You Are What You Ate Last

OPINION — We seem to be running short on a lot of stuff lately. According to a website called ListVerse, there are several important commodities that are in meager supply, such as sand. Yes, sand. The site claims we’re running out of sand, which is used to make concrete, glass, asphalt, toothpaste, and beaches. ListVerse says China has used more sand during the past four years than the US did during the whole 20th century, which seems like a lot. I’m thinking maybe ListVerse should check the deserts and see if they can’t scare up some more.

The site also claims we’re running a little thin on helium, because people blow up too many balloons with it, and lethal injection drugs, because companies legally block states from using their products for executions, and dirt, because the topsoil is being used up. So things are looking pretty grim. About the only thing the world still has plenty of is stupid. We’ve got an awful lot of that.

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Above: Magnus Soderlund

For example, a woman recently climbed over a fence into an enclosure at the Bronx Zoo and danced in front of an African lion. Normally my next sentence would be ‘for some reason,’ but there’s really no reason to do anything that stupid. Surprisingly the lion didn’t attack the woman, which is good. The last thing we need is our human level of idiocy being contracted by animals.

Then there was Sharleen Ndungu, a vegan who was ‘traumatized for life’ when she was served a pork sausage roll at a chain called Greggs, in Kent, England. She’d ordered a vegan roll of some kind, and the server accidentally gave her one with sausage in it. According to the Breitbart story, Sharleen said she ‘broke down crying and began having heart palpitations when she realized there was meat in her food.’ The horror.

Now, for the sake of clarity, which I’m normally opposed to, I will point out here that this could’ve been a serious thing, if Sharleen had a food allergy to what was in the roll. People die from that sort of thing, and in such cases they’re seldom satisfied with a refund. So serving the wrong food can be a real problem. But that wasn’t the deal here. Sharleen just didn’t want to eat the meat.

And certainly that’s her right, too. No one should be forced to eat something they don’t want. But I think Sharleen went a little overboard with her reaction, considering her veganism is a choice, and not a medical requirement. She claims she panicked, her belly started to hurt, and her heart went ‘crazy.’ And all that was wrong was that she didn’t like what she was served.

If Sharleen did a little research she might find that millions of people, all over the world, eat meat every day with no ill affects. Quite a few of them actually enjoy it. And even if it does cause cancer, as Sharleen claims, it’s not likely to do that from only a bite or two. I know people who didn’t get cancer from eating meat until their third or fourth steak, for goodness sake. So I’m thinking Sharleen should, to put it delicately, grow up and quit acting like a crybaby.

The climate change alarmists have been coming out in droves lately, too, holding protests, blocking traffic, and generally being a pain, which is about all they’re good at. Breitbart’s James Delingpole recently reported on the latest environmental expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness of global warming which, in the process of proving there isn’t enough ice left for a decent cocktail, became trapped in ice. This makes six (6) ships that have gone to the ends of the earth to prove how warm the planet is, and then been frozen in place.

The latest was the MS Malmo, and it got halfway from Norway to the North Pole before succumbing to the weather. The sixteen passengers, including a documentary film team from Climate Change which was there to record for posterity the total lack of ice, was rescued by helicopter. Erofey Schkvarkin, a reporter for the Maritime Bulletin, wrote, “Something is very wrong with Arctic ice. Instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors.” Droll.

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Above: MS Malmo

Not to be outdone, the followers of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are jumping on her environmental bandwagon. One woman who attended a town hall meeting in Queens told AOC, “We have to get rid of the babies. We need to eat the babies.” She was trying to be sarcastic, claiming eating babies would help solve climate change, but since then Magnus Soderlund, a Swedish scientist, has suggested that “eating human flesh could help save humans from climate change,” according to a story from Rare.

OK, maybe I was wrong. Maybe stupid isn’t the only thing we have plenty of. We also seem to be pretty well stocked up with crazy . . .