The Bureau of Specious Statistics....

Do you despise McDonald's because they are successful and you aren't?  The Bureau of Specious Statistics has some data to back up your weak thinking!

Welcome to the Bureau of Specious Statistics!  We have numbers to prop-up any argument, no matter how weak!  How do we do it?  We just make things up!  We welcome all weak thinkers, political obsessives, and just plain lazy folks who want numbers to back up poor decisions they've already made!

Who's first in line?  Oh, you with the dreadlocks and the vague pot smell - a winner-hater for sure, I'll bet!  I bet you need some "hard numbers" to make a searing indictment of McDonald's on your blog, so you bring down the evil corporate giant!  Keep blogging!  Any day now, they are sure to crumble!

Here's a good one!  Did you know that for every pound of beef you consume at McDonald's they ravage 55 acres of rainforest?   Sounds pretty bad!  Particularly when you consider that the entire planet earth has only 7.68 Billion acres of arable land in total.  That means for every 140,000,000 (140 million) pounds of meat McDonald's uses, the entire arable surface of the planet is destroyed!

But wait, it gets worse - that means that for every 560 million quarter-pounders sold, the Earth is reduced to a desolate, arid waste.  And given that McDonald's claims that they have served "Billions and Billions" of burgers (245 Billion as of March, 2010) that means the planet Earth has been utterly raped, over 437.5 times - just by one evil Corporation!

Wow, no wonder we have global warming - there is no land left on the Earth!  Oh, wait, that can't be right.  In fact, it is made up.  Entirely.  You see, McDonald's doesn't use "rainforest beef" in its foods.  In the US, they use US beef - which is the cheapest in the world.  And in fact, other than in restaurants in Brazil and other rainforest countries does anyone use "rainforest beef" or chicken or whatever.  And in those countries, McDonald's hasn't singled out the rainforest for beef - they buy beef where everyone else in Brazil gets it - at the market.  And some of that is raised in land that used to be rainforest.  If you have an issue here, it is with Brazilian government policy, not McDonald's. And McDonald's actually has taken steps to prevent rainforest products from getting into their foods.

And if you think about it, the amount of labor needed to clear 55 acres of rainforest, by hand or by machinery, is a staggering amount.  If the only thing produced by such devastation was a pound of meat, the price of meat about be about $10,000 a pound.  We are lead to believe that the price of four quarter-pounders is enough to offset the labor cost of clearing 55 acres of land?  Heck, it wouldn't provide lunch for the work crew for the first day.

But hey, you're a winner-hater, and McDonald's is successful, so why not harbor a lingering grudge against them?  On the other hand, if you hate them so much, just stop eating there.  I did, but only because I don't like eating pre-chewed food that takes like poo-poo.  Its an aesthetic thing, not a political one.  Not to mention economic - $10 for a bag of shit really isn't a "value meal" in my book.

But that is being logical, and not emotional.   It is so much more fun to indulge emotional thinking, ain't it?