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“Unprecedented” cold and snow in Iceland.
Thousands of sheep (13,000) buried alive in snowdrifts is nothing short of disastrous.
Here’s a video showing the rescue of a sheep buried by snow.
Snow in North Iceland in early September is not unheard of but
snowfall of two to three meters overnight at this time of year—when the
sheep are still in highland pastures—is highly unusual.
Two to three meters (7-11 feet) of snow overnight! That’s a small taste of what the mammoths experienced.
Armed with long sticks as used to look for people buried in
avalanches, farmers in North Iceland have succeeded in finding hundreds
of sheep. The search continues but hope grows fainter by the minute.
Although not all have survived, most of these amazingly hardy creatures were alive after days in icy graves. To make it even more difficult, foxes are attacking the trapped sheep, often leaving them brutally injured.
The association of breeders speaks of unprecedented disaster. Farmers say they have never experienced anything like this in their lifetime and hope they never will again.
Coupled with blackouts across the region, from Blönduós in the west
to Þórshöfn in the east, due to icing of power lines and we’re looking
at an unprecedented situation, with real blizzards and extended
blackouts throughout the region and motorists stranded in their cars.
Record snowfall
According to the Iceland Review Online, “it is believed to be a new record for snowfall at this time of the year”.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Climate Alarmism Our Sanity & Wallets Need A Break
Far too many scientists, activists, politicians and regulators have used supposed “catastrophic manmade climate change” – as a justification for harmful and destructive energy and economic policies. This article takes you on a fast-paced tour of climate change hype, hysteria and reality, and concludes with cautionary advice about the ways ill-advised energy and climate policies are harming our nation and world.
Climate Alarmism: Our sanity and wallets need a break
Billions of taxpayer dollars are disrupting our politics, science, energy policies and economy
By Paul DriessenPick up any 40-year-old science textbook – on chemistry, biology, geology, physics, astronomy or medicine – and you’ll find a slew of “facts” and theories that have been proven wrong or are no longer the “consensus” view. Climatology is no exception.
Back in the 1970s, many scientists warned of global cooling – and fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc. They predicted every conceivable disaster, short of roving herds of wooly mammoths stampeding through ice-covered streets. (The possibility of cloning a well-preserved mammoth could buttress the next scary ice age scenario.)
Newsweek’s 1975 cover story “The Cooling World” breathlessly reported that, “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Meteorologists are “almost unanimous” that the trend will “reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” it intoned, and “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”
The CIA, NASA, National Academy of Sciences and many news organizations issued similar alarums. Dr. John Holdren, now President Obama’s science adviser, joined Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich in penning an essay that warned: “The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
The Chicken Little ice age never arrived. Instead, the new “consensus” view is that our planet now faces fossil-fuel-induced catastrophic global warming. A 2006 Newsweek story conceded that its ice age theme had been “spectacularly wrong.” But the admission came amid decades of Newsweek, Time and even BusinessWeek and National Geographic stories about an imminent global warming “apocalypse.”
The tales of doom remain standard media fare, even as the science continues to evolve – and even as Climategate and other revelations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shenanigans and duplicity join the dissection of Michael Mann’s hockey stick in reducing climate alarmism and public anxiety over it. New theories about solar cycles, cosmic rays and the dominant role of solar activity in determining Earth’s climate are becoming far more common in books and peer-reviewed research compendia of science-based climate realism.
Cataclysmic cooling? Dangerous warming? Is there something in between that can help initiate real debate, improve our understanding of how our climate works, and let us get on with our lives?
Manmade global warming, climate change and “weird” weather remain the foundation of environmentalist and leftist political agendas for ending our “addiction” to oil, ushering in a new era of “eco-friendly” renewable energy, and “fundamentally transforming” our economy and society. Their power, prestige, control and access to billions of dollars a year for biased research and crony-corporatist energy schemes super-glue their dependency to this issue. With fracking and other new petroleum discovery and extraction technologies proving beyond doubt that we will not run out of oil or gas anytime soon, climate change is really all they are left with. Those realities are driving an extreme policy agenda.
The Democratic Party platform stated: “We know global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation – an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making … The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.”
Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) recently told Politico that Democrats would again seek cap-tax-and-trade legislation if they ever control both Congress and the White House. Because Congress rejected regressive climate legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency, under Lisa Jackson, has issued thousands of pages of regulations designed to shut down coal-based electricity generation and impose a true-believer view that carbon dioxide controls the climate and must be drastically reduced to prevent a global warming Armageddon. Meanwhile, legions of subsidized researchers are trying desperately to tie every conceivable phenomenon and event to global warming – even rape and murder!
By making fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive, while spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy, EPA’s war on fossil fuels is designed to force Americans to abandon the energy sources that power our economy. The goal is to force Americans to turn to inefficient, unreliable, impractical, expensive, job-killing energy sources that emit less CO2.
At a mere 0.0395% of Earth’s atmosphere (395 ppm), carbon dioxide is truly a “trace gas.” Yet it is the “gas of life.” Without it all life on earth would cease to exist. Many scientists nevertheless insist that plant-fertilizing CO2 has supplanted the many complex and interconnected solar, cosmic, oceanic, planetary, atmospheric and other forces that have always driven climate change – and that a further increase to 0.0450% (from 0.280% or 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution) would somehow push life and civilization past a “tipping point.”
Many other scientists vigorously dissent from that view. As natural scientist Dr. Willie Soon, meteorological statistician William Briggs and others have pointed out, changes in solar radiation caused by sunspots have changed Earth’s temperature and climate for centuries. Referring to data collected by the University of California-Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, Soon and Briggs note:
“These peer-reviewed results make it difficult to maintain that changes in solar activity play no or an insignificant role in climate change…. The evidence in BEST’s own data and in other data we have analyzed is consistent with the hypothesis that the sun causes climate change, especially in the Arctic, China and the United States. BEST’s data also clearly invalidate the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is the most important cause of observed temperature changes across the United States.”
Still other analysts have shown that neither average global temperatures, nor tornado and hurricane frequency and severity, nor droughts, rainfall, sea level rise or Arctic climate and weather patterns and events in recent decades differ measurably or significantly from historic norms, cycles or variations.
The hysterical and spectacularly wrong predictions would be hysterically funny, except for one thing. Too many global cooling/warming/weird weather scientists, activists and politicians are using the issue to justify policies that are trashing our economy. Congress and the Obama administration are already implementing draconian laws and regulations that make energy less reliable and affordable, destroy jobs, weaken our national security, make us more dependent on foreign energy supplies, raise consumer prices, and slow America’s economic growth.
The needless regulations are prolonging the recession, keeping unemployment high, impairing civil rights progress, and hurting poor, minority and elderly families most of all. Any conflicts and refugees will result far less from future weather and climate events, than from ill-advised US, EU, UN and other policies that make energy, minerals, food, water, healthcare, and opportunities out of reach for millions or even billions of people.
Our weather has hardly become any “weirder” than what Earth and humanity have faced countless times before. However, the “new normal” in political discourse, scientific research, democratic institutions, laws, regulations and sanity has definitely gotten both weirder and more pernicious.
Contrary to President Obama’s intent, we don’t need to “fundamentally transform” our energy, economy or society. We need to fundamentally transform the system that diverts our attention and resources from real challenges, analyses and solutions.
Non Stick Cookware Causes Cancer
Further presenting non-stick cookware dangers, a new study published in this month’s Archives of Internal Medicine
reveals a relation between PFOA (the chemical in Teflon, used in
nonstick pans among other things) and heart disease. While scientists
are cautious, as they always are, to say they are definitively linked,
some say steering clear of the chemical “just in case” wouldn’t be a bad
idea.
Also, those with higher PFOA, had a 78 percent higher risk of peripheral heart disease—where arteries narrow and harden.
Researchers say there is no hard evidence that the PFOA causes heart diseases or otherwise increases someone’s risk, merely that the conditions “co-exist.”
So, if something causes mutations in cells, as in cancer, wouldn’t it make sense that it could lead to a whole host of other health concerns?
Along with the increasingly well-known knowledge that the toxic fumes emitted from non-stick cookware can make a bird drop dead if it’s in the same room, PFOA has also been shown to cause like to low birth weight and organ specific oxidative DNA damage. Other research published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal says those with higher blood levels of PFOA also have a higher incidence of thyroid disease.
But PFOA is still found in some nonstick pans—it’s the coating that allows people to use less oil. And with 98 percent of Americans walking around with PFOA in their bodies, it’s definitely something to be concerned about.
What can you do? If you haven’t already, stop using nonstick pans. Cast iron is a far better choice, and will last a lifetime.
Cooking up Heart Disease
According to the study published in the journal The Jama Network, researchers looked at PFOA presence and incidence of heart disease, heart attack, or stroke. About 98 percent of Americans have traces of PFOA in them, those with the highest levels of the chemical were found to have double the odds of heart disease when compared with those having the lowest levels.Also, those with higher PFOA, had a 78 percent higher risk of peripheral heart disease—where arteries narrow and harden.
Researchers say there is no hard evidence that the PFOA causes heart diseases or otherwise increases someone’s risk, merely that the conditions “co-exist.”
“What we are finding is that high levels of PFOA and cardiovascular disease coexisted for some reason. That is all,” said lead author Dr. Anoop Shgankar with the West Virginia University School of Public Health. “It is possible that we are seeing something that is just a bystander and is there because of confounding associations.”But this isn’t the first time perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) has been associated or found co-existing with other health problems. The Environmental Working Group has it classified as a “likely carcinogen,” meaning it could lead to cancer. Even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it was likely to cause cancer.
So, if something causes mutations in cells, as in cancer, wouldn’t it make sense that it could lead to a whole host of other health concerns?
Along with the increasingly well-known knowledge that the toxic fumes emitted from non-stick cookware can make a bird drop dead if it’s in the same room, PFOA has also been shown to cause like to low birth weight and organ specific oxidative DNA damage. Other research published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal says those with higher blood levels of PFOA also have a higher incidence of thyroid disease.
But PFOA is still found in some nonstick pans—it’s the coating that allows people to use less oil. And with 98 percent of Americans walking around with PFOA in their bodies, it’s definitely something to be concerned about.
What can you do? If you haven’t already, stop using nonstick pans. Cast iron is a far better choice, and will last a lifetime.
Incurable Cancer Cured With Natural Remedies/Food
A grandfather, who was told by doctors that his cancer was 'incurable', has been given the all-clear less than four months later - after trying a different diet.
Allan Taylor could have been forgiven for fearing the worst when doctors told him they could do nothing to treat his condition.
But the 78-year-old would not give up, and instead searched the internet for an alternative method to fight his cancer.
Nuke Energy Is Crime Against Humanity
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Friday, September 14, 2012
Portland Or To Add Fluoride To Water
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The City Council approved a plan Wednesday to add fluoride to Portland's water, meaning Oregon's biggest city is no longer the largest holdout in the U.S.
The ordinance calls for city water to be fluoridated by March 2014.
Health experts say fluoride is effective against decay. Opponents of public fluoridation say it's unsafe and violates an individual's right to consent to medication.
Opponents also say council members rushed into action without a public vote. They plan to collect signatures to force a referendum in May 2014.
Voters in Portland twice rejected fluoridation before approving it in 1978. But that plan was overturned before any fluoride was ever added to the water.
Portland's drinking water already contains naturally occurring fluoride, though not at levels considered to be effective at fighting cavities.
Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish, who co-sponsored the plan, has said more than 200 million Americans drink water with added fluoride, and it doesn't appear to have caused great harm. Most mainstream health organizations, such as the American Medical Association and American Dental Association, endorse it as safe.
Public fluoridation came up this week in Phoenix when a public stir prompted re-examination of a policy in place since 1989. After a contentious hearing Tuesday, council members voted to continue adding fluoride to the water in the nation's sixth-largest city.
The ordinance calls for city water to be fluoridated by March 2014.
Health experts say fluoride is effective against decay. Opponents of public fluoridation say it's unsafe and violates an individual's right to consent to medication.
