News I waited for 20 plus Years

One of the biggest killers of animals for no freaking reason and just because they can. In the process they have caused a cancer epidemic all over the world to the people who use their household products are now facing the music.

Procter & Gamble PG -1.90%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it would cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its nonmanufacturing workforce around the world, over the next two years.

The maker of Tide detergent, Pampers diapers and Bounty paper towels had about 108,000 total employees as of June last year.

P&G executives, speaking at a conference in Paris, also said they plan to trim the company’s product portfolio, exiting some categories and divesting it of some smaller brands in certain markets. The company didn’t offer specifics on those plans. 

 

VICT3R Project: What Are the Goals of Virtual Rabbits?

Animals used in laboratories are often treated as mere objects, enduring painful procedures like burns, poisoning, food deprivation, and skin, eye, and ear lacerations—all in the name of human safety. While many argue that these tests are necessary for ensuring product safety, ethical alternatives exist, and they should be explored. That’s where the Spanish university’s virtual rabbit initiative comes in.

The primary goal of the VICT3R project is to significantly reduce the number of animals used in safety testing for drugs and other chemicals by replacing them with computer-generated virtual models. This represents a crucial milestone in the quest for ethical and sustainable scientific research. If successful, the project could  prove that virtual models can yield reliable scientific results without harming living creatures.

Scientific advancements have provided more humane -and incredibly scientific- alternatives to animal testing, such as computer simulations and human tissue models. These methods can offer effective results without harming living creatures like rabbits. The VICT3R project introduces additional key objectives:

• Reducing Animal Use: The European VICT3R project aims to reduce the total number of animals used in experiments by up to 25%. This could lead to fewer animals being subjected to tests for medicine and chemical safety.
• Data Reuse and Sharing: The project promotes reusing and sharing data and applying new data science techniques to further implement the 3Rs—reduce, refine, and replace—in preclinical animal experimentation.
• Generative AI for Synthetic Animals: In cases where historical data on certain species or conditions is unavailable, generative AI could create fully synthetic virtual animals to fill the gaps.
• Expansion to Other Studies: The aspiration of the VICT3R project is to extend this concept of virtual control groups to other toxicological and pharmacological studies, both in academic and industrial settings, further reducing reliance on animal testing.

- More Here

Most Underrated Problem - There Are No Effective Mechanisms For Bringing The Depth Of Specialized Knowledge To Public Consciousness

This is one of the core problems of the modern world. 

Tremendous growth in knowledge of the world around us ironically overlaps with little or no growth in humans understanding of the complex system we live in. 

The movie Don't Look Up captured this essence and this brilliant piece captures this situation better through some of my favorite movies. 

The leader of the Soviet Union cannot find even an appropriate posture in response, shifting uneasily before throwing up his hands in bewilderment. Likewise, in Contagion, when epidemiologist Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) describes to a touchy public official how a recent spate of infections will develop into an epidemic, the official can only think to remind Mears that releasing such information to the public would cause panic and economic contraction. Whether under Soviet Communism or the liberal capitalist order, there are no effective mechanisms for bringing the depth of specialized knowledge to public consciousness. The calamities beggar belief because the knowledge that unveils them seems to have been developed in seclusion, secret to all but a collection of elite minds.

[---]

Just as the expert is ennobled in the technical disaster movie, his responsibilities expanded by dire circumstance, so too is the ordinary person demoted and infantilized. Each entry has its surrogates for the layman; those whom Margin Call calls “normal people,” represented by janitors, plumbers, valets, firefighters or the pedestrian masses. Inevitably, they all exhibit the same characteristics: desperation, superstition, panic and an ignorance that tends to self-destruction. They cannot be anything but numbers, vectors, collateral, victims. They are never so lucky as to receive knowledge when it still matters.

[---]

Make no mistake: the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t accept the guidance of experts. We have to. But we could reexamine how and why this social necessity emerged, especially when so much popular media is content to simply chastise the skeptical layman for not upholding their end of the irrefusable bargain. This was recently exemplified in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an unbearably stupid allegory for climate-change denial in which two astronomers discover an Earth-bound comet that will destroy human civilization and most life on the planet. As they try to inform the public of the coming apocalypse, the astronomers are ritually ignored from all quarters of society—a manic political class; a glib media; shallow celebrities; a droolingly stupid public; and a pseudo-intellectual capitalist cult leader. The film cloaks itself in Cassandrian garb but only serves to vindicate liberals and progressives who want to unearth an ancient idea about disasters: that they are punishment. McKay’s film carries forward the logic of the technical disaster movie, but only after perverting it into a petty morality play, where the catastrophe is the only natural fate of a society so aloof and disdainful of expertise. Don’t Look Up manages to partake in the lethal incuriousness it means to bemoan by finding the suspicion of experts to be a moral failing, rather than a manifestation of the structure of technical knowledge itself. 

[---]

Specialized knowledge progresses in a sort of fractal pattern, further departing from commonsense understanding as it reaches deeper into nature, reticulating endlessly at ever greater resolution. Its complexity and abstraction are always rising. But it also works, bringing us closer to what is apparently true about our world. And what works reliably makes its way into the mechanisms of society. The theory that earthquakes are the result of faulting is developed and tested until it becomes the basis of building codes. Likewise, securitization is prototyped and refined by bankers and economists until it becomes a mainstay of the global financial system.

[---]

The technical disaster movie and the real events that inspire it serve as the most advanced expression of this social reality. Yet we will never find within these films a way out of the problem they uncover. The project of synthesizing technical knowledge into broader social concern, much like specialization, is a long collective haul—and we lag far behind the progress of knowledge. Until then, the expert class will remain in the unenviable position of convincing the public, with every compounding crisis, that ours is a technocracy of necessity.

So how do we solve this problem. There is no panacea. 

• Understanding humans nature and human phycology would help in curating and convening the message to masses. 
• Religious places should help in spreading the knowledge (yes, its possible and important) 
• Educating kids in early age to appreciate and meditate on the gift of complex systems, curiosity and wonder. 
• Educating people through movies and TV series
• From home to work encourage people to be humble towards the limits of one individual understanding everything and limits of human knowledge
• Encourage people to act more than talk. 
• Most importantly - people with depth of specialized knowledge should be humble, not label themselves politically and money, fame etc., should not be the primary drivers. 
• What else?

FDA Modernization Act - Better News For Future Animals

Good news came via an email from NAVS landed in my inbox: 

Yesterday, September 29, the U.S. Senate unanimously gave its consent to an updated version of the FDA Modernization Act. An earlier version of this legislation has already passed the House of Representatives.

The House and Senate versions of the bill still need to be reconciled; however, once signed into law, the FDA Modernization Act will end an archaic mandate by the Food and Drug Administration that all new drugs be tested on animals. It would instead give drug developers the option to use modern, non-animal methods.

While this bill does not mean a wholesale cessation of animal tests in drug development, it finally provides drug manufacturers with the option to use safe, humane, non-animal tests. It brings us one huge step closer to the day when animal tests are relegated to the dustbin of history.

NAVS advocates like you have been working hard for more than a year to ensure the passage of this bill. This is a time to be proud—your voice truly has made all the difference!

Thank you for all you do on behalf of animals.

From CATO:

Today the U.S. Senate passed, by unanimous consent, the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, co‐​sponsored by Senators Rand Paul (R‑KY) and Cory Booker (D‑NJ). The bill removes the mandate, included in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), that requires all drugs to be tested on animals to exclude toxicity. The bill does not end animal testing, but it now permits drug developers to use alternative methods to test for toxicity when feasible. Similar provisions are in a bill passed earlier in the U.S. House of Representatives, making this reform likely to become law.

Since the FDCA was passed 83 years ago, research has shown animal testing to be an inconsistent indicator of drug toxicity and, in many cases, alternative methods are equally or more reliable. Yet, because of the 1938 mandate, hundreds of animals must be killed for a pharmaceutical company to bring a single drug to market. Last year, Senator Paul held a “Puppy Press Conference,” making the case for the reform.

This bipartisan legislation is certainly commendable. But, to be fair, it’s low‐​hanging fruit. The FDCA needs much more comprehensive reform and must be made consistent with its authors’ pledge to respect the people’s right to self‐​medicate.

Thank you Senator Cory Booker for making this happen. You are the only person in the senate since well for ever who works tirelessly to help animals in need. 

Thank you Senator Rand Paul for crossing party lines and standing up for the moral cause. 

