diet drinks and cell phones will kill you

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/10/08/cancer_q_a/

cell phones and diet drinks cause cancer and the people who sell them to you dont care much like the people who sell you tobacco dont care .

what are you going to do about it ....their putting cockroach dna in the food it makes harder tomato skins so more profit in shipping them hundreds of miles

 

I find my answer summed up in the title for the piece.

 

attack the oil supply

 

Diet drinks were obviously always a hazard. Shame really as i have such probs with sugar sugar. But they tested them out on rabbits and mice, and last time i checked were pretty much completely different species
Lots of the creatures got cancer anyway btw
But these people dont give a damn. I hate artificial sweeteners in anything

Doesnt mean "life will kill you". Jeez how much effort does it take to avoid certain things in "food"? Not much, i get by
Eat some fruit!

I dont know much about mobile phones though. Although i know microwaves hurt my head

 

Oh and Jonny, GM food CREEPS ME OUT. Its oneof the things that scares me most about the world today. Just damn freaky, they dont even know what theyre doing

We buy all organic even though were dirt poor and it drains us. But itsnot worth the risk, im telling you

Mind you, wont be long until dodgy stuff spreads throughout the plant populations...cross polination and whatever. Then im screwed

 

I have heard that too. Well, mostly about mobile phones. I heard diet drinks contain more sugar than their counterpart.

Yeh, the mobile phone thing. Parents are to blame here. They do come out with daft stuff. Apparently mobile phones do this:

1. blow babies brains to abnormal size
2. They let out nuclear radiation into the frontal lobes and the back of brain.
3. They turn children crazy.(I admit, I was convinced by this one)
4. Mobile phone masts destroy squirrels natural habitat, due to a low hum that only small critters can hear.
5. Mobile phones are beacons for muggers (I actually agree with this one)

Mobile phones are similar to microwaves. We have had microwaves for decades. I bet when microwaves first came out, they were saying similar things. Parentpanic.

 

I dont drink diet drinks for that reason (artificialness) i dont like it all. We buy organic.

 

lmfao, it's just so surreal sometimes, I get tears to my eyes.

 

GM has great potential, I've no moral objection to it as long as it's done responsibly and all risks are fully assessed. Given the people who produce it, however, people like Monsanto, I somehow doubt this kind of risk assessment is going to be their number one priority. Moreover, for all it's potential to help feed the starving where there is not enough food to go around thanks to our ever expanding population, that potential will never be realised as long as it's controlled by enormous multinational corporations interested in profit and little else besides....

 

Huh?:S Am i lost?

 

I think he's commenting on human nature and our continual ability to do the wrong thing despite everything pointing us in the opposite direction....

 

Ooooh
I never would have grasped something as complex as that at this hour
Since when have we said cell phones over here anyway? I really havent got out in too long
Ahh, im tired

 

Sal i really do worry about you when you come out with this kind of comment. No disrespect, but you tell us that you are educated. What kind of education are we talking about and does it include crash courses in common sense and logic? The answer to starving people is not the production of more food. The production of more food leads to population growth. We dont have a problem with food shortage. We have political problems and corruption.

Considering the path you want to take politically in life your understanding of the world does sound incoate to say the least.

Time to take a bolder path and put your neck on the line not to follow the mainstream of the left wing. Time to put on your boots and get out in the world and feel the needs and people. the expression;Those wishing to be a politician should be automatically be excluded from from ever being one. Does ring true so often. As a friend I can say this to you without you taking offence

 

Me too .. he used an apostrophe for the possessive "its"... Calls himself a writer:tongue:

 

its nice to see you posting again moan .

And I dont think we should be messing with GM food at all we have no idea what we are doing and the risks are too great .
personally I dont like things like f1 hybrids either , with some foods the big companys are making it impossible for people to grow non hybrids because they wont sell the seed as people then are able to save their own seed as they have done since people started agriculture .
Ive been looking for someone to sell none gm cereal seed of non hybrid varietys and have had a hell of a job , I can get seed in america but Id have to go through all sorts of hoops to import it most likely .

 

I don't, have never and will never want to be a politician. That's a wild assumption on your part that has no basis in truth and it seems in part down to your own mis and pre-conceptions that because I've chosen the educational path that I have, the course and the university I did, that I should be somehow less pure in my 'underground activist' credentials than yourself. You're the son of a millionaire, Giles, but you yourself are proof that we are not destined to the same path our roots might have made possible for us.

Moreover, you haven't pointed to a commonsense argument and you have not employed logic, you've simply stated an area of political contention. The abundance of food is not sufficient to explain population growth. Population growth is lowest in countries where food is most abundant. Population booms are created by high birth rates, in part due to approaches to contraception and in greater part to considerations made essential by high infant mortality rates. Where infant mortality falls away sharply, it takes decades for births to fall in line, and populations boom. It happened in the West last century and it is happening in the developing world, this. But the impetus for this is not simply the provision of more food. