onoway

Such an interesting assortment of statements.. are you really truly trying to equate the ability to put limits on a technology proven to be NOT TRUE in ANY of the claims made for it are the same as laws allowing slavery? An interesting idea to be sure, especially when the rules regarding the right to grow crops would in effect reduce farmers to the status of serfs to the chemical companies. The laws enacted already across various countries limit or disallow farmers from saving seed, which even the midieval serfs were allowed to do, so less freedom than in midieval times, such an astounding situation for a supposedly advanced and democratic society! This is only an extension of such erosion of freedom to choose, not only what a farmer will grow and how, but of the consumer to know what he or she is putting into his or her body, and more importantly perhaps, what is going into their child's body. This doesn't even touch on the thousands of acres of land being desertified by GMO monocropping, the environmental costs, none of which are being borne by the chemical companies, nor the thousands of acres of productive farmland going out of production as a direct result of weeds, specifically amaranth, becoming quite happy to grow in RoundUp soaked land and covering former farmland with unmanageable weeds, which one USDA official said, was best pulled by hand for effective removal. Which, of course,Monsanto assured government officials could not happen when first seeking approval for such chemical agriculture. Just how taking thousands of acres of productive farmland ( by USDA figures) OUT of production as a direct result of using chemical monocropping is supposed to help feed a growing population Monsanto has not explained. It certainly DOES explain why they want no controls on their techniques though, which only involve using more and more lethal poisons, none of which have been shown to be safe for human consumption over time. In fact many of the chemicals used are based on those used in war to kill people. Since people probably don't want to eat that, then put in a law giving them no choice, allow the chemical companies to hide what is in the food. At least tobacco is a choice. If GMOs are so great, then treat them as governments treat tobacco, label them and let people choose to eat them as they choose to smoke cigarettes. If they choose not to, why should they be forced to do so? What possible definition of freedom do you adhere to that includes the enforced ingestion of poison by the general public? Ignorance indeed about GMOs, why won't Monsanto allow independant scientists free access to study their products? What are they afraid of? That even all their money will not be able to tarnish all the scientists and their findings sufficiently with lies and slander so as to buy their way into global control of all food supplies? (legally or otherwise, Monsanto has been proven to be quite happy to flout the law when it suits them, including bribery, and to lie as a matter of course if the truth will hurt their bottom line. ) All this law addresses is the prevention of people having a choice. What else is freedom about?

Got this in my mailbox this morning. It's part of a much longer email asking me to phone or email my congressman, since I don't have one I edited all that out.I also highlighted the one I see as most frightening On Tuesday, the US House Agriculture committee passed HR 1599, which has been dubbed the “Deny Americans Right to Know (DARK)” Act. Next week, it will go to the House floor for a vote. This bill would: Nullify democratically passed state laws that mandate the labeling of GMO foods; Make it impossible for the FDA to implement mandatory nationwide GMO labeling; Bar states and localities from restricting the growing of GMO crops in any way; and Declare it legitimate and legal to label GMOs as “natural”. More than 90% of Americans support mandatory GMO labeling. Three US states have passed mandatory labeling laws, and efforts are underway to pass them in dozens more. So far, ten US counties have banned GMO cultivation - with many more on the horizon. It would seem that this new law would nullify all of that. I also have got to wonder about laws regarding freedom of information to say nothing about truth in labelling as well as unfair competition. Microsoft got nailed for much less egregious ambitions. So much for power to/of the people, if this goes through.

As far as health care goes; unless we go to the practice of paying doctors as long as you are healthy,NOT when you are sick, the focus will continue to be the treatment of symptoms rather than causes, and the development of more drugs. Many of these apparently deal relatively effectively with the symptoms but may have rather severe side effects. An antibiotic given to heal a small wound, according to the sheet provided with it, may in effect cause your liver to shut down several weeks later. Then of course there are the recalls.. such as drugs that help with arthritis pain but cause fatal (or not) heart attacks... This isn't health care, whatever else it may be. But it is immensely profitable for the drug companies.

Glyphosates, the primary ingredient of RoundUp and other chemical mixtures used intensively in agriculture around the world, and pushed hard by both companies and governments, is patented as an antibiotic. The residues of these chemicals are present in food. Read yesterday that someone in Harvard has found an antibiotic to end the struggle, nothing can resist it. Monsanto got initial approval by assuring government bodies that nothing would develop resistance to the chemicals they were using, and of course all sorts of things have, from insects to amaranth. Someone recently pointed out it's called evolution. So when this new antibiotic is released for use, who knows what will develop as a reaction to it? We do insist on trying to find simple "ultimate" solutions to issues, and can't seem to catch on that there are none. We can't even impose the long term consistent behaviour we want from other people, from family members to nations, even with bullets bombs and torture, it boggles my mind that we persist in thinking we can impose our will without regard to the consequences on natural systems. I'm not saying there isn't a use for them nor that I think we shouldn't be looking for them. But until we stop being stupid about how we use them it's not likely to work out well, is all.