For decades animal testing was done for one reason - because they can do it and no one cared. 

This is not a right or left wing issue. This is a moral obligation. Thank you for doing what you do. 

A little history tour to explain why this is not a political issue but a madness of humanity issue. 

During cold car, Soviet Union killed 180,000 whales for no reason since:

the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Once the blubber was cut away for conversion into oil, the rest of the animal, as often as not, was left in the sea to rot or was thrown into a furnace and reduced to bone meal—a low-value material used for agricultural fertilizer, made from the few animal byproducts that slaughterhouses and fish canneries can’t put to more profitable use….Why did a country with so little use for whales kill so many of them?

The reason they killed so many whales was because... well "they can" and no one questioned. 

The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime. 

Along the similar craziness of Soviet Union, USA is still doing animal testing using dogs, cats, monkeys, bunnies and other mammals for the same reason - because "they can" and no one questions them. 

Since the FDCA was passed 83 years ago, research has shown animal testing to be an inconsistent indicator of drug toxicity and, in many cases, alternative methods are equally or more reliable. Yet, because of the 1938 mandate, hundreds of animals must be killed for a pharmaceutical company to bring a single drug to market. Last year, Senator Paul held a “Puppy Press Conference,” making the case for the reform.

Moral degradation happens agnostic to politics and geography unleashing immense pain and suffering on animals. 

We have an obligation to change this. 

Learn, Act, Update Learnings From Action. Repeat - Saul Griffith's Book Electrify & Other Sustainable Practices

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

What Margaret Mead missed in the above fact is that even simple changes by a small group of people has the power to change the status quo for good. Nassim Taleb calls it "Minority Rule".

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

Do simple changes to your life everyday instead of signaling, arguing and making language based noise which roughly translates to "I am a good human",  "I am pro market",  "I care for the planet, poor people animals, and nature" and other similar bullshit phrases.

Saul Griffith's Book Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future is meant educate us fast.

 “Here, I will try to offer you dinner party-ready talking points for the main questions that people will inevitably have for the main argument of the book. Each topic is worthy of a book in itself. If I dispose of a favorite baby of yours too quickly here, or you think I have it all ass-backward, then we should grab a beer sometime.”

Read the excerpts here and some actionable items: 

Stop the insanity of spreading "I love to travel" bullshit: 

Flying is energy-intensive per minute, but not per mile. Per passenger-mile traveled, it requires approximately the same energy as driving in a car with a passenger. That said, reducing the number of flights taken is one of the most effective ways for individuals to reduce their energy footprints.

Embrace nuclear energy and vote for candidates who will help innovate in nuclear waste management:

America has led the world in nuclear power. The U.S. Navy operates the largest fleet of small reactors in the world, and it boasts an impeccable safety record. Nuclear is a form of electrification, and it fits squarely with the plan to fight global heating. Nuclear power currently delivers around 100 gigawatts of very reliable electricity to America’s grid. Maintaining or even ambitiously increasing this amount would no doubt make the climate solution easier. Today’s best estimates have nuclear energy at approximately double the cost of wind and solar. Without a doubt, those costs could be trimmed enormously given advances in engineering, since most of these plants were designed 50 years ago.

The health effects of nuclear power have been well studied. It is established that nuclear is not as dangerous as we tend to think. But like shark attacks, it’s the prospect of a low-probability event that could release radiation that drives our fears. We can lower that probability further by building dedicated infrastructure like the facility at Yucca Mountain, but the fact remains that for 40 years, policymakers haven’t been sufficiently able to convince people to invest in this kind of infrastructure. Nuclear power will remain a very difficult political topic unless we have a breakthrough in waste management.

Pick a shovel today and plant trees:

Yes, we should — at least a trillion. Grab a shovel!

The best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. The second-best time to plant a tree is today.

Go plant a tree for your grandkids to climb on. Even better, go plant 30,000.

Remember - Electrify book is meant to enlightened you on how to help yourself not nature. Nature will do just fine with or without humans. 

Gia Mora has small-little-beautiful changes you can make at home to help yourself and your health. 

• Trade Beef for Beans - I eat lots of lentils and beans. Plus no meat in Max's house. 

• Buy Local Instead of Commercial - I haven't been to the grocery store in years and buy everything in small farms.

