I already saw that. I wasn't impressed enough to even remember it. Considering that A) wasn't long ago that the Russian Ministry of Health was blaming swine flu on GMOs B) that the vastbody of current evidence says GMOs are, in general, safe, C) we've been eating GMOs for years and there has never once been a single human health problem linked conclusively to GMOs, and D) they were, as usual, unable to find a causative agent or a chemical pathway for the creation of said agent for these problems (nope, just happens cause their genetically modified by man. A billion years of mutations and natural foreign viral DNA insertions is dandy, but insert one single gene in a lab and it's deadly. It can be done.), color me skeptical until I see more details (I can't find anything about their methodology of the line of GE soy they used) or preferably, someone a bit more high profile doing it.
Either way, one study vs the whole of science...it might be accurate for whatever line they used, it isn't impossible, but I'm doubtful. Here's a whole bunch of studies proving homeopathy works; do you, in light of the whole of scientific opinion, question those studies, all of them, and have skeptical suspicions, or do you accept that massively diluted stuff that's really just water is an effective way of treating disease? Same thing here. Ok, there' s yet another study 'proving' that GMOs are going to kill you. So what? That doesn't amount to jack, at least not yet, and the burden of proof rests on them to prove their findings to the world, not for someone to prove them wrong, and I'm not going to assume they're right until poo-pooed by various regulation agencies (like what happened with the French corn study). Remember the last time a big scare story broke? Bloke by the name of Andrew Wakefield had a study too, and tons of people believed it without waiting for the scientific community to confirm his findings. Remember how that one worked out?
I'm not trying to accuse you of crankery here by mentioning the homeopaths and the anti-vaxxers, but I point those out to draw the similarities between alternative medicine promoters & vaccine denialists and genetic engineering denialists, and to say that patient skepticism is a virtue.
Wow, that's news to me. I don't suppose you have a robust, repeated, peer reviewed, double blind, controlled study to back that up, preferably one endorsed by a reputable organization like the WHO, CDC, FDA, USDA, NIH, ACS, ect? As far as I know, no one has started complaining about that particular line of GMO, although since anti-GE folks whine about all of them, you can count on bitching about this one too. The last study to spread around the intertubes about corn and organ damage that made it to/. was absolute bullshit. Just a tip from someone who follows the field of plant development and genetic engineering: those studies come and go. Just like the studies proving vaccines cause autism, the ones proving homeopathy works, the ones proving 9/11 was an inside job, and the ones disproving evolution. They make their rounds, then fade away until a new one comes along. Not a single one has stuck, not a single one is accepted by the scientific community, and certainty no professional horticulturist I've ever met has found them worthy. What should that tell you (and please don't say giant corporate conspiracy)?
If it's protein you're concerned about, I'd say your best bet would be to skip both the animal and plant kingdoms entirely, animals especially would be far too inefficient, and use a spirulina genetically modified to produce all the proteins humans need. It's not that far fetched; there's already soy modified to produces omega-3. It probably wouldn't taste all that good, but since we're talking about being as efficient as possible...well, we aren't going to Mars for the local specialties. Not yet anyway.
Microsoft may not be all puppies and kittens, but there's no comparison between them and the COS. Even on a bad day they're not even close. When you see MS doing stuff like this, then maybe your argument that it's hypocritical to give their mockings unequal attention will hold water.
I don't mind lugging them around. What I mind is paying out ridiculous amounts for a rehash of last year's now worthless book. They sell ebook versions of textbooks; I don't see how this will hamper that (besides eliminating resale markets). What we need is some serious, high quality, free, open source type textbooks. I wouldn't mind paying to have them stamped on dead tree, I like dead tree, it's the BS mark-up that's the problem. This is cool and all, but it would mean a lot more if they could get something good and free/reasonably priced to put in it.
Topically, like in socks, or in a petri dish, yes, silver is antibacterial, and it does has legitimate usage. In your body, not so much. I don't think anyone has ever been able to demonstrate that it will do anything for people (besides maybe give you argyria). So in this case there is a very small grain of truth hidden in the alt-med woo-woo, but not enough to make it sensible medical advice.
