Here’s a fun quicky that might help you understand why it’s worthless to talk politics with people who don’t see your point of view.  A university study determined it’s in the reflexes…

For years now I have really felt that the most important issues we have to face are those that affect our food supply.  There is so much ugly stuff going on thanks to ConAgra and the incomprehensible shortcomings of the USDA, CDC, and FDA, that I donate most of my charity money to groups like the Organic Consumers Association and now this time to the Humane Society.  What is horrible about this story is what these animals go through, but what is terrifying are the measures ConAgra biz will go to get as much of this stuff on our plates as possible.

I’m not posting this to encourage you to donate, but rather to give you a heads up on what is possibly a win for us on the California front which can hopefully influence the rest of our country’s farm animal legislation.  But by all means if you are moved to donate please join me!!!!

Remember knowledge is only as powerful as the actions you choose to take with it.

PS here is a link if you’d like to read the proposition 2 in discussion…
http://yesonprop2.com/

September 19, 2008

Dear Sue,

They treat animals like units of production. They overcrowd them and put our food supply at risk. They pollute the land and water.

“They” are Big Agribusiness, and they have raised and allocated $10 million to defeat a landmark initiative in California that would ease the suffering of millions of animals now confined in tiny crates on factory farms and suffering terribly. It’s called Proposition 2, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called it “the most important election you’ve never heard of.” Indeed, because California is a trendsetter, this election has the potential to establish a better future for farm animals across the U.S.

Because of that, Big Agribusiness is investing millions in deceptive and false ads to disparage Prop 2.

The only thing that can stop them is you and me. We can match them ad for ad and tell our story to the people of California.

That’s why I am urging you to make a special gift today to the YES! on Prop 2 campaign.

If not you and me, then who will stand up to Big Agribusiness?

Just who are these underhanded foes of animals, who on a single day donated nearly $5 million to defeat Proposition 2? They’re Pilgrim’s Pride, chipping in $25,000, where a whistle-blower employee videotaped chickens being stomped and thrown against the wall. They are the United Egg Producers, adding $185,000 to the opposition’s pot, fined to settle false advertising complaints. They are Moark LLC, donating more than $504,000 against Prop 2, which paid $100,000 to settle criminal animal cruelty charges. They are Cal-Maine Foods, leading the pack with nearly $600,000 in campaign contributions, cited for spilling chicken parts and manure into waterways and killing tens of thousands of fish. The list goes on…

These are not the kind of farms we read about to our kids before bedtime. This line-up is straight off the crime blotter. Cruelty to animals. Threatening the safety of the food supply. Despoiling the environment. And deceiving consumers.

We need to raise $1 million by the end of the month as part of our offensive to counter their deception and dirty campaign tactics. Please make an emergency gift right now to put television ads on the air to challenge every one of their claims. If just 5 percent of you who read this message make a gift of $20 — a symbolic amount to reduce the suffering of 20 million farm animals — we’d reach our $1 million goal today.

Without your help, we will not be able to counter the deceptive claims of an industry that insists on cramming animals into insufferably small cages and crates — to increase density, and thus profits.

The claims made by these companies reveal them for the shameless hucksters they are. Here is their wildly false assertion about Prop 2 straight from their published propaganda:

Undermines animal welfare and food safety in California.

Ha! Remember what the California factory farmers were doing recently for “animal welfare” and “food safety”? They were patting themselves on the back and accepting performance awards for providing healthy food to the National School Lunch Program. Then one of our undercover investigators went into a Southern California slaughter plant. He secretly filmed the torturing of animals — horrors like a fallen cow being smashed in the eyes with a blunt object and another downed cow with a water-hose shoved in her mouth to simulate drowning. He showed plant operators routinely risking the health of children to get these potentially ill “downer” cows on their feet so they could be herded into the processing line for the lunch program.

The industry tried to deny that any such things could happen. But videotape evidence exposed their deceptions and false assurances. The result? The largest meat recall in U.S. history.

The nation was horrified by the abuse of these cows, who were literally minutes away from being killed. If we are concerned about the downer cows — as we should be — then we must also be concerned about the animals suffering in cruel confinement day after day for months or years on factory farms. Here is this remarkable one-time chance to do something about their suffering.

For the sake of creatures who don’t have a voice in this watershed election, please join us in speaking out for them. Make your emergency donation to the YES! on Prop 2 campaign today.

