Why Am I Vegan?
People seem to be asking me a lot recently why I am vegan. This is likely because I have recently been around people socially a lot more than I have in a very long time. My problem is that I have no...
View ArticleI No Longer Steal from Nature
The ideas behind veganism are much older than the 1944 Donald Watson coining of the term to distinguish it from the health-fad direction Sylvester Graham took vegetarianism, which it never recovered...
View ArticleDo You Live In The Free World?
I often hear my fellow Americans say "the free world" in reference to refer to the United States or call the POTUS the "leader of the free world". I wonder if they ever consider what "free world"...
View ArticleThe Proust Questionaire, Round Two
The young Marcel Proust was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary...
View ArticleUS v. UK Healthcare – An Anecdotal Comparison
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." ~ Aldous Huxley Living in London is supposed to be monstrously expensive for expats, and the tax burden is supposed to be a...
View ArticleFull Metal Jacket & Platoon
On December 24, 1986, Director and Writer Oliver Stone released his Vietnam War film Platoon, starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe and following the directors own experiences as an...
View ArticleThe Abolitionist Case for Animal Rights
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? But rather, Can they suffer? ~ Jeremy Bentham There is already a nearly universal agreement that there is some type of moral limit on the...
View ArticleAnimal Suffering Responses in Children & Adults
ALLEN, WILSON, NG AND DUNNE (2000) ARGUED that the values of vegetarians/vegans differed most obviously from those of omnivores when considering the symbolic meaning of meat in regards to hierarchical...
View ArticleAnyway
The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent M. Keith in 1968 as part of a booklet for student leaders. Some years later, eight of the ten Commandments were reformatted as a poem titled "Anyway"...
View ArticleAlbum of the Year
As I approach the end of my thirty-fifth trip around the sun, I have the urge to mark the occasion with a little look back at my life so far. Towards that end, I am working on a series of little posts...
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