there are other GMOs which do not heavily depend on Monsanto's pesticide.
Most GMOs, by type anyway, are not herbicide tolerant. There's a lot that Monsanto doesn't own, but the problem is, anti-GMO groups have protested so much that the regulations are too strict for most of them to come to market, so only big crops like Monsanto can afford to bring a GMO to market. A few I can think of are Rainbow papaya and HoneySweet plum, which are resistant to viruses, amino acid fortified corn, Golden Rice, BioCassva, virus resistant grape rootstocks from France, virus resistant potatoes from the UK, iron enriched lettuce, hypoalergenic peanuts, non-addictive tobacco, antioxident enriched tomatoes, ripening delayed rot resistant tomatoes, insect resistant corn from China, insect resistant corn from Iran, non-browing apples (I'm waiting for apomixis crops myself)...none of those are from big companies...they're from universities, governments, NGOs, and there are plenty more being worked on. To act as if Monsanto and genetic engineering are synonymous is just ignorance and laziness. I've done genetic transformation, and the last time I checked, I'm not a multinational corporation. Those anti-GMO guys are funny that way; it would be like if you hated the taste of McDonalds in your town so much that you wouldn't let any other restaurants be built next to it to compete with it.
Also, not all of Monsanto's GMOs are herbicide tolerant, they've also got the Bt insect resistant ones, that don't work with chemicals, and soybean with improved oil and drought tolerant lines on the way. And as for those herbicide tolerant ones, they're actually not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. Yeah, I know, it doesn't look good to act as if Monsanto isn't the big bad evil chemical dealer here (not that I'm saying I like everything they do mind you), but the fact is, the Ht GMOs do have a purpose. First off, it's actually fairly benign both environmentally (it degrades after about 28 days IIRC) and it really isn't known to be too dangerous to humans (it disrupts the synthesis of an amino acid that humans don't produce anyway).. Farmers like them because it gives them better control over their weeds and it saves the need for tilling, which in turn saves fuel and prevents fertilizer runoff, which is a real environmental win. I was talking to someone today about how farmers aren't stupid and wouldn't do something if it didn't benefit them, and that's true. I'm not saying I particularly like them, lower input is better than higher, no arguments here, but the Ht crops are not without merit either, although I certainty think it would be better if an allelopathic GMO could be produced to do the same thing without the need of the input.
No, but GMO not followed by breeding out the genes to see what happens is. You end up with a bunch of untested clones whose genes could do anything and you wouldn't know.
I have no idea what that even means. They usually do lots of breeding after a transformation event, and lots of testing too, to make sure the proteins (or whatever) are produced the same. What, you think genetic engineering is so simple that you can just push a few buttons and poof, off to market? This isn't Splice. That untested thing is such a huge load of horseshit, just like all the other anti-GMO taking points. Funny how the same people who say GMOs are untested conveniently ignore that we don't have things like AquaAdvantage salmon, Arctic apple, Vistive Gold soy, or Monsanto's drought tolerant lines on the market yet....gee, I wonder why if they're not tested. Evil Monsanto is just waiting around for the hell of it? Riiiiiight.
The "GM will save the world" is blatant lie, highly dangerous BS. Again we have put profit in front of sanity and well being.
And no one who knows what they're talking about says they will. Hunger is a social problem, and it's hard to fix that with a technical solution. But if you think that food security provided by things like drought, virus, and insect tolerant GMOs and biofortified GMOs (all real GMOs being developed/waiting for approval btw) can't help, then you know even less...unless of course you think their success will cause an even bigger population boom and start the cycle anew...
Certainly and GM crops aren't the real solution and this is for multiple reasons:
- Monsanto based grain can't be reused by the farmers, so one company hold everyone to ransom.
- GM crops require far more chemicals than traditional crops. This risks killing off pollinators.
- GM farming is a short-term solution.
Uh, what? Please explain to me how inserting a gene for virus or insect resistance causes something to suddenly need loads of chemicals? Of all the GM traits, only one works with chemicals, herbicide tolerance. Virus resistance, drought resistance, insect resistance, nitrogen use efficiency, biofortification, saline resistance, and all the rest don't work with chemicals, and even the Ht crops are like that for a reason. And how is is a short term solution? What, because you put a gene it it with GE, it'll go all Resident Evil on you, but if you spend a decade getting the same gene in there by conventional breeding it isn't? No. Horizontal gene transfer, natural genetic engineering, happens all the time, furthermore, the phenomenon you described (a common fear) has never been observed by science, nor is there any scientific reason to think it ever will be.
