It is a complicated relationship. I’ve argued before that we should not have betrayed the forest. This recurrent betrayal is a great way to map out our path to extinction.

But it’s worth mentioning how we got that fat grass : The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming | PLOS One

Organ farming is certainly a real possibility, but I think that it requires a quality of human capital welfare to ensure a high quality animal product. It doesn’t work with poor nutrition, pollution, various diseases damaging the merchandise. There was an nice SciFi movie about this: The Island (2005).

It’s ethicswashing or humanewashing.

To be clear, extensive animal farming isn’t humane. People just DECLARE that it is. As someone from a “less developed”, I’ve seen up close the remnants of traditional extensive animal farming and it’s as brutal as the industrial version, often worse by “welfare” standards.

It’s all marketing, bucolic pastoralist aesthetics feeding nostalgia and protofascism.

And this “factory farming bad” shtick is even more perverse. Like the Carnivore movement, they hide the simple fact that it’s this conspicuous consumption is a status symbol. It doesn’t stop at “welfare”, it’s a race, they keep going… regenerative, grass fed, unvaxxed, hormone free, raw milk, hand milked etc. It will never stop.

More perverse still is that making this most resource intensive meat and milk into the most sought after food product is going to increase food insecurity, it’s going to cause famine and conflict. The more resources are used to please the rich consumers’ idea of a “pure and superior diet” and their fantasies of being God’s chosen rulers of the food chains, the less food there is to go around. Which is how I see conflicts like the invasion of the Amazon forest or the war in Sudan where the rich meat eaters of United Arab Emirates are demanding grass fed meat and empowering the RSF (pastoralist) militias to “cleanse” the black agriculturalist population from the land.

Fascism is carnism in decline.

from kurzgesagt

red flag

Workers need to learn about what a birth strike is.

You’re in c/degrowth. Retirement from economic growth “generating” “passive income” isn’t a feature.

The article is pretty good, but you need to have a bunch of context to understand what it’s pointing out.

I’ve been noticing the Social Darwinism plans for a while. The traditional pronatalist policy is indeed that of “quantity”, specifically, a high quantity of human capital with high turnover - for labor and war. The human capital, you, need to understand that this means:

• women are domestic baby factories (“traditional family”)
• men are (wage?) slaves, worked to death with only enough time to sleep and reproduce
• huge infant mortality rates (this tends to increase fertility as people try to make spare children)
• huge childhood mortality rates
• large maternal mortality rate (guess why the chainsaw was invented)
• an abundance of orphans
• lower and lower life expectancy (retirement = death)

What I still don’t understand is why these pronatalist types want so much human capital when they have so much technology to replace humans, especially now. It’s a weird contradiction in the TESCREAL ideologues. If anyone knows, let me know.

Here’s a good podcast to get a grip on this very broad topic: the overshoot podcast.

There’s more that makes this weird. We also know some things about how pre-civlized societies handled narcissism. Surprisingly often, these societies actually had a dedicated word for these people. The exact translation and connotation of the word varied from one population to the next, but the stories that they told were basically the same. (For reference, we learned this by interviewing members of indigenous societies that had not yet been heavily influenced by civilization. Some of these societies still existed as recently as a century ago - now there are almost none left.) These were the people who were ‘unteachable’, ‘lazy’, ‘troublemakers’ - they caused drama while contributing next to nothing. When these people didn’t improve their behavior (or they did something heinous like commit murder or rape), they were exiled or killed. (Check out literature on ‘rape-free’ societies if you want to read more about this.) These individuals were pretty rare - around 1% of the population - so what little violence was necessary to keep the peace would not account for the evidence that we see from post-agricultural societies. We’ve no reason to believe that these pre-civilized societies suddenly stopped policing themselves when they were pushed into agriculture by the drought (and there’s even some evidence that they did not - again, see “Civilized to Death”), yet the vast majority of us now live in a society where such a penalty for mere narcissism would be unthinkable.

I recently learned that zombification (check the transcript) using drugs, as a form of slavery, was used by some indigenous people as a punishment of such assholes instead of execution or exile.

Tankies are conservatives acting on a social level instead of an economic level (from what you describe). This makes more sense if you think of military hierarchies and advancement in them.

I have used that kind of salt, mostly out of curiosity. The curiosity wore out quickly…

Here’s another paper that gets into brain aspects: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(05)00357-0

I’m not sure why this is a surprise, meat hardly has taste and fresh raw meat is like chewing on a piece of rubber. The point has always been to process the stuff (such as by denaturing proteins) and to add condiments, and that applies to lots of foods. If anything, humans need to improve horrible tasting food because humans aren’t carnivores. Carnivores have way fewer tasting receptors, 2 and human umami receptors are mediocre.

