It’s a truly scary collection on Yahoo! Movies. The Web site’s “Winter Horror Guide” includes some spooky spellings and terrifying typos, starting with the undercapitalized States and extraneous quotation mark:

Was it creepy carelessness that led to the mangling of Willem Dafoe?

and Benicio Del Toro?

The lack of consistency when it comes to treating movie titles is frightful:

Why use quotation marks around some, but not all, titles? And how does a supposed movie maven misspell Freddy Krueger’s first and last name?

Oh, the horrors!

I’ve often contemplated going vegetarian. I really don’t eat all that much meat as it is, and I really don’t think I’d miss it all that much.

I tried it for a while a few years back, but it never stuck. I think I missed certain foods. Bacon, for example. MMMMM, bacon and eggs. Yum.

Daydreaming aside, I come from a family which doesn’t cook meat heavy meals. In fact, my mother could quite happily stop tomorrow. My girlfriend is a vegetarian so I’m being slowly being pushed into becoming a herbivore.

Now, if I am to live up to my eco-credentials (as aspirations of eco-friendliness), maybe it’s the only way forward.

Indeed, all this week, and in the run up to the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, the BBC World Service is broadcasting a series called “The Climate Connection“.

The series follows five young people as they explore an issue they believe to be at the heart of the climate change debate. The participants come from all parts of the world and they look at potential solutions to the present crisis.

The series is in partnership with the Open University and their “Creative Climate” project. I’ll leave you to discover more about that if you wish. Just click here.

Tonight’s episode was titled “Does the World Need Meat” and followed a young American student from Columbia University in New York.

Together with the presenter she criss-crossed the United Sates in search of answers to that very question.

I thought it was a really interesting programme that took a very balanced approach and examined each side of the argument in equal measure. It did not try to impose a particular view on the listener in what can be a heated debate.

In fact, the “Climate Connection” series has so far been fair to all sides as it looks at quite contentious subject matters that divide opinion.

Why America? Well, if there was ever an avid meat eating nation, this is it. This is the country that chomped its way through millions upon millions of bison, driving it close to extinction, and continues to worship the cow, especially when it is on their plates.

10 billion animals are killed every year in the United Sates in order to feed their voracious and ever growing appetite for all things sanguine.

Of course, unashamed meat consumption is not limited to the US. Such is the demand that one third of the planet is devoted to rearing livestock and demand is expected to double by 2050.

At present, livestock accounts for 18% of global emissions. In the US, that figure is 2.8%. If you have read one of my previous posts, cows et al burp methane and this causes global warming.

The level of burping has a lot to do with the synthetic grain they are fed. Indeed, if you modify their diet, the burps decrease.

Anyway, in the States, the vast majority of cattle are raised in pens and fed on corn. Makes for a tastier animal apparently. Grass just doesn’t cut it (no pun intended).

And there are estimated to be 9.5 million cattle in such pens, or feed lots as they are also known.

What was interesting was the range of views we got in the programme. We heard from both sides of the debate, starting with the staunch defenders of the meat industry. We heard from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the ‘voice’ of beef industry as their Chief Environmental Counsel described it. Keen to point out that livestock produce only 2.8% of the US emissions, she was defensive when the presenter put it to her that the intensive raising of cattle was unnatural.

The American Farm Bureau, the largest farm lobby group in the US, argued that the US is the most efficient food producer in the world and attempting to regulate the industry through stricter standards would only have the effect of moving production to other, less efficient, parts of the world with the net result that the methane footprint would invariably increase.

Their president declared that the war raging between the meat eaters and the herbivores in the US is a pointless one

We like our hamburgers. We like our steaks, We like our chicken. We like our bacon in the morning and I don’t see that changing in the near future

I am inclined to agree with the naysayers. Nevin Cohen, from the New School in New York, said that their is a fatal flaw in the lobbyists’ argument. They fail to account for the vast swathes of rainforest in South America that is destroyed to make way for the soy plantations that feed the cattle. This raises CO2 levels.

