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Although this book is focused on how xenobiotics affect fertility, the topic of feminization is discussed in passing.

I love how this book was published back in '97, and now, more than a decade later, we still keep pumping endocrine disruptors into the environment and in consumer products. Ha-ha.

As for masculinized females, go look up "guevedoche"...

Yes, but unlike HFCS, cane sugar production doesn't introduce mercury or other heavy metals into the food/beverage product it's used in.

That by itself is more than enough reason to get rid of that nasty shit.

Also, while it is true that sugars can damage your liver, so can many other things, taken out of moderation (my favorite beer, for instance).

I've noticed a distinct difference in how I feel after I switched to Mt Dew that uses cane sugar compared to the HFCS kind I used to drink regularly, and that was before I even noticed it used cane sugar instead. I just was glad to be able to get it in those nifty green glass bottles instead of plastic bottles or phthalate lined cans. Now I don't get cranky if I go without drinking it for a few days, it doesn't make me urinate as often, and I no longer get kidney stones.

I've now started reading the labels on all of my food products, and if it contains HFCS (or sodium benzoate for that matter - I prefer to eat food that doesn't contain benzene by the time I get it home from the store), I don't buy it.

The weight of scientific evidence against the use of pesticides is quite frankly, frighting. For a decent condensed summary of many scientific papers from many fields demonstrating the effects of pesticides, (especially on the endocrine system) check out the book/collection of scientific reports Our Stolen Future.

In 1995 worldwide pesticide sales were around 30 billion. Who knows what they are today?

Not so fast. If you're concerned with pesticides, you might want to brush up on what exactly constitutes an "organic" food.
  Here is a Quackwatch article about the subject. It also addresses pesticides directly.

Weight of evidence (WoE) is a phrase used to describe the type of consideration made in a situation where there is uncertainty, and which is used to ascertain whether the evidence or information supporting one side of a cause or argument is greater than that supporting the other side. We all frequently make personal WoE decisions in our daily lives, but more-formal WoE approaches are used in many different kinds of circumstance â" for example, in commercial, educational, health, legal and scientific contexts

The weight of scientific evidence against the use of pesticides is quite frankly, frighting. For a decent condensed summary of many scientific papers from many fields demonstrating the effects of pesticides, (especially on the endocrine system) check out the book/collection of scientific reports Our Stolen Future. In 1995 worldwide pesticide sales were around 30 billion. Who knows what they are today?

There is loads of evidence, in the form of scientific research. Unfortunately the weight of evidence is growing at a rapid pace. Here is a collection of scientific articles from a broad range of research, rolled into one book/location for your convenience:

"The book Our Stolen Future brought world-wide attention to scientific discoveries about endocrine disruption and the fact that common contaminants can interfere with the natural signals controlling development of the fetus. This website tracks the most recent developments."
http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/

Ah. I see the problem here. I was writing about the world as it actually exists, and you were writing about an abstract definition of capitalism that has not and will not ever exist.

Ah but for a brief period capitalism did exist, from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. In some places it lasted until the US Civil War.

Case in point: given that much of the labor force in the US was held in slavery in the 1830s, wouldn't it be fair to say that they were not, in fact, engaged in the free "voluntary exchange" of their labor?

You could say slaves only if you included indentured servants, those who were made serfs until their debt was paid off. Fact is is most slaves were in the south, which had a lower population density, more people lived in a given area of land in the northeast than did the same amount of land in the south. As for slavery, studies in economics of the period conclude that without the civil war slavery would have ended within a generation anyway. Forced labor as the slave provided is economically unsustainable. It costs more to buy, own, and secure slaves than it does to pay freemen a living wage when those slaves want to be free.

This is why you don't leave your keys in the car, and why, if your car is taken from you, you file a report with a branch of the state. This is why people who have no home don't just come and take yours while you are away on vacation -- because the state will come in with laws (and guns if necessary) to protect your property

None of these exhibit capitalism. Capitalism is a free and voluntary exchange. Having your car stolen isn't voluntary, neither is having someone move into your home uninvited. Yes, it's government's job to do something about these. The purpose of government is to protect it's citizens, mostly from invasion but also from criminals who would deny someone their rights. Otherwise for other things civil society can do a better job than government. I recall back in the late '80s and early '90s Mother Teresa wanted to setup a shelter for the homeless and abused in NYC, however the city had so many requirements and regulations that would of had to be met it became too expensive. If the city had gotten out of the way she could have helped many people. Look at those in India she helped, though she was Catholic many Hindus admired her. Heck even China has realized capitalism, pseudo capitalism, even if it's corrupted, works.

A nuclear power plant has some waste to dispose of but lacks the space to dispose of it. It is willing to pay for someone to take it. I have a place to put it, which is my own private property. They pay me. I bury the stuff in my backyard. This is free, voluntary exchange. Now, in your capitalist Utopia, would there be anything to stop me, or not?

