Tannishblog

I remember the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. My family drove down from Chicago to stay with friends and experience the second week of festivities. On the Saturday we left, some nutcase bombed Olympic Park. We visited the park that Wednesday to find a cordoned area filled with flowers and tiny flags. People walked past dimming their enthusiasm momentarily, but not being cowed by the reminder of the world outside Olympic Fever.

I remember watching the Men’s Individual Archery event when an lesser known athlete from California, Justin Huish, took the gold in an formidable display of concentration and accuracy. When interviewed later about his feelings, he just said: “I’m stoked.” Awesome, dude!

We drove the 60 miles to Athens, Georgia to watch the rhythmic Gymnastics competition, an inspiring display of motion as art form, perfection of grace and the beauty and vitality of youth. Indeed, this is humanity at it’s finest. My daughter, then only five, picked the team in the pink outfits as her champions, I believe they were the Russians, who won the bronze - I may be mis-remembering. As we left the arena, the feeling of the crowd was subdued awe, as if we have experienced the unforgettable - and indeed we had. I recall thinking that such introverted emotions are often associated with firsthand experiences of violence and tragedy, but here we wrestled inwardly with fitting this emotion to a new type of experience: Beauty.

This speaks of the most enduring memory I have of the 1996 Games, a memory of solidarity. Wednesday night in Centennial Olympic Park my wife and I witnessed the biggest party I have ever seen. Despite the plethora of police and national guard troops peeking out from the downtown parking garages surrounding the perimeter of the Park, checking out our totes filled with snacks and water, despite the cordoned reminder of violence in our world, Olympic Park was a four-square-mile fete packed shoulder to shoulder with smiling, laughing, humanity. I mattered not that people couldn’t get anywhere through the crowd, we just formed trains of people slinking through the crowd, meandering in the general direction we wanted to go, others joining and breaking off like so many coal cars in a freight yard. All the while the party vibe was turned up to maximum. Astonished, I turned to my wife and said, ”There’s no attitude here.” Such a thing was beyond my experience.

These memories carry me through today; As I hear the dissonance of the American tapestry through political discourse, I can recall that individual humans are fundamentally good. When good people forget themselves and give their identities over to an idea or an organization, such inherent goodness can be leeched out by ideology or by a group-mind perspective. The result of forgetting our inherent goodness results in such acts as bombing Olympic Park. It results in war, genocide, even pollution. We are not our thoughts; We are not our ideologies. To identify ourselves as such diminishes what we are, limits the human potential each of us carries, and reduces the expression of the human spirit to cruelty, barbarism and hatred.

Thanks to playing around with FeedDemon, I found this article on globalization via A VC. This prompts me to write my take on the end of the white dominated world. Here’s a wake-up call to all fundamentalists who think they can keep the world the same-old way forever: You can’t!

It’s ironic that the very forces (like greed) that cause Western companies to sell technology to so-called developing nations also cause the west to loose its grip on development. By empowering the youger nations of the world through the selling of technology, they quickly become our competitors. And there’s a lot more of them who will gladly work for less money.

Sugar-free chocolate. Decaf Coffee. Low-fat (anything edible). For decades the food industry has been telling us that we eat too much and exercise too little. The Food and Drug Administration has been our Little Big Brother, looking out for a populace that should know better, but does naughty things anyway.

So much for small government, so much for our ownership society.

Now, the plot thickens. Kraft foods, Coca-cola, Nestle, and Campbell’s are working with biotech to engineer foods to fool us into thinking we’re eating more of the naughty stuff we crave than we really are. By blocking taste receptors they can “enhance or replicate the taste of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate, or MSG, in foods”.

By adding one of Senomyx’s flavorings to their products, manufacturers can, for instance, reduce the sugar in a cookie or salt in a can of soup by one-third to one-half while retaining the same sweetness or saltiness.

Unlike artificial sweeteners, Senomyx’s chemical compounds will not be listed separately on ingredient labels. Instead, they will be lumped into a broad category - “artificial flavors” - already found on most packaged food labels.

“We’re helping companies clean up their labels,” said Senomyx’s chief executive, Kent Snyder.

