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Don’t Look, Don’t See: Pesticides in the MSM

It is past time for honest media reporting on the impacts of pesticides

Colin Todhunter

The UK-based Independent online newspaper recently published an article about a potential link between air pollution from vehicles and glaucoma. It stated that according to a new study air pollution is linked to the eye condition that causes blindness.

The report explained that researchers had looked at vision tests carried out on more than 111,000 people across Britain between 2006 and 2010 and cross-referenced results against levels of air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Those living in areas with higher amounts of fine particulate matter were at least 6% more likely to have glaucoma than those in the least polluted areas.

Glaucoma affects half a million people in the UK and can cause blindness if left untreated. However, the study cited by The Independent, published in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, was unable to prove that air pollution was a trigger.

Following the article, environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason put together a 20-page report on glyphosate and has sent it out to key public health officials and media outlets, including The Independent’s editor.

In her report, she states that the European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage and is toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects. But she claims that the media still remains silent on the matter. Even in UK towns and cities, glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide is still being sprayed on weeds and super-weeds which have become Roundup-resistant.

Mason implores The Independent and other mainstream media outlets to write with honesty about the use and harmful effects of glyphosate-based weedicides and other agrochemicals. She quotes the UN expert on Toxics, Baskut Tuncak, who in 2017 urged the EU to put children’s health before pesticides.

Children form the most vulnerable part of the population as pesticides can adversely affect their development.

Offering insight into the incidence of cataracts in England, Mason notes that annual rates of admission for cataract surgery rose 10‐fold from 1968 to 2004: from 62 episodes per 100,000 population to 637.

A 2016 study by the WHO also confirmed that the incidence of cataracts had greatly increased: in ‘A global assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risks’ it says that cataracts are the leading cause of blindness worldwide. Globally, cataracts are responsible for 51% of blindness. An estimated 20 million individuals suffer from this degenerative eye disease.

Mason discusses long waiting lists for cataracts in England. Because the NHS cannot cope with the pressure, private companies are cashing in. The growing demand for cataract operations is forcing the NHS to send increasing numbers of patients to be treated privately.

In Wales, where Mason resides, 35,000 patients are at risk of going blind from macular degeneration and glaucoma while on the NHS waiting list. All the municipal councils in Wales use glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate now accounts for about 50% of all herbicide use in the US.

About 75% of glyphosate use has occurred since 2006, with the global glyphosate market projected to reach $11.74 billion by 2023.

Figures for the use of glyphosate in the UK show a similar trend, which Mason has documented in her many reports. And let us not forget at this point that the current Conservative government regards Brexit as an ideal opportunity to usher in crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the application of glyphosate or similar chemicals. The agrochemicals sector stands in the wings salivating at the prospect.

This has nothing to do with boosting yields or ‘feeding the world’ as Boris Johnson asserts (claims which fail to stand up to scrutiny) but has everything to do with facilitating industry ambitions.

Never in history has a chemical been used so pervasively. Glyphosate is in our air, water, plants, animals, grains, vegetables and meats. It’s in beer and wine, children’s breakfast cereal and snack bars and mother’s breast milk. It’s even in our vaccines.

Of course, the power of the pesticides companies has been well noted.

In 2017, global agrochemical corporations were severely criticised by UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver. A report presented to the UN human rights council accused them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions.”

The report authored by Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak says pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole”, including an estimated 200,000 deaths a year from acute poisoning. Its authors said: “It is time to create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.”

Hilal Elver says:

Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger.  According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed nine billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”

Elver said many of the pesticides are used on commodity crops, such as palm oil and soy, not the food needed by the world’s hungry people:

The corporations are not dealing with world hunger; they are dealing with more agricultural activity on large scales.”

Mason notes that chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to a range of diseases and conditions and that certain pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat to the entire ecological system on which food production depends.

The excessive use of pesticides contaminates soil and water sources, causing loss of biodiversity and destroying the natural enemies of pests.

The impact of such overuse also imposes staggering costs on national economies. Moreover, the use of neonicotinoid pesticides is particularly worrying because they are linked to a systematic collapse in the number of bees around the world. Some 71% of crop species are bee-pollinated.

Mason goes on to describe the various lawsuits in the US against Bayer (which bought Monsanto) and the tactics used by Monsanto to conceal glyphosate-based Roundup’s carcinogenicity, including capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud to delay its day of reckoning.

Following the court decision to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson, attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said the following at the post-trial press conference:

…you not only see many people injured, but you also see a subversion of democracy. You see the corruption of public officials, the capture of agencies that are supposed to protect us all from pollution.

The agencies become captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here.

This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…”

There is now also a good deal of scientific evidence linking glyphosate to obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease and brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.

Researchers also peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children.

The compound is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body, including iron, magnesium, zinc, selenium and molybdenum. Roundup disrupts the microbiome destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects.

Neurotransmitter changes in the brain have been detected due to exposure to glyphosate. This is why, according to Mason, there are so many mental health and psychiatric disorders, depression, suicides, anxiety and violence among children and adults. It is even found in popular breakfast cereals marketed for UK children.

And this says nothing about the cocktail of pesticides sprayed on crops. The Soil Association and PAN UK have indicated that exposure to mixtures of pesticides commonly found in UK food, water and soil may be harming the health of both humans and wildlife.

A quarter of all food and over a third of fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK contain pesticide cocktails, with some items containing traces of up to 14 different pesticides.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment has identified the rights threatened by environmental harm, including the rights to life, health, food and water and has mapped obligations to protect against such harm from private actors.

In effect, where pesticides are concerned, the public are being denied the right to a healthy environment.

But it’s not just the powerful pesticides lobby that is to blame here. Rosemary Mason says the British public (and indeed people across the world) have a right to information.

However, she concludes that the public have been denied this because mainstream media outlets have on the whole for too long opted to remain silent on the pesticides issue.

This article touches on just a few of the points in Rosemary Mason’s report. Readers can access the full text of ‘Glyphosatecauses serious eye damage’ on the academia.edu site.

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Antonym
Antonym
Dec 7, 2019 5:33 AM

For those interested in agriculture, food, and “greening” here is an interesting article about US agricultural bio fuel subsidies making (world) food prices much higher apart from other negative side effects: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-has-forsaken-us/602191/

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 8:24 AM

Mason goes on to describe the various lawsuits in the US against Bayer (which bought Monsanto) and the tactics used by Monsanto to conceal…

Concealment? Monsanto?

The former Monsanto Company manufactured DDT from 1944 until 1957, when it ceased production for economic reasons. This halt occurred long before any environmental concerns were brought to the table… [Emphasis added]

Bayer/Monsanto

Well there’s old sadsack Rachael Carson down the Official Memory Hole. Good riddance to all such inconvenient busybodies.

The following is a paraphrase of an excerpt from the letter Rachel Carson sent to Reader’s Digest in 1945 offering to write an article about the dangers of DDT [she refused all requests for any republications of, or the publication of any excerpts from, any of her writings]:

The experiments at Patuxent have been planned to show what effects DDT may have if applied to wide areas: how it will affect insects, waterfowl, or birds that depend on insect food, and whether the use of DDT may upset the whole delicate balance of nature.
— Rachel Carson. Stwertka, Eve. New York: Franklin Watts, 1991., p. 37.

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Dec 27, 2019 11:25 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Peerlessly nassty.

jay
jay
Dec 4, 2019 9:56 AM

Glyphosate is not classed as a poison.
At one this was also true for, asbestos, tobacco etc…people put mercury on their hats and drank arsenic as a tonic.
We seen the first case against Monsanto, a groundsman who’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was attributed to the use of Roundup…
So, now it is admitted, Glyphosate causes cancer…

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 12:01 AM
Reply to  jay

Glyphosate is not classed as a poison.

Glyphosate is slippery in that regard. Taken in isolation and very carefully proselytizing a restricted temporal view of any adverse effects, you could probably drink a glass of it and still be functioning well enough for that to be taken as a demonstration of the validity of the classification before the news cycle moved on to this year’s Turner prize or whatever. However, it is cannot be used as an effective commercial herbicide in its pure form and the various formulations of it, such as Roundup (just one of hundreds of variants), all process it and/or use modifying additives to various degrees. These not only make it much more toxic straight off the shelf, they also work to reduce the time it takes to exhibit its commercial “desirable” (as distinct from biologically damaging) effects. Most commercially sponsored research relating to broader environmental damage and human or animal toxicology has been very carefully arranged to avoid inclusion of the impact of the extra processing and additives that “pure” glyphosate receives en route to its becoming the favourite weed killer on the suppliers’ shelves.

