Tuesday, July 22, 2014

"Nice soul you've got there. Would be a shame if it were tortured forever."

BuzzFeed’s ’22 Messages From Creationists’ gets translated by science lovers and the results are hilarious: "In the wake of Bill Nye the Science Guy’s recent debate with young earth creationist Ken Ham, the online media giant BuzzFeed ran a piece entitled “22 Messages From Creationists To People Who Believe In Evolution.” The premise of the piece was simple: ask 22 creationists to pose whatever question they wanted to evolutionists, write it down and hold their questions up on a piece of paper for the camera. BuzzFeed was admirably quiet on the ideological fodder of the piece, leaving it open to the interpretations of viewers and commenters. But the folks over at The Science of Sarcasm took an opportunity too good to pass up, translating the questions into language they think might reveal a little bit of what could be behind the creationist train of thought."






Dwayne Johnson Confirms Role in Upcoming DC Movie: "In an interview with Total Film to promote his upcoming film Hercules, Johnson confirmed that he will indeed be playing a character from the DC universe in an upcoming movie. While he didn’t give a name, he did offer that “this character has the power of Superman, he can throw down. Just say the word.”"

Dwayne Johnson Confirms Role in Upcoming DC Movie: "Comic book fans will recognize this as Shazam, a character who turns into a hulking, flying, fighting machine simply by saying the word “Shazam” with great gusto. It sure seems like a role Johnson is well-suited for. This casting decision would also align with DC’s upcoming movie schedule; a Shazam movie is scheduled to be their next film released after Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Expect an official announcement soon."










 

This almost exactly mirrors my thought process when I went vegetarian for a couple years.  Hard to imagine now, as carnivorous as I am.  Tovar Cerulli – The hidden costs of vegetarianism: "When I ate meat, that meant animal death. When I ate dairy products, that meant animal confinement. When, inspired by the compassionate teachings of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I turned to veganism — that meant harm to nothing but plants. My conscience seemed clear. Eight years later, this fairy tale began to unravel. In the garden my wife and I tended, for instance, I began to see that squash and green beans were not just the fruit of plants. They were also the fruit of animals.

Like all living things, our garden plants had to eat. As their hungry roots drew sustenance from the ground, nutrients had to be replaced. So each year I drove our pickup truck a few miles down the road and brought home a cubic yard or two of compost: rich, dark, dense material made from the manure of cows and other animals, and from their bodies as well, as farmers sometimes compost carcasses.

I could have insisted on supplementing our own kitchen-scrap compost with fertilisers made from nothing but plants. Such products were certainly available. Most, though, were imported from out of state in bright plastic bags. Depending on them to feed our soil would, I reflected, be like subsisting on grocery-store tofu made from soybeans grown a thousand miles away, instead of eating chicken from a neighbour’s backyard or venison from nearby woods. These choices would keep animal products away from our garden and plates, but they made no ecological sense.

And even if I found a local source of animal-free fertiliser, would it make a difference? Though crops can be grown without manure, such approaches typically require more acreage than do integrated plant-animal systems. Why till more land, and perhaps displace more wildlife habitat, for the sake of excluding domesticated creatures from the agricultural landscape? Though this might help shore up my own conceptual categories, would it serve any other purpose, any greater good?

When I visit the grocery store these days, I realise we have a choice, but it is not simply the choice I once made between the purity of veganism and its alternatives, based on suffering. Walking down the aisles, we can let the orderly bins and shiny packages cultivate our forgetfulness. We can let ourselves believe in all the tidy separations: plants and animals divided into neatly compartmentalised kingdoms, food severed from earth, our shopping disconnected from others’ farming. We can let ourselves be comforted by our own ignorance, by everything we neither see nor want to see. Or we can remind ourselves of just how intertwined everything really is. Uncomfortable though it might be, we can remind ourselves that lettuce is not as innocent as it appears, that squash and green beans owe their existence to the lives and deaths of animals. We can remind ourselves that pastoral landscapes are not just backdrops for recreational hikes or idyllic rides through the countryside. They are not an ‘environment’ that exists around us. They are the places that feed us, the soil in which we are rooted. They are us."











"Chuck Palahniuk is breaking the first two rules of Fight Club: He's talking about Fight Club. The author's devotees probably won't mind since what's on his mind these days is more of the characters and world he created in his 1996 book, which was adapted three years later into director David Fincher's cult film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. The story of an unnamed insomniac narrator, his violent id come to life in the form of Tyler Durden, and an underground society built on bare-knuckle brawls and anarchic ideas continues in Fight Club 2, a 10-issue Dark Horse Comics maxiseries illustrated by Cameron Stewart, debuting in May 2015...


Fight Club 2 takes place alternately in the future and the past. It picks up a decade after the ending of his original book, where the protagonist is married to equally problematic Marla Singer and has a 9-year-old son named Junior, though the narrator is failing his son in the same way his dad failed him."

 




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