It was recently revealed that agrochemical giant Monsanto runs an “intelligence fusion center” to compile information on and conduct disinformation and harassment campaigns against journalists and activists who threaten the company’s financial interests through their research or organizing. “Fusion center” is the same term the FBI uses for its counterterrorism centers. In just one example, Monsanto targeted a Reuters journalist investigating the carcinogenic effects of the company’s star product, glyphosate, or Roundup. Their campaign included coordinating “third parties” to post negative reviews of the book, hiring scientists to cast doubt on the book’s conclusions, pressuring the journalist’s editors at Reuters “very strongly every chance we get” in the hope “she gets reassigned,” covering up their financial relationship with scientists claiming their product was safe, accusing the journalist of being a “pro-organic capitalist” activist, as though there were big bucks to be made in opposing some of the world’s largest chemical companies, and contracting search engine optimization (SEO) experts to make sure that their alternative facts, their negative reviews, and their various slanders of said journalist would appear in search engines above results showing how Roundup causes cancer.
The above case illustrates how corporations can orchestrate subtle campaigns of censorship, often without revealing their hand. In 2020, an academic publisher abruptly canceled the publication of a book that showed how Canadian mining companies benefited from the genocide in Guatemala, moving in to stake their claims sometimes even before the death squads had left. The publishers expressed fears of lawsuits for defamation, though they refused to point out what part of the book, which received favorable peer reviews, might be considered defamation. And in Canada, the RCMP spied on the release event of a book against mining.
“We do have country of origin labeling for all fruits and vegetables and chicken, but not for pork and beef, So why is that?”
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Independent Cattlemen of Missouri made it clear Tuesday why they are independent: special interests have clouded the meat industry and made it more difficult for Missourians to know where they are getting their beef and pork from.
A handful of ranchers joined State Sen. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove, at a news conference in the Capitol to announce a bipartisan push to get meat products to have labels on them featuring country of origin. “It urges the federal government to reinstate country of origin labeling,” Moon said of his resolution and a similar one from State Sen. Tracy McCreery, D-St. Louis County. “The reason for this is we have come to realize that people are concerned about where their food comes from.”
Moon said all meat used to have such labels before a change was made in 2015.
“We do have country of origin labeling for all fruits and vegetables and chicken, but not for pork and beef,” he said. “So why is that?”
Last week, a seeming miracle came to pass: John Deere, the Big Ag monopolist that — along with Apple — has led the Axis of Evil that killed, delayed and sabotaged dozens of Right to Repair laws, sued for peace, announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to make it easier for farmers to fix their own tractors:
https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_John_Deere_MOU.pdf
This is a move that’s both badly needed and long overdue. Deere abuses copyright law to force farmers to pay for official repairs — even when the farmer does the repair. That’s possible thanks to a practice called VIN locking, in which engine parts come with DRM that prevents the tractor from recognizing them until they pay hundreds of dollars for a John Deere technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console:
Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine — for a first offense.
This means that Deere owners are locked into using Deere for repairs, which also means that if Deere decides something isn’t broken, a farmer can’t get it fixed. This is very bad news indeed, because John Deere tractors are just computers in a fancy, mobile case, and John Deere is incredibly bad at digital security:
That’s scary stuff, because John Deere is a monopolist, and a successful attack on the always-connected, networked tractors and other equipment it supplies to the world’s farmers could endanger the global food supply.
Deere doesn’t want to make insecure tractors, but it also doesn’t want to be embarrassed by security researchers who point out that its security is defective. Because security researchers have to bypass Deere tractors’ locks to probe their security, Deere can leverage DMCA1201 into a veto over who gets to warn the public about the mistakes it made.
It’s not just security researchers that Deere gets to gag: the company uses its repair monopoly to threaten farmers who complain about its business practices, holding their million-dollar farm equipment hostage to their silence:
This all adds up to what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model,” an abuse of copyright law that allows a monopolistic corporation to reach beyond its own walls and impose its will on it customers, critics and competitors:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
If Deere was finally suing for peace in the Repair Wars, well, that was wonderful news indeed — as I said, a seeming miracle.
But — like all miracles — it was too good to be true.
The MOU that Deere and the Farm Bureau signed is full of poison pills, gotchas, fine-print and mendacity, as Lauren Goode documents in her Wired article, “Right-to-Repair Advocates Question John Deere’s New Promises”:
For starters, the MOU makes the Farm Bureau promise to end its advocacy for state Right to Repair bills, which would create a repair system governed by democratically accountable laws, not corporate fiat. Clearly, Deere has seen the writing on the wall, after the passage in 2002 of Right to Repair laws in New York and Colorado:
Deere’s deal-with-the-devil is a cynical ploy to brake R2R’s momentum and ensure that any repairs are carried out on Deere’s terms. Now, about those terms…
Deere’s deal offers independent repair shops access to diagnostic tools and parts “on fair and reasonable terms,” a murky phrase that can mean whatever Deere decides it means. Crucially, the deal is silent on whether Deere will supply the tools needed to activate VIN locks, meaning that farmers will still be at Deere’s mercy when they effect their own repairs.
