Stephan: Here is the latest on Monsanto and The GMO Experiment Trend. The court's decision, that Monsanto pledged not to sue farmers in whose crops their genes occurred, so the farmers needn't fear being sued, covers only half the story. What is missing, notable particularly with the Oregon wheat event as context, is that it shows Monsanto has considered it likely the genes would spread. What does that mean? No one knows. We are playing around with the fundamental building blocks of nature, with very little understanding of what the out-years look like.
Monsanto Co. on Monday won another round in a lawsuit brought by U.S. organic growers as an appellate court threw out the growers’ legal challenge to prohibit the biotech seed company from suing them.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a federal court ruling out of New York that found organic growers had no reason to try to block Monsanto from suing them as the company had pledged it would not take them to court.
Organic farmers and others have worried for years that they will be sued by Monsanto for patent infringement if their crops get contaminated with Monsanto biotech crops.
In its ruling Monday, the appellate court said the organic growers must rely on Monsanto assurances on the company’s website that it will not sue them so long as the mix is very slight.
‘Monsanto’s binding representations remove any risk of suit against the appellants as users or sellers of trace amounts (less than one percent) of modified seed,’ the court stated in its ruling.
Monsanto has developed a reputation for zealously defending patents on its genetically altered crops, which include patented ‘Roundup Ready’ soybeans, corn and cotton, genetically altered to tolerate treatments of its Roundup weedkiller.
The crops are […]
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Stephan: An example of what can be done if we jettison our sexual dysfunction and religious bias. People are going to have sex. You did, I did, most of the people you know have. And if you are like most Americans the first occurrence was somewhere in your teens. This decision will do more to reduce abortions than any other social policy. I consider it very good news.
The federal government on Monday told a judge it will reverse course and take steps to comply with his order to allow girls of any age to buy emergency contraception without prescriptions.
The Department of Justice, in the latest development in a complex back-and-forth over access to the morning-after pill, notified U.S. District Judge Edward Korman it will submit a plan for compliance. If he approves it, the department will drop its appeal of his April ruling.
According to the department’s letter to the judge, the Food and Drug Administration has told the maker of the pills to submit a new drug application with proposed labeling that would permit it to be sold ‘without a prescription and without age or point-of-sale prescriptions.’ The FDA said that once it receives the application it ‘intends to approve it promptly.’
Last week, an appeals court dealt the government a setback by saying it would immediately permit unrestricted sales of the two-pill version of the emergency contraception until the appeal was decided. That order was met with praise from advocates for girls’ and women’s rights and with scorn from social conservatives and other opponents, who argue the drug’s availability takes away the rights of parents of girls […]
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Stephan: How interesting it is that humor proves harder to crack than the human genome.
A straight-faced academic with a crew cut and sweater vest is making the packed room laugh using a projector and the branch of mathematics known as set theory. Up goes another Venn diagram. The left circle says ‘grandpa
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ROBERT REICH, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: I was just starting to write this essay, when I found someone had already done it. This is another person's view of the Great Schism Trend, and I agree with almost everything Reich says. My only disagreement is that he does not take into consideration the migrations climate change is going to create, nor does he see that the quality of life in Blue value states will become so much better than life in the Red Value states that the best and the brightest in the Red states will move to the Blue states, and the Red States will become like Mississippi, third world countries. But this is just the first layer.
Beneath that what this is telling us is that when one party simply chooses not to govern, even seems to lose the skill, the Federal government ceases to function and the ripples that go out from that rot the country from the core out. And that takes us to the deepest level: In the end our situtation is also a commentary on how democracies die because the citizens vote in corrupt nonentities.
About a week ago I set up a web page called the Power of Ten. I sent out an announcement about it to over 10,000 people, asking them to take this pledge:
The Power of Ten Pledge
I pledge that I will vote in the 2014 election.
Within the next two weeks I will ask 10 people to pledge that they will do the same.
I will tell them I am making my choices for that which is compassionate and life-affirming, and I will ask them to join me.
I will ask them to commit to make this pledge to 10 people, asking them to carry the process on so that it can spread through the matrix.
That's all that is required. Between now and the 2014 election the expression of this shared intention on behalf of national wellness, if passed from hand to hand could change the outcome of the election to one oriented towards national wellness.
I am quite serious about this, and I make the commitment to you. Will you join me? This is doable.
There was nothing about party politics, or partisanship. It cost nothing, and it required no more than the basic citizen duty. So far of those 10,000 only 76 have made this simple pledge.
We have no one to blame but ourselves for what we are becoming.
Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government – the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law – has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called ‘sequester’ that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.
But the nation’s work doesn’t stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which […]
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STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Marijuana prohibition either by intent or simply indifference is an utterly racist policy. Here's why.
The New York Civil Liberties Union published a research report (PDF) Thursday detailing the vast racial disparities in the state’s marijuana enforcement regime, finding that black New Yorkers are, in some parts of the state, up to 9 times more likely to be arrested for pot than whites.
The NYCLU’s report follows an American Civil Liberties Union study published Monday that found non-whites nationwide are more than four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana despite higher usage rates among whites.
The NYCLU report found that the New York had by far the most marijuana arrests in the nation in 2010, beating even Texas and more than doubling the national average in spite of possession being decriminalized since 1977.
Though simple possession is a violation-level offense, so-called ‘stop and frisk
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