Month: February 2017

08:24 – It was 48F (9C) when I took Colin out this morning.

What is it about women and GMO’s? It’s as though many of them consider GMO’s to be poisonous, which of course there’s absolutely no scientific evidence to support.

If you visit prepping sites that discuss food storage, you’ll find that many, perhaps most, of them that are run by women who treat GMO food as something to be avoided at all costs. It’s “unhealthy” or so they apparently believe. Conversely, you’ll seldom encounter such a site run by a man that even mentions GMO’s, let alone demonizes them.

What they ignore, of course, is the fact that, with minor exceptions like wild-caught fish and wild game, nearly all of what we all eat is genetically modified in some sense. Humans have been raising crops and livestock for more than 10,000 years, and they’ve been genetically modifying those organisms the whole time. Initially by selective breeding, and more recently by direct intervention at the cell level.

For example, ancient Rome could not have become what it did without GM wheat. Few people realize that until the time of Caesar Augustus, Romans subsisted largely on emmer, a primitive natural form of wheat that was not suited to growing on the Italian latifundia and later the North African grain belts. It was only the introduction of more modern wheat that allowed the population of Rome to explode as it did.

In fact, the invention of genetic modification by selective breeding of crops and livestock is what ultimately allowed the development of the modern world. People have to eat, and without selective breeding to greatly increase production, there would not have been enough food to support cities, let alone metropolises like Rome became. People would still be living in mud huts and scratching out a living from the soil.

Now, there are obviously different types and degrees of genetic modification, some of which most people consider more “natural” than others. Almost no one nowadays would take issue with selective breeding, but many draw the line there. For some reason, many people are bothered by the idea of a human manually transferring genes from, say, one breed of tomato to another to optimize the characteristics of that tomato for human use. What you end up with, of course, is just a tomato. A tomato that has somewhat different characteristics, certainly, but still just a tomato. And there’s no reasonable basis for assuming that that new form of tomato may be any less nutritious or any less healthy to eat than the older forms of tomato.

Even more people object to the most recent form of genetic modification, which involves transferring genes from one species to an entirely different species. It’s unnatural, they say. Of course, it’s actually completely natural. Nature does it all the time via a mechanism called horizontal gene transfer. Yes, the resulting organism is a “monster” using the strict definition of that word as something that never before existed in nature, at least if you squint your eyes and ignore the fact that “nature” does it all the time.

But even the most anti-GMO people happily use the products of some of these monsters without thinking twice about it. If they or family members are insulin-dependent diabetics, for example, of course they use insulin that is produced by GMO monsters. Until 1978, when the first genetically-engineered E. coli bacteria were produced that included the gene to allow them to produce human insulin, diabetics depended on insulin isolated from livestock pancreata, all of which has slightly different amino acid sequences than human insulin. It worked, usually, but how much better is it to have access to actual human insulin without having to kill healthy people to reclaim their insulin?

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 I wonder if any students read Kipling nowadays. More than 50 years, in 7th-grade English class, I read his Gods of the Copybook Headings. I wonder if anyone today who’s not at least 60 even knows what Copybook Headings are. The final stanza has always stayed with me:

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

When Kipling wrote that poem nearly 100 years ago, nearly everyone knew exactly what he was talking about. Copybook Headings were aphorisms and rules for living. Each was printed at the top of a page in a student’s copybook, what today we’d call a notebook. Students mastered handwriting by copying these aphorisms over and over, until each page was filled with their copies. As they copied these headings over and over, they were perforce required to think about what they were writing.

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08:58 – It was 33.3F (~ 1C) when I took Colin out this morning.

Walmart may be serious about taking on Amazon. I ordered 18 jars of Bertolli alfredo sauce at 9:51 a.m. yesterday. I got a ship notification from Walmart at 2:29 p.m. yesterday, saying the order would arrive Wednesday.

I checked several other food items that we use routinely. Obviously, Amazon isn’t seriously competing in this market. Walmart’s prices were reasonable, a bit more than Costco or Sams charges. Amazon’s prices on these same items were at least twice and often three times as much. Get real.

Interesting article in the paper this morning. Sanity still prevails sometimes. A man in Elizabeth City, down near the coast, shot and killed his wife of 53 years. The DA was surprised that the grand jury declined to prosecute him, so he’s been freed.

As it turns out, his wife suffered from Alzheimer’s and was about to be moved to a care facility. Even the best of Alzheimer’s facilities are hell holes, and he obviously recognized that the woman he loved was gone and didn’t want her body to continue suffering. He must have known when he shot her that he’d probably spend the rest of his life in prison, but he obviously loved her enough that he was willing to pay that price. Obviously, the grand jury realized the situation and concluded that he was no threat to others and that no crime had been committed by any rational definition. Good for them.

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10:21 – It was 35.8F (2C) when I took Colin out this morning, but with not much wind. I’ve never trusted our electronic rain gauge. We use it during cold months because we’ve had several standard rain gauges, plastic and glass, fracture when water froze in them. Our electronic gauge typically reads low. If the manual gauge is showing, for example, 2 inches, the electronic gauge may show 1.2 or 1.6 inches or whatever.

But I trust the electronic one even less now. When I asked Barbara this morning what the outside temperature was, she looked over at the electronic gauge and told me it read 37F. Then she added that we’ve had quite a bit of rain since the first of the year, 397 inches. I suggested she must mean 3.97 inches, so she showed me the gauge. It read 397.14 inches YTD, which is 33.1 feet, 1,008.7 cm, or about 10.1 meters. So unless our gauge has malfunctioned, we had more rain in the last month than we normally get in seven years.

I talked to Barbara yesterday about dropping Amazon Prime. She said she’d prefer to keep it, if only for the streaming video. It’s only $99/year, so price isn’t a factor. I told her that if I dropped Prime I was thinking about replacing it with Hulu for $12/month. She said she wouldn’t mind having all three streaming services. Once we’ve cut down on our backlog of streaming stuff we want to watch on Netflix or Prime, I’ll probably sign up for Hulu’s one-week free trial, just to see what kind of stuff they have.

Given that Hollywood in general is Trump’s enemy, I’d like to see him take steps to eliminate copyright protection for new video and audio recordings, and to eliminate it retroactively for existing recordings. There’s no Constitutional basis for copyrights on anything but books and essays–“securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”–but absolutely no mention of video or audio recordings. While he’s doing that, he needs to change “limited Times” to reflect the original intent. Tom Jefferson didn’t want to allow patents and copyrights at all, but he compromised on “limited Times”, intending that to mean perhaps a year at most. A 17-year term for patents and life-of-the-author-plus-50-years for copyrights is simply outrageous.

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