Only in an extremely trendy world an environmental struggle such as the current global warming trend becomes a “heroes for just one day” festival presented in the Live Earth show. All the participated hypocrite celebrities step out of their huge energy eating mansions and came in private jets to promote their new CD or cynically use the event for a last effort to revive their youth and old fame.
The live earth carbon footprint is estimated at 31,500 tons of carbon which are more than 3,000 times the average Briton's annual footprint.
Private jets for climate change.

It is as if animal rights activists never learn. Celebrities are celebrities they are not animal rights activists. Even the current good ones are distributing animal rights leaflets with their left hand while the right one is signing contracts that are against animal rights ideas or other social justice ideas.
You can't count on Celebrities to promote anything other than themselves.
If they cared so much about animal rights they would have become full time activists, and would spend on the subject more than what any of us have spent today only.
Some care to some extent we are sure but the whole idea of making people, who all they have to give is their fame, the animal rights spokespersons says something about the belief of the animal rights activists in themselves and in their message.
This fixation on "celebrity to each agenda" promotes hierocracy on the base of talent in the least horrible case and on money, good contacts, genealogically and of course looks in most cases.
None of the self-promoters, attention addicts celebrities, have something smarter to say about the subject than any unfamiliar activist. Usually it is the other way around. So the only reason for the mass Celebrity use is the acknowledgment that no one would listen to a "nobody" animal rights activist.

You can’t fight oppression using its symptoms. You can’t change society using mega stars who make millions of dollars per year and who are an integral part of the problem. Capitalists icons can’t be part of the solution.

A Convenient Lie

Al Gore received a Nobel price in 2007 for raising awareness about global warming, but the choice to focus on negligible and nonsensical solutions (like buying a hybrid car and an ecological house...) in the end of "An Inconvenient Truth", on his website and in his 7 points pledge, is more an act of obscuring than awaking.
The movie and the campaign created an oxymoronic green consumerism trend, which is harmful now and will be even more harmful in the future, because not only that this "green" trend distracts the attention from the biggest problem which is overconsumption and the consumption of environmentally devastative products like animal products, it legitimizes it.

"An Inconvenient Truth" produces a very convenient lie, as long as people buy the allegedly environmental friendly products, and buy carbon offsets to make up for their carbon footprints (using companies that gore is economically invested in) everything will be fine.

There is plenty of information about Al gore's financial connections to carbon offsets companies, buying his carbon footprint from his own company and actually boosting his own investments, his violations of his own environmental pledge especially regarding his huge, energy devour mansion and the famous electricity bills, his private jet, his connections to Richard Branson, the widely criticized live earth concert and etc.
But it is not about Al gore's corruption nor about his real intentions. Even if when he talks about a green house he is thinking about the white house, or about green bills, it is not the issue. Much more significant is that when he claims that he buys "carbon offsets" to make up with his monthly gas-and-electric bills of more than $2,000 for his 20-room mansion and related outbuilding ($500 a month for his poolhouse only), he invents the "capitalist environmentalism".

He knows that consumers will always choose the more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change. Chasing after popularity and not after a solution for climate change, he mentions the ideas that are more likely to be adopted because they don’t require the consumers to alter their routines very much, and that is regardless of the environmental footprint of these actions compared to other ideas that are much more environmentally significant but will require much more than changing the light bulb type.

The mainstream media, entrepreneurs, corporations, retailers and of course Al gore, offer people to buy their way into heaven. But it is impossible to avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products (from clothing and cars to homes and vacations) when the cumulative effect of humans' consumption remains enormous and hazardous. Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase. But as simple and as logical as this argument is, these forces and the trend’s natural attraction manage to conceal it.
Buying organic sheets, Toyota Prius and Del Forte 'Flora' Jeans for $190 is stylish statement much more than it is eco-sensitiveness. Guiltless consumption might be politically correct but it is environmentally incorrect. It is eco-narcissism, a tokenism that people are glad to take part in and Al gore is glad to sell it to them.
Not changing their consumption habits, but feeling much better about them is what it's all about. When someone offers people to feel good about themselves they don’t ask questions.

It is so obvious and so typical to this world that the ones who benefit the most from this "green" trend are not the first to suffer from global warming but entrepreneurs who seize the moment and start a green line of products to cynically sell to the eco-narcissists, and corporations who got the opportunity to green- clean their reputation.
This "green" trend is greenwashers heaven. And it goes on a personal level just as much.
Humans can eat what they want, wear what they want, fly as much as they want, and generally consume as much as they wish, but as long as they drive a hybrid car their eco- conscience is clean and they are in the "correct" social group.

