London Guardian says people who want to choose healthy foods are “mentally deranged”

Choosing healthy foods now called a mental disorder
Mike Adams
NaturalNews
June 29, 2010

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control

In its never-ending attempt to fabricate “mental disorders” out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they’ve invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you’re “mentally diseased” and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, “Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder” and goes on to claim this “disease” is called orthorexia nervosa — which is basically just Latin for “nervous about correct eating.”

But they can’t just called it “nervous healthy eating disorder” because that doesn’t sound like they know what they’re talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn’t). That’s where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means “bones with holes in them”).

Getting back to this fabricated “orthorexia” disease, the Guardian goes on to report, “Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out.”

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there’s something wrong with you.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be “normal?” If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that’s okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently.

What is “normal” when it comes to foods?

I told you this was coming. Years ago, I warned NaturalNews readers that an attempt might soon be under way to outlaw broccoli because of its anti-cancer phytonutrients. This mental health assault on health-conscious consumers is part of that agenda. It’s an effort to marginalize healthy eaters by declaring them to be mentally unstable and therefore justify carting them off to mental institutions where they will be injected with psychiatric drugs and fed institutional food that’s all processed, dead and full of toxic chemicals.

The Guardian even goes to the ridiculous extreme of saying, “The obsession about which foods are “good” and which are “bad” means orthorexics can end up malnourished.”

Follow the non-logic on this, if you can: Eating “good” foods will cause malnutrition! Eating bad foods, I suppose, is assumed to provide all the nutrients you need. That’s about as crazy a statement on nutrition as I’ve ever read. No wonder people are so diseased today: The mainstream media is telling them that eating health food is a mental disorder that will cause malnutrition!

Shut up and swallow your Soylent Green

It’s just like I reported years ago: You’re not supposed to question your food, folks. Sit down, shut up, dig in and chow down. Stop thinking about what you’re eating and just do what you’re told by the mainstream media and its processed food advertisers. Questioning the health properties of your junk food is a mental disorder, didn’t you know? And if you “obsess” over foods (by doing such things as reading the ingredients labels, for example), then you’re weird. Maybe even sick.

That’s the message they’re broadcasting now. Junk food eaters are “normal” and “sane” and “nourished.” But health food eaters are diseased, abnormal and malnourished.

But why, you ask, would they attack healthy eaters? People like Dr. Gabriel Cousens can tell you why: Because increased mental and spiritual awareness is only possible while on a diet of living, natural foods.

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control, you see. It literally messes with your mind, numbing your senses with MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. People who subsist on junk foods are docile and quickly lose the ability to think for themselves. They go along with whatever they’re told by the TV or those in apparent positions of authority, never questioning their actions or what’s really happening in the world around them.

In contrast to that, people who eat health-enhancing natural foods — with all the medicinal nutrients still intact — begin to awaken their minds and spirits. Over time, they begin to question the reality around them and they pursue more enlightened explorations of topics like community, nature, ethics, philosophy and the big picture of things that are happening in the world. They become “aware” and can start to see the very fabric of the Matrix, so to speak.

This, of course, is a huge danger to those who run our consumption-based society because consumption depends on ignorance combined with suggestibility. For people to keep blindly buying foods, medicines, health insurance and consumer goods, they need to have their higher brain functions switched off. Processed junk foods laced with toxic chemicals just happens to achieve that rather nicely. Why do you think dead, processed foods remain the default meals in public schools, hospitals and prisons? It’s because dead foods turn off higher levels of awareness and keep people focused on whatever distractions you can feed their brains: Television, violence, fear, sports, sex and so on.

But living as a zombie is, in one way quite “normal” in society today because so many people are doing it. But that doesn’t make it normal in my book: The real “normal” is an empowered, healthy, awakened person nourished with living foods and operating as a sovereign citizen in a free world. Eating living foods is like taking the red pill because over time it opens up a whole new perspective on the fabric of reality. It sets you free to think for yourself.

