The Easiest Possible New Year's Resolution: WWDTD?

WWDTD is, of course, a simple mnemonic for "What Would Donald Trump Do?"

My resolution for 2018 is to remember to ask myself this question, and do the opposite. On the simplest level, asking myself WWDTD will keep me from golfing; praising myself inordinately; whining for an apology every time I feel my name, appearance, or intelligence has been slighted; hanging out in meetings with crowds of sycophants in suits and ties; looking for questionable ways to cheat on my taxes or otherwise gain money for myself and my family through schemes and shortcuts; creating a fraudulent 'university'; making a profit by raising the cost of admission to my annual New Year's Eve party at my own club; belittling people of a race, gender, or nationality that differs from mine; attacking people who express their patriotism differently or worship a different god, or no god; etc.; etc.

But those are all the obvious negatives inspired by the WWDTD resolution strategy. There are positive steps I can take too, by proactively doing the opposite of what DT would do. Last night, for example, rather than hanging out with billionaires in monkey suits and being bored to death at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate New Year's Eve, I watched (at extremely high volume) all four hours of the Grateful Dead's New Year's Eve show at Winterland as 1978 became 1979 while reading the latest issue of The New York Review of Books and drinking ginger tea with turmeric. That's not something DT would do.

I woke up this morning and went directly to a New Year's Day yoga class. That's not something DT would do.

I'm working on turning my vegetarian diet into a vegan diet. That's not something DT would do.

I want to read even more books, and read more widely, than I did in 2017. I stumbled on a couple of things this morning that are geared toward that goal, the Los Angeles Times' "How to read more books in 2018" and the New York Public Library's "Read Harder in 2018! NYPL's Suggestions for Book Riot’s Annual Challenge." Personally, I have found that signing up with Goodreads and taking their Reading Challenge for the past few years has kept me reading more than 40 books a year. That's not something DT would do (I doubt if he has read 40 books in his life).

WWDTD should provide guidance throughout the year. I'm going for a long walk now even though it's 12°F outside. That's not something DT would do.

Bad News for Bacon Lovers (and good news for pigs) from the World Health Organization

Click here for more details from The Guardian today: 

"Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO"

Will BuzzFeed create more vegetarians than PETA with one video?

You Decide:

The Best States to find Humane Meat in the United States

Thanks to Vegan Street for all their hard work and hours of research in preparing this user-friendly guide to the best states in which to find humane meat:

The Other Big News Of the Month: Banksy in New York

"All pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside."
-Paul Cezanne

Throughout this month of government shutdown and Obamacare's rollout, the city of New York is being treated to one new work by Banksy every day.  You can check on all the works presented around the city on Banksy's "Better Out Than In" website every day. Most, as would be expected, are static additions to walls and doors, but here's a video of today's rolling three-dimensional addition to the cityscape, "Sirens of the Lambs":


Brilliant. And thank god it's out on the streets and not stuck in one of the national museums that's been shuttered by the Tea Party since October 1.

As a bonus, here's another piece, from October 6, that appeared only as a video:

Kids Say the Darndest Things about Animal Abuse at Thanksgiving.

"Dear God, Thank you for the turkey we're about to eat and for the turkey farms where they pack them into dark tiny little sheds for their whole lives. Thank you for when they burn their feathers off while they're still alive and for when turkey gets kicked around like a football and killed by people who think it's fun to stomp on their little turkey heads and special thanks for all the chemicals and dirt and poop that's in the turkey we're about to eat. Oh, and thank you for rainbows. Amen."

Happy Thanksgiving.

Language Matters: Liberal Environmental Hysteria!!!

It really struck me during the most recent debate of the GOP presidential candidates that there is no surer way to throw red meat to a Republican crowd than to attack those who would defend the environment against drillers and miners or any other business interests.  Here, from that Fox News Sioux City debate, was temporary-frontrunner Newt Gingrich in the middle of a rant about opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline:

"... and the president of the United States cannot figure out that it is – I’m using mild words here – utterly irrational to say I’m now going to veto a middle-class tax cut to protect left-wing environmental extremists in San Francisco, so that we’re going to kill American jobs, weaken American energy, make us more vulnerable to the Iranians and do so in a way that makes no sense to any normal, rational American."

