A Twisted Perspective

Mr. Laelaps and I don’t have TV in our little apartment, and everytime I watch it I can think of new reasons why! But since I’m watching my friend’s poodles this weekend, in a house that has a master bathroom slightly larger than our living room at home, I decided to indulge in a little mindless TV watching to break the cavernous silence and entertain me while I worked on the most recent knitting project.

 All was going well until a commerical for Franklin Templeton investments came on. It started off with a scene of a busy open-air marketplace, somewhere in Asia. There are stalls for everything, carts loaded with fruit, old ladies selling fish, spice stores, and people and animals everywhere. It is the perfect picture of a thriving local, economy. Once the viewer has had a chance to absorb the picture, the voiceover begins, “You see a traditional marketplace…”

Well, no argument there.

Then the perspective puts on a pair of spectacles and the view transforms as the voice continues: “…But we see an investment in what is now one of the largest modern asian supermarket chains.” In the new picture we see a young beautiful Chinese woman dressed in Western clothes, pushing a shopping cart down the bright, white, sterile lanes of what could be my local A&P, looking at row upon row of unidentifiable food products in plastic, sealed containers and smiling at her infant.

As I stared in horror at the visage of global sameness and corporate control, the voice over continued to ennumate the reasons I should invest with their company and how I could order a prospectus. Yikes. I don’t even know what to say to that sort of worldview. Literally, the first 15 seconds of that commercial I had spent wishing that I could go to that marketplace and shop and enjoy all the diverse colors and flavors and people. Then I am informed that only a true visonary could transform that lovely place into…the place where I shop every damn week.

Adventures in Shopping; or, How to Waste 3 Plastic Bags and 1 Afternoon

So what with Mr. Laelaps liveblogging it up in North Carolina I’m a single woman for the weekend. I thought I’d really crank up the party while he was gone by getting sushi and then cleaning the house and watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD. I had a lovely plan: Leave work at 3pm, do one quick errand, pick up my sushi and get him and into my pjs by 3:30.

Well, naturally nothing works out like we think, one errand turned into five, all in different directions, and home didn’t get seen until nearly 6pm! To add to my general frustration, was a screaming lady in the parking lot, a guy who parked across two spaces at once, a general grayness to the sushi at the first place stopped, and one other thing.

You see, as I did my more-than-expected errands, I toted my little canvas bag to each store, placed it on the counter with my purchases, and said clearly, “I have this bag to put the items in, ma’am.” And at each location, the clerk did the exact same thing while I wasn’t looking. He or she carefully put the things in my canvas bag…wrapped in the store’s plastic bag! ARGH.

At last, I got to my final stop. It was a grocery store, with automatic computer check-out. We bag our own in those lanes. Finally. My groceries would go in the bag I brought. As I scanned my groceries, an over eager clerk ran up while my back was turned and proceeded to bag them for me in the store’s bags. I turned around. “Oh, no,” I wailed forlornly. “But I has this…canvas…bag…”

“Oh, no problem!” she replied brightly, with an understanding smile. She took the canvas bag from me, and removed my groceries from the store bag and put them in my bag. “Thank you so much!” I breathed, my faith in the power of environmentalism restored.

“Sure thing,” she said, still smiling, as she balled up the plastic bag my things had been and stuffed it in the waste basket.

I think I’m gonna go lie down now…

Children’s Cold Medicine, Cloned Meat, and The FDA: Some Thoughts.

The FDA has been in the news a lot recently, most notably to declare the sale of meat from clones or the offspring of clones safe and legal, and to declare infant cold medicine unsafe for infants. I have alot of somewhat scattered thoughts on these two matters, and the FDA in general, so bear with me as I attempt coherency.

Firstly, the children’s/infant cold medicine/pain reliever issue. Paracetamol, the active ingredient in pain relievers has been available in a children’s formulation sine the late 1950’s . I wasn’t able to find out for how long it’s been available/marketed in an “infant” formulation, but it has been for a number of years in a myriad of different products for infants as young as 12 weeks old. The toxicity and dangers of overdose of paracetamol/acetaminophen have been well known and documented for nearly a century, while many drugs we use are toxic at higher doses the FDA is only just discovering that this particular drug may be unsuitable for infants and children now? They have issued an official warning not to give cold medicine or pain reliever to children under two, and are currently “considering” the safety of these products for older children.

