Concise animal poem

'Sssssuch sssssenescent ssssssssskinnn.....' 
 goes the snake 
                    abandoning it.

OK, it's not just elks...

She has connections with the other world, or is it with the other room?

Famous British psychic Sally Morgan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/20/psychic-sally-morgan-hears-voices

Poor lamb, her prompter forgot to close the door. Aieee!

Mövenpick & Morals

There's been feedback on the coffee blog.  Coffee consumption and morals--rich!
http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-would-immanuel-kant-say-about.html
I'm posting some reactions:

Of course, we "Kant be sure" about how Havelaar coffee is produced; 

I have to  assume  that their claims to "fairness in trade" are truthful.

And based on that assumption, I will buy Havelaar bananas in preference

to Chiquita. Sheldon Kopp, a wonderful psychiatrist-author, said in

his "Eschatological Laundry List":

- We must live with the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.

And

- All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. 

I think the important thing is not whether our actions are indeed ethically correct -

with our partial knowledge, who knows.. they may turn out in reality not to be so -

but whether we are impelled to take these actions on the basis of ethical principles ! DL

Interesting piece. I should put you in touch with my cousin who has a coffee thing in Mexico, a type of cooperative she and her husband are involved with, and she's quite opposed to Fair Trade coffee.
There's an old Claire Bretecher cartoon about three yuppies, and one starts taking off this piece of clothing and that for political reasons and refusing this and that food for the same reason, then at the end, says that it's impossible to be a genuine revolutionary any more...LF

As for ethical coffee... having spent my formative years in the NGO world I've drunk enough revolting "campaign coffee" to last a life-time - what, you never heard of campaign coffee? Disgusting muck, launched on an unsuspecting world by Oxfam, enabling us to consume caffeine with a clear conscience (and maybe just a hint of smug self righteousness). As there was little else on offer, I drank gallons of the stuff in my youth - I paid my dues and now feel I've earned the right not to question where the coffee comes from! PH


You are something!!!!!!!! Now I can't even drink my morning coffee (and I have been saving the Mövenpick for a special treat)  without considering ethical dilemmas and whether the workers were exploited while picking the beans and what my position should be not just about the coffee choice but about all the political agendas around me. Am I living the life of an ostrich much of the time here in l'il ol' Groton?????? MV

You like Mövenpick Coffee, enjoy it!  Don't go on a guilt trip everytime you have some. MP

Does this mean you don't buy Exquisito anymore?????   PF


Vigorous reactions, with multiple ?? and !!
(fuelled by caffeine no doubt)

Swedish hangover---Elk in crisis

A homeowner in southern Sweden got a shock when he found 
a drunken elk stuck in his neighbour's apple tree.  

"The animal was apparently on the hunt for fermenting apples when 

she lost her balance and became trapped in the tree.  Per Johansson, 

from Saro near Gothenburg, found the elk making a roaring noise

in the garden next door. He called the emergency services, who 

helped him free the boozed-up beast by sawing off branches.  She 

spent the night recovering in the garden. The next day she took 

herself off into the woods with her hangover."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14842999 

   The one in the photo is comical, all splayed legs, hard to tell which eye is up.  
   If I laugh am I callous and indifferent to suffering?  
   Well no.
   I realize it's hazardous to have tipsy elk hanging around the garden, snorting apples and threatening family members.*
   However I also have the elk's fundamental well-being at heart.  Consider the situation from the elk's point of view----there are no programs in Europe for treating alcoholism in elks!**

   This is clearly an elk with issues of substance abuse.  In a country like Sweden, she should be entitled to a proper government-funded residential detox and rehab program.  A three-step or ten-step program for follow up.  Without it she might become a repeat offender--shock another neighbor, get into fights, get tangled in another tree, mess up her liver.
   Elk haven't made it down to urban Geneva yet, maybe because we don't let our apples ferment outside of vats, and we create alcohol exclusively for human consumption.    
   Having said that, I just remembered there are some rotting apples at the base of two trees in our garden. I'll have to keep an eye on the cats, who have been spending more time down there lately.....

