A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health
From the Abstract published in 2009...
"We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn."..... This is what you are saying - that the damage could be from the pesticide residue..
But you dismiss the possibility of the the effects being from the genetic modifications, and the scientist doing this study don't. .
Instead they close the by abstract saying...
"In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded."
Toxins produced by and applied to GMOs are already found in most North American human blood samples including fetal blood of those consuming typical diets. This is an experiment without fully informed participants. I say experiment, because it's happening to us without any conclusive safety data.
We're getting more and more powerful genetic analysis tools and longitudinal sample sets are of course more available with time.
My point is: Don't be dismissive. Keep an open mind. Be a good scientist.
The data isn't in yet and you know it.
I reccommend trying out scholar.google.com with two Greasemonkey scripts: "Google scholar citation explorer" and if you don't have journal access (get it via your local libray site?) try "Google scholar immediately available highlighter".
Keywords: GMO, toxicity, GM corn, rat, NK 603, MON 810, MON 863
I want to give some context for the huge dollar numbers so common in political and economic discussions.
It would only cost $200 billion a year to end abject poverty worldwide. (UN, Jeffrey Sachs)
If everyone on earth had food, clothes, shelter and clean water - what would that do for security, innovation, economics, the environment and human rights? Those are big election issues, right?
Let's compare that $200 billion to some other things that are important in politics, apparently many, many times more important than ending abject poverty if money is our measure. Lets start with tax havens for the top few percent who receive our tax dollars via their ownership of the corporations which are recipients of government contracts, and in particular the military-industrial corporations whose private contractors receive a huge percentage of the military budget. For example prime intelligence contracts worth over $50 billion went over 70% to private contractors and in intelligence there are now more private than public employees.
The ultra rich hide over $20 trillion in offshore tax haven accounts while American minimum wage buys less than it did in 1968 and one in six families in the USA with children are extremely food insecure, lacking adequate nutrition at least once a year. The "job creators" don't use profits to create jobs, pay more or provide more benefits for workers. Instead they buy companies, combine them, and fire the duplicate workers. The ultra rich buy votes in Congress with their vast wealth too. Go see the correlation of Congress member's votes with donations made to their campaigns at maplight.org. Both parties are corrupt. The best analysis I've seen of Romney's economic plan done by MIT shows households making under $250,000 will on average pay $500 more in taxes, but the rich will pay less. Obama isn't much better. Neither candidate will do anything here.
The USA military budget is at least $500 billion a year not counting Iraq, Afghanistan, Veterans benefits, States spending or interest on past wars. It's over $1 trillion if you count that stuff. Private contractors get a huge cut. Americans are out of work, but for every billion dollars we spend on the military we lose from 5,000 to 15,000 jobs compared to spending the money on green jobs, health or education. Even just cutting the military budget and giving the money back to the taxpayers creates more jobs than spending it on the military. That's because the military isn't very labor intensive per dollar compared to other jobs. Go check my numbers, I'm low balling. The jobs numbers are from the Department of Labor, analysis by the PERI Institute. Neither candidate will do anything here.
The fossil fuel companies own over 2,795 GT of carbon assets worth $27 trillion at current market rates, but we can only burn about 565 GT more if we want an 80% chance of staying under 2.0C or 3.6F increase in global mean surface temperature over the next century. The Canadian Alberta Tar Sands contain more than 200 GT. Yet Exxon alone spends $37 billion a year or $100 million dollars a day, looking for more. Neither candidate will do anything here. Again I am low-balling, not counting coal oil or shale oil assets.
Both candidates are pro-torture, pro-warrantless spying, pro-secret prisons, pro-assassinate American citizens without trial, pro-indefinite detention, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-privatize profits and socialize risk, pro-drone, pro-WTO-WIPO-WorldBank-IMF, anti-poor, anti-labor, anti-drug, anti-free speech (zones?), anti-American motherfuckers. And that's just the start of the list.
Check my numbers using scholar.google.com
Fucking sociopaths.
So what to do? What to do?
For the citizen looking for change, four boxes are available: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please consider order of use carefully!
