Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was Charlie Chaplin’s first true ‘talking picture.’ A humorous film based on the age-old comedic concept of mistaken identity, it nonetheless has serious overtones in its parody of despots like Hitler, making it a welcome addition to the UK/US propaganda machine of the day.
One might suppose that such a film would be well past its sell-by date by now, but not so – the final speech might have been written today, touching as it does the modern zeitgeist and growing universal desire for change on a global scale. I remember seeing the film decades ago, and of course the final speech was no doubt lost on me at the time. So my thanks to Shunkaha Wanagi (@LisaGSD) for reminding me. Despite some of the sentiments being a little ‘of their time,’ this is still a relevant battle-cry for humanity at the edge of the precipice. So, making allowances for some of the rhetoric and odd bit of political or ecological correctness, enjoy the essence of the message that we the people need to wake up. So here is the text, with a link to a good YouTube clip for those who want pictures too . . .
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible – Jew, Gentile, black man, white . . .
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.
Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say, “Do not despair.”
The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don’t give yourself to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder!
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate!
Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written, “ThekingdomofGodis withinMan.” Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power.
Let us all unite.
Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil their promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!
Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance!
Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsgaFKwUA6g
A conversation between Blackadder and Baldrick . . .
(with thanks to Chris and Peppa Tolley and whoever they got this from)
Baldrick: What I want to know, sir, is before there was a Euro there were lots of different types of money that different people used. And now there’s one type of money that the foreign people use. And what I want to know is, how did we get from one state of affairs to the other state of affairs?
Blackadder: Baldrick – do you mean how did the Euro start?
Baldrick: Yes sir.
Blackadder: Well, you see Baldrick, back in the 1980s there were many different countries all running their own finances and all using different kinds of money. On the one hand you had the major economies ofFrance,Belgium,Holland andGermany, and on the other you had the weaker nations likeSpain,Portugal,Italy,Greece andIreland. They got together and decided it would be much easier for everyone if they could all use the same money, have one central bank and belong to one big club where everyone would be happy. This meant that there could never be a situation where financial meltdown would lead to social unrest, crises and wars.
Baldrick: But this is a sort of crisis now isn’t it sir?
Blackaddder: That’s right Baldrick. You see, there was just one slight flaw with this plan.
Baldrick: What was that then sir?
Blackadder: It was complete bollocks.
There is a lot of talk at the moment about fracking, or ‘induced hydraulic fracturing,’ as it is more formally known in the oil and gas industry. It is a way of releasing natural gas trapped in rock layers far below the surface. It is contentious, difficult, expensive, energy-inefficient and resource-hungry, using anything up to 3 million gallons of water per well at the high volume end of extraction. Yet the industry is keen to instigate a sharp rise in fracking activity around the globe. Why is that? The answer is clear: the oil industry knows that crude oil is running out.
The discovery, extraction and consumption of crude oil have accelerated the growth of our consumer society with rocket speed over the last hundred years or so. Naively, it was assumed that anything that gushed from the ground in such copious quantities was never going to run out. Everyone piled onto the gravy train – oil producers, manufacturers, investors and consumers alike. “You’ve never had it so good,” was the euphoric message of the 20th Century. But the party’s over. The oil is running out, and so the mad dash is underway to find alternative sources of energy before the gravy train hits the buffers.
Nowhere along the way did anyone on the train stop to think that there is no such thing as an unlimited resource on a finite planet or, if anyone did, it was only to add, “But the planet is huge – we can keep going for 10,000 years.” Now the grim reaper waits for the demise of the last great civilisation. Most of our major so-called ‘resources’ will run out in the lifetime of children born today. Despite this knowledge being out there, however, it still seems as if there is very little understanding of the seriousness of such a challenge or how it came about. I have already looked at this in my post of 18th April (The Steep Rise to Oblivion), but I just want to highlight some figures in a bit more detail.
Albert Bartlett’s lecture on the principles of exponential growth is as clear and concise as it is sobering, but it obviously also hits everyone’s blind spot, because most people probably still believe that technology will find a way to solve all our problems. I am sure that technology will indeed continue to come up with some brilliant ideas, but even technology cannot create a solution to an economic model based on infinite growth with finite resources.
