My plans for the day are seeing if I can convince a bank machine to give me some money off my credit card so I can get cowardly George some food. Otherwise he's going to have to eat pisspants Leeta's food which will give him the runs… Plus I want to get some more flowers. I can't begin to say how much I enjoy planting flowers. Dunno why, but it really makes me happy. I think it's in part because it's Rachel's garden…
Other than that I'll be working on an image update which will likely be posted tomorrow some time, and fiddling with my new article for later in the week. The working title is “Body Piercing for Young People as a Form of Empowerment and Social Protest” and it surely promises to be yet another nail in my coffin as far as the assholes that oppose freedom are concerned. The opening paragraph (which will surely be revised) currently reads,
More and more laws are being passed around the world restricting the rights of young people to legally obtain body piercings. Even in areas where it is legal, schoolboards enact secondary laws restricting access to the [mandatory] school system to those with body piercings in order to ensure that these young people are not able to express themselves on this level, and the corporate owned workplace also does everything it can to prevent those with piercings from obtaining employment. The establishment presents a series of deceitful justifications for this in an attempt to mask their true purpose: social control. In this article I will show that these laws and regulations are nothing but system sustaining safeguards to ensure that the education process continues to do its government defined role — the production of a uniform social product — and that it is essential for young people to defy these laws en masse.
People have been asking me lately — and even “pushing me” — whether I will start eating seafood once I'm relocated. Last night I watched — or started to watch — Iron Chef, which I haven't done in a long time (mostly because I don't really watch TV much these days). It was a segment on crabs, which were of course being cooked live. In gruesome detail they showed the living crabs being cooked alive in woks, straining in agony against the ropes holding them there; other shots showed them being steamed alive, and in the final shot before I shut the television off in disgust they showed the shell being torn off a crab and zoomed in with lurid detail on its still beating heart, and kept the camera there as it spent its last moments in agony and terror.
And the whole while the commentators were cracking jokes… “Well, he doesn't seem to happy” and “oh, look at him squirming, let's wait until he's dead to cut the ropes” or “oh, look his heart is still beating — zoom in on that — that means it's fresh! Sashimi anyone?”
I have to at least respect the Japanese for being willing to accept and embrace the true horror of eating animals — here in the West we hide it all behind layer after layer of corporate obfuscation… Few people who didn't grow up on a farm have experienced what it's like to watch the thousands of animals we consume writhe in pain as their lives are stolen. I'm not telling people they can't eat meat. Of all my friends, I think only one or two others actually refuse all carcass eating…
I stopped eating meat for environmental concerns, but I think the reason I've kept up on it (after all, now that I'm living in the country it's pretty easy to obtain “ethical” organic meat from farms that do little to no environmental damage) has become that I simply don't feel comfortable finding my nourishment in murderous agony.
NOTE: I write this not to start an argument or debate or to judge; simply answering a question I've been asked a lot lately, and trying to explain how I feel… and how watching it made me feel. If you disagree with me and engage in these activities, it's your demon to fight, not mine. I have enough battles already.
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