Ramblings in Retirement

Were it not for the ever-increasing volume of seemingly credible scientific evidence that the Earth is warming up, I would remain a complete cynic on this subject. Where I live it seems to get colder year on year: winter is colder and drier, spring is cooler and wetter, summer is usually cancelled and autumn is like spring only cooler and darker and windier. However, that may be a result of progressive, age-induced, low-temperature intolerance and purely subjective.

Firstly, I do not quite grasp how we can observe and measure a system as large and diverse as the Earth’s lithosphere plus hydrosphere plus atmosphere plus biosphere and claim that we know its average temperature to within a tenth of a degree C. Unfortunately, it seems that we can and it is claimed to be a quantifiable fact that the Earth in total is warming up, rather than that the temperature is gradually smoothing out causing ice to melt at ever higher latitudes and altitudes. It is also claimed/feared (?) that, assuming this trend continues, there will be significant unpleasant consequences, but the climate models do not always agree on those, except for sea levels rises.

That global warming is a fact is disputed, but nevertheless generally accepted to be true and the prevailing theory for its cause is fossil fuel combustion by humans. Hence, we have the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)! This theory is the best we have, since various other theories have little or no supporting evidence:

• Global warming by cosmic radiation
• Global warming by invisible, undersea, volcanic activity
• Global warming by sunspot cycles

The latter theory, the only one where direct scientific evidence exists and data from the past is available, is bedevilled by the fact that it predicts the opposite of what we currently observe. The temperature on Earth is supposed to increase and decrease with corresponding increases and decreases in solar sunspot activity. However, sunspot activity has inexplicably reduced to an extremely low level over recent years, which should bring the onset of a mini-ice age, but it has not. Depending on whom you believe, either global warming has continued or there has been no change. However, each new set of data analysed on icecap melting usually indicates that the degree of warming exceeds our prior estimates.

Hence, for want of a better theory, I would be inclined to go with AGW were it not for the doubts that are raised by looking at prior interglacial periods. At the peak of the previous interglacial period around 130,000 years ago, the average temperature on Earth was about 4 degrees C warmer than it currently is and sea levels were about 8 metres higher than now. That probably meant that there was no polar ice during the northern summers, so you could sail from Spitsbergen to Alaska over the North Pole. The two interglacial periods prior to that also had temperature peaks around 3-4 degrees C warmer than now, so maybe it is normal?

Just considering the last interglacial, we Homo sapiens were around on earth 130,000 years ago, but there were only very limited numbers of our Stone Age ancestors existing at that time and they were all confined solely to Africa. I cannot see how they could have triggered an AGW, so that period must have been a natural climate deviation. If such a deviation was possible then, why could it not be possible now? In 130,000 years the geography of the Earth does not change that much. The continents were in their current configuration to within a few kilometres, since plate tectonics operates at a speed of only a few to many millimetres per year. Also, I could find no evidence of any conjuncture in the Milankovitch cycles that might have had a forcing effect and, as far as I could find, there were no catastrophic events that might conceivably have triggered such an extreme temperature increase. Hence, since it was natural then, maybe our climate was heading that way of its own accord in our current interglacial as well, and our efforts with CO2 production are at best only giving it a little extra impulse.

Is there anyone out there who can point me at anything readable that can help me decide for or against AGW?

Islamophobia is an oxymoron. A phobia is an irrational fear of something, but a fear of Islam is entirely rational. A fear of Islam is a real and genuine concern that, as a political ideology, it poses a serious threat to the secular, democratic societies of the West. I share that concern very deeply, but feel compelled to look at facts when evaluating my prejudices.

