Belief, science, and central cues in public messaging

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"you are willing to take "natural selections" word for it but not the word of the folks that came up with the concept?"
"um ug science bad scientist trick hulk. smash. "

You'll have to prove to me you believe I believe that. Unless you're trying to make a circular argument whereas science being part of cosmological evolution, I'm indeed untrustworthy of certain aspects of genetic engineering towards foods - part of your argument that I don't somehow buy into evolution, because genetic science is part of the whole cosmological evolution argument? I'm already confused.

urban [ur-buhn]
adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or designating a city or town.
2. living in a city.
3. characteristic of or accustomed to cities; citified: He is an urban type.

Only a racist would ask such an utterly asinine and racist question. You've shown your true colors, have a good day sir.

are you confused a lot?
cosmological evolution ?
in my opinion the process of the formation of universe is not really related to what is good to eat.
So lets reel in our mystical thinking a bit.
It is a good strategy for learning to repeat or "parrot" back things the person you are conversing with.
so I give you kudos for that.
But one should try not to misstate what the other has said.
From your previous statement I take that you except biological evolution.
The irony is that you seem to have a mistrust of "[my] biology scientists".
(I call them biologists I find it is easier and as most of them are not mine per se, closer to the facts).
Well the funny part comes in here (and I think you will laugh when you hear this)
the theory Biological evolution was discovered by one of these Biology Scientists.
So unless you received your evolutionary theory from some other source (perhaps a cosmic one)
you trust at least one biology scientist.

also and I think this one is the real cracker.
the OP is not about GMOs it is about how tragic it is when idiots agree with you
But then use horrible arguments to do so.
so the real punchline is I am a GMO skeptic but you are so riled up in "outrage" mode.
it passed right over your angry little head.

p.s. I call sockpuppet

"cosmological evolution ?
in my opinion the process of the formation of universe is not really related to what is good to eat."

It all started some 14.8 billion years ago. It has everything to do with everything. Once the universe cooled enough to form hydrogen atoms, they went on to make everything else, including that incredible prime rib you're likely stuffing your face with.

"The irony is that you seem to have a mistrust of "[my] biology scientists".
(I call them biologists I find it is easier and as most of them are not mine per se, closer to the facts)."

They've not been at is as long as nature, I'd say evolution has a few billion years head start and field experience. Why is it necessary to trust a science in it's infancy? We're just learning the machine of biology, would you trust a 12 year old to rebuild your engine?

"the OP is not about GMOs it is about how tragic it is when idiots agree with you
But then use horrible arguments to do so."

Evolution doesn't always get it right, whether social, biological, etc, but the information is still usually stored for reference, and possible transmogrification into something else entirely different, which happens oh so often in science.

"so the real punchline is I am a GMO skeptic but you are so riled up in "outrage" mode.
it passed right over your angry little head."

You missed my point entirely with your assumptions. I'm not just a skeptic, the evidence is clearly in natures ballpark for efficiency and health. That was the gist of my first post, but your anger and outrage at my agreeing with the interviewee caused you to lash out because you know I'm right despite me ignoring the general message of the post. It's not the first time someones gotten angry because their subconscious is being muted by their "intellect", won't be the last either.

And there in lies the problem. The FDA is run by Monsanto execs. Obama appointed Michael Taylor, a VP at Monsanto, the Czar of the food safety division of the FDA. There are another 6 or so FDA employees that go back and forth between Monsanto and the FDA. They are essentially a self-regulating corporation.

And what have these Monsanto employees done in their roles in the FDA? They have fought against accurate labeling for and are currently in the courts trying to make raw milk illegal nationally (it's already illegal in many states). I don't know that I'd be interested in raw milk personally, but I think Monsanto's intentions are quite clear here. They now have the power to force the public to buy their products and are able to conceal their practices and formulas, legally. Is there clear evidence that rBGH/antibiotic treated milk is safer than raw milk? Does the FDA (Monsanto) even care? By their own admission, no, no they don't.

Do we really want a corporation that's been found guilty of illegal dumping of toxic substances (including Agent Orange and PCB's), fraudulent record keeping, bribes, false product claims, promises of painful retaliation to countries that ban their GMO foods, use of child labor, and bullying local farmers (often referred to as the mafia) to be self-regulating? They are responsible for 50 EPA Superfund sites. Just last November, a judge ordered the destruction of Monsanto's GMO sugarbeets because they were illegal approved by the U.S. Ag. Dept. Again, the list goes on.

