Idiocy – Page 121 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/01/23

SchwartzReport: Seven Sins of GMO Lobby — Toxicity & Infertility — True Cost of Commercialization and Corruption of Basic Science

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War

Here is a very sound paper on the activities of the pro-GMO lobby, and their assault on the integrity of science.

The pro-GM lobby's seven sins against science

Peter Melchett

Soil Association, 17 December 2012

The role that genetically modified (GM) food should play in our food chain is a highly contested political issues. One interesting facet of the debate in the past year has been the pro-GM lobby's interest in staking the ‘scientific high-ground'; simultaneously positioning itself as the voice of reason and progress, while painting its opponents as unsophisticated ‘anti-science' luddites, whose arguments are full of dogma and emotion, but lack scientific rigour. In this essay Peter Melchett explores how such crude characterisations are themselves based on logic that is itself profoundly damaging to the concept and representation of ‘science' in our national culture.

Powerful forces in Western society have been promoting genetic engineering (now usually genetic modification – GM) in agricultural crops since the mid-1990s. They have included many governments, in particular those of the USA and UK, powerful individual politicians like George Bush and Tony Blair, scientific bodies like the UK's Royal Society, research councils, successive UK Government chief scientists, many individual scientists, and companies selling GM products. They have ignored the views of citizens, and most sales of GM food have relied on secrecy – denying consumers information on what they are buying (20 US States are currently embroiled in fierce battles over GM labelling, strenuously opposed by Monsanto). Worse, they have consistently promoted GM in ways which are not only unscientific, but which have been positively damaging to the integrity of science.

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Indeed, the basic science concerning the complexities of gene organisation and function suggests that natural breeding, often augmented with the non-GM biotechnology tool of MAS, is a far more powerful and productive way forward for crop improvement. Natural breeding and MAS not only preserve gene order and function, but allow the multiple gene systems that confer desirable properties such as higher yield,1 2 3 4 5 pest-6 7 8 9 10 and blight-resistance,11 12 13 and tolerance to drought,4 14 15 16 17 salinity,4 18 and flood,4 19 20 21 to be rapidly and relatively inexpensively22 bred into crops – something which is still only a distant dream for GM crop technologists.

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Seven Sins (List Only Below, or Read Full Article)

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Seven Sins of GMO Lobby — Toxicity & Infertility — True Cost of Commercialization and Corruption of Basic Science”

2013/01/22

SchwartzReport: Genetic Modification of Crops Insanely Criminal — and Chemicalization of Agricultural Production Contributing to Climate Change

01 Agriculture, 07 Health, Commerce, Corruption, Idiocy

Regulators Discover a Hidden Viral Gene in Commercial GMO Crops
JONATHAN LATHAM and ALLISON WILSON – Independent Science News

The more I read about the GMO controversy the more it appears to be a story of commercializing a new technology before it was really understood, leaving us vulnerable to unintended consequences. Here is an example of what I mean.

The Agricultural Fulcrum: Better Food, Better Climate
Atlantic

As long as we see ourselves as something apart from the great cycles of nature, which is a fundamental assumption of our energy and agriculture sectors, we will destroy the earth and ourselves. There is an alternative.

2013/01/21

David Isenberg: Recommended Book, Mel Goodman on National Insecurity, The Cost of American Militarism

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

Recommended! Coming out 12 February 2013.

“Mel Goodman has spent the last few decades telling us what's gone wrong with American intelligence and the American military, and now, in National Insecurity, he tells us what we must do to change the way the system works, and how to fix it. Goodman is not only telling us how to save wasted billions–he is also telling us how to save ourselves.” — Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

Upon leaving the White House in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the dangers of a “military industrial complex,” and was clearly worried about the destabilizing effects of a national economy based on outsized investments in military spending. As more and more Americans fall into poverty and the global economy spirals downward, the United States is spending more on the military than ever before. What are the consequences and what can be done?

Melvin A. Goodman, a twenty-four-year veteran of the CIA, brings peerless authority to his argument that US military spending is indeed making Americans poorer and less secure while undermining our political standing in the world. Drawing from his firsthand experience with war planners and intelligence strategists, Goodman offers an insider's critique of the US military economy from President's Eisenhower's farewell warning to Barack Obama's expansion of the military's power. He outlines a much needed vision for how to alter our military policy, practices, and spending in order to better position the United States globally and enhance prosperity and security at home.

Melvin A. Goodman is the Director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy. A former professor of international security at the National War College and an intelligence adviser to strategic disarmament talks in the 1970s, he is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed The Failure of Intelligence.

See Also:

Goodman, Mel (2008), Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA (Rowman & Littlefield)

Steele, Robert (2000), ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA 2000, OSS, 2001)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)

2013/01/192016/03/26

Reflections on the Inability of Washington to Think with Integrity

All Reflections & Story Boards, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military, Non-Governmental

Power corrupts, no doubt about it. What most people miss is that it is not just about financial corruption that explicitly mis-directs scarce resources to benefit the few over the many (with Congress taking its standard 5% kick-back for delivering earmarks). Power also corrupts intellect. People forget how to think. They begin talking among themselves, shutting out external views, creating an incestuous cycle of circular citation. Col Mike Pheneger, then J-2 at the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) discovered this with respect to the Cuban Order of Battle (OOB), and I have found this myself on many occasions over the years.