Healthier food. None of that evil GMO shit or vegetables that are sprayed with chemicals and grown in bad crap.
That 'evil GMO shit' as you so scientifically put it actually reduces pesticide use (in the case of Bt GMOs). It does increase herbicide usage in the case of Ht GMOs, but even if it hasn't already degraded by the time you get the food, the herbicide used doesn't affect humans. Yeah, some people claim it does; these are the same idiots claiming it causes the spontaneous generation of a new class of organism that infects and causes every possible problem in both plants and animals (you can't make craziness like this up, google 'Don Huber gmo'). The half truths and whole lies of denialists are worthless. Furthermore, you act like GMO is synonymous with chemical usage. That's so ignorant I don't know where to begin, but start by reading about the Rainbow papaya.
How's that teosinte working out for you? Good and tasty? I'll bet. Good thing no one messed with nature there. The consequences would never be the same!
If they are going to go through the whole effort of genetic modification, why not instead modify the species so the females also only eat plant matter, and eliminate the blood transfer problem entirely?
Probably because they can't. Unless that's only controlled by a few proteins, and it's probably not, that would be one heck of a modification. Genetic engineering, at this point anyway, really can't do things that complex. Theoretically, yes, someday that will be doable, but probably not right now. Real genetic engineering isn't at all like what you'd see in a movie where you can just make any change you'd like to an organism.
Then again, any fiddling with nature can (and likely will) go awry
If you've eaten lately, or haven't died of smallpox, you can thank messing with nature. I'm more afraid of nature than messing with nature.
No shit? Everyone screws up from time to time, but take a guess at who is more likely to be right, an expert or an idiot. That experts are periodically wrong does not mean we should trust ignorance instead, which is what a lot of people seem to be doing these days.
Well, I guess that's true too. I also think the a lot of the problem is regular people, people who just don't get it...people who will go on and on about 'what the founding fathers would have wanted' while maintaining some hard-assed 'tough on drugs' policy, and think that anyone who wants drugs legalized is some dumb worthless hippie (since as we all know all cannabis users are stupid) meant to be dismissed. I think politicians don't want to take serious action for fear of looking like a drug supporter or something. Of course, banning booze would be outright evil, but there's a million reasons why different laws should apply to someone else's fix.
One other benefit I can think of, I think it'd be pretty darned cool to study the farm ecology of hemp/cannabis whenever it finally gets legalized...you can't grow something, even hemp, in huge quantities without some bug or bacteria overcoming it's pest defenses. Not related to the legal issue itself but I eagerly await that day. That could probably provide a whole lot of useful data on future crop biodiversification projects. Data collected on that might be the only good thing to come out of that stupid law.
We wouldn't call yew trees or amyapples chemotherapy drugs
Ack, that should be mayapple. They're actually pretty tasty fruit, like a sweet lemon, if you don't mind the fact that fruits that aren't extremely ripe, the seeds, and all other parts of the plant are pretty toxic, and even in the ripe fruits there is still some poison. Delicious other than that.
Growing a plant that can be used to produce prescription medicine doesn't require a license.
There are a crapload of chemicals found in plants, and THC is hardly the worst of them. I never could figure out why people can't separate the two. We wouldn't call yew trees or amyapples chemotherapy drugs, we'd call them plants, yet taxol and podophyllotoxin are chemo drugs. We know ricin and solanine are poisons, but castor beans and tomatoes are plants. No one would call white willow or foxglove medicines, yet that is what salicin and digitoxin are used for. No one thinks walnut trees are herbicides, but that's what juglone is. You wouldn't consider oranges to be anti-inflammatory agents or carrots to be dietary supplements, but what do you think hesperidin and beta-caratine are? Mescaline is a hallucinogen, peyote and San Pedro, however, are cacti. THC is a drug, no one is disputing that, but cannabis? It's just a plant.
