Damn the Butterflies

Damn the butterflies

The folks in a small town in Western Mexico, not far from the coast, used to hail the annual migration that used to bring the Monarch butterflies from all over North America to their humble community. For some reason, the Monarchs assembled there. Maybe they liked the climate; maybe it was the special trees; maybe it was the fact that this place had been programmed within them for countless generations.

And it happened every year like clock-work. The Monarchs came from all over North America taking the 1700 mile or longer migration in stride, stopping along the way to eat and rest..

And then one day, it virtually stopped. The Monarchs came but in falling numbers—numbers that were noticeable.

And the humble folk asked, ‘what happened?”

Nobody seemed to know.

So the microbiologists and entomologists and others within the scientific community who were involved in the habits of different species started to inquire.

What had happened?

The scientists started retracing the routes of the Monarchs and discovered that many of them seemed to stop in the mid-west on their way down to Mexico.

They would go to the corn fields and feed themselves and rest and then join the rest of the migration.

Only, it wasn’t happening the way it always happened.

And then someone had a bright idea, it was their food.

You see, the Monarchs were eating corn on the way down. Only this time, it wasn’t providing the nutrition and the Monarchs were literally unable to digest the corn.

Why?, they wondered.

It turned out that the concerns of the people had been realized. In order to give the corn disease resistance and the ability to grow faster, scientists at Monsanto had developed a hybrid corn that they promised would not get mixed up with the natural corn.

It was now clear, that the hybrids were out of control and that there were inherent problems with them; they produced results that were indigestible to the Monarchs.

Science can be a two way street. In many cases, it can be used to produce a desirable result; but, in this case, it may be responsible for wiping out a butterfly.

Fewer people seem alarmed by such developments; but in Europe, anticipating that such a result—or something like it could occur—they banned agricultural imports from America that involve chemical or agricultural tampering with Nature.

Clearly, they knew something the rest of us chose to ignore.

And now we stand to pay the price.

It is not only corn, we have tampered with the genetic structure of many crops—including wheat, barley, oats—in order to give the crops important disease resistance. We add hormones to cows so that they produce more milk. We grow fish now in farms and when they escape the nets and mix with regular fish, they produce off-spring not as disease resistant as the natural fish in its environment.

In so doing, we have gone along far enough to affect natural diversity and some wonder whether in providing what we presume to be a stronger, more distant strains, we have also tampered with diversity, leaving us open to the hazards of unforeseen ravages that we yet don’t know about.

We won’t know the answer to that question until it happens but some in the scientific community are worried. To guard against such an eventuality, there is a massive ongoing program now to find original seedlings, with all of their diversity, and store them away against any emergency that might befall our lands—from draught to excessive rain-fall.

For the time being, this is all we have as back up against the possible loss of our primary food supply. For without grain, we will be unable to feed cattle, chicken, or the pigs that constitute our fundamental supplies of meat.

Something to think about as we tamper with Nature.

But we didn’t just mess around with grains and other basic food supplies. No, we were to clever for that. We even got down to the basics.

We messed with the equivalent of the canary in the miner’s cap….and then we blinked.

No kidding!

The Cost of War!


Here’s where we have to draw the line folks.

It sickens me near to death to hear the same specious arguments being made over and over again by those who not delight in War but profit from it. Shouldn’t there be a place in Dante’s Inferno just for them?

And sadly, when they take up their false arguments, they argue against us for wanting peace. The implication is that we mournful wusses who think that war is dishonorable and a sickening display of macho power, do not understand the true meaning of war—as if there could be any logic in wanton destruction; nor do they mention that most sacrifices are made by the innocents on both sides.

Well, many of us, myself included, are here to tell you that War isn’t what you think—it’s either bloody or boring and it is the worst way for man to solve his problems. That being said, don’t say that to a republican who thinks war is some kind of sacred relic, yet when they come to balancing the budget, the republican never suggests touching the war budget as if to do so would guarantee immediate defeat for America.

I’m here to set this whole conversation right through the simple expedient of examining its costs, in terms of dollars and cents only, not the cost in terms of lives and suffering and pain. I’ll leave that for another day.

Truth to tell, while our army has grown smaller, the military budget keeps growing as if it has a life of its own until today it approaches 1 trillion dollars. If ever there was a place to cut back, it is the military budget!....
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Yet, few people in the Pentagon are willing to face facts. And those who review such budgets have an axe to grind. Meanwhile, the public, brain-washed and anaesthetized as it is, believes that if we were to cut one cent from the budget, the sky would fall upon our heads; there is no underestimating the stupidity of the American public.

Why are we where we are?

The fact of the matter is when Clinton closed out his tenure, we were ahead in every category . So, how did we go from a budget surplus to where we are today.

Well, of course, we gave the rich a tax break and we went to war in Iraq.

A war that was not only unnecessary and had nothing to do with 9/11, it was based on speculation and rumor and make-shift research with no basis in proof. But we’ve discussed that elsewhere. But what we haven’t fully discussed is the fact that Americans are saddled with a 1 trillion dollar debt for Iraq and by the time we exit Afghanistan, another trillion dollars in debt….all the while, extending tax breaks for the rich.