Opponents also say council members rushed into action without a public vote. They plan to collect signatures to force a referendum in May 2014.
Voters in Portland twice rejected fluoridation before approving it in 1978. But that plan was overturned before any fluoride was ever added to the water.
Portland's drinking water already contains naturally occurring fluoride, though not at levels considered to be effective at fighting cavities.
Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish, who co-sponsored the plan, has said more than 200 million Americans drink water with added fluoride, and it doesn't appear to have caused great harm. Most mainstream health organizations, such as the American Medical Association and American Dental Association, endorse it as safe.
Public fluoridation came up this week in Phoenix when a public stir prompted re-examination of a policy in place since 1989. After a contentious hearing Tuesday, council members voted to continue adding fluoride to the water in the nation's sixth-largest city.
US Totalitarianism Loses Major Battle As Judge Permanently Blocks NDAA's Military Detention Provision
Back in January, Pulitzer winning journalist Chris Hedges sued President Obama and the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, specifically challenging the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force or, the provision that authorizes military detention for people deemed to have "substantially supported" al Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces." Hedges called the president's action allowing indefinite detention, which was signed into law with little opposition from either party "unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous." He attacked point blank the civil rights farce that is the neverending "war on terror" conducted by both parties, targetting whom exactly is unclear, but certainly attaining ever more intense retaliation from foreigners such as the furious attacks against the US consulates in Egypt and Libya. He asked "why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens." A few months later, in May, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in favor of a temporary injunction blocking the enforcement of the authorization for military detention. Today, the war againt the true totalitarian terror won a decisive battle, when in a 112-opinion, Judge Forrest turned the temporary injunction, following an appeal by the totalitarian government from August 6, into a permanent one.
From Reuters:
What is ironic, is that in the ongoing absolute farce that is the theatrical presidential debate, there hasn't been one word uttered discussing precisely the kind of creeping totalitarian control, and Orwellian loss of constitutional rights, that the biparty-supported NDAA would have demanded out of the US republic. Why? Chris Hedges said it best:The permanent injunction prevents the U.S. government from enforcing a portion of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act's "Homeland Battlefield" provisions.
The opinion stems from a January lawsuit filed by former New York Times war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and others. The plaintiffs said they had no assurance that their writing and advocacy activities would not fall under the scope of the provision.
Government attorneys argued that the executive branch is entitled to latitude when it comes to cases of national security and that the law is neither too broad nor overly vague.
"This court does not disagree with the principle that the president has primacy in foreign affairs," the judge said, but that she was not convinced by government arguments.
"The government has not stated that such conduct - which, by analogy, covers any writing, journalistic and associational activities that involve al Qaeda, the Taliban or whomever is deemed "associated forces" - does not fall within § 1021(b)(2)."
He is 100% correct, and today, if it weren't for his lawsuit, the saying that someone, somewhere in the world might possibly "hate America for its liberties" would have been the biggest lie conceivable.The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.
But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.
Also, the total fascist takeover of America would now have been a fact.
Some other insights from Hedges, who explained back in January, just why he is suing Barack Obama:
This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.
The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?
Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.
Company behind 'pink slime' sues ABC for $1.2billion as 'network wrongly told customers the product was unhealthy'
Beef Products Inc. has filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News for its coverage of a meat product dubbed 'pink slime,' claiming the network misled consumers into believing it is unhealthy and unsafe.
The Dakota Dunes, South Dakota-based meat processor is seeking $1.2 billion in damages for roughly 200 'false and misleading and defamatory' statements about the product officially known as lean, finely textured beef, said Dan Webb, BPI's Chicago-based attorney.
The lawsuit filed in a South Dakota state court on Thursday also accuses ABC News of improper interference with the relationships between BPI and its customers.
It caused consumers to believe that our lean beef is not beef at all - that it's an unhealthy pink slime, unsafe for public consumption, and that somehow it got hidden in the meat,' Webb said before the company's official announcement.
ABC News, owned by The Walt Disney Co., denied BPI's claims.
'The lawsuit is without merit. We will contest it vigorously,' Jeffrey W. Schneider, the news station's senior vice president, said in a brief statement Thursday.
The reports cited in the lawsuit include 11 that aired on television and 14 that appeared online in March. Webb said the reports had 'an enormous impact' on the company, forcing it to close three of its four U.S. plants and lay off more than 650 workers.
Webb said the network also published a list of chain grocery stores that had stopped selling the product, and that this pressured others to end their business relationship with BPI.
Craig Letch, BPI's director of food-quality assurance, said the company lost 80 percent of its business in 28 days. Some of the customers have returned, he said, but BPI still doesn't have the customer base that would allow it to rehire former employees.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Burgers To Exterminate Mankind?
Hunger and malnutrition may kill millions of people in 20 years. The global tragedy is likely to be caused by three interrelated factors: fluctuations of food prices, extreme weather conditions and climate instabilities. The contradiction between the growing human needs and objective limits of resource become more and more serious.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) released another intimidating statement connected with the growth of global food prices.
"The current situation in world food markets, characterized by sharp increases in the prices on corn, wheat and soybeans generated fears of the repetition of the world food crisis of 2007-2008," the statement said.
Back then, the growing food prices led increased malnutrition in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. The food crisis also led to civil unrest there. This year, the food crisis may affect the Middle East - Yemen and war-torn Syria in the first place.
The authors of the statement said that coordinated international actions may help cope with the local crisis quickly. They called for imediate action to prevent another large-scale food disaster in the coming months. Typically, the UN food departments see salvation in financial handouts to the crisis-stricken countries that give local authorities a possibility to buy foodstuffs. This is what they call "fast and coordinated international effort."
According to the World Food Programme (WFP), every ten-percent increase in the price of the food basket means that the programme must seek additional $200 million a year to spend the amount on food aid. There were three jumps in food prices during the recent five years. At the same time, UN agencies say that high food prices are just symptoms, not a disease.
"When the international community takes urgent measures to prevent price shocks, one must also struggle with the root causes of this increase," the statement said.
Many officials say that mankind should reconsider, if not a diet, then the sources of production of vital proteins. Ecologists and economists have repeatedly proved that the modern system of agriculture is flawed in terms of excessive focus on cattle-breeding. In its present scale, cattle-breeding is one of the main industries that pollute air, ground and water. The industry is also a huge consumer of resources.
Thus, more than half of all cultivated lands in the United States are occupied by forage crops. In other words, harvests are fed to livestock. Afterwards, harvests return to American people in the form of burgers. According to the UN, "even in good years, the global production of maize can hardly satisfy the world's need in food." In the USA, more than 90 percent of maize is grown for fodder. If the criticism of modern-day cattle-breeding on the part of vegetarians is primarily of humane character, then numerous rational arguments, supported by calculations of ecologists and economists suggest that the further development of this path will lead the world into a deadlock.
There are about 7 billion people living on Earth at the moment. However, the number of domestic animals on the planet nears 17 billion. All of them drink, eat and defecate in much larger quantities than humans.
Cattle consumes enormous amounts of fresh water and food grown by mankind. This is clearly an inefficient way to live, isn't it?
As the UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicted, the food production will have to be increased by 70 percent by 2050 to feed the population of the planet. The demand on livestock products will continue to grow in the coming decades. The meat consumption is expected to grow, by almost 73 percent by 2050, while the consumption of dairy products - by 58 percent compared to the current level of consumption, FAO experts said.
Meanwhile, the further expansion of agricultural areas for the production of animal fodder and the growing number of the livestock population may trigger an ecological disaster and lead to millions of hunger-related deaths.
In turn, the further deterioration of the environmental situation may lead to climate changes. According to forecasts from Oxfam charity organization, Oxford, it is droughts and floods that will cause a sharp rise in food prices in the coming years.
NOTE: Simple solution, stop feeding cattle grains which they aren't designed to eat. Let them eat grass which they are designed to eat.
Satanic Western Culture Turns People Into Monsters?
Nicolas Bonnal speaks about the destructive power of the Western culture. According to him, the culture of the West is aimed against humans and their ability to think and feel. This culture is connected with the training of people; it has vile goals and global plans. The USSR, among other things, was disliked in the West for reasons other than political. The USSR did not produce The Beatles, but it did produce Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Society can not understand this weapons, so it can not realize that it is being attacked, that it obeys this weapons.
Silent weapons for quiet wars
The reverse side of the Pussy Riot case deserves carefully explanation. This is a political, but not just a political case. Tocqueville said that any social structure never ignites so much anger as it does at the time when it should disappear. In today's West, it touches upon both the church and the state. The madness of the market and the dark forces of it bursts with hatred against social security, against the law-enforcement forces and the churches that protect all that.
For our elites, the decline of Christianity in the West is not enough. Churches are empty or filled occasionally with elderly people and onlookers seeking spiritual experience. Only a small number of Christians remains, who enjoy less and less support in our society. Our entire history is encrypted and encoded in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", as I wrote in my book, which was translated into Russian (Nicolas Bonnal. "Tolkien, les univers d'un magician" ("Tolkien. Peace Miracle Worker") - Moscow, Sofia, 2003).
The Pussy Riot case proves that Satanism became an official and popular culture of the West. The West is ready to do anything to protect this culture. We can see this in "Harry Potter," MTV programs (zombies, vampires, the possessed, cannibals), Madonna's anti-French provocations in Tel Aviv with underlying reasons of occultism.
Such reasons can be found at almost all rock and pop concerts). Messages of Satanism are meticulously calculated. They incarnate the hidden guise of democracy, which is always ready to generously drop bombs on Syria, Iran or threaten the Russia of Vladimir Putin. The target is anything that does not fit into the system, but the main target is Christianity. Provocateurs like Madonna are Zionists; provocateurs like Pussy Riot are those who respect and fear Islamists and kick the cat in the church - the church that was accused of being the open expression of the heritage, which the West simply can not stand.
Churches do not let our demons celebrate, and our democracies are furious because of that. The liquid society, as Bauman described it, wants to eliminate every trace of purity and spiritual roots. It wants to destroy even memory itself. Because the perfect consumer - is the one who forgets what he or she just bought.
Let's go back in time. The Soviet Union was disrespected in the West for political reasons, but there were also reasons of cultural and artistic nature. The USSR did not make Pollocks, but it did make artists working in the genre of figurative painting; he did not make the Beatles, but made Prokofiev, Shostakovich, or folk dancing; the USSR did not glorify the Lucifer-like freedom but it did glorify socialist discipline. This, as we say, is old-fashioned and was outlived. Give us something new, and every morning!
As I will show below, it was the American services that were promoting the degenerative culture, the goal of which was to exert spiritual influence over the masses, to depreciate and vulgarize humanity. Soviet socialism was on the ring, fighting the opponent that would hit only below the waist. That socialism gave us Tarkovsky, the Bolshoi Theatre and the Red Army Choir. In response, the Soviet Union would receive "Rosemary's Baby" and rappers! The Soviet Union was not of the same level!
Modern culture - we'll go back to the 1960s - served (in an elite form) rather grim purposes. The culture (whether it is Lady Gaga, Swedish "Millennium" books, jazz, rap, neo-punk fashion or movie "Avatar"), in which we live, has turned away from our cultural heritage. The emergence of this culture is not incidental; it is not the fruit of audience tastes or the naive genius of its creators. This culture is no longer a Christian culture; it is not rooted in the history of the land of the given nation.
It is associated with the spiritual training of people, it is abstract and massive; it has vile goals and accurate globalized plans. Its history can be drawn from the so-called "modern literature" to post-classic cinematography. Contemporary music should drive people crazy, Adorno said. Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his Harvard speech that the world was conquered by intolerable music, that people forgot that they were alive. Black magic is in power everywhere in the West, and there is no need to be paranoid about it - just turn on the TV.
