Turkey Day

Forty-five million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving.

There are 6-9 million people in the US who do not eat meat (either vegetarian or vegan). Many of those people save the live of a Turkey every thanksgiving. For those of you who don't think one person being a vegetarian or vegan makes a difference, think about that number. The meat industry isn't going to turn out 6-9 million extra birds that aren't going to get sold so what do they do? They don't breed as many birds and therefore less animals suffer and die as a direct result of veg eating habits.

Ben Franklin praised their resourcefulness, agility, and beauty—he called the turkey “a bird of courage” and “a true original native of America.” He even suggesting the turkey be our national bird. Turkeys are very intelligent creatures, as well as being very paternal.

As Thanksgiving approaches I can't help but think about the apathy and cruelty among many people towards these helpless animals. Sarah Palin gleefully slaughtered a turkey herself last year after pardoning one of it's cell mates, with a type of relish one generally sees in psychopaths.

The life of the turkey on your table was a miserable one. Artificially fattened, most turkeys can barely stand and often suffer from broken feet and legs simply because they cannot support the weight of their own bodies. In the wild, the lifespan of aturkey is 10-12 years, but on factory farms they are slaughtered when they are only 5 months old.

"Erik Marcus, the author of Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, has spent a considerable amount of time with turkeys on farm sanctuaries. He reports, “Turkeys remember your face and they will sit closer to you with each day you revisit. Come back day after day and, before long, a few birds will pick you out as their favorite and they will come running up to you whenever you arrive. It’s definitely a matter of the birds choosing you rather than of you choosing the birds. Different birds choose different people.”" (goveg.com)

There's no reason to slaughter animals in this day and age in America. None at all. We cannot truly call ourselves a civilized society until that civility is extended to not only all people, but all creatures as well.

Letter to PETA

I want to join those who have began protesting Peta due to their sexism and all around offensive campaign tactics. Most recently the "save the whales" campaign which is ridiculous and highly offensive. According to a woman who I won't name here, when talking with Ingrid Newkirk about the campaign she was told that diet is the ONLY reason why anyone is fat- that weight gain is based solely on the consumption of animal products and byproducts . This shows extreme ignorance as there are many factors that go into a person's size.

I am completely vegan- not a single animal product to blame my weight on and yet I am still obese. Why? No doctor has been completely able to figure that out but I do have bipolar disorder which decreases the body's ability to regulate it's own weight due to the massive amounts of negative, stress hormones that tend to be present in the body. I was even a raw foodist for two months and didn't lose a single pound, this in addition to being an active member at a gym for women.

PETA has been losing support among vegans especially (because vegans tend to be better informed) for many years now and are continuing to do so to the point where vegans and vegetarians are actually protesting PETA.

The ladies who recently spoke to Ingrid Newkirk were also told that having young thin women holding signs naked was not sexist in any way and yet- why are there no men, older men and women, or larger men and women holding those signs? As a person of size I would like to volunteer right now to be a part of the next naked sign protest that PETA holds and I have several people of size who would be willing to as well.

I will no longer be supporting PETA in ANY way and will hopefully be able to engage in active protests against PETA.

I know you are, but what am I?

People never enjoy studies that come out which may seem insulting to a specific type of people. Such as one researcher who claimed to have discovered an intelligence gene which was most pronounced in Asians and least in.. well, I'll leave that out because it's.. well, insulting. After all, it's insulting to call someone less intelligent whether it's how they're born or how they choose to be. Personally, I have no problem admitting Asians are probably smarter than me.. but then, I'm not at the lowest level either.

So you can imagine the uproar that could very well be happening right this moment from a new study which concludes that there is a negative correlation between conservatism and intelligence. This means that when ones goes up, the other goes down. In this case, the more conservative a person is, the lower their intelligence.


"Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores."

Now, of course, a study should be done on a larger scale and with a greater variety of people and not just those already seeking entry into university. I'm not going to say that this study creates a definitive fact which states that liberals are smarter than conservatives, but this, combined with other well known intelligence markers does make it quite interesting. For instance, the more religious a person is, the lower intelligence they're likely to have (and lower education) and, as we all know, the conservative movement is headed by one and only one group- christians.

Critical thinking skills are essential to intelligence (it's not all just memorizing facts and dates) which is something that most religious people severely lack and, in the same group, something conservatives usually lack.

