permaculture

[Jack Rowe <jackrowe@compuserve.com>]

Re: gypsum board... manufacturers put stuff in our FOOD that you wouldn't
want in the garden... probably there's glue in gyp-board, maybe boric or
aluminate fire-retardant compounds... ultimately, probably about as
dangerous as eating out or buying food in a grocery store, which is to say,
of undeterminate fair-to-middlin' risk.

According to Texas Department of Ag. Organic Certification standards: Fish
emulsion is solublized with sulfuric acid; bone and blood meals have
measurable levels of herbicide residue (as do manures, which are often
further-sprayed to keep flies off); stuck-in-adolescence, mammary-obsessed
scientists are using every weird hormone they can synthesize to try and
grow breasts on all the MEN; I don't even want to THINK about what travels
through me to get into the urine I use in MY garden; DDT residues are still
detectable in mothers' milk and semen; yadda yadda... with current testing
procedures you can go outside and pick up a stick and find toxins... ain't
life grand... Un-scary conclusions? Use what we have, start cleaning
EVERYTHING up. 

Goes to the goat/intelligence thing... goats are, in fact, smart as can be
[and they have LOTS of time and boredom]. Are they smarter than Humans?
Ignoring the obvious impossibility of answering such a question, here's our
epistemological bone-of-the-day: If a species/person/goat is capable of any
intellectual feat, but spends its time doing stupid things... is it SMART,
or STUPID? Do we continue to measure "intelligence" with tests on paper, or
do we begin to measure intelligence in our pesky 4-dimensional world? IQ's
as determined by "paper" method: humans 100; goats 64; bacteria 0.0002; by
"pesky world" method: humans 6; goats 100; bacteria 100... trees 100...
grass 100... rocks 100. How come everybody else gets 100, and we get a 6?
Gotta work on our testing and evaluation paradigms...