Despite the obvious past failure of Islam to overrun us infidels, many in the West are concerned about the increasing immigration of Muslims into their societies. They see this as a sort of unspoken conspiracy to do by covert means what Islam has failed to do by explicit action over the past 1400 years. However, I do not believe this to be the case, since as far as I can tell there is no structure or organisation or authority in Islam to direct such a process, other than the self-contradictory Koran itself. The late Muammar Gaddafi claimed that there was a movement for Islam to conquer Europe from within via mass immigration, but nobody took him too seriously. Personally, I believe that Muslims emigrate to the West simply because most Muslim societies are failures! These immigrants want the hope of a peaceful and prosperous future for themselves and their children in a successful society. The Islamic world is an economic, political, cultural, social and moral disaster full of sectarian violence and hatred. It has a bleak future.

One of the claims of the Islamophobes is that the relatively small Islamic populations in the West will reproduce more aggressively and thus grow much faster than the indigenous Caucasian populations. The claim is that within a few generations they will outnumber us: a conquest by the superior productivity of the Islamic womb, financed nota bene by our own generous social security systems! However, some recent studies in the Netherlands seem to negate this proposition. The Dutch are very good at registering things, when allowed, and thus there is a wealth of data awaiting analysis. It is all publicly available on the web site of the Dutch Central Statistics Office (CBS.NL). One such analysis recently done concerns the behaviour of women with varying ethnic backgrounds who are of childbearing age.

The two largest Islamic immigrant groups in the Netherlands, each representing well over 2% of the total population, are Turks and Moroccans. In total, Muslims represent just under 6% of the Dutch population, so Turks and Moroccans dominate. These people, the first generation, primarily mature men, some married, some not, came initially to the Netherlands as migrant workers in the second half of the 1960’s. They were invariably poorly educated, unskilled labourers from remote rural areas. The wives they brought with them or acquired later from their home countries were equally uneducated and subservient and gave birth to many children, as was common in the regions they grew up in. As a result of Dutch fact-gathering diligence, good data on them and their successors is available. This was true even though the Dutch assumed these migrants were just here to work and that after a decade or two they would take their savings and go back to where they came from. Contrary to expectations, the vast majority of them stayed put, even though the economic crises of the 1970’s and 1980’s made a large proportion of them both unemployed and unemployable. They chose to stay in the Netherlands with their families on social security benefits rather than returning to the uncertainty of their poorer home countries, which proves to me that uneducated they well may be, but stupid they certainly are not.

Thus for the subsequent generation of Turks and Moroccans we also have good statistics. That second generation is now in its 40's and 50's, so has probably completed its childbearing period. In terms of the number of children produced, the state of play as of 2010 was:

• First generation Turkish women produced 2.53 children/women, but the second generation only produced 1.69!

• First generation Moroccan women produced 3.50 children/women, but the second generation only produced 2.04!

In 2010 the indigenous Caucasian Dutch birth rate was 1.81. Hence, in one generation Turkish women have managed to curb their reproductive rate to a level under that of native Dutch women and the Moroccan women are hard on their heels to achieve the same status…

What is even more encouraging on the global front is that in Turkey itself, the women have reduced their birth rate to 2.21 and in Morocco they have achieved a reduction to 2.15.

I find this an extremely encouraging trend, but the Islamophobes will have to adjust their propaganda.

There has been some furore here in the Netherlands in 2013 concerning the fact that the country is, apparently, a significant link in the global corporate tax evasion process. Thousands of foreign corporations, everyone from Apple to IBM and Starbucks to Wal-Mart, have empty shell holding companies registered in NL with no employees. They may also have separate legal entities here which are normal operating companies engaged in their primary business activities. These corporations are availing themselves of what unscrupulous accountants (like the big four: Deloitte, E&Y, KPMG & PWC) call the Dutch Sandwich construction.

I assumed that something questionable was going on, but did not understand how this worked until I watched a fascinating 50-minute YouTube documentary on tax havens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4o13isDdfY&feature=player_embedded

That gave a description of how the Dutch Sandwich worked in a very practical example. That was a case where a UK Parliamentary Committee was trying to determine why Starbucks, which despite being very successful in the UK, consistently loses money hand over fist, year in year out, according to its UK corporate tax returns. Despite that, the parent company is highly profitable in total, though it pays practically no tax anywhere. The Dutch Sandwich is an indispensible link in this profit-laundering global network and is applied where royalties are involved. In NL tax on royalty income is treated separately, taxed lightly and it is possible (if you are large and powerful) to have a special, secret ruling with the Dutch taxman whereby you get an even lower rate.