What’s more, the deal itself isn’t legally binding, and Deere can cancel it at any time. Once you dig past the headline, the Deere’s Damascene conversion to repair advocacy starts to look awfully superficial — and deceptive.
One person who wasn’t fooled is sick.codes, the hacker who has done the most important work on reverse-engineering Deere’s computer systems, culminating in last summer’s live, on-stage hack of a John Deere tractor at Defcon:
Shortly after the announcement, Sick.codes tweeted how the fine-print in the MOU would have prevented him from doing the work he’s already done (including “a direct stab at me lol”):
As with other instances of monopolistic, corporate copyfraud — like, say, the deceptive Open Gaming License — the John Deere capitulation is really a bid to take away your rights, dressed up as a gift of more rights:
[Image ID: Hieronymus Bosch's painting, 'The Conjurer.' The Conjuror's shell-game table holds a small John Deere tractor that the audience of yokels gawps at. One yokel is wearing a John Deere hat. The conjurer is holding a wrench.]
A commercial with a crying elephant & the eyes of a pig.
I saw the elephant commercial for an animal welfare group last Tuesday during NXT.
That is what started all of this.
I was vegetarian for two years from 2013 to 2015 meaning I didn't eat any meat or seafood but I did eat eggs & consume dairy.
Then I started eating meat again in 2015.
Then about a year ago, I decided I would eat vegetarian during the week (Monday through Friday) and then eat meat & dairy on the weekends -- so my diet was 75% vegetarian for the past year.
But I was still eating all the chocolate, cheese & all of the dairy tingz.
Then I saw a commercial last week during NXT with a crying elephant. It really got to me.
I started during research on elephants & emotion. Turns out elephants pass the "mirror test" and are self-aware.
So are dolphins.
That led me down a rabbit hole where I started researching the emotional self-awareness of other animals and was surprised to find similar findings for pigs, chickens and cows.
And monkeys -- rhesus macaques are endlessly tortured for human medication. They are extremely self-aware and emotional.
I questioned myself on why my 75% vegetarianism diet shouldn't be 75% plant-based (vegan).
And I realized that I didn't want to give up exactly two things: cheese & chocolate.
And hell no, I didn't want the vegan alternatives.
But I started researching the dairy industry which then led me to researching CAFOs (commercial agricultural feeding operations) aka factory farms aka hell on earth aka infinity mirrors of animals being tortured endlessly.
10 billion land animals are slaughtered every year in the United States. Millions a day.
Is that really necessary?
Then I realized that the dairy industry was the plot to a dystopian sci-fi novel:
Women are forcibly impregnated, their babies taken from them immediately after being born — the baby boys are killed within 1 to 4 days, the girls are imprisoned to be forcibly impregnated just like their mothers.
The impregnation cycle is relentless and there are absolutely no breaks between artificial insemination - impregnation - birth repeat.
The woman are also given artificial growth hormones to force them to grow bigger & more quickly — the easier & quicker to impregnate them.
The women are kept in stalls that are so small & overcrowded they cant even move or turn around.
The women never see natural sunlight.
They are only allowed out of their stalls to give birth.
They are forced to endlessly lactate and pumped by machines so mercilessly that they bleed.
I still didn't feel that I could give up cheese 75% of the time.
Then I questioned myself on why not.
I have done very restrictive very low calorie diets in the past. I used to work out 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. I used to have a six pack.
I broke my 13 year addiction to the NFL & won't even be watching the Super Bowl once a year as of this year.
Why then is not eating cheese 75% of the time a seeming impossibility?
That was honestly how I felt.
So, I googled and found this:
Cheese contains casein. This is what causes such intense cravings. It also contains casein fragments called casomorphins, a casein-derived morphine-like compound. Dairy protein has opiate molecules built in. When consumed, these fragments attach to the same brain receptors that heroin and other narcotics attach to. Casomorphins cross the blood brain barrier and attach to dopamine receptors.
Cheese is literally 10% as addicting as morphine.
Yet they (do ask yourself who they is) have the motherfucking audacity to say it is "no more addictive than anything else that could be addictive, like Pringles or fast food."
First of all -- they are simply proving the point as those foods -- OPFs or overly processed foods & fast food -- also are highly addicting by deisgn, they are literally made to be. Study after study has confirmed that the most addictive foods are foods that are highly processed, high in fat, high in sodium and/or sugar.
