A dedicated blogger who writes as ‘Crossed Crocodiles’ (X-Croc for short) introduced me to the horrors and schemes of Africom initially, at least as I remember it. He’s lived in Ghana off and on for years, and in Aug. 2014 suspended his writing to focus on ‘The fight against Big Ag and GMOs in Ghana’. The intro:
“Big Agriculture has targeted Africa with GMOs. Monsanto and friends, with USAID, are targeting several African countries as insertion points, and Ghana is one of these. Their plan for Ghana is described here: G8 Cooperation Framework to Support The “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition” In Ghana PDF, also known as the G8NA. If you read it there is lots of flowery language about helping smallholder farmers and women. The program it spells out does exactly the opposite and will destroy lives and livelihoods.
The G8NA works with the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program CAADP. CAADP has a highly questionable approach to food security and nutrition. The problems with CAADP and with G8NA are spelled out in Do African Farmers Need CAADP? a brief and clearly written pamphlet explaining the issues involved, a PDF version can be downloaded at the link.”
His Africom exposés are listed on the right side-bar. Im pleased to see him on the FoodSovereigntyGhana Twitter account.
(Obviously, the other elephant is the military, accountable for about half of all greenhouse gases.)
Of course, the chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. So if that deal gets ratified by all of the potential signatory nations: all bets are off.
“May I please have a Frankenfish salmon burger with GM papaya chutney with BT corn and a side of Simplot fries?”
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl
a scifi novel in which companies like Monsanto run the planet. quite good.
here’s a review:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/18/windup-girl-paolo-bacigalupi-review
the only way this story works is b/c the carbon energy age has died. if that doesn’t happen in the real world, we may not make it to the 23rd century.
holy canole, that’s like a prescient acid nightmare, isn’t it? can’t help but think it’ll be a film soon, yes? ‘created to be a geisha, she wound up in a thai brothel instead’. have you read it then? depending on which ‘we’ you mean, i expect you might just be right, jason.
there are so many threats now to human life as we know it; hanford ‘campus’ is leaking mightily again/still, who knows how the seed saver exchanges are really going, or how large the caches are…nuclear war? the wsws piece on U troops in yemen quoted a saudi prince saying they might just create a nuclear arsenal and ___ (i thought that was the other open nuke secret past israel’s, myself), ubiquitously poisoned water, who knows what changes to human dna via transgenics, and tra la la.
i might start readin’ at that ‘rapture, end times’ site myownself, lol. meanwhile, mr. wd and i live in this little cloistered oasis we created, and it just doesn’t seem right some of the time. not that we’ll be much safer when the shit really hits the fan… ha; the tax assessor doubled the valuation of our house this year. wth?
oh, i couldn’t get this into the OP without a zillion lines of google adsense showing up repeatedly, though most of it we already knew; the conclusion: ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership and Monsanto‘, nationofchange.org
“While the TPP is in many ways like NAFTA and other existing trade agreements, it appears that the corporations have learned from previous experience. They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.
If the TPP is adopted the door will be open wider for human rights and environmental abuse. Some of the things we should expect to see included:
•more large scale farming and more monocultures;
•destruction of local economies;
•no input into how our food is grown or what we will be eating;
•more deforestation;
•increased use of herbicides and pesticides;
•increased patenting of life forms;
•more GMO plants and foods; and
•no labeling of GMOs in food.”
it’s distressing when talking to whole foods health nut achiever types if i suggest the obvious that disease prevention will be impossible & the etiology of disease will be increasingly difficult to determine b/c of environmental assaults on the human body…and the crickets chirp. might as well be speaking Venusian. “but we recycle! and our condo is LEEDS certified!”
yes, i read the novel. great ideas, not english’s greatest wordsmith by any means. not enough of a lit crit person to say more than that. no idea about a movie. the book came out in 2009. contra the reviewer at the guardian, i tho’t the ending of the novel was brilliant. the wind up girl, the “new human” winds up w/the most evil geneticist on the planet who cackles that she has no idea what he’s capable of. not immortality, though. dark & open-ended.
ah, i’d failed to notice the publication date, and the days of clockwork orange’s are bygone. so….no.
but i get the same grrrs on the folks who advocate dealing with the food crisis via horizontal greenhouses, or like ian welsh: growing your own food in basements under led lights. he doesn’t let my comments out of moderation (‘bern is NOT a socialist!), but also: do you realize that USians eat or consume a ton of food a year (yes, a lot is wasted, still..) and that most folks live in apartments with no basements now, how many per apt., and couldn’t afford to purchase such a setup? or ‘backyard gardening: fine for the odd bits of veg and herbs if one has a backyard! but the locavore movement is cringe-worthy to me. here, most of the year, we’d eat hay, grubs, cow, skunk, yanno? do they not consider climate, altitude, and so on?
i love your final take on the ending of the book. kinda reminded me of clinton (the one with the vagina)..
the gang at spyculture.com have a piece up about how apocalypticism plays into the agenda of the elites. that it will be a non-stop Walking Dead/Mad Max episode is a projection of elite desire onto the whole of humanity & the future. that in the face of catastrophe, which they have created, we’ll all become like them, cannibals, zombies, hoarders who viciously kill anyone who touches our stuff, amoral psychopaths who’d stuff their faces w/their own children like it was an outing to The Olive Garden, who can’t wait for granma to croak b/c, like the Checkers commercial says, ya gotta eat, etc. people didn’t do that shit in the siege of Leningrad; they aren’t doing it in Aleppo. the natives aren’t, anyway. the mercenaries…well, different story ain’t it?
