Against the grain: 'Economics, not common sense, drives GM crops'

Genetic modification technology is a great research tool but it's crude. Some scientists claim that GM is just an extension of natural evolution, a development of cross-breeding, but this is, technically, totally inaccurate. The way genetic modification has been used to manufacture GM crops causes thousands of changes in the DNA of the plants' cells, variations of a different quality and quantity to cross-breeding.

Some of these are benign, but some are going to disrupt one or more functions of the plant. So it may now be herbicide resistant, but unable to stand heat, its nutritional value may be lowered, known toxins increased, or even new toxins introduced into the plant.

This mutagenic effect is well known, research by the Food Standards Agency has found such disturbances in the patterns of gene function, but at the moment we are being too selective about what we are looking for, so the health consequences are completely unknown. The risks of releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment are widely accepted.

In the research I do using genetic modification there are regulatory requirements that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are only used in " contained use" conditions and are genetically crippled, so they cannot escape and interact with the environment. It's totally bizarre that these rules do not apply for the same kind of technology used in GM crops. What we are seeing here is the irresponsible releasing of GMOs in to the environment with unknown consequences. GM crops are not performing as expected: GM cotton suffered cotton ball and root problems while GM soya has shown consistently lower yields than non-GM equivalents.

And animal feeding studies have shown the potentially damaging effects of soya, maize and potatoes. GM potatoes have caused intestinal lesions; GM soya has caused liver cell changes and premature death in the young; GM maize has caused problems with the kidneys and the blood system. Mechanistically, we do not know why this is happening or what the consequences for human health are, but there are clear physiological changes that have been recorded. Once out there we cannot contain it.

We don't need GM crops. Crop genetic diversity is enormous and can be exploited through natural cross-breeding aided by modern genetic screening technologies. The problems we have in agriculture are social and political. What is driving GM crops is economics.

Dr Michael Antoniou is reader in medical and molecular genetics at King's College London

http://news.independent.co.uk/education/higher/article2999527.ece

Humor: Ahmadinejad Invites U.N. Inspectors to Search for Homosexuals

Permits Use of Advanced Gaydar

Just days after asserting that there are no homosexuals in Iran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today invited United Nations inspectors into his country to search for homosexuals.

“We have nothing to hide,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “You can search the entire country – even the airport bathrooms.”

While some senior U.S. diplomats expressed skepticism about the Iranian president’s offer to allow U.N. inspectors to search his country for homosexuals, Mr. Ahmadinejad attempted to silence the skeptics by permitting the use of “advanced gaydar technology” as part of the proposed inspections...

[ full article ]

'Cheney's fondest pipe dream'

Lieberman-Kyl’s Iran amendment passes.

By a vote of 76-22, the Senate passed the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, which threatens to “combat, contain and [stop]” Iran via “military instruments.” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) called the amendment “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” and said it could “read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action.”

UPDATE Before the vote today, changes were made to the original amendment, with paragraphs three and four taken out completely. This paragraph was also added at the end:

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated on September 16, 2007 that “I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by the preferable approach. That the one we are using. We always say all options are on the table, but clearly, the diplomatic and economic approach is the one that we are pursuing.”

Read the full marked up amendment here.

[ Link ]

 

The Labor Lessons GM Never Learned

"...If business and labor had joined together in 1970 in the fight for health
insurance, unionized and non-union auto companies would now be on a level
playing field, and GM would not be at such a financial disadvantage
against producers like Toyota because of retiree health care costs. GM
knows that well: It has praised the cost savings from Canada's
single-payer health insurance system, but it has not used its clout to
push for such a system in the United States.

And the UAW would not be setting up a VEBA -- Voluntary Employee
Beneficiary Association, essentially a union-administered trust fund -- to
provide retiree health care. The VEBA will allow GM to pay roughly a third
less than its currently projected costs for employee health insurance. And
retirees will face the risk -- quite high given current health cost
inflation -- that the VEBA will not have enough money to continue to pay
their health insurance costs. A VEBA at the manufacturing company
Caterpillar, for example, went bust in a decade, and some retirees have
gone from paying minimal health costs to $1,000 a month.

