Political Cannibals: the end game

The two-party system is probably dying. Before you deplore me for celebrating, consider all the other ways we are played off against each other for profit. We are constantly asked to pick good guys and bad guys- in school cliques, in the NFL, in office politics, and in church.

The motto of our nation is E pluribus unum  (Latin for “Out of many, one”) for a very good reason. The ability of our diverse population to work together allowed us to be free of a colonial power, and become a prosperous “can do” nation.  Once social engineering began to exploit our differences to promote power and privilege, we lost our way.

“Why don’t you two fight?” might be a better motto for today’s America. So the next time someone encourages you to give your all for the team or the party, you might want to look at the menu- because these days we’re on it and the cannibals are sharpening their knives.

Co-operation is the basic survival skill, and if we lose it what else will matter? It’s time to overlook all the little things that make us different (and interesting), ignore distractions and gadgets, and stand up to manipulation. It takes real people to make a real democracy.

US food companies label GMOs on products for consumers overseas, but not for us…

Why Label?     JUSTLABELIT.org

Studies show that more than 90% of Americans support mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods (GMOs). Ever since GMOs entered the market 20 years ago, we’ve been kept in the dark about whether foods we feed our families contain GMOs. While our reasons for wanting to know what’s in our food may vary, what unifies us is the belief that it’s our right. Without labeling of GMOs, we cannot make informed choices about our food. The Just Label It campaign was created to advocate for the labeling of GMO foods.

Unlike most other developed countries – including 28 nations in the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia and China – the U.S. has no national law requiring labeling of genetically modified foods. Yet polls have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of Americans. As ABC News stated, “Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare.”

Vermont, Connecticut and Maine have already passed labeling laws and, in the past two years, more than 70 labeling bills or ballot initiatives were introduced across 30 states.  In response to these state efforts, legislation backed by big food and biotechnology corporations- dubbed the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act- has been introduced and seeks to halt labeling efforts.  The DARK Act would preempt all state labeling laws, make voluntary labeling the “solution” to consumer confusion, and create more barriers to mandating labeling.

How Roundup® Poisoned my Nature Reserve: A personal witness

Institute of Science in Society  09/17/2014    by Rosemary Mason MB ChB FRCA

A personal witness to the devastating demise of wild pollinators and other species as glyphosate herbicides increase in the environment   

In March 2006, UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) announced the closure of its wildlife research centres [1], a decision opposed by 99% of 1 327 stakeholders.  Monks Wood centre, which hosted BBC’s Spring Watch, pioneered work on DDT and pesticides in the 1960s, and more recently revealed how climate change is affecting wildlife, with spring arriving three weeks earlier. The research centres were also involved in assessing the impacts of GM (genetically modified) crops on wildlife, with findings contradicting industry claims that no harm would be caused.

In response to that and to the unexplained disappearance of birds and invertebrates (such as bumblebees, honeybees and other pollinators), we set aside one acre of the field next to our house in South Wales to make a chemical-free nature reserve.

Progress

To begin with we had considerable success. We photographed many insects that were clearly benefitting from wild flowers, often insignificant ones, which supplied nectar and pollen resources but which had been eliminated from many conventional arable fields. The reserve also provided larval food plants for several species of moths, butterflies and bush crickets.

In 2009, I had major surgery followed by radiotherapy. The work on the reserve diverted me from dark thoughts, and insomnia allowed me to make nocturnal visits around the reserve and adjacent fields to see speckled bush crickets in their most active periods. With a bat detector set at 40 kHz, a torch and recording device, I followed the ‘singing’ adult bush crickets and recorded the progress of their courtships. In fact ‘stridulation’ is a sound produced by the males rubbing a tooth-bearing left wing across a scraper on the right wing. Courtship and mating takes place at the highest point. It was amazing how many I heard and saw. The same frequency picked up the staccato discharge of pipistrelle bats performing their erratic aerobatics as they hunted insects along the hedge above my head. I would hear tawny owls calling to each other, such a haunting sound, and follow the voice with my ears, as the owl moved on silent wings between groups of trees.

