Jason Mark Roehrig My Web Home

I always shake my head when westerners get all upset about Asians eating dogs and/or cats. The latest in carnivore hypocrisy comes from horse lovers, as I found out today reading an article on SMH, from which the quotes below are taken: Racehorses For Dinner.

Figures obtained by The Sun-Herald show 2,000 tonnes, or $8.5million worth, of horse and donkey meat was exported from Australia from January to November last year.

So? Those who consume meat will have to agree, that the definition of it is "animal tissue used as food". It doesn't really matter which animal it comes from. According to numbers found on the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1997-98 the per capita consumption of meat was 74.2 kg.

"You can literally be watching a racehorse run at Randwick on the Sunday and the next week it is on its way to a dinner table in Japan," horse welfare advocate Laura Stoikos said.

Again, so? You can go into a sea food restaurant, point your finger at a lobster happily swimming in a fish tank, and it wont take a quarter of an hour to be served to you on a plate. As long as the killing is "humane", most of us can tolerate such behaviour. You can visit a farm and watch a calve sucking its mothers teats, and then buy veal from it the next day at your local butcher. I guess Laura is just telling us, that Japanese people are really evil, not only do they slaughter an endangered species, but they prevent us from developing our horse burial industry.

A former actor and model, only remembered by boys who grew up in the 80's due to her big ... hair, offers the following reasons for her opposition to using horses as a food source.

"Horses are never bred to be eaten. They're not even beasts of burden anymore, those are the old days," Derek said. "They're beautiful animals, used in sport and as companion animals."

If having been bred for consumption were a justification, or rather a rule for what can and can not be eaten, then deer, quail, moose, buffalo, and many more would also have to be taken from the list of animals that we are permitted to kill to feed upon. Her next qualifier is "beast of burden", to which I can only say, I'm sitting here wide eyed, with an expression of disbelief, thinking to myself "WTF is she trying to say?" Not surprising if you take into account, that this came from a women who supported Bush senior, as well as junior in their presidential campaigns. Clowns united. Next in line of painful reasoning is beauty. And I thought that by now everyone knew, that beauty is a subjective quality. I've met plenty of people, who would sign a statement claiming cows to being more beautiful than a horses.

Leaving us with the companion argument, which would actually force us to outlaw meat consumption, as every kind of animal has at some point been a companion of a human being. I can assure you, if it can be held captive, we will have kept it as a companion. To be honest though, this is the only argument I can actually accept and support, as it would be in line with my beliefs. As someone who believes in animal rights, I find it impossible to justify the killing of an animal to feed myself. But I highlighted the b-term, as it is just that. Some people like to believe in a creator, I like to believe that when lost and close to starving, upon meeting an animal I would decide to die rather than kill. And as reality has no creator, I'd probably kill a rat or what ever to live another day.

Miss Stoikos runs the not-for-profit organisation and said the treatment of the doomed horses was horrific. "They are trucked in like cattle in the dead of night," she said.

Sanity seems to be an exceptional condition.

Any "taboo" created, is just another form of religion - non-rational behaviour induced by psychosis. If you want the freedom to eat meet, then you can't tell other people what meat they are allowed to consume. The only exception being a threat of its extinction, and the last I heard, animals bred are the least likely to suffer such a fait. By the way, I'm a vegetarian, who keeps playing with the idea to turn vegan, but that is a personal life style choice. So carnivores, if you don't want to eat meat, join us. If not, well then stop telling other carnivores "you are bad", as you are not just as bad, but even worse - a carnivore living in denial.

Human beings have emotionally bonded with material goods as far as we can look back with confidence. In our modern times we find a variety of objects people form deep relationships with, as multiple as differences amongst individuals in general. Probably the most popular object or desire, especially amongst penis carriers are cars. Some people fall in love with buildings, and I don't mean this in the sense of "I love your new outfit", but rather "I love her with all my heart".

What will be really interesting to see, is how our relationships with robots will develop, especially once we have humanoid bots sharing our intimate space. It isn't far fetched to believe, that the legality of human-robot marriages will be the new frontier of the equal-rights movement.

Emerging Sentimentality

Reset Robot
Courtesy of Simulated Comic Product
I found this comic (see picture inserted) highly disturbing and offensive. In the absence of its possibility, having ones mind completely erased can sound sweet tasting. It's reality though, looses quickly any attractiveness. Rather fear inducing is the awareness of loosing everything we consider to be my self.

