Category Archives: genetically modified

Following the mercury trail…

by

Here is an excellent piece on solving the mercury mystery….it’s not really that hard if one looks for it.  But that would require work and persistence…

This passage really struck home to me:

He was only 44 years old. The cause of death, according to the ASA account, was lupus erythermatosis, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own healthy tissue. According to his death certificate, as mentioned above, his brother, Ritchey, died of multiple myeloma — a cancer of the immune system, formed by malignant plasma cells in the bone marrow.

~~~~~~~~

Mercury/heavy metals cause autoimmune diseases.  They also cause cancer.   I mean, they actually use nickel in labs to give rats cancer! These are well known, but rarely looked at by the medical profession…why??

Too much profit in providing medical care?? Too much profit for Big Pharma??

If you think not, just remember the story by Gary Null about the hospital in Washington state that first entertained the idea of liquid zinc helping women suffering from anorexia/bulimia…when the doc who discovered the connection was asked to speak before the hospital staff, the bean counters pulled the administrators aside and remarked that if a simple thing like liquid zinc could bring results in a week or so, what would happen to their $$$ profits on the eating disorders clinic…??  Yep.

As Shirley Chisholm said, “When profits come up against morality, it’s rare that profits lose.”

James O’Keefe at it again? **edited

by

This *cough* surfer guy sure does resemble James O’Keefe—the guy who brought down ACORN with his pimp impersonation and who also tampered with Mary Landrieu’s phone system.

This hit piece is just another Reagan-Cadillac-driving-welfare-queen smear to incite hatred towards food stamp recipients.  There is no waaaay someone on food stamps could survive buying lobster and other expensive grocery items in this video.  When his $200 is gone…it’s gone.

One would have to buy chicken, beans, rice, etc., to survive.  And fruits and vegetables to stay healthy.  But again, this video sneakily ignores that…

God these people are evil.

**edited to add link. Geesh

All things ALEC

by

Center for Media and Democracy has several links up on ALEC:

(most of these are from the week prior to the 40th birthday bash in Chicago)

They long for the bygone era.

ALEC agenda.

More *cough* scholarship funds for those poor, poor legislators…

I, for one, would like to know the reasons that Larry Summers, a hedge fund manager, would be the optimal choice for Federal Reserve.  WTH?

Pissed off at how much you’re taxed….well, how does this grab ya?  You at least expect your taxes to go towards useful things like roads, police, fire, schools….but, no, it is going to subsidize these folks.

This is the latest–the treatment of the protestors by Chicago P.D.  A note in the comments section said that over 900 people were arrested.

~~~~~~~~

On to other things–

Pandora’s lunchbox. Basically, like Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride tells GAPS patients….nothing processed is good for you–avoid it like the plague.  Try to eat more raw than cooked food.  Cooking destroys the enzymes in food–enzymes are used in all processes in your body.  This includes digestion of proteins and other nutrients so that your body can utilize them.  It won’t do your body any good if it lacks the enzymes to digest the nutrients.

~~~~~~~

Lastly, there’s nanotechnology everywhere.  Is anybody regulating it? Well, yes and no.  The FDA is regulating silver nanoparticals, but you know the FDA on the nanotechnology as a whole….throw it out there and hope nobody notices.  Be sure to click on the links for Grist’s take (I knew there was a reason that I felt like I had sludge in my gut after eating M&M’s); also the link for Purdue’s report on the fish; and  the effect on DNA.  Yep.

 

Hedge funds create jobs?

by

Um – hmmm…

These are just my first thoughts after a quick read~~

The title of the piece is written in a condescending way.  ” Just STFU and do your movies.”   Insulting.

The author brings up the two flops that Loeb complained about–and as George had stated, Loeb picks two flops and ignores the profitable movies. You can’t possibly think that you’re going to have hit after hit? Seriously? If one never takes a chance and puts stuff out there that may or may not do well at the box office, according to the public’s whim, then we’ll have what happened to the music industry. With the exception of Adele and the former Amy Winehouse, I can’t think of any new music that is being played on the radio that is worth a crap.

From the article:

But to be clear, and with job-creating growth in mind, if hedge funds didn’t exist we’d have to invent them

Um.. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think hedge funds invested in the movie industry when it was created. Folks used this thing called “cash” to form the studios and then they had this great idea to make some films and then ask people to pay to see them. Hedge fund investors don’t invest until there is a business going already. And Hedge funds have been known to fail themselves.

I found a history of hedge funds in investopedia.

More from the article:

It’s not broadly understood this way, but hedge fund billionaire John Paulson not only saved jobs, but the billions he earned surely created new ones.

Seriously? Where are those jobs, because there are an awful lot of people out of work for all the jobs created by Hedge Funds. /snark

For taking these risks, hedge funds are not only masterful job creators, they’re also paradoxically masterful job savers for their intrepid style telling others where and where not to go with their capital.

I think I’m going to be sick.

Let me get this straight–they create jobs by telling investors not to invest in a company that might create 100 jobs because….Company A looks better than Company B because Company A is willing to go without a union shop and pay people minimum wage….am I correct…?

Or…how about this–if you follow the “short selling” link, you see this:

Selling short is the opposite of going long. That is, short sellers make money if the stock goes down in price.