i booted up spyculture, and regret to report that nothing on the front page that i scanned seemed like what you’re describing although i never saw mad max or the walking dead. saucers? i didn’t scan much of that, being eye-and-brain tired. but your comment did ping me to find this again, whether similar…or not.
i s’pose there are stephen hawking quotes of a similar nature, and aye, gawd, ‘scientists! take note!’
http://www.spyculture.com/clandestime-episode-043-the-end-of-the-world/
saucers? like who gets to go on the saucer, the new Noah’s ark? i can see sstrangelove licking his chops about the end of the monogamous lifestyle already…Walking Dead: zombies taking over the world. Mad Max: humanity’s last survivors, decked out like hockey players for some reason, in the desert fighting over the few remaining pints of gas.
famine is nature’s response to too many black people? awwww, he thinks this subject is “sensitive.” isn’t he cute? feeding ethiopians today, whatever we need to do about the future, why that’s just crazy talk. mr science guy thinks that in a globalized economy famine is just part of nature’s, you know, cycle? do the ethiopians get any say in his bright plans for their future? right. humanity will survive only by rejecting basic morality, decency, compassion AND democratic principles. just who are the monsters again?
oh, bosh; i shouldn’t have mentioned the ‘saucers’ one cuz i just zipped past a few. sorry. but it was on the front page. thanks fr retrieving the one, but ooof: pury long, dunno how far in i’ll be able to get before i skitter off to something else.
great parody of sir sensitivity, though, but rather than flour, they should give legumes or something, yes? wiki says: maize, sorghum, teff, oil seeds, root crops…
but srsly, just in the nick of time, popular resistance sent this today, and one of the press releases actually mentioned ethiopia, but a ‘leafy green’ horizontal hydroponic lettuce container was also featured: from tree hugger:
“The Farm From A Box system is designed to feed 150 people per year, and includes drip irrigation, all of the tools, and its own renewable energy setup.
This plug-and-play farming system combines water-smart irrigation, renewable energy, and precision farming technology in a single shipping container that is said to be capable of supporting the cultivation of almost two and a half acres, using regenerative agriculture practices.” [snip]
“While the units are designed to be complete systems with all of the core components (minus the land and water rights and labor, of course), the company doesn’t just stop there, but also includes a training system to help “new farmers tackle the steep learning curve of permaculture technique.”
now i haven’t watched the video yet, but the basic unit costs only $55,000, dunno about shipping costs; the lettuce one for restaurants is a mere $88,000, so mebbe sir sensitivity and some of his comrades could buy a hundred or so for those blacks who are not to be mentioned now that he’s had his say.
nice. bet it makes monstanto types’ teeth grind & sets their hearts a schemin something wicked.
“Sir” Richard shows the limits of intelligence. he can’t see outside the system he has so greatly benefited from. and he’s deluded himself that his is some kind of “earth first” eco-posture. “The truth is only told by gutter snipe” – The Clash.
well, i dunno; nothing i’ve read talks about seed sources, pest control, and where the hell ya find that ‘water source’ or ‘water rights’, for that matter. i even skittered thru their twit acct, but found an ad for a ‘structural farming; conference last year in addis abbaba. went to the page and found this on the sidebar: ‘Ethiopia Calls for International Community’s Support to Withstand Drought Effects’
http://allafrica.com/stories/201605101019.html
ah, shoot, was trying to find nasa’s (?) global drought map. gotta go take care of some chores for now.
love the clash line; somehow i’d missed them here in dipstick county, co.
i was actually wondering about the seeds & water too for the farm in a box. there’s *possibility* there, but it is dependent on other things. innovative technologies by themselves won’t fix anything. of course Monsanto types would be perfectly happy to have farm in a box use their seeds.
you know monsanto (or their lobbying firm or their front group known as the EPA or some astroturf Big Ag “ngo”) has at least one person on their payroll mouthing off at the ecowatch site in the comments section? they show up in FB discussions on glyphosate. “i don’t want to go where the rich are going…”
i didn’t know, but i’m not a bit surprised. twice now diaries that i’ve written have been trolled: one on monsanto back at (the accured) dagblog, but he didn’t come to my.fdl where it was cross-posted. he kept mention norman borlaug, but tht’s bullshit. he developed that short-stemmed wheat through selective breeding, which a whole ‘nother animal
the other was an exposé i’d written waaay back at tpm café on doug brooks’ ‘international peace assoc.’, now seemingly called ‘int’l stability operations’. what the company did was subcontract jobs in war zones, and some of the usual mercenary suspects were their clients. no erik prince, but most of the others.
anyway, he got on the diary and about blew me away. at that time i had no knowledge of software or services that go hunting for related critiques ad whatnot . anyway, he asked me to name a date and time, make a list of questions, tra la la, and in the end it was very boring. he was the consummate PR man/head honcho. at least my guess is that this is it. http://www.stability-operations.org/
and yeah, it’s all billed as ‘ready for tech startups’, etc. and likely geared for africa as government expenditures, maybe NGOs, who knows? yeah, it’s a fine idea in a way, but soooo expensive, so high-tech. wifi links to their systems? i dunno. i also doubt two acres could feed 150 per year, myownself. i mean, how many acres would it take to grow enough cereal products or legumes to feed one person? divide the simplest one @ 50 grand by 150. $333 dollars? be tough, then shipping? ah, don’t listen to me; all this makes me grumpulous. ;-)
cool clash tune; i love their selective irreverence. got two mother’s day may 9 lemon buttermilk pies about to pop out of this accursed new oven, one for mr. wd and one to tithe for ‘terror tuesday’. and:
jan. 28
yeah, worthwhile to ask under *routine* conditions what’s normal output per acre. haven’t played farmer in about 30 years, and then i was a kid. some of that farm in a box stuff flew over my head. we, maybe we as americans, really are enamored w/whiz bang glossy beep beep solutions to stuff aren’t we? it’s a quick evasion of the real issue: who owns what? (and what will the new *routine* be? in 5 years?)
