WIP

The lobby to worry about is Pro- GMO/ not anti-GMO, because we all know who the hell has the money to buy the influence on this issue! Monsanto is creating their monopoly over global food production, not through some blind market forces as your post seems to try to leave the impression, but through the insider leverage to gain patent rights over things (like living organisms) that were never considered to be subject to such ownership in times past. If we say to Monsanto: sure, let the market decide, BUT you get NO rights to control seed distribution through this bullshit patent laws that justify monopolies....YES monopolies! That's what all of you freemarket capitalists are really saying behind the misleading rhetoric!

Exactly! The refusal of the rightwing to seriously contemplate the consequences of business-as-usual will leave two stark choices: Either enforced sharing and redistribution of the resources available or the final war of All against All. That seems to be the direction that modern unprincipled capitalism is pushing us in, and if we don't stop the worshipers of the market, there won't be a human race to worry about in two or three generations anyway!

I'm sick of talking to them or discussing the point anymore! The excuse of opposing Muslims is thrown up even though these same people have done NOTHING for the million Iraqi Christians forced into exile after the fall of Saddam and do nothing for the Syrian Christians who are part of the population desperately trying to sail across the Mediterranean today. It's just the bullshit that selfish, hateful people concoct to justify their hatreds and selfishness!

Oh well, if we're going to talk GMO's then, this just came in yesterday: Glyphosate to be labelled a carcinogen in California Glyphosate of course being that harmless toxin in Monsanto's Roundup used to kill pests. We'll see where this lands, but the widespread propaganda offensive on behalf of the GMO industry has almost made regulation effectively impossible! Maybe this will be the start of a pushback against this corporate monstrosity that wants to take control of global agriculture and destroy life on earth in the process!

I don't want to put Oprah in the same box as deliberately pernicious billionaires....like Fred and David, or the clueless, arrogant trustfund babies like Trump. I believe she does have some social conscience, the problem is that it is the same conscience that has been part of Hollywood liberals for decades...one that is salved by some dogooder acts to throw money around and do some benefit concert etc. or vote for a candidate that says the right homilies. I've heard a few marginalized radical left black voices over the years like Glen Ford, refer to the Congressional Black Caucus and the majority of black city officials across America as "The black misleadership class." And it seems that the message is getting across to others in black communities that putting black faces in charge of city councils in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore has just enabled the powers-behind-the scene to carry out objectives they would never accept from a white politician.

I noticed that too when I've read or heard some of them speak. It reminds me of the just throw crap at the wall strategy that the climate change-deniers use.

Not much knew or noteworthy in your MRA crap, except that "male feminists" are usually called "Manginas" in the horseshit you consume online! Every creep on the right trying to rally white men around the flag, has to come up with durogatory terms to use against men who are not following the plan. BTW, all this shit sure as hell explains why female participation in this forum is so low!

My beef with Oprah is that...as a black capitalist, she and other black billionaires and multimillionaires were responsible for getting a blank slate named Barack Obama into the White House. And once in there, Obama barely mentioned the problems black communities were suffering during his term after the recession.....his primary concerns were doing what Wall Street wanted, and getting a watered down health insurance "reform" bill through that will only do for drug companies and hospital and insurance corporations, what he has done for Wall Street. So when he started working go force through TPP and the other two disguised trade pacts...FINALLY there was a push back from the left, and even among everyday blacks whose lives have not been improved by having a black face in the White House! And that's why grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter scare the crap out of Oprah and her friends even more than it scares Republican billionaires! Oprah's PR doing whatever for the poor is just for show and even for economic opportunity...same with the Democratic Party funding billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros etc.. They are ultimately interested in their own advantage. The problem Oprah, and the other wealthy blacks have is they have to appear to know where they came from, regardless of whether they are interested anymore!