But we want to focus on what is by no doubt and with no proportions, our biggest problem with Al gore as the environmental messiah and with all this hypocrite, light green trend.

After Nancy gore died of lung cancer, the family decided to close down their tobacco ranch. Somehow the fact that the cattle ranches are one of the greatest contributors to global warming, which is “the biggest problem humans face today” as Al constantly say, didn’t convince the family to close down their cattle ranch and the joined meat restaurant.

Al gore and the rest of the eco-narcissists seem to “forget” that the meat industry is the largest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions. Of course if Al Gore and the eco-narcissists were genuine environmentalists, they would become vegans and would have focused on factory farming and animal consumption. But in Al gore's Oscar winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" the only time factory farms are mentioned, is when he tells us that he came from a family of ranchers. Interesting coincidence don’t you think?

He doesn’t even mention that according to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, livestock production is responsible for more climate change gasses than all the motor vehicles in the world.

Animal rights activists are familiar with the devastative connection between animal consumption and the environment, through water degradation, deforestation (cutting down or burning forests to clear land for livestock), animals’ farts (Methane), oil, natural gas and other fuels usage for: ventilation, conveyor belts, electric lighting, slaughterhouses which are energy intensive, the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and transportation to the retailers and etc.

You know all that so you don’t need the research conducted at the University of Chicago that have determined that switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius.
Al Gore is familiar with the Chicago study we are sure and he is probably also familiar with the Japanese study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science from 2007 which estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
But much like George "global warming needs more study" bush, Al gore doesn’t need researches, because he is a hypocrite as are all the environmentalists who continue to eat meat. He prefers pop environmentalism solutions like putting a geothermal system in his 10,000-square-foot home to heat his pool than the more self demanding but much more meaningful solutions.

Al Gore’s “global warming show” is a last-ditch for his political carrier more than it’s a last ditch to save the planet from the global warming catastrophe.
In the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, he re-set the course of his life to focus on climate change in what seems to be another round of claim to fame.

It should come as no surprise that the film’s conclusion is so lame.
After all, it was The Clinton-Gore administration that handed out permits for toxic waste incinerators, opened up western forests to logging, handed out tax breaks to oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and etc.
Also, Gore was one of the main brokers of free trade agreements like "NAFTA" and "GATT" that have gutted environmental standards across the globe.

Only in a trendy world the mainstream media and marketers can turn environmentalism into fashion, totally distracted from the serious issues.
Only in a trendy-phony world a meat eater like Al "NAFTA" gore can become an environmentalist messiah.

Low Crab, High Cruelty

As society becomes more and more obsessed with looks, weight and body image, hundreds of new diets are invented every year, joining the thousands of diets that were invented over the past few decades.
The Atkins diet is undoubtedly the worst. And respectively and unsurprisingly in this world, what is morally worst is also the most popular.

The Atkins diet is based on the theory that overweight people eat too many carbohydrates. Our bodies burn both fat and carbohydrates for energy, but carbohydrates are used first. By drastically reducing them and eating more protein and fat, our bodies naturally lose weight by burning stored body fat more efficiently. So according to the diet you can eat as much calories, fat and protein as you want, as long as you don't eat carbohydrates, you will lose weight.

The combination of the slim dream, which gets more and more unattainable over the years, and the new trendy diet which promises quick weight loss without hunger, allows a wide range of foods, has simple rules, celebrity endorsement, is supported by many “how-to” books and food product innovation and marketing, attract millions all over the world. At the height of its popularity in 2004, one in eleven North-American adults was on the diet.

People don’t care that according to the Atkins diet they are free to eat and as much as they desire of all the foods that they were told to stay away from.

It didn’t matter to people that scientific review by Obesity Research magazine concluded that low-carb dieters' initial advantage in weight loss was a result of increased water loss, and that after the initial period, low-carb diets produce similar fat loss to other diets with similar caloric intake.

People covered their ears when the “Annals of Internal Medicine” study showed that Atkins Dieters had significantly more diarrhea, general weakness, irritability, rashes, muscle cramps, electrolyte loss, calcium depletion and depression. Also, acidity from the typically high protein intake can cause Osteoporosis, not to mention heart diseases and high cholesterol.

