Monday, February 25, 2013

What Obama's Leadership Has Cost Us...In One Area, Only.



Massive Poisoning with Outlawed Herbicides as Superweeds take over Farmer's Fields, and New GMO's Approved under Obama's 'Watch', and How it's Been Done.

How 'Engineering Nature' for Greed and Profit May Lead to the Demise of Many Via Starvation as Crop Yields Fall and Fail, and Fields are Poisoned.

I thought the following article by Jon Rappaport was worth sharing, as it involves us all. Politics, religion and our personal lives are so often subjects shunned as 'inappropriate', and so we stay in the dark and try to live in insular worlds. It is time for our courage and leadership to come forth, and solutions to be brought to the table. Only by recognizing or acknowledging a problem, is there hope to address and solve it, for the good of all.

Remember this?
The Alcoholic Rules are:
1. Don't talk about the problem. (The elephant in the room...)
2. Don't have or express feelings. (Deny reality and lose reality.)
3. Don't trust. (How can we, if we don't look at the truth, or express it? We can't even trust ourselves, when we create our own darkness.)

Do we know who to trust, if we turn in apathy to our own lives, and forget that we are part of this world, and our actions or lack of them affect the whole?

When we elect leaders of our country, overlooking their track record, their lack of a track record, their lack of transparency, their history and colleagues and ideologies, hoping they will 'represent' us, or voting for the least disturbing candidate, there is trouble coming. No amount of confetti, or 'leave it to someone else' will save us.

We create and leave the future for our children...The children of the world... All of which are precious. Overlooking the realities of our world and doing nothing is a special form of narcissism.

Kahlil Gibran said that a leaf of the tree turns not yellow except for the knowledge of the whole tree. And, those who stumble do so because the ones that came before, did not remove the stumbling blocks and stones.

Food and safety are basic or common interests, and so I hope you read this article, and contact your legislators or write your local paper, and see the wisdom of storing seeds, especially heirloom seeds, and planting your own non-poisoned gardens, etc.

Remember, we eat to nourish our bodies, and stay healthy and energetic. After this article, I will attach a Study that shows the difference in nutrients of Organic and Inorganic Vegetables. Please feel free to share it with your family, friends and neighbors.

*******

US farmers flood fields with dangerous poison to fight Monsanto superweeds

by Jon Rappoport
February 25, 2013

You're a farmer. Season after season, you watch your fields being taken over by Monsanto superweeds, which are resistant to the herbicide Roundup.

What are you going to do? You're locked in. You're buying your GMO seeds from Monsanto, and the food crops that grow from those seeds are supposed to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup, so that's what you spray on your crops.

But the weeds aren't resistant. They spread and they grow taller. They're taking over.

So you, along with many, many other US farmers, go to a strategy called "burndown," which is just as bad as it sounds. You use something a lot stronger than Roundup to kill those weeds: Paraquat, for example, which has been banned in 32 countries.

You drench your fields with it in the fall. You kill anything growing. And you drench the fields again in the spring, before you plant. Then, just as you're going to plant, you hit the fields a third time with the poison.

This is in addition to all the sprayings with Roundup, which is toxic, too.

Then you harvest the crops and you sell them. And consumers eat the food along with all the poison.

Tom Philpot, writing in Mother Jones (Feb.6), reports the alarming stats on the superweed takeover of US farmland. As of 2012, almost 50% of US farms had superweeds. In 2011, it was 34%. In Georgia, it's now 92%.

The total acreage of US farmland with resistant superweeds jumped by 51% in 2012. In 2011, it was a 25% increase. That upward- percentage escalation is called a nightmare.

Well, so farmers are poisoning the hell out of their food and their fields. But with Monsanto's super-duper GMO technology, the crop yields are still much bigger than they would be without the GMO seeds, right?

The Institute for Responsible Technology cites and quotes three reports on that score.

An International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development study, signed on to by 58 governments and 400 scientists, states that GMO crop production is "highly variable," and in some cases it has "declined."

