My Face Is On Fire

Baptist church cancels youth conference's gun giveaway

2008-07-17T13:26:00.003-03:00

“I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill,'” said Ross. “That’s not at all what we’re trying to do.”

Ross said the conference isn’t all about guns, but rather about teens finding faith.

Hey fellas? While you're at it, why not try to entice them with a bag of crack or heroin? I mean, it's all about faith, right? Sheesh.

Read the rest of it here.

Bush on climate change and peak oil

2008-07-14T14:22:00.003-03:00

This is as close to flipping the world the bird as it gets:

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!"

And as if the price of oil isn't high enough:

Bush gives Israel tentative thumbs up to make preparations to strike Iran.

High oil prices and their impact on the US and Canada this month

2008-07-10T11:56:00.003-03:00

Air Canada has cut more than 600 flight attendant jobs across the country and intends to cut up to 2000 in total. In the US, Northwest Airlines has slashed 2500 jobs and bumped up ticket and bag fees.

SUV and full-size pickup truck sales in the US are down almost 50% from what they were a year ago.

US schools are scaling back or cutting services because of fuel costs. More students will be walking farther when classes resume in September. More schools are shifting to four day weeks, and cutting bus trips for non-competitive extracurricular activities.

New England governors met recently to call on the federal government for more home heating assistance.

The Pray at the Pump Movement

2008-07-10T09:03:00.004-03:00

I had to chuckle at this a bit.

The Pray at the Pump Movement, founded by Rocky Twyman, has been holding prayer vigils at gas stations across the country. On Monday, Twyman decided to take his movement from Exxon and Shell stations straight to the steps of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., hoping to encourage the oil-rich country to raise the amount of barrels they release each day from 200,000 to 1.2 million.

Twyman, who is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, spent the afternoon outside of the embassy praying and asking passersby to sign his petition for the release of more oil, which he hopes to deliver to the Saudi oil minister.

Read the rest here.

Old Sol

2008-07-09T13:19:00.003-03:00

I found this story via Digg. Apparently, 90% of Israeli homes are equipped with solar water heaters. They started popping up when restrictions on hot water usage were imposed during an energy shortage, and now all new home builders are legally required to install them. Hawaii just passed a similar law. In places with lots of sunshine, it seems to be the economical thing to do, which is what made it logical for a country like Spain to develop solar power more extensively and to mandate its use in new and renovated buildings. (For those interested, here's more information on the different types of solar water heaters, their installation and their maintenance and here's some information on solar collectors in general.)

A Swiss company called Mindset AG has recently announced its own contribution to the mix of electric cars nosing their way into the market. It's still a prototype, but this one's a bit different from the rest -- it's solar powered. The company plans to sell around 10,000 of them next year if you're willing to part with around $78K. (via Inhabitat)

USDA's recently updated chart of the growth of the adoption of GM crops in the US

2008-07-08T09:47:00.002-03:00

Regardless of consumers' wariness of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), thanks to a lack of labelling (not to mention testing and regulating), more and more GMOs are being planted by US farmers and entering the food supply (or in the case of cotton, clothing supply).

This USDA chart shows the percentage of planted acres grown that are GMO (it includes Ht soybeans, Ht corn, Bt corn, Ht cotton and Bt cotton). Here's another look at it. It's hard to believe that over 90% of all soybeans grown in the US are now genetically modified.

Looking ahead to a harsh winter

2008-07-07T08:54:00.005-03:00

A while back, I'd posted about rising costs in home heating oil and how this was going to become a major concern for consumers sooner than later. At the time, most of the oil-related focus in the news was about prices at the gas pumps. Now that summer's well on its way, more and more articles are starting to pop up about this coming winter and the effect the ongoing spike in prices will have on those who heat with oil or natural gas -- particularly those in the Northeastern US and in parts of Canada. One option being tossed around in Maine (where 80% of homes are heated by oil) is to add a surcharge to the already ridiculously high heating oil prices and to have this surcharge fund energy efficiency programs. This might be useful to some homeowners, but people who rent their homes and who pay for their own heating oil but have no control over renovating their buildings or changing their heating systems would end up choosing between heat and food this winter to subsidize a program that wouldn't necessarily help them at all. It would basically penalize those who are most in need.