Kinda funny really, but we still have people who think that same powdered silver (and to a lesser extent, gold) is for internal use in curing pretty much everything.
The world would be better off without any of these.
I disagree. I consider myself both a patriot and a xenophile, and I think it makes the world much more interesting when everyone has their own country, their own national home, tied with their own unique culture, customs, and language, preserving within boundaries what makes them different.
I don't believe that thinking you're country is the best is mutually exclusive with accepting others claiming the same thing. When I took Arabic, my professor frequently reminded us that his home of Tunisia was the best country on the planet. I'm as much of a patriotic American as you can get, but I thought that was cool. I like patriotism, anyone's patriotism.
Certainty, way too many people take it the wrong way, from ignorant xenophobic jingoist assholes to patronizing political correctness nutters, but I like things better with them. I like that there is a United States that I can proudly call my country, containing my way of life. I like that there is a Switzerland, a Jordan, a Peru, a Japan, a Cameroon, each with it's own rich history and ways and languages or dialects.
Arbitrary like race and sex? Sure, I guess nationality kinda is, immigrants aside. But I still think patriotism should be a positive aspect of human existence. Well, when people aren't being douchebags about it anyway, which, I must admit, is far too often.
What about the person that mechanically harvests crops? Those kill animals too. There's plenty of other ways that we each contribute to killing an animal somehow, somewhere. Taking it to the logical conclusion via guilt by proxy, everyone deserves a spot on this registry.
Apparently you have not paid any attention on how actual farming is implemented recently.
It's not quite the land of sunshine that is painted on the tele.
No, I'm afraid farming today is fairly beyond the concept of humane.
That's what pisses me off about groups like PETA: sometimes, they're right. There is abuse in farms. A lot. I'm not saying every farm does it, but it happens. When PETA goes out talking about farm cruelty, they might turn some heads, but then they follow that up by stripping naked and saying that eating meat makes you worse than Hitler (but naturally, stuff like this is fine and dandy). And that's where they lose people. People dismiss all their claims.
At the end of the day, their stupid antics only hurt the animals. Do they talk about sustainable fishing? No, they talk about 'sea-kittens.' Do they talk about humane animal testing? No, they want to end all testing (except for PETA VP Mary Beth Sweetland's insulin) in favor of non-existent models and cripple medical science. Do they advocate decent living conditions for farm animals? No, say farm animals completely equivalent to Jews during the Holocaust.
They're not about what's best for the animals, they're on a feel good quest for attention. Well, screw them.
I don't think that community service and prison time are mutually exclusive. I'm sure prisons can get cheap but adequate nutrition (some spiced up version of nutraloaf for instance) and keep them in a cell of some sort while during the day they can go out and work on community service projects. Guys like this, maybe they can work on something like township (or Spain's equivalent) websites or something.
Change that from 'no prison for non-violent criminals' to 'no prison with violent criminals for non-violent criminals' and I think you're on to something. I say lock these guys up for a good stay, even if not in the same prison they keep killers, rapists, and other physically violent criminals in.
Seizing anything is overboard. You might applaud the effort, but what do your kids learn? That responsibility is someone else's problem and that you have the right to control what others do? Those are the attributes of a reckless bully, exactly how we teach kids not to think. Parents should be against this for that (and the whole freedom of speech trampling of a universal human right thing).
I guess it could be possible, until relatively recently many Koreans used Chinese script, and a lot of historical documents are written it in, but I think that most Koreans, probably younger ones in particular, don't know much Chinese. I have no idea how similar their usage is; every time I see Korean, it's written in Hangul. If you look at the Korean Google news, you see almost no Chinese characters; the only ones you do see are the name of a city in Taiwan. I'm not Korean, so I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that nowadays, while they do learn some Chinese characters in later grades of school, it is not widely used, probably not widely well known, and anything that is left is on the way out.
