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French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, author of the book and documentary The World According to Monsanto, an exhausting investigation into genetically-modified organisms and Monsanto, the world´s largest transgenic seed producer, spoke with Latinamerica Press managing editor Elsa Chanduví Jaña about the effects of these seeds and Monsanto´s ambitions to “control the world´s food chain.” Robin participated in the seminar “Seeds of Diversity vs. Transgenics” in Lima Jan. 28-29, which Comunicaciones Aliadas and Latinamerica Press co-organized.
The interview follows.
Stand up for your right to eat healthy natural foods.French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, author of the book and... more
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This essay demonstrates how the black-and-white "War on Terror" frame through which most of the media reports on Somali piracy may be unfair to the actual human beings who, rather than fight to survive in a failed state thats become a nuclear materials dumping ground for much of Europe, make a choice to break the law to bring themselves better lives.
I am not saying that I totally agree with everything that Johann Hari has written here, but I do urge other people to read this and really consider for a minute the lives that some of us in the world have to live through...This essay demonstrates how the black-and-white "War on Terror" frame... more
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3rdarm
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This entire area of the world that includes India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and other islands such as Kirabati and Vanuatu are seeing the effects of rising seas already that will threaten not only their livelihoods, but their lives. This is not a drill, this is the real thing. It has begun and yet, what are we really doing to mitigate/adapt? Waiting for some politicians to have a meeting? I can bet you if it were the shores of NY or Florida their butts would be moving.This entire area of the world that includes India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the... more
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Massive snow storms hit England today, 2nd of Feb, 2009.
Alun Hill was at Stonehenge - along with Chinese touristsMassive snow storms hit England today, 2nd of Feb, 2009.
Alun Hill was at... more
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jkw077
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Decisions are made by media executives that result in far more reports of people in trouble because of marijuana than reports of the far more plentiful evidence that marijuana, in a managed and respected atmosphere, would greatly benefit society, economically and medically.
The Revolution will NOT BE TELEVISED!!! (or streamed online if the FCC or ISPs have anything to do with it)Decisions are made by media executives that result in far more reports of people in... more
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jkw077
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As predicted, droughts will become worse in this part of the US. How bad will it have to get before people understand that water waste, pollution, and climate change are all working hand in hand to bring this about? Farmers are abandoning their fields because they cannot plant on them due to lack of water. What is only imagined as being part of life in places like Africa and Australia is coming true right here in America. I am usually against desalination because it is costly, CO2 intensive (though there may be strides towards fixing that problem) and also because of the threat to marinelife and the affects of returning excess salt back to the sea. However, if this drought persists at this pace and it disrupts the ability to grow food to feed America, I think it would then be feasible to have desalination plants that are used to make water for growing crops along with stringent conservation measures and restrictions on use.
What do you think is the answer?As predicted, droughts will become worse in this part of the US. How bad will it have... more
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2012: Time for Change is a feature-length documentary, directed by Joao Amorim of Curious Pictures in New York and featuring Daniel Pinchbeck, the bestselling author of "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Penguin, 2006). In the style of "An Inconvenient Truth", "What the Bleep Do We Know", and "Waking Life", our file explores ideas about what the immediate future may hold, symbolized by the myths and prophecies of the Mayan culture of Mexico. Interviews with design scientists, anthropologists, physicists such as Dean Radin, Barbara Max Hubbard, Nassim Haramein John Todd and Paul Stamets and celebrities such as David Lynch, Sting, Ellen Page and Gilberto Gil. 2012 combines Film and animation in an innovative way, taking us on a journey through our own evolution.2012: Time for Change is a feature-length documentary, directed by Joao Amorim of... more
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Abbas to Tell Visiting U.S. Envoy: Israel Does Not Want Peace
By Reuters
January 28, 2009 "Reuters" -- - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas vowed on Tuesday to take a tough stance in talks with Israel and said he would tell a U.S. envoy that
Israel's Gaza offensive proved it was not intent on peacemaking.
