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Labels Scare the GE Crap Outta Bayer, Monsanto, et al

We had a gathering —  public meeting — in Ellensburg, WA, looking at the known and projected  impacts of genetically engineered crops. The Washington State supporters are looking to garner more support for an initiative on the upcoming ballot, I-522,  which calls for  labeling all genetically engineered food.

Sort of half the ball-game is lost. Akin to putting giant marques  around big and small communities that state:

Ground water contaminated with hydraulic fracturing chemicals
Ground ozone too high — stay inside, don’t exercise, breathe easy
Beaches closed due to medical waste flotsam
Tap water must be …

Somewhere in the Lester B. Pearson Building, Canada’s foreign affairs headquarters, must be a meeting room with the inscription “The World Should Do as We Say, Not As We Do” or perhaps “Hypocrites ‘R Us.”

With the Obama administration beating the war drums, Canadian officials are demanding a response to the Syrian regime’s alleged use of the chemical weapon sarin.

Last week Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed “if it is not countered, it will constitute a precedent that we think is very dangerous for humanity in the long term” while for his part Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird declared: “If it doesn’t …

Originally, I didn’t want to write anything at the 20th Anniversary of the signing of the Oslo accords, because I consider it a waste of time. But since there are still journalists and politicians who can get something positive out of this charade, I would like to show them that their thinking is illusory. Fact is: Secret negotiations take place between the fourth-largest nuclear power in the world and a brutally colonized and oppressed people, which only has international law on its side. This fact requires no further comment when it comes to a possible outcome.

At the outset, it should …

This is the debate, now, is it not, in a microcosm – many, many schools across this great Consumer-Condemned Land of Amerika are struggling BIG Time to make ends meet. Mostly those of us in the underclass, that sweeping 80 percent holding 7 percent of all wealth in the USA, have skin in the game. We are a giant majority, diverse, not organized, and, unfortunately, at each other’s necks in a dog-eat-dog world of divide and conquer, attack the weak, disperse the weakest and prey on the one-paycheck-away-from-living-in-a-van-down-by-the river-and-PhDs-on-food-stamps-and Millennials-screwed-from cradle-to-grave.

We are a sick joke of a society that can’t …

On May 23, President Obama gave a major address from the National Defense University, “On the Future of Our Fight against Terrorism,” in which he acknowledged for the first time the US government’s still officially secret program of assassination by remotely controlled drones. I was able to watch this televised speech from the privileged vantage of a federal prison on the last day of a sentence resulting from my protest of drones lethally operated from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri over various countries around the world.

Over the previous six months in the Federal Prison Camp at Yankton, South Dakota, …

2 9/11s in 1’s life

September 11, 1973 scattered us in all directions. Barricaded in Antofagasta’s only public high school, Liceo de Hombres #2, we listened to the news which at times was contradictory and confusing until the inevitable reality of it all cut into us deeply. We couldn’t organize an armed resistance because the promised weapons never arrived and the nunchakus wouldn’t be sufficient. Instead we began to worry about the human situation. Two of my school companions were not able to return home, it was too dangerous and betrayal hovered too close. Both of them ended up as asylees …

George W. Bush once flubbed an aphorism (granted, an easy to flub aphorism) about being fooled once, shame on the fooler, being similarly fooled twice, then the shame was on you. ((See Kim Petersen, “Public Gullibility and the Media,” Dissident Voice, 26 April 2003.)) Barack Obama has turned the scenario on its head. Obama was not fooled by Bush and the neocons pushing for an attack on Iraq. In 2002, while a United States senator, Barack Obama said, “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a …

The past ten days have seen what could be the start of an historic turning point away from endless war in the Middle East. Public opinion in the United States, in harmony with the majority of people in the world, has clearly rejected U.S. military intervention in Syria.

But for this turn away from war to be complete and lasting, greater awareness is needed of the forces that have been pushing the United States into these wars, and will surely continue to do so until they are clearly and openly rejected.

An American friend who knows Washington well recently told …

“For one thing, major world and European powers are often reluctant to engage less prominent stakeholders (nationality, class or generation). Their academic circles tend to follow about the same pattern: What matters – far too often – is WHO, not WHAT is to be published. This discouraging climate makes it increasingly difficult to generate or balance new ideas, to even participate or to steam up new visions, as well as to forge common approaches, and to secure broad consensus over the vital issues of our shared concern.” – was stated in the cover letter I recently got along with …

This Week:

1. ReReRepeat
2. Akira was right
3. Colombianarquía
4. Brazil Black Bloc
5. Mescal Molotovs
6. Olmeca
7. Colombia’s farmers revolt!

What would it look like if a government really knew what it was doing?

Lacking a comprehensive, coherent account of rational beings acting in rational ways to work towards peaceful and reliable solutions to difficult questions, we offer here a fragmentary highlight reel of one day in the life of an American government  spinning in all directions toward no known goal in Syria.

But first a note about the context of the current public debate about Syria: we’re getting conned by the White House on intelligence assessments. Again. As reported by Gareth Porter for IPS on September 9:

Contrary to the general impression …

(Full article …)

The distance between Gaza and Ramallah in sheer miles is hardly significant. But in actuality, both cities represent two different political realities, with inescapable cultural and socio-economic dimensions. Their geopolitical horizons are vastly different as well – Gaza is situated within its immediate Arab surroundings and turmoil, while Ramallah is westernized in too many aspects to count. In recent years, the gap has widened like never before.

Of course, Gaza and Ramallah were always, in some ways, unalike. Demographics, size, topography and geographic proximity to Arab countries with different political priorities have always made them separate and distinctive. But the Israeli …

Leafing through The Economist can be a disorienting journey for the garden variety leftist. As you enter the sanctified space of the week’s leaders, you are confronted with a pastiche of fulminant one-pagers by anonymous staffers exasperated with either the Western world’s reluctance to bomb somebody, or the Eastern world’s reluctance to immediately relinquish all forms of economic protectionism. This week’s spotlight was devoted to the former. But first, a word from our sponsor. Across the two-page spread from the leader is an image of Liam Neeson, the tenured international actor who has lately reinvented himself rather convincingly as a …

John Gray is a British social philosopher who, in the words of David Hawkes, puts forward an “uncompromising challenge to the myth of progress.” Hawkes (an English professor at Arizona State) has recently published an essay, “Backwards into the future” in the TLS (8-30-2013) which is a sympathetic presentation of Gray’s views and a review of his latest book, The Silence of Animals: On progress and other modern myths. What is Gray’s challenge all about?

Gray’s new book is an attack on “meliorism” — which Hawkes explains as the view “that the moral and material condition of humanity will improve over …

We are at a point where we try so hard to shunt our human stupidity, forgo any foresight, embrace and honor our consumer plague and believe the stories in our heads that somehow this point of methane explosion – a world without ICE —  human population blight, economic and ecological divisions and degradations somehow are just blips in the scheme of things.

A good movie, an in-your-face iron chef cooking show, some silly jive about I Have a Dream is So Coming True lol, and a few milliseconds of philanthropy in between a billion waking hours surfing and porning and blathering on the Internet and listening or reading (do …