Hence, these empty shell holding companies are the vehicles through which royalties are collected from all the operating subsidiaries. For example, let’s say for simplicity that Starbucks UK Ltd sells coffee for on average £1 per cup and that the cost price of providing that in the UK (rental on premises, staff, ingredients, power, marketing, etc., etc.) is £0.65 per cup. However, Starbucks UK, under its licensing arrangement with Starbucks International BV (the Dutch BV is the equivalent of an English Ltd) has to pay BV a £0.40 royalty on every cup they sell and they sell about 100,000,000 per year. Hence, poor, hard-working Starbucks UK Ltd has a turnover of £100M per annum with a loss of £5M and that is what is in their UK corporate tax returns. Those losses, of course, become carry-forward accrued losses for any future UK tax liability should someone pull the plug on this happy arrangement. Meanwhile, lucky Starbucks International BV has received £40M from the UK for doing absolutely nothing, pays a pittance in Dutch tax on those royalties, a small fee to those running the holding operation on their behalf (an accounting firm) and the remainder is shipped off in the twinkling of an eye to the Cayman Islands where there in no corporate tax. The bottom line is that Starbucks pays about 1.6% tax on its profits & not one penny of it in the UK.

Now, I call this tax evasion, but the big four call it “tax optimisation” and they get away with it?

In April 2013 I visited Dubai for the first time in more than a decade. This time it was for pleasure, whereas on all previous occasions it had been for business. Since the late 1980’s I had been to Dubai for a couple of days on business every 3 to 5 years and every time I returned there I noticed that the city seemed to have doubled in size. However, it was quite small in the late 1980’s, so a few doublings did not make all that much difference, but another few doublings since the turn of the century most definitely have. Dubai is now an incredible, vibrant, chic, dynamic, cosmopolitan city of more than two million inhabitants, of which less than 15% are the original Arabs of the region. It oozes wealth and is inundated with temporary visitors: those on holiday, those in transit and those on business. It is claimed that in 2012 Dubai had in excess of one million visitors staying overnight every single day of the year! Given how unbearable the summer there in the Gulf is, with temperatures up to 50 degrees C, that would seem like a miracle. Anyway, there is an amazing variety of good quality restaurants and cafes featuring every possible cuisine on the planet to service these hordes of visitors. They are not cheap, but also not excessively priced, and you need to know where to go if you want a glass of wine with your lunch or dinner. A lovely place to spend a short week!

It is a common misconception that Dubai’s current excessive wealth comes from oil, as is the case with all other rich nations on the Arabian Peninsula, but that is not true. Dubai’s oil reserves were relatively small and the majority was exploited and depleted during the last three decades of the 20th century. Currently, only a small part of Dubai’s income arises from a dwindling level of oil production. However, the oil revenues generated last century were wisely used to create the infrastructure to allow the development of the construction, tourism and services industries that are the motors driving the current economic success of the place.

Of course, because of its Islamic roots, there is an unpleasant, but politely ignored, undertone of latent aggression, cultural restriction and discrimination. Classes and discussions on cultural sensitivity make it clear to expats as to who is in charge, the restrictions on alcohol and that the things men may do to women against their will are viewed in a totally different light. Crimes, other than those inflicted on women (not real crimes, just inconveniences), are extremely rare, since the penalties are extreme. I do not recall seeing a single policeman the whole time I was there, but maybe they were all driving around in their Lamborghinis: thus moving so fast I could not spot them. We shall return to this subject later.