sorry to hear about your experience w/the GMO troll(s). not surprising though. they really don’t want anybody to know a damn thing, do they?
yeah, that box twitter thang said they were well-received at cop21; no doubt. the theme was kinda ‘innovation, geo-engineering, kamam!’ stuff. i suppose there are plenty who will make fantastic profits with all the alternative high-tech stuff, ad some of it may be good, but very expensive, with high external costs as far as carbon footprints, conflict minerals, etc.
but i mean look at ‘adam’ farm in a box above. nice veggies, but hardly an adequate diet except for mebbe rabbits. this page shows some of the average crop yields per acre, though there was no date as far as i could tell. wheat yields in NE are projected to be close to 50 a/bu this year..
naw, the gmo cretin was kinda fun to mess with, cuz i knew more than he’d expected (“but golden rice!!! [bill gates again]). sad truth is, in this country any of the ‘research’ is done…in house; it’s different in europe, or was, and likely in other parts of the world. silly, but i can’t remember which US agency approves transgenic foods, but whichever one it is…is nonsensical. binged it: ‘Regulation of GM crops in the United States is divided among three … (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’
as in: i don’t remember which former monsanto board member is so helpful to their cause, but remember obama signing the ‘monsanto protection act’?
on edit: speaking of gates, i saw a link on some rude commie’s twitter feed about vaccines in india; this may or may not be the story.
makes me wonder if ngo activities, pumping GMO’s, etc., are not of a piece w/the malthusian BS of the over-developed brains of people like Sir Richard Attaboy? it’s just astounding to me that people refuse to see that if Gates, etc., superstar “philanthropists” aren’t vocally, adamantly, unyieldingly 100% anti-war, fuck what else they have to say. but if you say that, people will look at you like you just peed on MLKj’s grave. and even people who have money for “charity” & its deductions, don’t recognize that B & M Gates don’t *personally* spend one penny on “philanthropy.” the guy giving a buck on the streets to the bag lady has more personal virtue than bill gates.
take me back to sunday school. supposedly rabbi hey-soos saw thru these killer clowns a long time ago, cuz hyper-militarized greco-roman society operated along some similar lines. Pericles or Caesar or…would run off, kill & plunder, come back & “beautify” the city and throw big pageants & spectacles & bring back lots of booty & slaves to build temples & work the salt & silver mines and latifundia & be gladiators in a process sometimes called “philanthropia” (more commonly called “euergetism”=latin benefactio, as in the quote below). they in turn would receive civil “honor” for their “benefaction”:
“A dispute also arose among them, which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25 And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you…-luke 22 “philanthropy” as a means of domination.
forgive me if i can’t pay comment-homage to your fulsome comment just now; long day, and i need a soak in a hot tub. but i may have mentioned that at another site i used to inhabit, they will brook no critiques of the clinton foundation, either. don’t they know how they’ve used those foreign contributions in aid of selling weapons of war to tyrannical regimes? ooops, i mean ‘our several partners in peace and geopolitical interest’? similar to what you’re saying about gates, of course.
i guess noblesse oblige was the term used in the USian robber baron era? toss’ em a library, some murals, yada, yada. free wine and beer festivities were euro old-school, i reckon.
but those historical terms (and biblical) as a means of domination are right, but perhaps ‘fealty to the feudal lords of capital’ will serve as well.
i need a soak and a rest, but: how many soft-power faux-lanthropists are globally killing us slowly with their fooking songs? are any of those ‘humantarian’ NGO’s giving birth control shots to peeps they believe shouldn’t be reproducing so often, or just letting the DU take care of business? ooof, i’m sorry to be so cynical, but i just finished ‘crash’ (don cheadle) and i am just o sick at heart of how ironic it is that unacknowledged dark sides can rear their heads in such hideous ways. thank the goddess the sun is going down on me here in SW Co, right? ;-)
dayum, i ♥ this song:
been the way of the world for a long time. fewer overt slaves (maybe). but lots more killing.
‘fewer overt slaves (maybe)’ made me chuckle; thank you.
question: i’d meant to ask you what your recent use of term ‘granular’ meant, but i’d forgotten to.
looking at something on a finer level, w/more distinctions, tightening the focus on the microscope.
this is not a granular analysis, but at least the slaves & serfs got the pyramids and chartres built, instead of 12,000 wal mart stores and 7 billion miles of strip malls in kansas alone. i know, i know, both of these are misuses of technology, but one is more aesthetically pleasing than an ocean of fiberglass.
you’re a peach; now i understand w/ that explanation. thanks. and i posted a companion piece to sir attaboy’s malthusian dreck.
i see both your new posts. i’ll give some other commentators a chance there ;)
i’m sure if caesar or ozymandias could have built a stealth bomber, they would have (or maybe not: the japanese rejected the western way of war for a couple of centuries.) self-monumentalizing thru gargantuan builidng programs is one way to express the “mandate of heaven” and intimidate people w/your power. (we sure got that in D.C., thank you, Rome, for cleopatra’s needle, aka Washington Monument.) there are othe ways to waste surplus resources. like bombing everything to rubble.