Daniel Estulin, a writer of Soviet origin, wonderfully wrote about the occult plan of the hidden side of contemporary subculture. It has long been known that the rock-like culture of the Beatniks was launched and encouraged to develop and separate most active political movements. The enthronement of drugs and counterculture meets the police and political project (such as MK-Ultra, Cointelpro, Artichoke), which Hollywood took as a source of inspiration. And, as we know, the author of the controversial "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Ken Kesey tried drugs for mind control programs. It was easier to control parallel worlds than create political parties. I have already shown the role that was played by the American "conquest of space" and science fiction that smelled like Scientology sect. Regarding the sexual revolution, it was prescribed as some sort of a miracle cure already in Huxley's "Brave New World" ...! It resulted in widely available mass pornography and angry roars of political correctness. While we boast of our sexual madness, the Catholic Church faces millions of accusations of pedophilia!
The conditioning of mass consciousness begins in childhood, and even earlier. "Teletubbies" were created to influence the consciousness of ... babies (anti-racism, socialization, worshiping the sun and animals). The body of a little monster is decorated with a big screen. A child turns into a hard drive and must function as a certain program. Teens follow their iPods, super violent video games and MTV-created Satanism. The cultural influence on people's minds is associated with the influence of food, which results in obesity, inactivity and eternal chewing. All those pastries were thoroughly studied laboratories.
The culture of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" acts in the same spirit. It had one goal - to make our youth dumb for generations to come, to distribute drugs, alcoholism and nihilism, and to turn human beings into channels, husk (see definition of 'pod') and tubes (YouTube).
The latest references to Satanism are quite evident in heavy metal music (Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, Dead Kennedy's). Children's literature and contemporary pop culture come next, translated through people like Madonna, Rihanna, Gaga and Beyonce, who shock the gallery of viewers with their bazaar Masonic symbolism. Repentant old rappers explain everything on YouTube. Music also serves as an invisible tool that makes people go shopping in malls. After all, we know its hypnotic and narcotic role in history - together with Wagner and Nazism.
We shall proceed further. Sociologist Bauman describes the "liquid society". So, we have passed the stage from hardening to liquefying and mass liquidation. America carried out the philosophical attack through advertising, which has war propaganda in its origins, and then - the Frankfurt School with its constant hunt for authoritarian figures (now it is Putin!). Also through television, which Adorno foresaw, they introduced the image of a homosexual individual, having denigrated the role of father and having turned woman into the serial Madame Bovary, with her eternal debt and divorces. The image of a teenager is an eternally dissatisfied and explosive individual, who wears the cap backwards (a good example is how Brando in 1953 replaced the traditional characters of John Wayne and James Stewart.) Family was destroyed, the very idea of nation was destroyed too. It was recognized as a fascist idea, which led to the destruction of civilization. As for races - we won't even speak about it! Therefore, Russia and the Slavic peoples must come to realize that they shock the West (at the Olympics, for example) with their white athletes. Of course, it's quite involuntarily, but still it's shocking!
We shall finish on quite a historical note. Everything is soaked with idle and playful Satanism - everything, especially American fraternities. They adore the devil, skeletons, skulls, wild sex, sorcerers, and magical powers. They endorse a world without faith (which only knows the law of money), a rough and trans-human world. And it is not incidental that the Denver killer (and many others before him) came from famous brotherhoods with Kabbalistic names that accepted only academically successful students. American universities turn people into mentally unbalanced Nietzscheans. Their communities, their codes, their rites, their Satanic messages are no longer hidden. They took power in the U.S. and they continue to parade their elites and themselves in full bloom of Lucifer Crusades.
Society can not understand this weapons, so it can not realize that it is being attacked, that it obeys this weapons.
Silent weapons for quiet wars
The reverse side of the Pussy Riot case deserves carefully explanation. This is a political, but not just a political case. Tocqueville said that any social structure never ignites so much anger as it does at the time when it should disappear. In today's West, it touches upon both the church and the state. The madness of the market and the dark forces of it bursts with hatred against social security, against the law-enforcement forces and the churches that protect all that.
For our elites, the decline of Christianity in the West is not enough. Churches are empty or filled occasionally with elderly people and onlookers seeking spiritual experience. Only a small number of Christians remains, who enjoy less and less support in our society. Our entire history is encrypted and encoded in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", as I wrote in my book, which was translated into Russian (Nicolas Bonnal. "Tolkien, les univers d'un magician" ("Tolkien. Peace Miracle Worker") - Moscow, Sofia, 2003).
The Pussy Riot case proves that Satanism became an official and popular culture of the West. The West is ready to do anything to protect this culture. We can see this in "Harry Potter," MTV programs (zombies, vampires, the possessed, cannibals), Madonna's anti-French provocations in Tel Aviv with underlying reasons of occultism.
Such reasons can be found at almost all rock and pop concerts). Messages of Satanism are meticulously calculated. They incarnate the hidden guise of democracy, which is always ready to generously drop bombs on Syria, Iran or threaten the Russia of Vladimir Putin. The target is anything that does not fit into the system, but the main target is Christianity. Provocateurs like Madonna are Zionists; provocateurs like Pussy Riot are those who respect and fear Islamists and kick the cat in the church - the church that was accused of being the open expression of the heritage, which the West simply can not stand.
Churches do not let our demons celebrate, and our democracies are furious because of that. The liquid society, as Bauman described it, wants to eliminate every trace of purity and spiritual roots. It wants to destroy even memory itself. Because the perfect consumer - is the one who forgets what he or she just bought.
Let's go back in time. The Soviet Union was disrespected in the West for political reasons, but there were also reasons of cultural and artistic nature. The USSR did not make Pollocks, but it did make artists working in the genre of figurative painting; he did not make the Beatles, but made Prokofiev, Shostakovich, or folk dancing; the USSR did not glorify the Lucifer-like freedom but it did glorify socialist discipline. This, as we say, is old-fashioned and was outlived. Give us something new, and every morning!
As I will show below, it was the American services that were promoting the degenerative culture, the goal of which was to exert spiritual influence over the masses, to depreciate and vulgarize humanity. Soviet socialism was on the ring, fighting the opponent that would hit only below the waist. That socialism gave us Tarkovsky, the Bolshoi Theatre and the Red Army Choir. In response, the Soviet Union would receive "Rosemary's Baby" and rappers! The Soviet Union was not of the same level!
Modern culture - we'll go back to the 1960s - served (in an elite form) rather grim purposes. The culture (whether it is Lady Gaga, Swedish "Millennium" books, jazz, rap, neo-punk fashion or movie "Avatar"), in which we live, has turned away from our cultural heritage. The emergence of this culture is not incidental; it is not the fruit of audience tastes or the naive genius of its creators. This culture is no longer a Christian culture; it is not rooted in the history of the land of the given nation.
It is associated with the spiritual training of people, it is abstract and massive; it has vile goals and accurate globalized plans. Its history can be drawn from the so-called "modern literature" to post-classic cinematography. Contemporary music should drive people crazy, Adorno said. Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his Harvard speech that the world was conquered by intolerable music, that people forgot that they were alive. Black magic is in power everywhere in the West, and there is no need to be paranoid about it - just turn on the TV.
Daniel Estulin, a writer of Soviet origin, wonderfully wrote about the occult plan of the hidden side of contemporary subculture. It has long been known that the rock-like culture of the Beatniks was launched and encouraged to develop and separate most active political movements. The enthronement of drugs and counterculture meets the police and political project (such as MK-Ultra, Cointelpro, Artichoke), which Hollywood took as a source of inspiration. And, as we know, the author of the controversial "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Ken Kesey tried drugs for mind control programs. It was easier to control parallel worlds than create political parties. I have already shown the role that was played by the American "conquest of space" and science fiction that smelled like Scientology sect. Regarding the sexual revolution, it was prescribed as some sort of a miracle cure already in Huxley's "Brave New World" ...! It resulted in widely available mass pornography and angry roars of political correctness. While we boast of our sexual madness, the Catholic Church faces millions of accusations of pedophilia!
The conditioning of mass consciousness begins in childhood, and even earlier. "Teletubbies" were created to influence the consciousness of ... babies (anti-racism, socialization, worshiping the sun and animals). The body of a little monster is decorated with a big screen. A child turns into a hard drive and must function as a certain program. Teens follow their iPods, super violent video games and MTV-created Satanism. The cultural influence on people's minds is associated with the influence of food, which results in obesity, inactivity and eternal chewing. All those pastries were thoroughly studied laboratories.
The culture of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" acts in the same spirit. It had one goal - to make our youth dumb for generations to come, to distribute drugs, alcoholism and nihilism, and to turn human beings into channels, husk (see definition of 'pod') and tubes (YouTube).
The latest references to Satanism are quite evident in heavy metal music (Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, Dead Kennedy's). Children's literature and contemporary pop culture come next, translated through people like Madonna, Rihanna, Gaga and Beyonce, who shock the gallery of viewers with their bazaar Masonic symbolism. Repentant old rappers explain everything on YouTube. Music also serves as an invisible tool that makes people go shopping in malls. After all, we know its hypnotic and narcotic role in history - together with Wagner and Nazism.
We shall proceed further. Sociologist Bauman describes the "liquid society". So, we have passed the stage from hardening to liquefying and mass liquidation. America carried out the philosophical attack through advertising, which has war propaganda in its origins, and then - the Frankfurt School with its constant hunt for authoritarian figures (now it is Putin!). Also through television, which Adorno foresaw, they introduced the image of a homosexual individual, having denigrated the role of father and having turned woman into the serial Madame Bovary, with her eternal debt and divorces. The image of a teenager is an eternally dissatisfied and explosive individual, who wears the cap backwards (a good example is how Brando in 1953 replaced the traditional characters of John Wayne and James Stewart.) Family was destroyed, the very idea of nation was destroyed too. It was recognized as a fascist idea, which led to the destruction of civilization. As for races - we won't even speak about it! Therefore, Russia and the Slavic peoples must come to realize that they shock the West (at the Olympics, for example) with their white athletes. Of course, it's quite involuntarily, but still it's shocking!
We shall finish on quite a historical note. Everything is soaked with idle and playful Satanism - everything, especially American fraternities. They adore the devil, skeletons, skulls, wild sex, sorcerers, and magical powers. They endorse a world without faith (which only knows the law of money), a rough and trans-human world. And it is not incidental that the Denver killer (and many others before him) came from famous brotherhoods with Kabbalistic names that accepted only academically successful students. American universities turn people into mentally unbalanced Nietzscheans. Their communities, their codes, their rites, their Satanic messages are no longer hidden. They took power in the U.S. and they continue to parade their elites and themselves in full bloom of Lucifer Crusades.
Civil Forfeiture For BATF
The Obama administration is making it easier for bureaucrats to take away guns without offering the accused any realistic due process. In a final rule published last week, the Justice Department granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) authority to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.” That means government can grab firearms and other property from someone who has never been convicted or even charged with any crime.
It’s a dangerous extension of the civil-forfeiture doctrine, a surreal legal fiction in which the seized property — not a person — is put on trial. This allows prosecutors to dispense with pesky constitutional rights, which conveniently don’t apply to inanimate objects. In this looking-glass world, the owner is effectively guilty until proved innocent and has the burden of proving otherwise. Anyone falsely accused will never see his property again unless he succeeds in an expensive uphill legal battle.
Such seizures are common in drug cases, which sometimes can ensnare people who have done nothing wrong. James Lieto found out about civil forfeiture the hard way when the FBI seized $392,000 from his business because the money was being carried by an armored-car firm he had hired that had fallen under a federal investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Lieto was never accused of any crime, yet he spent thousands in legal fees to get his money back.
Law enforcement agencies love civil forfeiture because it’s extremely lucrative. The Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund had $2.8 billion in booty in 2011, according to a January audit. Seizing guns from purported criminals is nothing new; Justice destroyed or kept 11,355 guns last year, returning just 396 to innocent owners. The new ATF rule undoubtedly is designed to ramp up the gun-grabbing because, as the rule justification claims, “The nexus between drug trafficking and firearm violence is well established.”
