Our World and Everything in It

That story made the news last week but the event happened in August. Four bottlenose (Flipper) dolphins encircled an injured surfer after a shark attack, bringing him to shore. It’s not the first time dolphins have saved a human. An article stated that dolphins protecting humans goes back to ancient Greece. I told you that to ask you this.

Why are we allowing dolphin hunts by a small Japanese village? Dolphins have been friends with humans for centuries and we knowingly allow their slaughter? And this is not about relations with Japan. There are Japanese that want the slaughter banned also. One of the key reasons, and the Japanese government knows this, is that the dolphin meat is contaminated with high levels of mercury.

The Japanese retested the dolphin meat themselves and were surprised.

The other reason this event should not be such a big problem to stop is because it is an isolated event. It happens in a cove outside of a small fishing village in Japan called “Taiji.”  Notoriety is building about these fisherman chasing dolphins into a cove where they are trapped by nets in the thousands. Some 20,000 human friendly dolphins are caught and slaughtered. I didn’t want to read about it. There is a video of it on “You Tube.” I guess the poor little guys aren’t always dead when…

So this event happens in one small fishing village, not as a custom throughout Japan, and there are Japanese that want it stopped also. The meat is poison, and the Japanese government knows about it. It only a matter of time you might say, meanwhile, Flipper is being stripped alive.

This should not be a big problem to fix. This should be about a few talks with Japanese officials urging them to prohibit killing dolphins by a few of their citizens. The argument is there is no market for poison fish anyway. The fisherman should not only be in trouble for killing dolphins this way, but selling mercury tainted meat. Besides, knowing what we know about dolphins, this is as cannibalistic as eating bushmeat. Let me go one step further in adding that the levels of mercury in our friends the dolphins is about as rotten a deal as killing them outright. So we that pollute are no better. And for those that don’t think man pollutes enough to cause change on earth, how did those dolphins get saturated with mercury?

Our congress people will not move on this unless we make it known that we want it stopped. The world needs to realize better policy concerning the creatures of earth that are threatened by our pollution. Write your congress people about getting Japan on board to prohibit Taiji from killing dolphins.

Read about what I read about at: http://www.savejapandolphins.org/weblog.html

The dolphin rescue story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21689083/

I like a good shrimp dinner like anyone else that likes shrimp, big, fat meaty mouthfuls of that sweet seafood, add scallops and lots of other types of seafood for that matter. But now I hear that 80% of the seafood we eat is imported. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the FDA only inspects 1% of that seafood, and what it does inspect will more than likely fail due to unsafe levels of antibiotics, or just plain filth.

Personally, I like to buy fish that says farm-raised in the U.S., even though the fish food contains PCB’s. In Vietnam farm-raised may mean “in sewage.” Eating in restaurants is a little more difficult. There are no labels. It’s a good idea to ask where the seafood comes from. There is a problem with an often used fungicide called Malachite Green found in imported fish. Malachite Green can cause cancer and birth defects over time.

The countries from which we import know what’s legal and what’s not. They do it anyway, and often replace the forbidden material with another that is potentially dangerous. That’s why it’s so important to have better checks on our imports, especially food. President Bush is expected to ask for reforms giving government the power to recall. Who is he kidding? His small government/privatization ideals have fallen flat in the area of imports already. More and more things we rely on as safe through governmental inspections are at risk because there is no government inspecting it. Some states like Alabama run their own inspections, but those states are few.

Be advised. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m going to start to ask where my seafood comes when I dine out. I had no idea that a good shrimp dinner may be the same as getting a big dose of unknown antibiotics. I refuse to eat meat because of CAFO’s. It’s getting very, very vegetarian around here.
Read more about fish inspections: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/Story?id=3825144&page=2.
 

I watched a really interesting Nova presentation on PBS last night about Epigenetics.  It is another reason for us to really nurture and care for the environment we live in. Our code of life seems to be more interactive with our surroundings than we think. All animals and humans have pretty much the same number of genes in our DNA makeup. Because of this, science is stumped by the individuality among humans and animals, especially health.

