Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

"7 songs to help you remember Pete Seeger": For example:


Pete Seeger died earlier this week at age 94. In listening to the many accolades about the singer and activist on various radio broadcasts, a comment on BBC struck me: "he even managed to forgive those who ruined so many years of his life." That reference was to Seeger being "blacklisted" during the "McCarthy Era" and the accompanying lost decade in the heart of Seeger's professional prime. The comment was no doubt meant as a positive statement about Seeger's legendarily affable personality, and how he recovered from being put through such duress, but it raises a question: why have so many suffered at the hands of so few, so many times in modern America? From Joseph McCarthy's "red scare" abuses, to those of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, to the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush's administration, to the modern-day illegal actions by the NSA under President Barack Obama's administration, Americans are seemingly forever in the mode of forgiving illegal or abusive actions years after they happen, instead of preventing them happening.
    Pete Seeger prospered after the McCarthy abuses; others had their lives permanently ruined and some even committed suicide due to those abuses. We will never know the damage done to individuals and our society by Hoover's monomaniacal misuse of the FBI, as we will never know the complete toll of death and atrocities caused by the Iraq invasion. And now, 60 years after Seeger's persecution, Edward Snowden is an American citizen who is safer in Russia than his home country because he dared expose NSA abuses that exponentially overstep anything Hoover did with his FBI.
    Winston Churchill is credited with saying something along the lines of "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." The BBC comment about Seeger, juxtaposed against Snowden's situation today, raises an obvious question: will Americans ever master the knack of doing the right thing at the right time, or will we always be forgiving after the fact what we should have prevented before the fact?

Pete Seeger vs HUAC. Transcript of his being questioned by the House Unamerican Activities Committee on August 18, 1955

Dad, this might explain your feeling confused and almost overwhelmed as to what you needed to purchase for your shelving project at the hardware store: "The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind." Excerpt: "It’s not so much that the mental faculties of older people are rapidly declining, it’s that their databases are fuller, a new study suggests."

My take on the Sierra Club's identifying coffee as being one of the "Five Foods That Are Killing the Planet" is that the Sierra Club is spot on with the foods they highlighted, especially coffee that is not shade grown. Most native forest in coffee country has at least two layers, and in some cases it has three. If the tall trees are producing their crops and absorbing their carbon, and the coffee trees are doing the same, that is a healthy forest accomplishing twice as much in the same space as commercial chemical-laden coffee plantations require.
    Even though I am a big fan of soy and eat 80-100 grams of soy protein three to four days/week, I'm a bit surprised they didn't list it as well: much of the rain forest destroyed in the Amazon basin was cut down to create more room to grow soy. You could of course add to the list free-range cattle farming out west that prevents a full comeback of the bison and the wolf (ditto for free-range sheep and goat farmers on that), slaughtering of sharks just for their fins, the commercial overfishing that has all but destroyed the North Atlantic cod industry, etc, etc.
    Genetic modification of organisms (GMO) actually has some upside, but it has so much downside there is no way it could have gained traction without the immense and corrupt backing of Monsanto and its paid-for politicians and alleged scientists. Much of the famine in certain areas of Africa is caused by GMO corn. Some of it is more disease resistant, but some of it also requires much more water. Where farmers used to grow half-million bushel yields of native corn, but were talked into giving it up for million-bushel yields of GMO corn (or were forced to give it up due to non-governmental organization (NGO) activism), they now live on corn and beans shipped in by relief agencies- because all the corn dies if the rains come a week or two late, which happens about every other year. It is amazing the number of places in Africa where NGO types have given really bad advice that perpetuates the need for NGO types: one has to wonder how much of that is a coincidence.

Genetically modified corn (a GMO) is helping wipe out the monarch butterfly: "Monarch butterflies drop, migration may disappear." Excerpt:

Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, wrote that "the migration is definitely proving to be an endangered biological phenomenon."
    "The main culprit," he wrote in an email, is now genetically modified "herbicide-resistant corn and soybean crops and herbicides in the USA," which "leads to the wholesale killing of the monarch's principal food plant, common milkweed."

What many people don't understand about genetically modified crops is that they aren't necessarily engineered to withstand invasive pests and competitive species, they are engineered to withstand herbicides, so those chemicals can be sprayed on an entire field and the only thing not killed is the crop that is genetically engineered not to be affected by Round Up or similar.
    The problem for the monarch butterfly is that milkweed used to grow in the margins of the corn fields, but now the milkweed is killed and the modified corn left standing after spraying. So no food for the monarch.
    The problem for people is that when they eat genetically modified corn, soybeans, peanuts, tomatoes or any other field crop, in many cases they are eating something that has been sprayed many times with a lethal chemical. How much of that chemical is still in the vegetable when they eat it? As far as I know, no agency is studying this from a food safety perspective, they are merely studying it to make sure the GMO plants aren't somehow intermixing with non GMO plants.
    Most GMO crops aren't designed for superior food value or with any environmental concern taken into account, they are simply designed to withstand several doses of chemical weed killer, because spraying weeds is a lot easier than trying to pull them or otherwise control them. It is sort of a scorched earth policy that kills monarch butterflies, worms, birds and any other living thing that counted on living between the rows or commercial crop or adjacent to it.

As part of its "Freedom2014" broadcasts ["Freedom 2014: What freedom looks like to me"], this morning's BBC radio program featured an interview with
peace activist Norman Kember ("Norman Kember: What does freedom look like?"), who was kidnapped at gunpoint in Iraq and held hostage nearly four months. It is more than a bit ironic to think that Kember, who went there to help show Iraqis that all Westerners weren't supporters of the war and did not think alike in regard to Iraq, wound up helping make Westerners wonder if all Iraqis and followers of Islam are more alike than we want to believe.

[Marvels] of the Human Body:
    Your teeth start growing 6 months before you are born. This is why one out of every 2,000 newborn infants has a tooth when they are born.
    A baby's head is one-quarter of its total length, but by the age of 25 will only be one-eighth of its total length. This is because people's heads grow at a much slower rate than the rest of their bodies.
    Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood the number is reduced to 206. Some of the bones, like skull bones, get fused into each other, bringing down the total number.
    Your nose can remember 50,000 different scents. But if you are a woman, you are a better smeller than men, and will remain a better smeller throughout your life..
    The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels.

Finalist for Plumber of the Year Award:

Limerick of the Week:

"Christianity's primitive"—that can't be right.
Oh? It's pagan at root, exactly. Christ
    is claimed to've been killed
    as prophecy billed—
Christianity's crux?...human sacrifice.

Background. This week's limerick was prompted by an interchange on Facebook, under a posting about President Obama's pushing for an American economy that values women and rewards equal work with equal pay. My friend Shirley Skufca Hickman asked, perhaps rhetorically, "Why has this taken so long?" I replied: "Could it be that Arab societies aren't the only ones that are 'patriarchal' [male chauvinistic]? Arab ones are just more open and proud and blatant about it than the American one." Then, an hour later, I added, "I wrote 'Arab' and 'American,' but I guess I could have said 'Muslim' and 'Christian,' those societies' respective predominant, primitive, patriarchal religions." And then, some minutes later, I remembered that relative to Islam, Christianity has grown up quite a bit and become somewhat civilized, so how could I lump it with Islam? My answer lies in the limerick.
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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