http://cellar.org/pictures/petamilk.jpg

PETA is taking a new approach and trying to get youngsters to stop drinking milk. To that end, they spoke to a middle school the other week, and have come out with a set of trading cards of weird and nasty things you can expect from drinking milk.

I'm convinced that PETA have to make up the majority of crack cocaine consumers.

Mike

Pardon my ignorance here, but who/what is PETA?

PETA are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

They're the guys that rose all the fuss about the CBS airing the contestants killing & eating rats, chickens, and other such animals on "Survivor".

They're complete morons. There are organizations to stop poverty, disease, hunger, opression, and other such evils of the world, and they're wasting their time on stopping the practice of milking cows. I have no sympathy for those people.

Mike

PETA
 

This brings to mind an idea I had earlier. Remember, in Roman times, proscription lists? The basic idea is that the government puts your name on a widely publicized list, and you can be killed by any citizen without fear of punishment. I think that these PETA idiots shoud go on a list like this. Interesting side note, my health teacher, who can't even spell his name, has tried to convince us that milk is poison. Then he wants us to take him seriously when he speaks about drugs and the like. I love fucking America, man.

I must admit, though, their demonstrations about skin/leather/fur are quite interesting. On the other hand, rest assured that if someone spraypaints my leather jacket, I will bury them with it.

Kick ass, man, and take names.

Milk may not be the perfect food but there's nothing wrong with it. 1% milk is pretty much the exact combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat that you're supposed to eat. Plus, if these PETA idiots take away the proteins from dairy, they probably want eggs too, and of course all meat, and pretty soon it's gonna be hard to get enough protein in yer diet.

Protein
 

Peanuts are gonna become one hell of a commodity.

In all seriousness, though. People are too damn self-righteous to realize that we are animals. We need to eat meat, which means we need to kill animals. I'm all for the ethical treatment of animals, but I don't think that being milked once daily is unethical in the least. And what about the ethical treatment of other people while we're at it? There are wars going on, people are killing each other, people are starving, people are freezing on the streets of New York and Chicago, in our own back yards, so to speak, and apparently a cow living a sedentary lifestyle, getting fed well, getting milk once a day, and eventually getting converted into fine meat products is more of an outrage.

This whole thing reminds me of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

This is parphrased by the way, but

It's basically that people take themselves, and everything around them, too damn seriously. We aren't champions of the earth, menat to rise above the animals and protect them. We're animals too, and we need to either learn to live with everything on the earth, and with everything that must go on on the earth (including death), or get out.

--Steve

I'm glad that Vonnegut wrote the Almighty to sound like the "Cap'n"*, Steve.

* - inside joke as to our VB teacher

~Mike

the cap'n
 

Just for the record, because you don't all enjoy our visual Basic 'experience', the Cap'n is what Mike (Chew) and I call our teacher, who is an excellent programmer, and an intelligent guy, but is flakier than your average pastry. He has a habit of simply giving us a problem, and the resources to learn what we need to to solve it. He does *not* teach. I, Mike, and a few others thrive in this sort of environment; everyone else struggles, and it jades them to the whole concept of programming. Which I guess is why they chose this class as a pre-requisite for C++, to weed out the word processors and other (l)users and only allow those who can develop coding skill carry on to the more complex, but far more powerful, language.

Personally, I think that this is the way programming should be taught, as a career. This is a field where things will(!) change constantly, and you must be willing and able to teach yourself what you need to know in order to get by. Unfortunately, most people are used to the standard regurgitation method of teaching. You know it; teacher tells you soemthing, and you repeat it until you can spit it back out on command. Programming requires a higher level of thought than this, as do the complex mathematics and sciences, and it's important to develop this talent as early as possible.

Now that I've attacked every teacher in the building (thank the gods I'm not posting froms chool right now), I should sign off

--Steve

I agree.

I went through CS in 1985 when college CS was just getting started. The brutal weed-out is always expected in programming. It's just necessary. They do it a lot worse in college pre-med courses; in CS it's "You aren't capable of this" while in pre-med it's "You can't HANDLE this". People are brutalized.

That said, it IS good to get a walk through certain algorithms when you're seeing them for the very first time. So I hope he's at least doing that.

He just recently installed Altiris Vision User to that effect. The obvious effect being that he can set a demo mode to show us his computer screen and walk the class through new stuff. The real reason is because a lot of us are downloading game demos and other such things and they're trying to put a leash on us. "Us" being the coders and programmers.

Naturally, the programmers are going first. We're the only ones in the school that show a streak of independence. The Comp. Apps. kids are repressed from day one. Steve, one day we must tell the tale of Cini-Mini in freshman year.

What I don't like about this (and I just filled out a survey to the fact) is that it's like giving a recovering alcoholic a Guinness. This is the school's way of imposing the "classic" form of education on those that have been seeing and thriving another way. We're being force-addicted to the classic form again, then upon graduation, we'll be yanked off it and be forced to go cold turkey.

It's like they're prepping us for a life eerily similar to "Office Space".

~Mike

The beef industry's favorite folks: <b>P</b>eople for the <b>E</b>ating of <b>T</b>asty <b>A</b>nimals.

Or do you mean their more humor-impaired counterparts?
Z

Re: Protein
 

Well, we don't actually <b>need</b> to get meat. What humans need is protein. And, while it is, indeed, possible to get all of the protein needed (meaning: the correct combination of amino acids) from purely non-meat and non-dairy sources, it's much easier for us to get the same combination by eating meat.

Just look inside your mouths. See those canine teeth in front (aka "eyeteeth")? Those are the mark of a predator- they exist purely to tear into meat; there's no reason for a purely herbivorous animal to have canine teeth. We're omnivorous- meaning that we're <b>designed</b>, more or less, to eat meat.

Not in copious amounts, mind you- vegetables, grains, etc. should make up the bulk of food a human consumes. But, for a concentrated protein wallup, meat is certainly the easiest source for an omnivore like us.

Plus, you get all sorts of fun diseases from non-Kosher stuff,
Z

Re: Re: Protein
 

This would be a good time for my tirade on devolution. We're all beocming weaker as a species. This fits in because when people started preferring cooked meat to raw meat, we actually lost strength in our stomach acids and other parts of the digestive system, and now we need to eat the food cooked. That doesn't really matter, but feast your ears on this one: the common cold can kill a man now. A mutant strain of the virus that causes the common cold is now deadly. And this mutation would, probably, have never happened except that people have a bad habit of assaulting their bodies with drugs and other medicines anytime they get a tickle in their throats. Their immune systems grow weaker from lack of use, and all the germs grow stronger through evolution, and eventually evolve to be antibiotic-resistant (I actually grew an amoxycillin-resistant strain of bacteria in 5th grade, but that's a whole other story). These resistant bugs can't be stopped by medicine, but, normally, our immune system would have an imprint of the bug from fighting strains of it before. BUT (and this but is bigger than Oprah Whinfrey's after a tub of Haagen-Daz) the immune system never had to fight it before, and now can't. Now I'm not advising that we stop using drugs to treat illnesses, but we ought to stop using them to treat illnesses our bodies can fight. Between that, and allowing genetic deformations to stay in the gene pool, and be passed on to children, we are becoming a weaker species.

This has been quite a good forum for me

Steve

I think I'll go to a PETA protest wearing a real fur coat, drinking some milk, and munching on a cheesesteak.