Checks out, right?
What foods do you consider the most addicting?
Probably Oreos, potato chips, pizza, french fries, mozzarella sticks, fast food, donuts, cookies, brownies, pretzels, burgers like anyone else.
Right?
They are designed that way on purpose.
They create addicts on purpose for profit.
Cancer, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, artherosclerosis, blood clots, immune system disorders, heart disease, stroke, heart attacks are all caused by diet & lifestyle.
It is a very lucrative business for them.
A million people are already on Wegovy babes?
It's a set up.
They make the food that makes people sick and they make the medicine that people buy after they buy the food that makes them sick.
The above diseases did not exist at the current rate even 100 years ago.
It's due to OPFs (overly processed food), PFAs (forever chemicals), toxins, sugar substitutes, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (transfat), high fructose corn syrup, modified food starch, monosodium glutamate, dextrose, sucralose, lecithin, emulsifiers, aspartame, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), bioengineered ingredients, pesticides, artificial flavors & colors, preservatives, synthetic lab-made chemicals.
Capitalism is nothing but a death cult.
Wake up.
They are literally made that way on purpose & designed to be addictive.
But the way that casein is addictive is truly unique because it is binding itself to receptors in our brains the way that morphine & heroine does.
So, I decided I want to do something that is sustainable in the long-term 15 & 20+ years from now. I am 43.
I don't play an all or nothing zero sum game of zealotry where it's something that is impractical.
I look forward to the weekly meals with my husband.
We have been together for 17 years and have been married for over a decade.
I've looked at thousands of recipes over the years and have curated a Top 100 list of our absolute favorite receipes plus ones that I want us to try.
We always make a meal on the weekend & post the pictures on his Facebook.
While we eat our weekly meal, we talk, hang out, watch stuff on Youtube, baseball, basketball & wrestling.
It's one of the things we look forward to doing together as a couple the most.
He is the quintessential "meat & potatoes guy" but when I started eating vegetarian 75% of the time last year, he agreed to eat vegetarian 3 to 5 days a week.
He does eat meat & dairy the other days of the week.
I have decided that maintaining our weekly meals ritual as a couple is important to me.
So, for this to be sustainable it has to allow for our weekly meals to have meat and/or dairy -- and also, during the holidays, I want to be able to eat meat and/or dairy.
Other than that, Monday through Friday, my plan for the rest of my life is to eat a vegan (plant-based) diet 75% of the time -- no meat, seafood, dairy or animal-based or derived ingredients or by-products.
I immediately went through my apartment this morning once I had decided on this & was disappointed at how many of my snacks weren't vegan -- Annie's Organic granola bars, Nature's Bakery Bars & literally all of my remaining Halloween candy (Take 5, Reese's Cups, Crunch, & candy corn).
I gave it all to my husband in a bag this morning for him to take to work.
Since they are snacks that I ate on a daily basis, it is better to remove them from the apartment as my goal is to now eat vegan (plant-based) diet 75% of the time, Monday through Friday.
Staring at a bag of my absolute favorite non-vegan candy corn isn't exactly going to help me achieve that.
Vox
When asked in an interview on the Climavores podcast why farms aren’t regulated to reduce pollution, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said there are simply too many farms to regulate, and that conservation efforts should be voluntary
According to Civil Eats, a nonprofit publication covering the US food system, nearly all animal agriculture operations are exempt from federal protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the agency doesn’t respond to 85 percent of worker fatalities on animal farms.
Most states exempt livestock from anti-cruelty laws, and many states have passed “ag-gag laws,” which criminalize activists and journalists for simply recording what goes on at farms.
All 50 states have so-called “right to farm” laws, which prevent citizens from suing farms for nuisances like pollution and odor that degrade their quality of life.
A recent analysis from Stanford University researchers found that from 2014 to 2020, the US livestock sector received about 800 times more public funding than the meat, egg, and dairy alternatives sector.
Farmers are heavily overrepresented in government, with 25 current members of the US House of Representatives, or their family members, having collected millions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. That’s almost 6 percent of the chamber, even though just about 1 percent of Americans live on farms. The dynamic is the same at the state level.
Corn and soybean production, most of which is dedicated to ethanol and livestock feed, accounts for half of all crop cash receipts.
Don't you think some of the children literally starving to death right now in North Gaza in Palestine could have used some of that corn & soybean? No? The livestock that we don't need to eat because we don't need meat to survive needed it more than the children literally dying from starvation right now in North Gaza?
Vox
Raising livestock requires far more land and water than growing plant-based foods — and produces far more pollution.