The main problem is that civil forfeiture creates a perverse profit motive, leaving bureaucrats with strong incentives to abuse a process that doesn’t sufficiently protect those who may be wrongly accused. Criminal forfeiture is more appropriate because it’s tied to a conviction in a court with the option of a jury trial and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocents like Mr. Lieto have to fight against the might of the U.S. government with a watered-down standard that stacks the legal deck so prosecutors can get a quick win.
The rule extending civil-forfeiture power to the ATF recognizes this dynamic, stating with perhaps unconscious cynicism that an uncontested civil forfeiture “can be perfected for minimal cost” compared to the “hundreds or thousands of dollars” and “years” needed for judicial forfeiture.
Nowhere is there any recognition of the burden placed on innocent citizens stripped of their property, or of the erosion of their civil liberties. In fact, the rule argues that, because in the past the ATF could turn over requests for civil forfeiture to the Drug Enforcement Administration, there has been no change in “individual rights.”
Instead of expanding the profit motive in policing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should be working to eliminate it.
It’s a dangerous extension of the civil-forfeiture doctrine, a surreal legal fiction in which the seized property — not a person — is put on trial. This allows prosecutors to dispense with pesky constitutional rights, which conveniently don’t apply to inanimate objects. In this looking-glass world, the owner is effectively guilty until proved innocent and has the burden of proving otherwise. Anyone falsely accused will never see his property again unless he succeeds in an expensive uphill legal battle.
Such seizures are common in drug cases, which sometimes can ensnare people who have done nothing wrong. James Lieto found out about civil forfeiture the hard way when the FBI seized $392,000 from his business because the money was being carried by an armored-car firm he had hired that had fallen under a federal investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Lieto was never accused of any crime, yet he spent thousands in legal fees to get his money back.
Law enforcement agencies love civil forfeiture because it’s extremely lucrative. The Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund had $2.8 billion in booty in 2011, according to a January audit. Seizing guns from purported criminals is nothing new; Justice destroyed or kept 11,355 guns last year, returning just 396 to innocent owners. The new ATF rule undoubtedly is designed to ramp up the gun-grabbing because, as the rule justification claims, “The nexus between drug trafficking and firearm violence is well established.”
The main problem is that civil forfeiture creates a perverse profit motive, leaving bureaucrats with strong incentives to abuse a process that doesn’t sufficiently protect those who may be wrongly accused. Criminal forfeiture is more appropriate because it’s tied to a conviction in a court with the option of a jury trial and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocents like Mr. Lieto have to fight against the might of the U.S. government with a watered-down standard that stacks the legal deck so prosecutors can get a quick win.
The rule extending civil-forfeiture power to the ATF recognizes this dynamic, stating with perhaps unconscious cynicism that an uncontested civil forfeiture “can be perfected for minimal cost” compared to the “hundreds or thousands of dollars” and “years” needed for judicial forfeiture.
Nowhere is there any recognition of the burden placed on innocent citizens stripped of their property, or of the erosion of their civil liberties. In fact, the rule argues that, because in the past the ATF could turn over requests for civil forfeiture to the Drug Enforcement Administration, there has been no change in “individual rights.”
Instead of expanding the profit motive in policing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should be working to eliminate it.
US Media Lying Again? Story Of Murdered US Ambassador
Attack on U.S. Consulate illustrates disastrous outcome of Obama’s humanitarian intervention in Libya as photos indicate torture before the murder.
Earlier today the US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was killed by the same terrorist he helped put into power.Following the initial reports that he and 3 other Americans on his staff were murdered when terrorists fired Rocket Propelled Grenades on his vehicles the corporate media reported US officials were stating the attacks were planned beforehand.
Now both the official story about an RPG attack and hence claims that terrorist planned the attack beforehand are being brought into question. The questions center around new evidence which appears to show that the Ambassador was in fact held captive and tortured by Libya militants prior to his death and then he was paraded on the streets after he was murdered.
Update: Reports – Murdered U.S. Ambassador To Libya Was Sexually Raped
More from Infowars:
By Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Despite initial reports suggesting he died in a rocket attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, photos appear to indicate that U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed by a lynch mob, illustrating the disastrous consequences of the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya – arming some of the very same men who carried out today’s attack.“The US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, has been killed in a rocket attack in the eastern city of Benghazi along with three other embassy staff, the White House confirmed on Wednesday,” reports France 24.
However, images released in the hours after the attack show Stevens’ body being paraded around by a mob. The body appears to show signs of torture.Subsequent reports speculated that Stevens’ car was attacked as he and the three other personnel attempted to escape from the Consulate.
The other embassy staff were shot while Stevens’ died of “suffocation,” suggesting he was lynched and physically attacked by the mob.
The incident is being portrayed by the establishment media as a reaction to a film produced in the United States that purportedly ridicules Islam’s Prophet Mohammed.However, the wider issue of how the 2011 bombardment of Libya paved the way for gangs of militant Islamic extremists, once backed by NATO powers with heavy weapons, to fill the power vacuum left by Colonel Gaddafi, has been largely ignored.Indeed, it’s a horrific irony that Hillary Clinton’s infamous gloating about Gaddafi’s execution - “We came, we saw, he died” - has now come full circle, with Stevens paying for such despicable arrogance with his life.
After NATO-backed insurgents with links to Al-Qaeda helped topple Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, they proudly flew the distinctive black Al-Qaeda flag over courthouses in Benghazi and other centers of power. That same flag flew over the Consulate today after the U.S. flag was torn down and burned.
In the aftermath of last year’s “no fly zone,” which turned into an incessant bombardment almost overnight, Libya, once one of the richest countries in Africa, is now run by brutal armed gangs who have rounded up black people in huge numbers, subjecting them to torture, incarceration in concentration camps and execution.A February 2012 report by Amnesty International found that Libya’s militias are “largely out of control” and that “Thousands of detainees are being held in various prisons across the country” and are being “tortured to death.”
The country’s NATO-installed rulers have proven themselves unwilling to prevent widespread abuse.
Libya’s oil resources have been carved up between NATO-aligned corporations while the country’s financial enslavement to global bankers is ensured with a fresh IMF loan and the end of their state-owned central banking system.Despite the fact that Libya is in a state of hellish sectarian warfare and societal collapse, with armed thugs hostile to the west now in control of major power centers, the White House is intent on repeating the same disaster in Syria, funneling arms to rebels, the majority of whom aren’t even Syrian, who are being led by Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Indeed, some of the very same militants responsible for the Libya debacle were airlifted into Syria with the aid of NATO powers as part of the effort to topple Bashar Al-Assad.
The assault on Libya was carried out with absolutely zero constitutional authorization.In June last year, President Obama arrogantly expressed his hostility to the rule of law when he dismissed the need to get congressional authorization to commit the United States to a military intervention in Libya, churlishly dismissing criticism and remarking, “I don’t even have to get to the Constitutional question.”Obama tried to legitimize his failure to obtain Congressional approval for military involvement by sending a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner in which he said the military assault was “authorized by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council.”
Today’s attack on the U.S. Consulate serves as another reminder that the military-industrial complex’s new paradigm of “humanitarian intervention” – a scam they hope to repeat in Syria – has nothing to do with humanitarianism in that it only results in more bloodshed and more instability.
Four Days To Stop Corporate Death Star
Details are leaking of a top-secret, global corporate power grab of breathtaking scope – attacking everything from a free Internet to health and environmental regulations, and we have just 4 days to stop it.Big business has a new plan to fatten their pockets: a giant global pact, with an international tribunal to enforce it, that is kept top secret for years (even from our lawmakers!) and then brought down like a Death Star on our democracies. Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Walmart and almost 600 other corporate lobbyists are all in on the draft – including limits on smoking laws, affordable medicines and free speech on the Net.
The latest round of negotiations ends in just 4 days – but outcries in each of our countries could shake the confidence of negotiators and scuttle the talks forever. Let’s get to a million against the global corporate takeover. Sign below and forward widely. Avaaz will project our petition counter on the walls of the conference so negotiators can see the opposition to their plan exploding in real time:
Sign the Petition Here
The deal, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is written to protect investors from government regulation, even if that regulation is passed in the public interest. Leaked versions suggest the TPP would undermine protections for air and water safety and reintroduce measures from the US Internet freedom attack as well as steamrolling efforts to produce generic affordable medicines. Worse still, lawmakers who fail to conform to the TPP’s rules face sanctions in an international tribunal — a place where corporations can sue us for deals previous governments signed in secret!
Negotiators say this is just a trade agreement, written to facilitate investment and profit for all. But the leaked draft imposes so many limits on citizen protections, it’s clear this “trade” agreement is skewed to put corporate profit above people’s needs — that’s not surprising since it’s been drafted in secret with almost 600 corporate lobbyists.
But there is hope: Australia is bucking against the international tribunal system, and New Zealand is objecting to the takeover of its medicine-pricing protections that keep drugs affordable. Massive public opposition, casting doubt over each country’s ability to sell TPP at home, could derail the talks for good. Sign the petition now, and forward widely — the delegates and lobbyists are watching the wave of opposition grow in real time:
Sign the Petition Here
US Senator, Elizabeth Warren in a recent speech said: “Corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters, because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.” Let’s reach one million to stop the corporate takeover of our governments.
With hope,
8 Key Concepts To Primal Living
With the Primal Blueprint 21-Day Challenge having just begun, it’s the perfect time to go over the Primal Blueprint 8 Key Concepts. I believe that fully grokking these powerful ideas is crucial to success during the challenge. As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Having a firm grasp of these key concepts will provide a framework for – and make you more resolute in – your daily decisions. Read them, commit them to memory, live by them, and you’ll be well on your way to a lifetime of health and wellness.
In the coming days and weeks, I will lay out the path to Primal health in greater detail, but for now, are you ready to learn the basics? Let’s get to it…
1. Yes, You Really Can Reprogram Your Genes
The popular conception of a gene is “a weird collection of DNA and chromosomes and other stuff that determines whether or not you’re going to get this type of cancer, how long you’ll live, and if you’ll get a coronary bypass at some point in your life.” There’s this idea that genes are immutable, that they represent a sort of cosmic destiny for an individual. But, aside from some heritable traits like eye and hair color or the number of fingers on your hands and feet, genes are actually programmable. They “express” themselves in different ways according to information gathered from our environment, our food, and our behaviors. They “turn on” or “turn off” in response to these environmental signals. Thus, though you might have “the gene for type 2 diabetes” – which is really just a genetic proclivity towards the disease, not a sentence – providing the right environmental signals will prevent the gene from ever turning on.
How we eat, exercise, sleep, interact with our social circles, stress, and spend time outdoors (plus tons of other environmental signals) determines how our genes express themselves; how our genes express themselves in turn determines our level of health. Genetic predisposition is not your destiny.
2. The Clues to Optimal Gene Expression Are Found in Evolution
While we can’t sit at a control panel and fiddle with our gene expression like a mad scientist just yet, we can make some very good guesses based on a powerful heuristic: human evolution. Reason being, two million years of selection pressure exerted upon the hominid line designed a healthy, successful, productive, vibrant organism. We didn’t just “happen,” after all. We look like we do and work like we do and have the genes that we do that express themselves the way that they do because of very powerful selection pressures. The habitats in which we lived, the foods we ate, the movements we had to perform in order to survive, the sunlight to which we were exposed, the stressors we faced – these environmental factors shaped our genetic code, and it is to these various environmental stimuli that our genetic expression responds most favorably. The clues to realizing our Primal Blueprint lies scattered amidst our evolutionary history.
Until that day when we can sit a computer terminal and decide which genes we want to express today, and how, the best we can probably do is use human evolution as a base level tool for making lifestyle decisions. You’ll probably refine the details later, but evolution is a darn good place to start.
