“If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers.  For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy.  For others, the decision will be a hard one.  To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience.  We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history.  What we don’t know, though, may be just as important.  How would making such a decision change us?

Setting aside the direct material changes initiated by opting out of the factory farm system, the decision to eat with such deliberateness would itself be a force with enormous potential.  What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?  Tolstoy famously argued that the existence of slaughterhouses and battlefields was linked.  Okay, we don’t fight wars because we eat meat, and some wars should be fought— which is not to mention that Hitler was a vegetarian.  But compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.”

Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals

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Why clean others mess when you can make ten times the money by selling your body? This is what Elina Tiilikka apparently asked, and couldn’t find a good enough answer. Punainen Mekko is her journey through the time when there were no tomorrows.

If you have been in prostitution, you do not have tomorrow in your mind, because tomorrow is a very long time away. You cannot assume that you will live from minute to minute. You cannot and you do not. If you do, then you are stupid, and to be stupid in the world of prostitution is to be hurt, is to be dead. No woman who is prostituted can afford to be that stupid, such that she would actually believe that tomorrow will come.

-Andrea Dworkin

Soundtrack: Alanis Morrissette – Hand in my pocket

Diego Forlan

A month of football has gone by and we have witnessed some of the best and worst moments you can imagine in football. The true football romantics must feel blessed that Spain were able to win the final before the penalties, and it is no surprise that they are having a strong foothold in the team of the tournament too.

I have always got great pleasure to name my favorite starting XIs, whether they are the teams of the World Cup, best left footers XI, best foreigners in Premier League XIs or whatever you can imagine. So it is time for the team of the tournament in World Cup 2010.

The tactic will be 4-2-3-1, which was widely used in the South Africa with a great success.

Goal: Iker Casillas (Spain) It is impossible to name anybody else after the man of the match performance in the final.

Right defender: Sergio Ramos (Spain) Sergio Ramos’ displays in the tournament made Jose Mourinho to abandon all his thoughts of pricing Maicon out from Inter Milan.

Left defender: Fabio Coentrao (Portugal) A marauding left-back who Benfica will really struggle to hold on after the tournament.

Centre-half: Carles Puyol (Spain) No-nonsense defender whose combative performances gave the Spain the defensive cohesion needed to play their own game.

Centre-half: Diego Lugano (Uruguay) Elegant, composed, spirited and whole-hearted displays pushed Uruguay further than any had believed before the tournament. Was sorely missed in the semi-final against Holland.

Midfield: Xavi (Spain) Xavi is at the moment quite simply a better footballer than anybody else.

Midfield: Bastian Schweinsteiger (Germany) Discovered his best form right from the beginning of the tournament and made the German team tick.

Right attacking midfielder: Andres Iniesta (Spain) Won the World Cup for the Spain. And even though he wasn’t on top of his game during the tournament made the Spain’s game look easy in the times when there was no space or time.

Left attacking midfielder: Thomas Muller (Germany) One of the brightest newcomers this summer. Had his breakthrough season with Bayern during the winter and rose to prominence in the national team during the tournament too.

Attacking midfielder: Wesley Sneijder (Holland) Got an average Dutch team to the World Cup final.

Forward: Diego Forlan (Uruguay) Probably the best player in the tournament, even if not quite as good footballer as Xavi.

Not too many suprises, but then again, it is the team of tournament so I don’t think any of the names should a surprise. On the bench would be sitting Samir Handanovic (Slovenia), Philip Lahm (Germany), Juan (Brazil), Anthony Annan (Ghana), Arjen Robben (Holland), David Villa (Spain)

Neutrals and football romantics have got their wish come true. The World Cup final will be played between two teams that possess their own strong football identities, have always believed in their own style, but have never won the World Cup before.

First Netherlands came through the challenge of Uruguay and last night Spain won Germany 1-0, in a game that had all the ingredients to become one of the all time classics, but  Germany failed the expectations and wasn’t able to match Spain’s midfield dominance. Schweinsteiger, Khedira, and Ozil were simply outplayed by Xavi, Iniesta, and Alonso. And that left Germany to rely on their counter-attacks, which were never coming, because such was the composure in the Spanish midfield. Spain has also now won all their second round games with a smallest margin of 1-0. But make no mistake, it is not catenaccio they are playing. Quite the opposite – they are really starting to make art of not conceding. (More about this later)

“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ’A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.” 

“To be successful,” Rove explains, “an attack must be perceived as both fair and relevant, backed with credible evidence, and launched at the right time.” The half-truth here is “credible evidence.” Rove means evidence that only appears credible, evidence that sprays fast enough and drips far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on.

Just starting to read Ohio’s Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man and Myth and then the latest NYRB brings another must to read in Karl Rove’s memoir - Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

If you are still undecided whether to spend next 600 pages with Karl Rove make sure to read NYRB’s piece, The Curveball of Karl Rove. The book will sure shed light to many things that have been in the headlines during the last decade and open up Rove’s special relationship to George W. Bush that is actually often compared with Hanna’s relationship with McKinley. And as Rove is also an admirer and student of Hanna’s career, (e.g. Billionaires for Bush. The Nation. July 21, 2003. ”It’s not for nothing that Karl Rove describes Mark Hanna as his political hero”.) the two books probably create interesting parallel if read together.

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage (August 6, 1991)

The war has changed, the society has evolved, but we are the same.

Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don’t know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.

…

I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press centre had been, where we’d sat smoking and joking and going, ‘Too much!’ and ‘Far out!’ and ‘Oh my God its gets so freaky out there!’ He looked so unbelievably peaceful, I knew that somewhere that night and every night there’d be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too. And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.

pp. 261-262

Getty Images

José Saramago died Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87 years.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it’s the citizen who changes things. I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century) (Hardcover) by David Weir
Hardcover: 233 pages
Publisher: State University of New York Press; illustrated edition edition (November 8, 2007)

The culture of decadence in the United States, historically considered, begs the question: what, after all, is decadence? As many critics have observed, decadence is hard to define because the concept is so nuanced and polyvalent that the very procedure of definition misses the point. The moment we say “Decadence is,” the game is lost: decadence and denotation appear to be opposed. Indeed, before we can even begin to say what decadence is, we must first say what decadence is.

“Inevitably, this means that there is something secondhand about American decandence, so the traditional, negative meaning of ‘decadence’ as “mannered imitation” has some relevance to the American variant. Still, this “decadent decadence” is not without its appeal, given the cultural alternatives on offer in 1890s America. … Perhaps the final paradox of American decadence is simply this: that only by ending could the culture continue.

Americans are not degenerate; rather, they are exhausted. In Nordau’s Europe, degeneracy is the ruin of civilization; in Beard’s and Weir’s America, civilization is the ruin of the citizenry, or, at least, that portion of the citizenry charged with doing the “brain-work” that keeps up the capitalist economy humming. “

Looking backward now, we can only be nostalgic for that vanished age when depravity and corruption actually meant something, when excess needed careful calculation and perversion required discipline and discretion. Today, of course, America offers no shortage of depravity, corruption, excess, and possibly even perversion, but never decadence: it is too late for that.

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“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

As summer has finally arrived to Helsinki I doubt there is better ways to spend days than being unoccupied and leave the city to wander in the woods close by. Henry David Thoreau’s brilliant essay Walking is definitely one to carry with you.

“

I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization; the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre” — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer“, a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.