Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Following the money

I  am either turning progressively into a cynical curmudgeon or perhaps it's merely the result of peering behind the curtain and seeing more of the under-workings and its pursuit of the mighty dollar. It could, in all fairness, be a combination of the two ... but I'm not here to discuss my internal demons at this point in time. I'll save that for my imaginary shrink.


Forgive me if I've stated this in an earlier post but I think it's worth restating - even if I may be my only recipient. As my titular title states, it boils down to following the money but I thought it might be nice to summarise a few areas where you, the general public, may not realise that you are being duped. That is not to say that I am infallible of their guiles ... but I will list at least a few areas where I believe I can point out an outright lie:

Ignoring the incredibly poor English, you've heard milk is good for you, right? That you need calcium for strong bones? Well, it turns out it isn't. For your body to even be able to absorb the calcium in dairy you need equal parts magnesium ... or, alternatively, you could simply stand in the sun, eat your greens and do a little exercise. Then there is the study which correlates increases in bone disease directly proportional to dairy consumption. Here's a simple question: How much milk do cows consume to keep their half-tonne frames strong? How much dairy do animals consume after infancy from a completely different species? If you answer: none you would be correct.

Ensuring that you separate your glass from your plastics, paper from your trash is very important if we wish to keep Mother Nature looking her best, correct? Well, it turns out that this is mostly incorrect. How, do you ask? Well, it comes down to the amount of effort required to recycle your by-products back into functional items once again. If the amount of energy (and pollution) is more than the energy used to create a new plastic bottle (say) then it's eco-unfriendly. The whole point of recycling is to reduce the burden on the Earth but that gets lost in all the good intentions flying about. I guess the only area where there may be a case is if the core elements were in limited supply, thereby forcing us as a society to salvage that core element (e.g. precious metals in smart phones). The better solution to recycling is reuse/re-purposing. For example, in many parts of Europe they use glass bottles for their beers which, upon having been consumed are returned, washed out and filled once more with delicious, delicious beer. Now that's something I can get behind.

I'm sure I could cover the whole industry if I looked hard enough (e.g. Diesel engines / Dieselgate, Privatised war profiteering, democracy, denialists etc.) but I won't. In the end, the only question you should be asking is why would they lie to us? And, I'm sure for most of you, the answer would be obvious. None of these organisations are in it for our benefit and merely in it to bolster their numbers. It hurts to admit but who am I to stop the deluge of lies?