Twists and Turns
My wife and I tend to enjoy foreign mystery series, mostly British and Nordic, their seemingly make-up free actors adding a bit more realism into the plots; the acting is generally top notch and the stories often proving a labyrinth of alleys and deadends to navigate: Line of Duty, Shetland, La Casa de Papal, Keeping Faith, Bron, The Killing, Dicte, Hidden, Silk, Happy Valley...as you can gather, we've watched a few. Generally, these shows for the most part maintain their tight writing and plots for at least a few seasons before losing a tiny bit of their muster, as if showing how difficult it is to remain at the top. Reflect back on series or artists or albums you've heard and likely there aren't that many that stay with you, even if the shows are in their 4th season or an artist has released her fifth album. It's much the same in our everyday life, how we tend to not pay much attention to another viewpoint the way a detective or an attorney would, even if a tiny piece of evidence is introduced that may plant a seed of doubt in your mind. Take the case of piglets, or an aircraft carrier, or plastics...
An article in WIRED reported on the question of whether virtual reality could or should enter the courtroom, only this wasn't to be an explanatory graphic from a science channel or a recreated flashback of a robbery or murder but rather actual footage of a factory farm raising pigs.* The activist group DxE (Diret Action Everywhere) trespassed onto the farm, filmed and took two injured piglets to a vet, then justified their actions with this: Someone who rescues a starving piglet from a factory farm, they say, is no different from someone who breaks a window to save a dog locked in a hot car—an argument that has yet to be tested in court as a defense for factory farm intrusions. Their footage is graphic and shows both pigs and piglets tossed into a dumpster, animals agitated and bleeding, all the sorts of things consumers don't want to think about when picking up their trimmed and shrink-wrapped packages of chops or burgers or sausages. The question becomes, would or should a jury see such footage, especially if presented immersively in 3D? Added the article: Whether this radical legal tactic will fly in court may come down entirely to the discretion of a judge, who will have to decide whether the VR material’s relevance to the case outweighs its emotional impact, which could prejudice the jury against Circle Four (the factory farm in question).. “The big question is whether they’ll be able to talk a judge into letting the VR stuff in,” says Hadar Aviram, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program who has focused her recent research on DxE. “The footage is quite arresting. I can see a jury, even in a rural county, a farming county, being very sympathetic to people trying to bring that to light.” Arguments appear to be good on both sides: the animals were scared and injured (because you were there, came the reply); the animals couldn't move or even turn around (that's been changed, came the reply); there were dead animals piled in the bins (you put them there, came the reply). Then again, the law is the law...they broke in, they trespassed. And if you're wondering where was the security, many of today's larger pig farms (150,000+ pigs) are robotically controlled and often have only 6 employees to run them...gates are opened, food is dispensed, fans and temperatures are monitored, waste is washed to holding ponds, and antibiotics are administered, all automatically.
So let's jump to Marc Benioff, Salesforce billionaire and one of the leaders in wanting to be taxed more, specifically Proposition C in San Francisco which asked for a mere .05% tax on primarily tech companies, a tax intended to generate $300 million and benefit a solution of sorts for battling homelessness by helping to create affordable housing (it passed). Here's how the same magazine put it: Integral to Benioff's reputation for goodness is the insistent badness regularly displayed by his ultrarich brethren...At a moment when his plutocrat peers seem increasingly hell-bent on mucking everything up, Benioff has carved out a different brand altogether: the good billionaire. The particulars of the brand can be dissected, but the point is a feeling, a man-sized dollop of hope that powerful interests might start working for us rather than against. On November 6, 2018, San Francisco residents passed Prop. C. But in a sense the biggest victor was the magnanimous billionaire behind it. Anyway, that's one way of telling it.** The story goes on to tell of his generous contributions, both company-wise and personal; $250 million to build a children's hospital, another $18 million to schools, personal giving over the past two years of $200 million. The piece notes two additional items -- that between 2017 and 2018, his net worth rose by $2.47 million a day, and that his company paid zero income tax on their $7.8 billion in profits in 2018.