I don’t know about you but between this, the Vioxx fiasco, and many other similiar situations where the FDA has given a drug the okie-dokie and then, sometimes decades later, retracted approval, I’m starting to think twice before I take any medicine, especially over-the-counter, no matter how bad that headache is! By the way, when I went to the FDA’s website to find out more, this information was conspicuously absent from their pages, despite it being splashed all over CNN and other major new outlets this morning. When I did a search on children’s tylenol within their site, I came up only with a warning from several years ago saying not to give the infant formula to older children because that formulation is much more concentrated (apparently several children died when their parents subbed a younger sib’s medicine for theirs – the tragic part is that the symptoms of overdose mimic the symptoms of a bad cold or flu, prompting parents to keep medicating)

What there was not a shortage of information on, however, was the approval for cloned animals to be put on the market. It was one of the first things I saw on the front page, and there was a link to a whole storehouse of information on cloning, cloning approval, and cloned food safety. Some would say a disproportionate amount considering how few cloned animals actually are or going to be on the market anytime soon (compared to, say, the number of people who give their infants cold medicine when they have the sniffles).

Now, I am definitely not a proponent of cloning animals for anything, especially food. And even though we’ve been effectively cloning plants for thousands of years, I’m not a fan of that either. To me anything that decreases the genetic diversity of our food source is bad news. All that aside, I do feel the hubbub and the endless polls about “Will you eat cloned meat?” are a bit of an overreaction. While I couldn’t find any figures for how much cloned meat is or is going to be on the market, my guess is that it will be virtually none.

It’s a numbers game, people. How much does it cost to clone a cow? A lot. How much does it cost it to get some semen from a great bull and inseminate a cow? Very little. It will almost certainly never be cheaper to clone an animal than to make it the old-fashioned way. What we will see, and probably are seeing already, is the meat from the offspring of cloned animals. A prize angus bull, try as he might, only makes so much semen in his life. But clone him, and even if his clone only lives half as long you still are probably making a big profit.

Now, I don’t think cloned meat is going to turn out to be acutely toxic or anything like that. But the honest truth is, clones do not live as long as their genetic progenetors, and they have a higher rate of sickness and organ failure. Whether this effects the offspring of clones or not seems to be undetermined – my guess is yes. By adding the offspring of clones into our food supply we are simulatainously decreasing the quality and diversity of our meat. And by allowing this meat to go to market without long-term studies and without any labelling system to allow the customer to make an informed decision, the FDA is being highly irresponsible.

Basically, all this goes to highlight the ineffectiveness, duplicity, and secretiveness of the agency responsible for the safety of pretty much everything we put in our body. I try not be a conspiracy freak, but honestly at this point I’m pretty much becoming one. It seems that you can’t trust any food you didn’t grow or raise yourself, and not even some of that depending on where you got the seeds/seedlings/baby animal. As for medicine, well…let’s just says if the disease isn’t life threatening, the cure may be worse than the illness. In any case, we obviously can’t leave it up to other people to tell us whether something is safe or not. It pays to do our homework.

Feral Cats Strike Back

Given all the flack my husband has caught for suggesting that feral cats aren’t unconditionally a plague and a pox on all the world, I found this story particularly interesting.

Basically a rescue group has been recolonizing feral cats in LA into places such as flower markets and police stations which have a big rat problem. They trap the kitties, spay/neuter them, and then give them new territories where they are fed, sheltered, and have one job: Keep the rats away. Most of the time they don’t even have to kill any rats to do it. Their very presence drives the offending rodents out.

This, to me, is a wonderful solution. While I appreciate the problem feral cats cause, it is hard for me to advocate them just being killed. Why should they pay for a situation we created? This is humane for the cats, humane for the rats, and safe, beneficial, and even enjoyable for the people. I understand this wouldn’t work everywhere, especially in islands or remote areas where the population of cats is spread out and truly part of the wildlife there, but in urban ecosystems this is perfect. My only worry is where the rats go when they flee the cats’ territory…

WTO = World Tyranny Organization

The WTO (World Trade Organization) is threatening sanctions against the EU for the refusal of some member nations to allow genetically modified food products to be sold in their countries. For an organization that claims their mandate is to promote free trade, this is remarkable hypocritical. We said free, not forced!

