Source: American Splendor

You lack the brains to know that 4 simultaneous days rotate in an imaginary cubed Earth.

Isn't it pointless to stop eating factory-produced meat, since one person won't make much difference and will never change the world this way, and because it's impossible to convince others when you can't even convince yourself?

Do you secretly hope for an environmental catastrophe big enough to finally prove that global warming is real and that you were right all along, but even more secretly fear that deniers will still say that it isn't anthropogenic, or that deaths and suffering will quickly be forgotten as the extreme right continues to extol the virtues of the new hotter world?

Don't you hate it when you argue about the existence of god and prove your case flawlessly, but then people discover the existence of consciousnesses in the universe that dwell in scales of size and time that are completely beyond our own experiences, and then people say, "See? That's God!", but really they cheated because that's not at all what they described when they were talking about their God, which really isn't fair.

How do you effect change in a world that stupidly, stupidly refuses to agree with you?

Hint: It doesn't matter whether you're right or not; all that matters is what's important to you.

...

There's an old saying by Oprah -- I know it's by Gandhi, probably by Oprah -- that says:

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."

Of course that means that you can't change the world without changing yourself first. But, it can also mean that by changing yourself, you are changing your world.


We each live in our own world. Our world is everything we're aware of, everything we choose to be a part of, everything we experience. Modern living and global news networks make us think that the entire planet is our world, but that's not true. You can let the news tell you what's important to you, and you can take on the entire world's problems (big and small) as your own, but you don't have to. You can tune out, and tune into a different world, make your world the world you want it to be, not by changing everything around you to your liking, but changing yourself to see the world you want to. You can make your world smaller, small enough to be able to make a difference in it.

How does this work?

Suppose you're in a grocery store and you simply read the ingredients on a package of meat, because you're concerned about what's in it ("right view and intention"). You've then already started changing the world. Suppose it contains "pork by-products" and "sodium nitrite", and because this sounds unappealing, you put it back ("right action"). You've changed your perspective on your world, and though it may change back, you might instead never take for granted what you buy and put in your mouth.

Without having to force yourself to do anything, you may find yourself interested in what's in everything you're eating. You may notice things that make you feel healthy and things that make you feel unhealthy, and end up changing your diet. You will see advertisements differently, being aware of some of the things they don't tell you, and decide what you want based more on your own decisions than on persuasion. This way of thinking will affect all your purchases, not just pork vs. no pork. You can escape the world of consumerism, and enter a smaller world where there is more intelligent thought put into what you buy. And that will spread from what you buy to what you do, in different aspects of life. Pretty soon your world is very different. You may not have shut down a hog factory, or convinced anyone not to eat meat, or even stopped doing so yourself, but you'll have changed your own world in ways that make a much bigger difference on your own life.

Last week Some time ago was Buy-Nothing Day. Are your spending habits different than they were a few years ago? Do you feel more conscious of what you buy, and what you do?

...

If you want to change the larger world around you, I'd suggest helping enable people to change their own worlds, rather than fighting against people who seem to be content with a world you want changed. Work for increasing people's freedoms and education, and then leave it up to them to change their own worlds.

fitter, healthier and more productive

Today's boycott: Industrial farmed meats

A friend related a story of once being sick with some kind of nasty bug, for which he took strong medicine. He would wake up in a panic thinking "I'm dying!" It was explained to him that living things share a lot of chemical signatures (hormones or enzymes or something), and that humans and tiny parasites both release similar chemicals when dying. If you kill a ton of bugs inside yourself, you get the chemical signal of all those bugs saying "I'm dying", in your blood, and you think it's your body that's saying it.

You wouldn't want to put this "I'm dying" chemical into your body. That's partly why it's important that animals raised for food aren't slaughtered in a stressful way. How they die matters. But what about how they live?

High-density hog factories are disgusting. There are plenty of surprising and disturbing documentaries that show the terrible conditions in which factory pigs live. People are willing to effectively torture animals if it means greater profit. Pigs are confined in dirty metal pens, squished in together till there's no room to move. The "stench of liquid manure" affects communities for miles around, and makes people sick outside of the farms -- imagine what it does to those living their entire lives inside.

One reason not to eat pork is simply that it's aesthetically and morally gross to eat something that has been raised in such filth and appalling conditions. There are other reasons: I've been told that pork is the closest meat to human flesh, and it doesn't digest easily, it just sits in your intestines rotting as much as being digested. Then there are parasites, etc.

Imagine though that when you eat meat, you are putting into your system the chemical signatures that an animal built up as it lived and grew. You are taking its chemical memories, and making them your own. So if you eat a ton of industrial hog factory meat, could your body be absorbing a feeling of being stressed out all the time, of being confined and crowded, frantic and agitated, living in filth? Could you be absorbing a little constant unhappiness, a desperate need to escape? Whether or not this actually happens, simply thinking about it might make you want to cut back on meat consumption.

Non-factory farms, where animals live and die decently, shouldn't have this problem. If you eat only ethically raised meats, it means lower-density production, which means that we can't all eat huge amounts of meat without requiring an impossibly large environmental footprint. But this isn't a problem; eating less meat is a solution.

Oink!

Question: What's cooler than being cool?

On a recent trip around the world and back, on foot I passed through the Rambo tunnels of Hope, British Columbia. There I met some fellow travelers also from Edmonton, who were making the same trek that I was. Here is a piece of worldly advice I picked up while conversing with these wandering strangers in that foreign land.

• To endure a cold winter comfortably, spend at least a half an hour outside every day.

The reasoning is that this will allow you to acclimate to low temperatures, the way we did as kids when we walked to school every day, back when winters never seemed that bad. Apparently, the face is an important meteorological sensor for our bodies, and keeping ourselves inside too much prevents us from getting used to the oncoming cold of winter.

If you find an excuse to be out while the weather goes from okay to bad, it should be tolerable when it goes to worse. I will try to test the idea this coming fall.

For your health!

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Bonus-beats advice!

• Soak raw nuts overnight before eating them.

Raw nuts have enzyme inhibitors on them that allow the nut to stay fairly inert through dry periods, and only "come alive" to start growing in the presence of water. These inhibitors make nuts hard to digest. Soak yer nuts overnight for like 12 hours or whatever, to get rid of the inhibitors. Beware though that what keeps the nuts inert, keeps them from spoiling, so the nuts won't last as long once they've been soaked. It's a good thing!

[Top notch post but could you add a witty and original "nuts" joke before we send this off to print? Thx. Maybe get Vince in for ideas. --Ed. PS. don't forget to remove this note, this time]