>> ^direpickle:

Well, to be fair, there are nutrients that humans need that aren't naturally available without eating animals or animal products. Vegans need to (should, anyway--asking for trouble if they don't) take supplements to get their B12.



That is correct direpickle, as far as I know.

Still its really annoying when people who really are intellegent and have otherwise sound values (yes i´m talking about you spoco2:) conclude that we´re just supposed to eat meat. We are not designed to be carnivours, we can choose.

But I don´t think the killing is the real issue. No human knows how animals or vegetables for that sake experience things. We can only assume. It´s the sympthomes of humans fancying ourselves being some kind of superiour existence that make me feel unpleasant. Even if we assume animals experience pain the same way we do, it doesn´t stop us from treating them like shit. Unnecessarily too.

Tupho said:

I've heard this argument before and it drives me crazy. Are you a religious person? And if so are you trying to convince us that you can't go to heaven if you don't eat meat. I have seen enough vegans/vegetarians live long healthy lives to know that it doesnt matter what we are "designed" to eat.

"Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

"Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html

Jeez. Biased much? They're missing the point.

Most of our produce and vegetables come from outside the USA from countries like China, Costa Rica, Brazil, etc. That stuff you can buy in any conventional supermarket like Walmart or Target. Now compare the ripeness and taste of THAT food (which is commonly available) to organic food. That's where the difference is and where the comparison should be made.

Food that is picked before it's ripe, shipped frozen across the atlantic, and sits on a shelf can not be as good as organic, locally grown food because the food did not have the time to absorb the nutrients from the ground.

Plus, they're putting scientists against malnourished pot heads. Hardly a fair debate here. Entertaining at best, but it's probably a good idea to not get into a debate about organic foods where your information is coming from a biased comedy show.

Techno music, other electronic music is terrible.

With a few notable exceptions. http://www.myspace.com/venetiansnares

Music is made by people, with instruments, and can be played live.

Electronic music is programmed by a person, yes, but the sounds come from computers. The snare hit in an electronic song is made by the computer, and there is no snare. You can't eat wax food, no matter how real it looks. You extract zero nutrients.

You can play an electronic song for hours, days, years, without getting tired, without any soul or effort. This runs against everything I believe in as a musician (i'm the lead singer of The Shillelaghs www.myspace.com/theshillelaghs)

Music should be from your hands, not from your fingertips. Music should be made standing up, in front of people, not sitting in your boxers in front of a screen. Music shouldn't be easy. You can fuck around with an electronic song for months until you have every single note perfectly right, in it's correct place. Do you know how much time I have to get my music right? Within the three and a half minuets that I am on stage, singing that particular song. Asshole DJ can perfect his crap on the computer, and bring it out, and hit play, and everyone cheers like that is a fucking accomplishment. Sure, you add this and that, alter it with more machines in your safe little booth. At what point does the artist shine through the technology?

I wish I could just bring a CD player on stage, connect it to the PA, and hit play. Would save my boys a lot of effort in hauling gear on and off stage, keeping everything sounding good. Why? All i need is my bands recording, come out, put it on the PA, and everything is the same, correct?

Not particularly bashing the energy that the audience brings to the music. People like to dance, i get it. But it's not "music". You'll never convince me of that fact. To me, music is another beast entirely.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:It is created as a result of conscious choices of the host.

So if I am walking through a dark alley when I'm hit over the head/tied-up/whipped, then it's my fault, and I have no moral recourse? All events can be tied to previous actions, that does not render any actor morally exempt, or morally hobbled.

An infant does provide returns for the host pysiologically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Please support that assertion, a fetus does harm and contributes nothing, even children do harm, as they are troublesome and expensive to raise. While reproducing benefits the genes, it does not benefit the individual.

People without children are happier/healthier/richer than people with them, and I can show you numbers to back that up if you doubt it.

It is an atypical claim

It is none the less demonstrably true, embeds in host, siphons nutrients, interferes with host physiology to assist in survival/reproduction. This is text-book parasitism. I know that people don't like the implication, but the facts remain, placental reproduction is parasitic.

inconvenience of 9 months ... no financial risk.

And if this mother or father is black? Does your world view really require that all these fetuses be white? Your little fairy story does not work for non-white newborns.

As for financial risk, how about you take 1/2 your food budget(siphoned) and your clothes budget(maternity clothes) for nine months, and provide medical care for people in developing nations instead of carrying a fetus to term? Is it morally superior to bring to term one potential human, or to save hundreds of actual fully developed humans? Using your logic would it not be immoral to spend that money being pregnant when you could use it to save so many innocent helpless lives?

Or you could terminate the pregnancy, resulting in nothing. Allowing the child the chance of a life is the superior moral decision based on opportunity cost potential alone.

Have you never known somebody who was pregnant? Are you really arguing that being pregnant is free? Are you aware that, even for people with good health care, pregnancy has a higher fatality rate for the mother than abortion?

