Another article from our investigative journalist s5:

Men are disappearing.  But, it doesn’t matter much.  We can make sperm in a lab.

I know you haven’t seen any news about the first statement.  Not sure if you have seen it about the second.  But, yes, that is the latest scientific finding of last week: we can engineer sperm in a scientific setting, without the need for an actual human.

When I first heard about the story, I was told of it.  Immediately I was asked, “ what do you think of that?”  At the time, I just answered that I didn’t see to what end this discovery was relevant.  I went on to say that independent of itself it didn’t hit me as anything truly useful except being a step in a bigger scientific discovery.

But the more I thought about it, the more some other pieces came together.  Which leads me back to my first statement.  Men are disappearing.

I want to make sure you understand that this sentence is independent of the one that follows.  I am not saying that we can make sperm, therefore we don’t need men.  I am saying, quite clearly and as a stand alone statement: men are disappearing.

Currently, in almost every product you can buy at the super market, exists two chemicals: Bisphenol-A and phthalates (pronounced: thay-lates).  They are both found in plastics, however Bisphenol-A is also found in cans and phthalates are found in things like artificial scents.  What this means is that if you do any of the following you are exposing yourself to one or both of these compounds:

drink from a plastic water bottle (whether personal size, water cooler size or sink top water filtration system), drink soda, eat a canned product (tomato sauce, beans, soup, fruit), ingest a gel-cap pharmaceutical, use an odorized laundry detergent or dryer sheet, use deodorant, use perfume, play with a toy, drink from a baby bottle, use a tupperware or other plastic food container, wear a condom, use a “sex toy”, have a shower curtain, use a laser printer, wear make-up, use nail polish, own a television, have floor tiles in your home, have any sort of electronic, use skin moisturizer, have a catheter, use a fertilizer or pesticide, eat something with a fertilizer or pesticide, and more.

In other words, you are exposed to these chemicals in some way or another.  You are naive to think you are not.

You ask: so what?  I am exposed to lots of things like air pollution and electro-magnetic fields, what’s one more thing?

There is a long history behind these chemicals, and I encourage you to do your own research to determine what is best for you and your family.  I am about to share with you what I believe to be true.

Both of these chemicals have weak or no covalent bonds to the plastic or substance with which they are mixed.  This means that as the plastic ages or is placed under certain conditions, the chemical is released into the environment and is absorbable by the human body.  In fact, 99% of the American adults and children tested have the chemicals present in their bodies.

These chemicals are classified as estrogenic.  This means that they are able to mimic hormones in the system and the hormone the body registers is estrogen.  For the sake of brevity, I will not go into detail about the entire functionality of the human form.  I will get to the point which is that many scientists believe that as a result of the increase of BPA and phthalates in our environment we are seeing an increase in birth defects, cancers, learning disabilities, reproductive function issues including sterility/infertility, and possible links to obesity and diabetes. Male children are the most at risk from these chemicals.  In effect, our boys are becoming girls.  For one thing, not as many boys are being born.  When they are, we are seeing an increase in deformities of their penises, breast formation, sterility, testicular issues, and more.

Men are disappearing.

There are two camps when it comes to the science of these compounds.  The Food and Drug Administration did approve these chemicals for use and as of today is not planning on banning them, despite protests from a majority of the scientific community.  The argument is that the chemicals were approved due to the results of two studies, that the government contends are valid and statistically significant.  However, there are another group of researchers that say future studies have indicated that the chemicals are dangerous and because of the new results, the FDA should review the validity of the approval.

I will tell you why this isn’t going to happen.  Dow and DuPont are the makers of these chemicals and it is a ten+ billion dollar industry for them.  They are a part of the American Chemical Council which funded the first two studies that granted the approval from the FDA.  The ACC is a major contributor to a handful of our legislators.  There are allegations that the FDA allowed staff from Dow and DuPont to write the safety and efficacy portion of the approval package of these chemicals.  Dow and DuPont are suing Canada, because they banned the chemicals, saying that it is violation of NAFTA.  And, I have seen meeting minutes from a gathering of executives from Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Grocery Manufacturers Association and others, in which they discuss a strategy and multi-corporation funding for how to change the press regarding BPA (Remember, it is used in canned goods.  These companies have a vested interest in not having these chemicals be reevaluated.)