And by way, serious questions about glyphosate’s adverse effects have been around for decades, ever since Monsanto GMOed some key crops into putative glyphosate resistance, greatly enhancing its popularity and their bottom line. The recent law case has served only to pique public interest (lowly worker wins fortune from beneficial giant) rather than dent its marketability. You might also care to take note of the article’s reference to a whole range of modern, synthetic herbicide and pesticides, not just glyphosate. The problem of an industrialized agriculture market as part of the money machine goes back over a century.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 4, 2019 12:36 AM

A couple of months ago I saw some council contractors doing spot spraying of verge weeds from huge and obviously heavy containers on their backs. “JC*,” I said to them, “the little packs were several hundred times beyond bad enough, have you taking to flooding the place with it now?” “It’s salt water,” they said, “we’ve been told to switch to spot spraying with salt water only.”

* Jeremy Corbyn

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 4, 2019 5:56 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

And, as we all know, salt water is just great for the environment…
Birds drink it, fresh water fish swim in it, crops thrive on it, and it’s cheap too!
Nice one, council contractors.
Or does it restrict its presence to the verges…?
C’mon guys, we’re going to have to go all the way here. This is mere ineffectual tinkering.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 12:46 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Nice one, council contractors.

I suspect that the gardener’s/council’s contribution to the sodium chloride load around an average winter snowbound highway would amount to the level of “insignificant”. Or does your local council pour your kneejerk scorn rather than salt onto its winter roads to keep the traffic moving? Very ecological. You may not remember this, Jumbobutt, but when you were an infant, shortly after your breech birth, it was a big leap for you to go from recognising nothing at all to even just beginning to discern the shape of your mummy’s face. Now look at you. Just a few months later and you can spot a productive pair of tits from halfway down the high street. And get it right, not shitforbains: like all contractors, they were doing what they were told. You want them to refuse and ditch the council’s newly perceived salt water loads for the former Health-and-Safety-spine-friendly multi-chemical backpacks? It’s yesteryear’s smartarses of the sort you seem to want to replicate in the here and now that have made the thrust of this article out of date before your daddy was born, but that’s another, if related, topic for another true story.

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 5, 2019 2:34 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Your abuse notwithstanding, the council’s sodium chloride contribution is much more significant than you imply. I’ve seen it. But there’s no need either to assume I am a supporter of glyphosate in preference. I am far from that.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 6:35 AM
Reply to  wardropper

I suspect that the gardener’s/council’s contribution to the sodium chloride load around an average winter snowbound highway would amount to the level of “insignificant”.

…the council’s sodium chloride contribution is much more significant than you imply.

I’m implying that in amongst the shedloads of crystal salt that is spread on snowbound roads, some gardener’s spot applications of dilute solutions of it to verge weeds is damn near nil. Are you contradicting that or are you just another keyboard pundit who gets too darling upset to read what’s written if your first quick impression is that some rude heckler has had the temerity to ruffle your carefully combed ego-feathers?

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 5, 2019 9:02 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

council’s contribution to the sodium chloride load around an average winter snowbound highway

I can only reply based on what you have stated.
I took “highway” to mean something more significant than a country pedestrian track. Americans use the term to mean, “motorway”, for example, and that is what I had in mind.
Let’s leave the personal attacks out of it, shall we?
My questioning some of your comments does not “darling upset” me at all, nor should my reply upset you.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 6, 2019 1:08 AM
Reply to  wardropper

I can only reply based on what you have stated.

In the initial post I didn’t state anything except ‘verge’. That’s where your “nice one” was the first response.

I took “highway” to mean something more significant than a country pedestrian track. Americans use the term to mean, “motorway”, for example, and that is what I had in mind.

The ‘verge’ I was referring to is by the side of a main urban road. I was on the footpath, houses and gardens were on one side, they were on the other side, tending a narrow, concrete-bounded grass verge, four lanes of busy roadway was beyond them.

Let’s leave the personal attacks out of it, shall we?

Why? There was no personal attack, just plain old robust heckling with a few bits creative name-calling thrown in. What’s wrong with that? Most of the let’s rip the social order out by its roots flaming radicals around here are too namby pamby to join an elegantly coiffured gentlewoman’s bridge afternoon without registering hurt at a dozen perceived slights an cutting remarks, if you ask me. Except, possibly, Weird Tim Jenkins. Fuck their blue suede shoes.

My questioning some of your comments does not “darling upset” me at all, nor should my reply upset you.

You’d need to be quicker than you are to upset me with words. In fact, I thrive on intended put downs and insults. The best have me chuckling for days. Some real-life, non-electronic ones for years. Provided they don’t physically attack me, so fucking what? One of the whole points about words is that they’re there to enable sharp–or even just minor–disagreements to be expressed in full, as-is, and maybe resolved without frets or tantrums or blows or guns. So up yours too.

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 6, 2019 4:37 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

My argument stands, as does the point I made, that salt is no real answer to the long-term problems we now face in our environment. It is too harmful in itself.
My view is that a more genuinely scientific study of the mutual interactions of various plants could point to entirely natural ways of limiting their vulnerability to diseases and pests.
By “genuinely scientific”, I mean scientific without the desperate need for shareholders to receive their regular dividends,

regardless of the success of the investment concerned.

But have it your way.
I thought you actually had a point or two to make, and your very long-winded way of spoiling for a fight is easily dismissed with a simple “lol”.
Of course you thrive on intended put-downs, because you belong on a site where others of your kind thrive.
Life’s too short for that here, since most of us are no longer in our teens.
Sad to have to mention such a remedy on this page, but you can consider yourself on an ignore list.
And, no, I don’t care whether or not that is of any significance to you.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 9, 2019 2:46 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Life’s too short for that here, since most of us are no longer in our teens.

“My sort?” I’m far closer to the telegram from the Queen that she doesn’t send any more than I am from the gold watch that no-one ever gave me. “Ignore list?” Chortle.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 9, 2019 3:29 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Oops. For my “sort” read my “kind”. My bad.

But have it your way.
I thought you actually had a point or two to make, and your very long-winded way of spoiling for a fight…

“… have it my way”? I posted re the fact that my local council’s gardening contractors were (following instructions to) switch to a dilute salt solution to spot kill weeds, away from last year’s frankenchemicals; your first response is a snorty-haughty “Nice one, council contractors”; and I’m the one “spoiling for a fight”?

Then you follow up with some nothing implication about local council contractors being co-conspirators in the Deep State plus a dollop of transatlantic nomenclature confusion wherein ‘highway’ = ‘motorway’. Sheesh, tell that to Dick Turpin: couldn’t even get Black Bess through the gap at The Spaniards as the ancient scars on the walls attest.

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 5, 2019 2:45 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Council contractors are also effectively a part of the council – whether they are supposed to be or not – rather like the way in which lobbyists are effectively a part of western government.
It was the council I was criticizing; not the men doing the spraying.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 6:53 AM
Reply to  wardropper

Council contractors are also effectively a part of the council – whether they are supposed to be or not…

Council contractors and their workers are increasingly poor schmucks caught up in the trap of trying to maintain a roof over their underwater mortgages while battling to survive the ravages of a rapidly growing gig economy and cynically cheapened imported labour.

It was the council I was criticizing; not the men doing the spraying.

“Nice one, council contractors?” Yeah, right. St Vitus’s dance?

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 5, 2019 8:56 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Council contractors are also effectively a part of the council

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 6, 2019 2:53 PM
Reply to  wardropper

Council contractors are also effectively a part of the council

Now that you’ve raised that point twice: in the UK not in general. In large cities most of the city-wide services such as integrated transport, water and sewerage services, etc., are handled by an over all city council but less universal services such as maintaining public open spaces, local public housing, libraries, street cleaning, rubbish collection etc., are adminstered by smaller, borough councils most of who’s outsourcing is to much smaller enterprises offering specific trades and chosen by open tender. These firms are basically SMBs and general have no political (or any) input into the council that contracts them. The borough councils invite tenders for property cleaning services, say, and that is what the firm that is awarded the contract does, in accordance with the specifications of the tender document, under the supervision of the council officer (not an elected councillor) responsible for that service. Their relationship to the council is the same as that of an individual builder of building firm to a private individual who wants a custom house built: they are simply tradesmen providing a service under the supervision of the commissioning individual’s architect or project manager. In general, to equate them with govermental lobbyists is a bizarre misunderstanding. For years I have tried to get the council to convert as much of its open space as possibe to meadow grasses and, when it mows lawns of any type, to set the mower blades at least twice as high as has been usual until now, as well as halving the frequency of mowing. No success yet, but last place to place such a suggestion would be with the council’s gardening contractors.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 5, 2019 6:57 AM
Reply to  wardropper

…fresh water fish swim in [salt water]…

That’s good. Otherwise they might havev pretty steep learning curve in the not too distant future.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 28, 2019 3:45 AM
Reply to  wardropper

A couple of months ago I saw some council contractors doing spot spraying of verge weeds […] “It’s salt water,” they said, “we’ve been told to switch to spot spraying with salt water only.”
Robbobbobin

And, as we all know, salt water is just great for the environment…
Birds drink it, fresh water fish swim in it, crops thrive on it, and it’s cheap too!
Nice one, council contractors.
wardropper

Have I just got your number, wardropper?