Primarily, however, I would like to examine Dubai as a financial bubble. In our (limited) experience, all bubbles burst, sooner or later. They burst because the funds fuelling them run out or get diverted elsewhere. We have had many excellent examples of bursting bubbles this century ranging from the dotcom bubble to the housing bubbles (bursting in the US, Spain, the Netherlands, to name but a few) to the global financial crises, not to mention the Greek and Cypriot Ponzi schemes. However, Dubai only suffered a minor hiccough for a couple of years from 2008 and is now back to all systems go and the sky is the limit. Why is that the case when the rest of the world is still wallowing in debt, austerity and doom and gloom?

Dubai is primarily about construction. In the past decade an incredible parade of ambitious, superbly conceived, scrupulously researched, state of the art projects have been launched, and many completed. They explicitly went after many world records, such as the best hotel in the world, the biggest artificial island in the world, the biggest shopping mall in the world, the tallest building in the world, the most beautiful fountain in the world, etc. That is why Dubai has a native population of only 300,000 Arabs supplemented by nearly 2 million expats who are employed to realise the dream. Each one of these projects costs anywhere from a few billion to many tens of billions of dollars and most of them were launched since I was previously in Dubai just after the turn of the century:

• The Palm Jumeirah
• The Palm Jebel Ali
• The Palm Deira
• The World
• The Universe
• Downtown Business District
• Burj Al Arab
• Dubai Marina
• Burj Khalifa

See Wikipedia for much more interesting stuff on these wondrous projects, including the credentials of the local boss:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Rashid_Al_Maktoum

This ruler is a shining example of how education is irrelevant if you have a modicum of talent and the good fortune to be born into the right family!

At the moment, I would only like to say a few words about the projects I visited on this trip. Firstly, we were staying with friends in the Burj Khalifa complex, which was opened in 2010. The tower itself, the world’s tallest building still, is but one part of the whole. The whole includes the Dubai Mall, 18 kilometres of shopping delight (or in my case drudgery) with an impressive aquarium, and the Dubai Fountain, which is exquisite, plus 9 hotels, 22 cinemas, more than one hundred restaurants and cafes and 30,000 “homes”. As far as we could tell from the Burj Khalifa observation deck on the 124th floor, the homes were all apartments, mostly high-rise. The Burj Khalifa building itself is mixed use (hotel, apartments, offices) and can house up to 35,000 people. Where we stayed was on the top floor of a seven-storey building combining a parking garage, offices and apartments with a communal swimming pool on the fifth floor. It was a lovely, quiet, roomy, well-appointed, 2-bed/2-bath apartment with a large balcony: very pleasant.

Secondly, the Palm Jumeirah we toured around mostly by car, it being the only Palm nearing completion. The whole structure is there and the vast majority of the hotels, parks, villas and apartment blocks are ready. In Dubai they say that the majority are occupied, but that only means that someone has purchased them from the developer. There are 28 hotels, in excess of 4000 luxury villas and tens of thousands of apartments. I could not find any conclusive figures on what it had cost, somewhere between $12 and $54 billion various articles claimed, nor could I find confirmation on the claim that it is sinking.

Thirdly, we wandered around the Dubai Marina, which is pleasant enough along the pedestrian walks of the waterfront lined with boutiques and cafes, but as a place to live would seem a horrifying monstrosity: a bit like large parts of Manhattan. Apparently, it will ultimately boast 100,000 “homes”, most of them in 50+ storey apartment blocks with not much more than 10 metres between them, clustered around the yacht harbour, which has room for a few hundred boats. It currently claims to have a population that is predominantly Western European, but it was the most uninspiring part of Dubai that I saw.

All these projects are bringing homes and offices onto the market at the rate of, I would guess, a few tens of thousands per year. Who is to live and work in these places? It seems to me that it can only be those committed to earning a good wage from completing the current projects and constructing the subsequent ones, plus those servicing the infrastructure to permit it all to function. But these people, the expats, in general only stay for a limited number of years and mostly do not purchase property. So now we come to the crux of the matter: who are the purchasers. If a local developer puts some tens of billions of dollars into building a Palm, money readily obtainable from the banks and government on easy terms (since the developer himself and the banks are appendages of the same government), then he must be expecting to sell the resulting homes and offices for much more than that. So, who buys all this stuff and rents it out to the expats busy building the next round of stuff?

