How Ignorant Are We?

 Cripes.....from education to food to health care to empire........we
americans have to be the dumbest, most self-centered, effing people to
have *ever* inhabited the earth......we absolutely deserve what is
coming.  I am sorry for my part in allowing this to happen.

Mr Smith is right......we are a stinking virus spreading across the
planet.  Gaia has nearly had enough of our stench.

Break more ground.  Take over a vacant lot. Resist the Oligarchy. Grow
your own........but not Pot, or you will be the latest target in the
"war on terror".  What an incredibly insane crock of shit in which we
stew.
.  
http://www.alternet.org/story/60854/  

Have an entertaining MacLife, those of you who doubt or are unaware.

Charlie

______________________________


Full Text at:

http://www.seedsofdeception.com/utility/showArticle/?objectID 58

THE CAMPAIGN FOR HEALTHIER EATING IN AMERICA

Healthy Eating Means No GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms)

By Jeffrey M. Smith

You may have heard that genetically modified (GM) foods are safe,
properly tested, and necessary to feed a hungry world. UNTRUE!
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), introduced into our food supply
in the mid-1990s, are one of history’s most dangerous and radical
changes in our diet. These largely unregulated ingredients are in
60-70% of the foods in the US, but are well worth efforts to avoid
them.

Fortunately, health-conscious retailers, distributors, manufacturers,
and growers are now participating in The Campaign for Healthier Eating
in America, which will eliminate GMOs from thousands of products. This
will make it easier for you to feed your family a healthier “non-GMO”
diet and may even end the genetic engineering of the entire US food
supply. This industry-wide rejection of GMOs can be achieved by a
“tipping point,” in which a sufficient number of shoppers in the US
avoiding GM ingredients force the major food companies to stop using
them.

Informed European Shoppers Say No to GMOs

Europe reached the tipping point in April 1999 and within a single
week, virtually all major manufacturers publicly committed to stop
using GM ingredients in their European brands. This consumer-led revolt
against GMOs in the EU was generated by a February 1999 media firestorm
after a top GMO safety researcher, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, was “ungagged by
Parliament” and able to tell this alarming story to the press.

Dr. Pusztai was the world’s top researcher in his field and a senior
researcher at the prestigious Rowett Institute in Scotland. He had been
working on a UK government grant to design long-term testing protocols
that were intended to become part of the official European GM food
safety assessment process. But when Pusztai fed supposedly harmless GM
to rats, they developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller
brains, livers, and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and a
damaged immune system. Moreover, the results clearly indicated that the
cause of the problem was due to the unpredictable side effects arising
from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, it
suggested that the GM foods already on the market, which were created
from the same process, might also create such effects. When he
expressed his concern he was fired from his job after 35 years and
silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his 20 member research team was
disbanded, the testing protocols were abandoned, and the pro-GM
establishment embarked on an extensive disinformation campaign to
discredit the study’s results and protect the reputation of GM foods.
But when an invitation to testify before Parliament allowed Pusztai to
finally tell his story, all hell broke loose. The outpouring of news
coverage, wrote one columnist, “divided society into two warring
blocs”[1] over the GM food issue. The tipping point was reached quickly
thanks to the buying power of consumers that convinced manufacturers to
keep GMOs out of the EU, in spite of official approvals by the pro-GM
European Commission.
 

Americans are Uninformed and Misinformed on GMOs

In the US, the Pusztai story was barely mentioned. Project Censored
described it as one of the 10 most underreported events of the year.
Indeed, the US mainstream media has been consistently close-lipped
about the enormous health risks of GM foods. They failed to cover the
preliminary study from the Russian National Academy of Sciences, for
example, that showed that more than half the offspring of mother rats
fed GM soy died within three weeks (compared to 9% from mothers fed
natural soy). They neglected to report that the only human GM feeding
study ever published showed that the foreign genes inserted into GM
food crops can transfer into the DNA of our gut bacteria. This means
that long after we stop eating GM corn chips, our intestinal flora
might continue to manufacture the “Bt” pesticide that the GM corn
plants are engineered to produce. And Americans were not told about the
estimated 10,000 sheep that died within 5-7 days of grazing on GM
cotton plants—also designed to produce this Bt-toxin.

Many consumers in the US mistakenly believe that the FDA approves GM
foods through rigorous, in-depth, long-term studies. In reality, the
agency has absolutely no safety testing requirements. (The tests that
biotech companies voluntarily perform on their own crops are often
meticulously designed to avoid finding problems.) The reason for the
FDA’s industry-friendly policy on GMOs is that the White House (under
the first George Bush) ordered the agency to promote biotechnology.
Also, the person in charge of developing the policy was the former
attorney of biotech giant Monsanto—and later their vice president. The
policy he oversaw claimed that the agency was not aware of any
information showing that GM crops were different “in any meaningful or
uniform way,” and therefore didn’t need testing. But 44,000 FDA
internal documents made public from a lawsuit show that this was a
complete lie. The overwhelming consensus among the FDA’s own scientists
was that GM foods were quite different and could lead to unpredictable
and hard-to-detect allergens, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional
problems. They had urged superiors to require long-term studies, but
were ignored. Evidence of this apparent fraud at the FDA was presented
at a Washington, D.C. press conference in 1999. Although major media
were in attendance, they didn’t run that story either.

Americans know so little about this subject, that only about 1 in 4 are
aware that they have ever eaten a GM food in their lives (even though
the vast majority of processed foods contain derivatives from the four
major GM crops: soy, corn, cottonseed and canola). Thus, the same
companies that carefully avoid GM ingredients for concerned Europeans
are happy to sell GMOs to unknowing consumers in the US.

 wrote:


Indeed!!  

Thanks for the links.......twisted perhaps, yet pertinent,
provocative......and practical!.  Actually, I have immensely enjoyed
the journey through the website.

Not bad music either.  I'm likin' it!

Wanna come to a BBQ this fall? ;-)

Peace to you, as well, my friend.
Charlie

 On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:55:50 -0500, Charlie wrote:


I like to watch...

sf

 jellybean stonerfish wrote:

Hmmm...you're a gardener, and your name is Chauncey?

 Charlie wrote:


I think the problem is that the many of the citizens of the US live in a
huge bubble world of their own, blissfully ignorant and unaware that
there are other people and happenings that exist outside of it.

By the way....what DO YOU interpret as 'coming'?