Tag Archives: pesticides

Need 15 reasons to eat organic food?

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Organic foods are higher in nutrients, free of neurotoxins, growth-supportive, not pesticide factories, not water-polluters, ecologically sustainable, economically sustainable, better tasting, not gas-ripened, safer for farm workers, conducive to wildlife, less likely to be cancer-causing, free of antibiotics and hormones, tried & tested, and supportive of biodiversity. Read on, from Care2 make a difference:

15 Reasons to Eat Organic Food

1. In study after study, research from independent organizations consistently shows organic food is higher in nutrients than traditional foods. Research shows that organic produce is higher in vitamin C, antioxidants, and the minerals calcium, iron, chromium, and magnesium.

2. They’re free of neurotoxins–toxins that are damaging to brain and nerve cells. A commonly-used class of pesticides called organophosphates was originally developed as a toxic nerve agent during World War I. When there was no longer a need for them in warfare, industry adapted them to kill pests on foods. Many pesticides are still considered neurotoxins.

3. They’re supportive of growing children’s brains and bodies. Children’s growing brains and bodies are far more susceptible to toxins than adults. Choosing organic helps feed their bodies without the exposure to pesticides and genetically-modified organisms, both of which have a relatively short history of use (and therefore safety).

4. They are real food, not pesticide factories. Eighteen percent of all genetically-modified seeds (and therefore foods that grow from them) are engineered to produce their own pesticides. Research shows that these seeds may continue producing pesticides inside your body once you’ve eaten the food grown from them! Foods that are actually pesticide factories…no thanks.

5. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that pesticides pollute the primary drinking source for half the American population. Organic farming is the best solution to the problem. Buying organic helps reduce pollution in our drinking water.

6. Organic food is earth-supportive (when big business keeps their hands out of it). Organic food production has been around for thousands of years and is the sustainable choice for the future. Compare that to modern agricultural practices that are destructive of the environment through widespread use of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers and have resulted in drastic environmental damage in many parts of the world.

7. Organic food choices grown on small-scale organic farms help ensure independent family farmers can create a livelihood. Consider it the domestic version of fair trade.

8. Most organic food simply tastes better than the pesticide-grown counterparts.

9. Organic food is not exposed to gas-ripening like some non-organic fruits and vegetables (like bananas).

10. Organic farms are safer for farm workers. Research at the Harvard School of Public Health found a 70 percent increase in Parkinson’s disease among people exposed to pesticides. Choosing organic foods means that more people will be able to work on farms without incurring the higher potential health risk of Parkinson’s or other illnesses.

11. Organic food supports wildlife habitats. Even with commonly used amounts of pesticides, wildlife is being harmed by exposure to pesticides.

12. Eating organic may reduce your cancer risk. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers 60% of herbicides, 90% of fungicides, and 30 percent of insecticides potentially cancer-causing. It is reasonable to think that the rapidly increasing rates of cancer are at least partly linked to the use of these carcinogenic pesticides.

13. Choosing organic meat lessens your exposure to antibiotics, synthetic hormones, and drugs that find their way into the animals and ultimately into you.

14. Organic food is tried and tested. By some estimates genetically-modified food makes up 80% of the average person’s food consumption. Genetic modification of food is still experimental. Avoid being part of this wide scale and uncontrolled experiment.

15. Organic food supports greater biodiversity. Diversity is fundamental to life on this planet. Genetically-modified and non-organic food is focused on high yield monoculture and is destroying biodiversity.

Simple American breakfast no longer

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pancake syrop corn syrup hfcs maple KaroMy ideal breakfast is served at a diner: coffee, eggs, hash browns and toast. But can you feel healthy about it –as your conscience (n) –> vegan? You could pack in sugar in the raw, sea salt, and organic peppercorns in the requisite grinders; likewise from a cooler you could pull jars of rBGH-free half and half, real butter, and organic ketchup if you’re inclined. But what about what’s served on the plate?

