Friday, August 19, 2005

It's the Right cancer at the Right time with the Right karate class: Going for your Brown Belt?



Hitler walking out of the Brown House after the 1930 elections.


(...)


When your boss is evil, how do you get a promotion?

You act more evil.

And when everyone else sees that?

They act more evil.

And the cancer grows...

(...)

Right here, Right now, Right on time, the Right cancer is spreading.

Separating policy from people, the ideas themselves are achieving a world of evil, a world of ignorance, a world of distrust, and a world where we attack each other, spy on each other, and lie to each other as encouraged to by the state. Once in motion, a perpetual drafting of New-Normal acolytes will occur based on a progressive weakening of the social fabric: communities are authoritarian hierarchies, other communities are enemies, and within communities are spies disguised as dissidents. The media will carefully, cautiously, and sporadically reflect some changes, but we may be slow to recognize their danger if we don't know to define them as part of a bigger picture.

Right now, the Right tools are in place for the Right moves.

This is not clear, but many people see it clearly, and say it loudly despite marginalization.

How is this possible?

We've looked.

We've seen a million questions...

We've seen a million lies...

We've seen a million charater flaws that would send a man to hell...

We've seen a million dollars make a man and a million men pay for it...

(...)

We've all seen the Patriot Act was a flagrant attack on the U.S. Constitution, a deliberate weakening of the ultimate check and balance against tyranny enacted in haste under patriotic peer pressure after 9/11. Some have seen Patriot Act 2 was then prepared secretly for 6 months by Viet Dinh and his team of 168,000 people, and how it caused an uproar from both Republicans and Democrats when it was leaked for it's incredible powers of surveillance, detention, search and seizure, and violation of privacy; and the fact that legislation is now being drafted in secret. Included were ideas like deputizing janitors and cable-TV repairmen to spy on private homes for the FBI. It sounds crazy, but since then it's really happened, and is being trialed in local markets according to local news stories that endorse it.

We stop and rewind the 3rd eye: it took all those people 6 months to draft Patriot Act 2 and they still weren't finished? Even with Patiot Act 1 as a template? I wonder how long it took to draft Patriot Act 1?

A quick "Google" and "Wikipedia" later found this sentence: "The House passed the USA Patriot Act on October 12, 2001". One month after September 11th. One month.

Hmph.

(And I trust Wikipedia on simple stuff like this, I see no reason for anyone to lie about the date the Patriot Act was passed.)

There's a few million "anomalies"...

I think the frustration people feel is the true scope of the issue as broadly understood, and how that's not broadly understood despite its simple premises. One example from the great Jon Stewart quoting his appearance on C-SPAN: "I think the fact that so much of this country's business is conducted in the dark is a crime." Mr. Stewart, I agree, allow me to add that helps hide many crimes.

Make no mistake, the underground community is massive, and as I heard the great Arundathi Roy say recently: "Around the world, the dirty business of American history is now street-talk." So people know, and people who know people who know know they know even if they don't know because they don't want to know or think they know because they need to know.

Still, as defined by many, the recent and effective arrogance Empire is displaying to get popular endorsement for radical changes is astonishing: sometimes they lie, but often they don't. They say things people forgot are historically bad ideas: including the ways they say them.

They move freely in silence, like a giant blue whale ingesting plankton populations, all the while the plankton don't know they're being eaten. Some plankton have been digested, some are about to be, and some are simply in its path. It keeps swimming smoothly with a growing appetite around the blue marble of earth, a gentle giant among drifting plankton unaware they can swim.

Existential dilemmas in the face of Empire are nothing new, but that is not to say they are not important. If this is truly a battle, when one side stops fighting: they lose.

So, how do you cure cancer?

Chemotherapy.

We may tear our hair out, but we'll keep blasting the Right cancer with as much radiating reality as possible. The rest is up to everyone to be objective about the motives, means and opportunities of the world they want to live in, and who you can trust based on their track record: friends, family, and neighbors, or government and corporations.

There is no central command on the outside, there are only local solutions based on universal principles, and individual actions as individually defined.

Counter-revolutionary thinking is needed:

The Revolution Is Happening.

It's just not who you expected to revolt against the system...

...Right?


(...)

The NewStandard

Monsanto Looks to Patent Pigs, Breeding Methods


by Jeff Shaw

In a move that has environmentalists and consumer advocates worried, one of the world's most controversial corporations is looking to claim swine farming procedures as intellectual property.

Aug 18 - In what critics call a dangerous power grab, the Monsanto Company is seeking wide-ranging control over swine reproduction methods in the form of patents which, if granted, would give the corporation economic rights over any offspring produced using those techniques.

