The Sins of our Fathers

Let's say you develop a solution to a problem. The problem is one that will cause great harm, and the solution is one that will take years to fully implement. Also assume that there is a very good chance that the solution will never be fully implemented.

Here's the question: Do you even bother to implement the solution?

I recently had a conversation with someone close to me who worked in a lab that tested organic food products for contamination. They tested for everything from e.coli to chemical pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. (This lab is run by the government, with direct and indirect funding from the Agri-chemical industry) Apparently, the organically grown foods are routinely found to have significant chemical residues. The conclusion from this person was that food products labeled "organic" is little more than a marketing ploy.

Perhaps you saw the news, High arsenic levels found in organic foods, baby formula. The products in question had one ingredient in common, organic brown rice. According to the news report,

In fact, rice takes up arsenic from the soil, Jackson explained. As it turns out arsenic looks very much like silica to the rice plant and “rice takes up silica to help it stand up in water logged soils.”

Different varieties of rice take up different amounts of arsenic, Jackson said. Brown rice tends to have particularly high levels of arsenic.

While arsenic can occur naturally, the levels found in these organic foods was much higher than typically occurs in nature. So where did the arsenic come from?

The Washington State University Cooperative Extension Service described how high levels of arsenic got into our soils in an advisory for home gardeners:

Lead arsenate was a popular insecticide during the first half of the 20th century because of its low toxicity to plants and great effectiveness for controlling insect pests. The most common use was for control of codling moth in commercial apple orchards. Ranchers also used large quantities for grasshopper control baits. Smaller but still substantial amounts were used on deciduous tree fruits other than apple, in home gardens and orchards, for mosquito control, and on lawns and golf greens. Applicators used other arsenic-based pesticides for agricultural crops, turfgrass, gardens, and rights-of-way. 

Repeated applications of lead arsenate over time caused lead and arsenic to accumulate in soil.

Some organic farming standards can require farms to practice sustainable methods for several years before becoming certified. Apparently, even that is not enough to insure that all chemical residue has decomposed in the soil. Researchers at Washington State University have admitted that an arsenic based chemical applied 50+ years ago can still bioaccumulate in soil. 

The promise of organic farming is that it can cure the land by replacing long-depleted minerals and by detoxifying the soil. No one can expect that process to happen overnight. And as we see with arsenic, this process can take decades.

So that brings me back to the original implication that organic food production is little more than a marketing ploy. 

It took humanity decades to poison our farmlands, it will take decades to detoxify that land. The marketing ploy seems to be one where organic foods are continually discredited by a media supported by corporate agribusiness.

As the Good Book warns us:

Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. - Exodus 34:7

Zen in a flood

There is a flood going on in Pakistan right now. That flood is one of the worst that nation has experienced in years. Images from this once-in-a-lifetime flood are plastered across the Internet. Many of those images reveal the dire situation the people of Pakistan face. From people gathering at food distribution vans, children crying, young men saving what food they can from their small farms, women holding onto their children with fear in their eyes. But there is one image from which I find inspiration.

This man, carrying two children. I see no sense of despair in the contours of his face. I can't discern a single ounce of helplessness in his eyes. What I see is a certain sense of determination. Not determination to overcome insurmountable odds, but determination that the events surrounding him will have no effect on his psyche. He is just doing what he must do and he has the confidence to complete his task.


I am reminded of a Zen proverb: "After enlightenment, the laundry."

Money for Nothing

I received some mail from YAHOO! today. This is what I received:

Your eyes do not deceive you. This is a check that I received via U.S. Postal Service from YAHOO! for the sum of ZERO dollars and ZERO cents.

Can someone please explain how this happens?



I'm just gonna guess that this check in the amount of ZERO dollars and ZERO cents cost YAHOO! about 50 cents to process and mail to me.

No, not that 50 Cent.

I knew YAHOO! was losing its Internet battle with Google and Microsoft and Apple, but now I have an inkling as to why. Time to sell my YAHOO! stock!

[P.S. Did you catch the irony in that last YAHOO! link?]

The Ant Wars: Mercenary Campaign, Part 2

The brave knight I hired to vanquish our household enemy, the piss ant, had to be recalled. He had come out and performed nobly in his attempt to dissuade the invading hordes from entering our home. For a full week, my enemy was held at bay. On about d-day +8 the enemy had again breached our defenses, so I recalled our mercenary.

He returned, aerosolized d-limonene in hand. After a short debriefing of the operational status, he went on a mission to inspect the perimeter of our fortress to seek out the source of the breeches. Returning to the command center to report, his furrowed brow belied his distress. His search for the source of the breech had been unsuccessful.

So we decided another inspection was in order, but this time I joined our warrior as a guide. Soon we discovered a massive enemy supply line. We then followed this superhighway of formicidae out into the back yard. The supply line stretched well over 70 feet to the perimeter and then branched out to several parts of our home, but mostly in the kitchen.

A massive nest was discovered in our back yard. Together we disrupted the nest, poisoned the supply routes with orange oil, and then sprinkled a bait all around the well-camouflaged colony.

Within an hour, the ant invasion had abated. Today, several weeks later, the ants have yet to return.

