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Almost a year ago we were all shocked to learn from the BBC that there’s “No Benefit to Organic Food”. Naturally, we found multiple links between the research behind that article and entrenched big food (read non-organic) producers. Today the BBC, via Professor Jonathan Jones, is deriding eaters who avoid genetically modified foods, labeling them “fussy eaters” — the very same day that the Wall Street Journal announced that the 2013 DSM may recognize “selective eating” as a treatable mental disorder. No doubt readers of both articles (or their offshoots) will make some kind of connection, though the DSM disorder is another animal entirely.

Most, if not all of Professor Jone’s arguments have been refuted numerous times elsewhere. Other “facts” in the BBC article, such as the shear percentage of GM acres planted, do not prove that GM is better, only that companies like Monsanto have the muscle to virtually mold the seed marketplace. Naturally the BBC finds no need to mention that the esteemed Professor Jones is in the service of Mendel Biotechnology (enter search term “Jones”, see result #3), nor that Monsanto is Mendel’s top customer and collaborator. From the horse’s mouth: “The interests of Mendel and Monsanto are highly aligned and the companies have established very effective mechanisms of collaboration…”

Yeah, I’d say so!

Posted: July 6, 2010 at 6:14 pm

We shouldn’t wonder that the loudest cries of “too big to fail” invariably arise from those with their snouts deep in the trough. The wobbly legs of the logic underlying their mantra can’t possibly prop up their swollen bodies, they merely appear to be standing courtesy of their immense obesity. The saddest part is that the hogs control the entire feeding system, so the rest of us critters ain’t doin’ so good. The good news is there’s plenty of ribs for everyone!

Posted: April 15, 2010 at 12:34 pm

Moody’s just announced that “Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion.” Behind all that high-falutin’ experty sounding blathering is flat out bullshit, engineered and released in advance of a predictable reaction to planned “adjustments” the masses won’t like, for the sole purpose of heading off establishment-side risk at the pass.

We’re mightily interested in social cohesion around here, and thus would like to point out that Moody’s is confounding “social cohesion” with an illusion of social cohesion propped up by government containment, namely, the threat of police action on rebellion. That there rebellion, that’s real social cohesion, when the population finally unites in purpose and pits it’s will against forces that would unjustly reign against it. Oh, those Moody folk aren’t just doing this for kicks – it’s top spin with a purpose.

Moody’s knows the country is struggling (nearly fifty percent of mortgages are under water), and they know it’s not getting better any time soon. They know the published unemployment figures, and the more accurate figures as well. They know the Consumer Price Index is jiggered. They know there’s no such animal as a “jobless recovery”. (A what??) They know the big boys are front running, flash trading, trading on inside info and using all manner of accounting chicanery while suppressing precious metals. They know it’s gonna be the poorest sectors doing the belt tightening (belt tightening is apparently not a trickle down phenomenon). And Moody’s is establishment. When these further “fiscal adjustments of a magnitude” great enough to initiate social cohesion (ie: general strikes, riots, etc.) take effect, they’ll want as many on the fringe of cohesion as they can get to brand the growing ranks of protesters antisocial.

Antisocial they are not. They are just anti-fuck-us-over-again-you-greedy-bastards!! That’s quite pro-social, actually. When citizens finally coalesce in a unified outrage intense enough to massively confront the truly anti-social elements lording over us, those who’ve sucked up all our wealth while putting nothing at risk and returning nothing of value, well, then we’ll see some social cohesion. Until then, the well-established dark forces will continue to rely on our near utter lack of cohesion.

Social cohesion will take shape as people come to understand that for the most part there is really not much less wealth today than there was only a decade (or more) ago. Wealth has just become concentrated in the hands of a comparatively very, very few. These few hundreds, or even, thousands, now have such concentrated wealth that the world – your world – is virtually in their control. And Orwell’s Squealer, this time in the guise of Moody’s, will do his damnest to keep it this way.

