Real World (U. of Auckland chaplains' magazine) 3 1993

A NOTE ON FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Robert Mann

'God-Talk and the Liberation of Women', Susana Carryer's feminist article in Real World 2, deserves some comments. Of Ms Carryer's key statements I quote and comment briefly upon a half-dozen. Then, I offer a glimpse of useful literature on 'the liberation of women'.

(1) "Biblical images of God as a mother . . . point to Mother as a viable and biblically correct option as a name for God."

If that is so, should not a scholarly article give references to those biblical images? Readers who do not know their Bible well enough, such as myself, cannot readily find these neglected passages. This comment is no mere pedantry; readers are entitled to wonder whether the Bible does actually contain passages to the effect (when read in context, as we would all like to do) claimed by Ms Carryer.

(2) " . . . the association of God with Father has become normative in our tradition . . . a cycle that is very difficult to break out of".

In one of God's central disclosures to us about his nature and how we should behave toward him, he has instructed us to address him as "Our Father". That key revelation of the Bible is of course reinforced by many others. This instruction presumably implies that, insofar as our feeble human minds can grasp and briefly refer in human terms to our relationship with God, it is most like that of a human child (male or female) with its father. Calling God 'Father' is no fleeting fashion or mere social construction; ironically, calling him anything else is.

(3) "the maleness of Christ has been converted from an historical accident . . . to being an ontological necessity".

Why God chose to reveal himself in a male rather than a female human constitutes something of a mystery which we may think about (while not hoping to understand fully). But the fact that he did thus choose remains a sheer fact.

To read into this historical given a universal ontological necessity that Christ (or any adequate manifestation of God) had to be masculine would be to go further than the Church has ever officially sought to. But to go to the other extreme and term it a mere accident entails an arrogant posture toward God of criticism which I, for one, find preposterous. God's choice within his creative process to make Jesus male really is a God-given fact not up for questioning. If the world is as God made it, trammelled by us sinners, we are faced with the sufficiently large task of discerning truly what are the facts of providence; speculation about whether Jesus could have been female seems, at best, peculiarly vacuous and evasive of reality.

Any thinking of God as personal entails the model of the human species, which happens to be male or female, as the only mode in which we can understand personality. To abandon gender must mean all too soon to lose personality. Doubtless God is unimaginably more than personal; but in our human apprehending he must be at least personal. The pronoun It would
leave him sub-personal, no more to be found responding to us as I to Thou.

But the colossal recent mistake has been to think of sexuality as the primary and divisive category among us. We are first of all human. It is out of our humanity and His that we acclaim in Christ the human being to gather up and re-present before the Father a whole redeemed humanity.

(4) "Terms promoting a linear rather than hierarchical relationship need to take their rightful place alongside the others . . ."

That Nature is inherently thoroughly and profoundly hierarchical has been detailed in Goldsmith's recent magnum opus 'The Way'. As well speak of an animal body without organs, or a cell without organelles, as babble of a non-hierarchical ecosystem or society. It is vacuous, futile, and confusing.

A further criticism, on the level of logic: to present "linear" and hierarchical as tolerantly co-existing characteristics is woolly-minded. Even if we were not stuck by providence with inherently hierarchical biology and society - that is, if we had a real possibility of supplanting hierarchy with "linearity" - it would indeed be a supplanting that Ms Carryer promotes. Any impression that she is advocating kindly addition 'alongside', not replacement, is at best confused.

(5) "Female images of God . . . are necessary to affirm the goodness and legitimacy of female sexuality and identity." [my emphasis]

I hope the falsity of this assertion will need little exposition. Goodness and legitimacy abound in many aspects of humanity without any necessity of being projected onto God himself. Female sexuality has been affirmed as not merely good but glorious in a colossal mass of literature, song, and art; female images of God have evidently not been necessary for the production of these affirmations.

(6) " . . . women are [represented as] the descendants of Eve, the cause of all the evil in the world . . ."

For many years, readers of the Listener were subjected to endless weekly accusations by feminist Marilyn Waring to the effect that men are to blame for the world's ills. The interpretation of Genesis of which Ms Carryer complains has, I submit, had far less (relatively negligible) influence during the past half-century at least.

Having pointed out these rather obvious comments, one can nevertheless expect that they will be ignored by the political ideology of women's lib, which diligently avoids critical discussion. Christians should be clear-eyed about the nature of this irrational political trend which has already made severe inroads on language, reasoning, politics and religion. (The extent of the latter inroads is glimpsed in the very fact that the article on which I have commented was accepted for publication.) Feminists, while differing amongst many sundering camps, are generally gaining political power (overtly or deviously) on the basis of misrepresentations of providence. I wish therefore to take this opportunity to point out some cogent facts about the way God has actually set up the world. Similar summaries have appeared elsewhere.

Ms Carryer, like most if not all feminists, complains repeatedly about patriarchy as if it were obviously evil and as if social rearrangements can do away with it. The book (Goldberg 1979) which first summarised the findings in the societies that have been studied on the subject of male dominance tells us that in all 1400 societies, men occupy the positions of apparent power. (The Amazons turn out to be a forgery.) Similarly, Keesing's (1976) textbook on cultural anthropology, in its section "womens' worlds", says:-

As 16 women social anthropologists compellingly argue in Woman, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), there is no evidence that matriarchal societies have ever existed. The apparent universality of male dominance - at least in public and political realms - must be a starting point for an anthropology of women.

The second edition of this book enlarges in very helpful ways, emphasising the need for both empathy and some measure of detached judgement regarding inferences of 'exploitation'.

Confusion often arises among people who have not looked up the meaning of the term patriarchy. Its characteristics relate merely to the formal, public arenas and social hierarchies, in which men brandish weapons, sometimes use them, march around in uniform, deliver loudly the decisions of society, defend and enforce them, etc. The very different forms of power exerted by women, mostly in private, in the formation of those decisions, are by their nature far less amenable to historical research; but it is a serious error to claim that patriarchy entails a lack of power for women. A particular case is that of many Maori women who are content not to speak on the marae because they do in fact speak through their menfolk, more effectively.

The latest and in many ways the best relevant textbook is Dr Anne Moir's 'Brain Sex' (1989). Like her predecessor Goldberg, Moir is rigorously blacked out, as is Illich's key book 'Gender', by feminist "scholar"s, of whom Margarita Levin (1986) makes some stinging criticisms.

Lisa Tuttle's 'Encyclopedia of Feminism' (1987) records the universality of patriarchy but asserts "alternatives to patriarchy may at least be imagined". I however contend that no such fantasy has actually been formulated, and that we cannot regenerate community on the basis of the erroneous notion - the axiom of feminism - that closely similar ways of life should be led by women and men. That such a notion needs to be pointed out as not only unrealistic but also highly undesirable illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender.

Paul's words about the subjection of women (1 Cor. 7; 1 Tim. 2,8ff.) have not endeared that apostle to radical feminists. To be reconciled with Paul's whole evident position, those passages need to be understood as contingent upon and conditioned by the society Paul lived in. We need the same understanding of Jesus' oft-cited decision to enlist no women in the intimate fellowship of the Twelve. In his human life Jesus, with his disciples, was a Jew faithful in daily matters to the social perceptions of his culture and time. Over and over again in his ministry we find Jesus following these, working "with the grain". Only thus could his mission be accomplished among the people into whom (very oddly as the rhymster says) God chose to become incarnate.

If we want to find Paul's convictions on the plane that counts eternally, we must go to the splendid Gal. iii 28-9: "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus".

Through the centuries this has been the normative text of conduct for any society to be called decently Christian. The first couple - Jew and Gentile - was given recognition in Christian practice during the first century; 'bond and free' took longer, until the 19th century. Let us work to see that 'male and female' become reconciled in the full Galatians sense in our time. Feminism is, on the whole, antagonistic to that Christian challenge.

Much more needs to be written about this important topic. To my mind the real question is, what is the appropriate division of labour between men and women? What, especially, is the meaning for today's men and women of the Bible's first three chapters? Have readers of Real World some thoughtful suggestions on that?

SOME GOOD SOURCES

Goldberg S (1979) 'Male Dominance: the Inevitability of Patriarchy'. Abacus
Goldsmith E R D (1992) 'The Way'. Century
Greer G (1983) 'Sex & Destiny'. Secker & Warburg
Illich I (1982) 'Gender'. Pantheon
Keesing R M (1976; 1981) 'Cultural Anthropology'. Holt Rinehart
Levin M (1986) 'Caring New World: Feminism and Science' Amer. Scholar 57 (winter) 100-106
Lyndon N (1992) 'No More Sex War'. Sinclair-Stevenson
Moir A, Jessel D (1989) 'Brain Sex: the real difference between men and women'. Michael Joseph; see also the epilogue to the American edition (Lyle Stuart 1991).
Tuttle L (1987) 'Encyclopedia of Feminism'. London: Arrow
addendum 2003 :
Hosie, Dorothea 'Jesus and Woman'. Hodder & Stoughton 1946; rev. edn 1956.

The Big Thing from small beginnings
- reflections on Pentecost

Robert Mann

slightly adapted from Real World 1998

Once Jesus had ascended back to heaven, the most important thing left for his faithful few was the Holy Spirit. That Spirit remains for us today The Big Thing - our most important asset, the continuing inspiration which we require to carry on proclaiming the Good News and living by it as best we can. But this most important Person became known to humanity through a quiet beginning.

On the festival of Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church as recounted in Acts 2 - a flamboyant occasion of doubtless crucial significance on that historic day and ever since. The so-called pentecostal sects emphasise visible direct operations of the spirit in group worship today, e.g. speaking in tongues.

Some more elderly congregations tend to prefer the name Whitsunday, and to read for that day's lesson John 20 19-23, a far quieter occasion. For those who have never spoken in tongues, let alone seen holy fire on each others' heads, that event at the closing of the first Easter Day is perhaps especially precious.

I would go so far as to suggest that, whatever Anglicans may think of 'pentecostal' tendencies, the Anglican church is open to the accusation of having gone too far the other way - too little emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In any case I wish to argue that a better understanding of the Holy Spirit will be encouraged if both John 20 19-23 and Acts 2 1-41 are embraced in preaching on Pentecost.

Jesus prefigured, with memorable if mysterious breath, a continuing spiritual presence, at his resurrected appearance amongst the disciples late in the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene had found the tomb empty. Translations typically quote him, having breathed upon them, "Receive the Holy Spirit". However, the Archbishop of Canterbury widely viewed as this century's most talented, William Temple, in his valuable book 'Readings in St. John's Gospel' (Macmillan 1938; reprinted through 1955) translates instead

"Receive holy spirit (or breath)".

Temple specifically insists on this wording by adding, in explanation, not
"the Holy Spirit" and goes on immediately to expound:

What is bestowed is not the Divine Person Himself but the power and energy of which He is the source. Earlier it had been said not yet was there spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7, 39). But now that glorification is complete, and it is possible for the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God, to begin its activity . . . only so far as the Church in and through its members fulfils the condition - Receive holy spirit - can it discharge this function.

The gospels were written in Greek. The word for spirit in the John 20 passage is simply the same as for breath (pneuma), the common word for spirit in the NT. The word paracletos appears in the NT only 5 times, all by St John (Jn 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1Jn 2:1). It seems straightforwardly justified therefore to adopt Temple's reading of the John 20 passage, rather than the more popular translation which infers that the Holy Spirit was conferred on that occasion.

The persistence of the popular translation - as if omission of "the" in gospel Greek could be casual or alternatively from some pious tampering - I must leave to biblical scholars to review. It would appear, e.g. from the biography by Iremonger, and generally from his fluent & profound arguments using Greek throughout his works, that Temple was a better Greek scholar than most or all today. J B Phillips in the late 1950s simply concurred with Temple's translation, whereas the prolix Rudolph Schnackenberg (1990) ignores it. I find Temple's reading much the more convincing.

He was, in 1938, very quiet in mentioning the error; and he did not comment at all on its possible origins. One may infer that Temple thought it would be needlessly critical of highly respected authorities if he were to make any fuss of this correction. (Would that many a modern stirrer were so thoughtful & restrained! It is easy to point out defects in the powers that be; but unless we have a good purpose in view, we should not do so.)

Pious insertions have occurred in the fraught history of our precious scriptures, e.g. the minor confusion in 1 John 5 7-8 complained of by Sir Isaac Newton. Even the Great Commission (the final 3 verses of St Matthew's gospel) is suspected of being a later addition rather than actual words of Christ. It would appear that "Receive the Holy Spirit" is a comparable pious embellishment of the Lord's more subtle words "Receive holy spirit".

An interpretation thus seems open that the John 20 phrase is a gentle prefiguring - with memorable breath, but nevertheless gentle compared to the mighty wind when, 50 days later, the faithful few must have needed firmer reassurance. I do not dispute Temple's toning-down in 1938 of his correction, but I do suggest that today it is due for acceptance rather than continued ignore.

Temple's reading is consistent with the promise in Acts 1 "not many days after this you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit", implied if not clearly presented as coming just before the Ascension, and certainly after Easter.

Within two months the few went through the agony & despair of Calvary; the eerie encouragement of the empty tomb; the quiet visitation later that day, unrecognised in that moment, on the road to Emmaeus; the Resurrected Lord that evening in the locked room conferring on the disciples awesome power after breathing holy spirit over them; other resurrection appearances, once to 500; the loss - if triumphant - of the Ascension; and then 50 days after Easter the overwhelming manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Evidently the emergence of the Paraclete in this world was a gradual process rather than sudden. (This should come as no surprise; Christ himself within his earthly life blossomed in a process of development - "day by day like us he grew".)

The question for us now is, therefore, what are we today doing to utilise and contribute to what Temple called the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God. This two-way process empowers, if dauntingly, the human species of the Christian era. The Holy Spirit, though of simple beginnings in earthly emergence, has become The Big Thing for us today. Are we with it - availing ourselves of this power, and also contributing to its working? Let us pray, feeding on him in our heart with thanksgiving, for faith to do so - believing that one prayer which is always answered is the prayer for stronger faith.
---

524 2949
Dr Brian Edwards
Radio NZ 17-5-97
P O Box 2209
Auckland


Dear Brian Edwards,

You read out this morning a message from one Dominic about the term "homophobia". I had written to you some months previously about this and been somewhat surprised to get no response. In case that letter did not reach you, I reiterate much of it now. I think the discussion this morning hardly got to the point.

My view of this new term is different from the purist philology of Dominic. Realising that you are trained in psychology, I point out that the phobias are a significant category of illness, characterised by debilitating irrational fearfulness. If there exists a particular version of this psychopathology with homosexuals as its fixation, I have yet to learn of it, but in any case the term "homophobia" should be reserved for that condition (be it hypothetical or real).

Warren Lindberg, Kevin Hague, and their whole set of homosexual activists wallowing in the pseudo-victim role, instead use "homophobia" with not only the meaning which you stated - prejudice against homosexuals - but mainly a further, completely illegitimate meaning: they misuse this term "homophobia" to smear, ad hominem, any misgivings about homosexuality as a political cause.

To get down to reality, criticising the politically militant homosexuals such as Lindberg has several good grounds quite aside from any prejudice.

They promote homosexuality amongst adolescents by misrepresentations of human biology. They promulgate falsehoods about "safe" sex which are gravely misleading. They grossly exaggerate the efficacy of condoms against HIV, in attempt to continue the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle which was severely challenged by the onset of the AIDS epidemic. The Men's Centre North Shore, on whose committee I serve, could provide a couple of expert interviewees from whom an interview could elicit the truth on these important issues.

To conclude back on the philology theme:
the word "homophobia" hijacks an important form of word which should be preserved for its valid & important function: Z-phobia means irrational, debilitating fear of Z. Misuse of psychiatric diagnoses for ideological purposes had a sordid history under Stalin and Hitler, and should find no place in New Zealand public health discussions.

You should at least desist from using this lie-in-the-language "homophobia", and preferably become active in explaining how it is wrong. Lies in the language are among the most horribly effective and are central in the Goebbels tradition which, to a most dismaying extent, perverts today's world. Try compiling a list of lies-in-the-language: "reclaimed land" (meaning filled-in water or wetland) etc. . . . [ also: Rightsizing. Reforms (Rogernomics, Ruthanasia). Women's liberation. Repatriation (export of profits for foreign investors). Feminism. ]

Yours sincerely

Robert Mann

7-6-97: Edw read out the Times parts, repeatedly saying this was very interesting, but closing with "I think I'll leave it there [i.e. declining the MC interview idea] and I don't necessarily agree with it".

14-6-97: Edw read out a letter from Lindberg to the effect "we've pulled it off anyway - the word means as we wish - we've won that battle".

A month or two later, Edw roundly condemned the term ‘homophobia’ as an utterly illegitimate word-trick. I felt it was - just - OK for him at that time to refrain from mentioning anything of the history of his attitude to it.

I know nothing of A Strom but have some comments on his statements.

R

> The NINE LIES of Today's church.
> -by Andrew Strom.
>
> It is a sad fact that today's church is deceiving itself in
> some very crucial areas. Below are some plain facts
> (-absolutely true) that may shock a few people:
>
> 1. "Ask Jesus into our heart" is not in the Bible. Neither
> is "Give your heart to the Lord", or repeating a "sinner's
> prayer". These practices do not exist in Scripture at all.
> The subject of salvation is the most important subject in
> the Bible and we are being lied to about it. These
> doctrines are a total fabrication. They were invented to
> make salvation "quick and convenient". Many church
> members today who are relying on these things are
> clearly not 'saved' at all.

Failure to find the exact phrase in the Bible does not prove the
concept invalid.

It always disturbs me when I see anyone declaring anyone else 'not
saved'. How would they know?

> 2. Church buildings do not exist in the Bible.

...
we are

> still spending millions on these monuments today.

When the church was tiny and proscribed, it could hardly have any
admitted bldgs. When it became the official religion of the Roman empire,
some bldgs became both permissible and desirable. Those bldgs are not
invalid just because there had been an early period when they were not
needed or allowed.

> 3. The "one pastor runs everything" model is totally
> unscriptural.

Oh yeah? What was Moses's status in _Exodus_ ?

> in the book
> of Acts we find the word "pastor" NOT EVEN USED
> ONCE.

I dare say; and the word 'trinity' doesn't occur either, but the
JW are wrong in claiming that this fact of wording invalidates the concept.

> 4. "Tithing" is not a New Testament practice at all. And it
> is being shamefully abused by today's preachers. In the
> New Testament we are told to give cheerfully - whatever
> we purpose in our hearts to give. Telling people that they
> MUST give 10% to the church or they are "robbing God"
> is totally sick - and a money-grubbing way of twisting
> Scripture. There is no evidence that the apostles EVER
> preached 'tithing' to New Testament believers. It was
> clearly regarded as an Old Testament practice.

Money-grubbing is notoriously rife in new "church"es, esp in USA.
That does not prove that tithing has no place in the modern church.

> 5. The words "prosper" or 'prosperity' were NEVER used
> by Jesus at all - and only exist a couple of times in the
> entire New Testament. Yet greedy preachers have built
> whole kingdoms upon them. The words - "sell what you
> have and give to the poor" and "deceitfulness of riches"
> and "you cannot serve God and mammon" and "woe
> to you that are rich" were DEFINITELY used by Jesus
> and the apostles. But we don't hear these things
> preached too much, do we?

Good one.

> 6. There were no Bible Colleges, Seminaries or degrees
> in the New Testament. The only people who seemed to
> have "Bible Schools" were the Scribes and Pharisees!
> The apostles were simple fishermen and tax collectors.
> It is likely that a number of them could not even read or
> write. What was their "qualification" for being in the
> ministry? Simply that they had SPENT A LOT OF TIME
> WITH JESUS.

Such privileged people have no counterpart today. That does not
invalidate the holy orders of Wm Temple, nor the usefulness of the reading
& writing that are essential to obey the Great Commission. It is stupid to
imply that only illiterate fishermen can be leading Christians.

>
> 7. There is almost no evidence whatsoever that the early
> church had their "main meeting" on a Sunday. They
> gathered together 'from house to house' virtually every
> day!

good on them - and some still do as well. That does not
invalidate our meeting on Sunday.

>There were no denominations.

The scandal of divisions is deeply embarrassing to us, and we
should do far more to reunite.

> There were no separate groups with different 'labels'. They
> lived their lives together - all the Christians in the local
> area. Love and fellowship and 'koinonia' were as natural
> to them as breathing.

Aren't there hints at least that followers of Paul were not always
in such total accord with followers of Peter?

>And the apostles in Jerusalem
> preached every day at huge open-air gatherings. -Not
> "hidden away" inside four walls. This was truly a "street
> church" in every way.

We can & should maintain suitable 'street church' action today; but
to imply that this is an alternative, rather than a supplement, to holy
sepulchres is just too silly.

...

> 9. We preach a 'humanistic' Jesus today. -A Jesus
> who exists mainly for our own "happiness". A Santa
> Claus who wants to rain down continual blessings
> upon us. A God of grace and mercy without judgement,
> righteousness or truth. Our gross misrepresentation of
> who Jesus really is, is one of the most serious offenses
> of the modern church. Today's church seems to worship
> a "plastic" Jesus - one that she has made in her own
> image. What an offense to God.

This is a pretty fair commentary on the sects emanating out of
Orange County Calif, Lubbock Tex, etc - and it is no mere coincidence
that these overlap largely with promotors of the demonic deceit
"creationism".

...

>
> There is a 'New Wineskin' coming. In fact it is upon
> us. There is a new leadership arising - many of them
> trained in the 'wilderness' for such a time as this. The
> hour is now here. LET THE NEW LEADERS ARISE!

If they will cooperate with decent current leaders, fine.
Where are they?

...

> The entire church is living a lie. Many inside her are
> told continuously that they are "OK" - that they are
> saved and headed for heaven. Nothing could be
> further from the truth. Multitudes of them are headed
> directly for hell.

Again, I deny that this raver could know such info.

>The systemized LYING that is going
> on has deceived the leaders and the people alike.

This raver has not exposed one lie. There are quite a few lies
being promulgated within even mainstream denominations, but Strom has not
mentioned any of them. Instead, he has blamed Christians for organising as
seemed best at successive stages of history. And what he advocates
instead, street & home action, is a false alternative whereas it should be
depicted as a neglected additional mode of action.

Mind you, having observed the odd Brethren in their version of
street preaching I seriously doubt they reach many.l

...

>
> PLEASE send me your thoughts and comments and
> responses to this email, my friends. If other people
> have responses then please send those in also.
> We want to make these things a serious topic of
> discussion. Our email address here is:
> prophetic@revivalschool.com

OK

R Mann

Monbiot's article below is so exhilarating in its forthright quest
for truth, and contempt for dishonest media hacks, that I feel provoked to
issue a new MannGram® in the quasi-samizdat series so studiously denied
overt acknowledgment in those media.

I esteem Monbiot more than almost all journalists commentating on
my field (applied ecology), so I do him the honour of respectful comment.

>http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=650

>The Fossil Fools

The dismissal of climate change by journalistic nincompoops is a
danger to us all

< right on Geo. In this country the "journalists" include
prominently, repeatedly in the NZ Herald the NZ agent of USA criminal &
nutter Lyndon LaRouche.

> By George Monbiot. Published in
the Guardian 27th April 2004

>Picture a situation in which most of the media, despite the
>overwhelming weight of medical opinion, refused to accept that there was a
>connection between smoking and lung cancer.

< dictating too fast here, Geo. The issue is not "a connection".
It has moved way beyond that. The issue is whether most lung cancer is
caused by smoking. It is that clear; why are you so vague?


>Imagine that every time new evidence emerged, they asked someone with
>no medical qualifications to write a piece dismissing the evidence and
>claiming that there was no consensus on the issue.

< that is actually the normal media procedure in New Zealand every
time new evidence emerges on gynaecology. Indeed, nearly all the new media
items on O&G since 1987 are generated by 'someone with no medical
qualifications'. Rewards for these usurpations are large: the main
impostor is now Governor-general, another became a list-MP but retreated to
Mongolia accused of filching from the public purse, another is an Auckland
Regional Councillor and has been able to get The Lancet to publish sporadic
columns of her opinions. One of the originators of this crazy racket is
now head of the WHO non-infectious diseases division.

< As a secondary effect, midwives have been treated as more
important authorities on O&G than, for instance, a highly respectable FRCOG
& chairman of the NZ Medical Association. Almost all GPs have abandoned
obstetrics; midwives collecting large subsidies routinely fail to arrange
specialist backup at National Women's Hospital. These trends will have
harmed a certain number of mothers and babies.

< Geo's rhetorical manoevre is neat, but far from conclusive. He
depicts, as if it were impossible or extremely unlikely, usurpation of
authority by non-specialists in medicine or science. The awful truth is
that such usurpations are not rare these past few decades. One main cause
is affirmative action putting ahead of expertise some ideology (usually
either racism, wimminsLib, or militant homosexuality).

>Imagine that the BBC, in the interests of "debate", wheeled out one of
>the tiny number of scientists who says that smoking and cancer aren't
>linked

< a sloppy term again, Geo. The apologists hired by the tobacco
industry in attempt to dissuade successive ministers of health from
imposing legal restrictions on sale & use of tobacco did not deny a link.
Their assertion was that causality had not been stringently enough
demonstrated. It is a matter of degree. As a member throughout of the
statutory board advising those ministers on poisons, I'm proud to say we
weren't persuaded by those deniers: smoking tobacco was agreed to cause
lung cancer (and other serious illnesses). But I am also proud to say that
same Toxic Substances Board concluded the evidence (2 decade ago) on
passive smoking was far less persuasive, and rejected the pressure for
further restrictions from a group of unqualified publicists.

>, or that giving up isn't worth the trouble, every time the issue of
>cancer was raised. Imagine that, as a result, next to nothing was done
>about the problem, to the delight of the tobacco industry and the
>detriment of millions of smokers. We would surely describe the newspapers
>and the BBC as grossly irresponsible.

>Now stop imagining it, and take a look at what's happening. The issue is
>not smoking, but climate change. The scientific consensus is just as
>robust

< i 'm sorry I can't exactly support that statement, with respect to
the main point of the IPCC which is *predictions*. The evidence that
global warning has been caused by human activity, let alone the evidence
that it will in future get much worse, is not so conclusive as the evidence
that smoking has caused lung cancer. It is, however, conclusive enough for
governmental purposes, as expressed (minimally) by the Kyoto treaty.

>, the misreporting just as widespread, the consequences even graver. If
>it is true, as the government's new report suggested last week, that it is
>now too late to prevent hundreds of thousands of British people from being
>flooded out of their homes,1 then the journalists who have consistently
>and deliberately downplayed the threat carry much of the responsibility
>for the problem. It is time we stopped treating them as bystanders. It is
>time we started holding them to account.

condemnation of rogue *scientists*.

>"The scientific community has reached a consensus," the government's
chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, told the House of Lords
last month. "I do not believe that amongst the scientists there is a
discussion as to whether global warming is due to anthropogenic effects.
It is man-made and it is essentially [caused by] fossil fuel burning,
increased methane production ... and so on."2

Sir David chose his words carefully. There is a discussion about whether
global warming is due to anthropogenic (manmade) effects. But it is not -
or is only seldom - taking place among scientists. It is taking place in
the media, and it seems to consist of a competition to establish the outer
reaches of imbecility.

< the extent of error, and the potential harm, are even worse in
what the media so cynically call "the debate" on gene-tampering.

< Thus the most dangerous technology of all diverts hundreds of
billions of dollars and scientific talent that could in principle be
redeployed to appropriate technology & science. The BBC gives Monsanto PR
operatives, lying unchallenged, free unbalanced time as if they were
reliable scientists. The NZ media present propaganda agents with no
medical or scientific qualifications who are furthermore paid to generate
pro-GM 'spin', to give the final word in news items about GM.

