Mmm ... radioactive Fukushima tuna!

http://www.trust.org/item/20140429222303-zff17

Mmm ... tuna.

Kill off those brain tumors, eh?

Yet another reason not to trust corporations when it comes to food.

Diluting the definition of 'organic', you don't say?

Well ...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/04/29-2

Published on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 by Common Dreams

Food Defenders Protest Corporate Takeover of 'Organic' Standards

Protester arrested as groups fight for a natural food system people can 'trust'

Telling snippet -

The so-called 'sunset process' required that non-organic food materials approved by the NOSB for use in organic foods—such as sausage casings from factory-farmed animals, synthetic vitamins, and the antibiotic streptomycin—must be reviewed every five years. Unless re-approved by a two-third majority vote, the items would be dropped from the list.

As Paul explains, the process was designed to ensure that these non-organic materials would only be temporarily allowed in organic foods until a better, organic option was found.

Under the new rules, non-organic ingredients are no longer dropped after five years and, instead, a majority vote is required to remove them from the list. The rule change "almost guarantees that the list of non-organic materials will just get longer and longer and it will be impossible to get them out," Paul said.

Organic industry watchdog groups—including The Cornucopoia Institute, The Center for Food Safety, The National Organic Coalition, the March Against Monsanto and OCA—are opposed to the change, which the USDA made in September 2013 without any input from the public..

The change to the sunset process, the groups say, is the "last straw" in the food industry's corruption of these safeguards.

"As consumer interest in organic grows, sales grow. These larger companies want a piece of that pie but dont want to play by the rules," Paul said, adding that food industry representatives "get themselves appointed to these boards and manage to, over time, corrupt these standards."

"Little by little these standards are being eroded, for the benefit for larger and larger organic and so-called 'natural' companies," Paul continued.

"Corporate interests, including the industry lobby group the Organic Trade Association, have been gaming the system for years with the help of the USDA,” said Cornucopia's Kastel.

Seriously ... what the fuck happened to John Kerry?

To think I deeply respected this guy. He had a backbone, and the courage to speak to the facts publicly.

I thought he would've made a great President.

Then there's this - http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/29/kerry-grovels-over-israeli-apartheid/

Even within this, Kerry was initially very accurate, only to back-pedal and grovel -

"It is a mark of how upside-down Official Washington has become over facts and evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry, who has developed a reputation for making false and misleading statements about Syria and Russia, rushes to apologize when he speaks the truth about the danger from Israeli “apartheid.”

After public disclosure that he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state,” Kerry hastily apologized for his transgression, expressing his undying support for Israel and engaging in self-flagellation over his word choice."

...

"But apartheid already is a feature of Israeli society. As former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar wrote in 2012, “the Israeli version of apartheid is very similar in important respects to the South African version, and that moral equivalence ought to follow from empirical equivalence. Both versions have included grand apartheid, meaning the denial of basic political rights, and petty apartheid, which is the maintaining of separate and very unequal facilities and opportunities in countless aspects of daily life."

Sigh - how I loved the idea of working in a big city.

... the biggest one near me being Vancouver.


Too bad it has to end - http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/27/fracking-in-the-worldsgreenestcity.html.

Manufacturing Consent: The Movie; and oldie but a goodie.

Stormtrooper evolution ...

If only it could morph from ATOC to ROTS to ANH ... (source: http://thepropden.aokforums.com/vp62930.html)

Excellent articles about pending economic doom and global warming.

I'm not sure which is worse - economic collapse followed by violence and death; or global climate warming which will make us all extinct.

Economic disaster - Pretty hard to ignore -

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/24/americas-surge-toward-oligarchy/

"While the elite of the elites get richer and richer and, therefore, can afford to exercise more and more influence over elections, another new study shows that nearly “one-third of American households — 38 million of them — are living a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.” And a new Gallup poll shows an increasing number of households teetering on the brink of “hardship” due to a lack of savings."

Hmm ... that quote from Kennedy comes to mind here, doesn't it? "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."^[3]

Global Warming - This is a tough one -

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/we-cannot-afford-to-lose-another-decade-or-even-another-minute

"But struggle and anger alone won't do it. We need intense activism along with structural analysis and the building of alternative, sustainable lifestyles. We need wisdom, reverence and creativity that we pull up from the depths of our uncertainty. Author Joanna Macy calls it "the Great Turning." It's a shift in consciousness that aligns social healing, economic fairness and an end to war with environmental sustainability. And the time to make it happen is running out. We can't afford to lose another decade, or another twenty minutes."

