Archive forMay 2010 - Peter Sibbald's Blog About Photography and Filmmaking

Yes Sir, yes Mam, don’t let his laid back southern drawl  fool you. My friend Dewayne Morris, rodeo barrelman “Soulman”, extreme bullfighter, producer and ex-US soldier, is the salt of the earth. Fuelled by a breakfast of Froot Loops and Dr. Peppers, Dewayne is one of the fastest mammals on two feet and just the sort of person who’d put his life on the line to save yours without a moment’s thought. In fact, whether it is cowboy protection (I’ve watched him do it, repeatedly) or a stranger in the street, he can’t help himself but to do so; I’d trust him with mine.

On Wednesday evenings, Dewayne hosts the Soulman Hour, pod-cast radio on the Makin8 Rodeo Network where he’s as apt to interview head-smashed-in cowboys as he is his own mother:

Right now Dewayne is competing in a pilot for a new reality TV show, America’s Real Cowboy, in the still snowy mountains of Colorado where he has just won the first round. Good luck Soulman.

In the same vein as my last post, and from a work done at great legal risk by the documentary makers, the following quotations:

“Monsanto, where creative chemistry works wonders for you.”

“I have never seen a situation where one company could have so much overwhelming influence at the highest levels of regulatory decision making, as an example of Monsanto with its GM food policy and the government.”

“More powerful than bombs; it’s more powerful than God”.

“We’re touching something that is untouchable.”

The World According to Monsanto

If there can be found to be any silver lining to such incipiently disastrous events as BP’s recent and ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is the reminder that we must be constantly vigilant of the hubris of Humankind and vigourous in demanding that our leaders and policy makers adhere to the wisdom and good leadership protocols embodied in the Precautionary Principle. After all, such man-man catastrophes have always been completely avoidable.

To reprise an earlier blog post:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

–Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, pt. xi, p.10(1776)