>During the heatwave last year, the Spectator magazine made the case
that because there was widespread concern in the 1970s about the
possibility of a new ice age, we can safely dismiss concerns about global
warming today.3 This is rather like saying that because Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck's hypothesis on evolution once commanded scientific support and was
later shown to be incorrect, then Charles Darwin's must also be wrong.

< your liking for analogy gets you into trouble yet again, Geo.
This time it's an awful tangle. You are wrong that Lamarck's main
hypothesis about evolution has been disproved. The penchant of the dreaded
media to depict every issue as a bipolar 'tis-'tisn't conflict has engulfed
even you, regarding evolution theory. Not only are examples known of
inheritance of acquired characteristics as envisaged by Lamarck, but much
more importantly, to the extent that Darwin was correct his ideas do not
logically exclude Lamarck's. The notion 'Lamarck v. Darwin' is a glaring
fallacy.

>Science differs from the leader writers of the Spectator in that it
>learns from its mistakes. A hypothesis is advanced and tested. If the
>evidence suggests it is wrong, it is discarded.

< fine - if experts dominate the discussion. But when the media
displace experts with unqualified attention-seekers, the scientific method
you so rightly admire will no longer work. The hypothesis that the Pap
smear is a reliable early warning of cancer, and that certain microscopic
anomalies of cells on the cervix indicate the uterus should be removed, is
not discarded, because it has become an ideological banner. The hypothesis
that synthetic genes can be inserted into plants by drastically novel
methods not resembling any process known in nature, to give a GM organism
that has all properties unchanged except for the desired herbicide
resistance, or novel modified insecticide, is based on junk science at many
steps of its illogic. Yet it prevails with governments, many of which have
invested in this new racket. Language of Monbiot-type vigour is fully
warranted in criticism of this crazy fad. GM has led the world far astray
because science has been sidelined.

>If the evidence appears to support it, it is refined and subjected to
>further testing.

< again , this is not what has happened in the hasty, rash releases
of GMOs. Almost all the relevant testing has been omitted, and those few
scientists that have been funded to begin testing have been vilified &
purged if they report adverse effects (notably Ewen & Pusztai). The truth
on actual maimings & killings of humans by material purified from GMOs
remains largely suppressed.

>That some climatologists predicted an ice age in the 1970s, and that the
>idea was dropped when others found that their predictions were flawed, is
>a cause for confidence in climatology.

< exactly - and this essential logical point is all you need.
Mistaken analogies only muddy the waters.

>But the Spectator looks like the Journal of Atmospheric Physics by
>comparison to the Mail on Sunday and its Nobel laureate-in-waiting,
>Peter Hitchens. "The greenhouse effect probably doesn't exist", he
>informed his readers in 2001. "There is as yet no evidence for it."4

< time to ask you to do some imagining, Geo our man. If you're
disgusted by that last statement from that agent, can you imagine how I as
a scientist feel about a *qualified* climate scientist - one of the few
in NZ - saying exactly that about global warming? A suave West Indian
Christopher de Freitas who did his doctorate with the respected K Hare has
consistently propagandized in the media to confuse and misrepresent the
science of climate degradation. Unprincipled hacks - hardly new, tho'
admittedly more rife than ever; but scientists issuing Hitchens-type
slogans - this is a yet more anti-social trend.

< I take this opportunity of publicly challenging de Freitas to
declare what rewards, if any, he has received for his propagandizing.

> Perhaps Mr Hitchens would care to explain why our climate differs from
that of Mars. That some of the heat from the sun is trapped in the
earth's atmosphere by gases (the greenhouse effect) has been
established since the mid-19th century. But, like most of these
nincompoops, Hitchens claims to be defending science from its
opponents. "The only reason these facts are so little-known," he tells
us, is (apart from the reason that he has just made them up), "that a
self-righteous love of 'the environment' has now replaced religion as
the new orthodoxy."5

>Hitchens, in turn, is an Einstein beside that famous climate
scientist, Melanie Phillips. Writing in the Daily Mail in January, she
dismissed the entire canon of climatology as "a global fraud" perpetrated
by the "leftwing, anti-American, anti-West ideology which goes hand in hand
with anti-globalisation and the belief that everything done by the
industrialised world is wicked."6 This belief must be shared by the
Pentagon, whose recent report pictures climate change as the foremost
threat to global security.7 In an earlier article, she claimed that "most
independent climate specialists, far from supporting [global warming], are
deeply sceptical."8 She managed to name only one, however, and he
receives his funding from the fossil fuel industry.9

>Having blasted the world's climatologists for "scientific
illiteracy", she then trumpeted her own. The latest report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which collates the findings of
climatologists), is, she complained, "studded with weasel words" such as
"very likely" and "best estimate".10 These weasel words are, of course,
what make it a scientific report, rather than a column by Melanie Phillips.

< right on Geo - and you could add that if they had been dogmatic
& totally certain (which good scientists like Sir John Houghton of the
IPCDC are not, in such predictions) - Melanie & her like would have
blasted them for failing to express uncertainties.

>If ever you meet one of these people, I suggest you ask them the
following questions:
1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures?
3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

It would be interesting to discover at which point they answer no -
at which point, in other words, they choose to part company with basic
physics.

< you miss the point. Physics is quantitative, Geo. The
qualitative facts you mention are not disputed by Lindzen et al., so you
actually get nowhere by reciting them. What the industry stooges say is
that the *extent* of global warming in the past century is so small that it
is not utterly proven by statistics. Lindzen goes further; I have heard
him say in a scientific gathering (while funded to propagandize in NZ by
the Business Roundtable) that even if the IPCC predictions do come true,
retrospective statistical analysis will still not be able to prove
temperatures, sea levels etc have changed *owing to anthropogenic
emissions*. Precautionary, schmecautionary!

>But these dolts are rather less dangerous than the BBC, and its
>insistence on "balancing" its coverage of climate change. It appears to
>be incapable of running an item on the subject without inviting a sceptic
>to comment on it. Usually this is either someone from a corporate-funded
>thinktank (who is, of course, never introduced as such) or the
>professional anti-environmentalist Philip Stott. Professor Stott is a
>retired biogeographer. Like almost all the prominent sceptics he has
>never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change. But he has made
>himself available to dismiss climatologists' peer-reviewed work as the
>"lies" of eco-fundamentalists.11

...

> What makes all this so dangerous is that it plays into the hands of the
corporate lobbyists. A recently leaked memo written by Frank Luntz, the
US Republican and corporate strategist, warned his party that "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in
general - and President Bush in particular - are most vulnerable ...
Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are
settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.
Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific
certainty a primary issue in the debate."12

> We can expect Professors Hitchens and Phillips to do what they're told.
But isn't it time that the BBC stopped behaving like the public
relations arm of the fossil fuel lobby?

> www.monbiot.com

< Right on Geo.

< This work of yours is on the one hand the best I've seen for
years, but on the other hand also riddled with unnecessary furphies. I
hope you can *relate to* that.

-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949>at>

The analogy of a theory of heredity that crippled agriculture for years
certainly applies to the promotion of GM crops.

However, the article below tends to focus on other mistakes.

Bush-League Lysenkoism

The White House bends science to its will

By The Editors
April 26, 2004 (May issue)
Scientific American

Starting in the 1930s, the Soviets spurned genetics in favor of Lysenkoism, a
fraudulent theory of heredity inspired by Communist ideology. Doing so crippled
agriculture in the U.S.S.R. for decades. You would think that bad precedent
would have taught President George W. Bush something. But perhaps he is no
better at history than at science.

In February his White House received failing marks in a statement signed by 62
leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, 19 recipients of the National
Medal of Science, and advisers to the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.
It begins, "Successful application of science has played a large part in the
policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful
nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy. Although
scientific input to the government is rarely the only factor in public policy
decisions, this input should always be weighed from an objective and impartial
perspective to avoid perilous consequences. ... The administration of George W.
Bush has, however, disregarded this principle."

Doubters of that judgment should read the report from the Union of Concerned
Scientists (UCS) that accompanies the statement, "Restoring Scientific
Integrity in Policy Making" (available at www.ucsusa.org). Among the affronts
that it details: The administration misrepresented the findings of the National
Academy of Sciences and other experts on climate change. It meddled with the
discussion of climate change in an Environmental Protection Agency report until
the EPA eliminated that section. It suppressed another EPA study that showed
that the administration's proposed Clear Skies Act would do less than current
law to reduce air pollution and mercury contamination of fish. It even dropped
independent scientists from advisory committees on lead poisoning and drug
abuse in favor of ones with ties to industry.

Let us offer more examples of our own. The Department of Health and Human
Services deleted information from its Web sites that runs contrary to the
president's preference for "abstinence only" sex education programs. The Office
of Foreign Assets Control made it much more difficult for anyone from "hostile
nations" to be published in the U.S., so some scientific journals will no
longer consider submissions from them. The Office of Management and Budget has
proposed overhauling peer review for funding of science that bears on
environmental and health regulations--in effect, industry scientists would get
to approve what research is conducted by the EPA.

None of those criticisms fazes the president, though. Less than two weeks after
the UCS statement was released, Bush unceremoniously replaced two advocates of
human embryonic stem cell research on his advisory Council on Bioethics with
individuals more likely to give him a hallelujah chorus of opposition to it.

Blind loyalists to the president will dismiss the UCS report because that
organization often tilts left--never mind that some of those signatories are
conservatives. They may brush off this magazine's reproofs the same way, as
well as the regular salvos launched by California Representative Henry A.
Waxman of the House Government Reform Committee [see Insights] and maybe even
Arizona Senator John McCain's scrutiny for the Committee on Commerce, Science
and Transportation. But it is increasingly impossible to ignore that this White
House disdains research that inconveniences it.

HyEDDers mai myEN

Your latest Looseness prompts me to copy a msg from 3 y ago -
soon after the successful symposium for Mort & H Turner - no bites, a
puzzling disappointment.

Looking it over now, I think even more of it ... if you like the idea
of such a confab, leading to a book comparable to that from the Mort/Turner
'Science & Christianity', can you think how it could be brought about?

I Cc some others who may be interested.

draft brochure material

JESUS the TECHTON

a symposium

New Zealand

Within walking distance from Nazareth, Herod Antipas was allowed by
the Roman Empire around the turn of the millennium to rebuild the city of
Sepharos. It is reasonable to assume that Joseph got subcontracts to work
on that major project, and that Jesus worked with him. This would be good
practice for getting along with the Romans, which was necessary if the
brief Ministry was to succeed as long as it did - a few years - under
the Empire.

These artisans (Gk 'techton') were probably not just carpenters but
more versatile: they may have typically mastered also a range of metals,
stone, and ceramics. Some of them were disposessed peasants who fell back
on this livelihood, which had no great status.

Technology is even more important than science - available to a far
larger proportion of humanity, for far longer, and its effects much more
pervasive, for good and ill. That the Saviour worked most of his life in
technology is an under-noticed fact. Who can tell us what is known about
the techniques he plied, so we can think about them? If he sanctified the
institution of marriage in one ceremony at Cana, how much more can we take
from his many years of apprenticeship and humble practical work? The
harnessing of science for technology, just this past century, does not
supplant technical creativity from its dominant role in all societies.
Whether or not we are Homo the wise, or Homo the sap, we certainly are Homo
habilis, the tool-making ape.

* The industrial revolution,

* the agricultural revolution some 10^4y earlier,

* the means to kill or maim on a scale of billions in nuclear war or
gene-tampering blunder,

* the delicate essential tools crucial to the ÍKung and the people who
refused to trade away anything to Cook in Australia,

. . . all human societies are powerfully shaped by technology.
But where is the theology of technics? Let us connect with what
has been written, and then try to carry it forward.

Some technologies enable destruction on a scale prefigured in
biblical times only by the Flood. Others can rival the plagues visited
upon the Egyptians. Why have we not controlled technology better, steering
the manipulation of nature into beneficial channels of development? What
has been Christianity's role in such control as has been achieved? What
should be its role in control of gene-splicing, the new dangerous
technology?

Science, while less important than technology, has certainly
affected it greatly. Especially since the A-bomb project a half-century
ago, science-based technology has been extremely important. The
relationship is normally one of mutual effects. But now we see a
commercially fraudulent technology - gene-splicing - feeding back into
science a dishonest, degrading influence.

In such circumstances, what can we make of the Saviour's respect
for artisanship? How should Christianity encourage restraint in dangerous
or merely wasteful technologies, and promote appropriate technologies?

SPEAKER TOPIC

H W Turner tba

L R B Mann Christianity and the art of motorcycle upsouping

N D Broom Nested causes in Richard Pearse's triumph

...

suggestions?

Taken from body of text below...

>the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth

- obviously the utterance of an atheist, or anyway anti-Christian.
If we live for the glory of God, maximising our chances for Heaven, we will
cooperate for - as a by-product - the only known means to create a
decent society on earth.

This essay suggests strong bases for cooperation between Christians
and reasonable atheists.

R

=============

From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6, February 2003

The URL for this item is:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/burke.htm

Why I became a conservative
by Roger Scruton

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted
Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals
regarded the term "conservative" as a term of abuse. To be a conservative,
I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against
the future, authority against innovation, the "structures" against
spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that
one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject
conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do
we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the
whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when
witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my
vocation.

In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting
and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back,
shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections
suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars
rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from
unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one
lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a
barricade against the next van-load of policemen. The van - known then as
a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows -
came cautiously round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt,
and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying
cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled over on the ground
clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched
fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped
into the van, and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the
cochons and throwing Parthian cobbles as they went.

That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the
barricades with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of Armand
Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of
Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist
theater - the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the
day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored:
policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The
bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would
be begging for mercy.

The Old Fascist was de Gaulle, whose Mémoires de guerre I had
been reading that day. The Mémoires begin with a striking sentence -
"Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France" - a sentence
so alike in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that equally
striking sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu: "Longtemps,
je me suis couché de bonne heure." How amazing it had been, to discover a
politician who begins his self-vindication by suggesting something-and
something so deeply hidden behind the bold mask of his words! I had been
equally struck by the description of the state funeral for Valéry - de
Gaulle's first public gesture on liberating Paris - since it too suggested
priorities unimaginable in an English politician. The image of the
cortège, as it took its way to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the proud
general first among the mourners, and here and there a German sniper still
looking down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression on me. I
irresistibly compared the two bird's-eye views of Paris, that of the
sniper, and my own on to the riots in the quartier latin. They were
related as yes and no, the affirmation and denial of a national idea.
According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions
or borders but by language, religion, and high culture; in times of turmoil
and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and
reaffirmed. The funeral for Valéry followed naturally from this way of
seeing things. And I associated the France of de Gaulle with Valéry's
Cimetière marin - that haunting invocation of the dead which conveyed to
me, much more profoundly than any politician's words or gestures, the true
meaning of a national idea.

Of course I was naïve - as naïve as my friend. But the
ensuing argument is one to which I have often returned in my thoughts.
What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this "bourgeoisie"
whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that
enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its
culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or
merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously
pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political
anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the
people I knew.

She replied with a book: Foucault's Les mots et les choses, the
bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form
of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an
artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating
facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the
"discourses" of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an
exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful
to argue-by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by
the Father of Lies-that "truth" requires inverted commas, that it changes
from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the
"episteme," imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The
revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has
found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he
tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is
oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy.
In the street below my window was the translation of that message into
deeds.

My friend is now a good bourgeoise like the rest of them.
Armand Gatti is forgotten; and the works of Antonin Artaud have a quaint
and dépassé air. The French intellectuals have turned their backs on '68,
and the late Louis Pauwels, the greatest of their post-war novelists, has,
in Les Orphelins, written the damning obituary of their adolescent rage.
And Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the result of sprees in the
bath-houses of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an
intellectual celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all
over Europe and America. His vision of European culture as the
institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel,
to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it.
Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud.

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent
lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So
far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck,
and that was Nunzia-Maria Annunziata - the Neapolitan lady who served meals
in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by
plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a
particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the
Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the
orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to
Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party
membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer - the
Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies
that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic
career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair's behest, with the second
highest award that the Queen can bestow - that of "Companion of Honour."
This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative.
For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual
life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that
Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the
grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor
to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and
Britain's first woman Prime Minister. We should ponder some of the other
recipients of honorary degrees from British academic institutions-Robert
Mugabe, for example, or the late Mrs. Ceausescu-or count (on the fingers of
one hand) the number of conservatives who are elected to the British
Academy.

Suffice it to say that I found myself, on arrival in
Birkbeck College, at the heart of the left establishment which governed
British scholarship. Birkbeck College had grown from the Mechanics
Institution founded by George Birkbeck in 1823 and was devoted to the
education of people in full-time employment. It was connected to the
socialist idealists of the Workers' Education Association, and had links of
a tenacious but undiscoverable kind to the Labour Party. My failure to
conceal my conservative beliefs was both noticed and disapproved of, and I
began to think that I should look for another career.

Because of Birkbeck's mission as a center of adult
education, lectures began at 6 P.M. and the days were nominally free. I
used my mornings to study for the Bar: my intention was to embark on a
career which gave no advantage to utopians and malcontents. In fact I
never practiced [sic] at the Bar and received from my studies only an
intellectual benefit - though a benefit for which I have always been
profoundly grateful. Law is constrained at every point by reality, and
utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the common law of England is
proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a
living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

Inspired by my new studies I began to search for a conservative
philosophy. In America this search could be conducted in a university.
American departments of political science encourage their students to read
Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Leo Strauss,
Eric Voegelin, and others have grafted the metaphysical conservatism of
Central Europe on to American roots, forming effective and durable schools
of political thought. American intellectual life benefits from American
patriotism, which has made it possible to defend American customs and
institutions without fear of being laughed to scorn. It has benefited too
from the Cold War, which sharpened native wits against the Marxist enemy,
in a way that they were never sharpened in Europe: the conversion of
important parts of the social democratic Jewish intelligentsia of New York
to the cause of neo-conservatism is a case in point. In 1970s Britain,
conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss,
Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly,
weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being
conservative.

The view has for a long time prevailed in England that
conservatism is simply no longer available-even if it ever has been really
available to an intelligent person - as a social and political creed.
Maybe, if you are an aristocrat or a child of wealthy and settled parents,
you might inherit conservative beliefs, in the way that you might inherit a
speech impediment or a Habsburg jaw. But you couldn't possibly acquire
them-certainly not by any process of rational enquiry or serious thought.
And yet there I was, in the early 1970s, fresh from the shock of 1968, and
from the countervailing shock of legal studies, with a fully articulate set
of conservative beliefs. Where could I look for the people who shared
them, for the thinkers who had spelled them out at proper length, for the
social, economic, and political theory that would give them force and
authority sufficient to argue them in the forum of academic opinion?

To my rescue came Burke. Although not widely read at the
time in our universities, he had not been dismissed as stupid, reactionary,
or absurd. He was simply irrelevant, of interest largely because he got
everything wrong about the French Revolution and therefore could be studied
as illustrating an episode in intellectual pathology. Students were still
permitted to read him, usually in conjunction with the immeasurably less
interesting Tom Paine, and from time to time you heard tell of a "Burkean"
philosophy, which was one strand within nineteenth-century British
conservatism.

Burke was of additional interest to me on account of the
intellectual path that he had trod. His first work, like mine, was in
aesthetics. And although I didn't find much of philosophical significance
in his Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful, I could see that, in the
right cultural climate, it would convey a powerful sense of the meaning of
aesthetic judgment and of its indispensable place in our lives. I suppose
that, in so far as I had received any intimations of my future career as an
intellectual pariah, it was through my early reactions to modern
architecture, and to the desecration of my childhood landscape by the
faceless boxes of suburbia. I learned as a teenager that aesthetic
judgment matters, that it is not merely a subjective opinion, unargued
because unarguable, and of no significance to anyone besides oneself. I
saw - though I did not have the philosophy to justify this - that aesthetic
judgment lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep social
imperative, and that it matters to us in just the way that other people
matter to us, when we strive to live with them in a community. And, so it
seemed to me, the aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its
vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the
world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement.
Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it
contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and
living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.

Like Burke, therefore, I made the passage from
aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual
incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost
experience of home. And I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is
the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured-not
necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will
be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil
of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression.
That belief is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find it-very
differently expressed - in Burke and Hegel, and also in T. S. Eliot, whose
poetry was the greatest influence on me during my teenage years.

When I first read Burke's account of the French
Revolution I was inclined to accept, since I knew no other, the liberal
humanist view of the Revolution as a triumph of freedom over oppression, a
liberation of a people from the yoke of absolute power. Although there
were excesses-and no honest historian had ever denied this - the official
humanist view was that they should be seen in retrospect as the birth-pangs
of a new order, which would offer a model of popular sovereignty to the
world. I therefore assumed that Burke's early doubts - expressed,
remember, when the Revolution was in its very first infancy, and the King
had not yet been executed nor the Terror begun - were simply alarmist
reactions to an ill-understood event. What interested me in the
Reflections was the positive political philosophy, distinguished from all
the leftist literature that was currently à la mode, by its absolute
concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary and
unexalted forms. Burke was not writing about socialism, but about
revolution. Nevertheless he persuaded me that the utopian promises of
socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human mind -
a geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the vaguest
relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings live. He
persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a
plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as
moral or spiritual progress.

Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which
hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality,
fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant
irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue
liberty, equality, and fraternity, not only because those things are
lamentably underdescribed and merely abstractly defined, but also because
collective reason doesn't work that way. People reason collectively
towards a common goal only in times of emergency-when there is a threat to
be vanquished, or a conquest to be achieved. Even then, they need
organization, hierarchy, and a structure of command if they are to pursue
their goal effectively. Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does
emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war.

Moreover - and here is the corollary that came home to me
with a shock of recognition - any attempt to organize society according to
this kind of rationality would involve exactly the same conditions: the
declaration of war against some real or imagined enemy. Hence the strident
and militant language of the socialist literature - the hate-filled,
purpose-filled, bourgeois-baiting prose, one example
of which had been offered to me in 1968, as the final vindication of the
violence beneath my attic window, but other examples of which, starting
with the Communist Manifesto, were the basic diet of political studies in
my university. The literature of left-wing political science is a
literature of conflict, in which the main variables are those identified by
Lenin: "Kto? Kogo?"-"Who? Whom?" The opening sentence of de Gaulle's
memoirs is framed in the language of love, about an object of love - and I
had spontaneously resonated to this in the years of the student "struggle."
De Gaulle's allusion to Proust is to a masterly evocation of maternal
love, and to a dim premonition of its loss.

Three other arguments of Burke's made a comparable impression.
The first was the defense of authority and obedience. Far from being the
evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority
was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he argued, is not
held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French
Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority - by which is
meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. And
obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of political beings, the
disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and without which
societies crumble into "the dust and powder of individuality." Those
thoughts seemed as obvious to me as they were shocking to my
contemporaries. In effect Burke was upholding the old view of man in
society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen
of a state. And what struck me vividly was that, in defending this old
view, Burke demonstrated that it was a far more effective guarantee of the
liberties of the individual than the new idea, which was founded in the
promise of those very liberties, only abstractly, universally, and
therefore unreally defined. Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom
that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of
obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal
intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified
into anarchy. Those ideas exhilarated me, since they made sense of what I
had seen in 1968. But when I expressed them, in a book published in 1979
as The Meaning of Conservatism, I blighted what remained of my academic
career.

The second argument of Burke's that impressed me was the
subtle defense of tradition, prejudice, and custom, against the enlightened
plans of the reformers. This defense engaged, once again, with my study of
aesthetics. Already as a schoolboy I had encountered the elaborate defense
of artistic and literary tradition given by Eliot and F. R. Leavis. I had
been struck by Eliot's essay entitled "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," in which tradition is represented as a constantly evolving, yet
continuous thing, which is remade with every addition to it, and which
adapts the past to the present and the present to the past. This
conception, which seemed to make sense of Eliot's kind of modernism (a
modernism that is the polar opposite of that which has prevailed in
architecture), also rescued the study of the past, and made my own love of
the classics in art, literature, and music into a valid part of my psyche
as a modern human being.

Burke's defense of tradition seemed to translate this very
concept into the world of politics, and to make respect for custom,
establishment, and settled communal ways, into a political virtue, rather
than a sign, as my contemporaries mostly believed, of complacency. And
Burke's provocative defense, in this connection, of "prejudice" -by which
he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social
beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life - was a
revelation of something that until then I had entirely overlooked. Burke
brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified
and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify
them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract
rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational
and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less
well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very
reason that they are justified by ourselves. The real justification for a
prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a
rational conclusion of an argument. In other words it is a justification
that cannot be conducted from our own perspective, but only from outside,
as it were, as an anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals of
an alien tribe.

An example will illustrate the point: the prejudices
surrounding sexual relations. These vary from society to society; but
until recently they have had a common feature, which is that people
distinguish seemly from unseemly conduct, abhor explicit sexual display,
and require modesty in women and chivalry in men in the negotiations that
precede sexual union. There are very good anthropological reasons for
this, in terms of the long-term stability of sexual relations, and the
commitment that is necessary if children are to be inducted into society.
But these are not the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men
and women. This conduct is guided by deep and immovable prejudice, in
which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds. The sexual
liberator has no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational,
in the sense of being founded on no reasoned justification available to the
person whose motives they are. And he may propose sexual liberation as a
rational alternative, a code of conduct that is rational from the
first-person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of practice from
a transparently reasonable aim, which is sexual pleasure.

This substitution of reason for prejudice has indeed
occurred. And the result is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not
merely a breakdown in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the
reproductive process - a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not
merely to each other, but also to their offspring. At the same time,
individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional
prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of
rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits
have replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of "date-rape"
take the place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by
the unattractive are routinely penalized as "sexual harrassment." This is
an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of
reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone
can fulfill. And indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of
sexual liberation, and the joyless world that it has produced around us,
that I came to see the truth of Burke's otherwise somewhat paradoxical
defense of prejudice.

The final argument that impressed me was Burke's response to
the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a
contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract
are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary
Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of
society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before
and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the
massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the
cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to
recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke's eyes the
self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the
Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of
the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among
the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the
"hereditary principle," according to which rights could be inherited as
well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized.
Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke's view, the only real safeguard
that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to
the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in
fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance
that they must strive to enhance and pass on.

I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else
in Burke, since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim
intuitions that I had had in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window
and thought of Valéry's Cimetière marin. In those deft, cool thoughts,
Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation,
all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the
future that has dominated and perverted modern politics. In effect, Burke
was joining in the old Platonic cry, for a form of politics that would also
be a form of care - "care of the soul" as Plato put it, which would also be
a care for absent generations. The graffiti paradoxes of the
soixante-huitards were the very opposite of this: a kind of adolescent
insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and
achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no
lasting sense save anarchy.

It was not until much later, after my first visit to
communist Europe, that I came to understand and sympathize with the
negative energy in Burke. I had grasped the positive thesis - the defense
of prejudice, tradition, and heredity, and of a politics of trusteeship in
which the past and the future had equal weight to the present - but I had
not grasped the deep negative thesis, the glimpse into Hell, contained in
his vision of the Revolution. As I said, I shared the liberal humanist
view of the French Revolution, and knew nothing of the facts that
decisively refuted that view and which vindicated the argument of Burke's
astonishingly prescient essay. My encounter with Communism entirely
rectified this.

Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism
was its ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole
populations to "live within the lie" as President Havel put it. George
Orwell wrote a prophetic and penetrating novel about this; but few Western
readers of that novel knew the extent to which its prophecies had come
true in Central Europe. To me it was the greatest revelation, when first I
travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1979, to come face to face with a situation
in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the book of history,
in which truth could not be uttered, and in which the Party could decide
from day to day not only what would happen tomorrow, but also what had
happened today, what had happened yesterday, and what had happened before
its leaders had been born. This, I realized, was the situation that Burke
was describing, to a largely incredulous readership, in 1790. And two
hundred years later the situation still existed, and the incredulity along
with it.

