March 2008
50 posts
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Baby seal slaughter is tragic -- for the... →
275,000 baby seals will be clubbed to death this season in Canada. But the real tragedy occurs when just a few of those killers-for-hire die in a boat accident. The arrogance is astounding and shameful.
Plamondon said the close-knit sealers were devastated by news of the accident.
I hope that in their devastation over the loss of a few, these men pause to reflect on the...
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Earth Hour →
Taking an hourlong break from raping the Earth as hard as we normally do really shows character and moral strength, I think.
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Virus infects Chile's salmon. (Drinking game... →
Okay, we’re going to play a game. Every time you notice an expression and/or consequence of humanist-capitalism, you have to take a shot. Go!
A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or I.S.A., is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile’s third-largest export industry, which has left local...
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Using sex to sell veganism: What's the problem? →
What is it about public sexual displays — in particular, those that are put on with a reasonable degree of consent by the participants — that ruffle some feminist feathers? I suspect that this anti-public sexuality dogma is little more than a manifestation of personal psychological issues so deeply rooted that some feminist intellectuals bypass their respective intellects altogether,...
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Sudden, Massive, and Mysterious: First the bees,... →
There has been a sudden, massive, and mysterious die-off of bees in recent years. Possible factors being looked at are pesticides, viruses, or parasites. This experiential article, written by an organic beekeeper, identifies the shrinking of the natural hive cells as one of the main causes of bee die-offs at many commercial beekeeping operations.
Whatever the most immediate causes for these...
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20 of 27 state governments list another animal's... →
Cows remain terribly ungrateful for the distinction.
So uncivilized of them.
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Slavery continues to flourish in many forms →
According to Benjamin Skinner’s research, there are more human slaves today than at any other time, despite no “official” sanctioning of the practice anywhere in the world. Often children, they are generally (ab)used as sexual objects or domestic laborers.
The number of non-human captives dwarfs the total human population — 10 billion of them are confined, tortured, and...
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Must Read →
Excellent article offering insights into the Bear Sterns fiasco and Wall Street culture in general.
"Free Market" Investors: NOW They Want a... →
Touting the “free market” in our modern political landscape immunizes corporate activity from the limits of proper regulation, thereby shifting all negative costs — environmental, social, etc. — onto the public. (And let’s not forget the incredible burdens routinely placed on members of other species and ecological systems in the name of human whim.) Finally, when the...
Move along folks, nothing to see here. →
Remember all those wall streeters cheering and popping champagne during former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer’s outing/resignation? They absolutely hated this guy, because, as Attorney General and then Governor of NY, he threatened their relentless pursuit of greed and self-interest. So… read the article linked above, and then read this. And don’t forget, the Bush Administration...
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30,000 specimens taken from Antarctic waters →
Isn’t it exciting when you find 30,000 specimens of creatures — some previously unknown to human animals and some just looking neat — and then steal them from their life-giving habitats for starboard photo-ops? While Scientist X gets to publish an article in an obscure academic (oops, redundancy) journal, 30,000 non-scientist lives are interrupted and lost. Oh well, they’re...
Ocean Deserts on the Rise: Marine Plant and Animal... →
I’m glad this topic is being discussed, but one of the problem’s root causes — if not the root cause — is unwittingly demonstrated in the last line of the opening paragraph: “this could be another blow for the world’s fisheries.” Translation: the disappearance of marine life is most importantly a blow to human animals. Isn’t this more of a blow to...
I heard the Earth actually was flat... until The... →
“Bernanke’s doing everything he can to end it,” says Brian Horrigan, chief economist at Loomis Sayles, a Boston mutual fund manager. But “he can’t miraculously change a bad asset to a good asset.” Experts differ widely on how far advanced the current financial crisis is. Some say it could last several more years, while others say the stock market may be near...
Fed cuts rate AGAIN (3/4 points) →
“The Federal Reserve slashed a key interest rate by three-quarters of apercentage point Tuesday, in the central bank’s continued effort to restore confidence in the economy and battered financial markets.” The (shit) show must go on, apparently. By lowering the Fed Funds interest rate, the Fed is hoping to accomplish two related things: (a) make it easier to borrow, especially...
An Empire of Debt -- Collapsing Under Its Own... →
This is a good post summing up the current economic crisis by the venerable BondDad over at DailyKos. Look, it really is so simple. Anyone (with half a brain cell in their prefrontal cortex) can and should understand exactly what happened. Anyone can and should have seen it coming. Yet so few of us did, and the many that didn’t will retain their power and influence. The next time someone...
Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace - New York... →
“The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.” The “fisheries experts” are having a little trouble figuring it out. I can think of any number of strong possible explanations as to why the salmon population has plunged,...
Times Co. to Give Seats to Hedge Funds →
“The New York Times Company has struck a deal with a pair of hedge funds that want to shake up the company, giving the funds two seats on the board in order to avoid a proxy fight, the two sides announced Monday. The agreement with Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners marks the first time since the Times Company went public in 1967 that it has accepted directors nominated by...
Wall Street: Follow-up
The reality is that the current economic paradigm is doomed to breed these cataclysms, and if this present cataclysm is as bad as the tea leaves suggest, then we should expect things to get worse. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine dwindling access to resources resulting from, among other things, environmental degradation and overpopulation of voracious consumers. Further, the modes...
Wall Street: Idiots at the helm →
Jan 2007: Bear Sterns, fifth largest investment bank in the U.S., is valued at $170 a share. Friday, 3/14: Bear Stearns closes at $30 a share. Sunday, 3/16: Bear Stearns is bought for $2 a share. Money quote: “That is just unbelievable,” said investing consultant Scott Fullman. “It implies there is more risk in here than has been apparent.” Also see this timeline beginning...