I think he meant speakers of different languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, ect) within China, not neighboring countries. They use an alphabet, Hangul, in Korea, which is not the Chinese characters, Hanzi. Same way with Japan. Their borrowed Chinese characters many times have different meanings (although they might be able to pick out some meaning here and there), and they also rely on a syllabary, Kana, in their wringing. Chinese has left major linguistic marks on neighboring languages like Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese (which is written with a form of the Latin alphabet, they could no more understand Chinese characters than your average English speaker), but you can't read Chinese on the virtue of knowing them.
I'll bet the Chinese could conduct the same study with their classical music and get the same result, and in 300 years someone will find the same with Michael Jackson. I wouldn't put too much into that study until the study was done a couple of times by multiple individuals, and I would be very interested in the mechanism that makes it work specifically for classical (as opposed to, say, techno or some of the more complex rock music, where there is also complexity in the notes). Whenever a previously baseless belief is perfectly confirmed, I think that's a good time to be skeptical. What a coincidence it would be that a particular type of centuries old Western music, popular with the 'tasteful' upper class, happens to makes people smarter.
Personally, I don't think that's much of an argument, but there is a much better one. Really, I don't think it matters who lived there once, or when, or whatever. What matters is who's making their homes there now. I'm American, and technically, my land was once brutally stolen from one tribe or another of Native Americans. If one of them now showed up at my doorstep and demanded his land beck, I'll tell him to bugger off, and if he took violent action against me I'd be well within my right to defend myself, because regardless of how things went down in the past, this is my home now. I think same applies to Israel. I don't know much about the formation of Israel, and I don't quite buy those stories about unprovoked land grabs and stealing homes from Palestinians, but either way, people are living and dying and making their home there now. It's hard to argue that that doesn't make it their home now.
I'm not saying that Israel is perfect of that the Palestinians are all bad or anything like that, but before any other issues can be addressed, the assholes need to accept that the country and people of Israel have a right to be there & defend themselves if need be and stop with the offensives.
Actually, there is research into developing strains of plants that can produce plastics, and probably oils too. Course, just like how they prefer coal to nuclear, if genetic engineering is involved in it, the irony is that the greenies would rather have petro based plastics.
But yeah, GW or no, worst case scenario to keeping society technologically updated is that things become cleaner, more efficient, and more productive.
I don't think it being a plant is a trivial aspect. A plant is not a drug, even if it contains the active ingredients of a drug. You would consider the taxane chemicals used in chemotherapy to be drugs, right? Yet you'd never refer to the yew plant as a drug, even though it is the source of the taxanes. You consider aspirin to be a drug, but not the white willow that asprin comes from. And you would not consider potatoes to be a poison, yet their sprouts contain solanine, which is very poisonous. Many rose family fruits like peaches and apples have cyanide in their seeds...you see where I'm going with this.
I'm not trying to poo-poo it, I'm seriously saying that, while THC is certainty a drug, the cannabis plant itself really shouldn't be considered a drug, and beyond the pragmatic necessities that result from the THC, like don't toke & drive or don't smoke it around anyone else (pragmatic aspects which could very easily apply to any of the other plants if people liked burning foxglove or whatever), it really shouldn't be treated like a drug, at least not to the degree that it is now anyway.
Even if the theories are wrong, reducing green-house emissions (etc) won't hurt anything but the pocket book.
I think the problem is that that is the wrong approach. So many of the greenie eco-nuts seem to have this mindset that helping the environment means hurting ourselves, and that's where the problems start. Check it out:
We improve our energy grid with nuclear energy. We use the newest models, the ones that recycle the 'waste,' the only thing it releases into the enviroment is steam. That cuts out all the nasty of coal. Meanwhile, we research solar to make it more usable than it is now. That makes energy cheaper, which helps manufacturing ect. and improves the economy.