Watching animal parents (rats) either nurture or ignore their young led to a study of generational DNA makeup relative to psychological environment. We all pretty much know that children of abusive or neglectful parents suffer more depression and psychological problems as adults, but what scientists found was a marker on the DNA of maybe 3 generations of rats down the line denoting the stress from their great, great, great grandparent due to neglect. 

Shortly thereafter, another scientist way up in the Northern part of Sweden was studying a town that maintained great records for hundreds of years not just the genealogy of families but also the weather patterns and harvest records. He found a correspondence in disease and illness with environmental stressors such as drought and famine that affected the harvest.  Illness from poor health due to lack of nutrition is a no-brainer. But it wasn’t just the generation affected that had illness and disease; he found it ran in the family as far as 3 or 4 generations down the line whether they ate well or had a much improved lifestyle. 

Scientists started looking at the DNA markers for disease in people relative to these new findings. It appears these markers are handed down from the paternal side of the family. Memory of environment appears to stamp sperm.  If the individual male suffered stress from death, loss of crops, harsh weather, abusive parents, horrible weather, etc., that stress was transmitted to his sperm and it expressed itself in the form of a markers on their children’s DNA. It is not a genetic mutation. Even though the children are stress free, the markers of their father’s environment were there, passed on.

Environmental stress, both physical and psychological, matters for generations to come no matter how well future generations quality of life improves! The specific markers for individual DNA according to ancestry are what turn on and off the receptors for disease and illness, so lifestyle choices are extremely important for children and grandchildren’s health. This says much about the black community. Blacks suffer from many more diseases than whites. Considering their history of slavery, a horrendous stress for a human being, and this recent revelation, it’s no wonder.

The good thing about all of this is that back in the 70’s there was a form of chemotherapy so toxic it was discontinued. However, it had the ability to erase these DNA stress markers. The chemo has been reduced to like 1/20th of the original and dispensed to patients with diseases that had no cure. The patients had no side effects and their disease went into remission. When their DNA was checked, the markers were gone. This is all experimental at this stage, but I have no doubt the findings. I own an African Grey parrot.  Bird people know that stressors of any type show up on new feathers as small bars. We all share almost identical DNA, rats to humans. What sets us apart as individuals health-wise, are the stress markers of our ancestors. What are we sending to our children, and their children, and their children after that by living in a polluted, hectic world? It doesn’t look good right now as breast cancer and all other types of disease seem to be on a rise again.

The average person breathes in air that is questionable. We bathe, drink, and cook with water that isn’t the purest, full of chlorine and other chemicals for purity. And the food we eat lived in horrific environments of stress where pigs and cows chew on metals bars of their cages out of frustration from a life of constant confinement, a living hell in a CAFO, before we eat it. These animals give birth in these crates. The babies are ripped from the mothers and they in turn live a life of hell as foodstuff. I don’t think its fit to eat, and the people that perpetrate the business are evil. So our environment is ailing to begin with, and then we smoke, drink, overeat, and are getting more and more sedentary, as we watch the instance of disease rise worldwide. According to Epigenetics the correlation is right on the money. We simply must become more responsible keepers of our personal and world environment for the healthy future of humanity.

For more about the program on PBS called “The Ghost in Your Genes” goto:

http://www.pbs.org/search/search_results.html?q=The+Ghost+of+Our+Genes&neighborhood=none&btnG.x=4&btnG.y=5.
 

You know I’m amazed at people that don’t believe man has any hand in global warming. Especially since my house sits in a jet zone. Oh I don’t mean I can hear my house shake when they take off. They are pretty high up there. When I look up, they look to be about inch in size. No one let homeowners know where the flight patterns were going to be when they enlarged Detroit Metro. I got lucky and now the sky above me is full of planes coming and going. I’m listening to one right now. It’s loud because it’s flying lower. I’ve turned down the TV before to see if it’s thunder or a plane.  With all these planes criss-crossing in the sky but doing so way, way up there, most people wouldn’t notice any problem. But just last weekend my husband closed our pool and in 2 short days time without a solar cover on that pool, we could see a gas slick on the surface of the water. We left it off for a week once before and a stain appeared at the bottom. 

