Torture, economics and animals

First, I've mentioned before that I went through a vegetarian/pescatarian phase. We now eat white meat and fish, simply due to losing the will/interest in maintaining the diet. Also, I gained quite a bit of weight (and muscle mass) when I gave up chicken. Here's an animation that might make one reconsider:


Next, a few points on taxes and economics:

• Pearlstein writes convincingly that, "The old Republican fantasy was that tax cuts were the magic elixir that would solve every problem. Now that the public has finally rejected it, it's disappointing to see Democrats offering up the equally fantastic notion that Americans can have all the government they want while getting someone else to pay for it." He goes through the numbers and shows that all of us are going to have to pony up some more to get the budget in good shape.
• Dean Baker writes, "Too-often ignored, the basic economic principles of marginal-cost pricing and gains from trade have much to offer in the area of health care. They need to be brought into the discussion." Why does running a medical scan that requires a few dollars of electricity and a few hundred dollars of technician and doctor time to run and read (respectively) get billed at thousands upon thousands of dollars?
• Simon Johnson believes politics, rather than pure economics, lay at the foundation of our country's financial woes. "His argument, in a nutshell, is that the last 25 years have seen deregulatory policies driven by the banking interests, leading to an over-large financial sector that has captured the political process. Financiers promoted free-market ideals, served in government, and funneled millions into the political process. Now, the risky behavior of major financial institutions, combined with the public policy they promoted, has created a major crisis. But the bankers' political power hasn't waned, and they are preventing the government from acting aggressively to start recovery." Sounds reasonable to me -- the people with their hands on the levers of power before Obama's inauguration haven't disappeared overnight, and they tend to be disproportionately connected to Wall Street.
  
• Of course, Johnson has his critics (Scheiber), " The logical chain is typically something like: 1.) I've seen corrupt elites prevent governments from resolving financial crises in emerging markets. 2.) The finanical crisis dogging the United States shares some features with emerging-market crises--for example, overleveraged institutions enjoyed an outsize share of corporate profits prior to imploding. 3.) Ergo, it must be the case that corrupt elites are preventing the U.S. government from resolving the crisis. Problem is, the third point doesn't necessarily follow from the second. Logically, it's like saying: 1.) Cancer patients don't get well when they're treated by witch doctors. 2.) The top oncologist at Mass General has lost a few patients lately--some of them inexplicably, under mysterious circumstances. 3.) Ergo, the top oncologist at Mass General was practicing witchcraft. Maybe, but it would be much more persuasive if you could establish causality."
  

Finally, one of my favorite blogs to read for political commentary has an excellent summary of the ineffectiveness and immorality of torture.

The impact of meat on global warming

Time magazine has a great article on how meat makes global warming worse:

In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions.

I've written a few things on my experiment with complete meatlessness, and how one of my motivations is the environmental impact of raising cattle. As of a few months ago, I started eating white meat again. I never plan to eat pork or beef again regularly, although there will probably be times when I'm trapped somewhere and all they offer is BBQ or something. On the ethics, I suppose I just don't think that birds have the same sort of conscious awareness as mammals like pigs and cows do.

Meatlessness

Yesterday, Kristof of the NYT wrote a column about animal rights:

So, yes, I eat meat (even, hesitantly, goose). But I draw the line at animals being raised in cruel conditions. The law punishes teenage boys who tie up and abuse a stray cat. So why allow industrialists to run factory farms that keep pigs almost all their lives in tiny pens that are barely bigger than they are?

Defining what is cruel is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But penning pigs or veal calves so tightly that they cannot turn around seems to cross that line.

More broadly, the tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned. Someday, vegetarianism may even be the norm.

Perhaps it seems like soggy sentimentality as well as hypocrisy to stand up for animal rights, particularly when I enjoy dining on these same animals. But my view was shaped by those days in the barn as a kid, scrambling after geese I gradually came to admire.

So I’ll enjoy the barbecues this summer, but I’ll also know that every hamburger patty has a back story, and that every tin of goose liver pâté could tell its own rich tale of love and loyalty.

His colleague, Mark Bittman, gave a talk at TED that had a lot more moral force behind it:

I went for about a year eating very, very little meat. I gained a lot of weight. Although I wasn't 100% strict, since I would partake of fish and seafood on occasion, I certainly felt good about my decision. When people asked me why I was a vegetarian, I told them three reasons:

1. ethics -- I don't like to cause animals to suffer; they feel pain just like we do
2. health -- studies have been done showing that a plant-based diet is very good for your ticker, while red meat has been clearly linked to cancer and heart disease
   
3. the environment -- the amount of our resources diverted to raising animals for food is vast, and the efficiency of this system is low, compared to directly growing plants for human consumption

Now, none of those three things changes whether or not you choose to be a vegetarian, however, after reading Kristof I don't see how he can make the arguments he makes with a straight face while admitting to eating meat. He talks about the increasing role and rectitude of animal rights, and how his own experiences on a farm support that, but then admits to enjoying burgers and goose liver.

