Lest We Forget

The statement 'lest we forget' in relation to the horrors of the first and second war. Now the question that should be posed is haven't we already forgotten. When was the last time that you thought about the lives that were lost on a day that was not in the week before rememberance day. When was the last time that you truly stopped doing everything that is happening around you at 11:11 and thought about those who had died.
We have forgotten what had happened. Every time we let Rwanda, Durfur, DRC, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Burma happen, we forget the past. There are many more situations which we allow as a world community and yet believe that we still remember those wars. We should not allow ourselves to lie and say that we do remember, when we know in our hearts that we have forgotten. To remember would be to react and prevent world suffering, some thing that the west has a terriable track record on.
We have forgotten because we do not remember these things in our daily lifes, only on rememberance day if it is convienent for us.

Fast Food and Corn

Well a few months ago i heard of a place that had replaced all of their plastic water bottles with corn based plastic water bottle. They were excited because they felt they were changing the world. They would be changing the world if they had not been replacing plastic with corn. Corn farming is not a sustainable use of resources, it is over funded by the government and reduces the productivity of the soil.
Today in the news there was a story about how much corn there is in fast food. At Wendy's, for example, if you order a hamburger or chicken burger with fries there is not one item of food that you eat that is not related to corn. The cattle for the hamburgers, or chicken, have been feed only corn products. The bread has corn in it. The fries and chicken are fried in corn oil. They figured this out by testing the products for corn, rather than reading the ingredients. This lead to the findings that 93% of beef from fast food have been raised exclusively on corn. This study did not look at the soft drinks at the restaurants because the sugars added to them are all corn based.
Corn is also used in ethanol. Which is not a solution to anything besides votes in the midwest. With out government subsidies corn would not be grown in places where heavy fertilization is need. Bio fuels currently are a joke because there is more energy need for the production of the fuel than is produced. The government is subsidizing the current production which allows the companies to not produce the most effience bio fuels. There is a movie on the topic, King Corn, that looks interesting, but i have not seen it.
To truly change the way that gas is produced we need to change who we subsidize and what we use for bio fuels, but that is another story.
Corn should be reduced from our food supply. Yes it is good to have corn in some products but we should not be living in a age where almost every product that you by that is prepackaged has corn in it.

News article on CBC

Actual science article in National Academy of Sciences (it is currently free)

Starting Anew

So many months ago now, around 6 months, i stopped writing or thinking about writing posts for this blog. One part was i did not have high speed internet.
So I was talking to the person who in the past told me that my posts were too long. This time the person told me to do the posts again. Not that this person has complete control over what I do, a few people have been asking recently why I had stopped blogging.
So I am back