America's Next Top Disgusting Model →
Repulsive photos of women in meat garb. Some viewers may have gotten a little closer to the uncomfortable origin of the contents of their stomachs. Others likely responded to the challenge with rationalization and compartmentalization, internalizing their beliefs and behaviors more deeply.
"The situation is very bad, the situation is... →
- Martin Feldstein, President of National Bureau of Economic Research and former Reagan economic adviser I’ve been saying it for years: the economy is worse than we think. I don’t just mean “worse than we think” as in “we all think it’s really good to have a ‘growing’ economy, when, in reality, that ‘growing’ economy will destroy the...
Sport: one of the "noblest human endeavors" →
“It is our policy not to get involved in politics,” he was quoted as saying, because it would not serve the cause of sport, which he called one of the noblest human endeavors “for creating understanding and peace all over the world.” - Swatch Group chief executive Nick Hayek, on Swatch brand Omega’s unwillingness to use leverage as an Olympics sponsor to publicly...
"Ethos": The bottled water brand that snatches... →
This is an excellent example of the chronic short-sightedness and selective morality of humanist-capitalism. Every day, a few powerful people (in this case, the PR/Marketing teams at Starbucks and PepsiCo) listen to the very slight pang in their respective consciences and decide they’re going to “save the world.” Of course, to the humanist, “the world” is humanity....
Bush names himself chief overseer... of himself. →
“On Friday, without explanation, Bush stripped the Intelligence Oversight Board of many of its core powers and duties… The IOB has been transformed from investigator to a passive observer, a mere recipient of administration reports about its own wrongdoing.”
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WatchThe annual Canadian seal slaughter will begin again soon. Learn more and sign the Humane Society’s boycott pledge of Canadian seafood. Better yet, sign the pledge and give up seafood altogether.
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About HERE
The Band Art rock duo HERE are as musically tight as the familial bond between its permanent members, twin brothers Dan and Matt Mims. Executing harrowing, audience-shocking art rock, HERE is often referred to as a “musician’s band,” even in music mecca Brooklyn, NY, which they call home. Undeniably avant-garde, HERE still manages to resonate with diverse audiences because...
Wow. →
“Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe. They can loose as much energy as our sun during its entire 10 billion year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more. The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. “It could only appear...
Study: Carbon emissions must drop to zero →
“… If we want to reduce warming to a certain level, there’s a fixed amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere. After that, we can’t emit any more, at all.” Caldeira and his colleague, H. Damon Matthews, a geography professor at Concordia University in Montreal, emphasized this point in their paper, concluding that “each unit of CO2emissions must be...
Drugs in your water →
“A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones…”
Another reason not to watch the Olympics →
The Chinese government has been strenuously trying to put on a good face in time for the international attention set to hit Beijing this summer. Reducing pollution (if only temporarily) is understandable. The systematic torture and killing of cats (and, before bowing to international outrage, dogs [not to mention the regular activities of the bear bile farms, the fur farms, the slaughterhouses,...
"[Non-human] animals are smarter than you think." →
By corollary, humans are less smart than you think.
Inside (non-human) Animal Minds →
“This is the larger lesson of animal cognition research: It humbles us.” A must-read.
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Man tries to undo man-made "solution" to man-made... →
Man “solves” problem… man creates many problems. “Before the dam was built in 1963, the river was warm and muddy, and natural flooding built up sandbars that are essential to native plant and fish species. The river is now cool and clear, its sediment blocked by the dam. The change helped speed the extinction of four fish species and push two others, including the...
Agri-giant Monsanto in state-by-state campaign to... →
Factory dairy cows are forced to lactate perpetually and pumped with hormones to increase milk production. Monsanto mainly markets its Posilac (Bovine somatropin, or BST) growth hormone to dairy producers in the U.S. because it is banned nearly everywhere else. Monsanto has repeatedly attempted to silence those raising concerns in the U.S. about the hormone’s impact on non-human and human...
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Crest Pro-Health Mouthwash: "I Woke Up With Brown... →
In addition to making harmful mouthwash apparently, Crest (and parent company Procter & Gamble) have a long history of performing tests on non-human animals.
NY Times is once again astounded: non-human... →
Surprise! Never mind that evolution as a theory — indeed, the basic survival of any animal — entails that creatures be able to respond and adapt to their complex environments. Humanists = children playing peek-a-boo.
Endangered species' bodies = guns for assholes →
Another distressing demonstration of an increasingly clear relationship: the subjugation of other species is directly connected to non-human and human animal suffering as well as overall environmental disorder. Note that the author views and interprets this information through a blatantly human-centric lens — e.g., the poaching deaths and severe endangerment of entire non-human species are...
The heart of a soldier, revealed. →
No comment necessary. PK Update: Soldier identified: David Motari. Update 2: More.
EPA rank-and-file protest Bush League management →
Gee, it’s great that they weren’t willing to let themselves get ass-raped for the 3,037th time. I mean, enough is enough.
FTC to hold businesses accountable for "green"... →
Perhaps. Will businesses be made to pay for the externalities of their respective business models? I think not. All of Earth’s inhabitants will continue footing that bill.
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Reading Archive
Works that have appeared in our Seminal Reading and Currently Reading sections:
NON-FICTION
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
The Arrogance of Humanism by David Ehrenfeld
Conquistador by Buddy Levy
Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis
Fear of Knowledge by Paul Boghossian
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
How to Stay Alive in the Woods by...
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Song Download (free)
Pass ‘em around.
RAIN (demo) Download — 11.0 MB Stream
ARMADA DOOR (demo) Download — 5.8 MB Stream
MOCO (demo) Download — 8.7 MB Stream
TOO GREAT (demo) Download — 9.5 MB Stream
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