truedelphi
truedelphi's JournalPolice in water cannon tank kill Turkish protesters by running them over
At least two people killed, and one in intensive care.
Video here at link:
http://intellihub.com/2013/06/02/turkish-police-run-over-crowds-of-protesters-with-large-tanks-warning-graphic-video/
Jackson Galaxy, Animal Planet's Cat Counselor
Is on tour with his new book. And there is this nice write up over at the Awl:
http://www.theawl.com/2013/05/cat-man-jackson-galaxy-on-famous-cats-dead-cats-and-being-a-cat-freak
Less Democracy in USA than in the UK - hacktivists receive
Wildly different sentences.
Jeremy Hammond might receive as much as 42 years in prison, here in the USA. Meanwhile young men guilty of the same crime will do less than two years, as Great Britain is not as tough on hacktivists.
From the article:
The acts the English activists plead guilty to—gaining access to and disseminating information from corporate and government websites—mirror the charges facing Hammond. Hammond is accused of publicizing internal emails of the private spying agency Stratfor through the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. The emails contained many revelations, including Stratfor’s spying on Bhopal activists at the behest of Dow Chemical and monitoring Occupy Wall Street for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
(SniP
“Jeremy is a gifted person who cares deeply about the world,” said Hammond’s twin brother, Jason Hammond. “My family is shocked at the treatment he has received by the Department of Justice. Jeremy is accused of committing a non-violent crime yet we are forbidden from seeing him or speaking to him on the phone, he has been denied bail and he’s facing what amounts to a life sentence.”
twitterjump
For more information on Jeremy Hammond please visit http://FreeJeremy.net. Press requests should be directed to Abi Hassen of the Jeremy Hammond Support Committee at Press@FreeJeremy.net
Re: May 25th 2013 MAM- Looking at the "science" behind the safety claims of Gm seeds.
Basically there is no science behind the safety claims of GM seeds. One of Bill Clinton's right hand men, one Mike Taylor, decided that the seeds were the nutritional "equivalent" of conventional crops, and he made this decision based on this on zero decades of research.
However, the lack of science behind the Taylor Doctrine has not hurt Mr Taylor's career - he has gone from the Clinton Administration back into the folds of the GM industry, and from there he was plucked for the position of the head of the FDA by Barack "Change and Hope" Obama. And it seems to be only us real activists that are concerned that the Taylor Doctrine is the only statement needed by our government to allow the GM foods and seeds industry the permission to go ahead. We have not witnessed such a blanket conformity of "science based on proclamation" since the days of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and their supreme notion of the sun revolving around the earth.
The GM spokespeople also claim that not a single person has ever been harmed by GM foods. However that is wrong.
In fact, in the late Nineteen Eighties, over 35 people world wide lost their lives to a rare blood disorder that came about after they had their daily tablet of L-Tryptophan, a supplement, that had been grown on a GM medium. Also, hundreds if not thousands were made ill. To conceal the fact that it was the Gm processes that were at fault for these deaths, our government went into hysteria mode over the "lethality" of L-Tryptophan. Dozens of nutritional supplement houses were raided, with products carried off, and inventories destroyed. As well as the fortunes and lives of the business owners. And again, no mention being made of the fact that had the Japanese L-Tryptophan manufacturer not used a GM medium, none of this would have happened. (L-tryptophan-induced Eosinophilia Myalgia syndrome was first recognized in October l989.)
Scientists and researchers across the world laugh at American science. They realize that few US scientists now design their research studies in accordance with the International Protocols used by the rest of the world. In the USA, researchers are subtly and not so subtly forced to cherry pick their data, design tests that have little to do with the methods of consumption relating to the product being tested (Monsanto's feeding study of dogs using glyphosate as a food, when glyphosate is ingested by mammals through inhalation, not in the alimentary canal and its organs, is one example of deliberately misleading test design.)