• Turn Your Food Waste Into More Food - I cook beet leaves like spinach to all parts of cauliflower and broccoli. Start composting for other things. Read the book The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook: Recipes and Techniques for Whole Plant Cooking by Linda Ly.

• Trade Disposables for a Zero-Waste Kit - Since Max passed away, I have almost replaced all plastic items with bamboo or eco friendly products. Cancer and our health is a complex system, its easy to eliminate bad health triggers from micro-plastic.

• Select Experiences Over Things - This doesn't mean travel (I cannot get over this mindless act from most humans) but go for simple walk, workout, listen to music and zillion other simple pleasures. Read E. F. Schumacher's classic book Small is Beautiful - cross domains and apply to daily life. 

• Get Your Shopping Fix Secondhand - I don't follow this when it comes to clothes. I retain my clothes for decades and donate every year. Quite a few kitchen items I still own are over 2 decades old bought from thrift stores when I had little money. 

• Invest in Quality Instead of Buying Cheap - Prius, Dyson and Apple are expensive but they are worthy long term investments.

• Make Your Own Cleaning Supplies - I don't and opt to buy not tested on animals for 2 decades. 

• Trade Plastic Cleaning Tools for Natural Alternatives - Covered in fourth point above. 

• Choose Reusable Cloths Over Paper Towels - Been doing this for years. Unfortunately when Max got cancer, I had to buy lots of paper towels. Went back to minimal use of paper towels now. 

• Store Food in Glass or Beeswax In Lieu of Plastic - Covered in fourth point above. 

• Reuse (Don’t Toss) Your Old Water - I don't capture rain water. I should start doing it. Watch the classic national award winning Tamil movie Thaneer Thaneer (Water, Water). K.Balachander's insight of increasing awareness of preserving water will make you cry. And stop playing golf and eliminate your lawns. 

• Wash Your Clothes in Cold Water Instead of Hot - Been doing this for 2 decades. Understand - there has been great innovation in the science of laundry detergents to clean effectively using cold water. Most people are unaware of (or under-rate) the innovations in home and body cleaning products. 

• Flush Less - Pee-flush happens once or twice a day. 

• Switch to a Sustainable Toilet Paper - I tried this a few times in the past years but it didn't work. I should try again since there are new products on the market. 

• Unscrew Your Incandescents for LEDs - Done that over a decade ago.

• Control the Temperature Outside of the Thermostat - One of the first adopter of Nest thermostat and it works great. 

• Don’t Just Turn Off—Unplug - I tried this decade ago and it worked. I took an alternate path - plug only lights, computers and coffee maker. I can be more conscientious.

• Switch to Renewable Energy - I am trying. Most solar companies are rejecting me stating I have too many trees - go figure the insanity.

• Trade Your Daily Drive for a Different Commute - I did car pooling to work for over a decade and now it doesn't apply to me. 

• Trade Travel Emissions for Staycations - Read the book Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin to cure yourself of the cancer called travel. 

I posted a couple of days ago about a meaningless book called What We Owe The Future full of useless philosophy and bullshit thought experiments. 

Stop reading such books and focus on what you can act on in everyday life and act on it continuously. Learn from mistakes and act empowered by new knowledge. Continue this Bayesian cycle untiring until the end of life. 

I am following a lot of things in the above list but the beauty of the Bayesian cycle will help me change soon by showing how much wrong I am doing by sheer blindness and lack of knowledge. Since Max died in 2019, I have made many simple changes in daily life from painful learnings of losing Max. 

This bayesian cycle will not only help your health long term but most importantly it will be your daily ally to your mind see reality as it is.

 

Everyday Foods & Cosmetics That Use Wild Plants May Be Harming The Environment

For over two decades, I acted on not using products not tested on animals. Good news is that it has gotten enough traction now that many countries and corporations have banned it. But yet, there is a lot of work to be done. 

Learning and applying that learning in action continues until one's last breath. In Buddhist terms - "Do it over and over again. Untiringly."  

For the past few years, there has been this new issue with food and cosmetics - think Almond milk to Shea body lotion to Himalayan pink salt. 

This national geographic article is a good start for one to raise awareness and to act on it: 

The chocolate you eat, the moisturizer you use, the tea you drink—these everyday products contain ingredients from wild plants. The way those plants—many of them threatened—are harvested may be damaging the environment and exploiting workers, a recent report found.

