keldwud.org

warning potentially offensive rant coming, if you identify yourself as an environmentally and politically aware counter-culture individual who is easily offended, please do not read the following.

I’m concerned about America’s Celiac Disease epidemic. Originally this disease only affected roughly 1% of the population, but apparently Celiac Disease is running rampant because you can’t go anywhere without being sold on some sort of product that is Gluten Free.

Either that, or every dumb shit who follows every Oprah fad is too stupid to use their freaking brains to understand that “Gluten Free” is another label that corporations have found people will pay premium for. Even foods that are naturally gluten free are now being marked up because they are combating the epidemic that is Celiac’s Disease.

What gets me the most is how every fad in the “hippie” community or the “burners” or any one who proclaims they are rising up against mankind’s tyranny against nature or basically many of the people who think they are counter-culture, every fad comes from Oprah. It’s like she’s the unrecognized anti-critical thinker that is unintentionally leading the ‘movement’.

The best way to pacify any counterculture movement that doesn’t support profits is to provide them with misinformation and fear.

He who controls the spice, controls the universe :-p

Fun fact for those of you who buy into this whole Gluten Free fad.

Wheat production in the U.S. continues to decline as we rely more on imported wheat and subsidies for wheat have been reduced.

If you were in the business of selling food and one of your staple ingredients cost more to obtain, would you eat that cost or would you pass it along to the customer?

Second question. If you choose to pass along the cost to the customer, how do you combat declining sales? It is sometimes natural that sales decrease when you increase the cost of your product. What if you knew that marketing has been proven as an effective tool to increase sales, would you use it?

Third question. If you chose to use marketing to cover the price gap between paying more for your product and asking your customer to pay more in return in order to increase sales, how would you market your product if your product used to contain wheat but no longer contains it?

Why would somebody be willing to pay more for something if you are removing an ingredient? How could you convince your customer that you’re providing a valuable service to them?

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/wheat/YBtable05.asp

Take a look at the last item in the list from the pdf linked below and remember that the U.S. population is not static, it is also growing so remember to take into account that as the population grows, so does the demand for wheat. Wheat production has been in decline since the late 90′s.

http://www.ndwheat.com/uploads%5Cresources%5C549%5Cndhistwhtacresdurum.pdf

here’s my previous response I made earlier about this whole issue.

*disclaimer*

warning: press your tl;dr button now if you aren’t functionally literate. All that’s going to happen if you read the whole thing if you’re *illiterate* is that you’re going to make personal attacks against my character and then threaten me or my loved ones with physical harm or distress.

remember, this is the internet, stop taking everything so seriously

***/end disclaimer***

I’d rather somebody resign because they weren’t doing their job. I could care less what they do in their own home.

Or are we trying to say that we don’t want people telling us what we can or can’t do in our own home as far as sexuality or marijuana but then we expect politicians to respect that when we force them to resign not based on their job performance but based on their sexuality?

Brian Jarvis:

If we evicted every individual in government office who has committed adultery (let alone phone sex and porn), we wouldn’t have much of a government left.

Politics, government, and and lying go hand in hand until you get down on a local level. Then it’s only *most* of the time.

I would think that in a democracy, despite our belief that the ‘other side’ is always winning in our government and always feeling like we’re on the losing team, our representatives represent a cross-section of *an* average population. Maybe not *our* average population but an average nonetheless.

Statistically speaking, we’re going to find adulterers in a certain percentage of a population no matter what government or religion or belief system you have so I’d have to argue that basing your feelings about a particular representative based on his home life or his sexuality is pretty weak because you’re not going to change a person’s sexuality and you definitely shouldn’t be dictating what other people do in their homes unless they are harming others or in a politician’s case, creating a conflict of interest.

No matter how hard we try, we are always going to have adulterers in office, I suggest we get over it and start focusing on the actual issues. Spending time on incidents we cannot resolve keeps us from the ones that we *can* change and the ones that we *can* resolve.

Quit being a passive citizen led around by your base emotions and start projecting your energies into creating solutions for the issues that *do* cause us personal harm or cause us to lose our civil liberties.

Brian Jarvis:

Part of this problem stems from the expectation that all politicians are supposed to have monogamous relationships.

For all we know both husband and wife have a don’t ask don’t tell policy while on business. (Lots of couples do.) Someone in the public catches something juicy from time to time, leaks info the the public, and a politician has no choice but to come clean if they want to keep doing their job without losing even more face than they already have.

For many spouses of politicians, it’s more of a strain that the issue goes public than it is that their husband was with another woman.

We don’t know this entire story. So much in the political world is done for face simply because human beings can’t accept others for who they are without instantly judnging them.

One of my discussion topics in my theater class where the assignment was: “What are your thoughts on censorship?”

I avoided sharing in this discussion for the very reason that I have too many emotions involved concerning this subject, but I ask anyone who is offended by this view should please move along as my discussion is somewhat inflammatory and very close to being troll-bait, although not by design. It just generally happens that way when you take such an extreme view on such an emotionally charged subject. So I apologize if any flaming occurs as a result of my remarks.

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Thomas Jefferson

I have some very strong opinions about censorship. My bias mostly comes from my philosophy that information should be free and freely accessible. Please forgive my ‘slippery slope’ fallacy, but censorship is a tool that is abused and stifles growth more often than it ‘protects’ somebody from harm. As this is only a 100 word discussion topic asking for opinions, I will not be providing references or empirical evidence but I will share my opinions on the matter.

