2007 MTV VMA Watch Party

This is a short version of an article from the AP and was featured on the El Nuevo Día a newspaper of Puerto Rico on February, 3 2008. Also you can read it on http://www.elnuevodia.com/XStatic/endi/template/content.aspx?se=nota&id=356665

It came to my attention because not only it’s a barbaric act but also because I am a Latina. It hurts deep what’s happening and how humans handle things to the point that they became monsters.

In Higüey, Santo Domingo a virus H5N2, the cause of Influenza Virus on animals, was detected on a bird farm on December 2007 and due to the circumstances Ramón Quiñones a spokesperson for the Ministry of Cattle and Animal Health informed on the actions they took to eradicate the virus.

Quote: “the birds were beaten-up, put on a plastic bag and then buried on a 8 feet deep grave”.

In another statement Quiñones mentions the fact that it is not dangerous to humans and that there’s no need to alarm. He also explains that the virus is under control and the sacrifices are part of a international protocol to establish quarantine measures.

I have 2 questions:

1. Do you need to beat up an animal to eliminate a virus? Why can’t you put him to sleep and then fallow the rest of the protocol?
2. If there’s no need to alarm and it’s not dangerous to us, why are you killing those birds and why not make sure it can cause damage in first place?

I can’t believe that at this time no one has come up with a better way to deal with this situations. So many smart people and nothing to prove!! Maybe it’s just the way that nature makes things happen so we learn to appreciate what has been given to us. All this horror and still people find an excuse to eat meat.

P.S. Feel free to leave a comment of any kind. Also, if anyone knows about this international protocol feel free to post the information.

Thanks.                                            VEGAN FOR LIFE.

PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES OF YOUR TIME TO READ THIS BLOG. IT WON'T HURT YOU A BIT UNLIKE THOSE FRIENDLY ANIMALS THAT WON'T HAVE THE SAME LUCK.

Many people who know pigs compare them to dogs because they are friendly, loyal, and intelligent. Pigs are naturally very clean and avoid, if at all possible, soiling their living areas. When given the chance to live away from factory farms, pigs will spend hours playing, lying in the sun, and exploring their surroundings with their powerful sense of smell. Considered smarter than 3-year-old human children, pigs are very clever animals.

Most people rarely have the opportunity to interact with these outgoing, sensitive animals because 97 percent of pigs in United States today are raised on factory farms. These pigs spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy warehouses, under constant stress from the intense confinement and denied everything that is natural to them.

As piglets, they are taken away from their mothers when they are less than 1 month old; their tails are cut off, some of their teeth are cut off, and the males have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums (castration), all without any pain relief. They spend their entire lives in overcrowded pens on a tiny slab of filthy concrete.

Breeding sows spend their entire miserable lives in tiny metal crates where they can't even turn around. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and they are sent to be killed. When the time comes for slaughter, these smart and sensitive animals are forced onto transport trucks that travel for many miles through all weather extremes—many die of heat exhaustion in the summer and arrive frozen to the inside of the truck in the winter.

According to industry reports, more than 1 million pigs die in transport each year, and an additional 420,000 are crippled by the time they arrive at the slaughterhouse. Many are still fully conscious when they are immersed in scalding water for hair removal.

Many people think of Charlotte’s Web and Babe when they imagine how pigs are raised for meat. Unfortunately, these Hollywood tales do not depict reality. Almost all of the 100 million pigs killed for food in the United States every year endure horrific conditions in controlled animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the meat industry’s euphemism for factory farms. Smarter than dogs, these social, sensitive animals spend their lives in overcrowded, filthy warehouses, often seeing direct sunlight for the first time as they are crammed onto a truck bound for the slaughterhouse.

A mother pig, or sow, spends her adult life confined to a tiny metal crate. She will never feel the warmth of a nest or the affectionate nuzzle of her mate—she will spend her life surrounded by thick, cold metal bars, living on wet, feces-caked concrete floors. When she is old enough to give birth, she will be artificially impregnated and then imprisoned again for the entire length of her pregnancy in a “gestation crate,” a cage only 2 feet wide—too small for her even to turn around or lie down in comfortably.