We really need to develop an alternative to oil. Either hydrogen power, or a biofuel, and not corn, something decent, like desert based enclosed algae farms. Once a suitable solution is found, we put it into mass production. This cuts off the huge amounts of money we send to foreign oil sources, and if it works well enough, cuts the cost of travel & shipping, and may even provide an export, possibly cuts off terrorism funding, which really improves the economy.
We improve our agriculture. We diversify our crops, do improvement work to breed commercially viable species of new crops, which will reduce the amount of inputs that are needed to keep crops pest and disease free. We develop and grow more locally adapted varieties of traditional crops, and grow the new ones in the best possible areas. In both cases, use techniques like intercroping and crop rotation to further reduce the need for inputs like pesticides and fertilizers. In all cases, we develop new traits that can be inserted via genetic engineering to further reduce inputs and increase yields, as well as open up previously inariable land for cultivation. This lowers food prices, might even increase overall health, and improves the economy.
Certainty, of course, it must be stated that regulation must happen, but whether AGW is real or not, who wants to be breathing in smoke and drinking polluted water anyway? Again, rather than saying 'Waah, industry!' what we need to do is ask, 'How can we develop cost effective solutions to maintain air/water quality without a significant decrease in business?'
We need to get over this mindset that green technology and green lifestyles must by necessity hurt the economy. We don't need to go back to the caves, we need to go back to the labs. Green technology is good for the economy. Greenie technology, on the other hand, the feel good hippy-dippy stuff, that's another story, but if done right, there is no problem whatsoever. Everybody wins. If man is causing global warming, this is what we should do, and even if it isn't us, we should do this sort of stuff anyway. What we should do is clear. That there is a political controversy is just baffling.
I agree. I wasn't trying to play the appeal to nature card, nor was I attempting to suggest that marijuana is good for you. Dieffenbachia, castor bean, poison ivy, pokeweed, and mayapple are all plants that can mess you up good (although many people grow the first two as an ornamental and some like to eat the last two and no one wants any of them banned). My point was that it's just a plant, and I really don't think that any plant should be illegal, at least not for the reason that marijuana is. A horribly invasive or disease spreading plant, maybe, but not because someone out there wants to smoke it. If people, for whatever stupid reason, started smoking sticks on fire or any of the other thousands of toxic plants, sure, it'd hurt or kill them, but that still doesn't mean the plant itself should be outlawed.
I've never heard of it before, but I don't doubt that the journal is legit, just that I don't recall seeing any meaningful peer review process for that particular piece (although I could be wrong here). However, the only things I've read about if from others (such as the French High Council of Biotechnology, European Food Safety Authority, and the Food Standards Australia New Zealand, among some moderately well known individuals) had nothing good to say. Bad stuff does wind up in good journals (as I said, the Wakefield study is a prime example). What they propose is plausible, that the chemicals used cause damage, however, the study still wasn't too hot. I can accept Round-Up causing the problems, I can even accept certain GMOs causing problems (here's two that did), but it won't be this study that convinces me of either. Comparing the Monsanto corn with regular corn, not much of a difference. It reminds me of the Failure to Yield report, which based it's premise (that GMOs have lower yield than non-GMO counterparts) on data showing an increase in yield!
To be fair, apparently the guys who did the study had to fight and claw to get the data they used for it from Monsanto, and that does highlight a lack of transparency which is not very desirable at all, but nonetheless, that doesn't mean that there is enough information to support their premise, and as you say, there certainty isn't justification to have this applied to all the other genetically engineered rice, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, alfalfa, soybeans, papayas, ect. out there, which it undoubtedly will be.