Over the past decade, the animal-agriculture industry has been behind the introduction of "ag-gag" bills in more than half of all state legislatures across the country. These dangerous bills are designed to silence whistleblowers revealing animal abuses on industrial farms. Ag-gag laws currently exist in six states, penalizing whistleblowers who investigate the day-to-day activities of industrial farms, including the recording, possession or distribution of photos, video and/or audio at a farm.
The USDA never conducts surprise audits, or any audits at all, to verify the company is telling the truth. It is, in essence, an honor system. The USDA also has an incredibly low, and often nonsensical, bar for what passes as humane treatment.
Over the course of more than a dozen shifts at multiple Foster Farms facilities, the investigator — who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations — documented workers slamming birds into crates, kicking and hitting chickens, and numerous instances of forklift drivers running over birds.
The investigator recalled making eye contact with a bird shortly after they were run over by a forklift. “They were being crushed and everything was being pushed forward, and they had their beak open, and they had this look on their face like they knew that they were dying,” the investigator told me. “And then I watched them flap and struggle for a moment before passing.”
The investigator chalked up most of the cruelty to the chaotic, fast-paced work environment imposed by supervisors during long, grueling shifts.
But you wouldn’t know that from its marketing or its “American Humane” certification.
Chickens raised for meat in America -- 98% of land animals that get slaughtered each year in factory farms -- are five times bigger today than they were in the 1950s!
In 1957, chickens on farms raised for meat were 907 grams. In 1978, chickens on farms raised for meat were 1,808 grams. In 2005, they are 4,202 grams!
WHERE IS OUR HUMANITY???????????
Vox
American Humane allows for the standard chicken slaughter process: shackling chickens upside down, dunking them in a bath of electrified water to stun them unconscious, slitting their throats, and then placing them in a scalding vat to loosen their feathers.
Despite all that, the resulting meat can still be advertised as humane, sustainable, and produced from healthy birds.
Currently, chickens and other poultry birds have zero federal legal protections while on the farm or in the slaughterhouse.
During their short stint on behalf of the Washington, DC-based animal rights group Animal Outlook, the investigator documented hours upon hours of the typical horrors found on chicken factory farms: tens of thousands of birds stuffed into dark warehouse-sized barns, many of them severely injured with gruesome lesions, injuries, and deformities. At more than one point, birds are deprived of feed or water, and there was also a rat infestation and footage of bugs crawling in the chickens’ feed.
The conditions are visibly at odds with Tyson’s advertising claims that it treats animals humanely and raises “happy” and “healthy” chickens.
“It’s just a living nightmare,” the investigator, who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations, told Vox. “A video just does not do it any justice.”
Despite the horrific findings, they’re not all that different from the conditions documented at other farms that raise chickens for Tyson and Tyson’s competitors.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says chicken producers using the label “free-range” must provide birds “continuous, free access to the outside” for over 51 percent of their 6.5-week lives.
Is 6.5 weeks a life?????????????????????
In another portion of Animal Outlook’s footage, when the investigator asked the farm manager why so many chickens couldn’t move, he was blunt:
“They’re just fucked up.”
According to a 2021 ProPublica investigation, humane-labeled chicken is often processed in the same slaughterhouses, owned by companies like Tyson, as conventional meat.
“You almost couldn’t design a more torturous setting,” she said, adding that the video shows dying and dead chickens in “advanced states of decomposition” with the potential to “spread infectious disease to the other birds, human workers, and unsuspecting Tyson customers.”
WHERE IS OUR HUMANITY???????????????
Animal Outlook’s investigator also documented bugs crawling in the chickens’ feed, and rat infestations — problems echoed by the Tyson technician in the undercover video.
“The little baby chicks are gonna peck at those bugs, eat them, and then they’re gonna die,” Tyson’s technician told the farm manager in a conversation recorded by the investigator.
“You got rats in there, you got fresh rat activity in all your houses.” Despite these known issues, Animal Outlook alleges Tyson delivered fresh chicks to the farm.
As journalist Eyal Press, author of Dirty Work, a book on jobs in morally troubling industries like poultry, put it in a Vox podcast interview: “On the rare occasions when the curtain is pulled back and we see this dirty work going on, the blame goes to the lowest-ranking people at the bottom, and that’s very convenient for society.”
Ofcourse it is -- society still wants their Wendys Spicy Nuggs.
Vox
However, holding meat companies legally accountable for how they treat animals is exceedingly difficult because there are no federal laws that protect animals while on the farm, and birds are exempt from federal slaughter and transport law.
Chickens raised for slaughter are bred in "high stocking densities", meaning they are unable to "move freely to flap their wings" or show "natural behaviors".
