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quote: Originally posted by TomK
quote: Originally posted by jahson777
Cannabis/hemp make medicine, food, fiber/clothing. Cannabis seeds are one of the best plant based protein sources in nature. I don't see how someone who would like Roundup banned and cannabis growing legal have double standards.
Jahson - you might be surprised by this but I fully support cannabis being grown on the island and am fully aware of its health benefits when used medically. On the other hand, there are known dangers with its use which have been shown in several scientific papers. My point, and what I was trying to find out, was why some people here are so adamantly against glysophate which enables crops to be grown and avoid starvation, which is a benefit but growing and using marijuana which has known serious health issues if used incorrectly or even correctly by prescription, is not a problem.
I don't know enough about glysophate or pot, I'm just curious why different standards are used for both. You can even add alcohol to this. That's known to cause health problems, but should that be banned as well? It didn't work out well in the last century.
. I don't see how the two can be compared, cannabis already existed in nature before we did. If someone added cannabis to food and did not label it in the ingredients I would hope anyone would be against that. If someone blows cannabis smoke at people who don't want it that would be bad as well. If someone decides to use cannabis in a way that may harm themselves and no others then that is on them, they can't sue God for their misuse of cannabis. The way Roundup is being used causes exposure to people who have no knowledge they are being exposed and were never given a choice whether they wanted Roundup in their system or not. Someone who wants cannabis or tobacco smoking allowed in public buildings and want Roundup illegal would be more guilty of having double standards.
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How are you being exposed to roundup Jahson777?
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Manufacturers are very particular about what they put on their labels. If it won't help sales they won't put it on unless they have to. If it will help sales they will put it on even if false or exaggerated (think NEW AND IMPROVED). If a manufacturer declines to list GMO corn in their corn chips it is because they derive no benefit from voluntarily putting a target on their own backs even though those corn chips are more available and cheaper and therefor better in terms of availability. Simple enough. Next, should they be compelled to? Yes, if there is data to prove possible negative effects from consuming whatever is in their product. No if there is no such data. That is where we stand now. No body of data that conclusively says that GMO products are bad for you. Same for glyphosate. Therefor no labels. When industry standard testing protocols repeatably return results that show harm then the labels should go on. We are simply not there yet.
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quote: Originally posted by rainyjim
How are you being exposed to roundup Jahson777?
I am not sure if what is sprayed locally in puna gets in my system, but some of the food on our store shelves contain Roundup. It is not listed on the ingredients and I don't have a lab in my kitchen to determine exactly which foods contain Roundup. I would choose not to consume Roundup with a choice but it's hard to make a choice if I'm not told if the product contains roundup or not.
https://www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyp...3ePxVkpBdY
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If you are so concerned why not just grow your own food?
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Penalty flag - illegal motion on the defense. Rainyjim trying to gain pages with false pretense posts. Loss of a down, 1 page, 3rd down.
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If you are so concerned why not just grow your own food?
That reminds me of a different yet similar situation...
Back in the 60s and 70s when we as young parents realized that the public school system wasn't going to provide the education we would wish for our children many of us turned towards alternatives. My wife and I started a school, as did other friends that were equally as energetic, and there developed a close knit group of us, who have remained friends for all these years.
More recently a bunch of us us got together to spend a vacation of sorts lallygagging around the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel and as the second or third day of good food and good wine and all that sand and casual swims across the bay, and while in conversation about the success of one’s child, and the adventures of another’s, a friend turned to me and said…
"You know, we created this mess we’re in.”
She was referring to the Republican party and the whole Trump debacle, and I asked her to explain. She replied that she feels that to go off and create private schools, to do home schooling and all the other ways our generation dealt with the situation did right by our kids but denied all the other kids we could have reached had we instead stayed with the public system. Her thesis is that we lived our ideals, but by not demanding that the school system come up to them, by not engaging more fully in society we robbed all the kids left to the system of the stuff we worked so hard to provide our own. And in essence contributed to the overall dumbing down of society.. and thus gave rise to the horrible situation we find ourselves in now.
I think that concept, of where best to apply one’s energy, in the current round of Roundup concerns, is best applied to insure the best outcome for all of society. Sure someone can go home and grow their own Victory Garden, but, all told, that energy is best applied to also insuring everyone has the same. Our grandchildren will thank us. Where as it is in the world today, because of the failure of our education system, there’s millions of people who have forgotten how to say thank you entirely and seemingly don’t give a sh*t about the quality of food they eat, the health of the environment, or the well being of their neighbors. In essence our generation failed them and I think it is incumbent on all of us to not screw it up this time.
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Well let me be the first to say Thank You glinda - for thinking for me and deciding for me whether I want to obsess over non-existent threats to my health and well being.
