Don't be scared of Trump

Don't be scared of Trump. Be scared of 'the people'. There are a whole lot of obnoxious arseholes in the US; bigoted people, narrow minded people, people who can't think critically. Shoot first, ask questions later people. People who lack magnanimity, empathy, or even curiosity. They ask no questions about matters of justice or equality. They are not interested in anyone other than themselves. US vs THEM kind of people. People who revel in their ignorance, and wear it as a badge of honor.
Be scared of the education system that spawned them.
Around the world people have generally scorned the American government and its policies; but claim to like and admire the American people. Much of that affection must have dwindled when G. W. Bush was re-elected in spite of what everyone knew about the invasion of Iraq. The responsibility at some point has to come back to the people; the gothic burden of a substantial proportion of the American people that weighs around the neck of aspirations to become a positive player at home and around the world.
Don't be scared of Trump. He can't do most of things he says he will (nor could Bernie Sanders do what he said he would). Be scared of 'the people'.

The Mathematics of Home (after a long hike and 2 hours on some South African roads)

A poem I wrote some years back. It was published in the South African weekly The Mail & Guardian but they changed it a bit, in ways I didn't really appreciate. Space considerations and all that, you know...
It's in my book, No One to Blame.

 

The Mathematics of Home (after a long hike and 2 hours on some South African roads)

(46 blinding highbeams, perverse to anyone sharing the road

37 pedestrians in dark clothing, often three abreast and oblivious

7 tailgaters, dying to pass by, cranking it up and flying over the pass

6 slow moving vehicles, too afraid to be on the road in the first place

5 potholes, popping up like poltergeist even though the sign warned us

2 goats,

1 donkey, and

1 cow, out for a stroll and as stupid as shit, and

1 bicycle rider, tooling along the tarmac, much rarer than in Tanzania)

+

(7 big beers
1 hot shower
1 bowl of chicken stirfry
1 spliff
     and a damn good lightning storm)

=

0 problems.

New Book

I have published a new book, No One to Blame. It is a collection of short stories and poems, many previously published in journals in South Africa and in the US. Get it on Lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dadownie1

Before long it will be available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Maximum Wage

Raising the minimum wage has again become an issue at local to federal levels. Given the increase in labor costs this will engender means that management will always be opposed to such a measure, as will those who feel management will seek to offset those costs by cutting the workforce (a threat from management, in fact). Labor is the biggest cost for many, if not most, companies, and they find that maximizing profits can best be done by short changing employees.
            That sucks.
            Increased labor costs are necessary if people are to make a decent living from their labor. One way to offset these costs is to impose a maximum wage. Putting a cap on the earnings of executives and other highly compensated employees (including movie stars, rock stars, and athletes) will go a long way toward keeping labor costs within bounds that do not impede reasonable profitability. Why are the costs of the producers always blamed for draining profits, and not the blood-sucking corporate execs? In fact, capping the salaries of the overpaid could actually accrue benefits to consumers in reduced prices.
            Capped at what amount? Say $500,000 per year? Maybe more, we can quibble about that. If you can’t live a comfortable life on $500,000 per year, you probably need to get some sort of therapy.
            Many will say such a ‘draconian’ move would violate their god-given right to be multi-millionaires. There is no such right. Many will say it is ‘un-American’─ maybe so, but in a good way. People should have the opportunity to move up and accumulate wealth, but how much does anyone really need? Are car collections, houses on every continent, 6 bedroom houses for 2 people, 57 pairs of shoes, opulence in every choice be it food or furniture; and a wide range of other extravagances one can imagine and can observe indulged in by the uber-rich, really justified? On what grounds? Are we really expected to believe that their work is so much more valuable than the hired help?
            Few of us do, and most of us know exactly what worth they bring, and sometimes it’s a lot, and often times it’s not. But it’s never worth the price paid by workers.

Salinger & Simenon

I watched the PBS American Masters segment on J.D. Salinger the other night. I always liked Salinger, and have always been perplexed at why a book about a miscreant and hateful adolescent got to be required reading in schools for so long. It’s probably a good thing. That audience can relate, and that the schoolmasters allow it is probably admirable (it could be getting time to change the curriculum now though). Never mind the wackos. They’d have latched on to something or someone else in any case.
            I respect Salinger immensely for saying; ‘Fuck these assholes. Catcher will give me a living for the rest of my life. Why bother? I can live a peaceful and sane life.”
            It’s an intelligent approach.
            But I think his choice was founded on his hyper sensitivity to criticism, which he would not have been able to indulge if Catcher hadn’t given him the resources. He wouldn’t have been able to do it without those resources, and wouldn’t have chosen to do it even given those resources, if his later works didn’t receive some harsh criticism. If those works had achieved universal acclaim he would have appeared at the opening of an envelope!
            He bowed out when the mud-slinging started slapping him in the face.
            He was no masochist.
            Narcissist, yes; masochist, no.
            From then on, he claimed to have been writing on a daily basis. It was all for ‘his own pleasure’. There is an archive, and we would expect it to be a huge archive, after 45 years!
            Is it? Will it be?
            Perhaps, but I’m willing to bet it will be an endless ramble, with brilliant passages that make you wish he was more calm and collected and could weed out the chaff and get to the quick, so that it was all brilliant.
            He was too self-indulgent to be able to do that.