yeah, but then some peeps gotta rebuild from the rubble: job programs, like the all-“volunteer’ military! but srsly, whassup w/ japan building a bigger military? wasn’t that part of the deal that they wouldn’t (post wwII)? i keep forgetting to click into those headlines, dagnabbit.
cleopatra’s needle, yay-uss.
well, you are very polite to let others go first on those new diaries. but er…which people? mebbe the ones out partaking of real life spring? moi, i’m heading down to the greenhouse to see if mr. wd’s trapped enough meeces that they ain’t eatin’ my second and third plantings of seedlings. my stars, do they love the cannabis, little creeps. neighbor advises me to put all the seed flats up high, but tells me they can leap outta a five gallon pail. oh, well.
lol. when does this rebuilding program begin? i might have mentioned this but i briefly knew stateside the head DOS liaison in Kabul for all the DOS-connected NGO’s in Afghanistan, which was practically everyone. things were a little different in 2005, but by 2010, he said no one was actually *doing* anything. too dangerous. he never left the compound, rarely left the giant metal shipping crate that served as home. but 10’s of millions were still pouring in. like the charter schools, these rebuilding programs are more or less slush funds and make work programs where the make work consists of making up stories about helping the hicks in the sticks cuz no one will ever check. i knew some lawyers in 2008 in country, still afghanistan, working on “judicial reform”. when i expressed a modicum of admiration to one of them, he laughed at my naievete & said he’s here for the money (about 175k w/combat pay) & hopes he doesn’t get dismembered cuz the death & dismemberment policy had recently dropped to 50k. he spent his days reading & waiting for the next run of liquor from the nearest military base and thinking of r&r in dubai. that shut me up.
now back during the ‘rebuild iraq from the rubble’, remember that some geniuses rebuilt showers that featured electrical charges in the water that came out of the shower heads? ooopsie. and another project was just dealing with all the rubble and depleted uranium, destroyed structures by dozing it into piles that stayed above ground? well, the poor chirren would scavenge for whatever was usable, and get sick from the radiation. but it was worth it™.
but holy hell, what a great story! i esp. love the D & D policy payout dropping. actuarials, yanno.
i wrote up some of the NGO exposés back in the day, including paying the taliban not to attack military convoys, the ‘sociologists’ or whatever who held little encounter groups for the locals…only to pump them for locations of ‘bad guys’ for night raids. then Oxfam’s report on ‘most all the NGOs just drive around in jeeps all day, using millions’ worth of $400/gallon gas, or something close. but staying in the shipping container is even more fun.
“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
a vaccination team came into the village…and the villagers hacked all the children’s vaccinated arms off & put them in a pile-Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (not an exact quote). omg! those monstrous Vietnamese! wait, what? they were supposed to let a bunch of do-gooders come in & vaccinate their kids while these do-gooders’ bosses are planning to drop napalm & agent orange & saturation bombing and the phoenix program & god knows what else on them? and then these do-gooders pose before the cameras to feign horror at the brutality of the local savages. (“we must wipe them out, village by village, pig by pig, cow by cow”- again, Kurtz, in the movie.)
speaking of vaccinations programs, didn’t the USG publish that it was a vaxx team that provided the whereabouts of the UBL compound? at that point, it matters not whether the osama death story is true or not. trying not to swear, but nothing but filthy words come to mind. oh no! those awful awful taliban are killing medical aid workers! (G. Greene saw thru this shit in “the quiet american.”) what are they supposed to do? let the nurse write down their coordinates so drones can come in & wipe out them (AND their families? all the official enemies have children. all of them)?
oh crap, pardon the interruption. i just went on J kerry’s twit feed to get a shot of ‘vaccinating the chirren in _’. got stomach sick for my troubles: peace agreements in yemen. congrats on tyrannical presidential winners in x, y, z, press sect’y condems barbaric attacks in iraq’.
yeah, and it was a cia fake vax thing. scientiic american was pissed as all giddy-up, cuz from then on, no one in pakistan trusted vaccines from then on. but the author also discounts rumors that vaccines were used to make young women sterile. well, how many US programs did that, how many experiments with radium, yada, yada. “O: they were prisoners, and volunteered!” now nazi of them.
thanks for the scientific american piece. and the recent piece up at CP, or put back up (originally by Alex, i think, PBUH), about the clintons proposal to thin out the haitian population.
i meant also see that article at CP.
Hey, wendye,
Just dropping in from lurkerdom to let you know that something seriously weird has been going on with the site – ever since not long after you put up this post. I was following the first few comments about The Wind-Up Girl, checking wikipedia about it, then when I came back to the site, when I clicked on the comments or the post itself, I kept getting a Webpage not available message, then couldn’t access the site itself – for hours. Could access all over the tubes except this site; IsItDown kept saying the site was Up, but I kept getting Webpage not available. After 3-4 hours, could access site, then rinse, repeat.
Methinks, monsanto doesn’t lightly brook serious criticism.
Well, I’ve finally made it in this far. Let’s see if this comment posts.