And as long as we're talking millions and billions (nevermind the expected $6 trillion final cost of the stimulus bill, an amount almost incomprehensible but also the amount scammers are projected to take from corporations in the next 2 years, said AARP; and yes, that's trillion with a "T"), let's jump to plastics. With all that is going on with tis new virus, picture all those surgical tubings and those disposable gloves and gowns and those ventilator masks, all contaminated and needing to not only be thrown out but replaced; now throw in your deli or meat or bakery folk putting on those protective gloves to dish out your items and then tossing them away (times hundreds of times daily) and to all of that add those shrink-wrapped pallets or packages and plastic bags. And that is just what we see. Rolling Stone put it all in perspective: Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year -- including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash...More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030...The worst of our global plastics crisis is borne by the oceans. Roughly 8 billion kilograms of plastics enter the world’s waters every year, and the problem is most acute in emerging coastal economies. The volume entering oceans can be hard to comprehend, admits Jenna Jambeck, an engineering professor at the University of Georgia who has published pathbreaking science that quantifies plastic “leakage” to the oceans. “It’s equal to five grocery-size bags full of plastic for every foot of coastline in the world,” she says. “If you imagine us all standing, hand-to-hand, covering the coastline of the entire world, this is what’s in front of each one of us.”....and 91 percent has never been recycled even once, according to a landmark 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances...Without dramatic change, the amount of plastics entering the oceans every year, already intolerable, is projected to more than double by 2025. But as Big Oil watches the demand for traditional fossil fuel use declining implies the article, it is turning to plastics (yes, it's a major user of fossil fuels)...Since 2010, according to the ACC, ("...the American Chemistry Council is a trade group that represents the large oil and petrochemical companies that produce plastic resins -- the back end of Big Plastic") U.S. companies have ramped up “334 chemical and plastics projects cumulatively valued at $204 billion.” Europe has built new plastics plants fed by fracked U.S. exports. Environmentalists warn that these facilities will lock in demand for fossil-fuel consumption for a generation. But as the last piece reiterated, "...that's one way of telling it."
I am currently reading a book by ecologist Alejandro Frid titled Changing Tides. He has worked for over 30 years with indigenous peoples, primarily along the coast of British Columbia. He sums up many of the above thoughts in his opening: Like many of my scientific coleagues, I am often overwhelmed. Climate change, ocean acidifcation, species extinction: we contemplate these difficult issues constantly. I know well what it is like to just want to give up. It seems so easy: losing faith in humans. It promises relief from struggle and responsibility. Yet, whenever I have gone there, I have also felt empty...There is no doubt that humans have changed the world irrevocably...What we do to the geologic record, we do to our insides. In the words of Sally Walker, a coauthor of the study (one done on fossils buried for over 500 million years), "Plastics, pesticides, and other petroleum byproducts are the worst. They affect our endocrine and reproductive systems...I am sure that my entire body is outlined by plastic from all the plasticized paper I've touch and all the water I've imbibed." When put that way, then maybe we should cling to the story that humans are inherently destructive and are particularly good at being self-destructive. Tempting. Vert tempting. And a total cop-out.
Rolling Stone featured a cover story of teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg which the reporter described as "wanting to talk about the loss of will among the olds." They say it's too hard -- too much of a challenge...Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don't. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it come to survival. Have we (the "olds") lost our will...or our leadership? Is our divide growing larger? Is there no way to even just go back to a friendly backyard conversation over this "fence." much less to think about tearing it down entirely? One person, an inflamer of sorts, feels that there might be. Said WIRED: Steven Bonnell, known online as Destiny, has made a business of picking fights with alt-right carnival barkers and other partisan provocateurs...As in any respectable blood sport, the fights last as long as they need to, sometimes as many as six hours. Eventually, everybody runs out of bullshit, and this is when Bonnell’s work truly begins. He seems all but immune to intimidation or cruelty, and he isn’t bothered by views that might seem vile to others. (Indeed, he subscribes to a few of them himself.) What enrages him most is mendacity. “If you’re a Nazi or a KKK person, if you want to talk about white supremacy, then go for it,” Bonnell says. “Just don’t lie about it. Don’t make information up. I want to make sure everybody is in the same world and is dealing with the same factbook.”
