Why ‘Open Carry’ Is an Abomination
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If you read The Federalist Papers—an account of how our forebears reasoned out the Constitution of the United States—you’ll find that they were deeply concerned about the establishment of a standing Army overseen by the Commander-in-Chief. This was, most of them thought, a prescription for trouble down the road in the form of foreign entanglements and general military truculence. Rather, they thought that we simply had to guard our land and people by organizing civilian militias, very much the way Switzerland has done. In Switzerland, each male citizen is required to own, but not necessarily use, a rifle. Just in case those crazies in Germany, France, or Austria came barrelling over the border with the lust for conquest in their eyes.
That was the idea in 18th Century America, and why the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights states, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, if we’re not to have a standing Army, then we need the people to organize themselves into militias to defend ourselves.
In those days, “arms” were single-shot muskets that required wadding, ball, flint, tinder, gunpowder, and a ramrod. It was pretty much a rifle that could fire a shot and take another couple of minutes to reload. The framers of the Constitution could not have envisioned clips of many rounds, semi-automatic and automatic weapons, hollow-point bullets designed to tear up flesh and shatter bone, and all the rest of our sophisticated weaponry in long rifle and short handgun form.
These weapons that can fire off dozens of rounds in a few seconds are easily capable of cutting a human being in half—as was proven at Sandy Hook. School shootings have now become as common as postal shootings were in the 1990s. Remember “going postal?” Now parents are outfitting their kids with bullet-proof backpacks. And Joe the Plumber, bless his benighted soul, delivered the line that should be engraved over the entrance to the National Rifle Association: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
I remember sitting on a quiet beach in Tobago about 30 years ago, hanging out with my good friend Osbert Mander, a local guy who took pity on me having to eat the greasy food served at my beach-side resort and invited me to his modest shack for fish stew: fish, potatoes, an onion, and some local herbs for flavor. There was no market in the tiny village of Black Rock where he lived, and I asked him where he got the fish. Here’s what he said:
“Every morning some of the village men go down to the beach and swim out to the boats anchored offshore. We have purse seines on those boats, and they pull them out across the mouth of the bay. They stay open all day until about five o’clock, when the men come back to the beach and swim out to the boats and draw up the purse seines, catching whatever swam in there during the day, hauling them to shore and dumping them on the beach.
“If someone in Black Rock is sick, we look through the catch for a shark and if there’s a shark, we cut out its liver and give it to the sick person. That will help. And then everyone in our village comes down to the beach to buy a fish for dinner, just for a few pennies, to keep up the nets. They cut the fish open and dump the guts on the beach. Then the men swim the nets back out to the boats, fold them up, and store them for the night.
“The dogs and cats and wild birds know of this ritual, and after everyone has taken their fish home, the animals come to the beach to eat the guts and waste—hundreds of birds, all the village dogs and cats. It’s very pretty to see and peaceful, and within 15 minutes after the people have left, the beach is perfectly clean.”
Osbert’s fish soup was delicious. But as we ate, he told me something. “I’d like to come to America—to Los Angeles—but I’m afraid. People are always getting shot and killed there,” he said.
Now I think of my friend Osbert and the gentle society of Black Rock in Tobago, where if you’re sick you get the shark liver, and where all the life there partakes of the daily catch in the purse seine. And I think, this is the way human life should be, and society should be organized.
And then I think of the men carrying loaded assault rifles into Target stores and restaurants, in an era where children are mowed down by the very same assault rifles and automatic weapons. And these men have the attitude, “You’ll take it and you’ll like it. Don’t mess with me. Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” And I realize what a sick sick sick sick sick society we have become.
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MONSANTO SUES VERMONT OVER ITS GMO LABELING LAW
Tiny Vermont this month boldly went where no US state had gone before, enacting a law to require food producers who use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to let consumers know of it on the packaging, according to a report by Gram Slattery of The Christian Science Monitor.
Now the state is going, perhaps just as boldly, to court.
