Why it's green to go veggie

Raising cattle is one of the most damaging components of agriculture*4. They cause the most environmental damage of any non-human species through over-grazing, soil erosion, desertification and tropical deforestation for ranches, in addition to their gaseous emissions and manure products. Studies on world food security estimate that an affluent diet containing meat requires up to 3 times as many resources as a vegetarian diet*5.

(Vegetarian Society http://www.vegsoc.org/environment/index.html )

A good reason for me to try harder to go back to being vegetarian, or at least a more responsible meat and fish-eater. The best reason, prehaps.

Zorba The Greek

Came across these that i had scribbled down after reading Zorba. No page numbers.

'Have you noticed, boss, everything good in this world is an invention of the devil? Pretty women, spring, roast suckling, wine - the devil made them all! God made monks, fasting, chamomile tea and ugly women.....pooh.'

'As a child...I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word "eternity" and into quite a number of other words too - "love", "hope", "country", 'god". As each word was conquered and left behind, I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress.'

london

I came back from London feeling very glad I don't live there. Some people were wonderful - people on the CAAT demonstration - Oh including a beautiful unassuming fellow with his painting of a mountain and a molehill who I walked back to the station with. He put up with school kids jeering at him and was very concerned about our safety when crossing roads. Policetoo were on the whole happy to be engaged in talk which surprised me. I asked one what he thought about the arms fair - he said he had no idea what happened in there either. I asked him what he thought about the protest and he said he felt it had gone well so far. He said demonstrating peacefully like we were meant there was no need for it to be difficult (hmm). I asked him if he had enjoyed the speeches and he said yes. I asked him if policemen are allowed to choose which demonstrations they policed, and if they could ask not to police one if they sympathised with the demonstrators (purposely naive) - he said no, they couldn't do that, he said their job wasn't to ask questions but to go where they were told to. We also talked about the weather, and how uncomfortable his clothes must be (4 or 5 layers including bullet proof jacket) in this heat and he said it was awful! I wonder if he would have found it harder to hit me with a batton later if it had all got rowdy, i mean - does talkoiing to someone a bit make it harder to be pushy with them later? I bet it does. We actually realise we are all human.

Oh - yes - disappointing people - racist taxi driver - apparently I shouldn't ask black people anything because they always lie. Disgraceful!

Another man who completely ignored me when i asked a polite question. I was shocked. Not even a grunt in response. Who are these people? In Sheffield people respond with lots of extra words on top of the expected ones.

I enjoyed the march though - there was a feeling of victory about it. Mark Thomas was with oomph.

Brown doing something different?

This is an article on Open Democracy. It says Brown is using different language to Blair and Bush when talking about Iraq and terrorism. It says he is adopting a new style which is not as in keeping with Bush as Bush might like.

This is good. I hope it is the start of something even better. He is still backing Trident though.

http://xkcd.com/310/

Dawkins - The God Delusion

There was one place I felt Dawkins didn't follow through with the argument enough for me to feel satisfied. He says:

'In our hypothetical tribe, imagine a single self-interested warrior in an army dominated by aspiring martyrs eager to die for the tribe and earn a heavenly reward. He will be only slightly less likely to end up on the winning side as a result of hanging back in the battle to save his own skin. The martyrdom of his comrades will benefit him more than it benefits each one of them on avarage, because they will be dead. He is more likely to reproduce than they are, and his genes for refusing to be martyred are more likely to be reproduced into the next generation. Hence tendencies towards martyrdom will decline in future generations.'

p. 170-171, The God Delusion

I am not at all qualified to comment on this really. But, anyway - I have a problem with 2 things: 1. Are we sure that martyrdom in humans is more about genes than environment, or than a combination? I know he hasn't said that, but he still puts the argument too simply. Martyrs may inspire their relatives not to be martyrs when they see the great load of death. They might be more likely to be martyrs so they can honour their ancestors. The child of a selfish parent who hung back may be shamed and choose martyrdom herself. This feels wooly but it wasn't in my head. 2. He says that tendencies towards martyrdom will decline in future generations - how can this be? Surely there would be an up and down cycle of more, then less, then more martrys/ non-martrys.... I mean, If you start to get lots of selfish,, non-martrys in a population (because the martyrs are dying to young to make babies) then eventually that population will lose the collective benefit that martyrdome brought and the population will be under greater threat. Those who do not work together may be more likely to be killed, and thus the numbers of martyrs (willing to put themselves at risk for the greater benefit) should rise again...on and on repeatedly.

Perhaps I have just missed something.

Dawkins - The God Delusion

This is full of metaphors which help me understand. I particularly liked the idea of an arch to help understand things which seem 'irreducibly complex' from a natural selection point of view. Dawkins writes that the arch will collapse if we remove one stone, so it is hard to understand how it was ever built. This is the argument used by some Christians who find life-forms which have parts or mechanisms which don't seems to fit the bit by bit natural selection theory because the thing only functions with all the bits in place at once. Dawkins helps us to see that the arch could have been build using scaffolding, or by making a pile of stones first and removing them one by one (the same thing as scaffolding i think). All those bits could have arrived because they were attached to other parts or other functions.

I also think the wonderfulness of our being here is truly celebrated by Dawkins in this book.

He does seem a bit childishly snide of people with who he disagrees. They must have fought back somewhere.