But eating processed junk foods is like taking the blue pill because it keeps you trapped in a fabricated reality where your life experiences are fabricated by consumer product companies who hijack your senses with designer chemicals (like MSG) that fool your brain into thinking you’re eating real food.

If you want to be alive, aware and in control of your own life, eat more healthy living foods. But don’t expect to be popular with mainstream mental health “experts” or dieticians — they’re all being programmed to consider you to be “crazy” because you don’t follow their mainstream diets of dead foods laced with synthetic chemicals.

But you and I know the truth here: We are the normal ones. The junk food eaters are the real mental patients, and the only way to wake them up to the real world is to start feeding them living foods.

Some people are ready to take the red pill, and others aren’t. All you can do is show them the door. They must open it themselves.

In the mean time, try to avoid the mental health agents who are trying to label you as having a mental disorder just because you pay attention to what you put in your body. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, soy, MSG, aspartame, HFCS and other toxic chemicals in the food supply. In fact, your very life depends on it.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to join the health experts who keep inventing new fictitious diseases and disorders, check out my popular Disease Mongering Engine web page where you can invent your own new diseases at the click of a button! You’ll find it at: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-mongering-engine.asp

Sources for this story include:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/16/orthorexia-mental-health-eating-disorder

Prison Planet Forum infiltrated by shill for cancer, drug, and food industries

View the whole debate here, and check the replies made by Prison Planet Forum member Paul-w who tries his best – and ultimately fails – at dismissing the obesity promotion of aspartame and MSG as “conspiracy theory” while pushing the Center for Consumer Freedom’s co-opted version of “choice” and “personal responsibility. It’s clear that Paul-w is either a shill for the cancer, drug, and food industries or a Cass Sunstein troll hired to attempt to debunk established facts as “conspiracy theory”.

Rockefeller banksters order Michael F. Jacobson to push “soda tax” propaganda

Comment: If this doesn’t convince you that Michael F. Jacobson is a shill for the bankster-controlled Federal Reserve and its IRS collection agency, then nothing will. After all, CSPI’s headquarters are located in a Washington, D.C. bank building.

The Universal North Building (foreground; Universal South Building is in the background) located at 1875 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The modernisthigh-rise was built in 1962 to the designs of architect Edwin Weihe. Tenants include the American Cancer Society, Center for Law and Education, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense Fund, Food Research and Action Center, Mautner Project, National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, National Bank of Pakistan, National Partnership for Women & Families, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Population Reference Bureau, Progressive Victory, Rendon Group, Results for Development Institute, Society for International Development, and Womens Foreign Policy Group.

A Soda Tax Is a Good Policy to Reduce Obesity in the United States
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
Posted: April 12, 2010 11:46 AM

Several weeks ago, New York Gov. David Paterson proposed an excise tax on soft drinks to help bridge that state’s $7.4 billion budget shortfall. Paterson’s soda tax proposal was one of a long list of revenue-generating and budget-cutting ideas proposed, but predictably was one of the items that got the most attention.

Within hours, Washington-based lobbyists for the industry went to work painting the idea as a scary, radical new thing: Susan Neely, head of the American Beverage Association, called the new tax a “money grab, pure and simple,” coming at a time when “New Yorkers continue to struggle through a tough economy with double-digit unemployment rates.”

Though Paterson’s proposed penny-per-ounce tax would be the highest tax yet on soda pop, the taxes themselves are nothing new. In fact, the state of New York has had a sales tax on soft drinks since 1965, which has poured (ahem) billions into state coffers since. And 32 other states (and Chicago) already have some kind of sales or excise tax on soda.

Georgians certainly don’t seem outraged by the four percent tax they pay on soda sold in vending machines. But what should outrage Georgians, New Yorkers and all American taxpayers is the financial harm caused by our out-of-control soft drink consumption. There’s no line for it on our tax returns, but on April 15 and out of every paycheck, we’re subsidizing the treatment of obesity, diabetes and other expensive health problems made worse by soft drink consumption.

