Daily Topics - Wednesday - March 31 2010
By Louise
Hour Two: "Everything you Know is Wrong...about Factory Farming"
Thom talks with journalist/author David Kirby about his new book "Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment" www.animalfactorybook.com
Comments
#2
http://fora.tv/2010/02/11/Jeremy_Rifkin_More_Empathy_in_the_Global_Econo...
Jeremy Rifkin: More Empathy in the Global Economy?
I just listened to this 53 minute lecture from Jeremy Rifkin on what is wrong with our society. He sounds a little like Thom, only Rifkin makes things sound like it is already too late to save our species. He says the temperature rising by 3% in the next century now looks optimistic (which would equal mass extinction). A harbinger would be this one statistic: “One in Seven People in The World Go to Bed Without Access to Food.” That has never happened before. We have become the “Monster Species”
We are only 6.8 billion, yet we only make up half a per cent of the animal biomass on the earth. Unfortunately, we are currently using 24% of all the photosynthesis available on the earth.
He calls the July of 2008 economic meltdown, “The end of the Industrial Revolution”
He says that was the earth quake and then the financial collapse was only an aftershock. So we are STILL not dealing with the crisis.
He also says not to confuse “Peak Oil Per Capita” with “Peak Oil Production.”
Peak Oil Per Capita has already peaked in 1979.
At $147 per barrel, purchasing power plummeted, and that was where “the engine of the Industrial Revolution shut off” world wide.
As we try to restart the global economy, and we do it with fossil fuels, we are limited by the inflation of oil prices and a ceiling of $147 per barrel. He say’s there is no way to get through that wall.
“We will be in very volatile times for many more decades”.... And then we’ll be extinct.
I seem to remember Thom having him on awhile back, but I’m such a heavy listener, that I can’t remember. Mostly, he reminds me of how much in denial we all are.
In any case, could Thom please address a Macro Question which I have been pondering for months now?
Exemplified in symptoms that we recognize as current issues in our society (Global Warming, Poverty, Etc.), is a much larger problem and that is our culture. As such, I engage everyone I know on a daily basis with these issues and frame it in this big picture paradigm. My responses are usually that no one wants to hear it. This is because they feel overwhelmed and helpless in addressing such a momentous problem. How do we break through to the average, overwhelmed, disassociated, uneducated, miseducated, egocentric, ethnocentric, Self-Centered American? I need to know because I’m probably going to have to make new friends as a result of my current progressive world view. Thanks Thom.
#3
“Empathy Entropy Paradox and how to break it”
Gestalt Effect – Biosphere Politics
"One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness. But actually history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I'm not doing Jeremy Rifkin's talk at The American Academy in Berlin much justice in my last post. His talk about the Extension of Empathy in our society is a valuable listen. He is suggesting that we have to Begin to Empathize, on a more macro level, “As a Species.” He is asserting that the next progression in our evolution is a Distributed Economic Revolution and Lateral Capitalism. All of which requires a New Social Model. “Consciousness changes very quickly when energy and communication revolutions come in.” The goal should be an “Empathic Civilization.”
The Death Bed Test: Look back at life and see what parts really counted.
Please have him on.
#4
How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen the farm?
www.pahrumplife.org
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
With His Holiness The Dalai Lama, at His home in Dharamsala, India (Synthesis Dialogues - made into a movie narrated by Harrison Ford)
At Mondragon - both the mountain and the cooperative city - in Spain (written about in "Threshold" book)
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Thom is a national treasure. Read him, embrace him, learn from him, and follow him as we all work for social change."
From Screwed:
"Hartmann speaks with the straight talking clarity and brilliance of a modern day Tom Paine as he exposes the intentional and systematic destruction of America’s middle class by an alliance of political con artists and outlines a program to restore it. This is Hartmann at his best. Essential reading for those interested in restoring the institution that made America the envy of the world."
From Cracking the Code:
"In Cracking the Code, Thom Hartmann, America’s most popular, informed, and articulate progressive talk show host and political analyst, tells us what makes humans vulnerable to unscrupulous propagandists and what we can do about it. It is essential reading for all Americans who are fed up with right-wing extremists manipulating our minds and politics to promote agendas contrary to our core values and interests."
From a Christian Farmers Point of View
I grew up on a farm, very small by todays standards 800 acres, 50 head of cows, 250 sows, some sheep, goats, horses and chickens. I have shot and ate most everyone of these and am not against farms or farmers. However, I am against the factory farms. As I Christian I do believe that God gave us diminion over the amimals. But I do not think he meant for use to raise pork that never sees the light of day, until the day it is loaded onto a truck to go to the slaughterhouse. I do not eat veal because of the way it is raised. And do not get me started on modern chicken farms.
So day these poeple will have to answer for the way they treated the animals in thier care.
This is just a Christian point of view. Not to mention the shots all these animals recieve, how turkeys are bred with such large breast they can not even fly. And how they die in less than a year. Why do you think all the turkeys the President 'Pardons' are in a big group. The truth is they die a few months after they recieve thier Pardon