Sincerely,

Wayne Pacelle
President & CEO
The Humane Society of the United States

I have been reading the Mayan Code by Barbara Hand Clow, and I must say it is a fascinating read. One of the most intriguing bits of information I have picked up so far is the mention of a woman who had begun mimicking the poses of some ancient statues and images to discover that she ended up falling into deep states of trance. I looked on the internet for more info on this phenomena and couldn’t find too much as of yet. But I did find an interesting article here.

Experiencing Archaic Crete’s
Sacred Trance Poses

Robinette Kennedy, PhD

In 1990, I read a fascinating article about yoga-like poses that people used during ancient rituals to go into trance.

At the time I read the article, a “developer” had begun illegally to bulldoze roads for a mobile home park next to the swampland in South Georgia where I had spent my summers as a child. My family had alerted various environmental agencies and filed several lawsuits, but the situation appeared hopeless.

When I read about trance poses that supposedly offered a method of receiving divine guidance, some friends and I gathered to follow the article’s instructions. While I was in the trance pose, I experienced a vision that clearly assured me that the swamp was going to remain intact. A few days later, in a series of miracles, the development was stopped, and a stranger bought the threatened land to preserve it.

A few weeks later, I flew to a workshop offered by the anthropologist profiled in the article. At the workshop, I was introduced to the visionary effects of five different trance postures. My life was forever changed.

Before I learned about trance poses, I had worked for a decade as a clinical anthropologist in private practice in Atlanta. Although blessed with rewarding, meaningful work, I felt something was missing. I was often frustrated that, according to the culture of the USA, the purpose of my work didn’t include intervening in how an individual’s values and lifestyle choices support the USA’s materialism, violence and ecological destruction. And, even if such a goal were appropriate, what approach could I offer my clients?

As I began regularly experiencing trance visions through these poses, I saw how my experiences were creating greater ecological and spiritual balance in my life.

Because the existence of trance poses was unknown in modern Western consciousness until the late 1970s, how they were rediscovered is all the more remarkable. The story begins shortly after the turn of the twentieth century when Felicitas Goodman was born into a German family living in Hungary—a country where the taltos (Hungarian shaman) was still part of everyday life.

When she was 18, Felicitas and her family left Hungary and returned to Germany. Just after World War II, Felicitas married and moved to the USA. Throughout her life, ancient spiritual traditions remained her primary interest, and in the late 1960’s, after thirty years as a medical translator, Felicitas entered a Ph.D. program in psychological anthropology.

As a graduate student fluent in 17 languages, Felicitas soon was working in Mexico on a landmark mental health project that focused on the various altered states of consciousness that are common in non-Western cultures.1

While attending Pentecostal church services in a Mexican village, Felicitas noticed that after the clapping and singing began in the church, the Mayans started making unusual sounds. As a linguist, she recognized that these vocalizations didn’t fit the definition of a culturally based “language.” She suspected that she was witnessing a biological phenomenon, an example of one of the altered states that her research team was hunting.

Eventually, Felicitas documented this altered state caused by listening to specific rhythms that awaken sensations in the brain. These sensations produce a mildly euphoric feeling as well as movements in the throat. The Ancient Greeks’ onomatopoetic word for this altered state of consciousness is glossalalia: which means tongue “lah-lah” or speaking in tongues.

By 1972, Felicitas had become an anthropology professor at Ohio’s Denison University. Her students, having grown up during the sixties, were eager to experience the “new” altered state of consciousness described in her recently published book about speaking in tongues.2 Thus began Felicitas’ search that led to the re-discovery of trance poses.

Summering near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Felicitas frequently attended local Pueblo Indian rituals where she noticed that rhythm played a key role in producing trance like states for the Indians, as it had for the Mayans during their religious experiences.

Felicitas—who was trained as a violinist—easily memorized the beat of the dancers’ gourd rattles, which she hoped to duplicate in her next trance experiments in Ohio. Felicitas spent the next four years rattling a gourd rattle as she had heard the Pueblo Indians do, trying to duplicate for student volunteers the Mayans’ method of entering a light trance state.

To read the entire article visit this link.

· By Jeffrey M. Smith
Comanche County Chronicle, Elgin, OK, September, 2008
Straight to the Source

from Institute for Responsible Technology, Spilling the Beans newsletter on GM Foods
by Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception

Before the Appleton Wisconsin high school replaced their cafeteria’s processed foods with wholesome, nutritious food, the school was described as out-of-control. There were weapons violations, student disruptions, and a cop on duty full-time. After the change in school meals, the students were calm, focused, and orderly. There were no more weapons violations, and no suicides, expulsions, dropouts, or drug violations. The new diet and improved behavior has lasted for seven years, and now other schools are changing their meal programs with similar results.

