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Friday, August 17, 2012

Fish for Friday


This column serves up fish caught by casting our hook into the waters of recent correspondence—fish that we think will be good for you, either for information or for provocation to think about something new, or about something old but from a different perspective.
Four people were already in the hot tub at my local gym when I arrived there yesterday. "Mind if I join your group?" I said to no one of them in particular.
An older lady (she might have been my age ) said, "Of course, the more the merrier."
She was very friendly. She said, "We all need the hot tub after working in the yard," which I guess is what she'd been doing earlier.
I said I hadn't done anything as strenuous as that, just picked up some dog poop and fed the birds.
She thought I meant birds in a cage, but I straightened her out and we went on to talk for several minutes about birds. She didn't know that some birds lay their eggs in other birds' nests.
"Oh, yes," I said. "Non-human animals can cheat, just as human animals can. Get someone else to do the work for you."
This made her stop for a moment. The others had just gotten out of the hot tub, and she had started to follow them.
"That reminds me of our federal entitlement programs!" she said. "Boy, they really get me mad!"
I said, "You mean, like the loopholes that our wealthy Congressmen have made into law so that the rich can legally hide their money off-shore and avoid paying income taxes?"
If looks could kill, Morris, I'd be a dead man.
She stomped out of the hot tub and headed for the exit. [personal communication]
I am not so naive that I do not know some people use the system. However, I do not criticize anyone that welfare helps, because neither am I so naive that I do not know that because of circumstances beyond my control, I too could be added to their list. None of us knows what tomorrow holds. We might be OK today, but could very well stand in need tomorrow. [from a letter to a local newspaper]
I just heard on NPR an excerpt from a Romney speech in North Carolina yesterday where he went on and on about all the damage the liberals have done around the world and "even in the great state of California." As I recall, the major changes that had the most impact in California weren't from the "liberals" but from folks like Ronald Reagan and the corrupt Republican industrialists in Texas who used Enron to take the state of California hostage over its power bills and ultimately bring Arnold Schwarzenegger to power. [personal communication]
Paul Ryan is a fly-weight next to Rob Portman. But fly-weights are often VPs, and this one would likely do the bidding of a Romney.
The debates should be entertaining.
The underlying politics is not. [personal correspondence, from someone who had predicted Romney would pick Rob Portman]
Paul Ryan is the author of the most extreme right-wing budget ever proposed in Congress. He wants to dismantle Medicare, privatize Social Security, and cut taxes for millionaires while raising taxes on the middle class.
Ryan isn't just an extremist—he's young, smart, and charming. The media constantly describe him as looking like "the boy next door." He's the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing. [from MoveOn.org Political Action]
If you want to see  where corporatization is taking us, look for the documentary Bitter Seeds, by Micha X. Peled.  This is where the policies of the Republican/Tea Party are heading.
They showed it at the Boulder International Film Festival. Basically, it is the story of how Monsanto convinced farmers in India to grow genetically modified cotton which did not reseed, so they had to buy new seed every year from Monsanto, requiring them to take out loans that they then could not repay. Short term profits trump long-term economic and environmental health. [personal correspondence; I’ve added a link to a description of and a trailer for Bitter Seeds]
Morris, I recommend that you read Leonard Pitts’s recent column in The Miami Herald on domestic terrorism ("Demanding an honest accounting on homegrown terrorism"). He lists a number of terrorist events in America over the last twenty years, then comments:
These incidents and dozens more comprise a list maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. What they all have in common is that they spring from motivations (i.e., opposition to taxation, government, immigrants, blacks, gays, abortion, and Muslims) that more or less define modern, mainstream, conservatism. So yes, it is time to say the obvious thing no one seems to be saying:
America is under attack by right-wing terrorists.
He hastens to add that his point is not that conservatism equals terrorism; his point is that
the perpetrators of these crimes are overwhelmingly white Christian men and thus, invisible in a nation where danger is routinely defined as Them, not Us. Maybe it’s because media have become cowed and self-censoring, reflexively flinching from that which might bring accusations of anti-conservative bias.
[personal communication]

8 comments:

  1. Loved the catch for this Friday — mighty fine reading!

    The reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed less than kindly, and I'd like to register my good opinion of him. He's a wild man in his personal life but a well-meaning maverick in politics. For an excellent profile of him, read the last chapter of Boomerang by Michael Lewis. Hell, read the whole book — it's an eye-opener.

