It sounds like the donor had requirements. From The Tribune:

The University of Chicago has received a $100 million gift from an anonymous donor to support free expression, marking what may be the largest-ever single donation to support such values in higher education, the university announced Thursday.

And:

Discussions surrounding the donation have been ongoing for over a year, according to a university spokesperson.

From https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2024/09/26/university-chicago-donation-free-speech-expression-forum :

The gift was ridiculed by advocates involved in the encampment that highlighted abuses against Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War and torn down by the university in the spring.

“It’s truly a slap in the face,” said Yousseff Hasweh, a U of C grad who’s diploma was withheld by the university for two months, allegedly for his involvement in the protest.

Be impressed that the bot put an actual sentence on the image!

I’m fine with removing the Audubon name from any group – not because of John Audubon himself, but because the current Audubon Society seems to be an unscrupulous, anti-union, money-grubbing, greenwashing mess.

Not all Americans eat beef equally, data shows. Last year, Rose and his colleagues published a study looking at U.S. government data of the diets of more than 10,000 Americans. They found that on a given day, 12% of Americans account for half of all beef consumption. That 12% was disproportionately men.

I’m confused by this because I want it to mean the same 12% all the time, but I suspect they mean that it is a different 12% from one day to the next.

“Many men do reduce their meat consumption or are willing to,” says Joel Ginn, food and psychology researcher at Boston College, “but there are hurdles that they’ve had to overcome.”

Manly men advertising meat – and Joe Rogan??? I guess all kinds of guys what to be oh so manly, but when I think of macho men, he’s just not on that list.

Seeing someone in your close personal circle, or celebrities like athletes, make a behavior change can be an important piece of the puzzle, says Daniel Rosenfeld, psychology and food researcher at UCLA. “The way to get some people to eat less meat is to get other people to eat less meat,” he says.

Personally, both myself and my better half enjoy the newer fake meat burgers. They really are a satisfying way to get a ‘manly’ burger.

This is the 37th time they’ve had to use this headline. I’m not sure if the repetition makes me more sad, or angry, or if it is now simply becoming numbing. Thirty-Seven. :-(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This,'_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens

Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t be ‘sitting ducks’, but I don’t want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter – or at least threaten to – with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.

I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn’t happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his ‘strong man’ shtick just like Americans fall for Trump’s version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel’s government rather than with anyone in the United States.

In terms of who to vote for in the U.S. presidential election, 3rd parties are spoilers. The U.S. voter is wasting their vote if they stay home or vote 3rd party.

Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it’s easy to say “Read my lips. No new taxes” or “Free IVF” if you’ve no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you’re not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.

Remember when Obama said you’d get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn’t say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama’s critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.

Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don’t expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that’s the basic reason the country was invented… maybe that’s not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I’m not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.

Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she’s come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there’s a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That’s fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.

Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There’s a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn’t particularly evasive.

Amazon offered up “Treatments for High Cholesterol” along with a link for an Amazon One Medical consultation as well as links to prescription medications.

That’s weird, because my doctor and my wife are the only people who know about my cholesterol numbers. They’re pretty good, too! But there are certainly data points, including my age, my food preferences, and my past purchases, maybe even news stories I’ve read elsewhere on the web, that might suggest I’d be a good candidate for a statin, the type of cholesterol-lowering medication Amazon recommended to me. And while I’m used to Amazon recommending books I might like or cleaning products I might want to buy again, it felt pretty creepy to push prescription drugs in my direction.

What did the author expect? Is anyone surprised that a big business is pushing people to buy more product?

HIPAA, the federal law that protects health privacy, is narrower than most people think. It only applies to health care providers, insurers, and companies that manage medical records. HIPAA requires those entities to protect your data as it moves between them, but it wouldn’t apply to your Amazon purchases, according to Suzanne Bernstein, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

HIPAA has always been a questionable law that does more for Pharma than for citizens. By signing a HIPAA form, patients basically allow their medical info to be distributed/sold to drug makers and other product/treatment vendors. I’m glad health information is legally considered private until you sign, but I’m not sure why the public is okay with signing away their privacy on every trip to a new doctor.

should my Amazon purchases be associated with Amazon’s health care services at all?

