Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
8,852 posts, read 10,458,803 times
Reputation: 6670
Advertisements
Quote:
Originally Posted by workingclasshero
you sit the and say the FDA (American) turns a blind eye...yet the ENTIRE WORLD has no=problem with GMO...heck Baier is a Nordic (Sweden/swiss some where in that region) company...and they are the BIGGEST producer of GMO's.....
And they label 'em too, which is the issue at hand (your hysterics about people 'starving' notwithstanding…).
New Labelling Laws for GM Products in the EU
Today’s regulations are based on a different principle: All food products that make direct use of GMOs at any point in their production are subjected to labelling requirements, regardless of whether or not GM content is detectable in the end product.
And they label 'em too, which is the issue at hand (your hysterics about people 'starving' notwithstanding…).
EU regulations are meaningless in the US, because they don't have our Constitutional protections. Just as our government cannot silence Free Speech, they cannot tell anyone what to say either. It's two sides of the same coin.
EU regulations are meaningless in the US, because they don't have our Constitutional protections. Just as our government cannot silence Free Speech, they cannot tell anyone what to say either. It's two sides of the same coin.
But is requiring GMO to be labeled forcing anyone to say something. I mean, a list of ingredients is required for all packaged food. Is that denying anyone the right to free speech or is it allowing the public to be informed? And would GMOs be in the same boat? The question then becomes what makes GMOs different from a list of ingredients? Why would one be needed but the other not?
Monsanto modified their corn to be resistant to Roundup, another Monsanto product, a chemical that kills all plant life. The intention was to cut down farming costs, not for any benefit to humans or animals nutritionally.
Who benefits from this? Only the huge mega-farms, <snip>.
Nahh, that's just biased rhetoric. Small family farms have exactly the same interest in reducing costs and increasing productivity as the mega-farms do. And that's why many do pay the higher costs for GMO seeds, because their projections show them making more money by going that way.
And let's not forget, much of the organic food is produced on very large industrial farms now, too. The difference is mostly a different list of approved fertilizers and pesticides.
Quote:
When only one type of seed is planted, there will always be something in nature that will attack it. And there goes our food and the food for our domesticated animals.
Sure, monocropping is risky, but that was going on before GMOs were even invented.
It's nothing attributable to (or that you can blame on) GMOs
Quote:
What happens to naturally bred corn that is accidentally pollinated? That is far from settled.
No one knows but Monsanto. And they have suppressed independent studies using the claim of patent infringement to prevent independent studies from finding out anything.
But patent protection only lasts 20 years, and the earliest GMO soybean patents have already expired and become public domain, so there's a big window to experimentation right there.
Quote:
And we have no idea of what could happen to all the natural ways of pollination that happens with the beneficial insects and animals. If GMO kills the bees, we are all in deep food trouble.
Yeah, except studies have shown that GMOs don't kill bees. Persistent neonicotinoid insecticides kill bees, and two viruses attacking at the same time kills bees. GMOs are not involved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GuyNTexas
The "pretext" (rather than premise) for GMO is greater yields via resistance to pests and environmental variables. The important difference here is that "pretext" is the advertised reason, while "premise" alludes to the true underlying "real reason".
Ooga booga, scary scary! This kind of unproven conspiracy theory is the exact opposite of how things generally work in life, under a principle known as Occam's Razor, which basically states that given a choice of different explanations for something happening, the simplest explanation is generally the most likely to be the truth.
The premise of GMOs is always to create a solution to an agricultural or biological issue that cannot be achieved through traditional breeding techniques.
Quote:
That said, the premise for GMO is total control of agricultural production by means of patent protection.
That said, the actual premise for GMO development is to create new solutions to old problems. GMO technology is being used to fight cancer, fight malaria, fight dengue fever, fight hunger, fight nutritional insufficiency, improve crop yields, produce cheaper medications, etc.
"Once people understand this very fundamental reality, a lot of what may not make sense to them now will become immediately clear."
Exactly!
Quote:
As it stands today, natural products cannot be patented
.
No, and that is as it should be. Patents are a means of protecting inventions and intellectual property. Nobody can own a natural organism, but a breeder can own the rights to an improvement they've on that natural product for 17 - 20 years, allowing them to profit financially financially from their work, if the market determines it to be a valuable improvement.