I like that. That’s tantamount to saying: “We’re not going to tell you what you’re eating. It’s supposed to be healthier, and that’s why were doing it”.

While food safety experts applaud efforts to reduce salt, MSG and sugar, they expressed concerns about the new chemicals, saying that more testing needed to be done before these were sold in food.

But Senomyx maintains that its new products are safe because they will be used in tiny quantities.

To put more words in the mouths of the experts: “We won’t be labeling the food with a chemical notation or catchy “brand name,” so don’t expect to get all “phenylketonuric” on us! Thanks to the speed of new technology, Senomyx races past the archaic laws for ingestibles

Since Senomyx’s flavor compounds will be used in small proportions (less than one part per million), the company is able to bypass the lengthy F.D.A. approval process required to get food additives on the market. Getting the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association status of generally recognized as safe, or GRAS, took Senomyx less than 18 months, including a 3-month safety study using rats. In contrast, the maker of the artificial sweetener sucralose spent 11 years winning F.D.A. approval and is required to list the ingredient on food labels.

How fun! this is the first step toward Soylent Green! Soon it won’t matter what we’re eating, it’ll always taste like chicken! Bon Appetit!

The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded today. For 89 years the legacy of John Pulitzer has kept an eye on society and a finger on the pulse of the world. Loose and hour in the timeline at Pulitzer.org, look for your next great read, check out this years winners, but especially, take the time to view photography by Deanne Fitzmaurice and of the Associated Press Staff.

Simply inspiring.

Of all the news I’ve read this week, the killing of the Toklat wolves makes me the saddest. Not Terri, not the Pope - may they find rest at last - but the wolves; I feel their pain. The crux of irony is that the trappers, while acting fully within our feeble laws, are catching adult wolves. More common would be a trapper finding young, inexperienced animals, but in Denali National Park so many non-threatening tourists have passed through the park, that the adult wolves have become habituated toward their human cousins, only to be preyed upon by those few who make a profit by killing animals. Some would think at this point that the wolves so trapped are just stupid, but these beautiful examples of our planet’s bounty (or God’s skills, if you so desire) are just following their nature; betrayal is a foreign concept.

When will humanity remember that we too are mammals? When will we remember that killing other mammals is the same as killing our brothers?

Wait. We kill other humans, too – by the thousands. If we can’t kill them with superior weaponry, we starve and rape them, stealing their dignity, their livelihoods and their land. Obviously, as a species we have no respect for life. We feign respect for certain lives, perhaps, if there is a perceived political advantage. History evinces our lip service toward the life affirming tenets of religion; yet as a species we are hypocrites.

I, for one, believe in karma, it is nothing more that the law of causality, as in “what comes around goes around.” I watch from the sidelines, sharing in the collective guilt because I have my own family to feed, just like the wolves do. And like the wolves I watch as humanity builds an astronomical karmic debt, much like our current national debt in that the causes are similar and that the payments will occur for generations to come. This assumes that generations will come - if not perhaps then the debt will have been paid in full.

I wrote a couple of political rants on My Other Blog. Made some minor tweaks to all three sites, including a picture of the family coat of arms on my bio page at the Tannish Page. This blogging lifestyle takes a lot of time!

Lovin’ it!

A spill of mental blockage is filling my brain this week. Suffering from Blog Envy caused by reading a plethora of Really Excellent Blogs, my humble postings are blushing from their own temerity, reeling from the competition, from a lack of direction, and from the unavoidable fact of my meatspace needs needing attention. Life often interferes on having fun.

My hopes of blogging daily have evaporated in the light of life’s persistent intrusions. That’s OK. Better if I focus on quality (to the limit of my talents), which takes time. I’m starting an essay on religion - make that religious substitute - which I’m sure will offend someone; Agnosticism and Atheism are not exactly in vogue. When finished it will appear on the Tannish Page. I created a contact card last night – to call it a business card would be too pretentious – that is light-hearted and maybe a bit cutesy. Maybe I should adopt the little guy as a mascot, he reminds me of me in a way and he even holds his pencil in his left hand!

All of the above is to keep my idle mind busy while the blockage is cleared. I think I’ll go meditate, that should help.