A disclaimer: let’s define eating to mean the consumption of nutrition and avoidance of toxin. That precludes genetically modified organisms, irradiated produce, chemical pesticides, trans-fats, corn-syrup, HFCS, etc. The expression “natural” has been co-opted by Big Agra, but no longer can detractors say that “organic” doesn’t mean anything.

I’m omitting the optional meats: ham, bacon and sausage links for the obvious reasons; free-range, grass-fed, single-animal slaughtered efforts notwithstanding. Enough said.

Empty calories like juice are out as well, unless it’s freshly squeezed for your glass.

And let’s presume too, we’ll be asking the cook to stir some onions and peppers into the hash browns, for at least a little green.

Before we leave the subject of condiments, there a three non-perishable items it might be worth bringing with you to the diner. restaurant jelly single serving corn syrup hfcs For your toast: corn-less fruit preserves, unheated honey, and if you’re planning to add pancakes, grade-B maple syrup. The diner variety syrup, and any portion-size pre-packaged confection are apt to be entirely corn syrup and HFCS.

If the price of your breakfast starts at $3.80, it’s unlikely your local diner can afford the healthy food supplies you are able to ferret from your grocer. It’s become enough of a feat to stock them at home. Let’s see: eggs from vegetarian-fed cage-less chickens, organic potatoes, whole-grain bread. All these hyphens concatenate into a value meal priced more like a dinner entree. And there’s probably no chance a typical diner can spring for fair-trade organic coffee beans.

Economists point to America’s relatively level cost of living. Progressive analysts address the subsidies which keep commodity prices artificially low. Others decry the need for society to address the real costs which cripple our unhealthy system. From the consumer’s point of view, the cost of real nutrition has suffered a hyperinflation to put it beyond our reach, eating out or in.

NOTES:
1. Here’s that recipe for organic catsup:

3 cups canned organic tomato paste
¼ cup whey (liquid from plain yogurt)
1 Tbls sea salt
½ cup maple syrup
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
3 cloves peeled & mashed garlic
½ cup fish sauce fish sauce

Mix together in a wide-mouth glass jar, leave at least an inch below the top and leave it at room temperature for 2-3 days before putting into the refrigerator. Recipe makes a whole quart.

2. An optimum juice concoction:

1. Beetroot
2. Celery
3. Carrot
4. Apple
5. Ginger

3. Three lists:

Foods to buy organic:
Meat, Milk, Coffee, Peaches, Apples, Sweet Bell Peppers, Celery, Nectarines, Strawberries, Cherries, Kale, Leafy Greens, Grapes, Carrots, Potatoes, Tomatoes

Foods that don’t need to be organic:
Onions, Avocado, Sweet Corn, Pineapple, Mango, Asparagus, Sweet Peas, Kiwi Fruit, Cabbage, Eggplant, Papaya, Watermelon, Broccoli, Sweet Potatoes

GMO crops:
Soybeans, Corn starch, Canola oil, Sugar beet, Rice. Watch list:
Wheat, Potatoes.

Honeybees were dying because?

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Lollipop by MikaNon-Bing-ers know the net is about the journey, not the destination. My search yesterday became the acquisition: from a Posterous tweet, to revisiting OK Go’s 2006 treadmill video, to their backyard dance gone-viral, to choreographer sister Trish Sie in LOLLIPOP (new tab: Mika’s highschool anthem WE ARE GOLDEN), to Sie’s PSA for Saatchie & Saatchie: HELP THE HONEY BEES. When the worry was climate change or pesticides: poor bees. Then the suspect was GMOs.

Irradiate the liars at the FDA

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tomato berryMost of the food in the American diet is approved by the FDA for irradiation and chemotherapy treatments. Our fresh produce and meat are subjected to these invasive procedures 1) to kill microorganisms and other pathogens 2) to arrest or delay the ripening process 3) to act as a pesticide 4) to prevent spoilage or sprouting. Although they don’t say it explicitly, irradiation also masks serious sanitation problems in both farming and meat processing and provides greater immunity to the food industry executives who can claim that their products were “clean” when they left the facility.