This is a highly politicized issue (alas), and these things seem to come and go. I know I've seen the 'proof' that GMOs are dangerous before that study, and I don't doubt I'll see it again. When one of them sticks, when the WHO takes notice, when there is some really good strong evidence, when my horticulture professors are running around going "Holy moly look at this!" I'll give it more heed. In the mean time, I remain unimpressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I already saw that. I wasn't impressed enough to even remember it. Considering that A) wasn't long ago that the Russian Ministry of Health was blaming swine flu on GMOs B) that the vast body of current evidence says GMOs are, in general, safe, C) we've been eating GMOs for years and there has never once been a single human health problem linked conclusively to GMOs, and D) they were, as usual, unable to find a causative agent or a chemical pathway for the creation of said agent for these problems (nope, just happens cause their genetically modified by man. A billion years of mutations and natural foreign viral DNA insertions is dandy, but insert one single gene in a lab and it's deadly. It can be done.), color me skeptical until I see more details (I can't find anything about their methodology of the line of GE soy they used) or preferably, someone a bit more high profile doing it.
Either way, one study vs the whole of science...it might be accurate for whatever line they used, it isn't impossible, but I'm doubtful. Here's a whole bunch of studies proving homeopathy works; do you, in light of the whole of scientific opinion, question those studies, all of them, and have skeptical suspicions, or do you accept that massively diluted stuff that's really just water is an effective way of treating disease? Same thing here. Ok, there' s yet another study 'proving' that GMOs are going to kill you. So what? That doesn't amount to jack, at least not yet, and the burden of proof rests on them to prove their findings to the world, not for someone to prove them wrong, and I'm not going to assume they're right until poo-pooed by various regulation agencies (like what happened with the French corn study). Remember the last time a big scare story broke? Bloke by the name of Andrew Wakefield had a study too, and tons of people believed it without waiting for the scientific community to confirm his findings. Remember how that one worked out?
I'm not trying to accuse you of crankery here by mentioning the homeopaths and the anti-vaxxers, but I point those out to draw the similarities between alternative medicine promoters & vaccine denialists and genetic engineering denialists, and to say that patient skepticism is a virtue.
Wow, that's news to me. I don't suppose you have a robust, repeated, peer reviewed, double blind, controlled study to back that up, preferably one endorsed by a reputable organization like the WHO, CDC, FDA, USDA, NIH, ACS, ect? As far as I know, no one has started complaining about that particular line of GMO, although since anti-GE folks whine about all of them, you can count on bitching about this one too. The last study to spread around the intertubes about corn and organ damage that made it to /. was absolute bullshit. Just a tip from someone who follows the field of plant development and genetic engineering: those studies come and go. Just like the studies proving vaccines cause autism, the ones proving homeopathy works, the ones proving 9/11 was an inside job, and the ones disproving evolution. They make their rounds, then fade away until a new one comes along. Not a single one has stuck, not a single one is accepted by the scientific community, and certainty no professional horticulturist I've ever met has found them worthy. What should that tell you (and please don't say giant corporate conspiracy)?
If it's protein you're concerned about, I'd say your best bet would be to skip both the animal and plant kingdoms entirely, animals especially would be far too inefficient, and use a spirulina genetically modified to produce all the proteins humans need. It's not that far fetched; there's already soy modified to produces omega-3. It probably wouldn't taste all that good, but since we're talking about being as efficient as possible...well, we aren't going to Mars for the local specialties. Not yet anyway.
Microsoft may not be all puppies and kittens, but there's no comparison between them and the COS. Even on a bad day they're not even close. When you see MS doing stuff like this, then maybe your argument that it's hypocritical to give their mockings unequal attention will hold water.
I don't mind lugging them around. What I mind is paying out ridiculous amounts for a rehash of last year's now worthless book. They sell ebook versions of textbooks; I don't see how this will hamper that (besides eliminating resale markets). What we need is some serious, high quality, free, open source type textbooks. I wouldn't mind paying to have them stamped on dead tree, I like dead tree, it's the BS mark-up that's the problem. This is cool and all, but it would mean a lot more if they could get something good and free/reasonably priced to put in it.
Topically, like in socks, or in a petri dish, yes, silver is antibacterial, and it does has legitimate usage. In your body, not so much. I don't think anyone has ever been able to demonstrate that it will do anything for people (besides maybe give you argyria). So in this case there is a very small grain of truth hidden in the alt-med woo-woo, but not enough to make it sensible medical advice.