The Union of Concerned Scientists' 2009 report, "Failure to Yield," emphatically stated: "Commercial GE [genetically engineered] crops have made no inroads so far into raising the intrinsic or potential yields of any crop."

A US Dept. of Agriculture report: "GE crops available for commercial use do not increase the yield potential. In fact, yield may even decrease..."

Let's summarize. Using Monsanto GMO technology to grow food crops results in massive poisoning of the farm land and the food. And increased crops yields are a fiction.

Nothing to see here, move along. Don't worry, be happy. Stand back, technology at work. Progress is our most important product. Better living through chemistry. Ignorance is strength.

What would a president and his administration do to make sure the truth is overrun and squashed?

In addition to silencing the media, they would appoint a host of GMO insiders to key government posts, and they would bring to market as many new GMO crops as possible, to construct a fait accompli.

So let's go to the scorecard and review the actions of Obama in his first term.

The new president filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA:

At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center.

As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

As commissioner of the USDA, Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had set up a national group, the Governors' Biotechnology Partnership, and had been given a Governor of the Year Award by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto.

As the new Agriculture Trade Representative, who would push GMOs for export, Islam Siddiqui, a former Monsanto lobbyist.

As the new counsel for the USDA, Ramona Romero, who had been corporate counsel for another biotech giant, DuPont.

As the new head of the USAID, Rajiv Shah, who had preciously worked in key positions for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of GMO agriculture research.

We should also remember that Obama's secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, once worked for the Rose law firm. That firm was counsel to Monsanto.

Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court. Kagan, as federal solicitor general, had previously argued for Monsanto in the Monsanto v. Geertson seed case before the Supreme Court.

The deck was stacked. Obama hadn't simply made honest mistakes. Obama hadn't just failed to exercise proper oversight in selecting appointees. He wasn't just experiencing a failure of short-term memory. He was staking out territory on behalf of Monsanto and other GMO corporate giants.

And now let us look at what key Obama appointees have wrought for their true bosses. Let's detail the extraordinary parade of GMO crops that have skated through the open door of the Obama presidency.

Monsanto GMO alfalfa.

Monsanto GMO sugar beets.

Monsanto GMO Bt soybean.

Coming soon: Monsanto's GMO sweet corn.

Syngenta GMO corn for ethanol.

Syngenta GMO stacked corn.

Pioneer GMO soybean.

Syngenta GMO Bt cotton.

Bayer GMO cotton.

ATryn, an anti-clotting agent from the milk of transgenic goats.

A GMO papaya strain.

And perhaps, soon, genetically engineered salmon and apples.
  
That's how you control and squash the truth.
  
Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com



Questions? Contact us at leangreencafe@yahoo.com

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Undone...III


Parenting Teenagers. Building Problem-solving Skills Together.

NPR's Emailed Story: How Parents Can Learn to Deal w/ a Testy Teenager and Build Problem-solving Skills

When you go directly to this blog article, you'll see the many comments in the section below. My own comment and what I've learned from the times of parenting my teens, is below:

A man wrote in about negotiating a time when the electronics were turned off at night. His kids said 10:00, he said 9. They agreed on 9:30 pm.

My response:


"Loved the negotiation to 9:30. Now that I'm alone, for my own health, I shut down the EMR's piercing the walls.  I just unplug the router. I no longer have 5 teenagers at one time, but I've had company that knows well... texting or internet throughout the night is met with my own home's boundary-a peaceful night with no electromagnetic radiation generated by me, because there's no WIFI. (You can just hope any neighbor's system is passworded...)



My own 7 children had the security of two parents, until the 1985 divorce, then disclosure of an aunt and uncle and step-grandparent's sexual abuse, then abandonment of 9 aunts and uncles and the grandparents and their father. The anger and grief overwhelmed any family system of rules as they blamed me, and wanted me to 'fix it' without doing their personal work. We struggle even today. What makes sense is deciding what we want. To be right, or happy. Some decided to try calling me by my first name. I invited them to refrain from contact until they could show the respect I believe...I'd earned, of 'Mom'. Earning Master's, PhD's and Law degrees are not a feeling of success, when the nuclear family is destroyed.