Exponential growth shows us some arithmetically irrefutable calculations that illustrate what’s really going on. As I mentioned in the first blog on this subject, one of the principles of exponential growth is that the number for each ‘doubling’ is greater than all of the previous numbers put together. So, looking at oil consumption, what do we see? Firstly, we see numerous attempts to evaluate the challenge of dwindling reserves, some optimistic, others quite the opposite. With a plethora of data ranging from precise geological surveys to wildly inaccurate postulations by uninformed government ministers, we have a lot of figures to look at. Working with data provided by what we might deem a reliable source (BP and other oil exploration companies), what appears fairly clear is that reserves of oil were estimated in 2008 to be around 1250 billion barrels, and that figure remains today. Against that we must plot current consumption of 31.9 billion barrels a year (BP’s figure).
Divide the reserves by current annual production and the answer is 39.18. Thus the known reserves of oil will last less than forty years, provided no new fields are found and demand remains at zero growth. New fields are being found, but not of any significant size. For example, the last enormous discovery, the Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea, was made in 2000 and estimated to hold around 20 billion barrels. Twenty billion barrels sounds a lot but it would satisfy world demand for a mere 230 days – assuming demand does not rise from present levels. That’s a pointless assumption in a global economy based on growth. BP calculated that world oil consumption in 2010 rose by 3.1% over 2009 – that gives us a doubling time of around 22.5 years. To illustrate this with Professor Bartlett’s arithmetical certainty, it means that consumption will reach 63.8 billion barrels a year by 2032 – that’s 20 years from now. And remember that each doubling time produces a figure greater than the sum total of all that has gone before. Thus in the next twenty-odd years we will use as much oil as we have used so far since the first gusher was capped.
Oil is currently being consumed at a rate of four barrels for every barrel that is being extracted. The world’s leading petroleum geologists are agreed that around 95% of the world’s oil has been found. Yes, but the optimists will say that there is no need to worry – we’ll soon have renewable energy supplying all of our needs. Don’t hold your breath. The oil industry’s next best bet is fracking oil and gas from tar sands. This uses the energy equivalent of two barrels of oil to produce three, hardly efficient when one considers that in the good old days of oil extraction the ratio was1:30. As for the other sources of renewable energy, they are currently insignificant in serving global needs and are unlikely to grow quickly enough to meet growing demand, especially burgeoning demand from the world’s most buoyant economies. Time for a long-overdue reality check.
Basically, the good ship Consumerism has now pranged itself on the iceberg of exponential growth. The First Law of Sustainability should have been displayed on the bridge in big bold letters, but it wasn’t. It’s simple enough. It says that population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of finite resources cannot be sustained. So now the ship is holed and many of us will go down with it. In the lifetime of our children, the world will become a very different, very uncertain place. Let’s hope that some of the survivors will remember something about basic arithmetic and will be able to make a better job of it next time around.
I am not part of the mobile phone culture. That’s not to say I don’t have a mobile phone. I do. It’s around ten years old now and laughably old-fashioned. It struggles to do more than make and receive calls. But that’s fine by me – it does the job it was designed to do. I use it when I really need to, which is about four times a year. So, when I say I am not part of the mobile phone culture, I mean, a) although I’ve fallen into the trap, at least I can see it’s a trap and, b) I do not carry with me at all times a tiny personal computer that will wire me up to an unreal world and do absolutely everything except make a cup of tea. And I don’t want to cohabit with a little box that knows my name.
We live in a technological ersatz utopia that promotes an uncontrolled insatiable appetite for new shiny gadgets, baubles and toys to gratify our increasingly short attention span. I don’t want to be part of that. I resist attempts by the psychologists of the cancerous advertising industry to mould me into a human silicon chip, uniform, interchangeable and imminently obsolete. More corporate profit can be generated from a compliant infantilised society of automatons than from a diverse collection of independent thinking individuals, and the machine that makes us into automatons is insidiously invisible. It has taken us unawares. Throwing before us sparkly trinkets in the same way that rapacious conquerors dangled beads before the native inhabitants of new found lands, it appears to be benign but has a heart as cold as ice.