Unlike milk or juice, sugar-sweetened beverages provide nothing but empty calories. I call soft drinks “liquid candy,” since they provide plenty of calories without necessary nutrients. Besides promoting obesity and disease, soft drinks displace from the diet real foods with valuable health-promoting nutrients. In fact, in the 1970s, teens drank about twice as much milk as soda. By the 1990s, teens drank almost twice as much soda as milk.

When I was a kid, soda was considered an occasional treat and served in small bottles. Now it’s practically the default drink, particularly for young people, and often served by the quart. Our 2005 analysis of government data found that teenage boys who drank soft drinks consumed an average of three 12-ounce cans per day and girls an average of two 12-ounce cans. One in 10 boys who drank soft drinks consumed 5 1/2
 12-ounce cans a day, or about 800 calories’ worth. It’s not the only reason, but the increase in soda consumption since the 1970s certainly helps explain why obesity rates have tripled in children and teens.

The father of free-market economics, Adam Smith, wrote in 1776 that “Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which [have] become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.” Were he alive now, he’d likely propose taxes on soda that would make Paterson’s tax look like chump change.

While soda lobbyists shed crocodile tears about the effects on poor consumers of a penny-per-ounce tax, the soda industry is gouging Americans for what is, after all, mostly water and high-fructose corn syrup. In recent newspaper ads, Coke praised itself for offering a new, 90-calorie, 7.5-ounce can. I could buy it at my local supermarket for $3.99 for an eight-pack, or about $8.50 a gallon. But I could buy 12-ounce cans of Coke for as little as $2.45 a gallon. That difference in prices amounts to a “convenience tax” that is as much as 3 1/2 times greater than the tax New York is weighing.

If Coke and supermarkets can ratchet up their profits like that by several cents an ounce, why shouldn’t legislators take a penny to help undo the damage that liquid candy causes?

This first appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on April 5, 2010.

A Soda Tax Is a Good Policy to Reduce Obesity in the United States
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
Posted: April 12, 2010 11:46 AM

Several weeks ago, New York Gov. David Paterson proposed an excise tax on soft drinks to help bridge that state’s $7.4 billion budget shortfall. Paterson’s soda tax proposal was one of a long list of revenue-generating and budget-cutting ideas proposed, but predictably was one of the items that got the most attention.

Within hours, Washington-based lobbyists for the industry went to work painting the idea as a scary, radical new thing: Susan Neely, head of the American Beverage Association, called the new tax a “money grab, pure and simple,” coming at a time when “New Yorkers continue to struggle through a tough economy with double-digit unemployment rates.”

Though Paterson’s proposed penny-per-ounce tax would be the highest tax yet on soda pop, the taxes themselves are nothing new. In fact, the state of New York has had a sales tax on soft drinks since 1965, which has poured (ahem) billions into state coffers since. And 32 other states (and Chicago) already have some kind of sales or excise tax on soda.

Georgians certainly don’t seem outraged by the four percent tax they pay on soda sold in vending machines. But what should outrage Georgians, New Yorkers and all American taxpayers is the financial harm caused by our out-of-control soft drink consumption. There’s no line for it on our tax returns, but on April 15 and out of every paycheck, we’re subsidizing the treatment of obesity, diabetes and other expensive health problems made worse by soft drink consumption.

Unlike milk or juice, sugar-sweetened beverages provide nothing but empty calories. I call soft drinks “liquid candy,” since they provide plenty of calories without necessary nutrients. Besides promoting obesity and disease, soft drinks displace from the diet real foods with valuable health-promoting nutrients. In fact, in the 1970s, teens drank about twice as much milk as soda. By the 1990s, teens drank almost twice as much soda as milk.

When I was a kid, soda was considered an occasional treat and served in small bottles. Now it’s practically the default drink, particularly for young people, and often served by the quart. Our 2005 analysis of government data found that teenage boys who drank soft drinks consumed an average of three 12-ounce cans per day and girls an average of two 12-ounce cans. One in 10 boys who drank soft drinks consumed 5 1/2
 12-ounce cans a day, or about 800 calories’ worth. It’s not the only reason, but the increase in soda consumption since the 1970s certainly helps explain why obesity rates have tripled in children and teens.