Documents obtained by Christoph Then, a Germany-based researcher for Greenpeace, show Monsanto's attempts to secure broad intellectual property protection for swine herds.

Monsanto spokesperson Chris Horner said that the company merely wants protection for its selective breeding processes, including the means to identify specific genes in pigs and use of a specialized insemination device.

Many say this trend is disturbing as corporations move to exert power and ownership over the fundamental human need for food. "We're not talking about [patenting] individual pigs," he said. "We're talking about the process itself."

But the actual wording of the patent applications appears to rebut this claim.

Besides production methods, Monsanto' applications seek to claim rights to "pig offspring produced by a method ...," a "pig herd having an increased frequency of a specific... gene...," a "pig population produced by the method...," and a "swine herd produced by a method..." respectively. If accepted, these patents would appear to grant Monsanto intellectual property rights to particular farm animals and particular herds of livestock.

"Broader and broader patent claims seem to be a trend," said Charles Margulis, spokesperson for the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group specializing in food policy, "and this is another move forward in that trend."

Many say this trend is disturbing as corporations move to exert power and ownership over the fundamental human need for food.


Monsanto is seeking to patent a package of protocols, including a device and several procedures aimed at increasing the effectiveness of artificial insemination.

But Then, who has been studying patents for a decade, said that there is really nothing new to the breeding processes of which Monsanto is seeking to claim exclusive ownership; rather, the patents attempt to privatize farming techniques already in existence for centuries.

"There's no invention in this," he said. "It's just normal pig breeding."

The dangers, Then said, are quite concerning. As food production centralizes, consumers could become dependent upon fewer and fewer companies -- raising the risk of dangerous monopolies. In this case, Monsanto -- already a giant in other arenas -- is making a bold move into pork products, on which American consumers spend about $38 billion each year.

But Monsanto’s new patent claims would give the company rights over pigs that have not been genetically modified, swine that have merely been produced with certain breeding protocols. Seeking to patent life forms is a relatively recent development. In a time of rapid scientific advancement, biotechnology companies are rushing to claim new discoveries as their own.

"But discoveries are different from inventions: genes have been in pigs forever," said Margulis. "In this case, it's as if someone had gone out during the California gold rush and tried to patent the process of gold panning, then said 'anyone who ever pans for any gold has to pay me a licensing fee.'"

Previous efforts at patenting life forms have mostly focused on genetically modified organisms. But Monsanto’s new patent claims would give the company rights over pigs that have not been genetically modified, swine that have merely been produced with certain breeding protocols.

Plus, Margolis contends, Monsanto's history suggests that the new patent applications deserve strict scrutiny.

"We're talking about one of the biggest polluters of the 20th century. This is a company with a 100-year track record of polluting the planet: now they're moving in and trying to control the food supply. This is a very troubling development, and people need to be aware of who is behind it."

For example, before dangerous industrial coolant chemicals called PCBs were banned, Monsanto spent decades producing the toxins and covering up internal studies that showed PCBs were deadly to humans and animal life.

To Then, granting these patents would be shortsighted and pose grave threats to small farmers.

"One patent is related to a genetic condition in pigs," he said. "It could be, in five years or so, that this becomes a desirable condition - nobody knows. If that happens, Monsanto could try to file lawsuits against farmers who own pigs with those genes, even if they've never bought a pig from Monsanto."

Monsanto has already sued farmers with crops containing the firm's patented strains of genetically modified plants. Often, plants with genetically modified genes cross-polinate with non-modified crops in nearby fields and farmers can end up with patented genes in the plants without ever even knowing it.

Food safety activists fully expect that if patents come into effect, Monsanto will begin filing lawsuits to enforce its newly gained intellectual property, targeting other producers -- including individual small farmers -- for using methods already in use. This, the activists say, would undermine local food production.

"That's exactly what's been happening with farmers and genetically engineered crops," says Margulis, "so there's every reason to believe that not only could [lawsuits] happen, but that Monsanto would be the first in line to make that happen."

Monsanto representatives downplayed the significance of the moves, pointing out that the claims have only been filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization, not with any particular country. The WIPO cannot itself grant patents, since it merely serves as a clearinghouse that forwards applications to regional patent offices.

"Anything we'd be looking at in terms of an individual country patent is still a ways away yet," said Horner.

He did not specify a timeframe, but did say that even though Monsanto is seeking patents in more than 100 countries, it would focus on the US market.

Irrespective of the practical implications, many critics say that placing patents on life is never justified.

"Genes should be looked at as the common heritage of nature," said Margulis, "and they shouldn't be owned by anyone."


SOURCE - http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=2240

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

best regards, nice info » » »

12:44 AM  

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