The media is part of this. I remember after the Blue Ribbon Panel headed by John Froines decided that MTBE the gas additive had no benefits and only risk, in terms of its safety, Immediately the media began to flood daily newspapers touting "newer studies" that showed that MTBE was harmless. Of course, these were all industry studies, and the scientists did not possess the integrity or decent design of study that Froines and his colleagues had used to determine the product's risks and dangers.
This creates the idea inside the minds of the public that "newer" means more accurate. That is a fallacious notion.
Currently the GM companies are not even allowing outside investigators to do research - you may peruse this article on what is going on with researching of the GM seeds by reading the following article:
L-tryptophan-induced Eosinophilia Myalgia syndrome was first recognized in October l989.
Here is a mainstream media article that raises some of the concerns I personally have:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research
“It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”
The perception among indie researchers is that unless the study says what the GM forces need the article to say, it will never be published inside the peer reviewed American science journals where the supposed truths about current day matters are to be discussed freely. In my days as an anti-pesticide and anti-herbicide indie reporter, 1997 to 2005, I would be confounded by the fact that when an indie scientist did a survey of some problem, if the results were unfavorable to the product, that product's manufacturers would immediately exclaim that the study was meaningless because it was too small a study. What especially confounded me was this fact: Not once did anyone in industry ever say: "This brings up a serious concern, and although the data was far too small to be accepted, we want to look into the matter by enlarging on this study."
That struck me as bizarre. Many scientific inquiries begin with individual observations. When five or six years back, our government agencies began receiving reports from people over the fact that individual pet owners were witnessing their beloved pets dying in record numbers, those individual observations brought about the inspection of the ingredients of Chinese produced pet foods, and China was forced to change its pet food formula. This is one proof that "anecdotal stories" count. Edward Jenner's idea for the smallpox vaccine came about after he witnessed the phenomena of milk maids escaping smallpox if they had first been infected with cowpox. His entire data base was fewer than 48 people.
Over a decade ago, the editor of New England Journal of Medicine ran an editorial in which they laid out that the Journal needed to relax its considerations of independence in the arena of decisions over what to publish. In the seventies and even the eighties and nineties, the NEJM could decide that too much industry influence existed in terms of study's funding and results - but that was now such an ubiquitous situation that there was noway the Journal could continue to exist unless it started to publish studies that had been totally funded and totally influenced by Big Money from Big Industry. This is one of the reasons why the rest of the world's scientists no longer take us serious.
I created this bit of writing as "information ammunition" for anyone attending the May 25th March Against Monsanto. Be there or be square.
A question about Angelina Jolie and Double Mastectomies
I have a question... First let me relate my experiences as a caretaker.
As a private duty Certified Nursing Assistant, I have taken care of several women after they had a single mastectomy.
I think it is fair to say that even when only one breast is removed, there is a quite an amount of suffering involved. The armpit area and the shoulder muscles that allow a person to use the arm on the same side of the body are too sore, swollen and disabled to allow only the most limited mobility for some time. (Can't remember if it took the women three to six weeks, but it was quite a while.)
On edit: Please make note of response number two below, as marybourg stated that when a woman is cancer free at the time of the operation, the lymph nodes are not removed and arm mobility may remain normal.
Our hospital system is so broken that women were released far before they should have been. Often they are instructed that they can, within 36 hours of the surgery, be at home, to feed themselves, bathe themselves, get to the bathroom, etc, change the bandages and then they are expected to do their own wound care!
Those women who were aware of the body's physiology,usually nurses or doctors themselves, would hire me to come in and feed them, bathe them and do the wound care. As well as help with normal household activities. (Pay the utility bill, handle guests arriving, and all of the may daily activities that life involves.)
There are also expected side effects. Cellulitis is one such illness that can afflict a person whose breasts are removed. Sometimes cellulitis lasts for the rest of the person's life! There is also the danger of staph infections, or complications from the anesthesia that was used. All of these things are extremely important factors. And they all need to be considered.
