Category: animal liberation

Veganism as Enlightenment: What Gives?

Today’s fortune cookie papers:

  1. Choose to eschew animal flesh, choose to chew plant nutrients.
  2. Make good lifestyle choices,
  3. A vegan diet a day keeps an extinction event at bay.

This is another in What Gives? — a series of articles designed to promote intellectual curiosity on a range of healthful topics.

 

michael-pollan

Caution: today’s post may not be suitable for all audiences.

Veganism and enlightenment go together like birds of a feather in a lush wetland — a match made in heaven. Allow me to entertain a wild guess, to estimate a ballpark figure on vegans’ good taste in matters of truth and beauty. In a word — legion.

Lisa informs me that my web search has led to Mark 5:9 — the one in which Jesus exorcises demons from a haunted soul, sending each demon into the souls of unfortunate pigs who drown themselves rather than suffer.

Veganism recognizes the right of all sentient beings to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s not a matter of lions laying with the lambs. No, a lion is a carnivore by nature. Canine teeth not withstanding.

vegan-we-are-legion

Veganism argues for the inherent right of animals to live by their own device — not a life ordained and enforced by a single specie, one with a storied history of arrogance. Homo Sapien might look into the eyes of another specie and imagine stretch-wrapped plastic slabs resting on styrofoam tubs in a super-duper market — factory-farm fresh from the slaughter house. Live and let live (in a Tyson death camp perhaps).

OK Bill, you are indeed “one of those vegans.” QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM, ERGO SUM.

Legion — the number saved, not the number served.

Bill, before you go back to your bunny diet, take a goose and a gander at the highlights on Sunday’s grand buffet:

  • foie gras,
  • veal cutlets (let’s cut),
  • bottomless meat bowls

Why do you not slaver?

ex-carnivore

Today’s reading is from Rama Ganesan:

Enlightenment and Speciesism: On the domain-specificity of awakenings

From Rama’s byline:

Vegan and former vivisectionist. BA (Oxon), PhD, MBA, Humane Educator. Mother of four, two humans, one dog and one cat. From Tucson, Cardiff and Chennai.

Highly recommended because it’s well written and inspiring.

Thanks for reading.

Inverting Pig Rectums for a Living

Rated V — Very vegan friendly post. May offend some non-vegan readers

Vegan Sayings and Cute Things

Every molecule of “meat” represents a return on investment in the multiple trillion dollar industry that scavenges the hide and the marrow of our barnyard friends. Meat and meat byproducts, mechanically separated flesh, slime pink, love pink.

why-vegan-bearing-witness

Workers eking out a living in inexpressibly incomprehensible “meat-processing centers” risk emotional evisceration. As a wise man never said: “if you can’t take the PTSD, stay out of the death camp.” 

Did I mention that those rectal returns on investment increase as processing technology drives down production costs? Where do those profits accrue?  To the workers? No. They are funneled elsewhere. Here’s a hint: think financial-market capital traders. New York City?

There are worksites where people invert pork rectums for a living.

boneless-pork-rectums-inverted

Consider spraying compressed air into pig skulls? What? This is done to prevent “resource waste.”   Remove brain before directing the skulls to the bone-crushing mills. 

Remove all brains and keep your brains right. I got my mind right boss. My factory floor poster suggestion. Display at the employee entrance.

swimming-pig
A vegan-friendly alternative. Here they have the run of the island.

Use squeegees to direct blood from the stainless steel cutting stations and slough it into the collection containers provided for that purpose. Remember — blood is the lifeblood of our prosperity.

Waste not — do not waste animal lives.

Go vegan.

Consumers enjoy factory-farm-fresh sausage served with factory-farm-fresh eggs. Healthy profits rely upon advertising campaigns, you don’t want to squander resources by sullying a good name with idle talk of screams, stench and pollution. “Bob Evans — down on the farm.“

3-batterychickens
Nine billion animals served annually

 

Take a look at the geography of animal processing. Contrast and compare with the geography of our prison-industrial complex. How are they similar?

See not, hear not, know not. Because complicity sucks — a lot.

Did any Soylent Green consumers know about rectal processing? It’s not just a camp classic.

Thanks for shuddering.

Leitmotif of a Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is a collection of loosely organized snippets of stuff. It’s a way of thinking that I first encountered by way of detour (my favorite hobby) at the Cincinnati Library — a book caught my eye and subsumed my identity — A Certain World by W.H. Auden. ’twas many a decade ago (4) in what now seems a distant galaxy.