The permission to eat all the historically notorious foods from dietary perspective and still losing weight made millions of people overlook the lack of grains, fruits, and vegetables in the Atkins Diet, a lack that may lead to deficiencies of key nutrients, including dietary fiber, vitamin C, folic acid, and several minerals.

The Atkins diet restricts the carbohydrates amount to 25 grams per day. Nutritionists say that 150 grams of carbohydrates per day are necessary for proper body and brain function. Apparently being thin is even more important to people than their brain function.

This diet is humans’ wet dream, eating what they like and get thinner.
Nothing can wake them up, not even the fact that there’s no single major governmental or nonprofit medical, nutrition, or science-based organization in the world that supports the Atkins Diet. Among them are: The National Academy of Sciences, American Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Kidney Fund, the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Institutes of Health are all against the diet.

The diet even contradicts modern physics by breaking the first law of thermodynamics - energy can change forms but it can't be created or destroyed. And dietary speaking, you can't absorb as much calories as you want and expect it will somehow disappear and won't turn into fat.

But when humans get a license to gorge as much meat, eggs and fat cheeses as they want, their hearing and reason gets even more selective than usual. Humans don’t care about their health, they care about their looks. The Atkins diet is only one of numerous examples.

The Atkins dieters' health is surely declining, but the real price is paid as usual by non-human animals as the meat, milk and eggs sales skyrocketed in the trend's peak. Not even an army of nutritionists, physicians and celebrities supporting veganism can overcome humans' desire to be thin. After years of efforts by animal rights activists a trend like the Atkins diet swiftly and easily puts so much of it in vain.

Super Sizing McDonald's

Another sad evidence of our trendy world and the superficiality of human society is the zero impact that critical books such as "Fast Food Nation", a movie like “super size me” and even the general buzz around obesity especially in America, have on a global economic scale.

The movie “super size me” didn't hurt McDonald's profits, not even for the short run.
McDonald's profits were steadily rising up every month for 24 consecutive months after the movie came out. In fact the movie strengthened McDonald's. The chain responded by radically overhauling its menu. Next to the famous all-beef patties, McDonald's introduced since the movie, salads and fruits. McDonald's commercials have changed and they focus now on the corporation's "health prospect" and feature their famous clown, Ronald, exercising.

Our consolation is supposed to be that now that McDonald's sell more salads they probably sell less meat, but unfortunately they don’t. They sell more meat today than they did before the menu change. First of all, many of these salads are chicken salads and eggs salads (chicken is marketed as the healthy meat), but the main reason is that parents feel more comfortable sending their children to eat at McDonald's since they changed the burgers’ oil and they sell salads and fruits.
But the double cheeseburger is still the chain's most ordered item, and that’s what the children are eating. The salads stay in the freezers.

McDonald's did a few more things like opened fewer stores, spruced up the existent restaurants and improved the service. The chain has also placed a greater emphasis on breakfast and introduced a successful global marketing campaign with the "I'm Lovin' It" tagline. But the most important factor is the Dollar Menu.

McDonald's has attracted attention with their new healthy food items like salads and fruits. Yet it’s not the greater sales of healthy foods but the selling of more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, from the Dollar Menu that keeps increasing their profits. For every salad McDonald's sell they sell 10 cheeseburgers.
The enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items cost $1, has helped to stimulate 36 consecutive months of sales growth at stores open at least a year. In three years, revenue has increased by 33% and the corporation’s shares have rocketed 170%.

Movies like "super size me" won’t change society because they don’t really challenge society's keystones. They don’t challenge capitalism nor anthropocentrism, in fact they are integral part of society, everything is still about humans and their minor interests and little lives. It is a diet and health movie, not social and moral movie.
It had a great impact for a very short while. McDonalds reacted very fast and very strong. They paid for ads before the movie was presented in movie theaters.
They placed a 30-second ad spot in the opening trailers of all viewings of Super Size Me and also offered to pay movie theaters to allow McDonald's employees to distribute apples to visitors as they exited the film.
In the United Kingdom, McDonald's placed a brief ad in the trailers of showings of the film, pointing to the website http://www.supersizeme-thedebate.co.uk. The ads simply stated, "See what we disagree with. See what we agree with."

In April 2006, when British newspaper The Guardian distributed a free DVD of the film, McDonald's placed a full-page advertisement on the back cover of the newspaper.

