GMO/IMO: A disgusting, unhealthy, profit inspired agricultural technology and their "studies."

Go here for the full story:  About Those Industry Funded GMO Studies . . .

Let's put aside the fact that this line of thinking would mean that while fossil fuel behemoths Exxon Mobil (market cap:$394.83B), Chevron (market cap:$215.45B) and BP (market cap:$150.07B) (total: $760.35B) have been completely stymied in their efforts to buy the scientific consensus they desire on climate change, but a medium large company like Monsanto (market cap: $57.43B) has been able to manipulate tens of thousands of scientists performing thousands of studies for three decades with no whistleblowers resulting in a scientific consensus that has been bent completely to their will. Let's put that aside.
Instead, let's first take a look at the evidence, before moving to unravel some of pretzeled logic often employed to dismiss the weight of that evidence in support of the scientific consensus on GMOs.
Take for example the EU. Politicians in the EU aren't that friendly to GMOs and they wanted to be very careful about them. So they ponied up EURO 200 million over the course of decade to look into the matter. The studies they carried out are neatly summarized in A Decade of EU Funded GMO Research [pdf].

More links from the author of the above :

A Decade of EU Funded GMO Research (2000-2010) [pdf].
European Commission | Directorate-General for Research
Studies with independent funding
Biofortified.org
Assessment of the health impact of GM plant diets in long-term and multigenerational animal feeding trials: A literature review
Chelsea Snella, et al. | Food and Chemical Toxicology | March 2012
A Meta-Analysis of Effects of Bt Crops on Honey Bees
Michelle Marvier, et al. | PLOS One | 9 January 2008
Toxicity studies of genetically modified plants: a review of the published literature
José L. Domingo | Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition | 2007
A literature review on the safety assessment of genetically modified plants
José L. Domingo, Jordi Giné Bordonaba | Environment International | May 2011
An overview of the last 10 years of genetically engineered crop safety research
Alessandro Nicolia, et al | Critical Review of Biotechnology | 16 November 2013
Association of financial or professional conflict of interest to research outcomes on health risks or nutritional assessment studies of genetically modified products
Johan Diels, et al | Food Policy | April 2011
Unintended Compositional Changes in Genetically Modified (GM) Crops: 20 Years of Research
Rod Herman, et al | Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry | 15 February 2013
Single study syndrome:€“ clutching at convenient confirmation
Graham Coghill | Science or Not | 23 October 2012
[cross posted at REALFOOD.ORG]
And some more:
Voluntary Instead of Mandated GMO Food Labeling: The Industry’s Latest
Farmers Fight World’s First Landmark GMO Cross-Pollination Contamination 

Christie Scandals Log: Ongoing

 01/13/14 

1.) Chris Christie's Entire Career Reeks It's not just the bridge 

 

The plight of the butterfly. Not that fly actually!

Read all about it here with links and such----Over Easy: The Monsanto Butterfly Effect

Karzai Comics: Follow the money episode!

Links to information about Afghanistan and Karzai. First Karzai
1.) Karzai Arranged Secret Contacts With the Taliban
2.) Know Your Hamid Karzai
3.) Hamid Karzai Highest-Paid Politician in the World
4.) Karzai family's wealth 'fuelling insurgency'
5.) Karzai accuses U.S. of civilian deaths in November drone strike
An' Den, Afghanistan
1.) Know Your Afghanistan
2.) Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says
3.) The US Cost of the Afghan War: FY2002-FY2013
4.) Cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting
5.) NYT Topics: Afghanistan

Updates:  02/14/14
Karzai criticises lack of US respect for Afghan sovereignty as relations worsen

"Gotta wait and see!"

Bridgegate Cafe: All Bridgegate, "all da time!"

Latest Updates:02/03/14

1.) ChristieGate: Port Authority Lawyer Coached Baroni for 5 Days Before Bogus Traffic Study   Testimony

2.)   Chris Christie campaign wants to raise money to cover cost of answering GWB subpoenas

3.)  Daily Kos #Bridgegate

4.)  Gov. Jindal, Paul Ryan: Christie ‘should stay’ as head of GOP governor’s group

5.)  It Only Gets Worse For Christie  

6.)  Fired Christie aide Bridget Kelly invokes Fifth Amendment, declines to produce subpoenaed documents

Latest Updates:02/02/14

1.) How patronage politics ate the Port Authority

 Previous:

1.) New Jersey Gov. Christie Knew of Bridge Lane Closures, Attorney Says Lawyer for Former Official Says Christie Knew of Closures on GWB While They Were Ongoing

2.) Christie Plays Defense

3.) Exclusive: Chris Christie attacks N.Y. Times, David Wildstein

4.) Christie, Clapper and other Officials who should be in Jail instead of Snowden

Another "old wives tale" verified: Nature can't be denied!