So does this mean the more conservative parties are suddenly going to be known as the stupid parties? Well, to most liberals they already were, but realistically, probably not. Since facts tend to be insulting and no one wants that. Still, it'll be interesting to see where, if anywhere, this leads.

Sexuality in America

This subject has been done to death but after a while I think every blogger has to put in their two cents. America has made huge strides in the progression of sexual tolerance and rights, but we're still not anywhere near where we should be. A homosexual child is still six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings and gay bashing isn't exactly hard time find. Johann Hari recently wrote an article about homophobia in the black community where it is most prevalent. The article claims that, like most homophobes, black or white, the hip hop community is so good at bashing gays because they're oh so good at hiding how gay they actually are.

He writes, "I recently interviewed Dean for Attitude, Britain's best-selling gay magazine. He told me about a man -- I don't believe in outing, so I won't give his name -- who "has been named in the past as one of the biggest rappers of all time by MTV. He's always trashing gay men in his lyrics. But he is surrounded by a posse of transvestites," who he has sex with. Dean then runs through a list of hip-hop gays, each more famous and closeted than the last."

It's funny how many white homophobes instantly get the title of having latent homosexuality, but that's pretty unheard of in the African American community. Maybe rightly so since the man interviewed by Hari, also secretly gay, says he feared for his life. Maybe rappers really are as violent as they sing about.

Still, a study in 1996 by Adams, Write, and Lohr found that the majority of men who identified as having aggressive feelings towards homosexuals were significantly aroused when shown homosexual pornography. The general feeling is that we have enough scientific evidence to suggest that a fear of gays really does suggest a person may be at least partly gay. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8772014)

Let's move on from heterosexuality vs homosexuality for a moment though and talk about bisexuality. This study also showed that 100% of the men were aroused by heterosexual porn meaning that they were not homosexual, but rather, bisexual. Hari writes "we know from decades of sexual research that almost everyone -- especially as a teenager -- has a period when they have omnivorous sexual urges, with attraction to the 'wrong' gender cropping up for a while. (Like most gay boys, I had a burst of heterosexual experiences when I was 15 and 16.)"

This from a man who, by the way, identifies as homosexual and not bisexual, yet he is essentially saying that not only does science indicate that all human beings at some point are attracted to both sexes, but he himself has personal experience in that area. This, ladies and gentlemen, we call bisexuality. Now, even in the bisexual community (people who acknowledge their attraction to both sexes) there is almost always a preference for one sex or the other. Does this mean that bisexuality is really the majority? Perhaps hetero and homosexuality are simply strong preferences by bisexual men and women. Even the gayest people I know still are "bi curious" even though they don't like to admit it. On the same note, even the straightest people I know have admitted to "experimenting" or having a curiousness as well.

I don't believe in homosexuality. I don't believe in heterosexuality. I believe in sexuality. I believe that we, as human beings, as sexual beings and have the capacity to be sexually aroused by numerous things, including both genders.

Germophobia's going to kill us

That's right, it's not the germs themselves, but your insane, neurotic germophobia that's going to be the death of us. Germ killing power is everywhere. Every cleaning commercial targeted at women states that so and so's product kills 99.9% of nasty germs. As a mother I find this ridiculous and, yes, dangerous.

Superbug. The word's been around for a few years now, but what is it? A superbug is a mutated form of a common germ that's become resistant to cleaning agents and medicines like antibiotics. Now, let's look at why we have superbugs. Make no mistake, these little critters are cause for alarm- and I mean all out the sky is falling alarm, because if these bugs become the norm then there's not much we can do since all the medicines we have to fight them would be completely useless.

1. Overcleaning. Seriously- let you and your kids be exposed to some germs. Exposure and, yes, even getting sick is necessary to let your body build up immunities, those nice natural defenses we come built with. Living in a bubble only means that when your kid hits the real world with no immune system, the risk of serious complication goes up. As long as you keep things pretty clean and aren't eating feces directly, you're pretty much okay.

2. CAFO's. Now, I'm against meat consumption for all kinds of ethical, environmental, and health reasons, but superbugs certainly ranks high up there behind ethics. Factory farms keep animals in filthy conditions, closely packed together, and eating foods they were never meant to eat. This means that the animals, if not treated with antibiotics, would stay sick all the time and most of them would die. The answer, in the CAFO world, is to give them drugs on a regular basis whether they're sick or not as a preventative treatment. Now, if you're looking past the fact that these animals are treated insanely horribly anyway, you might think this seems like a good idea. No, no. All it does does is breeds bugs that have to be stronger than those drugs in order to survive. The bird flu, the swine flu.. all thanks to antibiotic created superbugs.

