Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Yet another man-made disaster

If anyone is still unconvinced that the animal/death industry brings destruction wherever it exists, I suggest you check out the article below:



“Tsunamis, Mangroves and the Market Economy”
by Devinder Sharma
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Sharma0111.htm

Since the 1980s, the Asian seacoast region has been plundered by the large industrialized shrimp firms that brought environmentally-unfriendly aquaculture to its sea shores. Shrimp cultivation, rising to over 8 billion tonnes a year in the year 2000, had already played havoc with the fragile eco-systems. The “rape-and-run” industry, as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) once termed it, was largely funded by the World Bank. Nearly 72 per cent of the shrimp farming is confined to Asia.

The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangroves—amongst the world’s most important ecosystems. Each acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676 pounds loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature’s protection for the coastal regions from the large waves.

More on mangroves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove


P.S. Go vegan…

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BTW, (unrelated to the above post) here are two good sites to bookmark:
http://purepolemics.blogdrive.com
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog

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Posted on 01/12 at 05:26 AM
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Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Helen Keller says:

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all: the apathy of human beings.”



“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”


For a perspective on Helen Keller that goes beyond platitudes about “overcoming obstacles,” check out these links:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/17_01/Kell171.shtml
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/1682/sw168220.htm

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Posted on 01/11 at 01:10 PM
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Monday, January 10, 2005

The Mickey Z./Press Action Interview

Mark Hand, editor of Press Action (and, for full disclosure, a longtime friend of mine) asked some questions...like this one right here:

Q:  You sometimes categorize yourself politically as an anarchist, or at least as an anarchist fellow traveler. What people and events have had the greatest influence in the development of your political philosophy?



...and I came up with some answers...like this, for example:

A: I’m allergic to labels...but authority has always made me uncomfortable: parents, teachers, bosses, landlords, police, priests, older sister. I felt this way long before I had ever heard the word “anarchist.” Could be those twelve years of Catholic school, I guess. That was my inoculation...making me immune to trusting authority and needing some sky-god to solve my problems. To this day, I feel physically ill when an “authority figure” imposes his or her will on me or anyone around me.

In a more literal sense, reading Guy Debord was a revelation...a wake-up call to my innate spirit. Same goes for Chomsky...and the many authors who influenced my shift toward veganism. Bukowski. Emma Goldman, so many...and today I find Arundhati Roy to be an epiphany every time I read her words or hear her speak. On the artistic side, Bruce Lee and Marcel Duchamp also stand out as influences. The list goes on and on. As someone who did not attend college, I do the self-education thing well. One book leads to another which leads to a film perhaps or a radio program and so on. Eventually, I realized that the worldview I was cultivating had a name: anarchism (or perhaps anarcho-syndicalism).


To read the complete interview, please click here:
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand01102004/

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Posted on 01/10 at 01:06 PM
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