The Crowhill Journal

I’m a meat eater, and I have no qualms about killing animals to eat them. But I also believe there are several things brewing that will end meat.

The first is cloning.

It won’t be long before someone can grow meat in a lab. I mean genuine meat, not some silly substitute made of quinoa and beets.

This lab-grown meat will be cheaper, and higher quality. It will have exactly the amount of fat you want. It will be tender and tasty, and it won’t be in weird shapes and sizes.

The people selling this meat will ask why in the world an animal should have to suffer to give you meat of lower quality at a higher cost? And, of course, there’s no answer to that.

But the important point is that this cloned meat will transform the veganism debate entirely. It won’t be a question of the morality of eating animals. The cloned stuff will just be better.

I’ll eat it, and I look forward to it.

The second is disease.

You probably know that many of the worst diseases affecting humans come from livestock. There’s talk that this new Chinese monstrosity is from some hideous bat stew, although I’ve also read that it’s from snakes.

However that turns out, the point is that animals raised (or used) for food are a potential source of trouble. Keeping animals at a safe distance will slow the spread of new diseases.

Taking it all together, I simply don’t see a path for modern meat production to continue. The ugly way we treat animals, the potential for disease, and the easy alternative of cloned meat will put an end to it.

There are a few iconic dreams that most people have — being naked in public, being back at school on the last day of classses and realizing you’ve been enrolled in a class all semester and haven’t attended a single one, being chased by an unstoppable foe, etc.

A recurring dream I have is trying to get somewhere and being stymied at every turn by some dumb thing. The first time I can remember having this dream was in 9th grade when I had to get on a plane the next morning to go to the Bermuda Band Festival. It was the first time I ever went on a big trip without my parents.

One morning this week felt a little like that dream.

I was slow getting up because I was still shaking off a cold, so I was going to be late to the office. Then there was a heavy frost, and my ice scraper wasn’t in my car. I went to the garage to get one, and the garage door wouldn’t close. It would go down about a foot and then go back up, as if it hit something. I knew I could fix that by pulling down on the door, but the switch was at the other end of the garage, so I’d hit the switch, run to grab the door, and … too late.

That happened several times, but I finally got it.

I got on the road and a neighbor flagged me down. My right front tire was flat. It’s been suffering from a slow leak for a while, but this time it was genuinely flat. I went back to the house and got the “fix a flat,” hoping the magic goo would find the leak and plug it.

Best practices with that fix a flat stuff is to deflate the tire completely, inject the goo into the tire (which partially inflates it), then drive a couple miles to spread the stuff around evenly. I did that, drove to the drug store to get some tissues and some OTC cold medicine, then inflated it the rest of the way. (I have a portable air compressor that I keep in the back of the car.)

Finally, I was ready to go to work.

But no. I had forgotten to take my antibiotic. So I had to go back to the house.  Ugh!

The comments are set so that anyone’s first comment is held in moderation, and once you have a comment approved, the rest should be fine.

If I happen to miss that your comment is held in moderation, please drop me a line and I’ll fix it.

In this interview with People‘s British editor in chief, a couple interesting points come out. The first is that print is still very much alive, if you have a product that people want. But perhaps more relevant to this blog is the discussion of “diversity” on magazine covers.

Magazines are under a lot of pressure to have “diverse” covers. “Diverse” here being judged only by the categories that please the woke: sex/gender, skin color, and maybe sexual orientation and that sort of thing. Diversity never means anything that I would care about, like political differences, or different opinions, for example. I find the color of someone’s skin, or who they get naked with, far less interesting than their ideas. (If they have any.)

To me, the woke version of “diversity” is superficial diversity for superficial thinkers, and leads in exactly the wrong direction. It makes it seem that judging people by superficial characteristics is some moral virtue, rather than what it really is.

In the context of magazine covers, it reminds me of the saying, “get woke, go broke,” because the purpose of a magazine cover is to sell the magazine. When you stray from something that simple and essential to your purpose, you’re likely to lose money.

Of course it’s possible that more diverse cover photos (more diverse in woke terms, that is) are more effective at selling magazines, but that isn’t very likely. If you’re picking an image to serve a purpose — e.g., “buy this magazine,” or “click on this buy button” — and then you add another factor to your analysis (but it has to be “diverse!”), you’re almost certainly going to detract from the original purpose. That’s just the way things work. Consider, for example, “I want the sharpest knife, but it has to pink” against “I want the sharpest knife.”

Having said that, a business can (and I would say should) have a social conscience and try to do what’s right, even if that detracts a little from the bottom line. If you consider the woke version of diversity some sort of social good (I do not), then … what’s the best way to navigate this?

A sensible magazine editor would get the numbers. Run the “best cover” against the “best woke cover” and see how much it’s costing you (it’s almost certainly costing you), then decide if it’s worth the alleged social benefit.

The worst thing to do is simply to allow the woke crowd to force you into an ideological approach to a business issue without any idea of how much it’s hurting your business. 

Crowhill’s kids are a little too old for him to have to worry about this, but Pigweed has a teenager, so the boys struggle with the question, “How cool should dad be?”

Not very, they think.

Dads who try to be their kids’ friend are taking the wrong approach. Dad has a far more important role than just being a friend. In any event, here’s a somewhat rambling reflection on cool dads.

And speaking of completely uncool dads, you might want to give this a listen: The objectification of women. In which we show how incredibly uncool we really are.