Health care costs are not the only cause of GM's problems or the
insecurity of their employees' jobs. After all, labor costs represent only
about 10 percent of the cost of a car. There are vastly fewer GM jobs now
than in 1970 because GM's share of the market has been cut in half,
because productivity has increased dramatically, and because GM has
increasingly outsourced and offshored jobs.

GM would be in a far stronger position if it had listened long ago to the
union, in particular former president Walter Reuther. Back in 1956, before
the import onslaught, Reuther gave a prescient speech in which he argued
American auto companies should build a small, non-polluting,
fuel-efficient car. Unfortunately, even though the UAW still promotes a
single-payer national health insurance plan, in recent decades it has
largely sided with the auto companies in fighting stricter fuel efficiency
standards that ultimately would have put GM in a stronger position today..."

 

[ full article ]

Chomsky's response to WashPost review of 'Interventions'

Thursday, September 27, 2007

The letter to the Washington Post that follows was written as an experiment, to see just how low the editors would sink in their efforts to block a book containing evidence and analysis that they do not want to reach the public. The letter is a response to a crude and vulgar diatribe, in the form of a review of my collection Interventions. In response, I wrote a point-by-point refutation of each charge, a straightforward matter, as the editors doubtless understand. The letter was sent to the Post immediately, altogether four times, with a request for acknowledgment of receipt. Unpublished, no acknowledgment of receipt. Two weeks after the review appeared, Sept. 16, the Post did publish two letters responding to it. The letters were critical of the review, but acceptable by the standards of the editors, because they left the lies and slanders standing -- the authors could have had no way to refute them without a research project.

I think it is fair to take the editors' silence to demonstrate that they know precisely what they are doing, and are too cowardly even to acknowledge receipt.

- Noam Chomsky

Editor
Washington Post

Jonathan Rauch’s review of my Interventions (WP, Sept. 2) brings to mind Orwell’s famous observations on the “indifference to reality” of the nationalist, who “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but ..has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Rauch runs through a series of what he regards as “flights into a separate reality” and “tendentious whimsy.” When exposed, a straightforward matter, his charges may appear to be conscious deceit, but are more charitably understood as a textbook illustration of Orwell’s observations.

Rauch is appalled that I should charge Washington with bombing Serbia in 1999 “not to prevent ethnic cleansing but to impose Washington’s neoliberal economic agenda.” I neither made nor endorsed the statement. Rather, I quoted it – accurately, not in his words. The source is a high official of the Clinton administration directly involved in the Kosovo events, describing how events were perceived at the highest level. See p. 179.

Another bit of “tendentious whimsy” is the statement that “North Korea’s counterfeiting racket may actually be a CIA operation.” I neither made nor endorsed the statement, but cited it, accurately, from the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Rauch finds equally appalling the fact that “In Chomsky’s universe, the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan was undertaken with the expectation that it might drive several million people over the edge of starvation.” The statement is precisely accurate. That is why aid agencies bitterly condemned the bombing, joined by leading Afghan opponents of the Taliban, including US favorites. It is also why many months after the bombing ended, Harvard’s leading specialist on Afghanistan, Samina Ahmed, wrote in the Harvard journal International Security that “millions of Afghans are at grave risk of starvation.” That and more is in the book under review, but in these op-eds I did not provide full details that would be familiar to readers of the mainstream press, for example, the increase in estimate of those at the edge of starvation by 50%, to 7.5 million, when the bombing was announced and initiated. If Rauch is indeed unfamiliar with the mainstream press, he can find precise references in books of mine cited here.

