When will it be ALL GONE?

[niky]

The middle class got the lesser of two evils. Now all you have to do is get them to choose the least of three and Socialism in America can start in earnest.

Funny all the mudslinging between parties about vested industrial interests. The only difference between them is which inudstries get the interest. The one good thing about Obama is those industries included "green" ones, but one might argue he supported too many of the wrong ones. What a waste of money.

[freebeard]

Tweeledee and Tweeledum

"The upper class: keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class: pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there...just to scare the s@@t out of the middle class."

George Carlin RIP

[suspectnumber961]

Institute for Responsible Technology -


The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) doesn't think so. The Academy reported that Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food, including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM asked physicians to advise patients to avoid GM foods.

Before the FDA decided to allow GMOs into food without labeling, FDA scientists had repeatedly warned that GM foods can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged long-term safety studies, but were ignored.
gmo danger2

Since then, findings include:

Thousands of sheep, buffalo, and goats in India died after grazing on Bt cotton plants

Mice eating GM corn for the long term had fewer, and smaller, babies

More than half the babies of mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks, and were smaller

Testicle cells of mice and rats on a GM soy change significantly

By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies

Rodents fed GM corn and soy showed immune system responses and signs of toxicity

Cooked GM soy contains as much as 7-times the amount of a known soy allergen

Soy allergies skyrocketed by 50% in the UK, soon after GM soy was introduced

The stomach lining of rats fed GM potatoes showed excessive cell growth, a condition that may lead to cancer.

Studies showed organ lesions, altered liver and pancreas cells, changed enzyme levels, etc.

Unlike safety evaluations for drugs, there are no human clinical trials of GM foods. The only published human feeding experiment revealed that the genetic material inserted into GM soy transfers into bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GM foods, we may still have their GM proteins produced continuously inside us. This could mean:

If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create super diseases, resistant to antibiotics

If the gene that creates Bt-toxin in GM corn were to transfer, it might turn our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories.

Although no studies have evaluated if antibiotic or Bt-toxin genes transfer, that is one of the key problems. The safety assessments are too superficial to even identify most of the potential dangers from GMOs.

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On a South African farm growing GM corn, reports indicated that as many as 1-2 workers died each month while eating the corn as the main staple of their diet—three times a day. Many of the 50–60 workers fell ill—with flu-like symptoms, headaches, and inflammatory disorders—forcing the farm to employ 20% more people to make up for the sick days.

When the farmer switched to non-GM corn as a desperate attempt to counteract severe animal disorders, the health of both the animals and the workers improved dramatically. When he ran out of non-GM corn and had to use GM corn, the health problems reemerged—until the farmer secured non-GM corn once again.

According to a former Monsanto scientist, when his colleagues discovered that GM corn damaged the health of rats, they hid the evidence by rewriting the study. He was especially concerned that if the rats got sick eating a relatively small percentage of corn in their diet (e.g. up to 33% for 90 days), what does that mean for native Southern Africans who eat corn as the vast majority of their calories every day.

[suspectnumber961]

Socialism is already with us...it's just socialism for the 1%. GWB's tax cuts for the 1% and 2 wars for oil and other resources used citizen's $ to finance wars that benefit the 1%...who by the way own 92% of all stocks....defense and oil for example.

Now after the deficit goes high from unfunded wars and the tax cuts...the 1% want retired people and the poor to take a cut...

9/11 was a direct result of US foreign intervention in the interests of the 1%....unless you buy into all the STUPID they come up with to get you to go along with the wars. The 1% control the media...you fight the wars....we all pay the price.

So is it better to subsidize renewables rather than oil/coal? Eventually there will be high costs from global warming....renewables reduce GB...oil/coal increase GB?

Originally Posted by niky

The middle class got the lesser of two evils. Now all you have to do is get them to choose the least of three and Socialism in America can start in earnest.

Funny all the mudslinging between parties about vested industrial interests. The only difference between them is which inudstries get the interest. The one good thing about Obama is those industries included "green" ones, but one might argue he supported too many of the wrong ones. What a waste of money.

[niky]

AAEM? Now you're reaching...

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Definitely, it's a better idea to support renewables, if the long-term yields remain stable. The issue with the spate of "green" investments by the Obama administration was the quality and quantity of the companies supported. Instead of spreading money amongst "alternative" companies, many of which even a cursory study would have shown to be non-viable, they could have concentrated on two or three that would have actually worked out.

After the first year or two, they started getting cautious. Too bad for Aptera, et al... but what do we have to show for all that "green" money put into the automotive sector? A handful of sports cars and luxury cars from boutique manufacturers, not made to the same finish and quality as mainstream cars, selling at outrageous prices. Boo-yah.