Now that the natural balance has again been disturbed, I patiently and watchfully wait to discover where the next enemy will appear.

The Ant Wars: Mercenary Campaign. Part 1

Perhaps I was feeling a bit arrogant, as last spring's campaign ended with a touch of success. However, toward the end of the battle, I wondered if by reducing one species of ant I was not inviting another, more pernicious species. As is turns out, I may have been on to something.

I have not journaled my war against the ants this spring. I've not had time to record the events of this never-ending war because, quite frankly, the avenging hordes of ants have overwhelmed my defenses. They were in the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry room, the living room, the boys' rooms, my office, and even the fireplace. The only sanctuary we had was the master bedroom. I used all the same tactics that I used last spring: baiting with Spinosad, baiting with boric acid laced honey, DE, DE laced with boric acid, and even scalding water. But nothing I did slowed the invaders.

So, I called for reinforcements. After a little research on the Internet, I found the perfect mercenary force to call on for aid. This pest control company agreed to the original Rules of Engagement. The legionnaire that came to my aid was a lethal combination of hunter and warrior. He crawled around the house armed with a flashlight and a can of aerosolized orange oil. Looking in every nook and cranny on the inside, overturning every rock and stone along the outside, he hammered about fifteen colonies of sugar ants around the perimeter of the home, and laid bait and set physical barriers for all the ants still finding their way into the home.

For one week, we were largely free of ants. Last week, I called him back out.

Fun with the Census

Has anybody else noticed that the U.S. government has asked us to respond to their Census form on April 1st, April Fool's Day?
In the spirit of April Fool's Day, here are some ways to really mess with the Census Bureau?

1. Take the family to a hotel and spend two nights, March 31st and April 1st. Then answer zero to Question 1. For the outdoorsy types, I suggest a backyard camping trip.
2. For Question 2, host a wake and count the dead as "staying" in your home.
3. If you play by the rules and live in a state where you pay property tax, then you simultaneously can check the first option about having a mortgage OR the second option about owning your home free and clear AND that it is rented. Because if you don't pay "rent" in the form of property tax to the state, they will evict you.
4. I have my phone numbers registered with the federal "Do Not Call" list, so I will redact this information like they do on Confidential government documents since I don't want anyone calling anyway.
5. Question 5 does not ask for your legal name or your common name or even the name you are known by, it just asks for a name. My advice - make up a name. I'll ponder what I would have wanted my name to be had I had the naming rights and update this post when I determine what that is.
6. Question 6: What is Person 1's sex? What's a hermaphrodite to do? Check both boxes of course.
7. Question 7 is about your age. It asks for your age and your birth date. I wonder how they'll deal with Jews or the Chinese? I could say I'm 40 but put my birth year in the Hebrew or Chinese calendar year. My Jewish year of birth is 5728.
   
8. Question 8 is about your Hispanic origin. Well, if you believe in the common ancestry of mankind from either the Biblical or evolutionary perspective, then your origins are decidedly not Spanish, Hispanic or Latino. Your origins are either Semitic or African.
9. Question 9 is about race. I think I'll check "Other" and put "Human." Alternatively, I could put Other Asian and write Semitic (since I believe in the Bible version of human origins)
   
10. Question 10 asks if you occasionally live somewhere else.  If you have ever spent the night away from home then the answer has to be "Yes."

These are just some suggestions. Have fun with the form, it is asking about the way things are on April Fool's Day, so I'm sure the government will have a sense of humor about your responses.

24 Hours of Good Fortune

A few weeks ago as I was sitting in the bleachers watching my oldest son's basketball game, the Director of Development for the school joined the rest of the crowd and sat directly in front of me.  He had a stack of raffle tickets in his hand for an Apple iPod touch. I asked him how much ($3 each or 4 for $10); I bought $10 worth. To be very specific, I bought the first ten tickets. I don't know how it happened, but I told him, if I won, I'd give him the prize.

On Friday night, I received a phone call. The call came in kind of late, so it surprised me a bit. The voice on the other end of the phone informed me that I was the winner of a raffle for an . It was late, I was tired, but I thought to myself, and maybe even out loud, "That's cool!" The next morning I recalled my promise. I sure hope he refuses my gift.

On Saturday afternoon, after many weeks of delay and procrastination, I took the boys down to the box office at the American Airlines Center to redeem a voucher for 2 upper level tickets to a Dallas Mavericks game. We arrive at the box office to discover that there are no more tickets available through the voucher, but the ticket agent says to me, "Hold on.  Let me check on something."  She types on her computer for a few minutes. She waits. She types some more. She waits.

Then she turns to me, "We're completely out of the upper deck tickets for this voucher, but they are allowing me to substitute some lower level tickets. Would that be okay with you?"

Like a deer in the headlights I reply, "Excuse me? Would you say that again?"

Repeating herself, "We're completely out of the upper deck tickets for this voucher, but they are allowing me to substitute some lower level tickets. They're $79 seats. Would that be okay with you?"

"Uh. Yes?"

I told my son as we walked away from the box office window, "Sometimes it does pay to procrastinate." And after a long pause, "But you still have to do your homework when we get home."