Killer Bacon Bugs, Bid on Stars & Recycling Myths

1. An Op-Ed published by the New York Times last week has linked killer MRSA, also known as the  antibiotic-resistant “Flesh Eating Bacteria” to more than 18,000 deaths per year in the US. That’s more than AIDS. And what is the source of this superbug? You guessed it: cheap pig products. “Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all.“

A small Dutch study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12 percent of Dutch retail pork samples.

Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.

And now with the NYT review of the Documentary “Death on Factory Farm” which is taking HBO viewers by

storm, I can only wonder how these animals that are smarter than dogs (yet some dogs chew delightfully on their dried ears & limbs) will fare int he coming months? And au contraire Mike Hale and the Wiles’s community, we can all eat veggies and thrive.

2. Bid on me! Help Farm Sanctuary raise some funds, and get a private brunch for two prepared by yours truly! Also bid on items from Bill Mahr, Amy Smart, Joan Jett, Chloe Jo, Daniela Sea, Heather Mills, Matt & Nat, Wendy Kidd, Dan Piraro, Gloria Steinem, Joelle Katcher, Rachael Sage, 30 Seconds to Mars, Maureen Burke, Gabrielle Brick, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Nigel Barker, and more!

3. Is recycling really all that it claims to be? Have you ever been confronted by someone who is a total recycling skeptic and didn’t know what to say?

Read: “Recycling Is Too Difficult and 9 Other Obnoxious Myths“

Read the Economist article: “The Truth About Recycling“

Read: “ The Economics of Recycling“

Watch: William McDonough on ‘Cradle to Cradle’

Recycling is a tricky issue because it’s really a problem of over-production and over-consumption. But one thing is certain. We do not have infinite resources on this planet, and people who are in the industries that use up these resources, and are in positions to do something about it have a responsibility to figure out how to not leave devastated ecosystems for future generations. Just because the recycling systems aren’t perfect does not justify throwing caution to the wind and continuing ‘business as usual’.

The real issue is that recycling is not enough. Reuse is better, and ‘green’ products with toxic by-products need to be more thoroughly sourced, because there are products that come from closed loop systems, also known as EIN Eco Industrial Networking or EIP- Environmental Industrial Parks. But again, the root problem is still there.

One major problem is that recycling systems are often based on dollars as opposed to ecological and personal well-being. Dollars are abstract and when you work towards achieving such an abstraction (as opposed to working towards sustainability, good health, community, friendship, etc) the consequences to the physical world become secondary, when in fact ecosystems are primary and without functioning, healthy ones, we’d all be gone. The reason recycling appears to be useless to some people is not because re-rendering products into new products is impossible – it’s because they are seeing the effects of basing a recycling system upon a system that in itself is not sustainable.

Does that mean we shouldn’t recycle? Of course not! It means we should do that, and much much more! It also means the problems haven’t been solved and we need to get some serious critical thinking done.

Virtuous Hedonism & The Great Myth

There is a Great Myth perpetuated in our culture: that somehow, hedonism and a lifestyle of self-indulgence are radical protests against mainstream society, and furthermore; pursuing this as a lifestyle (obviously, through shopping) is defiant, brave and COOL. The most clever thing about this myth is that it really has most people fooled. The psychologist and theorist Abraham Maslow‘s triangle of development of personal maturity places infantile self-gratification as the first stage in human development. Ecologist Dr. Davord W. Orr argues that advertising is aimed at keeping us in that state perpetually, which makes a whole lot of sense.

The image industries (fashion, media and entertainment) are overflowing with cliché calls-to-action (advertisements) that ask us to rebel, to revolt, to be free, not to compromise self, to Just Do It © – as if this were a novel ideal to take up as a cause when in fact, this characteristic is the main driving force of our consumer-capitalist culture. It sells products. It keeps the cycle going. It justifies almost anything in the pursuit of selfish pleasure, which in turn, makes those in power really, really wealthy and gives them a huge reason to keep us stupid and scared. Smart, no? The surface-level commitment to modern Do-Good-Ness rarely extends beyond what we can actually see first-hand.One possible explanation as to why the pursuit of knowledge is stereotyped as unsexy in our culture is because the more we know, the less pleasure we can derive from traditional consumer-capitalist activities with an unethical base that benefits those in power. AKA: shopping and consuming starts to mean something completely different when a holistic comprehension of objects and activities is pursued. It turns traditional economics on its head, and it is not ‘good for the economy’ because we might decide not to purchase something based on the story of how it came to be. This conflicts with the story-telling and economic interests of those is power, so it is best that they continually reinforce a pseudo-rebellion against an ostensible culture of do-gooders.

Adbusters, Feb 2008

Things start to become less ‘cool’ when we realize that ‘cool’ is a grand plan, cleverly designed by a few monolithic entities who reap the benefits of having us run in circles to achieve some false dream of personal revolution through solipsistic hedonism. The truth is that falling in line by responding to traditional fear-based and cool-chasing advertising can rarely be a revolutionary act. It’s the furthest thing from it, because it simply reinforces the status-quo and in turn, the Great Myth. My main question for advertisers who use revolutionary terminology to sell images that sell products is this: What are you telling us to revolt against?

So, is it possible to be a virtuous hedonist? I believe that hedonsim does not have to equate to solipsism. When we are aware of the consequences of our personal actions, our ability to be pleasured by those pursuits changes dramatically. Even pleasure itself changes dramatically. For example, I used to love the taste of cheeseburgers from Burger King. It was just yummy, and that was all that mattered – simple as that. Soon, I came across information about how those cheeseburgers are made, and it changed my ability to receive pleasure from eating them. Instead of being able to enjoy the piece of meat and cheese that came from somewhere out there, it became an avoidance and denial of the knowledge that the ground up flesh and cultured cow-udder secretions required the torturous confinement, exploitation and eventual messy death of a cow, the clear-cutting of rain forests for cattle grazing, human labor abuses, the displacement of indigenous peoples and the general ecological devastation. Does it still taste good? Maybe. But the net-gain of sensual pleasure is outweighed by the discomfort, or loss of pleasure associated with the transcendence of infantile self-gratification.

The first maneuver to stepping outside this cycle is to recognize other entities (people, pigeons, and petunias) as subjects of perception. In other words, advanced empathy. An acknowledgment that others can sense, and are affected by our actions – and whose will-to-live is valid, is more rebellious than any fashion advertisement. This may sound simple, but when applied to our lives we’ll see it poses a real challenge to nearly all of our current typical activities.

I will argue that an evolved form of hedonism might be rooted in the pleasure one can potentially receive from activities (and the support of those activities) that pleasures all subjects of perception. The reason this might be difficult to envision is because there is little mainstream discourse surrounding it.

What is a Discerning Brute to do? Educate yourself and evolve to a different state of pleasure-reception. Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, and Animal Liberation by Peter Singer are a good place to start.

The Adbusters Media Foundation, and writers such as Naomi Klein, Derrick Jensen, and David Abram are also invaluable thinkers on this and related topics.