Monsanto, the British government and the UK and EU regulators say that glyphosate is safer than table salt. But would table salt kill all these insects that we recorded in our photo-journals or cause apocalyptic declines globally?”
— Rosemary Mason, quoted in Colin Todhunter’s The Right to Healthy Food: Poisoned with Pesticides

Are you around here, BTL in the Off-Guardian, to help the world drop international shooting wars or to drop disingenuous, redirectional, time-wasting, internal squabbling wars on the Off-Guardian’s readers?

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 28, 2019 1:51 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

It’s called sarcasm, rob.
Nobody who reads the whole of my comments would misunderstand my tendency towards anger where pollution and corruption are concerned.
My reference to salt was simply to point out that too much salt in the environment is also deadly to wildlife, and, therefore to us. It wasn’t a scientific paper, but a reaction to the idea that switching from glyphosate to salt would solve all our problems.
It wouldn’t.

iskratov
iskratov
Dec 3, 2019 9:17 PM

Researchers found that the use of glyphosate around conventional and GM crops weakened their root systems, making them more vulnerable to disease and crop failures, such as that which has devastated Florida’s citrus crops. One independent scientist who determined that glyphosate destroys soil health tells … “When you spray glyphosate on a plant it’s like giving it AIDS.”
https://medium.com/@joan_baxter/book-review-whitewash-the-story-of-a-weed-killer-cancer-and-the-corruption-of-science-4d8652a54e80

BigB
BigB
Dec 3, 2019 12:22 PM

More excellence from Colin.

As touched on: the importance of the human gut microbiome and its connection to the brain is only just coming to light. It has spawned a thousand science-lite articles and kindled the ‘Yakult’ era. The serious point is that the human microbiome is an important synthesiser of structural proteins; endocrine precursors; neurotransmitters; and is the major component of our immune system (our ‘second brain’). Impairment is not just cognitive impairment and learning difficulties – we are disrupting our own evolution. We are at the root of our own devolutionary psychopathology.

To see this more clearly: what I feel we lack is a cohesive conceptual model. One framing all the seemingly divergent symptomatic aspects of our own auto-immune disease and aberrant psychology …from which we are all suffering. We can no longer afford to treat community health; personal mental health; psychology; economy; and ecology as separate spheres within a multiplex of mechanical reductive materialist separationist (allopathic) models. Or continue to lack of any sort of coherent, cohesive, modeling at all …because all these things require separate fields of expertology to understand in an objective deterministic (post-)posivitist manner – via the Cartesian Method. Which is a posterior *ex post* methodology of regularised, linearised, and repeatable ‘smoothed’ patterns. Which is quite unlike life’s unique relentlessly non-linear creativity and unrepeatability. And then – from this ‘dead determinism’ – we have differing strategies for the economy; separately tackling air pollution; separately tackling the climate (capitalism’s new Zeitgeist); separately tackling mental health; etc in a disaggregated and disjunct anti-holism – and ultimately failing way.

Felix Guattari proposed the ‘Three Ecologies’ – of an integrated psychology, ecology, and economy – as a convergent resolution in 1989. The ecosophical approach to integrating all aspects of our crisis of civilisation into a single coherent dynamic systems theory has yet to become mainstream. That is simply because capitalism IS the scientism and dead determinism of alienation, separation, and fragmentation. It is its ruling ethos. It must resist any attempt to integrate in order to reproduce.

John McMurtry has made the study of this his lifes work. His magnus opus – the Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (CSC) – is essential reading. Before he wrote that: he contributed (as author and editor) a whole chapter to UNESCO on the global everything crisis we are consumed in. As a professional philosopher: he formalised the criterion of ‘life-blind’ and ‘life-coherent’ value creation as ‘onto-axiology’. Formal terminology which simply means correct value choice. When you deconstruct all the character masking narratives and look to the root of the root resolution of our convergent singularised problem: there is just a bunch of people making choices (the subjectification of choice) …badly. Very badly. Simply because they lack a cohesive criteria for choice: of life choosing life over death.

https://bsahely.com/2018/02/14/the-primary-axiom-of-value-universal-human-economy/

The hegemonic ruling value syntax is identified as the ‘money multiplier sequence’. Or ‘money multiplier cancer’ which is the ’cause of causes’ and ‘root of all pathologies’ (pathology or etiology of all pathologies). Which is a transnational globalised economic system. Hence: Transnational Money Multiplier Sequence or System (TMMS). All value creation is subordinated to this ruling sequence: hence all current value-ethics are ultimately anti-life.

Money multiplication entails perpetual expansion; accomplished by de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of nation states (spatio-temporal fixation allied with technocratic fixation and re-colonisation – by waves of surplus capital accumulation (by dispossession) [Harvey]). To expand: the TMMS must extract and expropriate in a correlative exponential ratio to its exponential expansion: pushing resource frontiers into new and formerly pristine locations (the Amazon; the Arctic; the salt flats of Bolivia; the Chilean Andes; the Heart of Africa; and into the heart of you). And it must power up on FFs and NE: there is no renewing this beast on ‘decarbonised’ 100% renewables and falsified ‘net zero’ targets. That is the current ‘Ignoble Lie’ for its protection and the reproduction of its core value ethic …the commodification and consumption of the life-ground of all value. Murder by fictitious exponential money multiplication.

That we lack a coherent systems view of all the regional psychoses that are multiplying momentarily. That is what makes viewing the ‘Big Picture’ impossible. There are no separate imagined geographies within the complex dynamic Earth system. Or separate symptomatic pathologies. It is all part of the TMMS. Which is why Professors like Nate Hagens – in his ‘Reality 101’ course – refer to the ‘superorganism’ for the framing of the expansionist, extractivist TMMS. It is all one energy consuming Beast.

https://un-denial.com/2019/02/02/by-nate-hagens-reality-101-what-every-student-and-citizen-should-know-about-energy/

The globalised economy is a biophysical exergy economy – completely dependent on the amount of free energy (exergy) available to do work, after the energy cost of energy of extraction, refining, transport, etc is costed in. That amount of energy can ONLY be supplied by FFs and NE. Renewables – on such a scale – are a con for the gullible: to allow reproduction of the core value-ethics of expansionist, extractivist, capitalist accumulation. Ergo: the hidden inner logic of the global GND (GGND).

In the same time frame that the ecomodernists, bourgeois socialists, and state capitalists assume the economy will have doubled: in fact – it will have halved. Petroleum production will have depleted to 35million barrels of oil per day (Mbopd): half of the current 80Mbopd. It is important to note this is petroleum and associated Lease Condensate. It is very unlikely we will replenish this: not least …because we are not even looking. And NO amount of shale or tar will compensate for the depletion of petroleum. Petroleum is the source of the naptha distillate – diesel – on which all LGV, HGV, shipping and flight relies. That is, on which the globalisation of the TMMS relies. Conversion from other oils (oil is generic term: there are 100 or so ‘oils’) is fantastically expensive and not commercially viable. And the viability of the ‘green industrial revolution’ depends on oil and other hydrocarbons. [Professor of Petroleum: ‘Tad’ Patzek]. Unless you want to mine 2,362,500 tonnes of copper by hand ..and carry it by cart from the Chilean Andes.

While many of us are preparing to vote to uncritically ‘extend and pretend to the end’ …of the expansionist Behemoth TMMS – it is in fact contracting rapidly. And no one is preparing for the rebound – or ‘Seneca Rebound’ – of a Great Simplification and decomplexification, dematerialisation, and de-enegisation of the money multiplier cancer of the TMMS. Or just preparing for the contingency of a simpler life. Do you really think the current system cannot fail?

Better education, re-evaluation, and complex system modeling of the TMMS would show it has already failed all of life on Earth. And yet there is no alternative (TINA) to the TMMS Capitalist Realism. And the GGND for the ecomodernist ‘green industrial revolutionaries’ is no alternative. It is a life-blind core ethics ‘business as usual’ for the bourgeois pseudo-left. By which you have been had …if you believe in it. Whether you admit it or not.

We are spectacularly blindsighted to the already instantiated contraction and depletion of all available resources. At the required exponential industrial rates of consumption: all resources are non-renewable …including life itself. We are already experiencing degrowth: but violently resisting it psychologically. This makes no sense: degrowth – consciously undertaken – is the only option we have. Unconscious degrowth is civilisational collapse. The difference is the Big Picture complex systems overview we currently lack. Most of us, that is.

bevin
bevin
Dec 3, 2019 2:32 PM
Reply to  BigB

Good stuff. The world would be a richer place if you wrote English.

BigB
BigB
Dec 4, 2019 11:21 AM
Reply to  bevin

You get the gist, Bevin, I know you do. You even admitted to me that capitalism and ecology are totally incompatible. I even offered to go through the GND with you months ago: when I said that Labour’s GND is humanities suicide pact with green corporate finance. I don’t know how close you live to Calgary: but you agree with me that the tar sands and shale plays in North America are a flash in the pan. Tar is kerogen that needs boiling and purifying: by which time – when it goes to market – it is being sold at below the cost of production. Which is why production is slowing and the rig count keeps falling; and debt delinquencies and bankruptcies keep rising.

