Words fail me

Doctor Slain at Church

Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, where Sunday morning services were being held, Stolz said. The gunman then pointed a gun at two men who tried to stop him before driving away in a 1993 blue Ford Taurus, authorities said.

Brilliant at Breakfast has a good post up about the American Taliban with links to other sites.

Vegetarianism is looking good

I just finished reading this interesting book. Farm Sanctuary is both a place and a movement that advocates for the humane treatment of livestock. It was founded by Gene Baur in the 1980s. Farm Sanctuary has been pushing hard against industrialized agriculture and the inevitable animal abuse it entails, and has had some successes. In California, for example, they managed to persuade the legislature to enact laws making it illegal to slaughter "downer" cattle for human consumption. Learning that in most places that a steer not being able to walk to the slaughtering chute on his own didn't prevent that sick steer from ending up as steak does make Boca Burgers suddenly look a lot more appetizing than they used to.

Theoretically, that's no longer true in this country, but it wasn't until March of this year that downer cattle were removed from the human food chain. The inability to walk is one of the symptoms of "mad cow" disease; I can't help but wonder just how many people are walking around now with BSE prions slowly wending their way into neural channels and causing dementia that's being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's.

On one level I found myself thinking the author was more than slightly nuts for getting a little too warm and fuzzy about chickens having personalities and sheep actually being capable of thought. On another, though, the descriptions of the incredibly inhumane conditions that factory farming entails really makes a person wants to switch over to living on legumes ASAP.

The author also brought out an interesting point when it comes to livestock. All the breeds favored now for milk production, meat production, egg production, etc., have been bred to the point where they're essentially incapable of breeding naturally. I've known for a long time that the domestic turkey, for example, has been bred to the point where that humongous breast makes it impossible for the tom turkeys to get it on with the hens. Turkeys have to be artificially inseminated. That's also happening with chickens -- although in the case of chickens it isn't so much that they're physically incapable, it's more a bizarre case of the meatier the chicken the more insane the cockerels are. The mature roosters are apparently psycho, so aggressive and violent they kill the hens in the process of trying to mount them. Very, very strange.

In any case, birds have it worst when it comes to factory farming, swine are kept in appalling conditions, most dairy cattle lead wretched lives, and beef cattle have it the best. Cattle feed lots can be pretty disgusting in terms of the cattle enduring mud, dust, and crowded conditions, but they are able to move around. Of course, even if cattle feed lots are the least inhumane of the factory farming options, they're still a nightmare in public health terms because the cattle are grain-fed, which encourages E. coli, and then the e. coli gets into the watershed and ends up contaminating vegetables being grown downstream, like spinach and lettuce.

I'm enough of a carnivore that I'm probably never going to give up red meat entirely, but am thinking that it's time to explore locavore options, like tracking down some of the farms where they raise livestock on grass and sell direct to the consumer.

The sad thing with farming, of course, and the book never really gets into it, is why we wound up with these humongous industrialized operations to begin with. Some of it was economies of scale, but in other cases it was an unintended consequence of good intentions. Dairy farms, for example, became regulated to the point where a small farm could not afford the equipment needed to meet the standard for selling grade A milk for human consumption (i.e., a totally closed system that takes the milk straight from the cow to a bulk tank that's kept chilled to a certain temperature). They had to grow to stay in business. When you get beyond a certain number of cows, it's too big an operation for it to be strictly a family operation -- you need hired hands. If you have hired hands, you have to get bigger. And so it goes -- an endless growth loop with an end result of "farms" with 5000 cows. By then, of course, it's no longer a farm -- it's an industrialized factory and an environmental nightmare.

They're probably ice skating in Hell today

I had a doctor's appointment this afternoon. Left my office at 1:30, got to the clinic at 1:37, the appointment was for 1:45 -- and at 1:45 I was actually talking with the doctor!

This may be a first.

