News

It’s ironic that billionaire George Soros (who is less wealthy than billionaire Bill Gates but has done a lot more philanthropy, both absolutely and proportionately) is today being notably vilified in a hate campaign by Hungary’s incipient dictator, Viktor Orban, who is expelling the Central European University (founded by Soros, and the best university in Hungary) while blaming its founder for Hungary’s ills. (Meanwhile Orban is busy becoming a billionaire -- in Hungarian Forints stolen from EU funds and Hungarian tax-payers)

Soros’s Open Society Institute was also the one that founded and funded the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) that launched OA 15 years ago. (But I suspect that yet another US billionaire will find a way to trump Orban’s odia with his own...)

FROM THE MONTRÉAL RODEO TO ALL QUÉBEC RODEOS

Summary of Settlement Agreement Approved by Superior Court Judgment Friday, June 16, 2017

Montréal - June 16, 2017

1. On May 23, 2017, Professor Alain Roy of the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal, supported by a group of law students, presented to the Superior Court a Motion for an Interlocutory Injunction to cancel the rodeo planned for this August as part of Montréal’s 375th Anniversary Celebrations;

2. On June 7, 2017, the parties signed a Settlement Agreement which deals with the social concerns at issue involving rodeos across Québec and not only Montréal’s 375th Anniversary Celebrations;

3. Normally, settlement agreements remain confidential and are not made public. In this case, it was agreed that the Settlement Agreement would be made public and fully transparent to deal with the concerns of Quebec citizens.

4. On June 16, 2017, the Superior Court approved and certified the Settlement Agreement. This Agreement is now a COURT JUDGMENT;

5. Pursuant to this Judgment, the parties are now required to jointly request MAPAQ — or the government ministry responsible for the application of the Animal Welfare and Safety Act (BÊSA) — to establish an Advisory Committee by June 22, 2017 at the latest. This committee will consist of:

• 3 representatives (soon be to appointed by Professor Roy) from the animal rights field
• 3 representatives from the rodeo industry
• 2 representatives from MAPAQ.

6. The Judgment directs the parties to the Advisory Committee “to identify the different standards of conduct for animal safety and welfare applicable to rodeo activities in the Province of Québec, TO EVALUATE THE SCOPE AND SUFFICIENCY OF SUCH STANDARDS WITH REGARD TO THE APPLICABLE LAWS (INCLUDING THE MATTER OF THE SPURS AND STRAPS USED IN BRONCO RIDING TRIALS), and to make the recommendations to MAPAQ that the Committee deems requisite for the safety and welfare of animal beings”;

7. The judgment also directs the parties to comply with additional obligations that were not part of the Injunction. Two experts (a veterinarian and a behaviorist) in addition to a photographer will therefore be appointed by Professor Roy to attend both the Montréal (NomadFest 2017) and Ste-Tite (Ste-Tite 2017 Western Festival) rodeos to make their own findings concerning the well-being and the safety of the animals used in the rodeos. Each of the expert reports will be submitted to the Advisory Committee and will then be made public;

8. In accordance with the Judgment, the report must be filed and made public no later than one year after the Advisory Committee’s creation;

9. At the conclusion of the Advisory Committee's report, nothing precludes Professor Roy from filing a Motion for a Declaratory Judgment in Court in order to obtain a ruling on the legality of the rodeo practices identified by the Advisory Committee and evaluated by the two experts (see paragraph 8 above), in light of the provisions of the BÊSA Act;

10. In summary, on June 16, 2017, the Superior Court issued a public and fully accessible Judgment setting out the legal obligations of all parties and furthermore establishing legal deadlines. In the event that a party fails to comply with its obligations, the Judgment may be enforced in Court.

SOURCE
Droit animalier Québec - DAQ
https://www.facebook.com/droitanimalierquebec/

INFORMATION
Me Michael Simkin
msimkin@legallogik.com
Phone: 438-478-3456

Follow-up to:
Harnad, S (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview?
CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science)

Richard Poynder: It’s an interesting interview. I have a following-on question for you, Stevan, if you feel like answering it: Much has been made of the likely impact that Brexit will have on science/the UK and European research communities, but what if any impact do you think it could have on the crisis facing liberal democracy?

Hi Richard. This is going to sound apocalyptic (and I certainly hope I’m wrong):
 
I think the British exit from the EU, including all the circumstances and factors that led to it, is one of the most tragic symptoms of the crisis in liberal democracy. As such, it is both cause and effect.
 
