English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 yea vaccines I trust them , you go for it. as your head is in the sand anyway..... MY head is in the sand? Look at what you just posted!! You've condemned them without knowing ANYTHING about them! How much more blinkered and ignorant can you be? You don't trust them? Based on what? Again - nothing but your gut instinct and a fear of progress. It's an example of how people are trying to save lives - and now it's an example of how stubbornly you resist change. Some people were exactly the same when Edward Jenner pioneered the smallpox vaccination - 'Inject your family with cowpox? Are you crazy?' You are just like those people - you know nothing but crow the loudest. If... no WHEN they are successful, you won't apologise. You won't admit they did something wonderful - you will carry on bitching and decrying other people's work. And you will pretend this conversation never happened. (But I bet you'll be happy to use their products if it makes your life healthier) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 REad more then what you want to hear Bob. I'm not going to waste more time trying to explain things to you since you've made up your mind and just like to toss trash about. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 REad more then what you want to hear Bob. I'm not going to waste more time trying to explain things to you since you've made up your mind and just like to toss trash about. Oh I see... like the two links I posted to the BBC that you just dismissed. That was trash? Or the 100,000 Indian farmer suicides that you posted... was that trash? (still waiting on that link BTW) YOU have made your mind up that the world is f**ked and mankind is responsible and that genetic engineering is evil. I will wait and see what they do next - but given mankind's recent development over the last 100 years - it's likely to be fantastic. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, you want to sit in your commune feeling nostalgic for the good old days - of malaria, smallpox, cholera, life expectancy of 35, dysentry, living and dying within 20 miiles of where you were born. Life today is ******* great. And it's because of visionaries who dared to take risks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 MORE reasons why GM is good and environmentalists are wrong... Turns out they are HELPING Monsanto to become a monopoly... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8789279.stm Fussy eaters - what's wrong with GM food?VIEWPOINT Jonathan Jones With the world's food security facing a looming "perfect storm", GM food crops need to be part of the solution, argues Professor Jonathan Jones. In this week's Green Room, he wonders why there is such a fuss about biotechnology when it can help deliver a sustainable global food system. In the US, where many processed foods contain ingredients derived from GM maize or soy, in the most litigious society in history, nobody has sued for a GM health problem. A billion humans do not have enough to eat. Water resources are limited, energy costs are rising, the cultivatable land is already mostly cultivated, and climate change could hit productive areas hard. We need a sustainable intensification of agriculture to increase production by 50% by 2030 - but how? Food security requires solutions to many diverse problems. In the US or Europe, improved seeds could increase yields by 10% or more, reduce pesticide use and give "more crop per drop". However, improved seeds can only help impoverished African farmers if they also have reliable water supply, roads to take crops to market, and (probably most important) fertiliser. Better farming methods are also part of the solution; these require investment in technology and people. Fortunately, after 25 years of "food complacency", policymakers are taking the issue seriously again. I want to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture while maintaining food supply. The best thing we can do is cultivate less land, leaving more for wildlife, but if we are still to produce enough food, yields must go up. There are many contributors to yield; water, fertiliser, farming practice, and choice of seed. 'Simple method' We can improve crop variety performance by both plant breeding (which gets better every year with new genetic methods), and by genetic modification (GM). Wheat grains (Getty Images) Droughts caused wheat prices to rocket as global harvests failed Ouch; yuck - GM. Did you recoil from those letters? Why? I started making GM plants (petunias, as it happens) in 1983, working at a long defunct agbiotech company in California called Advanced Genetic Sciences. In the early 80s, we did wonder about - in Rumfeldspeak - "unknown unknowns; the unknowns we didn't know we didn't know about", but 27 years later, nothing alarming has been seen. The method (GM is a method not a thing) is simple. We take a plant, which typically carries about 30,000 genes, and add a few additional genes that confer insect resistance, or herbicide resistance, or disease resistance, or more efficient water use, or improved human nutrition, or less polluting effluent from animals that eat the grain, or more efficient fertiliser uptake, or increased yield. We could even (heck, why not?) do all of the above to the same plant. The result is increased yield, decreased agrochemical use and reduced environmental impact of agriculture. In commercial GM, many hundreds of independent introductions of the desired new gene (the "transgene") are made, each in a different individual plant that is selected and tested. Most lines are