Posted: April 10, 2010 at 1:01 am

Uh-oh! Showing a clear lack of social conscience or any shred of responsibility to living citizens of these United States, the Supreme Court has removed the last vestige of restraint on corporate “personages” – a legal fiction fitting the definition set forth by Justice Scarth as “…fictions having a false assumption of fact in order to extend the remedy the Court could grant”. Indeed, the legal precedent for corporate personhood was set in an 1886 pre-decision statement, attributed to Chief Justice Waite, that somehow got written into the header of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The false assumption is surreptitiously doubly false, as it errs in assuming corporations operate as persons with normally functional moral, ethical, and intellectual faculties.

Legal precedents aside, if corporations are to be treated under the law as people, at best they should be accorded a set of diminished rights, as afforded to children or the mentally incapacitated, and justified “because of their presumed intellectual and moral incapacity” (Dahl, 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press).

In political terms, then, the disability category in laws governing political participation appears to be of considerable importance. Because disability is often thought of as deviancy, the exclusion of incompetent people is no surprise. By associating cognitive and emotional impairments with deviancy, these terms also are connected to fears of criminality. – Kay Schriner, University of Arkansas and Lisa Ochs, Arkansas State University (Encyclopedia of criminology and deviant behavior, 179-183)

Read that quote again, “Honorable” Supreme Court Justices! It is well established that corporations are designed to act sociopathically and without conscience, in strict pursuit of profit, thus there can be no good argument for allowing them unrestrained rights. Imagine the destruction a sociopath could wrought, given a multibillion dollar treasury.

Anyone who has studied logic understands that arguments can be made for or against just about anything. In the final analysis, arguments are selected to justify decisions after the fact. In this case, the Supreme Court quite obviously chose to further the (seemingly inevitable) collapse of the United States for unknown reasons. As this latest decision stands, any not-yet-paid-for, or uncompromised politicians are left no cover from a soon to be expected onslaught of corporate pressures brought on by the releasing of restraints. Anyone with a single pair of clicking neurons could tell you that it’s a very bad idea to allow corporations (owned by anybody, anywhere on the planet) to spend any amount they wish to influence our representatives. I’m now half expecting new legislation will force me to buy Wheaties or face punitive measures!

Posted: January 22, 2010 at 6:00 pm

When the world finally turns the corner, and we resume (?) our ascent toward utopian ideals, whistle blowers will finally attain their rightful place as heroes of mankind.

One such hero, as yet unknown to the public, has released 1079 emails and 72 documents from the Hadley University of East Anglia Climactic Research Unit. As stated on the CLU’s own website: “The Climatic Research Unit is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.” In fact, they might be being a bit modest there, as they supply the scientific grounding for virtually all significant international political action intended to mitigate the “Global Warming Crisis”. None of that political action comes cheap.

Rather than rush to judgement, I held off commenting for a few days, until I was able to actually peruse the leaked information. Much of it seems innocuous enough, a great quantity relates to acquiring funding (common with most research, but certainly problematic as most funding comes from politically motivated sources) and some is plainly incriminating. At the very least, the picture emerges of a not-so-unified scientific community, regardless of the widely distributed media statements and Al Gore’s posturing. One finds a definite bias evident throughout the material, indicating a “research” environment precluding any semblance of scientific objectivity. There’s very strong evidence of forcing data to fit the desired outcome and (worse) of conspiracy to marginalize “skeptics” within the climate science profession. The “warmist scientists” go to the extent of delegitimizing the peer-reviewed journal Climate Research for publishing a contrary study, and then consider doing the same when Geophysical Research Letters acts similarly scientific-like!

The newly public information, conjoined with the fact that just this past October the CRU was shown to have destroyed the raw data underlying their claims of a global warming crisis, does not paint a pretty picture. Their excuse for the destruction of evidence was “lack of storage space.” It looks more likely that the evidence simply didn’t back up the man-made warming claims.

The leaked emails and documents are available for download at wikileaks.org. The CLU’s director, Phil Jones, has admitted that the leaked information is genuine (though he hasn’t authenticated every document).

I’d like to add that as far as climate science goes, I’ve nothing to gain by taking either side in the debate. In fact I’m firmly on the side of making the world better for the common man, so if it becomes clear that we do need to cool the world I’ll let you know. However, from what I can determine the earth is managing pretty well temperature-wise, no matter what we do.