Until 1979 my knowledge of Communism had been entirely theoretical.
I did not like what I had read, of course, and was hostile in any case to
the socialist ideas of equality and state control, of which I had already
seen enough in France and Britain. But I knew nothing of what it is like
to live under Communism - nothing of the day-to-day humiliation of being a
non-person, to whom all avenues of self-expression are closed. As for
Czechoslovakia, as it then was, I knew only what I had gleaned from its
music-the music of Smetana, ~DVORAK, and ~jan in particular, to all three
of whom I owe the greatest of debts for the happiness they have brought
me. Of course, I had read Kafka and Ha~sek - but they belonged to another
world, the world of a dying empire, and it was only subsequently that I was
able to see that they too were prophets, and that they were describing not
the present but the future of their city.

I had been asked to give a talk to a private seminar in Prague.
This seminar was organized by Julius Tomin, a Prague philosopher, who had
taken advantage of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which supposedly obliged
the Czechoslovak government to uphold freedom of information and the basic
rights defined by the U.N. Charter. The Helsinki Accords were a farce,
used by the Communists to identify potential trouble-makers, while
presenting a face of civilized government to gullible intellectuals in the
West. Nevertheless, I was told that Dr. Tomin's seminar met on a regular
basis, that I would be welcome to attend it, and that they were indeed
expecting me.

I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and
deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied by some dark
official business, and in which Party slogans and symbols disfigured every
building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted.
Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air-raid
has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction.
Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me
as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Dr Tomin came out, and an
altercation ensued, during which I was thrown down the stairs. But the
argument continued and I was able to push my way past the guard and enter
the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the same expectant
silence. I realized that there really was going to be an air-raid, and
that the air-raid was me.

In that room was a battered remnant of Prague's intelligentsia
- old professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets;
fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their
parents' political "crimes"; priests and religious in plain clothes;
novelists and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst.
And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope;
and the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help
them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession: that of the
stoker. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment blocks; one
stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Some stoked where there
were no boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me,
a fitting symbol of the communist economy.

This was my first encounter with "dissidents": the people
who, to my astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders
of post-war Czechoslovakia. And I felt towards these people an immediate
affinity. Nothing was of such importance for them as the survival of their
national culture.

Deprived of material and professional advancement, their days were filled
with a forced meditation on their country and its past, and on the great
Question of Czech History which has preoccupied the Czechs since
Palack~y's day. They were forbidden to publish; the authorities had
concealed their existence from the world and had resolved to remove their
traces from the book of history. Hence the dissidents were acutely
conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise in what
Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things.
Something in me responded to this poignant ambition, and I was at once
eager to join with them and make their situation known to the world.

Briefly, I spent the next ten years in daily meditation on
Communism, on the myths of equality and fraternity that underlay its
oppressive routines, just as they had underlain the routines of the French
Revolution. And I came to see that Burke's account of the Revolution was
not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was like Milton's account
of Paradise Lost - an exploration of a region of the human psyche: a region
that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by way of a
miracle, to a world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the memories of
Hell. To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of Satan and his
work - the very same vision that had shaken Burke to the depths of his
being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burke's philosophy
as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human
beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life
on earth.

Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo
only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would
always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all
to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments
follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local
loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit
from the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience
has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long,
that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values,
and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite them
only in the short-term.

As to the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of
modern politics, the philosophy that Burke made plain to the world, this is
perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do not despair of it;
but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires not
a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.

http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=648

Apocalypse Please

US policy towards the Middle East is driven by a rarefied form of madness.
It s time we took it seriously.
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 20th April 2004

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican
party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions
made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.1

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters:
homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to
process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should
be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation
tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric
fences.2 Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a
small state 7000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that
the "screaming and near fistfights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered
down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they
adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West
Bank, that Arab states should be pressured to absorb refugees from
Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to
eliminate terrorism.3 Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a
state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs?
The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some
difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an
extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers
cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create
what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to earth when
certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the
establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation
of the rest of its "Biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the
rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the
Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be
deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the
valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to
Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that
before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe
what THEY believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to
heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to
sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best
seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils,
sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which
follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means
staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000 three US Christians
were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there)4, sponsoring Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for
Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of
Evil/United Nations/European Union/France or whoever the legions of the
Antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their
efforts. The Antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of
Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio
Berlusconi.5 The Walmart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a
very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing
humankind to the Mark of the Beast.6 By clicking on www.raptureready.com,
you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The
infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands
at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky
will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and
Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debating its
constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the South Atlantic, Hamas has
sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is
currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among
teenagers and a weak showing by the Antichrist (both of which score only
two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their
beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters
believe that between 15 and 18% of US voters belong to churches or
movements which subscribe to these teachings.7 A survey in 1999 suggested
that this figure included 33% of Republicans.8 The best-selling
contemporary books in the United States are the 12 volumes of the Left
Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised"
account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other
one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of
us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for
them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft,
the attorney-general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators
and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the
co-author of the marvellously-named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing
campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset
that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking."9

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the
current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on earth, which
is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the
invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelations (9:14-15) maintains that
four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released
"to slay the third part of men." They batter down the doors of the White
House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel
Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry
emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter
again.10

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this.
Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate,
the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest
when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle
East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president
fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at
the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by
encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it.
He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order
is now published in paperback.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.harriscountygop.com/sections/sdconv/sdconv.asp

2. eg. Committee on Resolutions, Harris County Republican Party, 27th March
2004. Final report of Senatorial District 17 Convention.
http://www.harriscountygop.com/sections/sdconv/sdconv.asp

3. ibid.

4. Paul Vallely, 7th September 2003. The Eve of Destruction. The
Independent on Sunday.

5. eg. http://www.raptureready.us

6. eg. http://www.raptureready.com/rap16.html (note: 5 and 6 are rival sites)

7. Megan K. Stack, 31st July 2003. House's DeLay Bonds With Israeli Hawks,
Los Angeles Times; Matthew Engel, 28th October 2002. Meet the new Zionists.
The Guardian; Paul Vallely, ibid.

8. Donald E. Wagner, 28th June 2003. Marching to Zion: the
evangelical-Jewish alliance. Christian Century.

9. Leader, 1st August 2003. DeLay's Foreign Meddling. Los Angeles Times.

10. Jane Lampman, 18th February 2004. The End of the World. The Christian
Science Monitor.

20th April 2004

http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=23227
9/11 Blunders Left Workers, Residents Literally in the Dust
Katherine Stapp April 7, 2004

Even as the White House scrambles to defend its handling of the terrorist
attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, the poisonous gas and dust unleashed by the
disaster continue to settle in the lungs of thousands of recovery workers
and New York City residents. They are particularly exasperated with the
federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), because it quickly reassured
people that the air around the World Trade Centre site in New York's
Manhattan was safe to breathe, when in fact EPA scientists lacked
sufficient data to draw this conclusion.

An internal investigation later found that the White House Council on
Environmental Quality "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and
delete cautionary ones" in its press releases.

In the months following the collapse of the centre, the EPA helped clean
some 4,000 apartments in the area through a voluntary programme. However,
tens of thousands of other sites, including offices and schools, have never
been officially checked for toxins like asbestos, mercury and lead.

"The question remains that thousands of homes could still be
contaminated," said Dr. Paul Lioy, one of the lead authors of a study
released in February by the National Institutes of Health on the
environmental and health impacts of the 9/11 attacks. "It's a very complex,
unprecedented situation."

With pressure building to assuage public fears, an expert panel of
scientists, doctors and one resident of Lower Manhattan is now in the midst
of re-evaluating the agency's actions.

"Nobody knows what people were exposed to," said Joel Shufro, the
executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and
Health (NYCOSH), a coalition of labour unions and workplace safety experts.

"The testing just hasn't been done. It's our assessment that the EPA and
Health Department never considered dust to be a public health hazard," he
said in an interview.

"The programmes they did create to deal with it were purely for political
cover. From day one, the primary concern was to reopen Wall Street."

According to the latest figures from Mount Sinai Hospital's occupational
health clinic, which has screened more than 9,000 rescue and recovery
workers, about one-half still suffer from respiratory problems and other
injuries. More than 40 percent have post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Those of us who responded to Ground Zero are in crisis," Jimmy Willis, a
member of the Transport Workers Union, recently testified before a
congressional subcommittee on national security.

"Transit workers toiled for weeks at Ground Zero without respirators.
Unfortunately, New York City Transit, the Department of Health and New York
State deferred site air quality and safety to the EPA," he said. "Of the
4,000 transit workers who responded to Ground Zero, as many as half of us
are now seriously ill."

Many also lack health insurance, and must rely on a handful of special
programmes to get treatment. The situation is especially bleak for the
undocumented day labourers who cleared dust from the apartments and office
buildings surrounding the World Trade Centre, without the benefit of
protective equipment.

A mobile clinic set up at Ground Zero in January and February 2002 saw 416
labourers, most of them from Colombia and Ecuador, while by last October
the Latin American Worker's Project had documented more than 600 day
labourers who helped in the clean-up.

Advocacy groups, like NYCOSH and the Puerto Rican Legal Defence and
Education Fund, are helping some of them to apply for workers compensation,
a state-run programme that provides medical treatment and cash benefits for
workers injured on the job -- regardless of their legal status.

But despite government promises that Sep. 11 cases would be expedited,
advocates say insurance companies are conducting business as usual, meaning
the cases will likely take years to resolve.

"The main problem is that insurance companies have learned how to work the
system so that it takes so long, workers get discouraged and give up," said
NYCOSH's Beverly Tillery, who is coordinating some of the World Trade
Centre cases.

"We've seen that happening, where the energy it takes to get through the
process just isn't worth it for some people."

"Also, the response letters that the Workers' Compensation Board sent out
are all in English, and the one worker advocate we talked to didn't speak
Spanish."

In March, a group of recovery workers and downtown residents sued the EPA
to demand further testing and cleanup, as well as the creation of a fund to
pay for medical monitoring of affected individuals.

Kelly Colangelo, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, lived just one and a half
blocks from the World Trade Centre the day the towers collapsed. She says
that personal testing later found relatively high levels of fibreglass,
asbestos and other toxins in her home, and she worries she is at increased
risk for deadly illnesses like asbestosis and mesothelioma.

"Thick grey dust, mixed with burnt papers, pervaded the apartment through
the open windows," she told IPS. "I contracted a rash on my face, and began
suffering from severe headaches, sinus problems, and a deep cough after I
was allowed to enter my building on Sep.12. The air in my apartment was
cloudy with suspended dust, and I had trouble breathing."

Last week, two members of Congress proposed expanding federal health
insurance to downtown residents and all workers to cover their physical and
psychological treatment, as well as the cost of prescription drugs. The
bill would increase the number of people now being monitored from 12,000 to
40,000.

Unions and worker advocates applauded the proposal, but noted that other,
larger issues must also be addressed.

"Workers -- for utilities, sanitation, transportation -- who were not
considered 'first responders' really were and need training" (in the event
of another incident like 9/11) Shufro said.

"We also need to sort out the issue of who's in charge. OSHA (the federal
Occupational Safety and Health Administration) deferred to local
authorities on the pile. For nine months, OSHA standards were not enforced,
and that's unacceptable."

For Immediate Release
April 22, 2004
Contact: Anne Petermann, Co-Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Press conference on Genetically Engineered Trees, The World Bank and
Global Warming
WHEN: U.S. Earth Day, Thursday, April 22nd, 12 noon
WHERE: The National Press Club - 529 14th St., N.W. - 13th Floor -
Washington, DC, USA
Global Justice Ecology Project, The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth
International, Forest Stewards Guild, Northwest Resistance Against Genetic
Engineering, Forest Ethics, the Stop GE Trees Campaign, Scotland's
WorldForests and the Peoples Forest Forum of Finland are sponsoring a press
conference to address the issue of genetically engineered trees in the
context of this week's mobilization against the World Bank.
Speakers include: Ricardo Navarro Chair of Friends of the Earth
International and the Director of CESTA/Friends of the Earth-El Salvador;
1995 Goldman Environmental Prize winner
Dennis Brutus Professor Emeritus Africana Studies University of
Pittsburgh, a South African activist, poet and former political prisoner
Anne Petermann, Co-Director of Global Justice Ecology Project and Chair of
the National Stop GE Trees Campaign

They will expose the dangers of genetically engineered trees and the
potential for disaster of developing these trees commercially or
incorporating them into carbon sink plantations to offset global warming.

In December 2003, in Milan, Italy, the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change ruled that genetically engineered trees can be used in
forestry plantations developed as carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol.
Non-governmental organizations from around North America and Europe will
address the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF) at their May meeting in Geneva on
the dangers of GE trees in an effort to convince the UN to rescind their
December 2003 decision.

"The approval of GE trees as part of the emissions trading schemes of the
Kyoto Protocol now opens the door for World Bank funding for GE tree
plantations all over the Global South," stated Anne Petermann, Co-Director
of Global Justice Ecology Project and Chair of the Stop GE Trees Campaign.
"Inevitable pollen drift from these genetically engineered tree plantations
will contaminate native forests, which will then contaminate more forests
in an ever expanding circle of ecological devastation. These trees kill
insects, resist herbicides, and provide no food for wildlife. They sound
the death knell for native forests and forest dwelling peoples."

Over 100 organizations throughout Europe have signed on demanding the UN
reverse its decision. The Earth Day press conference is the launch of a
similar drive in the U.S. to encourage organizations to sign on to the UN
campaign.

On April 19, Corner House of the U.K. joined over fifty environmental and
social justice organizations, NGOs and other groups in sending a letter of
protest to the World Bank calling for the closure of its new emissions
trading fund, The Prototype Carbon Fund. This letter was sent in response
to the World Bank's 60th anniversary, in solidarity with the protests that
are being held in Washington, DC, USA April 21-24.

####

Sierra Club's position on Genetically Engineered Trees

While we think of cities as the way the human signature is most
clearly written on the earth, it’Äôs agriculture which takes up the most
space. Agriculture is the technology which first allowed modern humans to
thrive, launching the population and cultural explosions which have
characterized the last ten thousand years of human history, and no changes
we’Äôve made on this planet are greater than our appropriation of the
majority of arable land to cultivate our food and fiber crops. A
surviving beauty of great meaning to most of us has been the forests which
have survived, often on steeper slopes or in more remote areas, less
changed by humankind and symbolizing our aspirations to retain some wild
places, remnants of a recent but largely dismantled past, to hand down to
future generations.

Forests can be characterized in terms of ecosystems, habitats,
biodiversity and so forth. Or we may say that they contain beauty and
scents and a sacred shade which must not be lost. Sierra Club has devoted
itself to maintaining the beauty and honoring a commitment to allow future
generations to be nurtured and inspired by it. Once, it seemed that could
be done by drawing lines on a map and holding unspoiled lands in a
perpetual trust. Today, we realize that human activities have remote
consequences and that acid rain or global warming don’Äôt respect park
boundaries. Another technology which threatens to despoil wilderness
despite all boundary lines is genetic engineering.

Sierra Club doesn't think of genetic engineering (GE) like a
genie which has escaped >from its bottle; there are many genies, many
bottles, and we think caution should be the rule. The risk that genes
taken from their native genomes and spliced into GE trees will interfere
with natural forests isn't a hypothetical possibility but a certainty.
Given a lack of caution, genetic engineering may do as much damage to
forests as chain saws and sprawl.

Looking at the world inside out

Looking at the world inside out, genes represent the beauty of
life just as much as a forest does. The grandeur of nature is the
deployment of the existing genetic diversity of our planet. The genome of
a single species contains a rich diversity.

Transgenic technology taking genes out of the genomes in
which they have evolved over millions of years and inserting them into
unrelated species isn’t needed. If genetic technologies are applied
to sylviculture, it should be to study and identify existing diversity. If
trees are to be bred like agricultural crops, then genetic sequence data
and polymorphisms should be used to steer selective breeding and accelerate
identification of the desired combinations. It isn’t prudent either,
because the tiniest errors in splicing might produce planetary effects.
And above all it isn’t moral because those who are rolling the dice are
not those who will pay the consequences.

The threat is now

We are often told that commercialization of genetically
engineered (GE'd) trees is at least several years away. However, GE'd
stands of papaya trees are yielding commercial crops in Hawaii. The tip of
the iceberg is already under our prow, not on the distant horizon. But it
is for the traditional forestry industries of paper and lumber that most
research is presently being done. This is also an area which poses the
greatest risk to nature. Engineering trees to grow more quickly into
lumber or to have less lignin in order to more easily be turned into paper
are examples of possible changes. Herbicide tolerance and pesticide
production, similar to many present GE’d food crops, are being actively
pursued.

The threat of GE'd trees interbreeding with wild trees is
extreme. While many agricultural varieties are already quite different from
their ancestors of thousands of years ago, this is not the case with
trees. And genetically engineered trees could easily become invasive.
Faster growing trees could crowd out others. Limp, low-lignin trees
resistant to common pests could easily become a kudzu-like invasive threat,
moving into our national parks and forests and changing their character
forever.

We do not say that every application of GE will necessarily be
bad. There may be good uses for this technology; it may be possible to use
it responsibly. But common sense should warn us that its commercial
development in the absence of strict environmental safeguards is a
prescription for disaster.

Genetically engineered trees are being designed for plantation
growth, and plantations are not forests. The difference between a
plantation and a forest will be compounded by genetic engineering. For
instance, GE’d pines might be grown without all those "useless" pine
cones. Eliminating these would allow the tree to put more of its energy
into growing rapidly. Or they may be herbicide resistant so that competing
undergrowth could be chemically eliminated. They may produce their own
pesticides so that many of the insects which live in association with trees
are poisoned.

The result, then, may be a silent forest, one which doesn't
support chipmunks or snakes at ground level, holds no birdsong in its
branches, supports no raptors soaring above. Clearly, such a stand of
trees would hold less beauty and poetry too.

Should we oppose genetic "improvements" to trees? Sierra Club
believes that we can't allow the industry to be judged by its hype and that
patented genes are not an improvement over nature. We also must avoid only
judging what one gene may do, because once hundreds of different genes --
most of them patented by industry and enjoying protection as "intellectual
property" -- are allowed access to public lands, the consequences of
unintended combinations will be unpredictable. GE trees will also be a
danger in other nations, particularly in the underdeveloped world where
conditions for effective regulation often don't exist.

GE trees and carbon sequestration

Sierra Club calls for action both at home and internationally
to create a worldwide moratorium on the further development and planting of
GE trees at least until an effective framework for public debate, unbiased
scientific evaluation, and regulation in the public interest -- with the
goal of preserving biodiversity -- can be brought into being. To approve
carbon sequestration credits for GE trees at this stage is unconscionable
and a subsidy for an insanity. Forests represent the right of nature to
exist for itself and of future generations to enjoy and be inspired by it.
We ask for international cooperation to support real forests and to oppose
corporate patented, subsided monocultures which destroy biodiversity and
turn nature’s genetic wealth into private property.

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=17960

Published: Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Bylined to: Jason Tockman

Cultivation of genetically modified crops to be prohibited on Venezuelan soil

Venezuelanalysis.com Jason Tockman writes:

President Hugo Chavez Frias has announced that the cultivation of
genetically modified crops will be prohibited on Venezuelan soil, possibly
establishing the most sweeping restrictions on transgenic crops in the
Western Hemisphere. Though full details of the administration's policy on
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are still forthcoming, the statement
by President Chavez will lead most immediately to the cancellation of a
contract that Venezuela had negotiated with the US-based Monsanto Corporation.

Before a recent international gathering of supporters in Caracas, President
Chavez admonished genetically engineered crops as contrary to interests and
needs of the nation’s farmers and farm workers. He then zeroed in on
Monsanto’s plans to plant up to 500,000 acres of transgenic soybeans in
Venezuela. “I ordered an end to the project," said President Chavez, upon
learning that transgenic crops were involved. “This project is terminated."

President Chavez emphasized the importance of food sovereignty and security
-- required by the Venezuelan Constitution -- as the basis of his decision.
Instead of allowing Monsanto to grow its transgenic crops, these fields
will be used to plant yuca (an indigenous crop), Chavez explained. He also
announced the creation of a large seed bank facility to maintain indigenous
seeds for peasants’ movements around the world.

The international peasants’ organization Via Campesina, representing more
than 60 million farmers and farm workers, had brought the issue to the
attention of the Chavez administration when it learned of the contract with
Monsanto. According to Rafael Alegria, secretary for international
operations of Via Campesina, both Monsanto and Cargill are seeking
authorization to produce transgenic soy products in Venezuela.

“The agreement was against the principles of food sovereignty that guide
the agricultural policy of Venezuela,” said Alegria when informed of the
President’s decision. “This is a very important thing for the peasants and
indigenous people of Latin America and the world.”
Alegria has good reason to be concerned ... with a long history of social
and environmental problems, Monsanto won early international fame with its
production of the chemical Agent Orange - the Vietnam War defoliant linked to
miscarriage, tremors, and memory loss, to which over a million people were
exposed. More recently, the company has been criticized for side-effects
that its transgenic crops and bovine growth hormone (rBGH) are believed to
have on human health and the environment.

Closer to home in Venezuela, Monsanto manufactures the pesticide
“glyphosate" which is used by the neighboring Colombian government as part
of its Plan Colombia offensive against coca production and rebel groups.
The Colombian government aerially sprays hundreds of thousands of acres,
destroying legitimate farms and natural areas like the Putomayo rainforest,
and posing a direct threat to human health, including that of indigenous
communities.

“If we want to achieve food sovereignty, we cannot rely on transnationals
like Monsanto," said Maximilien Arvelaiz, an advisor to President Chavez.
“We need to strengthen local production, respecting our heritage and
diversity."

Alegria hopes that Venezuela’s move will serve as encouragement to other
nations contemplating how to address the issue of GMOs. “The people of the
United States, of Latin America, and of the world need to follow the
example of a Venezuela free of transgenics."

This Jason Tockman article was published earlier today in Venezuelanalysis.com

----

* NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. *

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/005/16.22.html

Rainbow Coalitions
African American, Hispanic pastors lead the charge against gay marriage.
By Tony Carnes in New York

Bishop Roderick Caesar, 53, thinks he was 17 or 18 when a friend confessed,
"I am in the life," meaning he was homosexual. Caesar sat with his friend
and prayed. "I told him I would be his friend until the day he died. I
also told him I would pray that he would not find happiness."

Caesar, pastor of Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Jamaica, Queens, helped
organize a rally against gay marriage at City Hall on March 29 with the
400-church City Covenant Coalition, led by Puerto Rican-Italian Joseph
Mattera. Earlier, on March 14, more than 8,000 Hispanic evangelicals
converged in the Bronx for the nation's largest rally to date against gay
marriage. One of the speakers was a white Assemblies of God pastor.

In New York City and elsewhere, African American and Hispanic pastors are
facing off against a large homosexual-rights contingent over the issue of
gay marriage. For Christian leaders steeped in personal compassion, the
confrontation is full of anguish, fear, and anger.

When the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts ordered gay marriage to
become state law this month, local black and Hispanic clergy associations
quickly joined in protest (CT, April, p. 90). A month later, African
American pastors, organized by the Los Angeles - based Coalition on Urban
Renewal and Education (CURE), and in association with the Family Research
Council, came from across the country to support their beleaguered
colleagues.

"This is a line in the sand for black churches across the nation," said
CURE founder Star Parker.

The Alliance for Marriage (AFM), which advocates a constitutional amendment
to protect marriage, released a poll on March 4 showing that 63 percent of
Hispanics and 62 percent of African Americans support an amendment defining
marriage as between a man and a woman. AFM has broad support among
minorities. "Concern for stronger families trumps jobs," said founder Matt
Daniels. "It trumps the environment for all voter groups."

Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx had two brothers who were homosexual. As a
pastor in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) and overseer of more than
100 Pentecostal churches, he knew many other church leaders who had seen
members drifting from broken families into drugs, homosexuality, and death.

Ten years ago, Diaz, a Democrat, complained that city support for the Gay
Games was taking funding from poor families. His comments drew a torrent of
abuse from activists.

"They hit me with a pitcher of water," Diaz said. "They called me
'homophobe,' 'preacher of hate.' I received threatening letters.
Publicly, that issue forced me to commit."

Now a state senator, Diaz organized hundreds of Bronx Hispanic churches for
the March 14 rally on the steps of the state supreme court. "We are
praying, singing, and denouncing gay marriages," he told those attending.
"I can be expelled from the [Democratic] Party for what I am saying, but
none of that counts before the Lord."

Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign, said the minority
vote could make a difference. Other Republican strategists say that the
push for homosexual marriage will split some Hispanic voters from the
Democrats, while keeping socially conservative African American Democrats
home on Election Day.

For Caesar, the issue is not about politics. He cannot forget when his
friend came back to the church from out of "the life." "He walked in and
told me that one day he woke up and realized that his lifestyle is not his
destiny." The pastor said that since his friend wasn't legally entangled
in a gay marriage, "he never looked back."

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today

Pesticide & Toxic Chemical News
April 5, 2004
Pew Report spurs debate over future of biotech regulation.

The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology last week released a
lengthy report on the United States' review process for future biotech
food products that has already stimulated debate between supporters and
critics of the current system.

[ P&TCN unhelpfully withholds: http://pewagbiotech.org/]

That debate cuts across the usual industry versus consumer lines, with
some regulators and industry officials privately conceding that the
current system is - if not broken - at least in need of preventive
maintenance. The existing regulatory framework was assembled during the
Regan administrations from a patchwork of existing laws and regulations
and given to USDA, FDA and EPA to administer in a coordinated fashion.

"There's lot of unhappiness out there with the regulatory situation,"
Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environmental program at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, told Pesticide & Toxic Chemical News.
"Parts of the system are simply in paralysis. There are folks in the
agencies who want to move forward but don't know howl Even the biotech
industry is concerned. The scientists see no clear path forward for
some of these products."

The Pew Report, "Issues in the Regulation of Genetically Engineered
Plants and Animals," examines a range of options for dealing with future
biotech products now coming out of laboratories.

The report acknowledges that current ag biotech products have been
widely adopted without evidence of food safety or environmental
problems. However, it said "the potential complexity of future products
may challenge the ability of the existing Coordinated Framework for
Regulation of Biotechnology to continue to protect public health and the
environment and maintain public trust."

The report also examines the extent to which regulatory practices are
transparent and open to public participation - "all procedural elements
that will help build confidence in the integrity of the regulatory
system," according to Pew.

Key findings of the report include:

o Both EPA and USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
face challenges in managing possible environmental risks raised by
bioengineered plants. APHIS may not have the necessary
regulations in place to comprehensively oversee biotech plants
that (1) cannot easily be defined as "plant pests"; (2) consider
broad environmental risks that may be posed by a biotech plant; or
(3) quickly and fully manage environmental issues that arise once
the plant has entered the marketplace.

o Under current FIFRA rules, EPA cannot hold growers directly liable
for violations of planting restrictions intended to prevent
unwanted gene flow or curb the development o insect resistance.
Instead, EPA enforces these restrictions against registrants and
seed companies, which Pew says raises questions about the adequacy
of agency enforcement.

o FDA lacks the legal authority to require developers to prove the
safety of all foods derived from biotech plants - including
imported foods - before they go to market, which some critics
believe is necessary. It is also unclear how agencies would
conduct an early review to assess food safety risks if biotech
crops grown in experimental field trials were to accidentally mix
at low levels with crops intended for the food supply.