Leaked World Bank study asserts that 75% of recent food price hikes are due to biofuels

2008-07-05T18:33:00.003-03:00

It's finally slipping into the mainsteam that biofuels aren't the panacea that Washington would like us all to think they are. They're actually worse, and it seems that continuing to pursue them as a viable alternative source of energy will invariably mean that more and more people will go hungry. As it stands now, food prices will almost certainly hike significantly over the next several months as price increases for raw materials end up trickling down to consumers who'll pick and choose 'em off grocery store shelves. I hope that this report has an impact on governments currently rolling in minimum biofuel content requirements in their respective countries.

Read the Guardian article on it here.

Britain's home gardens ruined by toxic aminopyralid-contaminated fertilizer

2008-07-03T09:15:00.005-03:00

This story that's just started spreading in the news is frightening. This wasn't caused by home gardeners spraying herbicide on their soil. This herbicide -- aminopyralid -- was sprayed on grass that was made into food for cows and horses, and then made its way into their manure, which was then sold to home gardeners as fertilizer. The herbicide in question (manufactured by Dow) isn't meant to be used on food crops. It attacks broad leaf weeds, hence its devastating effect on plants like tomatoes, potatoes, etc. According to this (and a few other articles I've read on it during the past few days), contaminated soil should not be reused for a year, and contaminated manure should not be used for 2-3 to allow the herbicide to break down. This means that the gardeners in the UK who used the manure to fertilize their gardens have lost this year's harvest and won't be able to grow on the same land next year (most likely). Plus right now, authorities don't even seem to be sure of how to track the contaminated manure. I'm not sure of whether this stuff is widely used in North America.

Bits and blurbs in the news about animals we call 'food'

2008-07-02T09:54:00.003-03:00

Doug Moss had a short (but effective) opinion piece in emagazine.com a few days ago about how the majority of environmental leaders and advocates are still refusing to face (and address) the impact of the meat industry on the world around us. It reminded me of an opinion piece in the New York Times I'd read last summer that raised similar points.

Less than a year after a HSUS' investigation into downer cow abuse at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Chino, CA led to the biggest voluntary meat recall in US history, another investigation has revealed that the goings on there seem to have been the industry norm, rather than the exception. Ironically, a bill was defeated last Wednesday that would have required video surveillance in California slaughterhouses to prevent similar acts of cruelty in the future; slaughterhouse owners and meat industry lobbyists are no doubt relieved.

Cornell University's agriculture and home economics databases

2008-06-26T12:50:00.003-03:00

I stumbled upon these collections of online books and journals recently. First, there's the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, which contains links to thousands of e-books or journals on everything from soil management to barn building. Then, there's the Home Economics Archive that covers everything from plumbing to sewing. Both of these include publications going all the way back to the early 1800s.

For those interested in beekeeping (which is a bit controversial in vegan circles, I know), they have The Hive and the Honeybee Collection -- links to about 50 or 60 e-texts of older books on the topic.

Spain to extend rights to apes

2008-06-26T11:00:00.002-03:00

This is huge. According to this Reuters blurb, the proposed legislation which would, in effect, comply with the Great Ape Project's Declaration on Great Apes and extend what are currently regarded as ''human'' rights to all other apes. The proposed legislation has the support of all political parties and is expected to go through. It's expected that within the next year, all experimentation on apes will be banned, and it will also be illegal to hold apes in captivity for entertainment purposes (e.g. circuses, filming, etc.).

There'll still be some in zoos, but over 70% of these zoos will now be forced to drastically improve the conditions under which the apes are kept.

I'll see if I can dig up more details concerning this over the next few days.

McCartney's Meat-Free Monday

2008-06-25T10:31:00.002-03:00

Paul McCartney's in the news this week. I just read a story this morning about how he's promoting the idea of a meat-free Monday in Britain. He's encouraging people to abstain from eating meat one day a week to help the environment, citing the UN's recent report on climate change which linked meat consumption to global warming. I think it's a fabulous idea.

Around four years ago, I went to hear Canadian pop culture icon (and environmentalist extraordinaire) David Suzuki speak on one of his tours, he was also promoting the idea of non-vegetarians integrating a meat-free day into their routines. I've always wished Dr. Suzuki would publicly come around to vegetarianism, especially considering the fact that he frequently addresses the environmental impact of factory farming, as well as its inherent cruelty and also often writes about the environmental impact of the Canadian fisheries industry. I've read here and there that the only animal products he consumes are fish and dairy, but haven't seen official confirmation of it.