I arrived this morning to run a tourney that I had set last night and found it had not only been cancelled but I could not re set it because I had too many tourneys pending. Since there was only one other tourney planned for today, this seemed bizarre. Last week a tourney disappeared, not one I had set, and I thought the director must have only thought she had set it. I most certainly hadn't cancelled anything, in fact I had set the tourney for her that morning after waiting for her to set it so I could announce the tourney number in the daily announcements. I have no idea how/why either of these tourneys disappeared. It turns out that BBO has set up a system that people can set their tourneys for weeks ahead but that all the tourneys in a week are added up to the total allowed for the week. It's only recently we have found directors to help us run tourneys and they are happy to be able to preset for, say Saturday evenings for weeks at a time. It would seem very sensible, but it's now causing us all sorts of problems. Why set up a system that punishes people if they use it? I can understand having a daily limit for tourneys, but why should a tourney set for Saturday night mean I cannot run one on Monday morning unless I cancel the one on Saturday? It's a bit hard to see the point, frankly. We have to use the same ID so as to restrict the players to club members so it's not as though we have the option to use different IDs. People have occassionally forgotten and set a tourney with their own ID and it's a horror show; getting swamped with runners, screaming for the director and general chaos, they don't forget twice. But here is this perfect system to set and forget and we can't use it, we have to cancel each other's tourneys to run our own, NOT the way to have happy directors. Is there any way around this?

The Independant Scientists in Society ( an unfortunate acronym now) have some interesting reading, all referenced, such as this one about glyphosates; http://www.i-sis.org.uk/USDA_scientist_reveals_all.php Now that RoundUp has been shown to have become largely ineffective by itself, the new products include a cocktail of glyphosates, 2-4D and dicamba, which are more virulent yet, and which will also simply develop new resistant varieties of unwanted organisms. Also, dicama apparently has the charming capacity to volatilize which means that it can be applied and do its thing, then reform into a sort of cloud and drift again,then again fall to earth and kill anything green it comes in contact with. It is of course also toxic to people. People in Hawaii who live near the Monsanto testing grounds where ag. chemicals are being tested are having huge health issues. Apparently Monsanto et al have applied to the USDA to increase the allowable amount of dicamba in food 150%

Well one down two to go. The 1970s were remarkable with the three triple crown winners but it was something like 25 years between Citation and Secretariat.

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-monsanto-weed-killer-can-probably-cause-cancer-world-health-organization-2015-3 Of course Monsanto has demanded they retract the findings and their tentative criticism (results found to be true at least a dozen years ago). As an independent scientist recently said, studies funded by Monsanto tend to say that everything is fine. studies not funded by Monsanto tend to reach very different conclusions. This week a Monsanto employee admitted that Monsanto has a whole department whose only job is to befuddle and confuse the public by mocking and deriding anyone who dared suggest there might be a problem, and calling into question the qualifications and competence of anyone who dares suggest all might not be well. This has long been reported to be true, now confirmed by someone so employed. There was of course an example of this in this thread when Dr Shiva was dismissed as being unworthy of trust, presumably any unnamed scientist working for Monsanto being more deserving of such. Truth and Monsanto are strangers to each other, it seems. It strikes me as odd that people decry the diminishing respect that people hold for science when such stuff goes on. If what Monsanto is giving us is "science", then scientists deserve to be treated with the same distrust if not actual contempt that politicians have earned, and for the same reason. Oh yes...in India four farmers have raised record(that is to say beating all previous crop yields) harvests without GMOs, without chemical fertilizers and without pesticides, herbicides, fungicides etc. And in another area of India farmers with failed GMO crops beat up a Monsanto rep who met with them and told them it was all their fault their crops failed.

The reason I threw out the one I did was that he wouldn't shut up long enough for me to deal with the issue, but was overriding and interrupting everything I was trying to say with more and more vehement comments, he wasn't listening at ALL. He wasn't even listening to anything the opps were saying, when the bidder did try to clarify somewhat what the HELLO convention bids were, but kept talking more and more excitedly over everything anyone said. It was in fact, a tantrum, and so I dealt with it like I would any other tantrum, removed the person from the situation until they decided to behave in a reasonable manner. He made himself into the problem rather than letting me deal with the real issue. It got to the point of removing him or cancelling the match altogether, which I was on the verge of doing, but thought it unfair to penalize the other table of players, who were quietly getting on with and apparently enjoying their game.

