Peter Singer.

This is the definitive book on the ethics of where our food comes from, what it takes to get there and how we treat the nonhuman animals that we rely entirely on (food products, leather, labour etc) and yet utterly disregard and mistreat as not worthy of any human consideration. The book is not at all preachy, it does not attempt to tell you not to eat meat or animal products, it simply informs one on the practices used, the attitudes that certain societies have and how one inevitably increases the demand for the horrific treatment of domesticated animals (factory farms in particular). Luckily it does not go into too much detail of the inner workings of slaughterhouses (one massive reason I feel people are  ignorant to these issues, because they don't want to see it). The book follows three American families and their daily diets. One family lives on junk food,  cheap meat and anything easy and accessible. One family is trying to be atleast mildly ethical by buying local and organic food. And one  family is entirely vegan (including their two children). 

One learns, for example, that most salmon has been reared in salmon farms, so close together that their skin rubs off and they are in constant distress (in the wild they would see only two or three salmon in their lifetime). They are feed food colouring to make their flesh pink (it is naturally grey and only becomes pink due to their consumption of kelp in the wild). They are feed antibiotics to increase growth rabidly Antibiotics which are thrown into the ocean for other sea creatures to consume. They also frequently escape from their cage, breed with wild salmon and create a hybrid fish which is neither. Hence, even if salmon is labeled wild, it is probably a genetically modified salmon that has escaped from a salmon farm.

Peter Singer (Australia) is one of my all time favourite Philosophers and animal welfare advocates. 

Everyone should read this book. Even if you do not think that your consuming practices are unethical, you may learn a lot about the world regardless.

 

World At Large

Each one of us is potentially mind at large. We live together, we act on and react to one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. Embraced the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self, transcendence in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pull information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves, from family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Unknown source. Sounds very Humian, will endeavor to find out where I wrote it down from. I have a feeling it was from a poetry shrine in the Algonquin Hotel (Manhattan) dedicated to the poets of the Round Circle circa 1920s. Dorothy Parker I believe her name was. We shall see how my investigating skills go.

Words and Words

Some people are so good with words. Like these little notes of inspiration - they just appear so innate to the person who has written / spoken them.
I would like to be good with the written word. I think they express so much more than the spoken word.

Images from http://julia.blogg.se / http://somuchtotellyou.co.nz/ http://yespleasemademoiselle.blogspot.com/

Love, Knowledge and Pity

Bertrand Russell – What I have lived for. (British Philosopher and Logician)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
 I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
 With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
 Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
 This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell is one of my favourite Philosophers. Not only because I have mad respect that he (and Frege) revolutionised 20th cent Logic (which had ceased to evolve since the time of Aristotle), but that he was so passionate about his life and his work and the value of Philosophy in general. Amazing. 

To Bridge the Void

Failed dreams of completion – we inevitably are unable to bridge the void between an otherwise unbridled range of thought and the all too constrained action; between being and the nothingness that inherently co resides in our self. 

                               - J.P Sartre