After observations made during the summer of 2009, we published a photo-journal: Speckled Bush Crickets. Observations in a small nature reserve [2] (see Box 1). On 10 February 2010, Dr David Robinson, who is studying the behaviour and acoustics of Leptophyes punctatissima (Speckled Bush Crickets) at the Open University, said: “I think that it is probably the first time anybody has produced a book about a single species.” He gave a copy to Dr Judith Marshall, who is the British expert on grasshoppers and crickets at the Natural History Museum.

At the end of 2010, we published another photo-journal, The Year of the Bumblebee. Observations in a small nature reserve [3] (see Box 1). The United Nations had declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, to celebrate the diversity of life on earth.  It also marked the year by which 200 countries had promised to halt biodiversity loss. In 2010 we set ourselves the task of identifying the six common types of bumblebees, their emergence, behaviour and the species of flower from which they took pollen and nectar.

Box 1

Extracts from photo-journals [2, 3] & other observations

Mating strategy in the female spider Araneus quadratus

“At fence post 22 on 16^thAugust 2010, I was lucky enough to witness and photograph the courtship and mating of Araneus quadratus, an orb web spider, in our 1-metre high hedge.” Spiders reconstruct their webs during the night. “An early morning photograph illuminated by a torch, showing the previous night’s work. The prey catching web of an orb web spider is amazingly intricate. It was much more complex than her courtship web, which looked as if it had been thrown together in a hurry! There are strong frame threads and radial threads, after which the spider lays down a temporary auxiliary spiral which she takes down as she constructs the sticky prey- catching spiral. This ends before the central hub, leaving a free zone.”

The first pollen of the year for the Bombus Terrestris March 5^th 2010

“She descended like a helicopter, feet first into a large, purple crocus flower and disappeared completely. Apart from a faint tremor of the petals you would have been unaware she was there if you hadn’t actually seen her go in. Some 5-10 s later she emerged head first over the threshold, liberally powdered with pollen and crawled out like a drunk, narcotised by the first decent meal of the year.”

 

Moulting in a Speckled Bush Cricket nymph, August 8^th 2009

“She sat with her right hind leg extended and braced against the leaf below with the left leg flexed and acting as a counterbalance. The forelegs grasped the shroud and the two mid legs were used as stabilisers. The external mouthparts, mandibles and palps were clearly visible and this time I could see the mouthparts moving. She had chosen a perfect day on which to perform her ecdysis. She and her other self were poised like ballet dancers caught in the spotlight of the sun, casting surreal shadows on the scabious leaf below. At the end of 16 minutes all that remained was a pair of tibia, still hooked by their tarsi to a trefoil leaf above. Presumably she must have mentally calculated that the nutritional gain from climbing up and unhooking them was hardly worth the effort.”

The Ladybird Ball

For two weeks in April 2010 we studied 7-spot ladybirds. They are remarkable predators and natural pest removers!  They steadily graze their way through aphids and mildew spores. We made counts three times a day; morning, afternoon and evening. During those periods they migrated from positions in the field during the day and usually gathered on shrubs in the western hedge in the early evening sunshine; field maple, hawthorn, blackthorn, hornbeam and hazel. Here they fed, rested and mated. Although they meet by accident, the factors that govern their behaviour (they are attracted by light and move against the force of gravity) meant that they climb upwards and are drawn to the same places. In those 2 weeks we counted 348 ladybirds.

 

Three plant species that supported the insects

August 5th 2009: Male speckled bush cricket nymph on devil’s bit scabious leaf; ‘proof of grazing’.	July 7th 2010: ‘The Teasels grew and grew, like Jack’s beanstalk, and had to be staked up against the July gales!’ Teasels were the favourite flower of the new bumblebee queens. They were used for both feeding and roosting.	August 18th 2010: Bombus terrestris, buff-tailed bumblebee, has a short tongue which cannot reach the inside of the bell-shaped flowers of the Comfrey. She solves the problem of a short tongue by ‘stealing’ it. The short tongue penetrates the base of the flower.

