regularolyogamatt’s Recent Comments

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  Stopping an out of control vegetarian diet

  This Ask Umbra was surprisingly relevant to me as I have just stopped being vegetarian/freegetarian. I have been freegetarian (meaning if someone had ordered meat and couldn´t finish it, or if there were meat in the fridge about to go bad I would go ahead and eat it since there is no reason for such a nutritious and valuable thing to go to waste) but mostly vegetarian, and I have learned to wonders of a mostly plant based diet. Alhough my reasons for being vegetarian had mostly to do with the concept of ahimsa, or no harm, and following a yogic/dhammic diet, I figured that freegan eats were allowed since I was making sure that shunned foods didn´t go to waste, and by making a fuss about not throwing away food I found that I made my friends and relatives more conscious about their waste. Unfortunately I now find myself in a country where vegetarianism is an alien concept to say the least. You ask for a plate in Nicaragua without meat and they give you chicken. You explain that chicken is meat too, and they give you a cow heart. You explain to them that you don´t eat any part of any animal and they give you rice and beans fried in pig lard. It´s really impossible. I had the same situation in Cuba where I was for 4 months surviving entirely on rice, beans, eggs, soy protein (which I think they actually mixed with ground up entrails of a variety of animals), guava paste, black market yogurt and mangoes the size of my head, crackers, rum, and cohibas. After four months of that I nearly ejaculated with joy upon my first visit to Whole Foods, every package of delicious produce and exotic organic food shooting semi-sexually charged rays into the bottom of my stomach down to my gonads.

  Well, 2 months into my next foray into the world of eating nothing but rice and beans I said to hell with it and sat down and ordered a beef steak, and fried chicken. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!! I never forgot how GOOD meat tastes, but I had been psychotically repressing myself from it for so long that when I finally had those mouth watering morsels I knew it would be a long time before readventuring into the world of vegetarianism (ie until i get back to the states). After the first few days of binge eating entire chickens in a sitting I have finally balanced out to about 2 portions of meat per day (which is really only like 1 portion for me since I am a big guy), and have no intentions of looking back til I get back to the States since all the meat here is free range and grass fed. And DELICIOUS. I swear to god, meat is the only thing Nicaraguans know how to cook deliciously.

  Another point I will make is based on a passage from the book Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, by Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert). He talks about being in India and studying under his master Maharaji and going insane on his vegetarian diet. He was tormenting himself with thoughts of meat and finally decided to eat some pork ribs at a local chinese restaurant. He did a big long prayer of gratitude and awareness of the animal´s suffering before digging in but then he went at it, and at the end of the meal a white guy comes up to him and explains that he is a devout christian and saw Ram doing his long prayer before his meal and asked him if he was religious. Ram explained his spiritual training and then the guy asked him about his diet since he was a heavy guy and had been wondering about his eating habits of late. Ram said that "I would have given anything to have said ´well of course I´M a vegetarian´ but there were the bones staring up at me."

  The point of this is that we are humans. Humans are not necessarily basically evil, but basically self-centered and survival driven. The more we try to repress our base desires like having sex or eating meat, the more likely we are to stoke our ego flames saying "yes, i am a better person now, i am doing the right thing" when in reality we are driving ourselves insane thinking about eating a hot dog while bonking our monkey brains out. I think the Michael Pollan got it right: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.On Umbra on vegetarian remorse posted 2 years, 2 months ago 38 Responses

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  new rules

  Here are a couple of new rules:

  1. If you don´t feel obliged to keep the campaign promises you make to the people who vote you into office then you shouldn´t feel obliged to do the evil bidding of sketchy campaign financers.

  2. Read books and studies and listen to competent advisors. Don´t take money from people that make your skin crawl. Make informed decisions, not decisions based on personal gain.

  It´s about the bling bling y´all...you explain that going green equals making green, then, well, we might actually manage to change something

  On Advice for political leaders on how to deal with climate change posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses

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  I hate to say it, but Bailo has a point...

  It seems to me that a very salient point has been omitted from most posts apart from (and I really hate to say this) JBailo´s, and that is that for better or for worse we live in a very shallow world deeply influenced by the triumph of capitalism and emphasis on the individual. The average human today is trained to stop paying attention after :30 seconds with respect to visual and auditory messages and at most one paragraph with reading. The best way to capture people´s attention for those short time spans are: 1. (as Bailo hinted at) the insinuation that by "purchasing a particular product or making a certain lifestlye change" you will get lots of hot and steamy SEX, and 2. that by "" you will get lots and lots of stinky green MONEY. The VAST majority of us spend more time thinking about how to get more sex and money than we will ever spend considering the threat of nuclear annihilation, dwindling water and oil supplies, or global warming COMBINED. Religion might come somewhere in between the camps of self gratification and the consideration of long term threats to self gratification, but as often as not with religious moralization we become even more consumed by self centered toughts. That is to say religion typically fails at its general goal of stopping people from being so damned evil. What really gets me about the response from the social "scientists" to Tidwell´s piece is that they are so attached to the idea that people are capable of changing for the better and that small personal changes can affect the larger framework of money and power that govern the overarching business, political, and religious structures upon which our macro-societies are based. What gets me about Tidwell´s piece is that he implies that getting people to call a representative will do any more good than buying "green."

  People are lazy, ignorant, and pretty much terribly self-centered assholes generally. People typically by a certain good or do certain actions in order to benefit themselves, and the most gratifying things for the vast majority of people are money and sex (and religion, but that´s too loaded of an issue to get into here). Remember when the Vatican issued the 10 driving commandments? Let´s take the 5th driving commandment which reads: Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
  Silly Vatican, one of the first purposes of automobiles after driving was as a shelter in which to commit the ORIGINAL sin. And as long as stupid 18 year old girls still go silly dumb for a guy driving anything that looks remotely cool and badass, then dudes with nice cars are going to continue to get lots of stupid 18 year old girls to take a ride with them (Grist hiring staff please take note of the richness of that pun).

  We as a society cannot begin to start seriously tackling the problems facing us until we make them more relevant to the average joe and by positioning it such that he really believes that by making a change he will be benefitting himself monetarily and with the ladies. It is impossible to do this by moralizing the issue, because the average joe when confronted with a feel bad issue like the extinction of polar bears will say "aw that´s too bad" then flip the channel to see Paris Hilton saying "yeah, um, like, we´re here tonight, to like, save polar bears, or stop polluting, or something (cue ditzy and vapid and slightly terrifying/slightly sexy smile toward the camera)" and say to himself "I can dig that kind of environmental protection!" while turning back to his polar bear steak dinner. I´m not saying we should bring global warming into the gutter by placing ads on tv juxtaposing a bunch of cheerleaders making frowny faces :( with a hummer. But you know, maybe we should...I was going to say that we should first address the underlying sickness of our society, but then I remembered that our society is sick because humans are sick, so there is no cure. So sure man, let´s hose down a bunch of cute barely legal teens in bikinis and have them hug polar bears while frowning at pictures of the heads of coal fired power plants, Let´s give Dennis Kucinich some breast implants and a queer eye make over (is queer eye already not cool anymore), or spray dioxin on Fred Thompson´s face so he becomes as ugly as Viktor Yuschenko...it´s worth a shot and the worst case scenario is...well, we´ll fry to death knowing that we tried all options short of firing ze missiles.

  It´s about the bling bling y´all...you explain that going green equals making green, then, well, we might actually manage to change something

  On Social scientists respond to Mike Tidwell posted 2 years, 2 months ago 39 Responses