If you're worried about all the nasty, possibly deadly germs left over from the meat you served for dinner then don't eat the meat. Really- it contains possibly deadly germs that you're hoping will be cooked out and you're feeding it to your family? If you don't want nasty germs laying around, stop eating nasty food.

Now, I'm not saying that living dirty and throwing poop at each other is a good thing. That's what got Europe in trouble with the whole plague thing. Yes, wash your hands after you use the bathroom or scratch your butt, but people,seriously, stop overreacting- you're gong to kill us all if you do.

Religion Strangles Science

Everyone knows that religion inhibits science. In fact, we have religious based "science" that spends it's time trying to prove that dinosaurs never existed or that there was indeed a worldwide flood, ridiculous endeavors when we already know there were dinosaurs and no world flood. And still they keep trying. But that's off topic.. that's getting into faux science.. what about REAL science?

One of my favorite things to talk about in regards to science and religion is, of course, the dark ages. 300 years of ignorance and the outlawing of intelligence (which includes, of course, science). Can you really fathom where we would be if it weren't for Christianity? Where we would be with those hundreds of years where we could have been technologically advancing? Where will we be in 300 years? Think about it. That's where we could have been now.

Of course, those days are long gone and we, for the most part, don't let ignorance and religion effect science, technology, and education. Until, of course, Bush took office. Placed in the white house by God himself, he and many of his fight wing fundies flouted. He was a soldier for the religious. He would make things right. No stem cell research, which, he moronically said, supported and encouraged abortion. No, we'll have none of those life saving cures. We don't want those parapalegics walking again and goodness gracious we certainly don't want to get rid of those elderly degenerative brain diseases! That would be against God. Not that the abortion rate actually went down because of this and it's not like we can get stem cells from anywhere but aborted fetuses (oh yeah.. that's right.. we CAN!).

I was watching the news which talked about Obama lifting the ban on federal funding for stem cell research. The reporters praising the possible cures that will soon be available and the sheer potential! We have known about the potential of stem cells for about a decade now, they said. A decade. Can you imagine the progress we could have had in a decade? And what's been such a hinderence? Why, Bush, of course.

Stem cell research could very likely cure diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, spinal injury, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and a host of genetic and metabolic disorders. It could reverse cancer, or help replace damaged organs.

This is a modern example of religion strangling science. It's terrifying and disgusting to know that this still goes on and I dream of a day when people use common sense and fearless compassion instead of ridiculous and outdated fairytales and myths.

I Used To Be Extraordinary- A Metamorphasis

I was a young, mentally ill girl who liked almost everything about her personality. Gandhi said "be the change you want to see in the world" and I followed that even before I'd heard it. Those are truly words to live by, said by an extraordinary and admirable man. I strove, with every fiber of my being, to be kind, generous, free spirited, innocent and wise. It was perhaps with my first venture into Paganism that I really took to heart the idea of harming none, or at least causing the least amount of harm possible. I was empathetic and tender hearted by nature, probably due to knowing what it felt like to be abused, bullied, and persecuted, but this new thought took it to the next level.

I'm sure you're thinking, well, it should be obvious that one would want to do as little harm as possible and yes, you're right, but how many of us actually follow through with that golden rule? I became Wiccan at 13 and at 14 I stopped eating meat, not only for the health benefits, which I really only used when trying to justify myself to meat eaters who thought ethical reasons were too hippie-ish, but for spiritual reasons and to further my mission.

I was the kind of person whom people always referred to as "older". Not older in years, but more mature, more serious, more concerned with the problems of the world. I wasn't out doing drugs, drinking, or sleeping around like most of my school mates, but rather I was studying world religions, philosophy, and ethics. I got comments like "you're only (insert any age between 14 and 23 here)?" with a slight tone of shock. Yep, I was the bookworm, the weird nerd who never fit in, which made me happy.

By the time I hit 16 or so I was pretty happy with who I was. I was serious and aware of the world around me, seeing things that needed to be changed and I was proud of my passion for helping others. I was goofy and silly and free spirited, dancing through fields of wheat on my way to the bus stop or braiding flowers in my hair to wear to school. I was naturally a romantic and, while still believing in feminism and equal rights, being swept away the the idea of chivalry, nobility, and fairytale worlds.