I don’t need someone telling me man has created a big pollution problem due to fossil fuel use. I can see it! Out of curiosity I went rummaging around the internet to see just how much jet fuel falls on me everyday and found an article that jet fuel additive is in our food supply. Not a surprise to me. Fuel in my pool, fuel in the protected wetlands marsh behind my house. So it follows it’s in the groundwater, our drinking water, and our food supply. Our population has had 100% exposure to a jet fuel contaminant called perchlorate. The article went on to say: “The shocking thing is that it appears to be very widespread in the food supply. No one knows for sure, because the FDA has not done the studies they need to do to document its complete presence in the food supply.” Gee, I wonder why?

 This is just another way to keep under wraps the real pollution that’s taking place right under our noses in favor of the fossil fuel industry. For more about Jet Fuel Additive you probably ate tonight read: http://www.ewg.org/node/21582.

After all the problems we’ve had with tainted imports from China, the FDA planned to outsource some 322 jobs and shut down 7 of 13 field labs. What is wrong with this picture? This administration’s rush to privatize just about everything in the country is becoming more blatant.

If it weren’t for the National Treasury Employee’s Union that covers the FDA employees, the labs would be shut down right now, at a time when we should have more field labs to ensure imports are safe. That’s what Reps. Dingell and Stupak think also. They sent a letter to the FDA Friday questioning the outsourcing of so many jobs. Both Dingell and Stupak are quoted as saying, ” “It is truly incomprehensible why the agency would again consider reducing the expertise and institutional knowledge of the FDA at a time when FDA’s credibility with the American people is at an all-time low.” Evidently, the FDA doesn’t care what we think.

There is an Import Safety Working Group in place as of last month. Dingell and Stupak called the FDA’s move to outsource the FDA jobs without recommendations from the Import Safety Group, “hasty and injudicious.” That’s being kind. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of connection left between the American public and many of our Federal bureaus. They simply do not care what we think in lieu of privatization everywhere. Privatization is a nice word for the wealthy taking over. Somewhere in my earlier blogs, I said the wealthy have already done that. They just aren’t wearing their gold crowns yet. I plan to blog on the state of this move to privatize everything in the country soon. There is a huge article in Rolling Stone about it, I haven’t read yet and will certainly pass along.

Meanwhile, it is good that union forces that are supposedly breaking America, saw to it that the labs didn’t close. And Reps. Dingell and Stupak are a good pair for being quick with the questions and investigations. This is just another in a string of federal agencies that appear to be inept and out of touch with middle class America. The EPA is a joke with over 400 environmental laws loosened or lost altogether during the past 7 years.  FEMA is questionable, and now the FDA tried to pull a fast one in light of all the bad imports. It looks to me like we need a whole lot more whistleblowers among government workers. We think China is awful and untrustworthy, but it looks like we can no longer have faith in the U.S. agencies that exist for our well-being.