The FDA has assured us over and over that the process of irradiation is completely safe. So safe, in fact, that consumers don’t even need to know which foods are exposed to ionizing radiation.

I think the FDA should define its terms. What do they mean by safe? Irradiation works by breaking down molecules and creating free radicals. Sure, the free radicals kill some bacteria, but they also damage vitamins and fragile enzymes. The free radicals can combine with existing chemicals in the food, like pesticides, to form new chemicals, called unique radiolytic products (URPs). Some of these URPs are known toxins like benzene and formaldehyde, and others are unique to the irradiated foods. Since they are unique, I guess we can assume they are safe.

After the anthrax scare a few years back, the US Postal Service began irradiating our mail. Because there is no danger in irradiating anything, least of all the mail, they were surprised when postal employees began to experience headaches, nausea, eye irritation, lightheadedness, nose irritation, and chest or throat tightness when processing irradiated mail. The USPS hired an industrial hygiene consultant who found elevated levels of carbon monoxide, ozone, chlorine, and other volatile organic chemicals in the work area. The USPS called OSHA.

Long and short of it, OSHA came in and did a bunch of tests. They found the same URPs that the consultant had identified, and quite a few more. But instead of addressing the dangers of mail irradiation, OSHA made the following recommendations:
1) “Air out” the mail before processing.
2) Monitor facilities for high concentrations of toxic chemicals/gases and, if found, try a change in handling methods or provide additional ventilation.
3) Keep a log to track health problems related to handling or being exposed to irradiated mail. Have the log reviewed periodically by an occupational medicine physician to look for trends or areas requiring further evaluation. (like maybe increased cancer rates or other pesky statistics)
4) Recommend that employees experiencing eye irritation use over-the-counter eye drops as often as necessary to relieve symptoms.

Can you believe it? OSHA sold the postal employees down the river so they could keep the irradiation-is-perfectly-safe lie going. I’m sure they weren’t given much leeway by the unscrupulous ignorant bastards at the FDA.

Scientists have known for years that irradiation causes food to become vitamin deficient which leaves well-fed bodies starved for nutrition. Irradiation deactivates food enzymes which affects the digestion process, which affects absorption of nutrients, which affects every cell in the human body. Irradiation damages the very DNA of not only the food, but also the bacteria it’s supposed to kill. This, in turn, leads to irradiation-resistant super germs that are far more dangerous to us than the original pathogens. Irradiated food contains toxic radiolytic products, aka poisons, which are ingested by you and me and everyone we know. Irradiation creates free radicals which are known to cause cell damage. The cell damage can manifest in innumerable ways, from premature aging to cancer to blindness.

radura logoThe process of irradiation is safe? It’s certainly not free of harm. I guess the FDA means that irradiation is safe from public scrutiny, safe from government accountability, safe from ethical study, safe from its own sad truth.

I HATE THE FDA! HATE ‘EM. HATE ‘EM. HATE ‘EM.

Hay bellies

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I’ve read quite a bit about vegetarianism over the years. Nutritionists assert that in order to be healthy a vegetarian must actively seek the full complement of amino acids that make up protein, Hay ride the building blocks of our bodies, by consuming protein. This sounds like a reasonable assertion, but does it hold true in nature? Do living organisms, all of which are basically organized proteins, require ingested protein to survive?

Think of cows. What do they eat as they grow fat and delicious, merrily trotting the path to becoming culinary delights for the non-vegetarian population? Do they eat thick steaks, succulent chickens, light flaky fish, or the other white meat, pork? No, of course they don’t. They eat only plants — grass and hay — and only as much as they need.

Recent research suggests that our grains, fruits and veggies have become less nutritious over the past century. Man’s interference with the growth of plants — breeding for certain marketable traits, using chemical pesticides, artificially propping up the depleted soil with chemical fertilizers, speeding the ripening process — has resulted in not only dangerous food, but less nutritious food.

Animals are instinctive. They know what they need. They neither over- nor under indulge. I mean, have you ever seen an overstuffed cow, lying on her side in a meadow, moaning oh my god, I feel like a fat cow? No, nature provides every needed nutrient, in proper portions and proportions, for our cattle.