Since we're discussing box 1 and 2 here... what to do? "white box" and "priority voting"... google the terms...
I always liked John Wheeler and his "many worlds" interpretation as opposed to the Copenhagen model where you have to have an observer to collapse the wave function. Wheelers interpretation is simpler since you don't have to try to explain what's different about the atoms of an observer compared to other atoms that for some reason don't collapse the wave.
In the many worlds interpretation the universe splits into more universes, each one is a possible wave function solution. People don't like the idea of infinite real universes though.
John Young from Cryptome.org once applied for a Chrysler Award for political innovation or some such thing. It went something like this:
Anonymous money means you can create an assasination betting pool where people bet on the date of the assasination of a politician (or anybody). The assasin is most likely to win the pool. The pool might grow larger when one makes an unpopular decision, therefore decisions might become more democratic because of the increased risk of assasination as the pool grows.
Couple that with drone crowdsourcing and we could democratize assasination!
Think of the possibilities...
Politicians. CEO's. Lawyers. Reuters journalsists. Makers of Inconvenient Map Apps. Hippies and so on! Fox News whipping up the nation into a doubleplusgood 3-minute Hate with a side of a drone controlling frenzy. We'll need drone Republics to protect against the tyrany of the majority! And flooding attacks... and... and... I know... I know... I'm a bit twisted!/sickhumor
Whenever I hear giant numbers for budgets I like to compare them to other things to know what they mean. A good comparison is one that everyone or almost everyone can relate to. I like to use the cost to raise everyone on earth out of extreme poverty, which means clean water, food, clothes and shelter.
Ending extreme poverty would cost less than $200 billion each year.
(source: Jeffrey Sachs - The end of poverty)
The UN has similiar numbers from the millenium goals.
The United States military budget is $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. $500 billion doesn't count the middle east wars, interest on war debt, veterans benefits or spending by the States.)
Plus a recent analysis of Deptartment of Labor Statistics by the PERI institute shows that for every billion dollars that we spend on the military we LOSE from 5,000 to 15,000 jobs compared to spending the money on green jobs, hwalth or education. That's because the military isn't very labor intensive. It takes more people to teach effectively than to kill effectively.
Anyway, remember it only costs $200 billion to end extreme poverty globally. Think about that next time you hear a big budget item come up.
I'm off topic I know. Context matters. And for those of you who think "So what? Congress will never go for military cuts." go watch Lawrence Lessig talk about "How money corrupts Congress, and a plan to stop it."
I'd bet Teslas footprint overall as a corporation and for each model of car is not even close to sustainable.
I'd like to see self driving Aptera style cars for personal and public transit with auto train formation and so on. Oh yeh... plus backing up the grid.
Our pattern recognition abilities are still better than computers, although the gap is closing. Much of our pattern recognition capabilities are not conscious but can be utilized anyway.
I think most people mean the 90% we "don't use" is part of our mind that is not conscious. That's pretty accurate in a way.
There's a good BBC Horizon episode called "Out of Control" How Big is the Unconscious Mind? It gives some awesome examples of harnessing the power of our unconscious mind.
One intriguing example is using a person wired up to measure brain response to identify objects of interest to the military in satelite imagery. These are very high resolution images and take a long time to analyze using normal means. But you can use the pattern recognition powers of the unconscious mind to speed up the process without compromising accuracy. One image is cut up into many smaller images and these are then shown in rapid sucession to the analyst. Some images trigger neural patterns which are associated with interest, object recognition and so on. These images are then set aside and further analyzed using traditional methods including brute force human scanning of the images. Accuracy stays good and output is increased.
Oh yeh... a weird thing about breathing is that it's the only autonomic function that is fully wired with somatic nervous control too. Our breath works unconsciously but unlike other autonomic functions like heartbeat and so on it can be consciously controlled without lots of practice. This can be used to practicle advantage. By using the breath as an object of attention during meditation and by consciously controlling our breathing we can help to reprogram the autonomic functions of our bodies. This happens because both sets of nerves are firing together (the somatic and the autonomic) so the autonomic system is trained too.