Btw, really been enjoying your exchanges with regular commenters (hi, jason!).
hola, wascally wabbit. how odd-bodkins that sounds. which browser do you use? i can get in just fine on chrome (blech, but ya hafta use it to compose a diary sanely now), and firefox, but the diaries seem to re-format themselves at will sometimes; very frustrating.
now monsanto may be a good guess, but my thing is with bill gates. yes, i diss the bejayzus out of him, but for the third time this year he killed my microsoft network email account. once, everything was gone when i got a new one: emails, addresses, so i was kinda nervous about downloading another copy. i worked late into the might (for me), and it all worked out in the end. but eep, it’s weird having no email capability. last week my modem went haywire for a day and a half. i felt like i was gonna be the old geezer staring at his broken teevee all day.
glad you’re enjoying the comments; jason’s been keeping the place alive lately. great comments, too.
p.s. i swear, i just paid the rent on this place, too, so it eye gawd ougtta work! ;-)
I’m running Android ICS (4.0) on a three-year-old phone. Wizards of the Valley quit updating it a year ago, as well as Chrome for ancient machines such as this. Gotta get a new spy machine every two years, so they insist.
But … this machine was just out of the factory when geeky millennial insisted I get the Great New Thing. So I did, caught it “on sale” for some $130. Replacing it today starts at $350, plus $50/mo for 5G of surfing before I’m throttled (ha!). All such a rip-off.
Sometimes graphics screw up my browser. Mostly a reader so I usually keep JavaScript turned off. May have picked up a worm, weird that it only affects your site, though.
Hey, many, many thanks for leading me to Graeber’s There is no ‘West’ masterpiece. Took me three tries of reading then skipping then repeating said until I was able to actually read it all straight through (on a damn phone!), but absolutely worth the effort. Now I really need to reread it twice, as soon as my eyes recover….
Ah, to be an oligarch, or even a member of the Outer Party, to be able to afford the machines and bandwidth I, among the sidelined poor, have the time to use. Alas, alack, and all that.
Check the Café at least daily for what’s new, and now that I’m back in (got locked out for hours again after posting my “comment”), I’m off to explore what’s new.
Thank you most sincerely for your efforts. They are deeply appreciated. As are the conversations I eavesdrop upon here. I have learned a lot, an awful lot at your Café.
Now off to learn more!
O…silly me. i thought i might have a clue as to what could be wrong, but i yam so tech illiterate that i don’t even know what some of those things are. ;-) that the café might have a worm: perhaps it’s Lowly Worm? cuz i do get to feeling that low sometimes.
so glad you learn here; so do i. luckily we get some very able assists via the commentariat, for me both new ideas/histories, and things i’d forgotten in my dotage. did i ever finish graeber’s ‘there never was a west’? ooof, i forget.
but: let me contact you offline as soon as i can manage it; i may have an idea or two that might prove useful. sleep well, dream of a better world….if you can. there is one out there…somewhere.
jason, i don’t seem to be able to find it; it might be my eyes, though. i just saw a weird piece at freethoughtproject, though, about a potential sale of monsanto to bayer. that author claims that bayer knowingly got permission to sell hiv infected drug for hemophiliacs to ‘Argentina, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore after February 1984, according to the documents obtained by the NY Times. The documents showed how Cutter Biological, a division of Bayer, shipped more than 100,000 vials of unheated concentrate, worth more than $4 million, after it began selling the safer product.’
then ny times piece uses ‘high risk for hiv’, but it appears to be so. goddam.
i’ve never been on freethoughtproject…monsanto to bayer would be huge, when did this potential sale start?
it’s not an entirely reputable site, as far as i’m concerned, and they er…borrow things…and have ads. but here it is; sorry to be at the end o my day. glad i checked backed in before shutting down.
but no: the nyt piece is all: “information lag”. think what Obama’s fda fast-tracking meds will wreak. nothin’ good, but class action suits are tough, given everything, eh? but bloomberg yesterday.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/mega-corp-knowingly-infected-thousands-children-hiv-purchase-monsanto/
p.s. i go there from time to time for their killings by police stories, but check them out afterward.
yes, i googled the bayer/monsanto thing and several biggie sources are speculatin & rumor-ifying. put your gmo’s directly in to the aspirin!
it’s getting too difficult to put all the surplus labor of capitalism into prison camps & on chain gangs. i’m not going to click onto the link b/c of the ad-mongering you mentioned. this from the wiki page on war of aggression:
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” the internal crimes (holocaust) of nazi germany flowed from their imperialism; war on external enemies necessitates eliminating internal enemies. it’s not even possible that crimes against the population(s) of the US do not increase. capitalist industries will be only too happy to oblige.
some sites are calling it a potential ‘hostile takeover’, so i’m a bit lost. i did re-discover the fact that not long ago dupon tand dow chemical had merged: talk about a deal ripe for anti-trust! oh…right. i meant consolidation, as in the news-o-tainment complex. but now chemChina’s buying syngenta dor $43 billion, and whoa, nellie.
ooof, what a wiki entry; wonder who wrote it? re: ‘it’s not even possible that crimes against the population(s) of the US do not increase. capitalist industries will be only too happy to oblige’: ‘Pentagon Allowed to Supply Military Gear Directly to Homeland Security Dept. for ‘War on Immigrants’
“Excessive police brutality in cases like Ferguson and Baltimore put the 1033 program under the spotlight, and led widespread calls for greater accountability over the way domestic police departments are able to access military-grade equipment through the Pentagon scheme. In May 2015, the Obama administration moved to impose more robust oversight processes for the program, one of the consequences of which was a recall order compelling police departments to return equipment that was considered to be excessive.
The new provisions were, however, wide enough that military-grade equipment can still be acquired from the Pentagon by law-enforcement agencies if they can justify its necessity. Further amendments to the NDAA later that year expanded these provisions further, but their alarming scope has gone unreported until now.
Militarizing the Borders
Republican representatives in Congress managed to secure a key amendment to Section 1052 of the NDAA, expanding the application of the Pentagon weapons transfer program directly to the Department of Homeland Security.