A lawsuit filed recently challenges Vermont’s GMO-labeling law on grounds that it usurps federal regulatory authority and negatively affects interstate commerce. The new law, argues the coalition of industry groups that brought the federal suit, including the Snack Food Association (SFA) and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), is arbitrary given the dearth of scientific evidence that GMOs have negative health effects. (Actually, there’s plenty of evidence that GMOs have frightening health effects. The SFA and GMA are really just fronting for Monsanto and the biotech industry.)
The labeling measures could pose a definite burden for industry: About 75 percent of processed foods available on supermarket shelves in the US contain GMOs, as well as 85 percent of unprocessed corn and 91 percent of unprocessed soybeans.
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DEALING WITH INSURGENCIES—ALWAYS A MESSY BUSINESS
Bob Garcia writes:
If King George III had Obama’s mindset, he would have labeled the Colonists as terrorists and would have killed Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Revere with drones — seizing Franklin in Europe to torture indefinitely.
I respond:
I think King George had that mindset. He sent his Army here to put down the rebellion and would have hung the lot of the founders if he could have caught them. Remember Franklin’s saying, “Gentlemen, we must hang together or surely we will hang separately.”
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IF FISH IS BRAIN FOOD, THEN FISH ARE BRAINY
According to a new paper scheduled for publication in the forthcoming issue of the esteemed journal Animal Cognition, “fish perception and cognitive abilities often match or exceed other vertebrates.” In fact, “fish have a high degree of behavioral plasticity and compare favorably to humans and other terrestrial vertebrates across a range of intelligence tests.”
The author of the paper, Dr. Culum Brown, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Dr. Brown’s article, which is the first to distill for journal publication the voluminous research that exists into fish behavior and cognition, reviews the full range of ethological aptitudes, detailing dozens of studies and extrapolating from those results to determine what we do and do not know about fish. The areas considered include: evolution and biological complexity; sensory perception; cerebral lateralization; pain; and cognition (including learning and memory, social learning, social intelligence, tool use, and numerical competency).
With intriguing examples and reviewing all of the scientific literature to date, Dr. Brown concludes that “fish compare well to the rest of the vertebrates in most tasks,” differing little in cognitive and behavioral complexity from primates. For example, they:
• can “perform multiple complex tasks simultaneously” due to cerebral lateralization, a trait that was until recently thought to be uniquely human;
• can recall the location of objects using feature cues, a capacity developed by humans at approximately the age of six;
• “have excellent long-term memories” (including time-place, spatial, social, and aversive experiences);
• “live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and can learn from one another, a process that leads to the development of stable cultural traditions … similar to some of those seen in birds and primates”;
• “cooperate with one another and show signs of Machiavellian intelligence such as cooperation and reconciliation”;
• can use tools, another “in a long list of skills that was supposed to be unique to humans”;
• “use the same methods for keeping track of quantities as we do” (numerosity is another of the capacities that scientists once thought unique to human beings).
Unsurprisingly, considering their wide array of complex capacities, Dr. Brown also notes that of course fish feel pain, since “it would be impossible for fish to survive as the cognitively and behaviorally complex animals they are without a capacity to feel pain.” In the paper, he points out that pain perception is essential to animal survival, and that it has deep evolutionary origins across all vertebrate species.
This is the first paper produced with grant money from The Someone Project, an endeavor aimed at raising the public’s understanding of farm animal cognition and behavior.
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DECIMATION IN THE PIG POPULATION
Did you know that over the past year, nearly 10 percent of the entire swine population in the US has been wiped out by a highly lethal virus? The virus, called Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv), has been—at least in part—traced back to pig’s blood used in piglet feed, according to Dr. Joseph Mercola’s website.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has announced that a federal order has been issued, requiring swine farmers to notify the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) if they suspect PEDv on their farm. The USDA is also allocating $4 million for research, and the development of a vaccine against the disease.
Dried blood plasma is a relatively new pig feed ingredient, described as a “unique protein source for early-weaned pigs” in a paper on swine nutrition by Professor Gary Cromwell.