The three worst features of the 20th century were war, racism and poverty. The remedy for poverty was meant to be socialism (communism in Russia and China and social democracy in the West). The remedy for racism was meant to be multiculturalism (immigration, integration, tolerance). And the remedy for war was meant to be increasing world federalism (the UN and the EU).
 
But the cold war and the nuclear threat kept nations in a state of tension and consumed vast resources. The eventual economic (and moral) collapse of the Soviet Union seems to have had an effect rather like removing a diseased prostate but thereby disrupting a pro-tem equilibrium and precipitating kidney failure.
 
I think the wrong “objective” conclusion was drawn from the collapse of the Soviet Union (“the socialist experiment has proved to be a failure”). As a result “trickle-down” capitalism has been triumphantly lionized while liberalism and striving for social equity have been equally triumphantly stigmatized.
 
Meanwhile, two kinds of technology have developed at a stunning rate: destructive weapons and online media. One could not expect much good to come from the former, but great expectations were pinned on the latter (including open access). Yet one of the effects of both new technologies has been to “empower” (literally) the worst sides of human nature: the divisive and destructive tendencies toward intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism, paranoia and aggression.
 
And these unleashed human tendencies have quickly found their way to the fatal weakness of democracy itself: The people decide what they want, but their wants are shaped by populism, and unreflective appeals to their basest inclinations. In this it is not surprising that the unreconstructed self-aggrandizing bigotry and xenophobia of petty, primitive countries (like my birthplace, Hungary) have “flowered” with the introduction of democracy in eastern Europe and the middle east. It had been festering there, lying in wait, all along.
 
But one would have thought that the mature democracies would serve as a civilizing bulwark against that. Yet no, Brexit has shown that the same primitive, sinister, shameful inclinations are alive and well in the United Kingdom (and Trump is rallying them in the US too). 
 
No, freedom-of-information and open access did not serve as an antidote, as hoped. Disinformation profited more from the power of open media than the truth did. And the proliferation of destructive weapons is only beginning to be exploited by the genetic and cultural heirs of our most barbaric roots.
 
Perhaps both democracy and liberalism were always doomed; perhaps it was just a matter of time before the law of large numbers, the regression on the mean, would bring out the meanest in us.
 
All one can do is hope that there is an epidemiological ebb and flow also underlying all this, and that illiberalism will run its course, and kindness, decency, humaneness will again become “popular.”
 
I (as you know) remain an unreconstructed social democrat. Ironically echoing the NRA motto in the US, I don’t believe that socialism failed; I think we failed — to implement it properly. No one can hope for justice in an unjust society, where a few have vastly more than they need at the expense of the many who just scrape by. 
 
I don’t know how to fix that, but I suspect that the solution, if there is one, is still an informational one. (It used to be called “education.”) Alongside the basest tendencies of the human genome there are, I believe, humane ones too, at least in the majority if not all people. The hope had been that liberal democracy would ensure that a decent majority prevails, one that enacts laws that protect everyone from the worse sides of our nature (greed, intolerance, aggression).
 
And (as you also know), I plan to focus my remaining years on what I hesitate to call a “microcosm” of it all — because in fact there is nothing “micro" about it: If the Holocaust was humanity’s greatest crime against humanity, the Eternal Treblinka we inflict on victims unfortunate enough not to be our conspecifics is humanity’s greatest crime tout court.
 
So I am trying to mobilize the second technology — open media — to open people’s hearts. We have outlawed slavery, rape, violence and murder against human beings, but we all collaborate in them when practiced against species other than our own. Until the humane majority outlaws it all, our basest inclinations will keep being expressed and exercised against our own kind too.
 
You will of course see this as an obsessive focus on my own “narrow” issue, far removed from Brexit and the crisis of liberal democracy. If so, I’d rather go down trying to liberate the most savagely exploited and long-suffering of our victims than reserve liberalism for the victors.

Richard Poynder: Thanks for your response Stevan.
I don’t disagree with your gloomy conclusions. Personally, I think the core problem is that our political leaders (those who should have been sufficiently educated to know better) gave in to market fundamentalism, and behaved as if everything is a potential market, and that even when this means impoverishing and disenfranchising large sections of the population (thus opening the door to populism, racism and barbarism) it is a price that has to be paid. But perhaps that is what you are saying.

Yes, that’s the trickle-down capitalism that has been (provisionally) dubbed the winner.