The new provision stipulates that Pentagon equipment can be supplied to domestic agencies for the purpose of counterdrugs, counter-terrorism and “border security,” thus formally militarizing border operations under homeland jurisdiction.”
sure it’s about ‘the borders’. and know what barry O did? said that tanks with tracks are verbotten; wheels okay. mebbe no flamethrowers; i’ll look it up if i remember to.
yeah, it’s a weird site now, but more clicks mean more ad sales, so they’re apparently lovin’ the bucks.
somebody on the inside is always trying to sabotage Airstrip One.
i like the phrase “excessive police brutality.” a little dab’ll do you, as jack n. says in “cuckoo’s nest” in his 1st round of ECT shock and awe. thanks for sharing that. “we are going to have more review, more oversight, make police depts’ fill out more forms, more committees and…nothing’ll change.”
republicans will just hand ’em the stuff & say fire away. dems will build a bureacracy around proceduralist nonsense & then hand ’em the same stuff & cry, “see? oversight!” and in the process create some loyal worker bee dem drones staffing the committees & reviewing the files.
oh those poor outgunned cops. james comey says they cain’t do their jobs cuz there are too many cameras around making our heros in blue wet themselves at having to justify their actions. maybe just put them all in tanks & mwrap vehicles? cuz you can’t prosecute a tank?
ya got the R/D ‘differences’ just right, and made me laugh along the way. good thing there was chief broom, though, no? campaign zero: nothing will change, just the noises, imo. obama: whaddya want? you were in the oval office! clinton: make some lists for changes. (i keep watching conversations in which pissy blacks try to make one understand why ‘blacks are for hillary, i.e. ‘she knows how to get things done!’ but they also think O is the best Prez evah…) blacks are monolithic, yanno?
the black twittersphere, on the other hand is down with the bern, save for imani gandy (angry black lady, iirc).
yes, but there will be ‘restrictions’ on those hardwares, unless ya can prove need.
“the unemployment benefits of 10,000 of our citizens are about to expire. we desperately need a tank!” some mayor. mission accomplished, tank’s on its way. it’s a jobs program! somebody has to take the tread off (nice catch wd) and w/round the clock staffing & maintenance…that’s 7 or 8 jobs minimum right there.
how many police chiefs will order nine flamethrowers, two tanks, and a crew to put the treads *back on* given this?
‘One Million Americans Are About to Lose Their Food Stamp Benefits
Unemployed adults without children will lose food assistance‘
“One million of the nation’s poorest people will be cut from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) program by the end of 2016 (even if they’re actively pursuing work, according to Center of Budget Policy and Priorities.”
but srsly, amerikans by and large don't fight back. i'm working on a pre-#globalNuit post (rather lazily), wondering if anything will go down in this country.
hmmmm… er….wellll…
“but srsly, amerikans by and large don’t fight back.” some blame has to be placed squarely on america’s dale carnegie christianity as a tool of control. it’s the grease on the hamster wheel. this is a long discussion thread focusing on billy graham but w/lots if’s and what have you’s on related topics. you know graham? the guy who advised nixon to bomb the dykes & levees of vietnam to destroy their food production and kill millions more?
http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2012/02/neo-fascist-christian-roots-rev-billy-graham
i grew up in fundy/evangelical southern fried pompous religious BS. ignorance as a spiritual path.
now that looks interesting indeed, jason. mr. wd grew up in family of high grahamites. mainly i was weaned on ‘billy’s sunday’ objections. but no, i didn’t know that he’d promoted that particular christianist advice to nixon, my stars. i was tuned into his politically grotesque son franklin for a time; i admit i used to watch the mega-church sunday shows to see what was up back in the day.
hard to grow up like that; it’s so fine that you threw off those southern fried shackles. even if i don’t have time to rad it, i reckon mr. wd certainly will make the time.
but i’m assuming that you might mean ‘know your place in the social order, your reward will be in hebben’? dale carnegie…was he ‘how to win friends and screw people’ or some other similar title?
thinking more of the joel osteen “jesus was a millionaire” kind of thing. the dullest conformity masquerading in lots and lots of happy talk. maybe more so the work fetish which cuts across a lot of styles of religiosity.
but the reality is that we merkins are too poor to even be dirt farmers so there’s certainly a massive justification of the existing social order going on. and end times nonsense & israel-firsters and…
franklin graham is the worst. if there is a god, he’s got lots of splainin’ to do why he didn’t hit the abort button when that demon seed was launched from billy’s foul loins. apparently falwell’s son is also worse than his dad, if that’s possible.
oh yeah, and the anti-sex brigade thing. focus on the family…w/a pocket full of shells. i’m agnostic on the subject of hell…till i think of that place in your neck of the woods, colorado springs. and then i think, like capt. ahab, hell is probable. maybe.
here it is: ‘Praise the Lord: Obama will restrict grenade launchers and weaponized aircraft given to the Po-Lice!’, may 2015
grenade launchers?!? i’m sure the weaponized aircraft will come in handy if flint gets uppidy.
out of nested comments above, jason, but your joel osteen answer pinged so many family-related memories that i was sick at stomach. i’ll respond tomorrow, mebbe, but for tonight, after a long day of chores: i have a date with dr. blake and scott and bailey on pbs Mystery. sleep well.
oh no worries. i’m chock full of nuts. here’s one:
money for food? ok. money for water? super. money for heat, medicine, housing, clothing, entertainment, education, transportion, etc.,? all good. world could not be otherwise.