discarded. To be commercialised, a line must carry a simple, stable and well-defined gene insertion, and show heritable and effective transgene function, with no deleterious effects on the plant. Growing demand GM is the most rapidly adopted, benign, effective new technology for agriculture in my lifetime. Diseased potato plant Researchers say GM potatoes will drastically cut the use of fungicides Field trial of GM potatoes begins Fourteen million farmers grow GM crops on 135 million hectares; these numbers increased by about 10% per year over the past decade, and this rate of growth continues. More than 200,000 tonnes of insecticide have not been applied, thanks to built-in insect resistance in Bt crops; how could anyone think that's a bad thing? Bt maize is safer to eat because of lower levels of mycotoxins from fungi that enter the plant's grains via the holes made by corn-borer feeding; no insects, no holes, no fungal entry, no toxins in our food. There are not enough fish in the sea to provide us all with enough omega 3 fatty acids in our diet, but we can now modify oilseeds to make this nutrient in crops on land. Protection from rootworm means maize crops capture more water and fertiliser, so less is wasted. Farmers must always control weeds; herbicide tolerant (HT) soy makes this easier, and has enabled replacement of water-polluting persistent herbicides with the more benign and rapidly inactivated glyphosate. HT soy has enabled wider low-till agriculture, reducing CO2 emissions. And yet in Europe, we seem stuck in a time warp. Worldwide, 135 million hectares of GM crops have been planted; yet in Norfolk, I needed to spend £30,000 of taxpayers' money to provide security for a field experiment with 192 potato plants, carrying one or another of a disease resistance gene from a wild relative of potato. It boggles the mind. What are people afraid of? 'Wishful thinking' Some fear the domination of the seed industry by multinationals, particularly Monsanto. We need smart, sustainable, sensitive science and technology, and we need to use every tool in our toolbox, including GM Monsanto is certainly the most determined and successful agbiotech company. In their view, they had to be; they bet the company on agbiotech because unlike their rivals (who also sell nylon or agrichemicals) they had nothing else to fall back on. But monopoly is bad for everyone. Here's a part solution; deregulate GM. If it costs more than $20m (£13m) to get regulatory approval for one transgene, lots of little GM-based solutions to lots of problems will be too expensive and therefore not deployed, and the public sector and small start-up companies will not make the contribution they could. Never before has such excessive regulation been created in response to (still) purely hypothetical risks. The cost of this regulation - demanded by green campaigners - has bolstered the monopoly of the multinationals. This is a massive own-goal and has postponed the benefits to the environment and to us all. Some fear GM food is bad for health. There are no data that support this view. In the US, where many processed foods contain ingredients derived from GM maize or soy, in the most litigious society in history, nobody has sued for a GM health problem. Some fear GM is bad for the environment. But in agriculture, idealism does not solve problems. Farmers need "least bad" solutions; they do not have the luxury of insisting on utopian solutions. It is less bad to control weeds with a rapidly inactivated herbicide after the crop germinates, than to apply more persistent chemicals beforehand. It is less bad to have the plant make its own insecticidal protein, than to spray insecticides. It is better to maximise the productivity of arable land via all kinds of sustainable intensification, than to require more land under the plough because of reduced yields. Some say GM is high risk, but they cannot tell you what the risk is. Some say GM is causing deforestation in Brazil, even though if yields were less, more deforestation would be required to meet Chinese and European demand for animal feed. Some say we do not need GM blight resistant potatoes to solve the £3.5bn per year problem of potato blight, because blight resistant varieties have been bred. But if these varieties are so wonderful, how come farmers spend £500 per hectare on spraying to protect blight sensitive varieties? The answer is the market demands varieties such as Maris Piper, so we need to make them blight resistant. I used to be a member of a green campaign group. They still have campaigns I support (sustainable fishing, save the rainforests, fight climate change), but on GM, they are simply wrong. Even activists of impeccable green credentials, such as Stewart Brand, see the benefits of GM. Wishful thinking will not feed the planet without destroying it. Instead, we need smart, sustainable, sensitive science and technology, and we need to use every tool in our toolbox, including GM. Professor Jonathan Jones is senior scientist for The Sainsbury Laboratory, based at the John Innes Centre, a research centre in plant and microbial science Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 http://www.saynotogmos.org/ http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=why+GMOs+are+bad easy to find info to support any view these days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 Heres once with an englishman talking in it for you. got more "info" not just yea its good for you stuff..