Why is it that Angelina doesn't talk about any of this? She only discusses her doing the reactive type of procedure she did, and no mention of any of the rest of it. I have no idea what it even costs to do this surgery - but I am sure it is not inexpensive. (Even though the surgeons and hospitals have already removed themselves from the "after care" part of the situation, it is still expensive!)
Jolie and Pitt have full time nannies, so I don't know if she would even need to consider hiring on private duty nursing help. I imagine that she also has premium health care,w ith the top surgeons who specialize in this available to her, 24/7.
Most of us don't have those resources.
I don't want to comment on my personal "take" on the wisdom or lack of wisdom in her doing this. I am not someone with an 85% chance of getting breast cancer. Nor am I feeling under the gun, with emotions surging about me, as she must have been. But I do want to point out some considerations that the "Hollywood-ization" for this procedure ignores.
Please make sure you can handle not using BOTH ARMS for a period of time. Make sure you fully understand your insurance policy and what to expect in terms of a hospital stay, and who will and how will the policy cover at home care, if at all. Please make sure you won't lose your home, or your job or your life, if you go down this road. Do avail yourself of any and all internet discussion groups; I know Yahoo used to have some decent discussion groups on various women's health problems, that gave me a lot of advice on how to obtain a decent surgeon, how to participate in the optimum situation for my health care, when I was thinking I might have another serious health problem. (Not breast related.) That was about ten years ago - I can only imagine that support groups on the web have expanded since then.
Mr President, please don't consider re-scheduling marijuana and
Please don't consider any other methods of legalizing the substance on the Federal Government level.
I lie awake at night worrying about the Big Pharmaceutical companies. How will they ever re-coup the costs of patenting of various cannibanoids? If the Federal Government allows medical marijuana or marijuana itself to be re-scheduled, or taken off the schedule completely, does this mean that many of the top executives at Big Pharma companies will go to bed hungry? Or heavens perish the thought, they might have to go on food stamps, or the executives of those corporations over in the UK might need to start making use of Britain dwindling social safety net. How unfair to those hard working people would that be?
(Link: http://www.theweedblog.com/pharmaceutical-companies-rush-to-patent-medical-marijuana/!
So perish that thought!
My concerns also extend to the executives of the many Big Privatization of California prison efforts. How will we keep so many of the prison cells filled to overflow, if we stop having the DOJ, DEA, and ICE come into California and bust people who are growing their own?
I also worry about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has had to kick this issue around so many times that I think the issue has consumed far too much of their time. They have such contradictory legalese to consider regarding the issue that one year they make one decision, and the next year yet another.
Here is a topic that came up at DU about all the various in's and out's of the current legal situation:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2112283#2112576
And here is a link to Huff Po, from back in 2009, where so many folks celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling on Medical Marijuana, which gave some sanctity to the notion that state's rights on this matter trumped the Federal Government's rights:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/18/supreme-court-hands-medic_n_204681.html
President Obama, just because almost every poll taken in the last nine months shows that 60 to 70 percent of the populace of the USA wants this drug de-criminalized or taken off the Federal Scheduling of Drugs completely, doesn't mean you need to listen to that segment of the population. You were offered the Big Bucks you needed for your election by your Corporate Friends, who hold Corporate Personhood. Please don't feel that in the Twentieth First Century, mere human beings need to be considered!
Instead keep doing as you are doing already. Keep failing to mention th e unique ability of the Attorney General ( a person who is appointed by you!) to be able to take marijuana off the Federal Drug Schedule.Keep suggesting again and again that there is not any way for the Executive Branch to do anything about the medical marijuana issue.
Instead, keep insisting that it is up to Congress. After all, you then are able to rest secure in the knowledge that Congress has only Three Percent of its population approving of legalizing or de-criminalizing the substance. By the time that Congress becomes liberal enough to do this, the folks at the Big Pharma and Big Private Prison Corporations will be able to continue to plague the rest of us into obtaining prescriptions for our medical needs, or else risking the inside of a jail cell.
