They are trying to push GM crops over here, and today I found this.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/372521/GM-foods-pose-new-risk-as-viral-gene-is-missed-in-crops-
When there seems to be a plethora of ignorant, cruel people in the world and I can’t understand why so many, I often jokingly say, it must be something in the water. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not the water, but the food.
Di,
I’ve been thinking about your worry that something in the food is making humans not only be mean to each other for fun, but walk around saying stuff with fervid conviction that even a mildly backward but sentient 7 year old could identify as horse apples, and after thinking about it a good while I have to agree with you. There must be something in the food. Which points us to the obvious and happy solution: if human beings would just stop eating food, ignorance and cruelty would vanish from the earth!
I’m pretty sure most of the rest of the animals and plants wouldn’t miss us all that much. Dogs and cattle, okay, maybe a cat or two. Maybe….
Sort of OT, but I just heard a few minutes ago. A friend’s visiting London and we were going to arrange to meet up next week. But she’s with her sister; her nephew (who I didn’t know apart from seeing him at parties over the years) was one of the hostages killed in Algeria.
Another to add to a list of people I’ve known or whose relatives I’ve been friends with that goes back to the notorious football stadium in Chile in the coup against Allende and will (it seems) have no ending.
The particularly despicable cruelty is that he was allowed to phone home, had already seen one of his friends there killed; and then they killed him too.
There are days when I utterly despise the human race.
Me too.
I enjoy reading history books and can’t deny there has always been dreadful cruelty right though the ages, but I always end up thinking, shouldn’t we know better by now?
People are kind of crazy and malevolent, but plenty interesting too. I’d hate for them all to go away.
Course not, Di. We’re just part of history too.
Really? I’d like them to be wiped off the face of the earth. Enough is enough!
And do you know something? I am so sick of the stupidity and evil, that I’d press the button.
Di,
When I feel like that, which is more often than I would like, I try to remember the last lines of Invisible Cities by Calvino, because I think, despite everything, they have a lot of truth in them:
Gunny’s blog, for me, is one of those places where I seek people who are not inferno, in the midst of inferno. I like to think that Gunny is indeed making exactly that kind of space. And you, too.
Dunno, Di. there are a lot of folks on Tomasky’s blog who think, well, if we could just get rid of the evil republicans, we’d be in paradise and the garden of eden. I can attest to the fact that would create its own brand of hell.
Or in your case, i suppose, the evil tories.
Amen to Gunny’s blog. I’ve also helped give birth to a political blog here in the UK.
Since the Graun’s nesting farce some of us decided we’d strike out with Flythenest.freeforums.org
One or two of the subscribers are into tweeting which is the political tool of the future and we pass on info and likely links which we used to do on Andrew Sparrows Blog in the Guardian, The guts of it pretty much died a death when the new way of posting was introduced.
I’ve become more involved in local politics. Donate to a political cause if it appears genuine, by which I mean not ‘pie in the sky’, or ‘wouldn’t it be nice if.’ And sometimes I manage, on a National newspaper’s comment board, to post something that jars the complacency of bigots. But I’m not kidding myself. It’s far too little, and I fear I’ve personally left it far too late.
I am sick of complacency and hypocrisy. Far too many are happy to sit back and do nothing because it’s easier, or they secretly like the way it is and wish they could be or do the same.
The older I get the less patience I have with it.
You can’t put a political label on the stupidity and evil that’s out there.
Across the board there are some really twisted people out there.
I don’t know why or how, just that there are.
0
Rather than get involved in local politics, i vote for 3rd parties and indies, and any hard cash or support goes to independent organizations who work towards the issues i care most about – ie the ACLU, wildlife organizations, local community food banks and animal shelters, etc. I don’t assume that my small singular vote for 3rd parties / independents is going to make much of a difference, but if you vote for SSDD and business as usual, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise if that’s what you get. I just can’t contribute to that, even with my tiny vote, no matter how scary the boogieman stories.
Believe me there are just as many stupid evil people that if they bothered to vote would put their cross by Labour or BNP, or UKIP.
As it happens at present the Tories are being about as evil as you could get. Some real horror stories are emerging, which, no matter how you vote ought to make a decent human being squirm with shame.
And I didn’t vote labour at the last GE by the way
0
And that’s the one thing I’ve vowed never to do again. Voting for a third party is a waste. We’ve come a real cropper with it over here. Never again.
I’ll swallow my misgivings and vote for the lesser of two evils.
Well, luckily we do have a different system – as we vote individual, not party. So we don’t have to sweat coalitions either. If we voted parties, i highly doubt i’d vote Libertarian, or either of the other two for that matter – never again on them. I very happily voted for Gary Johnson, but i’d have voted Rick Perry before i would have voted Ron Paul.
But your Labour would have never gotten in there if Maggie Tee didn’t go so far over the top. They had their 3 terms, and fucked it up pretty badly. The Tories would have never gotten in if Labour had governed ethically. If the Tories piss off enough people, i reckon you’ll get another party in there next round.
It seems to me that actually in the US, you have nothing but coalitions. The Dems had their ‘Blue Dogs’, the Republicans their ‘RINOS’ and the Tea Party: all these factions that within the two main parties can be as far apart as the two main political parties here. And then you have a kind of coalition between the president and whoever. (Hard to tell who or what he’s been coalescing with the last year or so.)