Transporting the grain to the US and elsewhere raises CO2 levels.

As a result, the meat industry has a carbon footprint of rather large proportions.

Perhaps we do, as consumers, need to change our eating habits. Perhaps policy makers need to change policies. Yet, as the economic situation of a country improves, so does its meat consumption.

Maybe Pedro Sanchez of the Earth Institute at Columbia University is right..the American way of producing beef is sick. Through unnatural practices, the US is producing fatty beef by feeding them grain after grain. The world needs meat, but we must do it right. We have to use intelligent farming practices.

The problems associated with large scale soy farming in South America are well known. It is saddening to see hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest being cut down to feed the world’s appetite for meat and other agricultural products.

In its drive to become an agricultural giant, Brazil is plowing one of its most precious resources – the Amazon. We are talking farms the size of large English counties. They are now the world’s largest supplier of soybean and the country could soon replace the American heartlands when it comes to food production.

National Geographic covered the problem in typically excellent fashion.

So, the environmental arguments against meat eating are quite plain to see.

Will the world wake up tomorrow and turn vegetarian? No. People love their meat and will not stop eating it.

Can we modify our farming practices? Perhaps. I leave that to the experts.

More importantly, could alternative methods meet the ever growing demand for meat. Maybe only intensive farming would satisfy it.

I do believe that governments would be reluctant to do away with existing practices, if only for economic reasons. As we have seen, cattle farming in the US is a gargantuan operation with powerful lobbyists supporting it all the way up the steps to Capitol Hill.

Likewise, as much as Brazil would like to increase their eco-standing in the world, soybean farming will continue regardless. Why stop? There is a worldwide demand for the commodity.

If you would like to listen to the programme, click on the link below.

Does the World Need Meat?

P.S. If you have read this far, well done. Note to self: rant less and keep the posts short.

best and at the same time most tl;dr interview i’ve ever!!! i mean, proportionally, i feel like it’s a bit like obama’s last march speech on the race issue, no disrespect to obama or to the race issue or to the gay issue or …whatever. it explained things to me, and articulated things about discrimination, barriers, evolving mentalities…and framed the personality of the ’speaker’ in a very good manner. i do wish he would shut up sometimes, but then again, why?  i want to know what he’s got to say – and if it involves TMI, huh. okay, i am overwhelmed and have no original thoughts at this hour. but seriously! seriouslyyyyy!

part 1: http://www.out.com/detail.asp?id=26191

part 2: http://www.out.com/detail.asp?page=3&id=26192

We just got back from a super fun weekend in LA.  We went down to see the Huskies play UCLA – which was really just an excuse to go to Cali to visit Kevin’s friends (also Husky alums).  Holy smokes, these LA Dawg fans are no joke.  We ended up on a school bus (yes, you read me right, I said a school bus.  like for kindergarteners.) with 80 other Huskies, confident, happy, drinking our breakfast, crammed three to a seat with paralyzed knees from jamming them into the seat in front and no bathroom.  It didn’t matter.  We were headed to the Rose Bowl to beat the Weasel!  Fast forward three hours later…defeat.   A very sad game and long, traffic filled, bus ride home.

Thank goodness for Disneyland!  Where all your worries are left behind (nevermind that we went Friday and the game was on Saturday).  I haven’t been since the fifth grade and it was as magical as I remember.  We were blessed with Disneyland expert guides, free tickets, little to no lines (I guess a 30 minute wait constitutes ”no lines”) and a beautiful day.  We hit Space Mountain first, our Disney guides favorite, grabbed a fast pass and waited in the short line.  We ended up riding it three times, without cheating, in less than an hour which we are told could quite possibly put us in the Guinness Book of World Records.  That set the pace for the rest of the day.  Bouncing from ride to ride, park to park (California Adventure didn’t exist my last visit) and meeting our favorite characters.  They were slowly starting to put up Christmas decorations, which I LOVED.  We rode the “ride this ride last because you’ll crap your pants and nobody wants to walk around all day with crappy pants” ride – and did not crap our pants.  And got SOAKED at Splash Mountain.  We thought we were so smart by sitting in the middle.  The middle happens to have water spill over and soak you.  Not splash.  Soak.  My entire right leg, butt and shoe were soaked for hours…but it was my favorite!

