“The leaking of national macroeconomic data harms economic operations, prevents fair market competition, and affects government credibility, thereby causing heavy losses to the interests of the country, society, and individuals.”
- Li Zhong Cheng, Deputy Director General, Procuratorial Department of Duty and Infringement on Citizen’s Rights of the Supreme People’s Directorate, People’s Free & Democratic Republic of China, Inc
Perhaps, I should be a little more specific.
Like most Americans, you are troubled by excess weight, the consequence of eating both unwisely and excessively. You’ve tried one diet after another, from Atkins to the Tai-Bo South Scarsdale Grapefruit Eat-All-You-Want Ornish Diet, and they invariably fail.
You try to discuss this with your doctor, who barely disguises his boredom as he casually dismisses your entire plaint with an, “Eat less, exercise more.” Disgusted and depressed, you begin to believe that you just can’t reduce your body mass.
Actually, that is much closer to the truth than they’ve told you.
No, it is not a conspiracy of silence, nor does any one company, doctrine, or movement possess the One True Truth. It’s that people are and always will be averse to believing that simple and easy explanations and answers are wrong, virtually without exception. Weight loss directly involves and affects the entire body. Has it escaped everyone’s notice that the body will react to such a thing, and aggressively?
Recent research has demonstrated that exercise, for all of its genuine benefits, will NOT result in weight loss. This seems unfairly in league with the galling fact that dieting doesn’t result in weight loss, either. What is going on, you demand to know?
The trick to understanding this is setting aside the notion that humans are special and intelligent. In your self-image, you may be. To Nature, you certainly are neither special nor particularly intelligent. To Nature, you are a complex organism and the product of approximately two mega-years of evolution. That is important. Your physical body, your instincts (emotion), and your intellect (in descending order of importance) combine to form a complete human organism. How these three components function and interact was determined by that evolution, during which time Nature selected for those traits which enhanced survival. Any business model which ignores or denies this will fail. Fisher’s Law clearly stipulates this, and there are no exceptions to the laws of Nature or Fisher.
During literally and precisely 99.9975% of this time, there was no Wegmans around the corner. During this 1,999,950 year period, hominids had to live without an assured food supply. Think about what that means. More than anything else, it means that creatures which could survive in a time of inadequate nutrition could reproduce; those unable to cope with a varying and insecure food supply died before reproducing. When the caveman said to his mate, “It’s a jungle out there, Jane,” he was not kidding around.
Body mass meant survival. The amount of muscle determined strength, and that affected how successful proto-humans were in food-gathering and hunting. The amount of fat determined, quite literally, how long a creature could last between times of plenty. The greater one’s body mass (weight), the more likely one was to survive. Life was, indeed, that simple. This was NOT acculturation. This was evolution. In today’s terms, we’d describe it as behaviour hard-wired into the species. It’s something that you do not get to choose and it’s something that you do not get to change.
It is in your DNA. Literally. It is NOT changeable.
What does this mean? Traits which kept people alive, even before they were entitled to call themselves “people”, still affect us. All of us. Those who eat just enough to maintain body weight at a pleasing BMI of 21 may regard themselves as morally superior, but that’s nothing more than a fluke of Nature. Metabolically, as in every other respect, humans vary, and some end up naturally slender. For the average person, the contemporary surplus of food is unnatural, with inevitable consequences. Compared to Nature, the supermarket provides foodstuffs with far too much protein and fat, and the fats tend to be too saturated. Saturated fats, the hydrogenated stuff, are artificial. There is, after all, no I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter out there in Nature where we evolved and to which we are still attuned.
Thus, humans in the first world, especially in this country, start with a major handicap: too much food and most of it artificially enhanced in caloric content. Equally, it is too high in protein, a factor which research shows is a major contributor to cancer.
But wait, it gets better!
Now that you have blimped out because you eat too much protein and fat, and the carbohydrate excess has almost the same effect, you try to reduce body mass. Intellectually, you know that this is both desirable and necessary, since you comprehend the immediate and long-term consequences of obesity. But, your body knows no such thing. It’s still on Cave Standard Time, and it functions according to the more-food-is-better principle. That is how you are hard-wired, internally programmed, in the firmware that neither you nor your doctor nor your shrink nor Dean Ornish nor Shitforbrains Atkins can reprogram. They didn’t explain this to you, did they?