,
Author and professor Brené Brown put that thought in a different form, saying that "there are plenty of cheap seats." She was referring to a speech by former president, Theodre Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Captain Brent Crozier was called "too naïve or too stupid" by acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly (who resigned shortly after saying that); Crozier had a decision to make at sea when some of the 4800 crew members began testing positive for Covid-19 (150 have now tested positive)...he asked to immediately dock his ship and evacuate a majority of his crew to slow the spread of the virus. When official channels seemed too slow he released letters to the press and the resulting attention got his ship docked in Guam (and also his being relieved from command...and a standing ovation from hundreds of his crew as he left). The nuclear-powered carrier was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Another tough decision came from District Fire Chief Michael McNamee. His Moth podcast will tear at your gut as he makes the call to stop his men from entering a burning building, even as six other firefighters are trapped inside and running out of their emergency air.
The editor of Rolling Stone opened the recent issue asking the question "how much fight do we have left?" Said the op-ed: Welcome to the new decade. Gather your strength and say your prayers. The fight of your life is underway, and we've already lost the first two rounds. As emergency workers and grocery store workers and rest home workers and "olds" begin to succumb to an almost invisible virus and money grows tight and supplies and food run low and bills continue to arrive, it's easy to lay blame or grab any information or become even more vulnerable or even to just give up. But it's also a time for tough decisions --the everyday decisions-- on our part. The question for us might be to simply ask ourselves where we are seated...are we in the cheap seats, or down in the arena?
*Back in 2015, the cooking show, The Splendid Table (which is still on air), described one reporter's journey into the world of a typical factory farm raising pigs; it's not pleasant reading but describes the reality of what farmers and ranchers have to do to meet our insatiable demand for meat. There's little time to remove dead or injured animals, or give them more room, or let them live for longer than 6 months (chickens are slaughtered even earlier at just over a month). Most states and now countries prohibit any sort of filming or photography inside a factory farm; my state even prohibits filming any sort of factory farm even from miles away off of a highway (since overturned); known as Ag-gag laws, here's what Wikipedia said: Proponents of the laws note that public documentation of factory farming practices will result in negative consequences for the industry. "State Sen. David Hinkins (R), who sponsored Utah's law, said it was aimed at the 'vegetarian people who are trying to kill the animal industry.'" When investigators publicize documentation of factory farms, the company generally loses business. For instance, in 2007, an undercover investigator from The Humane Society of the United States visited the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse in Chino, California and filmed downed cows, too sick to stand up, being "dragged by chains and pushed by forklifts to the kill floor". A large amount of the meat from this slaughterhouse had been consumed through the National School Lunch Program, and the footage compelled "the U.S. Department of Agriculture to announce what was at the time the largest meat recall in U.S. history". Similarly, a Mercy for Animals investigation at Sparboe Farms resulted in McDonald's, Target, Sam's Club, and Supervalu all dropping Sparboe as an egg supplier. The investigation revealed cages full of dead hens rotting alongside living hens who were still laying eggs for human consumption. The investigator documented standard practices such as painful debeaking without painkillers and tossing live birds into plastic bags to suffocate, along with other behaviour deemed "sadistic" and "malicious".