The sight of the reset button evokes strong feelings, even if it attached to just a machine. Maybe it's just me. After all, my favourite character A Hitchhickers Guide To The Galaxy is Marvine, a chronically depressed humanoid robot.

Usually we associate it with turning a faulty machine back into a functional state.

Longevity Via Robotic-Rebirth

In a couple of centuries we will be able to virtualize our minds, enabling ourselves to be transfered from our wet-ware into maintainable hardware. Backing-up our data will then no longer just be of real concern to businesses only. Of course loosing a life-time supply of holiday snaps bears its tragedy, but imagine a backup actually meaning to live or to do.

There is certainly a gender bias programmed into the Google search engine. When I first stumbled upon the posting on Digg, I thought that this could be an unintentional consequence of the algorithm used, but further research has changed my first impression to the opinion stated in this articles headline.

I never, or very, very rarely read the comments on Digg, so I'm not sure what the opinion of others are. What I do know, is that if you google for "she invented" or "she discovered", you are served with a suggestion "Did you mean..."He..."", while the male gender search doesn't come up with any suggestions.

The search for "she invented" comes up with 139,000 results, while the search for "he invented" comes up with 1,060,000 results. Hence my first assumption was, that the suggestion was due to a substantial difference in possible results. Some more numbers:

Total Results for "X invented"

1,199,000

Percentage of "she invented" from Total Results

%11.6

Percentage of "he invented" from Total Results

%88.4

But a search for "she discovered" offers a total of 1,150,000 results, and for "he discovered" shows a total of 1,390,000 results. In total results the male version is still in the lead, though no longer is there a substantial difference, which could justify the seeming bias. Once again, some more numbers on this result:

Total Results for "X discovered"

2,540,000

Percentage of "she discovered" from Total Results

%45.3

Percentage of "he discovered" from Total Results

%54.7

So I entered the next obvious, well to me at least, search query for both genders. Now "she gave birth" offers a total of 803,000, which seems rather low if you think of the substantial contribution by women offered during the birth of alone over 6 billion people currently occupying this planet. Now the male result is subtiantly lower, the search for "he gave birth" only offering a total of 23,700.

Total Results for "X gave birth"

826,700

Percentage of "she gave birth" from Total Results

%97.0

Percentage of "he gave birth" from Total Results

%3.0

What is somehow disturbing, is that the last query did not offer a "Did you mean..." suggestion for the male gender search, although this search offered the clearest gender difference in total search result.

Cropped images of a few screen shots I took.

This was by no means an extensive research project, but shows sufficiently an inherint gender bias within the search results offered by Google, which Yahoo doesn't display.

Photo by t_a_i_s.

The human race is slowly reaching total domination of this planet, as there is a difference between domination and total domination. While we already cover a few patches of this planet, there still seems to be too much nature around. And what has nature done for us, besides ensuring pain and suffering? Suggested by our apparent behaviour, and illustrated by the decisions we make in regards to development.

A proposal to build a tunnel from Russia to Alaska, will mean a far more radical change to the environment of Alaska, than most can currently envision. And I'm not only referring to the destruction of natural habitat. Having a direct link connecting the two continents, will radically change the economic significance of Alaska from a relative unimportant state to a power house.

Image of some nice art work
by Zhan Wang.
A creative depiction of Bejing.

Environmental concerns are going to be drowned by the calls for jobs, energy, and development. And I'm certain, that lessons learnt from past mistakes will surely be forgotten and repressed, as cost reduction is what drives profits, and profits drive social change.

Further drilling for oil in Alaska might have been stopped by the US Senate in 2005, but as all involved knew and know, that wasn't the last we were going to hear of such an enterprise. Too tempting are the siren calls of profit. Sustainable development takes time. More than elected officials have to ensure re-election. With the majority of us humans solely concerned with survival, especially at a comfort level regarded as common in the collective, the electorate will rather follow the "we need jobs and economic prosperity" argument. "We need to live in harmony with our environment" is just not sufficiently compelling, leaving an impression of putting nature before humans. And as a species we are determined to ensure our short term existence only. The future will be taken care of by adaptation and developmental progress. Which is not a belief, nor knowledge gained through experience, but our primal instinct.

Current concern for the environment, is nothing but a "global warming fashion". It will pass by, just as every other guilt driven polit-fashion has.