In his first news conference in the Palestinian territories since Israel launched its 22-day offensive on December 27 that killed some 1,300 people in Gaza, Abbas also said he would back international efforts to prosecute Israel for war crimes.
"We will do all we can to prove Israel committed crimes that would make your skin crawl," Abbas said, referring to the Geneva Conventions. "We want the world to give us justice for once.
"Israel does not want peace, otherwise it would not have done this. We need to understand this and tell it to those coming from Europe and America. Israel wants to waste time to strengthen facts on the ground with settlements and the wall."Abbas to Tell Visiting U.S. Envoy: Israel Does Not Want Peace
By Reuters
January... more
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With a recession going full force, I thought this feature might help ease the pain.
Researchers have found that low self-esteem and materialism are not just a correlation, but also a causal relationship where low self esteem increases materialism, and materialism can also create low self-esteem. The also found that as self esteem increases, materialism decreases. The study primarily focused on how this relationship affects children and adolescents. Lan Nguyen Chaplin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Deborah Roedder John (University of Minnesota) found that even a simple gesture to raise self-esteem dramatically decreased materialism, which provides a way to cope with insecurity.
"By the time children reach early adolescence, and experience a decline in self-esteem, the stage is set for the use of material possessions as a coping strategy for feelings of low self-worth," they write in the study, which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research.
The paradox that findings such as these bring up, is that consumerism is good for the economy but bad for the individual. In the short run, it’s good for the economy when young people believe they need to buy an entirely new wardrobe every year, for example. But the hidden cost is much higher than the dollar amount. There are costs in happiness when people believe that their value is extrinsic. There are also environmental costs associated with widespread materialism.
In the book “Happiness: Lessons From a New Science”, Richard Layard exposes a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan.With a recession going full force, I thought this feature might help ease the pain.... more
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The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.
More than 150 top marine researchers have voiced their concerns through the "Monaco Declaration", which warns that changes in acidity are accelerating.
The declaration, supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco, builds on findings from an earlier international summit.
It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability.The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification... more
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jkw077
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The Federal Reserve Bank is a NETWORK of PRIVATE BANKS!!!! Others who know of what I am talking about feel free to post links to documentaries etc...!!!
America: Freedom to Fascism Documentary explaining the true beginnings and reasons for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173
LAS VEGAS -- Officials with the United Way will host a program for working taxpayers who earned less than $42,000 last year.
The "Earn It, Keep It" program was created in honor of National Earned Income Tax Credit Awareness Day.
Residents can get free help from people trained by the Internal Revenue Service at 18 locations in the Valley.
"For some of these families, it's an opportunity to get up to 10 percent of their annual income back at one time with added tax benefits to their taxes," said Jeff Ogden with the United Way Southern Nevada. "With the current economic issues, it's a great opportunity for those families to receive that additional money."The Federal Reserve Bank is a NETWORK of PRIVATE BANKS!!!! Others who know of what I... more
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jkw077
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A mass of plastic in the Pacific, increasing tenfold each decade since 1945, is now the size of Texas and killing everything in its wake. Currently, there is six times more plastic than plankton floating in the middle of the Pacific.
- Each day, North Americans throw away more than 385,000 cellphones and 143,000 computers-- electronic waste is now the fastest-growing stream of garbage. Lead and mercury are seeping from this waste into ground water. Some of the e-waste, however, is winding up in the sea.
- Each hour, North Americans consume and discard about 2.75 million plastic water and soda bottles; that's 24 billion a year.
- Globally, 100 million tonnes of plastic are generated each year and at least 10 per cent of that is finding its way into the sea.
- Worldwide, each year 113 billion kilograms of small plastic pellets called nurdles--the feedstock for all disposable plastics-- are shipped and billions are spilled during transfer in and out of railroad cars. Those spilled nurdles are ending up in gutters and drains and eventually carried into the ocean. Nurdles resemble fish eggs or roe. Tuna and salmon feed on them indiscriminately. Around 2.5 billion humans eat fish regularly. Plastic and other man-made toxins are polluting the global food chain and it's rising at an unprecedented rate.
