What do you get when you combine digital surveillance and human gene hacking with super computers that can comb through all the data with artificial intelligence?
The power to hack the human race.
This is the course the National Institutes of Health will be charting if President Biden can get Congress to fund his proposed ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
Although the media are finally waking up to the real lab origins of COVID-19, there has been very little coverage of the fact that “Gain-of-Function” (GOF) research, even after the Wuhan lab leak, is continuing
People who are dismissing the possibility that the pandemic might have come from a lab -- either accidentally from a Wuhan lab or them being effectively framed, as we saw with the 2001 anthrax attacks -- are basically risking the future of humanity because they don't want to have an uncomfortable discussion.
On Feb. 11, I asked Anne Schuchat, the CDC's Principal Deputy Director, at the National Press Club if it were a "complete coincidence" that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus happened in Wuhan, a center of China's declared biowarfare/biodefence capacity. I didn't get a satisfactory answer. In fact, at the end it was remarkably evasive. She wouldn't answer my followup question about whether the claimed "zoonotic origin" precluded the outbreak from being caused pathogens from nature that then could be accidentally leaked from the labs.
A new study calling for a “radical rethink” of the relationship between policymakers and corporations reinforces what Organic Consumers Association and other public interest groups have been saying for years: Our triple global crises of deteriorating public health, world hunger and global warming share common root causes—and that the best way to address these crises is to address what they all have in common: an unhealthy, inequitable food system perpetuated by a political and economic system largely driven by corporate profit.
Editor's Note: On February 7, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Green New Deal Resolution. You can read it here. Please ask your members of Congress to support this resolution by clicking here.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) fully endorses the Green New Deal (GND) as the most promising policy-level vehicle for achieving the large-scale transition to an organic, regenerative
food and farming system, while at the same time cleaning up the environment, advancing social justice, restoring urban and rural food and economic security, and restabilizing the climate.
The Green New Deal (GND) sets an ambitious goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2030-2050, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. This is achievable only if the GND includes programs and policies that will rapidly scale up both the transition to renewable energy alternatives (in order to reduce/eliminate future emissions) and the transition to organic regenerative agriculture and land-use and land-restoration practices (in order to draw down and sequester carbon already in the atmosphere).
To achieve these large-scale transitions will require the public support and political will to confront the corporate dominance of our democracy, perpetuated by lawmakers who take campaign donations from the fossil fuel and industrial agribusiness industries.
Absent the necessary political will, we must build a massive, broad-based social movement if we hope to see the promise of the GND fulfilled. This movement must ensure that embedded within the GND’s final plan is a slate of programs and policies that recognize that the solution to global warming must also include programs and policies that will scale up regenerative farming and land use as a means of drawing down and naturally sequestering carbon in healthy soils.
We live in a world where toxic chemicals that haven’t been tested for safety are lurking everywhere, including in our food, drinking water, personal care products, household cleaners, furniture, clothing, children’s toys and many other items. Chronic exposure to these chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs),is making us sick in ways we don’t yet fully understand, says green living expert and Mamavation.com founder Leah Segedie in her new book, “Green Enough: Eat Better, Live Cleaner, Be Happier.”
Whether it’s the animal waste and antibiotics from livestock operations, or the nitrates and pesticides from GMO corn and soy grown to feed the millions of confined animals, from sea to shining sea, industrial agribusiness, led by multi-billion dollar corporations like Tyson, is destroying our most precious natural resource—water.
State and federal regulators by and large use their power to protect corporate profits, not public health.
That leaves citizens to battle it out in the courts. But now some members of Congress want to eliminate even that last resort.
What can you do? To help speed the transition to an agriculture model that heals our waterways, rather than exploit and pollute them?
Welcome to Degeneration Nation 2018.
The frightening truth is that our “profit-at-any-cost” economy and global empire, run by and for the one percent and multi-national corporations, aided and abetted by an out-of-control Congress and White House, is threatening our very survival.
Our system of democracy, global co-existence, our physical and mental health, and the health of the living Earth—our climate, soils, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and oceans—is rapidly degenerating. The rhythms of nature—the atmosphere, the soil carbon cycle, the water cycle and the climate—are unraveling.
Will global civil society wake up in time, break down the walls and issue silos that divide us, connect the dots between all of our burning issues, and unite across borders in a common global campaign for survival and regeneration?
Last week the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) rejected the pleas of organic activists, farmers and many businesses to “keep the soil in organic” by voting to allow growers of hydroponic vegetables to label their produce “organic.”
The NOSB's vote did little to shore up consumer faith in the USDA Organic label, especially after well-publicized news reports earlier this year that accused a few high-profile organic brands of giving "organic" a bad name by skirting the rules. And it had some industry pioneers so angry and disheartened, that according to the Washington Post they were even “threatening to leave the program they helped create.”
The Organic Consumers Association supported the “Keep the Soil in Organic” campaign. We’re disappointed in the NOSB’s decision, another sign of Big Organic’s (negative) influence over organic standards.
But rather than mourn the demise of organic standards, or fruitlessly complain about how the USDA Organic label is being undermined by corrupt corporations, we’ve joined the growing number of organic advocates, both in the U.S. and abroad, who understand that the future of organic—and labels—is regenerative.
The most important thing we can do today as conscious consumers, farmers and food workers is to move away from industrial, GMO and factory-farm food toward an organic, pasture-based, soil-regenerative, humane, carbon-sequestering and climate-friendly agriculture system.
What’s standing in the way of this life-or-death transformation? Rampant greenwashing.
Perhaps no company personifies greenwashing more than Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s. Ben & Jerry’s history—a start-up launched by two affable hippies, from a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt., —is legendary. Despite selling out to Unilever in April 2000, the brand’s handlers have preserved its quirky, homespun image, and masterfully convinced consumers that Ben & Jerry’s has never strayed from its mission: “to make the world a better place.”
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) recently sent samples of Ben and Jerry’s top-selling ice cream brands to an independent testing lab for analysis. Ten out of 11 samples tested positive for Roundup (glyphosate and AMPA) herbicide contamination
So much for making the world a better place.