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Reason 5: Plants aren't on the same level as human beings.
Then why are cows? Rabbits? Sheep? Birds? Insects? Where is this magical, arbitrary line that says it's okay to eat a pumpkin but not to eat a fish?

It's not a rhetorical question. Apply some of your reason and think of how an animal differs from a plant. If you can't think of any difference, then you shouldn't have any trouble eating a diet composed entirely of pumpkins.

If you can think of some differences, you may realize that some promising avenues may include sentience, a central nervous system, and so forth. A fish has a brain and CNS; he or she can learn tricks, guard a territory, and engage in other complex behaviors, thanks to a long-term memory. A pumpkin doesn't generally do those things. Fish react to perceived danger and to pain. Pumpkins don't swim away, usually.

If killing plants still bothers you, you can eat fruit. Fruit is "intended" by the plant to be eaten by animals. That is why fruit is nummy. Num num num.

Reason 6: Meat is bad for you.
Citation needed. Last I heard you need a meticulous diet of a huge array of vegetables (something that no human could have done pre-civilisation) to maintain a healthy vegan life.

Citation needed, yourself. Chimpanzees are mainly frugivores. We probably were, too. A number of modern raw foodists eat mainly fruit and tender greens. In America, primary killers are heart disease and cancer; rates for both decline as meat is displaced by plants in the diet. Dr. Dean Ornish has clinically proven that his vegan/vegetarian diet can reverse heart disease. Google him.

Why do some vegetarians eat fish and/or chicken but not duck or lamb

No vegetarians eat fish or chicken. Fish and chicken are not vegetables.

Because I have never had a rational, coherent argument with a vegan

Perhaps that's because you believe fish and chicken are vegetables, and that a fish is the same as a pumpkin. I'm sorry to say that the evidence for clear thinking is not overwhelmingly stacked in your favor at the moment.

And why do some (ie. vegans) go as far as to not eat animal products like eggs, milk and the like, including from "ethical" sources?

Asked and answered -- note your use of quotes around "ethical". This is an old FAQ but it explains how each animal product is produced:

http://www.flashback.se/archive/vegan_l.html

Ok, but CAN you bring the sugar bags onto the flight? It can be used as a rocket fuel and here; and as an explosive Sugar has a LOT of energy!

What I really wonder about is the converse. How many highly useful (in humans) drugs have been abandoned at an early stage because they had no effect on mice.

It's interesting that LSD was thought to have little more than a very mild stimulant effect (and had been abandoned in favor of more promising lysergic acid compounds) until Hoffman got some of it on him and took the first acid trip. Apparently either it's not all that apparent when a mouse is tripping or mice don't trip.

He was looking for a better medication to stop uterine bleeding.

See this.

I wonder what other "uninteresting" substances have been ignored because they don't happen to have any effect on humans in microgram doses and don't effect mice in any dosage.

Unfortunatly, there's no much of a solution to that since we can't have people randomly ingesting chemical experiments just to see.

"Maybe this poor blog should just relocate their server to the United States to avoid the Swedish laws then."

Actually, it is already located in the US (on the Wordpress servers), so it can't really be relocated there. The funny thing is that if I remember correctly, Flashback, a Swedish-language forum open to just about any discussion, has had these kind of problems earlier, and I believe it was tried against the same law. It was freed, as it is located in the UK...

http://skender.be/supportdenmark/MohammedDrawings. jpg
http://www.antibuerokratieteam.de/wp-content/moham med_alle.jpg
http://www.stefan-herre.de/mohammed_karikaturen.jp g
http://www.welt.de/z/photos/index.php/item/karikat uren/
http://www.di2.nu/files/Muhammed_Cartoons_Jyllands _Posten.html
http://www.faithfreedom.org/Gallery/28.htm
http://www.michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm
http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/Jyll ands-Posten_Muhammad_drawings.jpg

And some more links (page in Swedish):
http://www.flashback.se/showarticle.php?id=58

THC Credit can extrapolate numbers from real cards and check them: http://www.thc.org/download.php?t=r&f=thc-c191.zip

You should signup using Tor as your proxy too: http://tor.eff.org/

Also some cool google stuff:
How to Verify Credit Card Numbers In Perl
Sample credit card numbers to use for testing http://perl.about.com/library/weekly/aa080600g.htm
cardware:
http://www.flashback.se/library/software/carding.s html