While the higher functions in your brain are congratulating you for losing three pounds last month, the more primitive and much more powerful parts of your body, at a far more fundamental level, are starting to worry. Weight loss is the first warning sign of starvation, and your body knows, right down to the cellular level, that unrestricted weight loss leads to starvation leads to death. Your body dislikes death. It will do anything not specifically prohibited by the laws of physics in order to avoid it.
And that brings me to the really pithy part of this entire story.
What does your body do in order to cope with the threat posed by dieting? It adjusts, you stupid nerk; what in hell did you think that it would do? Just sit there and not react to what it interprets as a lethal threat to its survival? Are you insane? Get real, fool.
Principally, it adjusts metabolically. I am no expert, but even I can figure this one out, and the experts will confirm it. The body slows down a bit, burning less fuel, thus needing less, and tending to bring fuel-intake/energy-consumption back into balance. More importantly, metabolism is made more efficient. Thermogenesis, the first and foremost function of metabolism and main form of energy transformation in the body, is maintained, but with less waste.
In short, you use fewer calories – less energy, less food – to maintain body weight. The increase in overall efficiency can be staggering. It is possible to start at the customary 2,500 calories per day, at which you maintain your weight, and end up at the same weight but with less than half that many calories. That is, you can not lose weight at slightly more than a thousand calories a day.
I can hear you now, snorting in derision. Well, you are right to do so. I have, you see, not yet mentioned the one key factor that makes this credible. Bear in mind the phenomenal complexity of the human body. If it is anything, it is not simple. The higher parts of your brain aren’t the only places in your body where learning and adaptation occur. Those whose weight has fluctuated significantly a number of times throughout their lives will find that, with each major change in weight, weight loss becomes much more difficult to implement. The body adapts and becomes extremely resistant to weight loss. Makes sense, doesn’t it? At that level which knows and can know nothing whatsoever about Wegmanic reliability, the body does what it is programmed to do in order to maximize survival probability. If the body senses that it exists in a regime of unreliable nutrition, a context that the dieter deliberately simulates, then it will adapt to make the most of the food that it can get and maintain body mass for as long as it possibly can.
The bitter truth, Bunkie, is that weight loss is VERY unnatural, and your body will fight you every fucking ounce of the way.
Those who believe that my antagonism toward law enforcement is unjustifiable or unreasonable will never change their minds. As the guy said once, you cannot reason someone out of a belief that he wasn’t reasoned into. For others, those with a degree of openness to ideas that may rankle, I recommend this essay. If there is a woman in your life who matters to you, or if you are a woman, then this one may not be easy to take.
What the news doesn’t tell you is that, since outlawing firearms, Britain has been hit with a burgeoning epidemic of knife violence, including a hell of a lot more than a dozen murders. The use of knives has become so widespread that the previous prime minister spoke explicitly of the crisis that it had caused the UK. (The current PM is too involved in cleaning up the MP corruption scandal to have time to worry about his citizens being knifed to death.)
It seems that, in addition to the value of a human life being determined by religion and nationality, it’s a function of what kind of weapon is used to terminate it.
Were this the worst of it, then it’d be no big deal. Hypocrisy is such an integral part of the human experience that I really ought to know better than to waste your time and mine fretting about it. We may some day find a cure for poverty, but there will never be a diminution in hypocrisy.
Something else does merit a bit of thought, though.
Each time someone goes postal, as this poor bastard did, or tops himself, or shoots up a school before killing himself, the usual idiots predictably do the breast-beating routine, asking why didn’t the self-destructive lost soul tell anyone that he was in despair. If only he had said something, they wail.
Bullshit.
And, in case you missed what I said . . . bullshit.
