Better Reading

Nicolette Hahn Niman, “The Carnivore’s Dilemma“.

It’s true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

From the great Northland

Meanwhile, north of the border—and south, such as it is:

A senior Mexican senator and former foreign affairs minister yesterday called Canada’s visa controls on Mexico a humiliation and questioned whether Canadian-Mexican relations will improve as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister.

In a blunt speech to a Toronto business and academic gathering, Senator Rosario Green Macias detailed the information she was required to provide to the Canadian government to enter Canada – proof of property ownership, her last six bank statements, a letter from the Mexican senate stating she is a senator and personal information about other members of her family.

“That has to stop,” said Ms. Green, who is president of the external relations commission of Mexico’s senate, an academic, a former secretary-general of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a one-time senior United Nations official as well as diplomat and cabinet minister.

She wore a silk scarf with a Mountie emblem, a gift from her daughter who attended private school in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

She repeatedly told her audience that the Mexican-Canada relationship is troubled. Twice she used the word “humiliating” to describe Canada’s visa controls, linking them to the wall – which she also called a humiliation – that the United States is building along the U.S.-Mexican border to keep out illegal migrant Mexicans.

Later, talking to journalists, she said the relationship will improve “when you change prime ministers,” then realized what she’d said and asked not to be quoted.

No, really. Imagine someone doing that—any of that—in the United States. And don’t give me that shit about how it’s coming. Yes, yes, whatever. But really. Proof of property ownership? Bank statements? A letter from home? From the Senate?

Yeah. And Barack Obama’s the goddamn Devil.

Okay, I got nothin’. Obviously. But … what about that story even sounds right?