And that's a big if. The now dominant strain of avocados known as Hass was patented in the 1930s by the Long Beach mail man named Hass who developed or found it (the exact story is unresolved). The total royalties collected were something like $36,000 for an agricultural development worth $ Billions on the commercial market.
Quote:
This is why pharmaceutical medicine replaced natural medicine, for which the active ingredients of many pharmaceutical drugs are synthetic copies of elements found in natural plant life.
This rewriting of history is entertaining, but just barely. In reality modern pharmaceuticals were developed in the search for more consistent and more effective results.
Quote:
This same agenda is being implemented by the same players who want to replace natural agriculture with patented versions for which they have exclusive rights.
There's no question they want to have a monopoly, but there's no way that will happen, because farmers can always choose other varieties. Farmers who grow GMO crops do it out of free choice, because they stand to make more money for their work. That's been going on since the 1930s, when the University of Kansas released the first hybrid corn varieties whic farmers would have to buy fresh seed for every year.
Quote:
Upon careful examination of the disastrous track record of pharmaceutical drugs, one can predict a similar, if not even more disastrous outcome should we allow GMO to establish an intractable foothold.
It's begging the argument to say that pharmaceutical drugs have a disastrous track record, when a view which is more objective than emotional would say there have disasters, yes, but the overall track record is quite remarkable on the beneficial side. In my lifetime diseases that were major worries of childhood survival have become nearly extinct, life expectancy has dramatically lengthened, and the quality of that extended life just keeps getting better.
Quote:
Anyone who cites these tests, or the findings of the FDA as proof of safety, haven't the common sense to come in out of the rain.
The fact that you keep resorting to insults just underlines with each and every dig the emptiness of your arguments. Eliminate all the pejoratives and loaded language and you'd have nothing to say.
Quote:
While the FDA turns a blind eye to the misdeeds of big Agra and big pharma, their focus and regulation enforcement efforts are directed at cooperatives, small organic farmers, and lowly Amish dairy farmer, protecting us from the threat of raw milk as if it were the milk of mass destruction, for no other reason than to defend the monopoly of milk of mass production.
As a matter of record it is a proven fact... underline proven and fact... that people catch diseases from raw milk at a highly elevated level over pasteurized milk.
Quote:
CDC: Raw Milk Much More Likely to Cause Illness
Raw milk and raw milk products are 150 times more likely than their pasteurized counterparts to sicken those who consume them, according to a 13-year review published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. States that permit raw milk sales also have more than twice as many illness outbreaks as states where raw milk is not sold.
The CDC study, published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases, reviewed dairy-related outbreaks between 1993 and 2006 in all 50 states, during which time the authors counted 121 dairy-related illness outbreaks resulting in 4,413 illnesses, 239 hospitalizations and three deaths.
Despite raw milk products accounting for approximately one percent of dairy production in the U.S., raw milk dairies were linked to 60 percent of those dairy-related outbreaks. In addition, 202 of the 239 hospitalizations (85 percent) resulted from raw milk outbreaks. Thirteen percent of patients from raw milk outbreaks were hospitalized, versus one percent of patients from pasteurized milk outbreaks.
It's not that consumers need a right reason for rejecting a product. I never said that. The technical name for that kinda crackpot logical error is a "straw man" argument.
What I said was that under our federal constitution, the government cannot compel labels or statements on products without a compelling public interest, and without substantial scientific proof that GMOs are unsafe there is no compelling public interest, as the courts define it.
.
First, there is no such thing as a "Federal Constitution", though given the amount of distortion and redefining of the English language engaged in by the Supreme Court in it's illegitimate and self serving interpretations of THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, it might be deemed a Freudian slip to refer to it as the Federal Constitution.
Be that as it may, I can't find a single reference in either of these constitutions that might grant to the federal government the power to solely decide what does and does not onstitute a "compelling public interest". Nor can I imagine a more compelling case of public interests than the will of the people who are demanding to know the source and nature of the food they are purchasing and consuming.
To conflate freedom of speech with product labeling is a most absurd and intellectually bankrupt position to defend, and particularly so given the plethora of existing labeling requirements already in place. Surely, if there is a compelling public interest in knowing the amount of calories in a serving of product A, it would also serve the public interest in knowing whether or not that product has had it's genetic structure modified in a laboratory.