Yay! The State of Vermont sees the wisdom in labelling frakenfood as such.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/24/vermont-bill-gm-food-health-labels

About fucking time.

Happy Earth Day - really?

No one seemed to care last year. And not much has gotten better this year.

I mean honestly - at this point in life, shouldn't every fucking day be Earth Day?

Here's a view I agree with - http://www.thenation.com/blog/179375/let-earth-day-be-last -

" ... to willfully obstruct any serious response to global warming is to knowingly allow entire countries and cultures to disappear. It is to rob the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet of their land, their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives and their children’s lives—and their children’s children’s lives. For money. For political power.

These are crimes. They are crimes against the Earth, and they are crimes against humanity."

And let's be very clear - this is about our very collective future as both a species, and as habitants of this planet -

"What I’m talking about is both a fight for survival and a fight for justice—for even the possibility of justice. It’s a fight that transcends environmentalism. It requires something of us beyond the usual politics and proposals, the usual pieties. It requires the kind of commitment you find in radical movements—the kind of struggles, from abolition to women’s, labor and civil rights, that have made possible what was previously unimaginable."

Corn Refiners Association = Right-Wingers

How so you may ask?

“Our bodies don’t know what to do with high fructose corn syrup – and don’t need it,”

Thank you FLOTUS for the reaction from these frankenfood morons that shows them to be the right-wingers and those that both deny reality, and attempt to prevent others from seeing it.

We're all April Fools - what with Carbon Dioxide levels at 400 PPM for the month.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/april-will-be-first-month-with-co2-levels-above-400-ppm-17331

Scientists expected the 400 ppm mark to be surpassed at an earlier date this year — and, indeed, that point came a full two months earlier than last year — and for this year to see the first monthly carbon dioxide average above 400 ppm.

Must be the lack of oxygen going into our heads.

Chaplin - the progressive America tried to deny.

Okay he wasn't perfect or infallible. Still, as this article demonstrates, his progressive stances on things found their way into a number of his works, despite the objections of may right-wingers.

http://www.progressive.org/100-years-on-charlie-chaplins-progressive-legacy-looms-large

Gotta love that clip at the end. The film work and production is way ahead of its time, as is it's commentary on the many stupid aspects of corporations and the endless drive for money.

Clone me a new arm!

Or something like that -

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/17/us-science-cloning-idUSBREA3G1KD20140417

Scientists have moved a step closer to the goal of creating stem cells perfectly matched to a patient's DNA in order to treat diseases, they announced on Thursday, creating patient-specific cell lines out of the skin cells of two adult men.

The advance, described online in the journal Cell Stem Cell, is the first time researchers have achieved "therapeutic cloning" of adults. Technically called somatic-cell nuclear transfer, therapeutic cloning means producing embryonic cells genetically identical to a donor, usually for the purpose of using those cells to treat disease.

More here -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning

Cool! Let's hope the residents of 'Kepler-186f' haven't destroyed their planet yet.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/earth-sized-planet-found-in-star-s-habitable-zone-1.2613794

On that note, I do think it rather interesting how we as humans name everything else in the universe something.

As if suddenly beings from these planets will arrive here and say 'Hey! We are from Kepler-186f!"

I also find it moronic of me to assume that such beings would - naturally - speak English.

Science confirms what I've long suspected - The United States of America is a Democracy In Name Only (DINO).

Read the results yourself -

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf (h/t to pajoy @ Daily Kos)

Fucking damning and depressing for sure -

"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

Walmart and organic food - not something I would trust on first hearing.

Apparently I'm not the only one.

Gee, if they cannot even answer a basic answer about farmers and how they'd be treated in this deal, something about tells me they aren't going to be treated well at all.

We'll see.

I hope he's alright.

http://loudwire.com/new-report-refutes-acdc-retirement-rumors/

This guy has been one of my rock guitar idols - hope he's okay.

The Wonderful World of Peanut Allergies.

I often wonder - why are there so many people developing them?

I asked myself - are peanut fucked with by the chemical companies (that's CV lingo for - are peanuts genetically modified?)

Turns out they aren't; and yet they are more or less GMO.

