Excellent piece by Mike Tidwell in Audubon Magazine: The Low Carbon Diet.

The Low Carbon Diet

I was a bit concerned when Tidwell opened with the usual “confession” that so many apologias for meat eating use, a trope I’m tired of reading:

Full disclosure: I love to eat meat. I was born in Memphis, the barbecue capital of the Milky Way Galaxy. I worship slow-cooked, hickory-smoked pig meat served on a bun with extra sauce and coleslaw spooned on top.

It always feels to me like a defensive posture that ought to be unnecessary, and serves to distance the author rhetorically from the position he or she is about to take.

But the piece as a whole is actually a welcome contribution to the ongoing work of trying to get environmentally aware omnis to start thinking about the impact of their diet:

The facts speak for themselves. If we really want to fight climate change, we should change our lightbulbs and purchase hybrid cars and, above all, vote for politicians committed to a clean energy future. But we should also eat less meat, a lot less, or none at all.

Tidwell acknowledges the challenges of changing consumer behavior, and the irrational reactions people have when you break taboo and start talking to them about what they eat, but argues that the connections need to be made:

one’s ideas about food reside in the same part of the brain that houses our ideas and beliefs about religion. It’s not all rational, in other words. . . .

. . . for people to care, the climate–food discussion must be about more than just facts, more than pounds of greenhouse gases per units of food. It’s got to be about morality, about right versus wrong. And I don’t mean the usual morality of environmental “stewardship.” Or even the issue of cruelty to farm animals. I’m talking here about cruelty to people, about the explicit harm to humans that results from meat consumption and its role as a driving force in climate change. Knowingly eating food that makes you fat or harms your local fish and birds is one thing. Knowingly eating food that makes children across much of the world hungry is another.

Of course, as an ethical vegan, I think the “cruelty to farm animals” ought to have a significant impact on one’s choices too, but I’m happy to see a mainstream environmental publication take issues of food policy on directly.

Mayo Brothers (photo by Olivander)

Nayonaise (photo by Smiteme)

Very happy to see this great set of resources from the Mayo Clinic - Vegetarian Diet: How to Get the Best Nutrition - which begins:

Adopting a healthy vegetarian diet isn’t as simple as scraping meat off your plate and eating what’s left. You need to take extra steps to ensure you’re meeting your daily nutritional needs.

A healthy vegetarian diet consists primarily of plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. Because the emphasis is on nonmeat food sources, a vegetarian diet generally contains less fat and cholesterol, and typically includes more fiber.

and concludes:

No matter what your age or situation, a well-planned vegetarian diet can meet your nutritional needs.

They even created a vegetarian version of the food pyramid:

Vegetarian Food Pyramid

Nice to see this coming from mainstream health sources, not just the PCRM.

Mercy for Animals Executive Director Nathan Runkle

From the press release issued by MFA:

Nathan Runkle, the 24-year old openly gay founder and Executive Director of the national animal advocacy organization, Mercy For Animals, was brutally assaulted on Saturday morning in an apparent hate crime.

To make matters worse, Ohio officials can’t consider the assault a hate crime:

Sexual orientation-motivated crimes are currently not addressed under Ohio hate crimes laws. The laws address only crimes motivated by race, color, religion, or national origin.

Although I’ve only known Nathan from the distance - as a supporter and fan of his activism - it is truly disheartening to see someone so focused on simple, peaceful, mercy-driven actions be the victim of such violence.

A few quotes from other bloggers:

Mark Hawthorne, Striking at the Roots:

Nathan is one of the kindest and hardest-working activists I know, and I am heartsick beyond words that anyone would hurt him.

pattrice jones, “Violence Hits Home”

So, if you’re somebody who cares about or works on LGBTQ issues but has not (yet) integrated the animals into your analysis of oppression, let this attack on a gay man who has dedicated himself to animal rights motivate you to educate yourself about the connections. And, if you’re a straight animal liberationist or veg*n advocate who hasn’t thought deeply about your heterosexual privilege and what obligations you might have to divest yourself of that, let this near-deadly attack on a gay animal advocate remind you (if Proposition 8 and Obama’s selection of a homophobic preacher to speak at his inauguration did not) that homophobia is still alive and dangerous.