Particularly amazing in Rauch’s universe is the idea, in his words, that “President Bush – the first and only U.S. president to declare formal American support for a Palestinian state – is the obstacle to a two-state solution that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are all prepared to accept (I am not making that up).” The tiny particle of truth here is that Bush announced his “vision” of a Palestinian state – somewhere, some day, a pale reflection of the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement. Bush did indeed innovate: he is the first president to officially endorse Israeli annexation of the major illegal settlements in the West Bank, a long step backwards from Clinton’s “parameters,” and a death blow to any hope for a viable Palestinian state, as minimal familiarity with the region demonstrates.

In contrast, Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei formally announced that Iran “shares a common view with Arab countries on ... the issue of Palestine,” meaning that Iran accepts the Arab League position: full normalization of relations in terms of the international consensus. “Khamenei has said Iran would agree to whatever the Palestinians decide,” the prominent Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian observes. If Rauch reads the journal in which he writes, he knows that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniye called for “statehood for the West Bank and Gaza...” (Washington Post, July 11, 2006) There are innumerable other examples, perhaps most important among them the statement of the most militant Hamas leader Khalid Mish’al, in exile in Damascus, calling for “the establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967” (Guardian, Feb. 23, 2007). Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly stated that as a Lebanese organization, Hezbollah will not disrupt anything agreed to by the Palestinians.

Much as it may distress the nationalist, on this matter the positions of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are more moderate – that is, closer to the long-standing international consensus – than those of the US and Israel.

In Rauch’s universe, Washington “tolerates a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq whose Shiite government is friendly toward Iran.” No comment should be necessary for readers of the daily press.

That exhausts Rauch’s charges. Orwell triumphs again.

It is perhaps not surprising that Rauch’s furious exertions did not unearth even a misplaced comma. As he knows, the op-eds passed through New York Times fact checking. There might be a lesson there for the journal in which he is a senior writer.

Noam Chomsky

Link

Excerpt: The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

Of diverse beings thou shalt sound the essence;
And thou shalt know the principle and end of All.
If Heaven wills it, thou shalt know that Nature,
Alike in everything, is the same in every place:
So that, as to thy true rights enlightened,
Thine heart shall no more feed on vain desires.
Thou shalt see that the evils which devour men
Are of their choice the fruit; that these unfortunates
Seek afar the goodness whose source within they bear.
For few know happiness: playthings of the passions,
Hither, thither tossed by adverse waves,
Upon a shoreless sea, they blinded roll,
Unable to resist or to the tempest yield.

      - - -

God! Thou couldst save them by opening their eyes.
But no: ‘tis for the humans of a race divine
To discern Error and to see the Truth.
Nature serves them. Thou who fathomed it,
O wise and happy man, rest in its haven.
But observe my laws, abstaining from the things
Which thy soul must fear, distinguishing them well;
Letting intelligence o’er thy body reign,
So that, ascending into radiant Ether,
Midst the Immortals, thou shalt be thyself a God.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ogv/index.htm

The Legend of Star Boy - the Christ legend of the Blackfeet

[... "When Poïa became a young man, he loved a maiden of his own tribe. She was very beautiful and the daughter of a leading chief. Many of the young men wanted to marry her, but she refused them all. Poïa sent this maiden a present, with the message that he wanted to marry her, but she was proud and disdained his love. She scornfully told him, she would not accept him as her lover, until he would remove the scar from his face. Scarface was deeply grieved by the reply. He consulted with an old medicine woman, his only friend. She revealed to him, that the scar had been placed on his face by the Sun God, and that only the Sun himself could remove it. Poïa resolved to go to the home of the Sun God. The medicine woman made moccasins for him and gave him a supply of pemmican.