Reducing and reusing creatively and a few other finds

2008-06-23T11:30:00.010-03:00

I like checking out DIY and crafts sites or blogs -- especially their posts or articles on environmentally-friendly creations. There are a lot of original ideas to be found that make being practical sorta fun.

For instance, here's a step-by-step guide to how to make your own reusable sandwich wrapper. You need some basic sewing skills to do it, obviously, but it's something that wouldn't be difficult to learn (and would have wider applications than merely making a bunch of reusable sandwich wrappers).

Then I stumbled upon instructions for making a solar food dryer. There are lots of these all over the internet and there are even more for solar cookers (with everything from satellite dishes to pizza boxes incorporated into the designs).

And then there's a lot of buzz about Zeer pots, which are refrigerating earthenware pots (you put a terra cotta pot into a larger terra cotta pot, slip sand in between then and keep it wet -- the evaporation of the water cools the inner pot).

Oh, and if you're like me and you have boxes and boxes of old VHS tapes in your shed, attic or basement -- here are some instructions on how to make a totebag using tape from them. The My Recycled Bags.com site has tons of neat blurbs on how to make bags out of just about anything, by the way. Very neat! (Do people still say 'neat'?)

Vegetarian bits in the media

2008-06-20T15:30:00.005-03:00

The American Chronicle features a writer's first-hand account of her journey to vegetarianism, away from it, and back again. It's pretty straightforward -- the sort of story you hear often in newbie forums on online vegetarian message boards. The only information offered up in it that made me feel uneasy was in her description of vegans. She described them as the ''elite'' of vegetarianism, and that just sounds sort of bitter. It perpetuates (whether deliberately or not) the stereotype of vegans as actually viewing themselves as morally superior to other vegetarians.

The thing is that this us vs. them mentality is the exact same thing that leads to a lot of omnis' defensive knee-jerk reactions to all vegetarians (i.e. any variation thereof), when they assume that vegetarians view themselves as morally superior to those who eat animals. I hate seeing that sort of divisiveness within the vegetarian community, and hope that I'm just overreacting to it. Another thing that may be confusing to some folks reading the article who may be unfamiliar with vegetarian terminology is that she lumped together ''vegans'' (who consume no animal products -- i.e. either eating them, wearing them or otherwise) and ''strict vegetarians'' (who generally don't eat any animal products, but may buy non-edible animal products like leather, et al.). Aside from that, though, it was a neat story of one person's journey.

Hawaii's KITV (ABC) lists the top ten reasons switching from an animal-based diet to a plant-based diet is environmentally friendly. It's a good list from that angle, for sure.

The New York Times' Mark Bittman had a piece a week and a half ago that describes, step by step, how to minimize one's consumption of meat, regardless of the reasons one wants to do so (e.e.g nutrition, to save money, animal suffering, the environment, et al.). It's positive, and I like it. There's no finger wagging, no stance-taking -- it's just straightforward piece on how to eat less meat. I sent it to a few omni friends who've been telling me over the past few months that they'd like to cut back, for a wide range of reasons.

Mini garden update

2008-06-19T16:30:00.003-03:00

One of the neighbourhood cats has discovered my garden. I'll see him amble towards it in the morning when I'm sitting on my back step drinking my morning coffee. Fearless, he is. I'll have to make sure that I keep some sort of screening down over any open areas lest he start using the garden as his personal litter box.

I'd planted some black heirloom bush beans almost three weeks ago (I'm bad with dates and need to check my gardening notebook), and they've been coming up over the past 2-3 days. So have the beets and chard I planted in-between the bean rows. I have heirloom wax bush beans beside them that I planted a little later and they should be coming up soon, as well. Between rain, overtime and the yard being occupied by neighbours, I haven't finished off as much of the garden as I'd like, yet. I still need to pull sooooo much lemon balm and sow some more greens. It's hard to believe that it's past mid-June already; it still feels as if May was right behind me, all spring-like and promise-filled. I have a few jalapeno peppers just barely starting to grow and my potted zucchini has a couple of blossoms.

I'll have to remember to jot down the names of the heirloom veggies I'm growing to post them here.

