Monday, November 26th, 2012
, - Samar News (Phillipines)/GreenpeaceNovember 21, 2012
Stephan: Here is some more news on GMOs. I have come to see the proliferation of GMOs as essentially a worldwide lab experiment with the human race as the lab rats.
QUEZON CITY, PHILLIPINES — Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), such as Bt corn, Bt eggplant, and ‘golden rice’ pose significant risks to human health and the environment, a gene scientist warned today.
Speaking at a Greenpeace press conference, gene scientist Tushar Chakraborty said GMOs are not safe, have not been independently tested, and have not undergone long-term studies.
Following a landmark case in India last month that called for a 10-year moratorium on GMOs due to safety concerns, Dr. Chakraborty, Principal Scientist of the Gene Regulation Laboratory of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, recommended the banning of GMOs in the Philippines as the prudent, science-based approach to the uncertainties surrounding these man-made food crops.
Dr. Chakraborty is among hundreds of scientists in India who have come out in support of a ban on GMO food crops in the subcontinent. He is in Manila at the invitation of Greenpeace, as an expert witness in ongoing Writ of Kalikasan hearings at the Supreme Court, to help substantiate scientific findings that GMOs are unstable and unsafe to be planted, processed, and eaten.
‘GMO technology is highly uncertain, as such, they are inherently unpredictable and irreversible,
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Sunday, November 25th, 2012
Stephan: This is a part of the greatest geopolitical trend of the 21st century, part of which involves the shift of innovation from the United States to the emerging power societies such as China and India.
The problem with old power societies, such as the U.S., and Britain before it, is that the power elite is wedded to the status quo because it is from this base that their wealth and power derives. It takes a very creative turn of mind to commit to the future, and executives only rarely get promoted for making risky choices. The irony is that individuals in the U.S. continue to be innovative leaders. This story describes what happens next. As this report says, ''If they build it first... it'll be faster and cheaper for us
BEIJING — On a typical day, the air above China’s big cities is so thick it seems chewable-a hazy gray soup that gets its consistency and color from the soot belched by the biggest clump of coal-fired power plants on the planet.
To a growing number of U.S. entrepreneurs, that gray looks like green: the color of money.
These Americans, ranging from startup inventors to big-utility chief executives, see China as a testing ground for technologies that burn coal more cleanly-technologies they hope one day to deploy around the world. They’re banking on a market for a new generation of cleaner coal-fired power plants in the United States many years from now, when a sizable chunk of the nation’s aging coal-fired power plants is likely to wear out and need replacing. But they see little appetite from U.S. investors or policymakers for the risk involved in trying to scale up these technologies today.
So, like all ambitious peddlers of newfangled widgets, they’re going where the buyers are: in this case to China, which over the past decade has become the biggest coal burner and carbon-dioxide emitter on Earth. They’re having a wild ride. But whether they’ll clean up coal on the […]
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Sunday, November 25th, 2012
LANE KENWORTHY, - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: Here is the hard truth few want to talk about. We, as a country must reorganize ourselves if we are to prosper. This is what happens to all empires. In theory this trend can be reversed, but whether we can end our denial and gather the political will to do so is not clear; some would say it is not likely.
For all the differences between Democrats and Republicans that were laid bare during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, the parties’ standard-bearers, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, do seem to have agreed on one thing: the importance of equal opportunity. In remarks in Chicago in August, Obama called for an ‘America where no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your last name is, no matter who you love, you can make it here if you try.’ The same month, he urged the Supreme Court to uphold affirmative action in public universities, putting his weight behind what has been a mainstay of U.S. equal opportunity legislation since the 1960s. Days later, the Republican vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, echoed Obama’s sentiment, saying, ‘We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.’ Romney, too, argued that whereas Obama ‘wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society,’ his administration would ‘ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.’
It is no accident that both campaigns chose to emphasize equality of opportunity. It has long been at the center of the American ethos. And one of the United States’ major successes […]
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Sunday, November 25th, 2012
MONICA DAVEY, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is an almost inevitable consequence of the growing Great Schism Trend. Elections are an expression of group consciousness, and the citizens of the Red value states and the Blue value states, step-by-step are choosing different paths.
I believe over the next four years we are going to see state level legislation that will accelerate this trend and, before the four years is up, it would not surprise me to begin to see migrations of Blue Value people out of Red Value states. I think migrations the other way are less likely, since the social outcomes in Blue value states will continue to be better than those in the Red value States, and people rarely give up benefits. All of this will just exacerbate the trend.
CHICAGO – Come January, more than two-thirds of the states will be under single-party control, raising the prospect that bold partisan agendas – on both ends of the political spectrum – will flourish over the next couple of years.
Though the Nov. 6 election maintained divided government in Washington, the picture is starkly different in capitals from California to Florida: one party will hold the governor’s office and majorities in both legislative chambers in at least 37 states, the largest number in 60 years and a significant jump from even two years ago.
‘For quite a period of time, people were voting for divided government because they wanted compromise, middle ground,
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Sunday, November 25th, 2012
Stephan: Here is an extraordinary new way of looking at medicine, what I think is going to become a major aspect of the New Medicine Trend. I began tracking this trend when a single Australian doctor figured out that institutional medicine's entire approach to ulcers was wrong; that it was really a bacterium in the stomach that was the problem.
What’s a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body’s surface.
A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body’s genetic mix.
And it […]
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