Galaxy (not the magazine) reminds me now of that breathtaking work by Douglas Adams — by golly, esme recently alluded to HHGTTG. Please consult esme for more, much and many. You’ll enjoy the visit. You will, yes you will. Say, I also offer a thread from H2G2 too.

commonplace-book-cartoon-newyorker  

I like to use the word eponymous whenever possible. By gosh, this entire writing adventure is eponymously named billziegler1947. Tell your friends about this ever so clever self-referential weblog, or not.

But WTF is a leitmotif? Doesn’t sound light to us. Har Har.

A leitmotif is a recurring theme in a musical or literary work.  

leit-motif

All so very well Bill, but isn’t it time for an unnecessary ‘detour’, one you cloyingly call a hobby?

A blog is a jarringly clumsy word created in the internet wild-west world: a two character left-string truncation of ‘weblog’ — it removes the ‘we’, or is it the’us’?

Captain’s weblog 2016.366. We is back. Welcome. Just us chicken defenders.

And so, this has all been a rather detour-ridden post. However, it’s a holiday of sorts — the null point , nodding here to Hariod, between 2016 and 2017. Or are we to be taken, in far less than an instant, to arrive in 1957. There to encounter a Back to the Future replay of the fell sort, Biff and all perhaps.

biff-wins-again

Holy heavens, you have completely abandoned every modicum that informs an insistent adherence to proper writing-style. Will you ever stay on task?

No.

Veganism is the best ‘ism’ ever. If you don’t believe that then you haven’t visited Crows Head Soup by Peter Schreiner, have you? Right. Go there now.

As you gather about that soup cauldron, allow me to pass the microphone to a most impassioned advocate, one who brings voice to each and every animal crushed to the marrow for the sake of appetites unending and insatiable — outsidersinsides. Expect no bon appetit if meat be on the table. Thank you! And to all gatherers — grab that mike. My ear enjoys your insights. Always.

Let’s say that you recognize the longest occupation in modern history, one that continues into 2017 and you are also interested in animal rights. Right. Palestinian Animal League.

Let us remind you, Bill, that you are no Laurence Sterne and we fervently pray that you not dash off first lines from Tristram Shandy to cover your untidiness. We merely ask.

First lines

shandy-black-page

Copy. (and paste). But I do recall that page of solid black ink from high school, don’t I?

Yes, I do.

cover-page-tristram

And so, with gratitude for every and each reader, and with appreciation for everyone I follow, a hearty fist in the air on behalf of all the exploited sentient beings who are our fellow travellers.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Nothing, or a Useful Pot?

Hariod Brawn has asked me to write my take on “nothing happening” and “nothingness”. So it is my every privilege to respond with something on nothing. For all and each, with sheer gratitude for simply being in the company of my readers.

Hello in there. Hello.

hello-in-there

Critics of composer John Cage are legion. His best known work 4′ 33″ is a quite quiet piece. Audiences chime in with coughs, traffic noise, sound absent upon the stage. Movements end with a drop of the piano-key lid, they begin upon opening the lid.

 

The most common objection to 4′ 33″:

“Why, anyone can do that.”

Cage’s reply:

“No one had before I did.”

Nothing doing, or doing nothing.

cage-against-the-machine

 

You may know of the Zen koan on the cup full and the cup empty. Some good nothing there.

That reminds me of something. Reading literature in original language is a way to avoid the lie of translation. All translations are variations on untruth. Poetry is highly susceptible to mistranslation. Reading Rilke in the original German is worth the effort.

Languages are subtle windows into culture. Deliberate mistranslation is a bludgeoning tool for propagandists.

Perhaps I digress.

“Yes.”

Oh well.

“Death to America” is a deliberate mistranslation from Farsi, inexcusable ignorance of ancient and marvelous Persian culture. The proper translation is “Down with America,” but the word “death” suggests “jihad” and feeds Islamophobia. Bomb ’em. 

Now, back to nothing.

Well, almost.

Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende quite accurately tells the universal tale of a nihilist threat: das Nicht (The Nothing). This tale is nothing like that empty cup or the useful pot. Milne wrote about a wonderful birthday present that Piglet gifted Eeyore: “The Useful Pot.”

useful-pot

Emptiness can be wonderful. It can be horrible. Another fantasy by Ende: Momo. A tale of time thieves who deviously steal hours at a time from unsuspecting, innocent hardworking people.  Give us the time of your life and we will invest it for you. Momo is a homeless waif who lends her time freely and with gratitude. A most rare quality.

michael-ende-momo-copy1

I proclaim that we are all existential, and by “all” I mean all sentient beings. We all exist, but some of us are exploited. To the victors go the history books — sometimes those victors also build expedient death camps for tasty or despised fellow sentients. Truth is not something generated by majority rule.

Do I again digress?

“Yes.”

Oh Well.

Thanks for reading.