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Grayson

gray_love

About Me

I ♥ VEGANISM!

  • FOR THE ANIMALS
    Despite the common belief that drinking milk or eating eggs does not kill animals, commercially-raised dairy cows and egg-laying chickens, whether factory-farmed or "free range", are slaughtered when their production rates decline. The same factory farm methods that are used to produce most meats are also used to produce most milk and eggs. These cows and chickens live their short lives caged, drugged, mutilated, and deprived of their most basic freedoms.
    On U.S. farms, an average of 7 egg-laying hens spend their entire lives in a battery cage with a floor area the size of a vinyl record cover. Living on wire floors that deform their feet, in cages so tiny they cannot stretch their wings, and covered with excrement from cages above them, these chickens suffer lameness, bone disease, and obsessive pecking, which is curbed by searing the beaks off young chicks. Although chickens can live up to 15 years, they are usually slaughtered when their egg production rates decline after two years. Hatcheries have no use for male chicks, so they are killed by suffocation, decapitation, gassing, or crushing.
    As with any mammal, cows produce milk only when pregnant and stop after their calves have been weaned. When a dairy cow delivers a female calf, the calf becomes a dairy cow herself, born to live in the same conditions as her mother. But when a dairy cow delivers a male calf, the calf is sold to a veal farm within days of birth, where he is tethered to a stall, deprived of food and exercise, and soon slaughtered for meat. Life is only a few years longer for the mother. Because it is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production declines, dairy cows are usually slaughtered at 5 years of age. Thus, a cow's normal lifespan of 25 years is cut 20 years short just to cut costs and maximize production.
    Today's farms are not like the ones most of us learned about in school; they are mechanized factories where an animal's welfare is of little concern compared to profit. Veganism emerges as the lifestyle most consistent with the philosophy that animals are not ours to use.
  • FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
    Animal agriculture takes a devastating toll on the earth. It is an inefficient way of producing food, since feed for farm animals requires land, water, fertilizer, and other resources that could otherwise have been used directly for producing human food.
    Animal agriculture's dependence on higher yields accelerates topsoil erosion on our farmlands, rendering land less productive for crop cultivation, and forcing the conversion of wilderness to grazing and farm lands. Animal waste from massive feedlots and factory farms is a leading cause of pollution in our groundwater and rivers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has linked animal agriculture to a number of other environmental problems, including: contamination of aquatic ecosystems, soil, and drinking water by manure, pesticides, and fertilizers; acid rain from ammonia emissions; greenhouse gas production; and depletion of aquifers for irrigation.
    In a time when population pressures have become an increasing stress on the environment, there are additional arguments for a vegan diet. The United Nations has reported that a vegan diet can feed many more people than an animal-based diet. For instance, projections have estimated that the 1992 food supply could have fed about 6.3 billion people on a purely vegetarian diet, 4.2 billion people on a 85% vegetarian diet, or 3.2 billion people on a 75% vegetarian diet.
  • FOR OUR HEALTH
    The consumption of animal fats and proteins has been linked to heart disease, colon and lung cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension, obesity, and a number of other debilitating conditions. Cows' milk contains ideal amounts of fat and protein for young calves, but far too much for humans. And eggs are higher in cholesterol than any other food, making them a leading contributor to cardiovascular disease. The American Dietetic Association reports that vegetarian/vegan diets are associated with reduced risks for all of these conditions.
    Vegan foods, such as whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans, are low in fat, contain no cholesterol, and are rich in fiber and nutrients. Vegans can get all the protein they need from legumes (e.g., beans, tofu, peanuts) and grains (e.g., rice, corn, whole wheat breads and pastas); calcium from broccoli, kale, collard greens, tofu, fortified juices and soymilks; iron from chickpeas, spinach, pinto beans, and soy products; and B12 from fortified foods or supplements.
    With planning, a vegan diet can provide all the nutrients we were taught as schoolchildren came only from animal products.
    For more information and references, visit vegan.org

    • For links to other issues facing our generation, see below:

  • Marijuana/Hemp Legalization
    Unfortunately this issue rarely gets the attention that it deserves. People tend to assume that the only argument for legalization is by marijuana users. This is not the case... The drug war is utterly ineffective, racist, fiscally irresponsible, and destroys far more lives than does marijuana. The marijuana and hemp crops are endlessly valuable and sustainable as medicines, fuel, food, textiles, construction materials, and paper.
  • Peak Oil
    As Americans, our daily life revolves around oil. Our cars consume it, our most useful products (bags, bottles, home siding, electronics, etc...)are made from it, our homes are heated/powered by it, our "on demand" food supply relies on it. When oil supplies become low/expensive enough, modern life will never be the same. Do you feel prepared?
  • Media Corruption
    The majority of modern people are getting their world news from televised news networks. This handful of networks is also owned by a handful of very wealthy, very powerful people. These tycoons look after their personal(and partners) investments and beliefs by censoring what information citizens have access too. By diversifying where you source your news, and by looking to independent sources, you get a more balanced perspective.

    • My Interests


    once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. the current of the river swept silently over them all- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
    each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging and resisting the current was their way of life, what each had learned from birth.
    but one creature said at last. "i am tired of clinging. though i cannot see it with my eyes, i trust that the current knows where it is going. i shall let go, and let it take me where it will. clinging, i shall die of boredom."
    the other creatures laughed and said, "fool! let go and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!"
    but the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
    yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
    and the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "see a miracle! a creature like ourselves, yet he flies! see the messiah, come to save us all!"
    and the one carried in the current said, "i am no more messiah than you. the river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. our true work is this voyage, this adventure."
    and they cried the more, "saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a saviour.

    Heroes:


    Seven Lies About Civilization
    by Ran Prieur
    1. Progress.
    The lie about "progress" is not just that it is good, or inevitable, but that it exists, that we have ever experienced such a thing as straight-line, single direction, open-ended, positive-valued change. We might think we have, because "progress" is the central lie of our culture and there are illusions and fantasies of it everywhere:
    There's the schooling system, where we go from "lower" to "higher" grades - but this rising is not real, just a story they tell, and the change is just to make us fit better in the dominant system, as we trade experience for rigid stories, intuition for intellect, diversity for uniformity, independence for obedience, and spontaneity for predictability. Then there's the wage labor system, where we're supposed to go from "lower" to "higher" positions, but few of us do, and anyway "higher" just means the dominant system has a tighter grip on our attention, our values, our souls. Then there's the history of technology, where the changes are declared "better" when their effects are to increase our forceful transformative power over the world while also increasing our emotional distance, or to make us more dependent on specialists, or to surround humans more and more with things humans have created, a process that Jerry Mander has identified as psychic inbreeding. The deepest place yet in our inbreeding is the world of computer games, games which almost without exception are built on the myth of progress, training us to self-administer dopamine for visions of ever increasing power, and then letting us off with a win" instead of showing us how this kind of story really ends.
    In reality, nothing gets absolutely "better" but just changes its relationships, and a change in relationships that trades awareness and collaboration for disconnection and domination is not irreversible but unsustainable, not open-ended but self-limiting, not positive but destructive.
    2. Evolution.
    There is no disputing the fossil record, in which life on Earth has changed many times. The lie is to project the myth of "progress" onto these changes, to declare that they go in a simple straight line, in one direction, and always getting "better." This is a circular argument, where our collective insanity slaps a mask of itself on the biological world to justify itself. In reality biological changes are unlike the lie of "progress" - they go in all kinds of directions, with populations falling and rising, organisms getting bigger and smaller, and moving from water to land to water. And nothing gets "better" except that species get better adapted to their environments, and in the absence of catastrophes the totality of life gets more diverse and complex.
    But in both these ways, civilized humans have done the opposite! We do not adapt to the wider world but twist it to fit ourselves, and even twist ourselves to fit our narrow cultural fantasies. And we do not increase but decrease the diversity and complexity of the whole, by driving species to extinction and exterminating or assimilating human societies into a uniform global monoculture. So whatever you call the biological history of the Earth, civilization is not an extension of it but a denial of it, a catastrophe.
    3. Everything is natural.
    Happily most people recognize this as a silly pseudo-philosophical distraction, but I want to knock it down anyway. The argument rests on a semantic distortion, a redefinition of "natural" to include absolutely everything, because I say so. Civilization is natural because humans are animals, toxic waste is natural because it's derived from stuff that comes from the Earth, bla bla bla.
    Real people do not use the word "natural" in this way. Maybe it's "natural" if I take this club and bash your head in, but you would prefer that I didn't, so you define words like "murder" to express and defend this preference. In the same way, people define "natural" to express and defend their preference for living trees over plastic trees, meadows over parking lots, rivers of drinkable water over rivers of dioxin. This is what "natural" really means, and if we don't want to die of cancer and turn the Earth into a poisoned desert, we have a responsibility to linguistically separate the natural from the unnatural and choose the natural many times a day.
    If you want a tight definition, natural means in symbiosis with nature, and nature means the totality of symbiotic life on Earth, and symbiotic means related in ways that are mutually beneficial and beneficial to the whole, where wider benefit takes precedence. Defining "beneficial" pushes the limits of our impoverished language, but I'm going to say generating autonomous and diverse aliveness. And if you don't know what aliveness means, look harder.
    4. Technology is neutral.
    Of all the lies about civilization, this one is the most insidious, the most challenging to refute, the one that most cripples the understanding of people who should know better. It is such a huge lie that it's hard to get a grip on it, so self-referential that it's hard to get outside it. Getting outside it is not a matter of learning a simple argument but learning a whole different and more complex way of thinking.
    The lie has two forms that are usually blurred together. One says that technology as a whole is neutral, where "technology" may be covertly defined as modern industrial technology. The other form says that every particular technology is neutral. My strategy is to attack the second and make the first look silly by declaring that no particular technology is neutral, that every technique, technology, and tool has its own set of motives and relationships.
    First, I want to expose the lie's strange internal definition of "neutral". A thing is "neutral" if you can tell a story about how it can do good and another story about how it can do bad. When do we ever use this definition in real life? Do we say a serial killer is neutral because in addition to raping and killing women he pays taxes and is sometimes nice to people? If you work in a factory by day to learn how to sabotage it by night, are you neutral to that factory because you both help and hurt it? If my nation sells weapons to two other nations that are at war, so they will destroy each other and my nation will come out on top, does that count as neutral? Of course not! But these are the same kinds of ridiculous arguments people use to declare technologies neutral: Television is neutral because it not only makes us passive consumers of a uniform culture subject to central control, but it can transmit useful information. Dams are neutral because while they submerge ecosystems and block fish runs, they also make electricity. Even atomic bombs are neutral if we can think of some cockamamie story about doing good with them.
    The next level of deception is to say that it's the "way we use" a technology that's important. For example, cars are neutral because/therefore you can use one to go from place to place, or to intentionally run someone over. But as Jacques Ellul pointed out, the latter is not a use - it is a crime. Calling it a use tricks us into placing our evaluating perspective in an artificial space between the normal use of cars and a crime, instead of where it belongs - right in the middle of the extreme biases in the normal use of cars.