[I've had a cough for over a month that just won't go away. I was hoping for something exotic with an unpronounceable name, but the reality appears to be a really boring minor sinus infection triggering post-nasal drip. Solution: antibiotics for a week, and if that doesn't do it then less common possibilities get checked out.]

I'm back to work

but apparently no one else is this week. At least one of the reasons why I was discouraged from taking annual leave so I could accompany the S.O. to the tundra is now clear: my team lead wanted me here because she was planning to be gone. Ditto a whole herd of other people. I noticed the parking lot was looking pretty empty compared to a typical morning, so I guess we should all hope no killer flu hits today -- Large Nameless Agency is definitely not running at full capacity.

It was a rather quiet weekend at home. The S.O. and the dog went on their merry way, the back of the truck packed full of stuff that the S.O. thinks he's going to need while working on the retirement bunker, and I retreated to the recliner with a good book. Or two. Or three. One of the library books (Mummy Dearest) was a nice fun read in which one author (Joan Hess) paid homage to another (Elizabeth Peters). It had a lot of in-jokes that fans of the latter would find amusing, and I did. The book ends with the heroine declaring that the absolute one thing she will not do while in Egypt is to give in to the cliche of being photographed while sitting on a camel in front of a pyramid -- and then when you look at the back cover, there's the author: sitting on a camel in front of the Great Pyramid at Giza. You gotta love an author who can mock herself.

The weather was sufficiently wet and dreary that I didn't venture far from the recliner until this morning. The one bright spot was a vintage dress finally sold on Etsy, giving me hope the others will eventually move, too.

I did listen to various news shows, did the usual weekend C-SPAN immersion, but must be hitting the saturation point (again) because listening to the tinfoil hat crowd didn't trigger much of a reaction. It does floor me that there are still people out there in wackaloon land who want to keep harping about the infamous 'fake' birth certificate. Some of them are good for a laugh, e.g., the ones who only memorized half of Rush's talking points and so babble about Obama being born in Hawaii* and therefore not a citizen, but most are just pathetic.

I'd ask rhetorically just how long this whining is going to last, but I already know. The next four years for sure, and probably the next eight. The Clinton-haters didn't let up on Bill the entire time he was in office; the Obama-haters aren't going to be any different. And now. . . back to work.

*A digression: the ignorance of many Americans is never ending. I find it perfectly believable that there are a lot of wackaloons who would believe being born in Hawaii would make a person a noncitizen because I've run into many people who think Michigan's upper peninsula is part of Canada -- and just recently I heard a great story about the Atlanta Olympics. When people from Albuquerque called the agency here in Georgia that was doing advance ticket sales via phone orders they were told that the tickets could only be sent to U.S. addresses, not to foreign ones like in New Mexico. The frightening thing, of course, is those people are voters.

Finally, important stuff on C-SPAN

They're talking about funding the National Parks. A representative from the National Parks Foundation is describing how underfunded the parks currently are, and what the benefits of the parks can be to the public beyond the obvious (i.e., hiking trails).

Naturally, the first caller was a member of the tinfoil hat crowd and treated listeners to a rambling paean to a park that is not part of the National Park system. Fortunately, that person seems to be the exception. All the calls since then have been from rational adults who love the parks and are concerned about the impacts of idiotic legislation like the recent bill allowing people to carry loaded weapons in National Parks.

Photo is from Cane River Creole NHP in Louisiana.

The Pinochet treatment

I was hoping this would happen, but didn't expect it quite so soon:

Judges at Spain's National Court, acting on complaints filed by human rights groups, are pursuing 16 international investigations into suspected cases of torture, genocide and crimes against humanity, according to prosecutors. Among them are two probes of Bush administration officials for allegedly approving the use of torture on terrorism suspects, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Maybe my fantasies about seeing Darth Cheney do a perp walk will come true after all.

No surprise here

From today's AJC:

Georgia drivers among nation’s worst

In fact, the only unexpected thing was reading that Georgia wasn't at the absolute bottom of the list.