The safety of GMOs revisited

2008-06-18T11:10:00.001-03:00

The Institute for Responsible Technology has recently issued a report called ''State-of-the-Science on the Health Risks of GM Foods''. According to the Organic Consumers' Association:

the 28-page study describes the conflict of interest among regulators that allowed GMO foods on the market; the wide range of adverse findings from animal feeding studies [...]; reports by farmers of thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock; toxic and allergic properties of GM foods; numerous scientific assumptions used as the basis for safety claims that have since proven false; inadequate regulatory oversight; biased industry safety studies; manipulation of public opinion; and the mistreatment of scientists critical of the technology.

The report is available for free download here.

Wanna start an organic farm?

2008-06-18T11:03:00.005-03:00

The Center for Rural Affairs' June 2008 newsletter has a short piece on starting an organic farm (or transitioning to organic farming). There are great resource links at the bottom of the article. The Magdoff book mentioned can be found online for free here; if you want to learn anything about building soil, it's invaluable to anyone who grows food on any scale. Also, the Rodale Institute's website offers a free 15-hour online course on transitioning to organic farming.

The AP plans to charge you $12.50 to quote as few as five words from them

2008-06-17T16:01:00.004-03:00

The Associated Press is now requiring that bloggers and websites pay them for permission to quote as few as five words from its members' publications (e.g. The New York Times). So, what I'm wondering is what if you blog a quote that's five words the New York Times quoted from somewhere else? Basically, what if the New York Times quotes Hillary Clinton as saying something; if you blog about it and quote the quote (i.e. Hillary Clinton's quoted words), do you still have to pay?

As the a bit in the first link below states, we're entering a world where we can no longer even criticize the press freely, since we're bring required to pay to reproduce as few as five words of what they publish.

Read about it here and here.

Edited to add:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had a great piece on it that raises really valid points. They've also got a must-read section on their website that looks at bloggers' legal rights in the US. I hope to find something about similar legislation in Canada. Wikipedia's got a decent little section on fair use legislation that's worth reading, as well.

A couple of things I'm reading up on

2008-06-16T15:24:00.004-03:00

My iMac is in a coma at home, so my 'net access has become tricky and will continue to be so until I can get my creaky little laptop online.

In the interim, here are a few things that I'd been reading up on before the ''big sleep''.

Vegan organic and veganic gardening. Basically, it has a lot to do with minimizing use of animals products in organic gardening (e.g. using plant-based compost rather than animal fertilizers). The UK's Vegan Society has a lot of info on it here.

A friend got me interested in Seeds of Diversity, a ''Canadian charitable organization dedicated to the conservation, documentation and use of public-domain non-hybrid plants of Canadian significance'' (kinda scary when we now have to start referring to certain plants as ''public domain''). They have a great website that includes a searchable database of 19,000 cultivars of Canadian garden vegetables, fruits, etc. -- I'm sure that most of it applies to the US, as well.

Orson Welles on loneliness

2008-06-15T19:34:00.002-03:00

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.
--Orson Welles (1915-1985)

Oprah's vegan fast blog resumes

2008-06-12T14:41:00.006-03:00

I just glanced at the Mighty O's site and there was a brief post from the day before yesterday stating that she'd ordered food from a vegan restaurant (no idea what) and brought some gluten-free waffles and Morningstar veggie sausages from home. And there's a note telling readers to check back on Friday for the next blog post. That's it, though.

Maybe I'm just too cynical about the whole thing at this point. Or maybe I was cynical about it from day one. It bugs me that someone as stupendously wealthy as Oprah can't at least find someone to write down what she's actually eating while on this purported vegan fast. I also don't think it's doing any of her followers any favours to read that she's merely ordering vegan takeout. This would have been a great opportunity to show how easy it is for people to (affordably) cook the right foods for themselves at home. What really, really, really bugged me the most, however, is that Kathy Freston, her supposed vegan fast guru, responded to Oprah's blog post by writing: ''You may have to drink a protein shake during the day to get your full nutrients (not everyone has beans and nuts on hand!!)''.

Um... First of all, nobody who's eating Morningstar veggie sausages is going to urgently need a protein shake to get their ''full nutrients''. She's making it sound as if nutrition is all about meat, meat, meat. Plus, if ''not everyone has beans and nuts on hand'', then who the hell has vegan protein powder on hand at al times? It just makes it sound as if the vegan cleanse is unhealthy and unbalanced and IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to do without a personal chef, access to a vegan restaurant and supplements. It's too bad, really.

