There are thousands of things the consumer might want to know but they can't all possibly fit on the package.

And yet, there is one thing - one single bit of information - that the chemical industry has spent billions making sure never gets on that package.

I've got concerns about the corporate influence or the monoculture that GMOs create. But the health concerns are bogus.

I've already stated that the health concerns are not what's driving my opinion on GMOs.

What's the difference between a GMO and non-GMO food? The GMO food can potentially create a slightly different set of chemicals. We can assess it's safety the same way we assess the safety of any piece of food, look at what those chemicals are and see if any are dangerous.

Shall we have a little conversation about which chemicals "Science" has told us are completely safe? And especially the FDA? You really wanna go down that road with me?

http://www.thalidomide.ca/the-...

Or my personal favorite in the category of "Scientist who tells you something is completely safe but runs away when it comes near him":

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...

Labeling should be about safety, not IP rights

Why? Every product I buy seems to have tons of label information about intellectual property rights. Why should food be any different?

Let me pick up some random item and see: OK, here's a package of DVD-Rs sitting on my desk. Let's see....one, two, three, four, five, six...I count six different indications of people claiming intellectual property rights over some aspect of the name, brand or technology involved in the production of these DVD-Rs. And I didn't even look at the fine print. And nothing on this label has any reference to or association with "safety".

It seems like the ONLY products that seek to hide their intellectual property claims are GMO foods. And that, my friend is suspicious.

Labeling GE foods is like labeling evolution teaching textbooks with 'Evolution is just a theory.'

No, labeling GE foods is like labeling evolution teaching textbooks with the name of the author, name of the publisher and copyright date.

If it objectively matters, it gets labeled,

Have you seen the labels on products in the store? You think everything on that label is objective?

And what does "objectively matters" even mean? Are you saying that genetically modified food products are exactly the same as non genetically modified food products?

If so, how can they be patented?

are you against music because people can copyright songs?

Songs' copyrights are clearly labeled. I can see who wrote it, who produced it, and who holds the copyright.

there is science

then there are corporations

I don't know if you've ever seen the agriculture science department of the schools that have done GMO research, but the distinction between corporations and science gets pretty blurred. Just look at the names on the buildings, for starters.

Name just 1 country that doesn't have hungry people

OK, you're right. I could go for a little something right now in fact.

The point is that GMO foods are no closer to helping world hunger today than they were 20 years ago. Maybe in large part because history has taught people to be wary of someone with the last name, "Inc" showing up on their doorstep telling them they're going to solve their biggest problems if they just sign this little piece of paper.

Just ask the people of Bhopal.

Then maybe we should change the GMO laws so that someone other than a multinational can afford to get a GMO plant certified as safe to eat.

Or change the laws to not allow food organisms to be covered by intellectual property laws beyond the brand name.

On the other hand, the race of the people working in the factory producing those socks is not an information that consumers must know, regardles of what some people feel about it.

This is another desperate tactic of the GMO sockpuppets. Believe it or not, they try to paint people who object to chemical companies owning the IP rights to basic foodstuffs as somehow racist.

That's how you know they don't have a real argument. They bounce from one ad hominem to another, praying something sticks.

or do you just stand against genetic engineering as we currently practice because you have an ignorant fear of what you don't understand?

I stand against genetically modified crops because I don't want fucking multinationals to own the intellectual property rights over basic foodstuffs.

this is what you represent:

And this is what you represent:

http://www.usnews.com/news/ene...

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/...

http://www.chemicalindustryarc...

Because make no mistake, those are the people who will own those rights. And they're the people saying GMOs will feed the hungry when GMOs are mainly targeted to countries where there are no hungry people.

I personally don't give a shit whether or not GMOs are safe. Hell if I cared about whether or not my food is safe, I wouldn't have eaten that burrito this afternoon from a street cart on Milwaukee Avenue run by the lady with prison tattoos. I care about what kind of sleazy motherfuckers are going to be gaining even greater wealth and political power from their iron grip on our food supply.

And, I'm also more than a little offended by people who say that consumers don't have a right to know the provenance of the food they eat. As if you've become some new arbiter of what information consumers may be allowed to base their purchasing decisions on. If I don't want to buy green socks, I don't have to buy green socks, even though they are every bit as safe as the grey socks I prefer. Does that mean that sock consumers must now not be allowed to see the color of the fucking socks in the package, because after all, green socks are functionally the same as grey socks? And if I don't want to buy GMO food, and you are hell bent against me finding out whether my food is from GMOs, we have a problem. Not because I'm denying some eternal law of Science, but because fuck you, I'm the one paying for that food. My purchasing your food is not some part of the social contract, and Monsanto making profit beyond the dreams of avarice is not part of some social contract, it's a simple consumer transaction. So if I want to know whether that sweet corn has been soaking in some Roundup lab experiment shit that has to be used in greater and greater amounts just to make the cockroaches drop dead, you'd better be prepared to tell me or no goddamn sale.