"They [Frankenchickens] have been bred to eat at an extraordinary rate so they put on this completely inappropriate weight gain just to get to market as quickly as possible."
If you are a starseed, understand our mission is to break up & dismantle Big Meat & Big Ag (& ofcourse Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc...):
LPE Project
Today four massive companies – JBS, Tyson Foods, National Beef, and Cargill – control over 80 percent of America’s beef. Three companies – JBS, Tyson, and Smithfield Foods – control 63 percent of America’s pork. Two of those – JBS and Tyson – also control 38 percent of poultry. The grain, seed, farm equipment, agrochemical, livestock genetics, and animal pharmaceutical industries have likewise become highly consolidated.
These companies possess dominant market power as both sellers of meat and buyers of livestock, which they used to raise prices for consumers and lower prices paid to farmers.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Earl Butz – who at the time served on multiple agribusiness boards – to lead the USDA, opening a revolving door between the industry and the agency that has swung non-stop ever since.
Under Butz, subsidies for fossil-fuel-intensive monocultures led to a glut of cheap grain, which in turn led to factory farmed animals. “Since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could,” wrote Michael Pollan.
In the last year, top companies in every major American meat sector – beef, pork, chicken, and turkey – have been subject to civil suits and/or federal investigations for conspiring to keep prices high. One lawsuit estimates that chicken industry price-fixing alone costs the average American family of four $330 per year.
The primary reason multinational meat conglomerates have flourished, and meat prices have remained artificially low, is that our government massively subsidizes them at everyone else’s expense.
Our government subsidizes Big Meat directly by allocating the bulk of federal crop subsidies to large farms growing animal feeds, by financing animal factory infrastructure, by buying billions of dollars of their products, and much more. In exchange for this support, taxpayers get hijacked federal agencies, policies shaped by pro-industry academic research, a less responsive democracy, and forceful industry lobbying to keep it that way.
It does this by failing to regulate the environmental impacts of factory farming, including the industry’s role in contaminating air, poisoning drinking water, and driving the climate crisis; by failing to require safe conditions for slaughterhouse workers; by denying most farmworkers the rights to form unions and earn minimum wage and overtime pay; by exempting “common farming practices,” no matter how cruel, from most state animal anti-cruelty statutes; and by failing to restrict the industry’s use of antibiotics (used to speed growth and keep overcrowded animals alive) despite the resulting increase in drug-resistant infections.
Farmer suicide rates are now 3.5 times that of the general population.
It is now commonplace for pigs (and their diseases) to be trucked hundreds of miles across the country without food, water, bedding, protection from extreme temperatures, or adequate space.
BedlamFarm.com
One of these happenings was the discovery by scientists in New York in the 1950’sthat by adding tiny traces of antibiotics to animal feed they could increase the growth rates of animals.
With these new tools, farmers could concentrate animals in confined areas on a scale never before possible.
This was soon to be called “factory farming” by the few voices raised in alarm. The term has never been complimentary..
At the same time as the geneticists made their discoveries, Earl Butz, Dwight Eisenhower’s Agriculture Secretary, defined the new future.
It isn’t clear if Butz, a crude by visionary agriculture economist, saw the coming future or created it.
Farms, he said, and farmers had to consolidate, corporatized, embrace economies of scale, just what most family farmers would never do. The economists picked up this cry, and the family farmers never had a chance.
Butz was serious, perhaps prescient. He meant that in order to survive, farmers must pursue a new corporate model for farms – maximize profits, minimize loss.
Corporations jumped into farming big-time, buying giant tractors, hiring biologists and geneticists to redesign animals and turn them into unhealthy freaks with short live spans and no resistance to illness, parasites, or viruses, setting up distributions systems that could even sell milk and meat overseas.
On the corporate farms, when a cow gets sick, it is instantly put to death, veterinary care cut into profits, the cow just goes to slaughter.
The average live span of a milk cow, says the Agriculture Department, plunged from 12-15 years to two years by the 1990s. Cows on corporate farms never set foot outside, some never left their stalls, get no exercise, and are bored almost senseless.
Where is our humanity?????????????????
There is no stimulation in their lives, no change of scenery no hed for these herd animals, no walk, grazing, or hanging out with other cows, a cow’s favorite activity.
They live as long as they can produce more and more milk, and when they can’t, they die.
For animals, life became an Orwellian horror show, their very bodies, and spirits taken from them as they were genetically engineered to be profit centers, not animals with human caretakers and individual personalities and traits.
So have the chickens and pigs, many of whom live their lives without ever standing up in factory farms, mostly in the mid-central United States.
Most Americans will never see what is happening to these animals or even hear about them.
The people who increasingly have taken over the care of the animals we eat are sometimes the cruelest and most immoral people who have ever come within a hundred miles of a farm.
