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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

[ALF’s self-defined mission is “to effectively allocate resources (time and money) to reduce animal suffering in the world.” Toward this end, ALF states that it “carries out direct action against animal abuse in the form of rescuing animals and causing financial loss to animal exploiters, usually through the damage and destruction of property.” In our rotten, filthy system, which holds profit and property sacrosanct and rationalizes the infliction of widespread suffering as a justifiable means to its depraved ends, Animal Liberation Front members have been designated as “terrorists.” One such “terrorist” is picture above.]

By Eduardo Lamazon*

10/1/07

Life for most animals can hardly be described as such. That is, it early on ceases to be life in the greater sense of the term, quickly devolving into an intense pain that serves as punishment for going along with a human coexistence that is entirely out of their control.

These ‘non-human animals,’ as propriety should coerce us into calling them, are marvelous creatures whose tendency towards both aesthetic and mechanical perfection is commonplace, yet whose defenses against our species’ incorrigibly vitriolic means of predation sadly do not follow suit.

There are those who posit reason as the singular quality of distinction between humans and animals. However, for those so quick to call upon the comparatively larger frontal lobes we possess, the counter response should both flatter and offend such a narrow-minded sensibility: ‘How,’ we should ask, ‘do we come to use this more refined calculating potential, not solely in relation to our admitted inferiors, but also as regards our unscrupulous method of understanding our own everyday actions?’

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

by Peter Singer

10/2006

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year.

The overwhelming majority of these animals have spent their entire lives confined inside sheds, never going outdoors for a single hour. Their suffering isn’t just for a few hours or days, but for all their lives. Sows and veal calves are confined in crates too narrow for them even to turn around, let alone walk a few steps. Egg-laying hens are unable to stretch their wings because their cages are too small and too crowded. With nothing to do all day, they become frustrated and attack each other. To prevent losses, producers sear off their beaks with a hot knife, cutting through sensitive nerves.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Vi Ransel

8/28/07

See them plump, parading
with cherubic cheeks,
their blimp-like breasts
and bouffant thighs chafing,
framing cheese,
butter, milk and ice cream-fed
pendulous bellies swaying
as they waddle, breathing laboriously,
to receive their 1st, 2nd and 3rd
place prizes, oversized satin ribbons
of heart disease and diabetes,
the dairy princes and princesses
who comprise America’s royal obesity,
her children suckled vicariously
by mothers whose milk
is a blueprint for producing
2,000 pound steers.

Look. At. Us.

Of all Earth’s creatures,
only man wet nurses himself
with the milk
of another species.

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Vi Ransel

8/18/07

Meat & potatoes.
Potatoes & meat.
This, we’re told,
is what REAL men
eat.

And since faggots, feminazis
and minorities got the upper hand,
it’s one of the last legal ways left
to show you’re a HE, not a girly, man.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

By Jason Miller

8/15/07

“The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”

–Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.

Deeply integrated into a cultural and economic system in which compassion is considered to be a weakness and in which greed, exploitation, profits, property, winning, bellicosity and selfishness are sacrosanct, we cannot escape the reality that each of us participates in the American version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to some extent. Unless we isolate ourselves in a mountain cabin or expatriate, as US citizens we are each damned to be one of the 300 million “Little Eichmanns” who enable our cynical plutocratic masters to dominate the world both economically and militarily.

Struggling to make itself heard above the cacophonous din of sound bites, advertising jingles, clichés, tropes, memes, mythos, and various other manifestations of the false consciousness that afflicts so many of us, the voice of conscience occasionally grabs our attention and violently reminds us how badly we are fucking the rest of the world.

And when it does, the question we each need to ask ourselves is, “How much like “Eich” do I want to be?”

While there are myriad ways we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution. Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly all stripes.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

“The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death.”

- Edward Abbey

By Vi Ransel

8/9/07

Elise ran,
wild-eyed and wildly,
through the green field, pursued
by an angry man wielding a weapon.
He beat her when he caught her
and threw her
into the back of his van.

He babbled on
about her supple flesh
as Elise’s brown soft eyes
wept terror. And when
the kidnap van suddenly
stopped, he drove her
toward his leering partner,
waiting impatiently to begin
his diligent ministrations.
And then he hit her
- hard -
but not enough
to completely stun her.

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