This is a war between corporations and the consumer, on the government’s battlefield, being played out in front of our eyes, yet, none of us are paying attention.  But, what do we know about?  We can make sperm.

This may be a rabbit hole none of us want to go down.  I am very well aware of the fact that it can appear as though I am making an accusation of a conspiracy.  However, both things are true.  All the data I gave you about BPA and phthalates, you can find on the internet.  If you look you can find in major news outlets across the US.  If you know to look for it.  The fact that we can make sperm was the biggest scientific news item of last week.  You didn’t have to look for it, it came to you. (No pun intended).

So before when I asked myself “to what end”?  I wonder if the two are inextricably linked.  What if the chemical companies knew there would be issues with the compounds?  They were so advanced in forethought that they put people on researching to determine how to create what would be missing when our boys reached maturity after being exposed to years of plastics, toys, beauty products, medication, and food.  But then in the media there is no link between the two groups, so we as the public, still stay blind to what is really going on?

And then what happens when we can only reproduce with influence from the scientific community? How do we know what kind of sperm we are getting?  Are certain people going to have access to better sperm than other people?  Are we going to be able to actually clean out economic or ethic strata because of their lack of availability to sperm, therefore reproduction?

A lot of questions that we all may be confronted with sometime in the future.

Or… we can change how we consume.

When was the last time you thought about what you put in your mouth?  Feeding is something that is the very basis of living.  We share this with all the other earthlings that inhabit this planet.  When animals wake up, they start their quest for food.  Not too long ago, we were the same way.  Even right now, in remote parts of the Earth, tribal peoples spend most of their day looking for, getting and preparing food; and by getting I mean hunting, harvesting and planting… not going to the super market.

But one of the consequences of the modern world that we all live in, and take for granted is just that.  The fact that we have become the dominant animal has provided us an unfortunate reward (and I respectfully borrow the term dominant animal from Prof. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and The Dominant Animal).  Rather than having to hunt, or even earn our food by working for it, we step into our “rolling couches” (the truthful term for a car), and roll our lazy behinds to a building where the food is already prepared for our consumption (grocery store).  All we have to do is give the Homo Sapien guarding the food supply (the cashier) some paper with pictures on it (money), and you are allowed to take your portion home.

We no longer operate within the food chain.  We are the ultimate predator, killing anything that comes in our way.  Human beings no longer worry about being eaten.  Since food is so readily available we choose to occupy ourselves with working for paper, so that we can trade that paper for food when it is feeding time.  Everyone in the system does this.  Even the guardian of the food (the cashier) has to pay for the food in the store they guard.  The driver of the truck that delivers the food, he too has to pay.  The people working in the field, to pick the food… they pay too.  We have agreed to work in a system, where paper dominates your ability to feed.  That is the human contract.

But this illusion of plentifulness has its side effects.  As the song Don’t Sleep by the Elevaters points out, there are “no subscriptions without the tax”.  What tax?  You watched it in the video above.  THAT my friends, is the beastly result of Homo Sapien Sapien not having to earn it’s food.  Fat, mislead humans, misleading other humans to a live a life of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity and government dependency (Medicare and Medicaid).  Read more here: http://thegoldenspiral.org/2009/06/08/bpa-the-bad-and-the-ugly-there-is-no-good/

We live too rich.  The spoils of it is now finally showing itself.  Imagine this sort of display in the plains of Africa?  Imagine this being shown to the peoples of Afghanistan, the very people we are trying to liberate from the brutal grip of fundamentalist religion.  We are going liberate them from one evil, and feed them another… this new culture of ours.

This is wrong on so many levels.  Just think of the inequity of ethics, when we treat the animals that died for this grotesque meal of these people with such indignity; only to create another form of indignity.  The very people that eat meat derived from industrial farming, are suffering the consequences… disease.  Suffering begets suffering.