In addition to the fact that the WTO’s version of free trade seems to equal “free to destroy the environment” and “free to exploit workers in 3rd world countries”, it looks like they want to add “free to force unwanted products down the throats of sovereign nations”. They claim France and Austria (the two main hold-outs on GMOs) aren’t within their rights to deny entry to Monsanto et al products because it hasn’t been shown that they are harmful to the consumer. And that’s exactly true, it hasn’t been shown. No one knows anything about them. There just hasn’t been the kind of long term studies to answer that question, and if the big ag companies have their way there never will be. Can you blame these countries for wanting to be on the safe side?

And aside from the effects/lack of effects of eating GMOs, there are a number of things that we already know GMOs do:

1: GMO strains encourage the growth and expansion of monocultures. Besides my personal distaste at the thought of everything being the same all the time, this allows for the possibility of wide-spread destruction of crops which would lead to famine. All it would take is one little virus, one little pest to wipe out a nation full of genetically modified clones. The vast majority of the corn in the US is GM, and the number of varieties used are decreasing everyday. With corn used in 3500 products in the US, from paper to virtually everything sweetened to tortillas, can you imagine the economic devestation that would occur if half our corn were wiped out?

2: GMOs enslave and destroy small and private farmers. GMOs and even just regular hybrids demolish the ability of farmers to store seeds to replant the next year with, forcing them to buy new seed every year. This is a big burden on farmers with already slim profit margins. In addition, many big buyers such as Nabisco will only buy certain strains of corn or potatoes (or whatever) for their products, forcing farmers to buy and grow GMO foods if they want to be able to sell them. GMO seed is considerably more expensive than other kinds of seed, and has strict laws about how it maybe use due to the patents held by the companies which engineered them. Even farmer who aren’t trying to use GMOs end up getting entangled, as in the case of Percy Schmeiser and many others who have found GMOs growing on their land without having planted them. They get the honor of being sued by the patent holder.

3: GMOs have a negative impact on the wildlife and the surrounding ecosystem. They cause a reduction in the number and variety of good creepy-crawlies in the soil, and a corresponding drop in songbirds and other fauna in the area. Although I haven’t found a study on it, I personally wouldn’t be shocked if the crash of our honeybee population is tied up with GMOs (pure speculation on my part).

I think that’s enough reasons not to want to get mixed-up with GMO foods, don’t you? And although there aren’t any conclusive studies on the the long term effects, smaller studies have shown that things can go very wrong when messing with the genetic code of plant. Plus I just feel there’s something intrinsically wrong with eating something that can express its own pesticide. But I guess most plants actually do that, just in a different. Still, it feels icky to me.

And when you get right down to it, it doesn’t really matter why France and Austria are against importing these foods. Whether it’s the ick factor, a moral issue like those I’ve mentioned above, or just because they don’t feel like it, nothing should be able to force a country to import or buy foods or goods it doesn’t want. If Canada decided by overwhelming popular vote to ban the color pink because they think it clashes with their flag, then they should be able to do so and to choose to no longer import anything pink. Now that would be silly and probably devestate their economy, but if that’s what they want then go for it. Now if 99% voted to ban a drug that would save the lives of 1% of their population, that would be another ethical issue and I’d say they were outside their rights. But this isn’t a medicine. This is a matter of what free trade and national sovereignty actually mean. I’d say the WTO needs to chew on that for a little while.

Happy New Year, All!

Hi everyone!

I apologize for the long break. I’m much better at blogging when I’m procrastinating on doing other things. Since I’ve been off from work the past 11 days, I’ve had nothing really to procrastinate on and thus very little creativity. But now, cruelly, I’m back to my regular life full of things I don’t really want to do, and so I should have some morsels for you soon.

Regard Me As A Cautionary Tale

Let me preface this entry with two disclaimers. #1 – I am an environmentally and health conscious person who for a variety of reasons often doesn’t eat like one. Yes, I”m a hypocrite, but at least I understand why I shouldn’t eat processed food and McDonalds, even if I choose to ignore those reasons. #2 – I love my parents very much and am glad that they have been visiting.