Isn't the core belief of Christianity some kind of "people can come back from the dead" thing?
Jewish zombie anyone? Christianity is irrational if it holds this belief at it's core.
Along these lines a new study adds up the return on energy for deploying sustainable power globally. It claims that "rapid deployment of low-emission energy systems can do little to diminish the climate impacts in the first half of this century. Conservation, wind, solar, nuclear power, and possibly carbon capture and storage appear to be able to achieve substantial climate benefits in the second half of this century; however, natural gas cannot." Myhrvold, N P, and K Caldeira. âoeGreenhouse Gases, Climate Change and the Transition from Coal to Low-carbon Electricity.â Environmental Research Letters 7.1 (2012): 014019. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.
One day I was reading James Bamford's book "The Puzzle Palace" which was all about the NSA and crypto stuff. I was sitting on the back porch of The Last Exit on Brooklyn street coffeehouse reading when I got to a chapter about a guy who had made an encrypting phone out of cheap off the shelf components. He called it the phasorphone. When he applied for a patent the NSA seized it and gagged him (that means he was threatened and coerced to not talk about it). I pointed at the name in the book and held it up to the guy across the table from me and said "Carl, is this you?". He told me a bit about it and said the NSA kept track of him all the time after that. Department of Defense
DIRECTIVE
NUMBER 5535.02
March 24, 2010
USD(P)
SUBJECT:
DoD Patent Security Review Process
You know, national security and all that. Because the light of democracy is so weak that it can only succeed if veiled by the cloak of secrecy, right?
Luis von Ahn says that past collavorations like putting men on the moon and the A-Bomb project were all done by about 100,000 because tech constraints limited effective organization to groups of that size. But projects like reCAPTCHA, DuoLingo and Wikipedia use massive human computation and organize millions of people. We'll see many more massivly co-ordinated projects and the ideal size of organizations for each kind of project will become more clear as the number of these projects increases.
Part of the FLA thing is anonymous channels for employee reporting of conditions and compliance. The FLA is the real thing. If Apple is using them things will improve. Go watch the TED talk now...
I think John Young from Cryptome nominated someone or was nominated for the Chrysler Award for an anonymous assassination pool where people would bet on the day an assassination would happen, presumably because they are the killer. Then they win the pool. Cryptoanarchy bitcoiny like idea y'know?
Scalable, sustainable community creation starting from family farm plots all the way up to a village bank, training new leaders and then replicating to the next community. Then NURU leaves... you should check them out. Your interests overlap.
Excellent when done right. Ask both of the founders of Google.
My wife's a teacher. "Three Tree Montessori" in my area does it right. My three year old is fucking awesome! When I went to observe there I did it through one way glass. The teachers do not know if they are being observed. This detail made an impression on me. Check it out. Highly recommended.
The odds of terror and government repression don't add up the same for personal risk. Terror is more random, but once you begin to be a real threat to the government (say as an effective organizer) your odds are way above average for becoming the victim of repression.
Robots are coming on fast in the military. Ethical robotics in in it's infancy while full autonomy for mass killing looms large. The argument that the military won't shoot it's own citizens is dying fast. See "Wired for war" for stats.
Instant runoff elections where you rank your candidates in order of preference. If number one is eliminated you don't lose your vote. It goes to the next candidate on your list. This enables people to vote for a third party without risk of swinging an election since voting for a third party candidate doesn't lessen the chances of victory for the second choice candidate when the first choice is eliminated.
Slashdot Mirror
A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health
From the Abstract published in 2009 ...
"We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn.". .... This is what you are saying - that the damage could be from the pesticide residue..
But you dismiss the possibility of the the effects being from the genetic modifications, and the scientist doing this study don't. .
Instead they close the by abstract saying ...
"In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded."
Toxins produced by and applied to GMOs are already found in most North American human blood samples including fetal blood of those consuming typical diets. This is an experiment without fully informed participants. I say experiment, because it's happening to us without any conclusive safety data.
We're getting more and more powerful genetic analysis tools and longitudinal sample sets are of course more available with time.
My point is: Don't be dismissive. Keep an open mind. Be a good scientist.
