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One day, I decided to go vegetarian. My reason was just that I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Working at a Noodles & Company, that was very easy for me to pull off. I ate my food with generous servings of tofu. I really wasn't too pleased with the diet. My girlfriend (who wasn't my girlfriend at the time) tormented me by sending me nice pictures of steak. I had planned to go until Thanksgiving with the diet, but it didn't last that long. One day, after church, Peter wanted to go get lunch at Good Times burgers. I decided to break the diet and eat the delicious bacon cheeseburger with a combination sauce of mayonnaise, ketchup and barbeque sauce that I memorise to this day and apply to my own creations at my current workplace.

While I was in my period of insanity, I took the time to reasearch vegetarianism on the Internet. The reasons that people become vegetarian vary from ethical to æsthetic. To me, vegetarian means that you don't eat meat. To my frustration, not everyone thinks that same way. I remember trying to explain to my grandmother that as a vegetarian, “I don't eat chicken because that's meat; I don't eat fish because that's meat too.” Apparently, the types of vegetarianism range from not eating pork, beef, red meat, meat, meat and dairy, etc. Some people don't eat meat because they don't like the idea of eating something that was once a bloddy mass of tissue. It's been said that everyone likes sausage, but no one likes to see sausage made. That's understandable in my mind. Some don't eat meat because they don't like the taste of meat. That's understandable… yet sad. Some don't eat meat because of œconomical reasons; eating plants is a more efficient use of land and water resources. In the view of world hunger, this is honourable, but if we don't eat the cows, they'll still eat the same grass and drink the same water. I can appreciate all of these reasons to become a vegetarian. The one reason that I find stupid is because of moral, ethical or religious reasons.

Some believe that man is better than animals and, therefore, can eat meat. Others believe that man is better than animals and, therefore, cannot eat meat. Humans and animals have a trait in common: they both must kill life in order to survive. Therefore, from the naturalist viewpoint, eating meat is justified. In commonly-accepted Christian belief, it's perfectly okay to consume meat. However, while I was in my vegetarian state, I came across a group of Christian vegetarians on the Internet. They said things to the degree that vegetarianism is God's ideal diet. I couldn't find the exact site today, but I found similar sites. “Blessed are the merciful. Go vegetarian.” It's really interesting to note that from what I see, they can't really explain how it is that Christ ate meat. “First, regardless of whether the fish in these events are actual fish…” If we're going to go along those lines, why not say, “Regardless of whether the people, places, events, descriptions, poems, proverbs, songs, genealogies, prophisies and teachings are real people, places, events…”?

My advise: eat meat. It tasts good and, it's okay to eat.

Continuing on the pros (and cons) of getting news by RSS, I like to add that I also have the opportunity to read foreign news. I used to read Al-Jazeera until I started watching the political cartoons which were shamelessly dumb. Now, I stick to reading BBC News. However, I'm concerned about something that just came across.¹ Basically, there was some concern that prisoners that are executed in the United States by lethal injection might be coherent during the process. After reading, my response was an exclamation that sounded much like Chandler's cry: “Oh my gosh!”

“Prisoners 'aware'”, “…standards do not meet those for putting animals down.”, “Without anaesthesia, the person would experience suffocation and excruciating pain…” — What happened to the good ol' days where the Nazi spy was just tied up, blindfolded and shot? My question is why are we even going out of our way to worry about the pain that a prisoner feels when he's being executed? Did he really care about pain when he whacked his victim or victims? When the Americans capture Usama bin Laden, he'll get less pain than I got when my parents spanked me as a child? I say, after the Americans catch him, just let Usama go… in the middle of Times Square.

People were created in God's image, but people also murder God's image. Since it's God who's saying that we need to kill people who murder people. It also has practical applications: you don't have to pay to keep them alive in prison with cable television, weight rooms and pornographic magazines. Plus, you don't have to worry about creeps like that in society. As my history professor would say, “It kind of puts a little spring in my step.”

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4444473.stm

I must say that RSS is awesome! When I recently switched to using Thunderbird instead of the older, integrated Mozilla client, I found the RSS feature handy. So, I supplied it with some RSS feeds from sites on the Internet: ABC News, CNN, BBC World Edition, BibleGateway.com's Verse of the Day… I'm even making an RSS feed for this site too so that you can have each of these rants delivered to your inbox as soon as it's available!