Dubai is a cash oriented culture. Paying a restaurant bill or a shop purchase elicits surprise if you present a credit or bankcard. Arriving at a bank to open an account with a suitcase full of cash is perfectly normal. Buying a villa on the Palm with a large suitcase, containing some millions in $100 bills, is business as usual. Buying a whole floor of apartments with a suitcase full of €500 notes is a sign of the times. Of the more than one million visitors arriving every week, some small percentage arrive with such suitcases and undoubtedly the vast majority of that cash comes from highly profitable business operations not seen by any fiscal authorities. The world’s biggest industries are drugs, prostitution and corruption. It seems that the proceeds can be taken to Dubai and laundered into property ownership, no questions asked. One friend claimed that 85% of property sales are done this way, though a newspaper article I found (Bloomberg) claimed that it was only 70% of all property purchased by foreigners that is paid for from a suitcase full of cash. These cash-rich people arrive from everywhere: from Russia, from Iran, from Pakistan, from India, from Europe, from China, you name it. Of the billions in development aid that the US and Europe have poured into various places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, etc. a significant part now resides in Dubai. I remember reading a few years ago that the Pentagon was extremely embarrassed about the fact that it could not account for a significant proportion of the billions poured into Afghanistan, but that many humble Afghan officials involved with the distribution of that money had the good fortune to acquire luxury retirement villas on the Jumeirah Palm.

Hence, I suspect that Dubai’s economy is to a large extent a money laundering bubble. As such, it probably has a much better life expectancy than the more mundane bubbles. It is fed by the world’s great, dynamic, enterprising growth industries: drugs, prostitution and corruption. In addition, as the banking system in the West experiences ever more pressure from governments for reform and transparency, the traditional bank secrecy comes under attack, as we have seen in Switzerland and Luxembourg recently. Hence, illegal money must find new avenues to escape. Dubai is and will remain one of those avenues, as long as owning property in Dubai appears attractive and the boom continues.

However, one thing could change this abruptly and that is Islamic militancy. If Sheikh Muhammad dies or loses his grip and those sympathetic to enforcing the less pleasant edicts of Islam gain control, then there will be a collapse in property prices, projects will go on indefinite hold and an exodus of expats will ensue. However, I think this unlikely in the short to medium term since the Sheikh has done his best for his people, provided them with health care and education, made them all rich and, to the extent that Muslims can be happy, he has done his best to make them happy. This is true particularly for the superior species, men. There are as many servant girls in Dubai as there are Arabs of both species, 300,000 thus , so the men wishing to indulge any fantasies have plenty of captive Indian, Indonesian and Filipino girls to chose from. A book has just been published in NL about the, in total, 2 million such servant girls on the whole Arabian Peninsula and it starts with those in Dubai. It came from a doctoral research project of the Law Department at the University of Amsterdam. I shall have to read it.

Another possible issue for the future is technical. Although the best of modern technology has been applied to the construction of the Dubai wonder projects, it remains to be seen whether the design, the materials, the builders and the finishers were focussed on durability. Maybe the Jumeirah Palm is sinking and many of the 50+ storey apartment blocks may suffer from construction faults in a decade or two, but so does a lot of the stuff put up in other parts of the world.

All in all it was a fascinating five-day trip yielding much food for thought. The Emirates A380 flights from Amsterdam to Dubai and back were superb, even in tourist class, and they were on time…

The current controversy about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) is not an issue that I have thought much about, so now is the time to order my thoughts. It would seem that most discussions on the subject are normally centred round the issue of the safety of GM food (Franken food), but that is surely only one of many issues. However, it is the one that captures media attention, so let us examine it.