All we see is the glitter, as we are distracted by the whistles and bells of the consumer merry-go-round. Mesmerised by window displays, primary colour packaging, slick advertising and the media hype that makes it all sound so must-have, so now, so necessary, we simply buy into the whole hollow urban culture package without question. That’s the sad part – our lack of inclination to ask questions. I suspect that’s because we don’t really want to hear the answers.
Who wants to know that mobile phones are only affordable because most of the production costs have been externalised? Who wants to know that the great Apple empire, now more profitable than such corporate giants as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs, has a despicable record of human rights, exploiting not only the workers who assemble its toys in austere union-free Chinese factories but also its own employees back home? Last year, the company earned $400,000 in profits per employee, whilst extolling loyalty from those cash-strapped and compulsorily non-union employees by telling them, “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple.” Rather, according to the management, serving at the altar of the Genius Bar™ ‘should be looked at as an experience.’
Of all the questions to which no one really wants the answer, the one about dwindling resources has everyone engaging selective deafness. Yet the fact remains that we are running out of all the things that make this technological economy tick. One of them is a dull black ore called coltan, an abbreviation for columbite-tantalite, from which tantalum is extracted. This is used in the manufacture of tantalum capacitors, vital components in consumer electronic products such as mobile phones and computers. As with so many raw materials, demand is now beginning to outstrip supply and, in the mining of coltan, we can see something of how the world is going to look in a few short decades from now. Like oil and other resources, extraction has now peaked, but demand continues unabated. Extraction of coltan ore is now bedevilled with stories of conflict and unbridled environmental degradation, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it is estimated between 65% and 80% of the world’s remaining coltan is to be found.
Mining of coltan in the DRC takes place in unregulated conditions, on an ad-hoc small-scale basis. The ore is traded virtually illegally on its way to the mobile phone factories inChina, whilst the income from it mostly funds the violent militias that still rule this inherently undemocratic county. Without regulation, the area is becoming an environmental wasteland, with land badly eroded and groundwater, rivers and lakes polluted. In addition, the miners, working in the bush far from their usual sources of food, are living off the land. Killing anything that moves, they have brought the population of mountain gorillas in that region to the edge of extinction. All of this just to feed the monster that is our technological world.
The hardest fact in such a world is that it is virtually impossible to live our lives with any clear sense of ethics. Moral and ethical considerations are no more than pious hopes in a society so disconnected from its support system that it has lost its understanding, its affection and its love for what provides the essence of life. Whilst we live a life of obeisance and supplication to the God of Economic Growth, we stand bereft of true morality and doomed by our own idolatry, lost in a fog of self-justification as we yearn for the next distraction. What we need is a penance app that will guide us through the options for various Acts of Contrition, set out a scale of manageable penances, and then we will be able to carry on as programmed, but with a refreshingly clear conscience.
For more information on the mining of coltan in DRC, try this link:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/coltan_mining_in_democratic_republic_of_the_congo
Three bullfinches were spotted in our garden today. A cause for jubilation, we might say, as bullfinches are now increasingly rare. No doubt they are eyeing up the buds of apple blossom about to burst open, for bullfinches love to eat blossom, you see. This is a deep irritation for profit-conscious fruit growers of course. Their answer to this hindrance is to poison the bullfinches, and so these pretty little birds are in steep decline.
Here we have the foundation to Agricultural Man’s attitude to the difficulties of food production – if it gets in the way, eliminate it. This basic premise is ubiquitous, entrenched, indiscriminate and largely overlooked by the general public. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve. A poisoned bullfinch drops dead and is picked up by a passing small furry animal, which in turn is poisoned and dies. No one really notices. No one really cares. As an aside, I have to say I find it profoundly offensive that the biggest producer of industrial cider in this county, and therefore by definition the biggest sprayer of apple trees, currently features the bullfinch in its marketing materials.
Another principle of agricultural dominance is the desire to remove all life that does not contribute to profit. Through the use of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and other poisons, we kill unwanted wild plants, the insects that feed on them, the birds and small mammals that feed on them in turn, as well as the mycorrhizal networks and supportive living ecosystems that maintain the health of the soil. We clear land with no conscience about loss of biodiversity or destruction of habitat. For every tree that is felled and every hedge that is uprooted to make way for cereal prairies, the habitat of countless living creatures is lost forever. They die just as surely as the poisoned bullfinches. Today we face a global mass extinction currently running at around 200 species a day, precipitated by us and our unwillingness to allow other forms of life room to thrive undisturbed alongside us.