That’s all that this blaming the suicide victim is. Roll back the clock and examine the situation before the lid blew off the killer’s head. What did he actually say? Perhaps there were warning signs? If there were, what did his friends and acquaintances do? Go on, be honest. What do you think that they did, back when they actually had the chance to see what was coming before it arrived? I guarantee you, they brushed it all off as stress, or fatigue, or a bad hair day. They would willingly eat roofing nails before trying to summon up the courage and resolve needed to face the problem. It’ll blow over, they tell themselves, and in almost all cases, it does.
Is “almost” good enough for you?
"Law and Order - The Next Generation"
For all of my adult life, I have believed that people have the right to possess arms. For every single day of that time, I’ve believed just as strongly that one hell of a big responsibility goes inseparably along with that right.
Cretins like those pictured above scare me. They really do. There are some things that you just don’t joke about, and drunks with guns is one of them. That these bubbas might think of themselves as proponents of “law” or “order” bespeaks a complete ignorance of the law relating to deadly force. All that one can do is hope fervently that this photo was taken well south of the Mason and Dixon Line…
Wow. They actually came up with a good reason for living in New Yawk. Who’d have thought it?
Yesterday, I posed the question, was this lady justified in taking vigorous exception to the presence of a man in the ladies’ dressing room at the local Macy’s store? As I noted, other cultures see the issue of personal modesty differently.
This is the view of another lady of great dignity and grace, an example of why it’s rarely wise to believe that a single opinion is all that we ever need:
In a nutshell, [that lady] over-reacted. They were being European and she was being American. We tend to make an automatic internal association that heterosexual undressing is related to sex. I know she was on home turf, but it’s not like the guy was trying to peep into her dressing room. (Very little boys now. . . . I’ve had little ones running around and lying on the floor trying to look under the doors – until their mothers call them back.) She could have still bought the sweaters and then told management that in the future they should make it clear that men are not allowed or something like that.
I had a parallel moment over 20 years ago. I was living at the feminist co-op, and a German friend was visited by a couple of German friends – two of them guys. We went to a swimming place together. We were all dressed in play clothes – shorts, etc., and had brought swim suits with us. When it was time to swim, the Germans without stepping behind a bush or tree simply took their clothes off and put their swimsuits on. We were in a semi-secluded area, and only we could see each other. Everyone did it quickly and efficiently – no looking, gawking, teasing – just clothes off, clothes on. Tops, then bottoms. It happened so fast, that my brief hesitation quickly left me the only one with the clothes still on.
When it came down to it, even though I knew that no one had any lurid desire to see any parts of me, even though I knew that nothing I had was very special – I couldn’t do it. They waited politely for a few minutes, there was a little bit of silent awkwardness while I kept saying internally, “Take your goddamn clothes off and put the suit on.” But my hands could not move, and pretty soon there was a silent shrug of shoulders, we went down to the beach and they swam and I didn’t. Which was okay – I probably wouldn’t have gone swimming anyway.
I felt so American. At the same time it was interesting to me that in this inner battle of cultures, so to speak, I couldn’t step outside of my own. I could step out enough to know that they were doing nothing wrong and everything right, but I couldn’t step out enough to partake myself.
They probably had a few chuckles to themselves later on about the poor uptight American.
We can and probably won’t debate the comparative merits of American and European interpretations of modesty, but that’s not the point. Given that people will vary in the rules by which they live their lives and guide their behaviour – with the exception of small boys, isn’t there a need to keep one’s mind open? Not so gapingly open that literally anything can fall in and so open that everything falls right back out again, but tolerant enough of others’ ways to be able to deal with the situations that these two equally civilized people had to face?
The shrink trade has for many years been self-consciously aware of its inability to do much of anything about mental illness. These are not stupid people, nor are they ignorant of their own shortcomings. They realize well enough that they have extremely little ability to change people’s lives for the better.
So, desperate for something to do which might at least create the illusion of activity, every so often, they redefine their terms. I am somewhat reliably informed that neurosis is no longer an approved word. The gods alone know what it’s called now. I do know with confidence that what we grew up calling manic-depressive behaviour is now bipolar disorder. Note that they still can’t cure anything, but they feel much better about what they call the disorder that is ruining your life for you.
