Why I Vote Green

[WIP]

- Golden Rice has been modified to provide additional vitamin A. I guess the greens don't care if people in the 3rd world suffer from blindness. (Either that, or they want to spend millions to fly vitamins to the developing world, in planes spewing greenhouse gasses.)

Secondly, I do have to echo TimG's comments when he said "so?" So what... Monsanto has been successful. The produce products people want. However, other seed companies (including ones selling organic seeds) still exist. If farmers didn't think increased yields warranted the expense of GM seeds, there are plenty of alternatives where they can buy alternative (even organic) seeds. Monsanto will then be forced to either come out with even better products, or go out of business.

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!

[WIP]

This thread was discussing the Canadian green party and its policies. It was not discussing international politics or views on science.

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?

[WIP]

Let's consider this. Companies that develop and patent gmo seeds are the same companies that develop and patent pesticides and herbicides which these seeds are resistant to. Not only that. Monsanto is the largest seed company in the world and owns 86% of gmo seeds sown globally. They are also the parent of Roundup (they produce pesticides and herbicides).

Food for thought but hopefully that food has gmo labelling.

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:

The Flawed Processes of GMO Risk Assessment

Some of my concerns with GMOs are "just" practical ones. I have read numerous GMO risk

assessment applications. These are the documents that governments rely on to 'prove' their safety.

Though these documents are quite long and quite complex, their length is misleading in that they

primarily ask (and answer) trivial questions. Furthermore, the experiments described within them are

often very inadequate and sloppily executed. Scientific controls are often missing, procedures and

reagents are badly described, and the results are often ambiguous or uninterpretable. I do not believe

that this ambiguity and apparent incompetence is accidental. It is common, for example, for

multinational corporations, whose labs have the latest equipment, to use outdated methodologies. When

the results show what the applicants want, nothing is said. But when the results are inconvenient, and

raise red flags, they blame the limitations of the antiquated method. This bulletproof logic, in which

applicants claim safety no matter what the data shows, or how badly the experiment was performed, is

routine in formal GMO risk assessment.

To any honest observer, reading these applications is bound to raise profound and disturbing questions:

about the trustworthiness of the applicants and equally of the regulators. They are impossible to

reconcile with a functional regulatory system capable of protecting the public.

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.

Edited September 14, 2015 by WIP

[-1=e^ipi]

how did you and Tim get away with turning this thread into GMO advocacy for most of its pages?

That would be me. See second post.

[WIP]

That would be me. See second post.

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!