I am afraid that I have to line up with TomK on this: you and many of the anti-gmo anti pesticide zealots are quite comfortable legalizing marijuana - while neglecting the effects it has on brain function, on learning, on attention span, and a variety of other long-term adverse effects. You claim that that is a personal decision and harms no one but the user - I beg to differ: it harms everyone who has to deal with that user on a day to day basis. I don't want to hire someone who uses cannabis (I unknowingly did in the past and over the course of his short employment he managed to trash three vehicles), I don't want to deal with someone providing me paid services while they are mentally impaired; I don't want them driving on the roads I use and exposing me to the risks of their inability to focus poses to me and the other drivers on the road.
But, no thanks, glinda, I would prefer to make my own decisions about what foods I choose to eat or not and what is a complete fraud - those being chemo-phobia and the whole gmo paranoia...
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I said I was done, but a friend whose opinion I respect asked me to continue. Shucks.
Open-d wrote: Package labeling is about what IS IN THE PACKAGE. It is NOT the place for "boast(ing) about how their innovations are improving conditions across the planet".
I went to the kitchen and pulled out a few packages. Most of them had statements about the company, and/or their policies and business practices, choices of ingredients, etc. Some of them were rather lengthy. Not required, it was their choice to do this. Open-d's statement is blatantly and absolutely 100% false. If a company wants to boast about their innovations on their labels they have every right to do so. There may be exceptions to this that I'll get to in a moment.
PaulW wrote: "That's the big difference here, compulsion vs choice. Guess which side you're on."
No need to guess. Mt entire spiel has been about choice. My question that nobody seems to be able to answer is why have the companies CHOSEN to not label. I have been suggesting, albeit in hindsight, that if the companies had CHOSEN to include the GMO information on the labels from the beginning, along with the "we're saving the planet" claim (whether on the label or somewhere else) they would have curtailed the suspicions of hiding something and they would have saved millions in legal expenses, not to mention all the bad publicity from those lawsuits. Instead, they felt that they needed to keep the info off of the labels at all cost because they believed having it on there would have a negative impact on sales. (I think that's the answer to my question, in case you didn't catch it).
Which brings me to a new question that I alluded to earlier: Do the companies actually have this choice?
To elaborate, suppose I have a company that makes canned soup. I want to make a corn chowder. I buy GMO corn from a local farmer or distributer. In my list of ingredients I want to list the corn as GMO corn. Am I at liberty to make this choice, or is there some sort of mandate from Monsanto that I cannot?
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I won't quote all of EW's rant, but he challenged my statement that 99.99% of all pesticides that we consume are naturally present in the foods we eat...
quote: Originally posted by ElysianWort
@Geochem
@Geochem [i]something like 99.99% of the toxic compounds we ingest on a regular basis are naturally occurring compounds in our food supply. So your insistence on not being exposed to any manmade chemical is nothing short of ridiculous...
Oh yeah Geochem? I think that italicized post of yours above is ridiculous. I insist on limiting exposure to unnecessary and unproven chemicals.....
This is a link to a published abstract by Dr. Bruce Ames: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9677052
A few lines from that abstract: " The vast bulk of chemicals ingested by humans is natural. For example, 99.99% of the pesticides we eat are naturally present in plants to ward off insects and other predators. Half of these natural pesticides tested at the MTD are rodent carcinogens. Reducing exposure to the 0.01% that are synthetic will not reduce cancer rates. On the contrary, although fruits and vegetables contain a wide variety of naturally-occurring chemicals that are rodent carcinogens, inadequate consumption of fruits and vegetables doubles the human cancer risk for most types of cancer. Making them more expensive by reducing synthetic pesticide use will increase cancer. Humans also ingest large numbers of natural chemicals from cooking food. Over a thousand chemicals have been reported in roasted coffee: more than half of those tested (19/28) are rodent carcinogens. There are more rodent carcinogens in a single cup of coffee than potentially carcinogenic pesticide residues in the average American diet in a year, and there are still a thousand chemicals left to test in roasted coffee."
I have read that Dr. Ames is one of the most cited scientists in the world - he invented some of the most widely applied toxicity and carcinoginicity tests now being used.
EW, I am very sorry that you and glinda are so thoroughly ignorant of the basic precepts of science and are being manipulated by some very cynical and self-serving interests. Your ignorance and credulity should not, however, be allowed to deny me access to safe and useful technology that can allow me to be more productive. Your insistence that roundup be banned due to a non-existent/entirely trivial threat makes as much sense as, should I be so foolish, my insistence that cell phones be banned because their electromagnetic radiation is disrupting my cell function in unknown ways... (a sincere belief by some, and possibly true...).
Insofar as labeling is concerned, if you are so insistent on not being exposed to synthetic chemicals, then buy only certified organic ... and take your own risks for exposure to salmonella and rat lung worm and all the other entirely natural nasties that those synthetic pesticides and treatment chemicals are intended to curtail....
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