Of course every action has a reaction, and every trend has a counter trend, so besides the McDonald's expected and devastative responses (expressed mainly in the dollar menu, the general health-wash and Ronald's workout campaign), an anti "super size me" trend has started shortly after the movie came out.

Not that McDonald's need help with their more than two billion dollars per year spend on advertising but still a few jerks saw that McDonalds was in "trouble” after “super size me" so they volunteered to help out.

Various similar experiments were made in response to Super Size Me, in an effort to provide alternative scenarios or refute the impressions made by the film. Here is a partial list of Ronald McDonald's new best friends:

Chazz Weaver, a resident of Costa Mesa, California, and a fitness and nutrition advocate, says he got fed up with the misinformation and partial nutrition information most consumers get. He thought Spurlock's movie was the final straw. So Weaver decided to show that, with an understanding of the basics of human biology and nutrition, a person can eat pretty much anything without getting fat if he balances calorie intake and output.

On April 1, he began eating all his meals - four or five per day - at McDonald's. He ate upwards of 3,000 calories per day and after two weeks he had lost eight pounds (yes, lost). Since he didn't particularly want to lose weight, Weaver then increased his food intake to about 5,000 calories per day and managed to gain back about two pounds by the end of the month. His cholesterol improved, his blood pressure dropped a bit, and he says he feels just fine. How did he do it? Weaver works out at a gym daily - about an hour and fifteen minutes per day - split between aerobic exercise and resistance training. He was in good shape before he began his McDiet and remained so throughout.

In the website DOWN SIZE ME (truthinfitness.org) you can see how deceiving trends are as Chazz try to break the fast food myth. Knowing humans you all know that they don’t need much more than that to guiltlessly eat fast food as much as they wish.

In New Jersey, documentary filmmaker Scott Caswell also performed a pro-McDonald's experiment. The results of his diet can be seen in his movie, Bowling for Morgan. It can be seen for free at BowlingForMorgan.com. Like Spurlock, Caswell consumed only McDonald's. Over the course of the experiment, he lost 20 pounds and his cholesterol fell sharply.

Soso Whaley, of Kensington, New Hampshire, made her own film about dieting at McDonald's, called Me and Mickey D. The film follows Whaley as she spends three 30-day periods on the diet. She dropped from 175 to 139 pounds, eating 2,000 kilocalories per day at McDonald's. The film was funded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Les Sayer of Edmonton set out to teach his biology students to be "critical thinkers". He explained to them that Morgan Spurlock's film Super Size Me expresses an opinion and is not an objective investigation. To do so he embarked on a diet that was similar to Spurlock's in that he ate exclusively McDonald's food, but much different in that it included exercise. The result: he lost 17 lbs.

San Antonio, Texas resident Deshan Woods went on a 90-day diet in which he lost nearly 14 pounds. He documented the entire experiment on his website LiquidCalories.com. His overall health improved while sticking to a diet mainly on burgers and fries. He stayed away from sugary drinks and stuck to non-caloric beverages instead. His average caloric intake was 2,500 kilocalories a day, which included 130 grams of fat. His cholesterol dropped from 204 to around 160.

Professor James Painter, chair of Eastern Illinois University’s School of Family and Consumer Sciences, made the documentary Portion Size Me. The film follows two graduate students, one a 254-pound male and the other a 108-pound female, as they ate a fast-food diet for a month but in portions appropriate for their size. Both students lost weight and their cholesterol improved by the end of the experiment.

Keiji Matsumoto, a civilian in Urayasu, Japan, tried to live with McDonald's food for 30 days. This trial was held twice, in 2004 and 2006, both describing his experiences in blogs, with no changes in weight and health.

There is no movie and definitely not a book that can beat fast, cheap and tasty food. With more than 33,000 local restaurants serving 68 million people in more than 120 countries each day, and one million more American visitors a day than last year, McDonald's are invincible.

McDonalds has been the historically and notoriously enemy of the animal rights, human rights and environmental organizations for decades now. Our point in this article is not that McDonalds is a much stronger enemy than the activists tend to think, our point is that it is a weaker enemy than the society that tolerates it. McDonalds as big and nasty as it is, is a capitalist corporation that reflects society. The organizations pick McDonalds because they can't pick society.
But if we keep fighting the symptoms we will never beat the system.

