Vox, the leftist site that claims to explain the news, is whining about renewed deforestation of the rain forest in Brazil. In the past six months alone 1600 square kilometers of rain forest was cut down!

You know, one of things I love about leftist journalism is that they make a point of only providing facts you would need to arrive at their favored conclusion. If the government is going to "cut" a program by 50 million dollars, they'll say that, but won't tell you that that total budget for the program is 50 billion, because that would make the cut sound small.

It's the same situation here. Curiously missing from the fact-filled Vox article is how big the rainforest really is.

Are you ready? The rainforest is 5,500,000 square kilometers in size. That's huge. Compared to that, 1600 square kilometers is barely trimming your toenails. If Vox had included that fact in its article, we might not have been so concerned.

So, because it's such a small percentage of the rainforest, we know it's a nonissue. But let me go farther. I think we should encourage further cutting down of the rainforest!

Ask yourself why people are cutting down the rainforest in the first place? Is it some enormous public art project?

Largely it's done by farmers and ranchers, who want to grow food and raise cattle to feed the hungry of the world. We have millions of people in the world who go to bed every night hungry. We need more land devoted to agriculture, and the warm climate of the Amazon is the perfect place for it.

There is 5,500,000 square kilometers of rainforest. Isn't, say, 1,000,000 kilometers enough for a wildlife preserve? How about a million square miles? That sounds more than sufficient! The rest should be plowed under, and turned into farms and ranches, to feed the hungry of the world, to still the screams of the children with bloated bellies who go to bed hungry every night!

Liberals will also talk about all the medicines that come from the rainforest. They like to repeat how less than 1% of the plants in the rainforest have been catalogued and if we cut down even 10 square feet, we could lose an irreplacable cure for cancer or transgenderism.

Do you know how many medicines are based on rainforest plants? Only 120. 120, out of thousands and thousands of medicines. You may wonder, why do we only have 120 medicines if the rainforest is full of cures? Why have only 1% of plants been catalogued, why aren't the drug companies sending thousands of researchers down there to take plant clippings?

The answer is very obvious. Most plants aren't useful for drug cures, most drug cures are synthesized. If they were, you'd find more than 120 rainforest drugs and more than 1% of the plants there would be categorized. This is just a canard liberals put up to prevent any of the rainforest from being cut down.

The other canard liberals throw out is about global warming. They claim that burning down the rainforest releases CO2 into the atmosphere. This might be a problem if there were global warming, but there has been no global warming of any kind, natural or man made, in 17 years, unless you believe falsified temperature data. Furthermore, even if burning the rainforest somehow made it a little warmer, people experiencing brutal winters around the world would only thank us.

We have all been taught to adore the concept of the rainforest but please try to let go! Think of the hungry children in Africa, Latin America and Asia, who would all be minorities if they were in America, and some of them would grow up to be feminist and transgender. Isn't the hunger of small children more important than almost endless jungle, filled with snakes and malaria and mosquitos  and five foot long parasitical worms that hatch inside your body? If so, let's put an end to hunger in the third world. Let's take four million kilometers of rainforest and turn it into farmland!

Pedro Gonzales is the editor of Newsmachete.com, the conservative news site.