The leaders of Big Agriculture–Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta–are determined that world's populations remain ignorant about the serious health and environmental risks of genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture. Deep layers of deception and corruption underlie both the science favoring GMOs and the corporations and governments supporting them.
This award-winning documentary, Seeds of Death, exposes the lies about GMOs and pulls back the curtains to witness our planet's future if Big Agriculture's new green revolution becomes our dominant food supply.
A Question and Answer fact sheet deconstructing Monsanto's GM claims and Big Agriculture's propaganda to accompany the film is available online:
I have decided to focus today's SR on GMOs and the transgenic sector because it represents such a clear example of the geopolitical shift we are living through: the Ascendence of the Non-geographical corporate states.
NGCSs are not just corporations, in a business sense, that we mean when we say, corporatocracy. These transnational entities are so big and so powerful that they are essentially states, literally countries without geography. They have their own foreign policies; their own goals that may have little to do with the policies of the country where they happen to be based. They control the political structure and write the laws that govern them, and judge them. They are the emerging world powers.
This transfer, is not a continuation of the chain of family, to tribe, to village, to duchies and the like, to nations. The NGCS springs from the business world. Its priority is profit. In its most extreme manifestation nothing else really is a factor.
Nowhere is the transfer of national power over to the NGCSs clearer than in what is happening in food and water. Parts of this trend are known, but the overarching strategy the NGCSs are following, and the tactics they are using are rarely seen as the coherent whole they are.
Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont and Syngenta. They are usually described as chemical pesticide companies but, I think, a better way to see them is as a corporate cohort making an aggressive attempt to gain domination over the world's food and water supplies.
Syria-Lebanon: According to a Beirut newspaper, the Syrian opposition group affiliated with al Qaida, the Al-Nusrah Front, has distributed a statement announcing that it will commence military operations in Lebanon.
The statement said, “If Hizballah is not deterred from killing our mujahideen brethren in Syria, and if its members do not withdraw from the Syrian areas of Al-Qusayr in three days, we will harshly respond in the different Lebanese territories, particularly in the border areas, Al-Biqa, and Beirut's Southern Suburb, where the rejectionist members of Hizballah are spreading. We will target markets, schools, public institutions, and parks.”
Comment: The term rejectionist is a derogatory description of the Shiites, Hizballah. Syrian opposition sources claim fierce fighting is occurring in al Qusayr, Syria, which is close to the northeastern Lebanon border. Hizballah is fighting in support of the Syrian army forces.
The significance of the statement is that it means al Qaida could have a franchise operating in Lebanon by next week. The Al-Nusrah Front has the capability to carry out this threat and spread the Syrian fighting deeper into Lebanon.
Pakistan: Press reports indicate a US drone attack killed a senior Pakistani Taliban leader and, variously, from four to seven comrades today. The Pakistani Taliban denied that Wali ur Rehman Mehsud was killed.
Comment: Reaction to this drone attack has been mixed, but the timing relative to political developments in Pakistan is unfortunate. The new parliament has not yet convened and the new government is not in place. Prime Minister-nominee Nawaz Sharif promised peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban to try to restore law and order and he promised to stop the drone strikes.
One commentator said the attack shows the US has no respect for Pakistan. Another opined that peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban are now dead.
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:
Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
If the Pentagon’s not careful, it’s going to find its new network of spies rolled up by Congress.
The Defense Clandestine Service was supposed to be the Defense Department’s new squad for conducting “human intelligence” — classic, informant-based spying. The idea was to place up to 1,600 undercover operatives and military attachés around the world, collecting tips on emergent battlefields. The problem was that the U.S. already had a human intelligence crew: the CIA. Almost immediately after the Defense Clandestine Service was introduced, an array of outside observers began to loudly question its value.
Add the House Armed Services Committee’s intelligence panel to that list of skeptics. In its revision of next year’s Pentagon budget (.pdf), released Tuesday, the representatives said they would withhold half of the DCS’ funding until the Pentagon proves that the service “provide[s] unique capabilities to the intelligence community.”
Syria- Russia-European Union: The military-technical cooperation contracts between Russia and Syria have not undergone changes, said Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad. “All agreements signed between Syria and Russia are being implemented without any changes made,” he told the press on Monday.
Haddad was commenting on reports claiming that Russia has frozen S-300 missile systems' shipments to Syria at Israel's request.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Tuesday, “We consider these supplies a stabilizing factor and believe such steps will deter some hotheads from considering scenarios that would turn the conflict international with the involvement of outside forces.”
Comment: The timing of the latest Syrian and Russian statements corresponds to the European Union decision to discontinue the ban on weapons aid for the Syrian opposition.
The Russian public statements are not aimed at deterring Israeli attacks, though the Russians said those attacks should halt. According to Israeli press, Israeli experts judge it will take at least a year for the system to be installed; personnel trained and for it to become operational. The new air defense installations will be added to the target lists for the Israeli Air Force.
The Russian statements are aimed at the US and NATO. Various Russian leaders have declared Russia will not allow Syria to go the path of Libya, in which NATO intervention began with a no-fly zone. The announcement is a public statement of commitment of support for Syria that will make it difficult for NATO members to generate the domestic political backing to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. The long war in Afghanistan has made the NATO electorates weary of fighting.
This Russian announcement also reduces the prospects for substantive progress at a US-Russian brokered negotiation sometime in June. No basis for trust or compromise exists among the parties. Russia and Syria can present a united position, but the Syrian opposition entities cannot. US and European goals are not congruent with each other and not with Saudi and Qatari interests.
The US intention apparently is to start a negotiating process, in the expectation that process will lead to substance. After the European Union vote, which in essence permits European states to provide weapons to the Syrian opposition entities, the backdrop of any discussion will be the EU action whose intended effect would be to escalate the fighting. That would seem to remove from the agenda any serious discussion of ways to stop the killing.
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