The UN-affiliated report by wildlife trade experts highlights 12 plants: frankincense, shea, Brazil nut, juniper, licorice, baobab, argan, candelilla, pygeum, jatamansi, gum arabic, and goldenseal.

Plant derivatives in household products often have “flown under the radar,” says Caitlin Schindler, lead author of the report and a project manager at Traffic, a nonprofit that monitors the sustainability of the wildlife trade. They “sit there somewhere in the middle of the ingredients list” on product labels. Even if consumers notice ingredient names, there’s no information about what’s involved in obtaining or processing them.

For example, about 20,000 Brazilians’ income depends directly or indirectly on the harvesting of Brazil nuts, which are one of the most widely consumed tree nuts in the world and are vulnerable to extinction. Entire families often come from neighboring regions to harvest the nuts, living in temporary forest camps, which provide poor shelter and no access to clean water. Here, workers risk being stung by scorpions, struck by heavy falling fruit, and attacked by jaguars. After the nuts are sold, importing countries profit, marking up the price about 2.5 times, even though no further processing is required.

First Successful Xenotransplantation!

The center announced Monday evening that surgeons there successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease.  The patient, David Bennett, was too sick to qualify for a human donor and had run out of other options.

In the decades-long effort to make xenotransplantation a reality, the new report differed from October’s in key respects. Most glaringly, the patient at NYU was already brain-dead. Doctors sutured a porcine kidney to the outside of her body and could only track whether the patient immediately rejected the foreign organ. As predicted by years of monkey experiments, she didn’t.

The new procedure may offer the first test of whether porcine organs, when bred with the right battery of genetic edits, can actually serve as a replacement or supplement to human organ donation and allow patients to live functional lives.

[---]

The news comes as xenotransplantation, after years on the medical margin, appeared to be inching closer to reality, potentially offering an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of patients in the US and around the world waiting for organs. After a high-profile attempt to transplant a baboon heart into a baby with a congenital heart defect failed in 1983, researchers and several companies tried to use recombinant DNA techniques to make pigs with organs that humans can accept.

- More Here 

The sad news is that they are using living pigs for this but hopefully in near future, they can create just "pig heart"in lab without actual pigs. I hope. 

The good news is - now there is concrete example for the morons who eat bacon to understand and open their eyes to see how pigs are genetically, physically and emotionally close to sapiens. 

Mexico Bans Animal Testing for Cosmetics

Mexico’s Senate has unanimously approved a federal bill banning animal testing for cosmetics. The decision makes Mexico the first country in North America and the 41st country in the world to ban cosmetics testing on animals.

Under the new law, cosmetic research may not include testing on animals that includes individual cosmetic ingredients or finished cosmetic products. The new law also prohibits the manufacture, marketing, and import of cosmetics whether their final formulation or some of their individual ingredients have been tested on animals elsewhere in the world.

Of the 103 senators who participated in the vote, all voted in favor of the bill. Humane Society International/Mexico advocated for the bill along with a non-governmental organizational called Te Protejo that promotes the use of cosmetics that haven’t been tested on animals.

The groups believe that interest in the legislation was influenced by Humane Society International’s stop-motion animated film “Save Ralph.” The story of a rabbit cosmetic tester had more than 150 million social media views and more than 730 million tags on TikTok. It spurred more than 1.3 million people to sign a petition for the legislation in Mexico.

- More Here

Do Wild Animals Get PTSD?

We are not talking about dogs or cats here (yes, they do get PTSD). This is yet another huge step in understanding all living beings in this planet suffer, emote, and every damn thing we sapiens experience. 

It is indeed a huge step but alas, sapiens moral compass refuses to move. 

Studies of the ecology of fear started in the 1990s. Before then, scientists assumed that the impact of a predator on an individual prey animal was either deadly or fleeting. If a hare survived a coyote attack, or a zebra escaped the claws of a lion, it would move on and live its life as before.

But research shows that fear can alter the long-term behavior and physiology of wild animals, from fish to elephants, Zanette and Clinchy write in the 2020 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “Fear is a response all animals mount to avoid being killed by predators,” says Zanette. “It’s enormously beneficial, because it keeps you alive to breed another day. But it does carry costs.”