Or at least she used to. These days, ranchers do, in fact, encounter fat cows, dissatisfied cows, cows with big hay bellies. When cows aren’t getting needed nutrients from the grass they eat, they eat more, and more again, until they do. The fact that ranchers are seeing hay bellies is an indication that food ain’t what it used to be.

We have a similar problem. As Big Food alters the natural food supply to ensure that food looks pretty, has a long shelf life, is conveniently packaged, transported, and prepared, we are starving to death. Without micronutrients like resveratrol to signal satiety, without phytochemicals, enzymes, vitamins and minerals to nourish and support our biochemical processes, we’re eating more and more to gain needed nutrients, and we’re getting fatter and unhealthier in the process.

Bachelor Nutrition, part 1. Breakfast

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Want the quickest, healthiest breakfast? Try this: half a container of cottage cheese, half the blueberries, and a sprinkle of slivered almonds. These should be, respectively, without rBGH, organic, and raw* when possible. The second day this meal will be even more convenient, since the berries are already rinsed and you can combine everything in the dairy container without needing to dirty a bowl. Use a plastic spoon and you can take breakfast for the drive.
Slivered almonds, cottage cheese and blueberries

*The Bachelor Nutrition series is meant to provide simple authoritative culinary guidance without exhaustive explanation. Suffice to say, your food should avoid additives, pesticides, and processing, and should be fresh, not frozen. Which means not just organic, but local. Check eatwild.com for a clean source for meat and dairy. Check localharvest.com for local organic produce.

Pesticides and Parkinson’s

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There is such an assault on the idea that environmental toxins actually do cause disease these days, that this study linking Parkinson’s to pesticides is noteworthy. Pesticide Parkinson’s link strong Of course, poisons cause diseases like Cancer, Asthma, and Parkinson’s, etc. and not just genes and heredity, but the media generally keeps quite silent about that as a general rule. Don’t want anybody to seriously propose more government regulation, now do they? That would harm the ‘free market’ and be socialism, something that the corporate press is quite allergic to.

No more reporting on the beef recall?

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Suspect beef product ON HOLD on school shelvesThe largest beef recall in history has taught us what, so far? That 37 million pounds went to the USDA school lunch program, which was distributed to schools unknown. We quietly presume the USDA had been pawning off the questionable product to the poor and dismissible among our population. But why won’t they release the names of the schools? In whispered tones with food program insiders, you learn why. Because the USDA product goes to ALL schools. (NOTE: Corpus Christi School found the recalled meat on their shelves and made the switch to a safer supplier, shouldn’t your school do the same?)

While all or any of the Colorado schools may have taken delivery of the Hallmark suspect product, the USDA school food program in Colorado gets the bulk of its meat from Advanced Meatpacking out of Oklahoma. Advanced is regarded by industry watchers as likely worse than Hallmark. We’re not talking about the tip of an iceberg, we’re [not] talking about the as yet largely unexposed large underbelly of American factory farming.

What’s so bad about US meat that foreign markets won’t buy it? Our government regulators won’t test it adequately. Individual meatpackers who want to submit their product for voluntary testing are prevented by the USDA, for fear of creating a stigma around non-tested meat.

Other countries test their 100% of their herd animals for BSE. They also prohibit the feeding of rendered animals to other animals. This is the process by which BSE spreads. The US does not prohibit the use of rendered feed. US calves are raised on a diet of milk and blood: milk fortified with the blood of their predecessors. It redefines “adulterated” I think.

US methods to prevent mad cow disease resemble more the measures necessary not to see it. The official word is that the USA doesn’t have mad cow disease. Cattle which display the traits resembling mad cow disease in Europe, here are called “downer cows.” Our safety guidelines are thus: keep those cows from reaching the meat packers. Easy enough, unless you run across slaughterhouse workers with the initiate to use forklifts and chains to harvest downed cows like any other. Then you need video cameras to catch them.