With the exception of that poll that I once tried in this blog, America just loves those little test or quiz thingies that appear on web sites and in newspapers and magazines for the masses.
Here’s one with but a single question:
Read this article and then tell me, are you troubled by it?
Does anyone remember what I said about that Polish aircraft crash?
In Oakland, California, a white transit cop murders an unarmed black man. He claims that he actually meant to pull his Taser and not his handgun and that it wasn’t his fault that he fatally shot someone in the back as he lay pinned to the ground by another cop.
Since the murder was video-recorded by a witness (is it any wonder that cops hate witnesses with cameras?), the city was unable to deny that it happened (anyone remember that little girl murdered by a Detroit cop and the “explanation” that the city tried to fob off on the public before discovering that there were witnesses?) and has settled a civil claim by the victim’s family.
Now that there may actually be a criminal trial of the cop, the country has a potential opportunity to see that rarest of all judicial events, the conviction of a cop for his misdeeds. However, given the track record of this country’s courts and juries, you’d be well advised not to hold your breath just yet.
Yeah, looks JUST like the Taser
Taser (police issue)
No matter what your position is on the Arizona law dispute, you have to admire the childishness of the entire proceeding. One of the players, the feds, has nearly all the power and authority, but it contents itself to use rhetoric instead of action in discharging what everyone agrees is its responsibility. The other principal player, having no one to run to and tell (has Arizona considered going to the UN?), is stamping its little foot, pouting petulantly, and threatening to hold its breath ’til it turns blue.
All the other snot-chuckers are standing around these two and yelling encouragement, “Fight! Fight!”
Yeah . . . very adult. Well, you idiots wanted states’ rights. This is what it gets you.
Mrs Palin, not to be confused with the wife of the British comedian, announces her anger and dismay over having not been given fair equal time in an NBC interview that she wasn’t part of in the first place?
It comes as a surprise to her that the newsies play fast and loose with the truth?
Gov Palin's predecessor, relaxing after a hard day at the statehouse
This is a bit much from someone claiming sufficient nous to be qualified to lead a whole country. Her gubernatorial experience in Alaska, a state that could easily be managed by a trained woodchuck, apparently did not include exposure to the realities of dealing with the liars, cheats, and scoundrels who “report” the news to a credulous nation. Moreover, her demand for fairness raises possible issues of hypocrisy, given the nature of her own campaign for . . . for . . . now, what was she running for, again?
It’s increasingly a myth.
In yet another decision by the Supremes that this country has entirely too many civil liberties and constitutional rights, those criminal suspects who have been lax in their watching of Law and Order face new perils during torture questioning by the rozzers. If they are not fully au courant with the latest subtle interpretation of Miranda, they will lose the protection that they had thought themselves to have as US citizens. Those unfortunate enough not to be US citizens are presumed already to know that they have no rights at all.
However, this is not what I wish to rant & rave about this evening. Pull up your chairs, settle down, listen carefully, and be edified.
Suppose that you need to know how to deal with a health or injury problem, who ya gonna call? You will, naturally, direct your enquiry to a medical doctor, for she knows about such things. If your house has begun to make ominous creaking noises each time the wind gets stronger than twenty knots, you’ll refer the matter to a structural engineer (no one in his right mind would trust anything said by a building contractor). If you have a legal question, then whom do you ask?
Okay, time’s up; answers, please.
That’s correct; you ask a lawyer. The deeper and more complicated the question, the stronger and better the lawyer you ask. On those issues of truly serious depth, you might bring a judge into this, since the judge’s role in a trial or hearing is determiner of law. (The jury is determiner of fact.) Following this simple reasoning, you would think that the very best authority on law would be a Supreme Court judge.
This is a lovely idea, but it is a patently false idea.
The reality is that the US Supreme Court is now little more than an implement of political policy. Much more than had been the case in centuries past, today’s decisions are generally 5-4 along political party lines. This is justice? I don’t think so.
The politicization of the Supreme Court has sunk to reprehensible levels. It has long been felt that even mediocre judges rise to the occasion when appointed to the Federal District Court bench, but that phenomenon stops short of the very top.
