tucholsky

The Embryo Speaks.
By Kurt Tucholsky
(1927)

They all take care of me: Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

I should grow and thrive, I should slumber nine months long; I should not worry about a thing-they all wish me well. They protect me, they watch over me. God have mercy if my parents do something to me; then they will all be there. Whoever touches me will be punished; my mother lands in prison, my father right behind; the doctor who did it must cease to be a doctor, the midwife who helped is locked up- I am a precious item.

They all take care of me; Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

Nine months long.

But when nine months are over, I have to see for myself what becomes of me. Tuberculosis? No doctor will help me. Nothing to eat? No milk? No state will help me. Torment and misery? The church will comfort me but that does not fill my stomach. And if I have no bread to break or bite and I steal: the judge is right there t lock me up.

Fifty years of my life no one will care about me, no one. I have to help myself. Nine months long they kill themselves, if someone wants to kill me. You tell me: isn't that a strange way to look out for the welfare of another?

disconnected?

on the way to work yesterday i heard stephen hawking on the bbc...he's flogging a new book that's gotten some attention because he says something to the effect that god isn't necessary to explain the universe...but that's not what i want to address...he also said that becaouse philosphers had not kept up with developments in physics and molecular biology their discussions about humans and their place in the universe are dated and disconnected...well...life still seems like a nietzschian struggle at times and steve seems a bit biased and a bit ungreatful...let's touch on a couple of scientific precepts...ockham's razor states, " entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily." this has been reduced to the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct and is a fundamental tenet of most scientists i know ( a limited sampling admittedly...but unanamous among them)...but willam of oakham was a fourteenth century monk writing a critique of scholasticism, not a scientist...a religious philosopher writing about theological issues...he didn't believe there were natural laws because god, in his omnipotence, could change them on a whim...a borrowed idea...which is okay...we all do it...but credit the philosphical source...scientists credit carl popper with the concept of falsifiability..holding that to be valid there must be some objective way to test the fact of an idea ( or hypothesis) in order to provide proof...okay again, but karl wasn't writing about science...he was writing about marxism, and for reasons opaque to me, freudian analysis...philosophers writing about political and social philosophy and expressing ideas well suited to science...seems to me that old steve is being a bit sloppy in his popularization of science.

hey buddy! those are MY seeds

there are quite a number of "volunteer" corn plants in the beanfields of northwest indiana...monsanto has been going after farmers when their transgenetic canola pollen gets loose and floats across the fields of canada nd the dakotas..infecting the canola crops they don't own...they aren't very pleased that some of the seeds are escaping while the crop is being transported for shipment and showing up as weeds along the roadside ditches either...so how are they going to feel at bayer or monsanto or pioneer when they discover an unlicensed, illegal second generation of their corn ( won't call dense yellow number two maize on a bet ) growing in a beanfield in the middle of nowheresville indiana? the timerity of it all!! somebody call the seed police!!!

ngo junk mail

in 2007 i had a need to belong and so i set about joining things like the bertrand russell society...the dada network...an unfortunate group of existentialist thinkers on yahoo...all kinds of stuff ( i was also new to the internet and was wild with abandon)...among other things i shipped thirty-five bucks off to amensty international...not a bad thing i suppose...a bit impulsive perhaps..but nothing ethically damning...then 2008 rolled around and the "recession" took its toll on my income and my attitude...changes had to be made and disgressional expenditures had to be prioritized...there was school...and through that i was hipped to the idea of micro lending by mik stokely in the anthro department( thanks mik!)...that wasn't going to be abandoned, economic stabillity ( not obscene wealth) fulfills a human need and a right in my book...neither was contributing to local food pantries...alas amensty found its way onto the expendable list and went by the wayside...doubly alas amnesty didn't agree and since my membership lapsed i have received monthly mailings of all sorts of stuff like address labels, pens,quarterly financial reports, and now christmas cards...all of this leads me to wonder exactly how much of my intiial membership fee amnesty has used up in trying to get me to fork over more lucre...postage, trinket importing, printing all the stuff they cram in there with the graft that is supposed to shame me into re-upping...surely they've used up that thirty-five bucks in three years and just who have they gotten out of camp x-ray or some cia balck prison since then? are they an ngo watchdog keeping tabs on human rights violations or an importer doing buisness? it has certainly sown doubts in m y mind about rejoining...and they aren't the only ones...credo wants me to express my support for progressive causes by buying a cell-phone plan...technologically advanced they use way more emails than mailings...but that means i get them weekly instead of monthly...i can't help but think that liberals have been infiltrated by bunko artists and low level capitalists...sure kiva asks for my support, but only when i make a loan or if they need a vote in some contest for corporate funding...they don't send me stuff to try to guilt me into making loans...it all very shady and it taints the issues ( in my opinion, mind you) with a seedy sort of capitalist manipulation...i could go on...doctors without borders isn't shy about asking for donations and neither are a lot of others...it is, perhaps, the carnival side-show barker facet of it that chills me...i will pick my own causes and i will back my beliefs with hard-earned cash given to people who use it to HELP others...not promote their own organization...it's my momey after all.

quarantined?

