The honey bees are still dying and the answer is elusive, man perhaps, or illness perhaps, a parasite perhaps or perhaps a combination of all three. What are the chances that a parasite would strike bees nationwide? Or what are the chances that an illness would strike bees nationwide? Is that possible, or perhaps it as some have suggested that the problem might be a lack of flowers?
The use of pesticides and fertilizers means American farmers no longer let fields lie fallow in clover. The use of genetically modified crops means that it might possibly be that the pollen itself is no longer a viable food source thus reducing the bees to eating a sort of junk food diet.
A friend of mine was fishing in the Alabama river one day when he was approached by a game warden. After checking his fishing license the warden remarked, "This is a good spot to fish, about the cleanest spot on the river."
"The fish here are safe to eat, are they?" My friend asked, "I didn't say that," the warden answered.
In 1962 Rachel Carson published her book, "Silent Spring." It warned of a future without song birds because of the use of the pesticide DDT. The DDT caused a thinning of the bird's egg shells so the eggs would break and the birds could not reproduce. The book caused a sensation and prompted the government, despite industry warnings of gloom and doom, to ban DDT and bird populations began to recover.
Back in those days there was no Rush Limbaugh or Fox news. Industry had no window to nay say society's problems. Isn't it possible that the bird die off was just a part of a natural cycle? Aren't most Gulf War Syndrome victim's just disgruntled veterans looking for a check from Uncle Sucker? Isn't it possible that global climate change is all just a big hoax?
If climate change is a hoax, then industry stands to lose billions of dollars by needlessly switching to greener and more environmentally friendly and sustainable systems of locomotion and power generation. If climate change is not a hoax and we do not act, we are condemning our children and grandchildren to an environmental apocalypse. Yet, as I have mentioned before, the questions of climate change are far off in the distance when compared to another problem which is right under our nose.
World wide fishing stocks have been reduced down to ten or twenty percent of their levels of fifty years ago. Massive industrial fishing ships have depleted eighty percent of the world's oceans of fish from pole to pole. It is estimated that by 2050, viable fish populations will be gone. There will still be fish in the ocean here and there, but there won't be the populations necessary for the fish to recover. World sanctioning bodies dither under pressure from their own national fishing industries. Many nations refuse to follow their quotas and openly cheat on them. The Japanese fishing industry is catching Blue fin Tuna and storing them in deep freezers, certain that as the supply dwindles the prices will go up.
Could droughts and dam construction be caused by sun spots? Or maybe cyclical planet heating has forced the Chinese to release waters from the Three Gorges dam to maintain the flow of the Mekong River in Asia. The Mekong is the Mississippi River of Asia and its failure means distress and famine for millions. Pesticide run off and industrial pollution have endangered fresh water and coastal fishing stocks. Farmers complain of water shortages with which to irrigate their crops.
By looking at the problems in Asia we can seen in their reflection our own problems in the Gulf of Mexico. Our government maintains the fish in the gulf are safe to eat, but isn't that is also what the Chinese government says and the Japanese government says as well about fish caught off the coast of Fukushima? That defective little monkey which lives inside of all of us would rather lie to us than to fix the problem. Or for you Christians, the original sin of Adam & Eve in disobeying God's orders and eating from the tree of knowledge is responsible for this. If however Adam & Eve did eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge it must have been from a low branch.
The Texas legislature recently decided not to regulate the payday loan industry. This decision came after eight and one half million dollar lobbying campaign by the payday lenders. These lenders charge their victims up to 300 percent interest on loans. For each dollar borrowed they must pay back 300, hence, you are not a customer but a victim. These aren't bankers lending money to build schools or hospitals. They don't lend out money to buy new homes or automobiles. These vermin lend out money so people can get their lights turned back on or to pay their rent to keep from being thrown out in the street.
Three hundred percent interest would make a mobster blush with embarrassment, but not these guys. This is a multibillion dollar industry and these guys see themselves as honest businessmen providing a service. They have been so successful that conventional bankers are beginning to imitate them with instant loans in place of overdraft protection. These payday lenders are societal DDT. They aren't even worthy of the term loan sharks--these are loan butchers taking advantage of the poor because the poor have no other place to turn to for assistance.
Why do we have so many poor? Sun spots perhaps? Why don't the poor have anywhere to turn for assistance? Because our government has become infested by these parasites. They feed government their poisoned pollen and we are left with bitter honey. The bitter honey of stunts and showmanship. The bitter fruit of a news media which no longer exposes or explains but only entertains. Sarah Palin on a motorcycle shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!" Andrew Brietbart shouting, "I'm a big boy, I made it up all by myself."
Barack Obama warns of sanctions against Syria while Saudi Army regulars shoot down protesters in Bahraini streets without a word of complaint from Washington. They hate us for our hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of a President who launches cruise missile strikes and drone attacks into sovereign nations while condemning Syrian violations of international law. A President who condemns the Syrian government for arresting and detaining protesters while he himself operates two concentration camps far from his own shores and even further from so called American justice.
We can focus the microscope tightly but when we expand the telescope greatly we can begin to see that these questions which we face are not simply about personal or national prosperity but about human survival itself. Food stocks, energy supplies, water resources are all squandered for mere profit--an unsustainable monkey model of all that you can grab and keep for yourself while the monkey commentators explain, "This is the natural course of monkeydom. The more aggressive and resourceful monkeys benefit and thus encourage the other monkeys to become more aggressive and resourceful.
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