Kinda funny really, but we still have people who think that same powdered silver (and to a lesser extent, gold) is for internal use in curing pretty much everything.
The world would be better off without any of these.
I disagree. I consider myself both a patriot and a xenophile, and I think it makes the world much more interesting when everyone has their own country, their own national home, tied with their own unique culture, customs, and language, preserving within boundaries what makes them different.
I don't believe that thinking you're country is the best is mutually exclusive with accepting others claiming the same thing. When I took Arabic, my professor frequently reminded us that his home of Tunisia was the best country on the planet. I'm as much of a patriotic American as you can get, but I thought that was cool. I like patriotism, anyone's patriotism.
Certainty, way too many people take it the wrong way, from ignorant xenophobic jingoist assholes to patronizing political correctness nutters, but I like things better with them. I like that there is a United States that I can proudly call my country, containing my way of life. I like that there is a Switzerland, a Jordan, a Peru, a Japan, a Cameroon, each with it's own rich history and ways and languages or dialects.
Arbitrary like race and sex? Sure, I guess nationality kinda is, immigrants aside. But I still think patriotism should be a positive aspect of human existence. Well, when people aren't being douchebags about it anyway, which, I must admit, is far too often.
Word processing then :)
What about the person that mechanically harvests crops? Those kill animals too. There's plenty of other ways that we each contribute to killing an animal somehow, somewhere. Taking it to the logical conclusion via guilt by proxy, everyone deserves a spot on this registry.
Apparently you have not paid any attention on how actual farming is implemented recently.
It's not quite the land of sunshine that is painted on the tele.
No, I'm afraid farming today is fairly beyond the concept of humane.
That's what pisses me off about groups like PETA: sometimes, they're right. There is abuse in farms. A lot. I'm not saying every farm does it, but it happens. When PETA goes out talking about farm cruelty, they might turn some heads, but then they follow that up by stripping naked and saying that eating meat makes you worse than Hitler (but naturally, stuff like this is fine and dandy). And that's where they lose people. People dismiss all their claims.
At the end of the day, their stupid antics only hurt the animals. Do they talk about sustainable fishing? No, they talk about 'sea-kittens.' Do they talk about humane animal testing? No, they want to end all testing (except for PETA VP Mary Beth Sweetland's insulin) in favor of non-existent models and cripple medical science. Do they advocate decent living conditions for farm animals? No, say farm animals completely equivalent to Jews during the Holocaust.
They're not about what's best for the animals, they're on a feel good quest for attention. Well, screw them.
I didn't mean anything critical; I'm talking about Dreamweaver or something. Just sprucing things up, and monitored carefully.
I don't think that community service and prison time are mutually exclusive. I'm sure prisons can get cheap but adequate nutrition (some spiced up version of nutraloaf for instance) and keep them in a cell of some sort while during the day they can go out and work on community service projects. Guys like this, maybe they can work on something like township (or Spain's equivalent) websites or something.
Change that from 'no prison for non-violent criminals' to 'no prison with violent criminals for non-violent criminals' and I think you're on to something. I say lock these guys up for a good stay, even if not in the same prison they keep killers, rapists, and other physically violent criminals in.
However, seizing the consoles seems overboard.
Seizing anything is overboard. You might applaud the effort, but what do your kids learn? That responsibility is someone else's problem and that you have the right to control what others do? Those are the attributes of a reckless bully, exactly how we teach kids not to think. Parents should be against this for that (and the whole freedom of speech trampling of a universal human right thing).
I guess it could be possible, until relatively recently many Koreans used Chinese script, and a lot of historical documents are written it in, but I think that most Koreans, probably younger ones in particular, don't know much Chinese. I have no idea how similar their usage is; every time I see Korean, it's written in Hangul. If you look at the Korean Google news, you see almost no Chinese characters; the only ones you do see are the name of a city in Taiwan. I'm not Korean, so I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that nowadays, while they do learn some Chinese characters in later grades of school, it is not widely used, probably not widely well known, and anything that is left is on the way out.