Rik you have clarified precisely what the problem was. Can I take some of your post and post it in the IAC website?

If the plants have evolved their own defenses then why is it necessary to flood the crops with more? Of course, people thought that the Titanic was unsinkable as well, because they had designed in protection against anything nature could throw at her... And if gmo agriculture, as it is being done now, is the "answer" why did India, after trying it wholeheartedly, now BAN GMOs in what used to be their most productive and fertile lands before they went to GMOs and almost destroyed their water table resources as a result? Why has Ghana, urgently in need of food self-sufficiency, recently said no to GMOs, and decided that they would be far better off building on their own traditions and food crops? If these companies have the interests of the poor and the hungry at heart, why did food riots around the world happen a few years ago at the same time as there were huge bumper crops of grain and corn? If you don't know the answer, it's because the companies selling the seed are also buying the crop and selling it for biogas paid better than selling it for food, because people in poor countries couldn't pay as much as if it were sold for biogas. So much for their humanitarian intentions. It isn't only that the crops are slowly poisoning people they are even more quickly destroying the land. That's what many people suggest explains the disappearance of many civilizations before now, but hey many of us will be gone and not have to deal with it,so why worry? So what if a new batch of people with inflated egos and unflappable hubris think they can short circuit and force nature to do their will without even knowing anything much about the soil life (assuming, giving them the benefit of the doubt here as the alternative would fit my definition of evil)..just like people beating the earth with sticks every spring used to think. It didn't work out too reliably in the past, but hey, this is now and that was then. The only problem is that people used to do things with limited reach, now we are doing things with almost unlimited capacity to do a great deal of damage for a very very very long time. Sort of like fighting with swords as opposed to nuclear weapons. And apparently they don't care, if they did, they wouldn't try so energetically to do everything they can to protect what they are doing from being researched by any scientists unfunded or paid for by them.Or hire firms to search out and befuddle conversations with half truths, which can be more confusing than outright lies, although they freely use those too. In any case, people will decide what they want to do, at least now they have been somewhat exposed to the realities of the situation. Believing in GMO agriculture as it is being promoted and practised by companies like Monsanto is sort of like being in the religion where people think that if they only have enough faith, the live rattlesnake they are handling won't bite them... that doesn't usually end up well either, although some have got away with it for a time.

That's what the crunch was.. 2nt was alerted as transfer to clubs, the opp wanted to know precisely what sort of hand it was that was doing the transfer, was it preemptive or could it show both majors or what. The bidder just gave a list of the possible bids she might have made, and what they might have meant, and said that the transfer to clubs meant she could stand playing in 3 clubs.The opp kept interrupting and saying she needed to describe exactly what her hand point count and distribution was, and nothing else would do. We never got to what the responses by partner might have meant, which would have inflamed the opp further, if that were possible. My feeling was that it's sorta like multi in that the alert for the opening bid isn't terribly helpful either, and depends on the subsequent bids to clarify, but that was insufficient for the opp and he started shouting about reporting the opps to everyone in sight so I removed him, at which point his partner said that he agreed with his booted partner and left as well. Therein lies the question, how much information is required to be given and how, if someone is using a convention unfamiliar to the opps, do you decide? If everyone had kept their cool it could presumably have turned into a teaching session, NOT the point of a team match, and the match would have taken even longer than it did, but that would have been better than what did happen. Admittedly it got more complicated because the (unhelpful) partner of the 2nt bidder is an ACBL accredited director, and the opponent is a WBF director and I am just someone who tries to provide events for the club. We have a number of accredited ACBL directors who won't direct any more live or on web because they have had too many hassles. This is the first time in about 6 years I've ever had a dustup or had to remove anyone for this sort of thing, not something I'd care to repeat. But how to decide how much is enough in terms of alerts? And is there a difference if it is an opening hand or an overcall hand?

Well that's the thing, I'm hardly the one to educate them :) I said that 2NT alerted as a relay to 3!c was fine and subsequent bidding would clarify for both partner and opps but that's when the explosion happened. I was told later that that was right, but by an ACBL director, obviously the annoyed player, who is himself a director in WBF I understand, disagreed vehemently.