One of my daughters had her child disclose inappropriate grooming behavior, written down, after a visit to her father. This generation is better armed. My daughter wanted to wipe the guy out, of course. I told her that during her childhood, I regretted not being able to remain calm and patient at all times. I missed out on the Christ gene under my own burdens. (Sometimes we don't have the convenience of some 'break-down'. We keep functioning.) She laughed.



My most unfavorite task as parent was coming up with consequences. I'd let my children help, but they were too harsh on themselves. Years later, I heard a talk in which a man said we chastise our children for their mistakes, but too often leave them in the mess, instead of showing them how a few steps can get them back on track. Simultaneous grief in a family, especially layered disappointment, may take years to heal. Verbal abuse, emotional blackmail or physical abuse is simply not acceptable. "Services' must stop until civility returns and apologies are made and kept. Too many parents today keep performing though boundaries of respect are crossed. We were not born to be door mats or the 'whipping boy' for our children. This is not success, or a gift to our young."
**************

In my own family of origin, my mother was silent, and my father aggressively loud and explosive. This is the problem solving I saw. Even though I tried to reason with my own children, and maintain the family system after the divorce and then sexual abuse disclosure, loss of any support system as we moved, left the religion, and lost all my large extended family and any contact with their father ceased, it was a losing battle. The model my children had seen from their father's own personal demons, was to act self righteous while projecting his self hatred, with silence and passive aggressive behavior.

Discussing the truth of history, I had to think of what influences my children had and what problem solving examples I set, etc. Though I had sworn I would never take the abuse I saw my mother experience, the man I married was also wounded, like so many of us are. His mother died at 8 or 9, his father withdrew in his own grief of his life long partner of 20+ years, and his only sibling, a sister, went to live elsewhere. He was left to figure life out for himself. His teeth weren't fixed, and when he later worked at a car wash as a teenager, he saved up the $1 an hour wage and paid for his own dental work.  This had affected his self confidence, along with a home without a woman's touch. 

The curtains were black where his father grabbed them in the middle to close them at the end of the day. My ex-husband felt too embarrassed at the condition of the house to invite his friends over. Roaches in the Mesa, Arizona adobe home took over the kitchen, leaving streaks of their waste down the cupboards. Black widows and scorpions are quite comfortable in the heat, and the citrus trees and date palms lent great homes to anything insect and crawly. The honey house with its large extractor and fading green paint was a memory to days of apiary work, where father and son worked to heat and cut or strip off the wax of a frame and set the exposed honeycomb into its place to be whirled along with others. The golden Arizona honey collected at the bottom, only to be siphoned off into 5 gallon cans. They talked about Alfalfa honey, the prized Orange Honey, Clover honey, etc. as to where the beehives were, and what kind of color and taste their finished product had.  His father sent trainloads of honey off through the years, and used the money his hard work earned to buy land and build rentals for his retirement someday. 

My ex-husband had a lot of hives that were burned along with the weeds, along canals, by fields, etc., during the two years he served a Mormon mission in Argentina. 

Because my ex-husband's father was a hard working man, and taught that work ethic to his youngest son, they worked together. They'd go to Eager, and work to build a cabin together on land that overlooked John Wayne's 26 Bar Hereford Ranch. He also passed on his ideas of his station in life, by saying his kids would have to work twice as hard as anyone elses', to be as good. His father had been raised on dirt floors on farmland in Missouri or Mississippi. That's why dangling a black widow from one hand to the other didn't phase him, I guess. 

One morning around 3:30 or 4 AM, when his dad came over to help him irrigate several pieces of land in Mesa, my ex-husband and I had some sort of argument, and though I was pregnant with our first child, his way to 'win' seemed to include trying to kick me as I looked for something on the floor in the extra bedroom. I snarled at him to go get his father, so he could see what a 'man' his son was, kicking a pregnant wife. He stopped. Another time, he pushed me outside, and locked me out. He literally locked me out of his emotional life, being mostly silent, and having his own private life outside his home life, which I was about to find out.