A brand new ethanol plant opened today in Adrian that will produce 100 million gallons annually. Sounds good, right? Not really. Although ethanol may be a quick fix for a percentage of our oil use, it is a program that falls pitifully short and is even dangerous. Think about this. Right now we only produce ethanol equal to 3.5 percent of what we consume in gasoline. This little bit of ethanol production is using up 20 percent of our entire corn crop in the states already. We will never be able to produce enough ethanol! The price of corn has already doubled. On top of that Third World countries are going to face starvation for sure if corn becomes our new oil. If we proceed with this massive corn production, where is the land needed for other crops? We’ve had massive fires across 11 states, devastating more than just forested areas. Our urban sprawl went unchecked for almost a decade. Now we have thousands of homes across the country in those newly sprouted subdivisions standing empty in foreclosure. Many of those subdivisions were once farmland.   And now no one wants to eat Chinese imported food and are paying attention to what they eat and where it comes from. I see a big mess over our food in the near future. I’m already buying new canning utensils and our garden will probably get bigger next year. It may get down to feed yourself if you want safe food, because the U.S. simply does not have the landmass to produce food staples and all this bio-fuel. Even if we could produce our own food, if the heat waves continue to get worse, our fields will simply fry. Then what?  Who is in charge of this fiasco? Congress, specifically the Senate, who just recently mandated we produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. This is frightening. Someone do the math. This does not solve the energy crisis by any means. The government is paying out $51 billion in subsidies for corn, which amounts to $1.38 per gallon, almost half of ethanol’s wholesale market price. This is very bad business sense. Ethanol is nothing but 180 proof pure grain alcohol that is denatured so we can’t get drunk on it. Other things than corn, like sugar cane and switch grass, can make pure grain alcohol also. Cars can’t run on the stuff in its pure form so what we get at the pumps is E85, 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. An article in Rolling Stone further said that the density of ethanol is 1/3 less than gasoline, so there is less bang for a tank full of ethanol. Cars will certainly burn more ethanol than gas to go as fast. We will never be able to produce enough ethanol. The article went on to say that ethanol is not all equal. Brazil is already ahead of the U.S. on ethanol production because they use sugar cane which puts out higher energy levels than the amount of fossil fuel used to grow, irrigate, fertilize, transport and refine it. Brazil’s sugar cane ethanol is 8 to 1, energy output versus energy used. It is better than gasoline at 5 to 1. Know what corn’s output to input is–1.3 to 1 or even 1 to 1. that renders it useless because we are using as much energy or fossil fuels (gas, oil, coal) to produce the stuff! So we have ethanol barons rising out of a foreign country to outperform us as the rich Arabs do with their oil. We’re not winning this race for ethanol already. There is a major company, every bit as greedy as big oil, pushing this stupid, stupid, costly move—Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness giant. Read more about this misleading mess at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15635751/ethanol_scam_ethanol_hurts_the_environment_and_is_one_of_americas_biggest_political_boondoggles. It seems every time we turn around, there is a huge conglomerate pushing their weight around to the demise of the middle class citizens of the U.S. Lately we’ve been duped about the food we eat, and the goods we buy. It doesn’t seem that anyone is really looking out for us anymore.  And no one seems to be looking out for the number one thing we need first and foremost, our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Without any of those things, the economy is of no consequence. We’ll be busy scrounging for food and water instead of a job.

When we think of the Olympics, we think about human beings exerting their best performance humanly possible in a given sport. In order for the athletes to perform to their best ability, their bodies must be at their strongest, and therefore, healthiest. The two things just go together. So is China a healthy example to be holding the Olympics in Beijing? China likes to put on a facade. They like to present themselves as strong, modern, but it’s the same old communist regime. The change in China’s behavior toward the environment has shown no significant improvement despite the environmentalists that were displayed in a documentary I watched. 

The documentary was 90 minutes of eye-opener. China’s lakes, streams, and rivers are all polluted. The air quality is so poor, some Chinese wear facemasks on the streets. The Chinese have stripped the land bare of trees in many places, so the ground is scorching at a faster rate. The Gobi desert is 100 miles outside the city of Beijing and encroaching.  Beijing is the 16^th most polluted city on earth, city not country. To rank 16^th among that many cities is bad. I’m curious. Who is number one?

CNN reported last night that China is having a heck of a time cleaning up for the Olympics. The outdoor arena where some of the events take place has very poor air quality. Some of the worst air in the city is nearby. According to the World Bank 400,000 people die each year because of the air. The bad air near where the athletes will compete may cause some of the events to be canceled because of poor air quality. There is fear that so many steroids in the food may trigger poor responses for athletes and drug testing. Everyone going to China is warned not to drink the tap water.

China is hardly the model of health and purity, which is a significant part of any athlete’s regime. It is a communist regime that has also decimated a peaceful Tibet, advanced on Taiwan again, exported food and merchandise that is harmful to human beings, and warned us more than a few times “Do not interfere.” The latest warning over not accepting their exported goods is to ruin us economically. They hold $407 billion in U.S. bonds and threaten to dump them if we stop importing their stuff. Isn’t that extortion? We should never have become indebted to a communist regime country. There are over a billion Chinese people. They are dying from their environment. How long will they stay in place? Think about it. If you’re forced to move somewhere, and someone owes you big time, of course you’re  moving near that someone, or in on that someone.  