And yet you still tacitly back the magical unrealism of the GND: judging by the resounding socialist call to arms you indulge in. You said it was beneath me to reveal who and what is behind Labour’s GND: every major capitalist on the planet. I’m still laughing at the really sick joke they have played by replacing Michael Bloomberg with Mark Carney as climate ambassador: designing the finance of the GGND no doubt? If you do get what this is really about: I don’t suppose you will admit it?

They are taking the piss out of us: and by and large, we are falling for it. The GGND has nothing to do with socialism: it is a capitalist reproduction mechanism to avoid the repercussions of rising populism. Which I have tried to liken to a Polanyian ‘double movement’. Globalisation is trying to protect its core ethic by feigning a socialist inclusivity compact: under the guise of de-globalisation and science fiction ‘net zero’ targets. This is most clear if you read Cory’s work or visit the WEF website. Klaus Schwab has been telegraphing this for years. It’s called ‘globalisation 4.0’ (trade in services; the fourth industrial revolution (4IR)); ‘stakeholder capitalism’ …or sick ironies of sick ironies – ‘conscious capitalism’. Which relies on CSR = corporate self responsibility. That it is the same old capitalism/neoliberalism with a greenwash makeover seems to have fooled most …especially Labour’s ‘green industrial revolutionaries’.

I think you know exactly what I am saying is true. You have been had. The green gilt imperialism and e-tech extractivism is ecogenocide. The ‘socialism’ is a lie: because it is contingent on the economy doing well in raping the planet and murdering any indigenous comrades who get in the way of technocratic progress. But it is not too late to rethink this.

I know you and Phillip find me ‘disconcerting’: is that because you secretly agree with me? If we want true internationalism and solidarity with all the oppressed – indigenous, human, and non-human – then a green finance capitalism designed ‘just transition’ is not the way forward. Because we all share the same bottom line: true international solidarity and (eco)socialism for all. But there is no Faustian bargain with finance capital solution: or Parliamentary route to this end. Phillip rightly revived the Marxist term ‘Parliamentary cretinism’ to aptly describe support for any political party (before throwing in his lot with Labour).

Neither of you are ‘cretins’: and I would not even suggest you are. You both highly intelligent: but you cannot see through the GND …it’s eco-suicide. If, for arguments sake, Labour gets in – and tries to deploy renewables at a rate to replicate current energy demands …we will quickly outstrip known reserves of many key minerals (indium and gallium being two that are on the ‘critical list’). Even LabourGND admit to this. By trying to reproduce our current industrial civilisation: we curtail the real ‘just transition’ – via the Great Simplification – to a truly sustainable future. We need those minerals to last for generations: not half a decade. Surely you must see this makes sense? If we want a future: we are going to have to be brutally honest and take responsibility upon ourselves to demand rapid degrowth. Renewables only make sense at small, appropriate, and localised human scales of living. Where microgrids can supply 90% of our energy needs for generations: if we commit to conserve and not industrialise usage.

With localised neo-sufficiency and fair international trade – we can have all the socialism we want. In fact, we can have nothing but socialism: because the military security state is total wasted energy: and unnecessary and evil extravagances – such as NATO and Trident – will be no more. They will be naturally superannuated as the energy (exergy) they use will be better allocated to education and healthcare. These are the sort of choices that are life-coherent. They are not ecosocialist idealism: they are survivability realism. Do we really want to squander centuries worth of e-tech mineral resources on EV fetishism and burgeoning militarism (such as the EU Defence Union) – to maintain the hyper-individualist pseudo-freedom of transport – when we could have socialist education, welfare, and healthcare for the same – or lesser – energetic cost?

Much of socialism – the actual socialisation aspects of communities of mutual aid – is unbound, unlimited and free. As will be the human spirit: unyoked from the ruling capitalist value-ethics and means and relations of production. The bindings and limitations are adherence to the ruling value syntax of the exponential extractivist and expansionist ‘money multiplier cancer.’ The value-ethics of choosing life are not totally free: but they are so much cheaper all round as to be sustainable. If we act now to conserve resources.

The bottom line is trans-generational eco-socialism – “as if people mattered” [E F Schumacher] – or a decade or so of bourgeois bad faith pseudo-socialism and militarism …as contingent ‘stakeholder state capitalists’ under the aegis of greenwashed finance capitalism. Do you really want Mark Carney designing your future? With Tony Blair and Ursula von der Leyen designing your foreign policy? Because I think that is a sick joke.

The bottom bottom line is: if by some miracle a true socialist internationale were to develop …capitalism would crumble. We only oppress ourselves so long as we have no credible alternative. Their fear of populism is only matched by our fear of freedom: as the great educator Paulo Friere made clear. What are we waiting for? What are we afraid of? The future is ours for the taking …if and when we want it.

bevin
bevin
Dec 4, 2019 9:26 PM
Reply to  BigB

I have no interest in the Green New Deal except as a pleasant sign that a proper debate on the environment is likely to take place.
As to Polanyi, the essence of a double movement is popular revulsion against (neo) liberalism. That seems to me to be taking the form of populism, a movement with which I have great sympathy.
I’m unsure where you think I differ : I regard international trade/ division of labour as something that is going to need to be reduced to a mere trickle. If only to put an end to the plundering of tropical countries evident in every supermarket.
I’m all in favour, it follows, of self sufficiency and reversing industrialism, to the benefit of all. I am not one of those people who sees capitalism as progress or believe in the cod marxism of the stages theories.

As to this”The bottom line is trans-generational eco-socialism – “as if people mattered” [E F Schumacher] – or a decade or so of bourgeois bad faith pseudo-socialism and militarism …as contingent ‘stakeholder state capitalists’ under the aegis of greenwashed finance capitalism. Do you really want Mark Carney designing your future? With Tony Blair and Ursula von der Leyen designing your foreign policy? Because I think that is a sick joke.” where does the idea that I favour this come from.
The reality, which you refuse to face, so invested are you in sectarian anti-reformism, is that the form that the populist reaction against liberalism is taking in the UK is the Corbyn movement with which you refuse to any truck with.
The problem with populism and politics generally is that you have to start from where you are: there are half a million members in the Labour Party. There would be half a million more of all the people who post here chalking up the score against Corbyn (Does anyone seriously see him as a fan of Bill Browder?) which is extremely easy to do, given that he is the professional leader of a party in which Blairism/RamsayMac/Jimmy Thomas-ism still dominates the PLP. He is bound to compromise with the majority in order to put pressure on them to conform with the manifesto and policy from Conference.
The point is that one can either play silly buggers and self fulfilling prophesy by writing off a Labour victory in advance (on the idiotic ground that it is always wise to do so as the case of Harold Wilson demonstrates) or concentrate on the real question which is to stiffen the slowly consolidating forces for socialism in society and challenge the reformers to take the steps needed to implement the ultra obvious priorities of dealing with poverty, taking on capitalism by putting an end to its control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, nationalising the Bank and credit, putting an end to homelessness and the NHS auction (in which everything goes to the lowest bidder) etc etc.
Much of this in itself constitutes an environmental advance: public transportation, energy production and decent housing being key parts of ending the current open fire culture.
These things put the ball back in the court of the XR people and their friends in high places, challenging them to stop protesting and start dismantling capitalism because it is capitalism which is the problem. If they can get the directors of EXXon and the yacht owners of Newport to go along with that I don’t care.
The bottom line is that there will be no miracle to produce the international but it could easily emerge out of the current crises and popular reasoning, because there is no alternative. And I’m sure that even a 16 year old Swedish girl can see that.

