LUV News on GMOs

We had to go to British news to find the following piece about a proposal in California to require labeling of Frankenfoods in that state, following.  Our corrupt government protects Big Agribusiness from being responsible enough to let us know we are guinea pigs eating genetically modified organisms.

Our bodies react to GMOs in unusual ways, because in billions of years of evolution on Earth, nothing like this has ever been consumed by any creature before, such as “Roundup Ready” gene splicing.  Our bodies appear to understand the genetic code, and digestion is guided by enzymes in the natural food and other things we don’t clearly understand.

It is thought by some that man-made chemicals we consume, such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals, are often mistaken for hormones or other things and processed incorrectly by the body, which begins to malfunction from this.  GMOs may function similarly, so that our body sees it not as food, but perhaps as estrogen, telling the body it has plenty so it shuts down estrogen production, the first in a string of malfunctions that eventually lead to problems.

We simply have no idea what Big Agribusiness is doing, but more frighteningly, neither do they.  By their past actions we are pretty sure they would kill us all for a nickel in profit.  They’ve all but made food inspection by our government rare as hen’s teeth because there’s a lot of nasty things in our food they don’t want known, and would rather sell us poisoned food than have it thrown out at a loss in profit.

Some of the GMO plants we eat are themselves soaked in herbicides, able to withstand them from their genetic altering.  The herbicides are poison to our bodies, carcinogens in very low quantities (man made dioxins in many herbicides are carcinogens in parts per trillion, one of the more toxic substances on the planet).

The natural plants we’ve eaten for millions of years have been through ice ages, droughts, floods, locust infections and other agricultural disasters, so we know we can count on them to survive.  But with more people alive today than have lived in all of history, we don’t think our food crops should be radically altered so that we have no idea if they will be there for the next disaster or not, or if they will make us sick at the very least.

All that this law is about is the right to know what we are eating.  In a country describing itself as “The Land of the Free,” one would think that wouldn’t be too much to ask.  Speaking for myself, I try to eat natural food without the herbicides, artificial coloring, added fats, miticides, preservatives, added sweeteners, pharmaceuticals, insecticides, artificial flavoring, added salt, fungicides, added hormones and yes, GMOs, but here, in the Land of the Free, of course, unlike Europe, I must guess, since I have no protection from my government. —Jack Balkwill

Humor: The Borowitz Report

To Boost Popularity, Romney Sprinkles Self with Bacon

Hits Campaign Trail with Zesty Meat Topping

COLUMBUS, OHIO (The Borowitz Report) – In what some are calling a move designed to help him connect better with voters, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney today began sprinkling himself with bits of bacon before each campaign appearance.

According to one campaign staffer, the decision to sprinkle Mr. Romney with a zesty meat topping was inspired by Burger King’s announcement that it would soon be selling a Bacon Sundae at its fast-food restaurants.

“Apparently, everything is a little more palatable with bacon on top,” the staffer said. “Even Mitt Romney.”

As part of the bacon rollout, the campaign changed its official slogan today from “Romney: Believe in America” to “Romney: Now with Yummy Bacon.”

The newly meat-flavored Romney appeared at a rally in Columbus, where his audience gave his generous sprinkling of bacon bits a tentative thumbs-up.

“I thought his speech was kind of boring,” said Carol Foyler, 44, a receptionist for a Columbus law firm. “But he smelled delicious.”

Not so impressed, however, was computer programmer Tracy Klugian, 25: “I was sitting in the front row, and I’m pretty sure Romney’s bacon bits were fake.”

Burger King’s launch of its Bacon Sundae has already had repercussions for its principal rival, McDonald’s, who today announced plans to introduce a new McDeathwich.

Andrew Sullivan on Mormonism

What Keeps The Romneyites Up At Nights

Here’s a question: if Barack Obama had to go through a brutal process of defending the doctrines, sermons and ideology of a church he merely attended, why is Mitt Romney exempted from explaining the doctrines and statements and ideology of a church he was an actual leading official in? I’ve been doing my best to read up on Romney’s life and career and the more you read, the more you agree with one of his fellow worshippers who told the New York Times that Mormonism is

at the center of who he really is, if you scrape everything else off.

You could argue, as I do, that politics and religion are separate spheres and that a candidate’s faith should not be a major issue for anyone. But Romney is running as the leader of a party whose modern incarnation is defined by an insistence that religion and politics are inseparable, and Romney’s runner-up memorably described president Kennedy’s strict affirmation of political secularism as puke-worthy. So there really is no solid defense against an examination of Romney’s faith and how it formed him – or questioning some of his faith’s stranger doctrines. The media thus far have trod gingerly around the subject for good reason. Anti-Mormon bigotry, like racism, has been part of this country for a long while and in many ways, an election between a black man and a Mormon is a stupendous achievement for toleration in America.

And yet. There must be a way to tell a story about Romney’s Mormonism that is illustrative and helpful in understanding a man we could put in the Oval Office rather than bigoted. In my view, this should be a priority for Romney, and he should soon give a speech, like Obama’s bright shining moment after the Jeremiah Wright onslaught. But I fear he won’t, because any day he is talking aout Mormonism rather than the economy is a lost day. But if Romney thinks Mormonism will somehow not be a factor in this election, he’s deluding himself. A new paper suggests a surge in anti-Mormon sentiment in the past few years, and a very stable and resilient anti-Mormon bias among evangelicals – who didn’t give Romney a single majority in any of the primary states. Money quote from Buzzfeed’s summary:

According to the paper, concern about Mormonism has remained relatively stable among Evangelicals, with 36 percent expressing aversion to an LDS candidate in 2007 and 33 percent doing so in 2012. But among non-religious voters, that number shot up 20 points in the past five years, from 21 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in February. There were also substantial increases in Mormon-averse voters among liberals — 28 percent in 2007 and 43 percent in 2012 — as well as moderates, who went from 22 percent in 2007 to 32 percent this year…

The new study argues that the single most accurate predictor of how a voter views Romney is how he views Mormons — whether or not they are Christian, patriotic, hard-working, and friendly. Strikingly, the correlation between attitudes about Mormonism and support for Romney is even stronger than political ideology or party identification.

Perhaps most potentially distressing to Romney’s campaign is the study’s finding that conservatives who said they were less likely to vote for a Mormon were much more likely to say they were undecided or would not vote at all in a contest between Obama and Romney.

My italics. One caveat may be that the study was conducted before Romney clinched the nomination – so partisanship may help assuage conservative jitters. But if Karl Rove were running the Obama campaign, we wouldn’t be discussing if this would emerge as an issue but how. I don’t believe that the Obama campaign, in contrast, can or should touch it. But what I expect is that at some point the sheer enormous new prestige and legitimacy that winning the American presidency would give to the Mormon church will give conservative evangelicals the willies. That won’t matter in the South – but it could factor in in Pennsylvania or Colorado or Ohio. And there may be some secular independents who really distrust the LDS Church.

Unless race trumps everything. And unless these very evangelicals also think the dude running against the Mormon is a Muslim. Is this a great country, or what?