Category: veganism

Solidarity for Sustainability

My thanks to all and each who inspire this blog 🙂

I appreciate my readers and am ever grateful for each of you — including those who disagree with some (or all) content here, or those who have tripped into my blog by entering a type O graphical error in a Google search bar. Say you’re interested in discovering something germane and find German instead. Many (most) might feel that nothing I write is germane to many (most) surfers’ interests.

sustain.pakistan

Today’s comment of the day is from Robert, creator of Words for Breakfast, a worthwhile blog I recommend to your attention on the basis of its inherent interest and merit:

“…Vegans, Vegetarians and proponents of sustainable living should work together more, be more receptive to each other instead of trying to convince each other of the rightness of their opinion…”

Please allow me to quote from my reply:

“… You are absolutely right about the need to work together with as many fellow travelers as possible. I believe in joining with others in solidarity, even if you disagree with them on many other issues. Creating enemies by edict solves nothing and poisons the soil… — crap drains no sewer…”

Vegans are not the only planetary inhabitants who recognize that a sustainable environment is not a luxury or a fantasy. Solidarity for sustainability unites many with whom you may disagree: mildly or vehemently. We have no Plan B Planet.

meatrix

I believe that sustainability is a rock-solid rule of Mother Nature, a rule enforced by her forces of evolution and devolution. You break the rules by stacking the deck in your favor, resulting in expulsion.

Before going any further, let me recommend a recent review and summation of a recent symposium in Sheffield UK by Mira Lieberman, a scholar who combines voice and verve at a sustained level of competence. Thorough and well written? Yes, indeed.

Sometimes the rules are blatantly not caused by planetary inhabitants. Sizable meteors are also a force of nature, as is a dying sun. The dinosaurs had been around far longer than mammals, for example. Extinction Event Number 5 was not of their doing. Sometimes being in the wrong place at the wrong time just happens. Sorry ’bout that.

Venus became enshrouded by clouds, setting hypothetical Venusians up for the heartbreak of The Greenhouse Effect. Your assignment: write an essay (50,000 words or less) on the topic: what I think happened to Venus.

greenhouse.smithsonian

Extinction Event Number 6 may be well on the way to completion, I’ve heard that nothing is completed until it is finished, or something. Unfortunately most other innocent fellow species are thus endangered. Many species have already disappeared through a process known as ‘extinction’ — something as natural as getting hit by a largish meteor or squeezed into a cul-de-sac by a human crave for lebensraum or some other geopolitical impulse.

Extinction events usually take millions or billions of years to complete. Leave it to the self-appointed kings of the hill, self-named topper of the food chain to deserve an “anthropocentric” geological era.

Perhaps robots invented by homo sapiens will begin a “cene” of their own after their creators leave the scene.

Vegan Venn Diagram o’ the Day

Venn diagrams are useful heuristics. Here is one from VeganStreet.com that departs from the conventional Meatist perspective. I’m calling it the Venn diagram o’ the day.

vegann.diagram.veganstreet

Hoping that you like the idea of complimenting a comment with a complementing commentary. 🙂

Thanks for reading.

 

Veganism vs. Extinction Event

Being out of synch with society is one way to identify iconoclasts.

Being out of synch with a jury of my peers is something I value, though it seems to preclude all those traits identified with career-ladder climbers.

Being out of synch with majority perspectives lends me a contented smile. However it’s not something I leverage and monetize.  For much and more on the phenomenon of contentedness, I recommend the works of Hariod Brawn.

Arcane topics of personal interest elicit mighty yawns, eye-rolls and eye-flinches among my fellow sapiens. This realization makes me most mindful and grateful for the readers who lend me their attention span, I am curious about the value systems of those who choose the seldom trod path for a living. I also suffer from “fear of not learning something.”

Now, let me test your patience with some more evidence supporting the existence of THE ANTHROPOCENE, something that elicits yawns, eye-rolls and eye-flinches among the masses of asses who would rather shrug shoulders, move bowels and move on.

ages

What are the odds of each of us actually being present on this planet as it prepares to shrug off the shoulder shruggers? Staggering or no? 

Consider the sheer number of homo sapiens presently residing on this orb.

Now consider that our population is increasing at an increasing rate, and now stands at 7.x billion, 97% of these guys consume 70.x billion edible and appetizing fellow Earth inhabitants per annum. Each of those non homo sapiens possesses a highly developed central nervous system, each has two eyes. There’s a market for every part of an animal, from fur to marrow, nose to tail. See my piece Inverting Pork Rectums for a Living for more. By the way, that article was inspired by William Brigg, statistician to the stars. 

Here’s the thing about veganism methinks: it removes a complicity with this butchering of 70.x billion this year and 70.x butchering of brand new beasts readied for butchering next year. By the way, I’ve an issue calling the slaughtered “beasts” and the slaughterers “consumers.”

AnimalsVeganManifesto_CVF

Did you know that only a few rodents survived the firestorm that accompanied Meteor Meets Planet. We are the descendants of those rodents.

In 1915 a chemist named Fritz Haber discovered a process for isolating nitrogen atoms from the atmosphere and combining them with hydrogen for the mass production of fertilizers, explosives and pesticides.

Not surprisingly Haber received Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918. Nobel knew a little chemistry himself.

Haber also invented Zyklon gas, a pesticide.  IG Farben removed the odor from the hydrogen cyanide product so that the exterminated in German death camps would not be alerted until it was too late.

fritz.haber

Ironically Fritz Haber’s achievement of  increasing population ultimately brings the concluding moment of the Anthropocene closer.