This really is time to choose sides: to side with the “third way” “Corbyn’s not good enough to me. He is indistinguishable from Johnson just as Brown and Blair were” is to join the queue waiting for lefty/godot.
You don’t like the EU, nor do I, nor does any socialist. You don’t like the EU army? Who does, apart from the imperialists and those anxious to park sovereignty somewhere that the working class can’t touch it?
These views only make sense because there is, and it is healthy that there is, a groundswell of right wing traditionalist opinion beginning to realise that they have nowhere to go but to socialism, which, all their lives they’ve been taught is both evil and impractical. So they won’t take the final step and rally to the movements that they have always distrusted and feared. It is a familiar political moment: the petit bourgeoisie, sensing doom, are ready to break with everything including capitalism and imperialism but not with surrendering themselves to the working class, because the core of their identity as a class is not to be working class, not to be manual workers, to wear ties, treasure lace curtains and be respectable.
We all know what happened the last time: a lot of those people took to fascism rather than admit that their most treasured prejudices/beliefs were wrong.

wardropper
wardropper
Dec 31, 2019 3:46 PM
Reply to  BigB

I think I get the gist too, BigB. But we should stick to the gist. Life’s too short to read an encyclopedia every day.
To cut to the end – “The future is ours for the taking” – just show us how to start, and we’ll do the rest.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 4, 2019 11:56 AM
Reply to  bevin

See yas a Geordie then?

richard le sarc
richard le sarc
Dec 27, 2019 11:31 PM
Reply to  bevin

Brenda is clarity personified compared to McMurtry, although recent stuff I’ve seen from him is much easier to follow. Not that he is not absolutely correct in his observations, although I would not say that capitalism has entered a ‘cancer stage’, because it always was neoplastic. I’d prefer to say that it has entered its cachectic, end-stage, where the host withers away.

state sponsored
state sponsored
Dec 3, 2019 12:16 PM

“Healtcare Bondage”
The Americans want to dominate the food supply, by any mean possible to further entrench a tight grip on life on Earth.
But what a weird way to go about it, by marrying poison DNA to foods!
The Americans, not only placing entire populations into food supply bondage but also enforcing a Healtcare Bondage, as the more you eat the new stuff, the more you get sick.

state sponsored
state sponsored
Dec 3, 2019 12:08 PM

“Children form the most vulnerable part of the population as pesticides can adversely affect their development.”

Democratic society began in the Greek capital, Athens. And they used to get rid of weaker children. Only the strong allowed to survive. Right?
Today, let’s poison these kids, and brag, it is a practice to strengthen democracy. Don’t say, Big Pharma is reaping enormous profits from people’s illnesses.

iskratov
iskratov
Dec 3, 2019 7:15 PM

that was Sparta, not Athens. Sparta was not democratic, he practiced a sort of aristocratic communism among the nobles, while the rest of the population was submissive …

Rhys Jaggar
Rhys Jaggar
Dec 3, 2019 11:54 AM

It is very important when taking statistics in isolation not to immediately assign blame to something which correlates. The first rule of investigation must always be: ‘correlation is not causation until proven otherwise’.

So without saying Mr Todhunter and Rosemary Mason are wrong in what they say, I would ask them to expand their discussions to the following questions:

1. Is the increase in cataracts on an age-for-age basis or is it simply that people are living longer so more people actually live long enough to develop cataracts?

Cancer is a classic series of ailments where cases rose hugely due to people not dying of something else first.Epidemiology shows cancers is linked to the sixth or seventh power of age, so you can see why increasing life expectancy from 55 to 85 causes cancer to increase hugely…

So I want to see more cataracts in the 55-65 year age group rather than it solely being in the 70-80 year range before I start worrying about active harm rather than old banger syndrome….

2. There are all kinds of reasons why people living in cities might develop illnesses.

The first is stress, which causes immune system weakening, which any educated person knows is a general feature predisposing humans to get ill. Everybody knows that employers are more heartless nowadays, employees more financially vulnerable, societal decency descending by the decade. All the conditions predisposing to increases in stress are there for all to see.

Another major change is increased use of ICT devices, which exposes eyes to EMR and heat. I am not saying ICT devices cause disease, I am merely highlighting another mass change in behaviour over the past 50 years.

A third is unhealthy diets/obesity/lack of exercise which is all linked into weakened immune function not to mention vitamin/mineral insufficiency. I am not saying processed food causes these diseases, I am saying huge changes in eating patterns have occurred the past 50 years.

How many things in diets can have adverse effects on opthalmic health?

3. Another possible reason for increasing cases is lack of regular eye checks failing to pick up early warning indicators so full blown disease is the initial presentation.

I am not saying this is true, I am saying please examine data the past fifty years to ensure it can be ruled out.

Why? Because regular eye checks is about as simple a remedial action as any government could possibly take.

4. Let us be clear, the correlation with MMR vaccinations and global warming is just as strong.

I am not saying either are causative, but perhaps Mr Todhunter would like to look up effects of mercury and/or aluminium on eye health?

I am not opposed to Mr Todhunter raising genuine concerns about Roundup, what I do not want to see is a repeat of Russophobia, where all the worlds ills are placed at that he-devil Vladimir Putin’s door….

state sponsored
state sponsored
Dec 3, 2019 12:30 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

More logic for entertainment:
5. Chemical compounds in Tobacco are very strong. So, smoking cigarettes must offer a great protection against the SARS virus (cigarette companies loves this logic)
6. Similarly, glyphosates are so efficient in destroying unwanted organism that they must be adopted as the chemicals of choice to destroy cancer cells (watch Bayer’s share prices skyrocketing)

iskratov
iskratov
Dec 3, 2019 7:18 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

”Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.”

state sponsored
state sponsored
Dec 3, 2019 9:14 PM
Reply to  iskratov

“Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.”

These are all ‘Performance Targets’ for Big Poison and Big Pharma.
Performance targets are the desired outcomes set in business activities planning.
A critical key milestone for success of these business activities has been achieved by getting governments around the world to give the stamp of approval to various poisons –including alcohol– for widespread use.
And in case someone missed it: these developments (spreading poisons at every opportunity) form fundemental pillars upon which today’s Western Civilisation stand –no ifs, no buts.

Brian Steere
Brian Steere
Dec 4, 2019 11:25 AM
Reply to  iskratov

In the circumstances, concrete proofs are hard to bring forth in a court of law or any scientific institution, when multibillion dollar interests hire lawyers to exploit any possible way of insinuating doubts – along with all the dirty tricks of the trade.
The precautionary principle should be ‘At least do no harm’ – but it works now as ‘At least do no harm to corporate profits’. For the capture of regulators, media and politicians (broad spectrum dominance), really works as the foxes running the hen house.

But independent science does give perfectly understandable vectors of cause and effect for glyphosate as a direct mechanism for the onset of what you list and a lot more. Stephanie Seneff being a key detective in this regard.

If it were just a gravy train of greed, the profiteers could be brought to transparency and account, but it is also about wielding power by deceit. Limiting the food supply is one of the vectors for population reduction – along with limiting medical provision and energy supply.
There are many devious ways to effect this.
Most of the rank and file are not aware of any such agenda – which is unthinkable and yet inescapable when looking at the evidence.

The best argument I have against extermination by industrial design is the ‘ I cant get out!’.
If it becomes known by industry insiders that they are culpable for disease and death on a large scale and they do NOT cease and desist because that would reveal they know what they did. then they SIN as the persisting of a knowing and actively destructive lie – that must then compound itself under cover of ever more lies – with NO WAY OUT but death.
Sustainability of a lie costs the Earth.
For what does it profit a man to gain a world of illusion if he denies his Soul Reason for existence?

This a form of addiction – driven and compulsive narrative identity overriding true relation as the attempt to fill or cover over a sense of lack AND cover its tracks in doing so.

Once relational being is denied – carbon units can be managed as data – being a more sophisticated version of the ‘extermination of scum’ or the ‘stamping out of vermin’.

“Dont look! Don’t see!” is built into a mind of judgement set over life.
It is also a self-destructive guarantee that the ability to persist under the spell of our own judge-mind is limited – because no matter how ingeniously our toxic debts are repackaged to support a sense of private possession and control – we have a finite tolerance for pain – which can be at any level of our experience – such as utter meaninglessness.

However a true dis-illusion opens for truth to reveal itself. The ingenuity of the mind is in seeming to change without actually allowing more than token change.

Another way of masking is to use predictive intelligence of what is unfolding as insider information by which to already shape a narrative of such a movement of being in the frame of a corporate capture – as in environmentalism.

Our true environment is the wholeness of relational being. The attempt to possess and control for a private wish at expense of a integrity makes for a doublethink. The ability to persist in self-contradiction and disregard it is the rendering ‘unconscious’ according to the active compartment of focus. The wish to be ‘as gods’ is a distortion of our creative expression in LIKE kind to the power of our creation. Alignment of thought word and deed is not a dominating will – but unified will. Making a god of our own judgement is the result of taking identity from it. What else can we think without release of identity investment to a willingness to listen to truth that reveals of itself – rather than a manufactured ‘reality-trap’.

Brian Steere
Brian Steere
Dec 4, 2019 12:17 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

The weakness of the article is pinning specific correlations as causal to one agency.
The strength of war by stealth and guile by humans upon others of their kind is in plausible deniability and ‘justifiable’ and ‘morally necessary’ interventions under a ‘self-protective’ emotional manipulation.

The scientific exploration of biology (or physics) is not primarily aligned with uncovering truth, but is funded and founded in a marketisation and weaponisation mentality that generally runs behind a cover story of ‘progress’ or ‘for the human good’ but increasing runs as the only priesthood and power by which to forfend impending disaster.

IE: when you have milked the dream to death and degradation, milk the nighmare.
That is what the Green Agenda does – and in the process contracts the ‘Economy’ or systemic
and manipulative coercion to sustain a core elitism of possession and control.

You may not relate to my way of expression but from reading you I know you have the capacity to recognise something of what I say.