I was extraordinary. I don't mean this in an egotistical sense, but rather just it's true meaning, beyond ordinary. I was not like the rest of the people I knew and I loved that. The rest of the world seemed cold, heartless, cynical, and hard. I wanted to be like those Buddhist monks you see in movies who are ever wise with love and kindness in their hearts. I was different and I didn't think the world could ever change me. After all, I grew up being abused, and still did not turn cold, I was bullied in horrible ways and still did not turn cold, my father was even murdered when I was 16, and still I did not turn cold.

As I got older, many bad things happened to me. Life has never been kind to me, but still I held out hope, kept faith in humanity, believed in everyone's innate kindness and goodness, and believed things would all work out for the best.

Then something happened and my world crumbled. My husband, whom I had been with since I was 15 and right after our 4th wedding anniversary did something horrible. That something is a long and painful story that may someday get it's own post but for now I'll paraphrase. He cheated on me. No, wait, it gets worse. We lived with the woman he was sleeping with and her family. It was all in front of me, flaunted, rubbed in my face. Being bipolar, I became very sick, very depressed. I became suicidal almost instantly and, for that reason, did not have the strength or courage to stop what was going on. For six months they did this and all I could do was cry and try, occasionally, to kill myself. My husband, who was no longer the man I knew, became more and more emotionally and verbally abusive, finally escalating to physical violence. The other woman was also horribly abusive and manipulative. She knew just the right thing to say to keep me down and was purposefully driving me to suicide.

Thinking about it is like watching a horror movie in my head. I can see myself, but it's not myself. A dissociated image caught in a fantastical play. There are a few main images I can't seem to get rid of. I can see myself, crying, sobbing in the room upstairs while they were downstairs, fucking like animals. I can see myself, that last time I tired to kill myself with the bottle of pills.. how I took them one at a time at first, and then more at a time until they were gone. I can see a myself, crying on the end of the bed, I see myself trying to stand up and being pushed back down by my husband's hand on my throat. These thoughts, replaying themselves over and over and wondering why and how this could happen to me, of all people. I tried so hard to be a good person, to be there for those I love, to do good for the people and the world around me, and this is what I got in return.

And so I changed. In ways I never thought possible. In ways that make me dislike who I am. Not because I am a bad person or because, being so hurt, I in turn began to hurt others, because I did not. Instead, what I dislike so much, is that I'm like everyone else.. cynical, distrustful, cold and blocked off to feeling anything. I am no longer extraordinary. I am like everyone else. I cannot be the change I want to see in the world. I cannot dance, I cannot love, I cannot enjoy the things I once did. My life is a drab, gray, mass of days which are all the same, punctured by heart breaking stabs of agony. My faith in humanity is lost, as am I.

Vegan School Lunches

Why I Don't Like Smokers

It's funny the course a thought can sometimes take. For personal reasons I was contemplating the mindset of an abuser and psychological factors and my mind jumped to an analogy of smoking and thus the revelation: smokers are like abusers. Or, more correctly, smokers are abusers.

Why? Think about it. A smoker is doing something very self damaging and, when they smoke around others they are inflicting harm, physical harm, on those people. These could be their spouses, their children, or total strangers. Like abusers, they often feel entitled to harm others in this way and, most of the time, don't even see why it's bad or harmful.

The most notable and, perhaps abhorrent of this abuse is perpetrated on our children. Not only children living in the household, but any child that comes into contact with their poison. Not only does it inflict physical damage, but also psychological damage. We know that children who grow up around smokers are more likely to grow up and smoke themselves, inflicting self damage which can be compared to self injury such as cutting or purposeful reckless behavior.

Most people would be disgusted if they found out that, say, a six year old were addicted to cigarettes. You would never let your six year old smoke... would you? If you would you would have your child taken away and into the custody of child services in a heartbeat, and yet we allow our children to become addicted to cigarette smoke from second-hand smoke at much younger ages. This is the real reason that children who grow up in smoke filled homes are more likely to smoke- they're already addicted!

So, smokers are, by all accounts, abusive addicts who feel no remorse in hurting other people, even their own children. I've made it no secret that I believe parents who smoke around their children should have their children taken away or be charged with abuse and be made to take a parenting class- perhaps one that shows what it is they're doing to their children which they supposedly love so much and would do anything to protect.. except not smoke, obviously.