First Vegan Pope?

I wish Arthur Poletti for his effort to convince Pope Francis to become the first vegan pope.

Being the Pope will not be easy. Hopefully, with God’s guidance you will be inspired and motivated, like no other Pope before you, to go against the status quo, and take a firm stand against all odds, criticisms, and adversaries. Especially when you are certain that God and you are right about a controversial subject.

Your Holiness, surely you will agree that God is the supreme symbol of compassion, kindness, life, and love for all creatures with a soul, and the best reason why none of God's precious animals should ever have to suffer and die so people can eat them, and or their dairy products.

Therefore, since there are no factory farms or slaughterhouses in Heaven, as it should be on Earth, now would be a great time for hundreds of millions of people to begin changing their eating habits.

Your Holiness, for these obvious reasons please seriously consider the significance of personally supporting and promoting God’s will.

Your timely announcement revealing that you have stopped eating meat and dairy products will promote — VEGANISM — like never before, and it will convince millions of people that you are personally supporting your love and God's love for all animals, setting the example and the precedent for religious leaders, government officials,and hundreds of millions of people throughout the world to appreciate and emulate.

Holy Father, your brave and bold historic action of becoming the FIRST VEGAN POPE would send a powerful message throughout the world, like a “lightning bolt from heaven,” that God and “Your Holiness” want to stop the hideous, completely unnecessary, seemingly never ending holocaust of God's precious animals.

Soon after your historic and courageous announcement happens, many urgently-needed benefits for animals, humans, the earth, and the earth’s atmosphere will begin to certainly occur, with the excellent prospects of a multitude of endless residual benefits.

It's not a major action, but there is a Credo petition to urge the pope to become Vegan. 

I went back and listened the the Funiciello show where he had Kate Austin-Avon and Don Donofrio as guests. Just wanted to double check to see if he had at least some principles that call for ending or reducing meat consumption to help save the planet, not to mention any moral principles. I had forgotten this bit. He tells Austin-Avon, a Vegan, that one of the most amusing things he's heard is from Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain calls Vegans a Hamas-like splinter group of vegetarians. See, it's funny because you're comparing a group that out of moral compassion for animals doesn't eat them and is also concerned about the future of our planet to a terrorist group. How fuckin' droll! Now, hummus-like splinter group might have been funny. And there's bonus patronization when he tells us that he has earned the right to eat meat because he's killed animals before. So, if you've killed animals that gives you the right to have others slaughter them to feed you food that you don't need to survive and to support an industry that is the top polluter in the world. Yes, he's the Green Party candidate for Congress in our district.  

The Republican War On American Health

OK, yeah blah blah blah from the Republicans, they are going to keep on keepin' on to repeal and replace Obamacare. I'm not going to bother putting any links up to the meaningless drivel that they are spouting. Why read that when you can be reading PAUL KRUGMAN.

Opponents of the law insisted that it would actually reduce coverage; in reality, around 15 million Americans have gained insurance.

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What about costs? In 2013 there were dire warnings about a looming “rate shock”; instead, premiums came in well below expectations. In 2014 the usual suspects declared that huge premium increases were looming for 2015; the actual rise was just 2 percent. There was another flurry of scare stories about rate hikes earlier this year, but as more information comes in it looks as if premium increases for 2016 will be bigger than for this year but still modest by historical standards — which means that premiums remain much lower than expected.

And there has also been a sharp slowdown in the growth of overall health spending, which is probably due in part to the cost-control measures, largely aimed at Medicare, that were also an important part of health reform.

What about economic side effects? One of the many, many Republican votes against Obamacare involved passing something called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, and opponents have consistently warned that helping Americans afford health care would lead to economic doom. But there’s no job-killing in the data: The U.S. economy has added more than 240,000 jobs a month on average since Obamacare went into effect, its biggest gains since the 1990s.

It was sad to see Scalia have a tantrum in full reactionary political mode. He's usually a better justice than that.

Finally, what about claims that health reform would cause the budget deficit to explode? In reality, the deficit has continued to decline, and the Congressional Budget Office recently reaffirmed its conclusion that repealing Obamacare would increase, not reduce, the deficit.

Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.

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But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.

That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Yeah, I don't know why I didn't just copy and paste the whole thing either. But there is much more and it's great, so go read it so I don't get in trouble with the NYTimes. It's bad enough that CSM is the paper of record here. 