As to social media, I don’t really think they have made the problem that much worse. One only has to visit pubs and clubs in certain parts of any city to realise that for many people the worst things one can read on the web are just part of their daily discourse.

I don’t doubt that is and always was the pub discourse. But the social media put it on a global megaphone, incomparably magnifying and accelerating its reach. — And the populist, “wealth-creation” politicos played to it, played it up, and helped it prevail.

The tragedy I see here is that the EU has itself increasingly given in to market fundamentalism, as the Greeks discovered.

I don’t know or understand the details, but some have portrayed some of it as Skinnerian feedback against disproportionate corruption and abuse. Who knows? And surely there was some way of targeting the politicos and the oligarchs rather than the poor.

Let’s hope the future proves less gloomy than we fear! -- Richard

Acting on the hypothesis that there’s still a way to help is the only hope for the victims. Acting on the hypothesis of hopelessness is to betray them: a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stevan Harnad

Unlike Professor Éva Balogh, who has been monitoring, analyzing and reporting on Orban’s depredations for nearly 20 years now, I only got my first clue in 2011, with the Philosopher Affair.

But what I find remarkable is how just about every element of what was eventually going to become patently obvious to me — and to everyone else who pays attention — was already there, in its full, flagrant, foul odors and colors, in that formative and shocking affair, scarcely believable at the time, or even now.

For me, as an academic, it has since become a life-long wake-up call — and (academic) call-to-arms.

The escalating and unending revelations since then are hardly surprises any more, though they still take one’s breath away.

Stevan Harnad
External Member, Hungarian Academy of Sciences    [Resigned in protest, October 8 2016]

The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the “other-minds problem.”

Within our own species, thanks to language, the other-minds problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or “mind-reading” capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science and supplemented by cognitive neuroimagery. Together, these make the other-minds problem within our own species a relatively minor one.

But we cohabit the planet with other species, most of them very different from our own, and none of them able to talk. Inferring whether and what they feel is important not only for scientific but also for ethical reasons, because where feelings are felt, they can also be hurt.

Animal Sentience [ASent] is a new international, interdisciplinary journal devoted to the other-minds problem across species. As animals are at long last beginning to be accorded legal status and protection as sentient beings, ASent will explore in depth what, how and why organisms feel. Individual “target articles” (and sometimes précis of books) addressing different species’ sentient and cognitive capacities will each be accorded “open peer commentary,” consisting of multiple shorter articles, both invited and freely submitted ones, by specialists from many disciplines, each elaborating, applying, supplementing or criticizing the content of the target article, along with responses from the target author(s).

The members of the nonhuman species under discussion will not be able to join in the conversation, but their spokesmen and advocates, the specialists who know them best, will. The inaugural issue launches with the all-important question (for fish) of whether fish can feel pain.

ASent is a publication of the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy (HSISP). Based in Washington DC, HSISP’s mandate is to advance the application of scientific and technical analysis and expertise to animal welfare issues and policy questions worldwide. The HSISP is an affiliate of The Humane Society of the United States, the world’s largest animal protection organization.

ASent is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. Thanks to HSISP sponsorship, ASent need not charge either publication fees to authors or subscription fees to readers.

Authors' opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher or editors.

The table of contents of the inaugural issue of ASent follow below. Commentaries by scientists, scholars, practitioners, jurists and policy-makers are invited on any of the target articles (in bold); continuing commentary is also invited on the commentaries and responses. And of course the journal now calls for the submission of target articles. All target articles are peer-reviewed and all commentaries are editorially reviewed. Open peer commentary is intended particularly for new target articles written specifically for ASent, but updated versions of articles that have appeared elsewhere may also be eligible for publication and open peer commentary.

(Open peer commentary is modelled on the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), of which the editor-in-chief of ASent was also the founder and editor-in-chief for 20 years.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Inaugural Issue (2016)
Harnad, Stevan (2016) Inaugural Editorial - Animal sentience: The other-minds problem Animal Sentience 2016.001


Safina, Carl (2016) Animals think and feel: Précis of Beyond words: What animals think and feel (Safina 2015) Animal Sentience 2016.002


Key, Brian (2016) Why fish do not feel pain Animal Sentience 2016.003

Balcombe, Jonathan (2016) Cognitive evidence of fish sentience Animal Sentience 2016.008