Anonymouse surfing: http://www.anonymization.net/ http://www.anonymizer.com/ http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/ians/ http://www.guardster.com/ http://www.antiproxy.com/ http://www.attackcensorship.com/ http://proxify.com/ http://www.anonymous.as/ http://www.mezzy.com/s-index.php http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html http://unipeak.com/ http://www.urlencoded.com/ http://www.behidden.com/ Full system proxy systems: http://tor.eff.org/ http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ http://internet.flashback.se/ http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.silentsurf.com/ http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html Ordinary proxies: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/firewall/cou ntry.aspx/Sweden-se http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html http://www.proxz.com/ http://www.digitalcybersoft.com/ProxyList/ http://www.freeproxy.ru/ http://www.samair.ru/proxy/ http://www.multiproxy.org/anon_proxy.htm http://www.rrdb.org/ http://www.free-proxy-servers.com/ http://www.proxylists.net/ http://www.proxywhois.com/anonymous-proxy-list.htm http://www.openproxies.com/ Plenty, as said.

Heise has just released a dire warning (and temporary treatment) from c't regarding ATA hard disk security passwords: There may be a gaping security hole in millions of computers that allows malware to lock the hard drives from their legitimate users. Some will remember what this means from extortionate trojan horses as early as 1989 (search for "Panama" - judicial outcome in 1995). Now factor in how some similar disaster, "supported" by firmware, could spread over the Internet rather than by postal mail today...

Try Albert Hofmann's own book, LSD - My Problem Child [flashback.se], which has been available on the Web -- for free -- for about a decade already. It's also available here [cmu.edu] as a single text file.

Much more interesting, exciting and enlightening.

Much more interesting, exciting and enlightening.

You can't say for sure that things would be better if we legalized drugs.

Ask the people in jail.

I can look at American history before the 1914 Harrison Act, and failures of alcohol and tobacco prohibition here and abroad, and I can look at the success of harm reduction policies in other nations. It's not like our current drug prohibition is unique in history - failed drug prohibition schemes go back thousands of years.

I can't say for sure, any more than I can say for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow, but I would bet my right arm that under a scheme of outright legalization of soft drugs, prescription hard ones for addicts, and accurate drug education (not D.A.R.E. propaganda), things would indeed be better.

What? Like Bananadine?

It's a shame that the government would use Child pornography as a scapegoat to promote taking away someone's right to view pornography. Let me make some facts clear, first off my wife is the Euro Director of EHAP (Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia) so I have no problems seeing pedophiles go to jail or being killed (sorry I have no tolerance for those who hurt kids.) But using the kids is an excuse by the government to minimize the rights of people one step at a time.

There's a site that ha(s/d) an online database of pedophiles recently, their names, pictures, etc., and it was quickly dragged into the legal muck to halt its operations. Why doesn't governments all over allow these kinds of sites to run if they were so concerned with the children?

The failure of the (Clinton) administration to enforce those laws has led to a proliferation of obscenity, both online and off," Goodlatte said. "And I am particularly concerned about the safety of our children on the Internet, where they're subjected to child pornography and solicitation in a massive way."

Asked Goodlatte: "I'd like to know to what extent the Justice Department will use its resources to assist state and local enforcement in combating this cyberattack on our nation's children."

Getting back to privacy, the government has no right whatsoever to dictate what should or should not be seen on the Internet or other due to the impartiality of it all. For instance I find Rotten, Defacation Vacation, offensive as all hell, yet why shouldn't they have the same liberty to post their expressions? I also find the Catholic religion offensive so why shouldn't I have the same right to have those leaders arrested since it's not my cup of tea.

You cannot have fair laws which state The cow can't jump over the moon but the pigs can, because its not fair. Government was put in place by the people, all of the people, and to bend over to try and appease a select amount of people is hypocritical as all hell.

Aside from this all, how is this going to affect the future outcomes of privacy? First they say they're doing this for the people, then they'll say implanting your brain with whatever product they choose is in your best interest as well. Its extremely disturbing, and I hope groups like the EFF, ACLU, and others get involved to halt the government from overstepping their bounds.

I don't know about USA, but in Sweden all major commercial internet providers refuse to sell bandwidth to a news and freedom of speech organisation (www.flashback.se) they don't like. They also refuse to sell to anyone who buys from them and then sells on to flashback.

A bunch of links about it, a few in english.