~~~~~

Read that again–short sellers make money if the stock goes down.  Now I’m wondering if Loeb is short selling….or if someone he knows is short selling Sony stock?  An associate?  A relative?  Since Loeb actually owns the stock, it doesn’t appear that he is short selling, since the broker technically owns the stock in a short sale.  Gah.  The whole thing sounds like a scam.

I used to invest in stock back in the day.  I took an investment class in college, and I did quite well investing in emerging telecommunications technology.    But this was at the beginning of the metamorphosis I was going through, and I began to question the whole scheme because of stuff like the above.  I knew that I could not invest in companies that did not use Fair Trade practices or those that ran sweat shops,  or companies like Monsanto, etc.  The decision came to stop investing after losing $4,000 in Lucent Technologies, which had “facts” and “figures” that made it appear to be a good investment.  Turns out that it was not. 

Telling Sony to spin off the entertainment portion of its business is not creating jobs. Sorry, try another line of defense of the doubletalk.

Biotech food launches new website

by

Propaganda...gotta love it. Not.   Ninety-three percent of Americans want GMO labeling…why isn’t Congress doing what the American people want??  I mean, they keep stating “the American people want…” so they must be concerned with honoring our wishes….right?   /just a little sarcasm there, folks

~~~~~~~~~~

One really has to wonder if the folks at the FDA have too much time on their hands or have completely lost their minds when you read stories like this. 

I think we should all live in bubbles so there is no way that we could ever, ever, ever come in contact with salmonella or any other bad bug.  /snark

I want eggs by free range chickens, but I can’t always get them.    It makes sense that the nutrition is better with free range eggs–look at the variety in their diet.  Clearly, the FDA is infiltrated with Big Ag  corporations that want to squeeze out the organic farmer.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of organic food–I am starting to see the fruits of my labor with the heirloom tomato, Cosmonaut Volkov.  I had one the other night with mayonnaise on it…and OMG, it was delicious!  It tasted like tomatoes used to taste like before the hybridized the taste out of them!  Oh, wow, it was just like they tasted back in the 60s.  I kid you not.

~~~~~~~~

More on the GMO war–of course, it always comes down to who is funding  it.   Gah, the “NO” list reads like a list of defense contractors.

~~~~~~~~

Organic food sales are increasing.  People are waking up to the poison in their food.  Good for them.

~~~~~~~~~

Michael Pollan and Mark Hertsgaard on how sustainable farming practices can help with climate change.

Mmmmm…Quesadillas

by

Ali Does It Herself has this mouth watering recipe for Quesadillas.  I haven’t attempted to make any with the gluten free tortillas–the one  I did use literally tasted and looked like rubber. Blech.  I could technically use corn, but even with organic, I’m concerned about GMO cross contamination.

I had to laugh when she said she forgot her onions and burned them.  Oops.  Been there, done that.

Anyway, the recipe looks delicious.

PR Watch

by

…has a few links up:

ALEC anniversary being celebrated in Chicago.  A few folks thought they’d drop by….

