wade's Blog

Sleepless_Madcow
Date: Jan 12th, 2004 4:52:23 am - Subscribe
Mood: pessimistic


My plan to sleep early and awake early has failed. After about 4 hours of sleep, I'm back to unsleep. I had hoped to at least make it to 7am. This usually occurs after periods of sleeping when the body is tired. So I would go to sleep when tired, thereby avoiding any sleeplessness. Near instant sleep is good. If I let myself completely turn to natural sleep, I think I will arrive at 24 hours of wakefulness and around 10-15 hours of sleep. Seems weird, but it is so comfortable when I am in that swing. Interestingly at the same time, moments of initial sleep and unsleep rotate forward. I will end up going to sleep later every time. Starting the cycle at 12am, it will eventually goto 1am, 3am, 6am, 12pm, 1pm... and so on. Not at those particular times, but I present the idea. Modern society foils my ideal sleep pattern; particularly UTSA. So therefore, I would desire a forced time of initial unsleep at about 8am. This is further complicated by my habit of not sleeping the same amount each night. My needed amount ranges from 4 hours (lower quantities) to 8 hours (most quantities) to 12 hours (lower quantities). Probably varied by the amount of daily effort and total period of preceding unsleep.

So like Dad has been doing for about the past three years, to much ridicule, I have decided to avoid eating certain beef products, particularly ground beef. Madcow is the main culprit. Of course, judging from experiences of people that have worked in meat markets; who have told me not to buy ground beef, a person shouldn't eat it anyway. I am still going to eat steaks.

So why now? Actually I have been considering it for a long time and have been much limiting my consumption of the ground beef. Finding one instance of madcow in the United States should frighten most people because of the extremely lax controls. And the cow that forced the current scandel very obviously had something wrong with it. Of course most cattle slaughtered are not an old cow. They are about a year old. It will not demonstrate signs of the infection. The only way to find out is to test the brain. And then consider that two major protein supplement producers have admitted to including cow blood in the supplement intended to enhance the cattle, a procedure that has been baned. So American feedlots continue to feed cow to cow. An industry that continues to do this deserves the economic fallout that will occur. However, as my understanding goes, most ranchers do not do the protein supplements. That occurs at the feedlot.

The sad part is that after the latest scare, most beef will probably become safer. But like I said earlier, feeding cow to cow... you are going to get what is coming to you.

So several people have commented to me. Including paraphrases, "If it's God's choice, I'll die," suggesting that somehow by not eating beef I am countering God's plan. Well I don't believe this. If you do that is your problem. What about, "You can't live your life in fear." Well it's not quite like that. Everyone knows Russian Roulette. This is like that, but there are many more chambers and many more bullets. Put it this way... If you had two devices, that you put to your head. One would one hundred percent of the time give you a good massage, and it makes you feel content. The second device would make you feel content (and just content, but in a slightly different way then the first. Perhaps slightly a better contentedness.) nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine time out of a million. But you have once chance of a million of it sending a powerful microwave beam into your head and instantly cooking it; thereby insuring death. Would you continue using the second device, especially because it only makes you feel content. No super high or extreme comfort. Well, I will stick to the first device. One in a million is too high of odds. Madcow is like that. In fact most beef eaters in the U.S., including me could already be infected with it. We don't know because the beef industry so strongly rejected any kind of controls. It was with regret that they supposeably eliminated feeding beef to cattle. Personally I don't trust them. Even ranchers that bought beef free protein supplements could have been tricked by greedy suppliers.

Ok so my position is that I will only eat beef steaks. Of course, depending on the butcher and cutting practices, I could get madcow anyway. I am not going to tell anyone to not eat beef. Eat it to your hearts content. More for you, right? And it will be less expensive.

On a side note, is there a way to eliminate comments to a blog and still make it publicly readable?
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