Posted: November 24, 2009 at 2:50 pm

David DeGraw’s article The Wall Street Economic Death Squad deserves your attention. I don’t know what he proposes we do about it, and can’t say whether I’d do or recommend the same, but surely his article shows you where your wealth currently resides.

Posted: October 25, 2009 at 9:23 pm

It’s a fact: Health care insurers are in it for the money. Payouts for health-care are minimized to benefit stockholders. Insurance company CEOs and other top executives literally rake billions of dollars off the top, funds that are put into health care yet will not be providing health care. Vast amounts of money leak out the pipeline between consumers and health providers, diverted to middlemen who add absolutely nothing of value to the system. Even without fraud, which seems pretty unlikely in this era of fraud, the health insurance paradigm represents a massive and unnecessary burden on our health care system. Yet no side of the debate in Washington addresses this fat section of the health care costs pie chart. Instead, the debate seems centered around how can we force every citizen to contribute to this particular slice of the pie!

Washington makes an enormous error in calculating the cost of health care, and everyone seems to just follow along. The real cost of health care is the sum of payable invoices of health provider services actually provided, with the additional costs of medicines prescribed and health related equipment sold or rented. This sum is far lower than the cost of insuring every citizen, in the event that they might need (or will eventually need) health services. Yet the plan moving towards legislation will force the uninsured to purchase “acceptable insurance” or pay huge fines and even face jail time (up to a year!). No costs are lowered, in fact the drug companies get protection from both having to lower prices and from lawsuits in the event that their product causes damage. The proposed plans are universally so ridiculous, so obviously pandering to large corporate interests, so psychopathic and so sociologically wrong – it makes me sick!

Acceptable insurance should be no insurance, and no need for it. Insurance does not provide health care, it takes from it.

Posted: September 27, 2009 at 10:41 am

The Delaware County Fair was last week, and since it was raining, I stopped by the Democratic Party booth. And there I suggested to the gray haired, and rather self-satisfied but somewhat delusional fellow, that he take down his signage, move his booth to the middle of the aisle and invite the Republicans in their booth across the way to join him, and thus discontinue the charade since they were two sides of the same coin – and a wooden nickel at that. Of course he was disinclined, and instead attempted to suggest that there was still some working semblance of representational government, and that the Donkey way was ever so much better than that of the Elephant.

Meanwhile in Washington, Obama was preparing to announce his appointment of former Monsanto vice president Michael Taylor to be Food Safety Czar. Need I say more? What about “Change”? What about “Hope”? I’m hoping Taylor has changed, but that’s doubtful. Mr. Taylor has made the trip through the FDA/Monsanto revolving door a few times, getting higher status each time around. Maybe Obama was pretty high himself, when he made that appointment. More likely, Obama was told who to appoint by those above him – and I’m not talking about God.

Biointegrity.org supplies links to some of the FDA’s internal documents which point out hazards of genetically modified foods and flaws in the methods the agency used to make it’s policy. I’ve added the link to the Research Tools list at left.

By the way, do you know why it’s hard to find genetically modified food in Europe? Because the people refuse to eat it! Demand labeling at the very least.

Posted: August 26, 2009 at 10:36 pm

When the righteous are tasked with cleaning up, accounting for, or fully investigating a set of circumstances, inevitably some common sense guidelines will be followed resulting in a clearly cleaner, accounted for, or fully investigated outcome. Sadly, after boatloads of U.S. government cleanups, accounting, and investigations we find ourselves ever deeper in muck. Unless we believe in unprecedented levels of ineptitude, it becomes obvious that neither clarity nor an honest accounting was ever the objective of these endeavors. As stated in the Yale Law Journal‘s somewhat apologetic article, Parrhesiastic accountability: investigatory commissions and executive power in an age of terror, “… commissions operate at the behest of elite political forces that have considerable investment in the status quo.” Commissions are obviously formed to conceal the crimes which lead to their establishment. Participating in such whitewashing is itself a crime. (By the way, a note to the Yale Law Journal: We don’t live in an age of terror, we live in an age of fraud.)

