Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

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

UPDATE II: Review ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’ on Amazon (Homesteading in the New South Africa)

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, GUNS, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Propaganda, South-Africa, Technology

“Into the cannibal’s Pot is brilliant, exceeding all my expectations; it is very courageous of Ilana also to attack the whole notion of ‘democracy.’ This is a much-needed shot at a holy cow.”

– DAN ROODT, Ph.D., noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic, director at PRAAG.

The word about my book is spreading—and will continue to spread slowly. But not without your help. I’d like to take the opportunity to ask readers to please review the just-released “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” on Amazon.

Many of you have read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot.” Thank you for the glowing (if somber) messages sent via email and Facebook.

However, a better way to help my work and its mission is to post your reviews to Amazon. Us talking among ourselves will achieve nothing in raising awareness of the issues covered in depth and in detail in the book.

And you don’t have to have purchased the book from Amazon to review it on the site.

The Kindle, e-book version, is available from Amazon too. Please note that you can purchase the lower-cost Kindle copy of “The Cannibal” without having to own a Kindle – all you need is a PC. This hyperlink describes the free Amazon software application for the PC. So you do not require a gadget to read the book on Kindle.

I appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance,

ilana

UPDATE I: THE SILENCE OF CELEBRITIES. Abelard Lindsey: Yes, I read Wilbur Smith’s novels in my teens. How am I to know what he thinks of the reality, as I describe it in my book (which has 800 plus endnotes), or if he thinks about it at all? We know Charlize Theron doesn’t think too hard. Lots of celebrities don’t think. That doesn’t mean you, the reader, should follow suit. Or that you should deduce anything from the silence of celebrities. The fact that a rich dude has a farm in CT, where I’m from, does not mean the “area is not adversely affected.”

The rich are more likely to afford high-quality private security than the average South African, whose right to bears arms has been severely infringed. The sub-chapter titled “Your Home: The ANC’s Castle,” in Chapter One: “Crime, The Beloved Country,” tells of what remains of gun rights in South Africa.

Take your cues from South African celebrity and Afrikaner activist, Steve Hofmeyr.

UPDATE II (June 24): As readers pointed out, the Cape’s demographics are different (and I thought I could duck that one on the blog!) However, it is still a relatively high-crime province when compared to where I live in the Pacific Northwest.

And farms (as I document in my book) are always under threat of expropriation by stealth. How? A “tribe” squats on the farmers property, cuts the fences, steals the crops, kills the livestock in slow torturous ways (cutting the calf muscles…), and claims the land in the newly indigenized courts. That’s homesteading in the New South Africa.

Any animal activists out there? Care about animals? Read the section titled “Killing God’s Creatures” in Chapter 2 of Into the Cannibal’s Pot.

UPDATED: “Are We Running Out of Resources?” Hell, No!

Barack Obama, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets

Most “resources” in nature are useless lumps of nothing. If not for man’s ingenuity, iron, aluminum, coal and oil would lie purposeless and pristine in the wildernesses; the matter and energy abundant on earth would come to naught. The ability to discover and transform natural resources into usable goods, and continue to develop “resource-enhancing and sustaining technologies,” is, after all, unique to man. At least to some men.

Watch this wonderful YouTube clip courtesy of economist Steve Horwitz, who demonstrates that, provided we allow profits and prices to serve as the street signs of the economy, we will not run out of resources. If only the “brilliant” Barack Obama, who keeps looking for ways to curtail production, would watch with you (or, at least, read Henry Hazllit’s Economics In One Lesson, which even BHO could grasp):

And this from “THE GOODS ON GAS”:

Purchasing patterns drive prices up or down. Through their “competitive bidding” people raise the price of a commodity. In an unhampered market, rising prices would have signaled to established oil companies and other entrepreneurs and investors that there are profits to be made in the industry.
Absent legislative barriers to exploration, enterprising capitalists would have defied central planners and turned from tinkering with ethanol to drilling for—and refining—oil. Forecasted profits would guarantee accelerated production. Had Exxon and the others been allowed to satisfy their only overlords, consumers, they’d have long since increased the production of oil. Increased supply would have brought down prices—and profits, eventually.
The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. The price system—rising prices in this case—signals to consumers to adjust their consumption. …

UPDATE: Hybrid hypocrites. Yes, “State-sponsored ‘sexy’ technologies in the West have decidedly ugly outcomes for worker bees in the East. The Copenhagen Crowd’s cravings must be sated, but not by despoiling California, if you know what I mean. Enter the Chinese worker. Read “NIMBYs: Not-In-My-Backyard Environmentalists” for what’s involved in the screwy, skewed Prius production line.

As for the gaseous Bill O’s Theory of Oil, which Bob below alludes to by way of the reference to the cartel: Purchasing patterns drive prices up or down. The particular price of fuel, concomitantly, is determined by supply and demand. The general trend of price increases is a consequence of government-generated inflation. I understand that Bill O’Reilly believes otherwise, but the natural laws of economics cannot be suspended, not even by “Bill O.”

The Pseudoscientific Method Of ‘Climate Change’

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Pseudoscience, Reason, Science

“Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.” That was “Reincarnation of the Reds,” my 2006 article which first articulated the “scientific” principle that undergirds “climate change.” Back in 2006, when I wrote the piece, the movement was still called global warming.

The media continue to blow hot air about global warming, as much of the country’s South and Northeast looks as though it is heralding an Ice Age. If you want to master the watermelons’ scientific methods, here’s more from “Reincarnation of the Reds”:

“These mutant Marxists have had to create a theory that can’t be falsified—the kind of ‘theory’ Karl Popper referred to as irrefutable. As Popper reminded us, ‘A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is,’ of course, ‘non-scientific.”

Here’s how you use the Socratic method to question a climate kook with the hope that reason will prevail. It never does.