killing and dismembering animals

Nobody should have to make a living from killing. Workers in abattoirs and on factory farms are often some of the poorest and most exploited in the country, and most meat-processing workers are immigrants. These are jobs that nobody wants to do.

An investigation into the UK meat industry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission revealed evidence of widespread mistreatment and exploitation of workers – in particular, migrant workers and pregnant women – including physical abuse by managers, discrimination, unsafe working conditions, bullying, and being forced to work 90 hours a week. Some pregnant women were made to stand for long hours and perform heavy lifting and were denied the right to go to the toilet.

In addition, people who work in abattoirs and who spend their days killing and dismembering animals necessarily become desensitised to violence, making them more likely to commit violent crimes. “Perpetrator-induced traumatic syndrome” is the term used to refer to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by slaughter workers, which include depression and suicidal thoughts. Academic studies have shown that in communities where abattoirs are a source of employment, rates of domestic violence, rape, and child abuse are high. Butchers and abattoir workers are also more likely to suffer from anger, hostility, psychoticism, and other symptoms of mental illness.

Source HERE

Wish for all in 2024….

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman, Journal

Network surveillance

Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google’s actual, profitable, monetizable product. “Search” is merely Google’s front end, a brilliant façade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google’s “customers” or even Google’s “users”, but its feudal livestock. 

Bruce Sterling – The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things 

unless your goal is to exterminate them

Fishing, too, is depleting the oceans of wildlife. Look at the sharks killed for their fins or cartilage or for sport. Look at the grouper and snapper and tuna caught and sold to consumers. My goodness. For humans, tuna is an acquired taste. A hundred years ago few people ate tuna. Bluefin-tuna populations in the Pacific have been reduced to 2.7 percent of what they were in 1980. There are still some adult tuna out there, but they’re smaller than before and less common. The price goes up as the supply goes down, however, so it remains profitable to catch bluefin tuna.

In the Atlantic the numbers are a little stronger. In 1990, when I was the chief scientist at NOAA, 90 percent of the North Atlantic adult-tuna population had already been extracted. When you’re down to 10 percent, isn’t it time to stop? Just stop, unless your goal is to exterminate them. If we really want to have an ocean without bluefin tuna, then we should keep killing them at the current rate, because there isn’t any way for nature to keep up with that level of extraction.

We kill tuna because there’s a market for the fish. We kill them because of that wonderful human characteristic called greed. We just can’t resist. The only hope is for people who care to say, I will never eat tuna again. We don’t need to eat it. For those for whom it is necessary sustenance, I say, OK. Native people who catch and consume the fish locally to feed their families — that’s different. That is not likely to deplete the ocean of wildlife. But when you catch fish to send to market on the other side of the world because you are going to get a hundred thousand dollars for one fish, that’s not sustenance; that’s a luxury. We are fostering the extinction of creatures that belong somewhere other than on our plates.

Sylvia Earle – Sunken Treasures, Interviewed by Michael Shapiro

we live for things

Sooner or later we are going to have to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that this amoral commercial culture has proved potent because human beings love things. In fact, to a considerable degree, we live for things. In all cultures we buy things, steal things, exchange things, and hoard things. Often these objects have no observable use. We live through things. We create ourselves through things. And we change ourselves by changing our things. We often depend on such material for meaning. This sounds simplistic but it is crucial to understand the powerful allure of materialism, consumption, and all that it carries with it. 

 James B. Twitchell – Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism 

A subjection that has never reached its limit…

. . [I]ndustry turned “the worker” into “the tool,” by getting rid of the human being. Thus monastic discipline, the Christian practice and urge to “free” the spirit by subjugating the body, was institutionalized throughout the Western world. And thus it led directly to the mechanization of the body, the human being turned into an appendage of the machine, a servomechanism, at work, play, love, and war. The spirit was never “freed” in this process, needless to say; it continues to share, with the body, in what Foucault calls “a subjection that has never reached its limit.” It has never reached its limit because the exercise of subjugation itself—the chronic submission of the human to the system and mechanism of such discipline—has become a function of profit, i.e., of world power. 

