kazookah's posterous

"Princeton Professor Cornel West is one of President Obama's most vocal critics from the African-American community. West will soon embark on a 15-city bus tour with media personality Tavis Smiley to highlight a class they say Obama is ignoring: the poor. Host Michel Martin speaks with West about his "Poverty Tour" and thoughts on Obama."

Check it out.

"The image details what the White House Garden would look like if it was planted with subsidized crops from the Food and Farm Bill (via Slow Food USA Twitter). The image, created by Kitchen Gardeners International, shows the layout of the Spring 2011 White House garden. There are plots for fruits and vegetables including peas, kale, kohlrabi, pak choi, cauliflower, endive, herbs, swiss chard, lettuce, broccoli, chervil, garlic, greens, mint, collards, turnips, beets, arugula, spinach, rhubarb, blueberries and raspberries.

The "subsidy garden" shows the roughly $11 billion per year spent on mostly large-scale agriculture. The garden consists of corn, wheat, rice, cotton, soybeans, tobacco, sorghum, canola and sunflower."

"And there's the real value of the food movement, whatever your stance on eating meat: it encourages people to think about their relationship to the food on their plate, about the environmental, social, political, moral and, yes, even culinary factors affected by their choices."

What unfortunately isn't mentioned here is that only a teeny tiny fraction of the meat in this country is raised the way foodies like. It is inaccessible to MOST Americans, and there's not enough of it to support even just the meat habits of the rich. If factory farms were abolished today, most of the country would be instantly vegetarian.

photo by Michael Schlegel

between the darkness and the light, the formless and the form.

"The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species."

"We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance."

GENIUS!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

"Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body." ~Wassily Kandinsky

"Every year, Hindus greet the turn of winter into spring with a splash of color -- in some areas, a geyser of color. They call their celebration the festival of Holi, and Hindus across India and throughout the world share prayer, camaraderie, special food, and a general sense of mischief as they douse each other in dyes and colored water. The large festival has roots to many Hindu legends associated with the triumph of good over evil. One of the best-known stories tells the tale of the demoness Holika, who tried to kill Prahlad, the son of the demon king Hiranyakashyap, for refusing to worship his father. Instead, Holika is consumed in flames, which is replayed each year with bonfires and effigies, before the celebrants break out the hues and cries of the festival. - Lloyd Young (43 photos total)"

and yes, that is me in purple to the left of bell. ♥

Some very important points brought up here by Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald.

I'm still inexperienced and slightly intimidated by most "greens", but they're reeeally healthy not to mention gorgeous. This article talks about how they cook greens in the South, and gives some good tips. Two of the 4 recipes given are actually vegan, and the other two could be veganized.

I don't think the idea that plants have consciousness and that the ethics of how we handle and treat plants should be considered is stupid, but this article sure is. Bafflingly so. Its mostly upsetting to me because she uses the argument that plants suffer to dismiss the reality that the suffering of animals in industrial agriculture is absolutely unacceptable and is something we can and should eliminate. Industrial agriculture is violent, I agree. We know this. But I don't think it takes a genius to see that not all violence is created equal. She ultimately dismisses people who make the decision to abstain from eating meat for ethical reasons as misguided. This is the biggest waste of space useless article I think I've ever read in the New York Times. She only goes as far as mentioning that  industrial agriculture is bad, and doesn't go on to talk in any depth about WHY or what we can do to stop supporting it, or any strategies of minimizing suffering, she just throws up her hands and acts all pleased at herself for being "reflective" and "philosophical". This is complete garbage, not journalism.

As Erik at Vegan.com said, "None of this argument is sincere. It’s feigned concern for the sake of bypassing the responsibility to make any ethical choices about food whatsoever."

The author's equating plant "experience" to animal consciousness, sentience, and ability to experience pain (nervous system pain) and psychological distress (distinct from physical stress), AND her claim that ethical vegetarians' position - which she says is speciesist against plants - is the same as the sentiments that lead to genocide and slavery is immature, ignorant, and like I said before, just plain stupid. This woman has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell, which makes me wonder whether she's really given this any serious thought like she claims to have. Being this flippant and trite about the ethics of food isn't uncommon, its just surprising for it to come from someone with so much experience in biological science. Maybe she's a great scientist, I don't know, but judging from this article she is a really terrible journalist and perhaps a dishonest person. She seems to be trying to provoke and irritate people that she thinks need to be brought down from "what seems the moral high ground" (emphasis added) and come to their senses that eating animals and eating plants is ethically equivalent.

Personally, I welcome all philosophical conversations about the ethics of being alive and surviving and eating and the "circle of life", and like I mentioned at the beginning, I do not think that the production and consumption of plants should be exempt from ethical discussion, BUT when the argument is made this poorly and in such a shallow way in what seems to be a justification for her personal eating habits and apparent lust for chicken flesh, I feel perfectly comfortable with dismissing her completely. This is not intellectual rigor, this is wishy-washy pop-ethics and is reminiscent of Lierre Keith in both style and maturity.

"American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism."

Pat Bagley cartoon from The Salt Lake Tribune

Loved this.

"What is the difference between the SHAC 7 and Westboro Baptist Church? The threat of corporate profits.

The bigots that stand outside of funerals don’t threaten the profits of large corporations like Huntington Life Sciences, the pharmaceutical industry, major universities that profit from animal torture, entertainment establishments like circuses and race tracks, the fashion industry and Big Agribusiness that confines, tortures and murders 10 billion sentient beings each year in the United States."