Isn’t it time we changed our world.  Isn’t it time we each made a decision to change our lives by participating in our decisions rather having decisions made for us by our televisions sets?  If the voice in your mind quietly told you right now, that you are not one of those people; then I hate to inform you… but you have already been programmed.  Only the people who are aware of this happening can change it in their own lives.  Look around you.  Marketing everywhere.  Cities are merely space for marketing.  Nothing is safe, not even the sky.  I couldn’t go to the beach without having to deal with these idiots:

Plane Flying With Banner Ad... at the Beach.

The sad part is that this is so rampant that we can’t even see it anymore.  Our incredible ability to create technology results in web sites where Homo Sapiens can capture video of something and make it available to others to learn from or experience, and this is what we do with it:

I can’t wait until she wins that competition and contributes her amazing skills to further advance humanity.

What I am talking about here is that everything in our society is starting to answer to the LOWEST common denominator.  Our health, our intelligence, our cultural advancement, our science, our value systems, and even our politics.  It saddens me to see that society has taken Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy and turned it into an instruction manual.

You can’t change the world, you can only change yourself.  If every one of us individually heeds that message, the world changes.  It’s really quite elegant and simple.  All you have to do to change the world, is wake up, and choose to be a better person.

Eat better.  Talk better.  Do better.  Think better.  Choose better.  Love better.

“Good, better, best.  Never let it rest.  Until your good is better, and your better, best.”

That is an old quote that many of you might know already.  It is quoted as being said by St. Jerome (c. 347 – 420 A.D.).  But I find it interesting that there are numerous articles littering the internet giving credit to Tim Duncan, a basketball player who said this quote in an interview because his mom always said it to him.  So Yahoo Answers shows this quote as Tim Duncan’s rather than St. Jerome (Link Here).  If this isn’t the beginning of idiocracy I’m not sure what is.

Come on people.  You DO NOT know what you are eating.  You are being programmed by your televisions.

Let’s figure this out shall we?  To help, I started a forum.  You will see a new tab [Forum] which will take you to an open area of the site.  You don’t have to register.  You can be completely anonymous.  Start talking.  Let’s see where the solutions to this problem are.

There is only one rule: if you post insults, vulgarity, or with hate, your comment will be deleted.  This is a forum for intelligent Homo Sapiens.

Just incase you still doubt…

I never thought it would be easy to undertake the steps I chose to evolve and understand what it means to live a simpler, cleaner life, and incorporate “consumption ethics” into my life.  I knew that once I ventured down this rabbit hole, what would come out in the end might not resemble what went in.  I also know it would take sacrifice.  Sometimes a lot of it.

The thing that bothers me most on this journey, is when I look around at the so called leaders of the revolution, and observe their lack of honesty, integrity, and their unfortunate inability in actually really getting anything done for our future.  Take TreeHugger for example.  This web site is the resource for many environmental readers.  It’s articles do more than just educate readers on the “news” of the growing green movement, they give perspective.

But the lack of integrity shows itself when it comes to reporting on what really matters most.  The problem is that often what really matters and can change the world most, is the most powerful and threatening adversary.  Take the meat industry for example.  It saddens me that no one has the guts to put their necks on the line, and call out the meat industry on their unacceptable behavior causing damage to our planet… environmentally and ethically.  This is evidenced in numerous articles that talk about how bad factory farming is, but they never mention specific companies or link letters of protest for their readers.  Even when TreeHugger has a chance to take a strange act of protest (President of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk’s Will) and shed light on the purpose of this extreme act, thus using this as a platform to call out the meat industry and their obscene abuse of your planet and it’s earthlings; they mock the gesture and participate in the childish rhetoric that every other journalist used when the story hit.

TreeHugger is becoming a fraud.  You don’t believe me?  Check out this ad on their web site for Domino’s Pizza.

Now, you have to realize, the purpose of this essay is not to bash on TreeHugger alone.  I have linked to them, and referred to many of the excellent articles they have published many times in the past.  My issue is that as these sites, companies and movements get bigger and more “corporate”, they begin to lose focus and become machines that careen out of control.  This behavior is the seen when small companies go public.  Regardless of their original intent, the fact that every shareholder has their fingers in the “profit cookie jar”, the corporation is destined to drift to a less ethical, more profit driven philosophy.  Ethics costs money, and profits are about saving money.