In Arizona, work as a brick mason and hod carrier (mixing cement and lime and carrying "mud" or mortar, water, brick and block, building and stocking scaffolding) or laying brick or block was a physical labor that keeps a man in top physical shape. It also allows him to inhale lime and cement dust into his lungs for annual respiratory bouts, and wears out his elbows, etc. with tendonitis, carpal tunnel and arthritis as he ages. To work in the Arizona summers, one has to rise around 3:30 AM, pack a lunch and get to work to out-fox the beating sun. Think of a brick mason in the elements, like a roofer, etc., and you will know that not every man has the work ethic to cut it. (Yes, Emily, ;-}...there are women roofers, also, and probably masons.)

When I was pregnant with our second child, maintaining this Mormon temple marriage/playing house role, two policemen came to the door and asked me about the truck in the driveway. Who drove it? Did anyone else drive it?...

To be continued....


Questions? Contact me at leangreencafe@yahoo.com
at pamcohenmsw@gmail.com
or at www.counselingwithpamela.com

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

A TED Talk Worth Noting for your Health

A Break in 'Undone'-I and II: Reflections on Domestic Violence

This TED Talk caught my eye this morning on Dr. Mercola's website, along with a commentary from Jon Rappaport on President Obama's Speech last night. I decided to share them both, as they say a lot about the times we currently live in, here in America.





Story at-a-glance

  • Publication bias—the practice of selectively publishing trial results that serve an agenda—represents a systematic flaw of the scientific basis of medicine
  • Bias includes publishing positive results but not the negative ones, not publishing retractions of fraudulent studies, and funding bias
  • Half of all clinical trials ever completed on the medical treatments currently in use have never been published in the medical literature. Trials with positive results for the test treatment are about twice as likely to be published, and this applies to both academic research and industry studies
  • In 2010, researchers identified all the published trials for five major classes of drugs, and then measured two key features: Were they positive, and were they funded by industry? Out of a total of 500 trials, 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, compared to 50 percent of the government-funded trials
  • Published studies are used by doctors and health agencies as the basis for making recommendations and writing prescriptions. When they’re given a radically skewed picture of the facts, they cannot make sound recommendations, and patients die.


Now for Politics:...Jon Rappaport

Ruthless State of the Union: current crime boss speaks

The ruthless State of the Union: the current crime boss speaks

by Jon Rappoport
February 13, 2013

Perhaps it's presidents running down the whole laundry list of issues, but it seems to me the last dozen or so State of the Union speeches by presidents could put a galaxy of insomniacs to sleep.

Originally, the State of the Union was the president talking to Congress. Now we all know no one from the Senate or the House is going to move a new inch by anything the president says in his speech.

It's just a dog and pony show. It's also a chance for the president to talk to the television audience. That's the real event. The president's on TV.

It's a stage play and it closes the night it opens. The script is always too long. It should have been cut by nine-tenths in rehearsals.

The droning of the laundry list is, of course, a reflection of the fact that big government has its paws and nose in every facet of our lives. I was waiting for Obama to talk about an adequate supply of toilet paper and paper towels in public-park restrooms, and the danger of pictures of guns brought to school.

And how about those unsightly vegetable gardens growing on front lawns? Would be bring in the FBI and the ATF and DHS to solve that problem?

Would he push for free sex-change operations for all college students? Radioactive body scanners in coffee shops? I think the system for assigning names to hurricanes and blizzards should be subjected to a task-force study.

When tonight Obama said the only way to make progress was for us all to work together, he didn't just mean the Congress. He meant the American people, aka the television audience. But I've never understood that idea. What are we all working together to accomplish? What's the program? Giving away more of our income to the federal government? Agreeing to more surveillance of our movements? Supporting the invasion of more countries? Refraining from photographing the police making arrests? Restricting our Facebook posts to happy faces and rainbows?

