Hot on the tails of my last vegetarian post, I learn the City of Ghent has a weekly “Veggie Day”:
The Flemish city of Ghent has designated every Thursday as “Veggiedag” — Veggie Day — calling for meat-free meals to be served in schools and public buildings, and encouraging vegetarianism among citizens by promoting vegetarian eateries and offering advice on how to follow a herbivorous diet.
(h/t Caroline, who got it from here.) If you read the article, the day is (predictably) not gaining full compliance from its meatier citizens. But as a public awareness campaign, this is a great step. Imagine if New York declared a meatless day once a week. Sure, millions of people would ignore it, but even a few thousand conscientious meat-eaters might participate. I’m thinking of the kind of consumer who has considered the ethics of their diet but lacked the drive to forgo meat entirely. I’m thinking the impact would be noticed pretty quickly.
Of course, I think it would have at least as large an effect (likely larger) if people starting avoiding corn-fed livestock and eating beef only when it was grass-fed, but until that becomes even a remote likelihood, veggie days wouldn’t be that bad of quick fix.
Apparently Americans United for Change is now running an ad pressing Arlen Specter to vote for the bailout in Pennsylvania (via TPM, as usual). Its worth a listen – the ad plays the Limbaugh “I hope he fails” soundbite and frames the party-line House vote as Republicans voting against job creation. That’s obviously an over-simplification, but the House Republican response also strikes me as disingenuous (to the extent that response is “No more tax cuts? What happened to bipartisanship?”).
Specter is getting a fair bit of attention as the bill moves to the Senate, although this seems in part to be motivated by speculations that Senate Republicans may filibuster the bailout. This seems fairly unlikely to me, for the simple reason that a “no” vote against a bill that is certain to pass anyway comes at little present cost to a Congressperson, with the potential for substantial gain if the recession continues to the midterm elections. It’s a gamble, but one where it’s cheap to buy in. A filibuster would attract considerably more media attention than even the vote yesterday, and any of the 40 Senate Republicans who feels even a little vulnerable probably wouldn’t have the temerity. But more than that, I doubt that a Senator like John McCain, who isn’t fearing for his Senate seat, would care to create the spectacle of a filibuster when a simple “no” vote would get the point across.
President Barack Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.
Less than 24 hours in office and already I think it’s safe to say Obama is a better president than his predecessor. Via TPM I learn that Obama ordered Guantanamo prosecutors to seek a 120-day halt in pending war crimes trials. Now that’s not rescuing the American dream (or for that matter, even as good as ordering a more permanent cessation), but it’s a good start for day one. It also got me thinking, what did Bush do on his first day of office?
Apparently, Chief of Staff Andrew Card wrote a memo to the heads of various agencies ordering them to “put on hold dozens of regulations passed by the Clinton administration.” These included “lowering arsenic levels in drinking water; reducing the release of raw sewage into rivers and streams; setting limits on logging, drilling, and mining on public lands; increasing energy efficiency standards; and banning snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.” This fuller account of the arsenic regulations explains that public outcry led the EPA to form new expert panels that “reached conclusions supporting an even more stringent standard” than the one Clinton had proposed (and the Bush administration sought to roll back). So less than a day in office and a Bush appointee was already trying to undermine regulations that administrative procedures proved to be justified. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that suspending prosecutions at Guantanamo won’t look as bad in retrospect.
Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that both McCain and Obama said “lipstick on a pig” before. I think it’s more than likely that Obama was at least primed to use that line by the pitbull-hockey mom joke last week. But in what respect is Obama’s use of this line sexist or an attempt to “play the gender card”? The context makes it clear that the primary meaning was an analogy for McCain dressing up his policies as ‘change’:
“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”
I know you’ve heard about this, and you’ve read about it, and you’ve seen clips, and you’ve read the transcript. Most of you have probably watched the whole thing. But if you haven’t then please, please do.
If you can watch that, and read things like this and this, and not want desperately for the man to lead the country for the next four years, then I don’t know what to tell you. Except maybe that we can’t be friends anymore.
I’m not sure if it was something in my dinner tonight or if Nature is just really funny this week. A few noteworthy picks:
How can you tell that I’m never going to make it as a scientist? One clue is that my favorite part of Nature is “Sidelines,” a feature which runs alongside their news section and includes random bits of information such as
11,000 is the number of potential names suggested for the migrating whales being tracked as part of Greenpeace International’s campaign to save them. Supporters can vote online for their favourites.
75% is the proportion of voters who chose ‘Mister Splashy Pants’ as their preferred name.
It turns out that boingboing has already covered this bit of Internet awesomeness, and there are no fewer than five Facebook groups devoted to the aquatic hero. Greenpeace owes the person who submitted this name to the contest big, because it clearly raised the profile of this conservation effort tremendously. The only question is, how many people who clicked the button to vote for this name also bothered to find out what the campaign is about?
Belle Waring at Crooked Timber links to a couple of posts about a woman who was raped and murdered in New York City last week. The first post is about how the New York Post changed the victim’s eye color to make the story seem more racially charged. The second — by Amanda at Pandagon — is a response to the general trend of the comments to the first, and in particular a number of attempts to blame the victim. Apparently it’s her fault because she should have known better than to go out partying.
Amanda’s post is great, which is typical for her, except that the pentultimate paragraph starts like this:
The guy who killed Moore threw her body in the trash like it was a Kleenex. He did that because he lives in a society that endorses treating women like less than human beings but simply masturbation toys and/or baby incubators for male use.
Really? Are you sure? Because I’m thinking maybe it’s because he’s a sociopath. I agree that, to some extent, we live in such a society as she describes, and that this is a bad thing. But is that really all you think is going on in this case?
[A short pause while Todd goes off and reads the comments at Crooked Timber.]
Damnit. It looks like my points have already been made.
Once:
As to “how society perpetuates rape,” I’m equally at a loss: I don’t think stranger rapes are any less disfavored in society than bank robbery, and yet people still commit bank robbery. I don’t know how I would comment on the proposition that “society perpetuates bank robbery.” This is not to say that you couldn’t have a more particularized discussion about aspects of misogynistic violence and its social background—Catharine MacKinnon, for one, has a lot to say about that—but it seems unlikely that a particular case of stranger-rape/murder would provide an useful or interesting angle on that subject.
And again:
From the Pandagon post: [Quotes the same sentences I did]This is bullshit with a captial ‘B’. The guy who killed Moore wasn’t only a rapist and murderer—he had a long criminal record. Did he commit his earlier robberies because ‘he lives in a society that endorses treating passersby like ATM machines’? No—he committed all of his crimes because he just didn’t give a damn what society endorsed or condemned.
Personally, I’ll settle for a lowercase ‘b’.
And then, less than 24 hours after my flight, Beirut International Airport is bombed. I wish there were actually something funny to say about this.