Should we regulate tomatoes and potatoes as poison? Should we treat walnuts as herbicides? Should we regulate foxglove and white willow as medicine? No, because that's idiotic. Why should cannabis be treated different? Hell, peyote is illegal for containing mescaline, but I'm pretty sure San Pedro has more! Could that be because the actual chemistry takes a backseat to the propaganda, bullshit, and racism in the drug laws? To anyone who knows jack about phytochemicals, the drug laws are so messed up it's nuts.
How is the parent post flamebait? It's true. The only reason we have prohibition is because it helps certain people (like DEA and their goons) remain in power and profit. Under our current laws, dangerous radicals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams would be thrown in a federal prison. The whole medical marijuana thing might have whatever problems, but much worse than anything associated with it is the fact that lives are being ruined because a someone scumbag likes sucking up taxpayers dollars to screw over honest law abiding citizens.
Read those words...they should be spelled lös and löz or something like that (with something like an 'Ö' representing the 'oo' sound). The ending sounds are different, but spelled the same, and the middle sounds are the same, but spelled different. And you really expect people to get that? Oops, did I just start a sentence with a conjunction? I must be a moron. Anyway, the problem isn't that people are stupid (sometimes they are), it's that English was all but made to be misspelled. There are sounds represented by multiple different letters and letters that represent multiple different sounds. My favorite is the word cyclic. That should be spelled siklik, but you've got the C making the sound S (as in snake) and K (as in kick), while the sound of I (as in sick) is spelled with an I and a Y. English orthography is a highly irrational system. Expect irrational usage.
Some people are just illiterate, yeah, but acting as if simple mistakes like misspelling lose/loose are important is just pedantic. Not everyone who screws up the English language's asinine spelling rules is a moron. Maybe they're just exceptionally logic-based people.
Really, it depends on what way you're speaking. In a horticultural (applied plant science)/culinary sense, vegetables are plant parts usually used in savory food, typically annuals, regardless if what you eat is leaf, petiole, root, tuber, stem, flower head, bud, seed, fruit, ect. Botanically, pure plant science, it's true that the term vegetable has no meaning. Confusion can arise with things like tomatoes because the term fruit has different meanings; as a horticultural or culinary term, it is something sweet, typically from a (woody) perennial, whereas botanically speaking it means anything with seeds in it, like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, pea pods, green beans, peanuts, cucumbers, ect. The study of vegetables is a field of itself: olericulture. So, squash & tomato are indeed vegetables; botanical fruit and horticultural vegetable are not mutually exclusive terms. That's true in reverse that a horticultural fruit is not necessarily a botanical one as well. If you ate a cashew apple, Japanese raisin, native cherry, or plum pine you'd probably think them fruits, but they're not.
Bottom line, it's like asking if a chicken is a type of poultry or a bird.
Animorphs, holy crap yes, I loved those when I was younger. My grandparents would make the long trip out to Barnes & Noble so I could pick up the latest copies a few times a year, and I'd have one read by the time I got back. Course, you might want to tell your kids you 'can't find' the last couple of books since they get a bit downbeat towards the end and (SPOILER)........everyone dies a horrible death in the last book.
For me anyway, they got me thinking about genetics and had me reading books on drosophila mutations in fourth grade.
Yeah, that is, unfortunately, true. Even if we could work out a GM glowing tree (which I would think is harder than just inserting the GFP gene in it like is usually done in 'glowing' GMOs, I'll have to find out about what photoproteins would actually work), it would still be cheaper to install streetlights than replant the trees every year after someone uproots, chops down, or otherwise destroys them. This is a very sensitive issue for some people (namely, people who haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about). If you did plant the hypothetical glowing tree, mark my words, they would be blamed for every little headache or bad vibe in the town. Opportunistic assholes like the weasels at Greenpeace would do what they do best, stoke fear, then you'd have way too many people opposing the planting of the glo-tree to make it a feasible project. Look at how they have all but stopped GM research in France after their last little stunt of destroying a government run GMO grape rootstock test field that represented $1.7 million, seven years research, and zero harm to anyone or anything (no doubt all while shouting that old lie of 'We're not anti-science we just want more research'). I just hope these guys go away before I go into the field.
