Academics From The United States

"We simply cannot ignore the devastating environmental impact of our diet any longer. The good news—yes, there is good news—is that we make a difference at every meal."

"The animal agriculture industry is one of the most powerful industries on the planet. I think most people in this country are aware of the influence of money and industry on politics, and we really see that clearly on display with this industry in particular. Most people would be shocked to learn that animal rights and environmental activists are the number one domestic terrorism threat according to the FBI. … It’s a difficult question to answer, why these groups are at the top of the FBI’s priorities. I think a big part of it is that they, more than really any other social movements today, are directly threatening corporate profits. When we try to find out how factory farms and how animal agriculture is polluting the environment, they try to claim exemptions to that information, either under "national security terms" or "public safety", "trademark issues", "it’s a business secret". We've seen all these attempts to keep people in the dark about what they’re actually doing."

"As the coronavirus epidemic stretches on, working people are facing an economic collapse, the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression. Organizing to fight for an immediate ban on all layoffs has to be an essential part of any program to protect the working class and to make the capitalist’s pay for their crisis."

"When practicing science, we understand that we must alter our paradigms to fit new evidence, but ideology makes us alter new evidence to fit our paradigms. Many argue that we should allow free speech and consider alternative viewpoints because 'we might be wrong.' Actually, we should consider alternative viewpoints because we are certainly wrong and the only way to be less wrong is to have our views challenged. Ideological thinking stifles this open-mindedness that would help eliminate errors in our thinking."

"The amino acids that come from animal sources tend to make our cells rev up and multiply faster. For example, there is accumulating evidence that high consumption of proteins from dairy sources is related to a higher risk of prostate cancer. That chain of cancer causation actually seems pretty clear."

"The Earth is an irregular oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles). Measurements of its dimensions and the amount of its flattening are subjects of geodesy. However, for most navigational purposes, assuming a spherical Earth introduces insignificant error. The Earth’s axis of rotation is the line connecting the north and south geographic poles. A great circle is the line of intersection of a sphere and a plane through its center. This is the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The shortest line on the surface of a sphere between two points on the surface is part of a great circle. On the spheroidal Earth the shortest line is called a geodesic. A great circle is a near enough approximation to a geodesic for most problems of navigation."

"... harassing problems must often be solved in order to produce scholarly biographical writing regarding the supporting actors upon the historical stage. For example, it is commonly difficult to find adequate source materials. In addition, a serious problem of organization frequently occurs. Thus it is not easy to achieve unity in an account of the activities of a minor personage who played a relativity small part in various scenes. Again, there is an almost overwhelming temptation to exaggerate the importance of such a person."

"Marine navigation blends both science and art. A good navigator constantly thinks strategically, operationally, and tactically. He plans each voyage carefully. As it proceeds, he gathers navigational information from a variety of sources, evaluates this information, and determines his ship’s position. He then compares that position with his voyage plan, his operational commitments, and his predetermined “dead reckoning” position. A good navigator anticipates dangerous situations well before they arise, and always stays “ahead of the vessel.” He is ready for navigational emergencies at any time. He is increasingly a manager of a variety of resources--electronic, mechanical, and human. Navigation methods and techniques vary with the type of vessel, the conditions, and the navigator’s experience. The navigator uses the methods and techniques best suited to the vessel, its equipment, and conditions at hand. Some important elements of successful navigation cannot be acquired from any book or instructor. The science of navigation can be taught, but the art of navigation must be developed from experience."

"Man is greatly tempted to see in past events the directing hand of God, or ineluctable Fate, or historical laws. The Americans were long inclined to believe that they were a chosen people, that they had a special mission, that the Deity guided them as He did the ancient Israelits. The historian, alas, must obtain his information from defective human records and remains. He cannot find the decree of the Divine declaring such to be His intentions."

"Combine all of this and here’s the picture: From the months before birth on, poverty diminishes opportunity, capacity, and agency and its consequences reach into adulthood. While that rigged footrace of mine was imaginary, child poverty certainly does ensure a future-rigged society. The good news (though not in Donald Trump’s America): The race to a half-decent life (or better) doesn’t have to be rigged."