The Most Successful Campaign

The campaign against fur was once considered to be the most successful campaign ever by the animal rights movement.
After almost a decade of being branded politically incorrect, fur is back in fashion, coming in all colors, shapes and sizes.
The Fur Council claims that in 1985 only 42 fashion designers included fur in their collections. 20 years later the number had risen to more than 500.
The fur industry resurgence in the last 8 years is an irrefutable evidence of the sole significance of trends in human behavior and public political views.
It is not empathy, rationality, concern and ethics that dictate humans’ behavior. It is fashion (in this case ambiguously speaking), trends, not rational and practical compassion.

In a “trendy” world, the shift back to fur was predictable. Every action has its reaction. Just a decade ago supermodels said that they’d rather go naked than wear fur. Not wearing fur was the trendy position, and that is precisely the problem, when a trend becomes too popular, the backlash can only be a matter of time.
The animal rights movement used celebrities (which are the air that trends breathe) to oppose the fur industry and now its celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Beyonce Knowles who promote fur by wearing it frequently.
The most ridicules example is of course Cindy Crawford who was the face of PETA’s anti-fur campaign and today she models fur. It’s the perfect example for the unreliability of trends.

Another example is the fact that the success of the fur campaign in the 90's was part of a wider change in public attitude. As opposed to the 80’s, when it was perfectly acceptable to flaunt one's wealth through one's outfit (and fur is the most ostentatious way to do it), in the 90’s, the trend was anti-ostentation and minimalism (grunge for example), a very good ground for an anti fur campaign. The last decade on the other hand, is dominated by the bling-bling look, with rappers singing about their love of champagne, grandiose cars and diamonds. A horrible ground obviously. And the most horrible thing is that a moral campaign needs a ground at all!

The fur industry has not only recovered from the decade of slow business during the 90’s (when the animal rights movement thought that the industry was history), it got strengthened and it is stronger than ever now. Today, fur is regarded as another fabric, it has become a standard part of fashion. Fur garments are not only coats, jackets and wraps, designers treat fur as a trim - around the necklines or hemlines of dresses, or on the collars and cuffs of sweaters and jackets, on skirts, belts, pockets, bags and even wedding dresses, helmets and on the hem of a trench coat. What was once a very expensive luxury is affordable today to the average fashionable brands consumer.

Terribly and ironically the movement has worsened the situation. The fur industry response to the campaigns over the years conducted a situation that now there are more fur items on “regular” clothes and they are wore by “regular” people. It trivializes the use of fur. The struggle against fur was a class struggle as well as animal rights struggle. Today it is a moral struggle against the current trend. And moral has no chance.

As genuine spotlight-seekers, many celebrities used the 'compassion is the fashion' trend for self promotion and for a slight tinge of image make-up.
Animal rights activists cynically use celbes who cynically use the current spirit of the age, the current trend for a better reputation and self promotion.
Good publicity is good for business.
But animal rights activists forget that every trend has an expiration date.
And the current trend is boastfulness.

The celebrity use is a two-edged sword. They might help with relatively soft and easy campaigns such as puppy mills, veal calves and fur but turning them into moral role models will cause immense harm to animals who are tortured in factory farms which are the absolute majority of the financially total exploited non-human animals, and to the animal rights agenda as a whole. Even the vegetarian self promoters will not defend animals in the meat industry if it might present them as weird or uncool preachers. Not to mention cows and hens in the milk and eggs industries which most if not all of them financially support.
And so the final message is that animals should be eaten not worn!

In spite of Al gore, Cindy Crawford, the Atkins diet, super size me and so many other trendy examples, activists still rely on trends and on celebrities to carry on moral and social justice campaigns.

Animal rights activists know just as we do how provisional and arbitrary trends are and that the same people that are against slaughtering animals for their fur, turn around and eat their flesh, or wear their skin.

Disappointment after disappointment, but the activists never learn.
They cover their eyes and ears because they can't control their urge for a short term goal.

The expectation that the same principle of action only using the good celebrities in a smart and sexy way will change the world is false and ridiculous. The same methods that are responsible for so much of what is wrong with the world can’t be the solution too.

Instead of looking for the current trends and how to use them for their goals, instead of dividing the world to good and bad celebrities.
Animal rights activist should ask themselves what are the chances for a vegan non-speciesist world when the moral message becomes a minor by product of the current trend and the mega celebrities’ reputation improvement efforts.