Comment to the above article:
A quick google search reveals legislation proposed to add oversight to use of antibiotics in animals in 2018, 2017, 2013, 2002- all fought by Big Pharma. Often with the same ferocity and tactics used by Big Oil to fight against regulations to slow climate change.
ForksOverKnives:
The USDA is tasked with setting the nation's nutrition guidelines. Yet this is in direct conflict with its primary interest: ensuring the profitability of producers of foods such as dairy and meat. These foods are known to increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Is it any wonder that programs administered by the USDA and funded by the Farm Bill preferentially feed school children and the poor unhealthy foods that cause chronic disease?
The farming practices that underpin our healthcare crisis also degrade our environment. To grow vast swaths of these monoculture crops, enormous amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are required. Many of these agricultural chemicals are suspected endocrine disruptors and carcinogens that are thought to alter human DNA down through the generations.
During my lifetime alone, annual worldwide pesticide production has increased from 200,000 tons to more than 5 million tons, according to estimates from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It has gotten to the point that many of these chemicals now rain down upon us. These pesticides wipe out beneficial and native wildlife such as honey bees, monarch butterflies, and songbirds.
A Happy Meal?
If, by eliminating Farm Bill subsidies, the cost of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese were to rise from, say $4 to $15, eating habits would likely shift toward eating healthier foods, especially if at the same time, a program were put in effect to incentivize the consumption of whole plant foods. In fact, a large nationwide program in South Africa has already demonstrated that the public will consume more fruits and vegetables when these healthy foods are subsidized.
Making Us Sick Makes Them Money
The 17 percent of GDP (about $3.2 trillion) the nation now spends on health care will rise to 20 percent of GDP by 2025, according to The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The CDC estimates that 86 percent of this money is not actually spent on making people healthy; it is spent on treating and sustaining chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and dementia. The medical evidence shows that most of this chronic disease is the result of the food we eat and can be prevented and even reversed by eating a plant-based diet.
Fish have it worse in one way -- they have ZERO legal protections.
AnimalEquality
Commercial fishing is cruelty to animals on a colossal scale, killing nearly a trillion animals worldwide every year. Ships the size of football fields use techniques such as longlining and gill nets.
Gill nets, which range from 300 feet to seven miles in length, create large walls of nets that fish are unable to see. They inadvertently swim into them and many will suffocate or bleed to death.
In the United States, fish are not covered by the Humane Slaughter Act. This results in a wide variety of cruel slaughter methods dependent on industry, company, and species.
Fish are usually removed from the water and left to suffocate and die. They desperately attempt to escape as their gills collapse preventing them from being able to breathe. Larger animals, such as tuna and swordfish, are usually clubbed to death. This often leads to an animal being injured but regaining consciousness and the process having to be repeated several times.
There are 1.3 billion farm raised fish in the United States.
Vox
It’s unsurprising that fish have been ignored. They live underwater, so we rarely interact with them. They can’t vocalize or make facial expressions, so it’s much harder to understand them than mammals and birds. And research has shown that the further animals are from us on the evolutionary chain, the less likely we are to try to protect them.
In commercial ocean fishing, the welfare concerns are mostly relegated to the final minutes or hours of a fish’s life — they’re typically left to suffocate to death on deck, which can take under an hour or up to several hours.
Other welfare issues include rough handling and the inability to express natural behaviors, like migration and nesting.
One of the bigger findings of the past two decades has been that fish have nociceptors, sensory neurons that detect and respond to damaging or threatening stimuli — a strong indicator they experience pain.
But just like with other species, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that fish behave differently in adverse conditions (for example, they limit eating and activity) and stop these behaviors when pain relief is given.
They don't WANT to believe fish feel pain because it will lower their profits -- read the above again & honestly tell me that those fish don't sound like they were in pain & then relieved from pain -- so should they be left alone on ship decks to suffocate to death for HOURS???????????
Wild-captured fish experience agonizing final moments no animal should have to endure, as pressure weighs on their bodies when they’re quickly pulled up out of the ocean’s depths in nets, and they begin to suffocate.
Death, too, is cruel on fish farms, where many fish are killed slowly by suffocation or in ice water.
Existing in these cramped environments is a far cry from the lives fish would experience in their natural habitats. For one example, salmon may swim spans of hundreds of miles to reach the ocean from the streams in which they hatched, and much farther as they reach feeding grounds, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Sometimes, salmon will spend years at sea before returning to their original stream to spawn.
Extraction of groundwater for aquaculture has been found in one study to accelerate sea level rise by causing land to sink.
Pigs on factory farms are often cannibalized, forced to eat meat from fellow pigs.
