Dorothy Day and 39 other women went to prison to try to obtain the right to vote in 1917. Equal rights and treating our fellow human beings with respect must be a fundamental characteristic of sustainability. Dorothy: thank you from the Y chromosome side.
And equal rights is not a zero-sum game. The gain in rights for women did not cost me any of my rights.
Scientists have produced rudimentary mouse sperm from stem cells in the laboratory, a step that may lead to a treatment for infertile men.
Source: Mouse sperm made in lab, may help with infertility
Alright all you science aficionados out there. Can you make sperm from a woman’s stem cells?
I am pretty darn certain you can. The chemical signals to produce sperm cells from a stem cell are being supplied by the lab. You would just have no sperm containing the Y chromosome. So an in vitro fertilization would produce all female offspring. Men truly are soon to be superfluous :-)
Investigation finds Organyc products contained traces of potentially toxic glyphosate.
Source: Organic panty liners recalled for containing traces of weedkiller found in Monsanto products
Did not I just comment a couple of posts back about Monsanto’s new GMO cotton that is advertised to take a triple cocktail of herbicides.
I would put a :-) but it really isn’t funny anymore.
I did a search for a user with the avatar farmersson63, because I had seen him trash so many environmentalists and anti monsanto posts with forceful, but flawed logic. Watch for the exaggerations. If someone says “sometimes this happens” he will say you’re an idiot for saying “this always happens” :-)
The Farmersson63 avitar is probably a paid Monsanto employee. He has over 2000 comments on news stories. I have less than 300 posts on this entire blog. How many of you have over 10 or 100? He is probably paid to go around trashing people that write anti Monsanto articles. He focuses on anti Monsanto news stories. It’s possible that he has multiple avatars to make it look as though others agree with him. Farmersson63 has a tendency towards a particular grammar bug that at least two other avatars also tend to use. Now it may just be that they know each other but… And why should I tell him what I noticed and let him fix it? :-).
Or he might even have one of his avatars post _for the article_, and use terrible grammar, and spelling in the post, so that the (fake) person appears backward and stupid. Then he posts back with one of his other avatars belittling the intelligence of the first post.
Think about it!!! If the first comments appear stupid and ignorant but they agree with the article then the article itself must also be stupid right :-)
Pepsi or coke or both used to put subliminal messages in movies. Have all the big companies gotten more stupid over the years?
And it got me thinking about an incident with Hewlett Packard printers 20 or so years ago.
The internet was almost non-existent but there were a few newsgroups that you could post questions on and potentially get help. — At 9600 baud :-)
I had a Hewlett Packard printer that would fairly regularly jam and after looking at it I was reasonably sure that it was the printer but I didn’t know if anything could be done about it. So I found a newsgroup that was about hewlett-packard printers and posted a question as to why my paper kept jamming. I had bought reasonably good paper not the most expensive but certainly not the cheapest and it would often jam after about 10 sheets or so. Well one of the users immediately responded with a fairly long, fairly logical, fairly detailed post that I wasn’t using quality paper. And that I should get better paper.
I started thinking about it, made a guess, and responded with that he was probably a hewlett-packard employee paid to muddy the waters and that since he knew so much about the paper being _the_ problem he certainly must know at least one or two _specific brands_ that caused this. And that I would be happy to know what those were so that the paper manufacturers could sue hewlett-packard and him. Wink
He ( I say “he” but it certainly could have been a woman vice president with a male avatar) had posted hundreds of posts, several a day for several _years_ and never posted under that name again as far as I could tell months later. Though I’m sure it just changed names. But the point is: do you really think that the big companies have gotten any dumber in the last 20 years? And today they realize that they don’t need to change avatar names. It would be impossible to pin them down legally.
Big companies have advertising budgets in the hundreds of millions. Do you really think it is much of an effort to pay somebody to continually monitor for online stories and then quickly post crafted responses.
And
where
is the money
for the other side?
Bob
Divert your roof rainwater to make a marsh in your yard. Gardening for wildlife means you’ll get to see beautiful butterflies and birds, as well as have a vibrant yard filled with native plants, so start your own wildlife habitat today with our help.
Source: How to Create a Backyard Marsh
Better yet dechlorinate your swimming pool and then divert your downspouts into your pool. This creates a chlorine free swim environment and creates aquatic habitat too.
As urban sprawl pushes wild things out, gardeners are creating backyard habitats to invite them back in.
Source: Save the Wildlife, One Yard at a Time: Backyard Wildlife Habitats
It is, however, plant diversity that is believed to be a crucial basis to species stability.
We have destroyed virtually 99% of the freshwater marshes in California. The plant diversity that went along with that resource has also been destroyed. When you go to the California native section of your local plant mega warehouse, where are the California native marsh and aquatic plants?
I am begging people to start introducing water resources that haven’t been poisoned with chemicals into their yards.