Parents’ and even grandparents’ experiences echo in offspring

The implications are obvious.  War, crime, abuse are all a part of a biological gift that just can't stop giving.  And they keep giving their gifts of stress, mental illness, disability and disease for several generations.  Illness in our society can influence the quality and length of our lives.  It is the manifest concern and business of all citizens.  Science News reports in this month's issue:

 Along with eye color, height and dimples, parents’ fears can pass down to children, scientists report December 1 in Nature Neuroscience. The results, from experiments with mice, suggest how fallout from a person’s traumatic experiences might ripple through generations.

 Mouse parents learned to associate the scent of orange blossoms with a shock. Their children and their grandchildren startled in response to the scent — a sign of fear — even though they had never smelled it before. Offspring also had more neurons that detect the orange blossom scent than mice whose parents weren’t exposed to the scent.

Sperm cells alone can deliver this fear message, study authors Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler of Emory University found. DNA in the sperm cells was imprinted with this fearful association: A gene that codes for the molecule that detects the orange blossom odor carried a chemical stamp that may have changed its behavior. 

Information from parents’ experiences could be important for survival. Knowing that a particular scent signals a nasty shock could help an animal avoid trouble without having to endure the shock firsthand. Ancestral experience could be an under-appreciated influence on animals’ and people’s brains and behaviors, the authors write. (my bold)

Citations

B.G. Dias and K.J. Ressler. Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience. Published online December 1, 2013. doi: 10.1038/nn.3594.

Further Reading

T. Saey. From great grandma to you. Science News. Vol. 183, April 6, 2013, p. 18.
More related: Great-grandpa’s genes gone, effects stay

Explosive Talk!

Explosive Talk:  Pen and Ink / John Shklov 01/14

MORE CHRISTIE NEWS UPDATES:01/23/14

0001.) UK DAILY MAIL .......BREAKING COVERAGE
1.)-Mayor Bollwage accuses Gov. Christie of shutting down 4th largest DMV in NJ for political revenge
2.)  Gov. Chris Christie reelection campaign subpoenaed for federal ‘Bridgegate’ investigation
3.)  BREAKING: U.S. Attorney’s Office subpoenas members of Christie's re-election campaign
4.)  Christie Re-Election Campaign Hires Patton Boggs
5.)  Hoboken Mayor Is Said to Have Told of Threat
6.)  Christie's Biggest Sandy Contractor Fired

Related INFORMATION:
A.)  Hurricane Sandy
B.)  Chris Christie Navigator 

Juan Cole:"Recognizing Israel as a Jewish State is like saying the US is a White State"

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is adding a fifth demand to his negotiations with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas: That the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.”

Now, that is a problem as you will see.  Just what will be the criteria to establish "Jewishness?"  It turns out the much of the science around the area of genetics has exposed a problem with defining Jewsihness in any terms than don't conflict with the facts of the true records.  As Mr. Cole says:

Of the some 6 million self-identified Jews in Israel, about 300,000 are not recognized as “Jewish” by the Chief Rabbi and there is no prospect of them being recognized as Jewish any time soon. They were allowed to immigrate to Israel because they had at least one Jewish grandparent, but if their mother was not Jewish neither are they.
So if Israel is a “Jewish” state, is it a state for these (largely Russian and Ukrainian) “non-Jewish” Jews? Many of them are Jewish by religion, but not all are. None of them are Jewish by the Talmud.

In fact genetic testing in Israel and elsewhere has established that most of the European Jews alive today come from Christian converts originating in tribal Turkey and who migrated to Europe when the Roman empire fell apart in the 700-800 A.D.:

It is worse. Genetic testing of European Jews (Ashkenazim) shows that most women in that community are descended from European Christians who converted to Judaism when they married into the Jewish merchant community, which was likely established at Rome and then points east from about 800 CE (A.D.) If the Grand Rabbi took haplotypes seriously, most Ashkenazi Jews would have to be declared “not Jewish” by the Talmudic criterion, since their mothers do not have the distinctive patterns in their mitochondrial DNA showing descent from the inhabitants of the ancient Levant. 

On many levels the demand that Netanyahu is making, demanding that Israel be recognized as a "Jewish State" seems just plain wrong and racist in the least"

Saying Israel is a “Jewish” state in the sense of race would be analogous to insisting that the US is a “white” state and defining Latinos as “brown.”(..........)While we can’t stop other countries from establishing state religions, we Americans don’t approve of it and won’t give our blessing to it, as Netanyahu seems to want. In fact our annual State Department human rights report downgrades countries that don’t separate religion and state.(........)Netanyahu’s demand is either racist or fundamentalist and is objectionable from an American point of view on human rights grounds either way (and I’m not just talking about the human rights of Palestinian-Israelis).

I have borrowed heavily from Juan Cole's essay about just how to define Jewishness.  He writes plainly and with many examples and links.  Please go here to read his whole essay:

 In any case, Sec. Kerry should simply slap Netanyahu down over this new demand, which is illogical and unreasonable and above all sinister. if Netanyahu won’t accept a two-state solution, then he or his children or grandchildren will likely have to accept a one-state solution. Kerry is trying to do him a favor, and if someone doesn’t want your favor, you don’t humiliate yourself to deliver it.