WHERE IS OUR HUMANITY???????????
Where is humanity?
They are sentient beings: capable of feeling pain, and experiencing a range of emotions. Scientific evidence has revealed that fish are far more intelligent than people assume. They have long-term memories, complex social structures, problem solving abilities, and some have been seen using tools.
Fish are even crushed to death & literally cut in half while alive!
Narrated by TV star Kristin Bauer, this new Mercy For Animals’ investigation reveals abuse of sensitive, intelligent fish at American farms.
Where is humanity?
Porkopolis
It is near impossible in the industry to encounter a conceptual or ethical limit proposed for sows biological reproductive capacity.
AnimalsAustralia
Farrowing crates are cold, hard metal cages with steel or concrete floors. In factory farms around the world, it’s standard practice to transfer mother pigs to a farrowing crate 7-14 days before she gives birth to her new piglets. After birthing (in a process known as ‘farrowing’), she remains confined in these metal ‘maternity’ crates for 3-4 weeks until her piglets are weaned.
Farrowing crates are so small a mother pig can barely move – she can only sit, stand or lay down slowly, and with difficulty. Pigs are naturally very clean animals, and when given the choice, never toilet where they eat, sleep or play. Instead, they will often travel far away to relieve themselves. But trapped in a farrowing crate, she can only take one step forward or back and is forced to urinate and defecate right where she stands. For mother pigs, this unhygienic behaviour causes her extreme stress, discomfort and heightens her risk of disease.
Despite having the intelligence of a 3-year old child, who can solve puzzles and even play video games, have amazing memories, can sense the passing of time, foster lifelong friendships with other pigs and expresses empathy for humans and pigs alike, these loving animals continue to be industrialised and treated like 'products', rather than individuals who feel - and express - an enormous range of emotions. She is someone, not something.
Eggs are Not Eggscellent
Cages are extremely cruel, and sadly they are just one of many cruelties chickens are forced to endure in the egg industry. In all commercial egg systems – cage, barn-raised, free-range or organic – male chicks are considered ‘worthless’ and are killed on their first day of life.
Female chicks are raised to replace hens who are sent to slaughter at just 18-30 months old — a fraction of their natural lifespan. As newborns, the tips of their beaks can be cut off without pain reliefto reduce aggressive pecking fueled by frustration when they cannot move freely, forage, or establish a natural social structure.
Because the males bred into the industry won’t grow up to produce eggs they are ‘disposed of’ by gassing or maceration -- literally being shredded to death while alive.
And later that year, at Sparboe Farms in Iowa, undercover investigators documented hens with gaping, untreated wounds laying eggs in cramped conditions among decaying corpses.
Leo Tolstoy - 1891 Essay
A village pig is dragged outside for slaughter. The animals “human-looking pink body” screamed in a “dreadful voice, resembling the shriek of a man”.
After the screams subsided and the animal was killed, even the gruff carriage driver accompanying Tolstoy lets out a heavy sigh.
“Do people really not have to answer for such things?”
Almost 200 years later, do they answer for such things?
My question to anyone reading this (unless you are already a strict vegan) is:
What can you do to reduce the overall suffering & harm done to sentient beings (all animals including fish & cetaceans) that is realistic & repeatable over the long term?
Me, personally I do not see the point in being some total zealot that never eats anyhing with bone char again if it isn't sustainable over the long term.
Vegans call it doing what is "practical & possible".
I believe it is also very important that it be sustainable over the long term or else what was the point?
Now, I will end this by asking you the same question I asked myself:
What can you do to reduce the suffering & harm to sentient beings (all animals including fish & cetaceans) that fits the following two criteria:
Realistic
Repeatable over the long term
I also want to say this if you are a starseed reading this -- we need to work with everyone.
This isn't some kind of ideological purity test or a flex as I see a lot of that within the movement for animal rights & activism.
This is about sentient, self-aware beings that are emotional, social & cognitively functional getting the living shit tortured out of them.
This is about the fact that 90% of the world's population as of today eats meat.
This is about 10 billion farm animals being slaughtered in the US every year for food.
This is about 99% of farm animals in the US being killed in factory farms.
This is about 90% of the 10 billion farm animals being slaughtered in the US being chickens.
This is about fedral subsidies that make a cheeseburger $4 when it should really be at least $15.
This is about big meat & big ag spending tens of millions every year to bankroll politicians for favorable policies.
This is about landmark legislation from the EPA & Congress not applying to the agricultural industry that causes the majority of land, air & water pollution & waste.
This is about the fact that there is no Big Broccoli to counter the meat & agricultural cartels.
This is about Trump winning.
It's not about fighting over bone char, cholecalciferol & cross contamination.