When they get to Washington and start all the wheeling and dealing, how can you tell what you’re going to get out of the ‘individual’ principles (!?) you voted for? Apart from maybe some company relocating, or a bridge to nowhere?
Wher it went badly wrong here was that in Europe, you usually know pretty much beforehand what the various parties in a coalition would support and what they would not. We thought we knew that of the LibDems, damn, blast and harry them to hell, but they turned out renegades and fakes. Which parties joining a coalition government in other parts of Europe don’t as a rule.
(And here we go: Cameron, having manoeuvred one party into extinction has obviously been laying the groundwork for the next coalition no doubt hoping for a similar result. Tory-UKIP god help us.)
Squirrel -
Within the parties, there are sort of coalitions on individual issues when something, say, goes up for a vote in congress. And there are at times coalitions across party lines on individual issues too. But because we vote for individuals, i can look at a Dem candidate’s platform/ website, and see where they stand on individual issues. For example, i didn’t vote for my Dem house rep because he’s pro-life. Chances are i might vote for a Republican candidate if they were pro-choice and pro same-sex marriage, etc. (Yeah, they exist. Scott Brown for one, and those NY state legislature guys who voted in favor of same-sex marriage). As to the wheeling and dealing in DC, we can easily check their voting records. And vote their tails out if they voted otherwise than they said they would or ought to have. The Iraq War vote hurt some Dems i think, and still does.
I check out the Indy / 3rd party candidates i vote for very carefully to try to make sure they aren’t any sort of stealth teahead, and where they stand on issues. Obviously there are turncoats like the LibDems on individual issues too.
My state’s current governor is an Indy – formerly a Republican senator (the only one who voted against the Iraq War), and more liberal on social issues than most Dems here. He’s pretty effective too (as much as can be given the mess this state is in). He takes his positions issue by issue – so he both supports abortion and same sex marriage, took a capital punishment case to court against the feds (he lost it, the feds get custody and can execute the man), plays hardball with unions in support of pension reform, and signed off on a voter ID law.
I voted for my Libertarian guy (and will continue to vote Indy / 3rd party) because i thought that if he got in on a very long shot, he’d still have a chance of getting some support from congress on some individual issues – some from Dems, some from R’s. Despite having no party support of his own in congress. I wouldn’t have voted Green because they didn’t have a ghost of a chance of getting a fart passed, and were in total fiscal la la land.
One other issue our governor is working on now is the abolition of the master lever in the voting booth. I think some states have already done this. If you don’t have anything like it in the UK – when we go to vote, we vote for candidates from potus, to congress members, to state officials, legislature, local town councils and school board members all at one pop. If you pull the master lever, you can vote all D (or all R) in one fell swoop, without having to vote for individuals. Certainly a topic for much black mirth in this neck of the woods – good christ, they’re actually going to have to think for a moment when they vote? Anytime someone from a public union says, yeah, maybe something is a bit unfair or not quite right or whatever, it’s like – but you pulled the lever, didn’t you. So shut the fuck up.
Porn, I can remember when those master levers (and there were only two) were marked with helpful symbols: one had an elephant and the other a donkey. Maybe that only happened in certain states down south. Maybe it happens still?
Ha! Never noticed, never pulled the master. Maybe they just have red and blue color coding.
Well, as you know, we haven’t gone on for all this fancy technology over here. (Despite occasional kites being flown about texting your vote or, for all I know, keying in tour vote along with your debit card PIN when you’re paying at a supermarket till. Still use a piece of paper and a nice black blunt pencil.
Pretty foolproof. (You can’t even break the point on the pencil since they aren’t sharpened to start with.) And the (literal) paper trail lasts. When I was an undergrad a friend’s dad was a Returning Officer. I’ve forgotten how long the voting slips have to be kept, but he told me there was a warehouse outside London somewhere full of them just for the London constituencies.
The only snag now is, I suspect, that we’ve got so used to seeing checkboxes on screen where a cross means ‘No’ and a tick means ‘Yes’ I wonder how many voters put a tick in the box instead of a cross? My friend did that and phoned me in a panic to ask if I knew whether they’d still count her vote. I\m pretty sure they do, as long as the mark shows a clear intention and choice.
(The Returning Officer also told me that if you really want to tell a candidate what you think of them, you can write a diatribe against them on the voting slip. That means you’ve spoiled your vote and it won’t count, but on the other hand, the candidates have to be shown every spoilt vote . . .So it won’t be diverted to the waste bin before your target sees it, and of course, it will be stored for posterity, or however many years the voting slips are kept.)
And anyway, I like pencils. Which reminds me. I’m getting a bit low on my 3B’s and 4B’s. And I thought I had a 2H somewhere, but I couldn’t find it the other day. Did I ever tell you there are websites devoted to pencils? There was even a New Yorker (woud have to be) who was offering an ‘artisanal pencil sharpening service’ at about four dollars a pencil. The ‘artisanal’ bit was holding the pencil in one hand and a pen knife in the other.
Pencils? We had black markers this time around.