I'm probably not going to be able to even look up other threads, cause it looks like I'll be spending most of the time this afternoon fighting the fires of bullshit that have sprung up today. And since I was too tired to review the entire previous post before posting, I'm picking up here where I left off. Looking it over, and going back to the opener, it seems I have to re-emphasize that when you and the MRA's that influence your thinking, talk of a gender gap, it is not the same gender gap I am talking about. Your side is claiming through careful cherrypicking of pop cultural info that women are favoured and receiving care at the expense of men. I haven't even bothered much trying to address the point, because modern culture is so complicated, so materialistic, so much bullshit, that any argument can be made for just about any topic! But the circumstantial evidence (as noted by cybercoma) clearly demonstrates that in every nation you want to examine, the effects of violence disproportionately land on women as the severity intensifies....especially when we get to murder. The gender gap that interests me is the difference in thinking and responding to stress between men and women. And, again I'll emphasize....since you are again framing your arguments against women around your own personal situation, that regardless of whatever exceptions you want to find, in general - women have a greater capacity for empathy and caring for others, and are less inclined to aggression and hostile behaviour. This is not something I take from feminist literature....I don't really read much of what most feminists write, because a lot of them....especially from my generation, formed complete sociological theories decades ago that are immune to new information! Many feminist theorists deny basic fundamental differences between men and women and treat the whole subject as one of imposed cultural oppression of women. Moving on............... From psychology and anthropology studies, we are beginning to get to the fundamentals of what we have and don't have in common. I'll start with this published study commented on here that actually confirms the folk wisdom that men turn inward in response to stress, while women turn to their friends and family for support Stress Increases Empathy in Women, Decreases It in Men: A point that comes to mind is how a male shift inward and to hostile aggression may be a big part of the answer to the higher rates of suicides among men than women.....which you MRA's blame on women I might add! That's a particularly stupid and egregious comment, considering the numbers of girls and women even of advanced age who are raped or sexually assaulted! Sexual attacks are not caused by sexual arousal...they are deliberately carried out to inflict pain and suffering on the victim. I've mentioned a couple of times before that when I was 17 and sneeking into strip clubs with my friends, they had full nudity/ but strict "no touch" policies enforced by....whichever biker gang owned the clubs. I had no problems keeping my hands off....neither did my friends...or older guys in the bar....just the drunks who lost sight of where they were and what the consequences would be if they grabbed a girl....until they were hauled out a side door and had the boots put to them. I would like to believe I am like most men, and would never consider committing a sexual assault under any circumstances. If there is an increase in rape and sexual assaults against women...as we are told in the media of both reported and unreported incidents, it is a sign that modern day porn has become so extremely degrading that it has completely dulled a lot of the sense that young men should have today! And was your violent assault at the hands of a girl gang? Actually, it shouldn't matter one way or another, since....like I said at the opening...we are generalizing with broad swipes whenever any positive or negative aspect is attributed to men or women. So, we're talking broad, sweeping strokes here and yet you are trying to blame all women for whatever happened in your past....and even worse in my estimation, you have no sympathy for what may still be a majority of women have to go through in their lives. I could act the same way about blacks, after being attacked by an approx. teenage tall, gangly black youth with a knife in Niagara Falls NY 20 years ago, after I stopped in to a gas station during the overnight hours. I took a few cuts, but refused to surrender my wallet....something I would never advise others to do...it's just that rational thought flies out the window when you're caught in that sort of situation, especially if you have a wife and young children at home, like I did at the time! Nevertheless, after I calmed down and thought about the incident for a few days, I wasn't going to excuse all of the abuses and deprivations that black people endure, because of my incident. Monogamy has never been as important historically as it is in modern culture! In paleo-hunter/gatherer societies, it's not at all clear whether or not men and women even paired up for other things besides sex...if we're judging by how brief and unimportant male/female bonding have been treated in the vanishing numbers of hunter/gatherer groups that survived into modern times. As psychologist - Christopher Ryan (a researcher who spent most of 20 years evaluating and designing research for anthropologists in the Amazon Vally) notes in his popular and entertaining look at human sexuality: Sex At Dawn, most Yanomamo groups in southern Venezuela thought the english or spanish term "marriage" referred to when a man and a woman string their hammocks together. When they decide to untie their hammocks and move on...that would apparently be divorce. And for more than 100 years, anthropologists...even the ones who respected native peoples, were trying to impute their modern values and standards on the 'primitives'. I don't know how often Ryan has been married and divorced during his life, but the only point of departure I had with his views, is his very dismal view of modern monogamous marriage. Ryan is overall a cynic about marriage, even though he notes within the book that the breakdown of extended families and their replacement with relationships that are primarily based on capitalistic principles of trade, all leave marriage and nuclear family as the only institution in modern culture that we can depend on because it doesn't come with a price tag! One thing I can generalize about regarding MRA's: whether they are sincere or just sick misogynists, they don't acknowledge that modern societies are still patriarchal...some more intensely patriarchal than others; but still patriarchal nevertheless. And when men suffer violence...including sexual violence, they get more sympathy from women and feminists than they receive from the so called 'masculists' that want the kind of patriarchy they still practice in Saudi Arabia!