But what I really wanted to talk about was how the Republican Party wants us to eat more meat and kill ourselves with it as well as killing the planet.  

The report, which informs the Dietary Guidelines for Americans that are updated every five years, found that “a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet.” This is the first time the sustainability of our dietary choices has been taken into consideration by the DGAC; according to the report, it is “essential to ensure a healthy food supply will be available for future generations.”

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This past Wednesday, the House approved two spendingbills that would completely alter the way the government is permitted to adapt the DGAC’s evidence-based recommendations. They do so by raising that standard of evidence: the agencies that form the Dietary Guidelines, they say, can only rely on the very strongest science in these matters. The DGAC rates its evidence on a three-level scale — “strong,” “moderate” and “limited” — and the science supporting a plant-based diet was deemed “moderate”: too low, by the bills’ standards, to be relevant.

And I will recommend two books that occupy places of honor on my bookshelf (at the Crandall Library), Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer and The Modern Savage by James McWilliams. It's not easy to avoid meat in our meat-based society, but it's worth at least cutting back to any extent possible. Think of the poor animals in their cages where they can't move when you eat that bacon burger and chicken fries.

One More Reason to be a Vegetarian

Thanks Charles Pierce. I've changed my mind about about actually eating a little flesh today.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather like to know whether my hamburger got dribbled off the floor of a Shanghai factory floor a few times before it got packaged up. You combine domestic lobbying juggernauts with the authority of international trade institutions and this is what you get. If you're lucky, you don't get anything else.

Green Versus Faux Green

Being both curious and open-minded, I did a web search to discover what the Green Party actually stands for, if anything. I didn't want to judge the whole party simply on the basis of Matt Funiciello. Besides which, I wanted to see how he stacks up as a representative of that party. I was presuming there was an environmental aspect involved and my presumption proved correct.

We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. 

We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

Off the bat, I'm liking that very much. So, I realize there are no perfect Christians, and likely no perfect Greens (except maybe Ed Begley Jr.). I do think it's necessary to take MF to task on his environmental record, though. At some point during the recent campaign, it came to my attention that he drives a Ford pick-up truck. I know someone with a similar vehicle that gets 12 MPG. Driving a vehicle with mileage that abysmal doesn't seem like the action of someone who wants to utilize resources to benefit future generations. 

As discussed previously on the blog, I feel (as do many others) that a meat-free (or greatly reduced meat) diet is the only one that will help sustain our planet. When I look at MF (and no offense, I'm chubby,too), I don't think vegan. In his defense, the 10 key values do not push for a vegetable diet. If they have not been updated to include that, I believe it's a massive oversight. The meat industry is the greatest polluter in the country, surpassing transportation. Tax meat now!

There is also a non-violence plank in the GP values.

We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

Also liking on that very much. In his interview with The Chronicle, MF stated, "If you don't feel we need to have guns to defend ourselves against tyranny, then you are not paying attention." I suppose you can chalk that up to falling under the defense rubric of GP values. Readers of Hometown blog will realize I see it as crazy talk. As Jim Jefferies says, "You're bringing a gun to a drone fight." When they knock at your door with an MRAP, all you're doing is committing suicide by cop. The non-violent methods part of that principle would be what I prefer to see in a candidate.

Just wanted to touch on the hypocrisy of the Ford Pick-up as well. In The Chronicle interview (a great source of amusement for me) MF chided President Obama for being a corporate puppet due to his getting ACA passed. The government is subsidizing my health insurance to the tune of $273 a month. Yes, I still pay $129, but something beats nothing. Is MF a corporate puppet for driving a Ford?

My dream is that the Democrats find a Volt-driving vegan with a solar paneled home to run in 2016. Let the Green-off begin!

Tax Meat Now

This will be a plank in my platform when I make my run for Congress in 2016. Meat should absolutely be taxed. Can't believe I found this in Bloomberg.

Meat has always been part of the human diet. Few dishes are as wonderful as a bolognese sauce made with a combination of pork, lamb, and beef. But taxing pigs, sheep, and cows is essential to contain the spiraling costs associated with massive meat eating.

Excessive consumption of meat is harmful to human health and the health of the planet. I'll be eating some turkey on Thursday and I consume it several times a month on non-holidays. It's necessary that the costs associated with its consumption are raised in order to discourage it.