nabeepchen

On a nice rainy day like today (my friend in Atlanta just emailed me and asked for some of our rain since they are in a severe drought), I thought I would send shock waves through the Internet.

First question–whatever happened to the bird flu? What happened to that dire pandemic that was upon us, and the predictions that this was the Armageddon that we’ve all been waiting for.
Is the sudden media silence about this deafening? Does it remind you of the threat of small pox a few years ago, when Bush was trying to talk everyone into getting vaccinated–that is, after giving Adventis (I think) about a billion dollars to produce a vaccine?

The threat of bio-small pox vanished when less than 10% of the “first responders” got vaccinated and the rest flatly refused. It seems that the bird flu is going down the same road. Nothing happened, it didn’t spread, it didn’t jump species in any significant way.

Second question–Does eating soy make kids gay? Don’t laugh, some people think so. If you’re feeling droopy over a dark rainy day, reading this should bring a smile to your face, and then you realize how truly loopy some of us are. According to Jim Rutz, who authored this profound piece of scientific discovery, ingesting soy products feminizes men and in turn, makes them gay.

Well according to this logic, then most of the men living in Asia are gay. Or since soy has been consumed in Asia for thousands of years, it seems that their societies would have died out long ago, since there just wouldn’t have been enough straight guys to keep producing babies.

And I’ve also seen a lot of gay men who redefine the term masculine–nothing sweet and chi chi about these bruisers. They probably beat up hairdressers for fun.

Anyway, the stupidity of this logic isn’t worth discussing, but there is a lot of soy-mongering going on these days. I may blog about that later on, as I’ve been reading some of this stuff on the web, and it seems to emanate from a few small but very vocal groups–primarily those who promote eating beef and drinking cow’s milk. Strange, huh. But I look at it this way—you can do all the scientific studies that you want, but the fact remains that soy has been an integral part of Asian diets for millenniums. In China, soybean were mentioned in texts that are over 5,000 years. Soybeans were introduced to Indonesia about 1600 years ago.

Considering the population of Asia, I doubt that soy has had a detrimental effect on health. Considering that the Japanese who eat traditional diets have some of the longest and healthiest lives on this planet, and considering their love affair with soy (there are 38,000 tofu shops in Japan and even the 7-11 stores sell tofu), I can’t imagine what danger soy holds for me.