My response to you is to recognise that ANY pet hatred operates the same agenda.
I call it a pet hatred because it is protected and sanctified by judgement that cannot be allowed to be called into question. (Hate, fear and guilt are interchangeable here).
Russiaphobia is a mainstreamed diversionary propaganda.Diversion can be as simple as a permission to vent hate and take temporary relief from a dump. Joining in hate forges a collective or self-reinforcing identity without any real joining what so ever.
Raising awareness of active and ongoing destruction has to counter the narrative identity under an unrecognised propaganda. For sure – if a movement seems to be gathering there are those who jump on the bandwagon for more alloyed motives than standing in an integrity of being, just because.

The competition between corporate networks of alliance uses the population – as a power base and as a resource to exploit for sustainability of such a power base. You do not see any of them breaking ranks from the idea and identity in possession and control set OVER others – even if some forms of control are collectivised substitution for life in moral virtue signalling under systemic social debit for ‘hateful’ thoughts – EXCEPTING always those that are mandated by loveless or hateful deceit.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Dec 4, 2019 3:54 PM
Reply to  Rhys Jaggar

So I want to see more cataracts in the 55-65 year age group rather than it solely being in the 70-80 year range before I start worrying about active harm rather than old banger syndrome….

More complicated than that:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/261561
+
Still doesn’t meet your requirement.
+
When I was in my early 70s a through opthalmic examination for a different problem showed, according to the opthalmologist, the ‘first signs’ of incipient cataracts. I was in my late 70s before I noticed any of the classic symptoms.
+
Doesn’t even begin to meet your requirement.
+
I don’t live in Wisconsin.
+
Really doesn’t meet your requirement.
_____________________________________________

Grand total = BigB’s oft-repeated point.

jay
jay
Dec 3, 2019 11:30 AM

Farmers spray with glyphosphate just prior to harvest as it helps dry out the crop.

Richard Steele
Richard Steele
Dec 3, 2019 7:06 PM
Reply to  jay

Yes- soybean plants, in particular, are frequently SOAKED with massive doses of glyphosate just prior to harvest.
E I see that here where I live…a verdant green field of soybeans will be sprayed, and by the following afternoon the entire field is the dark brown color of old pipe tobacco.
My gut instincts say, “Wow, that can’t be good- surely no one would want to eat that”. But those soybeans are harvested and mixed into SO MANY FOOD PRODUCTS.
Have we, as a species, gone mad?

jay
jay
Dec 3, 2019 8:47 PM
Reply to  Richard Steele

It started in Scotland, where there was a difficulty harvesting crops because of damp weather.

state sponsored
state sponsored
Dec 3, 2019 9:23 PM
Reply to  Richard Steele

Yes- soybean plants, in particular, are frequently SOAKED with massive doses of glyphosate just prior to harvest.
E I see that here where I live…a verdant green field of soybeans will be sprayed, and by the following afternoon the entire field is the dark brown color of old pipe tobacco.

And nothing about these posisons is mentioned in the ingredient list, why is that? One would think, the regulators in government has the population health at heart, wouldn’t you?!
Even if these posions are approved (and they are approved), why are they not mentioned in the ingredient list?

Brian Steere
Brian Steere
Dec 4, 2019 9:59 AM
Reply to  Richard Steele

The madness is not new, it has merely escaped the checks and balances – to now be setting the global agenda.
Deceit passing as truth, as science, as progress, as self-inflations or convenient untruths by which to run ahead of debts and use the leverage to deny the debt and dump it on others.

Brian Steere
Brian Steere
Dec 4, 2019 10:05 AM
Reply to  jay

In some places more than others – it kills the crop which puts all its energy into going to seed – which as convenient and profitable for bring all to harvest. Dead is desiccated – yes.
Farmers are told that

  • vaccines
  • pesticides are perfectly safe – and so they don’t have to worry because billion dollar science has reassured them as well as providing a service for more profit on less input.

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 3, 2019 10:21 AM

    The usual ‘cover story’ for industrial human biocide is some vector of infectious disease.
    There is a linkage here because under exposures to toxicity – what we call sickness is the mobilised as the body’s detoxing defence. But human thinking attacks the messenger – or the symptom as if the cause.

    Bolstering and strengthening immunity as wholeness of being, is usurped by the attack and undermining of natural immunity by a corporately managed ‘immunity’. The protection racket of a split mind that works the threat and the protection as two facets of on thing. The healthcare that induces and manages disease as a business model while normalising it as the natural and protected freedom to ‘identity’ in managed ‘cover story’ that is itself marketised and weaponised against ‘threat’ to an overriding ‘control’ mentality.

    In the same way the conditions of the soil and methods of agriculture, substitute a brute force growth control that depletes and kills the soil that is the matrix of life of which the plant is an expression. Biocides are protecting profits and the possession of revenue streams while outsourcing pain and degradation of life to the living matrix of life that is not just our own support as food or nutrition, but the underlying ‘Mother’ of life invisible by which what seems to be an organism or life unto itself is in fact supported and maintained in core functions of cellular functional immunity, cognitive and signalling function, and digestive ability to process our foods and exposures to toxicity or conditions of extreme or ongoing imbalance.

    Germ theory – as the attribution of causative agency to external and invisible pathogens, is simply the restatement of belief in demons as a scientifically defined and therefore regulated and controlled agency of intervention. Pasteur – who courted power, fame and fortune within the scientific explorations of his day is said to have recanted his championing of its premise on his deathbed. For as Bechamp discovered, the terrain is the primary condition that gives rise to the biota. We have it backwards.

    The winning story in the history of Science is not the survival of the fittest so much as that which can be marketised and weaponised by the dominant ideas and trends of the day. We stand on the shoulders of giant mistakes. But what is simply true remains discoverable – as we are willing to recognise and release a false investment – along with all that we have built upon it.

    As biota and as beings of choice, we are degrading and undermining our terrain of living support, for the illusion of profit and its possessive control that renders us powerless in the face of underlying fear of loss.
    I hasten to stress NOT with carbon dioxide that greens the Earth and is life-giving.

    The primary vector of threat to Life on Earth is human deceit. Not human being. Human beings are not a ‘virus’ or demonic plague upon the Earth – but the thinking that effectively operates parasitically by deceit.

    Merely ramping up ‘control’ of human thinking, under systemic suppression and denial of energy for cooperative and corporate endeavour, as the Global engineering of a top down ‘pharming’ of human bio-genetics to be manipulated, upgraded or replaced by robotic matrix of substitution for life – persists the deceit by limiting Consciousness to parameters of possession and control. Does it need saying that this is a willingness for a living death under density of great denial that does not actually LEAVE the Consciousness – but must be persistently covered over by devices of obfuscation and division as a great burden of ongoing sacrifice of Life to a private illusion of possession and control acted out.

    The unsustainability of illusions is their lack of foundation as the extension of the heart’s knowing.
    It is perfectly in order that a false sense of control generates chaos.
    The feedback is valid.
    But deceit is the mind of the willingness to persist in the false sense of control or its likewise illusory trap of its protection.
    The original error can be corrected, but the sin is the protection and persistence of the illusion by the denial and sacrifice of both a true account and of the living to the trading in deceit.
    Once we are profiting by genocide, how shall there be any way ‘out’?
    Excepting the undoing of the mind of deceit as our own ‘terrain’ or sustenance?

    Anyone who would deny the lives of others to make their own illusion ‘real’, must fear that the Others would turn on them if they were disclosed. This then becomes ‘War on Others’ and War on Life.
    A true elitism would bring an excellence of ability or performance into service of the whole.

    I could have written on the science – but science without relational reality can always be used to make diversion. We are Living Expression of relational reality – regardless the mind-trap of our own ‘thinking’.
    Aligning in a true acceptance of self and life is not in order to define, enslave and control it.

    Broad spectrum subjection is a valid result or feedback to look at and accept as a work in progress.
    If you find paralysis coming over you but for a ‘groupthink’ that feels nothing and knows nothing – cast out for the movement of your true willingness and give no acceptance to substitution of ‘thinking’.

    Beings of choice are not compelled unless of course they choose to believe so.
    Breaking or releasing the spell of addiction is really of restoring to true relation – not pulling in ‘reinforcement’ to protect against lack, conflict and feared or hated evils. Speak and live a true word requires noticing the word your are giving and living by so as to know what you do, rather than run on what you thought was true and find yourself delivered unto deceit.

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 4, 2019 9:54 AM
    Reply to  iskratov

    Truthout is purveying propaganda.
    Anyone with a capacity to WATCH the mind and NOTICE emotion can pick up the weaponised language immediately..
    When truth is made a weapon it is killed for the sake of a ‘holy war’ which in truth is war upon wholeness.
    I don’t tell anyone what to believe nor trick them into believing through fear and reaction.
    I hold that the biocide issue is a real and pervasive agency of destruction and degradation that is being masked over with lies – while the carbon dioxide extinction (sic) is a man made climate of fear – either in taking the bait and running under its narrative, or in recognising the power behind the campaign as too fearful to openly contradict, and then finally for both groups – of seeking personal profits as a result of aligning in the narrative.