A couple of days ago, while listening to CBC Radio (I think it was a Sunday Morning show) I heard a dramatic reading of this short poem by a young woman named Warsad Shire...an English citizen born in Kenya to Somali parents, whose become a sensation in British literary circles with her gripping and often disturbing poems on dark themes of war, sex, suffering of all kinds, and death. This poem: Conversations About Home, may give some people looking at refugees as something other than themselves....something hostile, intrusive, or a burden...as enough threads here already tell it, another perspective...one that comes as close to being a firsthand look at what it's like to be a refugee in today's world, and put to rest the nonsense that people want to leave home to come to "our great country." CONVERSATIONS ABOUT HOME (AT THE DEPORTATION CENTRE) http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/22840/CONVERSATIONS-ABOUT-HOME-AT-THE-DEPORTATION-CENTRE

Yes, but some of the culture theorists in the US are trying to turn intersectionality into some sort of scientific formula. It works as a general rule, that someone who's part of several oppressed groups...say a black lesbian woman is going to have to deal with discrimination and abuse on many fronts. But, the intersection police do not generally include economic class in the intersection...and it needs to be there....because someone like Oprah Winfrey is not an oppressed minority considering all the money she has to throw around.

Are you talking about some bullcrap like memetics when you refer to "cultural evolution?" I'm referring to behaviours that are innately human and can't be created nor destroyed by culture! We may have cultures in modern society that are highly hierarchal and materialistic....but that doesn't mean that we have physically and mentally adapted to the new way of living. Like I said before, the researchers who connect the dots between a whole range of ills with rising inequality, have tapped into a fundamental dilemma that's not going to be easy to fix: we are not well equipped to deal with structural hierarchies/ but we don't know how to build complex societies that are egalitarian. The best solution would seem to be to strive for equality, rather than doing the exact opposite as we are today with globalized capitalism. Recent anthropological studies regarding the Eastern Woodland natives over an approx. 1000 year period, showed that most tribes cycled back and forth several times between hunter/gatherer and horticultural (non-animal agriculture) living. The only correlating factor seems to be population densities, with the switch back away from settled farming occurring after recovery from likely population dieoffs caused by abrupt climate changes like droughts or periods of extreme cold weather. If the modern myth of progress had any connection, and people considered farming a step up from hunting and gathering, these indian tribes would have kept on farming straight through, instead of resorting to agriculture only when conditions were too crowded and made it necessary. The real story of the rise of agriculture in Asia Minor and the Levant, indicates that hunter/gatherers began gathering and planting seeds of favourite plants during the Pleistocene, and likely unintentional creating the hybrid non-shattering grains that became the staple of agriculture later on, since some research botanists believe that the first domesticated rye grains could be as old as 18,000 years....long before the so called age of agriculture. Unlike the Eastern Woodlands natives of North America, population levels remained too high to go back to the old ways of living in the forest...and likely inspired our Garden of Eden - type myths thereafter. So the condition favourable to cultures with agrarian traits was essentially having no other choice but to work the soil and scratch out a living as a farmer. Worth noting that it's been long realized now that the age of agriculture was a big step backwards for human health and vitality....as can be measured by the decline in stature and tooth decay when agriculture and relying on grains became the norm. And MLK also knew that he didn't live in a colorblind nation, and there was no path to such colorblindness without the state stepping in to address the extreme poverty and deprivation in black communities that had been kept down in the decades after formal slavery ended. Right wing Americans won't tell you that part of MLK's message.....just as they won't mention his last speech before he was assassinated: Beyond Vietnam. Racist is denying that some people are discriminated against because of their race and/or ethnicity. The race/ethnic group which has power, doesn't get to cry racism when they don't get everything they want!~ Tribes are not an organizational structure found among immediate-return hunter/gatherer groups....likely because the need to be ready to pick up and move to a new location on short notice would make the creation of complex tribal organizing near impossible. Tribal life comes in later societies that spend more time settled or within limited ranges....EP fails again. I wish there was a better copy to access, but regardless, the leaked Status of Women Report that the Harper Gov. was trying to keep a lid on....or flush down the toilet...who knows, but among its dismal findings for Canadian women are that 68% of police-reported domestic violence victims of all ages are women....so much for whatever bullshit your MRA sources pull up: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/status-of-women-internal-report-1.3214751 It shouldn't be rocket science! Men are on average larger and have greater upperbody mass than women. Add that to higher testosterone levels, and it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that women are going to be at much greater risk of violence than men are in these domestic violence cases.