Okay, now I can write the post without getting into too much trouble.

So for the past year or so my eating habits have been pretty terrible. Dinner would often be reasonably healthy (depending on how tired I was and the amount in our checking account), but I never ate breakfast because I had to get up early for work and my stomach always felt sick when I first woke. I would also either skip lunch due to lack of time, laziness in making, or lack of an insect free place to store it (I worked in an entomology lab – there were bugs in the fridge and freezer. In little baggies, but still!) or I would stop while I was driving to the field sites and get crap from Wawa or (gasp!) McDonald’s. I would end up being so hungry by the afternoon that I would just snack on cookies or whatever and give myself heartburn.

But when I started this new job in a normal office with regular hours, I actually got on a schedule. I ate breakfast every morning with whole grains and protein. I had plain organic yogurt and fresh fruit as a snack, and a salad or turkey wrap or homemade soup for lunch. We had grilled chicken and avocado or veggie stirfry and brown rice for dinner, and if I got the munchies I had a small handful of popcorn or a little bowl of sherbet. I basically swore off soda and sugary drinks.

And lo, it was as the dieticians had foretold unto me. For I was no longer sick in the mornings, no longer felt tired and bloated all the time (even though I was getting up brutally early), and my heartburn was vanished. I lost a little weight, had more energy and fewer headaches, and was in a much better mood. I was keeping track of my calories and I saw that it was good.

Then my parents came to visit. Bless their hearts.

They only see us once a year so of course they want to spend lots of time with us and take us out to dinner and stay up late chatting. And the holiday season likewise descended upon us. Gone went my schedule with my early bedtime and my free time after work to make lunch for tomorrow. Gone went only having the food I’d brought living in the kitchen at work, now piled high with holiday goodies a mere meter from my desk. Gone went waking up early to eat breakfast. Between parents and work and holiday parties I’ve had a week of cookie swaps and Chinese food and pizza and Chili’s and spicy chicken sandwiches and Chic-Fil-A and candy samplers. Oh and lets not forget the soda.

And, as was prophesied to me, I have reaped the whirl-wind. Plagues of nausea, heartburn, migraines, insomnia, bloating, and exhaustion have come upon me in Biblical proportions. And I have repented, yea, many times greater than my sin. I have seen the error of my ways and have forsworn my former eating habits.

Or at least I will when Christmas is over and my diet is back in my own hands. We’re eating veggies, brown rice, and grilled chicken for a month when this holiday is over and we’re not going to any New Year’s parties!

So what is the lesson here? All that stuff doctors and your mom have told you about eating your veggies, eating less sugar and fat, getting full night’s sleep, and breakfast being the most important meal of the day? That stuff is true. And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll leave you with a thought I heard on NPR:

“The first thing they do when they want a new sumo wrestler to gain a lot of weight is to stop them from eating breakfast.”

All I Want For Christmas Is Living Whales…

Speaking of Cetaceans, there has been recently hullabaloo over Japan’s announcing that this year they will go to Antarctica and kill nearly 1,000 minke and 50 humpback whales for “scienctific research”, which we all know is bullshit. Thankfully the international uproar was so great that they have put the trip on hold, hopefully indefinitely.

However, I heard something on the radio today that really pissed me off. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear the whole interview so I will have to paraphrase, and I’m sorry if I get my facts wrong (if you heard it, let me know what was actually said if I’m confused here). I was listening to the BBC Worldservice on NPR this morning and they had an interview with someone who I believe was a member of the Japanese government (although he sounded British) in some capacity. He basically said (and the interviewer repeated this back to him) “We have to kill whales so we know how many there…so we know if we can kill more whales.”

What the hell? Aside from that being the worst logic ever (couldn’t we just follow them and count them?), it is just a horrible way to think. I mean I generally am not against hunting, and I’ll grant you whales have bounced back, but why do people insist on wanting to kill them? They are familial, intelligent creatures, a very important part of the ecosystem and our cultural hertitage, and almost everything you get from them can be manufactured elsewhere these days.