"Our national opioid problem also affects the well-being of children in a striking fashion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 2008 and 2012, a third of women in their childbearing years filled -based medication prescriptions in pharmacies and an estimated 14 percent–22 percent of them were pregnant. The result: an alarming increase in the number of babies exposed to opioids in utero and experiencing withdrawal symptoms at birth, which is also known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS, in medical lingo. [...] (Given the ongoing opioid crisis, it’s unlikely that things have improved in recent years.) And the complications attributable to NAS don’t stop with birth. Though the research remains at an early stage—the opioid crisis only began in the early 1990s—it suggests that the ill effects of NAS extend well beyond infancy and include impaired cognitive and s, respiratory ailments, , difficulty maintaining intellectual focus, and behavioral traits that make productive with others harder. At this point, you won’t be surprised to learn that NAS and child poverty are connected. Prescription opioid use rates are much higher for women on , who are more likely to be poor than those with private insurance. Moreover, the abuse of, and overdose deaths from, opioids (whether obtained through prescriptions or illegally) have been far more widespread among the poor."

"Can children born into poverty defy the odds, realize their potential, and lead fulfilling lives? Conservatives will point to stories of people who cleared all the obstacles created by child poverty as proof that the real solution is hard work. But let’s be clear: Poor children shouldn’t have to find themselves on a tilted playing field from the first moments of their lives. Individual success stories aside, Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes—and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers. [...] Yet childhood circumstances can be (and have been) changed—and the sorts of government programs that conservatives love to savage have helped enormously in that process."

"Our own history and that of other wealthy countries show that child poverty is anything but an unalterable reality. The record also shows that changing it requires mobilizing funds of the sort now being wasted on ventures like America’s multitrillion-dollar forever wars."

"The Trump administration has, for good measure, rewritten the eligibility rules for such programs in order to lower the number of people who qualify. The supposed goal: to cut costs by reducing dependence on government. (Never mind the subsidies and tax loopholes Trump’s crew has created for corporations and the super wealthy, which add up to many billions of dollars in spending and lost revenue.)"

"Programs that reduce child poverty help even in years when poor or near-poor parents gain and, of course, are critical in bad times, since sooner or later booming job markets also bust."

"Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any for them. Whatever “” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line."

"Loss is a defending human experience. Nothing in the physical world lasts forever. Memory of what has been lost can be both ennobling and painful."

"In the higher organisms the higher faculties predominate, and in the lower organisms the lower faculties: but in all of them, from the highest to the lowest, the action is the resultant of impulses of sensation, perception, conception, and thought variously combined and inextricably blended."

"History teaches us that civilizations flourish, die and disappear. Sometimes they died swiftly, sometimes in a slow lingering death. And sometimes, as with Rome and others, echoes of that civilization find new life in later cultures. To lose the conscious memory of an entire civilization is especially tragic and dangerous, because each civilization, no matter how grand or flawed, is a laboratory of human ideas and ideals, of dreams and nightmares. We can learn from all of them."

"One in five American children live in poverty, even as s tout employment highs."

"To the Hebrew decalogue and the Christian beatitudes must be added the first of Buddha's ten commandments: Kill not for Pity's sake, nor dare to slay The meanest creature on its upward way."

""Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" is the golden rule; but far purer and more precious than gold is the injunction to do good without any reference to self, and to cultivate a morality that does not reflect the faintest tint, nor involve the slightest implication of self-love."

"No one will seriously assert that the drosera, Dioncea muscipula, and other insectivorous and carnivorous plants are organisms superior in sensitiveness to those which they devour, or that this transformation of animal into vegetable structure increases the sum of pleasurable sensation m the world. The doctrine of evolution, which regards these antagonisms as mere episodes in the universal struggle for existence, has forever set aside this sort of theodicy and put an end to all teleological attempts to infer from the nature and operations of creation the moral character of the Creator."

"The recognition of an original affinity between man and beast, however remote the kinship may be, or whether it be based upon the ancient dogma of metempsychosis or the modern doctrine of evolution, necessarily creates a current of sympathy extending even to the most insignificant members of the great and widely diversified family of sentient beings, and rendering it impossible willfully to neglect or maltreat the "poor relations," to whom we are united by the warm and living ties of blood."

"Perhaps, with the introduction of more rational views of cosmogony and anthropology, and broader and more generous principles of psychology into our elementary text-books, through the union of a sounder physics with a larger metaphysics, our children's children may finally learn that there are inalienable animal as well as human rights, and that, in respect to the ties of moral obligation and the claims to kind and just treatment which they imply, not only "all nations of men," as Paul affirmed on Mar's Hill, but, as the Indian sage declared, "all living creatures are of one blood.""

"To what absurdities of presumption the anthropocentric conception has paved the way is evident from the belief, once universally entertained, that the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the firmament with express reference to man, and exerted a benign or baleful influence upon his destiny from the cradle to the grave."

"The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivalled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids—16.2 percent of the total—live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70 percent of them have at least one —so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence."

