The McDonald’s “Talking Filet-O-Fish” commercial opens with a wide shot of a garage. A heavy, bearded man sits with a McDonald’s bag and drink on the table in front of him. He seems comfortable, content, and average as he holds a sandwich in his hand. When he takes a bite of the sandwich the shot cuts to a close up of a taxidermy fish mounted on a wooden plaque on the wall. The fish bends in half, making an hyperbolic mechanical sound, and looks right at the camera as it begins to sing:

“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme that fish!”

As the fish continues, the camera cuts to back to the man who is shown bobbing his head with the tune and chewing on the sandwich. He is sitting on a weight lifting bench next to a motorcycle. The fish continues singing:

“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme me that fish!”

Another man walks into the garage carrying a drill – perhaps returning it to his friend. He stops and looks with astonishment at the fish and then at his friend sitting on the bench eating the sandwich. The fish continues to sing:

“What if it were you hanging up on this wall?
If it were you in that sandwich,
you wouldn’t be laughing at all!”

Just as the fish sings, “If it were you in that sandwich,” the camera cuts to the man chewing.
continue reading "Teaching Speciesism: The McDonald’s Talking Fish schools Consumers on Complicit Complacency"

Sent by Elizabeth Housley. This is an amazing online graphic story by Patrick Farley.

2/9/10: Update, the work is back up on the original site here.

“The dignity of living beings with regard to plants. Moral consideration of plants for their own sake.” (PDF Download)

From the Swiss Federal Ethics Comittee on Non-Human Biotechnology.

Are there thoughts that are not permitted by the software of the brain?

Human rights depend on Animal rights. We can never have liberation of humankind without the same for all of animalkind. So long as we enslave, we will never be free.

If your browser isn’t functioning well, get an upgrade. New Version Culture.

via Elizabeth Housley

Story from North America (FULL VERSION!) from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

Via Discerning Brute, Erin Pavlina tells her story of running the vegan spirituality software:

I grew up on burgers, fries and milkshakes. I ate the Standard American Diet my entire life.

Around the time I started college, I told the spirits that I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save the planet. And I told them if they would just see fit to grant me superhuman powers that I would use them for good. I also told them I wanted to be a healer and asked for the power to heal people with touch.

They laughed and told me I wasn’t ready for such a thing. So I asked them what I had to do to get ready.

They told me to go vegetarian. They told me that in order to heal people and to have ”superhuman” powers and abilities that I would need to raise my vibration, my energy, and that one powerful way of doing that was to stop eating meat. They explained to me that an animal carries its torture and death with it when it is slaughtered, and that when we humans eat that energy, it lowers ours. That made a lot of sense, so I immediately told the spirits to go take a flying leap. There wasn’t any way I was going to go vegetarian! Give up my Big Macs? Pfft. Wasn’t there some other way? I asked them hopefully.

Nope, they said. You gotta stop making your body a graveyard for suffering, torture, and cruelty. I ignored their advice for years. But it always niggled in the back of my mind. How could I expect to live with compassion when I was allowing other people to murder an animal and feed it to me. Oh, the hypocrisy.

When I met Steve, he was a vegetarian. I remember being annoyed that he couldn’t eat at certain restaurants and was always trying to get me to go vegetarian too. I was always getting food poisoning and very ill when I ate animal products, so one day I decided to try going vegetarian for 30 days. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it. And it was easy! Much much easier than I thought it would be.

I went back to the spirits and said, “Now can I have super powers?” They said, “You’re headed in the right direction, but eating eggs and milk and cheese is just as cruel as eating the animal’s flesh. Look into it and you’ll see.” I promptly ignored them again. I figured I had done quite enough! They thought differently. But I did notice that my
psychic abilities increased as a vegetarian and it did make me curious.

One day Steve told me he wanted to go vegan and raise our future children as vegans. It nearly broke us apart because I had NO intention of doing anything SO drastic! But once again, I decided to give it a try for 30 days and see for myself if it was something I wanted to do or not. Oh my goodness! The difference was amazing. I lost tons of weight, I felt great, 95% of my chronic health problems just magically vanished, and my psychic abilities increased massively. How could I possibly go back to eating ice cream and cheese? That would be like putting poison back into my body.

