As If Anybody Cared About My Opinion on GMOs

Grandma’s fine, surgery went well and she even took her first steps on her new hip today. Anyway…

This is one of the custom blogs I do for my Facebook friends. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to blog about, and I’m writing a post for Chris because he answered.

How about, why can’t people just relax, why is everyone so passionate about everything?

As a passionate person, I tend to wonder how it is that anybody is able to relax at all. I mean, we’ve got 90 years on this rock if we’re lucky (although the majority of us are not lucky), and the first 20 and the last 20 are generally spent in complete and utter uselessness. So that leaves 50 years of functional adulthood (again, only for some of us). Take off another 10 for your 20s, which everybody agrees are total shit, and another 10 for child-rearing or parent caretaking and then you’re down to 30. 30 years is 262,800 hours, which may seem like a lot until you subtract 87,600 for 8 hours if nightly rest then take away 1,830 for the the 61 hours a year the average Los Angelino spends in traffic and you’re left with roughly 19.79 years to actually have a life. That’s shit. It’s nothing, and I’m not even counting years spent at unfulfilling jobs or stuck in shitty relationships or whatever.

The time to panic is now.

Really, we should have been panicking all along, but now’s good too.

OK so gas is expensive, big deal.

I do agree with this sentiment. There are more important factors to think about than gas prices. Like immanent death.

No, GMO stuff won’t kill you or change your genes.

Yeah, people who think that GMO food is going to turn them into some kind of spiderman 1. Obviously don’t know much about human digestion (pro tip, at no point does the food we eat rewrite our DNA) and 2. Obviously never read Spiderman because who the fuck wouldn’t want awesome spider powers?

My main worry with GMO food is the potential effects on biodiversity. Diversity (cultural, physical, biological etc.) is really important, not just for innovation like in the case of humanity, but for endurance as in the case of all living shit everywhere. Evolution is about survival of the fittest, and fitness tends to change when conditions change. So a corn blight may kill 66% of corn types in a diverse world, but if we only use one genetically identical species of corn for all our grain needs, a corn blight will wipe out 100% of our edible corn supply. A real life example of the dangers of genetically identical food can be found in the Irish Potato Famine. Not cool.

Also, there’s no telling what other unexpected consequences may happen. For example, a pesticide corn may kill it’s predator bugs, but it may kill good bugs too, which could lead to massive ecosystem destabilization. Also not cool.

However, being especially picky about the type of food I want to eat, and the type of food I want farmers to grow for me is pretty fucking privileged behavior while people in other regions are starving. I’m basically sitting on top of my thrown of burgers while plus-sized models lounge in my milkshake pool implying that the lives of bugs and a possible future food shortage for the first world are more important than actual humans actually dying of starvation actually right now.

So who really knows.

You’re fat cuz you eat to much and don’t workout.

This is true to a point. As a lifelong fat person, I can verify that I tend to be less fat when I work out more and eat fewer calories. However, my lowest weight is generally quite a bit higher than most other people’s lowest weight, and another magnitude higher than the ideal weight that mainstream media outlets would have me believe my goal should be.

I could probably get and keep my weight down pretty low through diet and exercise, but frankly it would take all my time and energy and I would be miserable. And studies show that unless the changes you make to your diet are permanent, you’ll gain back all the weight you lost and then some.

In short, it’s always a good idea to eat right and exercise, but it turns out extreme jumps in exercise rates and caloric intake may ultimately be bad for you. It’s better to care for yourself enough that you want to eat healthy and be active, not so you don’t get fat, but so you can feel good and appreciate your body and your life.

And people are not trying to fuck you over at every turn, shit ain’t that bad.

This I definitely agree with. What’s the quote?

“Don’t attribute to malice that which can better be attributed to carelessness”

We’re scaring ourselves.

And how.