All I can say is that this kind of behavior is exactly why, president-elect Obama, it is more than just an insult to have Rick Warren at the inauguration, and why the recent anti-gay legislation in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas is not to be taken lightly or as a matter of “polite” politics.

Mercy for Animals

Check out the MFA Year in Review 2008 video.

As Mary Gauthier sings in “Mercy Now“:

Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
Every single one of us could use some mercy now

Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.
On New Year’s Day.

But then at the center of the song declaring with renewed affirmation:

Though torn in two
We can be one.

I… I will begin again
I… I will begin again.

Video (why are they on horseback in the snow? I don’t know):

We enter 2009 with a “transition team” for Obama, but also with Israel and Hamas engaged in very real and violent conflict.

Do you enter the new year feeling hopeful, or resigned?

Criggo is basically Jay Leno’s Headlines routine from Monday nights as a blog, with the greater, um, latitude that blogging allows over late night tv.

One recent favorite:

She couldn't recognize it?

Check them out at http://criggo.wordpress.com/

So I took Tana Sokolow’s remix –  which put Obama’s speech over Lee Dorsey’s early seventies performance of Allen Toussaint’s Yes We Can – and created a ringtone.

This’ll get annoying shortly, I’m sure, but for now it is fun.

Download the ringtone: yes_we_can

(.m4r is the filetype iTunes uses for ringtones)

A version of Adam Sandler’s Hannukah song reworked with new lyrics by Don Davis, as performed by Louie Aronowitz: Put away your Fathiesm, its time to celebrate atheism:

Atheism is, the festival of Enlightenment,
Unlike many religions, it doesn’t depend on crazy enfrightenment

Very Sandler-esque.

Generated by Wordle. Technically not quite based on the final version, since I can’t find the final version. I have the PDF from University Microfilms, but the only editable version I have is ~4 months behind that final version.

Not sure how different it would be if it treated word pairs differently (like “New York” versus “New” and “York,” or “Dos Passos” rather than “Dos” and “Passos”).

It’s a really thoughtful book about an alternative approach to the battle over privacy based on two-way transparency, or more accurately accountability. Along the way I marked a few passages in the book.

Bear in mind this was writted in 1998, well in advance of the events of Sept. 11th and the Patriot Act which of course followed it:

As terrorists, criminal, and bombers go more high-tech and lethal, each new heinous act will prompt government appeals for greater surveillance powers. Perhaps citizens will refuse these requests nine times in a row — until something truly grievous happens. Then, in the ensuing dread and panic, a frightened public will grant these new powers. (p87)

At another point he quotes a Wired commentary by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden:

With the coming of a wired, global society, the concept of openness has never been more important. It’s the linchpin that will make the new world work. in a nutshell, the key formula for the coming age is this: Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead. Apply it to technology standards, to business strategies, to philosophies of life. It’s the winning concept for individuals, for nations, for the global community in the years ahead. (p328 - the original was an article called “The Long Boom: A History of the Future 1980-2020,” in Wired July 1997).

But my favorite was this aphorism from M. N. Plano:

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don’t assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one — until you can show it isn’t you.

A quick google search to try to locate the “M. N. Plano” to which Brin attributes this suggests it’s a variant on something known as Hanlon’s Razor, which has a vague history of misattribution. (I can’t find any other reference to “M. N. Plano” except to this exact quotation, or another on Brin’s homepage, and it is uncited in Brin’s end notes).

Anyone know who M. N. Plano might be?

MFA’s “How Much Cruelty Can You Swallow?” Ad Campaign Hits Boston

Millions of bus riders in Boston are getting a new outlook on dinner, thanks to the launch of over 600 pro-vegetarian MFA ads.

The campaign, which features images of cows, pigs, and chickens crammed in tiny cages on factory farms, asks Bostonians, “How Much Cruelty Can You Swallow?”

The powerful ads will be viewed over 20 million times in the next month.

This summer MFA unveiled the same campaign on Chicago bus and rail transit lines.

Click here to watch a video review of the ad campaign’s launch event in Chicago.