    While the plan includes to cut back on corporate power – from a consolidation of such power over all the rest – it is more likely to inaugurate the first mass human extinction event in terms of the reduction of the population by design.
    It doesn’t take much to see that what a ‘psychopathic dissociation’ says it will protect against is a revealing of what it is actually and actively doing.
    It is very easy to identify AGAINST something that flags up in your own consciousness as hateful or fearful. This makes you very easily false-falggable – as a proxy for someone else’s agenda.
    But does that identify you truly? Or does it possess your mind by reaction while it is running as a way to not have to feel and know and in a sense own – your hate or fear?
    I say in a sense ‘own’, because no one can release or change what they are actively disowning in themselves. I am not interested in blame as a guilting of carbon units such as to dump it on others as a way to offset and thus persist in lawlessness of further toxic consequence – to further dump on the scapegoat.

    It is global top down capitalism taken to a new level – but I don’t use the term capitalism much because old terms take on ever more meanings and become meaningless ‘pejoratives’ of ‘who I or ‘we’ are identifying against.
    What are you FOR? – Wholeness of being? Joy in being? A just and honest accounting? Sharing in the truly worthy?

    How possible is it to think or speak in terms of what we love rather than what we hate?
    Death is inherent to life in form – because all is transient and changing – and yet whatever Life IS – grows a consciousness as well as a body and within that consciousness is a quality of an ability to choose to define or accept its own definitions.
    That which defines you perfectly is who you truly are.
    Which is a joy to recognise because unlike the mind-made world and its struggle – is a wholeness of being. And no, it cannot be marketised or weaponised or controlled or exploited.
    What you seek to DO
    will set the measure, or definition and identity of what you then perceive or receive.

    To sustain a false sense of self is needful to actively deny the true, under ‘justified’ narrative of attack or plausible deniability. If we recognised that that was in fact what we are doing, and that we can drop it now, we might open a perspective from which to undo the Psyop of the human psycho-pathic dissociation. No one can undo what they are WANTING to see and attack OUTSIDE themselves. We are relational expressions of being and have no wholeness in fragmentation – regardless all the king’s horses and all the King’s men.

    Robbobbobin
    Robbobbobin
    Dec 5, 2019 4:19 AM
    Reply to  Brian Steere

    Germ theory – as the attribution of causative agency to external and invisible pathogens, is simply the restatement of belief in demons as a scientifically defined and therefore regulated and controlled agency of intervention. Pasteur – who courted power, fame and fortune within the scientific explorations of his day is said to have recanted his championing of its premise on his deathbed. For as Bechamp discovered, the terrain is the primary condition that gives rise to the biota. We have it backwards.

    Maybe (maybe, perchance, perhaps, possibly, conceivably, some mileages may varyably…)

    is said“? Not nearly good enough. Susan Dorey gets it very much gooder:

    Until an assistant confirmed for me that Delhoume’s book does not contain the recant, I was willing to believe that Bird’s reputation as a meticulous researcher and documenter would have to suffice as proof that Pasteur really did recant his germ theory. I no longer believe that. At this point, 2014, I have found no evidence that the recant was real.

    Susan Dorey

    It’s called “research” and “evidence”.

    I invite you to what if. What if neither Béchamp, with his microzymes, nor Pasteur, with his germs, were anything but two reductionist priests, peas in a pod within an overarching reductionist falsehood, regardless of whether one was a self-effacing devotee of science and the other a lying academic crook? Would that reveal your ultimate revelation “we have it backwards” to be just another emotional assertion of a misunderstood, unintegrated, frilly nylon panties pulled right up tight half (or quarter or tenth…) “truth”?

    I have recently found a new use for a now-discarded pseudonym (recycle, waste not, recycle, want not). It goes: “don’t be just another flaxgirl.”

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 5, 2019 5:57 PM
    Reply to  Robbobbobin

    I made clear that the recant was anecdotal and I don’t have any investment as to whether it is true or not. Devotion to principle has merit that achieves consistent results where devotion to fame and fortune will select the results that serve the purpose. If Bechamp was limited in his cultural outlook – do you score in judgement over him for not suffering your own? However the early ideal of science had a democratic impulse in serving both one’s nation and mankind, rather than bending or holding secret for private agenda.

    The principles involved in the science that became ‘the germ theory’ were a choice between two options:
    1. Personal independent creative agency – taken AS IF mind apart and set over life – but which then meets limitations, oppositions, adversities and conflicts with enemies to be denied, eradicated, held in check or managed.
    or
    2. Balanced awareness and alignment within the Creative and its Expression.

    As a result of choosing 1., we are now effectively sickened and pharmed for profit under a sickness-management system. This expands to ‘carbon guilt’, and any selected behaviours that fall into corporately regulated parameters and algorithms of ‘sickness’ because the ‘HUMAN IS THE VIRUS!’ now, and self denial and self degradation must be willingly taken, accepted, complied with and conformed to.

    The use of AS IF is our creative imagination – and in service of life is co-creatively aligned with the Heart’s knowing. (If you take that as emotional reactivity you will understand nothing I say whatever words I use).
    But in its use to introduce and interject doubt and division of conflict in the heart’s decision is the overriding of the mind that effects the ‘psycho-pathy’ we say we deplore today and yet are participant in behind our own identifications in ‘what if’.

    The revelation is not the error, but that your error is without true foundation.
    So in terms of this pose 1. can be the framework of our life, struggle and death, but only as an overlay upon 2.

    However merely saying that option 1. is self-illusion as if that changes anything is not addressing the invested identification in illusion that is protected and defended as Self.

    The basic ‘backwards’ or evil that I see is of assigning Cause to effects.
    One way I see this occur is in trauma of conflict where the feared and the hated is so overwhelming as to evoke recoil into contraction and denial, that then WANTS to see the cause OUTSIDE and AWAY from itself, so as to mitigate a fear of self-pain or self-conflict that can otherwise literally induce accepting death as release.
    The choice for partial sacrifice as appeasement, easement or price by which to ‘survive’ or escape total loss or total chaos is the underlying world of ‘who pays’, or power struggle over a scarcity of chairs every time the music stops.

    Your comment read as a personal smear and unworthy of you.
    But in so far as you offer a possibility of any real question or point to engage with – I have.

    You are free to use your mind as you choose – but you are not free to escape the consequences of your choosing. that a mind can ‘run ahead of its debts’ is to self-inflate before recognising its fallen lot. I don’t focus on persons in the realm of sharing ideas and perspectives but I have seen worthy comments from you. What is worth if it has to deride and invalidate another so as to seem to have any?
    We extend the worth we accept for ourselves – and we find it in ourselves by extending to others. A fool is a being of choice who is thinking and acting foolishly. The being of choice remains worthy even if the fool seems to have taken possession.

    Robbobbobin
    Robbobbobin
    Dec 9, 2019 1:09 AM
    Reply to  Brian Steere

    Your comment read as a personal smear and unworthy of you.

    My comment is absolutely worthy of me, as are all comments I make, on and offline. If some of them make me look like shit and others give me the appearance of a saint, that’s how it is: ‘look like’ and ‘appearance’ with–when they are not one a few genuine accidents of semantics or the many temporal ambiguities of low-bandwidth, asynchronous serial communication such as this–at least some correspondence to actuality. Like most human beings–all that I’ve ever met, in fact–worthinesswise I’m like a shit that’s been dipped in saint-coloured paint.

    Robbobbobin
    Robbobbobin
    Dec 9, 2019 1:12 AM
    Reply to  Robbobbobin

    For “…not one a few genuine accidents of semantics…” read “…not one of a few genuine accidents of semantics…”

    Robbobbobin
    Robbobbobin
    Dec 9, 2019 2:36 AM
    Reply to  Robbobbobin

    We have it backwards.

    Oh yes, and: I thought I “made clear”–to use your phrase–that that looks suspiciously like half-arsed, divine, fence-positioning bullshit dressed up as ontological profundity. Ontology, noun, 99% waffle on 0.99% obscurantism. “Being” will not be described, analyzed or classified. Even the cat knows that. Other than that, that was point where I hit the reply button. After that my mind glazed over, so I hit the next button (tl;dr).

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 9, 2019 9:30 AM
    Reply to  Robbobbobin

    You can indeed hold a negative appreciation for yourself and thus extend it to others. But the self that YOU make for yourself (and others) is then the choice that you are actively accepting in place of the freedom that you are created to be – and so simply Are.

    As you say that you know being cannot be described – excepting as ‘beingnesses’ or attributes assigned, flagged or attributed to being, you know that all that you give it is the measure of your receipt, and not the result of false flagged assertions that DO the very thing they present to defend against.

    The Golden Rule rests on self-honesty – for otherwise, if you believe you are a shit and deserve shit you will treat others as as the shit you believe yourself to be.
    As you are claiming to know – honesty is hateful and proud of it.

