On Tuesday 04 January 2005 15:48, Jed Rothwell wrote:
> Harry Veeder wrote:
> >Personally I do not feel life BEGINS by chance, although the
> >subsequent evolution is plausibly Darwinian.
> >Perhaps an E.T. (not necessarily God) has been
> >'guiding' the evolution of life on this planet.
>
> I find this hypothesis intensely annoying! It does not solve the problem;
> it merely removes it from our planet to some other planet. If ET #1 guided
> our evolution, do we assume that some other ET (#2) was there to guide ET
> #1, and did #3 guide #2? It is an infinite recursion. At some point, an
> intelligent species must have arisen from purely natural causes without
> intervention by any other species. Since it had to happen at least once,
> why shouldn't we assume it happened again on earth?
>
> The hypothesis is also annoying because it is not falsifiable.
>
> Regarding the Darwin quote: Yes he said that, but it has not been
> demonstrated that any organ exists which could not have been formed by
> numerous successive, slight modifications. Indeed, every organ I know of
> still has numerous existing successive slight modifications remaining in
> primitive species, including eyes, an example Darwin cited. Primitive eyes
> that can only sense the direction of light are way better than no eyes at
> all.
>
> Plus, anyone who thinks evolution is slow (or it does not exist) should
> learn about the growing crisis in antibiotic resistant diseases. This
> illustrates why ignorance is dangerous. We are frittering away the most
> potent drugs ever invented, mainly using them to keep the cost of meat low
> in the US. If this continues for a few more generations we will be back to
> the world as it was before 1940, when ordinary diseases often killed people
> of all ages. We have already thrown way the opportunity to eliminate
> tuberculosis, one of the most virulent diseases.
>
> - Jed
And we'll still end up with expensive meat. It is expensive now. Notice how
the meats that one can buy in the local American food store have grown more
expensive as the quality has simultaneousely declined. Beef chuck roast that
used to cost twenty nine cents per pound and smelled good in the oven and
tasted just as good on the table has been replaced by a product that costs
over three dollars and seventy cents a pound and smells like medicine when
cooking. If that was'nt bad enough, most of it is tasteless unless one
puts spices and salt into it.....then it tastes like the seasonings.
One reason is that grade standards have been loosened to allow low grades
into the American marketplace mislabeled as 'US Good' or even 'US Choice'.
This meat could never have evenly competed in the meat marketplace of the
1960's. The only way it got sold is to public schools and prisons and mental
hospitals. Occasionaly it got sold to the military to crooked commissary
officers who were taking bribes. This did not happen often. I sat on a
Court Martial Board of a couple of these excuses for troops who would feed
this stuff to there own. Another reason is that foreigners are realizing that
we are one of the few places in the worl d with safe meat, and the only
nation that will put foreigners ahead of its own citizens when selling our
quality meats abroad to rich palates able to pay over a hundred dollars a
pound. Ordinary Americans cannot pay over a hundred dollars a pound
for good meat. Our farmers do not get this money either. It is the industry
that grades meat, and industry that basically self inspects meat; courtesy
ot Bush the elder who approved self inspection regimes in the meat industry
when its deregulation was greatly accelerated in the late 1980's. Farmers
sell meat to giant intermediate buyers and are paid set rates that are barely
enough to keep them solvent as farmers. That is why stock farming is becoming
a creature of large corporate farms. Larger farms do not have to depend on
the intermediate buyer as they have money to reach other buyers.
Transportation and language are barriers to the larger profits, and larger
corporate farmers can participate in markets on similar footing as
intermediate processors like ADM and Monfort and others. Once safely out
of the hands of caring Americans and into the clutches of international
traders, it can then be graded up or down and sold and resold. It can also
be exported. And poor grades can be imported, and can be resold into the
retail market by the same commercial combinations of great wealth and
political influence that produced and evolved into the present day travesty
that is called our 'free trade' market. Free trade protects only
international bankers and other gangsters.
When local retailers are hooked into the scam, the middle men do not even
bother to disguise the foreign origin of the meat. They ship the bulk beef in
the original cartons to the end merchant customer and leave it to him not to
admit to his customers the real grade and origin of the beef he sells. Hence
you can see cases of British beef being offloaded into the warehouses of
a very major hamburger chain (which two years ago admited to using
'European' [British] beef), and Uraguayan beef loaded into the backs of your
friendly local very large 'superstore' warehouses. I do not have to mention
the names; they ran their competition out of business in a hail of imported
Chinese slave goods years ago.
This is only temporary, however. One day the impalances in relative
wealth that led to the internationalization of the phrase 'A fool and his
money are soon parted!' (we Americans had money and other nations
did not) will become leveled. It is happening now. As we grow poorer,
it will not even be worth importing slimy meat into this country. In the
end, we will be left with an enormous wasteland of thousands of
white elephant warehouses, rotting dock facilities, deserted and desertified
agricultural land, abandoned small towns, gutted 'superstores', and a largely
unemployed and shell shocked population feeling that they had fought a
war and lost. THEY DID!
Some time before that we may well have a population ripe and ready
for governmental reform on a scale not seen since Oliver Cromwell in
England. You may not want military age children in that age.
Standing Bear
