Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

A while back I was reading this blog entry titled “Your Food is from China“ about the large scale industrial production of vegetables in China, DNA manipulation of foodstuffs, and so on.

...The individual greenhouses were twice the length and width as a football field. The growing situation was a pond with blocks of styrofoam floating on the water. Each block had a multiple lettuce plants dangling their roots through holes into the water. Above were light fixtures that could illuminate the plants.

I also saw other research-type activities. One place was a hi-tech R&D company that was working on cattle. ... Biotech companies have long been interested in producing rare and important human proteins with pharmaceutical benefits in cow's milk. For example, why not produce human interferon in cow's milk rather than produce it via DNA approaches in yeast? The answer is that the yeast has a difficult time producing the modifications of human proteins exactly as those substances would be synthesized in people, but the cow can make them correctly.

Anyway, I've been reading various dire predictions from the EPA, insurance companies, and others about the rebuilding of New Orleans and there's all this worry about whether it's even affordable number. That's strange to me, because the US really is the richest country in the world and should be able to do this stuff in its sleep… But the problem with the US isn't that it's out of money, the problem is that its money is stolen by the wealthy corporate friends of politicians and the rest is squandered, so little is left for the taxpayers themselves.

Let's look at how China would face the problem of having to recreate a city? Well, they just handed British engineering company Arup a gazillion dollar contract to build — from scratch: there's only a swamp there right now — a metropolitan city larger than London, UK. Oh, and they're building 4,000 kilometers of highway every year and have a space program. And their coalfields are on fire, they've got bird flue, they're on the edge of environmental collapse, they have a population of one and a half billion, and the US is deeply in debt to them and their economies are linked.

So they're a hyperpowerful nation that's transforming at breakneck speed and headed straight toward a major collapse, unable to support its population without expanding into new territory… have I mentioned they've got plenty of nukes and ICBM delivery systems?

But I've been thinking what's going to save the US when the shit really finally hits the fan and everyone realizes we've gone around the curve, there's no turning back because the road behind us has collapsed, and things change radically… it's going to be the strange dichotomy in America between rich and poor, metrosexual and hillbilly. Yeah, the US can build you a computer, but it can also noodle you a catfish when the world infrastructure fails.

That said, if everyone doesn't cut down on burgers, maybe those rivers will have dried up by then anyway and there'll be nothing to noodle.

Blah blah blah.