I hate my freedom, Mr President, so keep doing as you are doing!
For those who care about the abandonned pets =
Really perky tune, to remind us of our better halves who languish behind bars, when all it would take is our love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vub70H_tTIk
My quick, quick take on Benghazi -
If the Federal Government has the ability to "help" individual counties inside the USA receive the $ 370,000 Bearcat Security vehicles, like the one discussed in this article, then there is NO EXCUSE for not having ample protection for its diplomats who serve the nation in dangerous places abroad.
No excuse!
Someone needs to serve as Chief Administrator to see that our military might is not wasted, but put to actual use. We need a Neil Barofsky of Defense, who would provide oversight to what vehicles and security items are going where. (Barofsky, through appointment by Obama, did oversight over the 700 Billion dollar TARP.)
But giving a county like Marin,. with its traffic congested roads, this monstrosity of a security item is a sheer waste of taxpayer money.
http://www.marinij.com/ci_22575612/marin-buy-370-000-armored-truck-terrorism-strike
While we all fuss about guns, our food supply is about to kill us!
If you grew up during the Vietnam era, you remember Agent Orange. Agent Orange was the notorious herbicide that was stored in orange barrels. Once it was transported to Vietnam, it was then used as a defoliant, and aerially dispersed above the heads of everyone residing in Vietnam. There were several reasons for defoliating that nation: one reason was to disrupt their food supply, in violation of the Geneva Convention. The second reason was so that the massive jungle ground cover that hid the Troops of the Viet Cong would be removed.
The unexpected result was that there were millions of miscarriages, and millions of babies who were born affected by some type of birth defect. Of course, the majority of these health travesties were endured by the people of Vietnam; however, due to the high level of service personnel from the USA's military serving in or near Vietnam during those years, some of the problems came home to affect us here.
Now a new threat from Agent Orange is upon us. With so much of our soy, corn and rice grown in this nation utilizing the RoundUp ready seeds that are genetically modified to withstand applications of RoundUp, experts watching the situation were predicting that the very weeds the RoundUp herbicde should remove would start to show resistance to the pesticide. Even back in the early 2000's, there were reports coming from Canadian farmers that a SuperWeed was resulting from the RoundUp applications, and that these weeds needed to be removed manually or else with a more powerful herbicide.
Reports now are coming out that our governing agencies will be approving gent Orange for use on our food crops. Since early march, 2013, activists concerned about the safety of our food supply have been giving us some heads up on what is to come. I offer up two citations, one from an "alt News" source, and one from "Business Week," a Main$tream news source:
Source One:
http://www.anh-usa.org/agent-orange-on-our-crops/
One of the two active ingredients that made up Agent Orange is 2,4-D. Despite what Agent Orange did to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, not to mention a generation of American soldiers, 2,4-D is currently the most widely used herbicide in the world, and the third most commonly used in North America. But apparently we aren’t using this poison enough. By using seeds engineered to withstand it, much more can be applied to our soil and crops.
One of the biggest reasons for genetic engineering of crops is that the harsh poisons used to kill weeds also tend to kill the crops themselves. Scientists genetically alter the crops’ DNA so they will resist damage from the herbicides. Most of the attention to date has been on the creation of Roundup Ready seeds—that is, seeds and crops that can withstand the herbicide Roundup from Monsanto. According to USDA figures, 94 percent of soybeans and more than 70 percent of corn and cotton planted in the US contain the Roundup-resistant gene.
Not at all surprisingly, weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to Roundup, creating “superweeds” which are “galloping through the Midwest.” So Dow AgroScience created a strain of corn that has been genetically engineered to withstand a different class of herbicides—those containing 2,4-D, a known carcinogen.
