they have “rescued.” This makes about an astounding 83.9% of the animals rescued killed. And only 13.43 were ever adopted.

2.) In 2002 on a federal income-tax return, Peta wrote off a $9,370 walk-in freezer. Oh, wait, vegans and vegetarians don’t eat meat? Yeah, they use it to keep the bodies of animals because they had charges with two of it’s own activists being seen dumping numerous amounts of dead animal carcasses.

3.) They make a gross income of about $30.00 Million each year, most of it spawning from donations because people think that they actually help animals, and the majority of it is used to brainwash children and getting arsonist and violent activists out of trouble.

Well, these don’t seem all that ethical. And the comparison to the Holocaust with animals? Well that’s just down right offensive. Comparing genocide victims and cows, along with claiming fully that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian just spells out mental problems.

Ingrid, (God, what a hideous name), wants “total animal liberation.” She is also against dogs for the blind because it’s discriminating. Total animal liberation would just put all of man to their grave. Animals would be screwing left and right and then all the shit all over the world would just raise the CO(subscript2) levels out of control. Bye bye earth.

“Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we would be against it.” – Ms. Ingrid Newkirk.

I think I am going to write Peta a little letter. Anyone care to join?

The Things They Don’t Teach You

My usual job is a mechanical engineering internship at a high tech company.  I spend most of my days sitting at a computer making 3d models.  Yesterday and today however, I have spent in the machine shop working away on a project that kept getting pushed back.  One of my own design.  It’s been nice to get out of the cubicle, but more importantly it’s made me realize the disconnect between designing and building something, because man is my design a piece of shit.  It makes sense why the machinists put this off for over a month.  I’ve built plenty of things before.  I’ve done my fair share of woodworking and some metal.  However never had I done metal work by hand.  Cutting out a square with tolerances of .01 is quite hard without a mill.  

I attend a UC, which is more research than application oriented for engineering.  In my program I will not take a class which actually puts me in a machine shop to make whatever I design or analyze until senior year, and even then it’s very limited.  I know it’s hard for most engineers to graduate in four years, but I think it would be well worth it to add at least one machining class.  Advances in technology make designing so much easier, but I think there’s a very large value in getting your hands dirty.

athletic integration

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