Time to Turn the Calendar Back?

     We here at Bloody Nib Manor have always tried to be as kind as possible to the various animals living on our extensive estate. We have treated our various cats and dogs, birds, the odd cow, lamb or pig with the utmost respect even before we milked them or slaughtered them to make a delicious fried chicken, pot roast or ham or lamb chop. The idea here at the Manor is to treat the animals that are to be used for food of one sort or another kindly because, not only are they animals, but because they are animals that are to be killed after too short a life or animals that will be expected to lactate on demand. That is the way of the world. Man is, by nature, an omnivore and not an vegetarian or vegan
     Recently PETA has come up with an ad campaign that basically says that the drinking of milk is a symbol of white supremacy because, well, milk is white and ethnic Europeans drink milk and ethnic Europeans are white. Ergo, accordingly to their logic, the drinking of non-human milk is racist because Europeans drink cow's milk. But they forget that Mongolians drink horse and pony milk and many ethnicites drink sheep and goat milk. Your own dear correspondent, once weaned, had to spend a deal of time drinking goat's milk before he was able to drink cow's milk as a child.
     And here, finally, is the point. PETA is a silly and stupid and dangerous organization that has become mainstream because the news media, after sloughing them off as a joke or extremist, has so infused the news media with their nonsense that the younger reporters believe what the organization is true. And the reason that the younger reporters believe what PETA claims is true is because the colleges that teach journalism have not taught critical thinking. The colleges that teach journalism teach the cutting and pasting of press releases. And this is a dangerous thing.
     This writer remembers when PETA first started and when it was considered an extremist animal rights organization. At that time PETA billboards of pictures of fried chicken on a piece of china and called it Holocaust on a Plate as if the deaths of chickens were equal to the deaths of six million Jews during World War Two. Or make such claims about the fur industry with silly glamour models posing in furs with blood dripping down from the furs. And let this writer admit here and now that industrial farming is not a pretty thing. But neither is plumbing, road working or being a coroner.
     The result has been, while that there is no reduction of customers at the local KFC, the fur industry has taken a hit from PETA's campaign and it has resulted in the loss of a lot of jobs in both fur animal raising, fur processing and the production of various fur garments. It has gotten to the point that when an actress shows up at a premiere for her new movie wearing a ratty old fox fur stole that her grandmother bought sixty years ago PETA calls the poor girl a killer of the worst sort; almost a Himmler. And the press reports this seriously because the people in the press have not been taught to think because the people who taught them did not want to teach them to think. They wanted them to become reflections of their own nonsense: In other words, two legged stools bitching about three legged stools.
     Here's the point. Thirty years ago things that were considered silly and stupid are now considered the norm. Not because they make any sense, but because the media says that they are of import instead of just damn silly and stupid. If we at the Manor could get some young female (and it's usually a female) just out of journalist school to cover the annual sausage rolling festival (because it's ethnic) here at the Manor your faithful correspondent would not have to work any more and just take in the cash from the idiots who think is's a stand against The Man.