It seems impossibly fanciful, almost like a script for a Bond movie.  A clutch of mega-corporations hatches a plan for the global control of an absolute fundamental for life itself: food.  The plan calls not simply for the global domination of food supply, but for placing Nature beyond the law so farmers and growers must buy their seeds from the corporations.  And because those seeds are genetically manipulated to produce barren plants, they must do it afresh every drilling season.

Cue the suave, unkillable good guy who always steals the villain’s very delectable girlfriend?  ‘Fraid not this time.  It’s down to freedom-loving Americans to save the world from predatory capitalism, with maybe some help from Ron Paul.  There’s about a week left in which to inform Congress about right and wrong as they pertain to this bill.

From that last link (Campaign for Liberty):-

Pay special attention to
Section 3 which is the definitions portion of the bill-read in it’s entirety.
section 103, 206 and 207- read in it’s entirety.
Red flags I found and I am sure there are more…........
Legally binds state agriculture depts to enforcing federal guidelines effectively taking away the states power to do anything other than being food police for the federal dept.
Effectively criminalizes organic farming but doesn’t actually use the word organic.
Effects anyone growing food even if they are not selling it but consuming it.
Effects anyone producing meat of any kind including wild game. 
Legislation is so broad based that every aspect of growing or producing food can be made illegal.  There are no specifics which is bizarre considering how long the legislation is.  
Section 103 is almost entirely about the administrative aspect of the legislation.  It will allow the appointing of officials from the factory farming corporations and lobbyists, and classify them as experts and allow them to determine and interpret the legislation.  Who do you think they are going to side with?  
Section 206 defines what will be considered a food production facility and what will be enforced up all food production facilities.  The wording is so broad based that a backyard gardener could be fined and more.
Section 207 requires that the state’s agriculture dept act as the food police and enforce the federal requirements.  This takes away the states’ power and is in violation of the 10th Amendment.

An MR reader sent me the following clip, which is actually of a guy reading an Op-ed News article titled “Monsanto’s Dream Bill”:-

by exPF

Cynicuseconomicus is a UK-centered economics blog, which develops a clear if somewhat pessimistic perspective on the state of the UK and US economies. Its most enjoyable facet is the clear discussion of the technical realities of the current economic situation - interesting to someone who wants to gain an understanding without an advanced economics degree. Things are explained felicitously.

The links on the left hand margin of the blog allow for an easy sequential reading of the past analytical work done on the blog, and one is quickly brought up to speed.

One of the recent revelations posted on Cynicus was the fact that the Bank of England’s policy of “Quantitative Easing” - in fact simply means the creation of money from nothing.  Thus being analogous to the printing of money undertaken by Zimbabwe, or Weimar Germany. He indicates on the blog that Britain is bankrupt and they are basically creating money from nuffin’ in order to finance - well, the status quo, basically.

George Pitcher is Religion Editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. He was ordained priest in the Church of England in 2006 and is Curate at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, in London – the “journalists’ church”.

So says the blurb on the Rev George Pitcher’s Telegraph blog.  It does not mention that George is the most open-minded journalist in the history of the known universe.  Just read the comments to his piece published today and titled Why Auschwitz needs to become history.

If every mainstream journalist was as accomodating and open to ideas as this chap we would have knocked the Establishment over years ago.  I wonder when his bosses are going to correct this, of course, completely unacceptable situation.

India Times reports that:

‘CEO and founder of popular site LinkedIn Reid Hoffman urged the US Congress and the Obama Administration to remove the cap on H-1B visas, which enable foreign nationals to live and work in the United States. LinkedIn is a popular business-oriented social networking site.’

‘“Remove the cap on H-1B visas and impose a 10 per cent payroll tax beyond the benchmark salary for each visa,” Hoffman wrote in an article “Stimulus 2.0: It’s the Startups, Stupid” in TechCrunch, a publication of The Washington Post. A day earlier in another article in The Washington Post, Hoffman made a similar argument for the next phase of stimulus policies.’

‘Observing that the US is a country founded on immigration, Hoffman said, “We should welcome the best and the brightest as our own. Abolish the H-1B cap, and give me an economic reason for preferring local. I’ll only do foreign if I need to.” ‘

You know I remember when they first ballooned the H-1b visa program in the late 90’s there were all these IT luminaries like Tim O’Reilly and Bill Gates saying stuff like each H-1b visa issued would generate 5 jobs.

How’d that theory work out, anyway?