But video cameras cannot catch the biggest flaw in this screening process. Most cattle infected with BSE do not begin to show symptoms until after they are two years old. Most cattle in the US reach the slaughterhouse before they are two.

Even with a breach of our paltry preventive procedures, the USDA is still unwilling to say their prescribed screening is insufficient.

Perhaps the USDA fears that implementing European testing standards would reveal a huge chunk of US beef to be tainted with mad cow. This would profoundly impact the food industry and our economy as a whole. Perhaps a few thousand CJD fatalities five years from now is a small price to pay for stability now. Besides, those in the know have money to buy organic beef from verifiable sources. The prosperity of the market has always been borne on the backs and at the expense of the common mortal. CJD means fewer to reach retirement.

Newspapers don’t want to touch this subject, many of their advertisers are restaurants which can’t afford to deal in the more expensive meats. Alternative news-weeklies rely on supermarkets for their distribution sites.

(NOTE: Except Ralph Routon and the Independent, March 6)

No one wants to shake consumer confidence in the food supply. The problem extends beyond beef, beyond poultry, beyond farmed fish, beyond ocean fisheries, beyond imported produce, beyond domestic agribusiness, beyond pesticides, irradiation and biogenetics. So the media is not going to start with any of it. As it is with the American health care system, your health is up to you.

By the way, most of the meat being recalled has already been consumed. Of what’s left, the USDA is only asking schools to set it aside for the time being. It is being neither recalled, nor destroyed. Probably it would be too alarming to ask cafeteria workers to destroy what only a day before they had been serving up for their kids for years.

This is good news for you, if you want to find out which schools were serving the bad meat. You still have a chance to call those responsible for the food service at your child’s school. Public or private, I assure you the probability is similar. Ask them if they’ve got the recalled Hallmark stock on hold.

You are how you eat

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There are land crabs around the cenotes of Yucatan which burrow in the mud, eating the mud actually. They’re bright blue and red. We don’t eat them because they taste like mud. It occurred to me today as I ate a naturally-grown apple, actively hoping to avoid a worm, that perhaps a worm growing in an apple might taste of apple.

If man has traditionally avoided worms, I’m not about to buck tradition. I wondered if eating raw produce in the days before pesticides involved the little ritual I was mindful to adopt between each bite. A blemish at the base suggested to me that something might already be eating this fruit. But it didn’t seem too difficult to plan to avoid the path already taken. I would simply take a bite, then check the corresponding area to see if a hole indicated a trail into the chunk in my mouth. If so, I could spit it out. If not I could chew with peace of mind.

What an unsettling experience, in retrospect, having to hold each morsel in escrow in my mouth until it was deduced to be safe. Thanks to modern chemistry we are accustomed to chowing down our food, without care, without pause, and without maybe that little bit more appreciation.

Brand name taste is an abstraction

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A friend of mine is a restauranteur who by his own admission doesn’t know much about wine. Never the less his wine rep was bringing over a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem for some occasion. I asked my friend if he’d read up on Sauterne vintages, the better to appreciate it. He looked at me quizzically. I persisted, thinking something along the lines of Tom Wolfe’s Painted Word, that you had to know about the theory of abstract art to appreciate what you saw. I didn’t get far because my friend was attuned to the un-abstract measure of his customer’s palate. Did they taste a distinctive quality? That was enough. You don’t need a text to appreciate pre-abstract art. Epicure likewise is not abstract.

Many aspects of our lives have become experiences of abstract quality. We may not prefer a fashion, but are happy enough with it so long as we believe others like it. A designer label says what we want about us, regardless whether we have a say about it. Marketing goes a long way to produce our appreciation. When we use the product we feel ourselves in the commercial. For some beverages, I’m certain the commercial has become the product. We begin enjoying the Coke from the first cold beads of condensation on the can, through the Shtffk of cracking the pop tab, until it’s down our throat. Right then we all know Coke doesn’t satisfy our thirst, because we already want more. It satisfies our craving to inhabit the Coke world.