Are we all working together to surrender our guns in exchange for movie tickets and candy? Are we pretending to be overjoyed that the federal government wants to force everyone to get vaccinated and eat GMO food, and take SSRI antidepressants that demonstrably cause people to go crazy and kill others? Is that it?

Are we somehow working together to print endless amounts of money? Are we working together to push the percentage of Americans collecting free government money from 40 percent to 60 percent? Is that the glorious goal?

Are we working together to give money to alternative-energy companies so they can go broke and declare bankruptcy? Are we working together to protect and defend the World Trade Organization, so ravenous mega-corporations can export jobs to China and roam the global landscape, raping and pillaging resources and labor?

Are we working together to accept Obamacare, which will steadily eliminate natural-health alternatives and enroll more people in a medical system that kills 225,000 people (actually a lot more) every year like clockwork? Is that the goal?

Are we working together to pretend we have two very different major political parties in the country, instead of one party with two heads?

Are we working to assure that no bankster is ever sent to prison for scamming the American people out of trillions of dollars?

Are we working together to take guns away from people who would only use them to defend themselves and their families against criminals, while at the same we work to ignore gang violence stemming in part from the fact that Mexican drug cartels use these gangs as subcontractors, under the protection of the federal government?

Are we working together to imagine that our troops are really fighting wars to protect and defend the nation?

Are we working together to hide the fact that, although interest rates are artificially low, we're spending more and more money every month to buy what we need to survive?

Are we working together to hamstring every small business in America with red tape and taxes?

Are we working together to ignore the absurd insanity called climate-change science, so the government can install carbon taxes and penalties and lop the top off of American industry?

Are we all working together to frame attractive free incentive packages for unlimited numbers of immigrants who come to America, while untold numbers of Americans are going hungry every night, and people can't find jobs anywhere? Is that the objective? Destabilization of society, under the cynical guise of humane gift-giving?

Are we working to dream that when the president says he's going to focus on jobs in his second term, this means he's actually going to do more than squint at the sun?

Are we working to find more foreign enemies we can invade, as our military advance teams pave the way for imperial corporations and continue to launch some sort of ridiculous "surround Russia" operation?

Are we all working together to drown the Third World in "free" medical drugs and vaccines that destroy immune systems, rather than cleaning up contaminated water supplies and installing simple sanitation systems (at a millionth of the cost of the drugs)?

Are we all working together just "to work together" and continue the fine tradition of destroying the nation from the inside?

That's what I thought. Yes, that's what I thought.

Hell of a speech, Mr. President. You and GW and Bill and Bush the Elder and Ronnie and Jimmy and Gerry and Nixon really know your laundry lists. You talk, and the government gets bigger. It's magic.

There's always more to do and the government has to make it happen. Otherwise, what are you there for?

I ask myself that question all the time. I'm still looking for an answer, other than, "We're all in this together."

Who is this WE you keep taking about? And what is this TOGETHER? You mean we who are watching on television and you who are talking on television? You mean you who are slicing the Constitution into little pieces while ridiculing it as a Neanderthal document? You mean you who are covert agents of Globalism? You mean you who have been vetted to make sure you're on board with the op to take American down into a planetary management system that will bring a thousand years of peace to people made over into androids?

That's what I thought.

You talk and the government gets bigger. You bankroll education and students are brainwashed into "uplifting social themes," and become more dumb. You talk and the state-corporate media strain themselves into hernias to praise your erudition or passion. You talk and thousands of lobbyists who have the inside track on your souls parse your words and plan their new strategies. You talk and the American people desperately try to imagine you're making a grain of sense. You talk and the winds blow and the snow falls and Somebody Actually Important, at a much higher level of the Mob, pats you on your shoulder and folds you up like a puppet and drops you in his pocket and walks upstairs to the Residence and puts you to sleep.

Asleep, you dream of a strange and alien thing: the freedom and power and independence of the individual. For you, it's a nightmare.

Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com

Questions? CONTACT me at leangreencafe@yahoo.com or
pamcohenmsw@gmail.com