The Bush Administration wants to allow even more food imports from China, specifically chicken. They are working on a proposal to allow chickens raised, slaughtered, and cooked in China to be sold in the United States. There is a loophole in regulations and store labels do not have to indicate where the poultry is produced. Nice huh?

It seems like every time we turn around our illustrious president enacts the opposite of good judgment. After all the pet food scares, and tainted fish from China, one would expect our leadership to enact regulations to protect the citizens of our country. But the opposite happens more than not. Why is it we do business with the tyrannical communist Chinese, but embargo communist Cuba? Is there a distinction? I would like to know what it is. Both are purported to be the enemies of freedom. Isn’t this a slap in the face to all the thousands of soldiers that did battle against the spread of communism in years past? Now we court them.

If we learned anything from the Godfather trilogy it is to keep our enemies close, but for Pete’s sake don’t eat their food. The people are fine. It’s the government. They are oppressive, torturous, cold-blooded killers. We hear very little of what they’ve done to Tibet. The real and new Dalai Lama, who is a little boy, disappeared long ago. No one knows his whereabouts. The ruthless Chinese regime has replaced him with one of their own as a facade. They have replaced many of the Tibetan monks with their own and brandish them in public as if no one knows there lie.  If I related what they have done to the many monks and nuns of that peaceful religion you would think I was relating stories from the 1950’s, when communism was known for what it really is, a ruthless regime of murderous torturers without conscience.

Talk about crimes against humanity. We invade Iraq against the cold-blooded Hussein regime, and make buddies out of communist China. The paper recently had an article on the United States of China. We’ve borrowed way too much money from this enemy; something else Michael Corleone would not do.  

China has marched on Tibet, and has already begun to ruin what was once the most pristine part of the world, protected for centuries by a peaceful Buddhist community at the top of the world. China has polluted its own environment beyond quick repair and has realized the potential to tap the resources in the Himalayan Mountains. Our news media documented a new train, a real marvel of engineering that the Chinese have built to the top of Tibet. This area used to take so much trouble to get to; it remained a sacred, clean, untouched area for centuries. No more. Hoards of tourists are going up there now, polluting an ecosystem that is every bit as important to our world as the Amazon jungle.

China also tried to march on Taiwan again recently. Something that never made the news but our military knew about it and stationed ships in the China Sea. I’ve heard and remember the answer communist China has given to our government more than once regarding their interest in the oil fields in Iran, their move on Taiwan, and their destruction of Tibet: “Do not interfere.” Is this a warning of what’s to come in the future?

In the light of becoming more and more indebted to this merciless enemy, and doing more and more business with them, I urge anyone reading this to read the whole story of China’s persecution of Tibet called “The End of Tibet” at:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/13247913/the_end_of_tibet.

Pass the story along to everybody and anybody. We have got to stop our increasingly disturbing close relationship with this brutal regime. And the only way our big business and government is going to do that is if we raise cane about it, above everything else. You think we have a problem with terrorism, wait until this sleeping giant really wakes up. Our relations with China have gotten way out of hand, way too fast.

All the ruckus over Chinese imports, especially food, may have caused many of our own food producers to rush to change their packaging to assure the American public that American food is fine. I got a kick out of the packaging on some popular American brands of chicken at the grocery store today. They assure 100% chicken with no antibiotics or additives in big bold letters on the packaging.

Does that mean there were antibiotics and additives in their before? Or is our food industry worried that now that we’re nosey and picky about imports we might be looking over everything with a discerning eye. Like I said, I’ve quit eating pigs and cows until they roam the farm or range as free spirits again, er um, if we have any ranges left. Eleven states are burning now. Up two more states since the last time I blogged about fires.

But chicken and turkey what about them? I’ll tell you, they live horribly in deplorable conditions until they are killed and brought to the store all packaged up with labels assuring us they are without antibiotics or additives. No antibiotics in the conditions I’m going to explain is a little frightening quite frankly. A good dose might go a long way to staving off what might be ailing the poultry we eat after they live their short lives in hell.