Money for Sex? BAD! WRONG! EVIL! tear down the brothels & raise the gallows! capitalist patriarchy forcing women to trade their bodies for food is no kind of excuse! get a job, wenches!
work itself as a kind of prostitution under capitalism, not literally, except the we all get screwed part, doesn’t cross the minds of the preachers of the “dignity” of work. not even getting into the not-metaphorical “trading in flesh” that is ubiquitous under capitalism, esp at the centers of capitalist, uh, penetration, aka military bases.
(not original to me but mostly plagiarized from harvard prof marjorie garber’s undergrad lecture on Measure for Measure, up on youtube, incl. comments on early puritanism.)
not worried, just late. well, no young girls likely grew up hoping to be prostitutes, so i reckon there are other kinds of work that don’t feel so much like that…except in one’s pay envelope, firings/downsizings for nuttin;, pensions revoked, and big unions acting as veal pens. but oy, that *voluntary* sex workers, if one can call them that, are so maligned unless they are the high class madams on the Lolita Flights bubba has been on (except mr. wd read that shite and said some were 12-year-olds ugh…yes, it’s all crazy.
my thing was partially that you’d mention C springs as the epicenter, yes, where military, cheyenne mtn. norad, and christianists converge. our daughter and her family live there, so we know well ted haggard, and many others. fambly first hand, i’m sorry to say, but fading in favor of: cage fighting
some in-laws in NE are submerged in prosperity doctrine, don’t need to explain that, i reckon. one nephew-in-law taught at pastor doug wilson southern reconstruction college in ID, prairie on the palouse.
yeah, too many associations of the stomach-churning kind. long day without internet working again; i was getting fancifully paranoid about it.
ugh. the south will rise again! speaking of trading in flesh…there’s a connection b/n this “focus on the family” (co. springs, right?) crap, temperance movements, the drug war, and sexual repression. pot smokers are less likely to be enthused about shooting gooks in foreign lands. or be so gung ho about working in a sweat shop. doing stuff is for suckers, certainly respectable stuff in the capitalist order. i may be wrong, but i kind of got the impression that prohibition in the US was really about work: people’s lives were so miserable they just wanted to go home & drink. it’s billed as a public health measure, but public health for what? oh yeah, the job, the military. so ban alcohol, that’ll solve it. and then repression itself becomes big business, w/the cops & all, but also to escape the repressive forces of the state you have to pay big bucks to enjoy the permissive forces of the “criminal.” and so we find banks making huge money off the drug “trade.” and the militarization of society, fearmongering, etc., etc.
i think 1984’s take on sexual repression & Big B has a lot of validity to it. frustration is great for aggression. don’t those MMA guys in those cages know that they could be doing other things w/their hot young sweaty bodies? the promotion of that kind of shit is just awful, but not unexpected. can we expect some future ESPN-type deep thinking on the relation b/n MMA cage matches & brain damage a la the NFL? yes, we can.
and child or youth predation among politicos and the like. double ugh.
gadzukes, i’d forgotten dobson’s doo-doo in in c springs. our adopted ute daughter was severely damaged before she was 6 months old, thus, many emotional problems. after a visit here, mr. wd’s bro and his wife sent us dobson’s ‘the strong-willed child’ as curative. ‘don’t hit the child with your hand, use a stick, so the child will know it’s not you hitting it!’ was some of his schtick, can’t think why so many christianists grew up to be the biggest bullies on the block, locally, mormons as well.
now i can’t really speak to your contentions about the reasons for temperance; i’m pinging cary nation, et.al., and whether the ptb just saw an opening for what you’ve proposed. but as with prohibition, the state is sponsoring both sides of the drug war, handily enough. i’d have thought cannabis would have been, could have been, the soma that huxley had predicted. guess prescription meds are taking its place instead. are big pharma opiate deaths and addictions really that out of control? (via WH email this week).
i’m embarrassed to say that i don’t remember 1984’s take on sexual repression, though. cage fighting and brain damage: yes.
julia & winston’s discovery of “free pleasure” & le petit morte as a release from aggression & outside BB’s control. at one point, o’brien says by 20XX “our neurologists will have eliminated the orgasm.”
that story you relate of the dobson crowd is just awful. all too familiar to me.
i’m suggesting industrialization ramped up the repressive aspect of the state. it’s always been there, but the factory makes it more desirable to control others’ desires. a la the girls in Melville’s “Tartarus of Maids.” this includes drugs, booze, etc.
i was wondering the same thing about this newfangled concern for opiate addiction. maybe if these people had enough food, they wouldn’t make meth in the outhouse? nah, crazy talk. excuse for more intrusions, more control, more pathologization, etc.
trying to find a somewhat dated story in WaPo about how states like Virginny & NC came to have state-run liquor stores. the state controls distribution, not production. any person, more or less, can make sour mash or beer or whatever for personal consumption (there are city restrictions, etc., too). you just can’t distribute it. in the guise of public health of course, this was the state’s way of controlling/ending the moonshine *gift exchange* aspects of the “informal” appalachian economy. distribute jack d & jim b, not your home-brew. they are perfectly happy w/anyone partying, getting wasted, killing themselves, etc., on sucking liquor from the big corp teat. there are no doubt similar things going on in the MJ arena, where it’s technically & locally legal.