**Added the piece on the difference between a millionaire and billionaire: A millionaire can, with some dedicated carelessness, lose those millions. Billionaires can be as profligate and eccentric as they wish, can acquire, without making a dent, all the homes and jets and islands and causes and thoroughbreds and Van Goghs and submarines and weird Beatles memorabilia they please. Unless they're engaging in fraud or making extremely large and risky investments, they're simply no match for the mathematical and economic forces—the compounding of interest, the long-term imperatives of markets—that make money beget more money. They can do pretty much whatever they want in this life, and therein lies the distinction. A millionaire enjoys a profoundly lucky economic condition. A billionaire is an existential state.
An article in WIRED reported on the question of whether virtual reality could or should enter the courtroom, only this wasn't to be an explanatory graphic from a science channel or a recreated flashback of a robbery or murder but rather actual footage of a factory farm raising pigs.* The activist group DxE (Diret Action Everywhere) trespassed onto the farm, filmed and took two injured piglets to a vet, then justified their actions with this: Someone who rescues a starving piglet from a factory farm, they say, is no different from someone who breaks a window to save a dog locked in a hot car—an argument that has yet to be tested in court as a defense for factory farm intrusions. Their footage is graphic and shows both pigs and piglets tossed into a dumpster, animals agitated and bleeding, all the sorts of things consumers don't want to think about when picking up their trimmed and shrink-wrapped packages of chops or burgers or sausages. The question becomes, would or should a jury see such footage, especially if presented immersively in 3D? Added the article: Whether this radical legal tactic will fly in court may come down entirely to the discretion of a judge, who will have to decide whether the VR material’s relevance to the case outweighs its emotional impact, which could prejudice the jury against Circle Four (the factory farm in question).. “The big question is whether they’ll be able to talk a judge into letting the VR stuff in,” says Hadar Aviram, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program who has focused her recent research on DxE. “The footage is quite arresting. I can see a jury, even in a rural county, a farming county, being very sympathetic to people trying to bring that to light.” Arguments appear to be good on both sides: the animals were scared and injured (because you were there, came the reply); the animals couldn't move or even turn around (that's been changed, came the reply); there were dead animals piled in the bins (you put them there, came the reply). Then again, the law is the law...they broke in, they trespassed. And if you're wondering where was the security, many of today's larger pig farms (150,000+ pigs) are robotically controlled and often have only 6 employees to run them...gates are opened, food is dispensed, fans and temperatures are monitored, waste is washed to holding ponds, and antibiotics are administered, all automatically.
So let's jump to Marc Benioff, Salesforce billionaire and one of the leaders in wanting to be taxed more, specifically Proposition C in San Francisco which asked for a mere .05% tax on primarily tech companies, a tax intended to generate $300 million and benefit a solution of sorts for battling homelessness by helping to create affordable housing (it passed). Here's how the same magazine put it: Integral to Benioff's reputation for goodness is the insistent badness regularly displayed by his ultrarich brethren...At a moment when his plutocrat peers seem increasingly hell-bent on mucking everything up, Benioff has carved out a different brand altogether: the good billionaire. The particulars of the brand can be dissected, but the point is a feeling, a man-sized dollop of hope that powerful interests might start working for us rather than against. On November 6, 2018, San Francisco residents passed Prop. C. But in a sense the biggest victor was the magnanimous billionaire behind it. Anyway, that's one way of telling it.** The story goes on to tell of his generous contributions, both company-wise and personal; $250 million to build a children's hospital, another $18 million to schools, personal giving over the past two years of $200 million. The piece notes two additional items -- that between 2017 and 2018, his net worth rose by $2.47 million a day, and that his company paid zero income tax on their $7.8 billion in profits in 2018.