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/opinion/10iht-edcross_ed3_.html seems curruption in the media is all over Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 Heres once with an englishman talking in it for you. got more "info" not just yea its good for you stuff..... LMAO!!! You linked to UFO TV??? UFO TV lol 48 minutes long? You've got to be kidding me. WTF were you thinking? Just LOOK at the comments underneath!!! It's you and the tinfoil hat brigade! I can't believe I wasted a couple of days on this... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/opinion/10iht-edcross_ed3_.html seems curruption in the media is all over And NOW you are trumpeting FOX over BBC? Game over, loser. What's your favourite episode of Monster Quest? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/opinion/10iht-edcross_ed3_.html seems curruption in the media is all over And NOW you are trumpeting FOX over BBC? Game over, loser. What's your favourite episode of Monster Quest? Yea if you don't like something try some name calling. very school yard of you. Saying you win gives you nothing, as usual your toothless Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 17, 2011 Report Share Posted January 17, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/opinion/10iht-edcross_ed3_.html seems curruption in the media is all over And NOW you are trumpeting FOX over BBC? Game over, loser. What's your favourite episode of Monster Quest? Yea if you don't like something try some name calling. very school yard of you. Saying you win gives you nothing, as usual your toothless Toothless? I've run rings around you for 3 days while holding down a full time job and an active social life.... Your debating skills are non-existent and there is no challenge or honour in watching you shoot yourself in the foot time and time again. I'm bored of your tired rhetoric and melodramatic prophecies of doom. You continue to spout conspiracy theories and anti-human propaganda without respite. You write ficticious accounts of 100,000 suicides and refuse to back up with any data. When pressed for an alternative to GM food you resort to UFOTV and FOX!! Is it any wonder I've lost patience with you? If you had actually come prepared and mounted a spirited defence, I'd have had respect for you. As it happened, you floundered and blustered. You squirmed and blagged - what you failed to do was convince. The debate was based on the premise that GM foods are wrong. Your argument is 'I don't like 'em.' You have no empirical evidence. You have no reason for not liking them. It's just your old-fashioned, anti-progress bias again. When the benefits of genetic modification are explained, do you counter? Do you debate? No... you attack the messenger (BBC). I'd like to say it's been fun and interesting... but it's been a one-sided match from the start. You shouldn't have even been in the ring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 18, 2011 Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 no your only impressing yourself bob your posts aren't worth reading .... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 18, 2011 Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 no your only impressing yourself bob your posts aren't worth reading .... Let's see... 100,000 farmer suicides... Not proven - almost certainly ficticious. Military spraying clouds to affect weather - link to a commercial cargo plane with a totally normal vapour trail. (although engine two may have been running a little rich) Hemp is the answer to the world's food shortage. Geneticists are evil. Cancer cure is no good. New farming methods are no good - but you offer no alternative. There IS only one alternative and that is to lower the global population. Well, if we followed your path of not using genetic engineering, soon enough millions would die anyway and the point would be moot. I don't write the posts to impress - I write the posts to counter the garbage you try to publish as fact. The reason I ridicule you is... well 'cos it's fun and easy. You are an anachronism. You are 'The Man that Time Forgot'. You rail against progress and berate mankind, but you can offer no workable alternative. You link to conspiracy theory sites as though they are factual. And yet you are a hypocrite. You use a computer, drive a car, use air-con, eat imported food, fly in aeroplanes and take advantage of modern medicines. And all the time you tell the rest of us what 'man' should be doing. Here's a newsflash.... You are 'man'. And until you walk the walk, you need to mind your own business on what everyone else is doing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Admin_2 Posted January 18, 2011 Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 No wonder I rarely check this thread, lol. Ok. Bruce and eagle vs. EB in a mud wrestling match. Winner gets to say, "I (we) told you so!" Or you can just post an article that says something to that effect. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce551 Posted January 18, 2011 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/19/climate-science-nasa-drought-drives-decade-long-decline-in-plant-growth/ “A snapshot of Earth’s plant productivity in 2003 shows regions of increased productivity (green) and decreased productivity (red). Tracking productivity between 2000 and 2009, researchers found a global net decrease due to regional drought.†Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought “The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production,†Zhao said. I feel there is acute deficit in situational awareness regarding current and very likely future impacts from global warming. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English_Bob Posted January 18, 2011 Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 No wonder I rarely check this thread, lol.Ok. Bruce and eagle vs. EB in a mud wrestling match. Winner gets to say, "I (we) told you so!" Or you can just post an article that says something to that effect. Same as Last Post Wins thread... Come on... after 3 or 4 years of hippy, anti-human propaganda, it's about time someone said 'Enough'. In my corner, I've got the history of the human race, showing how mankind adapts and evolves. And I've got scientists trying to cure cancer and feed the world's exploding population... In the opposing corner, there are two guys wearing funny hats and carrying signs... (BTW - I didn't draw the cartoon... he really looks like that coincidentally) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle Posted January 18, 2011 Report Share Posted January 18, 2011 No wonder I rarely check this thread, lol.Ok. Bruce and eagle vs. EB in a mud wrestling match. Winner gets to say, "I (we) told you so!" Or you can just post an article that says something to that effect. I'm posting info and people can read and decide for themselves and Bruce is doing the same. This isn't a race or a competition where someone gets to claim they won. Insults don't get extra points either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
warren Posted February 8, 2011 Report Share Posted February 8, 2011 Lorne Gunter: Shame a pre-schooler, save the planet Lorne Gunter February 2, 2011 12:09 pm Really? Is the cult of environmentalism now so zealous and pernicious that it has come to this a six-year-old Quebec kindergartener is punished for bringing a sandwich to school in a plastic bag? Whats next, suspending him for using a nightlight that has an incandescent bulb rather than a compact fluorescent one? The question is rhetorical, of course. There is no doubt environmentalism is so out of control that it thinks nothing of using shaming a favoured technique of Puritans for centuries on those who fail to conform to its dogma, even small children. Environmentalism is as much about command and control about telling others how to live their lives as it is about saving the planet. I think its hilarious that so many activists who would micromanage others lives in the name of protecting the environment who would tell the rest of us how to live, what kind of shopping bags and light bulbs we can use, what transportation to commute to work in, how much toilet paper to use, what kind of diapers to buy would be aghast if told how to live their moral lives. If social conservatives attempted to tell them who they could have sex with or marry, what television programs were acceptable and which books their children would be permitted to read at school, most environmentalist would rage against such censorship and restriction of personal choice. Yet they fail to see that their instinct towards regulating personal choice in the name of nature is simply the opposite side of the same coin. There will always be eat-your-peas personalities who have convinced themselves they are smarter and more ethical than their fellow citizens, and therefore have a right and an obligation to share their superior insights with the rest of mankind, perhaps even a duty to impose those insights. Environmentalists are merely the new conformists, the new PTA or country club membership board, the new establishment. They are hardly the revolutionaries they fancy themselves to be, nor the guardians of erudition and enlightenment. Consider that James Hansen of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the godfather of global warming hysteria, mused while in Beijing last November that the Chinese might be on to something, namely dictatorship as a superior form of government for ushering in the kind of radical lifestyle changes he believes are needed to combat global warming. The man who inspired Al Gores Inconvenient Truth movie envies the Chinese their ability to order compliance with new policies rather than having to seek approval from the people and their elected representatives. So long answer, short: I have absolutely no difficulty imagining a public school teacher excluding poor little Felix Lanciault from a teddy bear draw at his kindergarten because Felixs mom, Isabel Thort, had packed his PB&J in a Ziploc, rather than a reusable container. The horror! Recently, Felix began crying when his mom went to pack his lunch in a resealable plastic bag. When asked what the trouble was, Felix told his parents that his kindergarten class had had a draw for a stuffed toy, but that he had been excluded from the contest because his teacher had found a plastic sandwich bag in his lunch kit. So he pleaded with his mom not to make him an enviro-criminal again. What rot. Its not even entirely clear that permanent, reusable containers are that much better for the environment once you take into account the amount of material and energy needed to make them, the amount of water and soap used to clean them and the difficult of disposing of them when their useful lives are through. Yet, here is poor Felixs teacher separating him from classmates and targeting him for scorn because he wasnt falling in with the lockstep mentality-of-the-moment in public schools. There is poetic justice, usually, in such doctrinal overkill, though. Children typically rebel in their teenage years against whatever orthodoxy is rammed down their throats as children. So perhaps there is hope. In a decade or so, when all the little Felix Lanciaults begin reaching high school, they may just rebel against the environmentalists sanctimonious and pious catechism. National Post Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.