They are huge global powerhouse. They rule the market. They've got patents on everything and are responsible for 90% of genetically engineered seeds in the U.S. This is what concerns me. It's not the basic science, it's who's controlling the science. They've created a dependency. Sure they can help a farmer to yield more crops one year, but then next year the crops are resistant to the pesticides used the year before so they must buy the new version, or sometimes the soil becomes useless the next year. Whatever the case, you'd be hard pressed to find a farmer that has seen an actual long-term benefit to anything Monsanto has done.

I see this as a really big deal. We've seen what prison industrial complexes have done to our country. We've seen what happens with a military industrial complex. Why on earth would we want a food industrial complex?

The FDA was conceived of as both a regulator and a research organization so that it could protect food and drug manufacturers from litigation by shifting claims of safety away from the manufacturers. That's just reality. It's unsurprising that Monsanto benefits from the deal.



When they say "raw milk" they mean unpasteurized milk. Has nothing to do with rBGH or antibiotics.

Dairy cows can only legally be given antibiotics when under the care of a veterinarian for a diagnosed illness. They are not milked with the rest of the herd while they are on antibiotics because their milk is legally considered tainted. They are not allowed back into the general herd until their milk tests negative for antibiotics. After a cow has finished a course of antibiotics and tested negative for antibiotics in their milk and has rejoined the herd, the law requires that the holding tank that their milk goes into is also tested for antibiotics and disposed of if it tests positive.

When a tanker of milk is delivered to the processing plant, it is again tested for antibiotics by law, and if it tests positive the whole tanker must be dumped.

There are no legal "feed antibiotics" for dairy cows that would indiscriminately provide antibiotics to the whole herd.

Far less than 1% of dairy cows in the USA have ever been treated with rBGH, and the treatment is only useful during periods when the cow is not giving milk.



Crops aren't pesticide resistant, they're herbicide resistant, and that's a trait they program in. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

I have personally heard a farmer complain how much his GMO seed costs and then immediately admit that his profit margin is much wider because of it.

We want a food industrial complex only if we want to continue to enjoy the quality of life we have enjoyed for the last 50 years. Even if you choose to abstain from it, you benefit from it.

No it wasn't. It was created to be a consumer protection agency. In fact, it's the oldest and most comprehensive consumer protection agency run by our federal government. That was its original and primary purpose. That's supposed to be their current primary purpose as well. The fact that they act in the best interests of the manufacturer's and not the consumers is a direct violation of their purpose. We the consumers and tax payers pay for this protection and have every right to be pissed off that we're not getting the promised benefit.



The point I was making about the raw milk bans, which primarily affects organic farmers, is that corporations, like Monsanto, are aiming to take choices away from consumers in an effort to push their own products and profit agendas. I'd like to see some evidence showing that rBGH/rBST is not widely used. The lowest estimate that I have seen is about 17% (of cows are treated) and that was after the demand for hormone-free milk set in. The separation and testing of cows treated with antibiotics (because of infections like mastitis due to hormone treatment) sounds nice on paper, but who's in charge of overseeing such safety measures? I think you're entirely too trusting here. How often are farms inspected? When I worked in food service, our mandatory 'routine' health inspections happened maybe once every 2 years - and that's without a major conflict of interest.



Apologies, I meant pest resistant GMO crops. Monsanto puts out a new seed that supposed to be resistant to pests. But the pests quickly develop a resistance to to the engineered pest resistant seeds so the following year the farmer must upgrade to the new and improved pest resistant seed. The claim is that this fast resistance by the pests is intentional so that the farmer becomes caught in a vicious cycle of dependency on the manufacturer. So you have an example of a single farmer who has an improved profit margin. How about an entire country that has been devastated by these crops: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough ... uicid.html

I still fail to see the overall benefit. When you factor in the negative environmental impact (see 50 Superfund sites in the U.S. alone full of Agent Orange and PCB's), the corruption of our consumer protection agencies, and the abusive practices with farmers. Again, it's not the science that I have a problem with. I'm sure if an ethical entity was able to control this sort of engineering then we probably would be better off. But they don't and we're not.

Sometimes politicians say one thing to the public and another thing in private.

At best the FDA may serve to protect both the public and the manufacturer. But if you look at the events that inspired it's creation and how the regulations actually work, it's clear that the idea was to protect the manufacturer by shifting responsibility to an entity that cannot be sued.



I don't see why organic farmers can't pasteurize their milk. It's a simple process. Add heat, then subtract it.