For a start we should recognise that we have, at least passively, been genetically modifying our food and domestic animals for the best part of the last ten thousand years. For most of that time, till only recently, we did it by trial and error. Human selection replaced natural selection in determining which random genetic modifications were retained and which were rejected based almost entirely on visual criteria. It was an agonizingly slow and undirected process in which we undoubtedly missed a lot of opportunities and lost a lot of valuable characteristics, particularly nutritional ones along the way. Nevertheless, it did get us from a wolf to a Chihuahua, from the aurochs to Friesian cattle and from primitive grasses to the soft red winter wheat widely used in baking delicious pastries, but in the latter case losing all the vitamin A content in the process. It was not until the green revolution of the late 1960’s that a more scientific approach to the selection and production processes, particularly for grains, became widespread. Over the subsequent few decades, that prevented millions, if not billions, of people from starving to death, but that revolution has now run its course and has run out of steam. To feed the unborn, but definitely expected, additional 2 to 3 billion people coming in the next few decades, we need a new impetus. Hopefully, thereafter the population will stabilise at around 10 billion or, even better, shrink a bit.

Given the fact that the population is going to increase by 30 to 40 percent, but the total amount of agricultural land available on the planet is dwindling, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. Desertification, erosion and human habitation remove more land from the agricultural pool each year than is added by deforestation of the remaining fertile areas in the tropics. In addition, the climate is demonstrating an increasing instability, with wild fluctuations between extremes resulting in increasing crop failures. Oscillating between the extremes of droughts followed by floods causes not only crop failures but also the rapid deterioration of soil fertility leading to erosion. To make matters worse, food consumption patterns in the BRICS, where 3 billion people live, are shifting relentlessly towards the high-protein diets we treasure in the west. Cows, chickens, goats, pigs, sheep and all other domesticated livestock, plus the feedstock they need, require a lot more land/calorie than crops. Adding to the problem is that ethanol production for the noble task of reducing our dependence on Arab oil is yet another drain on the global food supply. To cap it off, fish stocks worldwide are also becoming seriously depleted through overfishing, pollution of the oceans and destructive trawling practices.

Hence, I can see no other impetus available: either we accept GMO and pursue it aggressively on a global scale or we sentence billions to death from starvation in the coming decades. GMO, of course, may also fail to deal with the magnitude of this resource crunch, but as far as I can see it is the only chance we have of dealing with the situation in a humane way.

Opposition to GM food is definitely a spoilt man’s hobby, but is supported by a large segment of the population in the west for, I think, misplaced reasons. These reasons seem to me to be:

1. Part of a more general trend opposing rational thought and the pursuit of the scientific method. The world has become vastly more complicated within a single generation and the prevailing optimism of the 1950’s and 60’s has been replaced by the pessimism of a GFC driven 21st century. There is a gnawing fear that decline and collapse is imminent and that science and technology have brought us to this mess. What is conveniently ignored is that, without the application of science and technology, the Malthusian solution to the population problem would have operated and most of us would be long dead. Science did indeed enable us to create and sustain 7 billion people on this planet: it is unbridled human greed and the capitalist economic system that prevents there being an equitable division of the available resources. Science and only science can offer us any hope of dealing with the additional 2 to 3 billion who are on their way.

2. Companies like Monsanto behave so abominably that anything they are involved with must be evil and dangerous. However, instead of dealing with Monsanto and friends, who own half of Congress, let’s just oppose their products, GM food, it’s easier.

3. Ignorance of what mankind has learned and achieved over the past 400 years through the application of the scientific method, and what genetic engineering really is. Thus there is an irrational fear of the unknown.

It is not without its dangers, but to me GMO offers nothing but promise:

GM Crops

We are now 30 years into the era of GM crops and, to my knowledge, nothing produced so far has been harmful to humans. The most promising recent efforts came this century with the development of golden rice, which contains vitamin A and could have a significant affect on the incidence of vitamin A deficiency, a serious problem in much of Africa and Southern Asia. Despite predictions that golden rice could help prevent millions of child deaths per year, it has not been approved for use anywhere.

