Meatless Monday

Some Facts:

• one burger a day increases your risk of dying young by a 1/3.
• 10 billion animals are raised per year for meat.
• most of which are farmed industrially with poor welfare.
• compared to vegetables, beef takes 100x more water for the same weight.
• cattle currently take up 30% of the worlds land surface,
• and release more co2 than all of the worlds transport put together.
• people today eat twice as much meat as we did in the 1950's.

So, with this in mind I'm going to be joining the movement known as Meatless monday.

Meatless monday is a US campaign to help raise awareness of the issues surrounding meat production, nutrition and food awareness, and it's a damn good, simple idea.

One day a week, you cut meat out of your diet completely, Simple as that.
Where possible I will also be avoiding beef and pork altogether and instead having a more environmentally friendly meats (sustainable fish or poultry).

For more on this issue, watch this 4min talk on weekday vegetarianism...


I will, of course keep you updated with how this is going, if it goes well (and I can't see why it wouldn't) I hope to expand it to more days, and perhaps eliminating milk and animal products from my diet as well.

Shep .

Eyjafjallajökull

This time-lapse video was shot by Sean Stiegemeiser:

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get

Shep.

The Intelligence² Debate

Below is Stephen Frys argument that 'The Catholic Church is NOT a force for good in the world', I highly advise you watch it.


Shep

The Wedding Bride

I'm not normally one for romantic films, but this looks pretty damn good.

The Spaces In Between.

How To Destroy Angels - The Spaces In Between.

Those of you who read this blog regularly, (or actually know me), will know i'm a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails.

The above video is the second song to be made available from Trents new band (How To Destroy Angels) self-titled EP due out in July. The first single 'A Drowning' is available to download from Amazon and iTunes, or just listen to here:

[Shep]

Best of a bad job.

From the 'I don't want to sound like a hypocrite' dept.

Given the public airing of my views over The Conservatives, here's my views on why the current situation of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition may be the best option for Britain:

Firstly I will start off by stating, as I have many times before, that I would have preferred a Lab-Lib coalition, and voted in the hopes of one, or rather, to keep the Tories out.

However, given the unclear result of the hung parliament there were three options for who could have been in power now:

Firstly, and my preference, would have been for the said Lab-Lib coalition. On ideological grounds it would have been the easiest match between the three parties. However, the numbers just weren't there to make it feasible for a majority, a majority could only have been made possible with the inclusion of alot of the independents and nationalists, this could have possibly meant that the government was held to ransom over national issues and meant England suffered worse cuts than Scotland or Wales (i've addressed my desire for further devolution here). And given the number of parties involved would have been unstable, probably only lasting 2 years at most.

Secondly is what has happened, the Con-Lib coalition. Although ideologically there was alot more policies to work out and compromise on in this situation, the numbers allow these two parties to have a majority in the commons without having to rely on others to join them. From the Conservative point of view they win because they get into power and can make the changes they feel are necessary while commanding a majority, from a Lib Dem point of view they've also won, they can get some of their policies passed and even some MPs on the cabinet. For the nation it means that all policies are subject to scrutiny before going into the commons and there are compromises made, but most importantly, the government is strong in a time of financial crisis.

The third option was that the Lib Dem talks would collapse and the Conservatives would go it alone in a minority government, this would have made it difficult to get laws passed through because of the size of the opposition, and resulted in weak government that would likely have meant we were headed to another general election very quickly.

I'm not saying that everything this government does I'm going fully support, it is still the Conservatives after all. Given that the election left us with no clear winner and three definite losers, no-one knew exactly what had been voted for and what the will of the people was; however, what was made clear, especially after the trouble in Greece, is that right now we need strong government, and this coalition is the best chance we have of getting that.

EDIT:

For another reason I don't think a Cameron government will be as bad as some people reckon (though I could, of course, be wrong), please watch this video:

[Shep]