http://www.politicsdaily.com/2…
Forgetaboutit, mommies and daddies.
Important interests don’t care if your brat dies. There already is at least a partial cure but it isn’t PC.
Dick lay in a hospital bed under heavy sedation as a common virus gone mad raced up his arm an inch or two an hour. Nurses and doctors poured on the most powerful antibiotics known as they cut away the gangrenous flesh. His wife could hear the groans and cries in the waiting room for three days though Dick lost three days of memory from delirium and sedation. Nobody knows how to deal with necrotizing fasciitis (“flesh-eating bacteria”). The old veteran years later died from something more preventable, murder-suicide, that claims far more victims, especially among veterans, but nobody much cares about that either. Dick’s pictures of war casualties horrified readers of magazines like Look but few care to stop war either. There are great profits to be made as well as glory and reputations.
What people could do is stop some kids from strangling on peanut allergies, and even a few adults who have not outgrown a mostly childhood allergy, but it would require letting growers plant GMO peanuts. A vial of epinephrine and some bottles of medicine that probably couldn’t be found in an extreme emergency would save a fraction at best.
Bananas and plantain are a true “frankenstein” cross-species sterile hybrid of inedible parents that we have become accustomed to. Big Mike was better tasting and superior in all manner of ways than today’s Cavendish banana that comes from a single plant because Big Mike was lost to the blight. What you can’t have any longer was always better. There is word going around that Big Mike is still available in Jamaica and elsewhere but it may or may not have been a protected specimen. Clones are obviously more vulnerable than the feared one-crop gardening that has some differentiation in genes.
So why not protect the Cavendish and other bananas and plaintain with death-defying genes conserved in all plants and animals, from yeast to humans? Well you see it would take bioengineering for the bananas and lengthy experimentation with other plants. There are some “naturally bred” plants by standard natural hybrid methods which are anything but natural but they still carry the stigma.
So multitudes can starve, the land, sea and water be poisoned and polluted, the consumers ripped off for profit and fun – science and common decency be damned.
We gots to be natural people eating meat and produce vastly different from its wild ancestry at high prices because its good to be better.
“What would it benefit a rich man to have a feast if there were not hungry and starving poor people?” – Aldous Huxley
BTW this is not a defense of Monsanto or Dow but rather the reverse. But who cares about that when there is money to be made and fun to be had?
Best, Terry
Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a different kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not unlike today’s The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original Life folded during the Great Depression, the influential American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this day in 1936. By this time, Luce had already enjoyed great success as the publisher of Time, a weekly news magazine.
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