Barbecued Rat And A $6,300 Bottle Of Champagne

The Irula are a very low-caste tribe in India, caught up in the twisted and bizarre religious hierarchy in India. According to an article in US News & World Report, the Irulas have a life expectancy of 45 years and a literacy rate of one percent.

While Indians in higher castes are becoming software millionaires or middle-class by answering American questions about electronics or banking in call centers in Bombay and other cities, the Irula’s specialty is rat-catching at about five cents a rat in India’s farming country. Rats are plentiful in India because good grain storage is so rare. The estimate is that rats eat about 25 percent of India’s grain crop.

Because of an invention which blows smoke into rat holes with a hand-operated pump, Chinnapayan Krishnan has been able to increase his daily earnings to $1.00 a day, up from the 25 cents he used to earn without the blower.

The advance in rat-hunting technology costs $25, so very few of the three million Irula can afford it. There are 100 million farmers in Krishnan’s state alone, so if microcredit loans of $25 can be made to prospective rat catchers, grain harvests may be saved and the diet of the Irula may be improved.

Before the smoke machine Krishnan and his wife and nine children often had only berries to eat if rat hunting was bad. With the machine he averages about 20 rats per day, which provide his family with cheap protein. In addition he can save some grain from the holes where he finds the rats.

For those Americans who might feel queasy about eating rats, there is nothing as tasty as squirrel stew with plenty of gravy. As a matter of fact their relatives in India probably have had a better diet--except for the locals that raid my bird feeders all the time. Some day I’m going to have a good stew or barbecue myself.

Who Is Worth More--A Democrat Or Republican?

In contrast to the rat hunters of India, The Bush Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has determined that each American life is worth $6.9 million. This value is used to determine a cost-benefit ratio for changes in environmental laws.

In other words, if it costs millions to install filters and other devices on smokestacks to limit the dispersal of pollutants, is it cost effective to actually go ahead with adding the devices?

I think it’s an interesting observation that the value of an American body has gone down $1 million over the last five years. I wonder if the administration sees the irony in decreasing the value of the body during Lurch’s tenure in the White House.

Besides the Indian rat hunters in farming country, there are human kidney hunters in the large Indian cities who offer “large” sums of money if poor people will sell them one of their kidneys. It has proven to be a booming business. $2,500 is the average standing offer for a kidney, although many times the donor is often cheated out of most of the money.

Some poor people are “kidnapped” and have a kidney removed by force. The Indians have records of 500 people who have had kidneys stolen from them in the last eight years.

There are even secret operating theaters in India where transplants are done illegally for about one-third of the $70,000 the operation costs in China. I guess capitalism is present in Hindu India.

Working The Landfills And Dumps Of America

We often see those horrible pictures of adults and children working the huge landfills of Asia and the Philippines, picking through the muck and garbage to find a bit of plastic or metal to sell and a scrap of food to eat.

We might be going down the same path shortly. We already have people stealing metals to sell as scrap. In January alone a cemetery in Lake Worth, Florida lost over $18,000 worth of bronze and brass pots that had been left by mourners on the graves of their loved ones.

Ironically copper is now worth $3.60 a pound in the U.S., primarily because of the increased demand from India and China.

Foreclosed and abandoned homes are being stripped of all copper wiring and plumbing. Aluminum siding and rain gutters at $1.26 a pound is also a popular scrounge item.

Auto catalytic converters containing platinum and palladium are being stolen off cars in parking lots across the country. Metal from irrigation equipment in farm fields has become a favorite target of thieves.

While the world’s poor--in every country except the Scandanavian peninsula--are hardscrabbling just to get food, celebritarians are cashing in on the worship, idiocy, and boredom of those lacking creativity, imagination, and curiosity.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just cashed a $14 million check from People magazine so their new twins would be featured in a 19-page section of the recent Pitt-Jolie 9.5 quaking union. The Pitts got another $4 million from People for the 2006 picture of their baby daughter Shiloh. Are Americans sick or what?

George Carlin, the comic who had a better grasp of what is happening in this country than most politicians, economists, and philosophers, summed up why a family health insurance policy now costs $12,106 and why we spend $6,697 per capita to get some of the worst medical care in the world: “The real owners (of this country) are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying--lobbying to get what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.”

If Carlin had not recently died of disgust, he would have made a good presidential candidate for the working class.

Why Not Serve The Rat-eaters $6,300-a-bottle Perrier-Jouet Champagne?

In these days of “reality” TV, wouldn’t it make a terrific scene if the family of the rat catcher Chinnapayan Krishnan would be served the latest limited edition champagne at $79,000 a case (12 bottles per case--commonly called a 12-pack in Detroit Lakes) so they could wash down the barbecued rats? I might even tune in.

Another possible reality show would be filming the super-rich trying on the Monica boot made by Christian Louboutin. The $1,790 boot is 28 inches high, goes beyond mid-thigh, and has no zipper.

The boots are the latest hot item among the ladies who have everything (except common sense) and want to create an impression among their peers (if there are any).

The manager of Louboutin’s Boutique in New York says: “It’s going to take a good five minutes to put them on, and a lot of wiggling around.” Real determined women sometimes use margarine or cooking oil to assist them in “squishing” them on. Now that’s a real yuck. But what else can the super-rich do to get attention?

I would imagine that Rush Limbaugh (I used to call him Trash Limbo but now I do not want to denigrate a drug addict), the man with half a brain tied behind his back, would welcome a reality segment about how he lives alone in his 24,000 sq. ft. Palm Beach home complete with love cherubs on the ceilings and a life-size oil portrait of himself. That has to be a real psychodelic, Oxycontin type of life.

Rich Enough To Have Your Own Fire Department

A member of the Federal Reserve Board said the other day that the living standards of the U.S. will probably continue to slide for the next 20 years.

That doesn’t say much for the lifestyles of our children and grandchildren.

The gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase. Wealthy Californians are now hiring their own private fire fighters to protect their mansions in the fire-wracked hills of the state. That must take real money.

But more ominous for this “richest nation in the world” is the fact that we are on the slippery slope of mediocrity while the rest of the world continues to outperform us.

A USA Today editorial points out why we are in danger of losing our edge in the global economy. In the 1970’s our young earned college degrees at a higher rate than any other country. Now we rank tenth among 30 democracies in the world in the rate of college graduates. Only one-half of our high school graduates now actually finish college with a degree, giving us a tie with Mexico.

College is no longer affordable for the middle-class. Since the early 1980’s college tuition and fees have gone up 375 percent while family income has gone up only 127 percent. Those numbers don’t match up well.

Sometimes I think half of our populace lives in some kind of never-never land. We hear all kinds of myths. A major one is that U.S. healthcare is the best in the world. Total nonsense.

We rank 28th in infant mortality rate, which is worse than Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Northern Ireland. We really don’t lead in any category--except we have the highest costs in the world, 20 percent more than Luxembourg, the country in second place. We spend twice as much as 30 other wealthy countries.

Our per capita rate of deaths caused by medical mistakes is the highest among 19 industrialized countries. The five-year survival rate for cervical cancer is worse than Italy, Ireland, Germany and others too numerous to mention.
Deaths from asthma are twice the rate of Germany’s and Sweden’s. We can go on and on.

We have not reached the rat catcher or kidney grower stage yet for our children and grandchildren, but how many parents actually believe that their children will be better off than they are today?