And as long as we're talking millions and billions (nevermind the expected $6 trillion final cost of the stimulus bill, an amount almost incomprehensible but also the amount scammers are projected to take from corporations in the next 2 years, said AARP; and yes, that's trillion with a "T"), let's jump to plastics. With all that is going on with tis new virus, picture all those surgical tubings and those disposable gloves and gowns and those ventilator masks, all contaminated and needing to not only be thrown out but replaced; now throw in your deli or meat or bakery folk putting on those protective gloves to dish out your items and then tossing them away (times hundreds of times daily) and to all of that add those shrink-wrapped pallets or packages and plastic bags. And that is just what we see. Rolling Stone put it all in perspective: Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year -- including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash...More than half the plastic now on Earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030...The worst of our global plastics crisis is borne by the oceans. Roughly 8 billion kilograms of plastics enter the world’s waters every year, and the problem is most acute in emerging coastal economies. The volume entering oceans can be hard to comprehend, admits Jenna Jambeck, an engineering professor at the University of Georgia who has published pathbreaking science that quantifies plastic “leakage” to the oceans. “It’s equal to five grocery-size bags full of plastic for every foot of coastline in the world,” she says. “If you imagine us all standing, hand-to-hand, covering the coastline of the entire world, this is what’s in front of each one of us.”....and 91 percent has never been recycled even once, according to a landmark 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances...Without dramatic change, the amount of plastics entering the oceans every year, already intolerable, is projected to more than double by 2025. But as Big Oil watches the demand for traditional fossil fuel use declining implies the article, it is turning to plastics (yes, it's a major user of fossil fuels)...Since 2010, according to the ACC, ("...the American Chemistry Council is a trade group that represents the large oil and petrochemical companies that produce plastic resins -- the back end of Big Plastic") U.S. companies have ramped up “334 chemical and plastics projects cumulatively valued at $204 billion.” Europe has built new plastics plants fed by fracked U.S. exports. Environmentalists warn that these facilities will lock in demand for fossil-fuel consumption for a generation. But as the last piece reiterated, "...that's one way of telling it."
I am currently reading a book by ecologist Alejandro Frid titled Changing Tides. He has worked for over 30 years with indigenous peoples, primarily along the coast of British Columbia. He sums up many of the above thoughts in his opening: Like many of my scientific coleagues, I am often overwhelmed. Climate change, ocean acidifcation, species extinction: we contemplate these difficult issues constantly. I know well what it is like to just want to give up. It seems so easy: losing faith in humans. It promises relief from struggle and responsibility. Yet, whenever I have gone there, I have also felt empty...There is no doubt that humans have changed the world irrevocably...What we do to the geologic record, we do to our insides. In the words of Sally Walker, a coauthor of the study (one done on fossils buried for over 500 million years), "Plastics, pesticides, and other petroleum byproducts are the worst. They affect our endocrine and reproductive systems...I am sure that my entire body is outlined by plastic from all the plasticized paper I've touch and all the water I've imbibed." When put that way, then maybe we should cling to the story that humans are inherently destructive and are particularly good at being self-destructive. Tempting. Vert tempting. And a total cop-out.
Rolling Stone featured a cover story of teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg which the reporter described as "wanting to talk about the loss of will among the olds." They say it's too hard -- too much of a challenge...Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don't. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it come to survival. Have we (the "olds") lost our will...or our leadership? Is our divide growing larger? Is there no way to even just go back to a friendly backyard conversation over this "fence." much less to think about tearing it down entirely? One person, an inflamer of sorts, feels that there might be. Said WIRED: Steven Bonnell, known online as Destiny, has made a business of picking fights with alt-right carnival barkers and other partisan provocateurs...As in any respectable blood sport, the fights last as long as they need to, sometimes as many as six hours. Eventually, everybody runs out of bullshit, and this is when Bonnell’s work truly begins. He seems all but immune to intimidation or cruelty, and he isn’t bothered by views that might seem vile to others. (Indeed, he subscribes to a few of them himself.) What enrages him most is mendacity. “If you’re a Nazi or a KKK person, if you want to talk about white supremacy, then go for it,” Bonnell says. “Just don’t lie about it. Don’t make information up. I want to make sure everybody is in the same world and is dealing with the same factbook.”