MOVIE SCREENING: On Wednesday, August 7, at 6 p.m. Common Cause, the Center for Media and Democracy, and others will host a screening of the Bill Moyers documentary the “United States of ALEC” followed by a panel discussion. The screening will be held at the University Center, 525 South State Street in Chicago.

RALLY: At noon on Thursday, August 8, a coalition of groups, spearheaded by the Chicago Federation of Labor, is calling on people to gather outside the ALEC conference at the Palmer House Hotel, located at 17 East Monroe Street for a march and rally. You can tell them you are coming here.

~~~~~~~~~~~

ALEC, Big Oil, and Big Ag…

 

ALEC and low wages…

 

Public Television pulls funding for documentary on the Kochs…because the Kochs are million dollar contributors.   Selling their soul doesn’t come cheap, you know…

 

 

Don’t like the NSA? How About Gates snooping into children’s school records?

by

Diane Ravitch has this and this up on the continued invasion of privacy…only this time, it’s your kid they are gathering information on.  This critical information gathered by a Foundation that now owns 500,000 shares of Monsanto, .

…and what about Rupert Murdoch getting hold of your family’s records? Especially since the newspaper he owned invaded people’s privacy already…even after a warning about his dealings went unheeded.  

From the first Guardian article:

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Does anyone else see the irony of a paper that is invading innocent people’s privacy complaining about maintaining standards….apparently lying and invasion of privacy are not standards someone should uphold…?

.

Scientists against GMOs

by

Wake-Up Call has a blog up on a new paper by scientists against genetically modified organisms (GMO’s).

From the paper:

For example, the claim that conventional plant breeders have been “genetically modifying” crops
for centuries by selective breeding and that GM crops are no different is incorrect (see 1.1). The term
“genetic modification” is recognised in common usage and in national and international laws to refer
to the use of recombinant DNA techniques to transfer genetic material between organisms in a way
that would not take place naturally, bringing about alterations in genetic makeup and properties.
~~~~~~~~~
In my view, this “muddying of the waters” as they say, is a way to placate the growing public alarm about what they are
putting in our food supply.  See, if you can claim that GMO’s were there all along, the public is pacified and the current
push of asking for GMO labeling will die a slow death…
….meanwhile, the public continues to suffer from GMO induced leaky gut causing susceptibility to heavy metal poisoning,
allergies, chronic fatigue, etc., and their doctors will be clueless.
Important points of the paper:
1.  They assert that it’s a mistake saying changing one gene is only changing one gene….the scientists assert that changing one
gene has something of a ripple effect. It makes total sense that the genes aren’t isolated and they work in concert with other
genes, thus when you change it, it has unintended consequences:  crop nutritional value, allergens, toxins, environmental harm.
The most striking point of this section:
These unexpected changes are especially dangerous because they are irreversible.
~~~~~~~~~~
They go on to say that unlike pollutants that degrade over time, GMO’s do not.  Pandora’s Box, baby.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the “atomic gardens” mentioned on page 12, but still shocking now, looking back,
at how they were using “peaceful radiation” to change plants beneficially.  Wow.  How naive we were.  I wonder at
the health of the people who ate those plants?  What about the people and wildlife surrounding these “atomic gardens”?
Since we know that people living within 20 miles of nuclear power plants are more likely to have thyroid issues….I
wonder about the effects of this type of radiation…
Well, I’m off to read more–it’s got 123 pages, so it’s gonna be awhile. 🙂

Bill Gates hasn’t destroyed public education yet….

by

…but damn,he sure is trying with everything he’s got.

<sigh>  I was all ready to rip into Gates once again… but I’m halfway through the article of Chronicles of Higher Education….and this one sentence that Gates “just wants to get more people through the system with college degrees so that it will lift them out of poverty…”

bwahahahaha.  That’s rich.

Then, further down, they disclose that Gates Foundation is supporting the Chronicles of Higher Education financially.  I think I’ve already read that somewhere, but alas, the brain didn’t bring it up…the article is clearly a promo by Gates…so yeah….

So…I’ll have to refer to previous blogs on Gates…

Here.

Here. Silencing teachers.

Here. Supporting Brookings Institute that dismissed Diane Ravitch

Here. Not content with just controlling education, but the food supply, as well.

Here.