In recent years, it’s been employed as an immune booster, and to enhance the growth rate and feed intake during the postweaning phase. In his paper, Professor Cromwell explains the process as follows:
“Most of the dried plasma is produced by American Protein Corporation, whose headquarters are in Ames, Iowa. This company collects and processes blood from a number of large hog slaughter plants throughout the country. At these plants, blood is collected in chilled vats and transported by insulated trucks to processing plants where the plasma is separated from the red blood cells. The plasma is then carefully spray dried. It is then shipped to ingredient suppliers and feed manufacturers throughout the feed industry for use in pig starter feeds. The red blood cells are also dried and shipped to ingredient suppliers and feed manufacturers.”
Okay—here’s the deal. Whenever you take body material from a large group of animals, you are very likely to be taking some disease from a few sick individuals with it. By then feeding it back to large groups of those same animals, what you are doing is spreading the disease as widely as possible. This is how mad cow disease was spread. It was the basis of the “Bug Juice” method of insect control I wrote about in the 1970s on Organic Gardening magazine, where a Florida entomologist said the way to control any pest is to collect a large number of them, whiz them up in a blender, strain out the juice, dilute it, and spray it on your crops. A few sick individuals then infect the whole population. It worked then, it works now, and it’s no different with blood-borne sickness with pigs.
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STANDING UP FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE ORGANIC MOVEMENT
Twenty organic farm and consumer groups have filed a legal petition with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to protect the authority and permanence of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). The petitioners object to recent changes to the NOSB charter, renewed on May 8, 2014, that undermine the mandatory and continuing duties of the Board as established by Congress under the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990.
USDA mistakenly—or maybe not so mistakenly–re-categorized the NOSB as a time-limited Advisory Board subject to USDA’s discretion and a narrowing of responsibilities.
“These changes to the NOSB Charter are significant and directly controvert the specific mandates of Congress that NOSB is a permanent, non-discretionary committee that must fulfill a long list of statutorily mandated duties integral to the organic program,” said Aimee Simpson, policy director and staff attorney for Beyond Pesticides.
The NOSB, appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, is comprised of a wide swath of organic interests, including farmers, consumers, environmentalists, processors, a retailer, and a certifier. It is charged with a number of specific duties, including establishing and renewing the list of synthetic and non-organic materials allowed to be used in organic production, known as the National List.
“Congress created the Board so that a balance of organic interests, from consumer to industry, would have an irrevocable seat at the table in defining, maintaining and enhancing organic standards. That independent voice is now seriously jeopardized,” noted Paige Tomaselli, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety.
In response to one of several recent moves by USDA to reclassify the NOSB’s role as a purely advisory and discretionary committee, petitioners urge USDA to reverse what they consider missteps. The petition finds that to comply with organic law, USDA must immediately revise the most recent NOSB Charter to accurately reflect the mandatory non-discretionary duties and ongoing status of the NOSB.
“The independence of the NOSB is the backbone of the system of organic governance that Congress set up to prevent the industry from being corrupted by undue agribusiness lobbying influence, a dynamic all too common in Washington,” stated Will Fantle, Research Director at The Cornucopia Institute. “It is questionable whether the law being debated in the 1990s would have received overwhelming organic community support if the powerful NOSB buffer, to prevent future corruption by moneyed interests, was not established.”
The groups signing the petition include: Beyond Pesticides, Center for Food Safety, Cornucopia Institute, Food & Water Watch, Equal Exchange, La Montanita Co-op (New Mexico), Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, Northwest Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Interstate Council, NOFA Connecticut, NOFA Massachusetts, NOFA New Hampshire, NOFA New Jersey, NOFA New York, NOFA Vermont, Organic Consumers Association, Organically Grown Company, Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, and PCC Natural Markets.
As a lifelong Rodale employee, I ask why isn’t Rodale and the Rodale Institute in that group? C’mon people!
Public interest groups overwhelmingly condemn the “power grab” by the USDA, and contend that there is little doubt that the regulatory agency is now blatantly violating the will of Congress in regards to undermining the statutory power vested in the National Organic Standards Board.
In a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon strongly criticized the USDA actions and asked for their reversal.
“One of the most unique things about organic is that consumers can get involved in setting the standards behind the label. For that to remain true, we need to have a strong National Organic Standards Board process,” said Patty Lovera of Food & Water Watch.
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