How so - you may ask?

http://blogs.prevention.com/inspired-bites/2013/11/25/hidden-truth-about-peanuts/ 

It’s interesting to note that the peanut is actually a bean. Its shape is similar to a soybean, and it is not a nut at all.  It is part of the legume family but different to the soybean and other beans which grow in pods on vines.  The peanut has its pod in the ground.

In other words, it’s buried in the soil.  It has a soft skin that protects it (not a hard shell like a walnut).  Put anything in that soil and you can imagine how it gets absorbed into the peanut.  Put genetically engineered seeds in that soil and you get soil that is saturated with a controversial chemical, glyphosate, linked to everything from cancer to infertility.

Peanut crops are often rotated with cotton crops, and now that cotton has been genetically engineered to withstand increasing doses of crop chemicals, it’s anyone’s guess as to just how polluted that soil has become.

But it’s not a guess to the farmers.

According to farmers, “Peanuts are raised in the part of our country where peanuts are a rotation crop with cotton. Most of the cotton is glyphosate tolerant and receives numerous glyphosate applications per year. Glyphosate severely damages the beneficial microorganisms in the soil. This leads to an increase in the population of opportunistic or bad organisms in the soil. The bad organisms cause an increase in the number of diseases that will adversely effect the peanut crop. This leads to an increased use of insecticides and fungicides on the peanut crop. It is common to see a conventional peanut crop sprayed with some type of pesticide every 8-10 days during the growing season.”

Act now while supplies last!

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/13/3426117/climate-panel-avoiding-catastrophe-cheap/

Obvious stuff apparently every major government knows -

Now you might think it would be a no-brainer that humanity would be willing to pay a very high cost to avoid such catastrophes and achieve the low emission “2°C” (3.6°F) pathway in the left figure above (RCP2.6 — which is a total greenhouse gas level in 2100 equivalent to roughly 450 parts per million of CO2). But the third report finds that the “cost” of doing so is to reduce the median annual growth of consumption over this century by a mere 0.06%.

You read that right, the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is 0.06% — and that’s “relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.” So we’re talking annual growth of, say 2.24% rather than 2.30% to save billions and billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries. As always, every word of the report was signed off on by every major government in the world.

Why are we so wasteful?

In 1970, cumulative CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, cement production and flaring since 1750 were 420±35 Gt [billion metric tons] CO2; in 2010, that cumulative total had tripled to 1300 ±110 Gt CO2.

I like her even more now.

And I liked her already.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/179239/presidential-prospect-or-not-elizabeth-warren-has-lesson-democrats

Those pesky software bugs ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed_Bug

Next time some idiot in your company seriously questions the need for testing, send them here.

I don't think it's a small coincidence ...

... that the last American President elected as a Republican which I actually respected, was perhaps the last American President legitimately elected.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/22980-thom-hartmann-there-has-not-been-a-legitimately-elected-republican

Gee, finally someone in the 'left-wing' gets it.

http://www.thenation.com/article/179147/why-do-so-many-leftists-want-sex-work-be-new-normal

It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her. As Grant says, they are buying a fantasy—the fantasy of the woman who wants whatever they want (how johns persuade themselves of this is beyond me). But maybe men would be better partners, in bed and out of it, if they couldn’t purchase that fantasy, if sex for them, as for women, meant finding someone who likes them enough to exchange pleasure for pleasure, intimacy for intimacy. The current way of seeing sex work is all about liberty—but what about equality?

I thought the left was about that, too.

Heck, what about pleasure? When one take's one pleasure and places a price on it, there is no equality - not unless that truly works both ways.

I'm rooting for you Carey ... all the way to a Cup victory!

... your team as well.


http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl/carey-price-looks-to-take-next-step-1.2596857

Hey there - corporations have more rights than you!

Didn't you know? We've lived in a plutocracy for some time now. This just makes it official.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mccutcheon-decision-campaign-finance-040214

The remarkable story of how we have come to privatize political corruption in this country reached another milestone today as the Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, handed down its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, effectively demolishing the aggregate, two-year limit on contributions by individuals, and taking a big chunk out of Buckley v. Valeo, the misbegotten 1976 decision that got the ball rolling in the first place. It was a 5-4 vote, with the court split exactly as it had in the Citizens United case. In writing the opinion for the court, Roberts further emphasized the equation of money with speech, and also seemed to agree with Anthony Kennedy's famous assertion in Citizens United that the ability of megadonors to shovel gobs of money into the election process,"We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

Sad to me, how I find the opposite to be true.