I think he meant speakers of different languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, ect) within China, not neighboring countries. They use an alphabet, Hangul, in Korea, which is not the Chinese characters, Hanzi. Same way with Japan. Their borrowed Chinese characters many times have different meanings (although they might be able to pick out some meaning here and there), and they also rely on a syllabary, Kana, in their wringing. Chinese has left major linguistic marks on neighboring languages like Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese (which is written with a form of the Latin alphabet, they could no more understand Chinese characters than your average English speaker), but you can't read Chinese on the virtue of knowing them.
I'll bet the Chinese could conduct the same study with their classical music and get the same result, and in 300 years someone will find the same with Michael Jackson. I wouldn't put too much into that study until the study was done a couple of times by multiple individuals, and I would be very interested in the mechanism that makes it work specifically for classical (as opposed to, say, techno or some of the more complex rock music, where there is also complexity in the notes). Whenever a previously baseless belief is perfectly confirmed, I think that's a good time to be skeptical. What a coincidence it would be that a particular type of centuries old Western music, popular with the 'tasteful' upper class, happens to makes people smarter.
Personally, I don't think that's much of an argument, but there is a much better one. Really, I don't think it matters who lived there once, or when, or whatever. What matters is who's making their homes there now. I'm American, and technically, my land was once brutally stolen from one tribe or another of Native Americans. If one of them now showed up at my doorstep and demanded his land beck, I'll tell him to bugger off, and if he took violent action against me I'd be well within my right to defend myself, because regardless of how things went down in the past, this is my home now. I think same applies to Israel. I don't know much about the formation of Israel, and I don't quite buy those stories about unprovoked land grabs and stealing homes from Palestinians, but either way, people are living and dying and making their home there now. It's hard to argue that that doesn't make it their home now.
I'm not saying that Israel is perfect of that the Palestinians are all bad or anything like that, but before any other issues can be addressed, the assholes need to accept that the country and people of Israel have a right to be there & defend themselves if need be and stop with the offensives.
Actually, there is research into developing strains of plants that can produce plastics, and probably oils too. Course, just like how they prefer coal to nuclear, if genetic engineering is involved in it, the irony is that the greenies would rather have petro based plastics.
But yeah, GW or no, worst case scenario to keeping society technologically updated is that things become cleaner, more efficient, and more productive.
I don't think it being a plant is a trivial aspect. A plant is not a drug, even if it contains the active ingredients of a drug. You would consider the taxane chemicals used in chemotherapy to be drugs, right? Yet you'd never refer to the yew plant as a drug, even though it is the source of the taxanes. You consider aspirin to be a drug, but not the white willow that asprin comes from. And you would not consider potatoes to be a poison, yet their sprouts contain solanine, which is very poisonous. Many rose family fruits like peaches and apples have cyanide in their seeds...you see where I'm going with this.
I'm not trying to poo-poo it, I'm seriously saying that, while THC is certainty a drug, the cannabis plant itself really shouldn't be considered a drug, and beyond the pragmatic necessities that result from the THC, like don't toke & drive or don't smoke it around anyone else (pragmatic aspects which could very easily apply to any of the other plants if people liked burning foxglove or whatever), it really shouldn't be treated like a drug, at least not to the degree that it is now anyway.
Even if the theories are wrong, reducing green-house emissions (etc) won't hurt anything but the pocket book.
I think the problem is that that is the wrong approach. So many of the greenie eco-nuts seem to have this mindset that helping the environment means hurting ourselves, and that's where the problems start. Check it out:
We improve our energy grid with nuclear energy. We use the newest models, the ones that recycle the 'waste,' the only thing it releases into the enviroment is steam. That cuts out all the nasty of coal. Meanwhile, we research solar to make it more usable than it is now. That makes energy cheaper, which helps manufacturing ect. and improves the economy.