Now, you can argue that the Supremes deal not with ordinary cases but with those in which the law changes and evolves, but this argument falls flat on its face under close examination. Take the current case as an example: Miranda has long been established law in this country, but the conservatives hate it because it favours the poor rather than the wealthy. Can’t have that, can we? It favours the individual rather than the police state. No way, José. (Okay, that was a cheap shot. So what?)
Now that we have a comparatively liberal president, one more appointment will swing the court back to the left for a while, and it will become the turn of the conservatives to whine and pule and piss and moan about the injustice of it all. All along, it has been an injustice for the entire nation. But, as usual, few people care, so what’s wrong stays wrong.
Next.
According to USA Today, the Attorney-General plans to deal harshly with BP if he finds evidence that they did something wrong.
I can see them in the BP boardroom, shaking in terror, “Oh, no! Not another letter! Horrors!”
Yes, boyzengurlz; that is French. Look it up if it’s not clear to you.
A neighbour of mine, a lady of impeccable standards of deportment, had an experience that pointedly proves the wisdom of this ancient French expression.
I went shopping today with a friend, we stopped in Macy’s at the end of our trip, and we saw a couple of things we wanted to try on. We grabbed our items and went into the dressing rooms. Suddenly, I heard a man’s voice and called to my friend in the next dressing room and asked if she had heard a man, and she said yes. I opened my door, and there was an elderly lady standing outside of a dressing room.
I asked if there was a man in there. The woman had an accent and said in a very high and mighty voice, “Yes, does that bother you?” I responded with also a high and mighty voice and told her yes it did. I grabbed my items and walked out, telling the sales girl as I did so that a man was in the dressing room. The sales girl went in and asked him to leave, and he walked out with the elderly lady, a younger woman in tow.
I expressed my annoyance and told the sales girl the store had just lost a sale. I was about to buy two sweaters and, if the dress fit, that too. The sales girl was very nice, and those people (I think they were German) were so annoying because they thought it was FUNNY.
I said to them as I left that it was not funny and that some people have no sense. I could just picture them going home and telling how the prudish Americans were horrified to find a man in a women’s dressing room.
So, what is your take on this? I cannot wait to tell my husband. I will bet he will think it no big deal, but that is because he is not a naked woman with a strange man two feet away from her in a booth with big side slits.
I am still upset about the sweaters. Hard to find just the right thing and in my size.
Had this taken place in Vienna, Paris, or even possibly London, it would have been an overreaction to a normal social encounter. However, it was not in Europe; it was here. That I think that the European moral standard of behaviour is wiser and more civilized than ours is wholly irrelevant, since you play by the local rules. The German tourists may have made an unintentional faux pas, but they crossed the line by ridiculing the local social norm rather than apologizing for their gaffe. Perhaps they felt insecure, surrounded by three hundred million Americans, but adults are expected to cope with social awkwardness in a civil manner.
We all know what “the ugly American” refers to; I wonder if there is such a thing as “Die Häßliche deutsch” in Stuttgart…
Here’s a slightly different take on it.
Apologists for capitalism enjoy boasting of its efficiencies, yet do these efficiencies really withstand honest skeptical examination?
On the way into the village this morning, I passed a truck operated by a company that reads utility meters for the local electricity peddler. It may be assumed that, having read meters more than two hundred million times, they have developed an expertise and economy of motion which enable them to do this rather undemanding job at low cost, low enough to be able to compete successfully against the utility itself.
Since contemporary capitalism contends that bigger is better – here’s where they trot out the heavy artillery, the economy of scale argument – then isn’t it contradictory that the overall business process is more rather than less efficient if it’s broken down into roles played by more than one company?
Doubling of overhead, that sort of thing. Precisely the reason why the fourteen hundred insurance companies in the US health-care market cannot come anywhere near competing with the single-provider model utilized by civilized nations.
Economists lightly dismiss this question with vague allusions to labour unions, wage disparity, and the usual suspects. Technically, they are correct, as is everyone who can see the obvious. However, this is nothing more than justifying something bad by claiming that it is what it is.
