Category Archives: Britain

UPDATE III (9/12/023): “Who Owns The Food Chain?” @ Quarterly Review (Monsanto Monopolist)

Britain, Business, Capitalism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Free Markets, Justice, Private Property, Technology

The state is in the business of death. State-subsidized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are the intensive rearing facilities in which the animals we eat live wretched lives and die a grisly death. Yes, and I am the same libertarian who penned perhaps the only propertarian defense of Michael Vick (I & II), which so horrified Sean Hannity, that he had me on his radio show. I regret that.

JULIAN ROSE, writing for Quarterly Review, pens a piece titled “Who Owns the Food Chain.” Rose rightly inveighs against the “factory farming and agri-chemically dominated conglomerates that retain their stranglehold over around 90% of the Western world’s food chain.”

While I disagree with the way Rose frames the life-giving profit motive (smaller family farms must too pursue profits to feed us), he rightly denounces the putrid practices of the factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, where animals are nothing but “units on a conveyor belt designed to extract the maximum amount of milk from the cheapest available high protein diet – a diet that will be laced with antibiotics and composed of genetically modified soya, maize and quite possibly nanotech feed components as supplementary ingredients.”

I recommend this thoughtful British magazine. Subscribe and read “Libya: a war of the womb: ilana mercer detects a uterine quality to US action in Libya.”

BACK TO THE ANIMALS. A careful philosopher named Jonathan Safran Foer has written the first philosophical treatise arguing against eating animals to have captured my attention because of its appeal to logic and fact. In “Eating Animals,” Safran Foer’s concludes: “We should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them. ‘In the way we now eat them’ denotes their utterly miserable lives in intensive rearing facilities – factory farms, aka CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – and their horrific deaths at assembly line slaughterhouses.”

UPDATED I: Fred, please read the articles I wrote in defense of Vick to understand my perspective. (HERE & HERE.) I would never suggest any state regulation; just voluntary attrition. You can purchase “happy meat” at your local farm market.

Karen De Coster, for example, writes a lot about “food freedom” and equates “true conservationism” with a rejection of the cruel “anti-nature destructiveness of monoculture.”

My local farm market guarantees that their animals lived free and died unafraid. Yes, we own these sentient creatures, but we must husband them humanely.

UPDATE II (Aug. 1/2011): MONSANTO MONOPOLIST. Most libertarians have not awoken to the fact that big farma is antithetical to the free market VIA RT:

Nearly 300,000 organic farmers are filing suit against corporate agriculture giant Monsanto, who have in recent years squashed independent organic farms from coast to coast.
270,000 organic farmers filed a lawsuit in March 30 in an attempt to keep a portion of the world’s food supply organic. The plaintiffs in the case are members of around 60 family farms, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations.
Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the suit lashes out at Monsanto to keep their engineered Genuity® Roundup Ready® canola seed out of their farms. Organic agriculturalists say that corn, cotton, sugar beets and other crops of theirs have been contaminated by Monsanto‘s seed, and even though the contamination has been largely natural and unintended, Monsanto has been suing hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patent for incidentally using their product.

UPDATE III (9/12/023)::

‘Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight,’Albert Schweitzer.
The intensive farming of sentient creatures has no place in our world
It is devastating for animals, environment & our planet

Via “Compassion in World Farming,” by Philip Lymbery

British Parliamentary-Police-Press Complex Splutters

Britain, Crime, English, Journalism, Law, Media, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the US we have a military-media-industrial-congressional-complex. These branches share a symbiotic relationship. For example, when the top brass in government or in the military want to launch a war on another people (Iraq, for example), or on their own (The Transportation and Security Administration), they entrust the ratings-craving (and craven) television networks to do their bidding.

In the UK they have a similar set-up, call it, for our purposes, the parliamentary-police-press complex. As in the US, its mission is to keep the populace preoccupied with puerile nonsense. The already pathetic British press, it turns out, was going above the call of duty in emulating the government: News of the World, a News Corp, Rupert Murdoch British tabloid, has been hacking the phones and voicemail of interested parties.

Not unlike the government that is currently quizzing it.

Today, Rebekah Brooks of the tumbleweed hair apologized for the editorial direction she took.

It has to be clear that this is a dance of statists.

Monarch Is Not Such A Mensch

Barack Obama, Britain, English, Etiquette, Foreign Policy

Conservatives all trashed the president for breaching etiquette with the Queen of England. In a painfully embarrassing moment, poor Barack Obama continued speaking and toasting the old girl as the British national anthem played. He was supposed to zip up his mouth. But when the poor guy turned to Elizabeth II and raised his glass, she glanced at him icily and averted her gaze. How ungracious! I’m all for etiquette. (And I’m all for the Queen.) But when manners come at the cost of kindness and hospitality—forget about it. Making your guest feel at home trumps standing on ceremony. The Queen ought to have broken protocol, smiled, and raised her glass to the glass of our poor oaf of a president. Had the old girl done that small thing she would have shown that she is a monarch and a mensch.

[The weekly, WND.COM column will be back next week. I’ve been under the weather.]

Mobocracy Vs. Monarchy

Britain, Democracy, Government, History, Political Philosophy

The following is from my new, WND.COM column, “Mobocracy Vs. Monarchy”:

“… Harmless though it was, the occasion of William’s marriage to Ms. Middleton drew nasty barbs from pundits on this side of the pond. Trashing the British monarchy appeared to be their way of asserting American exceptionalism. …

If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) and the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent. … The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes during his time in office. It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons’ staff to have vandalized the White House on the eve of their departure. …

Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The complete column is “Mobocracy Vs. Monarchy,”now on WND.COM.