Is Meat Methane?

And on top of that, the media has adopted an increasingly right-wing slant in covering the news. There are entire websites like this one that are devoted to debunking the right-wing propaganda that tries to pass itself off as "news."  And they are continuing to do the bidding of the Bush administration with examples like this:

In addition to explaining why the U.S. shouldn’t end the war in Iraq, corporate media frequently tell Democrats that they can’t end the war—citing the Republicans’ ability to filibuster in the Senate and George W. Bush’s power to veto any anti-war legislation (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/07, 9/13/07). "As long as [Bush] can keep most of the Republicans in the Senate, in the House with him, there’s no way to overturn the policy because of the way the Constitution reads," Newsweek’s Howard Fineman told the Chris Matthews Show (NBC, 9/2/07). "I hate to keep coming back to the Constitution. Sixty votes to stop a filibuster, 67 to overturn a presidential veto in the Senate."

In reality, Democrats need just 41 Senate votes to stop the war—enough to maintain a filibuster (which is not, incidentally, part of the Constitution) and prevent any new war funding bills from being passed. The problem with this strategy is that if Democrats adopted it, it would mean taking responsibility for ending the war—rather than sharing it with the White House and/or Republicans in Congress. In the conventional wisdom of Beltway media and Democratic insiders alike, ending an unpopular war is the political kiss of death.

So, with that in mind, we should consider taking our business elsewhere if they are guilty of carrying the water of the Bush administration -- we should hit them where it hurts. If they call and offer home delivery, then we should tell them that we would love to take on home delivery, but only when they get rid of Deborah Powell or Cal Thomas or Ann Coulter or whoever else pollutes the pages of your local rag.

Which brings us to the next question -- is the alternative media any better? Let me put it this way -- we knew about torture, renditions, Gannongate, Plamegate, the Downing Street Memo, Abramoff, and other such scandals long before the SCLM ever did. But that does not mean that all alternative media outlets are created equal -- some are much better than others. If we don't evaluate them with the same scrutiny that Media Matters does the SCLM, then we will not have learned a thing from the days of the Bush administration, and we are back to Square One. Some are good -- Current TV. Others are disasters -- Prison Planet. Others, like Truthout, are spotty -- they have nuggets of truth, but treat with caution.

With that in mind, I will, on occasion, review alternative news outlets. I will not comment too much on their content -- I will be like the FOX slogan -- I report, you decide. If we are going to beat The System, then we have to be able to divest ourselves from it as much as we can -- and that means looking at alternative publications and ideas and evaluating them for ourselves.

The whole point of building and growing our progressive political movement is for us to create our own noise machine, as Markos has said on many occasions. And that means that if the SCLM does not stop spewing their steaming piles of elephant dung, then we ignore them, like we do with the New Republican. There are still good mainstream reporters and outlets -- McClatchy, the NYT's Sabrina Tavernise, Olbermann, and the Post's Walter Pinkus come to mind. There are others who are hacks that we should totally ignore or ridicule, like Klein -- we all have to decide this for ourselves. And for us to grow our movement, we have to be willing to look outside the bubble. With that in mind, the first publication I will review will be Ode Magazine.

They are a Dutch-based alternative magazine which is not shy about putting radical ideas on the table like the idea that I mentioned. Their rationale for calling meat methane:

But CO2 is not the main byproduct of livestock farming, though it is responsible for 9 percent of it. Nitrous oxide and methane respectively contribute 300 and 23 times more to the greenhouse effect than CO2—and livestock is responsible for 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions and 37 percent of methane emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculated these figures for a report published last year called Livestock’s Long Shadow. The FAO concluded that the livestock industry accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than is produced by every form of transportation combined. In addition, 1,000 litres (265 gallons) of fossil fuel is needed to produce the meat consumed annually by the average family of four. When this fuel is burned, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef, more than 2.5 tons of extra CO2 enters the atmosphere—as much as the average car emits in six months.

The article goes on to take environmental organizations to task for not calling for the end of meat-eating, saying that they fear the loss of supporters who eat meat. This is not a black and white issue -- people's livelyhoods are at stake. But given the UN report, this is something that we will have to address in the coming months and years as we search for ways of ending global warming.

Another radical article that made their pages is this shout-out to Summerhill School in England. Founded in 1921, this school was founded on the radical notion that students should be able to make their own rules and not have to attend classes that they don't want to attend. And yet, they have thrived and are
actually growing today.

They frequently write religious or cultural articles like this one reviewing John Bright-Fey's new translation of the Tao te Ching.

This book is not the Tao Te Ching most of us are cozy with. Bright-Fey's spin on the Tao Te Ching is 180 degrees from the typical academic rehash of Lao-tzu's ancient manuscript. Bright-Fey's book aims for the guts, the viscera, not the intellect.

The oral rendition veers from the scribbled translations in that it's an actual road map to the cultivation of the Way. To go here is to leave the proverbial trail and dive into "an act of literary surrender to the poetic moment so total that the receiver of the direct transmission is fundamentally altered forever." Needless to say, stumbling into enlightenment by reading a book is about as easy as wining Power Ball without buying a lottery ticket. You'll have to look Bright-Fey up in person to find that frequency. Which is the whole point of the book: YOU must cultivate your own mystical experience. Books just tickle your amygdala into considering the first step. The Whole Heart of Tao is simply a conduit of the wiggly Way, an echo of the ineffable in the maelstrom of our topsy turvy theater of modernity.

John Bright-Fey stands out in a crowded field of authors who write about Taoism. There are plenty of other fun Tao Te Ching translations, to be sure; but, it's fair to say that, until now, we didn't have access to the kind of knowledge within the pages of The Whole Heart of Tao. Some will gnash their teeth at the idea that an underground version of one of the world's most popular pieces of literature has finally chosen to surface. Such is life.

Ode is one of those places that tries to be all in one -- they have blogs, a reader exchange post, a social networking site, and groups as well as their magazine. They were founded in 1995 in Holland, expanded to publish in English in 2004, and has a stated mission of promoting positive social change throughout the world.

Ode was founded in the spring of 1995 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands by Jurriaan Kamp and Helene de Puy. Kamp, a former editor and correspondent with the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, and de Puy wanted to create an alternative to mainstream publications, a magazine that was open to new inspirations and new visions from around the world. The cover of the first issue - a close-up image of a radiant woman laughing out loud - captured the joy and spontaneity they wanted Ode to embody.

For the first nine years of its existence, Ode was published in Dutch. But in the summer of 2004 Kamp and de Puy, who are partners in marriage as well as in publishing, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to launch the English-language edition of the magazine. Ode now appears ten times a year in both English and Dutch, with a worldwide circulation of more than 100,000. Over the past 12 years, Ode has helped make the 'alternative' media space more mainstream. The magazine profiled people like clown-doctor Patch Adams, guru Deepak Chopra and Dr. Andrew Weil long before more conventional publications made them household names.

Is Ode Pony Heaven, or are they a steaming pile of elephant dung? You be the judge.