Alternative transport means an alternative approach to the idea of transportation. Not trying to fit alternatives like a square peg into the gasoline automobile's round hole.

[suspectnumber961]

How GMOs Unleashed a Pesticide Gusher | Mother Jones

And just as weeds developed resistance to year-after-year applications of Roundup, corn's number-one insect pest, the rootworm, is quickly evolving to be able to withstand Bt-engineered corn, as I've reported before. Benbrook told me that in areas of the Midwest where farmers have been planting Bt corn year after year—an increasingly popular practice, since the explosion in ethanol production that started in 2006—ag university extension experts are suggesting that farmers spray other insecticides to supplement the failing Bt trait in their corn. "The goal of this technology was to make it possible not have to spray these corn insecticides, and now we have to spray them again to bail out this technology," Benbrook told me.

The chemical war against pests will likely get yet another boost from the failure of Roundup. As I've reported before, GMO seed giants Monsanto and Dow are preparing to roll out seeds designed to resist both Roundup and older herbicides including 2,4-D, the less toxic half of the formulation that made up the infamous Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange. The industry insists that weeds won't develop resistance to the new products. But last year, a group of Penn State weed scientists published a paper warning that the new products are "likely to increase the severity of resistant weeds." Indeed, 2,4-D-resistant weeds have already been documented in Nebraska.

[suspectnumber961]

https://www.truthdig.com/report/item...ress_20130113/


The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way.

But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

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“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

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“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”

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So...humans are just as dumb as yeast.....

[niky]

Not quite as dumb, but sadly, the greatest use to which we've put our gift of logic is in rationalizing our irrational actions and beliefs.

Human appetites have an "on" switch, but no real "off" switch. Those brain centers are still built for a world wherein our ability to use resources is barely enough to keep us alive. While people can be taught to conserve, if given the choice, they'd rather consume.

The collapse, though, if it happens, probably won't be sudden. It'll be slow, protracted, and painful... but hopefully it'll leave behind a small number of societies adapted to a post-scarcity world.

[suspectnumber961]

They've got a stunning variety of heirloom seeds (1,400 + in their catalogue) and a well earned reputation for quality. One of the big benefits of buying from Baker Creek is that they test every batch of heirloom seeds they sell for contamination from GMOs (genetically modified/engineered organisms).

So, it was a little disheartening to find this note from Jere Gettle, the owner of the company:

During the past 8 years since we started testing each lot of heirloom corn we sell, we have found that about 50% of America's heirloom corn supply is already contaminated with these unwanted, patented, and possibly dangerous, GMO varieties. We have pledged to not sell any seeds that come back positive for Monsanto's genes in our test samples. Not only do we not believe in offering GMO tainted seeds, but we would also be faced with possible legal action for selling these unwanted genes.

Essentially, the contamination from GMOs is spreading horizontally through pollination. Not only is this bad because it's contaminating an entire species of vegetable, it has all of the hallmarks of a classic 'industry innovation run amok' situation that has done so much damage to our financial and economic health recently. In that recent situation, financial derivatives -- a financial 'innovation' that Warren Buffett (the world's most famous speculator) called "financial weapons of mass destruction" -- almost destroyed the global economy.

To understand why GMOs are threat on a par with a global financial meltdown, you need to understand what they are.

GMOs are plants and animals that have been genetically engineered in a laboratory. These plants and animals are so different from what we find in nature, they are considered new organisms. How new? Enough to be granted patent protection from the US government.

That wouldn't be a problem if these plants and animals were constrained to the laboratory. They aren't. They were introduced, without any more than a cursory testing period, into the food supply. Over the past decade, they have become so pervasively used in agriculture, that most of the food available at the grocery store includes GMOs.

Here's why this is dangerous. We don't know what the effect of eating designed genetic sequences, in large quantities throughout the day, will have on us. Like the global financial system, but more so, our bodies are so complex we don't really know how they work.

Here's an example. Until last year, the scientific community believed that a whopping 80% of human DNA was junk. DNA served no useful purpose. It was even termed "junk DNA." That idea was proven false this year when it was found that this junk "DNA" is actually essential. It controls of the expression of our genes (when, how, and to what degree they are used throughout our lifetime).

So, since we don't even know how most of the DNA in our cells actually works, it's pretty clear that we don't have a clue what will happen when our daily diet is laced with genetic sequences that have been concocted in a lab. This lack of certainty makes GMO foods the biggest experiment in human health ever conducted, and we're all the guinea pigs.

Resilient Communities

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Monsanto et. al. trying to contaminate the worlds food supply...fait accompli?

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[niky]

Call me when they somehow get genetic expression from plants to carry over to humans.