The data isn't in yet and you know it.
I reccommend trying out scholar.google.com with two Greasemonkey scripts: "Google scholar citation explorer" and if you don't have journal access (get it via your local libray site?) try "Google scholar immediately available highlighter".
Keywords: GMO, toxicity, GM corn, rat, NK 603, MON 810, MON 863
I want to give some context for the huge dollar numbers so common in political and economic discussions.
It would only cost $200 billion a year to end abject poverty worldwide. (UN, Jeffrey Sachs)
If everyone on earth had food, clothes, shelter and clean water - what would that do for security, innovation, economics, the environment and human rights?
Those are big election issues, right?
Let's compare that $200 billion to some other things that are important in politics, apparently many, many times more important than ending abject poverty if money is our measure. Lets start with tax havens for the top few percent who receive our tax dollars via their ownership of the corporations which are recipients of government contracts, and in particular the military-industrial corporations whose private contractors receive a huge percentage of the military budget. For example prime intelligence contracts worth over $50 billion went over 70% to private contractors and in intelligence there are now more private than public employees.
The ultra rich hide over $20 trillion in offshore tax haven accounts while American minimum wage buys less than it did in 1968 and one in six families in the USA with children are extremely food insecure, lacking adequate nutrition at least once a year. The "job creators" don't use profits to create jobs, pay more or provide more benefits for workers. Instead they buy companies, combine them, and fire the duplicate workers. The ultra rich buy votes in Congress with their vast wealth too. Go see the correlation of Congress member's votes with donations made to their campaigns at maplight.org. Both parties are corrupt. The best analysis I've seen of Romney's economic plan done by MIT shows households making under $250,000 will on average pay $500 more in taxes, but the rich will pay less. Obama isn't much better. Neither candidate will do anything here.
The USA military budget is at least $500 billion a year not counting Iraq, Afghanistan, Veterans benefits, States spending or interest on past wars. It's over $1 trillion if you count that stuff. Private contractors get a huge cut. Americans are out of work, but for every billion dollars we spend on the military we lose from 5,000 to 15,000 jobs compared to spending the money on green jobs, health or education. Even just cutting the military budget and giving the money back to the taxpayers creates more jobs than spending it on the military. That's because the military isn't very labor intensive per dollar compared to other jobs. Go check my numbers, I'm low balling. The jobs numbers are from the Department of Labor, analysis by the PERI Institute. Neither candidate will do anything here.
The fossil fuel companies own over 2,795 GT of carbon assets worth $27 trillion at current market rates, but we can only burn about 565 GT more if we want an 80% chance of staying under 2.0C or 3.6F increase in global mean surface temperature over the next century. The Canadian Alberta Tar Sands contain more than 200 GT. Yet Exxon alone spends $37 billion a year or $100 million dollars a day, looking for more. Neither candidate will do anything here. Again I am low-balling, not counting coal oil or shale oil assets.
Both candidates are pro-torture, pro-warrantless spying, pro-secret prisons, pro-assassinate American citizens without trial, pro-indefinite detention, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-privatize profits and socialize risk, pro-drone, pro-WTO-WIPO-WorldBank-IMF, anti-poor, anti-labor, anti-drug, anti-free speech (zones?), anti-American motherfuckers. And that's just the start of the list.
Check my numbers using scholar.google.com
Fucking sociopaths.
So what to do? What to do?
For the citizen looking for change, four boxes are available:
soap, ballot, jury and ammo.
Please consider order of use carefully!
Since we're discussing box 1 and 2 here ... what to do? ... google the terms ...
"white box" and "priority voting"
I always liked John Wheeler and his "many worlds" interpretation as opposed to the Copenhagen model where you have to have an observer to collapse the wave function. Wheelers interpretation is simpler since you don't have to try to explain what's different about the atoms of an observer compared to other atoms that for some reason don't collapse the wave.
In the many worlds interpretation the universe splits into more universes, each one is a possible wave function solution. People don't like the idea of infinite real universes though.