Thus we come to the vexing questions posed by the vegan/vegetarian lobby, which becomes ever more strident in its condemnation of those who eat meat. With emotively charged phraseology, they claim the moral high ground, pointing out that there is no justification for eating meat, as there is no ethical argument for deliberately killing animals. In an abundant supermarket-dominated world of permanent global summertime, where fruit, vegetables and cereals from around the world are available anywhere, any season, anytime, it is easy to adopt this kind of ethical pose. But I say it is a specious stance.
Each of us is entitled to make our own personal choice when it comes to what we eat. I certainly have no problem with someone who chooses not to eat meat, but I do have a very big problem with someone who tells me that I too must give up meat in order to save the planet, because I think the argument has not been thought through. I also take issue with those who object to killing a living creature for food, whilst (albeit in innocence, ignorance or denial) they fill their supermarket trolleys with a cornucopia of fruit, vegetables and cereals, the production of which kills millions of creatures indiscriminately. There is much talk of why it is immoral to kill sentient beings for food, but virtually no talk about how many sentient beings die unseen in and around our vast monocultures. At least I am prepared to eat (and thereby put to good use) the meat of an animal that has been bred for food. But what of the creatures that die in the name of non-meat food production? They simply vanish without trace, unnoticed and unlamented.
It is my strong belief that the vegan/vegetarian lobby is missing the point by confining its thinking to arguments that suit a very specific agenda on personal food choices. I believe that our Mother Earth is more important than our anthropocentric debates. A staunch vegan might well say, “But I’m doing this for the sake of the planet!” Yet I wonder how that can be so, if no real consideration is being given to how our non-meat foods are generally produced. It is not merely a question of opting out of eating meat. The fundamental issue is how we feed ourselves in the modern world and whether our global food production system is wholly ethical. I say it is indisputably unethical. I say that anyone who feels moved to construct an ethical eating plan should first take a long look at plant-based food production (fruit, vegetables and cereals) to see how it is actually achieved.
Since our species worked out how to grow its own food, millions of acres of good ground around the world have simply been cleared of all natural vegetation and put to the plough. The 21st Century version of this is chemically supported monoculture on a gigantic scale, predominantly dedicated to cereals. Whilst a large proportion of this cereal crop is absurdly used to feed herbivorous animals, the rest feeds us, mostly through processed breakfast cereals, factory bread, other bakery products, brewery products, pasta derivatives and cooking grains such as rice. The food industry loves cheap versatile ingredients on which it can turn a huge profit, so the Unholy Trinity of maize, soya and palm (for oil) now dominates our industrial agriculture, displacing in its inexorable growth tropical rainforest, savannah and a diverse range of habitats on five continents. Biodiversity vanishes and soils are exhausted to the point of collapse. Our modern plant-based agriculture is, quite simply, killing the planet.
For the sake of rounded debate, I offer the following radical suggestion – that we accept our current exploitative food production as insane and unsustainable, that we instigate immediate measures to begin to repair the damage we have done and set as our ultimate goal a localised system of food procurement based on chemical-free permanent polyculture. Farm animals will have a role to play in this scenario, as their proven contribution to the repair of exhausted farmland will be vital. Inevitably, they will also provide a source of nutrient-dense food.
Whilst this might be anathema to those supporting the vegan (and, up to a point, vegetarian) argument, it is a simple fact of life that if we are to replace a system that is currently heading for terminal decline, a return to some kind of small-scale, wildlife friendly mixed farming is inevitable. The vegan stance appears plausible and attractive in its desire to protect anything with a face, but a bullfinch has a face too, and it has the right to live unmolested by anything other than its natural predators. To make a deliberate decision to kill such creatures in order to maximise our apple crop is clearly morally wrong. It is equally wrong to support a system that condones such practices, and there is no place for such a system in our future.