"[I]f animals may be rendered liable to judicial punishment for injuries done to man, one would naturally infer that they should also enjoy legal protection against human cruelty."

"The ethical corollaries to Darwin's doctrine of the origin of species and to his theory of development through descent under the modifying influences of environment and natural selection have already passed these bounds of beneficence not only by demanding the mitigation of cruelty to slaves, but also by the abolition of slavery, and not only by inculcating the kind treatment of animals by individuals, but also by asserting the principle of animals' rights and the necessity of vindicating them by imposing judicial punishments for their violation."

"The conservative response to all this remains predictable: You can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the success of American social programs proves this claim to be flat-out false."

"It is through the portal of spiritual kinship, erected by modern evolutional science, that beasts and birds [...] enter into the temple of justice and enjoy the privilege of sanctuary against the wanton or unwitting cruelty hitherto authorized by the assumptions and usurpations of man."

"Ethnocentric geography, which caused each petty tribe to regard itself as the centre of the earth, and geocentric astronomy, which caused mankind to regard the earth as the centre of the universe, are conceptions that have been gradually outgrown and generally discarded—not, however, without leaving distinct and indelible traces of themselves in human speech and conduct. But this is not the case with anthropocentric psychology and ethics, which treat man as a being essentially different and inseparably set apart from all other sentient creatures, to which he is bound by no ties of mental affinity or moral obligation. Nevertheless, all these notions spring from the same root, having their origin in man's false and overweening conceit of himself as the member of a tribe, the inhabitant of a planet, or the lord of creation."

"Perhaps we should not be surprised by such statistics: after all, men seem to have an overwhelming attraction to breasts. Isn’t a woman’s wish for an enhanced bust line just a natural response to a primal desire to attract a mate? Many contemporary thinkers would suggest that this is the case. They invoke the notion of sexual selection in their arguments, arguing that some time long, long ago in the human evolutionary past, some males became erotically aroused by females with visibly enlarged breasts, choosing them more often as sex partners than their “flat-chested” sisters, thus maintaining this trait in human populations. Some writers even argue that men’s attraction to breasts was a key to the survival of early humans. Given the putative significance of breasts to the human species, is it any wonder that women in the twenty-first century spend millions of dollars, and take medical risks, to enhance theirs?"

"Although sexual selection arguments are extremely popular, there is another, more plausible explanation for why enlarged breasts evolved. As I will argue, females with visible breast enlargement would have been better able to support themselves and their infants in the environment in which our early human ancestors lived. Indeed, I suggest that the more robust notion of natural selection is the key to understanding why women have breasts, not the problematic idea of sexual selection."

"Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: a 200-meter footrace in which the starting blocks of some competitors are placed 75 meters behind the others. Barring an Olympic-caliber runner, those who started way in front will naturally win. Now, think of that as an analogy for the predicament that American kids born in poverty face through no fault of their own. They may be smart and diligent, their parents may do their best to care for them, but they begin life with a huge handicap. As a start, the nutrition of poor children will generally be inferior to that of other kids. No surprise there, but here’s what’s not common knowledge: A childhood nutritional deficit matters for years afterwards, possibly for life. [...] Indeed, the process starts even earlier. Poor mothers may themselves have nutritional deficiencies that increase their risk of having babies with . That, in turn, can have long-term effects on children’s health, what level of education they reach, and their future incomes since the quality of nutrition affects , concentration, and cognitive capacity. It also increases the chances of having and experiencing mental health problems. Poor children are likely to be less healthy in other ways as well, for reasons that range from having a greater susceptibility to asthma to higher concentrations of lead in their blood. Moreover, poor families find it harder to get good health care. And add one more thing: in our zip-code-influenced public-school system, such children are likely to attend schools with far fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods."

"Dissatisfied with their breasts, women in the United States have spent millions of dollars on creams, lotions, devices, and techniques for breast enlargement in the last few decades. [...] Despite the health risks the procedure poses and its considerable expense."

"The melancholic errs by turning against his own ego all the critical energies that ought to be directed outward against the powers of the status quo. ... Encouraged to draw all of his aggressions inward, away from the true source of discontent, the compliant melancholic sets up a superegoic agency harboring the ego’s own former rage against the object. ... Introjection becomes a form of deflected critique. Meanwhile, the berated and debased ego, busy with its own internal insufficiencies and thoroughly discouraged from political activism, is not only fully censured but also is fashioned into a willing, productive—if ultimately impotent—participant in society. ... The ideal subject under capitalism is melancholic."