Or rather - aren't there some kinds of mushrooms and other flora that glow in the dark? Why not just splice that plant with a tree. I know, I use the term splice like its an easy task.
I've always thought that was a good idea, but two problems: First, I don't think it would be that easy of a task. I think it involves different proteins reacting with each other, luciferase breaking down luciferin in some sort of reaction, or something. I don't know how easy it would be to get a plant to produce both of those (I wouldn't think it would be too hard to get them to simply produce the proteins), but getting them to emit enough light to matter at the right time all night, if the plant would have enough energy to actually go that, the light not goofing up it's leaves' sensence in the fall, not sure how easy that would be to do Getting something to glow is much different than, say, inserting the gene for green florescent protein, which is what you usually see 'glow,' like when the news talks about glowing kittens or pigs or whatever, and is a relatively simple task, but that only works under a blacklight. I don't know much about those types of things though, so I could be wrong, all I really know is that the tobacco plant that could glow (maybe you saw that in a science book) could produce the enzyme but was watered with the substrate, so I'm (baselessly) assuming there is some sort of catch, otherwise they would have just made it express both. I hope there's some way to do it though, that would kick ass. Course, you're going to have a problem in the winter, and I highly doubt an evergreen could work up the energy to glow in the dead of winter (at least not without some massively advanced genetic engineering that quite frankly we are no where near seeing).
Second, however, may be an even bigger problem. You will probably be sued for every other headache, upset stomach, and mild case of the sniffles that occurs within a five mile radius of each tree. Most people don't understand anything about this sort of stuff except what some clueless fearmonger told them, and like the radio tower that could cause headaches before it was turned on, you can bet your bottom dollar people will attribute their mental illnesses and physical problems and erectile dysfunctions to the trees with the spliced gene, and they'll probably get chopped down, if they're ever planted at all. On the other hand, people might realize how cool and useful they are and embrace them, striking a blow to fear and giving science a win, but perhaps that may be an overly optimistic scenario.
Amen. In no other profession (and I use that term very loosely) can you murder someone and be rewarded with paid vacation for it. Sounds more like a terrorist cell than law enforcement. Brutal, sociopathic, thieving, scumbags who will screw over innocent people just to advance their own petty, meaningless career. Well, fuck them.
You seem to know a thing or two about it, so question: who do you think it responsible for keeping cannabis illegal? I've heard people accuse the pharma companies, paper companies, fiber companies, and maybe some others, because cannabis is a cheap way of doing things better than some of their business models, but I've always assumed the ones who try to keep anti-cannabis laws on the books are the DEA/criminal 'justice' industry/prison-industrial complex...people who deal in ruined lives and human misery, sucking up billions of tax dollars in the process. Free money and forced customers, must be a pretty sweet gig. And I guess there'd be a lot of douchebag pig-dogs in law enforcement out of a job if they stopped criminalizing cannabis, and heavens, can't have that (though in all seriousness, dangerous unemployed sociopaths running the streets would be kinda bad...maybe they should be the ones rotting in a federal prison because 'I was only following orders' is not a valid excuse). Know of any evidence to support any of those?
Little nitpick: perhaps you mean therapeutic benefits, which marijuana certainly has, not homeopathic. Nothing has homeopathic benefits because homeopathy is bullshit quackery. Homeopathy is the concept that super dilute concentrations of something have the opposite effect, for example, using poison ivy to cure rashes or using cola nut to help you sleep.
Both sides dishonest? On one had we've got people saying that cannabis is a just plant (and last time I checked, science is pretty clear that C. sativa is indeed a plant), and that it is immoral to imprison people because they like to grow and consume the wrong plant in the comfort of their own home, and on the other hand we have the people who brought you Reefer Madness, who go on and on about freedom then try to squash people's inherent right to said freedom because they disagree with it. Only one side is dishonest, and it ain't the potheads.
I tried watching it a few days ago. Didn't last too long. How anyone can stomach that movie is beyond me. This review about sums up the what I was able to get out of it. I can't believe how many people are able to find such great meaning out of that steaming turd. I guess it's because most of us are so disconnected from agriculture.
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there are other GMOs which do not heavily depend on Monsanto's pesticide.