Therefore, no matter what we choose to eat, our decision should be based on how our food choices impinge on the greater biodiversity of the planet. By that token, the rearing of grain-fed feedlot cattle is loathsome, as is the production of battery hens and eggs, the subjugation of hybridised Holstein cows into expendable milk machines and the despicably cruel factory production of pigs. All such practices should fill us with absolute shame, but so too should the industrialised monoculture of commodity crops, cereals, vegetables and fruit that deliver most of the foodstuffs consumed by non-meat-eaters. Plant-based agriculture as a whole is deeply tainted with cruel practices. Those wishing to take an ethical stance in their food choices should not blithely condemn the eating of meat, but should instead work out for themselves how they can opt out of the industrial food system and support instead food production that does the least possible amount of damage to all the other life on Earth, by working with nature rather than against it. In that way a person can morally defend their food choices – and let the innocent bullfinch live.
Just the other day, I saw a disparaging reference to Al Gore. Not the first one I’ve seen of course but, considering it is six years since the release of his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, it is surprising that he is still being pilloried for giving us all that bad news and for ‘inventing the hockey stick graph.’ Well, I can say without fear of contradiction, that he did no such thing.
His film certainly brought the image of the hockey stick graph to life, but all he was demonstrating is what exponential growth looks like on paper. Professor Albert Bartlett has been using this graph in a lecture that he has given over 1600 times in the 32 years since he first delivered it in 1969. The title of the lecture is Arithmetic, Population and Growth, and is a discussion of how exponential growth affects the human species and its behaviour on this planet.
According to Professor Bartlett, ‘the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.’ I am no mathematician (although I did enjoy a very successful, if somewhat curtailed, career as a land surveyor in the days before calculators and computers) but the arithmetic behind exponential growth is simple. The exponential function is used to describe anything that is growing steadily – i.e. at a certain fixed percentage per period of time. Within the function is the means to calculate what is known as the ‘doubling time,’ the time it takes for something to grow by 100%.
Those of you who are mathematicians will be able to establish quite easily that the number 70 is the key to calculating the doubling time of anything. Simply divide 70 by the % growth per unit of time, and you have the answer. Thus, for instance, if we want to calculate the doubling time for something growing at 5% per annum, we divide 70 by 5 – and the answer is 14. Therefore, at 5% per annum growth, it will take fourteen years for the original figure to double. More interestingly, it will take a mere ten doublings for the original figure to be over one thousand times bigger. Plotted diagrammatically, this would show a line that rises ever more steeply – and there we have the hockey stick graph.
The simple fact is that exponential growth moves us rapidly from small numbers to astronomical numbers. Taking world population for instance, at the beginning of this century it was around six billion and growing at 1.3% per annum. This seems like an insignificant (some might say ‘sustainable’) percentage, but it equates to a doubling time of only 54 years (70 divided by 1.3), which would translate into a total of around 12 billion by the middle of the century. Of course other factors will be introduced into the equation as the years unfold, and we may never get to this level of population, but the principle of exponential growth does not go away.
Taking an illustration from Professor Bartlett’s lecture, let us look at bacteria in a bottle. Imagine the bacteria are growing in a bottle, doubling every minute. At 11.00am there is one bacterium in the bottle, and at 12 noon the bottle is full. The good professor’s first question is, “At what time was the bottle half full?” Very clearly, the answer is 11.59, because a minute later the population had doubled and filled the bottle. Then he asks, “If you were a bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you realise you were running out of space?” The answer here is more difficult, as there would appear to be a huge amount of space left right up to the last minute. For instance, at 11.58 the bottle would still be only a quarter full, or three-quarters empty, and at 11.56 it would only have been one sixteenth full!
Such an illustration can be applied to anything that grows exponentially, which includes world population and all of the resources that population needs to survive. Applied to the consumption of resources, the exponential function shows us another invariable constant: the growth in each doubling time is greater than the accumulated growth in all preceding periods. Illustrated simply, if we consume, say, one barrel of oil in the first period and multiply by two, ten times, we will have consumed 1024 barrels in the 10th period alone, one more than the 1023 barrels consumed in the nine periods up until then.