The Warren Commission, the Kean 9/11 Commission, the Iraq Commission, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – these are just a sampling of the fairly recent. There are probably hundreds you never heard of, or have long forgotten, that just as surely swept facts under the rug. You can watch the posturing as Congress “grilled” Paulson, Bernanke or the SEC’s executive group of captured stooges. Quite a little theater they got going there in DC. With all the grandstanding, finger pointing, evasiveness, memory losses and denials I can almost believe they’re not meeting later for drinks. In the end, trillions are freshly printed for passing amongst cronies, conflicts of interest blithely ignored, and our once great country blunders along on it’s way down the pipes.

I doubt I’ve ever met anyone with a pair of firing neurons who implicitly trusts investigatory commission findings. Whitewash investigations are “de rigeur” in the final acts of all high crimes. Often enough, a commission becomes a long-standing aide and benefactor to the very same criminal elements it should curtail. In fact, you can be virtually assured either a heinous crime has transpired and is about to be covered up, or someone’s political opposition is about to be sidelined when you hear that a commission will be formed to investigate. Undoubtably, a scapegoat will emerge from the ranks of the lesser minions, with the blame squarely shouldered.

The Washington Post announced the latest charade today, Attorney General Eric Holder has determined he ought to hold up the façade of law and order by appointing a special prosecutor to “investigate” CIA violations of anti-torture laws. Don’t expect to see Bush and/or Cheney perpwalking. Bet on seeing the scapegoats trotted out. Even the Post has to inadvertently admit the pointlessness of the faux investigation/spectacle, the article ending with an upbeat spin on dismal news:

“(Holder and his team appear to be)…rejecting a broad inquiry that could result in possible prosecutions of Justice Department lawyers in the Bush years as well as cabinet officers who developed counterterrorism policy; but giving civil liberties advocates at least part of what they wanted without supporting a full, independent truth commission to examine a host of Bush national security practices.”

You want a feast, you get a spoonful – most likely of food gone bad. Criminal style compromise at best.

These shenanagins take place only with our tacit approval. Remember, those running the show are far outnumbered by their victims, or soon to be victims, and their success depends entirely on you doing nothing.

Posted: August 24, 2009 at 7:34 pm

A universal construct among scams and cons is the application of temporal pressure during a period of confusion and disarray. If you don’t sign now, this fabulous opportunity will be lost! And with just such a tactic, the 1000 plus page Stimulus Act was passed earlier this year. Buried within the weighty tome were fundamental Federal health care policy changes, passed without public comment or debate. We’re probably still a year away from seeing if the “Stimulus” part of the bill will work as intended but it’s certainly valid to question why health care reform legislation needed to be stuck in there and rammed through.

If the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Chairman John Conyers can’t make any sense of proposed legislation without “two days and two lawyers”, I can’t expect casual readers to be figuring it out either. There’s plenty of chatter throughout the media, traditional and otherwise, which pretty much only serves to cloud the issues further. All we can be certain of is that the legislation passed unread!

If rubber stamping reams of legislation into law without an inkling of what you are doing sounds like a bad idea, well, it probably is. I’ve read the stories of doctors losing decision making authority to appointed government bureaucrats, of eligibility for treatment to be determined by factors such as the patient’s age, of remedies based on mathematically derived “treatment effectiveness” rather than individual particulars, of massive databases to be built – and stocked with your personal medical history and financial information, of a new form of national ID card – ostensibly for health purposes. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all or of any of those scenarios, but I can’t say I like their remote possibility.

I like the stealthily enacted health legislation even less when scratching its surface reveals medical care may soon be doled out (or not) based on the value of a statistical life year (VSLY). It appears health care costs are to be disingenuously reduced by reducing health care itself, rather than actually lowering the cost of treatment. I’m sure that brings smiles to the Pharma/Medical groups paying to maintain financial hegemony throughout the “reform”. Naturally the wealthy will continue to receive the finest care money can buy, while the rest of us will be at the government bean counter’s mercy. Let’s hope those in charge aren’t eugenicists!

Posted: August 15, 2009 at 5:01 pm