Oprah? Are you falling off your temporary vegan wagon?

2008-06-11T10:13:00.007-03:00

The online vegetarian community has been buzzing for the past few weeks over the news of Oprah's 21-day vegan cleanse. Yes, it was only meant to be temporary cleanse, and not a permanent lifestyle change. However, it was bringing some ok attention to the reality that vegan food can be nutritious and tasty (and if any of her loyal followers were going along with her on this cleanse, it also meant that for 21 days, there'd be a little less animal consumption going on in the world). My biggest eye-rolling over the whole thing had to do with the fact that Oprah had her own personal chef preparing all of her dishes. Hey, I'd be a more-than-happy vegan too if I had someone preparing all of my meals, even (as per Oprah's blog) fed-exing them when I was traveling... So? I think there may be trouble in Oprah-land.

Oprah's last blog post on Saturday reported that her personal chef left. Her reaction: "Tal left…the void is immense. I'm in New York trying to make do."

That's the last time she posted about her cleanse, after posting daily since its beginning. I don't watch the show, so I dunno if she's commented on it on television at this point. Anyone? I'm thinking that it shouldn't be all that hard for someone that rich and connected to find another spectacular vegan-friendly chef to step up and fill Tal's shoes (heck -- I'd go cook for her myself for a fraction of what Tal must have cost, except that I somehow suspect that my ordinary old lentil chilli or chickpea salad wraps probably wouldn't impress her all that much), but the lack of further blog posts leads me to suspect that the 21-day cleanse may very well be on the skids. Which of course, would send out this big old message to her legions that following a vegan diet is just too hard for regular folks. And for this reason alone, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Oprah's lack of blogging has more to do with her busy schedule than it does her abandoning her project.

Wow. For the first time in my life, I'm sending supportive vibes out to Oprah. Kinda leaves me feeling a little warm and fuzzy inside.

The garden

2008-06-10T22:11:00.002-03:00

So far, I've got three heirloom Brandywines, three organic plums, one cherry and two ground cherry tomato plants in. I've also got a jalapeno pepper and a zucchini seedling (potted, for now). All of these are flowering. This Saturday, I plan to add a couple of bell seedlings, another couple of jalapeno, a cayenne (if I can find one), and at least another three plums.

I have the first sowing of organic leaf lettuce and organic dwarf carrots coming up, as well as my first sowing (15 square feet?) of yellow organic bush beans just breaking ground. Tonight, I planted a 4' row of beets and a 4' row of chard and my second sowing of organic bush beans (these, a drying type -- I'll have to dig out the envelope to post the names). The beets and chard are in between the bush bean rows. I added some thyme seed to my old winter-worn thyme plant (it's seven years old and I'll get another to grow alongside it before I pull this one out of the ground -- it was the first thing I ever planted in my garden). I also scattered some organic spicy mixed greens seed in with the lettuce and carrots coming up around my heirloom tomatoes.

I harvested some rhubarb yesterday. I should have separated some of it early in the spring. It's sort of scrunched together and scraggly. If I play my cards right, though, I should be able to get at least a couple dozen jars of chutney or jam out of it, and some frozen to boot. Right now, I need to figure out what to do with the 50 square feet or so of lemon balm that's spread across part of the garden over the past summers. Do I just pull it and compost it? I have some young burdock coming up, too, in a corner, and need to figure out when to pull it to get to try out the roots.

I'll definitely take some photos this weekend after I get some more seedlings in.

Hope as an obstacle

2008-06-10T12:47:00.003-03:00

As someone who often gets paralyzed in just trying to suss out possible outcomes, both good and bad, this passage from Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace Is Every Step really resonated with me.

Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.

[...]

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment. Many religions are based on the notion of hope, and this teaching about refraining from hope may create a strong reaction. But the shock can bring about something important. I do not mean that you should not have hope, but that hope is not enough. Hope can create an obstacle for you, and if you dwell in the energy of hope, you will not bring yourself back entirely into the present moment. If you re-channel those energies into being aware of what is going on in the present moment, you will be able to make a breakthrough and discover joy and peace right in the present moment, inside of yourself and all around you.