3. Your Body Prefers Burning Fat Over Carbohydrates
We’ve evolved to be fat-burners (must be why we’re so adept at storing it on our bodies!). It’s easy to see why. Fat burns slow and evenly, providing all-day steady energy levels. Carbohydrates burn quickly, and they’re gone in an instant, leaving you groggy and depleted unless you “carb up.” Furthermore, carbohydrates are an inherently unreliable and fleeting source of energy for our body, with most people only able to store about 400-500 grams of carbohydrates on the body at any one time. Our storage capacity for fat, on the other hand, is virtually endless. Just ten or fifteen pounds of body fat, which is the bare minimum available on even the leanest individuals, can provide tens of thousands of calories. Luckily, reducing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake sends the epigenetic signals necessary to help us revert back to fat-burning, and it only takes a week or two to get things moving in the right direction.
Become fat-adapted, enjoy boundless energy. Free yourself from the shackles of a carbohydrate-based metabolism/dependency.
4. 80 Percent of Your Body Composition Success Is Determined by How You Eat
Food is the single most important factor in body composition. You can exercise all you want but as long as you’re eating garbage, and too much of it, you won’t get very far. For that reason, any real attempt to modify your body composition has to begin by addressing what you put in your mouth. I like to start with the quality of the food you eat. I don’t discount the importance of quantity, mind you, but I do find that honing in on the quality of the food is more crucial and effective. Case in point: 2000 calories of fast food will have a very different effect on your body composition, satiety, and nutrient intake than 2000 calories of grass-fed meat, wild fish, and produce grown in rich, fertile, nutrient-dense soil. The fast food won’t be as satiating, nor as nutrient-dense, as the real food, so you’ll likely be compelled to eat more of it. The fast food will primarily include trans- and polyunsaturated fats, sugary sauces, refined grains, and poor quality meat, which will promote insulin resistance and the storage of body fat while inhibiting fat burning. Eating Primal food, rich in animals, plants, and healthy fat, on the other hand, will normalize insulin sensitivity, thereby allowing fat burning. In effect, quality will determine quantity; you’ll eat less spontaneously when you eat healthy Primal foods. Quality paired with proper quantity will in turn determine your body composition.
Sleep matters, exercise helps, stress has an effect, but how you eat – what you eat and how much you eat – is the prime determinant of your body composition.
5. Grains Are Totally Unnecessary
Despite their exalted position in the Conventional hierarchy of healthy foods, grains are completely and utterly unnecessary. And yes, that even goes for whole grains. I mean, what’s so great about them, anyway? What unique nutrients do they provide? If you want fiber, eat vegetables. If you want antioxidants, eat colorful produce. If you want carbs, eat fruits and tubers. Humans got along fairly well without wide scale grain agriculture for many thousands of years, and there’s no real reason to buy in today, especially when you consider the grain antinutrients like gluten that impair digestion, reduce mineral absorption, and damage the intestinal lining. What is it, then, that necessitates 10-12 servings of whole grains a day? It’s madness. Besides, for all the supposed health benefits that the grain-obsessed like to say are supported with tons of studies, this just isn’t the case when you look a little deeper. Those studies invariably compare whole grains to refined grains, and in that case, the whole grain will generally win out. I’d suspect that if you compared a whole grain-based diet to a grain-free Primal way of eating, you’d get very different results. Unfortunately, that study hasn’t been done.
There’s nothing good in grains that you can’t get elsewhere, and plenty bad that you won’t find elsewhere. Don’t eat ‘em.
6. Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Are Not Your Enemy
Another popular health canard is that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are horrible, evil things that seek only to clog our arteries, thicken our blood, and pad our waistlines. That’s crazy, of course. Fat, especially saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol are important building blocks for sex hormones like testosterone. Saturated fat helps us absorb nutrients from our food. Saturated fat is inherently the most stable fat, able to withstand heat and light stress without oxidizing, and it’s incredibly satiating. Cholesterol is crucial in the creation of vitamin D from sun exposure. And contrary to popular belief and the protestations of “experts,” neither saturated fat nor dietary cholesterol have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Sugar, refined PUFA oils, trans-fats? Those are the real enemies. Oh, and consider this: every successful diet is actually a high-fat diet. When you lose weight, whether it’s through low-carb Primal or high-carb vegan, you are consuming ample amounts of highly saturated animal fat. The only thing is that this animal fat is coming off your body, but it’s still saturated animal fat just the same.
A diet rich in animal fat and cholesterol is not just safe, it’s downright healthy.
7. Exercise is Ineffective for Weight Management
Exercise is healthy. Exercise is necessary for lasting wellness. Exercise builds muscle and exerts beneficial effects on hormone expression and function. Exercise gets you strong, gets you fit, and keeps you young. I like exercise; I do some form of it every single day, and I recommend that you do the same. But exercise alone is highly ineffective for weight management. For it to truly help manage your weight, exercise must be paired with a healthy eating plan, adequate sleep, effective stress management, ample sun exposure, and healthy amounts of social contact with friends, family, and loved ones. Sure, some people take exercise to the extreme, training for hours and hours on end, all in the quest to burn a few hundred more calories, to “make up for” those donuts at breakfast, to eradicate those love handles. And if you go long enough and hard enough, yeah, you’ll “burn calories.” But at what cost? Exercise is a stressor, after all. Maintained at a chronic, extreme pace and frequency, exercise becomes a chronic stressor that does more harm than good. It makes you hungry. It increases systemic and local inflammation. It depresses your immune system. It fatigues you, leading to less activity throughout the day. You’ll eventually and inevitably burn out unless you eat a massive amount of calories to make up for all that you’ve lost, and, at that point, you’re back at square one.
You can’t out-exercise a bad diet and poor lifestyle.
8. Maximum Fitness Can Be Achieved in Minimal Time With High Intensity Workouts
Study after study shows that the key to optimal health, aging, and fitness is muscle strength and mass. The more lean mass we have, the better we’re able to handle what life can dish out, whether it’s carrying groceries, playing with our kids, saving our own lives in a life-or-death situation, or engaging in the time-tested essential activity known as love-making. Luckily for those of us who relish our free time, the most effective, most efficient ways to build and maintain lean mass are through intense strength and sprint training. Twice a week, spend 15-40 minutes lifting heavy things using functional, full-body compound movements – squats, pullups, pushups, planks – and once every 7-10 days, spend 10-20 minutes doing 8-10 all out sprints. If you don’t want to move heavy weights, you don’t have to; bodyweight exercises are plenty of stimulus for most people. And if you’re not ready to run sprints on a track, plenty of lower-impact alternatives exist, like cycling, swimming, rowing, or even uphill sprints.
Make your short, intense workouts shorter and more intense. Round them out with lots of slow moving – walks, hikes, and the like – throughout your everyday life, and you’ll be incredibly fit and well-rounded, in a fraction of the time most people presume is required. This is Primal Blueprint Fitness.
So, that’s it – the overview of the eight key concepts that comprise the Primal Blueprint. There’s more to it, of course – the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws are elementary and should also be studied – but for the purposes of completing and downright killing the 21-Day Primal Blueprint Challenge, these 8 Key Concepts provide a solid foundation for you moving forward.
What do you say? Does this sound doable? Does this make at least a bit of sense? Are you ready to get Primal?
Let’s do it!
In the coming days and weeks, I will lay out the path to Primal health in greater detail, but for now, are you ready to learn the basics? Let’s get to it…
1. Yes, You Really Can Reprogram Your Genes
The popular conception of a gene is “a weird collection of DNA and chromosomes and other stuff that determines whether or not you’re going to get this type of cancer, how long you’ll live, and if you’ll get a coronary bypass at some point in your life.” There’s this idea that genes are immutable, that they represent a sort of cosmic destiny for an individual. But, aside from some heritable traits like eye and hair color or the number of fingers on your hands and feet, genes are actually programmable. They “express” themselves in different ways according to information gathered from our environment, our food, and our behaviors. They “turn on” or “turn off” in response to these environmental signals. Thus, though you might have “the gene for type 2 diabetes” – which is really just a genetic proclivity towards the disease, not a sentence – providing the right environmental signals will prevent the gene from ever turning on.
How we eat, exercise, sleep, interact with our social circles, stress, and spend time outdoors (plus tons of other environmental signals) determines how our genes express themselves; how our genes express themselves in turn determines our level of health. Genetic predisposition is not your destiny.
2. The Clues to Optimal Gene Expression Are Found in Evolution
While we can’t sit at a control panel and fiddle with our gene expression like a mad scientist just yet, we can make some very good guesses based on a powerful heuristic: human evolution. Reason being, two million years of selection pressure exerted upon the hominid line designed a healthy, successful, productive, vibrant organism. We didn’t just “happen,” after all. We look like we do and work like we do and have the genes that we do that express themselves the way that they do because of very powerful selection pressures. The habitats in which we lived, the foods we ate, the movements we had to perform in order to survive, the sunlight to which we were exposed, the stressors we faced – these environmental factors shaped our genetic code, and it is to these various environmental stimuli that our genetic expression responds most favorably. The clues to realizing our Primal Blueprint lies scattered amidst our evolutionary history.
Until that day when we can sit a computer terminal and decide which genes we want to express today, and how, the best we can probably do is use human evolution as a base level tool for making lifestyle decisions. You’ll probably refine the details later, but evolution is a darn good place to start.
3. Your Body Prefers Burning Fat Over Carbohydrates
We’ve evolved to be fat-burners (must be why we’re so adept at storing it on our bodies!). It’s easy to see why. Fat burns slow and evenly, providing all-day steady energy levels. Carbohydrates burn quickly, and they’re gone in an instant, leaving you groggy and depleted unless you “carb up.” Furthermore, carbohydrates are an inherently unreliable and fleeting source of energy for our body, with most people only able to store about 400-500 grams of carbohydrates on the body at any one time. Our storage capacity for fat, on the other hand, is virtually endless. Just ten or fifteen pounds of body fat, which is the bare minimum available on even the leanest individuals, can provide tens of thousands of calories. Luckily, reducing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake sends the epigenetic signals necessary to help us revert back to fat-burning, and it only takes a week or two to get things moving in the right direction.
Become fat-adapted, enjoy boundless energy. Free yourself from the shackles of a carbohydrate-based metabolism/dependency.
4. 80 Percent of Your Body Composition Success Is Determined by How You Eat
Food is the single most important factor in body composition. You can exercise all you want but as long as you’re eating garbage, and too much of it, you won’t get very far. For that reason, any real attempt to modify your body composition has to begin by addressing what you put in your mouth. I like to start with the quality of the food you eat. I don’t discount the importance of quantity, mind you, but I do find that honing in on the quality of the food is more crucial and effective. Case in point: 2000 calories of fast food will have a very different effect on your body composition, satiety, and nutrient intake than 2000 calories of grass-fed meat, wild fish, and produce grown in rich, fertile, nutrient-dense soil. The fast food won’t be as satiating, nor as nutrient-dense, as the real food, so you’ll likely be compelled to eat more of it. The fast food will primarily include trans- and polyunsaturated fats, sugary sauces, refined grains, and poor quality meat, which will promote insulin resistance and the storage of body fat while inhibiting fat burning. Eating Primal food, rich in animals, plants, and healthy fat, on the other hand, will normalize insulin sensitivity, thereby allowing fat burning. In effect, quality will determine quantity; you’ll eat less spontaneously when you eat healthy Primal foods. Quality paired with proper quantity will in turn determine your body composition.
Sleep matters, exercise helps, stress has an effect, but how you eat – what you eat and how much you eat – is the prime determinant of your body composition.
5. Grains Are Totally Unnecessary
Despite their exalted position in the Conventional hierarchy of healthy foods, grains are completely and utterly unnecessary. And yes, that even goes for whole grains. I mean, what’s so great about them, anyway? What unique nutrients do they provide? If you want fiber, eat vegetables. If you want antioxidants, eat colorful produce. If you want carbs, eat fruits and tubers. Humans got along fairly well without wide scale grain agriculture for many thousands of years, and there’s no real reason to buy in today, especially when you consider the grain antinutrients like gluten that impair digestion, reduce mineral absorption, and damage the intestinal lining. What is it, then, that necessitates 10-12 servings of whole grains a day? It’s madness. Besides, for all the supposed health benefits that the grain-obsessed like to say are supported with tons of studies, this just isn’t the case when you look a little deeper. Those studies invariably compare whole grains to refined grains, and in that case, the whole grain will generally win out. I’d suspect that if you compared a whole grain-based diet to a grain-free Primal way of eating, you’d get very different results. Unfortunately, that study hasn’t been done.
There’s nothing good in grains that you can’t get elsewhere, and plenty bad that you won’t find elsewhere. Don’t eat ‘em.
6. Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Are Not Your Enemy
Another popular health canard is that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol are horrible, evil things that seek only to clog our arteries, thicken our blood, and pad our waistlines. That’s crazy, of course. Fat, especially saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol are important building blocks for sex hormones like testosterone. Saturated fat helps us absorb nutrients from our food. Saturated fat is inherently the most stable fat, able to withstand heat and light stress without oxidizing, and it’s incredibly satiating. Cholesterol is crucial in the creation of vitamin D from sun exposure. And contrary to popular belief and the protestations of “experts,” neither saturated fat nor dietary cholesterol have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Sugar, refined PUFA oils, trans-fats? Those are the real enemies. Oh, and consider this: every successful diet is actually a high-fat diet. When you lose weight, whether it’s through low-carb Primal or high-carb vegan, you are consuming ample amounts of highly saturated animal fat. The only thing is that this animal fat is coming off your body, but it’s still saturated animal fat just the same.
A diet rich in animal fat and cholesterol is not just safe, it’s downright healthy.
7. Exercise is Ineffective for Weight Management
Exercise is healthy. Exercise is necessary for lasting wellness. Exercise builds muscle and exerts beneficial effects on hormone expression and function. Exercise gets you strong, gets you fit, and keeps you young. I like exercise; I do some form of it every single day, and I recommend that you do the same. But exercise alone is highly ineffective for weight management. For it to truly help manage your weight, exercise must be paired with a healthy eating plan, adequate sleep, effective stress management, ample sun exposure, and healthy amounts of social contact with friends, family, and loved ones. Sure, some people take exercise to the extreme, training for hours and hours on end, all in the quest to burn a few hundred more calories, to “make up for” those donuts at breakfast, to eradicate those love handles. And if you go long enough and hard enough, yeah, you’ll “burn calories.” But at what cost? Exercise is a stressor, after all. Maintained at a chronic, extreme pace and frequency, exercise becomes a chronic stressor that does more harm than good. It makes you hungry. It increases systemic and local inflammation. It depresses your immune system. It fatigues you, leading to less activity throughout the day. You’ll eventually and inevitably burn out unless you eat a massive amount of calories to make up for all that you’ve lost, and, at that point, you’re back at square one.
You can’t out-exercise a bad diet and poor lifestyle.
8. Maximum Fitness Can Be Achieved in Minimal Time With High Intensity Workouts
Study after study shows that the key to optimal health, aging, and fitness is muscle strength and mass. The more lean mass we have, the better we’re able to handle what life can dish out, whether it’s carrying groceries, playing with our kids, saving our own lives in a life-or-death situation, or engaging in the time-tested essential activity known as love-making. Luckily for those of us who relish our free time, the most effective, most efficient ways to build and maintain lean mass are through intense strength and sprint training. Twice a week, spend 15-40 minutes lifting heavy things using functional, full-body compound movements – squats, pullups, pushups, planks – and once every 7-10 days, spend 10-20 minutes doing 8-10 all out sprints. If you don’t want to move heavy weights, you don’t have to; bodyweight exercises are plenty of stimulus for most people. And if you’re not ready to run sprints on a track, plenty of lower-impact alternatives exist, like cycling, swimming, rowing, or even uphill sprints.
Make your short, intense workouts shorter and more intense. Round them out with lots of slow moving – walks, hikes, and the like – throughout your everyday life, and you’ll be incredibly fit and well-rounded, in a fraction of the time most people presume is required. This is Primal Blueprint Fitness.
So, that’s it – the overview of the eight key concepts that comprise the Primal Blueprint. There’s more to it, of course – the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws are elementary and should also be studied – but for the purposes of completing and downright killing the 21-Day Primal Blueprint Challenge, these 8 Key Concepts provide a solid foundation for you moving forward.
What do you say? Does this sound doable? Does this make at least a bit of sense? Are you ready to get Primal?
Let’s do it!
Secret TSA Body Scanners 50 X More Lethal
A growing number of Americans are already outraged over the government's use of high-powered, ultra-revealing and potentially dangerous backscatter x-ray machines at a growing number of the nation's airports, and as bad as that problem is, it's about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress intervenes to stop the madness.
In the late 1990s, travel experts doubted the government would ever employ such machines in a security checkpoint role at airports or other locations. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 dramatically reversed that mentality to the point that now, no doubt afraid of being accused of doing "too little" to enhance security, lawmakers and select government agencies have done a complete reversal, permitting the use of high-powered x-ray machines to "scan" airline travelers (and perhaps, we near bus, train and other modes of travel in the future).
The all-knowing Transportation Security Administration insists the machines it is currently using - some 250 of them - are safe, but the agency relies primarily on its own in-house and government experts to support their claims.
The non-governmental experts speak
But other private-sector experts, including a bevy of health and radiation scientists cited by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, disagree. They include Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D., a board certified neurosurgeon, who wrote:
The growing outrage over the Transportation Security Administration's new policy of backscatter scanning of airline passengers and enhanced pat-downs brings to mind these wise words from President Ronald Reagan: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. So, what is all the concern really about - will these radiation scanners increase your risk of cancer or other diseases? A group of scientists and professors from the University of California at San Francisco voiced their concern to Obama's science and technology adviser John Holdren in a well-stated letter back in April (2010).
The letter he referred to was signed by doctors John Sedat Ph.D., David Agard, Ph.D., Marc Shuman, M.D., Robert Stroud, Ph.D., all of whom are faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. They wrote:
We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers. Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.
These experts went on to say that even though the overall dose of radiation "would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high."
Despite what the experts say, the government continues to employ more powerful x-ray machines
No matter. Again, the TSA knows better. And apparently, judging by the lack of concern shown by a majority of members of Congress, most of them agree with this rogue agency.
So, law enforcement agencies, including the TSA and others, are continuing to expand their use of x-ray scanners, "including machines that expose people to as much as 50 times more radiation than an airport scanner, and are sometimes using them on people without their knowledge or consent," AllGov.com reported.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is currently installing some 35 drive-thru x-ray gates that will scan vehicles at the border with passengers still inside.
New York City, meanwhile, has utilized specially equipped vans to scan vehicles for drugs and weapons, again while people are inside them.
Also, prisons have begun to use x-rays that can see through the body in search of contraband that may be hidden inside the bodies of prisoners - and jail employees as well.
Where are the government regulatory agencies?
The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the safety of medical machines like x-ray equipment, apparently has no jurisdiction over their non-medical use, according to reports. So, they've done nothing about the use of x-ray scanners by police.
In the late 1990s, travel experts doubted the government would ever employ such machines in a security checkpoint role at airports or other locations. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 dramatically reversed that mentality to the point that now, no doubt afraid of being accused of doing "too little" to enhance security, lawmakers and select government agencies have done a complete reversal, permitting the use of high-powered x-ray machines to "scan" airline travelers (and perhaps, we near bus, train and other modes of travel in the future).
The all-knowing Transportation Security Administration insists the machines it is currently using - some 250 of them - are safe, but the agency relies primarily on its own in-house and government experts to support their claims.
The non-governmental experts speak
But other private-sector experts, including a bevy of health and radiation scientists cited by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, disagree. They include Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D., a board certified neurosurgeon, who wrote:
The growing outrage over the Transportation Security Administration's new policy of backscatter scanning of airline passengers and enhanced pat-downs brings to mind these wise words from President Ronald Reagan: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. So, what is all the concern really about - will these radiation scanners increase your risk of cancer or other diseases? A group of scientists and professors from the University of California at San Francisco voiced their concern to Obama's science and technology adviser John Holdren in a well-stated letter back in April (2010).
The letter he referred to was signed by doctors John Sedat Ph.D., David Agard, Ph.D., Marc Shuman, M.D., Robert Stroud, Ph.D., all of whom are faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. They wrote:
We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers. Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.
These experts went on to say that even though the overall dose of radiation "would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high."
Despite what the experts say, the government continues to employ more powerful x-ray machines
No matter. Again, the TSA knows better. And apparently, judging by the lack of concern shown by a majority of members of Congress, most of them agree with this rogue agency.
So, law enforcement agencies, including the TSA and others, are continuing to expand their use of x-ray scanners, "including machines that expose people to as much as 50 times more radiation than an airport scanner, and are sometimes using them on people without their knowledge or consent," AllGov.com reported.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is currently installing some 35 drive-thru x-ray gates that will scan vehicles at the border with passengers still inside.
New York City, meanwhile, has utilized specially equipped vans to scan vehicles for drugs and weapons, again while people are inside them.
Also, prisons have begun to use x-rays that can see through the body in search of contraband that may be hidden inside the bodies of prisoners - and jail employees as well.
Where are the government regulatory agencies?
The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the safety of medical machines like x-ray equipment, apparently has no jurisdiction over their non-medical use, according to reports. So, they've done nothing about the use of x-ray scanners by police.
Eat GMO? Liver Damage?
Genetically engineered wheat contains an enzyme suppressor that, when consumed by humans, could cause permanent liver failure (and death). That's the warning issued today by molecular biologist Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury in Australia.
Heinemann has published an eye-opening report that details this warning and calls for rigorous scientific testing on animals before this crop is ever consumed by humans. The enzyme suppressor in the wheat, he says, might also attack a human enzyme that produces glycogen.
Consumers who eat genetically modified wheat would end up contaminating their bodies with this enzyme-destroying wheat, causing their own livers to be unable to produce glycogen, a hormone molecule that helps the body regulate blood sugar metabolism. This, in turn, would lead to liver failure.
"What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat, intended to silence wheat genes, can match human genes, and through ingestion, these molecules can enter human beings and potentially silence our genes," said Heinemann in a press conference on the threat of GM wheat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7n_caiTvE).
"We found over 770 pages of potential matches between these two genes in wheat and the human genome," he continued. "We found over a dozen matches that are extensive and identical, and sufficient to cause silencing in experimental systems.
The findings are absolutely assured. There's no doubt that these matches exist. ...from this information, we know that it's plausible there will be an adverse effect and therefore that's why we're calling for a particular battery of experiments to be done before humans eat this wheat."
Professor Judy Carman, biochemist and director of the IHER, Flinders University, Adelaide, added: "If this silences the same sort of gene in us -- as it silences in the wheat -- then, well, children who are born with this enzyme not working tend to die by the age of about five. And adults with this problem, just kind of get more and more sick, and more and more tired, until they get very very ill indeed."
She continues, "Before this comes near any human feeding studies, you need to undertake thorough animal safety assessments, where you actually look to see if the animals get sick. So you need to see if this genetic modification survives digestion and gets into the bodies of the animals.
You need to see what effect it has on them. You need to do proper long-term toxicology studies... you need to check for cancer, you need to see if there are any reproductive problems, and you need to check for allergies..."
GMO pushers want you and your children to be the guinea pigs
As you consider this information, keep in mind that GMO pushers want you and your children to eat GMOs that have never been safety tested on anyone! You are simply supposed to believe in the safety of GMOs, like a cult followers, without any scientific evidence proving it.
In today's corporate-run quack science agricultural system, YOU are the human guinea pigs. There is no science behind the safety of GMOs, and in fact the real science shows that GMOs cause infertility, sickness and disease in the animal tests that have been done. GMOs are a threat to humanity, and those who promote them are junk science villains who have sold their souls to the criminal biotechnology industry.
The GMO industry is so evil that it doesn't even want you to know you're eating GMOs! That's why industry giants are funneling tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to try to defeat Proposition 37 in California (www.CArighttoknow.org) which would legally mandate the labeling of GMOs on food products.
