Get down, get dirty, get green.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/science/earth/19clean.html?ref=science
The poor people in this article are suffering from spotty dishes.

Few are saying it, but choosing lower-impact products and habits means living a dirtier life: Wash in cold water, and the socks are dingy; don't use dioxin-creating chlorine bleach and your shower tints pink with Serratia marcescens; recycle your gray water and you have some mucky buckets in your house; wear your clothes thrice and cut out the aluminum-armpit-crust, and you will smell richer than your compatriots; eat veggie diet and your intestines will swarm with happy (and healthy it seems) bacteria.

Do I have an immune system? Yup. And it needs some exercise: I *benefit* from an environment that is not hyper-clean. And so does my Mother Earth.

Embrace it. It is the future. It is truth. Your cleanliness is too expensive. (And don't you have something else to do?)

It's true, the rich are selfish scum

http://www.economist.com/node/16690659

The good news they are tractable: put them in a context in which there is social pressure of some sort to behave like a full human, and they do respond with greater generosity, and moderate their natural piggishness.

The bad news is their very wealth increasingly allows them to squeeze out those contrarian elements in life: neighbors worse off then than them (by gating their communities); church (WTF actually takes Jesus's words to their core? even if they do go. He ate with criminals.) family members who disagree (average distance between family members has increased ten-fold over the last thirty years); and our gvt tax structure.

Choose more time and less money: make and/or grow your own food, and skip the rat shit and waitress spit.

Mouse Grimace Scale

Now they will be able to scientifically measure nonspeaking animals' pain.

So that lab animals "don't suffer unnecessarily."

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/188227.php

Who gets to say what the necessary suffering will be?

Can no one remember Stanley Milgram?

vegan vice, ooo so nice

Excellent: Interviewer to man watching naked girls, dollarbill tucked behind ear, eating first ever vegan meal: "Would you consider becoming a vegan?" "Uh ... yes!"

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/videos/g-word-online-clips-vegan-strip-club.html

It's the PETA influence: don't ghettoize veganism into a little pocket of stuffy virtue---gloss it with lots of sexy glamour so people don't feel deprived---hence the naked people clustered together in animal costumes in the streets, and the glam celebs espousing their weight loss and good skin, kissing doves or baby koalas.

That's what's in all the vegan dessert cookbook craze: Okay I'm giving up all animal food, but I can eat lotsa rich yummy desserts. There's just no appeal in plain goodness.

a philosophy of vegetarianism

Reading Daniel Dombrowski's book _The Philosophy of Vegetarianism_, 1984. A detailed and extensive account of the ancient philosophers' reckoning on the vegetarian issue---and it was an issue from the beginning.

Why does rejecting meat and animal foodstuffs *require* a philosophy? It would seem that it has been so since the very beginnings of recorded human thought.

The ancients connected vegetarian eating with a golden (I wrote godlen) era of human being---a time when humans had a peace and connection with other beings in the world unmatched in historical time.

Is idealism a necessary condition of vegetarian diet? Are vegetarians *marked* by an idealism?


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