Braithwaite, Victoria A. and Droege, Paula (2016) Why human pain can’t tell us whether fish feel pain Animal Sentience 2016.009

Broom, Donald M. (2016) Fish brains and behaviour indicate capacity for feeling pain Animal Sentience 2016.010

Brown, Culum (2016) Comparative evolutionary approach to pain perception in fishes Animal Sentience 2016.011

Chella, Antonio (2016) Robot fish do not need sentience Animal Sentience 2016.012

Dinets, Vladimir (2016) No cortex, no cry Animal Sentience 2016.013

Haikonen, Pentti O. (2016) On the sentience of fish Animal Sentience 2016.014

Hart, Paul J.B. (2016) Fighting forms of expression Animal Sentience 2016.015

Jones, Robert C. (2016) Fish sentience and the precautionary principle Animal Sentience 2016.016

Manzotti, Riccardo (2016) No evidence that pain is painful neural process Animal Sentience 2016.017

Mather, Jennifer A. (2016) An invertebrate perspective on pain Animal Sentience 2016.018

Ng, Yew-Kwang (2016) Could fish feel pain? A wider perspective Animal Sentience 2016.019

Seth, Anil K. (2016) Why fish pain cannot and should not be ruled out Animal Sentience 2016.020

Striedter, Georg (2016) Lack of neocortex does not imply fish cannot feel pain Animal Sentience 2016.021

Key, Brian (2016) (Response I) Going beyond just-so stories Animal Sentience 2016.022

Baluška, František (2016) Should fish feel pain? A plant perspective Animal Sentience 2016.023

Burghardt, Gordon (2015) Mediating claims through critical anthropomorphism Animal Sentience 2016.024

Derbyshire, Stuart W.G. (2016) Fish lack the brains and the psychology for pain Animal Sentience 2016.025

Elwood, Robert W. (2016) A single strand of argument with unfounded conclusion Animal Sentience 2016.026

Gagliano, Monica (2016) What would the Babel fish say? Animal Sentience 2016.027

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2016) Pain in parallel Animal Sentience 2016.028

Gonçalves-de-Freitas, Eliane (2016) Pain and fish welfare Animal Sentience 2016.029

Merker, Bjorn (2016) Drawing the line on pain Animal Sentience 2016.030

Panksepp, Jaak (2016) Brain processes for “good” and “bad” feelings: How far back in evolution? Animal Sentience 2016.031

Rose, James D. (2016) Pain in fish: Weighing the evidence Animal Sentience 2016.032

Segner, Helmut (2016) Why babies do not feel pain, or: How structure-derived functional interpretations can go wrong Animal Sentience 2016.033

Shriver, Adam J. (2016) Cortex necessary for pain — but not in sense that matters Animal Sentience 2016.034

Sneddon, Lynne U. and Leach, Matthew C. (2016) Anthropomorphic denial of fish pain Animal Sentience 2016.035

Stevens, E. Don (2016) Why is fish “feeling” pain controversial? Animal Sentience 2016.036

Van Rysewyk, Simon (2016) Nonverbal indicators of pain Animal Sentience 2016.037

Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph (2016) Fish and pain: The politics of doubt Animal Sentience 2016.038/

Key, Brian (2016) (Response II) Falsifying the null hypothesis that “fish do not feel pain" Animal Sentience 2016.039

Brown, Culum (2016) Fish pain: An inconvenient truth Animal Sentience 2016.058

Damasio, Antonio and Damasio, Hanna (2016) Pain and other feelings in humans and animals Animal Sentience 2016.059

Devor, Marshall (2016) Where is pain in the brain? Animal Sentience 2016.060

Diggles, B. K. (2016) Fish pain: Would it change current best practice in the real world? Animal Sentience 2016.061

Edelman, David B. (2016) Leaving the door open for fish pain: Evolutionary convergence and the utility of ‘just-so stories’ Animal Sentience 2016.062

Walters, Edgar T. (2016) Pain-capable neural substrates may be widely available in the animal kingdom Animal Sentience 2016.063

King, Barbara J. (2016) Animal mourning: Précis of How animals grieve (King 2013) Animal Sentience 2016.004

Botero, Maria (2016) Death in the family Animal Sentience 2016.040

Fox Hall, Tara (2016) Anticipatory grief Animal Sentience 2016.041

Gardiner, Martin (2016) Modulation of behavior in communicating emotion Animal Sentience 2016.042