I wrote an article a long time ago called “Let’s get a new microwave” (LINK) that talked about how large corporate business ultimately leads to using cheap labor off shore, which then leads to cheaper goods, which drives repair businesses out of business.  Oh, which then leads to junk in the land fills, and one more step towards the doom of your planet. Why?  Because you’d rather get a replacement that is cheaper, than make an ethical decision to spend more and repair your unit?  Yes.  It happens every day in America.

Growth based economy.  This is what is driving Homo Sapien to it’s resting place in history as “The responsible party for the end of an era on Earth”.  The ads in TreeHugger are there because TreeHugger uses advertising money (and I’m sure other sources) to support it’s site.  Now, I ask you readers, how many of you clicked on a side bar ad, on a blog to order pizza?  Right. Probably none of you.

The fact that TreeHugger even supports advertising is a contradiction to their mission.  You cannot create a sustainable future if you support advertising.  Advertising promotes consumption.  And we all know now that consumption is what is causing all of this.  One rock.  6 Billion Homo Sapiens.  Limited Resources.  And a growing appetite for STUFF.  Not a good equation.  Advertising fuels this fire.

The next knife I need to stick in TreeHuggers side is that by advertising Domino’s THEY ARE SUPPORTING factory farming, the dairy industry, the meat industry, GMO foods, Monsanto, and the continued laziness of Americans.  Not to mention the fattening up of already fat America, and the diseases that result as this unnatural version of Homo Sapien becomes the norm.

I wrote TreeHugger and asked if they would consider my articles for posting.  You know what they answered?  They are not accepting applications for writers at this time.  Now, last I checked… there were never any applications for any of the revolutions in the past?  Are they admitting that what needs to happen (the shift in human consciousness) is trivial and not revolutionary?  I write truth.  Maybe this is too revolutionary for TreeHugger to sell ads?  Most people get upset when they read it, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are consuming too much.  If you live in America, you consume too much.  Even if you are an environmentalist… your way of life IS NOT sustainable.  If you: drive a car, eat meat, buy clothes and replace them when fashion changes, watch TV, shop at a grocery store, or any one of hundreds of things that I see your every day “environmentalist” doing… you are part of the problem.  So am I.  But I acknowledge this and keeping trying my best EVERY day to change it.  I would hope you do to.

But it’s not your fault completely.  Your sources are flawed.  If you care, want to do good, read The Ultimate Spaceship and decide, “I’m gonna start reading TreeHugger and start to change my ways”; you will be presented with confirmation that eating Domino’s Pizza is good for your environment.  Now I’m not even going to begin with the one of 500 ways I can prove that to be wrong.

Stupid is, as stupid does.  I looked it up and found this interesting description of the phrase made popular by the well known character Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump’s “Stupid is as stupid does” is a variant of an old adage, “Handsome is as handsome does.” This saying appears in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and in Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” and can be traced as far back as the 14th Century.

“Handsome is as handsome does” basically means that true handsomeness has to do with a person’s behavior, not just a handsome face. The saying is also phrased in the forms “Pretty is as pretty does” and “Beauty is as beauty does.”

Forrest’s version of the saying means that stupidity is not just a surface thing derived from a person’s appearance. Stupidity is a matter of deeds, not looks. Like the other versions, it comes down to this: judge people by what they do, not by how they appear.

“HANDSOME (PRETTY) IS AS HANDSOME (PRETTY) DOES – Good deeds are more important than good looks. The proverb was first recorded by Chaucer in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (c. 1387). In 1766, in the preface to ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ Oliver Goldsmith wrote: ‘Handsome is that handsome does.’ First attested in the United States in ‘Journal of a Lady of Quality’ (1774). The saying is found in varying forms, including ‘Beauty is as beauty does’.” From the ‘Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings’ by Gregory Y. Titelman
(Random House, New York, 1996).”

Actions.  Not words.

The whole point of this site was to open the door to your minds, and show the possibilities of living a clear, sustainable and peaceful life with planet, our neighbors, and our fellow earthlings.  If you have thoughts, or writing you want published, email me at:  s3@theultimatespaceship.com and I will discuss the potential of adding you as a contributor.