In the IAC club on BBO we have had a majority of people with ACBL background, and the European members have put up with it. We are trying to run a middle ground (several of the tourneys allow multi & psyches, if the directors do not specify otherwise, for example) and this is beginning to cause some issues. Today in a team match N/A couple used HELLO and a European player wanted a whole lot of information as to what exactly the bids meant in terms of strength and distribution, and was not content with the alert "transfer to !c" Was he also entitled to know what the 3!C bid meant?(other than "completing transfer") ? (we never got that far actually, he started shouting about WBF and ACBL and BBO so I subbed him out..but if we had?) We are not heavilly weighted with experts who play regularly but enough advanced players are starting to get involved that this sort of question is going to come up more. I am not a "qualified" TD but trying to do the right thing anyway; so far so good but today left me deeply troubled. I don't know if this is the right place for such a question...what would be absolutely terrific would be someone to come and give us a session on alerting. Some don't even get it right with their own system although that's getting better, but when we get international confusion it can (and did today) get a little ...difficult. Any guidelines? Anyone interested in helping us out with a session about alerts, especially for the more abstract bids, what's required and what people are entitled to, as opposed to what they might want? Barring that, how much is enough? If this is the wrong place for the question, please punt it into wherever it should go. I really need help with this, today was ..in spite of being told I did the right things etc... highly unpleasant and if I had been surer of my ground it might not have escalated as it did.

Oh yes, Bayer, the outfit that is strenuously resisting any controls of neonicotinoids implicated in bee colony collapse, is now getting heavilly involved in the production of bio products which supposedly will restore soil bacteria in which the soil is depleted. A nice gig,one outfit unnecessarilly kills them off and the other gets to try to restore them and both of you make money. Sort of like seeing someone going around setting fires and following them selling fire extinguishers. But it's good for business.

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/dr_hubers_warning/ Not to worry, once people have no choice but to eat GMO foods sterility and abortions (to say nothing of cancers) will take care of any population increase. Besides, with robots able to do pretty much anything these days, what really are people needed for anyway? Though if you are interested, Helene, I know a place which sells seeds of a cousin of tomatoes which supposedly is highly tasty when used with human flesh, or so people in New Guinea used to say.:)

Fair enough, because GMO's have never been held up to adequate independent scrutiny, many people, including me, feel that since we are now in a "allow them all" phase, we would be better off in a "Stop them all until we know they are safe" phase. It's the companies who have pretty much said all or nothing. Their mantra could indeed be 'resistance is futile". When someone who has spent most of his career working in biosecurity for the US Government says that in his opinion GMO alfalfa has the potential to wipe out alfalfa as a viable fodder crop,for example, I think people should listen. This alfalfa is now being grown in Canada, and what is that going to do to food security when the major fodder crop causes cattle to abort their calves? If cattle, then likely also deer, buffalo etc. What happens when the cattle who do survive this are slaughtered and is that genetic material in the meat? What does that do to people? Nobody knows. Perhaps it would have been sensible to find out before we let it loose on the world. An oops! is hardly going to cut it if his fears do indeed get realised over the next ten years and cattle farmers go bankrupt one after another. Perhaps people ought to have a CHOICE. Then people who want to or don't care about GMOs can have all they want, but why should these companies be in a position to FORCE people to eat them, even if only by not labelling foods containing them? And they ought to be held accountable for pollen drift contaminating crops which people are trying to keep clean of GMOs. Until at least those two things,labelling and accountability, are achieved, I do think they should not be allowed to be sold - which is not quite the same thing as banned, but which is what I think most people mean when they say banned, certainly the people with whom I am familiar. That doesn't even address safety issues as if people are ABLE to avoid eating them, then the people who do eat them are in effect, volunteering to be test subjects, which is possibly hard on their kids, but it's their choice. Many of us do not wish to volunteer to be test subjects.

I have never said that, nor do I think responsible people have said that GMO's are in and of themselves necessarilly bad. The problems are that some GMO's ARE bad, if you happen to think that regularly eating even miniscule amounts of poison is a bad thing, that they are totally unregulated and there is no independent oversight and no accountability. We don't allow a farm wife to bake a batch of cookies in a normal home kitchen and sell them at the farmer's market but we allow contrived plants with dubious benefits to contaminate food crops through cross pollination without a thought. Which has more potential for harm? The specific problems with GMOs for food, aside from the poisons now part and parcel of what we eat, is the interrelationship with the seed and what the cultivation of the seed does to the environment, and that GMOs have not demonstrated that they actually do lead to any of the results claimed, not healthier food, not better crops, not healthier soil, not even higher yields if you take averages of four years or more, and decidedly not more profitable farms. This is not to say that GMOs could never lead to improvements in all of those things, but when profit is the only concern then that's simply not going to happen.