####
Source Two:
On March 3, 2013, main$tream news source "Business Week" reported on the situation with need to fast track approval of Agent Orange for use on crops that have weeds that are now immune/resistant to RoundUp. Yes, you will indeed discover that Obama's USDA wants to fast-track the applications for Monsanto and Dow Chemical genetically engineered crops, reducing the process from an average of three years to either thirteen or sixteen months. Written from a business standpoint, as in: ‘Watch those stocks rise in value!’, the verbiage is nonetheless startling, as the piece implies that the crops will be approved. They’re right, they will:
“The move to speed biotech approvals comes as seed-makers develop new technologies aimed at slowing the spread of so- called superweeds that are no longer killed by Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Half of the 12 plants designated for faster review by the USDA are herbicide-tolerant crops made by Monsanto, Dow, DuPont Co., Bayer AG (BAYN) and BASF AG.
“Farmers needs technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,” Kenda Resler-Friend, a spokeswoman for Midland, Michigan-based Dow, said today in a telephone interview. “The USDA realizes that the longer farmers have to wait, the longer the weeds are going to get a head start.”
Well here are my reasons for hating Monsanto:
One: They lied through their teeth many years ago to secure the licensing needed by the US EPA, in order to be able to sell RoundUp over the counter to unsuspecting people in this country.
How did they lie? They claimed their product was 41% glyphosate, 15% Polyoxyethalenamine, (POEA) and the rest ws water. In actual fact, there was formaldehyde in the mix. How do I know this? Back when I was an indie reporter, I was contacted by Bob Simon, PhD, who spent many years as a forensic witness on behalf of families suing Monsanto.
Simon found this out when the court forced Monsanto to reveal its actual and secret paperwork on the composition of the substance. What troubled Simon at the time he realized that formaldehyde was in the mix, it was like a "Duh!" moment for him. After all, glyphosate by itself is in cake form, and some kind of aldehyde is necessary for the cake to be able to become spray-able.
This means that for several decades people were exposed to formaldehyde. One result of this is countless cases of Multiple Sclerosis. Formaldehyde ranks in the TOP TEN of most nasty chemicals, right after nuke radiation, benzene, mercury and then formaldehyde.
Since sometime in the 1990's, the formaldehyde has been replaced by a different aldheyde. We the Consumers in this nation need to upset the apple cart of the EPA licensing practices. There is no reason under the sun for the EPA to not run a gas spectrometry(GS) test against substances the Big Companies want to license. None. And the notion that the Big Companies need "proprietary control" and shouldn't have to tell the EPA what is inside their products is ridiculous - because any company that wants to know what is in the other company's product only has to run a GS scan of the product.
This is all done so that the Big Companies can continue to poison us. We pay for stuff that should be put inside expensive Super Fund containers and then shipped off to expensive Super Fund sites, but since the toxins are sold to us, our purchases are saving the companies a bundle,who then also profit from our doing this. Wonder why Febreeze, Glade etc is promoted so much? It is NOT so much because they want profits on these products - they want us to buy it so the benzene and formaldehyde in these products is not Super Funded by them!
Two: Activists who have looked into RoundUp have found out some rather painful truths about RoundUp. For one thing, the product can combine with your prescription meds so that the meds are taken into your body in a more serious manner than intended - much like how grapefruit juice increases the effects of certain meds. But your pharmacist will warn you not to combine such and such a prescription med with grapefruit juice. Few people are aware that they are harming themselves by being on certain meds while using RoundUp.
Three: In keeping with the above, people with celiac disease are upping their risk of having stomach cancers by about 4000 percent if they use RoundUp. My neighborhood lost one of its shining lights a few years ago. E was a ground keeper for a big country club that used RoundUp. It is as safe as table salt, his employer told him. No one explained to him that Roundup when used by a celiac patient is a deadly mix. He was diagnosed with late stage stomach cancer and dead within nine months! Oh well, this nation's "elected officials" are mostly in Monsanto's employ, so this will continue to happen til we wipe Monsanto off the face of the earth.
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