Source: Report says Monsanto-linked pesticide is to blame for microcephaly outbreak – not Zika
Jeeze! I had just been talking about this last Friday. I was wondering aloud that the 3177 pregnant Columbian women infected with zika but no evidence of neurological damage in their fetuses had just eliminated the possibility that the Brazilian brain damaged children could be from zika.
I commented to my friend: what do they do if they have a mosquito infestation? They spray more insecticides everywhere –“it is probably the pesticides.”
The next morning I read that I was wrong, as usual😀.
They weren’t spraying insecticides all over the place, Brazil had been adding a Monsanto linked pesticide to the freaking drinking water! And I wrote a long winded post where I called them dimwits! Go ahead and click on the link. Just hit the back button when you’re done.
Here is a graphic that was in a document produced by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control please look at it! The red dots are micro encephaly (brain damage). Large is Thousands, medium is hundreds, and small is tens of cases.
The entire country and all the pregnant women are exposed to zika (orange) and mosquitoes everyday and the only place there is micro encephaly is where they were _adding a chemical mosquito toxin to the freakin drinking water_.
Yesterday the article/study referring to the Monsanto linked insecticide pyroproxifen came out. To be fair, the company that makes pyroproxifen is only associated with Monsanto. Pyroproxifen is reportedly not produced by Monsanto itself.
Wikipedia also has a new section on this possible connection of pyroproxifen with the Brazilian birth defects. The Wikipedia section describes experts’ opinions that it would _not_ be plausible for the insecticide pyroproxifen to have caused the Brazilian Microencephalitic outbreak.
The opinions expressed by “experts” dismissing the possibility that the Brazilian birth defects are caused by Pyroproxifen are somewhat invalidated by the likelihood that many of these “experts” would be funded by chemical companies that have a monetary interest in the outcome. The Wikipedia arguments are well crafted and carefully presented, but the monetary contamination raises too many doubts in my mind. And they don’t explain the report that 3000+ pregnant women in Columbia have the virus but there are no signs of fetal brain damage. The Microencephalitic outbreak simply can’t be due to zika alone if the Columbian report is correct.
Why would the Wikipedia “experts” completely ignore the single most important clue that the brain damage cannot be caused by the virus? It might just be the old story of the cigarette companies funding research to show that cigarettes don’t cause cancer.
Adding to the unreliability of these Wikipedia comments, is the fact that some of the first to jump onto Wikipedia and provide “information” [smokescreens] are going to be people that have the most to lose if Monsanto’s stock suffers. In other words highly motivated completely _unbiased_ scientists working in the chemical pesticide field. Like this one. “the-true-inside-story-of-how-a-college-professor-sells-out-to-monsanto/” :-)
Seriously, I did not make up these headlines and don’t get me wrong! I love Wikipedia — after a story has had time to settle down.
In addition, none of these “experts” quoted in the Wikipedia article are neuroscientists (brain experts) or seem to be thinking about how much we don’t know about human brain development. Nor do they seem to be thinking about breakdown products of the pesticide. Virtually none of the pesticides produced today are adequately studied with respect to how they break down in the environment.
As I started thinking about possible breakdown products, it suddenly dawned on me that the insecticide in Brazil was likely added to chlorinated water. That started me thinking about chlorination byproducts of the insecticide. It could be that the chlorinated byproduct of pyroproxifen is more toxic to humans then the original pyroproxifen. I will bet that none of these pesticides have been studied in chlorinated tap water systems. Sigh! Scientific research labs generally use pure water in studies to avoid adding contamination unknowns, but that water is not chlorinated. And now I’m starting to wonder about UV filters on certain aquatic systems.
This story really, really, bothers me because I feel, that with all the ADHD, autism and neurological diseases we have today, that we have poisoned an entire generation of kids. And the pain and suffering that our unthinking behavior generates is REAL … Children of thalidomide.
I am afraid that these extreme examples will become commonplace as our use of insecticides and herbicides — and the GMOs that drive higher and higher use of these toxins, increases.
Under most laws, young people are recognized as adults at age 18. But emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don’t reach full maturity until the age 25. Guest host Tony Cox discusses the research and its implications with Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and co-author of the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain.
Source: Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years
The article above points out that we don’t fully understand how our brains age functionally as a collection of cells. And the article below points out that we don’t even know all the different types of brain cells, let alone have the ability to study them.
Without the ability to study all of the different types of brain cells there is no way to know how they develop as the brain ages. Why we allow the medical community to push drugs on our children that probably affect how their brain can develop is beyond me.
New test leads team to vital clues for understanding neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
Source: A new, multidisciplinary approach to classify cell types in the brain
And I know that you’re getting tired of hearing it, but I feel like I’m beating my head against the wall especially after the zika insecticide debacle. But if we haven’t even identified all the different neuronal cell types in our brains how can we have any idea whether some of the neurotoxins that we are spreading all over the place affect a specific brain cell type _that we have yet to identify_? Have you had your water tested for all the things we don’t know what to test it for?
So maybe we should be just a hair bit more careful about spraying neurotoxins all over our food to kill insects.
Just a thought.