Most GMOs, by type anyway, are not herbicide tolerant. There's a lot that Monsanto doesn't own, but the problem is, anti-GMO groups have protested so much that the regulations are too strict for most of them to come to market, so only big crops like Monsanto can afford to bring a GMO to market. A few I can think of are Rainbow papaya and HoneySweet plum, which are resistant to viruses, amino acid fortified corn, Golden Rice, BioCassva, virus resistant grape rootstocks from France, virus resistant potatoes from the UK, iron enriched lettuce, hypoalergenic peanuts, non-addictive tobacco, antioxident enriched tomatoes, ripening delayed rot resistant tomatoes, insect resistant corn from China, insect resistant corn from Iran, non-browing apples (I'm waiting for apomixis crops myself)...none of those are from big companies...they're from universities, governments, NGOs, and there are plenty more being worked on. To act as if Monsanto and genetic engineering are synonymous is just ignorance and laziness. I've done genetic transformation, and the last time I checked, I'm not a multinational corporation. Those anti-GMO guys are funny that way; it would be like if you hated the taste of McDonalds in your town so much that you wouldn't let any other restaurants be built next to it to compete with it.
Also, not all of Monsanto's GMOs are herbicide tolerant, they've also got the Bt insect resistant ones, that don't work with chemicals, and soybean with improved oil and drought tolerant lines on the way. And as for those herbicide tolerant ones, they're actually not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. Yeah, I know, it doesn't look good to act as if Monsanto isn't the big bad evil chemical dealer here (not that I'm saying I like everything they do mind you), but the fact is, the Ht GMOs do have a purpose. First off, it's actually fairly benign both environmentally (it degrades after about 28 days IIRC) and it really isn't known to be too dangerous to humans (it disrupts the synthesis of an amino acid that humans don't produce anyway).. Farmers like them because it gives them better control over their weeds and it saves the need for tilling, which in turn saves fuel and prevents fertilizer runoff, which is a real environmental win. I was talking to someone today about how farmers aren't stupid and wouldn't do something if it didn't benefit them, and that's true. I'm not saying I particularly like them, lower input is better than higher, no arguments here, but the Ht crops are not without merit either, although I certainty think it would be better if an allelopathic GMO could be produced to do the same thing without the need of the input.
No, but GMO not followed by breeding out the genes to see what happens is. You end up with a bunch of untested clones whose genes could do anything and you wouldn't know.
I have no idea what that even means. They usually do lots of breeding after a transformation event, and lots of testing too, to make sure the proteins (or whatever) are produced the same. What, you think genetic engineering is so simple that you can just push a few buttons and poof, off to market? This isn't Splice. That untested thing is such a huge load of horseshit, just like all the other anti-GMO taking points. Funny how the same people who say GMOs are untested conveniently ignore that we don't have things like AquaAdvantage salmon, Arctic apple, Vistive Gold soy, or Monsanto's drought tolerant lines on the market yet....gee, I wonder why if they're not tested. Evil Monsanto is just waiting around for the hell of it? Riiiiiight.
The "GM will save the world" is blatant lie, highly dangerous BS. Again we have put profit in front of sanity and well being.
And no one who knows what they're talking about says they will. Hunger is a social problem, and it's hard to fix that with a technical solution. But if you think that food security provided by things like drought, virus, and insect tolerant GMOs and biofortified GMOs (all real GMOs being developed/waiting for approval btw) can't help, then you know even less...unless of course you think their success will cause an even bigger population boom and start the cycle anew...
Certainly and GM crops aren't the real solution and this is for multiple reasons:
- Monsanto based grain can't be reused by the farmers, so one company hold everyone to ransom.
- GM crops require far more chemicals than traditional crops. This risks killing off pollinators.
- GM farming is a short-term solution.
Uh, what? Please explain to me how inserting a gene for virus or insect resistance causes something to suddenly need loads of chemicals? Of all the GM traits, only one works with chemicals, herbicide tolerance. Virus resistance, drought resistance, insect resistance, nitrogen use efficiency, biofortification, saline resistance, and all the rest don't work with chemicals, and even the Ht crops are like that for a reason. And how is is a short term solution? What, because you put a gene it it with GE, it'll go all Resident Evil on you, but if you spend a decade getting the same gene in there by conventional breeding it isn't? No. Horizontal gene transfer, natural genetic engineering, happens all the time, furthermore, the phenomenon you described (a common fear) has never been observed by science, nor is there any scientific reason to think it ever will be.