Alarmingly, this kind of steady growth is the central beam of our economic model, yet we hear virtually no discussion of the implications of applying a steady percentage growth to a finite resource. Like the bacteria in the bottle, we seem blissfully unaware of the inevitable crisis for humanity that is just around the corner. Professor Bartlett poses another question during his illustration of the bacteria in the bottle. He asks us to imagine that, at 11.58, some of the bacteria realise they might be running out of space and so instigate a search for more bottles, which results in the discovery of three more. What a result! That’s three times what they knew about before, and it gives them a total of four times the space they thought they had. The professor’s question is, “How long can the growth continue as a result of discovering three more bottles, a quadrupling of proven resources?” The answer is simple – two minutes. The first bottle is full at 12 noon, and the second will be full by one minute past twelve. A minute later, the population having doubled again, all four would be full.
This puts into perspective all of our hand-wringing about the problems facing society today. There are those who worry about climate change, and there are those who worry that the world is about to be taken over by snake-headed aliens. Meanwhile, however, our cherished economic model of prosperity, based as it is on the false flags of materialism and consumerism, has now been adopted by virtually every country on the planet, and we are all madly scrabbling to dig up the last remaining deposits of all the raw materials and minerals we need to keep the whole thing going. But we are right on the curve of the hockey stick, vindicating Al Gore’s explicit Power Point graphics.
In this context, worrying about climate change, or indeed worrying about anything, is fruitless. It is unlikely we will change our ways before we fill our bottle. As Professor Bartlett said all those years ago, our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function. He is not alone in trying to warn us of our folly. Like all prophets, his destiny is to be ignored. And the destiny of the human race is to extinguish itself by overrunning and consuming the habitat on which it depends for survival. Oblivion awaits. It’s not all bad news though – with the demise of this most alien species, at least Earth will have a chance to recover.
And, talking of milk . . .
The day I was tested for food intolerance on two different kinds of milk (pasteurised and unpasteurised, both organic) is often described by Sally or me as our Eureka Moment. At the time though, I had no idea how emphatic a moment that would turn out to be.
It became imperative to find out why these two types of milk were so different. Why should I be intolerant to pasteurised milk but strongly receptive to the raw version? We had anticipated this result, yet the reactions were so dramatically opposed that it was both elating and deeply puzzling, and my quest for answers started on that day.
Nearly ten years later, I am still on that journey of discovery. I found the answer to the milk question – that pasteurisation damages milk, but it suits the food industry, so it has been introduced without consent and sold to us on a health ticket. Yet this uncovered more questions than I could have imagined. The answer to each one is roughly the same: nothing is as it seems and practically everything we know is wrong.
This applies not only to food but also to the wider issues of society, morals, religion, government, the principles of democracy and the achievement of human happiness. I know I am always banging on about this, but what should I do? What is the proper course of action? Do I just go with the flow and accept the fact that we are all being duped, or do I stand up for the principles of truth and point out that the emperor isn’t actually dressed in all his finery – he’s naked? For me, it is clear that I must say something, and I have filled the pages of this blog with reams of words about our society’s naked emperors. Just as a bit of fun, I thought I might tackle this in a different way, so I have constructed the table below (randomly and in no particular order) to highlight just a few of the major items of disinformation currently stalking the belief systems of our society.
