I’m a Mad Cow

by MaxPower

SARS…. Ahhhhhhhhh! Don’t lick any door knobs! Oh no wait that’s passé. The money is in bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, or Mad Cow Disease. Guess which name the media likes using. Don’t eat any meat! Don’t you know that 95 people have died from the human variant of Mad Cow disease?

95 people!

In the history of mankind!

Now I’m aware of the old Stalinist quote that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic, however, one must place a the correct amount of importance on these ‘crises’ that are manufactured by the media.

Fact: One cow slaughtered in January in Alberta had BSE

Fact: The US, Australia, Japan, Mexico and others have banned cattle and meat imports from Canada. (Not the Europeans for some reason though, they are usually the first to jump on the ban-the-import bandwagon, i.e. genetically modified organisms)

But why the big hubbub? In 2000, 770,000 people worldwide died from measles or measles related complications. There is a safe and cheap vaccine for measles, yet the uptake of the vaccine is low in some regions where you think people would know better. In the UK, 2002 was the worst year for measles infections over the past 20 years – why? The take-up rate in the UK for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination is 85%. And why is it so low? Because parents out there have been convinced by end-of-the-world prophesies in the media that a couple of disreputable studies link the vaccination with autism in children. The studies basically went as such: 98% (or whatever percent) of children who have autism had been given the measles vaccination thus this vaccine causes autism. But the studies make no mention that in the mid 1990’s between 97 and 98% of all children had the vaccination to begin with.

Here is my study: 100% of the people who have cancer drink water. Thus water causes cancer. FOOLS, as I have R4nted about before, causality is almost impossible to prove. You can’t prove water causes cancer, what about oxygen or anything else the majority of the people have been exposed to? So following this logic you can’t say with any statistical certainty that a vaccine causes autism when over 90% of the population get the vaccine in the first place.

So even if there were a safe vaccine to prevent against SARS or BSE or whatever you may want to prevent against, I can guarantee some people wouldn’t get it because they feel the chance of getting SARS or measles to be lower than the chance of getting the possible side effects of the vaccine. Which is how I feel now but in reverse. I think that the chance of me getting BSE or SARS is so low that I may as well go ahead with my daily routine, eat meat and whatever lest I step off the curb today walking home and get hit by a bus.

Back to cows. As soon as I heard about this BSE thing I KNEW that the veggies were going to jump all over it. “See I told everyone that eating meat is bad, just look, you can’t get mad cow from a carrot!” I have nothing against vegetarians, eat whatcha want; it doesn’t concern me at all. However, I get pissed when some radical vegetarians don’t take the same line with carnivores. They DO care that I eat meat, killing innocent yet succulent cows. They demand that I stop. They consider me a monster who has no feelings for the prevention of cruelty to animals. This is the fundamental flaw with most radical factions of any lobby group – they lobby by insulting other people’s lifestyles. It’s the same with radical Islam, ‘the Western lifestyle shows that you are infidels’, radical Christianity ‘living a gay lifestyle shows you will go to hell’, radical feminism ‘getting married shows you are part of the male-instituted hierarchy of domination over females’ or finally radical vegetarianism ‘eating meat paints you as a killer and a monster who has no thoughts of this wholesale slaughter of animals.’

Look I eat cow. Love it. My favourite food is a medium-rare, juicy hunk of Alberta beef, preferably BBQ’d to perfection and garnished with onions with a side of potatoes with a Caesar to drink. Your favourite food may be an organically grown, GMO free tofu block, served with a drink of triple reverse osmosis filtered glacier water. Good for you. Good for me. Don’t get in my face and tell me what I should eat. I can eat damn well whatever I want.

There was a picture in the local paper recently of two ‘lobbyists’ standing outside a Safeway with signs ‘Don’t go mad, go Veg’ who were heckling people entering the store not to buy meat. I don’t heckle you to eat meat, so get away from me before I throw a salami your way.

MaxPower