Glymour, Clark (2016) The object of grief Animal Sentience 2016.043

Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona (2016) Love’s claim on grief Animal Sentience 2016.044

Proctor, Helen (2016) Monkey say, monkey do, monkey grieve? Animal Sentience 2016.045

Ristau, Carolyn (2016) Evidence for animal grief? Animal Sentience 2016.046

King, Barbara J. King (2016) (Response) Understanding emotional suffering Animal Sentience 2016.047

Broom, Donald M. (2016) Considering animals’ feelings: Précis of Sentience and animal welfare Animal Sentience 2016.005

Chandrasekera, Charukeshi (2016) From sentience to science: Limits of anthropocentric cognition Animal Sentience 2016.048

Clarke, Nancy (2016) Sentience and animal welfare: Affirming the science and addressing the skepticism Animal Sentience 2016.049

Copeland, Marion W. (2016) Life in translation Animal Sentience 2016.050

Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will (2016) Linking animal ethics and animal welfare science Animal Sentience 2016.051

Duncan, Ian J.H. (2016) Is sentience only a nonessential component of animal welfare? Animal Sentience 2016.052

Durham, Debra (2016) The science of sentience is reshaping how we think about animals Animal Sentience 2016.053

Rolle, M.E. (2016) Animal welfare and animal rights Animal Sentience 2016.054

Rowlands, Mark (2016) Mentality and animal welfare Animal Sentience 2016.055

Sammarco, Andrea L. (2016) Is humanitarianism recent? Animal Sentience 2016.056

Broom, Donald M. (2016) (Response) Sentience and animal welfare: New thoughts and controversies Animal Sentience 2016.057

Lachance, Martine (2016) Breaking the silence: The veterinarian’s duty to report Animal Sentience 2016.006


Ng, Yew-Kwang (2016) How welfare biology and commonsense may help to reduce animal suffering Animal Sentience 2016.007

On June 13 2015, all around the world – in Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin, Istanbul, Delhi, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal – people gathered to March for the Closing of the Slaughterhouses.

But the slaughterhouses will not close of their own accord.

To close the slaughterhouses people’s eyes and hearts have to be opened. Opening people’s hearts is the only hope for the countless victims – innocent, helpless, without voices, without rights – who are suffering, horribly and needlessly, every moment of every day, everywhere in the world, for our palates.



Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, The Ghost in Our Machine (with permission)
How to open people’s hearts?

With two fundamental facts that most people do not yet know or believe.

I. The first fundamental fact is that eating meat is not necessary for human survival or human health.

The vegans from all over the world who marched on June 13 were the living proof of this first fundamental fact (Nearly 1% of the world population of 7.5 billion is vegan today.)

II. The second fundamental fact is that in order to provide this meat that is not necessary for the survival or health of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, an unimaginable amount of suffering is necessary for over 150 billion innocent, voiceless, defenceless victims every year.

Slaughter for meat is not euthanasia. It is not the merciful, pain-free, terror-free ending of a long, happy life in order to spare the victim from suffering a terrible incurable disease or unbearable pain.

SEE ALSO:
- Video Captures Terror Of Slaughterhouses - The Dodo
- "Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside A Factory Farm - Mother Jones
- Scalding Live Chickens Is Business as Usual on Factory Farms - Mark Bekoff
- Cheap Meat Comes at High Cost to Farm Animals, Wildlife - Stephanie Feldstein
- Let's #OpentheBarns to Transparency- Matthew Bershadker

Slaughter is the terrifying and horribly painful ending of a short, anguished life full of disease and fear and pain, for innocent, defenceless victims deliberately bred and reared for that purpose. And it is all carefully concealed from the public eye.

And it is completely unnecessary for our survival or health. We inflict all this pain on the victims only for taste pleasure, and out of habit.

Demonstrations like the June 13 march are very important, but they are not enough to open people’s hearts and close the slaughterhouses.

For that, we first have to open access to the slaughterhouses, with audio-visual surveillance Webcams placed at all the sites of the abominations (breeding, rearing, transport, slaughter) -- cameras that will film the horrors and stream them all immediately, continuously and permanently on the Web so that all people on the planet can witness the terrible cost in agony that our taste-preferences are inflicting, every moment of every day, everywhere, on our victims: sentient beings, innocent, defenseless, without rights, without voice, without respite, without hope.



Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain image)

Not everyone will look at the videos streamed on the web.