Yeah, I know…. “It would have been so much worse without them…”

British MR readers may know that Peter Hitchens has been dishing it out lately to the BNP, posting on his blog on 24th February, 25th February and 3rd March.  The three posts have attracted 544 comments thus far, the great proponderance from BNP supporters.

Hitchens’ second post was less temperate than his first, and the third less temperate again.  That one was titled, charmingly, “A message to the mug punters, other dupes and self-indulgent fantasists fooled by the BNP - please stop trying to bore me into submission”.  This fully merited a response.

Hitchens has dallied with bits and pieces of truth all his journalistic life.  But he has some serious stopping points in his mentation and he cannot or will not venture beyond them.  Three in particular sing out of those latest postings on the BNP.  One is a stubborn identification of the party leadership as “forever Nazis”.  Another is the irreproachable virtue of the Jews (his mother, a suicide, was part-Jewish).  The third, with which I commence the following response, is the overt expression of racial interests in politics - he really hates that word “blood”.

The response I’ve written is not as eloquent nor as comprehensive as I would have wished.  The Daily Mail has an unstated character limit, and I wound up having to prune the original quite a bit to get it to post.  Anyhow, whilst one acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of Peter furnishing us with a reply, it would be very good to see him explain his position from an ethical perspective ... or attack ours.

Here we are ...

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by exPF

Note: this is a response to Skeptical’s comment in A religious image:

To wantonly cast aside so many centuries of European Man’s development simply because Christianity has a remote, Jewish origin is nothing short of narcissism. The barbaric ideal is just another romantic fiction that creates more problems than it can solve.

I’m going to give this particular quote a long response. This will ultimately be a restatement of previous arguments in favor of ‘cultural pessimism’. It is a view that I have consistently advocated on this blog, which amounts to essentialism relating to blood in spite of varying levels of civilizational advancement and the ups and downs of prosperity, learning, culture, etc.

The development of European man’s civilization is not the same as the development of European man.

I refuse as too simplistic the notion that European man has ‘developed’ into some kind of higher, superior form viz-a-vis his former self. Advantages - spiritual, physical, mental - which accrue to us a result of our historical development, are not the same as essential traits which become part of our nature through natural selection.

I have always been skeptical of using metrics of civilizational development in assessing the viability of a race or nation. This is because most of these metrics are based on refinements in memes, and work done by the upper 1% of thinkers and scarcely understood by the rest - mostly they are refinements of mental modules and toolsets which, grand as they might be, are ultimately phenotypic rather than genotypic. The wealth of accumulated cultural inheritance has grown so great that it leads us to continuous hubristic over-evaluation of our own merits and abilities both as individuals and as nations.

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By David Hamilton

New-born babies are now tested for tuberculosis in UK hospitals. TB was the biggest killer in this country during the 19th century. It had nearly been eradicated. But Third World immigrants have brought it back.

The first duty of Government is to protect the population. But for sixty years successive governments have been neglecting this responsibility and exposing innocent members of the public to deadly diseases.  They should have reversed the idea and not allowed immigrants into the country without proper health checks - all should have been screened for TB.

The Daily Mail of 5th July 2001 described Newham, London as TB capital of the West.  It had 108 cases per 100,000 people which over twice that of India, where there are 41 cases per 100,000, and more than Russia, where there are 91 cases. On an average day, seven people in London show the first symptoms of TB - a persistent cough, chest pains and sweats.

In English Witness P Scrivener categorised stories of imported diseases under Genocide.  Conservative writer and former prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels in the Daily Mail 10th May 2001:-

One obvious explanation (of the increase in TB in the Western world) makes officials uneasy that there has been a virtual conspiracy of silence about it. The explanation is the vast population movement from areas of high prevalence of the disease such as Africa and Asia, to areas of much lower prevalence, such as Western Europe and North America.”

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by exPF

It seems that one essential feature influencing the fate of a culture is the canon of stories which it uses to entertain young children. I had previously thought of morality as being the result of dictated principles, when a commentator on this website suggested that morality is also determined largely by story-telling. I think that that is an astute observation - morality plays and stories with moral messages seem to be important.

It also strikes me to what extent children’s minds, say up to the age of 8, are basically marinated in non-stop storytelling. In our capacity as adults we might tend to view storytelling principally as a vehicle for different skills and concepts: the ability to identify numbers, colors, ability to read, or lessons about the animal kingdom. These are things that children typically absorb up to the age of 5. While we may view the stories as a vehicle, children seem to view them as an end in itself. I think children take great delight in storytelling.

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