The father of free-market economics, Adam Smith, wrote in 1776 that “Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which [have] become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.” Were he alive now, he’d likely propose taxes on soda that would make Paterson’s tax look like chump change.

While soda lobbyists shed crocodile tears about the effects on poor consumers of a penny-per-ounce tax, the soda industry is gouging Americans for what is, after all, mostly water and high-fructose corn syrup. In recent newspaper ads, Coke praised itself for offering a new, 90-calorie, 7.5-ounce can. I could buy it at my local supermarket for $3.99 for an eight-pack, or about $8.50 a gallon. But I could buy 12-ounce cans of Coke for as little as $2.45 a gallon. That difference in prices amounts to a “convenience tax” that is as much as 3 1/2 times greater than the tax New York is weighing.

If Coke and supermarkets can ratchet up their profits like that by several cents an ounce, why shouldn’t legislators take a penny to help undo the damage that liquid candy causes?

This first appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on April 5, 2010.

CFR shill/operative Michael F. Jacobson’s latest phony “fight”: McDonald’s Happy Meal toys

Comment: Here’s the “food police” threatening to sue McDonald’s for using Happy Meal toys to get kids to want McDonald’s food…while they allow a known McDonald’s front group to act as a steering committee member on its nutritional advocacy coalition. Little do the sheeple realize that Michael F. Jacobson and McDonald’s are both CFR shills/operatives. Jacobson’s handler/financier is David Rockefeller, the CFR’s lifetime honorary chairman, while the McDonald’s Corporation is connected to several corporate members of the CFR such as Monsanto and Pfizer. Michael F. Jacobson and his ilk attack Richard Berman – and rightly so – for using his Center for Consumer Freedom to attack any person or group which threatens his busioness interests. Richard Berman is a food industry shill…but so is Michael F. Jacobson.

http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations#Corporate_Members

Michael F. Jacobson
Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
Posted: June 22, 2010 04:51 PM
McDonald’s Lawsuit: Using Toys to Sell Happy Meals

Dangle a toy in front of a child’s eyes, and you can bet the child will do just about anything to get it. And that’s exactly what McDonald’s (and other restaurants) do, using everything from TV commercials to signs in windows to the Internet in order to get kids to pester their parents to take them to the restaurant.

It used to be that parents warned kids to run away from strangers offering candy, but companies have made an end run by laundering their perfidy through electronic media. Now kids absorb countless commercials touting premiums based on their favorite characters — Shrek, Batman, Barbie, Beanie Babies, etc. — and, surprise, surprise, ask their parents to take them to McDonald’s. Consumer-marketing guru Adam Hanft said, “Happy Meals proved that you could actually ‘brand’ a meal and make children harass their parents for it.”

The Federal Trade Commission has reported that fast-food companies–with McDonald’s by far in the lead–spent $360 million in 2006 on toys to market children’s meals. In the same year, fast food restaurants sold more than 1.2 billion children’s meals with toys to children ages 12 and under, accounting for 20 percent of all child traffic at those restaurants. It should be no surprise that companies employ the practice–it works.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has long opposed the deceptive marketing of unhealthy foods to children. That’s why in 1978 we petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to set limits on the nutritional quality of foods marketed to kids.

In 1978 America was at the brink of the obesity epidemic that has seen rates of overweight and obesity in children triple. Factors ranging from video games to less PE in schools contributed to the epidemic, but one indisputable, major factor is the increased ubiquity of inexpensive, high-calorie foods.

McDonald’s is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, marketers of food to children. According to the Associated Press, in 2003 sales of Happy Meals amounted to $3.4 billion and made up about 20 percent of McDonald’s overall sales. McDonald’s has pledged to advertise only those child-oriented Happy Meals that meet its nutrition standards, but that pledge fails to address the insidious use of toys.