Mixed reactions

The Pew report drew mixed reactions from industry and consumer
advocates. Lisa Dry, spokeswoman for the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, told PTCN it would not be far-fetched to compare the
coordinated framework to the U.S. Constitution.

"The document works, but it can always be expanded and amended," she
said, nothing that APHIS is in the process of overhauling its
regulations through an Environmental Impact Statement, and that the
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is also considering
regulatory changes.

"They're clearly trying to keep up," Dry said. "It's not like the
system is broken. We have a good structure and foundation. We should
build on that and prepare for the future. We have the statutory
authority we need."

Jeff Barach, vice president for special projects at the National Food
Processors Association, described the Pew study as "basically a status
report on current oversight with no specific conclusions or
recommendations."

Noting that the report offers insights on possible options for the
future, he told PTCN, "Our position is that the system is in place and
working, but we may need to make adjustments. As the technology
advances, there may need to be changes."

On of the groups that want immediate changes is the Center for Science
in the Public Interest. Greg Jaffe, CSPI biotechnology project
director, recently outlined his vision of an ideal biotech regulatory
system in an academic journal (see PTCN, March 29, Page 16).

Praising the Pew report, Jaffe said it represented "one of the few times
someone has analyzed legally the full range of issues around the
Coordinated Framework and exposed its fundamental flaws and weaknesses."

"It's time for Congress to step up and write legislation to properly
regulate these products," he said.

Jaffe said the report reveals the "creative but extremely shaky legal
arguments" underlying the coordinated framework.
"Future products won't be comprehensively regulated, and the public will
bear the risks if the current system remains," he said. "We will lose
the benefits of sage products because of the weak regulation of some
risky applications."

Jaffe said biotech supporters should encourage reform in order to level
th playing field, create well-defined regulatory pathways and bolster
consumer acceptance of products.

"It's time for Congress to step in," he said.

Festering dissatisfaction

UCS' Mellon praised the Pew report as "an impressive piece of work,"
noting that she participated in the study process along with others.

"It provides a readable analysis of the federal framework and sets the
stage for a really big debate in a couple of years," she said.
"Dissatisfaction has been festering for a number of years. People
expected the framework would be revisited [after its creation in 1986]
but it hasn't happened. The will to actually do something about the
growing regulatory hold just wasn't there."

Mellon observed that the biotech industry has been "trying to sell the
technology against a very still headwind" for the past five or six
years. Industry executives and regulators were loath to be seen as
criticizing the existing framework in the face of domestic and overseas
resistance to biotech foods.

"They were whistling past the graveyard," she said.

Renewed debate will include the possibility of new legislation, Mellon
predicted.

"I think the dynamic is going to be different," she said. "There will
be more players, because it's not just environmentalists who want
effective regulation. There are sectors of industry that will want
something to be done.

"If someone in the government wants to stand up and take the lead, they
can use the Pew document as a guide," Mellon said. "We need to
seriously look at the framework, identify the holes and then fill them.
We can look at new legislation if necessary. Congress is a place of
last resort, because no one know what will happen during the legislative
process."

- Stephen Clapp
sclapp@crcpress.com

April 2004

Politically militant hx activists (despised by non-militant hx such
as L Perigo) have been challenging the Presbyterian church in NZ for years
to ordain known hx. The Anglican church is overdue for such a challenge,
and is ill prepared for it; indeed, bishops have been all but inviting such
an attack.

This is no abstract issue, for my parish. No new vicar had been
arranged for the scheduled retirement of Get Smart, whose attitudes
out-PC'd his PC predecessor Harvey Smith. A meeting was convened in the
*church* (avoiding the hall where opinions could be more vigorously
expressed) by Bishop Patterson's chaplain (tho' she didn't mention that's
her position) Barbara Wesseldine, to discuss what sort of vicar the
advisory cttee should seek. When an elderly parishioner said a married man
with a supportive wife would be best, Mrs Priestley (wife of the judge;
herself a candidate for ordination) said we should maximize tolerance &
diversity. Some parishioners fear the parish will be assigned to a sexual
deviant on the ground that political advancement of suchlike is a top
priority in the sexist & racist affirmative action which today dominates
church policy. I attach a good brief sketch of PC.

When the issue is raised whether to ordain known hx, the usual
tactic is to divert immediately onto the non-issue of whether church
*membership* is fully open to hx; the issue of whether to ordain them is
evaded. The sheer dishonesty of that evasion should tell more strongly
against its proponents than appears to be usual in the woolly liberal mind.

In the past couple decade has been added to the prior drawbacks of
hx activity the epidemic of HIV which, while turning out to be less than
universally fatal among those who contract it, is a v undesirable pathogen.
In NZ those infected, so far, have been ca.90% men. But (as documented in
the excellent Whitehead book 'My Genes Made Me Do It') bisexual men are 3x
as abundant as exclusive hx, i.e ca 2% of men vs. 0.75%. (Hx MP Chris
Carter as recently as last week tried to put across on Radio NZ the old
Kinsey "10% hx" lie.) Hx acts, and bisexual acts, are a danger to public
health, threatening innocent women & children as well as needlessly
diverting scarce medical resources. To legitimise hx orientation is,
statistically, to increase the prevalence of unnecessary serious illness.

Promotion of homosexuality is also unfair on women who want normal
marriage (a state undermined persistently by M Wilson esq MP). In the
recent parish mtg mentioned above, Ms W asked us to sketch trends of the
past few decades that the church should be coming to grips with - and I
mentioned that the institution *marriage* has declined in status and in
abundance. (I added I'd lately done personally what little I myself could
do against this trend; I took kindly the gale of warm laughter.) Nobody
dissented from this statement. In the *church* at that time one then felt
inhibited from going on to point out that one motive force in the
undermining of marriage is militant lesbianism e.g Marilyn Waring spreading
mistrust of men. The $0.5B ACC racket of framing up men on uncorroborated
"recovered memories" of childhood sexual abuse is another reminder of how
far perverts have been able to undermine the family as an institution.
Man-hating lesbians are the mainspring of wimminsLib; this should not be
overlooked, even tho' more 'respectable-looking' wimminsLibbers such as
Cartwright, Clark, M Wilson esq, etc are not so extreme.

The dauntingly high principle declared by the Lord in Mat 5:28
makes clear that - at least for a man desiring adultery - the sin is in
the intention, as much as or even more than in the doing. I'm not sure
whether that principle is to apply to all types of sin, but I will proceed
on the assumption that it is applicable to hx lust. (I shall assume that
only hx not lesbian lust is meant in Mat 5:28, tho' I point out in passing
that 'inclusive' affirmative action would want lesbians included

Many of those who concede that hx acts are sinful - or at the
very least, unacceptable in those seeking ordination as Christian ministers
- maintain that hx *orientation* is OK, i.e that lusting after same-sex
action is OK as long as it's not acted upon.

But why shouldn't the same principle apply? If an act that's
biologically natural becomes sinful when adulterous, so much so that to
want it is sinful even when that desire is not acted out, how can hx lust
be OK when the act lusted after is biologically deviant & unhealthy (and
biblically condemned)?

The routine liberal defence is of course to claim that hx
orientation is congenital and therefore not a choice. This is a lie, as is
amply proven by Whitehead's review of primary scientific literature. Hx
orientation may be difficult to shake, and all too easy to establish by
leading astray (a particularly grievous sin), but it is in almost all cases
learned, not congenital. That fact is much more hopeful, implying scope
for escape from the subcultures in question, as against the horrible
hopeless notion that a person is doomed to such perversion regardless of
will. It is also hopeful in the sense that the 0.75% etc can be decreased
rather than accepted as facts of biology.

Whether the bishop's unordained chaplain is a lesbian nobody asks.
Yet the nightmarish axis of politically militant hx & lesbians (with their
'bulk of the iceberg' bisexual allies) has gained control of the Anglican
church to such an extent that almost everyone is cowed by these perverts.
I appeal to decent Christians to speak out against these perversions,
especially in their political manifestations. To maximize diversity &
tolerance is to suspend opposition to evil.

In this context I make bold to query whether hx orientation is OK
for clergy as implied by Bp Coles' preposterous cttee and many other
liberal church leaders lately.

R

The Ten Commandments of Political Correctness

Thou shalt:

1. Regard all racial and sexual minorities as sacrosanct and refrain from any criticism of them.

2. Treat women as a minority, though they constitute 51% of the population. [*]

3. Blame all society's ills on the white, heterosexual, male "majority".

4. Deplore all discrimination, unless it is specifically designed to disadvantage the "majority".

5. Insist that the "majority" is by nature racist & sexist, and deviseways to control its behaviour.

6. Ignore any comments by minorities about the majority, or about each other, which might suggest that they too sometimes have racist & sexist tendencies.

7. Place no importance upon truth, accuracy or consistency of argument,for the next commandment makes these inconveniences unnecessary.

8. Silence all dissenters with a system of legal penalties, social vilification and ridicule.

9. Pretend that political correctness is simply about politeness.

10. Rejoice in your moral superiority.

---The Ten Commandments of Political Correctness by Don Bruce.
These were published in the letters to the editor of The Sunday Age newspaper on August 10, 1997.

* Note: The 51% figure relates to *all* females of all ages.
Amongst the population of voting age women comprise in the USA closer to 57%.
In other developed nations the figures aren't too far different.

April 12, 2004
Prof. Joe Cummins

Genetically modified biopharmaceutical products are being produced and
marketed in the United States of America

There has been a great deal of discussion about the testing of rice genetically
modified to produce the human gene products lysozyme and lactoferrin in the
United States (1) so far those tests in a stalemate. Nevertheless,
Sigma-Aldrich chemical company of the United States has been marketing the
biopharmaceutical products trypsin, avidin, and beta-glucuronidase (GUS)
processed from transgenic maize for at least two years (2) while Prodigene
Corporation markets aprotinin (AproliZean)(3) as does Sigma-Aldrich but from a
non-food or feed member of the tobacco family(4) For example, trypsin is a
digestive enzyme used extensively in research , to treat disease and in food
processing; the product TrypZean is marketed as an animal free product (to
avoid contamination with animal viruses or prions) produced jointly by
Sigma-Aldrich and Prodigene biotechnology company (Prodigene is the company
that faced problems after contaminating food crops with biopharmaceuticals in
the United States (5)).

The production of genetically modified (GM) food crops
follows a strict process in the United States. First controlled field tests
are undertaken for a number of seasons; then the proponent applies for
deregulation of the GM crop following reviews by the Animal Plant Health
Service (APHIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (SDA), the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
when the GM crop includes a plant-incorporated bio-pesticide.

Upon completion of the process the GM crop is deemed to be de-regulated
and can be grown without monitoring. None of the GM crops producing the
products listed above appear to have been deregulated. The production of those
biopharmaceuticals and their marketing seems to have been accomplished without
the benefit of final regulatory approval.

Production and marketing of the biopharmaceutical crops listed above has done
with apparently full cooperation of the FDA and USDA (the agriculture
department has proprietary interest in some of the biopharmaceuticals).
Approval of the biopharmaceuticals and their production appears to have been
done using a tricky backdoor procedure based on a loophole in the regulation
of field test releases. According to Pew initiative on food and
biotechnology “current APHIS regulations do allow the commercialization of a
GE crop without a prior affirmative approval by the agency and without public
notice. Developers are not required to file a petition for nonregulated status
before they produce a plant commercially. It is possible for developers to
grow plants at a commercial scale under notification or field trial
permits, even if the plants might pose some identifiable environmental or human
health risk(6)."

Crop production facilities are permitted as “field tests". Locations of
such facilities are designated confidential business information and is
not disclosed to inhabitants even though the genes and products of
such sites can easily contaminate both crops, ground water and surface water.
There seems to be no direct way for any but producers and government
regulators to find production facilities. The United States government
seems committed to going ahead with a procedure that bypasses public input
and scrutiny and which if ,when finally revealed, threatens the marketability of
US food exports. In contrast, the Canadian Food Inspection Service maintains
that “plant products of test sites cannot be marketed" (7) even though
numerous plant biopharmaceutical products have been tested.

Production of the commercial biopharmaceuticals has been, for the most part,
achieved using maize. Maize is a crop of fundamental importance and should not
have been messed with in the way it has to produce biopharmaceuticals. An
approach of that type might be excused on the basis that the products are
benign. However, the products are not benign. Exposure to such products will
result in characteristic impact on humans and animals. Each of the products
will be briefly reviewed below. But first the regulation of plant derived
biopharmaceuticals was reviewed in 2000 (. And in 2004 by the Pew Initiative
(6). Only the Pew report came to grips with the practice of marketing
virtually untested products commercialized with out public input. A review of
the Prodigene products was published in 2002 (9). As indicated earlier, test
plot permits for crops producing biopharmaceutical proteins are usually
designated confidential business information so that the nature of the product
is hidden from the public, the exact location of test sites is not declared,
but APHIS does record the crop and the state in which the modified crop is
tested. During 2003 and 2004 ProdiGene had test plots in Nebraska, Texas, Iowa
and Missouri (10), so residents of other states can feel relieved about
their neighbors corn.

Trypsin is an enzyme produced in the pancreas. It breaks down proteins in
digestion. The enzyme is used in a number of laboratory applications, in
wound treatment and to treat diabetes. The enzyme is used in food
processing and often put into infant formulations to aid digestion. The
plant-produced product is desirable because it is free of prions and animal
viruses (11). The method for modifying crop plants and preparation of the
gene for trypsin is described in US patent 6,087,558 (12). The gene for
trypsin is isolated from bovine pancreas. The gene is actually to produce
trypsinogen which has six additional amino acid residues at the start of the enzyme (these are cleaved to make active trypsin). The DNA 'cassette'
inserted into the corn plants comprises the ubiquitin promoter, including
the first exon and intron; the barley alpha amylase export signal sequence; a
trypsinogen encoding sequence;
pinII terminator (potato protease inhibitor II terminator); 35S promoter and
terminator with the moPAT (maize optimized PAT) selectable marker. The PAT gene
is for glufosinate resistance; the maize is herbicide tolerant but the gene
is mainly for selecting transformed cells.

According to material data safety sheets provided by trypsin manufacturers the
product is capable of causing allergy is a skin, eye and respiratory irritant
and may be a mutagen (13,14). Known allergens should not be produced in food
crops.

Avidin is a protein found in bird eggs. It functions to bind the vitamin
biotin which is required for many insect pests. The pests are inactivated by
the absence of the necessary vitamin. Maize transgenic for avidin production
is resistant to storage insect pests (16). Friends of the Earth did an
excellent case study of avidin corn providing substantial evidence that the
protein caused dangerous biotin deficiency in humans and animals leading to
immune deficiency and growth retardation (17). Even marginal biotin deficiency
is teratogenic in mice (1 and implicated in human birth defects (19). Biotin
is used a great deal but mainly as a diagnostic tool. Commercial production
using transgenic maize has been described in a publication (20) and in
patents (21,22). The genes used in transgenic corn are similar to those
described above for trypsin. A chicken egg-white avidin gene was modified in its
genetic code to make a maize-optimum gene. The ubiquitin promoter along with
first exon and intron were joined to a barley signal sequence for localizing
avidin in the grain. After the avidin sequence was the potato protease
inhibitor II terminator sequence. Along with the avidin related a sequence with the selectable Bar gene (glufosinate resistance ) driven by a double and a CaMV
promoter, tobacco mosaic virus leader sequence and maize alcohol dehydrogenase
intron, the transcription terminator was from the potato protease as above.
The avidin produced in maize has similar properties to avidin produced in egg
white but it is clearly a unique gene product that requires independent safety
assessment.

Aprotinin is a protease inhibitor normally prepared from bovine pancreas and
lung. Recombinant apoprotinin produced in plants is currently marketed as
incidated above. Bill Freese of friends of the earth provided a very fine
review of the product and the problem of allergy and pancreatic disease from
ingestion of the biopharmaceutical (23). Some findings additional to those
covered by Bill Freese are discussed as follows. Aprotinin is listed as a
reproductive hazard (24). There is serious danger to those exposed to
aprotinin after having had a previous exposure. Fore example a two year old
child suffered severe anaphylactic shock after a a test dose of aprotinin
(25). Fatal anaphylaxis followed aprotinin exposure in aa local application
of fibrin glue (26 or a similar application led to an immediate skin reaction
following reexposure to fibrin sealent (27). Secret field testing of plant
based recombinant aproptinin could result in severe or fatal anaphylaxis
either in a brief exposure in the maize field of one previously treated during
surgery or exposure of one exposed to the maize field then treated during
surgery.

Recombinant aprotinin derived from the bovine gene was produced in maize
(28,29). The genetic construction was similar to those described above for
maize based biopharmaceuticals. The ubiquitin promoter along with the ubiquitin
intron was linked to a signal sequence from barley amylase, the aprotinin
sequence was followed by the transcription terminator for potato protease II.
A selectable marker, bar (glufosinate tolerance) was added along with the
double CaMV promoter , tobacco mosaic virus omega leader and intron from maize
alcohol dehydrogensase along with the potato protease II terminator . The
recombinant aprotinin does not appear to have been extensively tested using
animals even though its glycosylation pattern may differ from the animal
product and effect its allergenicity and stability.

The final commercial recombinant product produced in maize is
beta-Glucuronidiase (GUS). The gene is used in a wide array of experimental
situations but does not appear to have therapeutic importance. It has been
observed that formula milk for infants had a low content of GUS while mother’s
milk had elevated GUS. Elevated GUS has been implicated in bilirubinaemia
(jaundice) of breast fed infants (30) and breast fed infants of diabetic
mothers (31). GUS is used extensively as a marker believed to have liitle
effect on the phenotype of the test organism, however, GUS was found to
enhance the feeding activity of the peach aphid (32) suggesting that the marker
may not be entirely without effect on the phenotype of organisms.

Commercial production of recombinant GUS was reported in 1998 (33). The
recombinant GUS gene was isolated from E. coli. The maize construction was
similar to those described previously for the other recombinant proteins
inclusing the promoters, introns etc. and selectable marker described above.
Codon alterations to accommodate protein synthesis in plants, a surprising
omission because bacterial genes do not normally perform well in higher plants
unless the gene codons are adjusted for the plant cell.

In conclusion, the secretive production of truly dangerous pharmaceuticals in
food crops is a truly disturbing development. Production of products such as
aprotinin may have fatal consequences to the unknowingly exposed The sale of
such products without transparent public approval is a threat to the
residents, not from the products themselves, but from the knowing exposure of
the public through the food crop and concealment of that information by
authorities. In a democratic society we should insure that elected local
officials take care to insure that the secret production is not permitted in
the area. If the elected officials are uninterested or willing to connive with
the bureaucrats they should be replaced at election or by recall.

References

1.Cummins,J. "Pharm crops near you" 2004 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ pp1-5
2.Horn,M,Woodward,S. and Howard,J. "Plant molecular farming:systems and
products" 2004 Plant Cell Reports 2004 in press DOI: 10.1007/s00299-004-0767-1
3.Prodigene "Aprolizean recombinant aprotinin from maize" 2004
http://www.prodigene.com/pdf/AproliZean(tm)%20Backgrounder.pdf
4.Yahoo Finance "LSBC and Sigma-Aldrich announce an agreement to manufacture and
distribute plant-produced recombinant aprotinin" 2004
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040308/85333_1.html
5.USDA NewsRelease "USDA announces actions regarding plant protection act
violations involving prodigene,inc" 2002 http://www.usda.gov/news/releases/2002/12/0498.htm
6.Pew Initiative on food and biotechnology "Issues in the regulation of
genetically engineered plants and animals" 2004 pp1-174
7.Perron,F. personal communication CFIA 2004
8.Graham,S. "Plant derived biologics meeting" 2000 pp1-145
http://www.fda.gov/cber/minutes/plnt1040500.pdf
9.Hood,E. "From green plants to industrial enzymes" 2002 Enzyme and Microbial
Technology 30,279-83
10.APHIS "Prodigene permit activity" 2004 APHIS-USDA 2004
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/cgi-bin/parse-company.pl pp1-2
11.Prodigene "TrypZean recombinant trypsin from maize" 2004 pp1-3
http://www.prodigene.com/pdf/TrypZean(tm)%20Backgrounder.pdf
12.Howard,J. and Hood,E. "Commercial production of proteases in plants" United
States Patent 6,087,558 pp1-18
13. Safety data "Safety (MSDS) data for trypsin from bovine pancreas" 2003 pp1-2
http;//physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/TR/trypsin.html
14.Specialty Media "MSDS EDTA,MSDS and trypsin MSDS" 2004 pp1
http://www.specialitymedia.com/05Resources/MSDS%20SM-2002-C.htm4/
15. McGraw,L. "Avidin an egg-citing insecticide protein in corn" 2000
Agricultural Research http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/aug00/egg0800.htm
16. Kramer,K, Morgan,T, Throne,J, Dowell,F, Bailey,M. and Howard,J.
"Transgenic avidin maize is resistant to storage insect pests" 2000 Nature
Biotech 18,670-5
17. Freese,B. "Biopharming:case study of avidin corn" 2002 Friends of the Earth
http://www.foe.org/biopharm/csavidin.pdf
18.Mock,D,Mock,N,Stewart,C,LaBorde,J. and Hansen,D. "Marginal biotin deficiency
is teratogenic in ICR mice" 2003 J.Nutr.133,2519-25
19. Zemleni,J. and Mock,D. "Marginal biotin is teratogenic (in human)" 2000
Proc.Soc. Exp.Biol.Med.223,14-21
20. Hood,E, Witcher,D,Maddock,S, Meyer,T, Baszczynski,C, Bailey,M, Flynn,P,
Register.J, Marshall,L, Bond,D, Kulisek,E, Kusnad,A , Evangelista,R, Nikolov,Z,
Wooge,C, Mehigh,R, Hernan,R, Kappel,W, Ritland,D, Ping ,C, Howard,L and
Howard,J. "Commercial production of avidin from transgenic maize:
characterization of transformant, production, processing, extraction and
purification" 1997 Molecular Breeding 3,291-306
21. Bazynski,C,Hood,E,Maddox,S,Myer,T,Register,J,Witcher,D. and Howard,J.
"Commercial production of avidin in plants" 1998 United States patent 5,767,379
pp1-15
22.Albertson,M,Howard,J. and Maddox,S. "Induction of male sterility in plants by
expression of high levels of avidin" 1999United States patent 5,962,769
23. Freese,B. "Biopharming:case study of corn producing aprotinin" 2002 Friends
of the Earth pp1-5 http://www.foe.org/biopharm/csaprotinin.pdf
24.Research Safety "Appendix B:Reproductive Hazard" 2002 pp1-22
http;//www.northwestern.edu/research-safety/pdf
25. Ryckwaert,Y,Barthlet,Y,Bonnet-Boyer,M,Rochette,A,Capdevila,X. and d’Athis,F.
"Anaphylactic shock after a test dose of aprotinin in pediatric orthopedic
surgery" 1999 AnnFrAnesthReanim 18,904-8
26.Oswald,A,Joly,L,Gury,C,Disdet,M,Leduc,V. and Kanny,G. "Fatal intraoperative
anaphylaxis related to aprotinin after local application of fibrin glue" 2003
Anasthesiology 99,762-3
27.Beierlein,W,Scheule,A,Antoniadis,G,Braun,C. and Schlosser,R. "An immediate
allergic skin reaction to aprotinin after exposure to fibrin sealant" 2000
Transfusion 40,302-5
28. Zhong,G, Peterson,D, Delaney,D, Bailey,M, Witcher,D, Register ,J, Bond,D,
Li,C, Marshall,L, Kulisek,E, Ritland,D, Meyer,T, Hood,E. and Howard,J.
"Commercial production of aprotinin in transgenic maize seeds" 1999 Molecular
Breeding 5,345-56
29. Baszczynski ,C, Czapla,T, Hood,E, Meyer,T, Peterson,D,Rao,G, Register,J,
Witcher,D. and Howard,J. "Commercial production of aprotinin in plants" 1998
United States patent 5,824,870 pp1-15
30.Gourley,G. and Arend,R. "beta-Glucuronidase and hyperbilirubinaemia in breast
fed and formula fed babies" 1986 Lancet 22, 644-6
31. Sirota,L, Ferrera,M,lerer,N. and Dulitzky,F. "Betagucuronidase and
hyerbiirubinaemia in breast fed infants of diabetic mothers" 1992
Arch.Dis.Child 67,120-1
32. Cherqui A, Alla S, Saguez J, Doury G, Sangwan-Norreel B. and Giordanengo P.
"Probiotic effects of beta-glucuronidase on the peach-potato aphid Myzus
persicae (Aphididae)" 2003 J. Insect. Physiol. 49,1199-209
33. Witcher,D, Hood,E, Peterson,D, Bailey,M, Bond,D, Kusnadi, A,
Evangelista,R, Nikolov,Z, Wooge,C, Mehigh,R, Kappel, W, Register,J. and Howard
,J "Commercial production of â-glucuronidase (GUS): a model system for the
production of proteins in plants" 1998 Molecular Breeding 4,301-12

http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum/uk/index.html

WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE´S FOREST FORUM!

As the UN Forum on Forests meets in Geneva next May to discuss the state of
the world´s forests and to weigh the various problems and solutions
involved, it will have before it a number of national forest reports,
including that of Finland. The national reports can be found here .

It is alarming that Finland is to present the UN Forest Forum with a summary
that manages to ignore all the major problems of our forestry! And,
unfortunately, some other countries are just as likely to paint a rosy
picture of their own situations regarding forests. Reporting like this is
not a useful starting point for improving our understanding of the global
state of the forests.

But the official truth can also be taken as a challenge for debate. This is
why we have launched this site - the People´s Forest Forum - a forum for
openly discussing and reporting on forests.

Genetically modified trees are not the answer

The idea of fighting global warming with genetically modified trees,
approved by the UN climate meeting in Milan last December, serves to show
that there is a pressing need for a comprehensive approach to the planet´s
forests.

The course taken in Milan was a wrong one. We do not need plantations of
genetically modified tree-clones on our planet. Plans like this are in
direct contradiction to the terms of the Rio Convention on Biodiversity. We
hope that as the UN Forest Forum assembles in Geneva next May, it will
recognize this discrepancy and ban the introduction of genetically modified
trees. We hope that as many of you as possible will join our demands and
sign the petition here: http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/appeal/

==============

-----Original Message-----
From: ECOTERRA Intl. [mailto:mailhub@ecoterra.net]
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 2:32 AM
Subject: Global Ban on GM trees -update-


Petition against GM trees

Please note:
The petition against GM trees will be presented and given for UN Forum on
Forest in side-event 11.5. in Geneva.

The further planning of the UNFF activities in Geneva is going to be
worked out in the workshop. Please bookmark this adress:

http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/forum/topic/?catid=92

The present program of the whole two weeks meeting is posted there soon.

Hannu Hyvönen

===================================================

Global Ban on GM trees
People´s Forest Forum
http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum

14.4.2004 Finland

Dear all

Here is some good news for those NGO´s who have signed the petition for
UNFF to ban GM trees. Please forward this message to those persons in your
organisation who deal with these issues.

Issues in this infoletter

1. Side event in UNFF in Geneva 11.5.
2. Managing the program of the side event
3. Informing the Press
4. Planning the further activities

1. Side event in UNFF in Geneva 11.5.

The petition against GM trees will be presented and given for UN Forum on
Forest in side-event 11.5. in Geneva.

We have got one hour and 10 minutes for that event.
Besides the petition and GM tree issue we shall present some reports and
suggestions introduced in workshops of People´s Forest Forum
http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum

2. Managing the program of the side event

Now we need urgent consultation with all subscribed NGO´s
specially with those whose representatives will take part UNFF meeting.

The first question is the program of that side event.
We should quite soon announce for UNFF secretariat our visiting speakers
and the program in that side-event.

The draft and our suggestions for the program of the event is this:

Opening

-could someone of Friends of the Earth International be the chairperson?

