A Brave and Startling Truth

American poet Maya Angelou wrote this poem in honor of the UN's 50th anniversary.

We, this people on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through causal space.

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns,

To a destination, where all signs tell us,

It is possible and imperative that we discover,

A brave and startling truth.

And when we come to it.

To the day of peacemaking

When we realease our fingers

From fists of hostility

And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate

And face sooted wth scorn are scrubbed cleand

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign lands

when the rapacious storming of churches

The screaming racket in the temples hav ceased

When the pennants are wavin gaily

When the banners of the world tramble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it.

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged my walk into evenings of peace

When religious ritual is not perfoumed

By the incense of burning flesh

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it.

Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection

Not the Garden of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory

Not the Grand Canyon

Kindled in delicious color

By western sunsets

Not the Danube flowing in its blue soul into Europe

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the rising sun

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it.

We, this people, on this minscule and kithless globe

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blad, the dagger

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace

We, this people on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cantankerous words

Which challenge our existance

Yet out of those same mouths

Can come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falter in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, lifeis sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

When we come to it.

We, this people, on this wayward floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely with out sanctimonious piety

And without crippling fear

When we come to it.

We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonders of this world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.

Everything Depends On The Lens You Use To See Life

This was a email forwarded to me. Normally, I scan through the subject line and delete most of the emails which are "forwards". However, the I had some time on my hands, and thought of actually checking what the mail was all about.

One day . . . a wealthy family man took his son on a trip to the country, so he could have his son see how poor country people live.

They stayed one day and one night in the home of a very humble farmer. At the end of the trip, and when they were back home, the father asked his son, "What did you think of the trip?"

The son replied, "Very nice dad."

Then the father asked his son, "Did you notice how poor they were?"

The son replied, "Yes."

The father continued asking, "What did you learn?"

The son responded, "I learned that we have one dog in our house, and they have four.

Also, we have a fountain in our garden, but they have a stream that has no end.

And we have imported lamps in our garden . . . where they have the stars!

And our garden goes to the edge of our property. But they have the entire horizon as their back yard!"

At the end of the son's reply the father was speechless.

His son then said, "Thank you dad for showing me how poor we really are."

Isn't it true that all depends on the lens you use to see life?

One can ask himself what would happen if we give thanks for what we have instead of always asking for more.

Learn to appreciate what you have. Wealth is all in one's point of view.

New Global Network Against the Fur Industry

There is a new international network of organizations against fur, which includes groups and individual activists from the animal rights/liberation movements from various countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.


It is called Global Network Against the Fur Industry, it was formed this autumn and it’s started its activity with a campaign against the ESCADA group.

Escada is a high fashion international company, with headquarters in Aschheim/Munich, Germany. It is involved in many stages of the process of fur garments production and sales: from designing its own collections to producing them in its own factories, to selling them in its own shops, in shop-in-shops and in concessions in department stores.

The ESCADA Group owns a sussidiary company called Primera, which in turn owns other brands: apriori, BiBA, cavita and Laurèl. All these companies and brands use fur for their collections.

There are 240 ESCADA stores all over the world, mainly in Europe (130), Asia (86) and North America (25), with a few in South America, Africa, Australia. In addition, there are the stores of other brands owned by the company: almost 400 stores, mostly in Europe but also worldwide.

The choice of ESCADA as a target is due to the fact that this is a company which has a huge influence on the catwalks of the world; if Escada stops using fur, this will send a signal to the fashion industry as a whole.

The Global Network Against the Fur Industry has organized a first weekend of international action against ESCADA’s fur trade on 12th – 14th October 2007. Many protests have taken places worldwide.

In Florence, the Escada store remained closed all day on Sunday 14th October, to avoid bad publicity in view of the protest, with consequent loss of revenue. As a result, the campaigners moved their protest to a department store, COIN, to force them to stop selling fur following the example of two other major Italian department stores chains, La Rinascente and UPIM.

The ZARA, Guess, H&M campaigns show how important global cooperation of anti-fur organizations is and how effective it can be in changing the policies of major retail groups.

Visit the Global Network Against the Fur Industry new website.

Human health and animal ethics

Human health and animal ethics posts

Human health & animal ethics: an introduction to this Category
 
Mesothelioma and asbestos
 
Carcinogens, food poisoning and meat
 
The greatest scientific event of the millennium
 
Thalidomide tragedy, side effects, history
 
Carcinogenicity studies on animals
 
Cancer and animals
 
The half vegan monks who are the world's healthiest people
 
Eating bacon and sausages every day increases cancer risk by 20%, new authoritative report says
 
Growth in animal farming increases disease risks for humans, says FAO
 
Meat workers health problems
 

Human health & animal ethics: an introduction to this Category

Of all the major areas of animal exploitation, two of them, animal experimentation and farming, have two fundamental characteristics in common, which will make them, in my opinion, the real battleground on which the case for animal rights and equality will be fought.