Even popular brands that "sound" natural are actually fighting against GMO labeling: Kashi, Larabar, Cascadian Farm, R.W. Knudsen, Silk and other brands have all betrayed consumers and are now the subject of a global Natural News boycott.
Australian regulators sell out to Monsanto
In commenting on all this, Dr Brian John of GM-Free Cymru said:
"What we see here is yet another example of a GM wheat variety released into the environment without any proper assessment of health and safety issues. CSIRO and the Australian and New Zealand regulators have long had a strategy of promoting GM crops which nobody actually wants, with a degree of enthusiasm that verges on criminal negligence.
We see a very similar scenario in the UK, where GM wheat is being grown at Rothamsted in spite of strong public opposition and in spite of zero market demand, just to satisfy the whims of politicians and multinational corporations. It is high time for this absurd and dangerous experiment with GM technology to be stopped in its tracks, since new evidence of harm to health and the environment now seems to be appearing on a weekly basis."
See the background on CSIRO:HERE
It shows that CSIRO has financial ties to Monsanto and other biotech companies.
Read the expert scientific opinion reports
(Thanks due to GMwatch.org for this list.)
Professor Jack Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion
Professor Judy Carman's Expert Scientific Opinion
Professor Michael Antoniou's Expert Scientific Appraisal of Heinemann and Carman's Work
Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion: Appendix 1
Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion: Appendix 2
Safe Food Foundation media release on the opinions
ABBREVIATIONS
CSIRO = Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
FSANZ = Food Standards Australia New Zealand
OGTR = Office of the Gene Technology Regulator
I am a molecular biologist. I have been an academic at the University of Canterbury since 1994. Prior to that, I was employed by the US National Institutes of Health. My doctorate was conferred by the University of Oregon at Eugene (1989) and my Bachelor of Science (with honours) degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1985).
I am involved in risk assessment research and participate in risk assessment through evaluation of assessments provided to regulatory bodies and through the development of international guidance documents for risk assessment. I have over 100 scholarly works published on the topic of molecular biology, genetics, risk assessment and other scientific matters within my expertise. I publish in leading international journals and my work has been recognised by prestigious professional organisations for its excellence.
Heinemann has published an eye-opening report that details this warning and calls for rigorous scientific testing on animals before this crop is ever consumed by humans. The enzyme suppressor in the wheat, he says, might also attack a human enzyme that produces glycogen.
Consumers who eat genetically modified wheat would end up contaminating their bodies with this enzyme-destroying wheat, causing their own livers to be unable to produce glycogen, a hormone molecule that helps the body regulate blood sugar metabolism. This, in turn, would lead to liver failure.
"What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat, intended to silence wheat genes, can match human genes, and through ingestion, these molecules can enter human beings and potentially silence our genes," said Heinemann in a press conference on the threat of GM wheat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7n_caiTvE).
"We found over 770 pages of potential matches between these two genes in wheat and the human genome," he continued. "We found over a dozen matches that are extensive and identical, and sufficient to cause silencing in experimental systems.
The findings are absolutely assured. There's no doubt that these matches exist. ...from this information, we know that it's plausible there will be an adverse effect and therefore that's why we're calling for a particular battery of experiments to be done before humans eat this wheat."
Professor Judy Carman, biochemist and director of the IHER, Flinders University, Adelaide, added: "If this silences the same sort of gene in us -- as it silences in the wheat -- then, well, children who are born with this enzyme not working tend to die by the age of about five. And adults with this problem, just kind of get more and more sick, and more and more tired, until they get very very ill indeed."
She continues, "Before this comes near any human feeding studies, you need to undertake thorough animal safety assessments, where you actually look to see if the animals get sick. So you need to see if this genetic modification survives digestion and gets into the bodies of the animals.
You need to see what effect it has on them. You need to do proper long-term toxicology studies... you need to check for cancer, you need to see if there are any reproductive problems, and you need to check for allergies..."
GMO pushers want you and your children to be the guinea pigs
As you consider this information, keep in mind that GMO pushers want you and your children to eat GMOs that have never been safety tested on anyone! You are simply supposed to believe in the safety of GMOs, like a cult followers, without any scientific evidence proving it.
In today's corporate-run quack science agricultural system, YOU are the human guinea pigs. There is no science behind the safety of GMOs, and in fact the real science shows that GMOs cause infertility, sickness and disease in the animal tests that have been done. GMOs are a threat to humanity, and those who promote them are junk science villains who have sold their souls to the criminal biotechnology industry.
The GMO industry is so evil that it doesn't even want you to know you're eating GMOs! That's why industry giants are funneling tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to try to defeat Proposition 37 in California (www.CArighttoknow.org) which would legally mandate the labeling of GMOs on food products.
Even popular brands that "sound" natural are actually fighting against GMO labeling: Kashi, Larabar, Cascadian Farm, R.W. Knudsen, Silk and other brands have all betrayed consumers and are now the subject of a global Natural News boycott.
Australian regulators sell out to Monsanto
In commenting on all this, Dr Brian John of GM-Free Cymru said:
"What we see here is yet another example of a GM wheat variety released into the environment without any proper assessment of health and safety issues. CSIRO and the Australian and New Zealand regulators have long had a strategy of promoting GM crops which nobody actually wants, with a degree of enthusiasm that verges on criminal negligence.
We see a very similar scenario in the UK, where GM wheat is being grown at Rothamsted in spite of strong public opposition and in spite of zero market demand, just to satisfy the whims of politicians and multinational corporations. It is high time for this absurd and dangerous experiment with GM technology to be stopped in its tracks, since new evidence of harm to health and the environment now seems to be appearing on a weekly basis."
See the background on CSIRO:HERE
It shows that CSIRO has financial ties to Monsanto and other biotech companies.
Read the expert scientific opinion reports
(Thanks due to GMwatch.org for this list.)
Professor Jack Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion
Professor Judy Carman's Expert Scientific Opinion
Professor Michael Antoniou's Expert Scientific Appraisal of Heinemann and Carman's Work
Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion: Appendix 1
Heinemann's Expert Scientific Opinion: Appendix 2
Safe Food Foundation media release on the opinions
ABBREVIATIONS
CSIRO = Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
FSANZ = Food Standards Australia New Zealand
OGTR = Office of the Gene Technology Regulator
I am a molecular biologist. I have been an academic at the University of Canterbury since 1994. Prior to that, I was employed by the US National Institutes of Health. My doctorate was conferred by the University of Oregon at Eugene (1989) and my Bachelor of Science (with honours) degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1985).
I am involved in risk assessment research and participate in risk assessment through evaluation of assessments provided to regulatory bodies and through the development of international guidance documents for risk assessment. I have over 100 scholarly works published on the topic of molecular biology, genetics, risk assessment and other scientific matters within my expertise. I publish in leading international journals and my work has been recognised by prestigious professional organisations for its excellence.
Massive Fund Attack on GMO Labeling Proposal in California
Just how much is it worth to chemical giants like Monsanto to make Proposition 37 – a bill that would require labeling of genetically engineered food – go away?
Enough to contribute $4.2 million so far to a campaign to defeat it, that's how much.
Monsanto's not the only major chemical company hoping to defeat this measure. Dupont ($1.27 million) and Dow Agro ($1.18 million) are contributing millions to fight our right to know what's in the food we eat.
Why are You Being Kept in the Dark About What's in Your Food?
Monsanto is the acknowledged leader responsible for the genetic changes in our food system – the mother of biotechnology in agriculture and creator of other products that have included Agent Orange1, PCBs2, DDT3, Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) and aspartame4.
How Monsanto became such a ringmaster is crucial to understanding why Americans are not allowed to know if their food has been genetically engineered by simple labeling like 50 countries around the world do, including Russia, China and the entire EU.
So why are Americans kept in the dark? Monsanto is not just an expert in manipulating genetic structures, they are also experts in manipulating people.
Monsanto influenced President Ronald Reagan's administration back in 1986 to assure genetic engineering would be kept away from the public forum. Monsanto's power has been further enhanced through each administration, adding more influence with each federal appointment.
Even in the past year, Monsanto has directly supported at least 65 candidates for federal office in the 2012 elections, with significant dollars "donated" to the chairs and leadership of the House and Senate Ag Committee.
Who's Really in Charge of GE Food Safety?
Who is ensuring the safety of Monsanto's products? Not Monsanto.
"Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.'s job" – Philip Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Playing God in the Garden" New York Times Magazine.And neither is the US FDA...The FDA has not conducted a single independent test of any genetically engineered product. The agency simply accepts the testing completed and provided by the biotechnology corporations like Monsanto. The FDA makes this very clear,
"Ultimately, it is the food producer who is responsible for assuring safety" – FDA, "Statement of Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties" (GMO Policy), Federal Register, Vol. 57, No. 104, p. 229Does that make you a bit concerned about the integrity of our food safety system? There are many variables to consider with these genetically engineered foods. GMOs are living, synthetic organisms that can reproduce and proliferate, they can mutate and migrate. Can we trust a small group of chemical companies to control and monopolize our food and restructure the world's food system?
The USDA has implemented a new fast-track process that is a part of efforts by the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack5, to "transform the USDA into a high-performing organization that focuses on its customers" – namely big biotech bullies like Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, BASF, and Syngenta. The USDA recently posted 12 new genetically engineered (GE) crop submissions for public comment, and nine are under the new fast-tracked process. It's no coincidence that Vilsack was named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Association in 2001...
Former United States Secretary of Agriculture (served from 1995 until 2001), Dan Glickman, was a big promoter for biotechnology and pushed for these products to be sold in Europe to secure profitable exports. He concluded after his USDA departure,
"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches."
"FDA Shouldn't Order Costly GMO Labels Just to Satisfy Scientific Illiterates"
Arrogant biotech scientists make alarmingly dishonest blanket statements suggesting all scientists agree that genetically engineered foods are beneficial to us and our environment. I invite you to read GMO Myths and Truths if you'd like to completely debunk that lie.
A recent article by a biotechnology company consultant recently wrote an article entitled, "The FDA Shouldn't Order Costly GMO Labels Just to Satisfy Scientific Illiterates."6
In Europe, Monsanto supports labeling genetically engineered foods because the people demand it. In fact, after realizing how much it had upset the European public by attempting to force these products upon consumers, Monsanto ran ad campaigns in support of labeling to save face.
One ad proclaims, "You have the right to know what you eat, especially when it's better... We believe that products that come from biotechnology are better and that they should be labeled."
In an interview with State of the World Forum, News Team journalist Alastair Thompson asked Monsanto CEO, Robert Shapiro about the consumers demand for labeling GMOs. Shapiro said, " ...it is not my role, or Monsanto's role, to decide these things. It is society's role to decide those questions after appropriate debate."
"So you are open to labeling being introduced then?" Shapiro answered: "Yes. Of course."
Monsanto spokesman, Gary Barton also clearly stated, "There's a total misperception that we're against labeling." Genetically engineered products should proudly display a simple statement acknowledging this technology. These multinational businesses should have no problem promoting evidence to convince consumers of their many benefits.
Surprisingly, Monsanto appears to contradict those principles in the United States, where the company says it doesn't support labeling and will spend millions to ensure this information is concealed from consumers.
That's because the current policy in America is one where the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture operate as both regulator and marketer of biotechnology. Most people don't realize that our own USDA co-patented the "Terminator" technology that makes seeds sterile. Monsanto loves to proclaim that genetically engineered foods will save the environment and feed the hungry, apparently with a very heavy hand.
"People will have Roundup Ready soya whether they like it or not" – Ann Foster, spokesperson for Monsanto in Britian, as quoted in The Nation magazine from article "The Politics of Food" by Maria Margaronis.
