BLOG IN YOUR FACE

When you go throughout your life - or a good majority of it - believing something that you have always been told is true…and then someone or something goes and makes you challenge your beliefs or seriously makes you consider changing your mind altogether, it kind of sucks. When you develop strong opinions about something that you feel is right, wrong, weird, acceptable, cool, awesome, shitty, stupid, annoying, awkward or just “a given,” and then you come across someone/something that thinks, says or DOES the complete polar opposite, it kind of makes you feel really weird and frustrated. These are not just BuzzKills. These are things that are on a much larger scale - things that could potentially change not only our way of thinking but the entire way we live our lives.

Here are some past examples from my life:

1. Finding out Elton John is gay.
2. Finding out that Santa Claus is not real.
3. Finding out that Ozzie Smith is a dickhead.
4. Finding out that hot dogs have 60 percent of my recommended sodium intake per day and have virtually no nutritional value.
5. Finding out that Jaci sheds 4 1/2 pounds of hair in the shower every day.
6. Figuring out that I am not capable at plumbing of any sort.
7. Finding out that Barbie dolls have no nipples.
8. Assuming that Cristina Ricci could never make a shitty movie because she is just plain TO HOT!!!
9. Finding out that Kirby Puckett was mortal.
10. Finding out that Mickey Mouse is really just some fat guy named Harold in a mouse suit sweating is a** off and hugging (and scaring) little kids for little more than minimum wage.

I was reading one of my favorite personal finance blogs the other day, FRUGAL DAD, and he informed us that he was going on a 30 day binge of drinking strictly water. No other liquids. I was skimming through the comments when I came across one that led me to a website entitled “Not Milk” - www.notmilk.com - a play on words from the famous “got milk?” marketing campaign.

Now, I have grown up in the Midwest and I have always just assumed that drinking milk is a good thing. Drinking milk makes strong little boys. Drinking milk makes strong bones. Drinking milk is an important part of school lunches. Drinking milk at every…single…meal…is just something that all Americans should do in order to be healthy, right?

Not so much…

This website has completely changed my perspective on milk. In particular, THIS ARTICLE within the website. I won’t bore anyone with too many details, but the more you read about cow’s milk, the more disgusting it sounds and the more insane we seem for drinking it as much as we do. Pesticides, Hormones, Lactose, White Blood Cells (Puss), etc. The fact that milk really does NOTHING to prevent osteoporosis when it all comes down to it. The fact that billions of people in the world have never tasted cow’s milk and correlational studies point to them being much healthier because of it. Allergies, Cancer, Kidney Stones, Alzheimer’s and Crohn’s Disease. The list goes on and it scares the buh-JESUS out of me.

The people that market milk are genius. They have done a flawless job in brainwashing the American public into believing that milk is virtually a necessity. This website and article have completely stopped me in my tracks. I found myself staring at the milk with the ‘fridge door hanging wide open tonight. How could this be? Sweet, sweet milk…tell me it isn’t so!

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As if trying to soak in the bad news about one of my all time favorite beverages isn’t hard enough, I also came across some information that I found to be absolutely mind boggling. It concerns electric and gas/electric hybrid cars. I have been under the assumption for quite some time that electric cars or gas/electric cars are the wave of the future. I watched the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car and I immediately became frustrated with the oil companies for “sabotaging” the engineering of the Electric Car in the early nineties.

But then I found this out: If we were to all switch to electric cars today - right at this moment - yes, we would reduce our dependency on foreign oil immensely, but I never really thought about the effect on our nation’s present day power grid. Ever since I started getting interested in politics I have been under the assumption that any kind of energy and transportation that doesn’t have to do with oil has got to be a good thing, right?

Wrong. And that brings us to BussKill #2 of the day: This Article.

The author, Clayton Cornell, points out that a 30 mile commute in a gasoline powered car costs our water supply 18.9 gallons of water (in the refining of the gasoline). The same thirty mile commute in a plug-in-hybrid car would use up to 318 gallons of water! Unbelievable!

Why the big difference???? Power plants are the source of energy for your little hybrid.  The majority of power plants on our grid are either coal or natural gas. Someday we may be able to have power plants running on wind, solar and geo-thermal energy but that is a whole different blog for another day in the far away future. For now we have the more traditional two listed above. The turbines in those power plants are run on steam and the whole plant is cooled using water.

Now, I am absolutely HUGE on water conservation. I predict that future world wars will be fought over water. I predict that the United States will end up centered around the Great Lakes. I predict that water will be more expensive than gasoline one day. I predict that the end of human existence will come because of something directly related to the lack of water. I think it is a huge deal that not many people think or care about in today’s politics.

That is why BuzzKill #2 is so hard to digest. My heart and mind was set on the fact that Gasoline=Bad; Electricity=Good. But with the information about the ridiculous amount of water it takes to run a hybrid car, I find myself forced to partially retract some of my strong opinions. It is frustrating to be so passionate about the environment and feel like you know what is good for it and suddenly realize you have no idea what you are talking about. Seriously, I feel like tomorrow I am going to find out that recycling is horrible for the planet.