Restaurant meals that include toys are coming under increasing attack. In March 2008 Consumers International, a global alliance of 220 organizations, and the International Obesity Task Force called for bans on the “inclusion of free gifts, toys or collectible items, which appeal to children to promote unhealthy foods.” Months later, the city council of Liverpool, England, considered such a ban. One council member charged that, “By offering these toys, they are preying on the needs and desires of children in order to cash-in on the sale of junk food.” And recently, Santa Clara County, California became the first jurisdiction to ban the inclusion of toys in unhealthy restaurant meals.

This week, CSPI has upped the ante by threatening to sue McDonald’s unless the company agrees to stop using toys to beguile young children. CSPI contends that tempting-kids-with-toys is unfair and deceptive–both to kids who don’t understand the concept of marketing and to parents who have to put up with their pestering offspring.

Adding to the perniciousness of tempting kids with toys is the use of promotions that have kids coming back to “collect them all.” Most notable in that category was McDonald’s offering of 101 different dogs in a promotion linked to the movie “101 Dalmatians.”

To make matters worse, the nutritional quality of Happy Meals ranges from mediocre to miserable. Notwithstanding all of McDonald’s protestations that its products are healthful, every single one of the 24 Happy Meal configurations on McDonald’s Web site is not what the doctor ordered. Every meal is too high in calories — that is, it provides more than a third of an average child’s recommended 1,300 calories per day, with the most caloric meals providing half the calories. Meals that include soft drinks both accustom kids to drinking soft drinks with their meals and provide about twice as much sugar as the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that kids consume in a whole day. And Happy Meals with cheeseburgers provide about three-fourths of a day’s worth of sodium, which can increase blood pressure even in young children.

Furthermore, in a survey of 44 McDonald’s outlets around the country, we found that the default side item in Happy Meals was usually French fries, not the healthier Apple Dippers. That is, in response to a customer’s request for a hamburger Happy Meal, over 90 percent of the clerks did not ask which side dish the customer wanted, but automatically provided fries.

McDonald’s former Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon said that their clever advertising “shows that something like a Happy Meal at McDonald’s can make everything better.” “Everything,” though, should not be construed to include the child’s health.

But concern about the marketing of Happy Meals goes beyond nutrition. The very practice of using toys to get kids to pester their parents to buy a food — junky or nutritious — is unconscionable. Listen to how marketing experts view marketing to kids.

A General Mills official explained his company’s philosophy: “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we… believe in getting them early and having them for life.”

Lucy Hughes, of Initiative Media World Wide and author of the Nag Factor study, said: “It’s a game. If we could develop a creative … 30-second commercial that encourages the child to whine or show some sort of importance in it that the child understands and is able to reiterate to the parents, then we’re successful.”

However, Michael Brody, a psychiatrist who chairs the television and media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, has no tolerance for those predatory marketing practices: “These marketers are very similar to pedophiles. They are child experts. If you’re going to be a pedophile or a child marketer, you have to know about children, and what children are going to want.”

McDonald’s claims to be “proud of our long heritage of responsible communication with our customers, especially children.” And its Happy Meals Web site says: “You want the very best for your kids, and so do we.” That’s McNonsense. McDonald’s wants your money–and it’ll manipulate your kids any which way to get it.

Minority Report and 1984: Obama regime now targeting piracy pre-crime and piracy thoughtcrime

Comment: In other words, Obama the corporate stooge for Redmond and Silicon Valley now says he has the right to arrest people who may be about to commit copyright infringement.

http://www.dailytech.com/Obama+Administration+Announces+Massive+Piracy+Crackdown/article18815.htm

Australian internet censorship plan is stealth agenda to ban Linux!