As an example, the presence of artificial sweeteners in a product must be listed, even though the industry and the FDA insists there is no risk to the health of persons who consume them. So, there is no need to prove something unsafe in order to justify requiring disclosure. In fact, it is idiocy to even insinuate such a thing, given the FDA's charter to ensure that all approved food products are safe to consume to begin with.
Of course, the majority of people who are adequately informed already know the inherent health risks in consuming many substances that the FDA insists is safe, so assurances of safety from them is as worthless as teats on a bull.
First, there is no such thing as a "Federal Constitution", though given the amount of distortion and redefining of the English language engaged in by the Supreme Court in it's illegitimate and self serving interpretations of THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, it might be deemed a Freudian slip to refer to it as the Federal Constitution.
No, I was simply using a word that the dictionary defines as meaning "of, relating to, or denoting the central government of the US." to be clear I wasn't talking about the State Constitution. No points to you for being nitpicky about my exact word choice.
Quote:
Be that as it may, I can't find a single reference in either of these constitutions that might grant to the federal government the power to solely decide what does and does not onstitute a "compelling public interest". Nor can I imagine a more compelling case of public interests than the will of the people who are demanding to know the source and nature of the food they are purchasing and consuming.
It means compelling government interest. And if you read the text of the decision, public curiosity, even intense public curiosity, simply does not rise to a high enough standard to create an exception to a constitutional right.
Quote:
To conflate freedom of speech with product labeling is a most absurd and intellectually bankrupt position to defend, and particularly so given the plethora of existing labeling requirements already in place.
Commercial speech, as the courts refer to it, is every bit as protected as any other form of speech. And the existing labeling requirements are based on demonstrated need due to abundant scientific evidence. For example, some fringe researchers claim there are additional vitamins which are essential to life, but mainstream medical science doesn't concur, so these claimed "vitamins" are not listed.
And let's take your argument that public demand should overturn Constitutional protections... let's say that anti-Semitism rose again in this country to such a level that there is a loud public clamoring for food that was grown or prepared by Jews to be labeled, so they could avoid it. Sound familiar?
Well, that isn't going to happen, no matter how shrill the demand to know might get, and for the same reason. Freedom of speech means the Government cannot stop you from speaking in public, within the reasonable limits we all know, and it also means they can't compel you to speak, such as to tell others your food is poison, when it isn't.
Quote:
Surely, if there is a compelling public interest in knowing the amount of calories in a serving of product A, it would also serve the public interest in knowing whether or not that product has had it's genetic structure modified in a laboratory.
Again, to paraphrase Dr. Gonsalvez, "It was a papaya before, it's still a papaya." The need to label calories is driven by proven nutritional science. There is no such demonstrated need with GMOs, and to get back to the topic of this thread, there is now massive evidence showing clearly there is no need for labeling, because GMO foods are safe, and nutritious, virtually indistinguishable from unmodified foods except by sophisticated laboratory examination.
Quote:
As an example, the presence of artificial sweeteners in a product must be listed, even though the industry and the FDA insists there is no risk to the health of persons who consume them. So, there is no need to prove something unsafe in order to justify requiring disclosure. In fact, it is idiocy to even insinuate such a thing, given the FDA's charter to ensure that all approved food products are safe to consume to begin with.
But there ARE sound reasons for labeling artificial sweeteners, including diabetes management and PKU sensitivity, which have nothing to do with the alt.med claims. And there are 4 artificial sweeteners that are approved for use in other parts of the worlds that are not approved in the US, which speaks to the FDA's commitment to keeping our food supply safe. GMOs are not labelled because there has been no credible need established.
And this new study is massive new evidence that their stance on the issue is correct.
Ooga booga, scary scary! This kind of unproven conspiracy theory is the exact opposite of how things generally work in life, under a principle known as Occam's Razor, which basically states that given a choice of different explanations for something happening, the simplest explanation is generally the most likely to be the truth.
"Ooga booga" ? Really? Are you 3 ?
Might I suggest that the application of Occam's Razor in this context would fully support my contentions here, since it is a long established fact that money is almost always the primary motive, and particularly true when it comes to corporations and commerce. While you may be so naive as to believe the quest to build a better mouse trap was to catch more mice, the primary objective was always to sell more mouse traps. This fundamental truth can be applied to virtually any product, across the board.
