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/

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.

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/. 

So there is a beef and seafood recall in Michigan and everyone is up in arms about imported food from China. Their catfish is full of antibiotics. This is laughable because ours is full of PCB’s from its food source. That was on the news years ago. I know. I love farm raised catfish and remember well my options: farm raised equal PCB’s, ocean caught equals mercury. Now I have a third choice. With China’s catfish I get antibiotics. I guess our concern is what quantity of harmful substance is in our food. Is this not a pitiful situation? It never occurs to anyone that these things shouldn’t be there at all? I’m waiting for a national expose on our industrialized farms. I feel like a hypocrite so many times when I watch the media get in a dither over substandard imports while ignoring our own shortcomings. We’re throwing stones a lot lately.

As far as China’s use of antibiotics, our industrial farm raised meat is full of it along with hormones. You don’t honestly think a baby cow or pig ripped from their mother as soon as possible and confined for the rest of their life in a bin where they can’t turn around or scratch themselves, while standing above fumes from the cesspools below where all the droppings, afterbirth, babies that have fallen through the slats, and pesticides that have doused the animals are drawn upward by large exhaust fans, isn’t sick? Heck, they are traumatized and many are barely alive before they become our food. They have to be shot up with antibiotics in this environment. And we think Korean’s are barbaric for traumatizing dogs as meat before eating them. We do it all the time.

Our poor food animals chew on the metal of their bins out of frustration. This is a hell we allow animals to live in; the same lovely farmyard animals we like to introduce our kids to on petting farms. If those kids only knew the hell sweet little “Charlotte the Pig” endured before being slaughtered … This is not right. It’s very hypocritical especially when on the other end of the media it’s been reported that pigs are up on the intelligence scale with dolphins and elephants. They are beyond the intelligence of the Korean dog evidently but are next weeks sickly pork chops anyway. But then again we shouldn’t expect much, we don’t treat each other well either, another whole spectrum of hypocrisy.

If you think, I’ll just eat chicken and turkey; think again. Poultry doesn’t fare any better. Many birds are crammed into one little cage, where they can’t stand or spread their wings, and peck each other horribly out of sheer frustration. The cages above pollute the cages below. The visions we have of farms where animals are in a yard, a pen, or pasture to roam have all but disappeared. The petting farm is a facade of what America’s farms used to be. It will take a monumental movement by people to stop the way our food is raised or should I say tortured to death. Industrialized farming is so wide spread the idea of reversing it is daunting. We’ve used up quite a lot of farmland at a rapid rate with urban sprawl and congress of late has decided bio fuel should be the front-runner for alternatives to gasoline. So available land will go to corn and we will deal with imports.

Pay attention to the new Farm Bill. Call our congress people often. The movement for change must start somewhere. Congress is presently involved with this bill so it will be a timely e-mail or phone call if you do so now. Act out, for a change or nothing will improve. The farming conditions we have in this country are deplorable, immoral against living things, harmful to our environment and us, and shameful for this nation. 

I got a kick out of the controversy over cloned food that made the news this morning. The FDA is ready to make a new ruling. They say meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as any other meat. More than likely, our other meat is pumped with hormones. Our other meat is fed food that is filled with additives and fertilized with the hormonal animal manure, blood, and bacteria. Our other meat is doused with pesticides while breathing the fumes from the cesspools below them.  Our other meat is sickly and then pumped with drugs to keep alive. Where is the Center for Food Safety for these conditions? They are voicing their concern over cloned meat.

So to say cloned animals are as safe as any other meat is not saying much at all. I wonder if some of the medical conditions we suffer are from eating meat like this? Kids suffer Attention Deficit Disorder. Adults suffer ADD also. There are conditions out there that go undiagnosed after years of tests. Autism is growing. Girls reach puberty earlier. Boys go bald sooner.

We need to pay attention to our food industry. We’ve had a preview of tainted food already. Not a terrorist to blame but ourselves. We’ve allowed industrialized farming and they are terrorists of a different sort according to the small farmers they’ve put out of business.  And we’re worried about cloned animals? I suggest if we take up the fight against cloned animal meat do it also to discontinue industrialized farming. Read my “Pig Poo” blog. The future of our food and freshwater depend on our petitioning our representatives to stop monopolies like Smithfield Foods and other industrialized farmers.

45% of Americans polled thought cloning animals is morally wrong. Industrialized farming is the most immoral act I’ve read about yet. The pollution from them is overwhelming. The animals live a life of hell. They are literally traumatized from birth to slaughter. And this is on the heels of science that declares pigs have a high degree of intelligence. Oh how I loved pork. I don’t eat it anymore. Red meat is an occasional treat.

You might say animals have always been foodstuff. The act of slaughter is not pretty. But I like to think we at least allowed the animal to have a life first, grazing, and procreating. It’s called kosher.  A decree by God for his animals. They are to be treated with care and decency. The slaughter should be clean and swift. Our idea of morality and the animal kingdom is like the fickle finger of fate that points and misses more than not. We’re concerned about cloned animals while the suffering of those given us by God goes ignored.