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  2. Thank you for the roundup in general and the reminder about Monsanto in particular. More than 100 years after it was founded, Monsanto is apparently still being true to its roots, which include being involved in the development of saccharin, the nuclear bomb, DDT, and Agent Orange, to name a few. And yes, they make the herbicide Round Up, which people are by now hopefully learning not to use. In addition to the book you recommend, I would like to suggest your readers do an online search for "The World According to Monsanto" and view it when they have time.

    Since the billionaire petrochemical-industrialist Koch brothers are the founding, funding and driving force behind the Tea Party, the direction that movement is taking is not surprising.

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    1. Moto, I know nothing about Monsanto's role in the development of the nuclear bomb. Can you please say when and how?

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  3. Ken, I remembered that tidbit from writing a magazine article many years ago about PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). In my original off-the-top-of-my-head post about Monsanto's role in helping make the world more productive, or making it less safe, depending on your perspective, I forgot to mention that Monsanto had an Illinois plant that for years was the epicenter of PCB production. My ancient article is not available on the web so I had to do some "Googling" for support in answering your question.

    Here goes...

    Quoting from the NaturalNews.com website: "World War II was the catalyst to a new partnership between Monsanto and the U.S. Government. Monsanto became involved in research for the Manhattan Project which led to the world's first nuclear bombs. Until the late 1980s, Monsanto also operated the Mound Laboratory (a nuclear facility) on behalf of the Federal Government."

    The Mound Laboratory, as you probably know, was a Cold-War era nuclear weapon research site. I'm not positive, but I think it and several other former Monsanto labs and factories are now Superfund sites.

    For a different take, here is a quote from AtomicHeritage.org:

    "Charles Allen Thomas was one of dozens of scientists who lay in the desert sand of Alamogordo, N.M., in the predawn gloom of July 16, 1945, waiting for a frightening new era in human history to begin.
    Twenty miles away, atop a 100-foot tower, was the world's first atomic bomb, code-named Trinity and equipped with a polonium trigger designed and developed in Dayton by a team of hundreds of researchers and technicians led by Thomas, research director at Dayton's Monsanto Chemical Company.

    "If the trigger didn't work, the bomb wouldn't work, and the $2 billion invested in the Manhattan Project, as well as the concentrated efforts of thousands of the nation's best physicists, chemists and mathematicians over the past three years, would have been for nothing."

    As we know, the trigger worked.

    Ken, now that you have me thinking about it, the most interesting question may be which of Monsanto's efforts has, or ultimately will, kill the most people and other living things. The atomic bomb surged out to an early lead, obviously, but when you start considering the long-term impact of PCBs, DDT, Agent Orange, genetically engineered food products, and other endeavors, the bomb may struggle to stay in the Top Five on Monsanto's kill list.

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  4. I'm not a booster for Monsanto, Moto, but I think the pejorative implications in your comment deserve another look. Do the the people involved in the development of the A-bomb deserve our displeasure or contempt? If so, I'll have to adjust my opinion of not only Monsanto and Oppenheimer, but of Einstein and FDR as well.

    As for DDT, it was synthesized in 1874, when Monsanto didn't even exist. Monsanto got involved with DDT in 1944, along with more than a dozen other firms that manufactured the poison. Its demand grew because it was found to be an effective herbicide that could reduce the instances of typhus and malaria among our troops.

    I am indeed disturbed by the development of Agent Orange, but Monsanto isn't the main villain here. The military, after all, deployed it. They decided where, how widely, and how often it would be used. It would be interesting to know what Monsanto told the military about the effects on people and on the long-term poisoning of targeted areas.

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  5. Ken, as I noted in my reply to your original question, Monsanto could be seen as "helping make the world more productive, or making it less safe, depending on your perspective."

    What I find most interesting is that Monsanto and many other companies seem to have no trouble finding an unlimited supply of scientists and chemists smart enough to create lethal products that make huge profits for their companies. Yet those brilliant minds almost always seem unable to notice the equally lethal side effects of those products until so much damage is done that your tax dollars and mine have to be used to clean up the mess.

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  6. Hmm... so the Manhattan Project scientists were probably in the dark about the consequences of what they were doing. Thanks for that insight.

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  7. Do you really think they foresaw nuclear energy as a long-term positive side effect of the atom bomb?

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