You've provided such a loaded question. The lines are not so clear, and that's where I will start.

The question assumes that eating food with a face somehow must be different from eating food without it. The assumption is that the animal kingdom is superior to the others, that raising animals only to eat them should invoke a moral horror that should not apply to things without a nervous system. The reasoning seems to be: if it can feel pain, you should feel pseudo-pain that you would eat it.

This comes off as disingenuous as soon as you view the contrapositive. "Oooh, look at me being morally superior because I'm eating non-sentient objects! They never felt pain, so it's perfectly fine for me to grow them only to eat them. I didn't even look them in the eyes when I yanked these potatoes from the ground. You'll have to excuse me, as I need to make a virgin pressing of some olives and take out my anger on them."

All agriculture is both necessary and a heavy investment of resources. It's true that raising livestock takes far more resources: you have to grow what they'll eat. However the animals provide far more resources to assist in raising the crops: they poop.

Oh man, do they poop. Methane is a problem for the atmosphere. In fact many of the older reasons to raise animals came from using them to work the fields. Now we use diesel. The fertilizer in manure has been replaced with chemical fertilizers -- and the addiction to agribusiness.

The more I talk about this, the less I'm coming to any conclusions. I cannot untie the assumptions in the original post without getting angry. I want to keep this separate from my own eating habits, but I just keep thinking "f*(k you for judging me, and everyone else that claims to be vegetarian but really just eats Oreos".

I'll restart from here: I've met too many vegetarians that wouldn't eat my vegetarian cooking. "Eww, eggplant?" "You eat mushrooms?" Yeah, I can make so many delicious things from these items.

The vege-slope (vegetarian but eats fish, vegetarian, vegan, breatharian) is just as annoying as the bacon-slope. My own mother thought I was insane for not liking bacon. I didn't even like it until I had it in Australia, where it's served with the rasher (the strip) still attached to the peen (aka Canadian bacon). It was thick, not crispy. It worked REALLY WELL with bitter greens. It was killer brekkie.

I like to cook. I grew up with the big Sunday meal at my Sicilian grandmother's -- the ravioli, the three-hour tomato sauce, the works. I learned how to make her sauce and from there I learned how to make the food chemistry swing.

The guilting of meat is a very Protestant, Puritan approach. It implies all food is a punishment. I like spices in my food. Scratch that -- many root vegetables require long cooking times to be digestible, so the solution is to spice them. This is the centerpiece of Indian cuisine.

Lentils... I heart lentils. My wife set up the crock pot with lentils and celery for dinner. Happy...

I have cut down my meat consumption over the years. I only allow myself red meat once a week, and I often skip a week. I try to eat only one meat meal per day because I don't need more.

However it gets back to the vege-eww problem I mentioned earlier. So many Americans eat like children: the same few bland foods every day. You have to sneak food on them. This is why the Slow Food Movement and even the pompous angles of the Foodie culture are important: we can't fix the bad diet problems if we do not make nutritious food more readily available and appealing.

If it weren't for Trader Joe's, it'd be a lot harder to eat properly. Frozen food that is worthy of your body, $4 lunch.

Enough guilt and negative reinforcement about meat, I say. Create a positive movement -- that diverse food high in fiber is cheaper, easier to spice, and feels good.

It is a separation of church and state thing. No one is asking churches to change who they allow to marry. That's not the same as having legal rights to marriage.

Marriage has two aspects: a legal one and a religious one. So yes, the government HAS TO GO THERE because it has already been there since the Magna Carta. At the center of this is Common Law and jurisprudence.

I'll say this again so you don't ask: I am only going to give a brief history and logic of legal (civic) marriage. This will have no implications to the history of who was allow to marry inside a church. This is about the part you go through whether you call a vicar or just a sea captain (in my case, my wife and I were married by her best friend from grade school -- who is also the state prosecutor of New Hampshire).

Civic marriage has been fundamental to Common Law. The US federal government and all US states except Louisiana follow Common Law. Common Law is an ever-growing set of legal precedents that can change both by legislature and by judiciary process. Much of the marriage part of it is older than the Constitution or the US as a nation -- we're talking English Common Law. Just as a contract signed before the US broke off from the UK can still be binding, so too our marriage laws have precedents going way back.

So what? That means civic marriage is thoroughly tested in every court. Civic marriage is sacrosanct, legally speaking. Once X marries Y, no hospital can say "no, X's parents get to call the shots about X's pull-the-plug request." Y calls the shot. If the hospital disobeys Y as a representative for X, they'll get sued and lose.

Any para-marriage act is untested. It's not clear how much a hospital or even a bank has to respect a partner in a civil union. It doesn't have the same divorce procedures, it varies even between the few states that have them, and it definitely doesn't get you its own standard deduction on your tax forms.

I mentioned Louisiana earlier, as they are a Canon Law state. This means their state laws evolved from the Napoleonic Code. Their courts have almost none of the jurisprudence powers. This means the judge cannot interpret which precedent is at the root of a decision -- it's only how the law was written that matters.

A Canon Law nation or state can make up a para-marriage and it will have all legal bindings. France had this for about a decade with the PACS. A Common Law state can make up a new para-marriage contract type, but it can be shot down as legally invalid by a high enough court.

The most recent precedent for the solidity of civic marriage is Loving vs Virginia, 1967. This Supreme Court decision tossed out all anti-miscegenation laws, not just Virginia's: it was no longer legal to bar a checkerboard couple from getting married.

Let me boil this down: gay marriage is civic marriage, or no marriage contract is meaningful. There is nothing in the earliest legal assessment of marriage that determined who could be the parties involved, with the exception of blood relatives. It was founded to determine lineage of property, and now determines how easily one other person could ruin your credit rating.

Marriage provides an amazing set of legal features. Don't let random churches steal that value.

When I lived in Boston, I'd hear people talk about New York City all the time: they hated it, they missed it but still hated it, they were there last weekend and got messed with for wearing a Red Sox cap (or got confused with a Brooklyn Dodgers fan). There was a certain obsession with the city only 210 miles away.

That suited me, because I had grown up in upstate New York. Then I went to college with a bunch of wicked smart but wicked solipsistic New Yorkers. When I found out there was a whole city that actively hated New Yorkers, I couldn't move fast enough. That overexposure got it out of my system.

New Yorkers, in contrast, didn't notice Boston. They were hung up on themselves and had plenty of things within that. They needed cans of Pepsi that mentioned New York on them for some odd reason.

I live in Los Angeles now. People in San Francisco have a strange hatred of Angelinos. It reminds me of the Bostonian hatred of bigger NYC, except it makes less sense (except for the Giants fan that got beaten into a coma after a game at Dodgers Stadium -- that was horrible). It's like being resented by the gods: San Francisco is a beautiful city wrapped in clouds, while we have food trucks. Los Angeles is perfectly nice, so why do the better-off people feel the need to be our rivals?

Hubski is small. We're going to talk about Reddit because there is some modelling of its community. We'll also talk about it because we go there as well, then come here to get out of the loud bazaar and into the quiet tea room.

We're Hamtramck inside Detroit, Brookline surrounded by Boston, West Hollywood always a couple blocks from sketchier but more famous Hollywood. We have that removal because it keeps our brains in order, our lives in perspective.

Something that goes giant on Reddit can wind up mentioned on TV. Something that fills the eight-dot circle and gets over 20 comments in a day here could still be tiny news. That's fabulous.