We had such a good time as big kids.  I can see why parents get so excited to take their little kids.  The kids were sooo happy.  They really were on cloud nine.  And so much fun for us to watch.  I thought often about Alli meeting all the Princesses and how much she would love all the rides.  When we go back, it might not be free (oh by the way, tickets are up to $97/day for a park hopper pass.  Yeah.  HOLY freakin’ CRAP!  Plus food and souveniers….enough to go broke.) but we now know to go mid-week in November to get your money’s worth!  If I had to wait 110 minutes for a ride, I’m pretty sure I would not be able to smile at the happiest place on earth.

Another magical weekend with awesome friends!  We’ll get ‘em next year, Dawgs!

Wednesday, November 11th, The Kyber hosts a wicked rock show featuring; Sex Office, Hair Rocket, Acres of Diamonds, and The States.

The States

Hair Rocket

Acres Of Diamonds

The Catholic Church has been busy getting involved in US politics in the last few weeks. The Church’s decisions, however, are incompatible with a ‘big tent’ strategy aimed at growing membership. Like the Republican Party, the Catholic Church’s move towards ideological purity risks further alienating the moderate parishioners it needs to grow.

The Catholic Church: a public campaign against gay marriage and abortion

First we had reports from Maine that Bishop Malone of Portland, ME was a leader in the Yes on Question 1 campaign that would overturn gay marriage in the state. The Bishop stuffed church bulletins with anti-gay marriage messages six Sundays in a row before the vote. He sent directives to his priests to preach in favor of traditional marriage before the vote, and a DVD he produced arguing against gay marriage was shown in every parish. The diocese ended up giving well over a half million dollars to the Yes on 1 campaign. After Question 1 passed on Election Day and gay marriage was repealed, Archbishop Kurtz, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, let the world know that the broader Catholic Church was extremely supportive of Bishop Malone’s actions in Maine, expressing his “deep gratitude” to the bishop and praising the voters for reaffirming the “truth of marriage”.

The Archbishop’s comments are strange for two reasons. First, Question 1 was not a question of fact. No one was voting on the question: “True or False: marriage is spelled M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E.” In America, we don’t vote on matters of fact: those are resolved by observation, not majority rule. We vote on matters of policy, as defined by the will of the people. Question 1 was really about

Secondly, and even stranger, was the Church’s decision to become so publicly involved with Question 1 in the first place. The Church made a similarly-aggressive decision to intervene in the debate in the US Congress about the health care bill. Politico reports that “priests and bishops were calling members to lobby for stricter language to limit abortion coverage,” and that the Church was an important reason why Bart Stupak’s Amendment (which bans private insurers participating in the health exchanges from funding abortions) came to the floor and passed in the House.

The Catholic Church and political parties: a little decision theory

The Catholic Church’s decision to assert its socially-conservative views  so publicly in debates on US domestic policy is a little odd, given the demographic pressure the Church is facing. The latest American Religious Identification Survey shows the percentage of US adults calling themselves catholic has fallen from 26.2% in 1990 to 25.1% in 2008. The fall is not as dramatic as the decline of identification with mainline Protestant churches, but the Catholic Church certainly sees the writing on the wall and is concerned that a growing movement towards atheism and unaffiliated status will lead to a long-term decline in attendance, donations, and influence similar to the Church’s fall in Europe.