The reasons to fear are clear. Recent studies have found that up to 32 percent of adult female giraffes in the Serengeti carry scars from lion attacks, 25 percent of harbor porpoises in the southern North Sea have claw and bite marks from gray seals and 100 percent of manta rays in some African waters bear multiple bite wounds from sharks. These survivors may carry memories of terror along with their physical scars.

[---]

Some researchers now disagree with this human-centric view of PTSD, however. “A lot of things are shared between humans and other mammals,” says Sarah Mathew, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University. This includes learning about and responding to danger, and avoiding situations that present life-threatening risks. Mathew believes that PTSD has deep evolutionary roots, and that some of its symptoms arise from adaptations — like a heightened state of alert — that allow individuals of many species, including our own, to manage danger.

This evolutionary perspective is beginning to change minds. Clinchy and Zanette have organized conferences on the ecology of fear and PTSD that bring together ecologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. “The psychiatrists and psychologists were talking about PTSD as maladaptive,” recalls Clinchy. “We were arguing that this is an adaptive behavior, to show these extreme reactions in this particular context, because that increases your survival.”

Diamond came to agree. The brain of someone with PTSD, he says, “is not a damaged or dysfunctional brain, but an overprotective brain. You’re talking about someone that has survived an attack on his or her life. So the hypervigilance, the inability to sleep, the persistent nightmares that cause the person to relive the trauma — this is part of an adaptive response gone awry.”

“There’s a stigma involved in PTSD, frequently,” says Zanette, “so people don’t seek treatment. But if patients can understand that their symptoms are perfectly normal, that there is an evolutionary function for their symptoms, this might relieve some of the stigma around it so that people might go and seek treatment.”

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Nevertheless, mosquitoes and water provide narrow paths from one host to the next. Mosquitoes, for example, are not syringes. They are fully functional animals that have their own immune systems, and even those microbes that can manage to evade mosquitoes' defenses will be limited to those in the blood. Similarly, water generally passes on those microbes that live in the digestive tract. Hunting and butchering, in contrast provide superhighways connecting a hunting species directly with the microbes in every tissue of the prey. 

I've never become completely accustomed to exactly what is required to prepare meat for consumption.  We take for granted what it means to remove hair and skin from a dead animal, the effort needed to separate meat from many bones distributed in an animal to support its movement. We forget how many parts of an animal must be negotiated to get the prime cuts: the lungs, the spleen, the cartilage. Watching the process on the dirt floor of a hut or on leaves spread out on the ground in a hunting camp, seeing the blood-covered hands that separate the various parts of the animal and hearing bits of discarded meat and bone hit the floor still shocks me. It also helps to remind me of the microbial significance of the event. 

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe; who is aptly called the Indiana Jones of virus hunters. 

Max was little over three years, when I first listened to Nathan Wolfe interview - Waiting For The Next Plague on Edge. That was on January 30th 2009 (Yes, I was following Edge everyday that time). 

Fast forward to March 2020 - exactly 11 years and 2 months later, after the COVID pandemic hit, I went to my basement to dig through my "preparations" for a future pandemic. Surprisingly, I found masks, medical supplies etc., which I bought in 2009 after listening to Nathan's interview. 

For once, I was happy with myself that I acted on what learned and didn't just accumulated knowledge for the sake of knowing. Nothing matters in life than action. 

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

- Buddha 

In other words, I was expecting a pandemic for over a decade. 

• Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck's discovery. 
• Category Four agents represents the final steps on the journey to become a human-specific microbe. Whether or not monkeypox has the potential to join the pantheon of our Category Four agents remains to be seen. Microbes that reach Category Four can live exclusively in humans while simultaneously continuing to liv in animal reservoirs. Monkeypox still ranks as a Category Three agent, but that could certainly change. 
• Checkout how chytrid fungus has resulted in global grog deaths and in some cases extinction of entire grog species, a tragic loss of wildlife on our planet. What happened with the chyrid fungus also gives us important clues to a larger phenomenon that affects much more than amphibians. 
• The number of livestock on the planet now boggles the mind but the way that they're transformed into meat also differs in important ways from how it's been done since domestication began. Historically, a single animal would feed a family or at most a village. With the evident of processed meats, a single hot dog consumed at a baseball game can consist of multiple species (pig, turkey, cattle) and contain meat derived from hundred of animals. When you bite into that hot dog, you're literally biting into what was only a few decades ago an entire farm. Combining the meat of many animals and then distributing it to many people has obvious consequences. Connecting thousands of animals with thousands of consumers means that an average meat today will consume bit of millions of animals during their lifetime. What previously was a direct connection between one animal and one consumer is now a massively interconnected network of animal parts and those that eat them. And while cooking the meat certainly eliminates many of the risks, the massive number of interactions increases the potential that a rouge agent will make the jump. 
• Understand the term "emerging genes".
• Only a trivial fraction of the global ape population are under the watchful eye of woefully underfunded primatologists. If we're relying on these scientists to regularly capture the animal epidemics that could signal future human plagues, then we're destined to fail. To truly catch epidemics, we'll need to do more. 
• Please fund and support people who listen to "viral chatter".
• Steve Quake, a scientist working to change the ways we can forecast microbial evolution is not a microbiologist at all but rather a physics-trained bioengineer. 
• It is important to understand that all viruses are not our enemies. Safe viruses are some of the best friends we have in fighting the deadly ones. 
• Using one microbe to prevent another microbe from causing disease is pretty amazing. This is something that's increasingly explored in the nascent field of virotherapy. 
• Consider the human body. Only about one out every ten cells between your hat and shoes is human - the other nine belong to masses of bacteria that coat our skin, live in ur guts, and thrive in our mouths. The bacteria and viruses represented by thousands of species will outnumber the human genes every time. 
• There are gentle microbes out there - bugs that helps us, defend us, and live quietly within us doing no harm at all. If we could accurately determine which of those microbes on our bodies and in the environment were beneficial to us and which are rogue, we'd find something pleasantly surprising: the harmful ones are certainly in the minority. The goal of public health should not be to have a completely sterile world but to find the rogue elements and control them. A key part of addressing the nasty microbes will be to cultivate the microbes that help us. One day soon, the way we protect ourselves may be by propping up with bugs that live within us rather than knocking them down. 
• One day we may be able to rank the greatest future risks for pandemics, but for now we cannot. We know that they'll almost certainly be microbes that come from animals and that some spots around the world pose greater risks for their entry. 
• Among the most substantive risks for the emergence of a novel pandemics is the close contact between humans and animals, particularly wild mammals. Changing human behavior to decrease this sort of contact can begin long before we have an ideal prediction systems in place. 

The term "Risk Literacy" is an important one. The idea that part of the solution is having an informed public that can understand and appropriately interpret information on pandemics.  

Risk literacy, the ability to distinguish between different levels of severity, is not only for policy makers. Effective response to natural disasters depends on individual people and how well they stay calm and follow instructions. The constant barrage of threats articulated by the media has led to chronic risk habituation. The only way to break that logjam is for everyone to understand risk, to be able to assess the different kinds of disasters, and respond appropriately to them.  

Widespread risk literacy will help the public support the massive government expenditures that will be needed to appropriately predict and prevent pandemics. It will give a sense of how best to expend funds. 

From April 2001 to August 2002, a period which includes the 9/11 attacks, it's estimated that around eight thousand people died from terrorism. From April 2009 to August 2010, the same period of time but eight years later, over eighteen thousand people were confirmed dead from H1N1 pandemic alone - a pandemic dismissed by the public as insignificant. And that number is certainly an underestimate. 

I'm not claiming that proportionality in deaths is the only factor we should take into account when preparing for threats. But the trillions of dollars spent to prevent terrorism seem wildly disproportionate to actual risks when put the threats in proper context. 

 

The number one issue and the only issue which caused COVID and will cause future pandemics are our brutal relationship with animals; our fellow sentient creatures who we share this beautiful blue planet. 

Our mindless diet focusing only on tradition, gastrointestinal pleasures and sheer habit with no remorse for billions of animal sufferings nor our own health nor an understanding of that significant microbial event we leash every time we kill and chew meat. The truth is even after 18 months of COVID pandemic majority of the sapiens don't want to hear this nor don't want to change their diet. 

So, I am waiting and preparing for the next plague or worse, the final plague. 

AI is getting closer to replacing animal testing

Scientists test new chemical compounds on animals because we still don’t completely understand the world around us. New compounds might interact with living cells in unexpected ways, causing unforeseen harm.