| What we are told to believe | The truth |
| Cholesterol is a dangerous substance that causes heart disease, and its level should be lowered at all costs. | Cholesterol is a substance vital to the cells of all mammals, and our bodies produce it all the time to keep us healthy. Lowering it can be dangerous, particularly if done with the use of drugs. |
| Saturated (animal) fat is a killer, clogging up your arteries, leaving you open to heart attack and premature death. | Saturated fat (from organic pasture-fed animals) is nutritious and essential to health and normal digestion. |
| Fluoride added to our water supply is a great benefit in dental health and strengthening tooth enamel. | Fluoride is a toxic by-product of the fertiliser industry, classified by the US FDA as an ‘unapproved drug’ and is actually harmful to tooth enamel |
| Sugar is a benign and useful sweetener that provides us with energy in the form of easily accessible calories. | Sugar is actually an addictive refined substance that causes hormonal chaos throughout the body, does more harm than good and can fast track the body to diabetes and other degenerative diseases. |
| Medical research is conducted by hard-working laboratory scientists in order to improve the medical profession’s ability to heal the sick. | Medical research is increasingly funded by the all-powerful Corporatocracy to further its own ends and to justify introducing often dubious (but profitable) drugs into the marketplace. |
| Diets are carefully constructed to work as a foolproof method for those who wish to lose weight. | Diets are designed to fail, for it is not in the interests of the highly lucrative diet industry to allow people to succeed in their efforts. |
| Feeding the world is a modern imperative that necessitates stepping up our commitment to global intensive agriculture, otherwise we will fail in our objective to eliminate hunger. | ‘Feeding the world’ is a conveniently emotive phrase that entitles global food corporations to continue to make money out of everyone on the planet. Modern global systems actually cause hunger, which will not be eliminated until people reclaim their right to their own food sovereignty and the right to feed themselves. |
| Soya is a highly prized foodstuff from the Far East which is now used as an aid to good health. | Soya is a foodstuff that must be treated with care as it can be detrimental to health unless fermented and properly prepared. Its ubiquitous presence in our processed food is due to the fact that it is cheap, versatile and therefore profitable to industry. |
| Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are healthy, easy to digest and the only kind of fats that are good for us as they help to lower cholesterol and promote a healthy heart. | Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are generally highly processed in order to present them as clear odourless liquids and are quite simply harmful to health in their usual role as cooking fat, because of the undesirable changes that occur when they are heated. |
| The ‘war on terror’ is a vital necessity in these troubled times when all Western democracies are threatened by Islamist terrorists who will stop at nothing to unseat our freedoms and way of life. | The ‘war on terror’ is a trumped up fiction created by the Western triumvirate of banks, corporates and governments to create a favourable climate in which to pursue their dual objective of garnering scarce resources and controlling their own populations. |
| Democracy is rule of the people by the people and it is the system of government which runs the ‘free’ Western world. | Democracy has been abused to the extent that all Western countries are to some degree operated by what is effectively a police state, with major curtailment of civil liberties now prevalent. |
| The European Union is an economic federation of European countries designed to strengthen trading potential and eliminate future wars. | The European Union is the working model for the ‘one world government’ proposed after the end of World War II, and it is vital for those in charge to hold it together so that it can eventually be amalgamated with the other ‘unions’ to form a single global state. |
All I have done here is set out a small selection. I could easily add many other items to this list, as I’m sure you could too. What is important is not how long a list we can create but the fact that the world really is not as it generally appears. Once we understand that, we can begin to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to work out how all the trickery works – and then we can sack the magicians.
Anyone who knows us will probably know by now that Tuesday is Milk Day, when we go to a local farm to collect raw unpasteurised milk for a growing band of people around our area. We are impressed by the increasing level of interest in this precious whole food. Gone are the days when we would go to collect about 20 pints a week – today we picked up the equivalent of 142 pints!
The other thing that is growing is the incidence of positive feedback from those who are now drinking this milk, not just in our area but all over the UK. We hear about, for instance, improved sleep patterns, greater resistance to winter colds and the disappearance of eczema, none of which comes as a surprise to us. All such results and more are well documented in books and on websites, notably that of the Weston A Price Foundation.
Yet all drinkers of raw milk in this country have to put up with the totally specious Government Health Warning on each container, despite the fact that the dairymen involved (well, all the ones I know of anyway) produce top quality milk to the highest standards of organic animal husbandry. Here’s what it says on the bottles of milk produced by Hook & Son from their small herd in West Sussex: “Health Warning: This organically produced raw milk has not been heat treated and may therefore contain organisms harmful to health.”
Since the Government is so keen to protect us from potentially harmful foods, and since I am ever the helpful citizen willing to do what I can to assist our hard-pressed overworked ministers in their efforts, I have come up with some other health warnings they could use on all that dead white liquid currently masquerading as milk in every supermarket, corner shop and eating establishment in the land.
- “This organic whole milk has been heat treated and therefore will no longer contain the enzyme necessary for the body to absorb calcium.”
- “This non-organic, non-specific milk has been produced by cows fed an unnatural protein diet and will almost certainly contain organisms harmful to health, despite being heat treated.”
- “This skimmed milk has had all of its potentially beneficial components removed, leaving only the milk sugars, and thus is recommended for those who wish to gain weight.”