I should have sources who know something whereof they speak? Where are your sources? Where is the research that proves ANYTHING I have said is inaccurate? Since you seem to feel that your experts are more in the know than Dr. Shiva who has been recognized around the world by universities and others, Who are they, and why don't you bring them and their work forward? Or is it enough to just spout Monsanto propaganda and pronounce as a sort of truism that anyone who has reservations about GMOs must be unworthy of having anything to say just because of that fact? Do you moonlight, perhaps, as one of the people that Monsanto has hired to go around to forums such as this and spread such drivel? You had best bring all your buddies in to start upvoting, since that's the usual next step with such tactics, and they better earn their wages. But you obviously don't care about evidence since you offer none, it's supposedly enough that you sneer and belittle anyone not panting with eagerness to turn the world over to people with apparently more ego than ethics " as long as it makes money it must be fine, who cares about the future" attitude. To me that's a pathetic and irresponsible attitude but clearly you are more than comfortable with it.

DR Daphne Miller has a really interesting video out but I can't find the one I wanted. The one I had seen was on a membership site and apparently not available anywhere else, but she talks about Finland noticing that children on the Finnish side of the Finland/Russian border suffered much much more from allergies than the children on the Russian side. The government came to attribute it to the excessive concern about germs. She had a photo of a child kissing a pig and said the the Finnish government is trying to get people to get a more realistic relationship with microbes. But this video covers much of the same ground

Well your diatribe about my "luddite" worries is ill directed. There's no need to go back to oxen and pretechnological days, nor have I suggested it. Indeed technology has made it possible to know and understand just how and in what ways GMOs are dangerous, and that their claims are both premature and inaccurate. It's interesting that you regard my interest in "mistakes" as a yearning to return to the "good old days" I would suggest that people who don't learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them and the consequences of some mistakes are too costly to risk. Nor have I suggested anything like what you are accusing me of. Your comments are certainly an indication that modern technological advances in understanding how to manipulate opinion is (at least sometimes, for people who don't look too closely,) successful. Being pro or anti technology just because it IS technology is idiotic. A blanket approval for all and let the chips fall where they may is no longer useful any more than the idea of nuclear war is useful, technology itself has made it highly dangerous to follow that road of primitive thinking that war has ever solved anything at all in the long run. Unless of course, you subscribe to the idea that wiping humans off the face of the planet would be a good thing, in which case there's really nothing to discuss.