It's not about a competition on who can utilize the least animal byproducts (like the paint on the walls in your home & the tires in your car).
It's not a who's the best vegan dick measuring contest.
We need to work with everyone given what we are about against.
The 10 billion number has not dropped. And actually, people are consuming more meat.
Although there have been legislative wins and imitation meat like Impossible & Beyond Meat are promising.
They have the lobbying machine, political apparatus, laws, subsidies & constant commercials & ads on their side.
When's the last time you saw a commercial for vegetables?
Now, when's the last time you saw a commercial for Sonics, Dominos, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Pringles, Lays, Reeses Cup, Snickers, Twix, Applebees, Chilis, McDonalds.
We need to work with omnis, flexitarians, pescatarians, people that don't eat pork, people that don't eat chicken, people that don't eat beef, people that don't consume dairy.
That's not watering down or diluting a message.
It's decentering zealotry so we can actually get somewhere in our fight for animals to be recognized as sentient beings with their own inalienable rights.
That is maybe 100 to 250+ years off.
We won't get anywhere if we stay on reddit debating about whether brown sugar is okay if it is processed with bone char.
Keep that in mind. The animals are counting on us. ✨✨✨
A handful of companies own the patents on virtually every seed planted in the US. Now, a new crop of unowned seeds is bringing biodiversity back to farming.
“Most people have heard of open source software, maybe also of open source beer (Free beer for all!) or open source pharmaceutical research. The principle is the same: Someone developed the seeds — for cowpeas, corn, rye and more — and now offers the resource for everybody to share.
Just like software development has been co-opted by a few global companies like Microsoft and Apple, the international seed development and trade, too, is controlled by a few big giants like Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva (DuPont) and ChemChina (Syngenta). A 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains.
When we buy cereal or bread, few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented. Most farmers don’t own the seeds they sow on their fields. “They are renting them,” Kloppenburg, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of OSSI says with disgust. The problem with that? “A few global companies have the monopolies on global seed trade, and they breed cash crops like corn and soy, purely for money. They don’t care about biodiversity, world hunger or about the small farmer.” What sounds like a business problem impacts everybody, Kloppenburg insists. “These few gene giants on top of the food chain decide what ends up on our plates.”
In 2012, Kloppenburg and half a dozen like-minded agriculture experts founded OSSI as an alternative to the monopolies. OSSI’s aim is the “free flow and exchange of genetic resources, of plant breeding and variety development,” Kloppenburg says. With global warming, disease and changing climatic patterns, “we need novel plant varieties that are capable of responding to the changes. Farm to table is popular, but we really need to talk about seed to table.”
The movement faces an uphill battle, particularly in the US where most farmers plant seeds that are patented by the big corporations. Still, about 50 seed breeders have already signed on with OSSI in the US to offer nearly 500 seed varieties. And other open source seed organizations are making their own way in Europe, Argentina, India and more...
Of course, salad is no software, and the work of plant breeders has to be protected. Otherwise they might fare like plant breeder Jim Baggett in Oregon, who in 1966 started breeding broccoli with an extra-long stem so it could be harvested more easily. He shared his novel broccoli with researchers and other breeders — until Monsanto-offspring Seminis patented a broccoli with exactly that trait in 2011. Baggett could trace more than a third of the plant material to his work...
Seed breeders who commit to the OSSI pledge allow buyers to use what they have developed however they like. The pledge reads: “In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.
Examples of OSSI varieties include dwarf tomatoes, bred for people with little space by small farmers in North Carolina and Australia who worked together and exchanged information across continents. A new rye, called Baldachin, has been developed with the help of crowdfunding in Germany specifically for the sandy soil in East Germany and is for the first time available in bakeries this fall. Also potatoes, corn, wheat and nearly everything else you need to cook dinner...
Just like software, “we want to go viral,” Kotschi says. In North America, he notes, cannabis breeders are interested in the OSSI strategy. “Cannabis is going to be a multibillion dollar market,” he says. “The small breeders fear for their seeds. They are interested in using the open source license to protect themselves while making the seeds available to others.”” -via Reasons to Be Cheerful, 10/14/22
I love science. But also, I can clearly see how it is the western man’s explanation of explicit indigenous knowledge. ESPECIALLY in agriculture and food systems. Isn’t it quite interesting to think about how regenerative agriculture was THE way of living. We’ve strewn so far from this form of food production that now rich white women with masters degrees and inherited land get to teach others “regenerative agriculture” for profit. It irritates me that our culture (mostly white culture) needs the chemical, biological, physical, scientific proof that something works when oral traditions have been tried and true on this continent for 10,000 years. Is the scientific method a means of distraction so big ag, big pharma, big oil, and big chem can make a profit?