Healthier food. None of that evil GMO shit or vegetables that are sprayed with chemicals and grown in bad crap.
That 'evil GMO shit' as you so scientifically put it actually reduces pesticide use (in the case of Bt GMOs). It does increase herbicide usage in the case of Ht GMOs, but even if it hasn't already degraded by the time you get the food, the herbicide used doesn't affect humans. Yeah, some people claim it does; these are the same idiots claiming it causes the spontaneous generation of a new class of organism that infects and causes every possible problem in both plants and animals (you can't make craziness like this up, google 'Don Huber gmo'). The half truths and whole lies of denialists are worthless. Furthermore, you act like GMO is synonymous with chemical usage. That's so ignorant I don't know where to begin, but start by reading about the Rainbow papaya.
How's that teosinte working out for you? Good and tasty? I'll bet. Good thing no one messed with nature there. The consequences would never be the same!
If they are going to go through the whole effort of genetic modification, why not instead modify the species so the females also only eat plant matter, and eliminate the blood transfer problem entirely?
Probably because they can't. Unless that's only controlled by a few proteins, and it's probably not, that would be one heck of a modification. Genetic engineering, at this point anyway, really can't do things that complex. Theoretically, yes, someday that will be doable, but probably not right now. Real genetic engineering isn't at all like what you'd see in a movie where you can just make any change you'd like to an organism.
Then again, any fiddling with nature can (and likely will) go awry
If you've eaten lately, or haven't died of smallpox, you can thank messing with nature. I'm more afraid of nature than messing with nature.
Experts can be wrong too.
No shit? Everyone screws up from time to time, but take a guess at who is more likely to be right, an expert or an idiot. That experts are periodically wrong does not mean we should trust ignorance instead, which is what a lot of people seem to be doing these days.
Well, I guess that's true too. I also think the a lot of the problem is regular people, people who just don't get it...people who will go on and on about 'what the founding fathers would have wanted' while maintaining some hard-assed 'tough on drugs' policy, and think that anyone who wants drugs legalized is some dumb worthless hippie (since as we all know all cannabis users are stupid) meant to be dismissed. I think politicians don't want to take serious action for fear of looking like a drug supporter or something. Of course, banning booze would be outright evil, but there's a million reasons why different laws should apply to someone else's fix.
One other benefit I can think of, I think it'd be pretty darned cool to study the farm ecology of hemp/cannabis whenever it finally gets legalized...you can't grow something, even hemp, in huge quantities without some bug or bacteria overcoming it's pest defenses. Not related to the legal issue itself but I eagerly await that day. That could probably provide a whole lot of useful data on future crop biodiversification projects. Data collected on that might be the only good thing to come out of that stupid law.
We wouldn't call yew trees or amyapples chemotherapy drugs
Ack, that should be mayapple. They're actually pretty tasty fruit, like a sweet lemon, if you don't mind the fact that fruits that aren't extremely ripe, the seeds, and all other parts of the plant are pretty toxic, and even in the ripe fruits there is still some poison. Delicious other than that.
Growing a plant that can be used to produce prescription medicine doesn't require a license.
There are a crapload of chemicals found in plants, and THC is hardly the worst of them. I never could figure out why people can't separate the two. We wouldn't call yew trees or amyapples chemotherapy drugs, we'd call them plants, yet taxol and podophyllotoxin are chemo drugs. We know ricin and solanine are poisons, but castor beans and tomatoes are plants. No one would call white willow or foxglove medicines, yet that is what salicin and digitoxin are used for. No one thinks walnut trees are herbicides, but that's what juglone is. You wouldn't consider oranges to be anti-inflammatory agents or carrots to be dietary supplements, but what do you think hesperidin and beta-caratine are? Mescaline is a hallucinogen, peyote and San Pedro, however, are cacti. THC is a drug, no one is disputing that, but cannabis? It's just a plant.