            Now take Simenon.
            Georges Simenon was a Belgian who wrote in French. He was a high school drop-out, and a journalist in his teens. By his mid-twenties he was rich and partly famous for his hundreds of pulp novels. Then he hit on the character of a detective and wrote about 75 mystery books around him. In the middle of all that he began writing ‘hard novels’. Sometimes they’re called psychological novels, for some reason. There are a lot of them. I don’t think anyone is quite clear on just how many but there is little doubt that no one has surpassed the output.
            Whatever you call them, they are a wonder.
            Currently I’m reading Dirty Snow, a book about a young man living in an unspecified city in an occupied country and who is eagerly diving into a criminal lifestyle‒in a world where ‘criminal’ has become undefined and amorphous. We think that we are in France, or Belgium in World War II, but nowhere is there a mention of ‘German’ or ‘Nazi’ or ‘France’ or ‘Fascism’, or any reference to a specific time and place. Hitler is nowhere to be found. Things are mostly circumscribed to a small urban neighborhood. As the book progresses one is sucked into a more and more surreal world‒Philip K. Dick and Kafka come to mind‒which still somehow feels like the world we all live in. The book transcends time.
            It’s not even his best book. 
            How did he do it? How could someone write so much, so well?
            Simenon’s style was spare, sparer than Hemingway. The lines lay down like a blade of quick fire. Read Simenon after just a few hits of decent weed. Any more than that and you’ll blow it…none or less would be fine…but do it anyway.
            Unlike Salinger, Simenon was not afraid of criticism. I’m pretty sure he didn’t give a damn. He had all the acclaim he needed, and caring about that kind of thing would interfere with getting laid, an obviously more satisfying pursuit. He claimed to have had sex with 10,000 women.
            Now there’s a common pursuit of these two writers...myth-making. It’s not among their most attractive aspects, but it worked for both of them, in a big way. It’s worked for a lot of writers, in fact. Myth-making. Not essential for a writer, but for a writer who would achieve financial success?
            Hell, just another character, eh?

            But what a contrast! I’ve liked both these writers, and they have both had an influence on me. I don’t think Salinger could touch Simenon however, and it’s a measure of America’s preoccupation with itself that Salinger’s myth is so much bigger than Simenon’s, and that a writer who freely gave it all to the world, and maintained his artistry while he was at it, is less read and discussed than one who hid it away, like a squirrel.
            You pretty much know that Salinger will disappoint, while we have all the evidence we need of Simenon’s brilliance.

Francis and Timmy

Story of mine published in online magazine Verbicide, go here to read:

 http://www.verbicidemagazine.com/2013/11/26/francis-and-timmy-doug-downie-fiction

On an article on GMOs

In response to an article in the Sacramento News & Review, first published in the Village Voice. Perhaps demonstrating their utter lack of commitment to balance they did not publish this piece, or a short letter to the editor I wrote previously. They did print 2 sappy praise letters for the execrable piece that 'inspired' me to write this:

 

I have problems with corporate capitalism. I see the practices that corporations engage in as being, more often than not, exploitative of workers, duping and deceitful to consumers, duplicitous and evasive to regulators, and corrupting to politicians. It’s the nature of the game, and it sucks. We should throw spanners into the works when we can. This is why it’s hard to read some of the stuff that gets published on a subject such as GMOs, where rational thought and science are left in the dust of fear-mongering and paranoid fantasies. I find myself in such opposition to this stuff that I end up nearly coming down on the side of one of those corporate beasts. This was especially true of the article by Chris Parker in the 8/1/13 issue of SN&R (first published in 7/25/13 issue of The Village Voice).

            Mr. Parker doesn’t wait a minute to start with the appeal to fear, and the fallacy of misleading vividness when he cites Monsanto’s ‘random killing’, ‘take control of the world’s food supply’, ‘Franken-crops’. Such wording elicits shock even though they have little relationship to reality. The article is filled with ostentatious waving of oversized red flags around in this manner, with little corroboration or backing offered for some rather outlandish statements.

            For example, Parker has ‘agents’ of Monsanto lurking in the bushes and the coffee shops, secretly videotaping, infiltrating, intelligence gathering, pretending to be surveyors, bullying farmers…this poor guy has been watching too many movies. When statements like these are made a journalist really needs to inform his readers of where the information has originated, and it better be from multiple reliable sources. Parker does no such thing; it’s all pulled out of his hat! I have dealings with farmers and grower organizations in my work – none of them have mentioned anything like this. None of them are ‘terrified’. Later Parker attributes the question ‘Trust Us. Why Would We Lie?’ to Monsanto. In fact, he is asking the very same question to his readers about himself. He gives us little reason to trust him.