Sugar is not an acquired taste, but wanting to be a Pepper is. Breakfast cereal feeds a pathetic sweet tooth. Cheap beer and the new soft-liquors feed conditioned desires.

Not only is the processed food industry relying on its talent to taylor our appetite, it undermines our reliance on our own senses. If something is not advertised, can it be of value? Ice cream flavored of cookies ‘n cream isn’t good enough unless they are Oreo brand cookies. Toffee must be Heath Bars, peanut butter must be Reeses. Except for regional salsas or steak marinades, products fade from the supermarket shelves if nt cross branded with a national identity. This has become an easier feat for the big guys because they’ve conglomerated so many diverse products, from babies diapers to tobacco.

The brand name is now the critical ingredient which we all taste with our imagination, crafted by ceaseless ad campaigns. A product’s advertising is itself a stipend paid to the media companies to ensure a brand stays on the public palate. Remember Oh Henry? Somebody lapsed in their payment.

Now the powerhouse food corps are using the same manipulative method to plant doubt in the consumer’s mind about their own ability to judge taste. (I remember an subscription tag line for GQ magazine to this effect: You don’t know fashion, let GQ tell you.) How could what you think tastes good, have any bearing on what they tell you tastes good?

With health food the fearful conglomerates caution, how do you know it’s really organic? But isn’t that the same assumption I threw at my friend? It’s true with processed food, we can’t taste BGH or Mad Cow spinal matter, or protein additives necessarily. But other factors like refined sugars, fats, or chemical pesticides we can detect. In the produce department, it’s not just a matter of stickers that say “organic” or higher prices or more easily blemished fruit, it’s the taste. Organic produce tastes fuller, richer, more pleasing, more satisfying.

Our own natural sense of taste tells us whether we are enjoying it or not. No textbook, afficionado’s article, or 30 second commercial need tell us what we think of that apple. Or what we think of the non-stickered apple which tastes like the floor cleaner we thought they used in the supermarket. That isn’t the floor we were smelling, it was the apples. If it weren’t for the antiseptic packaging, the inert food content and the slick marketing directing our taste buds, we’d realize the whole supermarket smelled of Union Carbide and Monsanto.

Medicine for profit is a world disaster in march

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Medicine for profit is a march down a blind alley and the reason why is quite simple to understand. ‘Care’ for an individual for an individual fee, is the ultimate non-holistic approach possible since health is so absolutely connected to the environment that people live in.

To treat the individual in an effective manner, doctors have to also treat the environment as well. But just go and try telling this to your average numbskull private-profit doc that the American medical schools turn out so in mass. These think-they-know-it-all degreed idiots are sure they know what’s best for you, but the medical machine they are part of never does jack shit to treat the environmental conditions that make people sick. Logically and scientifically it makes no sense. But that is medicine for profit for you, is it not?

Take as just one tiny example, the cathedrals where many of these doctors often practice in; the hospitals. The doctors often stroll in with their coats and ties on, while the patients and medical worker peons that the doctor boss around are most often passing their days in areas more nasty than your home toilet area. Most of these doctors are cynical bastards that almost entirely identify with the corporate structure they have melded and immersed themselves into. They say they care about the patients they take in for a fee, but the ‘care’ most often stops when the bucks stop. Or it never begins in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Then try going into an average doctors office without medical insurance cards in hand. What’s the first thing one gets asked when they show up half dead into the ER? It is always, ‘What’s your coverage?’ And if you got none, you most often will get sent packing. ‘Dumped’ is the word now used, and that’s not exactly treating the patients holistically. Not at all.

Truth is, the medical doctors are not allowed (nor allow themselves to even contemplate) to treat the environment. That is seen as the terrain of the corporations and their government alone. The average American doctor concedes that area without even a bleat of protest. But why? Public Health is certainly important in the treatment of disease, isn’t it?

Why treat the farm worker, say, after his exposure to deadly pesticides? Why not treat the environment to prevent the disease, Doc? No money in it for you? Why not treat the lack of food, the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of a decent living space, the lack of a decent wage, instead of just treating the now already sickened individual who comes to you with insurance card in hand, Doctor? Too scared to fight disease? Too bought off by the hundreds of thousands you are often making?