Quote:
The premise of GMOs is always to create a solution to an agricultural or biological issue that cannot be achieved through traditional breeding techniques.
That said, the actual premise for GMO development is to create new solutions to old problems. GMO technology is being used to fight cancer, fight malaria, fight dengue fever, fight hunger, fight nutritional insufficiency, improve crop yields, produce cheaper medications, etc.
"Once people understand this very fundamental reality, a lot of what may not make sense to them now will become immediately clear."
Exactly!
What should be immediately clear here is that aside from those with a vested interest in promoting such ludicrous nonsense, you are a member of a very small club, and it's getting smaller each day.
Quote:
No, and that is as it should be. Patents are a means of protecting inventions and intellectual property.
We all know why patents are sought.
Quote:
This rewriting of history is entertaining, but just barely. In reality modern pharmaceuticals were developed in the search for more consistent and more effective results.
Right. What's really amazing is how drugs seem to begin losing effectiveness round about the same time their patents are about to expire, and how another, "more effective" one is created by the benevolent knights of the pharmaceutical round table, just in the nick of time, with a fresh, new patent, of course!
Quote:
There's no question they want to have a monopoly, but there's no way that will happen, because farmers can always choose other varieties. Farmers who grow GMO crops do it out of free choice, because they stand to make more money for their work. That's been going on since the 1930s, when the University of Kansas released the first hybrid corn varieties whic farmers would have to buy fresh seed for every year.
Baloney! Tell that to the farmers whose natural crops have been contaminated by Monsanto's GMO, only to suffer additional damages by being sued by Monsanto for patent infringement. One can hardly find a more blatant case of victimizing victims, and standing justice on its ear. The unwanted and unpreventable contamination of non-GMO plants via cross pollination now being considered by the corrupt courts as an infringement of Monsanto's patent protections truly knows no equal in the realm of corruption of justice, as the victims are ordered to pay damages to the perpetrator.
This situation proves that it is impossible for farmers to choose to be GMO free. Pure double talk. It also proves that the courts are as corrupt as the congress.
Quote:
It's begging the argument to say that pharmaceutical drugs have a disastrous track record, when a view which is more objective than emotional would say there have disasters, yes, but the overall track record is quite remarkable on the beneficial side. In my lifetime diseases that were major worries of childhood survival have become nearly extinct, life expectancy has dramatically lengthened, and the quality of that extended life just keeps getting better.
Nothing remotely close to emotional ... facts are facts. And the facts are, roughly 200,000 people die each year from pharmaceutical drugs prescribed by doctors, and taken as directed. That's the equivalent of one fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every day, 365 days each year. If that doesn't constitute a disaster, nothing does, and no where else would such a situation be tolerated.
As for the nonsense about childhood diseases ...it's a modern day fear mongering fraud for the purpose of promoting the greatest disaster of all modern medicine ... vaccines. When I was a child, no one worried about it. It was a part of growing up ... mumps, measles, chickenpox .. the "big three" were as common as a cold ... we all got them, and we all survived with lifelong immunity as a bonus. No doctor intervention was required, just mom, putting on some over the counter lotion. No "Ooga booga".
Nowadays, we keep hearing a lot of BS about how modern medicine has rescued mankind from almost certain extinction, but what are the real, measurable results? We Americans now lead the world in incidences of all the major diseases .... cancer to diabetes. Even infant mortality rates are increasing, not decreasing. We've never been fatter or sicker ... with the rates of chronic diseases exploding, including those of young children suffering diseases that were once upon a time seen only in the elderly. The explosion of autism, and other autoimmune disorders are off the charts, along with diabetes, cancer, arthritis, COPD, etc. Now how does that jibe with the miracle of modern medicine we hear so much about?
Sorry, charlie, that dog doesn't hunt. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and you just have to read between the lines when you hear talk about the successes of modern medicine. Oh yeah, the medical establishment has been very successful ... the state of public health, not so much.
Quote:
The fact that you keep resorting to insults just underlines with each and every dig the emptiness of your arguments. Eliminate all the pejoratives and loaded language and you'd have nothing to say.
