The atomized and empty consumerist Status Quo is the “monster Id” behind the American diet.
I know it may appear unduly harsh to discuss America's self-destructive dietary “monster Id” right before the Thanksgiving day feasting, but when is it more appropriate?
There are a great many disconnects between reality and what Americans believe out of convenience (“no snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche”) or propaganda, but perhaps none is more visible than the disconnect between what we're collectively doing to our health with the food we consume.
The Chinese have an apt saying” “Disease comes through the mouth,” meaning disease comes from what we eat.
ALEX DALEY, Chief Technology Investment Strategist – Casey Research
Here is an investment advisor's view of developments in GMO. These analysts, who are focused only on making money, have a very cold blooded view of issues like GMO, and when they are alarmed it is worth paying attention.
Last month, a group of Australian scientists published a warning to the citizens of the country and of the world who collectively gobble up some $34 billion annually of its agricultural exports. The warning concerned the safety of a new type of wheat.
As Australia's number-one export, a $6-billion annual industry, and the most-consumed grain locally, wheat is of the utmost importance to the country. A serious safety risk from wheat – a mad wheat disease of sorts – would have disastrous effects for the country and for its customers.
Which is why the alarm bells are being rung over a new variety of wheat being ushered toward production by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) of Australia. In a sense, the crop is little different than the wide variety of modern genetically modified foods. A sequence of the plant's genes has been turned off to change the wheat's natural behavior a bit, to make it more commercially viable (hardier, higher yielding, slower decaying, etc.).
Does Sugar Kill? How the Sugar Industry Hid the Toxic Truth
For decades, the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?
GARY TAUBES and CRISTIN KEARNS COUZENS – AlterNet (U.S.)
November 15, 2012 |
This article first appeared in Mother Jones Magazine. Get your magazine subscription here.
Click on Image to Enlarge
ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in ” the forging of public opinion. ” The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.
Speaking on Fox News today Lou Dobbs blasted the Obama Administration and Mayor “Talk to the Hand” Bloomberg. While he exaggerates in relation to Katrina and Bush being blasted (Sandy is 40,000 displaced persons, Katrina was 700,000), he does make the obvious point upon which we elaborate–where is the US military with General Purpose (GP) tents, cots, oil stoves, field kitchens, medical triage, and Internet cafes (many of the displaced have no power for their cell phones and their home phones are gone).
If Leon Panetta wanted to be useful today, both to the public and to the President facing defeat tomorrow, he could order the service chiefs to put every single displaced person under a warm GP tent before nightfall. If he and they cannot do that, we will have taken the measure of DoD here at home, and found it wanting.
We are waiting for a Situation Report from Col GI Wilson, USMC (Ret) and Team Rubicon, which received on demand mapping support from our network, instantly.
The corruption prohibition produces is so much more extensive than most people realize. An unholy alliance between governments and cartels and, like a cancer, is eating us alive from the inside. Here is a taste of reality that explains how so many feed at the narco-trough and why no one who is making this money, be they sheriff, legislator, or mule has any real interest in ending prohibition.
Lars Schall is a German financial journalist.
Oliver Villar is a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, a country where he has lived for most of his life. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina. In 2008 he completed his PhD on the political economy of contemporary Colombia in the context of the cocaine drug trade at the UWS Latin American Research Group (LARG). Whilst completing his PhD, Villar's research interests in political economy, Latin America and the global drug trade followed teaching positions in politics at UWS and Macquarie University.
For the past decade his research has been devoted to the book (co-written with Drew Cottle) Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review Press, 2011). He has published broadly on the Inter-American cocaine drug trade, the US War on Drugs and Terror in Colombia, and US-Colombian relations. This abiding interest extends across economic thought, economic development and the development of social and political relationships between the First World and Third World (in particular between the United States and Latin America) and the impact of neoliberal economic globalization.
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“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” Milton Friedman
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Lars Schall: What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade?
This is an excellent and very insightful account of what has happened in Big Pharma's quest for profit above health. Although the physician author is based in the U.K., his comments apply to the U.S. as well. If it doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention. I hope all the physicians who are readers particularly take this to heart. Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies, a lect! urer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of psychology at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut has published many papers showing that anti-depressants in general do little better, or even not as well as placebos. It is hard not to see the entire anti-depressant industry as anything other than a multi-billion scam.
Switzerland tops the list as the best country brand globally, according to the Country Brand Index, out today from global brand consultancy FutureBrand. As a symbol of economic, cultural and social stability in our tumultuous world, Switzerland “shows that the cultivation of freedom, tolerance, transparency and environmentalism can put a country’s brand ahead—even in difficult economic times,” says FutureBrand Global Chairman Chris Nurko. “On a human level, Switzerland is also a country geared around its people and their needs.” As a result, the country supplanted two-time leader Canada by scoring high marks in CBI’s Value System dimension, including impressive scores it the political freedom, environmental friendliness and stable legal environment attributes.