A church, much like a political party, faces the choice of advocating its central principles and demanding unanimity of belief, or expanding membership by accepting diversity within a “big tent” strategy. The decision is a complicated one, and at least in the case of political parties, it hinges on whether the party is in power or in the minority. As Newt Gingrich is arguing for the Republicans, the party out of power will do best if it pursues a “big tent” strategy and welcomes in new members who may not agree 100% with the party line. That’s what the Democrats did after their big losses in 2000 and 2002, and it led to big successes in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It is only when a political party is in power that it makes sense to insist on party unity, as the Democrats are finding out these days. That’s when a party has the ability to actually change the outcome and make a real difference in people’s beliefs and actions, and it makes sense to sacrifice some electoral appeal in order to remain true to the party’s principles.

The Church: going for the small, unanimous tent

In a time when the Church is facing declining membership as a proportion of the population, it ought to start thinking like a political party out of power. How can the Church compete for those marginal believers in other traditions or the growing number of non-believers and unaffiliateds? The answer would seem to be to pursue a Big Tent strategy – and that is what at first glance the Church has done by creating a path for easier conversion for disenchanted Anglicans.

However, any good will this move may have bought the church is threatened by its aggressive actions on the political front. Bishop Malone and the rest of the US bishops are in effect narrowing the acceptable range of belief within the Church by telling their parishioners that in order to be good Catholics they must oppose abortion and gay marriage. These happen to be very divisive issues amongst parishioners, with 65% of non-practicing Catholics and 35% of practicing Catholics describing themselves as ‘pro-choice’ on abortion. On the question of gay marriage,  46% of non-practicing Catholics and 25% of practicing Catholics do not oppose gay marriage.

If the Church really wanted to increase attendance at mass, it might avoid publicly antagonizing its dissenting members. It could even do this without sacrificing its anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion ideals. There is a difference between attending a church that disagrees with some your personal political convictions but otherwise lines up with your ideals, and attending a church that insists you can’t be a member because of some of your deeply-held beliefs.  Parishioners may be willing to tolerate a Catholic hierarchy that disagrees with their voting behavior, but it’s harder to sit in a pew being told that you can’t vote a certain way. Instead of driving away the marginal parishioners, why not welcome them in and try to persuade them to change their views?

In the end, the Catholic Church’s US strategy seems to be very similar to the Republicans’ strategy (despite Gingrich’s best efforts to the contrary): drive out the moderates and forget trying to grow. On the one hand it opens its doors to the Anglicans and on the other slams them shut to its own parishioners who are also social liberals. From the standpoint of ideological purity, this makes sense: the Anglicans who are welcomed are also staunchly anti-gay, and the median churchgoer will likely be more socially conservative as a result. However, from the standpoint of church growth, these decisions are likely to speed up the process of disenchantment that is already underway in the US.

If the Church or the Republican Party want to remain relevant this century, they’re going to have to start thinking more strategically about the requirements they put on membership.

i’m a horrible liar. i’m also a horrible blog artist. it’s why these never last for me. i used to be an avid journal keeper back in the day. but mam used to like reading it so that came to a halt and it’s never recovered. but i’m determined to make it work, damn it.

so i’m back in ottawa. which is slowly crushing my soul. friends are keeping me occupied, thank god. but late at night when i’m alone with my loud mouth brain, life turns sucky. still havent forgiven my family, which makes living in this house hell as well. i feel bad for them sometimes, since i’m a bitch and they have to put up with it, but for the most part i can’t work up even an inkling of remorse or pity. i am a little embarrassed how i sort’ve just aired my dirty laundry. or at least that part of my life. im usually quite closed in about thoughts and feelings, so i do apologize. i guess it needed airing. it does make me feel better, though, that i’m not the only one who’s noticed some things that’re off with how they are. back at the dreaded old school thing. and back at the dreaded old pier 1 as well. i’m thinking about sprucing up my resume this week, though. hand it out to a few restaurants. see if i’m hireable. which is definitely questionable. and boys… well. we’ll leave it at that for now.