The study that I first read regarding this was done in Scotland and like so many others seems to have vanished into the ether.Much of the early information and links I had were on a now defunct computer so I can't retrieve them. One study maybe 15 years ago, not entirely sure of the date, was a joint university research project looking at the use of glyphosate..a chemical intricately involved with GMO plant production..and its effect on the workers in the tomato industry in Ontario. Their findings of health issues including prostate cancers and spontaneous abortions among the workers alarmed then sufficiently to call for a world wide ban, as although each chemical used was not in itself extremely dangerous, the combination intensified the lethality considerably. I sent a copy of that study to various MPs in Ottowa and was told that the government was satisfied that everything was just fine and not to worry. A professor in New York which studied the effects of feeding hay dessicated with the same chemicals to milk cows found the use of chemically dessicated hay was strongly correlated with an increase in abortions. (I was interested in that one as friends of mine had all their Quarter Horse mares abort when they unknowingly bought and fed hay that had been chemically dessicated). The professor was told to withdraw his publication of results or the university would have funding withdrawn and he might even be in danger of losing his job.It is very difficult now to find that study. This interview with Dr. Don Huber, Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology, Purdue University on discovery of new organism and crop disease, livestock infertility and threats to U.S. food and agriculture, done more recently, speaks to that problem Complicating access to research further is the focussed attack on anyone who dares to publish anything remotely anti GMO, frequently with innuendo and often with outright lies. Typical of the reaction to a possibly negative impact of anything related to GMOs is this article which painfully tracks an article, an attack on the article and the response by the person who was attacked, Dr. Elaine Ingham, a very highly respected scientist who has worked with soil science for many years. http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/8951-full-story-of-the-dr-elaine-ingham-controversy-over-klebsiella-p This article was not the one I was trying to find but she has so many links now it was taking too long to find the one I wanted. This one demonstrates both the use of innuendo, slander and outright lies used to discredit anyone who questions the forward march of whatever idea someone proposes which might make some money, and how careless officials sometimes are with their mandate to safeguard. Lead author Gilles-Eric Seralini, a biologist at Caen University in Caen, France and president of CRII-GEN's scientific board, who got some smuggled GMO and fed it to rats with rather dramatic and alarming results was vilified, slandered and threatened with lawsuits if he did not retract publication of the research. There is another link regarding comments from a former PRO GMO scientist who now is against it. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/05/28/gmo-dangers.aspx#! This did not get the publicity that Dr Ingham got and indeed I didn't even know about it until I stumbled over it trying to find an entirely different article. IF the GMO foods are safe, why won't the developers allow long term impartial studies? One of the major problems facing researchers is the intransigence of the GMO companies to ALLOW any research. In regard to a research project regarding pigs: The lack of a controlled feed-growing environment potentially calls the results into question, according to Kent Bradford, Ph.D., director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California, Davis. “These are different products,” Bradford told Food Safety News. “For example, soy beans can have a wide range of phytoestrogens. The amount varies widely by production.” But the study’s researchers had little choice but to work with retail GM grains due to one nearly insurmountable research hurdle: grower’s contracts. Anyone who buys GM seeds is required to sign a technology stewardship agreement that says, in part, that they cannot perform research on the seed. Without express permission from the biotech patent-holder, scientists and farmers risk facing lawsuits for conducting any studies. “Any study you want to do with these engineered crops, you need to get the company’s permission,” Hansen said. “Could you imagine if tobacco research was only done when the tobacco companies had the final say?” In July 2009, a group of 26 public sector scientists wrote to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to complain about the restrictions imposed on them by the patent holders of GM seeds. In part, they said critical questions regarding GM foods could not be answered without more research freedom, which has still not been established." A couple of years ago people in Britain who bought manure and spread it on their gardens watched in horror as their gardens all promptly died. The manure was from cows who had eaten feed that had been sprayed and at least some of the chemical had passed right through their systems and was still potent enough to kill any plant it came in contact with. Will these chemicals really have no effect on human metabolism? Why are there no studies showing that, then? It is ironic to me that pro GMO people are constantly claiming that people who have serious reservations about GMOs are anti science.. Where is the INDEPENDENT LONG TERM science showing they are SAFE? GMOs are not necessarilly bad, the technology holds out a good deal of potential, but because of the patenting of seed and life forms, it has become primarilly a mechanism for profit, with no oversight or responsibility for consequences whatsoever. Indeed, for a while, it was made illegal for anyone to sue or challenge Monsanto in the American courts, they were actually seemingly set above the law.(No longer the case) The link between the companies producing them and the companies controlling the fertilizers and chemicals they require to produce a crop and the companies buying the crops for the commodity markets means that global food production, if relying on GMOs, virtually rests within the control of about 4 or 5 companies, Monsanto among them. These companies are trying to extend their reach further to make it actually illegal to grow much of anything other than their seed (which of course, farmers must buy each year). They started out with soybeans and canola and quickly moved into other crops, now they are moving big time into vegetable seed. They have bought a number of very large seed companies, sometimes in partnership, and use them as false fronts to introduce seed which is NOT identified as GMO seed, into the public.Companies which once claimed they would never sell GMO seed are now strangely silent - or actively quietly lying as some of the seed they sell has indeed got GMO markers. If you read the fine print you find companies like Seminis now are "sister" companies..ie companies linked to Monsanto and the development of GMO seed. The latest information is that they are also moving into GMO tree crops as well, olives and apples among the new targets. Combine this expansion into every food crop with laws in the EU and now in Canada severely restricting the legal right to save, sell, trade seeds ( in Europe that includes vegetable seed, don't know if that applies in Canada -yet-) and it makes the anti monopoly lawsuit vs Microsoft look like a very very minor thing indeed. All this with no independant long term studies on the safety nor any consideration for the proven environmental destruction inherent in the way GMO crops are grown, nor any CHOICE allowed for the public to exercise as to what they choose to eat. Absolute power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, is that the saying? What if the companies with the power had already been demonstrated in courts of law to be corrupt to start out with? Let's let them have virtually total control over humanity's food supply, why not! So it gets very complicated but there are a whole lot of issues involved with GMOs which extend far beyond the actual seed itself, but are interconnected intimately with GMO food production. We KNOW that monocropping, the farming technique for which GMOs are designed, is harmful to the soil. We KNOW that the fertilizers and pesticides essential to their production are harmful to the environment. (Consider the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, now said to be the size of New Hampshire and agricultural runoff is responsible for most of it). We are TOLD - by the people who stand to profit by GMOs - that the studies showing problems with GMOs are all nonsense and bad science but there is no independant research showing they are safe, quite aside from any other consideration. According to the Institute of Responsible Technology :The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) doesn’t think (GMO foods are safe). The Academy reported that “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,” including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM asked physicians to advise patients to avoid GM foods. Before the FDA decided to allow GMOs into food without labeling, FDA scientists had repeatedly warned that GM foods can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged long-term safety studies, but were ignored. I can track down some individual studies but these links were the fastest to offer. As an interesting adjunct, I watched a TED talk the other day in which the speaker enthusiastically said that within the very near future any undergraduate would be able to do genetic modification in his or her dorm room. The thought boggles my mind, not because of the technology, but that anyone could seriously consider this a good thing.. many undergraduates are not precisely the responsible people we might hope them to be. ( Not that all adults are either but still). It's like giving the materials and instructions for making an atomic bomb, without the risk of radiation contamination.