The “Protestant spirit” added greatly to this process by rationalizing worldly profit as a function of Christian spirit. The fundamentalist-Protestant tautology that “wealth is a sign of God’s favour because God wants you to be rich” is a perfect machine: While it grinds out “the profits of morality” for the many, it gathers in “the morality of profits” for the few; and thus Christian capitalism, where God becomes a kind of shrewd world banker in the sky, exchanging souls for dollars, and dollars for souls . . . at a terrible rate of exchange. 

Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor – The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth 

Doing a lot more nothing

Politicians may declare that ‘we need to do more and we need to do it faster’. The opposite is true. We need to do less, and we need to do it more slowly. Doing a lot more nothing, including sleeping, would reduce resource consumption, lower stress levels and enable social relations more conducive to dignity and grace    –    Ruth Levitas   

communicate with the distant future

All nuclear agencies have a duty to try to prevent radioactive sites from being disturbed by future civilisations, who may decide to excavate an area in ignorance or even in the misguided hope of finding some kind of treasure buried underground. To this end, they are trying to find a way to communicate with the distant future, in order to warn its inhabitants about what will happen if they become too curious  

[…] 

This is a mind-bending task. About 100,000 years ago Europe was populated by a different species of human, Homo neanderthalensis. We have no knowledge of the language they used. […] A large part of the written Mayan language, used until the 17th century in Central America, is indecipherable to us today. […] How do you write a message that lasts thousands of years? What language do you use? What do you even say? 

 […] 

Rossella Cecili, a Belgian-Italian artist living in Paris, and the Italian composer Valentina Gaia, have together come up with a children’s song telling the story of where the French waste is buried. It also urges adults to trust children, and to trust their songs, because they contain life-saving information. “There are songs that we have been singing for hundreds of years, and tunes that are even older […]. Ours is about where the site is and what is buried beneath. ”   

[…] 

The philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri came up with the idea of the “Ray cat”, a genetically engineered cat that glows in proximity to radiation. In a culture where cats are worshipped, cats changing colour would signify danger. “We wanted to find a medium that would remain important to humans forever,” says Fabbri, a professor of semiotics at Urbino University in Italy. “Symbols, language, everything will change, but cats have always been important to us.” 

[…] 
 

The message [proposed by the US Department of Energy], a lengthy explication, was designed to instil fear into those who could understand it. Part of it reads: 

“This place is not a place of honour . . .  no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here . . .  nothing valued is here.  

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.  

The danger is in a particular location . . .  it increases toward a center . . .  the center of danger is here . . .  of a particular size and shape, and below us.  

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.  

[…]  

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.” 

It was also suggested that a larger series of “markers” should be erected on the site — an imposing signal, beyond the written word, that would be “non-natural, ominous and repulsive” — in case our languages do not survive. A series of terrifying designs was proposed, one of which was to cover the entire ground surface with giant concrete spikes. The spikes and their shadows, it was thought, would always communicate danger. The contorted face of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” was proposed for the warning signs that were to be scattered across the site.  

Michael Stothard – Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years 

Solving all our problems…

Like all of us, I have the impression that our culture and civilization is in a final stage, that it has entered a stage of decay. I believe that either we shall find a renewal, or else it is the end. And I can only see this renewal coming out of what Jung discovered, namely in our making positive contact with the creative source of the unconscious and with dreams. These are our roots. A tree can only renew itself through its roots. For this reason my message is to urge everyone to turn back to these inner psychic roots because that’s where the only constructive suggestions are to be found — how to come to grips with our enormous dilemmas: the atom bomb, overpopulation. This is the best way of solving all our problems which appear insoluble. – Marie-Louis von Franz

a crisis of capitalism

The crisis afflicting this country, along with other countries of the Western world, is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the dominant economic system that prevails in all those countries. Michael Foot, Speech to the House of Commons (Hansard, 20 January 1976, Col. 1126)