Advocate:  Pentagon spent more on lobster in one month than it did on trans health care all year

Stop it queer magazine, I am already proud of our military.

Trans people require ongoing medical care, and that isn’t compatible with military deployment.  A peanut allergy can disqualify a person.  Being taller than 6 foot, 6 inches tall disqualifies a person, as does taking ADHD medication.

The military exists to attack and defend, not to explore personal life choices.  The Pentagon shouldn’t spend anything on trans health care.

I’m not convinced that the Pentagon should spend anything on lobsters. 

I take a moderate position on lobsters.  This article says that lobsters were once cheap and plentiful.

During the 1700s lobsters were so plentiful that they used to wash ashore on Massachusetts beaches in piles up to 2 feet high.

If you were to see a 2-foot-high pile of lobsters today I’m sure your mouth would be watering, but in the 1700s they were not as impressed.

Yuk!  That sounds wretched. 

I doubt that anyone’s mouth waters when they see live lobsters in a tank at the grocery store.  I’ve been to the wet markets of Hong Kong, and there were all manner of living sea monsters in tanks.  Asians love that shit, but they weren’t slobbering.

I like a good steak or brisket, but my mouth doesn’t water when I see a cow.  How much less appealing if I see a dead cow on the road that was hit by a snow plow. 

A live lobster would crawl back to the sea.  A pile of lobsters stacked up on the beach, are probably dead and stinking.

Lobsters were considered the “poor man’s chicken” and primarily used for fertilizer or fed to prisoners and slaves.

Nonsense.  Everyone knows that tofu is ‘poor man’s chicken’, at least in our modern era.  In other times and places, cats, rats and pigeons were ‘poor man’s chicken’.

In the 1700’s, people might see a pile of rotting seafood on the beach, and choose to feed that to prisoners.  Today, when I see road kill, I don’t pick it up to feed to my dogs.  My dogs wouldn’t object.  Sparky is famous for eating rotting garbage we find in the woods, but I wouldn’t do that to him.

Our fresh lobster isn’t that bad, but it isn’t that great.  It’s the butter that makes it palatable.  If surf didn’t rhyme with turf, half as many people would order it.

Steak is a durable way to say that life is good.  Dining with a client at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse or friends squatting in a junkyard near a charcoal fire mounded in a truck rim, grilling a steak on an old oven rack, everyone appreciates the moment. 

The military should serve steak.  Maybe not all the time to everyone, but don’t be stingy.  Anyone working on the deck of an aircraft carrier should get a steak after a sortie.  Anyone returning from a forward operating base should get a steak.  Or maybe once per week.  Pete can work that out.

Non-meat eaters don’t have anything comparable.  A vegetarian would say they have a ripping good couscous recipe, and I agree, but it’s usually some food from the culture we are bombing, so, just bad messaging.

The lobster is a stand-in for steak.  It represents good living, and doesn’t actually have to be that great.

Michelle Obama ruined school lunches.  I agree that children should endure a certain amount of suffering to build resilience, but she broke the model.  Our military should eat as well as they feasibly can, because it can be a tough job in harsh conditions.