Apart from the standard arguments (see the salmon below), for crops the argument of creating a dangerous monoculture situation threatening biodiversity has been used. For me, it appears that we probably already are in a dangerous monoculture situation with or without GM crops. How dangerous it is remains to be seen, but I am sceptical.

GM Livestock

There are still no approved genetically modified livestock in the food chain. However, there are GM animals, such as goats, which have been engineered to produce special protein drugs for use in human medical treatment. Why does nobody object to that?

GM Microorganisms

Microorganisms were the first to undergo GM development. My wife, as a diabetic, appreciates one of the early successes of GM. It engineered bacteria capable of producing insulin. Insulin and a range of other human proteins are now produced for medical use by GM bacteria on a large scale. Why does nobody object to that?

GM Poultry

The only example of GM I have heard of here is an attempt in the UK to create GM chickens that would NOT transmit bird flu. That would be most handy and save an awful lot of vaccinations (of both chickens and people), but the research is ongoing.

The broilers that animal rights groups are protesting about are simply cross breeds from various types of chickens fed with special diets, including growth hormones. That focussed cross breeding, with the attendant human-influenced natural selection, has been going on for about a century.

GM Seafood

The first test case here is a GM salmon that grows much faster and grows to become much larger than the salmon we know. The genes that cause this situation are naturally occurring in other species of fish and have been cut and spliced into the Atlantic salmon’s genome.

There are two main arguments of those fighting against approval of this product. The first is that the meat may have long-term negative health effects in humans, even though it is chemically indistinguishable from natural salmon and contains no harmful chemical compounds. The second is that if these salmon were to escape into the wild they would out-compete all current species and wipe them out.

The first argument lacks credibility, I feel, since our digestive systems do not absorb and use genes from whatever we eat. What we eat we break down into basic chemical building blocks and then construct our own genes and cells from those.

The second argument, however, has merit in that it may well be true, but that is how natural selection works: when a new species out-competes the old, the old die out. That is why 99.9% of all species that ever evolved are now extinct. The inferior salmon species would join them. However, it is equally likely that the new salmon, brought up in an artificial environmental niche, where humans supply adequate feedstock and protect them from predators, could not compete in the wild where the food supply is limited and erratic and the predators have no aversion to GM food.

See Wikipedia for a whole host of articles on this subject. I am all for GMO, but a lot of people seem to disagree with me.

Since this blog is here & costs me nothing any more, why not use it in connection with FaceBook & Twitter?

OK, I'm convinced: what do we post?

In the beginning there was the void.
And the void was God.
And God filled and fulfilled the void.
And the void was without form or structure or substance.
And the void was outside of time and immeasurable.
And God wondered why there was a void.
And God wondered to what purpose he existed in the void.
And God wondered from whence he came and where he was destined to go.
And God wondered what could be done to resolve these questions.
And in a moment of contemplation he had a revelation.
And he created a universe of matter and substance and energy that would exist.
And he created time and dimensions and suitable laws to govern it for his purpose.
And into this universe would evolve intelligent beings that would be curious.
And those beings would ask, Why is there something rather than nothing?
And they would ask, Why are we here and where are we going?
And maybe they could find answers to such difficult questions.
And maybe that could help God solve his own riddles.
And after observing for fourteen billion years he despaired, for there was no answer.
And to expedite the process God sent messengers to all intelligent life forms.
And such messengers assumed the form of the dominant local species to gain acceptance.
And spoke in their tongue, but could not divulge their true mission.
And the messengers were treated with suspicion and many suffered an unpleasant end.
And God became furious and frustrated and he abolished the void.
And all that was left was the universe of matter and energy.
And mankind looked at that universe and saw a thing of beauty.
And mankind saw that it was good, but they did not understand why.