Wild food crop relatives to be ‘rescued’ BBC
Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers Independent
An evaluation of airport x-ray backscatter units based on image characteristics Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson, Journal of Transportation Security (hat tip Slashdot). Basically says backscatter X-ray machines aren’t very effective.
GA Prisoner Strike Continues a Second Day, Corporate Media Mostly Ignores Them, Corrections Officials Decline Comment Black Agenda Report (hat tip Lambert Strether)
Worldwide demonstrations support WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Raw Story
Afghan police crisis threatens British withdrawal as thousands quit force Guardian (hat tip reader May S)
‘Our lives became something we’d never dreamt’: The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses Independent (hat tip reader May S)
GMAC Can Sell Foreclosed Homes in Maine After Court Ruling Bloomberg (hat tip Lisa Epstein)
Foreclosure Fraud – Simple BofA Refi Turns Into Foreclosure Nightmare Foreclosure Fraud
Perspectives on Exchange-Traded Funds Rajiv Sethi
Employment-Population Ratio, Young People: A Potential Lost Generation Of Young Americans Mike Konczal
“Before You Uncork The Champagne”: David Rosenberg’s 10 Themes For 2011 Clusterstock
Antidote du jour:
15 comments
Comments are closed.
Yves,
The CIA/Nazi link is empty.
Hitler parody – Hitler as a CEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq0OKWmP5kA
These articles on seeds are always bizarre. They discuss the long-term ecological threats to various cultivars, as well as how specimens can be saved for those same kinds of ecological crises (all of it usually involving climate change).
But as a rule they studiously ignore the vastly more pressing threat of the corporate assault on heirloom varieties right now. The overwhelming threat to seeds and to crop diversity is the onslaught of corporate seeds domination, the way governments and globalization entities collaborate to economically force proprietary hybrids and especially GM seeds on farmers all over the world. Cultivar diversity has been greatly diminished all over the world. Perhaps hundreds of varieties have been lost forever. This is in fact a direct, intentional part of the mass extinction event the world is now undergoing. (As we’ve discussed here at NC in the past, “philanthropic” NGOs like Gates’ AGRA are part of the assault.)
So in this context to discuss longer term climatic threats is like saying you might get cancer from the second hand smoke from the cigarettes smoked by the firing squad who’s shooting you right now.
On its face, the very concept of hoarding these seeds rather than trying to disseminate their planting as far and wide as possible in insane. Think about it: Does any plant produce its seeds and then hoard them? Or plant them all in one place? Or does it try to broadcast them and have them transported as far out as possible? Who could think our own seed preservation efforts shouldn’t follow the exact same practice?
So while seed saving is a great idea and a necessity, It’s good only under these conditions:
1. Only as a supplement to getting these seeds planted, cultivated, and grown as part of ongoing crop production.
2. Obviously a robust, resilient seed-saving program has to be decentralized, involve hundreds (preferably thousands) of small caches rather than a handful of concentrated ones under system control.
That latter point leads to the last problem with these “authorized” seed banks. I don’t know yet who ultimately is funding most or all programs like this (although we have a pretty good idea; wherever we do see the money trail, it’s always ultimately corporate money), but we can take as axiomatic that any seeds saved in this way won’t ever be used for the benefit of the people, but are only a hedge for the same elites who are ravaging crop diversity as we speak. Some of these criminals know how unsustainable corporate agriculture is, and how its catastrophic collapse, on account of Peak Oil and/or the genetic resistance of superweeds and superbugs, is inevitable.
So we do need to save these seeds, plant these varieties, and produce these crops. If that’s uneconomical under a particular economic regime, that’s proof that the economic practice is bad and has to be changed. No sane person wants our very food supply to be completely in the hands of any single interest, let alone the malevolent corporate interest.
So this is perhaps the most pressing reason why we need radical political change.
Tempter said:… “So this is perhaps the most pressing reason why we need radical political change.”
Don’t be simplistic. You cannot slam all corporations for all the evils in the world. Corporations like people have different moralities. Monsanto whom you obliquly refer to without naming is certainly one of the most evil. Others pour out gobs and buckets of money and effort to do good. The bottom line is that ordinary people in every day decisions also have culpability.
I believe the root of our problem is stupidity. Because few of us are truly intelligent and most are truly lazy, we find it easier to simply monetize every aspect of our world and our lives. All the while ignoring that money isn’t worth anything.