GMO's are so good that we can't tell you if they're in your food! Not long ago, I came across an article on GMO safety written by science writer - Johnathan Latham on why in his earlier days as a research biologist, he quit working on GMO development. His first point of departure was with what he considered incompetent or uninformed regulating agencies: It sounds similar to the stories of regulatory capture we hear about in medicine...especially drug research, where we're getting to the point where we can't trust the validity of the health or safety claims.

I don't usually weigh in on how things are moderated here...since it's impossible for anyone left of center to exist on a typical US conservative forum; but since you brought it up, how did you and Tim get away with turning this thread into GMO advocacy for most of its pages?

I haven't caught up with this thread yet, but I'm jumping in here because I can't stand anymore of your GMO bullshit! If we're to believe the overhyped crap about golden rice, Monsanto is in the business of saving the world from starvation! Pure horseshit! Adding vitamin A to golden rice hardly makes up for the loss of nutrients caused by exporting modern agribusiness methods of exhausting topsoil through overproduction and applying oil-based fertilizers to make less nutritious crops grow, plus the negative side of mass monocropping golden rice, takes away land that has been used to plant indigenous crops that provide a more balanced diet in the places like these fake dogooders pretend to be trying to save! And, the purpose of all GMOs is not to feed the world or improve farming anyway. It's so multinational monstrosities like Monsanto can gain intellectual property rights over seeds and plant breeding. Then they can control the kinds of plants that farmers grow on a global scale, and then everyone will be stuck with living on rice, corn, wheat, soybeans and maybe the animals that are fed these grains....for a little variety! No wonder so many people are getting sicker and weaker than they should be in middle age today!

Well thanks for reviving this thread....I guess! But, whoever I was debating with at the time, this obviously went way off the topic of the upcoming election. So, I'll just say that your narrative above is the typical historical and cultural revisionism that has been a part of European thinking at least since Thomas Hobbes started writing about economics and human nature. This line of thinking, that began as a dismal complete dismissal of the lower classes and people in new lands regarded as "savages," has more politically correct packaging today, which pretends to be non-racist and actually concerned about the lower classes, but it's the same bullshit once the flowery rhetoric is removed. A real, unvarnished, rational look at how we live from the beginning of hunting/gathering through settled farming...the rise of hierarchies and feudal despots to industrial capitalism and to modern financial capitalism...which has given financial institutions the governing power over monetary, banking and trade policy, has hardly represented a steady rise in human wellbeing. A better case can be made that the exact opposite has occurred: take away a few bells and whistles and the lives of most people have hardly improved in the past two centuries, and are declining rapidly today....which is why so many people are becoming so greedy, desperate and irrational....and end up becoming conservative supporters, thinking they will get a share of the pie I suppose. Total Hobbesian bs! From the beginning of the first enclosure acts to their modern forms in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the millions forced off the land into overcrowded, dirty cities to work as slave labour for industry, are presented as somehow improving their lives. I took this bullshit apart back when factory fires and a collapse that killed 1000 in Bangladesh were in the news. The way we measure economic worth through GDP, it looks like someone who used to grow most of their own food has improved their lives when they take that sweatshop job and have to buy substandard food from a market, because GDP doesn't apply any economic value to public lands or common ancestral lands, where people were growing for their own needs and selling off surplus for any gain.