            A few studies are cited in the time-honored tradition of cherry-picking – a disconcertingly common form of argument among anti-GMO folks. What one typically does is not just cite the reference that supports your a priori belief, but also cite others that produce different results…like what happens in the real world of science, and good journalism; but not in this fictional one. Of course, one would have to actually read those other works, and think about them, and weigh the evidence…not the strong suit of someone like Mr. Parker. The weight of evidence is important in science. A 2009 study by Gurian-Sherman that failed to support the claim that GM crops produce higher yields is discussed, but no inkling is given that studies have been mixed on this issue. Besides the fact that GM crops currently in commercial use are not generally engineered for greater yield directly, many studies have found that they do have greater yield than conventional crops (A 2-part review in Annual Review of Plant Biology (2008 & 2009) by Peggy Lemaux, of UC, Berkeley, provides an excellent review and entry into the scientific literature in general.).

            Another argument put forth by Parker (and others) is that the FDA ‘approves GM crops by doing no testing of its own; it simply takes Monsanto's word for their safety.’ It is not the purview of the FDA to approve GM crops. They approve foods. As such, they are downstream in the regulatory process from Monsanto and its immediate products. It is the EPA and USDA that approve GM crops (or the transgenes and their products in the case of the EPA); all 3 agencies play a role however. While they do no testing of an applicant’s products on their own they do not ‘take Monsanto’s word for it’. They require specific studies with the cost of the research to be borne by the applicant (not the taxpayers), and they subject the data, results, and interpretations of the applicant to scrutiny by expert scientists. If the methods or data are found wanting, more data is required. (This all comes at a cost of from $6-15 million (Nature Biotechnology 25:509–11), a major reason why public institutions don’t play a greater role.) Some of this ends up in the peer-reviewed literature and so goes through another layer of scrutiny. Not ideal, but a far cry from ‘taking their word for it.’ One can make a reasonable case for the insufficiency of testing of GM crops, and foods derived from them, but what we have here is something else. Lying is not the best tactic for a ‘journalist’.

            Parker states ‘Monsanto understood early on that the best way to stave off bad publicity was to limit research.’ A simple search on Genamics (correct spelling) Journal Seek (http://journalseek.net/) found 227 journals publishing on genetic engineering. How has research been ‘staved off’? Citing a filmmaker as source, Parker claims that ‘95 percent of genetic-engineering research is paid for and controlled by corporations like Monsanto.’ You mean all those people who I’ve heard speak at conferences, whose papers I’ve read, who worked in universities, and who were funded by the NIH and the NSF and the USDA were only the 5%? I really want a better source of data than a filmmaker here (who has been doing some cherry picking of his own). I don’t have much time but I looked in the acknowledgements in the first 10 papers from 2013 I found that involved genetic engineering and only 1 group received funding from Monsanto. That’s 10% (of a very small sample, true). And no, the scientists are not all keeping it a big secret. Certainly Monsanto (and Syngenta et al.) does extensive in-house research that is not shared, and more of the pie should go to public institutions, but 95% is a stretch. In fact, while 80% of the commercialization of GM crops has come from corporations, a substantial amount of the research innovation comes from public institutions (Lemaux, 2009, cited above).

            Finally, on GM crops and resistance to pesticides and pesticide use: weeds and insects become resistant to any strategy to kill them. Always have, always will. Resistance to Bt crops has actually been much longer in coming (few examples after 15 years) than to conventional insecticides (usually after about 1-3 years). Parker cites pesticide use data from a 2012 paper by Charles Benbrook (though he doesn’t say so, perhaps fearful that readers would see how few sources he uses). He doesn’t mention another 2012 paper by Brookes and Barfoot that contradicts Benbrook’s results. I found Benbrook’s analysis fairly persuasive but Parker doesn’t tell the whole story. Insecticide use in Bt crops has decreased by 123 million pounds over the same period, indicating an ecological benefit of these crops. The overall increase is from herbicide use (not surprising when you have crops specifically engineered to tolerate them to allow easier spraying–a misguided innovation, its true). Note as well, that while many weeds have evolved resistance to Round-Up in the presence of Round-Up Ready crops; just as many have in conventional crops. Round-Up gets used too much! Period! (Actually the active ingredient, glyphosate, which is now used in dozens and dozens of products not owned by Monsanto.) The nub is that if they dropped using Round-Up farmers would move to other, more toxic herbicides.

            I wish I could go on. This article was riddled with fallacious argument, distorted information, and withheld information. It deserves a more thorough critique. Time and space prevent me.

There are real concerns and risks in genetic engineering. There are also benefits. Rational and honest discussion is needed.

To end, I am no friend of Monsanto. In fact, I think that corporate capitalism in the broader sense is the real problem; and Monsanto has lots of company in that department.

Read the story here:
 www.villagevoice.com/2013-07-24/restaurants/the-monsanto-menace

Links to the articles by Peggy Lemaux are given in a previous post from 1/3/2013, 'GMOs'.

 

 Doug Downie holds a PhD in Entomology from UC, Davis. He has 20 years experience in research and teaching of entomology, ecology, evolution and genetics. He has never received any funding from the private sector.