Tea Leaves

Events have conspired this week to bring up a topic that I find sort of near and dear to my heart and yet simultaneously deeply depressing. That topic is the state of “classical” music in our modern times. Growing up, my father listened to nothing but classical music in the same way he read no paper except the New York Times. Once you hear the best, he reasoned, nothing else is interesting.
(more…)

This story makes me angry. It’s about vegans who feed their cats vegan diets.

Cats, you see, are obligate carnivores. Feeding them a diet without meat (or rather, with amino acids that are only found in adequate quantities in meat) is abuse. I can understand people who don’t eat animal products because they think it is cruel or exploitative, even though I don’t share that belief. But I have nothing but contempt for people who have ethical objections to eating any animal product, but delight in torturing their pet.

Apparently, for these people “vegan” means “against animal cruelty where the cruelty is fast enough that I notice it.” If your cat goes blind over a 3 year period because you were abusing it, though, that’s fantastic.

I’m so enraged I can hardly see straight.

A number of people have commented on my mockery of “Cousin Lovin’ Poetry,” responding with detailed and impassioned screeds about how I don’t understand genetics, how the Bible thinks that people who have sex with their cousins are morally superior to those that don’t, how in Saudi Arabia cousin-lovin’ is the norm, how Europeans are so much more sophisticated than Americans about this issue, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. The lack of perspective on this is hilarious.

One poster says:

There are no contemporary studies that indicate cousins have children with significantly higher than normal birth defects.

And then, two paragraphs later, says:

Fact: Children of non-related couples have a 2-3% risk of birth defects, as opposed to first cousins having a 4-6% risk.

On my planet, that’s a pretty significant additional risk. As one of the commenters below observes, it is in fact double the risk of birth defects.

But I don’t want to get bogged down in the genetics argument. It is, frankly, a sideshow. Let me be perfectly clear: my main concern is not that you will create a child with genetic defects by marrying your cousin, but that by breeding you might pass on your condition that results in your having a complete lack of any sense of humor.
(more…)