-----

*A man was recently acquitted of murdering his wife when forensic tests showed the presence of elk hair and saliva on her person, presumably belonging to the four-legged suspect, who never bothered to show up in court. Yes sir, it was the elk.      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8384143.stm
** to my knowledge

What would Immanuel Kant say about Mövenpick coffee?

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

During my brief introduction to philosophy at university, I made the passing acquaintance of Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative.  It sounded like a cool principle, though I couldn't get my head around how rationality played such a central role in determining one's duty.

In Geneva there's a choice of many kinds of coffee.  There's mocha, Viennese roast, dark roast, espresso roast, arabica 100%, arabica/robusto.....you choose.  There's bio, organically grown. And there's ethical coffee 'café éthique' or 'café équitable' (sic) cultivated and harvested by workers who apparently enjoy better working conditions in plantations with a conscience. There are organic bananas and ethical bananas and organic ethical bananas.

After World War II many boycotted German and Japanese cars.  In the seventies many of us boycotted lettuce, then grapes to show solidarity for exploited farm workers who went out on strike, led by the courageous late César Chavez. *

From the seventies onward many people have boycotted Nestlé for their hard-sell of baby formula in poor countries with unsafe water supplies and implying that breast-feeding was less healthy for an infant. A cousin boycotts Walmart because of their poor treatment of workers, especially women.  Others have boycotted DuPont, Monsanto, Reynolds and others for being defense contractors supporting US military aggression.  Products such as Welch have been shunned because of known political affiliations. People have tried to boycot Chinese products (difficult), French, Iranian, Israeli and American imports--human rights abuses, political positions, government violence, tyranny, etc. ** Come to think of it, the original Boston Tea Party (the real American Tea Party) was a form of boycott.

The question is:  if I want to act ethically and want think of myself as an ethical person (and most people do)  how do I make consumer choices?  And what effect will these choices have on 1) my life 2) on other people's lives?
Kant says it doesn't matter what the outcome is, the importance lies in the action itself based on one's interpretation of the true moral action, what one must do.  In fact he wouldn't tell us to buy only ethical coffee in order to support poor workers.  He would tell us to buy only ethical coffee because it is one's moral duty to do so.***

By purchasing one non-ethical and one ethical bag of coffee what am I doing?  Hedging my bets?  Buying myself an economy-class seat in heaven?  (Also should I be calling the one that's not 'fair-trade' non-ethical?  Is the fair-trade one really less exploitative?  One could only know by going to the coffee plantations and checking out each situation personally).

For now I choose one bag of each.  In so doing  I'm soothing my conscience. I'm helping the fair-trade industry in a small way, but I'm not avoiding or boycotting the other. I'm not wholly good.
One bag for the taste buds, the other for the developing nations.
(Une pour les papilles, l'autre pour le tiers-monde).
One Mövenpick and one house ethical coffee.

Immanuel, please look the other way.

* His younger brother Richard, who died earlier this year, was invited to the White House by President Obama in 2010.  During apartheid we boycotted South African grapes and Outspan oranges.  César Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers Union with Dolores Huerta.  Also, during apartheid we boycotted South AFrican grapes and Outspan oranges.  

** And of course for health (scare) reasons people have refused to buy British meat (BSE), US meat (hormones in cattle), Spanish and German (epidemic of food poisoning which turned out to be from consuming toxic sprouts). I've surely left out many others.

*** Kant said that we all experience an innate moral duty. The existence of the conscience and feelings of guilt and shame tell us when we violate this moral duty. He believed that our moral duty could be revealed to us through reason, objectively. His theory was based solely on duty. He said that to act morally is to perform one’s duty, and one’s duty is to obey the innate moral laws   http://members.fortunecity.com/rsrevision/kantandthecatimp.html