Should we regulate tomatoes and potatoes as poison? Should we treat walnuts as herbicides? Should we regulate foxglove and white willow as medicine? No, because that's idiotic. Why should cannabis be treated different? Hell, peyote is illegal for containing mescaline, but I'm pretty sure San Pedro has more! Could that be because the actual chemistry takes a backseat to the propaganda, bullshit, and racism in the drug laws? To anyone who knows jack about phytochemicals, the drug laws are so messed up it's nuts.
How is the parent post flamebait? It's true. The only reason we have prohibition is because it helps certain people (like DEA and their goons) remain in power and profit. Under our current laws, dangerous radicals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams would be thrown in a federal prison. The whole medical marijuana thing might have whatever problems, but much worse than anything associated with it is the fact that lives are being ruined because a someone scumbag likes sucking up taxpayers dollars to screw over honest law abiding citizens.
At one point, there was even a Linux distro based on that: Hikarunix.
Read those words...they should be spelled lös and löz or something like that (with something like an 'Ö' representing the 'oo' sound). The ending sounds are different, but spelled the same, and the middle sounds are the same, but spelled different. And you really expect people to get that? Oops, did I just start a sentence with a conjunction? I must be a moron. Anyway, the problem isn't that people are stupid (sometimes they are), it's that English was all but made to be misspelled. There are sounds represented by multiple different letters and letters that represent multiple different sounds. My favorite is the word cyclic. That should be spelled siklik, but you've got the C making the sound S (as in snake) and K (as in kick), while the sound of I (as in sick) is spelled with an I and a Y. English orthography is a highly irrational system. Expect irrational usage.
Some people are just illiterate, yeah, but acting as if simple mistakes like misspelling lose/loose are important is just pedantic. Not everyone who screws up the English language's asinine spelling rules is a moron. Maybe they're just exceptionally logic-based people.
Really, it depends on what way you're speaking. In a horticultural (applied plant science)/culinary sense, vegetables are plant parts usually used in savory food, typically annuals, regardless if what you eat is leaf, petiole, root, tuber, stem, flower head, bud, seed, fruit, ect. Botanically, pure plant science, it's true that the term vegetable has no meaning. Confusion can arise with things like tomatoes because the term fruit has different meanings; as a horticultural or culinary term, it is something sweet, typically from a (woody) perennial, whereas botanically speaking it means anything with seeds in it, like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, pea pods, green beans, peanuts, cucumbers, ect. The study of vegetables is a field of itself: olericulture. So, squash & tomato are indeed vegetables; botanical fruit and horticultural vegetable are not mutually exclusive terms. That's true in reverse that a horticultural fruit is not necessarily a botanical one as well. If you ate a cashew apple, Japanese raisin, native cherry, or plum pine you'd probably think them fruits, but they're not.
Bottom line, it's like asking if a chicken is a type of poultry or a bird.
So, how much do I owe you for the theft of your comment that I just read?
There are times when you can draw good parallels to physical and intellectual property. This isn't one of them.
Animorphs, holy crap yes, I loved those when I was younger. My grandparents would make the long trip out to Barnes & Noble so I could pick up the latest copies a few times a year, and I'd have one read by the time I got back. Course, you might want to tell your kids you 'can't find' the last couple of books since they get a bit downbeat towards the end and (SPOILER)........everyone dies a horrible death in the last book.
For me anyway, they got me thinking about genetics and had me reading books on drosophila mutations in fourth grade.
Yeah, that is, unfortunately, true. Even if we could work out a GM glowing tree (which I would think is harder than just inserting the GFP gene in it like is usually done in 'glowing' GMOs, I'll have to find out about what photoproteins would actually work), it would still be cheaper to install streetlights than replant the trees every year after someone uproots, chops down, or otherwise destroys them. This is a very sensitive issue for some people (namely, people who haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about). If you did plant the hypothetical glowing tree, mark my words, they would be blamed for every little headache or bad vibe in the town. Opportunistic assholes like the weasels at Greenpeace would do what they do best, stoke fear, then you'd have way too many people opposing the planting of the glo-tree to make it a feasible project. Look at how they have all but stopped GM research in France after their last little stunt of destroying a government run GMO grape rootstock test field that represented $1.7 million, seven years research, and zero harm to anyone or anything (no doubt all while shouting that old lie of 'We're not anti-science we just want more research'). I just hope these guys go away before I go into the field.