We really need to develop an alternative to oil. Either hydrogen power, or a biofuel, and not corn, something decent, like desert based enclosed algae farms. Once a suitable solution is found, we put it into mass production. This cuts off the huge amounts of money we send to foreign oil sources, and if it works well enough, cuts the cost of travel & shipping, and may even provide an export, possibly cuts off terrorism funding, which really improves the economy.
We improve our agriculture. We diversify our crops, do improvement work to breed commercially viable species of new crops, which will reduce the amount of inputs that are needed to keep crops pest and disease free. We develop and grow more locally adapted varieties of traditional crops, and grow the new ones in the best possible areas. In both cases, use techniques like intercroping and crop rotation to further reduce the need for inputs like pesticides and fertilizers. In all cases, we develop new traits that can be inserted via genetic engineering to further reduce inputs and increase yields, as well as open up previously inariable land for cultivation. This lowers food prices, might even increase overall health, and improves the economy.
Certainty, of course, it must be stated that regulation must happen, but whether AGW is real or not, who wants to be breathing in smoke and drinking polluted water anyway? Again, rather than saying 'Waah, industry!' what we need to do is ask, 'How can we develop cost effective solutions to maintain air/water quality without a significant decrease in business?'
We need to get over this mindset that green technology and green lifestyles must by necessity hurt the economy. We don't need to go back to the caves, we need to go back to the labs. Green technology is good for the economy. Greenie technology, on the other hand, the feel good hippy-dippy stuff, that's another story, but if done right, there is no problem whatsoever. Everybody wins. If man is causing global warming, this is what we should do, and even if it isn't us, we should do this sort of stuff anyway. What we should do is clear. That there is a political controversy is just baffling.
I agree. I wasn't trying to play the appeal to nature card, nor was I attempting to suggest that marijuana is good for you. Dieffenbachia, castor bean, poison ivy, pokeweed, and mayapple are all plants that can mess you up good (although many people grow the first two as an ornamental and some like to eat the last two and no one wants any of them banned). My point was that it's just a plant, and I really don't think that any plant should be illegal, at least not for the reason that marijuana is. A horribly invasive or disease spreading plant, maybe, but not because someone out there wants to smoke it. If people, for whatever stupid reason, started smoking sticks on fire or any of the other thousands of toxic plants, sure, it'd hurt or kill them, but that still doesn't mean the plant itself should be outlawed.
And let me fix that for you.
Ah, the war on some drugs and a friggin' plant and the American people!
I've never heard of it before, but I don't doubt that the journal is legit, just that I don't recall seeing any meaningful peer review process for that particular piece (although I could be wrong here). However, the only things I've read about if from others (such as the French High Council of Biotechnology, European Food Safety Authority, and the Food Standards Australia New Zealand, among some moderately well known individuals) had nothing good to say. Bad stuff does wind up in good journals (as I said, the Wakefield study is a prime example). What they propose is plausible, that the chemicals used cause damage, however, the study still wasn't too hot. I can accept Round-Up causing the problems, I can even accept certain GMOs causing problems (here's two that did), but it won't be this study that convinces me of either. Comparing the Monsanto corn with regular corn, not much of a difference. It reminds me of the Failure to Yield report, which based it's premise (that GMOs have lower yield than non-GMO counterparts) on data showing an increase in yield!
To be fair, apparently the guys who did the study had to fight and claw to get the data they used for it from Monsanto, and that does highlight a lack of transparency which is not very desirable at all, but nonetheless, that doesn't mean that there is enough information to support their premise, and as you say, there certainty isn't justification to have this applied to all the other genetically engineered rice, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, alfalfa, soybeans, papayas, ect. out there, which it undoubtedly will be.
This is a highly politicized issue (alas), and these things seem to come and go. I know I've seen the 'proof' that GMOs are dangerous before that study, and I don't doubt I'll see it again. When one of them sticks, when the WHO takes notice, when there is some really good strong evidence, when my horticulture professors are running around going "Holy moly look at this!" I'll give it more heed. In the mean time, I remain unimpressed.