Years ago, a science class at Appleton found support for their new diet by conducting a cruel and unusual experiment with three mice. They fed them the junk food that kids in other high schools eat everyday. The mice freaked out. Their behavior was totally different than the three mice in the neighboring cage. The neighboring mice had good karma; they were fed nutritious whole foods and behaved like mice. They slept during the day inside their cardboard tube, played with each other, and acted very mouse-like.

The junk food mice, on the other hand, destroyed their cardboard tube, were no longer nocturnal, stopped playing with each other, fought often, and two mice eventually killed the third and ate it. After the three month experiment, the students rehabilitated the two surviving junk food mice with a diet of whole foods. After about three weeks, the mice came around.

Sister Luigi Frigo repeats this experiment every year in her second grade class in Cudahy, Wisconsin, but mercifully, for only four days. Even on the first day of junk food, the mice’s behavior “changes drastically.” They become lazy, antisocial, and nervous. And it still takes the mice about two to three weeks on unprocessed foods to return to normal. One year, the second graders tried to do the experiment again a few months later with the same mice, but this time the animals refused to eat the junk food.

Across the ocean in Holland, a student fed one group of mice genetically modified (GM) corn and soy, and another group the non-GM variety. The GM mice stopped playing with each other and withdrew into their own parts of the cage. When the student tried to pick them up, unlike their well-behaved neighbors, the GM mice scampered around in apparent fear and tried to climb the walls. One mouse in the GM group was found dead at the end of the experiment.

It’s interesting to note that the junk food fed to the mice in the Wisconsin experiments also contained genetically modified ingredients. And although the Appleton school lunch program did not specifically attempt to remove GM foods, it happened anyway. That’s because GM foods such as soy and corn and their derivatives are largely found in processed foods. So when the school switched to unprocessed alternatives, almost all ingredients derived from GM crops were taken out automatically.

Does this mean that GM foods negatively affect the behavior of humans or animals? It would certainly be irresponsible to say so on the basis of a single student mice experiment and the results at Appleton. On the other hand, it is equally irresponsible to say that it doesn’t.

We are just beginning to understand the influence of food on behavior. A study in Science in December 2002 concluded that “food molecules act like hormones, regulating body functioning and triggering cell division. The molecules can cause mental imbalances ranging from attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder to serious mental illness.” The problem is we do not know which food molecules have what effect.

The bigger problem is that the composition of GM foods can change radically without our knowledge. Genetically modified foods have genes inserted into their DNA. But genes are not Legos; they don’t just snap into place. Gene insertion creates unpredicted, irreversible changes. In one study, for example, a gene chip monitored the DNA before and after a single foreign gene was inserted. As much as 5 percent of the DNA’s genes changed the amount of protein they were producing. Not only is that huge in itself, but these changes can multiply through complex interactions down the line.

In spite of the potential for dramatic changes in the composition of GM foods, they are typically measured for only a small number of known nutrient levels. But even if we could identify all the changed compounds, at this point we wouldn’t know which might be responsible for the antisocial nature of mice or humans. Likewise, we are only beginning to identify the medicinal compounds in food. We now know, for example, that the pigment in blueberries may revive the brain’s neural communication system, and the antioxidant found in grape skins may fight cancer and reduce heart disease. But what about other valuable compounds we don’t know about that might change or disappear in GM varieties?

Consider GM soy. In July 1999, years after it was on the market, independent researchers published a study showing that it contains 12-14 percent less cancer-fighting phytoestrogens. What else has changed that we don’t know about? [Monsanto responded with its own study, which concluded that soy's phytoestrogen levels vary too much to even carry out a statistical analysis. They failed to disclose, however, that the laboratory that conducted Monsanto's experiment had been instructed to use an obsolete method to detect phytoestrogens results.]

In 1996, Monsanto published a paper in the Journal of Nutrition that concluded in the title, “The composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean seeds is equivalent to that of conventional soybeans.” The study only compared a small number of nutrients and a close look at their charts revealed significant differences in the fat, ash, and carbohydrate content. In addition, GM soy meal contained 27 percent more trypsin inhibitor, a well-known soy allergen. The study also used questionable methods. Nutrient comparisons are routinely conducted on plants grown in identical conditions so that variables such as weather and soil can be ruled out. Otherwise, differences in plant composition could be easily missed. In Monsanto’s study, soybeans were planted in widely varying climates and geography.

