Schadenfreude

I asked my nearly 4 year old daughter who Tony Blair was. She replied "Prime Minister" in a way which suggested that anyone who didn't know ought to. I continued with the questioning and asked who the Chancellor was and she said "Tony Brown". I am wondering how much of the news she is picking up. I would hate to think of her education being furthered by the ramblings of Andrew Marr et al. Having said that, I get the feeling these days that the junk they spout on ALL news channels is below my daughter already. We have a presenter who transferred from "Newsround" to "News 24" and now she is on the more adult programme, I feel more patronised. Maybe this is just psychological and that in actual fact she is the same as she always was - that is worse isn't it.

Maybe my daughter thinks that all politicians are called Tony. It's certainly beginning to seem like that anyway. Cloning has been banned unless you are a Government Minister. Could you just clone a brain and stick it in different bodies. Then you could have a cabinet of like minded people. Isn't that what politics is all about, convincing everybody that your way of thinking is the best one? At least we know that Tony and Gordon are not clones of one another.

This leads me to something which I worry about almost continuously on the fringes of my mind. Our Government seems to suggest that GM produce is totally safe ( I suspect that their spin on this would be that they haven't actually explicitly stated that it is safe but that they have an open mind). What about the "butterfly effect"? Genetics, even its basic application, has recessive Genes and things which sometimes don't show up in descendants for many generations. Mendel's Peas were used to demonstrate this recessiveness (In two generations I have to admit). Could we not introduce something which seems harmless in current crops but which will cause havoc later on. Even if there is no inherited pattern which causes direct problems, the fact that the overall characteristics of such organisms will be different (They have to be or there is no point in modifying them), that the whole balance of the local ecosystem will be upset in ways which we cannot forsee. See this article to see where the first real problems may occur. I hope you can tell from the general tone of this journal, that I am by no means a Luddite. I do feel that things as broad ranging in their consequences as GM should be examined very carefully and tested over many years rather than blindly introduced mainly for profit.

I am angry that there is even work being done on trying to patent things related to food. The fact that Rice Tec can even think about trying patenting anything related to something which is a basic foodstuff is Immoral and almost Criminal. I know that they say that the patents do not prevent anyone from growing the rice but the fact that in one of the articles I saw a comment saying that it was "a wake-up-call" for India to put in place its own registration procedures belies this view. Why the hell should they create their own registration process? I know they spend millions of dollars on building Nuclear Weapons while people starve (which is immoral as well) but for a Company to use patents to make money on a BASIC foodstuff is just evil. Support BAG. We can grow enough food for everybody many times over WITHOUT any GM etc.

All this, along with the pile of stuff I have found about rice, has made me depressed. Nothing can be said to be "True" any more. There is so much printed and published stuff that we can't decide on truth. Maybe nothing is true and the world I see through the TV, papers and the Internet is just a filtered picture of what reality is. I can;t possibly know anymore than an infinitesimal fraction of what is real. I could live on a spaceship in interstellar space and still not know all things about my world. I suspect that this lack of definite reality is something which has been going on for all time. History is written by the winning side. Technology is written by the Gurus.

Read the words of The Terror Time. It fits with the nightmare end of GM though I know its really about Travellers.

"Diami un seme e pulirò la vita dalla superficie della terra"

("Give me one seed and I will wipe the life from the Surface of the Earth")

Andreous De Exiginati

Obturator di Firenze - 1479