Sorry but that's total nonsense, verbal gymnastics at best. The genetic material which naturally can coexist is within a group. Nothing outside that group has the capacity to interact successfully to generate life. A flower can rub pollen on your arm for a million years but you are never going to grow a petunia there, nor develop the ability to photosynthesize. There are jokes about men are men and sheep are nervous but never yet has that led to a creature half human and half sheep, although people have certainly had myths about centaurs, satyrs harpies etc. Genetically modified foods which are of concern are an entirely different thing than hybrids or anything at all that possibly could occur in nature. What farmers and others have traditionally done is select for preference of the expressed genetics within/across families; different varieties of wheat with each other, or cousins like wheat and rye for example. In animals an example are mules, the result of crossing donkeys and horses. These can and do exist in nature. Farmers have also selected out for varieties which have done well and by the process of selection have developed new varieties. But you can look for all the time that the earth has existed and you will NEVER find jellyfish genes occurring naturally in a potato. However, they now exist in genetically modified potatoes because they have been put there. To try to say they are the same thing is like saying selecting the Q !H out of your hand to play and manufacturing the Q!H out of the table napkin to play is the same thing. The most common modifications, though, involve such things as rendering the seed sterile (the terminator gene) so farmers can no longer save seed or select out what works best for them but must buy seed every year. One question that comes to mind is what does it do to the nutritive value when a "seed" in effect is no longer a seed, as it no longer has the capacity to generate a new plant. Obviously any plant which developed that gene naturally would become extinct in short order. A side concern would be what happens when there is no competition in the market and what that implies for food costs in the future? Another one is that many of these GMO plants derive from similar if not the same stock so the specter of the Irish potato famine comes to mind, as it was largely a matter of only one variety of potato being grown and it had no resistance to a blight which unexpectedly showed up. The other common modification, and the one I'm talking about here involves installing genes which have been designed so plants can take poisons in the plant without dying. Thus you can spray the plants to a farethewell with herbicides and fungicides and insecticides and they happily take them in but keep growing. You may have been told to wash your fruit and vegetables to rinse off any chemical residues. Not going to help when those chemicals are part and parcel of the food itself. These are IN the food you are eating, and the USDA last year approved an increase in the amount of such poisons it allows to be present in food. If they weren't there, then this would not have been required. The increase was necessary, because just as we now have flesh eating disease and other antibiotic resistant diseases which have been spawned by overuse of antibiotics, so insects and plant diseases have begun to develop immunity to the poisons, so they have to use stronger and stronger ones, and/or more of them. The other thing about GMOs is that they are HIGHLY dependant on fertilizers, so much so that when farmers in South Africa weren't instructed to provide a high enough amount for their crops, even Mondanto admitted it led to at least a third of the corn crop failing to develop kernals at all, hundreds of thousands of acres. Aside from the obvious fact that a total failure of the plants to produce anything sueful whatsoever unless heavilly fertilized is hardly a resilient crop to depend on for food security, virtually all fertilizers have natural contaminants in them, such as cadmium, zinc, uranium etc. These are also obviously in minute quantities, but again, over time they build up both in the soil and in the plants grown in that soil. Again, we are told that the levels of such contaminants is safe for human consumption, but that's again based on what is known to kill quickly, not what happens with continuous consumption. Selenium is essential for many of the animals we raise (and to humans) but in miniscule amounts, selenium poisoning is not uncommon in livestock. A little bit of arsenic won't kill you, and neither will a little bit of most of these poisons, although farmers are advised to use hazmat equipment to deal with many of them. Over time, though, those infinitesimal amounts will add up, just as they will with arsenic. How long can people eat tiny amounts of poison daily before it starts to have an effect? Nobody knows, because we are told that these things are just fine, trust them, nobody's died from eating GMO foods yet. Do we know that? No. We only know that nobody has IMMEDIATELY died from eating GMO food. There are many many poisons which won't kill you immediately but over time will do you in, often highly unpleasantly, and generally people are advised to avoid them. GMO technology is deliberately and knowingly causing poisons to be part of the food we eat. You may not be old enough to remember the whole sad story about thalidomide. Scientists and doctors all raved about it. ONE doctor said she wasn't convinced and she was vilified mercilessly, until finally someone started looking a little closer at why so many children were suddenly being born with flippers or no limbs. Turned out she was right and all the scientific community that had jumped on the bandwagon far too quickly was wrong. We are seeing the same frantic rush to adopt GMOs as was once the case to approve thalidomide. If the doctors and scientists didn't consider even the possibility that thalidomide might be implicated when they were faced with something so dramatic as a child unexpectedly born with no arms, how can they be expected to consider anything less obvious such as the astonishing increase in autism or children's cancer wards? I read today that cancer is now the leading cause of death in children in North America. WHY? A couple of days ago I read an interview with a doctor who said he now frequently sees women under 35 with ovarian cancer, something virtually unknown when he started practice. WHY? But then.. it's as you say, good business model at least for the moment, as the chemical companies don't have to deal with the health care costs and the anguish of families dealing with the results of their "scientific" hubris. Or the clean up of the rivers and lakes or the salting or desertification of untold acres of land, or the drilling into and draining of water deposits which may be millennia old and which will not readily be replenished. All of these things go hand in hand with GMO crops, as was very clearly demonstrated in India when they abandoned traditional farming practices and embraced new technology and GMOs wholeheartedly. That led directly to India eventually declaring an area comparable to the Prairies to be GMO free, GMOs to be banned forever, with the UNANIMOUS approval of over 600 scientists who had seen the destruction and death this caused, thousands of farmers committing suicide when they could no longer raise any crop at all on their land It's all been well documented, google Dr Vandana Shiva. Selling hard drugs is also very profitable they say, as long you don't have to pay the costs. Tobacco companies are now being held somewhat responsible for the damage which has been attributed to tobacco, something else that doctors used to say was just fine, if not heartily endorse. Even so, smoking is a CHOICE, not a necessity as is food.