Yes, because it's still a threat to your neighbors, those downwind, and those downstream. Let me clue you into something, though most Libertarians would abolish the EPA, I actually support a strong Environmental Protection Agency. Not only do I support one at the state and federal levels, I'd actually support one for all of earth, I'd support one for space if we ever colonize space. Pollution doesn't know anything about imaginary lines drawn on a paper map by humans. Take a look at the Inuit of the Artic Circle, the Inuit have high blood count of PCBs and other manmade toxic chemicals they'd never made or used themself.

• Toxic chemicals poison Inuit food.
• Our Stolen Future: PCB contamination of Inuit.
• High PCB Levels Found I

Thank you for mentioning plastic. I have heard also in general, many man-made chemicals appear in the body as estrogens, including pesticides. One link that has been made in other studies, that I haven't seen posted yet as I'm scrolling down reading comments, is studies of polution and the sexual effects on wild-life animals. There also in some populations are dramatic declines. They could be our dying [dead?] canary in the mine warning of imminent danger for us. Maybe I can find a link via quick google search:

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/chapters.htm
http://www.holology.com/hormone.html
http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/environmentalscienc e/casestudies/case7.mhtml
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Plasticizers/Out- Of-Diet-PG5nov03.htm

Anyways, that's just a sampling. I think it's already a pretty well known issue. Not saying there's not other possible contributing factors. But this is being studied and there's quite a few references attached to some of those articles. Have fun. Who needs to reproduce anyways? We have genetics. We can clone! Muwahahahaha.... :-)

For all this "extra work", bottled water STILL ends up with more bacteria 2 weeks later than ordinary tap water, as well as more contaminants. There are a ton of regulations governing the purity of the water you drink from the tap - none of which apply after its bottled and sold to you.

As for the "pipes that haven't been clean in 50 years", I don't know where you live, but the pipes here are flushed on a regular basis. It's not a hard process - they just dump some extra chlorine into the system, open the fire hydrant at the end of the loop and let it run. This removes any "dead zones". Also, if you've ever done any home plumbing, you'd know that even 50-year-old copper pipe is in decent shape inside, after decades of attack by chlorine, ozone, and good old H2O.

And if you're concerned about energy consumption, there's a lot more energy consumed trucking that water all over the place, as well as in the manufacture of the bottles, etc., than in just pumping it through the muni pipes. And most water bottles end up in the dump (the blue-tinted ones are harder to recycle anyway).

Plus, last I heard, copper and cast-iron water pipes don't have issues with phthalates leeching from the plastic water bottles. You know, those plastics that contaminate the water in the bottle, your peanut butter, etc., 6 types of which have already been permanently banned in Europe http://www.eiatrack.org/reg_alerts/regulatory_aler t_detail.php?id=882 because of their effects http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/newscience/oncompou nds/phthalates/phthalates.htm.

They're everywhere http://www.ewg.org/news/story.php?id=4830, they help explain the huge decline in male fertility over the last 50 years, and we'll have to phase them out if we want to reduce the cancers they cause.

Better than mind control is mood control, or sex control.

There is a way to do this, more or less: just inject estrogen hormones into the food of a people, and they will switch to being unaggressive and docile. There are a ton of chemicals which sort-of look like estrogens to animal bodies, and they are showing up in our foods and plastic wrappings all over the place (the inside of pop cans in the plastic liner, for example.)
So to control the population, all you have to do is inject estrogen into the food or water supply, that way they will become fatty, docile, easy to manage. Sperm counts have been going down in men all over the western world for the past 50 years because of chemicals like pesticides, pthalates, DDT, PCBs and dioxins making estrogen-like changes to the anatomy of men. The plastic liner inside the soda pop can also has estrogen-like properties. So the whole world *is* becoming more subdued, because of the plastics we use for food containers and everything like that.

You can http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/ for more about this.

Sperm count loss to temperature is only temporary. The real threat comes from the unavoidable presence of synthetic hormones all around us. "Our Stolen Future"

Take another look at the second article in the original post. Their tests were measured in pg/cm^2. Picograms. As in 10^-12 grams. It's gonna take a while for the compounds to accumulate to toxic levels (on the order of mg/kg body weight).

Also, remember that the PBDEs are primarily used as cleaners and anti-flammability agents in the manufacturing processes of many electronics. They're not being created by your monitors (i.e., there's a finite amount of them per piece of computer equipment, so they'll eventually run out). Your computer won't be "infectious" forever.

Try these sites for more info on PBDE:

• slightly reactionary info at ourstolenfuture.org
• info at the cdc
• a little more technical, including a toxic estimate (for rodents) at accuchem.com

Right, big corporations are just naturally responsible in nature. I mean, why would they care about profits instead of doing the right thing. Can someone please point me to one biotech firm which says right now that they assume all responsibility for any health risks their products might cause in the future? Just one?

Fish-Tomato anyone?