I've not directed a single insult to anyone specifically. If, in my general statements, you find that the shoe fits you, that's your problem, not mine.
Quote:
As a matter of record it is a proven fact... underline proven and fact... that people catch diseases from raw milk at a highly elevated level over pasteurized milk.
Imagine that. How did humanity survive without Sir Louis Pasteur for thousands of years drinking raw milk? Just dumb luck, I suppose.
I'm actually a biological scientist, but a critical-thinking educated person could easily determine this long-winded tirade is lacking of one iota of evidence to support your claims that GMO products are unsafe.
It does include the common logical fallacies of: (1) Conspiracy arguments (2) Argument by ignorance (3) Strawman.
I wanted to revisit this particular post again, and challenge you to actually address a few points specifically, since you claim to be a "biological scientist", you should be able to speak to the technical points which I will number ... let's just start at the beginning, with just one ....
1) the main foundation of genetic science was based on the theory of "genetic control", meaning that the genes control what an organism becomes, and it's unique traits are contained within the orgaisms genome. Furthermore, it was believed that a specific gene will code for one specific protein. That was proven false by experiments conducted back in the 1970's by Dr. Bruce Lipton, and reaffirmed by the results of the Human Genome Project, wherein roughly the human body utilizes 100,000 separate proteins, while only possessing about 25,000 genes. Obviously, there is not a one to one correlation. Moreover, in Dr. Lipton's experiments, he placed cloned stem cells into three different environment mediums, expecting all three to produce the same results, based on identical DNA sequences. To his surprise, each cloned cell produced a different outcome, meaning that it was not the genetic code in control, but the outside environment determined the outcome.
Consequently, genetic science doesn't really understand the complexities of gene expression which is significantly influenced by outside factors.
In addition to this, a team of scientists at the University of Washington discovered in 2013, the existence of a separate "hidden" code hiding in DNA which dramatically changes the way scientists must read genetic instructions. Consequently, the assumptions for which genetic engineers have been operating on have been wrong, all along. Therefore, the assurances from genetic engineers claiming that these genetic modifications are targeted, precise, and predictable couldn't be further from the truth.
Frankly, genetic science cannot even define the exact sequences which create naturally found proteins, let alone predict what effect genetically altered novel proteins may induce, including foreign proteins and DNA/RNA inserted into the mix.
Perhaps you could address this first, before we move on to other points?
I wanted to revisit this particular post again, and challenge you to actually address a few points specifically, since you claim to be a "biological scientist", you should be able to speak to the technical points which I will number ... let's just start at the beginning, with just one ....
1) the main foundation of genetic science was based on the theory of "genetic control", meaning that the genes control what an organism becomes, and it's unique traits are contained within the orgaisms genome. Furthermore, it was believed that a specific gene will code for one specific protein. That was proven false by experiments conducted back in the 1970's by Dr. Bruce Lipton, and reaffirmed by the results of the Human Genome Project, wherein roughly the human body utilizes 100,000 separate proteins, while only possessing about 25,000 genes. Obviously, there is not a one to one correlation. Moreover, in Dr. Lipton's experiments, he placed cloned stem cells into three different environment mediums, expecting all three to produce the same results, based on identical DNA sequences. To his surprise, each cloned cell produced a different outcome, meaning that it was not the genetic code in control, but the outside environment determined the outcome.
Consequently, genetic science doesn't really understand the complexities of gene expression which is significantly influenced by outside factors.
In addition to this, a team of scientists at the University of Washington discovered in 2013, the existence of a separate "hidden" code hiding in DNA which dramatically changes the way scientists must read genetic instructions. Consequently, the assumptions for which genetic engineers have been operating on have been wrong, all along. Therefore, the assurances from genetic engineers claiming that these genetic modifications are targeted, precise, and predictable couldn't be further from the truth.
Frankly, genetic science cannot even define the exact sequences which create naturally found proteins, let alone predict what effect genetically altered novel proteins may induce, including foreign proteins and DNA/RNA inserted into the mix.
Perhaps you could address this first, before we move on to other points?
Excellent!
Glad you got that out there.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This kind of unproven conspiracy theory is the exact opposite of how things generally work in life, under a principle known as Occam's Razor, which basically states that given a choice of different explanations for something happening, the simplest explanation is generally the most likely to be the truth.
