Tuesday--

Hummm? "Security psychosis." Interesting phrase and a very apt description. But--a certain old saying comes to mind: just because you are paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you. I had an odd thought about when our "security psychosis" developed. My guess, which is only a guess, is when the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic bomb. After that, with the development first of long range bombers and then intercontinental missiles, we suddenly realized we could be "touched" from an incredibly long distance and our focus shifted to more and more distant threats. Now, considering the possibilities of this and other such incidents, we may not even know who is attacking us. Think I am kidding? Think of how many known cyber attacks our government has accused which ever enemy du jour they were on the outs with and how few of those came any concrete evidence.

How do you protect yourself and your family from the pollution that came from your country's drive to industrialize? At great effort and financial expense. Which opens up some interesting marketing possibilities.

This article asks a good question: how do you define GMOs and how well do our definitions correspond to reality? It has been tickling the back of my mind occasionally as I read some articles on the problem. We try to avoid GMO products as much as possible. Partly it is a question of safety. If the corn that was ground to make your cornmeal (or anything made from corn meal commercially) came from plants engineered to make the Bt toxin (by inserting a gene from a bacterium that produces the toxin naturally) how much of the toxin are you ingesting and what are the effects on you? With a quick and dirty Google search I found a lot of articles from a lot of different sources which came down on all sides of the issue. And even if I chose to read every one of them how do I choose which to trust? What is the evidence the authors use? How were the studies/experiments conducted? Do those protocols translate to the real world? And how much do you trust the authors and/or those paying for their studies? Do you trust Monsanto, et al., or do you trust the FDA, or whoever? Frankly, I don't much trust either of the first two and I examine carefully the "whoever." And a legal definition isn't going to be any real help because you can bet the the companies who depend on selling GMO products will have massaged any definition to allow them the maximum freedom to continue their business and they will have figured out how to game the legal game anyway.