It seems to me that when you combine this with the findings of other studies that the bacteria in the gut is altered when provided with GMO food, the old saying you are what you eat is being shown to be literally true. At least one study found that altered gut bacteria in humans are a precursor to diabetes. Children living in a highly urban area and eating a lot of processed or semi processed foods have different bacteria in their gut as opposed to children living in a somewhat isolated rural area without access to processed foods. Might the trend being pushed by most governments and industrial ag plant patent owning chemical companies toward GMOs beginning to result in the astonishing and dismaying leap in the incidence of asthma, autism, obesity and childhood cancers as well as the (now considered to be epidemic) occurrence of diabetes, arthritis, some adult cancers, and depression in adults. Consider that many GMO crops have hormone disruptors embedded in their genetic material, and we are told by the patent owners that although these will have an affect on other life forms including mammals, they won't affect humans. That's been shown to be untrue, as common sense would suggest..(Talking about exceptionlism!) but studies showing these results somehow seem to be quickly swept away. The PR says that GMOs are necessary for us to feed the world but that has not shown the promise that was predicted, in fact, studies have shown non industrial based commercial farms are both more productive and more profitable in the long run. They are also far more resilient and reverse rather than cause desertification, which is one of the major threats to food production as more and more land becomes basically sterilized by agricultural chemicals, many of which end up in the food we eat. GMOs are the apple being held out to Snow White. Unfortunately, there's unlikely to be anyone wandering around who will save us from the results of eating the apple.

Once had a neighbor who worked full time and spent much of her off time in the winter cooking huge batches of whatever she was making for dinner and freezing meal size portions of it. They also did most of their dinner parties and such during the winter. Come summer, her husband bar-b-qued and she made salads but other than that they pretty much took the summer off from cooking. They did have a garden in the summer but it was set up to look after itself, once planted little needed doing but harvesting. It seemed quite a sensible way to proceed, summer here is woefully short and meant to be enjoyed. She must have been REALLY well organized though, not to end up with a host of packages of the same thing in the bottom of the freezer.