What about the harm implicit in displacing a child who desperately needs to be adopted? Lots of, mostly non-white, children are waiting to be adopted, why add another to the queue, or add a white baby who will be placed at the front of the line?

Protecting the innocent and helpless is one of the highest moral choices our species can make.

So are you a vegan? I am, so don't pull the "protecting the innocent" line with me. If you eat meat, your a couple rungs down the ladder from my position on that issue. But we are not talking about innocents, we are talking about a parasite.Protecting the "innocent" does not mean that anybody has a moral responsibility to be parasitised/enslaved.

>> ^yourhydra:
yeah, how can anything that uses light as its source of energy grow in a pitch black lung? not to mention needing nutrients from soil and water.


In order to just START to grow, a plant needs no light. The seed can germinate in pitch darkness. However, the image they showed of the needles and such is unbelieveable entirely. The needles were huge compared to the size of the entire organism. WTF. Evergreens don't grow full-sized needles when they are sprouts in my experience. Someone correct me.

Well I don't know much about botany, but if the little pine had even a little bit of a root system, it had to be "growing" in some sense. Just inhaling a piece of a pine bough wouldn't come with roots attached. I know plants can do some growing without much light to work with. Did you ever do that experiment in middle school where you put a plant in box with dividers in it, and it grows around them to get to the light? Maybe they can do a little bit of growing without light, just based on nutrients and such?

I dunno, maybe it's some viral video for some pine flavored Russian cigarette or something. heh

yeah, how can anything that uses light as its source of energy grow in a pitch black lung? not to mention needing nutrients from soil and water.

the discription is misleading -- surely it must get other nutrients from somewhere. You can't survive on CHON alone.

So much for 'Sciencecentral' They don't even specify if the 17% bacteria difference between hands occurs in both left-handed and right-handed people. Of course there would be a 'difference' because you don't use your dominant hand in the same way as your other hand and therefore it is not exposed to the same surfaces. How is that surprising? women tend to have longer nails, is that a factor? what about hand creams and other chemicals women use more often than men? none of that was mentioned.

"Why do we have so many bacteria and what are they doing there?" are you serious? the human body is a paradise for microorganisms; predictably stable, warm, nutrient rich environment. The human body can harbor as much as 10000 times as many bacterial cells as human cells and he asks why are there so many species on our hands?

He did not even say which of the 150 something species found are actually harmful. There is bacteria all over the skin all the time, but only a few cause harm, and most are kept in check thanks to the skin. Many species have lived with human beings for thousands of years.
Why do you think as soon as we die and consequently, homeostasis stops, do our bodies get consumed by bacteria so quickly?

I am all for scientific news but the quality of this piece is fucking ridiculous.

(Edit)

From, nasa.gov:

"It's of interest to astrobiologists because organisms release much of Earth's methane as they digest nutrients. However, other PURELY GEOLOGICAL PROCESSES, like oxidation of iron, also release methane. "Right now, we don’t have enough information to tell if biology or geology -- or both -- is producing the methane on Mars," said Mumma. "But it does tell us that the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It's as if Mars is challenging us, saying, hey, find out what this means." (Full article posted below by stingray)

NASA did NOT announce today that "the methane that surrounds the planet is a result of microbial organisms, which are still alive and kickin' today." They announced that they found more plumes of methane.

I am so pissed at you right now volumptuous. I had to go back offline for four hours to work and I come back to this?


(edit) MY GOD!!! They found methane on Titan as well!!!

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1693680

Years ago...

ive been preggers a few times. you need not worry about the baby getting its nutrients. your body will steal from the host to feed the parasite! they sell some wrist bands with a plastic knobby in the center thats supposed to hit some pressure point and stop the nausea, that SEEMED to help with my first pregnancy. though i realize i might have been fooling myself. saltines and gatorade are your friend. with my second kid i was steady stream of pukes and poops for 6 months, i kept nothing down or in and was righteously sick. i only gained almost 7 lbs. and delivered an 8lbs 2oz 24in long perfectly healthy ravenous monster of a son. it turned out i had developed an allergy to my prenatal vitamins, i am in no way suggesting thats the case with you, it most likely is not. i am only illustrating how ok your baby is. i was anemic, sick, malnurished and vitamin deprived, but had a horse baby. you feel like shit and theres not much you can do, but im sure your baby is fine.

p.s. vitamin allergy aside, the morning sickness very often ends with the first trimest, second trimester is fun! third trimester is fat hot and uncomfortable! enjoy!

If all else fails the baby'll just eat you, so don't worry about it. That's what Alien babies do!

I just hope you don't give birth through your chest cavity - I've seen it, it would be a damned shame.

>> ^UsesProzac:
All I've been able to "eat" is water, and it comes up most of the time. I'm just worried I'm starving the fetus of nutrients.

All I've been able to "eat" is water, and it comes up most of the time. I'm just worried I'm starving the fetus of nutrients.