TBL.org sidebar  12/19/2011

Newt's "left-wing environmental extremists in San Francisco" came to mind just now when I was looking at my blog and ran across the attached selection of articles with the keyword "liberal" selected by Google for the trueblueliberal.org sidebar. "Liberal Insanity on Light Bulbs" from the Washington Examiner and "Keystone XL: Liberal Histrionics Answered" from Forbes are not at all uncommon uses of  "liberal" as an adjective in the center-right press. Look back at Newt's quote and see how he ends his rant with an appeal to the common sense of  "any normal, rational American."  You don't have to search far in the right-wing and mainstream media to find the same opposition between "insane," "hysterical," "histrionic," "left-wing," "liberal," "extremist" defenders of the environment and those level-headed, normal, rational, mainstream defenders of the bottom line and real (i.e., monetary) concerns over anything that might seem squishy or fuzzy-headed.


We can all see how the GOP is purposely using and abusing the language in a Luntzian manner (and being parroted by a lazy press), but I still can't -- on any emotional level -- understand why anyone, even Tea Partiers, would have the same visceral reaction against environmentalists that the Occupiers have against the billionaires hanging onto their low tax rates as a birthright. I don't have a lot of understanding for other red-meat conservative issues (executions, torture, anti-gay prejudice) either; maybe it's just because I don't eat red (or any other color of) meat.   And that's an environmental issue too.

Property is Theft

It's amazing, but the clearest video representation I've ever seen of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous slogan, "Property is theft!" (of course, first formulated in French as "La propriété, c'est le vol!") is found in a John Wayne classic, Red River.
The movie ends with John Wayne a large-scale landowner, rancher and all-around asshole.  Here he is very early in the film beginning his Texas real-estate and cattle empire with the theft and murder pictured in the minute and a half between 5'30" and 7'00".

The video attached to this 2011 post has gone black, but click here for an updated 2019 post with a live video of the scene.

A Holiday Shopping Suggestion

This chart explains why I'm doing all my holiday shopping here or here.

"There ya go baby!" or Sarah Palin alienates the vegetarian vote

What will Sarah kill next week?

By the way, this rugged-individualist self-sufficient hunting junket to kill a wild animal cost over $42,000, but image is everything and the people who like guns and death and camouflage will love this unrealistic reality-show image as much as they love her brainless flag-waving books.

Support The Right to Arm Bears!

"Meet Your Meat"

I had read about the "Meet Your Meat" video when reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, but I avoided watching it until today. Not even the soothing familiar voice of Alec Baldwin as narrator makes the images more palatable, which, of course, is the point.
If you're thinking of giving up something other than Christianity for Lent, then you might be well-served by watching at least some of this (or finding more videos at the PETA TV archive).



Of course this isn't just about meat eating, or ethics. It's about corporations and the fact that, in the pursuit of dollars, EVERYTHING is permitted.
But we don't have to support it.

The Second Word of the Day is "Carnevale"

Who knew that Carne-vale is old Latin for "Farewell to Meat"?! Not me. But it's a great word to keep in mind as we approach Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. "Farewell to Meat" is a thought that True Blue Liberal dot org can get behind for all the heath, environmental, and ethical reasons we've touched on in earlier posts.

I stumbled upon the history of the second word of the day this morning on a website called Meatless Monday, which is run in connection with the Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health and has the goal of reducing meat consumption by 15%. If it can't be seven days a week without meat, or five, or three, it's good to start somewhere. I just wonder when they'll be harassed and sued by those same cowkillers who went after Oprah in the '90s.

"... if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film..." another quote for the day

If there's any justice in the world, then Jonathan Safran Foer's first work of nonfiction (after the brilliant novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) will do to factory farms what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to DDT. At least it should turn a significant percentage of its readers into vegetarians and vegans. Or at the very least it will create more conscious eaters.

I finished reading this book on the train from work tonight. I couldn't return it to the library without sharing at least one quotation:

"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals(p. 143)

But please consider reading the entire book. It should be widely read and it deserves to have a place in our national conversation.

TBL Helps You with Your New Year's Resolution (if your resolution is to become a vegetarian)

To reinforce your resolve to stick to a diet in twenty ten that's better for you and animals and the planet, you don't even have to read all of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Simply read this short article on AlterNet today: "Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef."
Actually, maybe you don't even have to read the whole article, just read the title of the article again.

You're Welcome.