HERE

“What do you get when you mix utter ignorance and a mind able to ask, ‘Why’?”

—David Brin, Earth

“Will either side draw the right lessons from this midterm election? Mr. Obama, and his party, have to do a far better job of explaining their vision and their policies. Mr. Obama needs to break his habits of neglecting his base voters and of sitting on the sidelines and allowing others to shape the debate. He needs to do a much better job of stiffening the spines of his own party’s leaders.”

—NY Times Editorial Board, today (link). The key piece of this passage is the part about neglecting the base. We’re the ones who donate, who talk to friends, who create grassroots media, who blog, who write letters to editors, who comment on articles — in short, who are influential. We’re also the ones who vote — when we aren’t being shat upon. If the NY Times editorial team gets it, the enlightenment of Democratic politicians is past due.

“Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: “Because the animals are like us.” Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: “Because the animals are not like us.”

—Charles R. Magel, highlighting one of the many contradictions animal exploiters embrace to rationalize their cruelty.

“One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (h/t Bina A.)

“Senate District 56 Republians [sic] exist to promote our Republican principals [sic], to help elect Republician’s [sic] to the various offices which represent our area and reflect our beliefs. We in the district support each other and our neighbors to have government enable us to succeed, and not us enabling government to grow.”

—The Republican Party of Minnesota Senate District 56’s mission statement, as presented by its official website. (Update: They’ve fixed the misspellings since somebody who isn’t a Republican actually noticed. Knowing they would, I took a screenshot.) Naturally, the mission statement is poorly worded, with little regard for grammar and syntax — even forgiving the typos and misspellings. You might be asking: why is anyone talking about a local chapter of the GOP in Minnesota? Their executive, Joe Salmon, posted a video claiming that Republican women are more attractive than Democratic women. The evidence for? Mentally incompetent GOP icons like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Michelle Malkin. The evidence against Democrats? Just a few self-made women with law degrees and earned achievements, like Michelle Obama (Harvard), Hillary Clinton (Yale), and Janet Reno (Cornell). As Minnesota Democratic chairmen Bob Melendez responded, “The day when a woman was judged by her looks rather than her competence and intelligence should have passed three generations ago.” Even after taking the video down due to the outrage of marginally decent people everywhere, Joe Salmon had this to tweet: “It [is] really unfortunate to relearn that the other side is severely lacking a sense of humor.” Time for you to go to your room and let the grown-ups do the talking, little Joey.

“We are familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticize the messenger to distract from the power of the message. We don’t see any difference in the White House’s response to this case to the other groups that we have exposed. We have tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm. All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence.”

—Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, rebuking the White House’s knee-jerk contention that last night’s carefully planned leak of over 90,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan has harmed America’s national security. (Broken record, anyone?) What’s it like to live in a world where somebody — anybody — is acting as an intelligent, truth-seeking watchdog over the military and foreign affairs elements of world governments? I’m excited to find out. —Dan

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

—Winston Churchill. I think the dogs and pigs are just being nice.

“Health-care spending in the last year of life by the top 1 percent of Americans is nearly twice the annual income of the typical American household.”

—Ezra Klein - The Economics of Dying in One Graph (via rubenfeld). If I find myself dying at a time when my life has been well lived, then my death will be a short, inexpensive process — in other words, a dignified one.

“It’s odd how little we’ve heard lately from the skeptics who deny that climate change is real. What’s the matter, people? Heat stroke?”

—Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

“Dr Stephen Byrnes published an article in the Ecologist magazine claiming that vegetarianism is unhealthy and is destroying the environment. He boasted of his high animal fat diet and robust health – and, unfortunately, died of a stroke at 42. There were more than 40 scientific inaccuracies in the said article, including the direct misquoting of scientific studies.”

—Justine Butler, writing for the Guardian, in an article debunking the oft-heard, corporation-propagated myth that soy is unhealthy for human consumption. Read the article, then go ahead and enjoy that soy!

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

—

Sigmund Freud. (via mityelpoc) (via killthekids)

Tragically, this falsehood still persists in the more or less subconscious mythology of our culture. Let’s set the record straight.

“Civilization” is not a social marker but a tactical one. Linguist human social groups (and non-human ones, for that matter) existed well before the advent of civilization, which is recognized to have occurred relatively recently — sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 B.C.E. — and is marked by the moment that humans began to employ agriculture. In other words, civilization began when humans employed certain tactics: dominating the land and seizing control of food production.

As happens with all otherwise unconstrained animal populations, greater abundance of food entailed greater rates of reproduction. Agriculturalist human social groups reproduced at a rapid clip, to which they responded by expanding their physical domains outward into the habitats of other humans. This is the very foundation of war as we know it, in which whole populations were destroyed, subjugated, or, at the very least, subsumed. It should come as no surprise that weapon technologies only advanced beyond “stones” when civilization appeared and invented the need for more efficient, more powerful killing methods.

Far from being the beginning of what we wrongly call “civility,” civilization is the very root of war — against human animals, against non-human animals, and against the land itself.

“We need an extreme movement because what is happening to animals is so extreme. Some misinformed people claim that animal rights activists are terrorists, but these people are simply ignorant of who the real terrorists are - the companies and industries that torture literally billions of animals each year.”

—River Phoenix (1989, The Animal’s Voice). Phoenix’s death was a tragic loss in so many ways.

“I’m gonna get a tattoo that says ‘Helvetica’ but am going to get it in Arial. When a woman corrects me on it, I will marry her.”

—Jason Zada (via soupsoup) (via takethecityandrun)

“[Animal agriculture is] one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

—Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Livestock’s Long Shadow (2006).