Representing the petition

-Mikko Vartiainen /People´s Biosafety Association in Finland
represents the petition and gives a contribution on the legitimate of
growing GM trees

About the risks of GMO:s and GM trees

-We hope to get some scientist to give some lesson about that

Alternatives for plantations

-Hannu Hyvönen/The Union of Ecoforestry in Finland represents
the dvd-report based on the contributions on People´s Forest Forum

Some other issues

Please make your comments and suggestions for this plan as soon as
possible.

3. Informing the Press

We have not yet started any real efforts to reach the press in different
countries. Here is some good news concerning this work.

Global Justice Ecology Project is organizing a press conference on the
dangers of the UN decision to allow GMO trees to be used under the Kyoto
Protocol, and why the decision needs to be reversed. The press conference
will be at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Earth Day (April
22). If you would like your group signed on as a co-sponsor to this press
conference, please email Anne Petermann at globalecology@gmavt.net no
later than April 20.

The project is also representing this petition for UNFF and this will be
the first press info arranged for this campaign.

We hope that all of signed organisations would give their support for this
effort by Global Justice Ecology.

4. Planning the further activities

For further planning we ask you to use this discussion forum or contact
directly the coordinators: forestforum@elonmerkki.net
http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/forum/topic/?catid=92
(The site is not linked to be visible of People´s Forest Forum because
this is our inside workshop.)

If you have any questions or suggestions
please don´t hesitate to contact us,

Hannu Hyvönen
coordinator of the campaign
The Union of Ecoforesty in Finland
ekometsa@sci.fi

Leo Stranius
Chair
Friend of the Earth Finland
lstraniu@pp.htv.fi

------------

Please forward the Action alert (see below) to your friends, networks,
clubs, campaigns, fellow organisations, mailing lists and encourage
everyone to join in signing the petition

You can also copy the banner of this campaign at
http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum/img-uk/banneri1.jpg
and make a link on your website to these campaign sites

Let´s put the message on a real move around the Earth!
Let´s together make this a success,

People´s Forest Forum
Action group
contact: forestforum@elonmerkki.net

ACTION ALERT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AND CULTURAL
ACTIVISTS AND MOVEMENTS

GLOBAL BAN ON GM-TREES -
SIGN THE PETITION FOR UN
at the address:
http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum

We are asking for your participation in the campaign urging the UN to
ban genetically modified trees. In the next weeks, this dynamic Internet
action will be focused on collecting as many signatures as possible for
a petition to be presented to the UN Forum on Forests in Geneva next
May.

The campaign has now been widely welcomed all over the world. The list
of groups and campaigners having signed the petition so far includes the
World Rainforest Movement, Friends of the
Earth in different countries, Scottish Green Party, The Forest Action
Network- and a lot of other organisations and individuals around the
world.

We are hoping that you and your organisation will give the campaign your
strong support.

Global Ban on GM trees
People´s Forest Forum
http://elonmerkki.net/forestforum
forestforum@elonmerkki.net

-------------

ECOTERRA Intl.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1186509,00.html

Comment
Jump on our bandwagon

The left must see that only environmentalism has the power to restrain
global corporations

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 6, 2004
The Guardian

Beside the disaster in Iraq, the new Islamist terror campaign and the
battle over immigration policy, the survival of the black-browed albatross
may not look like the most pressing political issue. For many of those on
the left, environmentalism is at a best a distraction, at worst a
regression. As Christopher Hitchens said in a debate last week:
"Environmentalism and ecology ... are conservative positions. They may be
honourable ones, they may be defensible ones, they are not radical ones."

This was once true. The modern European green movement began as a
response by landowners to the rise of the middle class and the industries
which empowered it. Industrialism threatened both the landscapes which
reflected an unchanging social order and the aristocracy's economic control.

Today, it would be foolish to claim that this tendency has entirely
disappeared. Much of the movement's funding in this country is provided by
people with inherited wealth, the most prominent of whom, Teddy Goldsmith,
happily describes himself as a reactionary.

< This is misleading.
< 1. Such modest wealth as Z.E has accumulated was trickled out
from the ill-gotten gains of his late money-maniac brother Jimmy. They did
not inherit a fortune.
< 2. Z.E's sense of humour abounds in self-deprecating jokes.
He is a conservative, but would not admit to being a reactionary (i.e
unreasoning opponent of all change).
- R

By reasserting the traditional Tory policy of trade protectionism, the
British Green party, which in other respects is a radical force, finds
itself allied to such ultra-conservative bodies as America First.

But while some of the policies of its adherents haven't changed, the
political meaning of environmentalism has. Corporations have become the
new aristocracy: an enthroned power which shows no sign of being usurped
from within. Far from becoming a catalyst for revolutionary change, they
have ensured that all that once melted into air becomes solid, as
intangible assets - the genome, the internet, even the weather - are bound
up by a new generation of property rights. Financial speculators establish
the limits of political action: if a government steps over the political
line and "loses the confidence of the markets", the economy collapses, and
the government soon follows.

Their world order is as dangerous to social welfare as feudalism. While
industrialisation still has liberating potential for poorer nations, its
global impact on the climate means that it could now destroy more lives
than it saves. Environmentalism and social justice have become
indivisible. To ignore the environmental impacts of economic decisions, as
some on the left still do, is to ignore one of the major sources of
oppression.

This is not to say that the classic leftist analysis of power relations
has become redundant. At the global level we can discern a dialectic of
precisely the kind Marx foresaw. As the same corporations seek to enforce
the same conditions everywhere, they create a universal class interest in
confronting them. No one needs to persuade the people fighting Monsanto in
Britain that they have common cause with the people fighting Monsanto in
Bangladesh or Bolivia. But because the corporations have so effectively
crushed the global workforce, much of the pressure for change now comes
from outside the factory gates.

Partly as a result of the changes they have engineered, partly as a result
of the depletion of natural resources, the corporations now appear to be
more vulnerable to environmental protest than they are to industrial
action. Having exhausted the most accessible reserves of oil, minerals,
timber, fish and freshwater, they are now forced into ever wider conflicts
with the local people whose land and water they must seize to maintain
production. As a result, the theft of resources and the ensuing pollution
have become major political issues almost everywhere.

At the same time, the drive to cut labour costs and find new markets
requires constant technological innovation. Science in countries like
Britain has been subordinated to the corporate demand for profitable new
technologies. To deploy these technologies, companies must also demand
ever-lower regulatory standards. These are the reasons why science policy
has become such a battleground, and why so many of those who claim to be
defending science instead appear to be defending corporate power.
The limiting factor for corporations, in other words, is no longer labour,
but the ecosystem and the regulations which protect it. This is why
battles over the environment are among the few that the world's dissident
movements are winning.

This might seem an odd thing to say, at a time when climate change seems
to be accelerating, the US government insists on raising the production of
an ozone-destroying chemical, and a new UN report suggests that vast "dead
zones" caused by sewage and farm pollution are spreading across the oceans.
But over the past week in Britain alone we've won four resounding victories.

Last Tuesday, Bayer, the company which just a month ago received
permission to start growing GM maize commercially in Britain, pulled out.
This means that no GM crops can be grown in Britain until at least 2008,
and perhaps never. On Thursday, the European commission, having
prevaricated for 14 years, ordered the nuclear power station at Sellafield
to clear up the plutonium it has been dumping. Since the 1950s Sellafield
is believed to have thrown 1.3 tonnes of plutonium - enough to make 162
atom bombs - into an open pond.

On Friday executives from the Lafarge conglomerate visited the Hebridean
island of Harris to announce that they had abandoned their plans to turn
Mount Roineabhal, part of a protected landscape, into roadstone. The
mountain, according to one of the quarry's backers, would have become the
biggest hole in the world.

On Saturday, the British Foreign Office, after threatening to sink it,
finally dropped its objections to a new treaty, enforceable in British
territorial waters in the south Atlantic, protecting albatrosses from
longline fishermen. So many albatrosses were being caught on baited hooks
that all 21 species are now threatened with extinction.

In all these cases, victory against some of the world's biggest
corporations was achieved by small groups of local people and roving
campaigners, armed with a tiny fraction of their opponents' budgets. They
haven't liberated the working class from oppression, but they have
restrained the power of the oppressors. These are victories for the common
people against the new aristocracy.

Nothing so undermines a cause as repeated failure. By showing that we can
win against great odds, we revitalise the campaign not only against
environmental destruction, but against other forms of oppression. Those
leftists who still see environmentalism as someone else's mobilisation are
missing a massive opportunity.

But if these victories are to spread, then both sides need to be more
consistent. The Green party, for example, claims to support the doctrine
of "contraction and convergence", in which the use of resources by the
different nations converges to equality. Yet it seeks, through
protectionism, to prevent the transfer of manufacturing and service jobs
from rich nations to poor which would assist this process. Similarly, if
the traditional left is to take a truly internationalist position, it must
cease to press for the kind of development at home which, through climate
change, destroys the lives of other people. If the greens junk their past
and the reds grasp their future, the new aristocracy will find itself in
serious trouble.

· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World
Order, is published, with new material, in paperback today.
monbiot.com

Puncturing the GM Myths

From an interview with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, Director of the Institute of Science in
Society, by Anastasia Stephens of the Evening Standard

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, senior academic scientist in a UK University was pressured into
taking early retirement for speaking out on the hazards of GM. She is currently
director of the Institute of Science in Society, Editor of its quarterly
magazine, Science in Society and author of many books including Living with the
Fluid Genome (www.i- sis.org.uk). She is also member of an international
Independent Science Panel on GM launched 10 May 2003 and co- author of its
report, The Case for a GM-Free Sustainable World (www.indsp.org).

AS: We have altered and manipulated plants and animals for centuries - just look
at the dog breeds we have created and the hybrid roses. Why is GM any worse
than this?

MWH: To breed dogs, you need actual reproduction, crossing dog breeds belonging
to the same species. Animal and plant breeding can only be done within a
species or between closely related species. You can't ever cross a spider with
a goat.

Genetic modification, on the other hand, can do that and more because it
bypasses reproduction altogether, and is therefore not restricted by species
barriers. Entirely new genes and combinations of genes are made in the
laboratory and inserted into the genomes of organisms to make genetically
modified organisms. Contrary to what you are told by pro-GM scientists, the
process is not at all precise. It is uncontrollable and unreliable, and
typically ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely
unpredictable consequences.

AS:You accuse the world's governments of deliberately misleading the public over
GM. Why would governments do this?

MWH: I have never accused the world's governments of deliberately misleading
thepublic over GM. There are good governments that don't do that, they listen
to a wide range of scientists, take account of all the scientific evidence and
respond to public opinion.

Then there are bad governments that don't tell the public the truth about the
inherent risks of GM, helped by a pro-GM scientific establishment that will
evenbend science to serve the interests of the biotech industry.

AS: How can you prove that our Government is ignoring its own scientific
advisers over the hazards of GM to the health and environment?

MWH: Let's face it. Scientific evidence has gone decisively against GM. But our
government has chosen scientific advisors that tell them what they want to hear
all along. Scientists like us have lost our jobs speaking out. We submit
evidence on the hazards of GM to the government's scientific advisory
committees again and again over the years, only to be met with bland denial and
dismissal. Fortunately, some good governments all over the world are taking
heed, and are rejecting GM on account of uncertainty over safety to health and
the environment. The UK government is isolated, even in Europe, over its
pro-GM stance.

AS: Are the anti-GM brigade anything more than a bunch of conspiracy theorists?

MWH: There is no "anti-GM brigade". There are ordinary citizens angry at the
lies they've been told, and the undemocratic way in which GM crops are foisted
on them. There are angry farmers who will be out of business once their crops
are contaminated by GM genes. There are scientists incensed at the abuse of
science that has allowed GM crops to be approved, which have all the signs of
being unsafe.

There is no "anti-GM brigade"; on the contrary, there is a distinct pro-GM
brigade that will stop at nothing to promote the corporate agenda. They've
infiltrated the science-media establishment and the government, and using smear
tactics borrowed from America's far-right to try to discredit and silence all
critics.

AS: The government's Farm Scale Evaluations of GM maize found it was better for
the environment than the conventional maize crop to which it was compared. Why
do you refute this evidence?

MWH: You only have to use your common sense to see through the shameful abuse
ofscience in the GM maize trial, indeed of all the trials in the Farm Scale
Evaluations, which have cost the taxpayer £3 million. GM crops are compared to
the most destructively managed industrial non-GM crops, not organic or other
low input agriculture. No measure of gene flow, health impacts on a wide range
of wild life or human beings, no study on the soil ecosystem; only a few
species of weeds and insects as indicator of biodiversity. They still get the
answer they don't want for two of the crops.

The GM maize appeared to do better because it was compared to conventional plots
sprayed with deadly triazine herbicides that Europe has banned a week before
the results were announced, so the GM maize trial was no longer valid. But days
before Margaret Beckett announced the approval of the GM maize, eleven
scientists from five publicly funded research institutes wrote a paper that was
rush-published online in the prestigious journal Nature claiming they have
evidence that the GM maize will still do better than non GM after the triazine
herbicides are no longer in use. That 'evidence', it turns out, is based on
comparing the GM maize plots with 28 non-GM maize plots, 24 of which were in
fact sprayed with the banned triazine herbicides. That paper is highly
misleading, to say the least, and should never have gone past the peer-review
process.

And you know what, they never measured yield, because if they did, they would
very probably have found that the GM maize did much worse. A local citizen Jean
Saunders in Oxfordshire took photographs of her local maize trial. She has
evidence of the severely stunted GM crop that flowered later, with far fewer
and smaller cobs than the non-GM crop.

AS: If GM can help feed 800 million people around the world who suffer
malnutrition, isn't its development a moral imperative?

MWH: That is a wicked lie perpetrated by the pro-GM brigade in the mainstream
press, using hunger and poverty and moral blackmail to promote the industry.
There are indeed hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world who are too
poor to buy food, and they can be helped today if the political will is there.

India alone has 320 million who go to bed hungry every night, while more than 60
million tonnes of food grains are stacked away to rot in the open or in the
go-downs. In neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan too, food silos are bursting
while their poor people starve. GM cannot help the poor, it is very likely to
make it worse for them because GM seeds are patented, and farmers are not
allowed to save seeds for replanting or exchange as they have been doing for
thousands for years. The GM crops need lots of fertilizers and herbicides that
the poor can never afford to buy.

AS: Doesn't genetic modification follow what nature does already - the
evolutionary principle of genetic selection?

MWH: No, GM breaks all the rules of evolution, it short circuits evolution
altogether. It bypasses reproduction, creates new genes and gene combinations
that have never existed, and is not restricted by the usual barriers between
species. Evolution happened over billions of years, each species has its own
space and time on the evolutionary stage, they didn't all evolve at once, so
gene exchange between different species were restricted by space and time as
well as by biological barriers.

AS: If as manufacturers and governments argue, GM could lead to crops that are
more productive, grow on land that is otherwise barren, and decrease the use of
pesticides, shouldn't it be hailed as a breakthrough?

MWH: We've been hearing those promises for more than 30 years, and they still
remain distant potentials. US Department of Agriculture documents a net
increase in pesticide use of 50 million pounds after GM crops have been grown
since 1994. The biotech bubble has burst several years ago. All the
agro-biotech companies have been falling in the stock market, led by Monsanto.
They no longer invest in GM crops research. They are now trying to use GM crops
to produce pharmaceuticals in the open field, which will contaminate our food
supply with vaccines, immune- suppressive chemicals and worse.

AS: A GM strain of rice that produces high levels of Vitamin A is already
helping to prevent blindness in South East Asia. Isn't this good news for
producers and consumers alike?

MWH: That is yet another lie that they keep retelling, long, long after it has
been exposed. This "Vitamin A rice" or "Golden rice" produces such a minute
amount of Vitamin A precursor carotene that a person has to eat some 3.5 kilos
per day to get the minimum requirement. But, anyone who is malnourished won't
be able to convert carotene into Vitamin A anyways. Besides, many green leafy
vegetables that anyone can grow in their own backyard will supply lots more
Vitamin A and other essential nutrients and minerals.

Why did the scientists embark on such a stupid, useless project in the first
place, at the cost of tens of millions to the taxpayer only to produce a junk
crop that has more than 70 patents attached to it? Why don't scientists learn
and work together with farmers who are doing sustainable non-GM agriculture
that recovers local varieties adapted to grow and flourish in the local
environment, which has proven much, much more successful?

AS: One of the first commercially approved GM crops is a soya bean modified to
be tolerant of the herbicide glyphosate. Manufacturers argue that spraying with
glyphosate replaces a more toxic regime involving several herbicides. Isn't GM
in this case helping the environment?

MWH: Glyphosate is not a benign herbicide. It is a broad-spectrum herbicide that
will kill all species of plants indiscriminately, broadleaves and grasses both,
so it is actually much more devastating for the environment. It also destroys
nitrogen-fixing bacteria and kills earthworms, both of which are crucial for
maintaining soil fertility. New research is linking glyphosate to cancers in
humans, spontaneous abortions and neuro-behavioural defects in children born to
people using the herbicide. It causes genetic damage in mammals, fish and
frogs.

New data from the US Department of Agriculture actually found that glyphosate
tolerant GM crops have increased the use of herbicides, especially as fields
have become infested with glyphosate tolerant weeds after just a few years.

AS: GM could lead to better-flavoured, cheaper food with a longer shelf life.
Isn't that what we all want?

MWH: Yet other unfulfilled promises that we are tired of hearing. There's no
research on that now. Two long-shelf-life tomatoes have come and gone, one in
the United States, the other in Britain. They were utter failures, and quietly
withdrawn after a few years.

AS: The Institute of Food Science and Technology claims that since 1987, more
than 25,000 field trials of GM plants have been carried out in 45 countries
without adverse environmental consequences. Surely this is enough to allow the
use of these crops?

MWH: More lies. The most devastating environmental consequences have been
documented by scientists in Argentina, the second largest grower of GM crops
after the US. This country, once known as the "world's granary", has spiralled
into despair from planting GM crops, especially GM soya. It is having huge
problems with hunger, displaced rural populations and loss of traditional food
crops. Weeds have multiplied, as resistance to glyphosate (the herbicide used
with RR soya) soared. The herbicide has had to be applied more frequently and
at higher concentrations. Toxic older herbicides, such as 2,4 D and Paraquat,
banned in many countries are back in use. The pampas - the beautiful natural
grasslands for which the country is renown - has disappeared, as have hundreds
of thousands of hectares of forest. Aeroplanes are used to spray herbicides on
RR soya, subjecting local populations to tremendous health risks.

AS: What do you say to the GM companies' claims that many opponents to GM have
irrational views and a poor understanding of science?

MWH: On the contrary, it is the pro-GM brigade that has an irrational attachment
to an obsolete understanding of genetics. Genetic engineering was inspired by
the idea that everything about an organism is more or less hardwired in the
genes, but all the scientific findings since genetic engineering began in the
1970s tell us just the opposite. There's a lot of cross-talk between genes and
the environment, even the genome itself is fluid and dynamic. I've written a
new book on it, called Living with the Fluid Genome.

What really worries me about the pro-GM brigade is that they are destroying
science by bending it to suit their purpose. In that respect, they are the ones
that are truly anti-science.

AS: Scientists are rearing GM animals to produce drugs or tissue to help cure
human diseases. Surely that must be a good thing?

MWH:That's an even more risky enterprise to health, and thoroughly unjustified
in terms of animal welfare. Most of the gene drugs created that way simply
don't work, and they are very costly as well. A lot of hype goes with each new
drug marketed, only to be withdrawn years later, when unacceptable
"side-effects" including death surface. And watch out for the human embryonic
stem cells, hyped as a panacea for cell and tissue replacement. They have side
effects that include uncontrollable growth, or cancer by its usual name.

AS: A few genes straying here and there - is it really that dangerous?

MWH: "A few genes straying here and there" is what makes new viruses and
bacteria that cause disease epidemics, like the recent SARS and AIDS. If you
want to know the truth, the toolkit for GM is precisely the same as that for
making biological weapons: viruses and bacteria that cause diseases and spread
antibiotic resistance genes to make diseases more difficult to treat. Nasty
surprises have already surfaced in 2001 when researcher in Australia
"accidentally" created a lethal virus that killed all mice injected, in the
course of modifying a harmless mouse-pox virus to create a vaccine. Nowadays,
there are laboratory techniques that can chop up different viruses into small
pieces and make the pieces join together again at random to generate in a
matter of minutes millions of new viruses. You won't even have time to look
through them to see how many deadly ones you have created.

AS: We already eat GM-altered food - Chymosin, produced by GM microorganisms,
has been used in cheese-making since the late 1980s. Has that caused harm?

MWH: There is a big difference between making enzymes in microbes modified for
use in a closed vat in a factory, and sending GM crops out into the open
environment. Still, when you say there is no harm, no one has seriously looked
yet. Perhaps we should.

AS:Could GM really increase the risk of diseases like cancer, allergies and
other unknown illnesses?

MWH: Up to 100 villagers in the south of the Philippines living near GM maize
plots were reported to have suffered from serious illnesses when the GM maize
came into flower last year. Prof. Terje Traavik of the Institute of Gene
Ecology in Tromso Norway found antibodies that react against the Bt toxin
produced by the GM maize in the blood of 39 of the villagers. There are already
scientific reports that several Bt toxins and spores of the soil bacterium -
from which the Bt toxins were isolated - cause immune reactions in animals and
allergies in human beings.

Before that, twelve dairy cows were reported to have died between 2001 and 2002
on a farm in Hesse, Germany, after being fed Syngenta's GM maize Bt176, and
others in the herd had to be slaughtered on account of mysterious illnesses.
Farmers protested in front of the Robert Koch institute at the end of last year
because they suspect a cover-up, and to this day, there has been no serious
investigation. But that's just scratching the surface. Other diseases are much
slower to take effect.

Cancer may take years or decades, and if you don't look, you won't find it. But
we already have evidence from gene therapy, which is genetic modification of
human cells using construct and methods similar to those used in genetic
modification of animals and plants. In gene therapy, it is generally accepted
that the major side effects are infectious viruses appearing and cancer. Back
in 2000, the first success of gene therapy was widely reported in the world
press after 12 years of fruitless clinical trials. Researchers in Paris
pioneered a treatment of infants with an X-linked severe combined immune
deficiency by taking bone marrow cells out of the patients, putting in the
missing gene and then selecting the cells that have been modified to inject
back into the same patient. Eleven infants were treated, 9 apparently
successfully. But 18 months or so later, two of them developed leukaemia. The
foreign DNA has inserted into the wrong place, giving rise to uncontrolled cell
multiplication, or cancer.

This article can be found on the I-SIS website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/

More than a quarter of the 125 councillors who govern the City of London
are freemasons, it was revealed on Thursday.

The extent of the movement's presence in the Square Mile emerged because of
new rules that require councillors who are members to declare it.

The 34 councillors who are masons include senior business figures and
Michael Snyder, the political head of the City Corporation as chairman of
its policy and resources committee.

Sir Brian Jenkins, deputy chairman of Barclays bank, Michael Savory,
chairman of HSBC Stockbrokers, and David Lewis, director of Standard Life
and former senior partner at Norton Rose, the law firm, all list masonic
membership on their recently filed register of members' interest forms,
seen by the Financial Times.

Sir Brian merely mentions membership of the Grand Charity, another name for
the masons, and his role as honorary treasurer of the Masonic Trust for
Girls and Boys.

William Hunt, a herald at the College of Arms and member of the Royal
Household appointed by the Queen, is also a mason.

The number was revealed after a question by Brian Mooney, a councillor, at
a full council meeting on Thursday.

He pointed out that Mr Snyder had championed councillors' traditional
independence when fighting to prevent candidates from Blue Dawn, a
right-of-centre political movement, getting a foothold in last month's
elections.

"Lo and behold, 34 members of the court belong to the same interest group,"
he said.

April 1 Genetic Engineering News put out their list of biotech's millionaires.
The leaders included first P. Frost of Ivax, followed by L. Rosenthal of a
number of companies,William Gates III fourth on the list with 220 million in
Icos a Bothell , Washington firm that makes Cialis,the most popular drug among
spammers. Gates may not be happy about the spammers on windows but he takes
cialis to keep a stiff upper lip .

A former colleague Bill Rutter is number five on the list.

Sam Waxsal of Imclone has dropped to 12 on the list. He was
sentenced to seven years in federal prison for securities fraud,
obstruction of justice, perjury, bank fraud and tax evasion. He is expected to
spend his jail time in a Florida prison, home for rich swindlers. He may be
joined by others on the list.

Along with the crooks the list includes Nobel Prize winners and women (a
few of each).

The states home to the richest biotech companies are California, New York,
Massachusetts then Washington State.

Monsanto (HQ Missouri) and the other Ag biotech companies are not listed
for some reason?

Pathraigh m'lad

This is a minor classic of the USA muckraking style.

My first reaction is that it displayed, uniquely in the body of email in my good
old Eudora Lite, both big letters and colour. Also the letters were smaller,
and lines full width - maximum economy, you cyberdemon you!

Before I read the detail, let me point out generally that any
capitalist country that wants good universities will have to fund them from
excess profits. Those like Cornell founder Andrew White (who
misrepresented history in his biased book on the alleged war between
science & Christianity) have nevertheless to get bulk money from wealthy
capitalists of their day, and many of those will have got their excess
profits by types of commerce which can - always by today's implied PC
standards, not the ethical standards of their day - be criticised.

Let me remind you that opium was practically the only drug that had
undoubted powerful effects - The Drug that Won the West. It was not all
in the shocking trade into India.

May be in touch when have read details

thanx

R

==============

Thought you might enjoy this most educational website and all of its
associated websites. You would have to do much research to come up with
this information.

For example, how did FDR get his money? He married the daughter of Mr.
Delano. How did Mr. Delano get his $? From Slave and opium trade mainly
and oh yes, maybe a little tea.

How did John FORBES Kerry get in Skull & Bones? He is a decendant of John
Murray Forbes of Russell Co. and was the head of the drug laundering
Shanghi Bank.

This stuff appears to be throughly researched. If Bush is not reelected,
Kerry will sadly carry on the will of the same masters.

http://www.newsmakingnews.com

HOW THE MONEY WORKS AT HARVARD

As we have already seen, certain families from the area around Boston,
whose wealth came primarily from trading in slaves and in the drug opium in
the 18th and 19th centuries, tried to hide the taint of dirty money by
donating huge sums of it to Harvard College, resulting in their control of
the board of trustees from the early 1800s. The charter of the Harvard
Corporation also gave these board members the authority to choose
successors to replace members of the board who died or resigned, so that
their long-practiced habit of laundering drug money through the university
system survives until the present day.

Interestingly, it was the same families who were involved in setting up an
endowment at Yale College. Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in
London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming
governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune
from trade and returned from India to England in 1699. Yale became known as
quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School
in Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent
bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in
1718. [See Kris Millegan's article, "The Order of Skull and Bones" at
http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/skullbones.htm ]

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell & Company for the purpose of
acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Forced out of the
lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts,
leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis
families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium
syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By
the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made
Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts
families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop)
and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.
[Source: http://www.tarpley.net/bush7.htm ]

There is a long list of names of the great American and European fortunes
which were built on the "China"(opium) trade:

*Augustine Heard (1785-186: ship captain and pioneer U.S. opium smuggler.
*John Cleve Green (1800-75): married to Sarah Griswold; gave a fortune in
opium profits to Princeton University, financing three Princeton buildings
and four professorships; trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary for
25 years.
*Abiel Abbott Low (1811-93): his opium fortune financed the construction of
the Columbia University New York City campus; father of Columbia's
president Seth Low.
*John Murray Forbes (1813-9: his opium millions financed the career of
author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes's daughter, and bankrolled
the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was
Forbes' son.
*Joseph Coolidge: his Augustine Heard agency got $10 million yearly as
surrogates for the Scottish dope-runners Jardine Matheson during the
fighting in China; his son organized the United Fruit Company; his
grandson, Archibald Cary Coolidge, was the founding executive officer of
the Anglo-Americans' Council on Foreign Relations.
*Warren Delano, Jr.: chief of Russell and Co. in Canton; grandfather of U.S.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
*Russell Sturgis: his grandson by the same name was chairman of the Baring
Bank in England, financiers of the Far East opium trade.