So now, I introduce you to the thoughts of s5…

You don’t care that animals die for your food… but here are some other reasons you should quit eating meat

I am a vegetarian.  I haven’t yet made the transition to veganism (although I probably should), but I can’t quite give up cheese and eggs.  I know that someday, probably soon, I will be a vegan, too.

And, as cruel as this may make me sound, it isn’t all about the treatment of the animals.  I am an evolutionist, and I do believe that we were a gathering/hunting society.  Therefore, I do not feel that animals shouldn’t die for the survival of another, just as I would never begrudge a lion for killing a gazelle. But, don’t get me wrong… it is about how we, Americans, treat the animals.  It is also about my bigger reason to not eat meat: because we don’t have meat available to us.  You may think I am crazy by saying that, and all indicators would point in agreement.  But, I have done a lot of research on the matter, and that is my conclusion.

Due to the current practices of raising livestock, the end product is not what we evolved to eat.  It is making the livestock sick. It is making us sick. It is killing the planet.

It is making the livestock sick:

There are 306 million people in the United States and only 7.3 million of those are vegetarian/vegan.  That means there are just under 300 million people eating meat, on average, 2-3 times a day.  In order to feed all those people, we have to raise all those animals.

Animals slaughtered in 2008:
Chickens: 9 Billion
Cows: 34 Million
Pigs: 116 Million
Turkeys: 271 Million
Sheep/Lambs: 2.5 million
Ducks: 24 Million

Can you imagine what it would take to raise and slaughter 9 BILLION CHICKEN!!?!?!

I can tell you what it takes: Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s).  Here is the definition… author’s discretion to highlight some things… and, this is taken from the Environmental Protection Agency website:

Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations. CAFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.

OK.  So, that burger you ate last night was raised on a small land area, amongst its manure and urine, as well as, maybe, some dead animals… and THAT is okay by our government.

Now, look at your computer screen.  (I am hoping it is an average 13” monitor.  If not, could you please imagine a 13” cube please. Thank you.)  Now, imagine a chicken.  A full sized adult chicken.  Now, imagine 10 chickens sitting on your computer screen. Hard to do, right?  Like, seriously, are you wondering what that would be like?  But that is the condition the grilled chicken in your grilled chicken salad from CPK, that you ate for lunch three days ago, was raised in.

But this is thing that you really need to know about these conditions. (And, yes, I know this is not a fun topic.  As a responsible American, human, and if you believe in this, spiritual soul, you need to know what you are putting in your body.)  Animals hate living like this.  Who wouldn’t? Imagine what happened to you when you were living with housemates in college, or if you had a lot of siblings, or even your parents were a little too smothering; you felt confined, you hated things, you got mean and grumpy.  If you have a kid, look to your pre-teen son or daughter.  You get it. The same thing happens to animals.  They get nervous, they get aggravated and they start to act out.

Unfortunately, they act out by biting and gnawing.  However, that damages the other animals, and that impacts the bottom line dollar amount.  As a result, in the case of the chickens and turkeys, their beaks get clipped off so they can’t peck and pull.  And, in the case of the pigs, their tails get cut off, because the other pigs like to gnaw at them.  To be fair, and in the essence of full honesty, cows are very docile and don’t get aggressive.

Next, they need to grow the animals quickly.  Again, if you had to raise 9 BILLION CHICKENS, you want them to grow fast and get on with their life… uh, death?  So, all of the livestock are given foods and hormones they are not used to, nor evolved to eat.  For example, cows evolved to eat grass.  They are ruminants.  They have four stomachs specifically designed to breakdown what we cannot… the cellulose material in grass.  But, we don’t feel them grass.  We feed them grain, corn mainly.  This is mainly done to get the animals bulked up and out the door in less time.

The vast majority of U.S. beef cattle eat grain or other high-calorie feed for several months at a feedlot before being processed.  Eating such concentrated feed fattens the animals quickly and produces fat-marbled meat that is favored for its flavor and tenderness. (Univ. of Calif, Agriculture and Natural Resources)

The visible downside to this is that the cow is sick.  It walks around all day with an upset stomach, because it cannot digest the grain properly.