The Palestinians’ last option: A struggle for equal rights

Palestinians must shed the illusion of the current peace process and at least push for equitable rights.                              Ghada Karmi    23 Jun 2013               Aljazeera

…Israel/Palestine is today one state. But it is an apartheid state which discriminates against non-Jews in favour of Jews. The Palestinian task now is to fight against this apartheid and mount a struggle, not for an impossible Palestinian state, but for equal rights under Israeli rule. They would need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is now a liability that only camouflages the true situation, and then confront Israel, their actual ruler, directly. As stateless people under military occupation, they must demand equal civil and political rights with Israeli citizens, and apply for Israeli citizenship if necessary. That puts the onus on Israel to respond: either to ignore the five million Palestinians it rules, or vacate their land, or grant them equal rights.

Israel will reject all of these, but whatever it does will be against its own interests. And Palestinians at one stroke will have broken up Israel’s hegemonic hold on the political discourse and changed the rules of the lethal game being played against them….

Occupy London- in pictures

Occupy London’s best signs – in pictures

Protesters’ signs, posters and placards at the Occupy London camp. The City of London Corporation has followed St Paul’s Cathedral’s lead in suspending its attempts to evict protesters from the surrounding land

The Guardian   Nov 2, 2011   more pics at link

Fantasy enervates America

Anthony Weiner-converted-to-Islam meme spreads

By Justin Elliott    Salon  June 21, 2011

A prominent right-wing Islam expert believes the Jewish congressman “most likely” converted in secret   » More

 We must have an extreme mental health crisis if large numbers of people can swallow this kind of scam. And I fear such gullibility is not influenced by politics at all. Surely equal numbers on the Left consistently believe doing the same thing repeatedly (like re-electing Obama) will eventually have a different result. Reason has little impact on cherished fantasy. But people locked in fantasy-mode cannot long endure.

see also: Republicans may love war, but Democrats wage it

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now”

–  J. G. Ballard  

 

 

USDA Decision On GE Alfalfa Leaves Door Open For Contamination, Rise Of Superweeds

Update: see more links at end

Center For Food Safety January 27, 2011

ROGUE AGENCY CHOOSES “BUSINESS AS USUAL” OVER SOUND SCIENCE

CENTER ANNOUNCES IMMEDIATE LEGAL CHALLENGE TO USDA’S FLAWED ASSESSMENT

The Center for Food Safety criticized the announcement today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that it will once again allow unlimited, nation-wide commercial planting of Monsanto’s genetically-engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa, despite the many risks to organic and conventional farmers USDA acknowledged in its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).  On a call today with stakeholders, Secretary Vilsack reiterated the concerns surrounding purity and access to non-GE seed, yet the Agency’s decision still places the entire burden for preventing contamination on non-GE farmers, with no protections for food producers, consumers and exporters.

“We’re disappointed with USDA’s decision and we will be back in court representing the interest of farmers, preservation of the environment, and consumer choice” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director for the Center for Food Safety. “USDA has become a rogue agency in its regulation of biotech crops and its decision to appease the few companies who seek to benefit from this technology comes despite increasing evidence that GE alfalfa will threaten the rights of farmers and consumers, as well as damage the environment.”

On Monday, the Center sent an open letter to Secretary Vilsack calling on USDA to base its decision on sound science and the interests of farmers, and to avoid rushing the process to meet the marketing timelines or sales targets of Monsanto, Forage Genetics or other entities.

CFS also addressed several key points that were not properly assessed in the FEIS, among them were:

Olbermann Departs, as Media Consolidate Further

01/22/2011 by Juan Cole Informed Comment

People are blaming the abrupt departure of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC on that company’s merger with Comcast and Olbermann’s loss of the protection and patronage of Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBC programming. MSNBC says that the issue has nothing to do with Comcast.

It seems Olbermann is too extreme for US television. But Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, now they are mainstream. What universe could that proposition be true in? That of cranky old white billionaires. And television news is owned by them. Not by you.

Whether Comcast is the villain of the piece directly, things like the Comcast merger with MSNBC are responsible for there being very few voices on American television (and despite the proliferation of channels) like Olbermann’s. And for there being relatively little news on the “news” programs. Time Warner, General Electric and Comcast (partners in NBC), Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp own almost all television news. In other words, six big corporations determine what you will hear about the world if you get your news from television. There are fewer and fewer t.v. news outlets that do not belong to one of these six, a process called media consolidation.