It’s in the mind.

In 2023, Rosenfeld co-authored a study finding that people who more strongly believed in humans’ right to eat meat, milk, and eggs were more likely to expect vegan burgers and ice cream to taste bad.

Precisely. Prejudice at the taste level. Or framing, if we want to be more neutral. The smell and taste of cheese is based on the same chemicals as the smell and taste of stinky feet (and there are some similarities to armpit sweat too): Foot Odor: Why Do My Feet Smell? | UPMC HealthBeat. Cheese smells like feet.

What matters here isn’t the product, it’s the expectations. Which is also why animal-meat corporations have tried to coerce supermarket stores to segregate the products, thus creating a prejudice in the meat eaters. It’s not about confusing the animal milk or meat products with a plant-based product, it’s about priming the customer to expect a very different experience.

Yeah, the health care facilities for the old are full of life-long plant-based people.

/s

Check your stats. The only way you die quickly from eating meat is if you choke on it.

Locals noted that the $16 million project is meant for flooding or rain water issues (heavy rainfall can come off the mountain and accumulate in town), instead of ocean water problems eyed by the Army Corps plans.

So they’re climate change deniers…?

“77% of the people voted against the floodwall project.

Wow.

But opposition has mounted with residents concerned about how the cost would affect property taxes, the fact they’d have to cover the cost to maintain the floodwall as well as effects the barrier would have on beach views or access to the shore.

Alrighty then, enjoy watching house values drop and people abandon the area, leading to lower tax revenue and higher taxes.

“Long story short, it comes down to the fact that they’re looking to just roll it into our taxes, roll it into our responsibility,” said Longo, whose family has lived in Highlands since the 1950s.

It’s interesting that people who don’t live in a communist society expect others to bail them out.

Always have been. What is going on in the Amazon rain forest now is what went on a few centuries ago in North America: settler-colonialists invading with cows and horses, wiping out forests, native herbivores, and, of course, indigenous people.

We’re seeing it happen now, it’s not in history. It’s happening IN REAL TIME.

Mongabay has more articles like this:

Rainforest cowboys: Rodeo culture sweeps the Amazon

Here’s a related documentary interview for context: Can the Amazon Rainforest be saved? with Richard Mosse - YouTube

Trailer of sorts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CmeqMe48MQ

This week we talk to photographer, filmmaker and artist Richard Mosse, who spent two years documenting the desctruction of one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world, the Amazon Rainforest. Using infrared film, GIS mapping technologies, and ultraviolet cameras, Mosse explores every scale of the rainforest, from miscroscopic organisms to hectares of cleared land. On the human level, the film follows both the indigenous people who are trying to hold on to their way of life and the loggers, ranchers, and miners who are trying to carve out a living at the edge of the world. The result is an immersive, unflinching multichannel film called Broken Spectre

https://jackshainman.com/exhibitions/richard_mosse_broken_spectre

…

And now to read the article…

It’s a common lament in the Amazon ranching community, and one that helps to explain why populist politicians such as the former president Jair Bolsonaro and the US president, Donald Trump, have such an appeal. It taps straight into the existential debate about the role of frontier men and women – farmers, miners, oil workers – in a world where wide-open spaces are increasingly constrained by environmental limits.

It’s not a “wide-open” space. The Amazon is a forest ecosystem that has been “nudged” by indigenous people for a very long time. It’s not an open space, it belongs to the indigenous people there.

He is referring to plans – promised by JBS – the world’s largest meat producer, which is the majority buyer from ranchers in the Amazon – for a new birth-to-abattoir tracking system that will, supposedly by the end of this year, tag and trace every head of cattle in the Amazon to ensure none of them are raised in areas that have been deforested. An investigation by the Guardian and its partners suggests this deadline will be missed. JBS told the Guardian that it respectfully contested the conclusions of the investigation, but added that “while the sector-wide challenges are significant and larger than any one company can solve on its own, we believe JBS has an in-depth and robust series of integrated policies, systems, and investments that are making a material and positive impact on reducing deforestation risks”.

JBS can’t be trusted: Brazilian Amazon ‘cattle laundering’ taints JBS & Frigol supply chains: Report

Ah, they mention it too.

And rather than clean up, many in the beef industry have simply found loopholes that allow them to carry on with the old ways. “Cattle laundering”, which hides the origins of livestock from environmentally embargoed ranches, is so widespread that few farmers bother to hide what they are doing.

