Slashdot Mirror

GMO is bad because it contaminates non-GMO crops through pollination.

GMO contaminated crops are bad because organic farmers are sued for patent infringement

Organic farmers being sued is bad because the remaining farmers promote a mono-culture crop which is prone to blight.

You must watch Fox News for your information. The government failure started with Rick Snyder, a corporate Republican. The water problems did not start until he signed a bill giving emergency managers more power, and then turned the city management over to a private emergency manager, who switched the water supply to the river water to save money. The city council tried to reverse the situation.

https://www.foodandwaterwatch....

But you probably knew that, and were just pissing.

Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure of yourself. Glyphosate may not be lethal immediately as used, but it does appear to have unexpected detrimental effects. And then there's the really bad "inert" ingredient effect to consider.

It's not all about LD50 numbers. O2 or H2O can both kill you, yet, like salt, you must have them. Glyphosate has no beneficial health properties, it merely makes farming "easier" apparently. We grew crops successfully long before glyphosate, maybe we should review that effort. Considering one of the linked stories, in western societies incidences of various chronic diseases has increased markedly since Glyphosate entered wide-spread use.

"The NRC has chosen to include numerous scientists who work on promotion or development of genetically engineered (or GMO) crops and who have financial ties to biotech companies, which have an economic and political agenda in this debate."

You think Greens would actually support desalination? Look at these:

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.o...
(Huntington Beach is a small coastal town in our country which is suffering a record drought).
http://www.citizen.org/documen...
http://desalalternatives.org/
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103...
http://www.watereducation.org/...

These links are not about random ranters, but well-funded activist groups with the legal resources it takes to tie up vital projects for as long as it takes to starve them to death. It's time we investigated where all the activist cash is coming from.

In the case of Purell, its Triclosan that is an issue.

Um. No.

Even if you believe that Triclosan has issues (and evedence indicates it might) that doesn't mean Purell does. Because standard Purell does not contain Triclosan - and never has contained it. Purell and the like use *alcohol* to clean/disinfect your hands, not Triclosan. Alcohol kills bacteria and viruses in a completely different manner than Triclosan, one that has none of Triclosan's potentially dangerous effects.

Yes, the link you provide has "hand sanitizer" in the URL - but that's because *it's the Huffington Post*, not really your go-to source for accurate scientific news. Note that nothing on the page mentions hand sanitizers, presumably because they realized their mistake and corrected what they could correct. (With the URL being somewhat uncorrectable.)

By the way, nice FUD with the "Maybe they have removed it, maybe not." comment (and then a link to something that doesn't mention Purell in the slightest.) Perhaps you should have done a web search (/triclosan purell/), where the first link is the Purell FAQ, where the first question is about the topic: "U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations do not allow the use of triclosan as an active ingredient in "leave on" products like hand sanitizer". But don't take their word for it. Scroll down to other pages, and see places like "Food & water watch" which encourages you to "Take the anti-triclosan pledge" and "Report products that you find containing triclosan and take the pledge to choose soaps and products wisely." "Support Companies That Do Not Use Triclosan: ... Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer"

If you're going to sidetrack the conversation, at least get your facts right.

These guys are going to starve in outer space.

Actually, pushing back is a good idea.

Very true. But informing oneself fully about the issue in question is even more fundamental - to wit:

I have contacting my senators and congress woman concerning legislation that might make it difficult to have community and personal gardens (House and Senate bills HR 875 and S 425).

Having an active interest in both community gardening and organic farming, I spent a modest amount of time reading the text of these and other bills related to the recent food-safety debacles (like HR 814 - ref http://thomas.loc.gov/), and reading analyses from respected pro-consumer food safety advocates (eg http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/background-on-h-r-875). It quickly became clear that there's been a bit of a rush to judgement by some people about just what's in these bills.

I understand that the last few years (heck, the last several decades) may have made many of us prone to hair trigger paranoia wrt govt/corporate quid-pro-quos. But breathless panic doesn't serve our personal or public interests any better than ignornace or willful denial.

To bring this back to the original topic, I'm glad KEI is pursuing this information and I hope that people will press the administration on it, but it does look as though this initial denial of FOIA can be laid at the feet of a longtime civil servant's overenthusiam for the rubber stamp, and not current Executive policy. I believe that the truly important part of this story will be to see how the Obama administration reacts when made explicitly aware of the issue.

Brought to you by the two-wrongs-make-a-right department.

That would be a meaningful response if the West was currently a good global citizen engaging in fair trade and not still engaging in military campaigns with the thinly veiled purpose of usurping economic resources. But as it stands, the west is still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for control of petroleum, De Beers is still financing wars in Africa to ensure the continuance of its diamond monopoly, South East Asian nations are still used as a source of cheap de facto slave labour, the IMF is still used as the G8's stick to ensure sovereignty of the third world governments is a purchasable commodity and companies like Bechtel are still pulling this sort of rubbish.

So, sorry, your moral high horse has no legs.