First Blog

  The Pig and I The question today is about the farm-raised pig from its birth to eventual harvesting. What can we say from a moral, sanctity of life or existential basis? This is an age-old problem of eating meat, particularly meat that is farm-raised. At first blush, you might think it is immoral to slaughter animals and eat them. However, this is only a more refined way of ancient hunting. We now even farm-raise salmon, shrimp, and other fish. Watching the nature shows, we feel pity for the seal attacked by killer whales, but that same seal consumes kilos of fish to reach its size. Or feel for the walrus, hunted by Eskimos, yet feeding on its vast gardens of mussels and clams to reach its multi-ton weight. Many are the contradictions of the morality arguments. In the animal world, few babies survive their first year. Some predators live exactly where the prey travels or resides. Abstractly, the lion farm raises the gazelle, and consumes them as needed. Or consider the Nile cro

More gun violence. Modernity in warfare. You know Asians are consummate pork consumers.  The grow 'em. They eat 'em. They buy more from other countries. China is the biggest consumer.  With 1.4 billion  people, there's a lot of demand.  But did you know, China has 250,000,000 swine fever diseased pigs. Dire problem. They are found en masse floating in rivers.  Others, also diseased, are sent to slaughter houses for human consumption.    Now, the infection problem has spread to North Korea. We never know how NOKO handles any problem.  But, just across the border to the South Korea (SOKO), another big pork consumer. So then??? South Korea, like many Asian countries, has a large pig population and is frightened by this highly contagious disease coming in from the North. What can be done? Well ... SOKO now employs snipers to shoot, possibly infected, feral pigs coming into the South.   Being totally cynical, I could posit new low tech wars agains