India Bans Genetically Engineered Bt Cotton Seeds
The Indian state Maharashtra has now banned the sale and distribution of Monsanto's genetically modified Bt cotton seeds7 for obvious reasons. India recently released an analysis from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture regarding Monsanto's Bt cotton performance in the country. According to the report:
"The Bt cotton has aggravated agrarian distress rather than helped farmers. The irresponsible hype and promotion of this technology has cost many farmers their lives and cannot continue."A thorough investigation into the Bt cotton collusion has been ordered from the beginning, including a review of studies showing inexplicable changes in the organs and tissues of Bt cotton seed-fed lambs. India has suffered greatly due to false promises of biotechnology. I traveled to several locations in India back in 2008 to see the suffering first hand and to hear the tragic stories of farmers consuming the very herbicide that was supposed to help them harvest high-yielding genetically engineered crops.
Instead, these farmers were burdened with great debt to purchase these products, and eventually would lose their land when the promised yield never came, and ultimately would take their own life. Yet we're led to believe these patented, synthetic life forms are supposed to be the salvation for impoverished farmers and starving people. GMOs can't even feed America's inner cities, much less Africa, Pakistan and the rest of the starving population. This is a problem of politics, distribution, and equity that Monsanto simply dismisses in an attempt to control the world's food supply.
Monsanto's Utopian Future = Environmental Disaster
Monsanto was prosecuted on corruption charges in Indonesia. The biotechnology giant said it would pay $1.5 million to settle charges of bribing Indonesian officials. The company made payoffs to officials over six years, according to a complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, including a $50,000 cash payoff to Indonesia's environment ministry official.
You see, Monsanto will do whatever it takes to accomplish their ultimate goal.
In January, 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. Monsanto executives told the consulting firm what their ideal future would look like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world in which 100 percent of all commercial seeds would be genetically modified and patented; a world in which natural seeds would be virtually extinct.
"What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain" –Robert Fraley, co-president of Monsanto's agricultural sector, in the Farm Journal. Quoted in: Flint J. (1998) Agricultural industry giants moving towards genetic monopolism.Telepolis, Heise.
Why No One Should Overlook Monsanto's Sordid Past
Monsanto has had a controversial past that had polluted the land and contaminated virtually every human and animal on earth. According to a former Monsanto vice president, "We were despised by our customers." Monsanto's chief European spokesman admitted in 1999, "Everybody over here (Europe) hates us."
It appears that the rest of the world is catching on. Monsanto has gone so far as to even begin brainwashing our children, creating a Biotechnology Basics Activity Book.8 The book states:
"This is an activity book for young people like you about biotechnology – a really neat topic. Why is it such a neat topic? Because biotechnology is helping to improve the health of the Earth and the people who call it home."The book goes on misleading kids with statements like: "Reduces Blindness," and "creates products with reduced fat." Not covered in the book however, is any explanation of how for nearly 40 years, while producing PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into an Anniston, Alabama creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into landfills. Thousands of Monsanto documents marked "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" show how they hid their transgressions that went on for decades. One internal memo concluded:
"We can't afford to lose one dollar of business."A life-long resident of Anniston, Alabama revealed,
"Monsanto did a job on this city. They thought we were stupid and illiterate people, so nobody would notice what happens to us."Monsanto created virtually all of the PCBs in the U.S. and is a "potentially responsible party" at 93 sites where hazardous waste has been identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A former Anniston plant manager for Monsanto, William Papageorge, was asked in a deposition whether Monsanto officials ever shared their knowledge about PCB hazards with the community.9 "Why would they?" he replied.
Monsanto "Learned its Lesson" from Successful EU Refusal of GE Products
In a 2010 article in the International Journal of Communication, titled "Monsanto Discovers New Social Media," Wilhelm Peekhaus writes:10
"Monsanto learned some time ago about the value of the Internet in influencing the message being disseminated publicly about genetically engineered crops. The company's director of communications, Philip Angell, admitted to The Wall Street Journal that 'maybe we weren't aggressive enough. …When you fight a forest fire, sometimes you have to light another fire.'
Monsanto executives identified the Internet as the medium that had facilitated the rapid and expansive uptake of European protest against its products.
Jay Byrne, former Monsanto director of Internet outreach, counseled colleagues beyond the company to 'think of the Internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed.'"
GE Crops – the Largest Experiment on Earth
Monsanto's business practices are certainly one concern we need to take into account when it comes to our food supply. But what about the science – will Monsanto's monoculture prevail and thrive or cause massive problems for our future agriculture system? The National Academy of Science concluded after a fungus spread through America's corn crop:
"The key lesson is that genetic uniformity is the basis of vulnerability to epidemics."Back in 1993, Monsanto issued statements to the USDA regarding the potential for the development of weed resistance, ensuring that "glyphosate is considered to be an herbicide with low risk for weed resistance" and "it is highly unlikely that weed resistance to glyphosate will become a problem as a result of the commercialization of glyphosate-tolerant soybeans."
Over 20 different weed species have now developed glyphosate resistance and the risks are not limited to the plants. The Bt gene that is introduced into a majority of the American corn and cotton dramatically catalyzes the resistance of insects. At least eight species of insects have already developed Bt resistance.
"We're not going to make this go away," said University of Minnesota professor Bruce Potter, a pest management specialist. "We're stuck with managing this problem."11We are performing an experiment on a world scale whose consequences are unknown and can only be imagined. Dr. Charles Benbrook was a former agricultural staff expert on the Council for Environmental Quality at The White House, Executive Director of the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture, and Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences.
He has stated,12
"The scope of the fraud, if you will – I know that's a harsh word – the scope of the fraud that's being sold to the American public about this technology is almost unprecedented.
They have no control over where in that cell or where in that plant's genome the new genetic material gets lodged and expressed. Because they don't have control over that, they have absolutely no basis to predict how that trans-gene, the new genetic material, is going to behave in the future as that plant deals with stresses in its environment – whether it's drought, too much water, pest pressures,imbalances in the soil, or any other source of stress.
They just don't know how it's going to behave. They don't know how stable that expression is going to be, or whether the third generation of the plant is going to behave just like other generations. They don't know whether the promoter gene, which has been moved into the plant to turn on the new piece of genetic material, will influence some other biosynthetic pathway that's in the plant, turning on some natural process of the plant when it shouldn't be turned on, or turning it off too soon.
There are all sorts of things that they don't know.
The biotechnology industry says, 'Well, if one of these genetically engineered plants kind of goes crazy, it's probably not going to be fit and it won't survive. It won't last in the environment. Nature will select out against it.'
For somebody that works for a public institution to make that point, it really borders on libelous. It's such a violation of the public trust for scientists who understand this stuff to be so divorced from fairness in talking about the technical issues to an audience of non-scientists. It's really scandalous, in my opinion."
Without Choice, How Can There Be Trust?
Former Monsanto lawyer and current FDA Food Czar Michael Taylor wrote the policy of substantial equivalence, ensuring biotech companies would not need to label their products as genetically engineered. This would appear to contradict Taylor's opinion in a 2003 Nature Biotechnology article13 where he states:
"The United States and the major US agbiotech companies have positioned themselves in the eyes of many as opposing choice by virtue of their aggressive promotion of the technology, their opposition to labeling worldwide, and most recently by resorting to trade remedies to force Europe's hand. Nothing could be more destructive of trust in the technology and its promoters than for them to be on the wrong side of the choice issue. They should change their position and put themselves on the side of empowering choice in whatever way works in any given country."Even Presidential candidate Obama promised to label genetically engineered foods – a promise we're still waiting for him to fulfill even after a full term in the Oval Office.
After moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety, the US ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of George W. Bush, asked Washington to penalize the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.14
"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.In one document, the embassy wrote: "If Spain falls, the rest of Europe will follow." It was also leaked that the US knew in advance how Spain would vote, before the Spanish biotech commission had even reported their findings.15
Are Genetically Engineered Crops Saving the World as Promised?
Not according to the Union of Concerned Scientists16, which recently created an ad campaign to awaken the public to Monsanto's failed agricultural model. One such ad reads:
More Herbicide + Fewer Butterflies = Better Seeds?A Cornell University study back in 1999 showed Bt pollen from GMO corn killed monarch butterflies. This was confirmed in a study performed at Iowa State in the summer of 2000. The caterpillars' guts were essentially destroyed, they crawled slowly, turned black and rotted. There are 4,000 different species of butterflies and moths that could be affected.
Monsanto Says: "In the hands of farmers, better seeds can help meet the needs of our rapidly growing population, while protecting the earth's natural resources."
In Fact: Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops, genetically engineered to tolerate the company's Roundup herbicide, increased herbicide use by an estimated 383 million pounds between 1996 and 2008. And Monarch butterflies have laid 81 percent fewer eggs thanks to habitat loss since Roundup Ready was introduced.
Walmart has recently announced they will be selling sweet corn utilizing this Bt technology, unlabeled of course. Even more damning may be details from the "GMO Myths and Truths" report17 that was produced by industry expert scientists. The report presents evidence that genetically engineered crops:
- Are laboratory-made, using technology that is totally different from natural breeding methods, and pose different risks from non-GM crops
- Can be toxic, allergenic or less nutritious than their natural counterparts
- Are not adequately regulated to ensure safety
- Do not increase yield potential
- Do not reduce pesticide use but increase it
- Create serious problems for farmers, including herbicide-tolerant "superweeds," compromised soil quality, and increased disease susceptibility in crops
- Have mixed economic effects
- Harm soil quality, disrupt ecosystems, and reduce biodiversity
- Do not offer effective solutions to climate change
- Are as energy-hungry as any other chemically-farmed crops
- Cannot solve the problem of world hunger but distract from its real causes – poverty, lack of access to food and, increasingly, lack of access to land to grow it on
Beware of the Hired Front-Groups
In a recent Huffington Post article18, public health lawyer Michelle Simone warns that many former tobacco industry consultants are now hard at work devising battle plans for the food industry against California's Proposition 37. She writes:
"...Another tactic honed by Big Tobacco is to form a front group that appears to be made up of small businesses and others, in order to give the impression of a grassroots campaign, but which is really funded by large corporations. This tactic, known as Astroturfing, is alive and well with 'No on 37,' which describes itself as a 'broad coalition of family farmers, scientists, doctors, taxpayers, small businesses, labor, food companies, biotechnology companies and grocers.'
Small farmers and small businesses? I don't see any listed on the 'Who We Are' page. I do see many not-so-small trade groups representing numerous not-so-small corporations, some of them from outside California, including CropLife America, which is a trade group for the biotech and pesticide industry.
...Another group with Big Tobacco origins now spreading lies about the GMO labeling initiative is the unsubtle front group California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, whose executive director recently warned us to 'beware of trial lawyers lurking in your food.' (It seems lawyers are scarier than altering the genetic code of the food supply.) ...In sum the food industry, to oppose a simple labeling law, is hiring lawyers and consultants with ties to the tobacco industry, to deploy stealth tactics such as creating front groups, digging up dirt on opponents, and spreading outright lies.
For decades the tobacco industry and its shills hid the truth by deploying its most effective weapon: manufacturing doubt about the health hazards of smoking. How many millions of Americans died as a result of Big Tobacco's deceptive and cynical campaign? Why would we trust these same operators now?"
The Final Hope for Americans to Achieve Basic GMO Labeling
As we are only weeks away before voting begins, this is our final push to raise funding and awareness for the Proposition 37 campaign. There may never be another chance to achieve labeling in the United States.The decision to label genetically engineered foods will be put into the hands of voters. This coordinated effort has brought millions of consumers together from around the world, but some are wondering why some of the largest businesses that support labeling remain on the sideline. With Monsanto leading the funding for opposition with $4.2M already contributed, funding for support of Prop 37 is provided by consumer associations and organic companies.19
I urge you to get involved and help in any way you can. Be assured that what happens in California will affect the remainder of the U.S. states, so please support this important state initiative, even if you do not live there!
- Join the CA RightToKnow campaign, and tell everyone you know in California to vote YES on Proposition 37.
- Whether you live in California or not, please donate money to this historic effort through the Organic Consumers Fund.
- Talk to organic producers and stores and ask them to actively support the California Ballot. It may be the only chance we have to label genetically engineered foods.
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