When you hear the voice, you know the woman.

I recognized the voice as soon as the NPR piece began. My sister and I must have been around 7 and 8 years old … 1972-ish. Soon after the fancy new stereo with turntable and 8-track was set up, my dad brought home our first 8-track; Mahalia Jackson.

Mahalia Jackson: Voice Of The Civil Rights Movement

The abuse of these infant calves is merciless. There is no excuse for skinning animals alive and shocking them time after time with electric prods when it’s obvious they are too weak to stand.

Veganism for me started when I was in Vermont stuck in road construction beside a veal lot. I didn’t become vegan overnight, but immediately reduced my intake of dairy products, including Ben & Jerry’s, whose headquarters ironically, was just a few miles down the road from that veal lot.

“Operations at Bushway Packing, Inc., a veal slaughterhouse in Vermont, have been shut down by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vislack, pending further investigation. The footage that an undercover investigator from the Humane Society of the United States obtained was truly shocking, showing calves only days-old being shocked and prodded, and live calves being left in piles of dead calves.” –VegNewsletter

I’d hoped I could read more about the shutdown of the slaughterhouse without seeing any photos. I couldn’t bring myself to click play on the video on the HSUS website. The still image is almost too horrifying to bear.

#3) When in doubt, wait: If you can’t allow the bike 3 feet of space, wait to pass until you can — just as you would for any other slow-moving vehicle.

From the Los Angeles Times, How to minimize accidents between autos and bicycles, by Christie Aschwanden. Six simple tips; short and sweet. #2 would have prevented my collision with a car, except that the 87 year-old driver apparently never saw me. I wish this information was more widely understood by drivers. Hmmm….maybe a few questions on state drivers’ tests?!

I would add -
Understand that when the wind is gusting 30mph (or even 10mph) a cyclist may have a hard time holding their line. In other words, a cyclist may be dealing with weather and road conditions that drivers are unaware of….thus the 3 foot MINIMUM.

“… there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it’s too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven’t even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that’s coming.” – Read it all at apophenia

Link to video.

Also check out the John Oliver clip, Dan Choi is Gay.

My message 09.05.15:

President Obama's argument that our insurance based health care system is already in place so insurance should be part of health care "reform" is just an excuse, just bowing to pressure from insurance companies. Insurance companies and equity markets provide no health benefit to U.S. citizens and have NO place in our health care system, much less their current position of controlling decisions about life, death, and quality of life. Now is the time for strong leadership. Our economy, and more importantly our health, should not be sacrificed to maintain an industry that exists only to profit from one of our citizens' primary needs. Single payer health care is the only real solution.

I also have to wonder about the dog owner who went along with tying their dog to a post. I can’t imagine allowing something like that to happen to my pet without first being shot myself, but I don’t have any dependents other than my dog, and who knows how my bravery would hold up unarmed, against an angry man’s rifle.

The crime was committed in Felt, Idaho, in late 2007, by a Teton County Sheriff’s deputy. After pleading guilty last week, the deputy, Joseph Guitierrez, was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Seems like a light sentence given the brutality of his actions. But wait, 25 days of his sentence were suspended, and he has been assigned to a sheriff’s inmate labor detail for the other five. Sounds like he will spend a total of zero days in jail. He does have to pay a whopping $100 fine and serve a six-month UNSUPERVISED probation. If he completes probation successfully the crime may be removed from his record. Is it possible to unsuccessfully complete an unsupervised probation?

Is this justice? Apparently it is … in Teton Valley, Idaho, and not just in the mind of Judge Colin Luke. There is a poll on the home page of the local paper asking people if they are satisfied with the outcome of this case. It appears that this is not an important issue to Teton Valley News readers because there are only a few votes, but shockingly 71% have voted “Yes,” they are satisfied with the outcome of the case. They believe that $100 and 40 hours of work is fair punishment for this barbarity.

…we know being a loner isn’t about hating people. It’s about essence, about necessity. We need what others dread. We dread what others need.

I recently finished reading Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto, by Anneli Rufus. It was recommended by an ultrarunner several years ago. He thought that probably lots of ultrarunners are loners. I would say the percentage is higher than the general population, but we’re not a majority in that community either.

In some ways the book was a disappointment. I mean, how many examples do you need that “loner” is often used to describe criminals who are social outcasts. People who are truly loners would rather stay home and make a bookshelf or knit or mow the lawn or whatever, not bother themselves with some socially intimate mass murder plan. Really, except for the part about the making a bookshelf or knitting or mowing, and being social, that is true of most non-loners too! Ultimately, the book could have been much shorter. The author seemed to lack material and on more than one topic was just filling space.

There were some good insights for me; like 75% of the population actually enjoy hanging out with groups of people. That it is not a flaw or weakness in them. It’s just the way they are wired. Most of that 75% would think it was fun to walk up to an astronaut and ask about her job. Where I would rather research astronauts on the Internet, at home, alone. I loved the author’s insight about a lunch invitation creating a crisis for about 25% of us, and, that while big cities offer anonymity and are ok for loners, small towns make us feel completely uncomfortable. The interesting thing is that I knew all this about myself. I just didn’t realize that my feelings are shared by a large segment of the population. A minority yes, but still, 25% is a lot of people! Another interesting part of the book was the fact that loners are heroized in movies, tv and literature, but when many non-loners come face-to-face with independence they are either offended, frightened or try to fix it.

So what does this have to do with walrus and polar bears? Well, if you’ve seen the documentary Arctic Tale you know. As Queen Latifah says, the walrus are “always up in each other’s business.” A polar bear spends most its life alone. The mother polar bear chases her daughter off when she is only two years old! How sad. But she knows it is the best chance for either of them to survive. On the other hand, when one walrus gets itchy he assumes the walrus next to him is itchy too and starts scratching. In the movie, at times it almost seems as if the group of walrus is one organism rather than a group of individuals.

I of course related to the polar bear, not just because it was cuter! Sure friends and family are important, but given the choice of being completely alone or living en masse, the former seems more survivable. Made me wonder if most people relate to the walrus. Since this was a movie, and independence is heroized in that context (and it was cuter), more people probably relate to the polar bear. It would make an interesting survey.

They remind me of instant messaging. When AIM first came out for non-AOL users I wasted a LOT of time IM’ing. Yes, there were some benefits; a quick question-answer to a friend or family member, but overall IM was, for me, a huge time suck. After a few months I uninstalled all IM apps from my computer. Oh sure, I suffered a few days of withdrawal symptoms, but overall what a relief to get my time and privacy back! Fortunately I haven’t gotten hooked on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reunion, Plaxo, ad infinitum naseum.

I had a great interaction a few weeks ago. A friend sent a “friend invitation” for yet another social network. I wrote to let her know not to take it personally, but I wasn’t signing up for anymore of those things. She e-mailed back and said, she hadn’t really wanted to sign up either, she just responded to another friend’s invitation, and clicked next, next, until she’d ended up inviting and adding people to her network that weren’t even friends. Makes me think social networks are just the new chain letter.