Look at it in this way: all labour done in all economies is performed by people. Add all the capital, machinery, and other resources that you wish, wealth can and will still come from labour only, and all of that comes from people working. The company name printed on the paycheck is irrelevant, as is whether it’s a privately held corporation, a publicly-traded multi-national, or a government agency. You always start with a person doing a job in order to achieve a result.
Okay, then what?
The quality of management will either (a) enable that worker to do her best and thus achieve the maximum that is possible, or (b) hinder and impair the worker in her performance. Please don’t try my patience by pretending that you do not believe this.
Those who believe in fairness would prefer that each worker be paid what his work is worth, neither more nor less. Thus, union contracts which raise pay above its true value or greedy employers who refuse to pay a fair wage are both morally wrong and unjust. If the utility has to pay exorbitant wages, then a subcontractor can compete, but this is an artificial situation which benefits a few at the expense of the many. That is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. That is not efficiency; it’s extortion.
I can but ask that you imagine my embarrassment at having to admit to one and all that Dick Cheney got it right. You remember him? The bloodthirsty warmonger maniac who proclaimed, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy,” nine years ago?
I do not praise him, not really, no more than my stating that the obvious fact that Hitler very accurately summed up the public mentality when he observed in his autobiography that the great masses of people will sooner believe a greater lie than a lesser one is praise.
It goes against human nature to do without. This is triply so in a nation of spoiled consumers who have been trained by television to believe that no desire should go unsated, as long as there’s a credit card not yet maxed out. Since real life is never that simple, one must recognize that some people do have the maturity which which to accept that at least a few of the less painful forms of conservation might be implemented.
When this takes the form of buying costly fluorescent bulbs with which to replace incandescent, then they mutter about the price and buy them. They understand that investing a few bucks up front in order to benefit in the long run makes sense. (Unfortunately, they do not realize that the claims made by fluorescent bulb peddlers are wildly optimistic and do not reflect real-world performance.)
However, and we all knew that there’d be a “however”…
When conservation means actually doing without, well, then, that’s a whole ‘nuther matter.
Not owning a bloated SUV, not driving around just for the fun of it, not having an in-ground pool with heater, doing without almost any of the things that are de rigueur for the affluent consumer (or the consumer who wishes to be regarded as affluent), are these sacrifices that people are willing to make?
Here, we arrive at the crux of this dilemma. If everyone were to share the grief and all make equal sacrifices, then the majority of the public would at least think seriously about it. However, when it is a personal and individual choice, then very, very few Americans will give up their goodies while knowing full well that almost everyone else declines to do so. It’s not that people fear standing out as the only nonconformist in the neighbourhood; it is simple resentment: “Why should I have to do without when he gets to keep his?”
Ignoble as this may be, it’s how humans are wired, so decrying it will avail you nothing. Thus, asking people to do without, to make individual sacrifices, will never work. Conservation, which is inevitable, must be forced upon the public. If, as appears to be the case, we elect to do nothing, then when things run out, we will conserve whether we like it or not.
If the expectations of the optimists are correct, then we will force ourselves to do with less, and we’ll do it before we run out. How will this happen, you ask? Flat-out prohibitions rarely work, and rationing is about as popular as prohibition, so the most likely method is pricing. If prices are high enough, then people will conserve.
How to get prices high? Artificial shortages are a long-favoured technique, but they breed their own counterforces and thus hardly ever succeed. The traditional procedure is massive taxation, as currently done with alcohol and tobacco. Experience proves that the prices must be brutally high in order to discourage demand, and the fact that the added money goes straight to the government hardly serves as a disincentive to the politicians.
Since humans have a blind spot for unintended consequences, let’s take a quick look at one of them: the poor will be disproportionately affected. First, given their financial constraints, they will have to do without to a far greater extent than the wealthy will, thus shoving the burden of suffering off onto the poor. The only people who have a problem with this are the poor, and we all know how much anyone cares about them.
Second, since those resources that we most need to conserve are virtually never discretionary, the poor will not have any choice about buying them, no matter how confiscatory the prices are. Try driving to work without gasoline in the car, especially in the 99.9999999999% of this country without public transport of any kind. Try living without the income from work. The notion that most of the poor in America live high on the hog on welfare is a cruel lie with which the middle class makes itself feel morally superior.