The biggest threat to Biodiversity is Global population. I don’t know about you, but i’m not going to volunteer to be terminated to save the bunch grass.
The second biggest threat as mentioned above is stupidity, and the third is probably megalomania.
We need a new standard of value. Monetary riches are not a viable standard.
Whether a person is a cog in some corporate machine, living in a 3000 foot SFD in Ohio with two Suv’s in the garage, or some villager with 10 kids poaching teakwood from Burma’s forrests; we all seem to have the same goal. We want to make more money to buy more stuff…
“The biggest threat to Biodiversity is Global population. I don’t know about you, but i’m not going to volunteer to be terminated to save the bunch grass.”
The irony being that while no one would fault you for that sentiment and 99.999% of the population shares it, without grass we wouldn’t be here. At least not in our current form and numbers.
I guess what I’m saying is that if we don’t find a way to save the grass, or the invertebrates or the algae or you name the lowly life form that we hardly give a thought to, many of us will be terminated involuntarily.
Yves,
You do have excellent taste in cute. I love (almost always) your antidotes.
I too appreciate the antidotes—very appropriate for the new socio-economic paradigm to come.
Ekhart Tolle observes that, like flowers, puppies, kittens, and babies open a window into the more real timeless dimension (heaven) beyond our binding material plane. Their loving spirit, authenticity, and disarming vulnerability is so transparent that they can awaken even deeply unconscious people from the egoic dream-state into awareness of life. Thus hospitals and nursing homes are increasingly using animals for healing and other therapeutic benefits.
http://4closurefraud.org/2010/04/29/wsj-is-watching-foreclosure-lawyers-face-new-heat-in-florida/
WSJ is Watching – Foreclosure Lawyers Face New Heat In Florida
Posted by Foreclosure Fraud on April 29, 2010 · 7 Comments
That was fast! Thanks again Amir!
Again straight out of the Foreclosure Fraud Blogosphere here, here, here, and here, to the Wall Street Journal!
Foreclosure Lawyers Face New Heat In Florida
By Amir Efrati
Foreclosure DrThese are precarious times for lawyers in the business of filing foreclosure cases for banks.
As we’ve noted before, the feds in Jacksonville recently started a criminal investigation of a company that is a top provider of the documentation used by banks in the foreclosure process. And a state-court judge ruled that a bank submitted a “fraudulent” document in support of its foreclosure case.
The news today: the Florida Attorney General’s office said it has launched a civil investigation of Florida Default Law Group, based in Tampa, which is one of the largest so-called foreclosure-mill law firms in the state.
According to the AG’s website, it’s looking at whether the firm is “fabricating and/or presenting false and misleading documents in foreclosure cases.” It added: “These documents have been presented in court before judges as actual assignments of mortgages and have later been shown to be legally inadequate and/or insufficient.”
The issue: judges are increasingly running into situations in which banks are claiming ownership of properties they actually don’t own.
We’ve reached out to Florida Default Law Group and LPS and will let you know if we hear back.
4closureFraud
1-561-880-LIES
Florida Foreclosure Defense
Law Offices of Carol C. Asbury
http://www.FightTheBanksNow.com
Yves, the URL for the independent piece on the Nazis does not work.
CIA-Nazi article is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/revealed-how-the-cia-protected-nazi-murderers-2158071.html
The Nazis’ use of dummy shell corporations to hide their stolen wealth, and successfully retain control over it and large corporations, after the war, seems to be the model for what goes on under the MERS veil of secrecy and in those originator warehouses.
Re: Georgia Prison Strike
As of this comment, the Atlanta Constitution Journal has zero coverage of the prison strike. Check the search tool as I did.
http://www.ajc.com/
The Grey Lady headlines the strike as a technology first, but the article covers the subject well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html?hpw
Oops. The AJC is covering the strike, but not on front page of site, or top of any search except ‘STATE PRISON.’
Speaking of “it ain’t only Wikileaks”….
Pollard admitted to prosecutors that his handlers at the Israeli Embassy often goaded him for better-quality information, Bowman says.
“[H]is initial handler told him that they already receive ‘SECRET’ level material from the United States. What they needed was the TOP SECRET data they were not yet receiving.”
….
Some the documents Pollard gave Israel ended up in Moscow, according to various reports, but as one investigator in the case told SpyTalk, “there are only two countries that know the facts …Russia and Israel. Which leads me to believe we will never know the truth.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/12/former_top_intelligence_offici.html