Comment: Will the Australian government provide antivirus software and firewall software to Linux users, or will they ignore Linux users and therefore prevent Linux users from using the internet? Think that can’t happen? Think again. Scott “sk0t” McCausland pleaded guilty in 2006 to uploading Star Wars III and was told by his probation officer that he had to install an OS which would support and run the monitoring software which he was required to install and use if he wished to use the internet. If Scott McCausland can be forced to abandon Linux and use Windows, it can happen to millions of Australians.

Australian Government To Force Internet Users To Install State-Approved Software

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Australian government is set to intensify its war against Internet freedom by forcing web users to install state-approved anti-virus software. If they fail to do so, they will be denied an Internet connection, or if their computer is later infected, the user’s connection will be terminated.

“AUSTRALIANS would be forced to install anti-virus and firewall software on their computers before being allowed to connect to the internet under a new plan to fight cyber crime. And if their computer did get infected, internet service providers like Telstra and Optus could cut off their connection until the problem was resolved,” reports News.com.au.

A 260-page report released by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications outlines a plan to mandate Internet users to install government-approved software before their Internet connection can be activated.

Of course, the vast majority of Internet users already use anti-virus software, but by creating the precedent of having to conform to government mandates simply to get online, this opens the door to later requiring government permission to use the Internet at all, as well as a Chinese-style ID verification system which will prevent “undesirables” from using the web.

It also makes it easier for the government to use the law to subsequently demand that a mandatory Internet filter also be installed as part of the software package that blocks websites deemed “offensive” to the authorities.

Efforts to place restrictions on the internet are unfolding apace in Australia where the government is implementing a mandatory and wide-ranging Internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy said the government would be the final arbiter on what sites would be blacklisted under “refused classification.”

The official justification for the filter is to block child pornography, however, as the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia has pointed out, the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires while the pornographers can relatively easily skirt around the filters.

Earlier this year, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blocked by Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

Senator Joe Lieberman on Sunday called for the United States to move towards a a Chinese-style system of Internet control. Under Lieberman’s 197-page Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PDF), President Obama would be given a ‘kill switch’ to shut down parts of the Internet.

Constant fearmongering about cyber attacks is the cover for a global assault on Internet freedom by authorities. The web is being overtaken by independent media outlets which are now beginning to eclipse establishment news organs. This has enabled activists and the politically oppressed to expose government atrocities and cover-ups at lightning pace, something the system is keen to curtail.

Roundup resistant weeds pose environmental threat (Monsanto Is hell-bent on destroying the US food supply!)

Maybe the SCOTUS should have read this before they gave Monsanto the “go-ahead” for the GMO Alfalfa.  They sure aren’t thinking about the future food supply that’s for sure!
http://www.atlanticbb.net/news/read.php?ps=1011&rip_id=%3CD9GFHU980%40news.ap.org%3E&_LT=HOME_LARSDCCLM_UNEWS&page=2

Roundup resistant weeds pose environmental threat
By DAVID MERCER Associated Press Writer The Associated Press
Monday, June 21, 2010 4:48 PM EDT
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — When the weed killer Roundup was introduced in the 1970s, it proved it could kill nearly any plant while still being safer than many other herbicides, and it allowed farmers to give up harsher chemicals and reduce tilling that can contribute to erosion.

But 34 years later, a few sturdy species of weed resistant to Roundup have evolved, forcing farmers to return to some of the less environmentally safe practices they abandoned decades ago.

The situation is the worst in the South, where some farmers now walk fields with hoes, killing weeds in a way their great-grandfathers were happy to leave behind. And the problem is spreading quickly across the Corn Belt and beyond, with Roundup now proving unreliable in killing at least 10 weed species in at least 22 states. Some species, like Palmer amaranth in Arkansas and water hemp and marestail in Illinois, grow fast and big, producing tens of thousands of seeds.

“It’s getting to be a big deal,” said Mike Plumer, a 61-year-old farmer and University of Illinois agronomist who grows soybeans and cotton near the southern Illinois community of Creal Springs. “If you’ve got it, it’s a real big deal.”
When Monsanto introduced Roundup in 1976, “it was like the best thing since sliced bread,” said Garry Niemeyer, who grows corn and soybeans near Auburn in central Illinois.