But the number of witnesses who will look and see will grow and grow. And with them will grow the knowledge of the heartbreaking truth, the reality that has till now been hermetically hidden from our eyes and our hearts.

And those of us who come to know the awful truth can provide the eyes and the voice for the victims.

The existing regulations for minimizing suffering in slaughterhouses are shamefully inadequate -- how can one needlessly end an innocent life humanely? But even these existing, inadequate regulations are not being enforced or monitored or obeyed today.

As its first consequence, the crowd-sourced monitoring of slaughterhouses, based on the evidence streamed and stored publicly on the web, witnessed and reported by a growing number of informed and concerned citizens, will help to ensure that today’s existing (though inadequate) regulations – and prosecution for their violation – are enforced more and more reliably and rigorously.

In Quebec -- the province that has until now been the worst in Canada for animal welfare -- we have just acquired a legal basis for requiring rigorous monitoring of slaughterhouses: the National Assembly has heeded the many Quebec voices raised on behalf of protecting animals from suffering. The Quebec Civil Code has been amended to give animals the status of sentient beings instead of the status of inert property - or movable goods - as formerly. (Other countries are doing likewise: New Zealand is the latest.)

But this new status, like this public demonstration, are not enough.

Sensitizing Sentients to Sentience

In Quebec, on this new legal basis, and with the help of the new audio-visual evidence, as witnessed by the Quebec public, not only would we be able to prosecute those who do not comply with the existing (inadequate) regulations but we could also press for the passage of stronger and stronger legislation to protect sentient beings.

And the evidence provided by these surveillance Webcams would have a still further effect, apart from the enforcement and strengthening of today’s animal welfare regulations: It would also awaken and sensitize witnesses to the actual horrors made necessary by a non-vegan diet: It would sensitize us all to the sentience of sentient beings.

In place of the shamelessly false advertising images of "happy cows" and "contented chickens" we would all have the inescapable, undeniable, graphic evidence of the unspeakable suffering of these innocent, sentient victims - and the utter needlessness of their suffering.

Might this not at last inspire us all not to remain non-vegan, just for the pleasure of the taste, at this terrible cost in pain to other innocent feeling beings? Might it inspire us to abolish their needless suffering, instead of just diminish it?

SEE ALSO:
- Federal Report: Vegan Diet Best For Planet - The Hill
- No Lie Can Live Forever: Predicting a Vegan America by 2050 - Kathy Stevens
- 2015 Predictions From Vegan and Plant-Based Nutrition Experts - Sandy Pukel
- Getting from A to Z: Why Animal Activists Should Support Incremental Reforms to Help Animals - Bruce Friedrichs
- It's About Power, Not Food: The True Causes of World Hunger - Joel Berg

Win/Win Outcome for All

Let me close with a little optimistic numerology and the world’s most benign pyramid scheme for every sentient being on the planet, with no losers other than industries that build profit on suffering:

If each vegan today inspires just 6 more non-vegans (1) to become vegan AND (2) to each inspire 6 more non-vegans to become vegan, then in just 9 steps all of the population of Quebec will be vegan, in 10 steps all of Canada, in 11 Canada and the United States, and in 12-13 the whole world.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain image)
It is also entirely fair that it should be ourselves, the most prosperous and well-fed populace in the world, who start. By the time we have closed all of our industrial slaughterhouses and converted the land to producing food to feed people instead of using it to breed, feed and butcher innocent victims, needlessly, the planet will be producing 40% more human food, 60% less pollution and 90% less suffering – with enough left to sustain natural wildlife and their habitat too.

That will also be enough food to feed the world’s current malnourished as well as to allow the last subsistence hunters on the planet to make the transition to a truly fair, sustainable, scalable and merciful means of sustenance.

CHALLENGES TO THE RULE OF LAW IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: THE CASE OF HUNGARY
(March 3rd 2015 Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University, USA
Professor András Bozóki, Central European University, Hungary
Professor András Göllner, Concordia University, Canada
    + Hungarian Government Response (Lajos Olah, Deputy Head of Mission, Hungarian Embassy, Ottawa)

---

How Hungary's Orban Regime departed from democracy in the EU
(Prof A Bozoki, Central European University) (1 of 4 videos)

---

How the EU can help restore Democracy in Hungary
(Prof KL Scheppele, Princeton University) (2 of 4 videos)

---

Democracy 101
(Prof. A Gollner, Concordia University) (3 of 4 videos)

---

     Hungarian government response... (4 of 4 videos)

---