The next time you receive “junk mail” that is from Farm Sanctuary, or a Farm Animal charity, read it. They exist for a purpose. We not only need to watch how much we eat for our health, but what that food went through to get on our plate.

I just read the most disgusting article about pollution I’ve read in a long time. And I read a lot of pollution articles. The article, “Boss Hog” by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone magazine took me on a tour of the pork meat packing business that got me thinking of hell, torture, something out of Revelations in the bible, to disgust, outrage, mistrust of the EPA, USDA and other governmental organizations. A lot of thoughts for one little article about Smithfield Foods.

Joseph Luter III owns Smithfield Foods. It is the largest meat packing business in the world. Smithfield killed 27 million hogs last year. Hogs weigh 50% more than people so it was the equivalent of processing, (a decent term), the entire human populations of 33 of America’s largest cities. Hogs also produce 3 times the poo we do.

The hogs are compartmentalized in cubicles from birth to slaughter in large buildings. The slats in the floor allow droppings, stillborn piglets, small piglets, and afterbirth to fall through to open air pits that flow into lagoons around the massive buildings. Large ventilation fans attempt to take the stench out but the animals breath  bacteria and methane gases. Coupled with the trauma from living in hell, the pigs immune systems weaken. They have to be shot up with drugs and antibiotics continuously. They are also doused with pesticide. Much of it falls into the pits and out to the open air lagoons.

Lagoons are lined, but liners can break.  Lagoons can cover an area as large as 120,000 sq. ft. and be 30 ft. deep. One slaughterhouse can have as many as 100 open air lagoons. The stench is described as putrid and fetid.  The lagoons are the color of Pepto Bismal from blood.  Dead pigs are piled up in areas of the premises. It’s a sewage horror story and I haven’t stated the worst yet.

When the lagoons get too high, workers suck the stuff up and blow it into the air to land on the ground that grows the feed for the hogs. Pig poo hangs from the surrounding trees and covers everything. Industry people call this over-saturation and act as if this stuff is a nutrient. At this point, picture grease in a pan of cold water, the slimy crust floating on top a mix of blood, pig parts, afterbirth, chemicals, drugs, fertilizer, bacteria, and poo. Pour something like that on the ground. That slime is going to lay on top and draw more bacteria, and flies, before it seeps in. Raise a flag to the recent outbreak of bacteria tainted veggies? Smithfield has operations in 20 states.

The lagoons overflow into subsidiaries when it rains too much. When hurricane Floyd hit N.C., and one of the largest hog farms, entire counties became cesspools. Fish died within minutes of touching lagoon water. There were dead fish along the ocean shore at the mouths of the subsidiaries that swelled with lagoon overspill. People who come in contact don’t fair too well either. The stench cannot be inhaled for long or a person blacks out. A worker repairing a lagoon in Michigan inhaled too much, blacked out, fell in, and immediately died.

That’s right. Smithfield is in Michigan. All of our  lakes, streams, and rivers run into our Great Lakes, the world’s largest freshwater supply. If a Smithfield farm was dead center in our state, I wouldn’t rest easy. I don’t think this is the wave of the future at all. It is unnecessarily inhumane. Many states are fighting it as a monopoly because Smithfield sucks up all the small farms. Dead pigs piled up is nothing but waste and overkill. The pollution is uncontrollable, affecting our groundwater and soil, and eventually our other food and water supplies. The pigs are sickly. Many are pumped with drugs and kept alive long enough to kill and serve as our food.

While organizations are forming to keep Smithfield out of their state, and to stop industrialized farming, Smithfield Foods made the Fortune list, was honored by a leading meat packing industry magazine, and the EPA honored them for following ISO 14000 standards. These standards are a joke. The 14000 program is a pilot that only encourages active environmental management. None of the standards hold force so a company is not required to improve its quality control. Most significantly, the standards do not require sufficient public disclosure of a firm’s environmental impacts. What’s wrong with this picture? The EPA, not long ago, handed Smithfield the largest fine in history. 
Pollution is a political issue. Luter is a major contributor to politicians and part of the growing problem with lobbyists. Lobbyists like Smithfield Foods get the government to look the other way and dump their pollution on us when we don’t fight back. We don’t fight back when we don’t know about it. We don’t know about it because of flimsy, voluntary standards s like the EPA’s 14000 ISO’s.  
Smithfield Foods is not only killing off America, they are in Canada and have spread like a virus to Poland and Romania.  Search the article under Boss Hog by Jeff Tietz. One of the first urls brings up the entire article. E mail Senators Levin http://levin.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm, Stabenow http://stabenow.senate.gov/email.htm, and Representative Dingell http://www.house.gov/writerep/  to stop Smithfield Foods and industrialized farming.  Global warming isn’t the only threat to our environment.