"Poïa journeyed alone across the plains and through the mountains, enduring many hardships and great dangers. Finally he came to the Big Water (Pacific Ocean). For three days and three nights he lay upon the shore, fasting and praying to the Sun God. On the evening of the fourth day, he beheld a bright trail leading across the water. He travelled this path until he grew near the home of the Sun, when he hid himself and waited. In the morning, the great Sun Chief came from his lodge, ready for his daily journey. He did not recognise Poïa. Angered at beholding a creature from the earth, he said to the Moon, his wife, 'I will kill him, for he comes from a good-for-nothing-race,' but she interceded and saved his life. Morning Star, their only son, a young man with a handsome face and beautifully dressed, came forth from the lodge. He brought with him dried sweet grass, which he burned as incense. He first placed Poïa in the sacred smoke, and then led him into the presence of his father and mother, the Sun and the Moon. Poïa related the story of his long journey, because of his rejection by the girl he loved. Morning Star then saw how sad and worn he looked. He felt sorry for him and promised to help him.

"Poïa lived in the lodge of the Sun and Moon with Morning Star. Once, when they were hunting together, Poïa killed seven enormous birds, which had threatened the life of Morning Star. He presented four of the dead birds to the Sun and three to the Moon. The Sun rejoiced, when he knew that the dangerous birds were killed, and the Moon felt so grateful, that she besought her husband to repay him. On the intercession of Morning Star, the Sun God consented to remove the scar. He also appointed Poïa as his messenger to the Blackfeet, promising, if they would give a festival (Sun-dance) in his honour, once every year, he would restore their sick to health. He taught Poïa the secrets of the Sun-dance, and instructed him in the prayers and songs to be used. He gave him two raven feathers to wear as a sign that he came from the Sun, and a robe of soft-tanned elk-skin, with the warning that it must be worn only by a virtuous woman. She can then give the Sun-dance and the sick will recover. Morning Star gave him a magic flute and a wonderful song, with which he would be able to charm the heart of the girl he loved.

"Poïa returned to the earth and the Blackfeet camp by the Wolf Trail (Milky Way), the short path to the earth. When he had fully instructed his people concerning the Sun-dance, the Sun God took him back to the sky with the girl he loved. When Poïa returned to the home of the Sun, the Sun God made him bright and beautiful, just like his father, Morning Star. 1 In those days Morning Star and his son could be seen together in the east. Because Poïa appears first in the sky, the Blackfeet often mistake him for his father, and he is therefore sometimes called Poks-o-piks-o-aks, Mistake Morning Star.

"I remember," continued Brings-down-the-Sun, "when I was a young man, seeing these two bright stars rising, one after the other, before the Sun. Then, if we were going on a war, or hunting expedition, my father would awake me, saying, 'My son, I see Morning Star and Young Morning Star in the sky above the prairie. Day will soon break and it is time we were started.' For many years these stars have travelled apart. I have also seen them together in the evening sky. They went down after the sun. This summer, Morning Star and Poïa are again travelling together. I see them in the eastern sky, rising together over the prairie before dawn. Poïa comes up first. His father, Morning Star, rises soon afterwards, and then his grandfather, the Sun.

"Morning Star was given to us as a sign to herald the coming of the Sun. When he appears above the horizon, we know a new day is about to dawn. Many medicine men have dreamed of the Sun, and of the Moon, but I have never yet heard of one so powerful as to dream of Morning Star, because he shows himself in the sky for such a short time. ...]

Excerpt from 'The Old North Trail'

http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/pla/ont/index.htm

The Nation: Protecting the Wiretappers

Bowing to White House pressure, Congress passed the 2007 Protect America Act in August, eviscerating any meaningful checks and balances on a sweeping range of governmental surveillance. Now that it has protected telecommunications giants from all future liabilities, the Administration is demanding they be granted amnesty from legal liability for past complicity in spying on ordinary Americans.

The professed reasons for protecting commmunications giants from liability in secret wiretapping are no less disingenuous now than they were when these rightfully defeated provisions were first proposed after 9/11. Rather than promoting security, the push for telecom amnesty furthers the larger ideological ambitions of the Bush Administration: expanding government power while choking off accountability for the way that power is used.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and his allies offer four main arguments in support of the amnesty proposals, each more vacuous than the next.

First, McConnell argues that lawsuits could "bankrupt" the companies. If McConnell is to be believed, we must choose between our civil liberties and our cell phones...

[ full article ]