hejah got engaged which brings me immense joy for her. i met last weekend. i needed to get the hell out and hejah wanted to see adam and behold! a plan! we drove down the thursday. so october 29th. i hate boston drivers, p.s. but im a fan of boston itself. the architecture alone is phenom. we did salem on the friday. i could barely contain the excitement that was spewing inside of me. huuuggeee tourist trap, i was well aware but oh my. the town is absolutely adorable and old and full of bustle and eccentrics. my heart was a’flutter the whole time. meeting adam was beyond bizarre. we’re twins. it was like i was joking, laughing, talking, dancing, getting drunk with a mirror. it really was surreal. and i see how hellish it is to fight with me because he’s pretty fucking annoying to argue with. and heather gets put in her place. often. which is amazing to see. and i love how he does it. it’s sharp and strong and gets her attention. so i’m definitely more at ease now, having met him, that they’re getting married. i can see them lasting now. although this is me and i see any marriage doomed to fail let’s be honest. but i have higher hopes for them. but above all, i was really happy to get away. i dreaded the feeling that came over me when i drove onto the 401. meant i was about 45 minutes away from the house. it was a feeling of panic, and insides collapsing and dread and utter emptiness and despair. which is horrendous. i was quite intimate with a form of this feeling for a long time, many years ago. im terrified at how it’s almost comfortably settling back in. how it knows the nicks and crannies of my entire being. terrified. but two more months and ill be moving out of here and onto some place new. and some place new after that. i’ll be fine, i’ll be fine, i’ll be fine. i hear if you say things three times, it happens/becomes true. here’s hoping.

Since capital punishment was resumed in 1976, 1,174 convicted criminals have been executed by state governments in the US.  About three times as many, or another 3,297, were waiting on Death Row to be executed as of the beginning of 2009. With each capital case, the governor has the opportunity to review the case and either execute the prisoner or granting clemency or a pardon and spare the prisoner’s life. Must be a tough decision. One thousand, one hundred seventy-four times in the past 30 odd years, a governor has had the opportunity to spare life but instead decided to go ahead with the execution. And being a governor is only going to get harder, with many more life and death decisions coming to her or his desk in the coming decades.

Setting aside the question of capital punishment itself, we can all agree that the clemency/pardon review should be a gut-wrenching process for a governor, and one that any executive should approach with the proper perspective. No one wants to deal with life and death cavalierly. But looking at history, how seriously do governors actually take their duties when it comes to executing convicted felons?

First comes the easy part. Why should governors take the death penalty review process seriously? Because no one wants to kill an innocent man. The scores and scores of people wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death, and only later exonerated before being murdered by the state should give any governor pause to consider that, just maybe, the particular case on their desk may have slipped through the cracks. Even the most bloodthirsty politician can’t very well use the old saying that “to make an omelet you gotta crack a few eggs” when talking about murdering an innocent citizen. But even assuming the felon’s guilt, their ought to be a certain sense of decorum and duty when deciding whether to kill a man or put him in jail for life. We’re not Soviet Russia after all. But how do governors actually behave?

Looking at the record, there seem to be about 4 different perspectives that a governor can take on the review process:

• The tough-as-nails defender of the public from the scum of the earth.

Exemplar: Texas Governor Rick Perry (R).  The New Yorker last month ran an in-depth look at Mr. Todd Willingham’s conviction and subsequent execution for supposedly burning his house down on top of his daughters’ heads. Apparently the two key pieces of evidence in his trial were a jailhouse informant who later recanted and forensics evidence from a ‘fire investigator’ whose conclusions in the case were later shown to be entirely unfounded. Perry went ahead and executed Willingham, as he has over 200 other prisoners in his time as governor, without seeming to give the Willingham case much thought. But then word got out that Todd Willingham may likely have been innocent of his crime. A government panel was organized to review the forensic evidence in the case, but a few days before the panel convened, Governor Perry dismissed several panel members, essentially closing the investigation. Calling the investigation “a waste of money“, Perry went on to say that Willingham was “a monster” and his guilt had been proven time and again. Oh really? Then why are so many prominent fire investigators contradicting the finding that the fire was arson? And if he’s clearly guilty, then why not let the panel conclude that and put the matter to rest? Sometimes it seems like Gov. Perry isn’t concerned with doing justice, and would rather not be bothered by the details. It takes a special kind of hubris to be so sure based on such little evidence. The Dallas Morning News calls it a “political blunder“, but isn’t the bigger point that we should consider this an ethical blunder a breach of the governor’s public duty to seek justice?