It's funny that our consumer economy has made a fucking religion out of people's purchasing preferences, but as soon as someone says, "Hey, I'd like to know if this food product came out of Doctor Motherfucking Frankenstein's lab" he is told, "No, you are not allowed to have that information. Just purchase and believe. Even worse, when a company did decide to state on their label that their products did not contain GMOs, motherfucking Monsanto sued them. Fortunately, they lost, but I don't think for a minute that this won't be revisited. When someone is so desperate to hide a single fact, to the point of spending billions fighting legislative and grass roots efforts just to make sure there is this one, single, scientifically-verifiable fact, that food product X contains genetically modified organisms that makes me suspicious as hell. Because when did it become "pro-science" to hide information from people?

Also, the studies on GMO safety have been extremely narrow, looking for toxicity and certain types of cancer-causing effects. There have been no studies at all on people who've eaten GMOs for 20 years, because they've only been selling GMOs to people for 20 years. Further, no studies on the overall health of people eating GMOs or life expectancy of people eating GMOs or effect of GMOs on developing children or senior citizens. Not a fucking one. And I don't know what's up where you live, but judging from the people I see walking the streets who eat the foods most likely to come from GMOs (ie: prepared foods), I would say it's not a shining endorsement of the health-giving benefits of GMOs.

So knock off the ad hominem attacks on people who want labels on food or who don't want to pay license fees for sweet potatoes. The use of "anti-science" accusations for this kind of thing is actually devaluing peoples' respect for science. That's how you get these whacko anti-vaxers and people who think the earth revolves around the sun. To a great extent the arrogant attitudes of scientific mouthpieces in fields as diverse as astrophysics, climate science and the gold-plated jackoffs who do "agricultural sciences" in campus buildings named after the owners of chemical companies who have created some of the deadliest substances on earth are actually causing people to lose respect for "Science" (as if it were some monolithic council of elders), and that's a bad outcome.

So knock if off before you get someone hurt. And just put the goddamn label on the package, OK? If you're so ashamed of where that food comes from, well that tells me something, too.

Think instead of huge sprinkler systems that spray millions of gallons you had a few solar powered robots running around spraying just the right amount of water on each plant right when the needed it, not too much and not too little.

Robots, bitches.

Anything not to admit what's happening.

Not sure what reagan has to do with racisim

1. Reagan opposed all civil right legislation.

Reagan's transformation from actor to serious political figure began in the 1960s, first with a nationally televised speech on behalf of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then with his election as governor of California. This was also the decade in which the civil rights bills that ended legalized racism were passed ... and Reagan was on record opposing all of them, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Reagan continued this pattern as president by gutting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), fighting the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoing the Civil Rights Restoration Act (which required all recipients of federal funds to comply with civil rights laws) and initially opposing the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (he changed his tune when it passed Congress with a veto-proof majority).

2. Reagan vetoed and anti-apartheid bill.

Reagan further tarnished his record on racial equality when he vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed economic sanctions on South Africa that could only be lifted when that country abolished apartheid. Although Reagan argued this was because he worried the sanctions would prompt the South African government to respond with "more violence and more repression," critics pointed to his administration's close relationship with the apartheid regime, well-known belief that anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress were Communistic, oversight of the decision to label Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and weakening of a UN resolution condemning apartheid.

Ronald Reagan was one of the most racist presidents we had in the post-WWII period. He and Nixon are 1a and 1b on that list.

http://mic.com/articles/85379/...

I'm having flashbacks to grammar school

Well, consider yourself lucky. I'm having flashbacks to the time I took three hits of yellow double-dome and thought I was Doctor Octopus. When I finally came down, I was naked under a railway crossing and covered in a substance that was eerily similar to sweet and sour sauce.

But enough about the good old days.

Age for one. It's been down there for over 60 years now, so a lot of it has decayed.

As someone above pointed out, the half-life Pu-239 is 24000 years. I don't think you can say that a "lot of it" has decayed in 60 years.

We can't get any large projects completed today. Not the International Space Station, a large hadron collider, or anything of that sort.

The origin of both of those projects was over a decade-and-a-half ago. And the LHC was built by Europeans, where the anti-government rhetoric hasn't reached the AM-Radio fever pitch that it has here in the US. You see a lot less of the "Get government out of my Medicare" sentiment in Europe than in the U S of A, where a gun for every person is the reason there is zero crime.

The statement was that we couldn't get those large projects completed today unless they can be shown to create a massive and ongoing profit to some rent-seeking corporation with legislators and governors in their pocket.

Song of the South isn't racist or offensive or anything. It's just not a very good movie.

It's just a simple tale of how slavery wasn't as bad as all that and how well the white landowners got along with their help.

The movie is racist enough that Disney stopped listing it in their film catalog, in 1980. If folks during the Reagan administration thought it was a little over-the-edge, I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that the Song of the South minstrel show was probably kinda racist.