Here’s a little excerpt and the website where a lone writer ventured to see for himself what a typical industrial sized chicken farm is like. Brace yourself. It’s not all that much better than the Smithfield Foods expose another reporter from Rolling Stone researched that I blogged about as ” Pig Poo Who Knew?” Michael Specter of the New Yorker said:

‘I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe…. There must have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.’

Lovely huh? I have to thank China for bringing curiosity about the food we eat to millions of Americans—finally.  Pay attention. Boycott if you feel the need. It would go a long way as a wake up call to the meat packing business in this country. I’ve pretty much gone vegetarian and it doesn’t bother me a bit. My grocery bill is cheaper too. And whenever there is a recall on any meat, I don’t have to sweat. I don’t eat any of it.
 
The FDA only has the capacity to inspect 1% of all our imports. And their funding has been cut, the war you know. So where does that leave them with our food? Specter reported about 30,000 chickens in one spot. You honestly think we have enough FDA to inspect all our farms and do it well?
 
We need some big reforms in this country. Chinese tainted food imports are just the start. The last largest 3 recalls were all home produced meat folks, not imports. Get informed. Contact your reps. Some things gotta change. Myself, I’m having Morning Star Farms Prime Grillers for burgers these days. They’re tasty, and it didn’t require that a living thing suffer in hell before the slaughter. Until chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are allowed a normal life on a farm again where they have a pen, a pasture, are allowed to bear young in livable conditions, and eat normal food, they won’t be on my plate. For more info on chicken farming: http://www.chickenindustry.com/. 

Canadian officials announced today that health risks for eating Great Lakes fish are increasing. I have two stories relative to this. First of all, walleye and perch are delicious, and a great natural resource for Michigan. The health risks are associated with what the fish eat, passed onto us when we eat the fish. It’s all a big chain you know. Ever wonder why vegetables are suddenly important enough to be included in dog and cat food? They are both known carnivores (meat eaters). Well when a wild dog or cat eats a bunny, it automatically gets the veggies the bunny ate. So even wild dogs and cats get their veggies one way or another. The fish are getting whatever is being discharged or accumulated in our Great Lakes that are supposed to be clean according to the fish flies. Baloney. I think those fish flies are adapting to pollution.

Anyway, way back in the 80’s, I worked with someone who was an avid fisherman who liked to fish Lake Michigan. His wife did not like to cook, so there was a lot of grilling going on. He grilled all kinds of Great Lakes fish and ate it about 4 times a week. I didn’t pay much attention when he started have digestion problems and had an upper GI looking for the culprit. Nothing turned up, but the stomach or intestinal problem continued. I saw an article about eating lake fish and how it should be limited because of mercury and other pollution. So I asked him how many times a week he was eating salmon he caught? When he lifted his head, I could see the lightbulb go on. Was it the fish? He cut out eating Lake Michigan fish for awhile and the symptoms subsided.

Next story, is about a family that lived along the shores of Lake Erie. The father enjoyed hunting, and fishing and the family ate all kinds of wild things, particularly a lot of walleye, and perch. The daughters grew up to have children that all suffer some form of autism an/or unusual chronic health problems. The daughters cannot find any other unifying factor outside of genetics, that may be the culprit, other than eating a lot of fish while growing up. Doctors doubt the genetic factor because the diseases are not the same except for autism.

This is not about the fish being delicious or the fishing industry taking a hit. It’s flat out about pollution. We surely don’t want a legacy of lakes full of fish that are unedible. The Great Lakes Legacy Act was established to help maintain the clean quality of our lakes but is it too late? Some people have eaten the fish for years with no problems, but then again how many times a week? Eating fish every Friday doesn’t seem to pose a problem. Eating it everyday may be another story. I live on the lake and don’t eat any of it. I’d like to have a pond and raise my own quite frankly.

Environmentalism is taking a bit hit in Congress in Michigan right now. I don’t think we can afford to do that do you? As good citizens we have a big responsibility keeping the freshwater “fresh” for many years to come.