Although one of their trials was a side-by-side comparison between GM and non-GM soy, for some reason the results were left out of the paper altogether. Years later, a medical writer found the missing data in the archives of the Journal of Nutrition and made them public. No wonder the scientists left them out. The GM soy showed significantly lower levels of protein, a fatty acid, and phenylalanine, an essential amino acid. Also, toasted GM soy meal contained nearly twice the amount of a lectin that may block the body’s ability to assimilate other nutrients. Furthermore, the toasted GM soy contained as much as seven times the amount of trypsin inhibitor, indicating that the allergen may survive cooking more in the GM variety. (This might explain the 50 percent jump in soy allergies in the UK, just after GM soy was introduced.)

We don’t know all the changes that occur with genetic engineering, but certainly GM crops are not the same. Ask the animals. Eyewitness reports from all over North America describe how several types of animals, when given a choice, avoided eating GM food. These included cows, pigs, elk, deer, raccoons, squirrels, rats, and mice. In fact, the Dutch student mentioned above first determined that his mice had a two-to-one preference for non-GM before forcing half of them to eat only the engineered variety.

Differences in GM food will likely have a much larger impact on children. They are three to four times more susceptible to allergies. Also, they convert more of the food into body-building material. Altered nutrients or added toxins can result in developmental problems. For this reason, animal nutrition studies are typically conducted on young, developing animals. After the feeding trial, organs are weighed and often studied under magnification. If scientists used mature animals instead of young ones, even severe nutritional problems might not be detected. The Monsanto study used mature animals instead of young ones.

They also diluted their GM soy with non-GM protein 10- or 12 fold before feeding the animals. And they never weighed the organs or examined them under a microscope. The study, which is the only major animal feeding study on GM soy ever published, is dismissed by critics as rigged to avoid finding problems.

Unfortunately, there is a much bigger experiment going on one which we are all a part of. We’re being fed GM foods daily, without knowing the impact of these foods on our health, our behavior, or our children. Thousands of schools around the world, particularly in Europe, have decided not to let their kids be used as guinea pigs. They have banned GM foods.

The impact of changes in the composition of GM foods is only one of several reasons why these foods may be dangerous. Other reasons may be far worse (see http://www.seedsofdeception.com).

With the epidemic of obesity and diabetes and with the results in Appleton, parents and schools are waking up to the critical role that diet plays. When making changes in what kids eat, removing GM foods should be a priority.

For me one of the most important issues on the ballot right now is the environment.  In particular our food supply and the ease and accessibility of organic foods.  You can click the link below to see a rundown of the greener candidates in your state and how they fair on the issues.  This link takes you to the Illinois list, but to the left you can type in your state and get that list there.

http://www.grassrootsnetroots.org/states/IL.cfm#responses

Illinois

GNA has been working to identify outstanding progressive elected officials and candidates who deserve your support. Politicians are vetted using our survey on vital issues of justice, peace, democracy, health and sustainability.

Click here for survey results

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• EPA Buzz Kill: Is the Agency Hiding Colony Collapse Disorder Information?
  Natural Resources Defense Council, via Common Dreams, August 18, 2008
  Straight to the Source

Comments

Today, 01:37 PM

it made me giggle.

Not only this, but she is pushing so hard to open up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil, as well as suing the Department of U.S. Fish and Wildlife to take the polar bear off of the endangered species list. What?Her policies on the environment, civil rights, and women’s reproductive rights are something every male member of the Taliban would be happy to support if she wasn’t a woman.

This was in my latest iShift…

Is literature necessary? What is its evolutionary function?

Recent studies suggest that reading fiction enhances our social skills and capacities for empathy and personality change. After assessing how much fiction participants in one study routinely read, investigators Maja Djikic, Raymond Mar, and Keith Oatley, of the University of Toronto in Canada, asked them to take a “mind-in-the-eyes test,” which measures empathy and social acumen. Fiction readers showed substantially greater empathy and interpersonal perception in the test than non-fiction readers did. “I liken fiction to a simulation that runs on the software of our minds,” says investigative psychologist Keith Oatley. “Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories, and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.” See the Journal of Research in Personality 40.5 and the Creativity Research Journal 20.4. You’ll find the mind-in-the-eyes test here.

I’m mostly a nonfiction reader and I scored below average on this one. Hmmmmm.