,
Author and professor Brené Brown put that thought in a different form, saying that "there are plenty of cheap seats." She was referring to a speech by former president, Theodre Roosevelt: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Captain Brent Crozier was called "too naïve or too stupid" by acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly (who resigned shortly after saying that); Crozier had a decision to make at sea when some of the 4800 crew members began testing positive for Covid-19 (150 have now tested positive)...he asked to immediately dock his ship and evacuate a majority of his crew to slow the spread of the virus. When official channels seemed too slow he released letters to the press and the resulting attention got his ship docked in Guam (and also his being relieved from command...and a standing ovation from hundreds of his crew as he left). The nuclear-powered carrier was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Another tough decision came from District Fire Chief Michael McNamee. His Moth podcast will tear at your gut as he makes the call to stop his men from entering a burning building, even as six other firefighters are trapped inside and running out of their emergency air.
The editor of Rolling Stone opened the recent issue asking the question "how much fight do we have left?" Said the op-ed: Welcome to the new decade. Gather your strength and say your prayers. The fight of your life is underway, and we've already lost the first two rounds. As emergency workers and grocery store workers and rest home workers and "olds" begin to succumb to an almost invisible virus and money grows tight and supplies and food run low and bills continue to arrive, it's easy to lay blame or grab any information or become even more vulnerable or even to just give up. But it's also a time for tough decisions --the everyday decisions-- on our part. The question for us might be to simply ask ourselves where we are seated...are we in the cheap seats, or down in the arena?
*Back in 2015, the cooking show, The Splendid Table (which is still on air), described one reporter's journey into the world of a typical factory farm raising pigs; it's not pleasant reading but describes the reality of what farmers and ranchers have to do to meet our insatiable demand for meat. There's little time to remove dead or injured animals, or give them more room, or let them live for longer than 6 months (chickens are slaughtered even earlier at just over a month). Most states and now countries prohibit any sort of filming or photography inside a factory farm; my state even prohibits filming any sort of factory farm even from miles away off of a highway (since overturned); known as Ag-gag laws, here's what Wikipedia said: Proponents of the laws note that public documentation of factory farming practices will result in negative consequences for the industry. "State Sen. David Hinkins (R), who sponsored Utah's law, said it was aimed at the 'vegetarian people who are trying to kill the animal industry.'" When investigators publicize documentation of factory farms, the company generally loses business. For instance, in 2007, an undercover investigator from The Humane Society of the United States visited the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse in Chino, California and filmed downed cows, too sick to stand up, being "dragged by chains and pushed by forklifts to the kill floor". A large amount of the meat from this slaughterhouse had been consumed through the National School Lunch Program, and the footage compelled "the U.S. Department of Agriculture to announce what was at the time the largest meat recall in U.S. history". Similarly, a Mercy for Animals investigation at Sparboe Farms resulted in McDonald's, Target, Sam's Club, and Supervalu all dropping Sparboe as an egg supplier. The investigation revealed cages full of dead hens rotting alongside living hens who were still laying eggs for human consumption. The investigator documented standard practices such as painful debeaking without painkillers and tossing live birds into plastic bags to suffocate, along with other behaviour deemed "sadistic" and "malicious".
**Added the piece on the difference between a millionaire and billionaire: A millionaire can, with some dedicated carelessness, lose those millions. Billionaires can be as profligate and eccentric as they wish, can acquire, without making a dent, all the homes and jets and islands and causes and thoroughbreds and Van Goghs and submarines and weird Beatles memorabilia they please. Unless they're engaging in fraud or making extremely large and risky investments, they're simply no match for the mathematical and economic forces—the compounding of interest, the long-term imperatives of markets—that make money beget more money. They can do pretty much whatever they want in this life, and therein lies the distinction. A millionaire enjoys a profoundly lucky economic condition. A billionaire is an existential state.
Comments
Post a Comment
What do YOU think? Good, bad or indifferent, this blog is happy to hear your thoughts...criticisms, corrections and suggestions always welcome.