I believe we live in a world of measured risks, and i think walking across the street is more dangerous than having milk in my tea from a cow i haven't met. Though i admit that much of the tea i drink is certified organic, that's largely because premium whole-leaf teas all cost basically about the same, and my favorite leaves happen to have been produced organically. Maybe elephant poo just makes better tea than chemical fertilizers.




Monsanto and their ilk (Dow, ADM, etc) do things we don't like sometimes. At the same time, if you want a safe, economical alternative to red 40 to suddenly replace all the bug-derived red 40 on the market, I can guarantee it will come from someone like Monsanto.

I'll tell you a true story that you won't believe. A good friend of mine is a chemistry professor at a major state university. His specialty is to teach spectroscopy - the science of identifying substances by exciting them electromagnetically and then listening very carefully to how they respond to the energy.

We were chatting with some mutual friends one day when someone mentioned that they know a girl who gets an allergic reaction from almost anything with artificial orange flavor. That she can eat an orange, but she can't drink a can of orange soda.

My chemist friend said that this was preposterous. That citric acid is citric acid no matter what way you look at it, and at any rate allergies are always about protein, and there should be no protein in orange soda.

But it made him curious.

So he identified every manufacturer of citric acid in the world and sent each of them a letter explaining that he was researching reports of allergen contamination in citric acid, and requesting a sample.

Some of them sent him a teaspoon in a baggie - plenty for NMR. Some of them sent him a small container, or a larger baggie. None of them refused. One of the Really Big biochemical companies sent him a 200lb fiber drum.

All of the samples he received were basically 99.9999% pure citric acid.

The sample from the fiber drum had two protein spikes in it's spectra. One tiny, one really, really tiny.

The tiny one turned out to be from the glue holding together the fiber drum.

The really, really tiny one, he had trouble identifying. So he showed it to his colleagues, who mostly shrugged and didn't know.

After a couple months, a biologist who saw it let him know that he had identified it - that it is a fragment -- a short section -- from a protein created by aspergillis niger. aka black mold.

Sensitivity to aspergillis is a very common allergy, and some people are super-duper allergic to aspergillis.

A lot of synthetic biochemicals are manufactured by growing GMO aspergillis in huge vats. "vegetable" rennet in vegetarian cheese, for example. But i digress.

He wrote a letter to the manufacturer detailing his findings, his surmise that they are deriving citric acid from modified aspergillis niger, what he supposes the defect in their process is, and proposing a bleaching process they could use early on in the purification process that would not alter their yield but which would totally eradicate the protein fragments.

Four months later the bursar of his university asked to speak to him about an unusual check received in his name donating $100,000 to the chemistry department.

This thread is getting really hyperbolic. I'm gonna try and let it die.

On to the grave, but just a few more things

Many organic farmers do pasteurize their milk. Actually, I think most do. Some consumers would rather drink raw milk so why not let them? (because it's not good for big business)

With the FDA, I get that corruption is nothing new, but why should we be complacent about it? I'm concerned that the level of corruption has been taken to new heights over the past decade or so and it pisses me off. I'm a taxpayer and a consumer, but more importantly, I'm a parent responsible for feeding 2 small children. I think I'd be remiss not to educate myself and take appropriate actions.

And that story was nice. The actions seemed ethical. I'm aware that it's all not bad news, but I still think it's prudent to be cautious. The point is not find a safe alternative to Red #40, but to eliminate it all together. There's no reason whatsoever to artificially color food, except of course for marketing purposes.

People seem to like color in their food and drink. So manufacturers will keep using it.

At any rate, hollering "evil monsanto is poisoning us because they are trying to kill us" is not helpful, and possibly harmful.

Try writing a rational, unemotional, paper letter to your senator suggesting specific regulations on the industry.

I use jamica (hibiscus tea) to make food red.

I never said that. I highlighted their illegal and unethical practices. Practices that they have been found guilty of in the courts. I do not look at this situation emotionally. The opinions I have are based on factual events and evidence. I've asked for examples of benefits given to us from Monsanto and you gave one anecdote of a single farmer. In contrast, I've shown a rather exhaustive list of wrongdoings. An objective and rational approach is to weigh the good against the bad. I'm pretty good at math and it appears that the con list is much longer.

I might try writing a letter, but certainly not to Toomey for that would surly fall on deaf ears. I'd like to think that maybe a few people read my posts so possibly that could have a tiny impact, although I doubt it. Sometimes just venting is nice.