I guess it's like religion: they preach perfection while admitting to being imperfect with a straight face.

Back to me for a moment, this summer I've started eating some poultry again. For one thing, I am getting really tired of what we eat; for another thing, I've gotten really fat. Part of the problem is just eating too many damned carbs, but I think the bigger problem for me is the feeling of being full. High-protein foods are very filling to me, while low-protein foods leave my stomach rumbling an hour later.

Unlike Kristof, I'll not preach it if I'm not practicing it, but I don't know how much I did before.

The big issue for me is getting people to wake up to the environmental impact of raising cattle, but I am afraid that won't happen any time soon.

More animal outrage

I just read the CNN article about the largest beef recall in American history, and watching the accompanying video made me want to cry and punch the slaughterhouse workers at the same time. They take these poor sick diseased animals that are unable to stand and jab them with electric prods, stab them with forklifts, drag them by ropes attached to one foot...

The animals literally scream in pain. It's horrible. If you can't see the ethical implications, you're not capable of rational thought.

If you want to see more animal abuse TV, see here. If you need rational arguments for becoming a vegetarian, or at least cutting meat down to a rare item in your diet, see here. As I said a few months ago, some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

"Meet your Meat" (12:28), narrated by Alec Baldwin, follows below:

Wake-up call for carnivores

My wife and I have been meatless for a long time now. It feels really good, and though we occasionally (once a month?) used to have fish/seafood, we are cutting that out entirely now. An eye-opening report in the NYT explains the global, environmental and economic impact of American's carnivorism.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Read it all.

Some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

Common Misconceptions

I asked an old friend of mine, Crazilla, if he had anything interesting to say lately...and he sure did. The following are his thoughts, or you can view them at their original source:

Common Misconceptions, by Crazilla

FYI, in a spirited but lighthearted tone:

• There is no "free trade vs. fair trade" conflict. Anyone with a conscience and an understanding of the term desires fair trade; from what i've gathered, its meaning is little more than literal. Free trade, on the other hand, has to do specifically with lessening the restrictive effects of legislation and taxation on the flow of resources, materials, products, labor, and capital across boundaries. It is opposed by many--but, it seems to me, supported, in concept, by many more--proponents of fair trade. The central problem with free trade seems to be that a product (or labor) that comes cheap from one source has the ultimate advantage over the corresponding products (or workers) from other sources of comparable quality, hence free trade undermines competition between sources of differing standards; for example, manufacturing plants in China that pay workers Jack Shit In A Can draw business from the U.S., which has become dependent upon low prices, and as a result businesses that pay U.S. workers decent salaries are sold out. (Overall, i see this as a positive effect of free trade; in the long run it will incite workers the world over to establish criteria of fairness which no company will be able to escape by simply changing location. This is a long way off, however.) Anyway, most advocates of fair trade seem to support relatively free trade on the condition of transparency. The popular myth that free trade and fair trade are opposing ideals seems, as far as i can tell, to stem from misleading reports that focus only on (apparently marginal) calls for balancing tariffs, which would merely serve to price foreign products similarly to domestic products; that is, establishing fairness for the companies in the eyes of the consumer (particularly the U.S. consumer)--the two most overprivileged entities in the trade system (far behind, for example, the farmers, laborers, and undeveloped governments). I obviously am very fresh on this subject, so any further suggestions for reading or thinking (and especially personal opinions) are encouraged.
• You are a feminist. To some extent, you support fairness between (among?) the sexes and (nearly) equal opportunity for men, women, and whomever else in endeavors for which they're comparatively qualified. (If you read through the article, or at least this definition, and do not fit the description, I apologize; among my LJ friends i find no one known to me to oppose this concept. Speaking of which, what in blazes is the matter with you!?)
• Everybody seems to like making fun of vegans. I kinda do, too--at least the ones who found their moral principles on the well-being of animals, particularly in an age when at least a quarter of people the world over are living on less than $1/day. However, it is important to note that many vegetarians and vegans care little (or, as in my case, not at all) for animals' so-called "rights" and humane treatment, and instead found the habit on the larger concern of sustainability--that is, they do it for the betterment of the world human population as a whole, and to better enable our species to fulfill its purpose of avoiding extinction and, in the meantime, to provide better living conditions to those without. However misguided you may feel some of these tactics to be, the cause itself is the noblest possible, and in any case meatless diets cause no one (except, in rare cases, the dieter) harm.

So, no one wants to join me for wine and cheese?

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