Three things I learned from the internet:

Lesson 1: Sea-Monkeys® support hate. Harold von Braunhut, the man who in 1957 began marketing brine shrimp -- specifically a patented hybrid involving Artemia salina, used his fortune to support the Aryan Nation. This despite the fact that von Braunhut was born an ethnic Jew. Note: other than Sea-Monkeys, von Braunhut literally holds patents for, among other things, X-Ray Cameras and an aquarium watch. ("A wearer of such a timepiece is then able to contemporaneously tell time and enjoy watching the aquatic pets." Thank you, Google Patents!)

Lesson 2: Eat dolphins and die. Further investigation into the life cycle of the brine shrimp accidentally led me to discover that the Japanese annually hunt dolphins. Many in the East consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy, and the hunting of dolphins continues despite the fact that they frequently contain more than 10 times the legal Japanese allowable tolerance of mercury. Note: Mercury poisoning is blamed for many neurological conditions, one of which may be developing a taste for dolphin meat.

Lesson 3: Mormons control the world's fish supply. Utah is among the world's foremost suppliers of brine shrimp (at one time controlling up to 90% of the market), as the Great Salt Lake is an ideal breeding ground for the little critters. (The brine shrimp is, in fact, the largest animal living in the saline lake.) Commercially, brine shrimp are used as food for birds and farmed aquatic life, biomedical experimentation, and, of course, pets. Brine shrimp fishing on the Great Salt Lake has its own lobby, the Utah Artemia Association, that relies on the tiny organism for life support like a tapeworm. Note: despite their nearly microscopic size, brine shrimp can carry and transmit real tapeworms.

If I can learn all of this, quite by accident, in 5 minutes on the internet, I believe that this clearly demonstrates that it is finally time to stop throwing away money on public education. I never learned anything as interesting or useful in my high school French classes. (What did I learn in French?
Je ne sais pas.)

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