, - A Garden for the House
Stephan: Gardening is one of the most popular activities in America, and increasingly people are growing their own food. Plants usually start with seeds. A reader sent me this list of the seed companies and labels owned by Monsanto. I wanted to share it with you, along with my recommendation not to buy these seeds.
Note how many apparently different companies are actually one corporation -- Monsanto.
IF YOU ARE THE KIND OF GARDENER who buys vegetable seeds or seedlings (including tomato plants) from a local garden center, as I sometimes do, beware the varieties you select. Otherwise, you could very well be putting money into the hands of the wretched Monsanto Corporation. Forewarned is forearmed, right? Here is the list of Seminis/Monsanto home-garden vegetable varieties, and yes, it even includes zucchini:
I’m going to print out this list, and keep a copy in my wallet. This way I won’t be caught off-guard the next time I decide to impulse-shop at a big-box garden center:
Beans: Aliconte, Brio, Bronco, Cadillac, Ebro, Etna, Eureka, Festina, Gina, Goldmine, Goldenchild, Labrador, Lynx, Magnum, Matador, Spartacus, Storm, Strike, Stringless Blue Lake 7, Tapia, Tema
Broccoli: Coronado Crown, Major, Packman
Cabbage: Atlantis, Golden Acre, Headstart, Platinum Dynasty, Red Dynasty
Carrot: Bilbo, Envy, Forto, Juliana, Karina, Koroda PS, Royal Chantenay, Sweetness III
Cauliflower: Cheddar, Minuteman
Cucumber: Babylon, Cool Breeze Imp., Dasher II, Emporator, Eureka, Fanfare HG, Marketmore 76, Mathilde, Moctezuma, Orient Express II, Peal, Poinsett 76, Salad Bush, Sweet Slice, Sweet Success PS, Talladega
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MARGARET FLOWERS and KEVIN ZEESE,, - Truthout
Stephan: Civilian nuclear power was a creature of the Cold War created so that the nuclear industry could develop a profit making application for the technology, and be able to maintain a career path and a cadre of men and women who could maintain the skill sets necessary to run such an industry -- whether military or civilian. It was sold to the country as the long term energy solution, a theme one still hears. However, the reality is quite different. Like most things created out of paranoia and fear it has turned into one long horror show. Here is the latest. And you thought it was just reactors we had to worry about.
In addition to the nuclear aspect, please note the absolute racism in this story.
Early in the morning of July 16, 1979, a 20-foot section of the earthen dam blocking the waste pool for the Church Rock Uranium Mill in New Mexico caved in and released 95 million gallons of highly acidic fluid containing 1,100 tons of radioactive material. The fluid and waste flowed into the nearby Puerco River, traveling 80 miles downstream, leaving toxic puddles and backing up local sewers along the way.
Although this release of radiation, thought to be the largest in US history, occurred less than four months after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown, the Church Rock spill received little media attention. In contrast, the Three Mile Island accident made the headlines. And when the residents of Church Rock asked their governor to declare their community a disaster area so they could get recovery assistance, he refused.
What was the difference between the Church Rock spill and the Three Mile Island partial meltdown? Church Rock is situated in the Navajo Nation, one of the areas in the US sacrificed to supply uranium for the Cold War and for nuclear power plants. That area and many others in the Navajo Nation are contaminated to this day. Another sacrifice area is the […]
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DEVIN DWYER and JAMES GORDON MEEK, - ABC News
Stephan: Here is yet another example of the surveillance state.
The Obama administration has been quietly collecting millions of telephone records from U.S. Verizon customers under a top-secret court order first obtained in late April, according to British newspaper The Guardian.
A copy of the classified order, posted Wednesday on the newspaper’s website, reveals that Verizon has been required to provide to the National Security Agency on an ‘ongoing, daily basis’ information on all phone calls made through its systems.
Under the order, the government has obtained phone numbers of both parties on every Verizon call, the call’s duration, location data and the time of day the calls were made. The order does not allow the government to listen in on the calls or obtain details of their contents.
The order was granted April 25 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), which oversees secret government requests for private information that might help identify suspected terrorists or foreign nationals in the U.S. The order, which did not identify intended targets or the rational for casting such a wide net, expires July 19.
A former top U.S. intelligence official with decades of direct experience handling FISA surveillance matters told ABC News that the scope of the Verizon order posted online by the Guardian is breathtaking.
‘This […]
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BARTON GELLMAN and LAURA POITRAS, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Since the librarians revolted about being required to secretly report the book borrowing habits of their patrons, I have been warning people that we are entering a national security police state, and I have repeatedly warned you that anything you say on a phone, or write in an email is subject to surveillance.
Over the past several years a number of my conservative readers have written me, particularly during the Bush years, to tell me that I was being paranoid, and alarmist, and that this was necessary for the War on Terror. In the last two days confirmation of every one of my assertions has been revealed to be true, and it is even worse than I thought. In the U.S. privacy as a concept and right no longer exists. Welcome to 21st century America.
The only difference between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration is that the Obama Administration is better at writing the laws and regulations so that this is all perfectly legal.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: ‘Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.
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SADHBH WALSHE, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Even your DNA will be no longer private. This is a police state that even Orwell did not envisage. Imagine what James Madison, or Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson would think about a country where every phone conversation, every email, even the basic stuff of life itself was monitored, tracked and cataloged.
A divided US supreme court ruled this week to uphold a Maryland law that allows the police to collect without warrant DNA material from persons who are arrested. The 5-4 decision was greeted with dismay by civil liberties advocates who see it as a body-blow to privacy and a further erosion of the US constitution’s fourth amendment, which is supposed to protect individuals from excessive government intrusion. The truth is, in an era of mass surveillance, we have little privacy left to lose – and the courts have shown little willingness to resist law enforcement claims that access to our personal and physical data is necessary for them to do their job.
This willingness to forgo the privacy of the many to identify the misbehavior of the few is already well established in America’s warrantless surveillance program. In January, President Obama signed into law a five-year extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows for the monitoring of personal phone calls and emails as long as one of the communicants is outside the US. We have also recently been given reason to believe that all our domestic phone calls may be ‘captured as we speak’ and that no ‘digital […]
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