Saturday, October 17, 2026
1933 Albert Einstein arrived in the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany
1973 OPEC oil ministers used oil as an economic weapon in the Arab-Israeli War, mandating a cut in exports and recommending an embargo against unfriendly states
1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
1979 US President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the Department of Education
2024 Israel claims to have killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, during a battle in Rafah, Gaza
2025 Israelis fired at a vehicle carrying a displaced family in Gaza City, killing eleven Palestinians, including seven children. The IDF claims it crossed the ceasefire demarcation line.
In bed at 9, up at 5; 0530 201.8 115/75/62 96; 34/27/55/34, sunny.
Morning meds at 10 a.m. Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. I've missed my evening meds each of the last two nights.😱 The alarm on my Apple Watch is not sounding.😧
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian,” Paul McCartney has said.
Perhaps for that reason, slaughterhouses and factory farms have not only thick walls but also often barbed wire fences. Yet every now and then we catch a peek of what goes on behind those walls. One glimpse comes from video taken by an undercover investigator who worked at a chicken slaughterhouse in Dobson, N.C., from June through September.
The investigator, an employee of the nonprofit Animal Outlook, shared the video with me, and it can also be seen on the Animal Outlook website. The scenes underscore the frantic pace of the assembly line — except that in this case it’s a disassembly line, in which the birds come apart.
My takeaway from this glimpse is that the inside of even a well-run slaughterhouse is a sickening sight and that the comforting narrative of humane slaughter — as federal law terms it — bears little relation to the horror that livestock and poultry often endure in their final moments on the way to our dinner plates.
I am confident that what Kristof wrote was accurate. He's a careful and reliable reporter, not prone to making stuff up. He's a Big Lib, a lefty with a capacious and aching heart that he often shares with his readers. He seeks out and reports on the great injustices and suffering in the world. He pricks our consciences, or perhaps I should say, pierces our consciences about our indifference to all that injustice and suffering. He reminds me of what the fairies say in Yeats' The Stolen Child:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
He reminds me of an Ezra Klein interview of Kathryn Schulz on May 30, 2025, in which he said:
One of my most inconvenient beliefs about the world is that we now know too much about it and that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.”
And of course I thought of Ecclesiastes, ch. 1;
16 I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
And so I stopped reading, unable to burden myself with what Kristof promised: more knowledge of "the horror that livestock and poultry often endure in their final moments on the way to our dinner plates." And thus I don't know what his purpose was in writing the essay. Was it to turn us all into vegans? Or perhaps just to urge more rigorous enforcement of regulations intended to require "humane" slaughtering practices? Or to urge the promulgation of new and more effective regulations? Regardless of his purpose, as I read his words, I thought to myself, "No. I can't bear any more guilt." Not every time I have a hamburger, a chicken sandwich, or a bratwurst. Every time I eat meat. Or, for that matter, every time I eat an egg, I've seen reports of terrible conditions for the hens at egg factories, even for the so-called "cage-free" birds.
We are an omnivorous species, and for most of our history we have preyed upon other animals. Some religious people justify this by citing Genesis 1:26-28: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth…" and, after creating us male and female (a topic for another day) "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…” Most of us never think about it. We need to eat, and we need protein. Even Jesus ate fish, didn't he? And served it to his followers. Can't we assume he also ate meat, prepared according to kashrut?
Now there are about 350,000,000 people in the U.S. and more than 8,000,000,000 in the world. In the US, about 80% of the population lives in urban areas; in the world, about 58% lives in urban areas. Reliance on factory farming and factory slaughterhouses has become the norm and may be a necessity for survival. I surely believe that slaughtering farmed animals ought to be as "humane" (there's some irony in that term, isn't there?) as "practicable," and I suppose that is one of Kristof's points in his op-ed, but I recall the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which one of the hominids realizes that a large animal bone can be used as a tool and weapon. The sequence shows him smashing animal bones, then using the bone to kill a tapir-like animal for food. The group subsequently eats meat. Soon afterward, the same tool is turned against a rival hominid group, and one of them is beaten to death.
As a species, we have been killing each other since long before the dawn of civilization. We possess almost absolute power over the animals we breed, confine, transport, and kill for food, and with that power comes, for at least some of us, a moral obligation to minimize their suffering. Yet our history gives no reason to be confident about how "humanely" we use power. We have inflicted extraordinary cruelty even upon one another—upon members of our own species, who can speak, protest, remember, grieve, and beg us to stop. If we so often fail the human beings over whom we acquire power, it should not surprise us that we so often fail the animals, who are even more completely at our mercy.
Israel’s warm relations with the apartheid regime took many forms. The two countries saw themselves as part of the same struggle for civilization. “The Jordan Valley and the Zambezi Valley are alike frontiers today of the free world,” Radio South Africa declared in 1972. Sometimes, Israel’s equations would go too far even for the tastes of apartheid. In 1973, Ha’aretz, often viewed as a liberal publication, published a cartoon of African leaders as cannibals, only to find its “sheer racialism” decried and compared to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.” This was an uncommon slip. Israeli leaders were usually careful to respect the appearance of anti-racist language toward a regime shunned by most of the world. But after the 1973 war, which exposed Israel’s weakness, such caution was abandoned.Moser, Benjamin. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (p. 318). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Israel’s warm relations with the apartheid regime took many forms. The two countries saw themselves as part of the same struggle for civilization. “The Jordan Valley and the Zambezi Valley are alike frontiers today of the free world,” Radio South Africa declared in 1972. Sometimes, Israel’s equations would go too far even for the tastes of apartheid. In 1973, Ha’aretz, often viewed as a liberal publication, published a cartoon of African leaders as cannibals, only to find its “sheer racialism” decried and compared to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.” This was an uncommon slip. Israeli leaders were usually careful to respect the appearance of anti-racist language toward a regime shunned by most of the world. But after the 1973 war, which exposed Israel’s weakness, such caution was abandoned. In 1975, South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, was welcomed to Jerusalem. Vorster was considered far-right even by the standards of Afrikaner nationalism. A Nazi in all but name, he held views that were so extreme that he had been interned in South Africa as a potential saboteur during World War II, and he took a harder line with regard to racial matters than even Verwoerd had. This was the man who was welcomed to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; praised by The Jerusalem Post as one who had “recharted his country’s racial and foreign policy”; lauded by Yitzhak Rabin, remembered as a liberal, for embodying “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”; and embraced by Shimon Peres, later prime minister and president, for “their common hatred of injustice.”
Hi, Chad. I'm wondering whether you received my text message with the long entries from my journal. I didn't get a "delivered" notification under it. It's very long and probably too long for you to do anything with it with so many students, but I mainly wanted to let you and your students know how grateful I am for all your and their thoughtfulness and kindness. I also wanted to mention that I was particularly touched by the letters from Colt Bergeeman, Alexander (no last name given), Katie Kanopa, and Saphora Vang. I may not have gotten the spelling of those names right and I certainly don't want those students singled out publicly, as that might serve to diminish my appreciation for all the letters, but if it seems appropriate and you have occasion to let them know privately, I would appreciate it. I hope I'm not becoming a nuisance. Thanks again for all that you've done.