So, where are we? The rich are always isolated from and immune to economic forces, and none more so than those which deprive them of anything that they want. The middle class lives to consume, and to consume as much as it can, irrespective of whether it can afford to do so. These two classes certainly will never voluntarily conserve, and they are capable of enduring the costs of involuntary conservation through tax-elevated prices. The poor are left holding the can . . . as always. As Dr Sheldon Cooper would say, “Bazinga!”
Kinda makes ya proud to be an American…
Even though they have thus far exercised remarkable self-restraint, those who disagree with my views have a major challenge ahead of them, although, I predict, they will strive to do their very best not to see it.
The fallout from the BP incident in the Gulf of Mexico, or, as it will soon be called, Gulf Oil, will generate so much legal controversy, so many lawsuits, and so much contradictory self-serving drivel from pundits, politicians, lawyers, and other bottom-feeders as to set a world record for wasted energy.
The entire system will heave and thrash and fume, creating such masses of smoke and heat and noise that the real issues will drown and suffocate.
In short, the system is broken, and the consequences of the BP boo-boo will demonstrate the system’s failures and ineffectuality perhaps even more than did the lame and incredibly costly reaction to 9/11.
A well-informed critic sent me this article in the New York Times. It’s a brief and to-the-point warning about some of the blind assumptions made by consumers (and those charged with the responsibility for protecting them from harm) in this age of factory-manufactured foods and the containers in which they’re sold.
I agree with what Kristof says. Wholeheartedly and fully.
Except…
I take exception to his inclusion of chemical fertilizers in his list of things to avoid. Clearly, he knows nothing about agriculture and chemistry, nor does he understand the function of fertilizers.
The unspoken assumption in his essay is that these chemicals are first ingested into the human body. In the case of pesticides, that’s a no-brainer. The same applies to the manure residues left on unwashed produce. (That anyone would use fresh fruit or veg without first washing it is a little weird, but, it seems, it happens.)
The chemical fertilizers are not carried along on the food. They are dissolved into the water from which the plants draw, taken up by the root system, and then converted by plant metabolism into plant mass. When excessive fertilizer application results in run-off, then there’s a problem. Given the terrifying increases in the prices of fertilizer currently, this should dwindle.
Like the vitamins and minerals we humans require, fertilizer is micronutrition for plants. (It is not plant food. Plant food is carbon dioxide.)
None of this in any way negates the truth in that article, and I think that the real threats lie in man-made chemicals introduced not in real food itself but elsewhere, including factory-manufactured foodstuffs and their containers.
To lump chemical fertilizers, such as urea and ammonia, into the same basket that contains Bisphenol-A is unfair and misleading. Anyway, until there is a workable substitute, it’s folly even to propose abolition of chemical fertilizers. Is there a better idea floating around? I would like to hear about it, if there is.
At the monthly meeting of the movie-makers’ group I recently joined, I was talking to someone with a good deal of experience, and the advice I was given had more than the ring of truth.
To make myself popular with producers and directors, to assure myself of ample invitations to join production crews, to be made welcome throughout the organization, all that I had to do was . . .
. . . show up when I promise to, and do the work.
What’s my point? That the standards of personal performance, commitment, and integrity these days have fallen to such subterranean levels that merely keeping one’s promises and doing what one has agreed to do constitute exceptional behaviour.
Bloody hell…
For someone making as much rude noise as I do about other writers’ typos, misspelling, sinful syntax, ungrammatical grammar, and other errors in writing, I certainly commit more than my fair share of those very offenses. That’s the only reason why I read my own stuff, to find mistakes and desperately correct them before millions of people see ‘em.
As the man once said…
Werk smarder not harder and wach yor speling.
I don’t know how MSNBC found out before everyone else did, but when the public hears that King George’s wars have killed this many American soldiers, the Republican spin doctors will be working three shifts and weekends…
Of course, leave it to Facebook to capitalize on this…