The weed killer, known generically as glyphosate, is absorbed through plants’ leaves and kills them by blocking the production of proteins they need to grow. At the same time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers it to have little toxicity to people and animals, and aside from the plants it’s sprayed on, it’s less of a threat to the environment because it quickly binds to soil and becomes inactive.

Monsanto’s introduction of seeds designed to survive Roundup made things even better for farmers because they could spray it on emerging crops to wipe out the weeds growing alongside them. Seeds containing Monsanto’s Roundup Ready traits are now used to grow about 90 percent of the nation’s soybeans and 70 percent of its corn and cotton.
With increased reliance on Roundup, herbicide use on corn decreased from 2.76 pounds an acre in 1994 to 2.06 in 2005, the most recent year for which the U.S. Department of Agriculture has data. Spread that out over the 81.8 million acres planted in 2005, and it’s a decrease of more than 57 million pounds of herbicides annually.

Farmers also found they could cut back or in some cases eliminate tilling, reducing erosion and fuel use.

But with any herbicide, the more it’s used, the more likely it’ll run into individual plants within a species that have just enough genetic variation to survive what kills most of their relatives. With each generation, the survivors represent a larger percentage of the species.
St. Louis-based Monsanto maintains the resistance is often overstated, noting that most weeds show no sign of immunity.

“We believe that glyphosate will remain an important tool in the farmers’ arsenal,” Monsanto spokesman John Combest said.

That said, the company has started paying cotton farmers $12 an acre to cover the cost of other herbicides to use alongside Roundup to boost its effectiveness.

The trend has confirmed some food safety groups’ belief that biotechnology won’t reduce the use of chemicals in the long run.
“That’s being reversed,” said Bill Freese, a chemist with the Washington, D.C.-based Center For Food Safety, which promotes organic agriculture. “They’re going to dramatically increase use of those chemicals, and that’s bad news.”

The first weeds in the U.S. that survived Roundup were found about 10 years ago in Delaware.

Agricultural experts said the use of other chemicals is already creeping up. Monsanto and other companies are developing new seeds designed to resist older herbicides like dicamba and 2,4-D, a weed killer developed during World War II and an ingredient in Agent Orange, which was used to destroy jungle foliage during the Vietnam War and is blamed for health problems among veterans.
Penn State University weed scientist David Mortensen estimates that in three or four years, farmers’ use of dicamba and 2,4-D will increase by 55.1 million pounds a year because of resistance to Roundup. That would push both far up the list of herbicides heavily used by farmers.

Dicamba and 2,4-D both easily drift beyond the areas where they’re sprayed, making them a threat to neighboring crops and wild plants, Mortensen said. That, in turn, could also threaten wildlife.

“We’re finding that the (wild) plants that grow on the field edges actually support beneficial insects, like bees,” he said.

In Australia, weed scientist Stephen Powles has been a sort of evangelist for saving Roundup, calling it a near-miraculous farming tool.

Australia has been dealing with Roundup-resistant weeds since the mid 1990s, but changes in farming practices have helped keep it effective, Powers said. That has included using a broader array of herbicides to kill off Roundup resistant weeds and employing other methods of weed control.

Those alternative methods, such as planting so-called cover crops like rye to hold back weeds during the winter and other times when fields aren’t planted with corn, soybeans or cotton, are the key, said Freese, the Center For Food Safety chemist.

Otherwise, he said, “We’re talking a pesticide treadmill here. It’s just coming back to kick us in the butt now with resistant weeds.”

(This version CORRECTS the second paragraph to say that it is 34 years after the introduction of Roundup, not 24.)

Inmate claims mafioso Madoff was allowed to keep $5 billion

Crooked financier Bernard Madoff secretly stashed more than $5billion with friends before being jailed for a Ponzi scheme that robbed thousands of investors out of their life savings.
He is said to have funnelled the money to three close associates prior to being arrested in December 2008 for stealing over £45 billion.
An inmate at the North Carolina prison where Madoff, 72, is serving a life sentence told the New York Post newspaper the financier voluntarily made the confession.
The inmate claimed Madoff told him his former business partner Frank DiPascali knows the names of the three people who received the money.

