Exposed: the great GM crops myth

[Cricket Tragic]

Originally Posted by screener

UrbanFarmboy I'm hoping you will edit that out because I have this feeling that people are scratching their heads at you.

screener, I suggest UrbanFarmboy has only noticed something I have also noticed about the comments of JamesM (aka Grandaddy) on the boards. They can be distinctly odd at times. btw, I though sockpuppets were banned on this forum. Is that not the case?

[screener]

Hi deek, I'll have to try and get the book. If we get enough people with the same chords being struck maybe there will be some resonance.

cricket tragic, so you figure it's safe to say that Barney Gordon won't be losing his funding? What about the guy in nebraska with similar findings?

I think that urban farmboys comments were meant to be insulting and that's not wanted on here, They came out to be very very odd to the extent that I thought he might want to edit them for his own face.

Show me the puppet.

[Cricket Tragic]

screener, I know a couple of people at Kansas State and checked with them. Barney Gordon still has funding. Roger Elmore left the University of Nebraska some time ago. He is currently an extension specialist at Iowa State. As far as I know, he still does research.

You really fall into being a conspiracy theorist at times. Why would anyone want to withdraw funding from a scientist whose carefully done research indicated some minor and sometimes occasional effects on yield of herbicide tolerance? Barney Gordon got it right. What matters is not how the crops yield in the absence of weeds, but how they do in the presence of weeds. Weed populations can reduce yields by far more than these small differences.

I wasn’t agreeing with UrbanFarmboy, merely stating that I could see what he was getting at. I agree that gratuitous insults are uncalled for, but every so often it is important to point out the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth is.

Sockpuppet Hint. Granddaddy is really JamesM.

[screener]

cricket tragic, it is not that I theorize conspiracy, it is that I recognize the faults of the powerful. Why would the powerful, those who are left having the money to fund research at universities, withdraw that funding in the light of minor detractions from their perfection? I suppose it is deep insecurities.

I don't know that sock puppets are banned, perhaps Adi can fill me in, I have had word that a second identity is only allowed in exceptional circumstances. I expect that so long as no other rules of the forums are broken there isn't a problem.

Interestingly enough the wikipedia article you noted has the following concerning sockpuppetry.

A sockpuppet-like use of deceptive fake identities is used in stealth marketing. The stealth marketer creates one or more pseudonymous accounts, each one claiming to be owned by a different enthusiastic supporter of the sponsor's product or book or ideology.[8]
A single such sockpuppet is a shill; creating large numbers of them to fake a "grass-roots" upswelling of support is known as astroturfing.

[deek]

Originally Posted by screener

Hi deek, I'll have to try and get the book. If we get enough people with the same chords being struck maybe there will be some resonance.

Hi screener,

Brewster Kneen's book is titled;The Rape of Canola published by NC Press 1992.
ISBN 1-55021-066-1

My quote from Brewster's book was slightly out of context, but when you put it into context (by including Brewster's preceding paragraph) this makes the situation a whole lot more untenable.

“Not enough time has elapsed for the biotech industry to discover the consequences of what has been so carelessly initiated. There has been, however, sufficient increase in the occurrence of allergies, asthma, cancers, immune system disorders and similar illnesses, for which there is no adequate explanation, to give us good cause to doubt the assurances about the safety of scientific endeavours in general and biotechnology in particular.”

[Cricket Tragic]

Originally Posted by screener

cricket tragic, it is not that I theorize conspiracy, it is that I recognize the faults of the powerful. Why would the powerful, those who are left having the money to fund research at universities, withdraw that funding in the light of minor detractions from their perfection? I suppose it is deep insecurities.

The powerful have faults just like the rest of us simply because they are human. Probably the only difference is that the powerful’s faults have a bigger individual impact than yours or mine. That is why there is regulation. It remains true that the vast majority of funding for Universities comes from State and Federal Government programs and from tuition fees. Alumni provide quite a lot of money to some Universities – they are often quite powerful within Universities, but I am guessing they are not who you mean. For most Universities, corporations are very much miniscule players, so it is a bit hard to see how corporations can influence funding for Universities all that much.

Even at UC Berkeley, Novartis’ $5 million per year funding was a drop in the bucket. UC Berkeley’s budget during these years was more than $1.2 billion per annum making Novartis’ contribution less than 0.5%.

Now corporations might decide that they no longer want to fund particular research, as Syngenta did at UC Berkeley. These are commercial decisions made by corporations and those people then need to source funds from elsewhere.

Originally Posted by screener

I don't know that sock puppets are banned, perhaps Adi can fill me in, I have had word that a second identity is only allowed in exceptional circumstances.

http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/fo...-accounts.html

Personally, I am not that fussed if James wants to play ‘silly buggers’ on the forum, but when one of his identities continues on a campaign that his other identity has started, don’t be surprised if I get a bit more terse than usual.

[screener]

Thanks deek, checking into Brewster Kneen I came across the Rams Horn and the work that he and Cathleen Kneen are doing, great stuff. and from there to http://www.grain.org Both sites with info on how people are fighting the good fight for food sovereignty and security and why.

This from the GRAINS site, for example.

In this issue of Seedling we publish an article (Seeds of passion) showing how terminator technology (and its variants) is continuing to be pushed by governments, including the European Union with its Transcontainer Project. Guy Kastler shows (New threat from covert GMOs) how these second-generation GMOs are being quietly brought to the fore. On the face of it, European consumers appear to be winning the battle against GMOs. However, Europe’s reappraisal only amounts to a tactical retreat. Behind the scenes, European companies are quietly developing a second generation of GMOs that will be far harder to combat.