i have been seeing these green things on utility poles all over lake and porter counties as i've been out surveying the crops and photographing seed signs and i had been wondering what they were...they resemble baited traps we used one year to trap japanese beetles ( do not do this...the pheromones in the traps we put up attracted all the beetles in the surrounding area to our yard, overwhelming the traps and leaving us with the neighborhood's largest infestation ) and traps are what they are...seems gypsy moths are on the move in indiana this year...where exactly i cannot say beyond infering that lake and porter counties are involved due to the presence of the traps...the map on the dnr website ("use this site for current and correct information") only shows quarantined counties up to 2000, so we may be under a usda quarantine...among other things that means if you are moving from a quarantined area to one that is not you are required to have your household goods checked for gypsy moth eggs prior to moving...bear that in mind if you're planning an exodus form the rust-belt to sunnier economic climes ( wherever those may be)...introduced accidentally in the boston area in 1868 or 69, the moths have been moving westward since pigging out on oak leaves or almost anything elese that they can find...the migration seems to be spasmotic and pilot populations in newly colonized areas seem to die out suddenly...small mamals, birds, fungus, and a specialized virus all can do them in before they reach a threshold for successful establishment in any given area...despite this they are still moving westward as well as south...nothing to do with climate change apparently...just ignorance one hundred and forty-one or forty-two years ago.


and by the way, i did not disturb the trap...i only photographed it...i do not how many gypsy moths were harmed.

what kind of culture is industrial agriculture?

"Pioneer maintains the industry's largest winter seed production program with a capacity for 1.3 million units. With the recent addition of a fifth dryer our installation at Paine, Chile is the world's largest seed corn production plant."

"Incorporate superior and reliable sources of disease and insect resistance through intensive breeding and use of marker-assisted selection techniques."

"The unique proprietary genetics that make up Pioneer brand seed products are valuable assests of the company. Patenets and plant variety protection laws are tools to protecr germplasm and research knowledge in order to bring new and improved products to the marketplace that provide value to growers. For example, Pioneer wheat varieties introduced contain a genetic package that takes an average of twelve years and over a million dollars a year to develop."

"When a customer purchases a Pioneer wheat variety or trait having the protection of an issued patent, the purchaser is granted a limited license to ONLY PRODUCE A SINGLE CROP OF GRAIN OR FORAGE FOR FEEDING OR PROCESSING. The patent prohibits any unauthorized making, selling, or use of the pateneted variety. NO SEED CAN BE SAVED from this commercial crop and used for planting purposes. Persons willfully infringing on this patent protection are subject to multiple damages and costs."

from the pioneer website. the capitalized passages are theirs, not mine.

sounds like a globalitarian corporate culture to me. far removed form the yeoman farmer who won the war for independence ( americans do not have revolutions...not since hamilton and madison got hold of the government anyway ) "production plants" "proprietary genetics" "limited license"...those don't sound very agrarian to me...okay...there's been a vigorous trade in food as long as there has been agriculture...and generations of farmers have willfully interfered in the reproductive processes of plants and animals to encourage traits they found desirable...artificial selection is genetic engineering...but it took place in fields over generations of human and their domesticates, not in twelve years in a labratory...and there were exchanges of species and landraces of plants between farmers...if farmer brown grew wheat that made a superior flour you might like to buy some of his seed and grow some yourself, so there was some sort of "marketplace" for those genetic enhancements...but once you bought or bartered it, it was yours and you could keep part of the crop back to resow the next year or maybe cross with a somewhat hardier breeed you'd found without the local sheriff hauling you in front of the justice of the peace for doing so...if i go out to the field where i took that photo of that sign later this autumn and flich an ear or two of the corn there ( and let me assure the good people at pioneer that i have absolutely no intention of stealing their genetic secrets...the stuff is inedible and genetically modified corn is somewhat contrary to my evolving food philosophy) and plant it around like some sort of guerilla pirate of intellectual property i could be walloped with some doozies in the way of fines and arbitrary damages...just over some seeds..seed producers sound alot like pharmaceutical companies these days...and i wonder what happens if some of pioneers pollen blows across the road into farmer jones' field and infects his corn with pioneers genes..is farmer jones liable for the actions of the wind and the corn? i'll be he would be if it were detected...maybe pioneer should splice some gene in that makes their corn purple so they could tell more readily...whatever kind of culture agriculture has become it has mostly passed out of the hands of farmers and smallholders and into labs, boardrooms, and courtrooms...when, i wonder, will they start policing my gardens?

extractive agriculture

in the last garden blog i was remarking on the dearth of soybeans...well today i was driving around warming up my truck before taking it to be emissions inspected so i headed south-east into porter county between routes 130 and 30 and i found some...quite a few fields like the one in the bottom photo...so the traditional industrial agricultural crops are alive and well here in northwest indiana..i also found a bunch more corn and there really are feilds of alfalfa out there too...a pioneer variety by the look of the sign...that sign triggered a whole slew of memories from my childhood...when we'd go to visit my grandmother and my great aunts and uncles down in jasper county ( places like fair oaks...before the dairy, i never want to go to fair oaks again, it could not possibly be what it was when i was eight and i would absolutely hate to violate that memory...wolcott, parr, remington...my grandfather left the farm along with his brothers but my grandmother's kin stayed on the land) we'd go down route 231 through de motte and down through renesselaer ( where my granny lived on webster street) and all along the way by the cornfields would be little sign printed with an ear of corn, the name pioneer seed, and a lot number for the hybird seed in the field...today i saw a sign for the alfalfa, but nothing in the way of an explanation of what the corn or beans were...i only knew what they were because i rcognized them...so, have the seed giants like bayer and monsanto so restricted the genetic make of things like "roundup ready" or "liberty link" corn that there is no need to differentiate seedlots? does everyone have virtually genetically identical plants in thier fields? or is it so engineered with spliced genes that no-one wants us to know what's in those fields? just speculating here, but i wonder what the story is...more later...it's specualtion that won't go away.