And, like I said, it doesn't matter a crap, because the US controls Jordan and has a vested interest in keeping the royal family in power there.

And I know the laundry list of bad verses too. But, even though I'm not a Christian, I know that the theme throughout the New Testament (and even the OT prophets) was about concern for the poor and deprived. But, the fact that we have Christianities focused on accumulating wealth and congratulating the rich (something you sure as hell can't justify from the Bible) tells me that Christianity, like all organized religions, is a collection of beliefs and practices that end up being used for any good or evil purpose regardless of its origins and traditions. A case in point today, would be look at that goddammed Hungarian Catholic Church from top to bottom, and compare the attitude of its archbishop and most Hungarian Catholics interviewed with what their supposed leader is telling them should be the Christian response to a refugee crisis! It's not like all Christians are following the Hungarian example of threatening to kill any new refugees entering their country...many are doing what they can to take in refugees.....I even learned of a small village in southern Italy that in the last few years, has taken in many new immigrants and refugees, and sees them as a solution to their aging and emigration problem....not a burden that they would rather not have to deal with.

I've been saying for awhile now...especially a year or two ago before the stream of refugees started reaching Europe, that this was a crisis of the Global South, and not something that could be easily defined with one simple cause/and one simple solution. All of these countries (including Palestine) have been subject to increasingly severe droughts in the past 10 to 20 years. In Sudan, the ethnic cleansings and wars perpetrated by the northern tribes that controlled the Sudan, responded to the drought by just taking more land from those to the west and in the south...it had nothing to do with religion....and that's why after a coalition of evangelical whackjobs and US NGO's (fronted by George Clooney) successfully lobbied to make South Sudan an independent nation, it's still the same warring cluster**** that it was before the war started...btw, where the hell is George Clooney, and why hasn't anyone in Hollywood with a microphone asked him about the value of his work and lobbying efforts? Palestine has the added problem along with declining water availability of not having control of underground aquifer sources of water. Israel controls the water, and uses most of the waters they share in common and even the bulk of the aquifers located in the West Bank for their goddammed new settler colonies! According to the UN agency tasked with monitoring this issue, Gaza's drinking water supplies will be unusable likely even before 2020.....what then? If refugees in Gaza are able to escape from the world's largest open air prison colony, who's shores will they end up on?

If you care to call up any demographic numbers from anywhere in the world, you'll find that generosity decreases with greater affluence! And when the rich give, it's quid per quo, such as the rich bastards who donate millions to already filthy rich private institutions like the Ivy League universities in the US (some so that they can ensure that their idiot sons have a Harvard or Yale degree), or places that they want to be seen..such as the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. That bullshit gets more millions than they know what to do with, while most arts go unfunded or inadequately funded. Even much...maybe even most of the money given to churches should be removed from tax-exempt status, since a lot of that money goes towards very earthly concerns that don't include feeding the poor and tending the flock. But, when it comes to who is going to give aid to someone in need, it's more likely to come from those who don't have a lot themselves!~

That's not why they "prefer to slam the door behind them!" It's mostly a phenomena that occurs one or two generations after the children of immigrants have mixed in to the new world and lost all connection with the homeland. And if we're honest about this, it is much, much more likely that the previous generations of white immigrants (when only white immigration was permitted) are able to blend in and start acting and talking like they are part of a broad, white middle class. That's not a luxury available to most visible minorities regardless of how much wealth they may amass over time. And let's not lose sight of the fact that nativism is not some sort of ethical thinking! This is just greed and selfishness applied to an international issue.

Because Jordan has been a proxy US colony since...forever! But, the aid provided to house what are largely US-created refugees is not completely picked up by the US...especially now that millions are on the move. UN agencies like UNHCR scrupulously avoid judgment and just go about the task of providing aid....and shaking down monthly donors for more and more money!

Sad news for comedy fans across the USA and beyond, as Rick Perry rides off into the sunset:Republican Rick Perry drops out of presidential race. No doubt this will be a letdown for Texas comedian/voice actor Mike Mcrae, who has made Perry one of his goto characters in recent years. So this segment for the Jimmy Dore Comedy Show three weeks ago may be the last time he gets to take him out for a spin: Rick Perry Net Worthless - Jimmy Dore Show (08-14-15)