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Friday, December 17

This is a birthday party for one of our beloved minions!

Mark Birtles Project [merely magnificent and glittery]
Fractal Pattern [quantum physics performed live]
Tin Foil Antenna [crackly and receptive]
Lime [greased lightning on a small stage]

Doors @ 7:00
Show @ 7:30

Bring gifts and/or food bank donations

THIS SHOW IS ONLY $3!!!!! How can you NOT come?

State Representative Cynthia Davis of Missouri on why she's tabling bills to remove the teaching of contraception and its health effects in schools (i.e. teaching only abstinence) and requiring biology textbooks to include at least one chapter with alternative "theories" to evolution:

Scratch that.

Alison do you use canola oil?

ooo! I'm so excited. Christmas trees are better for the environment than the fake ones. That makes me so happy! I couldn't reconcile myself to a fake one... because they're just so fake, and now knowing that they're full of PVC (evil evil evil!) and (gasp) lead, I feel much better about supporting local charities through purchasing a gorgeous, live and aromatic tree from their lots.

for more info, check this out

and... to clarify even further, I choose not to eat GMOs as much as I can primarily because of my concerns with environmental damage, not for what they could possibly do to me. Hell, all those preservatives and pesticides in my body ought to be good for something other than just preventing my body from decaying once I'm dead...

spot on, Paras.

It's a personal choice for me not to eat GMOs... not that I have total control over it. And, to be honest, I'm not too scared about the effects of GMOs on me, that issue has been tested, and it has to in order for it to pass into the food chain (for humans, at least). Anything with soy lecithin in it is apparently a GMO now... but regardless, that has nothing to do with why I don't like GMOs. so rest assured, Beck, I'm not totally anti GMO... except that I still sort-of am. ;) That doesn't mean I hate you.

I don't like GMOs because they aren't tested in the environments that they're intended to be grown in. As is the case with many new crops.... that's how we got Purple Loosestrife - a horrible noxious weed that's destroying wetlands across Canada and the United States (admittedly not a GMO, but a 'horticultural variety' designed to be sterile... and was in the lab... but wreaked havoc across the continent, and has made lots of "impossible" babies).

I am far more interested in/concerned about/against the environmental effects of adding new species that could fuck up the evolutionary/successional pathways of ecosystems and plants themselves... just like adding european plants to our soils (like dandelion and clover...). That's what it came down to between Monsanto and Mr. Schmeiser... they sued him for taking their genetic information that flew over on the wind... not really something Percy can control. That pollen can be carried far and wide, and canola isn't so far removed from some of our natural rapeseed and mustard plants that it wouldn't create issues there. And that's just canola, there are so many other plants that mess with our native (and sometimes endangered) plants that it's hard to control, but at least without the roundup ready varieties, or the Bt toxin stock, we can use herbicides or insects to help us control them. Yes, I'm using isolated examples, but it can be seen across the board in other examples I'm not listing.

Genetic diversity of natural plant species is an incredibly important thing, and for crops intended to be planted in a wide-spread manner, that can interact with native plants, those predetermined genes can intermingle and destroy all that diversity. South and Central America is losing corn species left and right. There are next to no unadultered corn plants left in the world... they've all been touched by GE (via pollen or insects or direct alteration) and that's going to destroy the future of corn... because where do you think they got those original variations from? ... the natural corn diversity... and without that diversity, there can be no future evolution... without the use of GE.

I think I plain old like evolution and selective breeding. Things change for a reason that way, and all the pesky ones are weeded out through time, not causing the horrendous ecological disasters that could very well be taking place right now (and actually are in some of Monsanto's fields... where Roundup no longer kills the weeds - because they're immune like the canola).

I think what we have here are two people talking about very different concerns about GMOs. Of course, I could be misinterpreting, but I believe Alison was talking about the effects of growing large fields of crops (and other organisms, I guess) in, essentially, an alien environment. On the otherhand, I believe Beck's talking about the effects of consumption. And they're both probably right.

With rigorous testing of food products, I think we can very well show safety for humans. These aren't powerful chemical substances targeting specific cellular and organ structures (i.e. prescription drugs), yet we subject them to those standards. The chances of problems finding their ways through trials undetected in food products are far slimmer than in prescription drugs.

Environmentally, however, there is a different issue with these foods. When genetically modified crops are engineered, they are being designed for widespread use (there's very little financial benefit to engineer an exotic food that will not be grown.) Inserting large quantities of these foods into such a complex system, such as an ecosystem, is bound to have consequences. At a conceptual level, this isn't vastly different from growing crops that have evolved in a European ecology in South America. And given that we are still really lousy at predicting the results of large scale alterations to such complex problems (q.v. climate change), we really are going into this thing blind. And I think that's what Alison refers to with 'safety.' (It may be a moot point, however, because we are so focussed on progress in society; our obsession with gazing to the future blinds us to the long-term impact of what we do.)

For those of you who miss the NHL

Indeed you are right Alison, Monsanto is a world leader in douchebaggery and should never have sued a farmer for "stealing their genes".
However, GM foods ARE HIGHLY tested - far more so than anything organic. I'm not saying that organic is bad, just that there is little to no testing of organic, and due to the nature of meiosis you can get an almost infinite combination of different peptides being produced. There is a chance, albeit a very small one, that one of those peptides could be 1. the same as what was spliced into the GM version, or 2. poisonous. Of course The majority of the time it will have no effect at all. This is not the case with GM. The point is you don't actually know what you are getting with organic, whereas you DO know what you are getting with GM which has been fully genome sequenced and the gene(s) that have been spliced in are known down to the individual nucleotide.
In fact the GM tomatoes that have the gene in them so they are resistant to frost (yes the gene is from a north atlantic fish - I'm arguing safety not ethics of interspecies translocation in regards to vegetarians or anything like that) was sequenced and it was found that apart from the target gene there were 18 extra nucleotides inserted after the stop codon. These 18 nucleotides were not intended to be there, but after they were discovered the tomatoes were rigorously tested to see what the extra nucleotides did, if anything. They did nothing, they were after the stop codons in the target gene and had no primer/sequence that is transcribable, nor did they affect regulation of nearby genes.
Then the tomatoes went for testing by the FDA, they were tested not only as a food, but also went through the battery of tests as a drug, simpy because they were GM. It was found that they are safe in every way, and indeed resistant to frost. Note that GM foods are not approved if it acts as an allergen to 0.1% of the population, which is ~100 times less allergenic than most nuts. It also passed that requirement.
There's no way you can say that GM foods are "untested". That's plain bullshit.

Please don't regurgitate environmental alarmist rhetoric without knowing the facts.

Hey I managed to do that without bringing up the over-used example of golden rice