- Each year, a million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins and whales die from eating plastic.
Read more at the link.A mass of plastic in the Pacific, increasing tenfold each decade since 1945, is now... more
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First its economy, and now its government? Iceland's Prime Minister Geir Haarde has announced the immediate resignation of his government as a direct result of the country's dire economic crisis.First its economy, and now its government? Iceland's Prime Minister Geir Haarde... more
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For a nation that loves its bratwurst and schnitzel, the message is not a welcome one. Germans have been urged to rethink their meat-eating habits if they want to help the planet.
Germany's federal environment agency has issued a strong advisory for people to return to prewar norms of eating meat only on special occasions and otherwise to model their diet on that of Mediterranean countries.
Germans are among the highest meat consumers in Europe, obtaining around 39% of their total calorie intake from meat and meat products, compared with 25% in Italy.
"We must rethink our high meat consumption," said Andreas Troge, president of the UBA, the government's advisory body on environmental issues...
"It hardly means sacrificing quality of life," said Troge. "I don't believe that the Italians are particularly unhappier than us as a result [of eating less meat]."
Hilmar Steppat, of Germany's vegetarian association, VeBu, welcomed the move, saying: "It's good to see politicians are finally waking up to the fact that the amount of meat we eat is unsustainable." He added that although the number of vegetarians had increased from 0.4% in 1983 to around 10% today, Germans were still very big consumers of meat.
Troge cautioned that not only is meat production energy intensive, the methane gas emitted by cattle and the nitrous oxide produced by their dung, which farmers often leave in the fields from where it enters the atmosphere, also harms the environment.
Findings by the World Wildlife Fund also supports the claim that meat production is environmentally damaging. In its recent Living Planet report it said that a single kilogramme of beef requires 16,000 litres of water, taking into account a three-year lifespan for a cow, the grain it eats in its lifetime, and the water it drinks.
According to VeBu, young women are particularly motivated by environmental concerns to give up meat.
Meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates, though other experts believe that figure is too high.
In the UK food consumed by people accounts for nearly a fifth of national emissions, and meat and dairy products for just over half that, finds the Food Climate Research Network.
The high impact derives from the farmstock fodder grown with chemicals, transport fuels, and the potent greenhouse gas methane from belching cattle and sheep. The government estimates that, kilo-for-kilo, compared with bread, emissions linked to poultry farming are more than four times as high, to pork six times as high, and to beef and lamb 16 times. Besides this, tropical forest is cleared to allow feed-crops, also a source of emissions.
Compassion in World Farming says halving meat-eating would be more effective than halving transport use.
What's good for the Germans is good for the rest of the meat eating World, looks like more and more countries are seeing the connection between a meat diet and methane output that's contributing to greenhouse gases. So how about it USA, China, India, UK?For a nation that loves its bratwurst and schnitzel, the message is not a welcome one.... more
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SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the nation's largest farms plan to cut back on planting this spring over concerns that federal water supplies will dry up as officials deal with the drought plaguing California.
Farmers in the Central Valley said Thursday they would forego planting thousands of acres of water-thirsty canning tomatoes and already have started slashing acreage for lettuce and melons.
As growers in Fresno and Kings counties prepared to sow their dry fields with tomato seeds this week, the giant water district that supplies the irrigation for their sprinklers warned them to think again.SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the nation's largest farms plan to cut back on planting... more
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jkw077
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A thick photochemical smog comprised of respirable suspended particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide hangs thick over the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, 22 January 2009
Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. "The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell," says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. "Each year it just gets worse and worse." What comprises this nuisance — a sprawling high-altitude mass of air pollution that stretches from the Arabian peninsula to the western Pacific Ocean — has long captured the curiosity of scientists. A report released in the Jan. 23 issue of Science breathes fresh air into that ongoing study, confirming that the mass, nicknamed the 'Brown Cloud' but comprised of several small, local clouds, is soot from human burning of wood, dung and crop residue, as well as industrial processes and traffic pollution.A thick photochemical smog comprised of respirable suspended particulate matter and... more
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jkw077
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As of last night, a US marshall, 2 state police and a county police are all over Mr. Hixon's area, serving notices to farmers that they are being sued by Monsanto. They arrive in pairs, with two cars parked a quarter mile and half mile down the road. They've served 3 so far and said "a bunch more are coming." No telling how many will be served since Hixon has between 200-400 farmers he cleans seeds for and these farmers have been repeatedly threatened by Monsanto thugs for the last two months, getting "visits," letters, and calls daily.
