And Who Is Surprised By This?

Last fall, the Environmental Protection Agency warned that Monsanto’s Bt corn, which was genetically engineered a decade ago to ward off rootworms, is now falling prey to worms that have developed resistance to the plants’ built-in insecticide. The EPA also expressed concern that Monsanto’s monitoring was “inadequate and likely to miss early resistance events.”

At the time, a company spokesperson denied there was a problem, telling Bloomberg News, “Monsanto continues to believe there’s no scientific confirmation of resistance to its Bt corn.”

However, this year’s corn-growing season is now well under way in the United States, and in some places the crops are suffering severe damage. Scientists have identitied the culprit as Bt-resistant rootworms.
  Raw Story

Any self-respecting scientist or student of biology could have predicted this (and did). The only reason Monsanto was able to push this technology on the world is the big money they spend on lobbying Congress members who not only have no self-respect, they have no shame, and no conscience.

The resistant rootworms have also appeared in South Africa, India, and China, but they may have the greatest impact in the United States, where more than half the corn grown is Bt.

In addition, American taxpayers could find themselves picking up the tab for any crop failures, thanks to government subsidies.

There's no “could” to that. It's guaranteed. And the price you pay for corn products will go up as you pay a premium to the growers who have been storing corn, waiting for the right time – like now, pull it out of their grain bins and put it on the market.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What Mitt and Barry Will NOT Be Arguing About

No matter which millionaire wins, the entrenchment of corporate control over every aspect of our lives and the destruction of the ecosystems in which human civilization developed will both continue without a pause.  "Four more years" isn't an aspiration—it's a threat.

[...]

I've always found it bitterly amusing that while hyperventilating right wingers conjure up conspiracies to establish a UN-controlled one world government in nefarious plots like the attempt to increase bike ridership, corporations are taking actual, concrete and successful steps to render democratic self-governance—in the broadest sense of the phrase—all but meaningless.

  Distant Ocean

The [Trans-Pacific Partnership] requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures to what are 26 chapters of very comprehensive rules, only two of which have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters set a whole array of corporate new privileges and rights and handcuff governments, limit regulation.
  Democracy Now!

You have only to see the way the United States has savaged the Earth summit's draft declaration to grasp the scale of this problem. The word "equitable", the US insists, must be cleansed from the text. So must any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women's empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change "unsustainable consumption and production patterns", and to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources.
  UK Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Helen Figured It Out

The only interest the Tea Party has in making government smaller is that a smaller government will more easily fit in a woman’s vagina.

[...]

[The] “personhood” initiative [...] would give human fertilized eggs the legal rights and protections that apply to people, and outlaw abortion as well as some of the most widely used forms of contraception and in vitro fertilization.  Eggs are people.  Corporations are people.  Women, evidently, are not.
  Margaret and Helen

Treat

What's Wrong With This Picture?

And Still in Looney Tunes Land

Bill Kristol is panicking and has gone so far as to trial-balloon Condoleezza Rice for Romney’s VP, presumably because Condi did such a bang-up job aligning  her greatest achievement as National Security Adviser (being blindsided by the 9/11 attacks) with Bloody Bill’s greatest achievement (priming the pump for an  unnecessary war with Iraq) and economies were ruined and shitloads of people die or, as Bill  might put it: “good times … good times”.

And he should eat a big bag of salted dicks.
  TBogg

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Still Sinking

Every few weeks, the unemployment numbers come bubbling forth from the malarial swamp that greed and incompetence made out of our economy, and hands are wrung, brows are furrowed, and forelocks are tugged until they reach well past the kneecaps. Sympathetic grunting is heard all over cable television, and the low whirring of political calculus soon even drowns that out. And what do all these reactions have in common?

They're all performance pieces by people who still have jobs.

[...]

People who have jobs — like pundits and congresscritters — are turning rude and stupid, blaming the poor for their poverty, casting the long-term unemployed as government-addled wastrels of the public fisc, and portraying the sick and uninsured as victims of their own short-sightedness. Allowing these tactics to succeed is a recipe for political catastrophe. We are all in this together. If we don't realize that, and if we don't focus our unified dissatisfaction on the correct targets, the failed elites that Chris Hayes so ably eviscerates in his new book, we deserve what fresh hell waits down the road another month, when the numbers will suck again.
  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday Thursday ?

I've been watching another wonderful Ken Burns series - Prohibition - on DVD.

I've learned where the terms teetotaler and skid row come from (capital "t" total abstinence, and the saloon district of Seattle where loggers "skidded" logs along a track to their loading site - in case you didn't know either), and that before Carrie Nation and the women's temperance movements began, the age of sexual consent in the United States was 10 years old!

I also learned that prohibition lasted almost 14 years.  I had in mind that it was much shorter than that.

Can't help but notice how the war on drugs parallels the experience of prohibition.  Including the fact that religion plays a not-insignificant role.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We Blinked

Pakistan agreed Tuesday to reopen supply routes to the U.S.-led NATO force in Afghanistan after the United States apologized for the first time for inadvertently killing 24 Pakistani troops who were manning two border posts last November, signaling a new attempt by the nominal allies to repair their severely damaged relationship.

The Obama administration also agreed to ask Congress to reimburse Pakistan $1 billion for the costs of operations against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

There was no indication, however, that either side had budged on its major demand for restoring cooperation, making it uncertain how far the apparent reconciliation bid may go. The United States wants Pakistan to drop a refusal to move against sanctuaries within its borders from which the Afghan Taliban and their allies wage their insurgency in Afghanistan; Pakistan is demanding an end to missile strikes on those sanctuaries by U.S. drone aircraft, which it charges violate its sovereignty and kill civilians.

[...]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced […] she had apologized by telephone to Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.
  McClatchy via Record Online

It's Sunday

To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of this remarkable institution, the Vatican and the City of Rome have assembled an extraordinary exhibit of materials from the Secret Archives, Lux in Arcana (“Light in Mysterious Places”), which can be enjoyed at the Capitoline Museum in the Piazza del Campidoglio until September 9, and sampled online at www.luxinarcana.org. If good fortune brings you to La Città before September 9, reserve at least three hours to savor an assemblage of primary historical materials of a magnitude never before exhibited in one place, and unlikely to be shown again in the foreseeable future.

Some of the documents — written on such various materials as parchment, vellum, paper, and birchbark (the medium for an 1887 letter from the Ojibwe Indians to the pope, “the Great Master of Prayer, he who acts in Jesus’s stead”) — bring to mind epic moments and historical turning points across ten centuries: the handwritten records of Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition; Pope Alexander VI’s bull Inter Cetera (which might be translated, “Among Other Things”), dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal; the 1530 petition from dozens of members of England’s House of Lords, asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that the Tudor king might marry Anne Boleyn; Gregory XIII’s calendar of 1582 with the “missing ten days” in October, an excision that rectified the inaccuracies of the earlier Julian calendar; a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to Sixtus V just before her execution; Polish king John III Sobieski’s 1683 letter to Innocent XI, reporting his victory over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna; letters from Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln to Pius IX during the U.S. Civil War.
  National Review

The Vatican has enough money to create an unparalleled museum where people from all over the world throughout the ages could witness these and other remarkable artifacts held in its vaults. And they could make another fortune in ticket sales. So why keep them “secret”? As if I didn’t know the answer to that. Charlie Pierce rather precisely and concisely states the situation:

Make no mistake. I would sell your grandmother to the Somali pirates for a half-hour in there, and I know actual historians whose price would be higher than that.
  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.