There’s just no excuse. I’ll make a small exception for the First Nations peoples who are allowed to take the occasional whale for traditional reasons, but only if they use traditional weapons and methods where the whale has at least as much chance of killing you as the other way ’round. If you’re hunt whales because of tradition, but you are hunting them in speed boats with modern harpoons, forget it. And you’d better be living a traditional lifestyle. If you live next to McDonalds or Walmart, you don’t get to kill whales anymore. Sorry.

Japan’s excuse of scientific research is just insulting to our intelligence. They are killing whales because they like the meat, and trying to pull wool over the eyes of the international community is pointless. It’s time we said, “We don’t care why you want to kill them, you just can’t any more.” Whales, even more so than other large mammal (seeing as how they inhabit all oceans of the world), belong of all of us. That makes it everyone’s duty to protect them and no one’s right to destroy them.

A Little Kinkiness For Your Wednesday

While attempting to look up something in Greek on Google, I stumbled onto this highly disturbing website (don’t worry, no pictures). Apparently there are quite a few people, who are actually organized in some bizarre fashion, that believe that part of a Christian marriage include frequent spanking of the wife by the husband! Now the website goes to great lengths to stress that this is a consentual arrangement, and decorates itself with soothing colors, feminine fonts, and pictures of teacups. And it is apparently run or at least heavily contributed to by one or more women. However if you look at their blog and the fascinating articles, you will see tips for paddling an uncooperative wife (approved by wives themselves, no less) and how to discipline your teenaged daughter to “spank the demons out of her”.

Whoa. Now, if a brisk spanking is what gets you off then paddle away (just leave me out of it). But once you bring “God says” into it, then you don’t know whether its consensual because it is what you and your wife are into or if it is because she thinks she’s going to hell if she doesn’t let you smack the hell out of her bare bottom every Sunday before church. This is just a controlling, kinky, and destructive mindset. You can see how twisted this is by reading the article “explaining” why Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD) isn’t domestic violence. It’s written by a women who was in an abusive relation, got out of it, and then married someone and introduced this idea of spanking to her husband to make her feel loved and disciplined. That doesn’t make it different that makes it exactly the same! It just proves that the only way she feels love is through physical pain and violence.

As for the daughters… I don’t even know what to say about that! Spanking any child is a murky idea at best (I was spanked and I preferred that to a loss of TV or dessert, but I wasn’t spanked very hard…in any case we won’t be spanking our children). But the idea of a father spanking his adolescent daughter at all, much less without all or most of her clothes on is and trying to justify it with scripture is… horrifying…revolting…criminal. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, and I’ve heard a lot of repressive and crackpot theories, but this really takes the cake.

Their Biblical support for it is noticably lacking as well, as nowhere in the Bible does it actually say it is ever permissible to beat your wife. The best they can do is point to the verses that say “wives submit to your husbands” and point out that sometimes, but not always, the word for submit is the same used elsewhere in the Bible for a child submitting to his parents. And since Proverbs speaks of disciplining children with a rod, obviously God wants us to beat the crap out of both children and wives.

I don’t suppose anyone thought that maybe the verses were just talking about making sure you discipline your kids, rather than physical beatings. And even if the author of those proverbs was himself referring to an actual “rod”, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what God means for us to do. And of course these people convienently ignore verses in the New Testament (which I personally count much more relevant to my faith than the Old Testament, though the OT isn’t without its pearls of wisdom – just need to be taken with a grain of salt and a shaker of context) such as

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 2:28

Which is clearly about equality, no matter social status, and is carefully phrased to emphasize the new status of the lowest members of the contemporary totem pole (Jews, slaves, women) with their more honored counterparts. Not to mention the bit in Ephesians right before Paul gets into the wives and husbands and submitting bit where he says “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesesians 5:21, italics mine).

Now I once asked a very independent minded yet conservative Christian woman what she thought about all the stuff in Paul’s letters about wives submitting, and she said two things. First, there was a first century cultural context to it that we need to remember, and that Christ always treated women as complete equals in word and deed and that was enough for her. And secondly, that it’s clear from surrounding verses that God wants both husbands and wives to mutually submit and love each other. But the verses focus on what tends to be the weaker point for each. She said she often thought that is was much harder for many men to remember to act out of love when things got heated, so Paul says “don’t forget to love your wife!”, and that it was much harder for many women not to just nag and be passive agressive until they get their own way when things weren’t good, so he says, “don’t forget the respect!”. But that the whole picture is one of equality and mutual respect and submission to another out of love, regardless of the failings of the participants (I know many relationships where these traits are reversed) which to me is a beautiful picture of marriage.