But DiPascali, who is awaiting sentence for his part in the Ponzi scheme, is using the inside information to secure a lighter sentence with prosecutors.
The 52-year-old former chief financial officer for Madoff Securities pleaded guilty last year to 10 charges in relation to helping his boss swindle clients out of billions.
The three people said to have received £5 billion have not been identified.
But the inmate told the Post: ‘I think it was personal friends’.
The US Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting DiPascali, and Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, had no comment on the inmate’s claims.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1288377/New-York-fraudster-Bernard-Madoff-secretly-funnelled-5BILLION-friends.html

Perfect real-time example of PROPAGANDA: Google ‘image’ of Iran….

I was looking for images of Iran – you know, the images of the modern sophisticated city of Tehran, the people going about their daily lives – living in one of the most ‘westernized’ cultures in the middle east. So off to Google, to use their ‘image’ search… and look what they bring up when you run the search…

Think Google wants war with Iran much???

This was the first page of results. If you go through the next TEN pages, you will see much the same; including lots of pictures of hangings, a few torture shots, lots of propaganda to be had. Maybe ONE picture of a street in downtown Iran.
They don’t want you to know that normal people like you and me live in Iran. They have families, lives, children, grandmothers, family picnics, movies, music, art – they have everything that we have; including love for each other and love for their country. Hard to find those images… wonder why Google can’t find them.

Google: Bringing you their own version of reality 24/7.

Contrast the search in Google with this search (Iran – then click “Images”) from ixquick.com (Startpage.com)
Note in particular, the pic of the kids on the soccer team.
Nice kids. Iranian kids. Like our kids.

Remember that school that was spying on kids? Well now it’s creepier

Remember that school that was spying on kids? Well now it’s creepier
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/02/24/remember-that-school-that-was-spying-on-kids-well-now-its-creepier/
by John Biggs on February 24, 2010

The Lower Merion School District (motto: “We’re Building the Future Police State”), caught using a remote monitoring service on school-supplied laptops while the kids were at home, had some pretty creepy rules on the books to ensure compliance. To wit we find, thanks to strydehax, these gems:

* Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes
* Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated
* Disabling the camera was impossible
* Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion

Expulsion, eh? Pretty rough stuff. But shouldn’t the school district be able to protect their investment? Well, the reason this all came up was that a kid in the district was caught eating Mike-n-Ikes at home. The principal called him in for eating candy and, presumably, this school watching this kid in his own room.

This means, in an effort to prevent theft, there was some potential pedophilia happening here.

That’s not all. Here’s the PA tech guy, Mike Perbix, talking about the tracking program, LANDRev in a promotional video:

And then there are these testimonials by students at the school, including:

” had brought in my own personal computer to work on a project for school one day. I was doing a presentation involving programs not available on the regular computers, only in specific labs. I happened to have a copy of my own. My personal property was confiscated from me in a study hall when I was working on a school assignment because it was against the schools ‘code of conduct’.”

What we have here is a perfect example of why technology, thrown willy-nilly at children, is bad. These laptops gave school authorities the ability to spy on their charges in their own homes. You can see the board meeting now: “Let’s give the kids laptops.” “How do we make sure they don’t look at porn?” “We’ll watch them. I know these dudes with a great solution.” And so it begins. A great idea – giving kids technology – turns into reducing the learning opportunities by essentially making that technology useless. If I were in a flamewar kind of mood, I’d say this is what stymies the One Laptop Per Child project as well. It’s the assumption that kids will break your stuff and so they deserve hobbled hardware. Technology, when misused, does not augment teaching. Instead, it gets in the way of it. This is a dark day for education and will cast a pall over future laptop loaner programs. These administrators should be ashamed.

via BoingBoing