Here’s a hint to other governors: if you’ve executed 200 people but only ever commuted the sentence of 1 without having to be told to by a court of law, then maybe you aren’t taking your job seriously enough.

• The public official performing his solemn duty.

Exemplar: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). Schwarzenegger was born in a staunchly anti-death penalty village in Austria, and his village voiced its disapproval of Schwarzenegger’s approval of the death penalty during his time as governor. Responding to his fellow villagers, Schwarzenegger explained,  “The death penalty is law here, and I have to uphold the law of the land and the will of the people.” When the case of Crips founder Tookie Williams came to his desk in 2005, Schwarzenegger went through a serious and lengthy review process, calling counsel into a private meeting to discuss the particulars of the request for clemency. Schwarzenegger is no softie for criminals – he allowed the Williams execution to proceed, and continues to profess his belief that the death penalty is a necessary and effective deterrent. The defining different between Schwarzenegger and his fellow Republican Rick Perry is that the California Governator is actively engaged in the review cases that fall on his desk. Which is really the basic minimum we should all demand of our governors.

• The tortured soul following the law.

Exemplar: Virginia Governor Tim Kaine (D). During his first campaign for governor, Kaine was attacked by his opponent for not supporting the death penalty. In his religiously-charged response, Kaine explained, “My faith teaches me life is sacred, I personally oppose the death penalty. But I take my oath of office seriously and I’ll enforce the death penalty.” It’s the sort of nuanced opinion that rarely gets put forward by a campaign during a heated electoral battle, but Kaine was elected anyway. One might wonder why he would want to put himself in such a difficult personal situation, but he did. During his term so far, Kaine has approved the execution of 9 people, and though he seems to hav eseriously grappled with each review case, e also made no serious attempt to convince the people of Virginia to limit the application of the death penalty.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) takes the ‘tortured soul’ paradigm a step further than Kaine, publishing an anti-death penalty op-ed in the Washington Post that invoked the cause of human dignity in stopping state-sanctioned killing. O’Malley later convinced the legislature to reduce the scope of the death penalty, and O’Malley writes that Maryland now has one of the most restrictive death penalties among death penalty states.

• The conscientious objector

Exemplar: Former Illinois Governor George Ryan (R, 1999-2003). Ryan, knowing full-well that his Republican base was likely to vigorously protest, introduced a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois in 2000, noting that at the time the state had executed 12 men since 1976, but had been forced to release and exhonerate 13 Death Row inmates based on further evidence of their innocence. That’s not a good track record for a justice system, and Ryan felt unable to put a convict to death knowing that there was a chance he or she was not guilty. When he left office in 2003, Ryan created a political firestorm by commuting all Death Row inmates’ sentences to life in prison, pardoning four others. Ryan came under attack from conservatives for what they called hubris,with Pat Buchanan calling his actions “pathetic“. For most sane observers, like me, however, Ryan’s actions seemed meritorious precisely because they were likely to be unpopular. That’s the mark of a governor truly grappling with the issues involved (a stark contrast from Rick “off with their heads” Perry).

So where do most governors fall among the four archetypes? It’s hard to say, given that most governors try to say as little as possible about their deliberations on specific review cases. But I would hope that whether you are pro-death penalty or anti-death penalty, we can at least agree that the way in which the government deliberates on each case matters. There is a proper perspective that all serious adults should have when making life and death decisions. And it seems like governors from Schwarzenegger to Ryan are at least trying to come to grips with the serious moral and legal issues involved. And hopefully, some day not too many years down the road, we will all agree that America’s public discourse has no room for the hubris of Governor Rick Perry.