Archive for July 9th, 2016
Weekday vegetarian? Why Not weekday carnivorous?
We all know the arguments that being vegetarian is better for the environment and for the animals — but in a carnivorous culture, it can be hard to make the change.
Graham Hill has a powerful, pragmatic suggestion: Be a weekday veg.
Graham Hill. Journalist. Founder of TreeHugger.com and LifeEdited; he travels the world to tell stories of sustainability and minimalism. He tweets at @GHill. Full bio
1:16 I also knew that I’m not alone. As a society we are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. Any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak.
So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you’re a meat eater or you’re a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn’t quite ready.
Imagine your last hamburger. So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I’d commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar?
I wondered, might there be a third solution? (How about half a dozen alternatives?)
And I thought about it, and I came up with one.
I’ve been doing it for the last year, and it’s great. It’s called weekday veg. The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple.
If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish.
It’s structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it’s okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. (Actually, most of the 7 billion population cannot afford to eat meat)
The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint’s smaller, I’m lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I’m even saving money. Best of all, I’m healthier, I know that I’m going to live longer, and I’ve even lost a little weight.
3:28 Ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What’s stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians.
Guns and Hotdogs
How the U.S. Military Promotes Its Weapons Arsenal to the Public (July 9, 2016)
By Jon Schwarz
America’s wars take place far away — Kabul is 6,700 miles from New York or, traveling in the other direction, 7,400 miles from San Francisco.
They also involve fewer and fewer Americans — the Army now has about 475,000 active-duty soldiers, the lowest number since World War II.
This leaves the Pentagon free to promote itself to a country that largely has no idea what war actually entails.
In addition to standard TV advertising and flyovers at the Super Bowl, the U.S. military spends tens of millions of dollars each year on live events that function half as recruitment pitches and half as visceral plugs for its spectacular high-tech weaponry.
(Click for the pictures)
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The irony of propaganda: “A B-2 stealth bomber at Atlantic City’s Thunder Over the Boardwalk event in New Jersey in 2007.
Each B-2 costs approximately $1 billion; analysts now believe it is a “virtual certainty” that Atlantic City will be forced to declare bankruptcy.”
Photojournalist Nina Berman has spent 10 years traveling to Fleet Weeks and air shows to document the peculiar collision between the Pentagon’s idealized self-image and the people who pay for it but have little comprehension of what they’re truly buying.
U.S. Marines arrive on a light armored vehicle in New York City’s Times Square during Fleet Week in 2015. In the background is an ad for Shandong, China, where U.S. Marines landed at the end of World War II to intervene on the side of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in China’s civil war.
Civilians handle a pistol with a silencer during Fleet Week at Orchard Beach in the Bronx in 2007. Some of the young men had just signed up to join the Marines and potentially go to Iraq.
A U.S. Marine applies camouflage paint to a young woman’s face at an event at Orchard Beach in the Bronx in 2007.
A girl and boy dress up as Marines during Fleet Week at Orchard Beach in the Bronx in 2007. The boy is holding an M4 carbine, which is replacing the M16 as the Marine Corps standard rifle.
A young boy “shoots” a machine gun from a Vietnam-era helicopter at the New York Air Show in 2015.
There are no certain statistics for the number of Vietnamese casualties during the war, but at least 1 million died, and potentially 2 million or more. A 1991 survey found that Americans estimated that about 100,000 Vietnamese had been killed.
A B-2 stealth bomber at Atlantic City’s Thunder Over the Boardwalk event in New Jersey in 2007. Each B-2 costs approximately $1 billion; analysts now believe it is a “virtual certainty” that Atlantic City will be forced to declare bankruptcy.
The gift shop by the Battleship New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey, in 2015. The now-famous “We Can Do It!” poster was created by Westinghouse, and during World War II, it was seen only by workers in several company factories; it became nationally known after being rediscovered during the 1980s.
About 50,000 people attended the parade in Raleigh, North Carolina, during the April 2008 Salute to Our Troops event. It is said to be the biggest military appreciation event in the city’s history.
Nina Berman is the author of Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq and Homeland and is a member of the NOOR photo collective.
Adonis Diaries 