One of the report¹s authors, Dr. Michael Antoniou of King¹s College London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed.
Aren¹t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn¹t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?
A report released June 17, GMO Myths and Truths, challenges these claims. The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms.
Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners but from two genetic engineers, who believe there are good scientific reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops.
· Transparency and truth – reveal what chemicals and metals have been used.
· Close all of the bases and radar facilities – completely de-militarize the island.
· Clean and decontaminate the bases and land, aquifers and sea around them.
· Provide health care to all people affected by military activity on the island
· Provide financial assistance and clean land and sea to farmers and fishers
Need to test some new weapons? Bomb paradise! The sound of bombs, missiles, and other explosions; massive attacks from the sea onto the beach; an epidemic of cancers and birth defects; soil, air, food and water contaminated with heavy metals, jet fuel and other poisons; and national and company secrets that prevent the residents from learning the truth: Is this a modern war zone? No – Sardinia is the victim of weapons manufacturers, polluting military activities and a political system that cares about power and money over the health of people and the environment.
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.
Click on Image to Enlarge
There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.
In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.
There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.
Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country.
U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported.
They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post reported.
“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy, told the Post.
“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said. “Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough.’ But largely it’s an economic decision.”
But to leave means finding a new country and obtaining citizenship and there are many that are eager to welcome wealthy Americans, such as Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, and Antigua, according to the Post.
These countries tend to offer a fast track to citizenship and protections from the Justice Department and IRS.
At a time when pressures to punish Iran with more sanctions or perhaps even war (I still consider the latter unlikely), it might pay to try to understand things from the Iranian point view. Attached below is an excellent essay in the London Review of Books analyzing Iran's recent history. It puts the CIA/MI6 overthrow of the popularly elected Muhammad Mossadegh (1953) in a historical context of the preceding 75 years as well its ramifications for the present crisis. Note how the author, Pankaj Mishra, also shows how the poisonous roles played by the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in the heinous warmongering against Iraq is part of much longer tradition of yellow journalism in this part of the world.
Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, 20 July 2012
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
Bodley Head, 310 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 1 84792 108 6
Phi Beta Iota: Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has it exactly right… When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it. The U.S. Government in particular, all Western governments generally (including the Nordics) have been so busy lying to their publics that they have not been able to connect to the truth. As Robert Steele likes to say, “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”
As I have indicated in earlier blasters, I find the parallels between the political forces corrupting defense “science” and climate “science” to be stunning (e.g., directly here or more subtly here).
Attached is a very thoughtful piece by the distinguished Australian scientist Garth Paltridge. His subject is the psychological state of play in the politicization of climate science, and without saying so, he reinforces the parallels. Note the author's reference to Eisenhower's farewell address toward the end of the essay. Most people remember Eisenhower's phrase for its snappy reference to the military-industrial complex. Ike should have included Congress, but deliberately chose not to and removed the reference to Congress from an early draft, in effect, placing sensibility before common sense. If you read the farewell address carefully (here), you will see that Eisenhower's warning was really a more nuanced one about public policy becoming prisoner to the special interests feeding off uncontrollable cash cows those interests helped to create — a point more in tune with the quote highlighted by Paltridge.
Readers should note I reformatted Paltridge's essay to highlight what I think are important points, but did not change any words or the order of those words. A link is provided to the original form, should you prefer it.
22 JUN 2012 00:06:00 | UPDATED: 22 JUN 2012 10:46:02
GARTH PALTRIDGE
Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor with the University of Tasmania, a visiting fellow at the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is the author of The Climate Caper: facts and fallacies of global warming, Connor Court, 2009. He was a chief research scientist with the CSIRO division of atmospheric research.
The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense.
EXTRACT:
The bottom line of all this is that deliberate understatement of the uncertainty of the science allows overstatement of the climate change problem. [CS note: in the Pentagon, downplaying the future consequences of current decisions and “threat inflation” are part of what is the known as the “front loading” power game, defined here.]
Phi Beta Iota: Within Climate Change, Carbon is less important than sulpher or mercury, but favored by Maurice Strong and Al Gore as a global financial derivatives scam. Climate Change is at best 10% of Environmental Degradation, high-level threat to humanity #3, after #1 Poverty and #2 Infectious Disease. Governments have become so corrupt — less the Nordics, Netherlands, and Singapore, with Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela having their own forms of making do — that only hybrid panarchy (M4IS2) rooted in the craft of (public) intelligence will scale to meet all these challenges. Governments–as a general statement–do not represent their publics but have instead sold out to the wealthy–the public servants having failed to hold the political class accountable with intelligence and integrity. As David Weinberger notes so ably, experts are not really expert, only all of us together will do. Organized people armed with organized knowledge can beat organized wealth and their corrupt political servants (self-made servants we might add — the wealthy did not bribe the politicals– the politicals fell from grace and shake down the wealthy).
Got a birthday, anniversary, or wedding coming up?Let your friends know how important this election is to you—register with Obama 2012, and ask for a donation in lieu of a gift. It’s a great way to support the President on your big day. Plus, it’s a gift that we can all appreciate—and goes a lot further than a gravy bowl.