You may have read news items on the massive decimation of flying insects in the last few decades. I am old enough to remember wiping the windshield clean of accumulated flying bugs every hundred miles or so on Summer drives. Today your wipers clear dust and debris only. You could put off cleaning bugs from the grill until they built up by the thousands. I recall seeing massive tanks along the Ohio River at Cincinnati — mostly labelled Sohio and Monsanto.

Rex Tillerson began his career with Exxon at the same time that Exxon scientists discovered that their product would tip the scales in favor of runaway global warming.

Most hardware stores in my neighborhood stock massive aisles of their über money-maker Roundup® — don’t buy into their propaganda. Merely a suggestion of course.

Ending on a positive tone — vegans and proponents of sustainable living have much in common. Go team!

Discover veganism, another mere suggestion 🙂

Thanks for reading

A Vegan in the Agora

Hello all and each 🙂 Here is yet another post on a theme of vega..

nism from a self-righteous, self-serving wild-eyed V-Gun. Raving screeds spewing from an amino-acid-deprived, protein-starved snot brain…

…n perspective of an agoraphobic in the marketplace (agora is the Greek word for market). I’ve a field trip suggestion — be you agoraphobic or no.

shopper_selecting_meat

Three steps:

  1. Stop by your local übermarket with a weekly grocery list in hand.
  2. Encircle each line item on the list that contains animal-based ingredients: stuffs like meat, egg, dairy, variously mechanically separated body parts. Check product labels if applicable.
  3. Take note of the contents of grocery carts in your vicinity…

and upend any cart that doesn’t meet your approval. Glare threateningly at innocent grocery shoppers — including their youngsters — and arrange a funeral pyre in accordance with Hindu-friendly ceremonies for the dearly departed…

Did you know that junk food is subsidized by the USDA? The lobbies stuffing the rear, front and suit pockets in federal, state and local government offices include small-scale outfits such as Monsanto and Tyson. A merger a year keeps the arrears away.


Source

Did you know that the North Koreans could use a few good fools? Sounds like a place you would find less threatening.

Global warming did not trend until the Industrial Revolution started spewing spent fossil fuels into that thin bubble of air blanketing the Earth. Perhaps there is a deity who could bring around a replacement planet? There is that. I’ve heard somewhere that a reduction in meat-baseless eating could help.

Vegans are at the brunt-end of many jokes, but the jokesters seem to tread a bit nervously these days — we’re still outnumbered 33 to 1, but our numbers are not decreasing.

You need to lighten up a little, Bill. We hope these help:

Q: Why did the tofu cross the road?
A: To prove he wasn’t chicken.

Q: What did one vegetarian say to the other vegetarian?
A: We have to stop meating like this.

Q: Why do people kill animals?
A: Fur convenience steak.

There are more where those came from, but just remember: vegans are the joke, Bill.

Source

The animal atop the food chain believes itself ordained to husband lesser sentient creatures to the highest bidder. All other species get to exist at the whim of human appetite and fashion. Is there anything questionable about this?

Thanks for reading.

Hedonic Hyperphagia

Announcing an alliteration to accompany my entry to Club Septuagenarius. Have I mentioned being born on my mother’s birthday: September 17, 1947? Well, I found a clinical word pair to celebrate a new decade — hedonic hyperphagia — eat one and you’ll eat them all. Whether potato chips (or crisps), Oreos®, All Hallows Eve candy: ad nauseam. It literally describes a fulsome moment. I raise my hand to admit something to a jury of my peers.

“My name is Bill and I am an hyperphagic.”

potato-chips-eating-for-pleasure

“Revealing the scientific secrets of why people can’t stop after eating one potato chip” couches that couch-potato moment in an article from Eurekalert.

Here are fifteen words to digest while digesting the last thing you consumed, such as Deep-fried Oreos® breaded with finely crushed chips (the crisp variety).

I know from studied experience that animal-based product may result in hedonic hyperphagia. You might not wish to know that the consumption of humus, not to be confused with hummus, is termed “geophagia.” I once (circa 1970) read an article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers that earth-eating is associated with a low mineral diet. I also recall that Frank Zappa once warned about eating yellow snow.

Every time you eat or drink, you are either feeding disease or fighting it.

— Heather Morgan

As a former loyal-to-a-fault meat and hide consumer I know that items containing meat and meat by-products are based on animalian cells. These cells are comprised of molecules that have a psychoactive effect on an homo sapiens’ brain, “hedonic hyperphagia.”  Detox from such a diet is enervating to the extreme, both painful and discouraging. I had previously gone cold Tofurky® from tobacco and alcohol consumption before abstaining from animal-fare. I admit to the character flaw that accompanies total abstention however. Ambrose Bierce tosses well deserved water on my countenance. It’s called “total abstention.”  🙂

quote-abstainer-n-a-weak-person-who-yields-to-the-temptation-of-denying-himself-a-pleasure-a-total-ambrose-bierce-210924

 

Vegans stand as infuriating reminders that they serve sentient beings to man. Damon Knight wrote the definitive “To Serve Man,” most familiarly associated with its adaptation into a Twilight Zone episode. I wish Rod Serling had kicked smoking. You too?

That introductory pith drawn from the work of Heather Morgan inspires me to join Morgan by paraphrasing her:

“Every time you eat or drink the lifeblood of another, you are either feeding nihilism or fighting it.”  — Bill Ziegler

I leave tales of nihilism for a future post.

non.vegan.limbo

 

Here is another envisaged scenario: what would occur were I to show up at a pro-life rally with an enlarged photograph of an aborted calf fetus? It’s surely happened at some rally somewhere. Would one or more protesters counter that there’s a deity-informed difference between the immortal soul of a God-created icon found in a book called Genesis? Who made homo sapiens the boss of other sentient beings? May I beg to differ?

Thanks for reading.