After giving birth, a mother pig is moved to a “farrowing crate,” a contraption even worse and smaller than a gestation crate, with only a tiny additional concrete area on which the piglets can nurse. Workers will sometimes tie the mother’s legs apart so she cannot get a break from the suckling piglets. She may develop open “bed sores” on her body from the lack of movement. This practice is so barbaric that gestation crates have been banned in Florida, the U.K., and Sweden and will be banned in the European Union in 2013.

When pregnant sows are ready to give birth, they are moved from a gestation crate to a farrowing crate. One worker describes the process: “They beat the shit out of them [the mother pigs] to get them inside the crates because they don’t want to go. This is their only chance to walk around, get a little exercise, and they don’t want to go [back into a crate].”

The piglets are taken away from their mother after less than a month—in nature, they would stay with their mother for several months. She is impregnated again, and the cycle of forced breeding and imprisonment continues. For such an intelligent animal, this intensive confinement causes debilitating stress and boredom. With nothing to do but stare at the bars in front of her, a mother pig may go insane. This is often exhibited by neurotic chewing on the cage bars or obsessive pressing on her water bottle. After three or four years, when her body is exhausted and her mind pushed to or even past the brink of insanity, she is shipped off to slaughter.

Meanwhile, the sow’s piglets have their testicles cut out of their scrotums, their tails cut off, many of their teeth clipped in half, and their ears mutilated, all without any pain relief. Terrified and in extreme pain, the piglets are often put alone into tiny metal wire cages (called “battery cages” by the farmers). These cages are stacked on top of each other, and urine and excrement constantly fall on the piglets in the lower cages. After the piglets have grown too big for the cages, they are placed into small, cramped pens crowded with many other piglets, where they are kept until they are large enough for slaughter. The animals are given almost no room to move because, as one pork-industry journal put it, “[O]vercrowding pigs pays.” Impeccably clean by nature, pigs on factory farms are forced to live in their own feces, vomit, and even amid the corpses of other pigs.

Overcrowding, poor ventilation, and filth cause rampant disease. Respiratory problems are common because of high levels of humidity and toxic gases from the manure pits—in fact, 70 percent of pigs on factory farms have pneumonia by the time they’re sent to the slaughterhouse. Many pigs die from infections caused by the noxious fumes and filth of their enclosures. Pigs are fed massive doses of antibiotics to keep them alive in these conditions. Conditions are so filthy that at any given time, more than one-quarter of pigs suffer from mange.

Because of illness, lack of space to exercise, and genetic manipulation that forces them to grow too big too fast, pigs often develop arthritis and other joint problems. Many pigs on factory farms live on slatted floors above giant manure pits. Smaller pigs often suffer severe leg injuries when their legs get caught between the slats.

Always concerned with their bottom line, some farmers kill sick animals instead of giving them medicine or veterinary care. A PETA investigation found that a manager at an Oklahoma farm was killing pigs by beating them with metal gate rods, and others were left to die without food or water. Unwanted “runts” were killed, as they are on most farms, by “thumping,” which involves slamming the animals’ heads against the floor.

I posted a video, but you can find more visuals on You Tube, just in case you might need more insight in what these animals go through.

After enduring months in these hellish conditions, pigs are forced onto trucks, bound for a horrific and agonizing death at the slaughterhouse.

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF PETA  http://www.peta.org/ and GO VEG http://www.goveg.com/

* PLEASE FIND MORE INFORMATION AND LEARN HOW YOU CAN MAKE A BETTER DAY FOR THESE ANIMALS. DON'T FORGET THAT THEY HAVE FEELINGS TOO.

 

     How many of you saw The Ellen Degeneres Show today (Friday 14)? Kanye West was a guest, very controversial for staying what's on his mind despite the consequences or troubles he might get into, but the reason why I brought it up is mostly because during the VMA's weekend (I know, still talking about it) he made a point about the way the nominations, performances and moonmans were handled. On the Ellen show he explained exactly why he thought MTV wasn't been fair to him... (Here's a video of what happened backstage during the VMA's).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-631TgPP2s

     She also asked his take on Britney's performance as he expressed his discontent with facial expressions as she basically agreed by adding that anyone at her camp stopped her or why the MTV people saw the rehearsal and didn't took her out of the show, because it was clear that she wasn't ready. He remain silent affirming that he was no longer pointing fingers at MTV anymore making Ellen and the viewers surprised because we all know he always speaks his mind regardless. I think that he didn't wanted to sound like he was blaming MTV or that they did it on purpose.

