Jim's Wheel of Anger #2

The Wheel of Anger rant from last night popped a few gaskets in Jim Earl's cortex. It starts with "This may seem a little trivial, but:"

On a side note, stop putting unwanted pets in your local pond. Yesterday I saw some guy and his two kids put two turtles into Echo Park Lake. The local lake is not your unwanted reptile recycle station. Just because it's a big flat thing of water doesn't mean turtles can live in it, alright? If you don't have the intelligence to take care of two little turtles, then maybe you shouldn't have any kids. As a matter of fact, next time why don't you just keep the turtles and release the kids into the lake. They'd have a better chance of surviving, and if they make it to the other side where the rents are lower, they might even get sold into white slavery -- which is a considerable improvement over what they had with you.

The humorously strident vegetarian Earl earlier mentioned that 80% of all freshwater in California goes to producing meat. I could not verify that fact but did find this factoid from 1999:

Contrary to a prevously reported unpublished study that showed no effects from grazing on certain springs in the Central Valley, Belsky's paper surveyed virtually all the ecological aspects of livestock grazing in the western United States, from effects on ground-nesting birds to water quality. The news was overwhelmingly bad. Livestock grazing has damaged 80% of the streams and rivers west of the Mississippi, according to a U.S. Department of Interior report that Belsky unearthed. Another report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicated that riparian areas throughout much of the West are in "their worst condition in history."

Marc Maron Show podcast MP3 (Wheel of Anger at 33 minute mark)