Profit over proof. Once and everywhere

1. Corporate ghostwriters can produce an entire article for a researcher (who may or may not have been the one who actually did the research and who may or may not acknowledge the role of the true author).
2. Companies pay thousands of dollars to academics who give lectures favorable to drugs.
3. Money talks to the mind: Researchers who have received more money from a drug company perceive that its drugs are safer than do researchers without those financial ties.
4. Requirements that researchers report financial conflicts of interest when publishing articles tend not to work because (a) there are no consequences for failing to report conflicts and (b) backup systems to ensure reporting don't work.
5. The same problems regarding not reporting conflicts of interest occur when applying for grants.
6. Management at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which gives tens of billions of dollars in grants, discourages investigating conflicts of interest.
7. NIH advisory committee members receive large sums of money from drug companies for speaking and consulting.
8. NIH waivers for conflicts of interest are supposed to be exceptional, but are passed out like candy on Halloween.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27889-gmo-contamination-denial-controlling-science

Global Warming is a looming catastrophe?  Nuclear exposure deadly? Frankenfood unsafe? That drug has life-ending side-effects?

Never to these corporations. They don't think and they don't care. Profit over proof. Once and everywhere.

"Defending the right of scientists to investigate dangers of GMO food could not be successful if that defense were limited to demanding free scientific inquiry while ignoring the way that agro dollars control the world's food. The food industry will use any technique it can to squash significant opposition. That includes softening their blows against critics until the heat dies down and then beginning the attacks anew. The right to scientific investigation can only be protected if it is part of a larger effort to challenge the right of corporations to define what good food is and how it should be grown. The fact that the food sovereignty movement fully understands the unity of these goals is why it is so strong and why Big Food fears it so much."

Hmm ... I'd buy these bundles

https://leanpub.com/b/thetesterslibrary
https://leanpub.com/b/qualitysoftware

Hey progressive groups ...

Here's a tip.

When you do business with Amoron's holiday marketing strategy (smile) you're in effect a partner in their business.

Groups like IRT and Courage Campaign are asking me to do business with them by helping their holiday marketing strategy - they should really read the GIFs Amoron has them put in their emails more carefully. They are not a charity - charities don't use '.com'.

They are -in-effect - a partner in their business - and I want no part of it.I will no longer trust these two groups that much either going forward.

Still I can't blame them too much - corporations will take advantage of any situation for growing themselves. Much like a cancer, I would think.

A promise of the future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29

Or at least, one thay doesn't involve fucking up the planet as much as Global Warming.

Weekend just about over.

Well it was a local weekend for sure.

New library, holiday lights at the park, eating dinner at a local diner.

Can't say we weren't checking out the usual city haunts. I feel so productive.

Ah a lazy Saturday ...

When you've got no money - you've got to get creative to keep the family entertained.

The library usually works.

'Modern-day feminist'? No thanks.

I have always believed when it comes to who's smarter - men or women, that they are both equally stupid.

That one is no more and no less than the other.

In that regard, I have always believed feminism has always been about true equality between men and women. I say this because I know for many many years in many societies, women have been regarded as inferior or less than men, and have been treated as property or essentially less than human.

I've never believed that.

And I believe feminism has been about the pursuit of rectifying these inequalities, along with other basic things like walking down the street without being harassed or attacked or ogled.

All that being said ...

... I've found there are a group of women who've always carried themselves as morally superior to men - and oftentimes I find them in the media or part of the entertainment establishment. Indeed I know it's largely to push products and services by corporations on the purchasing customer base in Western Society - but when I hear this same type of women calling themselves, 'modern-day feminists' - a red flag goes up.

They speak of the Bechdel test as the measure of any film they go to (which really is a measure of the quality of the writing as opposed to the genders), and at the same time smear any one who disagrees as misogynist.


These are usually the same women who proclaim demanding equal pay for equal work, and in the same breath, expect a man to hold a door open for them. What fucking hypocrisy - that's not equality of respect; that's believing you are better and deserving to be treated as more important. Or worse, treating men like animals or less than human - kind of like the same kind of way many men used to treat women back in the day ...

I've never believed that.

So next time you hear someone calling themselves a 'modern-day feminist' - ask them what they really mean and request some examples. If they sound anything like some of the examples I've seen and heard, one can only hope they don't reproduce.

It goes back to what I said -

I have always believed when it comes to who's smarter - men or women, that they are both equally stupid.