Censorship allows anyone who is offended to control what other people are allowed to consume. It provides people with a false justification with which to impose their will upon others with no repercussions. Censorship also allows people to feel entitled to philosophy and lets people think that it is acceptable to forcefully control the lives of others.

I do not care for your cries of “what about the children”/”save the children”. This rhetoric proves to me that the only purpose of censorship is to manipulate the emotions and fears of everyone concerned. Censorship serves no other purpose than to give those with intellectually incapable minds a more ‘level’ playing ground with which to aggressively attack those who have more rational minds. It is their way of trying to make up for their laziness of the brain and excuses them from having to exercise their right to refuse to consume offensive content. Worry about your own consumption of information. Don’t force your flawed world perceptions upon mine or my family’s.

Relating this subject to current events brings me to the topic of censoring Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn by replacing all instances of the word “Nigger” with the word “Slave”. Rewriting history as it was actually spoken speaks volumes of the lengths people will go to in order to avoid becoming offended or avoid the remote possibility of offending others.

The abuses of censorship far outweigh any social benefits we could curate by instituting any form of ‘reasonable’ censorship rules. I know I keep repeating myself, but, I’ll say it a different way again. Censorship can cause greater magnitudes of harm to society’s growth and learning than the harm that is caused by somebody being offended by objectionable material, especially considering no one has the right to force you to watch offensive material while those that are offended have the right to force others to not view objectionable material.

Unedited copy paste from my facebook rants: *updated Dec 06*

Fact: inserting “save the children” into any message will assure it’s success in becoming viral, regardless of the source.

Stop Child Abuse, Turn Them Into Skittles

I did *my* part to stop child abuse by changing my profile pic on facebook. For every profile pic that changes to a cartoon, another child will be spared the rod. Save a child by changing your profile pic now! plz copy and paste, if you don’t it means you are a child abuser.

If you’re serious about saving the children, maybe try some of the following.

http://www.givewell.org/united-states/top-charities/invest-in-kids

http://www.givewell.org/united-states/education/top-charities/KIPP

?”Don’t confuse what “feels good” with what actually helps the most – Wanna know something that feels good? I fund micro-loans on Kiva. It’s a ridiculously cheap way to feel good about helping people. It totally plays into this romantic story I have in my mind about helping business owners help themselves. And there’s lots of shiny pictures of people I can identify with. But does loaning $25 to someone on the other side of the planet really make the biggest impact possible? Definitely not. So I fund a few Kiva loans a month because it fulfills a deep-seated psychological need of mine — a need that doesn’t go away by ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist. But once that’s out of the way, I devote the vast majority of my time and resources to contributing to other non-profits with staggeringly higher pay-offs.” – Less Wrong

I’m against child abuse, too. But I’d rather find a more pro-active way to help children than changing my profile pic on facebook.

It is an example of ‘low risk’ strategy for social change. It doesn’t require any sacrifice or effort on the part of the participant. But it makes people feel like they are a part of something big and makes them feel better about themselves, even though they haven’t really invested any part of themselves.

Now that we feel like we’ve participated, we no longer feel the need to be pro-active in other ways because we already contributed by changing our profile pic on facebook.

“It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” – New Yorker

Remember, the original “change your profile pic to your favorite cartoon character” meme did not include an appeal to our emotions by invoking child abuse, it was only after a couple weeks of unsuccessful propagation that the meme morphed and gained traction after adding the call to arms against child abuse.

This causes me to suspect the design and the intent of the message, therefore my incessant “whining” and “bitching”. I’d just like to see some more critical thinking and less blind parroting.

Logical Fallacies:

Appeal to Emotion – ‘This sort of “reasoning” is very common … serves as the basis for a large portion of modern advertising. …aimed at generating feelings in people so that these feelings will get them to vote or act a certain way. … In most cases, such speeches and commercials are notoriously free of real evidence.’

In this case, feelings were generated towards child abuse, therefore we felt the need to change our facebook profile pics.

Nope, no downside. Just trying to help people use their brains a bit more and so that they are less likely to be manipulated through their emotions.

The more friends that I have that can’t be manipulated by their emotions, the better my world will be, because then large corporations and shifty politicians can no longer influence them because you cannot sell shoddy products or shady promises to logic and reason.

http://i.imgur.com/Drw9c.png

**UPDATE**

Good place to keep track of the whole cartoon profile picture event. Now there’s another one being spread about how it’s all a conspiracy by the pedophiles. Shit gets funnier and funnier, the stuff that you guys believe without question. It’s religion that teaches you to accept information without evidence.

If you have a cartoonpicture as your profile picture, REMOVE IT! a group of pedophiles madeit up. They’re doing it because kids will accept their friend requestfaster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with child.violence. It was on a TV show that warns you about Internet fraud, plus it’s on the news tonight. SET THIS……… AS YOUR STATUS AND WARN OTHERS!See

more memes. First we pass along the first one blindly without question, then we pass along the second piece of misinformation. Without question.

If we weren’t copy pasting statuses in the first place, none of this would be happening. amirite?

who needs critical thinking when we have facebook?

If you have time to search the internet for a picture, you also have time to do a bit of critical thinking and research the information before you blindly pass it along and ask your friends to do the same.