What vivisection and farming have in common is: 1) they involve an enormous number of animals, far superior, at least in the case of farming, to other areas of animal abuse; 2) there is an appearance (I underline “appearance”) of genuine conflict between the liberation of animals from these two forms of abuse and human health, which in many people’s minds, unfortunately, justifies them on moral grounds.

For this reason I’ve created a special category in the current blog, Human health and animal ethics, to explore this assumed conflict between human and non-human animal interests. In animal testing, the conflict is purported to be in the fact that renouncing it would deprive medicine of an irreplaceable tool of immense value, or at least this is the claim. In animal farming, the conflict is said to derive from the fact that humans need to eat animal flesh products to stay healthy, believed by many people to be true despite the repeated assertions to the contrary by the most prestigious medical authorities and organizations in the world, who say that the opposite is true and vegetarianism is indeed a healthier option.

All other forms of animal exploitation do not involve any real, important human interest. Nobody can claim that they will die or become ill without a fur coat (not even Eskimos), if they don’t attend circuses, if they don’t visit zoos, don’t go fishing or hunting.

The lame excuses of some of these animal abusers, like hunters justifying torturing foxes to death because they are “pests”, are only seriously believed or appeared to be believed by themselves and their close supporters.

But with vivisection and animal farming, the belief that they are necessary for human health is widely held by a majority, so it needs to be addressed with empirical and logical instruments. I’ll do that in this category, which has the advantage of tackling both major areas of animal abuse with one common approach useful for both, and I will also explore the tricky question of whether veganism can really be suitable for human health: on this issue I have to say that I am not convinced myself. People wouldn’t need vitamin tablets to supplement a vegan diet if the latter were an appropriate, fully well-balanced diet. And if you look at it from a naturalistic viewpoint, the human species is not a herbivorous species: we use a similar argument against meat-eating when we say that humans are not a carnivorous species, so it seems to me that, if we are intellectually honest, we recognize that the argument cuts both ways.

Designing Your future Begins Here ….

I was at an IT workshop recently and one activity given to us was to “design the future” (as opposed to predicting!) for the next 10 years. Dealing with technology, I am sure you will agree with me when I say, imagination is the limit. I have watched several movies with a high caliber of “future technology”. I often wondered, “how in the world did they think of that!”. May be you have too.

The workshop inspired me to “design the future”, again! Yet, from a different perspective. Let’s call this edition the ‘enhance life’ edition!

Yes, Life. Do you still have one?

Unlike technology, there a few additional parameters that adds to the equation, when designing your LIFE's future. I suppose imagination is bound by reality and human emotion.

Some people might regard this post as stupid or nutty. You are welcome to your own opinion, after you need the next sentence!

In order to be where you are today, you certainly have to have designed it; knowingly or otherwise. The sequence of actions that have taken place over the last few years, has led you to, today. (And you don’t need me to tell this to you!)

Looking back, about 10 years ago I never “designed” it to be where it is today. Well, may be I partially designed it!. In some areas, designs have materialized to a construction marvel; in certain other areas, the design needs effective execution!

So what do you think?
Is a design for the future needed? Or do I go with the flow? (In a couple of years time, you will know whether you made the right choice! )

San Marino bans vivisection

Maybe a small step, but it seems highly significant to me: the Republic of San Marino, an independent state lying entirely in north-east Italy, has abolished all experiments on animals.

This tiny country on the Adriatic Coast, which already has the record of being the oldest republic in the world, now can be proud of another record in the history of civilization: to be the first country on the globe to totally forbid animal experimentation.

In February of this year the Associazione Sammarinese Protezione Animali (A.P.A.S.) presented a law proposal supported by citizens’ signatures to ban vivisection, which on the 20th September 2007 has been approved by the General Council, San Marino’s legislative body.

Now San Marino can call itself a “cruelty-free country”, at least as far as animal experimentation is concerned.

"We are very happy of this result, so good and quick" say Marina Berati from NoVivisezione.org and Massimo Tettamanti, Europe manager for I-CARE (Centro Internazionale per le Alternative nella Ricerca e nella Didattica), who, along with Stefano Cagno from Rome’s Lega Anti-Vivisezione, have been helping to achieve this outcome, "and A.P.A.S. volunteers have been extremely determined and successful. From now on San Marino will be off-limits for chemical and pharmaceutical companies carrying out animal tests and for all research institutions, both public and private, often funded by unaware members of the public, which base their research on vivisection".

A.P.A.S. Press Office says that thanks to this new law, which heavily punishes animal experimenters, San Marino Republic will represent a pole of attraction for companies using methods alternative to vivisection, which are better, more reliable and cheaper too.

I don’t know how many animal tests were conducted in San Marino before the introduction of this law. But I don’t think that the number of animals saved is the only issue here. I believe that this is a breakthrough anyway, because it establishes a precedent and has great historical significance, morally and politically.