Recently I have observed two deeply dysfunctional conversations in Washington. The first deals with intelligence and information overload, the second with the force structure requirements for the U.S. military beyond 2014.

Blithering Blobs of Blogdom

The intelligence discussion is best represented by SASA/INSA and The New America Foundation. The first fronts for the intelligence-industrial complex and the second for a mix of benefactors, none of whom appear actually interested in creating a government that works for all. Indeed, it can be said that the secret intelligence world and the “non-profit” think tank world share the same motivation: do whatever it takes to keep the money (inputs) moving, never mind the outputs or the outcomes.

Continue reading “Reflections on the Inability of Washington to Think with Integrity”

2013/01/172013/01/17

Mini-Me: Sandy Hook, Israel’s “Art Students” in Purple Van, Greenwich Safehouse, Nurse’s False Testimony — Four Competing Narratives

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement

Huh?

Obama “Gun Address” Misses Real Terrorism Threat

by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

Despite attempts to blame a seemingly endless group of lunatic mass murderers for the equally endless number of devastating mass killings now plaguing the United States, our government, our “protectors” and, most damnably, our president, are failing to react to real terror attacks that are becoming an almost daily occurrence.

Ambassador Susan Rice was “sacrificed” for failing to cite the Benghazi attack as terrorism.

However, when something worse, when a dozen “somethings worse” happens, not in North Africa, but here at home, our schools, movie theatres, military bases, college campuses, the use of the term “terrorism” is forbidden.

Why?

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The US Army has recognized a pattern of terrorist activity in several of the recent mass shootings, based on timing, type of target, control of media, lost evidence, poor investigations, a pattern that shows signs of the involvement of a military type operation against “soft targets” in the US.

Sandy Hook, we are told, is a total failure as an “false flag” terror attack, having left too many “loose threads.” Some are listed in the video below. In truth, there are hundreds:

Initial suspicions led investigators to extremist groups in the US, the National Socialist Movement, the US Border Patrol and the Hutarees.

However, investigations found these groups to be both almost entirely inactive or with a majority of members FBI informants.

Read full article with video and photos.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Sandy Hook, Israel's “Art Students” in Purple Van, Greenwich Safehouse, Nurse's False Testimony — Four Competing Narratives”

2013/01/16

SchwartzReport: Criminalization of Preganancy Among Poor — Mental Institutionalization, Criminal Proceedings, and Forced Medical Procedures on Rise in Radical Right States

01 Poverty, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement

This story should horrify, and outrage you. I read it early this morning, in my first pass for today's SR. It upset me so much that I had to just stop and sit, and meditate for some moments. And it worried me that I knew nothing about this. That's how deeply buried this part of the war on women has been.

As you can see, this is where personhood amendments take us.

Notice that this is 75 per cent a Red value state issue. For this reason I see it as also part of the Great Schism trend. Not only on the basis of values, but because the Blue value states are tiring of financially supporting the lunacies of the Red value states.

Study finds widespread ‘criminalisation of pregnancy' in US institutions

Study cites misinterpretation of Roe v Wade in array of cases where women were denied rights based on pregnancy status

NEW YORK — Hundreds of women have been arrested, convicted, jailed, detained in mental institutions or forced to endure medical procedures as a result of the “criminalisation of pregnancy” over the last four decades, a new report has found.

In the first study of its kind, to be published on Tuesday, researchers from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) identified 413 criminal and civil cases across 44 states involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women's liberty between 1973 and 2005. NAWP said that it is aware of a further 250 cases since 2005. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, it said.

The report, which will appear in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, found that women were denied a wide range of basic human rights, including the right to life, liberty, equal protection and due process of law “based solely on their pregnancy status”.

It found a wide range of cases in which pregnant women were arrested and detained not only if they ended a pregnancy or expressed an intention to end a pregnancy, but also after suffering unintentional pregnancy loss.

The cases of detention and forced medical intervention varied widely and included one in which a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her having an abortion.

Another involved a woman in Oregon who refused a doctor's recommendation for additional testing for gestational diabetes. She was held in a locked psychiatric ward. Another case involved a court in Washington DC, which ordered a critically ill woman to undergo caesarian section over her objections. Neither she nor the baby survived.

Read full article.

2013/01/132013/01/13

Anthony Judge: Flatulence is a Problem Aired Resmelling the stench of past undertakings (personal, organizational, and national)

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude

Flatulence is a Problem Aired: Resmelling the stench of past undertakings

Introduction

The third edition of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (1990) was reviewed for The Guardian by John Vidal under the title Flatulence is a Problem Aired (The Guardian, 7 February 1992). The review was introduced by the phrase: John Vidal finds the authors of a definitive guide to all the world's ills treading an ever thinner line between the sublime and ridiculous. The author of the review is a renowned editor on environmental matters, most notably for The Guardian. At that time the review could be seen as a highly skillful journalistic exercise in what has since been recognized as characteristic of negative campaigning — although the intention in so framing the undertaking was unclear at the time.

Continue reading “Anthony Judge: Flatulence is a Problem Aired Resmelling the stench of past undertakings (personal, organizational, and national)”