Beef Nutrition

The weight gain is not a sign of health, it is a sign of disease.  Kind of like when humans eat mass amounts of McDonalds… we get fat (disease).  The hidden aspects of eating the grain are two fold.  First off, grass fed, free range cattle are full of Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids.  You normally hear this as Fish Oil, because fish seem to be the only animals with it nowadays.  But, cattle should have it, too.  The lack of the good fat has been replaced, internally, with bad fat; the same fat that many people with cholestoral or coronary disease have to stay away from.  You know the marbling that we are supposed to look for to determine the quality of beef?  Well, marbled meat is actually a sign of sickness. And here is a fun fact.  The meat industry lobbyists actually got the USDA to change its grading policy to include marbling in the high grades, despite the fact that they all new it was a result of the cattle eating what it was not designed to.  Again, the government knowing allows you to eat diseased meat, raised in its own poop, next to its dying sister.

Where am I going with this? Whether due to confined condition, the butchery of animals to meet a dollar goal, or the improper nutrition, the animals are prone to disease.  If you lived standing in your own poop, next to your dead brother… oh, you get it. The animals are given antibiotics.  Kind of an ongoing aperitif, if you will.  They are constantly being fed a cocktail of antibiotics to keep them well and hormones to make them bigger.

As we all have read when it comes to ourselves, the bacterium and viri that we are exposed to are getting more and more drug resistant.  The same thing is happening to our livestock.  With each treatment using a stronger medication, another generation of stronger bugs is created.  Which is why it is so unnerving that just this year, the approval of a very powerful antibiotic, cephalosporin, was granted for use in livestock (HERE).  And, is more than likely why we are seeing things, like this most recent “pandemic” of swine flu (HERE).

The scientific truth is that with greater medications comes greater disease.  We are proving this with our livestock.

Now, onto us: we are getting sick.  If it is because we are eating this meat, then it is indicated by our increasing waist size and our failing hearts.  If it is because of uber-viri and bacterium, then it is indicated by outbreaks like made cow disease and swine flu.

The bottom line is that no one is doing this to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  We feel the need to grow bigger livestock and faster rates so we can make sure we have meat and potatoes on the table.  We the consumer are to blame because we didn’t stop the livestock industry from doing this.  This was the shiny new SUV in the driveway dressed in sheep’s clothing.  We have been in awe that we can get meat cheaper than we can get vegetables, so we bought it, ate it and now are suffering the consequences.

And believe me, we will suffer more.  You may think our waist lines and flu symptoms are the only things growing, but you would be wrong.  The raising of livestock is one of the worst things we are doing to our environment.  In fact, if everyone went vegetarian for just ONE DAY:

the U.S. would save:

* 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
* 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
* 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
* 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
* 33 tons of antibiotics.

the U.S. would prevent:

* Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
* 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
* 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

Our desire for meat is killing the planet.  I once read, maybe here on Ultimate Spaceship, about the irony of the person driving a Prius, prideful in the fact that they are helping the environment, as they pull up to a drive thru window at Carl’s Jr.  Their absence of meat consumption does more for the planet than driving that car.

I understand that there are those of you out there that are not affected by the humanity plea of vegans and vegetarians.  I understand that it is a choice, like any other choice.  I know that it is a decision that each and everyone of us must come to on our own.  It is a personal decision as much as religion, your support of a particular political party or how to raise your child.

I hope I have shed some light into why the poor treatment of the animals does directly affect you, if you make the choice to eat meat.  And, I hope I have also clarified that your choice of eating meat is impacting my life; your choice has a greater chance of killing the planet, than any other thing I might do in return.  For that, you need to be sure you are making a choice you can fully support and defend.  Because, given what I know and just shared with you… I just don’t think that’s possible.

I know this might be graphic for you.  I apologize.  But I ask you, why should I keep up the decorum that is the mask that everyone wears?  We lie to ourselves every time we bite a piece of meat.  We justify our consumption of dead sentient beings by making arguments like “we’re carnivores”, or “it’s natural to eat meat, look at other animals”.  But I argue that you are wrong.  I believe that human beings are the most incredible creation of nature.  And the very essence of this “incredibleness” lies in our ability to contemplate.  Our ability to understand complex pathways of logic.  Our ability to appreciate and create music.  And our ability to observe, collect data and propose theories, that are held to the highest of standards for merit… the ability to be proven wrong.  Human beings are the most sophisticated creation of nature, because we fashion tools.

