The Essence of Superbowl

How much time in a televised football game is actually spent showing football being played. From the Wall Street Journal it turns out to be 11 minutes. So what happens the other 174 minutes of the game? There is about an hour of commercial. Alot of footage showing players standing around. There is even more time spent showing replays than actual plays! So the essence of a football game can be distilled into 11 minutes. In those 11 minutes the winner and looser are determined.

In a similar way many people worship God, but there are differences from one person to the next. In Ghadhada I-27 (which is part of this weeks Kishori/Kishore syllabus) Maharaj distills the essence of a devotee in which God resides eternally. Reading the Vachnamrut we see that through this distillation we arrive at the Satpurush. Try using the 11 minute fact about to introduce the concepts in the Vachnamrut. The unexpected aspect of it will get people listening. It also leads to a very good way to give one (there are others) simple message embedded in this Vachnamrut - if we distill the essence of devotee in which God resides eternally we find Bapa.

As the Superbowl approaches we thought this would be appropriate. We also wanted to share a common message many sticky presenters have sent in. Many mandals have taken to watching the big game together. However they already realized that really all it takes is 11 minutes. What to do with the rest of the time. One small step is to retake half time. Several people are going to spend the half time show going over sticky presentation skills. Others are spending the half time show doing some kind of team building. One group is going to try and have a half time goshti. All good ideas. Let us know how they turned out.

WP: Bellying up to Environmentalism (11/16/09)

The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West -- water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally -- more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals -- most of them healthy -- consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That's just a start.

Meat that's raised according to "alternative" standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. "Free-range chickens" theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many "free-range" chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

"Grass-fed" beef produces four times the methane -- a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide -- of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting -- their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that's left with millions of pounds of carcasses -- deadstock -- that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/15/AR2009111502210.html?hpid=opinionsbox1