Kate O'Neill and then some

Not only that, but many of them get angry if you try to shed light on where their meat originates—just telling people you're vegan can sometimes inspire hostility. That’s because people know, on some level, that animal agriculture is horrific but support it anyway. By raising awareness of the reality of animal agriculture, you shed light on that moral discomfort that most people feel at the idea of eating animals.

Had an interesting discussion over lunch with a friend who experienced backlash while on vacation with friends when she casually stated that she wasn't interested in eating much meat because she was cutting back. Their chilly reaction and subsequent efforts to tempt her into eating various hunks of seared flesh left her puzzled. But longtime vegetarians and vegans will no doubt recognize this reaction, and Dr. Melanie Joy describes the phenomenon in this linked article on GOOD. She has coined the term "carnism" to refer to the systemic cultural belief that eating meat is right, healthy, and required, rather than the choice it truly represents. She highlights the fact that it is a choice by pointing out the wild inconsistencies in our attitudes and assumptions towards different kinds of animals.

I've found it to go beyond that, too. In my experience, any behavior (the deviation doesn't even have to be verbalized) that demonstrates an effort to make conscious choices about food and diet becomes suspect. It is as if my desire to eat a salad impinges on your ability to eat a steak.

The trouble with that is that my chosen diet is pretty non-mainstream. I am vegan and have been since 1998. Being vegan is as much an ethical choice as a health-conscious one, but I realize that ethical ideals are impossible so I try to respect everyone's ability to arrive at their own ethical compromises, within reason, and I try not to force my values onto anyone else. I'm also learning more and more about raw food and other optimized nutrition, and that has to do with improving my health: I'm not overly concerned about the welfare of carrots. But uttering the word "vegan" can stop a cocktail party conversation cold. Everyone is waiting for the other non-leather shoe to drop, I suppose, and for the lectures to begin.

I'm not a lecturing kind of person. (Not usually, anyway.) But I think this article presents some valuable new vocabulary and food (ha!) for thought, so whether you choose to eat meat or choose to abstain, you may find it valuable to read this whole article and possibly see some of the nearly-invisible constructs we're surrounded by in a new light.

Let me know your thoughts.

But Jobs delayed surgery for at least nine months, making it "sound to assume that Mr. Jobs' choice for alternative medicine has eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.

I saw the headline "Steve Jobs Regretted Wasting Time on Alternative Medicine" tweeted many times a few days ago when this article first showed up, but I didn't have time to click through and read it. I was suspicious, though, that alternative treatments may have been scapegoated. Now that I have read it, I can't say that for sure, but it still strikes me as sensationalist and oversimplified. (No! Something in Gawker, sensationalist? Something about Steve Jobs?)

The thing is, what comes through to me as I read the Steve Jobs quote, "I didn't want my body... violated in that way" reads as straight-up fear. It doesn't read as if he got the news and went "oh, you know what? I want to go with an intense holistic approach and beat this shit" and then went all Gerson therapy on its ass. Instead, it reads as if he got the news and went "Shit. I don't want to deal with this" and used something between no treatment and alternative treatments as avoidance. There's a pretty big difference there.

The alternative treatments, in this part of the discussion, are a scapegoat and a distraction. I have known people -- LOTS of people -- who say they have overcome cancer through diet and lifestyle changes. I met literally dozens of them when Karsten and I went on a holistic-health-oriented cruise. (Don't take me to task on this: these are THEIR claims, not mine, but I believe them.) And at this moment in my life, I can't claim to know what I'd do if I were diagnosed with cancer. I do know how I reacted when I was diagnosed with something that could be cancer: I had the recommended surgery. (It turned out not to have been cancer, thankfully, and I ended up with complications, so perhaps an instinct to think twice about surgery would have been prudent.) But that was only a few short years after my dad died from cancer, and the word "cancer" scared the shit out of me. With more years of perspective and more education about the body's own systems of balance, I know I'd at least be inclined to double-down on my healthy diet and lifestyle and give my body the chance to deal with the abnormality on its own. I don't know if I'd actually go through with that; I might have surgery first and then follow that with a healing diet.

Either way, what I believe I wouldn't do is ignore it. And I'm not saying Jobs did, but it kinda comes across like he chose a level of denial over aggressive treatment, whether conventional or alternative. Unless someone knows and can tell me that he began following a very intentional diet and regimen geared at helping the body reverse the growth of the tumor, I don't think you can lay the blame for Steve Jobs' death at the feet of alternative medicine for the gap in treatment. I think you have to blame that on fear.

You bought two dead animals – killing each other – because renting them is a bad investment?

Yes, this has been making the rounds. Yes, I'm a few days behind on sharing this. Deal. Read the whole thing. Click the links in the post. It's all worth it.

Found on Pinterest. So totally stealing this idea.

(Note: if the image isn't changing, click it to go back to the original - it's an animated GIF, and it's worth seeing.)

Cassette singles. Remember those?

We get used to seeing metaphors and metrics in certain contexts, and we just start taking for granted that they make sense. It's why I get really animated whenever an e-commerce client cites something Amazon does as proof that a technique works: Amazon can get away with crappy web interfaces because they're Amazon. No one else has that same power.