Yesterday was Earth Day, an event I barely noticed because it happened to coincide with the Pennsylvania primary. I'm a big fan of the earth, in both its lowercase and uppercase permutations, and try to avoid screwing it up whenever possible.

The key word there is "possible." I'm not an all-or-nothing guy, which is why I'm not a vegan or a Ron Paul supporter. I like meat, and I don't want to return to the gold standard.

Earth Day and Election Day, unfortunately, tend to bring out the extremes in our species. Vegans tell us our meat eating is killing the planet, and political enthusiasts tell us the candidate they oppose will bring about the end of our republic as we know it. There's nothing in between, and whether we're talking about poultry or politics, the message is the same:

Repent, and ye shall be saved. Continue your life of sin, and ye shall damn us all to hell.

That brings me to Regina Wilshire, who writes a terrific blog called The Weight of the Evidence. Regina focuses on low-carb diets, and always manages to look beyond the headlines to find something interesting and incisive to add to the debate. Yesterday she outdid herself with this magnificent response to the anti-meat movement:

I recommend reading the entire post, including the comments. You'll see that she got hammered with responses from vegans, who do what extreme partisans always do in arguments: They shout slogans and pay no attention to any part of an argument that might suggest common ground, or at least a point at which reasonable people can disagree. It's all fire and brimstone -- if you don't agree with the environmental argument against eating meat, then you're just a murderer because you can't eat meat without killing something.

They win because they're anti-death. You lose because you're willing to acknowledge the necessity of killing something before eating it. You can support more humane ways to raise and eventually slaughter the animals, but there's really no getting around the fact that there will be blood.

Vegans, like Ron Paul supporters, seem to thrive on the unpopularity and impracticality of their positions. It's easy to be an uncompromising zealot when nobody takes you seriously enough to compromise with you. It's easy to oppose the killing of any animal for any reason when you know there's zero chance you'll wake up to find a herd of bison crapping on your earth-friendly composite flooring. It's easy to say "abolish the IRS and eliminate all entitlement programs" when you know your own grandparents won't end up living in your storage shed and raiding your medicine cabinets.

Coming up with practical solutions that people can accept and live with -- that's hard.

Wednesday blog meat

• More food at conception = more boys conceived. Women who ate more than 2,200 calories per day were more likely to have boys; women eating less than 1,850 were more likely to have girls. On average, mothers of boys ate 130 calories more per day around the time of conception. All the usual caveats about correlation vs. causation apply -- it's an interesting finding, but by no means definitive.
• Do stereotypes affect performance? If they do, we'll at last understand why Shaquille O'Neal can't hit free throws.