Fish Tale

Anyone who is actually listening should agree that we Americans are in the midst of a civil war.

I don't think that we will ever take up muskets, Springfields or even Glocks against each other but the war is real and the thought of a truce or armistice is a pretty far reach these days.

It isn't about our leadership. It is about us. We just plain don't like each other. We are pretty evenly split down the middle and we are flailing around and listing like the Titanic getting buffeted by gigantic waves. First one side teeters up in the air and then finally the other and we try to scratch each other's eyes out when we meet in the middle.

Yet even in the midst of this great discord and cultural war, at times strange alliances are made. Saw an article today about Sen. Tom Coburn, an extreme right winger joining with organic farmers to fight a bill that would let the FDA regulate and safeguard our food and hopefully avert situations like we had with the recent egggate. Ag Department had found over 400 cases of salmonella in the past year and the FDA could legally do nothing. Coburn thinks that improving food safety will be too expensive. Even the grocery manufacturers support the bill. I understand that the organic farmers have nothing to fear from the bill, despite a lot of misinformation. In any case I think that we deserve safe food.

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Americans should be up in arms about Section 9006 of the new Health Care bill that will require by 2012 that businesses receive a 1099 for any purchase from a supplier over $600.00. This will add ridiculous requirements and hardship to my business and I hope it gets turned over somehow. I guess they are trying to attack the shadow economy but I see an avalanche of paperwork.

If a little old lady walks into my gallery and wants to sell me a painting for $800.00 that has been in her family since 1910, are we going to have an army of IRS agents interrogating her on the picture's cost basis? This bill is going to suck and it's going to stifle trade in a measurable way.

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Now for the entree for this post. Salmon. This is one of the things that I think every American should be able to agree upon unless perhaps that you are lucky enough to have your own salmon farm. That the country is run by idiots. Not just now, all the time.

The FDA is taking the position that genetically modified fish, in this case salmon, does not have to be labeled as such. As you are probably aware, mad scientists have created a new frankenfish that gets big twice as fast and eats half again as much.

Now I think that this is terrible but it actually gets worse. The nimrods are taking the position that it is illegal for a company to mark non genetically modified fish as such because the FDA can supposedly not "materially" tell the difference. Bullshit. I want to know what I am eating. I personally think genetic modification is a really bad idea for a host of reasons previously discussed.

This salmon would be the first modified animal ever offered for consumption in the United States. AquAdvantage has given the salmon a gene from the Ocean Pout (an eel like fish) and a growth hormone from a chinook salmon. Purportedly the FDA is under great pressure from industry to approve a label free fish.

I would hope that this asinine stance gets squashed. I demand the right to know exactly what I am putting in my own body. Something smells mighty fishy in Washington.

Prometheus steals fire. © Chris Harding