A PLAN IS HATCHED IN 1832.
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW WORLD ORDER?

It seems a plan was devised early in U.S. history to take control of our
centers of education in order to control how history was written. By
setting up endowments in the universities, they would be able to claim
positions of influence on the boards, which would then give them the power
to control those funds that they had donated and direct the investments
thereof. At the same time, they could control which historians were
appointed to the chairs they endowed and make sure their reputations were
free of the taint of the drug trade by which their fortunes were acquired.

William Huntington Russell studied in Germany from 1831-32, during a
transition period in Germany's educational structure. Germany was adopting
the philosophical ideas of Hegel who had built on the philosophy school of
Immanuel Kant. To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is
Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and
obedience to the state. Both fascism and communism have their philosophical
roots in the Hegellian philosophy in which William Russell was
indoctrinated during his time in Germany. This philosophy makes it
possible for those who use the Hegellian dialetical process to manipulate
society to be on both sides of any issue. According to Hegel, it is the
conflict of the ideas that brings about change. The result of the conflict
is to create a synthesis between the two extremes and leads closer to the
final outcome of control by the forces seeking the ultimate power.

More aptly stated: Thesis (create the crisis) Anti-thesis (Offer the
Solution) which is the basis of globalist elite manipulation paradigms. The
synthesis achieved becomes a symptomatic response instead of addressing the
real cause (Government). The World Order organizes and finances Jewish
groups, anti-Jewish groups, Communist groups, anti-Communist groups, and
other "opposing" social forces to create predetermined outcomes ensuring
power maintenance.

See http://www.trufax.org/chrono/crb.htmlhttp://www.trufax.org/chrono/crb.html

When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with
Alphonso Taft (Yale '33). According to information acquired from a break-in
to the "tomb" (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, "Bones is a
chapter of a corps in a German University.... General Russell, its founder,
was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a
leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college,
authority to found a chapter here." So class valedictorian William H.
Russell, along with fourteen others, became the founding members of "The
Order of Scull and Bones," later changed to "The Order of Skull and Bones".

http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/skullbones.htm

In 1832 many of these founders of the Yale society were still closely
connected in the opium business with their cousins at Harvard. Because of
the research done into George H.W. Bush's family background involving Yale
and Skull and Bones, and also because of the presidential candidacy of his
Skull and Bones member son, George W. Bush, much has been written in the
last few years about Yale's control by this secret society. But little
research has been published about the connection between the Yale crew and
their counterparts in the other Ivy League colleges.

FROM FORBES TO DELANO--THE LEFT WING OF THE DIALECTICAL PROCESS

Part One of this series left off with Robert Bennet Forbes, a partner in
the firm of Russell and Company in 1840, the same year that a young man
named Warren Delano would become a partner in the same firm. The following
is a brief summary of the Delano family, the maternal parentage of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and is extracted from an excerpt of
"Before The Trumpet" by Geoffrey C. Ward, two chapters of which have been
posted by Kris Millegan. See them in full at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0001A&L=ctrl&P=R67717&m=32288 and
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0001A&L=ctrl&P=R68837&m=32278

The first American Delano was Philippe de la Noye, a Huguenot who arrived
at Plymouth Colony in 1621. He came out of love, not religious zeal, hoping
to marry Priscilla Mullens (the same Priscilla with whom Myles Standish and
John Alden were later smitten). His dramatic arrival on her doorstep did
him no good. She turned him down, and he did not marry for thirteen more
years. When he did, he chose another Englishwoman, Hester Dewsbury, with
whom he had several children. One of these, Jonathan Delano, married Mercy
Warren, fought in King Philip's War, and was rewarded for his service with
an 800-acre tract of land at New Bedford, Massachusetts, which then
encompassed the coastal village of Fairhaven.

There his sons and their sons prospered as mariners and whalers and
shipbuilders, and there Warren Delano II was born in 1809. His father, the
first Warren, had begun his career at sea at nineteen, ferrying cargoes of
corn and salt, bathwood and potatoes to New Orleans and Liverpool and the
Canary Islands. Later he purchased interests in a number of fine ships,
came to own several more, and was captured at sea and endured two grim
weeks aboard a British prison ship after the War of 1812 had officially
ended. He returned to Fairhaven in 1815, alive but "sick enough," he said.
After that he built himself a great rambling house and settled into a
lucrative if less eventful life ashore as a whaling executive.

Young Warren was graduated from Fairhaven Academy at fifteen in 1824. Two
years later, his father had him apprenticed as a junior clerk to Hathaway
and Company, a Boston importer; later he worked for Goodhue and Company,
one of the biggest import firms in New York, gaining what one business
associate later called "a first rate mercantile education."

In 1833, he sailed for China at the age of twenty-four. At Canton he was
offered a junior partnership in the new firm of Russell, Sturgis and
Company of Boston and Manila. In 1840, at thirty-one, he would become a
senior partner with Russell and Company, by then the largest American firm
in the China trade. The object of every partner was to gain a
"competence"-$100,000-before returning home. Warren Delano would earn at
least two, one with each of the trading companies he served.

All dealing in China was done through one of thirteen Chinese traders, who
were held personally responsible for the actions of their foreign
associates. This was sometimes a touchy business. Sailors reeling back to
their ships from an evening in Hog Lane, the single narrow street of grog
shops they were permitted to visit on shore leave, occasionally got into
trouble, requiring their Chinese sponsors to pay stiff damages to the
imperial viceroy. But it was worth the inconvenience. Houqua, the agent who
handled business for most American firms (and has been said to have been
the Chinese agent for the East India Company), became probably the
wealthiest merchant on earth, said to have compiled a fortune of some $26
million by the year Warren Delano first came to know him.

The high points of the Canton social season for the Americans were the
sumptuous banquets held at the home of Houqua on the midriver island of
Honam. Houqua wore silk brocade robes and clattering ropes of jade and a
silk cap with a bright blue button that denoted his special status. The
bohea tea grown on the slopes of his family estate and shipped aboard
American ships was said to be among the finest in the world and he was
generous toward those who had made him rich. A portrait of Houqua always
hung in the Delano parlor at Algonac. According to the Delano Family
Papers, successive heads of the Wu family, who were important Chinese
merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were called "Howqua"
("Houqua") by the foreigners who did business with them. The first usage
appears to have arisen from a corruption of the given name of Wu Hao-kuan.
See John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening
of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (2 vols., 1953).
http://www.nara.gov/publications/prologue/butowsrc.html

The idyll was abruptly interrupted in 1838. Opium was the cause. Traffic in
the drug was the dirty little secret of the China trade, almost universally
practiced, almost never discussed. And as an increasingly important Canton
trader, Warren Delano was deeply involved in it. The British controlled
the business; perhaps a third of their Chinese revenues came from the sale
of opium, though its importation had been expressly forbidden by the
emperor since 1729. Massive bribery of local officials made it possible;
the drug's compactness and the almost insatiable demand for it among
Chinese addicts made it spectacularly lucrative.

The Americans did their best to keep up with the British, but never came
close to matching their earnings. Every American firm took part, with the
lone exception of D. W. C. Olyphant and Company. Robert Bennet Forbes,
Warren's friend and immediate predecessor as head of Russell and Company in
Canton, had offered his justification for taking part in the trade: the
best seafaring families of New England were involved in it, "those to whom
I have always been accustomed to look up as exponents of all that was
honorable in trade-the Perkins's, the Peabodys, the Russells and the Lows."
There was a huge profit to be made. Others were enriching themselves;
Warren Delano and his fellow traders saw no reason not to get their share. Under
Robert Forbes's energetic direction, Russell and Company became the third-most
important single firm in the opium trade, British or American. As Forbes's
successor as head of the company, Warren Delano improved upon his
performance.

It was a matter of supply, not scruples then, that kept the Americans >from
doing even better. The British owned their own poppy fields in India. Their
American competitors had to make do with opium bought in Turkey, or to sell
the Indian drug on consignment for British or Indian firms. The Manchus
were powerless to stop it, though they despaired over opium's impact on
their subjects and worried at the drain the trade made on precious specie.
After two wars with the British over whether opium could be sold to Chinese
citizens, the Chinese were thoroughly defeated and the ports were opened up
to bring in the drug. Warren Delano was in China during both wars.

FROM MONEY COMES PRESTIGE, AND FROM PRESTIGE POWER

Opium helped make Warren a wealthy man. Neither he nor his descendants were
proud of that fact. He kept his business affairs to himself. Years later,
one of his sons remembered "how strictly he complied with the admonition
not to let his right hand know what his left hand was doing." In a family
fond of retelling and embellishing even the mildest sort of ancestral
adventures, no stories seem to have been handed down concerning Warren
Delano's genuinely adventurous career in the opium business.

In 1843 Warren Delano returned to Massachusetts and during a visit at the
home of his Canton friend John Murray Forbes at Northampton he met a Forbes
cousin, Judge Joseph Lyman, who invited the Delanos to his home that
evening. The Lymans, too, were members of a distinguished old
Massachusetts family, and their youngest daughter Catherine Robbins Lyman,
would soon become the wife of Warren Delano. On December 4, the newlyweds
sailed for China aboard John Bennet Forbes's sleek new Paul Jones. With
them went Warren's younger sister Deborah, who was called "Dora."

The Delanos stayed in China for three years. Warren continued to run
Russell and Company, increasing both its profits and his own with each
successive season. Toward the end of 1846 the Delanos returned to America
to stay. Warren stayed busy investing his new fortune in a host of likely
ventures-New York waterfront property, railroads, copper mines in Tennessee
and Maryland, land and anthracite coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town
was named Delano in his honor. He never entirely abandoned the China trade,
building and owning several clippers, and when gold was discovered in
California it provided him with a whole new market for his cargoes. His
ship, the Mint, built with Robert Forbes and the Swedish engineer John
Ericsson, was the first American paddle steamer on the Sacramento River.

They first bought themselves a five-story Manhattan town house at 39
Lafayette Square, and their neighbors included Washington Irving; John
Jacob Astor, now nearing eighty-four but still the wealthiest man in
America; and Warren's younger brother Franklin, who had married Mr. Astor's
granddaughter Laura Astor just two years earlier. He too had been in the
shipping business but had recently "retired" at thirty-one to live off his
wife's immense trust fund. While Warren had had to buy his house,
Franklin's had been free, a token of the old man's fondness for his grand-
daughter. William Backhouse Astor, Laura Delano's father, lived just across
the street.

The family-Warren, Catherine, and their three children-moved to Algonac in
1852. With them came several servants and two unmarried relatives, Warren's
sister Sarah and his brother Ned, now home from China and without much
initiative of his own. Later that year, another boy was born and given the
name, Warren III. And there, two years later, on September 21, 1854, Sara
Delano was born.

In the late summer of 1857, Algonac was nearly destroyed by an intrusion
from the outside world which even Warren Delano could not keep out. Panic
hit Wall Street, sparked by the abrupt failure of the giant Ohio Life
Insurance and Trust Company, but further fueled by the legacy of years of
wild over-speculation in railroads and real estate. Market prices were
halved overnight; specie payment was suspended for a time; thousands of
businesses closed over the next three years; hundreds of thousands of men
were thrown out of work. One by one, Warren Delano's investments soured.

THERE'S ALWAYS DOPE TO FALL BACK ON

In January 1860, Warren Delano was fifty and faced with bankruptcy after
thirty years in business. He resolved at last to return to China, to Hong
Kong this time, and re-enter the trade which had made him so rich so fast
when he was young-tea and opium.[7] By 1862, Warren Delano's fortunes had
improved, not enough to permit him to come home, but enough for him to
arrange passage on a clipper, the Surprise, and send for his family to join
him at Hong Kong. Algonac was leased to Warren's old Canton friend, Abbot
Low. At the time Warren left for China, Sara was pregnant with a ninth
child, and she would bear two more while in China. In 1864 the children
were returned to America. William Forbes, a junior partner with Russell
and company to whom Dora was now engaged, provided an escort.

By 1865 when the Civil War was over, Warren had restored his fortune but
was unable to reunite the family at Algonac, on which Abbott Low's lease
still had two years to run. Sara's sister Dora married Will Forbes, and
the two of them returned to China to continue the family's business. The
rest of the family went to Paris for a time, later to Dresden. Sara's
brother, Warren, was graduated from Harvard in 1874, hoping to travel west
as a mining engineer. His father had other plans for him, however, and he
went to work instead as superintendent of one of Warren Delano's enterprises, the
Union Mining Company, digging coal and shale from deposits near Mount
Savage, Maryland, and making firebrick from the local clay. While still at
Harvard he had met and fallen in love with Miss Jennie Walters of
Baltimore, the sister of one of Warren's classmates. Her father had
organized the Atlantic Coast Railroad Line, made himself many times a
millionaire, but would not agree to the marriage until 1875.

Sara was to remain single until the age of 26, when she became the second
wife of James Roosevelt, who was many years her senior. After the wedding,
the couple went to Europe, where Will and Dora Forbes, still taking care of
the family's business in China, met them for three weeks in Rome. Sara's
uncle Franklin Delano, for whom her son would be named, met them in Geneva
with his wife. (Will and Dora Forbes would remain married until his death
in 1896, when she married his brother Paul Forbes. Although James had
other children by his first wife, he and Sara were to give birth to only
one child, Franklin. James Roosevelt died in 1900, and it was largely due to
his mother's family contacts and fortune that he was able to finance his
run for president a few years later.

While he was a student at Harvard, the president emeritus of the college
was Abbott Lawrence Lowell. At the age of 35 Franklin was elected to
Harvard's Board of Overseers. He returned for his twenty-fifth reunion in
June 1929. His classmates had elected him chief marshal of Commencement.
Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, to which Theodore Roosevelt had belonged,
chose him as orator at the annual Literary Exercises, and made him an
honorary member (along with his uncle Frederick Delano, A.B. 1885, twice an
Overseer and later president of the Harvard Alumni Association). Among
FDR's backers was Joseph P. Kennedy (Harvard 1912), whose son, John
Fitzgerald, would follow his father to Harvard and later become the
nation's thirty-fifth president.
http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/nd96/frank3.html

Two days after Franklin Roosevelt's death in office on April 12, 1945,
mourners jammed the Harvard Memorial Church for a service led by Willard
Sperry, dean of the Divinity School. "We have lost one of our own members,"
said Sperry. "It would be presumptuous to say that elsewhere there is no
sorrow like our sorrow. But our sorrow is touched with a humble and proper
pride that this society was one of the shaping forces which fitted him for
his duty and his destiny.

I wonder what the dean meant by that? Did he mean that the Harvard
Corporation supports those of its sons whose ill-gotten gains have been
washed through its institution and that Harvard expects nothing in return
except protection, power and prestige? Surely he didn't mean that.

To be continued....

Web sources:

Kris Millegan's Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http://archive.jab.org/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/

Modified rice won't be planted -- for now

State halts planting of rice for pharmaceutical use - sf chronicle
Public to have say before state rules on bioengineered crop

Charlie Goodyear, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 10, 2004

State agricultural officials have blocked efforts to plant genetically
engineered rice in Southern California for what would have been the nation's
first crop bioengineered for use in the pharmaceutical industry.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture said Friday that there appears
to be no urgent need to plant the rice. A company called Ventria Bioscience was
hoping to plant by May 1 after narrowly winning approval from the California
Rice Commission.

In a letter to the commission, John Dyer, chief counsel to the department, said
it was unclear whether the proper federal permits had been obtained to plant
the engineered rice.

At the same time, Dyer wrote, "it is clear that the public wants an opportunity
to comment prior to any authorization to plant."

The department said Ventria's May 1 deadline to plant in time for the state's
rice-growing seasons did not qualify as an emergency.

Ventria wants to plant the rice because it contains a human protein that could
be used to produce medicine to combat anemia and diarrhea, which are among the
leading causes of death for children under 5 in underdeveloped countries.

The company contends that using the rice is many times cheaper than developing
the proteins in a laboratory and therefore can create affordable medicines. A
Ventria spokesman could not be reached for comment Friday.

Greg Massa, a Colusa County rice grower, had opposed the Ventria plan and was
pleased by the department's action.

"I'm very happy,'' he said. "I think this is the best outcome that we could have
hoped for here. The rice commission passed this onto the (department) without
adequate input from growers and without any input from the public. All of those
people need to comment. Obviously, there is no emergency.''

Many of California's 2,200 rice farmers have worried that an engineered crop
could taint the state's harvest of conventionally grown rice, much of which is
exported to Japan. The Japanese government issued a statement this week saying
the rice planting sought by Ventria raised food-safety concerns. Japanese rice
retailers and consumer groups are seeking to give their opinion on the plan.

Charley Matthews, a member of the advisory panel that approved of the so-called
pharm rice proposal, said it was unclear whether a public hearing could be held
in time for the crop to be planted.

"The problem is a late planting date,'' Matthews said. "It creates a lot of risk
for actual production. It's agronomic risk, but we're used to that. It's kind
of inconvenient.''

Matthews said he wasn't surprised that state officials ultimately decided to
delay planting given all the controversy surrounding the issue of genetically
engineered crops.

Simon Harris, a spokesman for Californians for Genetically Engineered Free
Agriculture, said Ventria's plan did not eliminate risk to contamination of the
state's rice crop.

"We think that there's no hurry,'' Harris said. "There should be plenty of time
for public input.''

E-mail Charlie Goodyear at cgoodyear@sfchronicle.com

http://www.genok.org/english/lesartikkel.asp?article_id=812&id2=iX3yRc1wTtE0bR5bLFKQrt7RO

The effects of transgenic maize in Mexico

The potential effects of transgenic maize on traditional varieties of maize
in Mexico have been a source of public debate for several years. The key
concern is gene flow from genetically modified plants—or transgenic corn—to
Mexican maize and its wild relatives. Such gene flow may threaten the
diversity of land races—in the case of traditional maize, crop varieties
with a broad genetic base resulting from thousands of years of development
and adaptation to particular soil types and microclimates. This is of
particular concern not only because of the socio-cultural and economic
importance of traditional maize agriculture, but because Mexico is a centre
of origin for this important food crop.

Since April 2002, the CEC Secretariat has received a number of letters and
petitions from members of civil society in Mexico and worldwide, requesting
that the Secretariat initiate a report on this issue.

Read more about the report on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation
website

http://www.cec.org/maize/index.cfm?varlan=english

The potential effects of transgenic maize on traditional varieties of maize
in Mexico have been a source of public debate for several years. The key
concern is gene flow from genetically modified plants—or transgenic corn—to
Mexican maize and its wild relatives. Such gene flow may threaten the
diversity of land races—in the case of traditional maize, crop varieties
with a broad genetic base resulting from thousands of years of development
and adaptation to particular soil types and microclimates. This is of
particular concern not only because of the socio-cultural and economic
importance of traditional maize agriculture, but because Mexico is a centre
of origin for this important food crop.

Since April 2002, the CEC Secretariat has received a number of letters and
petitions from members of civil society in Mexico and worldwide, requesting
that the Secretariat initiate a report on this issue.

The purpose of this study is to examine, from different perspectives, issues
related to gene flow from transgenic varieties of maize to Mexican land
races and their wild relatives, and the conservation of biodiversity in this
center of origin. At the conclusion of this examination, the Secretariat
will prepare a report, including findings, background papers on key issues,
and recommendations from our advisory group. The final report will be
presented to the Council of the CEC. In ten chapters, the report will
assess, among other topics:

Effects of transgenic maize on genetic diversity and natural ecosystems;
Social and cultural effects associated with transgenic maize production;
Identification of potential benefits and risks from growing transgenic
maize; and

Public engagement in the management of biotech risks.

A complete list of the report's chapters and authors is now available. The
draft report will be posted to this site for public comments prior to the
symposium.

In addition to the report, specific recommendations from the advisory group
will be presented to the Council of the CEC.

As with previous reports prepared in accordance with Article 13 of the
North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, the process will
include:

Selection of an advisory group representing specific expertise and
stakeholders from each country;

Distribution of discussion papers, prepared by independent experts, on
potential issues to be considered in the report;

Release of the terms of reference for public comment;

Development of various background papers and report chapters by experts
hired by the Secretariat to fulfill the study's scope and objectives;
Release of these draft documents for public comment;

A public symposium at which the issues are given further scrutiny;
Submission of the Secretariat's report, including recommendations from the
advisory group, to Council; and,

Public release of the final report, unless the Council decides otherwise.

======

next item:

http://www.cec.org/maize/resources/chapters.cfm?varlan=english

List of report chapters and authors

The ten chapters commissioned by the CEC Secretariat for its Article 13
report, “Maize and Biodiversity: The Effects of Transgenic Maize in Mexico,”
still contain some inconsistencies and repetition, as well as a few factual
errors to be corrected after their drafting and initial round of editing.
The Expert Advisory Group guiding the preparation of the chapters agreed to
release them for public comments nonetheless, to foster public participation
and transparency at the maize symposium, which was held in Oaxaca on 11
March 2004. Following the comments received at the symposium and with more
time for the Advisory Group to work with the authors one-on-one, the
chapters and their abstracts are being carefully reviewed to ensure that
they and the final book are factually correct, line-by-line and
page-by-page, and that they represent an accurate assessment of the state of
knowledge of the impact of transgenic maize in a center of origin and
diversity. It is the hope of both the CEC Secretariat and its Advisory Group
that the “noise” around transgenic maize can be reduced by presenting a
comprehensive review of the science and other issues pertaining to the
subject, written in a language accessible to the public.

Chapter Author Co-author Chapter steward/Advisory Group member
Chapter 1
Context and Background on Wild and Cultivated Maize in Mexico
Abstract | Research paper Antonio Turrent (INIFAP) José Antonio Serratos
Hernández José Sarukhán
Chapter 2
Understanding Benefits and Risks
Abstract | Research paper Paul Thompson (Michigan State University) Lilia
Pérez Santiago, Don Doering, José Luis Solleiro
Chapter 3
Assessment of Effects on Genetic Diversity
Abstract | Research paper Julien Berthaud (IRD) Paul Gepts (University of
California, Davis) Allison Snow, Andrew Baum, Norman Ellstrand
Chapter 4
Assessment of Effects on Natural Ecosystems
Abstract | Research paper Lillian LaReesa Wolfenbarger (University of
Nebraska, Omaha) Mario González-Espinosa (Ecosur) José Sarukhán, Peter Raven
Chapter 5
Assessment of Biological Effects in Agriculture
Abstract | Research paper Major Goodman (North Carolina State University)
Luis Enrique García Barrios (Ecosur) David Andow
Chapter 6
Assessment of Social and Cultural Effects Associated with Transgenic Maize
Production
Abstract | Research paper Stephen Brush (University of California, Davis)
Michelle Chauvet (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) José Sarukhán, Peter
Phillips, Víctor Toledo, Mindahi Bastida-Muñoz, Julian Kinderlerer, Lilia
Pérez Santiago
Chapter 7
Assessment of Human and Animal Health Effects
Abstract | Research paper Héctor Bourges (UNAM) Samuel Lehrer (Tulane
University Medical Center) Amanda Gálvez Mariscal, Luis Herrera-Estrella,
Andrew Baum
Chapter 8
A Framework for Judging Potential Benefits and Risks
Abstract | Research paper Mauricio Bellon (CIMMYT) George Tzotzos (UNIDO)
Paul Thompson Peter Phillips, Conrad Brunk, Julian Kinderlerer, Lilia Pérez
Santiago, Amanda Gálvez Mariscalm
Chapter 9
Understanding Complex Biology and Community Values: Communication and
Participation
Abstract | Research paper Jorge Larson (Conabio) Michelle Chauvet Julian
Kinderlerer, Lilia Pérez Santiago
Chapter 10
Managing potential risks and enhancing potential benefits-Identification and
analysis of management tools and policy options
Abstract | Research paper Reynaldo Ariel Alvarez (Cinvestav) John Komen
(ISNAR) David Andow, Susan Bragdon, Don Doering, Amanda Gálvez Mariscal

ANTONIO TURRENT FERNANDEZ

Antonio Turrent Fernández is a soil scientist for the Instituto Nacional de
Investigaciones Forestales, Agricolas y Pecuaries (INIFAP) in Mexico and
also a part-time research professor.

Dr. Turrent has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Iowa State University and a
master's degree in agricultural sciences from El Colegio de Postgraduados de
México. He also has a diploma in agronomic engineering from the Universidad
Autónoma de Chapingo.

He is the author of several publications related to Mexican agriculture and
crops produced for community self-sufficiency.

JOSÉ ANTONIO SERRATOS HERNÁNDEZ

José Antonio Serratos Hernández is a biotechnologist for the Instituto
Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y Pecuaries (INIFAP) in
Mexico. Dr. Serratos holds bachelors and masters degrees in biology from the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the University of Ottawa,
Canada, and a PhD in plant biotechnology from the Centro de Investigación y
Estudios Avanzados del Politécnico. Dr. Serratos specialized in agroecology
at the Land Resources Research Institute, Central Experimental Farm, in
Ottawa, Canada. He is currently an adjunct scientist at the Applied
Biotechnology Center at CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz
y Trigo), and member of Subcomité Especializado de Medio Ambiente
(Biosafety) for the Instituto Nacional de Ecología. His principal research
interests are molecular biology of maize reproduction and the biochemistry
and ecology of maize-insect interactions.

PAUL B. THOMPSON

Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and
Community Ethics at Michigan State University, and is professor in the
departments of Philosophy, Agricultural Economics, and Community,
Agriculture, Resources and Recreation Studies. He formerly held the Joyce
and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics at Purdue University. He is a
co-author of the National Research Council Report Environmental Effects of
Transgenic Plants, and has published widely on risk and ethical issues
associated with agricultural biotechnology.

Dr. Thompson received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the State University of
New York at Stony Brook in 1980, and holds a B.A. in philosophy from Emory
University in Atlanta, GA.

JULIEN BERTHAUD

Julien Berthaud is currently working for the Institut de Recherche pour le
Développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France, as a researcher on in situ
conservation of maize in Mexico, gene flow and dynamic of maize genetic
diversity. Prior to this, Dr. Berthaud worked as a senior scientist and
researcher on in situ conservation of maize in Mexico, gene flow and dynamic
of maize genetic diversity for CIMMYT-IRD, a joint research project
conducted in CIMMYT, El Batán, Mexico.

Dr. Berthaud holds graduate degrees in agronomy engineering from University
of Paris at Orsay (doctorat d'état ès sciences naturelles, doctorat de
troisième cycle and D.E.A. in plant breeding), from the Ecole Nationale
Supérieure Agronomique, Montpellier, France.

He has published extensively on genetic resources and many other issues
related to coffee and maize.

PAUL GEPTS

Paul Gepts is a professor in the Department of Agronomy and Range Science
for the University of California at Davis. Prior to this, he worked as a
researcher and held several teaching positions.

Dr. Gepts has graduate degrees from Gembloux, Belgium (B.S., agricultural
sciences, M.S., agricultural sciences in plant protection), and the
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Ph.D., with a major in plant breeding and
genetics and a minor in botany).

He has published extensively on gene flow from crops, crop evolution and
many other issues related to genetics.

L. LAREESA WOLFENBARGER

Lillian LaReesa Wolfenbarger is an adjunct associate professor, Department
of Biology at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Dr. Wolfenbarger has a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Cornell
University and a B.S. in biology from the University of California at Los
Angeles.