The relevance of the tool in all of this is that without them, we could not eat meat.  Think about it.  How would we carve into a cow without tools?  How would we skin it?  We have no claws.  Our teeth are not developed for tearing meat.  We are not even agile enough or strong enough to even actually catch our own meat.  We set traps, and use tools like spears and guns to kill our prey and more tools to prepare it for eating, and more tools to cook it so we can digest it.

Most of the people who argue that it is okay for human beings to consume meat, also argue that we are the most advanced beings on this world, the special ones.  I wouldn’t disagree with the last part of that discussion, however being the most advanced species, also comes with great responsibility.  The ability to contemplate and to reflect allows us to examine our instinctual behaviors and improve on ourselves into a plane where most other animals cannot evolve.  The spiritual plan is one that every modern religion claims to provide it’s hungry followers.  But, where most religions compliment mankind by accentuating the creation of man in God’s image, they fail in telling their disciples that the other sentient beings on this world are also entitled to a life without pain or violation.  Whereas lions HAVE to eat meat to survive, mankind doesn’t.

We are capable of thought outside of the instinctual plane. That is what makes us human.  Why is it then, that we just absolutely resist the idea of not eating meat.  Every person that finds out that I’m vegan immediately replies with “so then, what do you eat?”  What bothers me more than their actual diet, is the common-knowledge, herd mentality that most humans suffer from.  No original thought put into the logic of their own behaviors.  Just reasons that sound official because they are attached to mass numbers of followers.

I discovered this new philosophy later in life.  Like everyone else in this world, I was born into the world of well packaged marketing, which has been in began the moment the first images were broadcast out of the television.  But what brought me to this point in my life was that crucial first step of not eating meat. It’s not that eating meat is just about animals and their feelings.  This topic is much more complex than that.  It would be an injustice to vegetarians and vegans to call it just that.  Rather, the choice to not eat meat  is also based in environmental and economic ideals.  At this point in the human story, we can no longer afford to eat meat.  Our planet is being intoxicated by the requirements to feed, manufacture and dispose of the byproducts of the meat industry.

Being conscious of your surroundings, of the beings around you, and of your role in this world is the pinnacle of being enlightened in this life.  At that point, a person cannot help but to understand why it is important not to wander through life with their eyes closed.  There are so many other things we do that are conditioned into us, and we blindly go on living.  But reason has to be the force that moves us forward.

If you start the process on yourself, the way I did 2 years ago, you will see a change in your consciousness.  Consider it from an energy perspective: all living, sentient beings harbor energy.  And the energy you are consuming in a modern farm raised cow is that of suffering, lack of normal animal social development, lack of freedom, lack of natural divine sunlight, and lack of dignity.

So I embarked on an experiment to see what would happen to my consciousness if I stopped eating meat.  At first it didn’t shift my perspective.  But then, because I am so stubborn and was convinced there must be some difference in energy transfer, I delved deeper and became vegan.  After a few months of understanding the real values of a vegan lifestyle, the ripple effect had already taken shape in my life.  Because I cannot live a life without integrity, changes took place in areas of my life that did not show themselves in the past.  My choice of transportation, my clothing, and where that head of broccoli comes from at the market? My perspective to conflict changed and I became less militant.  Reason prevailed.

I’m not saying I’m right and you need to listen to me. That would be contradictory to what I try to convey with this site.  What I am saying, is that I tried an experiment to prove to myself what I suspected to be true, and experienced the truth without conditioning playing a role.  I challenge you to do the same with your life.  In any arena, this will work to start the process of waking up and de-conditioning your mind.  I’m not sure about you, but I don’t want to have my mind susceptible to hidden marketing.  I want to control my own decisions without social themes dictating their outcomes.  To do that, I will make and effort to stay aware.  You should to.

For those of you who still are convinced that meat is important to your diet.  I again challenge you to provide the burden of evidence called experimentation.  Watch THIS documentary called King Corn. This film is also available on the iTunes Music Store for download HERE.