Here’s a headline for you: “GOP Senator Wants to Make Sure the Full CIA Torture Report Never Sees the Light of Day.” And why does he want to do that? Because our sexually anxious overlords get off on torture. It makes them hard. It makes them feel tough. It makes them forget what cringing, servile ass-kissers they’ve had to be — for years on end — in order to slither and slime their way to the top. That’s it. That’s all of it. All the other ‘reasons’ they adduce for protecting the practice — and practitioners — of torture are just bullshit. They love it because they are weak, sick, damaged wretches dead to their own humanity.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/2558-protection-racket-why-our-leaders-shield-torturers.html
floyd’s line of thinking leads me to believe stories of child/youth predation among the elite are, if not always true (who knows?) at least plausible, b/c of the psyche of those elites. people get tired of raping & killing from a bureaucratic distance.
believe it or not, i’d seen it this a.m. i’d gone looking to see if he had up any jests or polemics about this: ;-) telesur had quoted him/them as ‘these docs being the most significant’ yada yada.
thanks for the explanations above, i’d missed that comment. when i was a kid, ohio had state liquor stores, too. i kinda thought it was largely about taxation, but your guess may be the better one. but otoh, selling ‘legalize recreational cannabis’ as a revenue enhancer for the state coffers’ sucks. partially, because: capitalism, but also it gets so expensive that those without big bucks are forced to buy underground anyway. and land in jail.
the state of MA has “package stores” which are like VA’s ABC stores. they used to not be open in MA on Sunday due to “blue laws”. of course restaurants & bars loved those laws.
skimming some poetry i read waaaaay back in college & came across this gem, andrew marvell’s “the mower against gardens.” if only he could have seen what monsanto & co would get up to.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48333#poem
not to be a great idjit, but is the poem rather in mockery of gardens/gardeners in defense of The Wild ‘where fairies and fauns do till’?
i’d gotten to thinking about the arguments over if many of monsanto, et.al.’s seed are terminus, and found that ‘monsanto bought X terminus seed co. for X billion, but promised, swear to gawd, not to use the technology’ in 1999. take.it.t.the.bank. i would.
funny thing about self-pollinating flowers, eh? still, some bee action helps out. i love the propagation organs of flowers; guess it shows in my banner photos, eh? ;-) ‘the flowers know not from whence their stock comes’ (summat like that). cool notion. i’m trying to start a new to me brand of papaver somniferum, but not much luck this chilly spring.
your take was my read too. i’m not certain about the last line, but i don’t think it can possibly be positive. “the gods themselves w/us do dwell.”
his green seraglio has its eunuchs-take that monsanto terminus seeds!
now just what could you be getting up to w/ papaver somniferum? poppy seed bagels & such?
guess there were all sorts of gods… :-) but if he meant it as a positive, it caused me to remember a wonderful old film we just watched: ‘second hand lions’. i’d prolly watch it once a year if we owned it. michael caine, robert duvall, an the kid in bruce willis’s ‘sixth sense’.
duval has a speech he gives young adults, to the effect that it’s often Very Important…to believe things that may not be true. to believe in valor, virtue, that people are essentially good, and that Good is more powerful than Evil. none of which, he notes, may be true…but are worth believing as sort of a touchstone, polar star. i loved it.
now the poppies: i would sincerely like, and we deserve, to have some poppy tincture in our home medical kits (we don’t do docs). paregoric was one iteration, great for the GIs, fer instance.
and i have scored the lovely pods, but no nuttin’. guess it’s the short growing season, so the pods are about a sixth the size of afghani ones. but really, not for recreational use, just emergency pain relief. cripes, when i had an MMJ card, we grew enough for…well, a hella lot of.it. and yet…i’ve had the same beautiful bud in an alligator clip on the bedside for close to a month. i like to breathe the smoke thru my nose, not smoke it, i do use some of the cannabis salve often for inflammation, though.
but what a sublimely gorgeous plant, made by the gods! when the banner shows a purple one, with white stonehenge-like circles of stamens…that’s it.
here ya go, jason; hope this works from my flickr thing:
the rest of the poem is pretty negative on human beings, and the fauns & nymphs now only existing as statues….in any case.
your description was very nice.
and thanks for the movie recommendation. one for you, if you haven’t seen it already. it’s up on the super youber tube.
The Ruling Class, starring Peter O’Toole.
i checked to see the poem’s date, but only the publication date showed up. it reflects, imo, ‘they paved paradise’ which…well, yanno.
i’ll ask mr wd to see if it’s available thru our inter=liberry loan; co has a thang in which a=whale-able cd’s are delivered thru what? courier or something close. we don’t have any of the ‘watch youtubes on yer teevvee’ sort of capabilities, no cable, tra la la…hard to care, really,
but bless yer ♥. and joni’s
it’s a romp.
cable? i think from time to time of a terrified bill paxton’s line about the power in James Cameron’s 1st alien movie, “Aliens,” “They cut the cable?!? how could they cut the cable?!? they are animals!!!” that’s one of them movies that pops up regular on the basic Comcast stations, “i don’t know which species is worse, Mr. Corporation Man! You don’t see them screwing each other over for a goddam profit!” a heavy finger on the CAPS LOCK in his movies, for sure.
anyway, living w/o cable. omg! actually having a DVD collection! it’s like the dark ages. or sharing at a neighbor’s or via the library…you know rich people’s problems. in a way. having internet access. ($80/month. mediocre service.)
that poem was sometime around 1650. lots of aristos w/their elaborate pleasure gardens.
catch you on another thread
we de-be da dark ages here, save for teh internet. yeah, expensive, ish, but some package deal w/ quest or qwest, whatever.
i’m watch a time warp sci-fi thing now featuring lots of cables. ;-)
millions march against monsanto today; looks very cool.
https://www.rt.com/news/343917-global-march-against-monsanto/