Next year, I’m going to grow some veganic sugar beets and see if I can make my own sugar with them. That should be an interesting project! If it turns out, I’ll let you know!

to proceed to perform the first or earliest part of some action; commence; start

to originate; be the originator of

to come into existence
Do you ever have trouble getting started? Beginning?

I do, sometimes. Many times, I wait until something is fully formed in my head before I start putting it together. I think I miss out, though, when I don’t just go ahead and start with whatever glimmer of an idea I have and see what happens … or even begin with no idea at all. Because, no matter how I begin, the idea – in the making of it – will almost always

transform

change in form, appearance, or structure; metamorphose

change in condition, nature, or character; to undergo a change in appearance or character;

become transformed

It’s never exactly what it was in my head.

“Too often, we are so preoccupied with the destination that we forget the journey …” ~ anonymous

“… let your mind start a journey thru a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.” Let your soul take you were you long to be … Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.” ~ Erich Fromm

fly

flit, flutter, hover, soar

clever, alert, wide awake, first recorded 18th c, reinvented in 1990s

to rise

In making these three small paintings, I used mostly the techniques I’ve done here before … some resist with pastes and glazes, a bit of silk screen, some relief and embossing, etc.

To a turquoise and lime green background, I added some titanium white stripes and magenta spots. To make the spots, I cut out a stencil of watercolor paper (I ran out of acetate, but this worked better than I expected), and did a thin wash through the holes.

This is a product I find handy. It’s called EZ Screen Print. It’s a light sensitive sheet coated with emulsion that can be exposed in sunlight and then used as a screen without a frame. At $10 or more a sheet, it’s a lot more expensive than regular silk screening supplies, but it’s convenient and works well on a smaller canvas like this. I can’t ever seem to use products in the way they were intended, so your mileage may vary as they say, but I just used straight from the tube acrylic paint and pushed it through the screen with a palette knife …

and added text with permanent ink.

“For the last two and a half years, I’ve been able to declare, without hesitation and with only a modest sense of theater, that the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in a long time was a bowl of warm pig’s blood.” 

So begins Bill Buford’s tale for the New York Times Magazine of one of the tastiest meals and most aware moments of his life … a tale of his slaughtering of a living being so he might drink her blood.   The tale ends with an exhilarated Buford sheepishly sporting a blood moustache. 

The blood was of a pig, an animal more intelligent, and often more socially complex, than any nonhuman primate. Pigs can play video games and they can remember abstract ideas years after an event. It’s recognized by most animal behaviorists that pigs are, “as intelligent as a three year old child.“  

We all know, of course, that it would be wrong to kill a three-year-old child. Right? But here’s a thought. If a three-year-old child and a pig are equally aware, equally cognizant, equally alive … then is there really all that much difference between killing the child and killing the pig? Arguably, there’s a difference in their value to us. Under most circumstances, any human child is going to be more valuable than a pig would be to another human being. But to each of them, is there really any difference in their experience of dying? Of being killed? Would a pig experience the event of having a knife stuck in his throat in a significantly different way than would a human child of equal awareness? And if they would each experience the event in the same way, wouldn’t killing them be equally wrong? 

What disturbs so many of us when we hear of a young child being injured or killed is we imagine what must have happened to the child and what she must have felt while it happened. Someone like Caylee Anthony, the little girl in the Florida case that transfixed the nation for months, was just weeks away from her third birthday. Whatever the cause of her death, she would have been cognizant enough to know something horrible was happening, but not so cognizant as to understand why. That she didn’t understand why it was happening makes her last moments, whatever they were, perhaps even more horrible to contemplate. Certainly, we all understand she was capable of pain and fear and terror; given her nearly three-year-old level of cognition she was capable of suffering. 

” … the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in a long time was a bowl of warm blood pig’s blood. I had it on a cold day in February 2009, in a gravel-and-straw courtyard, on a farm, in the hills above the Rhone River, in France.”

Buford’s romanticized tale becomes a screaming nightmare if you reread it replacing the word pig with human child. Yet any three-year-old child, compared with any member of any species of pig, would possess roughly the same skill at playing video games, and have about the same memory for abstract events. They would each be fascinated by and able to use mirrors. They would also have similar central nervous systems and a similar ability to feel physical pain and emotional terror. In other words, in all the ways that matter to the one who is being killed, their experience would be the same. 

“Two friends slaughtered the pig that morning, following an old-fashioned approach. I had wanted to witness it, mainly to see how the deed was done but also to learn what the effect on me might be.” 

Mr. Buford was curious about what it looked and felt and smelled like to kill a living being, one who had the cognizance of a three-year-old child, and because we have no laws preventing such things, he was able to indulge that curiosity. Being the arbiter of life and death, especially over a being so similar to humans, must be a powerful feeling. Indeed, Ted Bundy had this to say about his victims: “You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”

Bill Buford continued: 

“It was strong — it took four of us to pin it down — and had an abundance of character and a withering self-awareness: it knew it was going to die … “

After killing three year old Breeann Rodriguez, Shawn Morgan stated to the police that it “felt like it took an hour for the girl to die.”

During the actual experience of being killed, there really isn’t all that much difference between one being who has the awareness of a three-year-old child and another being who has the awareness of a three-year-old child, even if one of them is a pig. So what does that say about their killers?

What does that say about us? I can’t argue with Mr. Buford when he says, “Every meat eater participates indirectly in an animal’s death, normally at a very far remove.”  Because he’s correct.

At any given moment, there are 65 million pigs in American factory farms. Each year, in the United States alone, we will cut the throats of more than 112 million pigs …  213 every minute; 112 million living beings who possess the same (or higher) level of cognition and awareness as Caylee Anthony, or Breeann Rodriquez, or any other three-year-old child. 

Of those 112 million beings capable of rudimentary video game playing, with bodies and minds so very similar to our own, many of them will arrive at the scald tank alive, conscious, and exquisitely aware of what’s happening to them. What they won’t understand is why it’s happening. And neither will I. 

http://eatingplantsdotorg.wordpress.com/tag/bill-buford/

http://chris-mclaughlin.suite101.com/the-intelligent-pig-a84448

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10angier.html

… or, what will $22 billion buy?

val-ue
verb, noun
1. to consider with respect to worth, excellence, usefulness, or importance.
2. relative worth, merit, or importance
3. monetary or material worth

How many top hedge fund managers can we get for $22 billion?

This many …

That’s right. Twenty five.

There are 25 dots in the square above. Most of us can fit 25 people in our kitchens.

In 2009, the twenty five highest paid hedge fund managers collectively made $22 billion in income. Not only that, but thanks to a tax loophole, their income is taxed at 15% as long-term capital gains rather than as income. In short, they are richly rewarded and not asked to contribute much back. Yet, hedge fund managers produce nothing that can be eaten, worn, breathed, drank, lived in, read, thought about, or otherwise be of genuine use. In other words, they do nothing we can’t easily live without.

And if we paid them each $50,000,  which most of us would agree is at the middle to lower end of a living wage, how many teachers, artists, fire fighters, nurses, writers, road workers, (veganic!) farmers, alternative energy developers, grocery store workers, child care workers, and so on, can we get for $22 billion?

This many …

Yes, that’s right. In case you didn’t stop to count, that’s 440,000. That many people would fill about ten large football stadiums.

If we pay a living wage of $50,000 to the producers of goods and services we actually need and from which we all benefit, $22 billion will pay for almost a half million of them. We get to enjoy their goods and services, and they get to make a living wage.

That’s a win-win scenario.

I’ll file this under, “just sayin.”