And all that aside, these crazy people can’t deny that the Bible also says, “love your wife as your own body”, which mean that those husbands ought to be lining up for whippings of their own.

Not Nearly Good Enough

The House just passed a bill raising efficiency standards for cars, lightbulbs, and appliances, as well as funding huge subsidies for corn-based ethanol. Everyone in Washington seems pretty pleased with themselves. But as far as I can tell, this bill is the equivilant of me switching the lightbulbs in my house to CFLs and turning the powerstrip off when we’re not watching the TV. Nice gesture, reduces the impact a bit, everyone should be doing it… but it’s not going to save the planet. Here are my issues:

1: New fuel standards will require new cars to get at least an average of 35 miles per gallon, a 40% increase from the current 25 mpg standard. That’s lovely. My 1986 Toyota gets 37 miles per gallon right now. Mind you, this standard won’t go into full effect for twelve more years. So in 2020 my car which was made 34 years before will still be more fuel efficient than your average family car will be required to be. That’s progress, right there. (Please note that there’s nothing special about my Toyota – it’s just a good car – and I do not actually expect it to be around in 2020, but if it was, I would still drive it!)

2: Ethanol subsidies are taking us down the wrong road. Aside from the fact that it is the least energy efficient alternative fuel out there (in terms of the ratio of fossil fuel input to energy output), aside from the fact that I think that in a world in which millions of people go to bed hungry and thousands starve to death every single day it is crime to grow anything but food on arable cropland, there is this important point:

“For farmers and agribusiness, the energy bill is a windfall, perhaps providing more support than the farm bill. It doubles the use of corn-based ethanol – despite criticism that corn-based ethanol is driving up food prices, draining aquifers, and exacerbating fertilizer runoff that is creating dead zones in many of the nation’s rivers.”
-Boston Globe

For the purposes of this post I”m going to ignore the fact that the last two are things regular farming does as well… I’ll get to that in a future diatribe. Ethanol may be a reasonable solution for Brazil (though by no means a permanent fix) where they make it from sugar cane, which is both cheaper and much more land and fossil fuel efficient, but in the US where the ratio of energy in to energy out in corn-based ethanol is only about 1:2 (not counting the environmental distruction and hidden costs of rising food prices) it is just not worth it. There may be a magic biofuel out there that will free us from our dependency, but corn ain’t it.

3: They cut out the bit where clean energy like wind and solar get more tax breaks and oil companies get few tax breaks. Excuse me, but I don’t think that what is effectively the most lucrative and the most environmentally distructive industry we have, one which everyone currently uses due to need for energy and lack of alternatives should be getting any tax breaks at all. Unless they are working to develop clean alternative energies. That they can can get tax breaks for. But other than that, I say tax them and give the money to alternative energy research. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship for dry land, they will follow the money.

In conclusion, despite some very laudable legislation about lightbulbs and dishwashers, I think this bill will do more harm than good. It allows our lawmakers to sit back and say, “We passed new energy standards, we gave money to alternative fuels…it’s not perfect but we’ll look at it again in 12 years or so,” while the environment continues to go to hell. Our meager cuts aren’t even offsetting our own growth, much less what China and India are doing (it may be the other side of the world, but guess what? We all share the same atmosphere.) This bill gives excuse to do nothing more. Our lawmakers are afraid (and rightly so!) of pushing the auto and oil industries. Saying, this is what you have to do – if you don’t have the technology now then you’d better invent it because this is what is required to make a real difference. In a country that went to the actual moon in an actual spaceship after the government decided that was a priority, I find it very hard to believe that we can’t make solar power feasble or be driving 100mpg cars in a couple of decades if that’s what we really wanted to do. And saying to the public – it is nice that you want big powerful cars that burn a lot of gas, but you simply cannot have them unless we find a better way to power them because that is harmful to all of us. That is the government’s primary duty: to protect everyone under its rule. To me, that consistents pretty much of preventing people or companies from doing things that hurt other people or the society as a whole.