She is the author of several publications related to ecology and genetically
engineered plants issues and conducts research on the ecological effects of
commercialized genetically engineered crops on plant and animal communities.

MARIO GONZÁLEZ-ESPINOSA

Mario González-Espinosa, is a senior researcher in the Department of
Terrestrial Ecology and Systematics, Biodiversity Conservation Division, at
El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (Ecosur) in San Cristóbal de Las Casas,
Chiapas, Mexico. He has held teaching and research positions at Universidad
Autónoma Chapingo (1974-1977), and the Botany Center at the Colegio de
Posgraduados (Chapingo, México, 1977-1982).

His current research interests include population and community ecology of
plants in tropical highland forests subjected to traditional land-use
patterns, ecological restoration and conservation of forest ecosystems, and
macroecological issues of neotropical floristic diversity.

Dr. González-Espinosa obtained his diploma in agronomic engineering in 1976
at the National School of Agriculture (Chapingo, Mexico). He also earned a
Ph.D. (population biology) from the University of Pennsylvania
(Philadelphia, PA) in 1982.

He has authored and co-authored more than 35 scientific studies and book
chapters, and has contributed more than 70 papers, lectures, or seminars in
national and international professional meetings.

MAJOR GOODMAN

Major Goodman is a professor in the departments of Crop Science, Statistics,
and Genetics at North Carolina State University.

Dr. Goodman has graduate degrees from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
(B.S. in math), North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (M.S. in
genetics) and North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (Ph.D. in
genetics), followed by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of
Genetics, ESALQ, University of Sao Paulo, Piracicaba, SP, Brazil.

He has published extensively on tropical maize germplasm, maize genetics,
and maize breeding.

STEPHEN B. BRUSH

Steven B. Brush is a professor in the Human and Community Development
Department, University of California at Davis. Prior to his present
position, he worked as a senior scientist at the International Plant Genetic
Resources Institute (1994-1995), as associate director of the anthropology
program at the National Science Foundation (1980-1983) and as
assistant/associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and
Mary.

Dr. Brush holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin
(1973).

He is the author and co-author of several publications related to issues on
crop genetic resources and crop diversity in peasant and industrialized
agriculture.

DR. LUIS GARCÍA BARRIOS

Luis García Barrios is a senior researcher (Investigador Titular B) at El
Colegio de la Frontera Sur, a multidisciplinary research center with offices
in the five southernmost states of Mexico. He has served as head of the
Department of Agroecology (1992-1996) and as head of the Division of
Alternative Production Systems (1999-2002).

He has a BSc degree in biology (Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, 1985) and
masters and PhD degrees in ecology (Instituto de Ecología, UNAM, 199. He
has been an invited researcher at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor,
1992) and at the University of Wageningen (Wageningen, The Netherlands,
2003)

During the past 20 years he has done field and experimental research on
different topics related to peasant indigenous agriculture. He has worked
and published on the topics of peasant technology, ethnobotany,
participatory research, potential yield of corn land races, intercropping,
agent-based modeling and simulation of mixed crops, sustainability of
multi-species agricultural systems, agroforestry systems, and nonlinear
dynamical systems applied to agriculture. He teaches agroecology to masters
and PhD students at ECOSUR.

He currently collaborates with Drs. Elena Alvarez Buylla, Hugo Perales
Rivera and other researchers on an international research project aimed at
understanding the extent to which trangenes have been incorporated into
Mexican land race genomes, and the rate of progress and mechanisms of such
processes.

MICHELLE CHAUVET

Michelle Chauvet works as a researcher/professor in the Sociology Department
of the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana), Unidad Azcapotzalco.

Dr. Chauvet has a Ph.D. and master's degrees in economics and a bachelor's
degree in journalism and communications from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico.

Since 1990, she has been working as a researcher on the socioeconomic
impacts of the biotechnology on the agriculture and the environment. She has
also been doing research on meat livestock.

Presently, she is doing joint research for Cinvestav-Irapauto and the
Autonomous University of the State of Morelos (Universidad Autónoma del
Estado de Morelos-UAEM) on the identification and evaluation of
socioeconomics, biotechnology and biodiversity issues of small communities
that cultivate wild corn in Mexico.

HÉCTOR BOURGES

Héctor Bourges obtained his M.D. degree from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (1963) and a Ph.D. degree in nutrition at MIT (196.
Since 1968 he has been a researcher at the "Salvador Zubiran" National
Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, where he is currently director
of nutrition.

His research has covered a variety of subjects in the area of nutrition
physiology and biochemistry and in food science. In addition to pursuing his
reasearch interests, he has lectured in nutrition at different universities.

He has published about 250 research papers and 12 books, and contributed 40
chapters to peer-authored texts, as well as serving on many academic and
advisory committees.

SAMUEL B. LEHRER

Samuel B. Lehrer is a research professor of medicine at the clinical
immunology section at Tulane University School of Medicine and is adjunct
professor of environmental health sciences at the School of Public Health.

Dr. Lehrer is an expert on food allergens and allergen detection. He is
exploring new methods for testing and characterizing food allergens and has
lectured extensively on methods for testing genetically modified crops for
potential allergenicity.

Dr. Lehrer serves on FDA's Allergenic Products Advisory Committee and has
served on the NIAID Food Allergy Study Group. He obtained his Ph.D. from the
Temple University School of Medicine in 1971.

MAURICIO BELLON

Mauricio Bellon is a senior scientist for the economics program at Mexico's
Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (International Maize
and Wheat Improvement Center-CIMMYT). He has a B.S. degree in agronomy from
the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana),
Mexico, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in human ecology from the University of
California at Davis. At CIMMYT, he is responsible for participatory research
and the social and cultural aspects of crop biodiversity research, and is a
member of the Biosafety and Bioethics Committee. Dr. Bellon has research
experience in farmers' management of crop diversity with an emphasis on
maize and rice among small farmers in Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and
Zimbabwe. He also has conducted research on the use of participatory methods
in the design and evaluation of agricultural technologies.

Prior to joining CIMMYT in 1997, Dr. Bellon was affiliate scientist at the
Genetics Resources, IRRI (1995-1997), and from 1990 to 1995, an investigador
asociado "C" at the Centro de Ecología, of the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). He is a
member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

He has authored and co-authored several publications on genetic resource
conservation and crop evolution. He has also written extensively on issues
related to maize in Mexico.

GEORGE T. TZOTZOS

George T. Tzotzos is head of the Biotechnology Unit of the United Nations
Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Prior to his present position,
he worked as Science Coordinator at the International Centre for Genetic
Engineering and Biotechnology. He is currently visiting professor at the
University of Concepción, Chile.

Dr. Tzotzos has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Bristol, UK
(1981).

He is the author or co-author of several publications related to issues on
biosafety and is active in developing computer-based decision support
systems for biological risk assessment.

JORGE LARSON

Jorge Larson is a biologist collaborating with the Comisión Nacional para el
Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for the
Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity—Conabio) since 1992, in activities related
to national biodiversity policy, access to genetic resources and benefit
sharing, biosafety, intellectual property rights and the in situ
conservation of biological resources. He served as technical coordinator of
the Mexican Delegation to the negotiations of the Cartagena Protocol on the
Transboundary Movement of Living Modified Organisms, and was a MacArthur
Foundation fellow with the project "Intellectual Property and Biological
Resources in Rural Mexico." He currently coordinates the Collective
Biological Resources Program in Conabio.

REYNALDO ARIEL ALVAREZ-MORALES

Dr. Reynaldo Ariel Alvarez-Morales is a principal researcher in the
Department of Plant Genetic Engineering at the Centro de Investigación y de
Estudios Avanzados del I.P.N. (Cinvestav), Unidad Irapuato, Mexico.

Dr. Alvarez-Morales has a postgraduate degree in microbial molecular
genetics from the University of Sussex, Great Britain, with a major in
microbiology, and a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the National
School of Biological Sciences, I.P.N., Mexico City.

He is the author of several publications related to implementation of
biosafety on agricultural issues.

JOHN KOMEN

John Komen is assistant director of the Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS),
at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR). PBS
is a five-year biosafety capacity development program, funded by the US
Agency for International Development and implemented by an international
consortium of organizations. Mr. Komen joined ISNAR in February 1993 as a
research officer responsible for projects on the policy and management
aspects of agricultural biotechnology and biosafety. In particular, his
areas of expertise include:
- international collaboration and technology transfer in agricultural
biotechnology;
- intellectual property rights and IP management;
- biosafety policies and procedures; and
- designing training materials and methods for biotechnology research
managers.
Mr. Komen has authored, co-authored and edited over 30 peer-reviewed
publications on policy and management aspects of agricultural biotechnology.
He is an editorial advisor for the Biotechnology and Development Monitor, a
quarterly journal published by The Network University (TNU) and The
Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Photos: CGIAR/CIMMYT
© Commission for Environmental Cooperation

From: "Maxim Institute"

Australian Family Court says girl can become a "boy"

A landmark decision by the Australian Family Court has authorised a
13-year-old girl to start sex change hormone treatment. Alex has been
diagnosed as having a gender identity dysphoria and it is the first time an
Australian child has been given legal approval for this treatment.

The application to the court was made by the state welfare department that
is Alex's guardian. An expert psychiatrist found that, "Alex is a bright,
engaging, biologically normal 12-year old girl who has a strong,
persistent, longstanding belief and desire to live as a male...[Alex] has
repeatedly stated his desire to be a boy and has behaved as such."

Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson said that Alex did not have the capacity
to consent to the process. "However, in the present case, I have
uncontrovered evidence not only that the proposed procedure is entirely
consistent with Alex's wishes but also that the expert evidence as to the
best interests of Alex accords with those wishes." But is this really in
Alex's best interests? And is Alex of an age and maturity to grasp the
reality and implications of such a process that will eventually involve
irreversible treatment?

At least three significant issues arise. The term "best interests" has no
legal definition and as we can clearly see in this case it encourages
judicial activism. The term "gender identity dysphoria" looks more like an
ideological construct than an accurate description of a medical condition.
Implicit in the courts finding is the assumption that gender is a social
construct. Applying that ideology to Alex is outrageously irresponsible,
girls can not become boys. The courts decision will put Alex in no man's
land, indeed in no woman's land.

Real compassion demands shared suffering. The response of a loving parent
would be to lead Alex out of her confusion, not to endorse it. Sadly Alex
doesn't have that parent and we can be sure that many tears will be the
consequence of the courts decision.

To read a Sydney Morning Herald report on the case visit:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/13/1081838723546.html

Discuss this article in our
on-line discussion forum

http://www.sundayherald.com/40974

Sunday Herald (Scotland)
4 April 2004

Divorced, lonely and angry ... and reaching for their wallets
By Elizabeth McMeekin

As divorce rates reach record heights, Scottish estate agents aren't the
only ones cashing in. Elizabeth McMeekin reports

The emotional effects of divorce have been well documented. There is the
obvious heartache and loss, followed by loneliness, sadness and anger.
But divorce has the capacity to break more than just hearts. It severs
families, breaks up homes, and divides everything the couple owned from
their bank accounts to their CD collection. The surprising result, it
seems, is that the rising divorce rate may actually be boosting the
Scottish economy.

A marriage break-up not only forces two people to buy into the single
market again, it also cajoles them into purchasing a whole new material
life. New homes must be bought and in some cases, the old one sold. A
second set of furniture has to be purchased and divided CD and video
collections have to be restocked. Divorce not only puts two new
singletons onto the market, it unleashes two new spending powers as well.

“Several niche markets have been fuelled by the needs of divorced
people," explains Dr Simon Clark, an Edinburgh University economist who
specialises in divorce. Since well-paid divorcing couples tend to notably increase their spending after break-up, Clark argues that this anomaly is being
reflected in the retail and property markets. Indeed the “divorce economy”
has become so significant that estate agents privately refer to divorcees
as “sumos” (splitting up and moving out).

“A lot of the marketing for Ikea appears to be aimed at people who have
split up or are getting divorced," says Clark. “And I think there is an
element of this on the property market too. At the moment, the demand
for housing is being fuelled by single people and divorce is contributing to
this.

“Married people go from having one larger family home to, when they
divorce, two smaller homes for one or two people. That means the housing
market is being driven by an influx of newly single people looking to
buy smaller properties for their new smaller households."

Scotland has one of the highest divorce rates in Europe, with more than
10,000 marriage break-ups each year. With the average cost of divorce
estimated at around £13,000, new divorcees are contributing millions to
the economy on a yearly basis. Obvious bills such as lawyers’ and estate
agents’ fees make up part of this expense, but hidden costs such as
buying an extra sets of toys and clothes for the children and another set of
household appliances, all add up. Statistics also show that many
divorcees tend to splash out on treats and luxuries such as holidays.

And although their households have been split, when it comes to
property, well-heeled divorcees don't always downsize their expectations.
Michael Cox, a lawyer who divorced from his wife a few years ago, explains:
“Instead of your family needing one three-bedroom house, you suddenly
need two three-bedroom homes when you get divorced. I still very much wanted
to be part of my children’s lives and there was no way they were sleeping
on my floor when they came to stay. I have three boys and you just couldn't
do that to them - it wouldn't have been a normal life."

Cox is a part of the Fathers 4 Justice organisation, whose members
campaign (normally clad in lycra superhero outfits) for better legal rights for
unmarried fathers. A great deal of his post-divorce expenditure has been
connected to the standard of his sons’ lives when they come to visit.

“It started with having to buy them another set of clothes to keep at my
house," Cox explains. “It’s simply not practical to keep handing things
backwards and forwards between their two homes. And then there are two
lots of roller blades and fishing rods. In fact, the only thing we haven't
doubled up on is their karate kits because of the expense.

“I felt if I hadn't done it this way they would always see my house as a
place they came to visit and their mum’s as their home, and I didn't
want it to be that way.

“When we divorced I left most of the things we owned with my ex-wife and
the children, so I had to start my life afresh. I had to buy things all
over again like furniture, washing machines and fridges as well as
little things like CDs and cutlery."

Many divorcees do find themselves looking around for smaller properties.
And according to property market experts, these broken-hearted
separating couples are helping to price young, single people out of the
market.

“Divorce is actually causing a problem, as there is a notable increase
in demand for single person properties," explains Peter BoltonKing, chief
executive of the National Association of Estate Agents. “People tend to
have to down-size their homes when they get divorced as most can't
afford to buy another family house of the same size. This particular area that
divorcees buy into is very much the area that first time buyers are
trying to get into, and this level of interest in that market pushes up
prices."

BoltonKing also points out that because divorcees generally have more
capital behind them and better-paid jobs, they tend to be able to
out-bid their younger unmarried counterparts.

“We have seen a gradual build-up of this over the last 10 or 15 years,"
BoltonKing adds. “Both parties in divorce now tend to be better off,
each of them having their own independent income that they can use as the
basis for a new mortgage once the old house is sold.”

William Barne, the valuer for Independent Estates in Glasgow, agrees:
“We have been commenting in the office recently about the number of divorced
people coming in to buy new homes,” he says.

“The divorced couples we've come across have already made money out of
the selling of their old house and so very often they have a bit of money
aside to use as a down-payment on their new home.

“That gives them an edge over first-time buyers who have to go for
bigger mortgages. The divorcees also tend to be older and that can give them an
advantage as well. The effect in our area is that although divorcees are
not single-handedly buoying up the property market, they are helping to
add to the value of certain smaller one or two-person properties. As a
result, many first-time buyers are opting out of the usual bidding system and
going for fixed priced properties where it is first-come, first-served and
they can't be out-bid."

But not everyone agrees new divorcees are necessarily a spending power
to be reckoned with. Jeanette Findlay, who teaches economics at Glasgow
University, believes that although some divorcees who have successful
careers may be able to double up on homes and appliances, most can't
match that level of spending.

“People who earn a certain income will always be able to spend more, and
there will obviously be a knock-on effect if couples like that get
divorced," Findlay explains. “But it seems more likely that most people
are not in a position where they cannot afford to live in two large homes
and have to opt for very small, basic one-bedroom flats.

“These people do not have much spending power at all.
“Very often, one half of the couple or both will be tied to the mortgage
on their old house and unless they choose to sell that, it is almost
impossible to get a second mortgage to buy a new home for one of them."

Fiona Garwood from Mediation Scotland agrees that divorce doesn't
necessarily mean financial freedom.

“Some people who have moved out as a result of a divorce find themselves
with few options in terms of their finances and what they can give to
their children," she explains.

“If people are better off there is more opportunity there to get a new
home and kit it out properly, but that is often not the case. There just
isn't a one-size-fits-all case for divorce - everyone’s circumstances are
different and their spending power will vary accordingly."

Australian Financial Review, April 1, 2004

State governments continue to capitulate to green hysteria over
genetically modified crops by agreeing to multi-year moratoriums
against commercial planting of GM canola. They don't put it like that,
of course. Western Australia's Premier, Geoff Gallop, deployed the fig
leaf of "market acceptance concerns" nothing to do with government to
justify his state's ban two weeks ago. And Victoria's Premier, Steve
Bracks, cited equally spurious economic worries when he announced a
four-year moratorium on commercial production of GM canola.

Tasmania is another state to shut itself out of the development phase
of this challenging technology by imposing a multi-year ban. But
Victoria is the most curious case. It fancies itself as a leader in
biotechnology and other sunrise industries, and spends millions of
dollars of taxpayers' money subsidising research in order to maintain
its edge against challenges from Queensland and NSW. Queensland
has given the go ahead to commercial planting; NSW has been trialling GM
canola and will make its mind up shortly; and both have been growing
GM cotton source of cottonseed oil since 2001.

The arguments against GM have been falling over rapidly. No one takes
seriously the human safety concerns implicit in the anti-GM lobby's
"Frankenfoods" label. And the economic concerns were obliterated by a
report prepared for the Victorian government by ACIL Tasman. GM
crops have been adopted by our major rivals in the grains industries Canada,
the United States and Argentina with due care and process. A country
that relies on grains for a chunk of export income needs more
compelling reasons than those presented to date to turn its back on
GM. The same goes for states like Victoria and WA, which risk leaving
the field open to Queensland and possibly NSW.

Of course some of Australia's rural lobbies are sensitive to the
hysteria in Europe and the Middle East. AWB Ltd , accounting for $4
billion in wheat exports, reckons about a third of its customers have
raised issues about GM contamination. The Barley Board says its
Middle East and Japanese customers are resisting and that it can't afford not
to give them what they want. But they both advocate "co-existence"
trials of supply chains to segregate GM and non-GM grains because
they want to be prepared for when GM becomes a reality.

The Bracks government clutched at an independent report by Peter
Lloyd, an economist. But Professor Lloyd's report advised only against
unconditional release of GM canola, on the grounds of uncertain
benefits and the risks to conventional producers of being denied legal
remedies and insurance if GM canola turns up in their crops. He saw
little reason to fear loss of markets as long as a reliable
segregation system could be put in place.

Professor Lloyd, like the Wheat Board, recommended a series of
co-existence trials beginning this year to allow production, to the
point of export, of GM and non-GM canola, without cross-contamination.
And if the final decision were to give the GM product the go ahead, he
said it should be permanent and unrestricted in area.

ACIL Tasman went further, reporting that though there was some
sensitivity to GM crops there was little or no evidence of price
discrimination or market access problems in Australia's key markets.
The only market that might deny access, Europe, was at best an
opportunistic outlet for Australia.

The benefits of GM crops are obvious; they improve yields and
nutritional value, and allow reduced use of pesticides. Last year
Robert Norton of the University of Melbourne predicted that farmers
switching to GM canola would increase their yield from 1.27 tonnes per
hectare to 1.38 tonnes. The Bracks government has barely
acknowledged this. It will look only at tightly controlled trials on a case-by-case
basis with the main objective of protecting Victoria's non-GM status.
This tail-wags-dog Luddism is at odds with where the Bracks
government likes to think it's headed. Only this week a government press release
from the Minister for Innovation on a different subject talked about
being at the forefront of genomic research.

AusBiotech , an industry association, complains its members have
invested millions of dollars in Victoria and will have no incentive to
invest further if they can't commercialise their products. It points
to a European study which showed 61 per cent of the private sector
cancelled R&D projects in biotechnology as a result of GM moratoriums.

A country with a large grains industry can't afford to ignore
promising new crop technologies like GM. Governments should embrace it
cautiously, but purposefully. Blocking it in obedience to green
hysteria sacrifices the public interest.

********

4 States in 5 Days ... a Loss for Innovation

- AusBiotech, 1 April 2004

AusBiotech, Australia's biotechnology industry organisation is stunned
and amazed at a week in politics that has seen GM moratoria placed in
four states in five days.

In such a short period of time, many of AusBiotech's members and
biotechnology players have been left wondering at the timing,
coordination and coincidental moratorium periods and legislation
announced in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western
Australia.

"This marks a sad day for colleagues in the agriscience and
biotechnology industries, as the sheer enormity of this decision
impacts the competitiveness of Australia's technology and the ongoing
confidence and support of local researchers, " said Dr Tony Coulepis,
Executive Director, AusBiotech.

"Not only have biotechnology colleagues questioned the transparency of
our government processes, but also the state governments ' confidence
in the national regulatory body - the Office of the Gene Technology
Regulator (OGTR). "

AusBiotech urges the agriscience and biotechnology communities to
unite and work towards the future development and needs of these
innovative industries and to minimise the international criticism of
such an action.

"The moratoria decisions will have a much wider impact than the
multinational companies they directly effect at the present time.
These decisions erode away the international confidence and perception
of Australia as a globally competitive biotechnology and agriscience
country and sadly makes the task for our researchers even harder to
remain competitive, " Dr Coulepis said.

Internationally, experience has shown that Moratoria impacts investor
confidence and support to the agriscience sector, as evidenced in
Europe, and already indicated for Australia by international
investors.

In Europe, a 2002 survey showed 61% of the private sector cancelled
R&D projects in this emerging technology as a result of moratorium
actions.

"Now more than ever, agriscience stakeholders need to unite to support
the national OGTR regulatory system and other innovative technologies
that are also on the agenda for review."

"As the Australian biotechnology industry organisation, many of our
members are questioning what will be next in line for such a harsh
treatment against all scientific and logical argument?"

AusBiotech is seeking reassurances from political leaders that
technology and excellent research does count and Australia ' s global
competitiveness is not something to play with.

Media Contact:
Paris Brooke, Communications Manager, AusBiotech
tel: 03 9208 4318 / 0407 715 574
www.ausbiotech.org

Paris Brooke
Policy and Communications Manager

AusBiotech Ltd
Australia's Biotechnology Organisation

**********

http://www.cropgen.org/databases/cropgen2.nsf/?Open

Too little and too late

- CropGen, April 1, 2004

While it is disappointing that, in the light of endless official
delays and prevarications, Bayer feels disinclined to proceed with
Chardon maize, clear messages have emerged.

The first is that Bayer made a business decision, confirming what some
people have been saying all along: that GM technology is a commercial
opportunity, not a dogma. If a project is not worth developing
further, drop it. New maize strains have a commercial life of five
years or a little more before they are replaced by something better.
Chardon was already years late into the field because of the many
superfluous barriers placed in the path of its development and there
were likely to be another two years before all the additional hurdles
were surmounted. It had simply outlived its usefulness.

The anti-GM campaigners will no doubt be celebrating and they should
make the most of it: their happiness will be short-lived. Agricultural
biotechnology has a global momentum which is unlikely to be halted by
minor commercial decisions ñ and Bayer have confirmed their
commitment to going forward.

The Bayer announcement points up the weak basis on which the
Government appears to have decided "yes but" for maize and "no but"
for oilseed rape and sugar beet. Fodder maize is not much of a
commercial crop in Britain; the other two are. Interpreting the Farm
Scale Evaluation (FSE) data (as the Government did) to mean that GM
maize is "good' for the environment while GM oilseed rape and sugar
beet are "bad" is, perhaps, based more on political science than on
sound science.

The FSEs told us about weed management; in two cases, the control of
weeds was more effective in protocols using GM crops. But "good" or
"bad"? That is very much a matter of opinion. The sensible decision
would have been to go forward with all three, considering carefully
how best to do so. On their working land, farmers need to grow crops,
not weeds; the field margins, the areas between fields and
uncultivated land together offer plenty of opportunity for weeds to
proliferate.

British farmers will now be in the bizarre position of being allowed
to import GM cattle feed but not to grow it themselves: every year the
UK brings in 2 million tonnes of cheap-to-grow GM maize and soya, a
figure set to rise. With six or seven million farmers using the
technology abroad, and increasing year on year, GM crops are obviously
attractive because they lower production costs. But not here ñ we will
make do with yesterday's technology while they use tomorrow's.

There is another message for all of us. From every quarter of business
and commerce come complaints of excessive red tape. As a nation (and
a continent) we are in danger of increasing paralysis and loss of
initiative: too many proposals simply become not worth the candle. The
Chardon episode, minor though it is, offers a warning that playing it
excessively carefully (the "precautionary principle", some people call
it) does none of us much good.

The article below shows that the GloFish® recently approved by USFDA for
commercial sale is a dangerous genetic mess. it is clearly lunacy to allow such a mess to be spread throughout the warm waters of the Americas.

The slovenly regulation seems to be being mirrored in the rush to approve
biopharm rice in California.

Correspondence

Nature Biotechnology 22, 379 (2004)
doi:10.1038/nbt0404-379a
The vector that got away
Pat Gibbs
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami,
Miami, Florida 33149, USA. pgibbs@rsmas.miami.edu

To the editor:

Your editorial in the January issue (Nat. Biotechnol. 22, 1, 2004) rightly
raises concerns over the regulatory oversight of the GloFish marketed in the
United States by Yorktown Technologies (Austin, TX, USA). But the most
pertinent question is what exactly is the transgenic content of this animal?

In fact, analyses in my laboratory have revealed that GloFish® contain four or
five tandem duplicated copies of the DsRed1 shuttle vector from BD Biosciences
Clontech (Palo Alto, CA, USA) with a zebrafish muscle promoter inserted into
the multiple cloning site (http://www.bdbiosciences.com/clontech/techinfo/
vectors_dis/pDsRed1-1.shtml). In addition to a minimal transcription unit for
red fluorescent protein expression, the fish contains six extra unnecessary
segments of DNA. These consist of the following: f1 bacteriophage, pUC and
simian virus 40 (SV40) origins of replication; a 'universal' expression
cassette with the -lactamase/SV40 promoters; and the herpes simplex virus
thymidine kinase polyA site and terminator driving expression of the
kanamycin/neomycin resistance transgene (nptII).

The decision not to excise the antibiotic resistance marker nptII from GloFish
is particularly troubling, given that kanamycin is sold over-the-counter for
home aquarium use and is also commonly used in ornamental fish aquaculture.

As GloFish appear likely to come into contact with kanamycin, the presence of
prokaryotic and eukaryotic origins of replication together with 'universal'
expression of antibiotic resistance is likely to positively select for rare
horizontal gene transfer events, raising the potential for horizontal gene
transfer from this genetically modified organism (GMO).

As far as I can tell, nothing like this animal has ever been approved for
release as a GMO into the environment in either the United States or the
European Union. Yet, all we have from the US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA;

Rockville, MD, USA) on these fish is an ambiguous three-sentence ruling:

"Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes, they pose no
threat to the food supply. There is no evidence that these genetically
engineered zebra danio fish pose any more threat to the environment than their
unmodified counterparts which have long been widely sold in the United States.
In the absence of a clear risk to the public health, the FDA finds no reason to
regulate these particular fish."1

Neither the antibiotic gene nor the regulatory sequences contained in the fish
are even mentioned. More importantly, the statement gives the impression that
the FDA was not aware of the precedent-setting nature of this particular
release.