Now, this may not seem like much, but consider what we could do an extra 2 trillion dollars in our budget.

Consider just the suffering areas, like education and infrastructure.

In Education, let’s assume that you could put up a pretty nice school for ten million dollars and that you can budget a new teacher for 50,000 dollars. If you spent a trillion dollars on teachers and a trillion dollars on school infrastructure using those guidelines, you would come away with the following:

20 million new teachers and 100,000 new schools! We’ll, realistically, we probably don’t need that many schools and teachers but we could use about 25% of that and shuffle some of the left-over money into needed infrastructure.

Or let’s look at it another way.

Let’s take that same amount of money, and divide it evenly across the board in each state, although the smarter way would be to divide it by population; but for the sake of example, what that would mean is that each State would average out at about 20 billion dollars per state. That would put us a long way back to rebuilding an infrastructure that for the most part hasn’t been improved in decades and set us on a path to modernization that’s been lagging for all too long.

That, my friend, is the price we are paying to conduct unneeded wars in places that as soon as we leave will return to what they have been doing for generations.

I’m sorry for that, you can be sure. But I also do not see America cast permanently in the role of the world’s policeman and you can reinforce what I’m saying when you write the president, your local newspaper and your elected officials and remind them of that.

In the meantime, nothing we say or do, will return the more than 4,000 who gave up their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and the more than 100,000 wounded who may never be fully rehabilitated. That, my friend, is the true cost of War!....

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

In figuring the equation for War, did the planners intentionally leave out “x?”

Take a step back from War, and think about the saber rattling that took place and the larger arguments for going to War in the last decade and you may be surprised.

If you examine it, you will discover that the overall rationale for war, it seems that there are no contradictions with the well-being of the Military Industrial Complex. Both enterprises seem somewhat conjoined at the hip. In fact, like the buzzard that is dependent on dead things, the MIC could very well not survive if War wasn't a constant threat--even though at times, the seriousness of the threat had to be enlarged upon and expanded in order to keep the contracts flowing. Nevertheless, the MIC never looked a gift horse in the mouth when it came to filling its larder and, thank you, today they are very, very profitable to the tune of almost a trillion dollars annually—give or take the upkeep on a much smaller military presence.

Without the generosity of these and other companies who's longevity has a direct correlation with War and, needless to say, benefits immensely from that unstable condition, it would be very hard to generate the kind of dollars that sustain Republicans in office. For it seems that there is also a mutual relationship that assures those who press for War, or at least the threat of it, there is a continuing supply of manna to underwrite those efforts.

Thusly, the formula is in place, when we come out with new technology, the idea is to sell the next best technology to all those countries seeking to arm themselves against their possible oppressors. And since we have supplied so many of them, it seems that we are by ourselves the largest contributor to that state of affairs.

So, the demand goes unabated.

Of course, nobody thinks of the American people who underwrite all of these undertakings? Or whether they feel that they could not survive without an F22, despite the fact that there is no real competition for the F18; but those are simply trivial considerations, it seems, in the larger context of keeping the world on its toes and its fingers poised just above the trigger.
But, nevertheless, the game continues.

Of course, this never changes from theatre to theatre, but in areas like the Middle East, there are other considerations.

For example, the Saudis and some other Middle Eastern power bases tend to see us as the equivalent of their hired “hit team.”

And the arrangement is well understood. It works this way, our government provides the protection they need, and they will sell us oil at an optimum rate.

This, of course, endears the Saudis and the other oil potentates, to the Oil barrons and others who profit from Arab oil wealth--thanks to decisions made more than a hundred years ago when the Brits decided that they would decide who owned what land irregardless of the fact that Bedouins had no idea what land ownership implied or inferred-- and one doesn’t have to look too hard, to see all the Western businesses that are dependent on this brisk one way trade that Americans are willing to underwrite in order to drive their cars to the tune of 800 billion dollars annually.

Interestingly, we spend about as much on oil as we do on weaponry!

In exchange for Arabic courtesies, we get to protect their countries against the threat of Iraq and Iran and other ambitious foreign powers while they sit around and make deals to pass our money to their terrorist friends so that the cycle can continue ad infinitum.

There is only one little thing left out of the equation, the “x” factor, the people.

For the people seem to be the least of those to benefit from these elaborate arrangements. Nonetheless, it is the people who furnish the “cannon fodder” for this country’s real enterprises which are to keep the military industrial complex, the oil companies, and, thusly, the government happy, which in turn translates into happiness for the Arab countries who make the whole thing work.

It seems a wonderful arrangement until you wonder what was the role of the people in making these decisions in our democratic society and you have to wind up shaking your head.

It is perhaps one of the best examples of why democracy seems to work so well for business and government; but not so well for the people.

Tocqueville warned us about how easily transformed democracy was and how difficult it was to understand what it can morph into before our eyes. This must be true because it’s been going on for so long without anybody raising a whisper about it.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon