Vegetarianism #3 (also, sucking at Halo but not sleepy is condusive to blogging)

So again, in attempting to reply to all the comments, I found my self with a really big paragraph so I figured I'd post it up here where everyone would actually read it:
Adam, numbers : From Good News for All Creation (Kaufman and Braun, 2002): "Yet worldwide in 1998, 37 percent of all harvested grain was fed to animals being raised for slaughter; in the United States that figure was 66 percent. Meat wastes between 66 and92 percent of grains’ proteins and calories." They have their figures sourced from different journals and books. When writing the posts, I quickly grabbed my figures from a U of Penn website I pulled off google, so that's how i got the water numbers and the 70% compared to the 66%. As for the amount of people starving to death a day, that's the figure I've heard several times in the past year, somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 thousand daily. I just briefly browsed around and got 16 thousand children dying a day of hunger related diseases from bread.org, 1/3 of the world is well fed, 1/3 is under fed, and 1/3 is starving according to the World Health organization, and according to thinkglobal2005.org, 10 million people died in 2003 of starvation, which comes to about 28 thousand a day. Likewise, according to makepovertyhistory.org, 30,000 children die of poverty related causes. So I think I was thinking of poverty, not just starvation, for my 30 - 40 thousand number. But my point remains the same, way way way too many people are dying for us to be so careless with a essential to life resource.
Secondly, Dan - the whale comment about Free Willy was intentional at the end, but good catch.

And since I have nothing else to add, I may as well began to ramble on about my economic justice paper, too. The premise of this paper is that billions around the world live in unjust conditions while David chillaxes ('99, what) with his 20 t-shirts, six pairs of shoes, and lots 'o cable tv up with the affluent west. Basically, I'm saying in this paper that we all have a duty to provide far more aide than we currently now give, and the failure to give such aide is akin to murder. Hopefully, just because I'm a major hypocrite (I've failed to even reach a basic 10% tithe the past 4 working years of my life) on this topic (throwing out the ad hominem on myself before all y'alls drop it on me) doesn't mean the arguments I'm trying to make are invalid. By the way, I don't really feel like searching up a bunch of quotes about how x number of people are living on y number of dollars a day while zee (not zed) number of billionaries have more money than n number of countries. But those numbers do exist, they aren't disputed, and they are staggering. Anywho, listen to me ramble, yo:

Lemme first establish some points crucial to my argument: Every person has a right to a healthy life, which includes a helluva lot of other things (shelter, clothing, etc) . Every person has right to his or her own property and to decide to do with such property as he or she wishes unless it compromises human freedom, dignity, or anything along those lines. The right to life of every human being far outweighs any property rights of any amount of persons. In other words, if I am able to destroy a hundred thousand hummers owned by a hundred thousand different people to save one human life, I have a directy duty to that one person to do so. If I take no action to save that one life, I have committed a moral wrong - something akin to murder. Maybe not murder exactly, but my point here is inaction resulting in a violation of a basic human right in almost equal to action resulting in a violation of a basic human right. Follow me? AKA, not preventing (if able without any harm to self and others) someone from killing someone is almost as bad as shooting someone in the head yourself. Ace? See where I'm headed with this?

We have the ability to satisfy so much essential need in the world, but instead, we satisfy our own superficial material needs and desires. Example: "To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US $13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year. " (http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm) Dude, I have three bottles of axe sitting on my dresser right now. Who the hell needs three? People are dying, but I like smelling good. What my actions say is, it is more important for me to smell good for a couple months than it is for a fellow human to have food for a month or whatever the h-bomb $25-30 will getcha. This is a grave moral wrong committed by a helluva lot of people (you and me included) that is akin to murder. People die, I spend hundreds of dollars a year on vanity. Now I'm going to stop writing and you're going to stop reading, and we're both going to go do something else and forget about this injustice and inequality we daily contribute to because, quite honestly, it is very uncomfortable, depressing, and guilt inducing. I'll hopefully have the stones to return to this later, and hopefully, maybe I can grow up and help someone or something. And I don't know, maybe you and I both can start thinking about how maybe we shouldn't go out to eat, maybe we shouldn't pick up the new broken social scene album, or buy that dwayne wade poster, or that dwayne wade jersey, or that dwayne wade shirt, or more make up, or more perfume, or more shoes, or, and this one is directed right at stewart, more man-thongs (or any sort of thongs). Anyways, I've become incredibly cliche so i'm going to run and hide in the bathroom stall where the poster of hilary duff watches me poop until I feel original again. Love.