Or rather - aren't there some kinds of mushrooms and other flora that glow in the dark? Why not just splice that plant with a tree. I know, I use the term splice like its an easy task.
I've always thought that was a good idea, but two problems: First, I don't think it would be that easy of a task. I think it involves different proteins reacting with each other, luciferase breaking down luciferin in some sort of reaction, or something. I don't know how easy it would be to get a plant to produce both of those (I wouldn't think it would be too hard to get them to simply produce the proteins), but getting them to emit enough light to matter at the right time all night, if the plant would have enough energy to actually go that, the light not goofing up it's leaves' sensence in the fall, not sure how easy that would be to do Getting something to glow is much different than, say, inserting the gene for green florescent protein, which is what you usually see 'glow,' like when the news talks about glowing kittens or pigs or whatever, and is a relatively simple task, but that only works under a blacklight. I don't know much about those types of things though, so I could be wrong, all I really know is that the tobacco plant that could glow (maybe you saw that in a science book) could produce the enzyme but was watered with the substrate, so I'm (baselessly) assuming there is some sort of catch, otherwise they would have just made it express both. I hope there's some way to do it though, that would kick ass. Course, you're going to have a problem in the winter, and I highly doubt an evergreen could work up the energy to glow in the dead of winter (at least not without some massively advanced genetic engineering that quite frankly we are no where near seeing).
Second, however, may be an even bigger problem. You will probably be sued for every other headache, upset stomach, and mild case of the sniffles that occurs within a five mile radius of each tree. Most people don't understand anything about this sort of stuff except what some clueless fearmonger told them, and like the radio tower that could cause headaches before it was turned on, you can bet your bottom dollar people will attribute their mental illnesses and physical problems and erectile dysfunctions to the trees with the spliced gene, and they'll probably get chopped down, if they're ever planted at all. On the other hand, people might realize how cool and useful they are and embrace them, striking a blow to fear and giving science a win, but perhaps that may be an overly optimistic scenario.
Amen. In no other profession (and I use that term very loosely) can you murder someone and be rewarded with paid vacation for it. Sounds more like a terrorist cell than law enforcement. Brutal, sociopathic, thieving, scumbags who will screw over innocent people just to advance their own petty, meaningless career. Well, fuck them.
You seem to know a thing or two about it, so question: who do you think it responsible for keeping cannabis illegal? I've heard people accuse the pharma companies, paper companies, fiber companies, and maybe some others, because cannabis is a cheap way of doing things better than some of their business models, but I've always assumed the ones who try to keep anti-cannabis laws on the books are the DEA/criminal 'justice' industry/prison-industrial complex ...people who deal in ruined lives and human misery, sucking up billions of tax dollars in the process. Free money and forced customers, must be a pretty sweet gig. And I guess there'd be a lot of douchebag pig-dogs in law enforcement out of a job if they stopped criminalizing cannabis, and heavens, can't have that (though in all seriousness, dangerous unemployed sociopaths running the streets would be kinda bad...maybe they should be the ones rotting in a federal prison because 'I was only following orders' is not a valid excuse). Know of any evidence to support any of those?
Little nitpick: perhaps you mean therapeutic benefits, which marijuana certainly has, not homeopathic. Nothing has homeopathic benefits because homeopathy is bullshit quackery. Homeopathy is the concept that super dilute concentrations of something have the opposite effect, for example, using poison ivy to cure rashes or using cola nut to help you sleep.
Both sides dishonest? On one had we've got people saying that cannabis is a just plant (and last time I checked, science is pretty clear that C. sativa is indeed a plant), and that it is immoral to imprison people because they like to grow and consume the wrong plant in the comfort of their own home, and on the other hand we have the people who brought you Reefer Madness, who go on and on about freedom then try to squash people's inherent right to said freedom because they disagree with it. Only one side is dishonest, and it ain't the potheads.
Oh, crap, you're right, I guess I really wasn't paying attention. I forgot the dash in the term woo-woo. My bad. I hope that clears things up.
I tried watching it a few days ago. Didn't last too long. How anyone can stomach that movie is beyond me. This review about sums up the what I was able to get out of it. I can't believe how many people are able to find such great meaning out of that steaming turd. I guess it's because most of us are so disconnected from agriculture.