John Young from Cryptome.org once applied for a Chrysler Award for political innovation or some such thing. It went something like this:
Anonymous money means you can create an assasination betting pool where people bet on the date of the assasination of a politician (or anybody). The assasin is most likely to win the pool. The pool might grow larger when one makes an unpopular decision, therefore decisions might become more democratic because of the increased risk of assasination as the pool grows.
Couple that with drone crowdsourcing and we could democratize assasination!
Think of the possibilities ...
Politicians. CEO's. Lawyers. Reuters journalsists. Makers of Inconvenient Map Apps. Hippies and so on! Fox News whipping up the nation into a doubleplusgood 3-minute Hate with a side of a drone controlling frenzy. We'll need drone Republics to protect against the tyrany of the majority! And flooding attacks ... and ... and ... I know ... I know ... I'm a bit twisted! /sickhumor
Giant numbers should be presented in context.
Whenever I hear giant numbers for budgets I like to compare them to other things to know what they mean. A good comparison is one that everyone or almost everyone can relate to. I like to use the cost to raise everyone on earth out of extreme poverty, which means clean water, food, clothes and shelter.
Ending extreme poverty would cost less than $200 billion each year.
(source: Jeffrey Sachs - The end of poverty)
The UN has similiar numbers from the millenium goals.
The United States military budget is $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. $500 billion doesn't count the middle east wars, interest on war debt, veterans benefits or spending by the States.)
Plus a recent analysis of Deptartment of Labor Statistics by the PERI institute shows that for every billion dollars that we spend on the military we LOSE from 5,000 to 15,000 jobs compared to spending the money on green jobs, hwalth or education. That's because the military isn't very labor intensive. It takes more people to teach effectively than to kill effectively.
Anyway, remember it only costs $200 billion to end extreme poverty globally. Think about that next time you hear a big budget item come up.
I'm off topic I know. Context matters. And for those of you who think "So what? Congress will never go for military cuts." go watch Lawrence Lessig talk about "How money corrupts Congress, and a plan to stop it."
I'd bet Teslas footprint overall as a corporation and for each model of car is not even close to sustainable.
I'd like to see self driving Aptera style cars for personal and public transit with auto train formation and so on. Oh yeh ... plus backing up the grid.
The earth is wearing a goatse? That's one big asshat.
Our pattern recognition abilities are still better than computers, although the gap is closing. Much of our pattern recognition capabilities are not conscious but can be utilized anyway.
I think most people mean the 90% we "don't use" is part of our mind that is not conscious. That's pretty accurate in a way.
There's a good BBC Horizon episode called "Out of
Control" How Big is the Unconscious Mind? It gives some awesome examples of harnessing the power of our unconscious mind.
One intriguing example is using a person wired up to measure brain response to identify objects of interest to the military in satelite imagery. These are very high resolution images and take a long time to analyze using normal means. But you can use the pattern recognition powers of the unconscious mind to speed up the process without compromising accuracy. One image is cut up into many smaller images and these are then shown in rapid sucession to the analyst. Some images trigger neural patterns which are associated with interest, object recognition and so on. These images are then set aside and further analyzed using traditional methods including brute force human scanning of the images. Accuracy stays good and output is increased.
Cool huh?
Horizon magnet link:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:34619356B292593508809F809F313CE4C064FC9A&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com
and torrent:
http://torcache.net/torrent/22DA604A946D2E38C1076574447029393F90320E.torrent
Oh yeh ... a weird thing about breathing is that it's the only autonomic function that is fully wired with somatic nervous control too. Our breath works unconsciously but unlike other autonomic functions like heartbeat and so on it can be consciously controlled without lots of practice. This can be used to practicle advantage. By using the breath as an object of attention during meditation and by consciously controlling our breathing we can help to reprogram the autonomic functions of our bodies. This happens because both sets of nerves are firing together (the somatic and the autonomic) so the autonomic system is trained too.
maplight.org matches how politicians get paid by donors with how they vote and displays the correlations as nice graphics.
Cool ... Lessig thinks so too.
How to deal with this corruption?
Lawrence Lessig has a good idea about this:
search for his talk titled "How money corrupts Congress and a plan to stop it" on fora.tv and other sites.