Well, Amazon isn’t going to restrict itself, so we – as the public – will have to make a fuss about it if we want anything to change.

I, too, think Biden did a great job as President – especially given the constant pushback he got from Congress and the corrupted Court. It frustrated me that the public didn’t notice or care, but I could see from the polls and negative press that there was no way Biden was going to get re-elected, so I was living in despair for our future until he dropped out. With Biden out of the race, the public is paying attention to the race again, becoming aware of the crazy Trump/2025 “agenda nobody asked for”, and (if we’re to believe the polls) becoming more interested in voting for a new face. Yay!

Have hope! But also, if you can volunteer to talk to potential voters, do that too.

If your schedule is too tight to volunteer, or if it is physically/emotionally too much, consider at least talking about her in a positive way.

If that is too much, maybe at least, at least mention that you’re hearing lots more support and enthusiasm than even when Biden won, so you are going to be very suspicious of claims that Dems ‘steal’ elections. Yes, Trump is still supported in the boonies, but more and more suburbs and cities are increasingly wanting Harris – you know, the places with most the people.

Sorry, I was trying to add my support. You gave good evidence for a meat preference and I wanted to back it up with evidence of genetic aversion to the specific vegetable mentioned in the original article.

However, no one is born loving hot dogs or disliking broccoli

But we ARE! Doesn’t anyone remember the whole kerfuffle about the ‘bitter’ gene and PTC sensitivity?

Water/sewer systems

Scratch that comment. Vote Harris! :-)

Wow, that’s a long read, and IMO, it misses a key point. Namely: similar to plastic industries spending tons of money to convince us that recycling is an individual problem and responsibility (despite the fact that most plastic can’t be effectively recycled), this article mostly frames Climate Change as an individual responsibility to stop eating meat and dairy. Thankfully, at the very end, it gets to a better solution, which is to stop spending our tax dollars on subsidies to harmful agro-businesses.

The start-point, however, is that Big Farming has co-opted natural conservation groups by giving them cash to join ‘mitigation’ groups that are “Greenwashing” the subject such that no one talks about real solutions (such as making meat more expensive). Have a bunch of quotes:

So the meat industry did what other industries have done under similar pressure in the past: demonstrate that it could change just enough to avoid being forced to change even more by the government.

In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.)

For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.

WWF is hardly alone. Two of the other largest US environmental organizations — the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — also closely collaborate with large meat and dairy companies, ranchers, and trade groups on a range of initiatives. But outside observers, along with some former and current employees at EDF and WWF, argue that those initiatives often do more to improve the companies’ image than the environment.

Last year, Tyson Foods — America’s largest meat processor — began selling beef marketed as “climate-friendly.” The company claims that by getting some of its suppliers to graze their cattle and grow the animals’ feed crops in a more sustainable manner, it’s reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent.

But Tyson has repeatedly declined to share data with Vox and other news outlets that could prove its claim.

Beef is the worst food for the climate. Got it. Sadly, plant-based meat substitutes are losing market share (see graph p. 36 of Good Food Institute PDF). Personally, I like fake meat and it happens that tonight we’re having Beyond Burgers for dinner (sorry for the product plug, but they work for me – though I know some people prefer Impossible or other brands, and some people don’t like any of them).

Using global averages, beef’s carbon footprint per 100 grams of protein is about 7 times that of pork, 9 times that of poultry, 25 times that of tofu and plant-based meat, and more than 60 times that of beans and lentils.