    Even if we ignore the exploitation of "resources," the displacement or murder of indigenous people, and the release of toxins required to manufacture and fuel cars, even if we ignore the millions of collision deaths and the poison-leaking wrecks, and we just look at cars as consumer tools, we can still see troubling built-in effects: By moving us faster from place to place, cars insert distance into our physical environment, and the space in this distance will be largely filled with streets and parking lots to hold all the cars. Earth-killing pavement, urban sprawl, and strip malls are practically inherent in the technology of the automobile. Also, for complex reasons, speeds beyond a certain low threshold actually increase commuting time. Also, once this distance has been inserted, you need a car to do anything. To exaggerate a point made by Ivan Illich, if you live in Los Angeles you might as well have had your legs cut off.
    Take away the cars, and we dont try to walk 40 miles a day on the freeways - we tear up the pavement and build our physical communities so that everything we need is in walking distance. We spend less time commuting, we free all the time and energy we were putting into cars, and we regain autonomy through being able to use our own legs. Also we have better relationships. Because cars move us past everything so fast, and because they enclose us, they insulate us from the reality around us, from other people and nature, and they enable us to replace thick close relationships with thin distant ones. Without them we relate directly and frequently to what's right in front of us; we know our neighbors and we know the land.
    I could make similar arguments about computers, television, electricity, even written language. But the point is not to simply reject whole categories of technology, but to learn to see the alliances and motives that are built into technologies themselves regardless of "use," and to practice including or rejecting them on the basis of this understanding.
    5. We can't go back.
    Like the above, this is purely a religious doctrine - but this one is clearly refuted by the ruins of ancient civilizations all over the world from which people went "back," and by lucky or exceptional individuals all through history who have dropped out of the system and moved closer to nature. In one sense, however, it's true: exploitative societies have no reverse gear and can only escalate until they crash. To avoid thinking clearly about this, we can tell ourselves the next one:
    6. The all-or-nothing future.
    According to this story there are only two possibilities: continued industrial civilization, or the total end of the world. Continued civilization generally means continued use of machines to transform relationships into domination and self-absorption. For the technophiles this could mean mining other planets, or deeper virtual reality; for the liberals it might mean taking an idealized version of upper-middle class life in a wealthy country in the late 20th century, extending it to the whole world, and staying there indefinitely through mechanical central control. And supposing our civilization fails - don't look! There's nothing there but horrible absolute oblivion which we can talk about only in terms of what we "must" do to avoid it. People express this with maddeningly vague pronouncements like :If we don't reduce greenhouse emissions by 50% in ten years, it will be too late."
    Too late for what?
    The obvious reality is that the suggested reforms are both politically impossible and insufficient, that our civilization is a runaway train that will not slow down until it jumps the tracks, and that the actual future will be deep within the region we're forbidden to look at. The extinction of 95% of species including humans is not some unthinkable horror but a specific possibility that we can think about with precision. A milder possibility is the Road Warrior scenario where a few humans survive on a half-dead Earth. Milder still would be a political decentralization and ecological recovery like the so-called "dark" age in Europe after the fall of Rome. My point is, we can influence this! Our dreams and actions can affect what kind of world we go to, but they cannot possibly maintain the world we're used to.
    There comes a time in a fire when you stop trying to save the whole building and switch to saving what you can. The purpose of the all-or-nothing lie is to block this mental shift, to keep all our attention channeled into either saving the world as we know it, or just giving up. If we see that radically different worlds are possible and some of them are really going to happen, if we start imagining and building vigorous competitors to industrial civilization, we will hurt the "economy" and especially hurt the feelings of people who have invested their egos in the dominant culture. Another way they protect their egos is with the next lie:
    7. Civilization happens once.
    This peculiar idea is similar to the above, but the blind spot it enforces is not to other-than-civilized systems, but to other civilizations. The pro-civ version says this is our one and only shot to colonize space or whatever, and the anti-civ version says that if we can knock down the present civilization, nothing like it will ever happen again. I don't know where people came up with such an idea, unless they know something I don't about the coming new-age transformation of human consciousness. The harsh lesson of history is that every particular civilization falls while civilization in general keeps chugging on.
    I define civilization in general as an alliance between dominator consciousness and exploitation-enabling techniques, creating a society that systematically takes more than it gives. Yes, the oil will run out, but civilizations were rising and falling for thousands of years without oil, and I see no reason they won't do so again. The general pattern can operate, if necessary, on nothing but the muscle power of slaves and domesticated animals. And when you add on all the metal and hardware that will be lying around, and the lingering habits from our age, and whatever technical knowledge is preserved, it sure looks like were going to have civilizations around - to play with or resist - until we go extinct or change into something quite different.

    My Blog

    still traveling...

    ok... so i am mildly intoxicated, as a precursor.since i last wrote about my trip, which must have been like a month and a half ago... i have been many places. i believe i was in ocean beach near san...
    Posted by Grayson on Sat, 10 May 2008 11:55:00 PST

    San Diego to Vancouver!

    Hey yall!I am in San Diego right now!  I flew from D.C. to SD last Tuesday after spending the weekend at NCOR (National Conference on Organzied Resistance)My friend Tess and I are having a west c...
    Posted by Grayson on Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:45:00 PST