Farmers report that a Monsanto investigator laughed that they were doing "rural cleansing."
Steve Hixon is a seed cleaner in southern Illinois. He has equipment that takes the plant materials and "cleans" it so that the seeds are separated out and can be given back to farmers to save for the next season. It's a mechanized step up from farmers hand picking seeds off their own plants, which, with hundreds of acres - or even 10 - would not be easy to do.
Mr. Hixon has the non-distinction of being attacked by Monsanto. He is far from alone. Monsanto has been picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest, having already done its thuggish thing in Pilot Grove, Missouri, and in Indiana, attacking Maurice Parr, destroying business for all of them.
Mr. Parr reports that when he was sued, the first thing out of the judge said was how "honored to have a fine company like Monsanto in my courtroom."
"Shortly after someone broke into Mr. Hixon's office and he found his account book on his truck seat where he would never have left it, evey one of his remotely located and very scattered customers had three men (described as goons with "no necks") arrived at each farm, going out onto it without permission ... Mr. Hixon and state police who were called in, believe a GPS tracking device may have been put on Mr. Hixon's equipment." Click here.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Raids-on-Seeds-life-itsel-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-081215-45.html
In 2002, when Mr. Hixon was at the state legislature for a meeting, he said he told a Monsanto representative there, "If you guys want to take over the seed industry so bad, you ought to buy guys like me out." The Monsanto agent is supposed to have responded "We'd rather put you out of business, it's more fun that way."
..."Of all of Monsanto, DuPont and Dow's agricultural products, genetically engineered food crops might appear to be the least tainted with immediate wartime origins. But this technology emerged from a period when the future of chemical agriculture appeared very much in doubt. With the rapid expansion of the agrochemical industry during the post-World War II era, these companies and their European counterparts had established a profound degree of control over agricultural practices."
But as public pressure and the weight of scientific evidence curtailed the use of DDT and many other chlorinated pesticides in the 1970s, executives and corporate scientists saw the potential for limitless advances -- and ever-expanding marketing potential -- in the incorporation of technological advances into the genetics of seeds. During the 1990s, Monsanto alone spent nearly $8 billion acquiring leading commercial seed suppliers in the United States and internationally; DuPont and others quickly followed suit, leading to today's widespread proliferation of genetically engineered food crops."
Today, in Illinois, our federal agents and police, working on behalf of Monsanto, are terrorizing ... whom? Drug dealers? Financiers who have stolen this country blind? The people who took us to war based on lies and have profited while thousands of American and 100s of thousands of Iraqi have died? No. Our tax dollars are being used to turn our marshals and police into Monsanto agents to terrorize our disappearing farmers.
Terror is palpable in rural America. It defines American farming communities now.As of last night, a US marshall, 2 state police and a county police are all over Mr.... more
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"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".
Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?
Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.
Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".
In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."
See link above for rest of article.
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz,... more
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Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago, and scientists blame warming temperatures for the trend, according to a new study.
The study, to be released Friday in the journal Science, is the first large-scale analysis of environmental changes as contributing factors in the mortality of coniferous forests.
The data for this research was gathered by generations of scientists over a 50-year period at multiple sites in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and southwestern British Columbia. Seventy-six forest plots, all more than 200 years old, were monitored by scientists doing some of the most rudimentary research -- counting trees.Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago,... more
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jkw077
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PMT is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Towards 2012," introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality and a host of other subjects.PMT is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global... more
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