I was interested in the benefits of regenerative farming being very questionable, and any stats should be viewed suspiciously unless/until we have a verifiable measuring standard AND see data over the span of years per given acreage – because any increase in carbon capture is likely to fall off over time.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the world needs negative emissions technologies — approaches that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere, as regenerative agriculture supposedly does — to avoid catastrophic global warming. But the research doesn’t bear out the claims many of regenerative agriculture’s proponents make, as there’s still significant doubt and uncertainty around the potential for farmland to store a lot of carbon.

“The science is clear that, while some mitigation can be achieved by improving meat and dairy production, climate-neutral or zero-emissions meat and dairy is not a possibility in the foreseeable future,” said Hayek, the New York University environmental studies professor, speaking about net-zero claims in animal agriculture broadly, not the WWF report specifically.

EDF and the Nature Conservancy are also founding members of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a coalition of meat, dairy, and agricultural trade groups, many of which lobby aggressively to block environmental policy. But the alliance is a vehicle for their other goal on Capitol Hill: ramping up subsidies for regenerative agriculture and technological solutions. It’s similar to how the fossil fuel industry lobbies to both block climate regulations and subsidize carbon capture.

Money shuts up the World Wildlife Foundation, Sierra Club, and so on.

“If you can’t get the Sierra Club to [support a methane tax], how the fuck are you going to get anyone else in society to do that?”

Some politicians paint calls to stop pollution from factory farms and eat more plant-based meals as anti-farmer, a potent charge given both farming’s close association with America’s national mythos and the disproportionate political power that rural states hold.

If we can’t change ourselves in the environmental community, then how would we expect to change the general population?”

Many environmentalists have come to criticize individual action as ineffectual and naive. The burden to mitigate climate change and pollution falls on politicians and corporations, they argue, not the average person.

I agree with the last bit, but realize that at least a third of the U.S. will remove any politician painted as ‘anti-meat’. That is, a politician might try to argue that our tax dollars shouldn’t give hand-outs to Tyson or the like, but the attack ads against will say, “He wants you to stop eating meat, so he’s working to bankrupt our ranchers.”

The idea that environmentalists shouldn’t try to influence how people eat “is a win for industry … It’s their script,” said Jacquet, the University of Miami professor. Environmentalists who repeat this, she added, have “become sock puppets for industry, and they don’t even mean to be.”

Well, the public IS hearing that message from various places despite the fact that it’s a message too many people are unwilling to hear. I don’t require Environmental groups to be in-your-face about it. Let the data speak for itself.

A 2023 analysis published in the journal One Earth found that, from 2014 to 2020, the US meat industry received about 800 times more government funding than did meat and dairy alternatives.

A lot can be done to tip the scale in the other direction, and in ways unlikely to spur political backlash.

I didn’t find the examples they list to be very encouraging, but they do exist. They describe how Denmark is doing some neat stuff.

“It needs to be a political liability to choose false solutions over effective climate policies,” said Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

That’s the hard part! :-) Near the end there are some examples of where stuff is working and suggests a public awareness campaign would help. No more pictures of happy cows on green grass, but instead images of the barren land of holding pens stretching out in all directions. Show people the reality instead of the mythos and ask them to make it an issue with their local politicians.

Could you fix a mistake I made? Near the bottom I inadvertently typed ‘Munich’ instead of the correct ‘Berlin’ games for when the Nazi salute was allowed. Source is Wikipedia and you can see there it clearly say ‘Berlin’. I was just reading too many Olympic details and didn’t even notice I typed the wrong city/game.

Thank you for posting this! I was sad and frustrated to hear he was arrested, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. Maybe signing a petition isn’t much, but it is a start, and it feels probable that people with the means to do so might get organized to show up in person to offer support. If I was richer and younger, I’d love to take a pro-environmental vacation to Greenland.

Thank you both. You are both very considerate. I stumbled on one detail and then went down a rabbit hole of different aspects about that Olympic moment and wanted to share. I’m glad to see people are as interested as I was.

Thank you for cross posting :-)