"Whatever the exact selective advantage of fat, it is clear that the evolution of permanent breast enlargement in human females need not be explained through their erotic appeal to men. What my colleagues and I hoped to show by presenting our explanation is that a reasonable argument based on natural selection could be developed. Our model is not as “sexy” as the explanations that see breasts exclusively as erotic attractors of men. But it avoids relying on such poorly substantiated concepts as differential parental investment, female dependency, and sexual selection, ideas that may reinforce twenty-first century notions about women and gender roles but have little, if no, empirical evidence to support them. The idea that female breasts are little more than objects of sexual attraction for men is a popular one in many European societies, and certainly in the United States, among not only producers and audiences of slick programs on “The Learning Channel,” but also quite obviously among many scientists. But, it seems, they may be indulging more in sexual fantasy than scientific fact."

"The melancholic errs by turning against his own ego all the critical energies that ought to be directed outward against the powers of the status quo. ... Encouraged to draw all of his aggressions inward, away from the true source of discontent, the compliant melancholic sets up a superegoic agency harboring the ego’s own former rage against the object. ... Introjection becomes a form of deflected critique. Meanwhile, the berated and debased ego, busy with its own internal insufficiencies and thoroughly discouraged from political activism, is not only fully censured but also is fashioned into a willing, productive—if ultimately impotent—participant in society. ... The ideal subject under capitalism is melancholic."

"I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name."

"He was waiting for me to say something. He was staring at me. This, I think, is the first time I dared myself to stare back at him. Usually, I'd cast a glance and then look away—look away because I didn't want to swim in the lovely, clear pool of his eyes unless I'd been invited to—and I never waited long enough to know whether I was even wanted there; look away because I was too scared to stare anyone back; look away because I didn't want to give anything away; look away because I couldn't acknowledge how much he mattered. Look away because that steely gaze of his always reminded me of how tall he stood and how far below him ranked."

"Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are [...]."

"[I]nflicting pain as retribution for wrongs is a horrible mistake: The person wronged and the person punished are one and the same."

""Later!" The word, the voice, the attitude. I'd never heard anyone use "later" to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again. It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!"

"It never occurred to me that I had brought him not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember."

"Think about what you ordinarily would recognize to be 'these experiences', 'mine'. What makes them 'mine' for you? Is it the detail of their content? If the colours you were seeing had been different, would the experiences have failed to be these, yours? Think of all the features of this experience that could be varied while its character of being 'mine' remained untouched. If you had fallen asleep and were now in the midst of a wild dream that had little in common with any of the usual content of your experience, would that experience have therein failed to be experienced as 'mine'? If you had eaten different particular items of food over the past years (as you might so easily have done), so that all the particular atoms in the structure of the body were different in numerical identity from those in your body now, would the experience have failed to have that character of being 'mine'? Must you take care with the particularity of the food that you eat because it is determining the identity of an experiencer, of the subject of self-interest? If the experience were had in a different location, if it were at a different time, would the experience not still have had that same character within it of being this and being mine?"

"You possess all conscious life. Whenever in all time and wherever in all the universe (or beyond) any conscious being stands, sits, crawls, jumps, lies, rolls, flies or swims, its experience of doing so is yours and is yours now. You are that being. You are fish and fowl. Deer and hunter. You are saints and sinners. You are Germans, Jews and Palestinians. This is an important result. What else can come close to it in importance? And perhaps the spread of this knowledge among the intelligent beings that are you can help you to stop yourself from hurting yourself because you mistake yourself for another."

"What makes an experience yours is none of the specification of its content or of the particularity or other properties of its possessor. All that is required for an experience to be yours, to be 'mine', is that it be immediate in its character as its character is experienced within it, that it be first person. My pains are pains that are not remote like those that belong to another. My pains are those that are immediate. They have internality. They are experienced in a first person way. They are subjectively at the center of the world, here in me. But all real pains must be had with this quality of immediacy that makes them 'mine'. What could really be a pain without its thus hurting?"

"I am countless conscious organisms, but each of these possesses only one package of experiential content, isolated from that of every other. And within any of these packages only that much of the content of experience is displayed as having the quality of immediacy that makes experience be mine. So being mine is naturally confused in each with being the experience of only that organism. One must be jolted into realising that being mine is instead an abstract quality like being red. And, further, that this is a quality that must pervade all experience. For what could count as experience that didn't have that quality? I hope that I have succeeded now in doing that jolting."

"[M]y self-interest reaches fully into the life of every conscious organism, each of which I equally am, and that the death of any one of these does not annihilate me so long as there still is any other conscious thing anywhere in all reality—since I will be that thing. And every experience in any time is experienced by me with all the same urgency of its happening now. All of it equally is mine and now."