The lack of lucidity at the FDA is mirrored by equal confusion at the level of US state's rights-driven regulation. Already, California has banned the GloFish on the basis of apparent 'ethical' reasons. Florida, in contrast, has decided that GloFish can continue to be cultivated, but that regulatory guidelines will be formulated for further release of new varieties of transgenic ornamental fish. The United States thus appears in danger of promulgating an incoherent regulatory patchwork on these products.

The FDA, or some federal GMO umbrella organization, should clarify the situation
by describing the transgenic content of all GMOs before they are released and
providing an up-to-date list of allowable genetic sequences/functions and
combinations.


Nature Biotechnology responds: We are aware of neither studies on gene transfer
between individuals within a zebrafish population nor studies on gene transfer
between teleost species. As yet, the genomes of Fugu and zebrafish have not
been sufficiently analyzed to ascertain the presence of horizontally
transferred gene sequences in either fish genome.


REFERENCES
US Food and Drug Administration. FDA Statement Regarding GloFish®. (USFDA,
Rockville, MD) (December 9, 2003).
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2003/NEW00994.html

Jeffrey Smith's book reviewed by Michael Meacher.
Jeffrey is a member of Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering Committee.

Seeds of Deception (UK edition) by Jeffrey Smith
ISBN 1 903998 41 7 £9.95
Green Books Tel : 01803 863260.
[pubd in NZ by Craig Potton bks]

Foreword
by Michael Meacher

This is a brilliant book which combines shrewd dissection of the true
nature of GM technology, a devastating critique of the health and
environmental hazards of GM crops, and scarifying examples of the
manipulation of both science and the media by the biotech industry.

Despite the British Government's GM Nation Debate in mid-2003, the level of
understanding of GM remains alarmingly low in the UK. This book should be
compulsory reading, not only for the general public, but even more so for
the decision-makers who have never been exposed to systematic analysis of
the problems created by GM.

What is so exciting about this book is that it is no dry text of scientific
exegesis - it positively fizzes with the human drama of the cabals and
conspiracies behind the scenes which have littered the history of Big
Biotech in its frantic efforts to get itself accepted. It is meticulously
documented and powerfully written, somewhere between a documentary and a
thriller.

It reveals above all that GM is not some arcane issue about science or
technology - it is ultimately about power. There are no consumer benefits
from GM crops, the alleged benefits to farmers are deeply disputed,
environmental and health testing has never been carried out, non-GM farmers
are being put seriously at risk. So why is GM being pressed at all? The
answer, set out painstakingly and frighteningly in this book, tells us a
great deal about how power is exercised today-funding political parties and
key individuals, networking around opinion-formers and decision-makers, and
fixing strategic job swaps between the biotech industry and Government.
And this is not just conjecture; plenty of examples are given which
illustrate how secretive and malign these influences are.

The main area of cover-up is undoubtedly the GM effects on health. It is a
staggering fact that there have been virtually no clinical or biochemical
tests of the impacts of eating GM foods on human health. Jeffrey Smith sets
out, like a detective story, the unravelling of the L-tryptophan fiasco,
the StarLink maize allergy mishap, and the cauliflower mosaic virus
promoter hazard, as well as a host of other health risks, both predicted
and unpredictable.

But the kernel of the book is the commercialization of politics and the
politicization of science. For those who still believe the constitutional
fantasy that governments act in accordance with their manifesto in the
general interests of society, this book will come as a shocker. The
exercise of power today is much more hard-nosed and ruthless, and the
power-brokers are not the electorate, but Big Business. As a case study of
this suborning of democratic accountability, Jeffrey Smith's account is an
eye-opener. But most of all it is a call to arms, not only to prevent the
contamination of the nation's food supply, but even more to tackle the
poisoning of the nation's decision-making system by the undercover wielding
of economic and financial muscle and PR manipulativeness of Big Biotech.

see:

The Institute of Science in Society
Science Society Sustainability http://www.i-sis.org.uk
General Enquiries sam@i-sis.org.uk Website/Mailing List
press-release@i-sis.org.uk ISIS Director m.w.ho@i- sis.org.uk

Bt Toxins in Genetically Modified Crops: Regulation by Deceit

Prof. Joe Cummins reviews the impacts of Bt toxins and Bt crops and
points to a fundamental flaw in their regulatory assessments - toxicity
testing based, not on the toxins in Bt crops themselves, but on
surrogate toxins. There is, furthermore, evidence that some Bt toxins
are toxic to mammals.

This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BTTIGMC.php

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin genes inserted into genetically
modified (GM) crops are, along with herbicide tolerance, the leading
modifications of food crops. Bt crops were planted on over 62 million
hectares worldwide as of 2003 [1].

Bt bacteria store multiple toxin proteins as crystals in spores. The
individual toxin genes have been isolated and cloned; each of the toxin
genes and proteins are related, but differ in the range of insects that
each poisons. The main crystal toxins are designated Cry, then
individual toxins are designated Cry1, Cry2 etc. A particular toxin such
as Cry1 may have alternate forms, designated Cry1A or Cry1B, which
differ significantly in gene sequence. Finally, small differences in
gene sequence may reflect significant difference in specificity and the
final designation is Cry1Aa, cry1Ab, etc.

Each toxin that modifies a crop is normally modified in its DNA sequence
from the natural toxin by the introduction of regulatory sequences such
as introns, polyA signals, promoters and enhancers. The DNA sequence for
the toxin is altered from the natural gene to make the gene more active
in the crop and in many instances the amino acid sequence of the toxin
is altered to make the toxin more soluble in the plant cell [2].

Each toxin in a GM crop must be evaluated separately from other toxin
genes and proteins, making regulatory evaluations complex. But, in every
case, the Bt crops released in North America have been evaluated based
on the toxicity to mammals and to the environment of the natural toxins,
not the product of the synthetic altered genes in the GM crops.
Regulators have simply assumed that the toxins produced using the
altered synthetic genes are equivalent to the natural gene toxin so long
as the altered toxins contain domains for insect toxicity and they had
an immunological relationship to the natural toxin [3].

Therefore, the actual toxins in the GM crops have not been tested. This
is because the cost of isolating the toxins from the GM crops was
considered prohibitive.

Toxicity to mammals

The Cry toxins have a common mode of action in insects. The toxin
proteins bind to cell membranes of the cells of the insect gut. The
receptors for the toxins have been identified as membrane-anchored
aminopeptidase enzymes and cadherin-like proteins. Cry toxins form ion
channels that cause an efflux of potassium ions from the insect gut
cells, leading to cell lysis (the cell breaking open) [4]. The actual
aminopeptidase binding sites for the Cry toxin is glycosylated (short
carbohydrate molecules are added to the protein) and recognized by a
lectin-like protein domain on the toxin [5-8]. Lectins are a class of
proteins that bind to carbohydrates associated with proteins. They are
usually recovered from plants and many are known to affect mammalian
cell growth while others are toxic to plant predators such as insects.

The toxicity to mammals of relatively few of the numerous Cry toxins has
been reported in the scientific literature. Senior scientist Dr. Arpad
Pusztai has prepared a superior review of the health risks of GM food,
which included a comprehensive section on Bt toxins. Areas covered in
the review included an earlier report from an Egyptian laboratory
showing the Cry1 toxin, either fed alone or in transgenic potatoes to
mice, led to hypertrophic and other changes in gut ultrastructure.
Pusztai pointed out the need for fuller and much more extensive animal
feeding studies on GM crops [9].

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho has reviewed recent findings on the mammalian toxicity of
Bt toxins. Her reports include observations on the death of cows fed GM
fodder, survival of transgenic DNA during digestion and binding of Bt
toxin to the intestine of mice [10-12]. Some of the studies in those
reports are mentioned below.

Cry1Ac toxin was observed to bind to the cell surface proteins of the
mouse small intestine and caused changes in the physiological state of
the intestine [13]. Vaginal and intraperitoneal immunization with Cry1Ac
toxin elicited antibody response at several mucosal sites, including the
vagina. At the large intestine, the antibody response changed during the
oestrus cycle, while the vaginal response did not change throughout the
reproductive cycle [14]. Intranasal, rectal and intraperitoneal
immunization with Cry1Ac toxin induced serum, intestinal, vaginal and
pulmonary (lung) immune response in mice [15]. Cry1Ac toxin was a potent
immunogen, more potent than cholera toxin [16, 17].

These few studies have made important breakthroughs on the impact of Bt
toxins but are seldom followed up vigorously, a serious mistake
considering the widespread consumption of unlabeled foods containing Bt
toxins. Furthermore, the adverse findings seem to be seldom mentioned in
regulatory reviews.

The behaviour of transgenes and toxins in the mammalian digestive system
is crucial to evaluating their impact on the animal. Cattle were fed
maize silage containing Cry1Ab toxin. After four weeks, the contents of
their digestive system and faeces were analysed. The low-copy Bt genes
could not be quantified in the digestive system, but the Bt toxin
protein was detected in the digestive system and faeces of the cattle [18].

Pigs fed maize containing Cry1Ab were found to have quantities of the
Cry toxin genes and toxin protein; and Cry1Ab protein was not totally
degraded in the digestive system [19]. Pigs fed StarLink (Cry9c) maize
were found to have about a quarter of the ingested Cry genes in their
rectal material, showing that the genes were only partly degraded during
digestion [20].

It is clear that Cry toxin genes and proteins are not entirely digested
in animals fed GM maize. The impact of the genes and toxin proteins on
the animals deserves much fuller study. As GM foods are not labelled in
North America, it has not been possible to determine whether or not
feeding humans and animals has had an adverse impact. Clearly, the DNA
and toxin proteins studied in the feeding experiments are the ëreal
thingí, not the bacterial proteins used as surrogates in the toxicity
testing approved by regulatory agencies.

Toxicity to non-target organisms

The impact of Bt toxins and the genes determining them on non-target
organisms in the environment has been studied to some limited extent,
but nowhere as much as is needed. The soil around the GM crop may
accumulate toxins, if these are released to the soil.

Bt toxin is found released to the soil by maize plants both in the
laboratory and in the field [21]. The toxin is released in root exudates
>from a number of maize hybrids expressing three different transformation
events [22]. Bt toxin released from exudates is bound to soil
particulates and is active for at least 180 days [23]. Bt toxin is not
taken up from the soil by plants, not even from hydroponic growth media
[24]. It has been reported that Bt maize exudates had no effect on
earthworms, nematodes, protozoa, bacteria and fungi in soil [23].
However, a recent study showed that the litter from Bt maize, while not
fatal to earthworms, caused a large weight loss in worms exposed for
over 200 days to the litter containing Bt toxin [25].

Some Bt crystal proteins have been reported to target nematodes while
the toxins targeting Lepadoptera or Coleoptera insects do not appear to
target nematodes [26], but further investigation is needed. Soil
nematodes include both plant pathogenic species and species that eat
insect pests (entomopathogenic). The destruction of the latter by Bt
crops would have disastrous economic consequences.

Beneficial predators may be destroyed by Bt crops and their loss would
be costly. The green lacewing is an important predator of the insect
pests of maize. Insect herbivores feeding on Bt maize were fed to green
lacewings. Insect herbivores that ingested little Bt Cry1Ab toxin did
not affect lacewing survival, while herbivores that ingested a quantity
of Cry1Ab toxin caused low survival in lacewings and delayed development
among survivors [27].

To test the concern that consuming herbivore insects may have produced
ìindirect toxicity to the lacewing predatorî, the herbivores were
treated with high levels of the natural Cry1Ab toxin in the laboratory,
then fed to green lacewing predators. The lacewings that were fed
insects treated with natural Cry1Ab toxin turned out to be far less
severely affected than the lacewings fed insects feeding on Cry1Ab
transgenic maize [28, 29]. The researchers stated that their procedure
was to ìgive evidence that Bt-maize poses no threat to this predatorî
[29]. But they failed to indicate that the natural Cry1Ab toxin was not
identical to the Cry1Ab toxin synthesized from a synthetic gene in Bt
maize, and the Bt maize proved to be far more toxic. Whether it is the
Bt toxin in Bt maize that is responsible for the toxicity, or something
in the transgenic process itself is not known.

The negative impact of Bt maize pollen on the survival of the monarch
butterfly has been extensively reviewed and will not be discussed
further here [30].

Regulatory shortcomings

The manner in which mammalian toxicity and environmental impact of Bt
crops is evaluated is spelt out in the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
reports on the deregulation of GM crops that had been field tested. With
both Bt insect resistant crops and herbicide tolerant crops, approval
was not based on the Bt toxin proteins, nor on the bacterial enzymes
providing herbicide tolerance in the crop, but on Bt toxin proteins or
enzymes isolated from bacterial cultures.

The Bt toxins in bacterial cultures were produced using genes that
differed from those used in the GM crops. The proteins were
significantly altered in amino acid sequence from those in GM crops. The
regulatory agencies and their advisory committees argued that so long as
the bacterial products retained their active domains as toxins or
enzymes and had similar immune profiles to the proteins produced in GM
crops, they were ìsubstantially equivalentî to the proteins produced in
GM crops.

For example, Cry1Ab toxin gene in maize was tested using a toxin
produced in E. coli bacteria that differed from the protein produced in
the GM crop [31]. Maize altered with Bt gene Cry3Bb1 was similarly
tested using the bacterial protein [32]. Maize modified with Cry1F and a
gene for herbicide tolerance was approved based on testing the bacterial
- not the crop - proteins for safety towards mammals and non- target
organisms [33]. Cotton modified with Bt toxin gene Cry2Ab was approved
based on studies of the surrogate product produced in bacteria [34].
Potato modified with Bt toxin gene was tested, as in the cases above,
using the bacterial surrogate protein, not the protein in the crop [35].

These examples are representative of all risk assessments for Bt crops.
The practice of testing surrogates for toxins and enzymes produced in GM
crops is unsound in the light of the millions of people and animals
being exposed to the products. Such careless procedures have been made
possible by the absence of labels on GM food and feed, which makes
tracing impacts of the products difficult, if not impossible.

The second report of the UKís GM Science Review Panel (2004) commented,
ìMany of the genes introduced into GM plants are based on bacterial gene
sequences, but are synthesized de novo in the laboratory to include more
appropriate codon usages for more efficient expression in plantsî [36].
However, the report failed to mention that the evaluations of mammalian
safety and environmental impacts (particularly the impact on non- target
organisms) have been done using a bacterial surrogate for the proteins
produced in GM crops. Consequently, GM crops produced in the United
States, Canada and other countries are untested and unknown for
toxicities, and the failure to label the GM foods produced from the GM
crops has obscured any impact on humans and animals.

Apparently, this makes the approval of the GM crops illegal.

Network of Concerned Farmers
www.non-gm-farmers.com

10 main concerns

The Network of Concerned Farmers concerns about GM crops are based on:

FARMERS ARE BEING MISLED
Although farmers are being promised the world with this technology, the
evidence of performance to date for Australian GM canola has been below
average. There are non-GM biotechnology alternatives using GM in the lab
to fast track selection of desired traits in non-GM that gives the
advantages without the risks in future plant breeding.

LACK OF RESTRICTIONS TO THE GM INDUSTRY IMPACTING NEGATIVELY ON OTHERS
The GM industry has been allowed to self-regulate their integration into
the cropping system. They have taken full advantage of this situation
which will result in the agricultural industry not having the choice to
avoid the impact of this crop on their business.

CONTAMINATION
Contamination of GM crops into non-GM crops is considered uncontrollable.
If GM crops are introduced, the non-GM farmers are expected to keep
contamination out of their crop rather than the GM farmer keep it
contained. When unsuccesful, farmers are at risk of being sued under the
Trade Practises Act for delivering a contaminated product, or under Patent
Law for growing a patented crop. Contrary to what has been promised,
coexistence is impossible when many markets are demanding guarantees of no
contamination (rather than the 1% tolerance claimed).

COSTS AND LIABILITIES
In order to market on the preferred non-GM market, the costs and
liabilities are prohibitive. Costs are estimated at 10% of product value
or conservatively $35/tonne to maintain an unacceptable 1% contamination.
Liability could extend to millions of dollars and may be uninsurable. If
it is not viable to market as non-GM, we are faced with a serious economic
problem when Australia can only market a portion of our produce on the GM
market.

MARKETING
Australia has a clean green image which we need to preserve. Many of our
export markets, and much of the domestic market, does not want to buy GM
crops or GM contaminated crops and as growers we have both a right and a
responsibility to continue to grow and market products consumers are
demanding. As it is too difficult and too expensive to segregate these
crops, conventional farmers are expected to market on the GM market, yet
markets are rejecting the product. Organic farmers will not have the
choice and will be unable to maintain organic status.

LEGISLATION
The existing legislation does not adequately address concerns and
economics is not considered by legislation as reason for rejection of GM
crops on a Federal basis. If one state adopts GM crops, there is no way to
quarantine that state. Decisions regarding industry preparedness and
coexistence plans are dominated by the GM industry themselves and plans
are unacceptable and will not enable coexistence to be possible.

PATENTS
The unique major patent rights that accompany GM crops will undermine the
independence and the rights of farmers and will create increased
dependency on a small number of agribusiness corporations. In Australia
there is a concern that end-point royalties will be used to collect patent
royalties as there is no indication as to what level of contamination
triggers royalty deduction from our payments.

HERBICIDE RESISTANCE
Many of the GM crops that have been developed and commercialised have been
genetically modified to be herbicide resistant. These crops will
undoubtedly lead to problems of herbicide resistance and to on-farm
management problems, particularly with the gene-stacking properties of GM
crops. In the case of glyphosate tolerance, we risk losing the
effectiveness of our most commonly used herbicide and as yet, there is no
replacement available.

ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
We are concerned that there has not been adequate testing of the
environmental impact of GM crops and that due to the crossing of the
species boundary (and crossing genes between kingdoms), GM crops pose
risks that are not clearly understood and the product is not recallable.
The increased use of more toxic chemicals (such as 2-4D and Paraquat) to
control unwanted glyphosate resistant volunteers is both of health and
environmental concern.

HEALTH CONCERNS
As farmers we are concerned about growing safe, healthy food for our
customers. There is still some concern about the safety of GM foods and
this is leading consumers to be cautious about eating them. Although
considered to be the worlds leader, our regulatory system does little to
address health concerns when neither the OGTR or FSANZ does their own
health testing. They mostly rely on the GM industry themselves to do
health testing and the longest animal health test appears to be 28 days.
Consumers don't want to be guinea pigs and we need to grow food that our
customers are confident in and that we know is safe. It is irrational to
be in a rush to permanently contaminate the world's food supply with a
product that has had reports of adverse health findings when there is no
recall strategy.
-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
PO Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

I've posted something on this once (from UNWire) but this cogent article
is worth a read.

Individuals can sign the petition against GE forests at
http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/appeal and I
hope Sierra Club will be able to sign on as an organization as well.
Jim Diamond, M.D.
Senior Conservation Fellow, International Program
Chair, Genetic Engineering Committee


- - - - -

Climate change: Hot air, fake science and genetically modified trees
By Chris Lang chrislang@t-online.de

Published in WRM Bulletin 80, March 2004 www.wrm.org.uy

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been
in force since 21 March 1994. For a decade, international climate change
negotiators have filled meeting rooms with hot air. Meanwhile, greenhouse
gas emissions have increased by 11 per cent, according to World Resources
Institute.

Yet when more than 5,000 participants descended on Milan for the ninth
Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP-9) in December 2003, reducing
greenhouse gas emissions was not on the agenda.

Instead, as Larry Lohmann of The Corner House, a UK-based solidarity and
research group, explains, the meeting "formulated rules for capturing new
subsidies for industrial forestry projects that will accelerate global
warming, disempower activists trying to tackle it, promote
genetically-modified monoculture tree plantations, reduce biodiversity --
and violate local people's rights to land and forests worldwide."

One of the decisions reached in Milan allows the North to establish
plantations in the South under the Kyoto Protocol's "Clean Development
Mechanism". These carbon dumps are supposed to absorb carbon dioxide and to
store carbon.

The COP-9 decision on carbon dumps will allow corporations to sell "carbon
credits" based on the amount of carbon supposedly absorbed by large-scale
industrial monoculture tree plantations, including those using genetically
modified trees. The decision allows corporations to take over huge tracts of
land in the South and to continue polluting.

COP-9 also accepted what is perhaps the biggest scientific fraud the world
has ever seen. In the international climate change negotiations, one ton of
carbon released by burning coal or oil is considered to be the same as one
ton of carbon contained in a tree plantation. From the point of view of the
impact on the climate, however, these are two different types of carbon
which cannot be added to, or subtracted from, each other.

Carbon stored in the form of fossil fuel under the earth is stable and
unless corporations dig it out and burn it, it will not enter the
atmosphere. Tree plantations, on the other hand, can catch fire, they can be
destroyed by pests, they might be logged or local communities might try to
reclaim the land they lost to the plantations by cutting down the trees.
Allowing genetically modified (GM) trees to be used as carbon dumps only
makes a bad situation worse.

Before the Milan meetings, Norway and Switzerland had argued publicly
against allowing the use of GM trees under the Kyoto Protocol. During COP-9
any opposition to GM trees withered away. Kyoto rules now state that
countries on the receiving end of GM tree carbon dumps should "evaluate, in
accordance with their national laws, potential risks associated with the use
of genetically modified organisms by afforestation and reforestation project
activities".

Northern governments and corporations, according to this statement, have no
obligation to evaluate the risks involved in the GM tree projects they
impose on the South.

Even the mention of the word "risks" during the Kyoto negotiations in Milan
was too much for the US chief climate negotiator, Harlan Watson. "We felt
particularly that this singling out of GMOs was inappropriate in this
context," Watson told Agence France-Presse.

In an official submission issued at the end of COP-9, the US government
stated: "Genetically modified organisms do not present unique risks that
would warrant specific mention in the preamble to a decision on Clean
Development Mechanism activities."

Many communities in the South have seen the impacts of fast-growing tree
plantations. In South Africa, Brazil, Thailand and India (to give a few
examples) communities have seen their common lands, grasslands and forests
converted to monoculture tree plantations. Because of the huge water needs
of these plantations, streams have dried up and fields near plantations have
become too dry to grow crops.

In 1993, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota started field trials to test trees
which had been genetically modified to absorb more carbon. While carbon
absorption increased, Toyota's scientists also noted a dramatic increase in
water consumption.

Trees genetically modified to grow without seeds, flowers, pollen or fruits
will grow faster. The prospect of silent, sterile monocultures might look
good from the corporate perspective, but it would be disastrous for insects,
birds, wildlife and people living near the plantations.

GM trees that do produce pollen could cross with native trees, irrevocably
changing forest ecosystems. Trees can take up to 100 years to mature, making
it impossible to know the long-term risks. Dead leaves, branches, roots and
trees rot, mixing with the soil and adding to the risks.

Earlier this year, a coalition of the People's Biosafety Association, the
Union of Ecoforestry and Friends of the Earth Finland, launched a petition
against GM trees which will be presented to the UN Forum on Forests in
Geneva in May 2004.

The coalition, called People's Forest Forum, states: "The course taken in
Milan was a wrong one. We do not need plantations of genetically modified
tree clones on our planet. Plans like this are in direct contradiction to
the terms of the Rio Convention on Biodiversity. We hope that as the UN
Forest Forum assembles in Geneva next May, it will recognize this
discrepancy and ban the introduction of genetically modified trees."

Sign the petition to ban GE trees at http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/appeal.

BIO-IPR docserver | http://www.grain.org/bio-ipr
____________

TITLE: Treaty on biodiversity to become law: 48 countries have ratified
first ever legally binding treaty on biodiversity for food and agriculture
PUBLICATION: FAO News Release
DATE: 31 March 2004
URL: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2004/39887/index.html
NOTE: Also available in Arabic, French and Spanish.
____________

FAO News Release | 31 March 2004

TREATY ON BIODIVERSITY TO BECOME LAW
48 countries have ratified first ever legally binding treaty on biodiversity
for food and agriculture

31 March 2004, Rome -- Twelve European countries and the European Community
have ratified the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food
and Agriculture, triggering the 90-day countdown to the Treaty's entry into
force, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced today.

The latest ratifications bring to 48 the number of countries worldwide that
have ratified the agreement, which will therefore enter into force on 29
June 2004.

The Treaty will ensure that plant genetic resources for food and
agriculture, which are vital for human survival, are conserved and
sustainably used and that benefits from their use are equitably and fairly
distributed.

"This is a legally binding treaty that will be crucial for the
sustainability of agriculture," said FAO Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf.
"The Treaty is an important contribution to the achievement of the World
Food Summit's major objective of halving the number of hungry people by 2015".

"Years of multilateral negotiations under the auspices of FAO's
Intergovernmental Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
have finally been successful," said José Esquinas-Alcázar, Secretary of the
Commission.

"The Treaty provides an international legal framework that will be a key
element in ensuring food security, now and in the future. The challenge is
now to ensure that the treaty becomes operative in all countries."

TRIBUTE TO THE PAST AND GUARANTEE FOR PRESENT AND FUTURE

Most of the world's poor farmers depend on the use of genetic biodiversity
for their income and living.

Experience and knowledge gained over many generations have made possible the
development and conservation of thousands of agricultural crop varieties
which otherwise would have been lost forever.

The Treaty recognizes and protects this legacy and develops the innovative
principle of Farmers' Rights.

GENETIC EROSION

Despite the efforts of farmers, there has been a dramatic reduction of
biodiversity. Since the beginning of agriculture, around 10,000 species have
been used in food and fodder production. Today just 150 crops feed most
human beings and just 12 crops provide 80% of food energy (wheat, rice,
maize and potato alone provide 60%).

Some of the poorest countries are among the richest in terms of genetic
diversity.

GENETIC RESOURCES AND FOOD SECURITY

Access to a wide range of genetic resources will make possible the
development of a greater variety of food products, which will improve the
lives and diets of consumers in both rural and urban areas.

The Treaty will institute, for the first time, a multilateral system of
facilitated access and benefits-sharing for the crops and forages most
important for food security.

Scientists, international research centres and plant breeders from public
and private organizations will benefit from enhanced access to genetic
biodiversity.

The multilateral system will also ensure the fair sharing of benefits
derived from the use of genetic resources, in particular for farmers in
developing countries that have for centuries contributed to the conservation
of genetic resources.

The system also provides for the obligatory sharing of monetary benefits
arising from utilisation, including from commercialisation of new varieties
by the private sector.

For more information, contact:
Nuria Felipe Soria, Information Officer, FAO
mailto:nuria.felipesoria@fao.org
____________

GOING FURTHER (compiled by GRAIN)

Intermediate Technology Group, "International Seed Treaty on major food
crops to become law", Rugby, 31 March 2004.
http://www.itdg.org/html/advocacy/seed_treaty_2004.htm

FAO, "Loss of domestic animal breeds alarming: Value of many animal genetic
resources poorly understood - on-farm management and conservation
suggested", News Release, Rome, 31 March 2004.
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2004/39892/index.html

John Mason, "Agriculture 'is depleting gene diversity of animals'",
Financial Times, London, 31 March 2004.
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=Sto
ryFT&cid=1079420042342

A rare anomaly in the otherwise extremely proGM bias of the RSNZ: a
branch is permitted to present a scientific critic of GM. Who will go
along to learn something - that plurry Porluh, the unreasonable hijacker
Adrienne dubious 'interchurch commission', Barry Scott, etc etc?

ROYAL SOCIETY OF NEW ZEALAND MANAWATU BRANCH

The Manawatu Branch is hosting the talk "Superbugs and Corngate"
by Associate Professor Jack Heinemann (School of Biological Sciences,
University of Canterbury, Christchurch).

Superbugs are bacteria that cause disease while also being resistant to
common antibiotics. They provide many lessons for the regulation,
monitoring and containment of genetically engineered organisms (GEOs). This
talk will address how both superbugs and corn evade our best biosecurity
technologies.