You are a fraud, corporate medicine and corporate model doctors. You turn all of us in your medical factories into dehumanized entities with only titles and employee numbers in hand, and not even our own humanity which you strip away from us bit by bit, same as you strip away the sick and elderly folk’s dignity. You turn us all into an Evil Empire that churns out your profits, and destroys people’s health. You destroy the environment same as your corporate cousins in agriculture, mining, and military goods production do, alsdo.

You are strip mining world health, not bettering it, all to make bucks. And the US doctors are all aboard this gigantic con game on society, hiding behind a facade of being all high tech and scientific. Instead, you business doctors are as nasty as an MRSA sore, a Vancomycin resistant diarrhea, a brain dead corpse in the ICU, a multi drug resistant TB, and all the other products of made by your corporate medical model and your human devolution as system into monster. All you hold now to bedazzle the crowd with, is some sort of future tech fix that is the pie in the sky you always promise. Meanwhile, you turn our environment into cesspool. You are turning all of us into ‘medical waste’, Corporate Doc.

Give Founding Mothers a chance

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Aunt Sally wants you to think about peaceIt’s about time we integrate some “Founding Mothers” into our political process! Let’s make it a requirement that henceforth any official gathering whose purpose it is to pass judgment, make laws, determine patriotism, set political agendas or put into effect national security measures, should have to include at least three mothers. Better yet, three of the gathered officials’ own mothers.

These mothers would be required to be part of the review board, or sit in key positions in the assembly, in such a manner that their opinions and positions would be factored into the process.

Imagine that! Mothers, guardians of life, standing side by side with our elected representatives deciding legal limits on pesticides, cutting funding for education, re-appropriating money for defense spending, or voting on whether to go to war.

These mothers would, by their mere presence, alter the dynamic of any male dominated, testosterone driven group. These mothers couldn’t help but change the course of history. True to their very nature, these mothers would stop the next war now!

Phosphorous Bombs- US/Israeli Weapon of Torture

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The BBC has a news item today saying that Israel has just admitted for the first time today that it used Phosphorous bombs on Lebanon. The evidence kept piling up that they in fact had, and evidently Israel came to the conclusion that their lie, that they had not used this type of chemical weapon, was no longer defensible.
 
A similar process had ocurred earliet where the US originally denied using this chemical weapon on Falluja, but then later admitted that it had. Both countries have argued that phosporous bombs are legitimate military weaponry, though previously they had attacked Saddam Hussein’s use of this chemical weapon against his Kurdish population.

The US/ Israeli defense of their use of this weapon is similar to Bush’s defense of using torture against POWs. They have merely changed the label on what they say constitutes torture, as they have now changed the label of what the phosphorus bombs actually are. They call them incendiary bombs now, instead of chemical weapons, which is what they called them when Hussein was using this weapon.

The use of chemical weapons against civilian populations by the US military is ancient news, as is their juggling of labels for them. Chemical weapons are often called ‘pesticides’, ‘defoliants’, or described as ‘smoke bombs’, as Israel did with phosphorous, which gives off plumes of camoflaging smoke, which just happens to be poisonous. Israel claimed to be merely marking targets with phosphorus bombs’ smoke, rather than using this weapon to burn the insides out of its targets. That’s what phosphorous does as it burns downward and into the blood stream, where it is later carried to organs inside the body while still burning.

The US/ Israeli use of these weapons explains their political policies in the Arab world quite well. These are the weapons of terrorist countries, rogue staters that defy international law that has tried repeatedly to limit weapons of torture like this, not to mention trying to outlaw the cluster bombs also dropped everywhere by the same two states. These are the weapons of terrorist states, and not merely legitimate countries just trying to fight the terrorism of a few rogue individuals. Rogues, one might add, that originally fought on behalf of the US in other terrorist conflicts directed from Washington DC. These are the weapons of imperial governments that illegally occupy territory of other peoples, peoples they consider inferior to their own. These are the weapons of racists.