But an artificial intelligence system published in the research journal Toxicological Sciences shows that it might be possible to automate some tests using the knowledge about chemical interactions we already have. The AI was trained to predict how toxic tens of thousands of unknown chemicals could be, based on previous animal tests, and the algorithm’s results were shown to be as accurate as live animal tests.

The algorithm can predict results from nine different tests, from skin corrosion to eye irritation, which authors say comprised 57% of all animal testing done in the EU in 2011.

- More Here (here & full paper here)

Pasta Company Barilla Bans Animal Testing

At Barilla we do not test our products or raw materials on animals, nor do we fund, commission, co-author it or otherwise support it, either directly or through third parties.

In order to assess the safety and quality of our products, we use a very broad range of methodologies, which do not include any type of animal testing.

We insist that our suppliers use alternatives to animal testing methods. An exception would only be made if regulatory authorities demanded it for safety or regulatory purposes, and even in this instance, Barilla will make every effort to identify and propose a non-animal alternative which could fulfill the regulatory requirement, if possible.

We have a keen interest on the latest advances and breakthroughs in the areas of alternatives to animal testing which are and will be developed by Institutions, scientists and NGOs. We are committed to publishing and sharing any new research that uses alternatives to animal testing. We will be continuously collaborating with third parties to put in place new non-animal-alternative testing methods.

- More Here

15 Great Cruelty-Free Companies

Complete List Here

Not Tested On Animals - 9

It's impossible to find a razor not tested on animals. Thanks to Harry's, I not only found one but also had the best shave ever. This is the best razor on the world market, period ( did I mention it only cost's fraction of other major blades?). Most men have a subconscious "personal" relationship with their razors and it's next to impossible to change brands. But most men don't know that the blade manufactures are worst offenders of animal cruelty either.

Harry's website states:

What's in your shaving cream?

We make our shaving cream from a blend of natural ingredients. We cool your skin with licorice, milk thistle, and cucumber, protect it with Vitamins E & B5, and then moisturize your face with marula & coconut oils. There are no parabens or sulfates in our cream, and it's both gluten-free and vegan. And of course, we never test on animals (if you exclude us personally). If you need a full ingredient list, reach out to us and we'll send it your way.

But I think it would help a lot to attract more customers if they can print "non tested on animals" on their package and also make it easier to find on their website (currently it's hidden inside the help section of their website). I had to email their customer service to confirm before ordering.

Not Tested On Animals - 8

Method products has been the find of the year - highly recommended !! Available at your local Target store and Amazon.

• Method Laundry Detergent 
• Method Dish
• Method All Surface Cleaner

- More Here

The "If" Syndrome - Stubbornness, Laziness & Ethical Consumerism

"David Vogel, a skeptic of ethical consumption, argues that beyond the narrow range of the population who really care and are already buying the products that match their values, consumers can’t be counted on. In The Market For Virtue, he cites a study suggesting that consumers:
will only buy a greener product [if] it doesn’t cost more, comes from a brand they know and trust, can be purchased at stores where they already shop, doesn’t require a significant change in habits to use, and has the same level of quality, performance, and endurance as the less-green alternative.

This might indicate that the people who say they care are, to put it bluntly, lying. People don’t want to admit to survey researchers that they don’t care about climate change or workers, so they exaggerate their concerns. But there are other reasons consumers do not act even when they have strong ethical beliefs."

- More Here.

Check out David Vogel's excellent book The Market For Virtue: The Potential And Limits Of Corporate Social Responsibility )

Not Tested on Animals - 7

We all need variety; without which it's easy to console our conscience. Every Man Jack bar soap is one the best ever (available at Target). Of the all not tested on animals products I have used so far, this one is the best.

Not Tested on Animals - 6

The most difficult find yet, Brut's Bees shaving gel and shampoo at the local A&P!! It eluded me for so long since it's neither listed on GoodGuide yet nor does it have that prominent leaping bunny logo.

Not Tested on Animals - 5

This was the most difficult find to date but ironically found it closest to home.
Toms of Maine Bar Soap @ the local Rite Aid

Not Tested on Animals - 4

Toilet Bowl Cleaner from Seventh Generation @ Target

btw., check out how to create our own self-disinfecting toilet brush here.