I starting reading and learning more about how food animals are treated and I could no longer be a part of their suffering. When I realized that I could live quite easily and happily without harming animals I made the firm decision to continue to be vegan. Not only did this increase my compassion, it increased my connection to the spirits. I was able to hear them more easily, and I started having more precognitive dreams. I started being able to “read” people and know what was going to happen to them. I guess you could say I became vastly more psychic. And they started giving me tasks and assignments to carry out. I felt like a first level hero.

So, that’s how I went from eating fast food to plant food. Even though the spirits were right all along, I just wasn’t ready to listen. And they understood that too. Free will and all.

From this experience, I learned that having superhuman powers doesn’t mean flying around and using x-ray vision. It means moving towards a higher vibration and moving closer to Source. And it’s that kind of “superhuman” power that will save our planet. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from trying to fly occasionally, and I do still have that cape tucked away somewhere … just in case.

“U.S. Chief District Judge Mark Wolf ruled this week that the Department of Correction violated federal law protecting religious freedom and ordered the department to provide Daniel Yeboah-Sefah a diet in line with his Buddhist beliefs.”

Read more…

From the New York Times article:

Thousands of South Korean students, mainly networking through the Internet, immediately took to the streets, followed by a broader uproar.

The uprisings and protest in South Korea are a great example of the power Cyberactivism to affect and infect people (who may or may not have access to technology) with the call to action for social justice.

This is from the introduction to my paper in progress “Cyberactivism and The Courage to Be: Resisting Institutional Power in the Network Society”:

Technologies of resistance are manifold. The mythologies and histories of resistance are transmitted between actors, tribes, nations and networks through technologies as diverse as writing, dancing and uploading. Such means of transmission, information technologies, are foundational components of the cognitive spaces where we describe the indescribable, make the finite infinite and explore and expose the internal. These cognitive spaces are dreamplaces, realms of imagination and spiritual depth, where resistance is born from belief in
social justice and the possibility of a different, or even better, world. From the archaic to the advanced – information technologies are, as Davis (2004) describes them, “technocultural hybrids” (p. 7). These hybrid technologies are the revelatory vision, the pictograph and petroglyph, the smoke, the alphabet, the printing
press, the electronic signal, the telephone, radio, television, fax and satellite.

Along with the rise of networked information communication technologies emerges a potential new depth and scope for dreams of social justice. These are not only new means of resisting power but also new spaces for institutional power; technology is always the trickster, a coyote of the network society.

However, when used as a means to resist institutional power, information technologies can mediate the expression of what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate concern.” When information technologies are engaged to communicate what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate meaning” in answer to the “moral demands” of
“ultimate concern,” technology mediated communication becomes a religious practice.

MOMA kills a sculpture.

Discerning Brute blogs about Guillermo Vargas Habacuc’s plan to starve another dog as part of an exhibition. As artists and viewers of art, we must take a firm stand against this exhibition. Not a stand against any form of art, but a stand against cruelty and slavery, torture and murder.

Discerning Brute is right on here – it’s the trend toward cruelty based shock art that is so disturbing. Let’s modify the old art school adage to reflect this trend:

“If you can’t do it well, do it big.
If you can’t do it big do it red.
If you can’t do it red, do it in multiples.
If you can’t do it in multiples, add animal cruelty for shock value and you’ll be right on your way to some Biennial or another”.

“Natural Charcoal”

I contributed a little story about a food producer and their sugar refinery to The Discerning Brute. You can read it here.

I verified that the Domino refinery in question does not use cow bones. I read something recently that claimed it takes something like 7,800 cows to produce the ‘bone char’ for one industrial sugar filter. The sugar industry calls it “Natural Charcoal.” Right, like “Healthy Forests” and “No Child Left Behind.”

From: Susan Norrell
Date: Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Subject: RE: Industrial products

Hello Michael,

Our Yonkers refinery has never used natural charcoal filter (also known
to some as the bone char). They use a carbon filter process. If you
have any other questions, feel free to email me.

Regards,

Sue Norrell
Consumer Affairs
Domino Foods