However, the point that I'm trying to make is that it's useful; it's useful to determine the liberal media bias in certain media outlets. Eric Rudolph has been in the news lately. He is the man who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympic Games and some abortion clinics and gay bars in the South. There is no doubt in my mind about how setting a bomb off at the Olympic Games is bad. However, I kind of have mixed feelings about the abortion clinic bombings. When I hear about how some poor abortion person¹ who makes a living off of murdering children who haven't even had an opportunity to breath air gets killed or looses an eye, I really can't have sympathy for that. The issue is in the news recently because Rudolph is now facing trial. With my nifty RSS feed reader, I'm reading the articles that come in about this. As I'm reading CNN's article² on the subject, it mentions how he bombed several “women's clinics”. What's a women's clinic? Well, ABC News's article³ states that they were abortion clinics. Hmmmm, what's the connection between women and abortion? Obviously, men don't go getting abortions, but women don't go become the president. Does that mean that we can call the White House the Man House? (On a side note, the term White House is ironically descriptive since all the presidents have been white.)

As John Kerry would say, we're living in an Orwellian society where words are skewed to change our mindset towards certain issues. Women's health — who's against that? Hey, I'm all for pap smears and breast exams! Who in their right mind wouldn't want women to be unhealthy? It's a good thing. Abortion is a bad thing. So, how do you make a bad thing seem good? Write your answer on a piece of paper.

[Cue Jeopardy music.]

I'll trust that you'll grade your own paper in this instance. The answer's not that hard.

1. I can't really use the term abortion doctor here. Doctors “do no harm”.
2. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/rudolph/
3. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=666679&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Lately, the third world has been on my mind lately. I've started to feel deep sympathy for those living in third-world conditions. I always had hope that, somehow, those conditions would be improved. I've felt very positive about this as I've seen third-world countries become more developed as education has become widely available in third world countries.

I began having doubts when my girlfriend, Sarah, asked me about a concept known as dependency theory for her œconomics class. So, I looked into the topic. Dependency theory states that the quality of life that exists in first-world nations is dependent on poorer nations in order to remain wealthy. Today, as third-world nations are becoming more sucessful and technologically advanced, œconomists have considered this theory to be baseless. However, this theory might not necessarily apply to just nations; could this principle also apply to people? The basic question is this: when we buy something, does someone, somewhere down the line, get the shaft?

Take this example: a serving of coffee at my workplace costs $1.40. That is practically affordable for most Americans. However, the farmers who grow the coffee only get two percent of that price.¹ If coffee became more expensive, would Americans buy it? What happens to the coffee industry if products don't sell? So, it seems that raising the price of coffee to give the farmers more money for their efforts would result in less money for the farmers.

My solution? I have none. I'm clueless about how to solve this. I'm starting to see œconomics as a zero-sum game. In other words, when you take the benefit that first-world nations gain and subtract the benefit that third-world nations loose, the result is zero. Communism promises to be a solution in which everyone is paid the same for their efforts, but communism is shown to be equal distribution of suffering where capitalism is unequal distribution of wealth. The way that I see it: we're screwed. Hopefully, I'm seeing it wrong. I hope that there is some principle that I'm overlooking or not paying attention to.

1. http://www.maketradefair.com/en/index.php?file=coffee_chain06.htm

I fail to understand how calculus relates to computer science. If you know, let me know. I'd post my e-mail address here, but I'm afraid that spammers would find the address and send me spam.

I'm awake at 2:00 AM doing calculus homework while listening to Gavin DeGraw and Coldplay to keep me awake because I neglected to do the assignment this weekend. I guess that I have no right to complan about the hour, but I will complain about having to take the class in general. I have no problem with the professor, Dr. Frank Blume. He's a true gentlemen. He's offered to help me. However, I'm afraid that I'm beyond help. I lost track of everything when we got into factorials! Most engineering students have to take four semesters of calculus, but me, being a computer science student, only have to take two (Haleluja!). If I can just hold onto whatever there is for the next few weeks and pass the final with devine intervention, I can proceed without the right to complain about any other course with the possible exception of physics. God does grant us the devine gift of knowledge, so I see no reason why he wouldn't bestow it upon who needs it, but Dr. Blume would say something around the lines, “I have no problem with students asking for knowledge, just not right before my tests.”