     My question to MTV will be... Is that why he doesn't get a moonman? Asking for them (MTV) to be fair and questioning the way things are handled, will get you in trouble or even out of their favorite list? I also wonder, if Justin Timberlake comments: "play more videos", made twice during the live show, will put him in the naughty corner with Kanye West?

     But as a music fan the question is... Does he need MTV to sell his albums? Does he need to worry about the VMA shows? Is MTV important for an artist career? DO WE NEED OUR MTV? As a personal conclusion I don't think MTV is that important to the music world anymore, and I'm sure a lot of people agree with me on this one. With today's advance technology, specifically the internet proving that you can be recognize and became a hit before you appear on TV.

P.S. As I said before love to read your takes on this and on my writing skills.

Is this the state of affairs for music?

I don't have cable in my apartment. (I plan to keep it that way.) I was forced to use MTV's Overdrive site to keep up on the events of the night so I could properly inform myself for what would be my inevitable rant this morning.

(A side note: Whomever is the web designer at MTV who built the MTV Overdrive page should be fired immediately and never allowed to type another string of HTML ever again. Someone strip him/her of all degrees, awards, and internet responsibilities. That is the worst site on the face of the planet.)

Despite that Yahoo! is reporting that the VMAs were an overwhelming success, I'll have to categorically disagree.

I don't have cable for a reason: Television sucks. Always. (Except a few precious shows, almost none of which currently air. HINT: Lost and The Office = Love.) And, watching the concurrent clips being aired online, I most assuredly will stick to this conclusion for the next 5 years or so.

Never would I ever think that, in 2007, I'd be agreeing with Justin Timberlake, but what the hell, MTV? When are you going to start showing music on your channel? Even when you have an entire award show devoted to music videos, you CONSTANTLY cut away from clips I actually wanted to see. (EX: Foo Fighters covering "Holiday In Cambodia" with Serj (System of a Down) on vocals; Mastodon playing "Colony of Birchmen" with Josh Homme singing his vocals.)

Apparently, this is their plan to earn higher ratings; instead of having a 3 hour show, as they usually have done, they cut out an hour and will not air the show in it's original form again. (In the past, the show would run 4375208947320946329671235987 times for two weeks afterwards.) Instead, they'll "remix" the show for future airings, which makes little to no sense at all. This is supposed to encourage people to revisit their site or watch MTV, hoping to catch these edited clips in their full form.

But I'm not going to bite the bait. I don't care at all. This ratings scheme is so blatant and so obvious and it rests on the assumption that I, the viewer and music fan, am a complete and total idiot. Thanks for the compliment, MTV.

I don't need to comment on the ridiculous display that Britney Spears' provided us. (I wish I could make a .gif file of 50 Cent's reaction. So perfect.) I don't need to comment on how boring the entire show was. It was obvious no one cared to be there; for once, even the celebrities who showed up couldn't hide their disinterest.

But I can't believe that something so senile and worthless captured some of my attention and energy, given that there are more important issues in the world: We may be stuck in Iraq, there's a possibility that we're going to war with Iran, and Senator Larry Craig won't shut the fuck up.

I hate you, MTV.

what perez wrote on his site about britney spears was so mean that i now feel really bad for her.
im the first to admit that britneys performance was a huge let down. the couple of days before the vmas in all the pictures that i was seeing online she was smiling more than she had in a long time. i was happy to see her being happy and being her old self. i really thought the vmas was going to be THE show where britney proved to the world she was still britney. unfortunately, i think she found out along with the millions of people watching that maybe she doesn't have "it" anymore or maybe she does but she needs more time to figure out how to use "it" again. being a mother of ONE is a tough job so being a mother of two young boys has to be strenuous. i just hope that britney gets back to her old self soon. remember when she was good at lip syncing? last night, she might as well had not been moving her mouth at all. remember when she actually danced and didnt have a million dancers dance for her or OUT DANCE her during her own performance? oh man, i miss the old britney. really, i do! girl, you can DO IT! you just gotta try a little harder.

im gonna go out on a limb and say that the last performance that was THIS talked about (or criticized) has to be the ashlee simpson SNL fiasco from back in '04. that was before i was on the internet so i dont know what the cyber kids were saying but that shiz was all over the radio and the news the next morning.

dear perez,
youre a douche bag.
that is all.

xoxo
erica