- “This standardised, homogenised semi-skimmed milk will, as a result of the homogenisation process, be difficult to digest and may cause discomfort or actual harm to the digestive tract.”
- “This standardised, homogenised filtered milk is virtually inert and has no beneficial components in it whatsoever.”
That should be enough to be going on with. Anyone who wants more information on why these warnings must be put in place with immediate effect, or who wishes to challenge my wording or indeed to enter into a dialogue on the more general subject of industrialised food, please feel free to email me.
A couple of days ago, it was brought to my attention that the New York Times is running a small essay competition, and it was suggested that I should submit an entry. Up for the challenge, I followed the link and found that NYT had assembled what they describe as ‘a veritable murder’s row of judges,’ mostly hardline vegetarians. A good start then!
The essay didn’t have a real title. Contributors were merely asked to ‘tell us why it is ethical to eat meat’ in 600 words. Okay . . . Not sure where the goal posts are on this particular field, but let that not deter me . . .
So here is my contribution, in exactly 600 words of course (hardly enough for a proper discourse – six thousand would have been better for me!).
Tell us why it is ethical to eat meat.
What am I to make of this request? Is it a trap set by some vegetarian Witchfinder to catch an unwary omnivore in a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equivalent of the ducking stool? Or is it an attempt to enter into serious debate? If the latter, the invitation is still booby-trapped through its lack of contextual reference. Thus the response from a hungry Pirahã or a Kalahari bushman will not be that of an overfed Westerner spoilt for choice by supermarket abundance.
Then of course there is that troublesome word, ‘ethical.’ In common with so many words used in relation to the politics of food, it has undergone something of a transformation into a handy catch-all, bandied about by those who use it to justify personal food choices. It is not to be trusted. It has a touch of the weasel about it. Words are indeed weapons, and can be dangerous in the hands of an increasingly solipsistic species. The formal concept of ethics enjoys an elevated status, yet is essentially little more than an intellectual distraction, almost an esoteric irrelevance in a society that has become dysfunctional, divided and disconnected from the natural order of the universe. An obsolete them-and-us attitude ensures that Homo arrogans still struts his puerile stuff, believing he can live outside natural laws.
It is time we grew up. We must abandon our ivory towers, climb down from our moralising and look at the world around us. An absence of hubris will enable us to contemplate the damage we have done, much of it through the massively destructive application of chemically supported industrial agriculture that has laid waste to millions of acres of fertile soils across our planet. Contrition might also be appropriate, allowing a clearer view of our relationship with our food, defining the word ‘ethical’ and giving it a valid frame of reference.
In this materialistic world in which love itself has been commoditised, the politics of food is about fear, peddled by those who have lost touch with the spirituality of eating. Love opens the door to an understanding of how we move from rapacious exploitation to nursing our soils – and our souls – back to health. Domesticated farm animals will play a major part in this future, as a return to true pasture farming is an essential component of land regeneration, underpinning a localised system of permanent polyculture. Industrialised grain and cereal production is insane, and all the arguments for ‘more of the same’ collapse into farce in the face of the evidence provided by those engaged in the planet-friendly alternative.
Thus we come at last to the question of whether it is ethical to eat meat, and the answer is surely a qualified ‘yes’ – qualified by the understanding that there is no place in our future for feedlot cattle, pig factories, grain-fed Holstein milk monsters or battery hens. Love rejects such unmitigated cruelty but accepts the highest principles of good husbandry. All living things, including us and our farm animals, are part of the food cycle. We have domesticated plant and animal alike, and we have responsibility to both, but it is well nurtured animals on managed grassland that hold the key to a healthy future. We must value their ability to convert vegetation into essential manure to help us grow plant food, but we must also accept the clear understanding that farming is management and necessitates the control of animal numbers. The meat from those animals is too precious and nutrient-dense to be wasted, but love and respectful husbandry are the essential inputs. Then, and only then, is it ethical to eat meat.
Good day today, with a fruitful inbox. I am now $130,850,000 better off since this time yesterday, following two lottery wins and four bequests from persons unknown. I’ll soon be able to think about retirement . . .
And the sun is shining too! Does it get any better than this?