Let's get this number in context with some other of democracies fundanmental goals shall we?
$175 billion a year to end global extreme poverty (Jeffery Sachs)
$500 billion a year US Military budget is a low estimate.
Hmmm ...
Isn't the core belief of Christianity some kind of "people can come back from the dead" thing? Jewish zombie anyone? Christianity is irrational if it holds this belief at it's core.
Along these lines a new study adds up the return on energy for deploying sustainable power globally. It claims that "rapid deployment of low-emission energy systems can do little to diminish the climate impacts in the first half of this century. Conservation, wind, solar, nuclear power, and possibly carbon capture and storage appear to be able to achieve substantial climate benefits in the second half of this century; however, natural gas cannot." Myhrvold, N P, and K Caldeira. âoeGreenhouse Gases, Climate Change and the Transition from Coal to Low-carbon Electricity.â Environmental Research Letters 7.1 (2012): 014019. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.
One day I was reading James Bamford's book "The Puzzle Palace" which was all about the NSA and crypto stuff. I was sitting on the back porch of The Last Exit on Brooklyn street coffeehouse reading when I got to a chapter about a guy who had made an encrypting phone out of cheap off the shelf components. He called it the phasorphone. When he applied for a patent the NSA seized it and gagged him (that means he was threatened and coerced to not talk about it). I pointed at the name in the book and held it up to the guy across the table from me and said "Carl, is this you?". He told me a bit about it and said the NSA kept track of him all the time after that. Department of Defense DIRECTIVE NUMBER 5535.02 March 24, 2010 USD(P) SUBJECT: DoD Patent Security Review Process You know, national security and all that. Because the light of democracy is so weak that it can only succeed if veiled by the cloak of secrecy, right?
Luis von Ahn says that past collavorations like putting men on the moon and the A-Bomb project were all done by about 100,000 because tech constraints limited effective organization to groups of that size. But projects like reCAPTCHA, DuoLingo and Wikipedia use massive human computation and organize millions of people. We'll see many more massivly co-ordinated projects and the ideal size of organizations for each kind of project will become more clear as the number of these projects increases.
If Orwell was right we wouldn't know it, but we do. Therefore Orwell wasn't right ... yet.
The first time I saw an ipod i thought. Where's the record button. Stallman is right. Right to read that is.
Part of the FLA thing is anonymous channels for employee reporting of conditions and compliance. The FLA is the real thing. If Apple is using them things will improve. Go watch the TED talk now ...
I think John Young from Cryptome nominated someone or was nominated for the Chrysler Award for an anonymous assassination pool where people would bet on the day an assassination would happen, presumably because they are the killer. Then they win the pool. Cryptoanarchy bitcoiny like idea y'know?
Scalable, sustainable community creation starting from family farm plots all the way up to a village bank, training new leaders and then replicating to the next community. Then NURU leaves ... you should check them out. Your interests overlap.
Excellent when done right. Ask both of the founders of Google. My wife's a teacher. "Three Tree Montessori" in my area does it right. My three year old is fucking awesome! When I went to observe there I did it through one way glass. The teachers do not know if they are being observed. This detail made an impression on me. Check it out. Highly recommended.
RSS over IRC with magnet links for the DHT. EZTV and some others to the RSS over IRC thing.
One of IBMs Watson designers said HAL in 2001 inspired him to get into computers and AI / Natural language stuff.
The odds of terror and government repression don't add up the same for personal risk. Terror is more random, but once you begin to be a real threat to the government (say as an effective organizer) your odds are way above average for becoming the victim of repression.
Robots are coming on fast in the military. Ethical robotics in in it's infancy while full autonomy for mass killing looms large. The argument that the military won't shoot it's own citizens is dying fast. See "Wired for war" for stats.
Instant runoff elections where you rank your candidates in order of preference. If number one is eliminated you don't lose your vote. It goes to the next candidate on your list. This enables people to vote for a third party without risk of swinging an election since voting for a third party candidate doesn't lessen the chances of victory for the second choice candidate when the first choice is eliminated.