    To put the lie before the truth is backwards.
    Hatred of life is bio-cidal.
    It is also that which projected to others and relished there can be attacked as a source of ‘moral legitimisation’. In other words you can get or make a self in ‘opposition’ to evil and think to get your OWN back.
    But you are then receiving self definitions from such a mind framing instead of from the formless movement of your being – which is wholly worthy – being without conflict and therefore untarnished by the mind of conflict.

    If you do not want to understand or stand under being, then perhaps you want the mind of conflict. While you have elected yourself by your example – it can serve for all of us. The clutching to the heart of a grievance as a treasure of what we wanted but feel denied in, rejected from or betrayed in.

    Hard hearts must be running Bayer/Monsanto et al’s program of food control, and therefore of population control. Any felt connection must be threat or weakness to their god of possession and control – and therefore must be attacked as bullshit or heresy.

    What is felt connection?
    Release the mind of possession and control and know the movement of being as that which identifies you truly.
    Giving and receiving as one.

    You do not engage with any point raised but only make smear and attack the person so as to say ‘Nothing to see here! Don’t look here!’

    I do not demand or seek to coerce your attention and yet you enter into the field of relation by choosing to engage with me. For regardless of whatever you think – I am here and I am with you in felt connection – and you chose to answer the knock on your door?

    My sense of re-education in a revelation of lies – is to be aware of my own emotional reactions and own them rather than dumping by reaction and setting myself in such terms of identification.

    The substitution for connection with grievance is the stamping of a past made in anger upon the presence that would otherwise expand a future from wholeness of being. I am no stranger to the experience of hate, fear or grievance – but I no longer choose to recycle it as guilt demanding attack.

    And when I notice that I have inadvertently done so – I see I am attacking myself in a split of a would-be victor AND as victim denied release. Both as a timeshare of the same split and shifting mind.

    Jim Porter
    Jim Porter
    Dec 3, 2019 9:31 AM

    So, we are killing the bees, cutting down trees and poisoning the plants. Not enough, make sure everyone has a lingering painful death as well. I give up.

    state sponsored
    state sponsored
    Dec 3, 2019 12:39 PM
    Reply to  Jim Porter

    “we are killing the bees, cutting down trees and poisoning the plants. Not enough, make sure everyone has a lingering painful death as well”
    Surely, this is a small price for something, some Exceptional American strategists want to achieve.

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 9, 2019 10:27 AM
    Reply to  Jim Porter

    The degradation of our own cognitive function, digestive function and immune response or vital function is masked over as multi-factorial – which allows anything to be posited as a scapegoat and cast our or made sacrifice of, while persisting in the sin.
    Self-hatred or hate of Life is a mind made insane BY hatred or blame and attack.

    The whole notion of possession and control can also be seen as the insulation from a dispossessing ‘blame and attack’ – therefore to seek to monopolise such ‘power’ is to align in it AS power.

    Perhaps the understandings that arise in the process of killing Life uncover not only the killer but the Life. Nature as ‘Holy Victim’ is inherent to the self-hating environmentalism that the likes of Monsanto et al propagate as part of farming human minds.

    Thus they ‘outsource’ their biocidal intent to the population at large. That is how it ‘works’
    It is a kind of mind-magic of inducing or framing others to choose to take on toxic consequence as their invested identity.

    It was revealed in the Banking system fraud – but applies across the board as ‘broad spectrum subjection’.

    Now we are being induced to sacrifice everything for the sustainability of a systemic control mind that deems itself too big to fail or perhaps more accurately to defended to allow to be open to question. It is a narrative lockdown for the sake of the ‘survival’ of a technologically extended and supported elite control.

    The replacement of God Living All Things Now – with a split level pandemonium operates
    ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men remaking Humpty in their own image.

    All things align to the active desire – not to the presented mask of assertions and beliefs.
    Vengeance on Life is winding up its moment of satisfaction – but as anyone can see who engages in fantasy, its enacting upon the body is only a passing moment to be repeated over and over in a hollowing and degrading that can NEVER get enough! Not because it is being denied – but because it is acting out a denial of Life as a sense of LACK given power.

    Life and its Source are thus made a fleeting moment in the frame of death.
    We can see and experience this way – but do we WANT it to be true?
    While want the fantasy in the picture we get the frame.

    I don’t see the fruit of the tree of Judgement of good and evil as being ‘Forbidden’ but warned against as a mind-trap or self-deceit.

    Narcissus’ self-reflecting thought is his own fantasy of self image – that then casts out all felt or relational connection as an interference or violation to such a ‘perfection’. Life and others then fails to meet or support the fantasy ideal and so is hated, suppressed, denied, and replaced.

    The ideal of progress is enacting a hatred of past made in a present anger, masked in rational justification.
    The idea of Life as Creation of the expansion and development of an integrative Consciousness has not gone away – but is being used as fuel for a ‘backwards’ agenda set in the frame of fear fuelled ‘survival’ against all odds.

    Is it possible to give up the framing in fear rather than on Life?
    Do we co-fuse fear of death and its clinging to life as the only life we have?
    Is awareness OF the ‘mind-trap’ part of the opening of a fresh and present perspective?
    Is there a point of reference within us that is not IN the deceit?
    In other words is there truth or self-honesty as transparency to Self-Awareness?

    Frank Speaker
    Frank Speaker
    Dec 3, 2019 7:07 AM

    Excellent article. The analogy with the tobacco industry is spot on.

    Nothing will change though, there’s too many vested interests and vast sums if money tied up in this industry and agribusiness.

    Fortunately individuals do have the possibility to reduce their exposure to these poisons by purchasing organic foods. Sure, there will be some product substitution/ fraud in that supply chain, but it’s still way better than doing nothing.

    Brian Steere
    Brian Steere
    Dec 3, 2019 11:47 AM
    Reply to  Frank Speaker

    Tobacco crops are drenched in pesticides and chemical additives. Tobacco is the ‘scientifically correct’ scapegoat for the moral crusader who has thus opened the way to assign anything else to such parameters and engineer society accordingly.
    Howbeit we are deceived.

    Some people have some degree of freedom to reduce some of their exposure to some of the toxicities applied by negligence and disregard at best or by design at worst.

    Fraud is already pervasive in the food supply – you do not necessarily know what you are taking in or sharing out. Profit before principle normalises unprincipled or lawless behaviours.

    To say nothing will change is perhaps a symptom that you also have too many vested interests in presuming to persist in business as usual to actually open a willingness for positive or integrative change in your own life. ‘Better the devil we know’? – or think we know. Everything will change – not just because the very nature of our experience is change – but because a lie costs the truth, and living a lie is only sustainable by capacity to pay the cost in sacrifice of truth or by ‘incentivising’ others to take the pain of outsourced or dumped toxic debts – as if protecting their own interests. An ‘Otherness’ here includes what we call our Biosphere.

    The survivalism of the alien will set OVER and APART from Life is the enacting imposition of a global control system. Perhaps within this are some who hold for the idea of global governance but from where is the Authority as to who and what is accepted lawful, worthy and true? A cabal of corporate elitists under financial supervision? To whom most of us are ‘pests’ – at least once we have no vector of use as an asset.

    Change is guaranteed and therefore the only promise the politicians can fulfil – because nothing is going to stay the same and has already changed in ways that are past the tipping point – which again – has only to do with a Climate of fear – not carbon dioxide.
    Where you choose to be – or accept yourself – in change is your decision alone. Yet having made it you have your result in the world you see and share in.
    Can we Really share a world of pain OR under enforced correctness of its redistribution under a top down ‘equality’ dictate enforcement.

    To look and to see the desecration of our own hearts is only to recognise what we are NOT.
    You do not need a ‘process of release’ for what is not true. Only to value truth and yourself enough to no longer run the habit of an old pattern, by choosing something alive instead.

    In this sense the fear-driven ‘DOING SOMETHING NOW! is the reactive trap of an old recycle of fear and guilt. But recognising you CAN do nothing OF yourself alone, as the freedom to stop re-acting as a ‘self alone’ and listen or feel for the movement of being in which you are restored to tangible and recognisable connection.

    The idea that we have to combine AGAINST a perceived evil is the subordination of truth to war. Truth is not at war with lies – but both have a voice in our mind and we are conflicted until we choose one and let the other go. To want to have it both ways is simply to make an illusion of truth and set it against a lie and then persist in slavery to illusion under belief you are ‘free’.

    When we catch our mind in a mistaken identity that suddenly releases a false sense of world we may laugh in the release and its moment of reflection. But when we think to see the error in others and laugh at them as if we are better, we are blind to the reflection of our own.

    Nothing changes when shapeshifting is used to mask over a sense of self-specialness running as justified ‘defence’ or plausible deniability. But if the game is no longer felt worthy of the candle – and more and more light is withdrawn from its support. how shall you persist in isolation made obvious?