At this point, I just want to live long enough to see these takers deal with the Amazon Desert that they’re birthing into existence. I mean:

A keynote speaker at this Encontro dos Pecuaristas (meeting of the Livestock Farmers) is the lawyer and land-owner Vinicius Borba, a slim man with a thin beard and a sharp turn of phrase. Borba says he represents rural producers in the indigenous territory of Apyterewa. Before the meeting, he had spoken defiantly about his own environmental penalties and accusations of wrongdoing, which he blamed on the government’s failure to legitimise his property. “I am called a land-grabber, an invader, a deforester, but it is not my fault,” he said. “I have a property that we have occupied for over 20 years, and to this day the government has not given me the title … Since the regularisation never comes, I end up becoming a statistic, another land-grabber.”

and

All the same, she says, change is coming, whether ranchers like it or not. “Unfortunately, the environmental issue is here to stay,” she says, of the growing pressure for transparent tracking systems to eradicate deforestation from supply chains. “If we don’t wake up, we will be left out of rural production.”

This should be treated as confessions to crimes.

I guess I’m a ghost, having been vegan for so long. If this is the afterlife, people like you must be why it’s Hell, as you’re spreading egg industry misinformation about choline - a substance which, in those animal-based regular concentrated doses, is correlated with a greater risk of cancers 1 2 3. Also heart disease.

Despite large parts of the population being under the “adequate intake”, a common worry for choline deficiency is about dementia. If plants were so low in choline, you’d expect AD to be a big issue for those who ate more plant-based (as a spectrum) than animal-based food.

Effects of intensive lifestyle changes on the progression of mild cognitive impairment or early dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease: a randomized, controlled clinical trial | Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy | Full Text

Here’s a trial with an intervention of:

This lifestyle intervention includes (1) a whole foods, minimally processed plant-based diet low in harmful fats and low in refined carbohydrates and sweeteners with selected supplements; (2) moderate exercise; (3) stress management techniques; and (4) support groups.

and the conclusion:

in persons with mild cognitive impairment or early dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease, comprehensive lifestyle changes may improve cognition and function in several standard measures after 20 weeks.

Too short? Perhaps something on the Mediterranean diet, which is a heavily plant-based diet (if you don’t know what the MD score is, look it up):

Mediterranean diet adherence is associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic predisposition: findings from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study | BMC Medicine | Full Text

We used Cox proportional hazard regression models to explore the associations between MedDiet adherence, defined using two different scores (Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener [MEDAS] continuous and Mediterranean diet Pyramid [PYRAMID] scores), and incident all-cause dementia risk in 60,298 participants from UK Biobank, followed for an average 9.1 years. The interaction between diet and polygenic risk for dementia was also tested.

…

In this large population-based prospective cohort study, higher adherence to a MedDiet was associated with reduced dementia risk.

Is the MD bad in this way?

Frontiers | Dietary adherence to the Mediterranean diet pattern in a randomized clinical trial of patients with quiescent ulcerative colitis

Results: Participants’ diets were analyzed (MDP n = 15, CHD n = 13). The MDP (n = 10, 67%) achieved a high level of adherence (MDSS score between 16 and 24) vs. CHD (n = 3), (p = 0.030). HEI-2015 significantly increased from baseline to week 12 (p = 0.007) in the MDP and was significantly higher at week 12 compared to the CHD (p = 0.0001). The SIBDQ (bowel domain) showed reductions in the passage of large amounts of gas (p = 0.01) and improvements in tenesmus (p = 0.03) in the MDP. Despite enhanced diet quality and adherence in the MDP, females had inadequate intakes of calcium, iron, vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline and males had inadequate intakes of fiber, vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline. No adverse events were reported.

You’ll find that studies on dementia and diets tend to recommend more plant-centered diets.

Hmmmm… if you actually check the literature for choline, it’s an “Adequate Intake” recommendation, not an RDA. There isn’t enough data for it.

Dietary intake and food sources of choline in European populations | British Journal of Nutrition | Cambridge Core

In most of the population groups considered, the average choline intake was found to be below the AI set in 1998 by the IOM in the USA. Given the definition of AI, no conclusion can be drawn regarding the adequacy of choline intake.

ಠ_ಠ

That’s called late stage capitalism. It’s a winners-take-all game. Have you ever played Monopoly?

It can be called “energy security” now. And “food security” probably.

showing this to the bovine abuser costumed character is an even better fit.