For reasons of profit-seeking, when Disney acquired ABC, it looted the company’s news divisions. Profits are not to be had in hard news, but rather in tabloid news. It used to be that human interest stories would be ‘dessert,’ but they have become the main meal.

Ironically,former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was one of Olbermann’s biggest critics, afraid that the latter’s flamboyant and polarizing style would tarnish the reputation of regular NBC newsmen for objectivity.

What Brokaw seems not to have noticed is that NBC and MSNBC did, like most television news, a miserable job of covering the Iraq issue in 2002-2003–mainly buying White House propaganda. The powerful bias toward the point of view of the rich and powerful and well-connected in Washington demonstrated by all the major tv news outlets in 2002-2003 makes Olbermann look like a staid centrist.

Senator Al Franken, a former NBC employee, fulminated against the Comcast/ MSNBC merger:

But the FCC has passed it.

We’ll miss Keith. But it isn’t about him. It is about the ever-narrowing character of public comment in the US, about the few having most of everything. It is about media consolidation.

See also:

Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read

And:

Why I’m glad Keith Olbermann is gone

By Niall Stanage:    “The smugness, the narcissism, the never-ending parade of yes-man guests: Goodnight and good riddance!”

Silent Majority Faces Sad End

 

I keep seeing articles written as if Obama might waken from his actual self and become the dream-self many thought he was. Why is it so difficult for many to face the current reality?

There was never any intention or even feint move to fulfill his supposed campaign promises. If we can’t get beyond that, we can never effectively stand up to the onslaught against the people by the banks and the mega-corps. The polls tell us the people’s views are being ignored with impunity. Because they can! The Lone Ranger isn’t coming this time.

This article is interesting for its statistics about people’s stand on issues. If only it mattered!

RICHARD ESKOW The New Silent Majority

“Today there’s a New Silent Majority, and it looks very different from Nixon’s. The polling results are undeniable: This Majority is looking for somebody to fight the big banks, protect Social Security, and tax the rich to fund government’s vital role in society … If the President can let go of his attachment to his postpartisan self-image and embrace the policies most Americans want and need, they can be his North Star.”

exerpt:

The American majority must be suffering from whiplash. It’s not just the sudden reversal on the deficit. Now the story of the day is taxes – which was a top priority for only one voter in fifty.

What else does the “new silent majority” stand for, besides jobs, protecting Social Security, and taxes for the rich?

• 72% want the government to crack down on Wall Street more than it has.
• 81% want the government to do more to reduce poverty.
• Eight out of ten oppose cutting Medicare.

Despite the widespread support for these views by members of both parties (bipartisanship at last!), the political and media landscapes are dominated by journalists and politicians who keep telling us these positions are “extremist” and politically unrealistic.

–read entire article here

US military suicide rate nearly twice national average

A Sign of Empire Pathology

More US military personnel have taken their OWN lives than have died in action

By Finian Cunningham

Global Research, January 12, 2010

Here is a shocking statistic that you won’t hear in most western news media: over the past nine years, more US military personnel have taken their own lives than have died in action in either the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. These are official figures from the US Department of Defence, yet somehow they have not been deemed newsworthy to report. Last year alone, more than 330 serving members of the US armed forces committed suicide – more than the 320 killed in Afghanistan and the 150 who fell in Iraq (see wsws.org).

Since 2001, when Washington launched its so-called war on terror, there has been a dramatic year-on-year increase in US military suicides, particularly in the army, which has borne the brunt of fighting abroad. Last year saw the highest total number since such records began in 1980. Prior to 2001, the suicide rate in the US military was lower than that for the general US population; now, it is nearly double the national average.

A growing number of these victims have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. What these figures should tell us is that there is something fundamentally deranged about Washington’s “war on terror” – which is probably why western news media prefer to ignore the issue. How damning is it about such military campaigns that the number of US soldiers who take their own lives outnumber those killed by enemy combatants.

What is even more disturbing is that the official figures only count victims of suicide among serving personnel. Not included are the many more veterans – officially classed a civilians – who take their own lives.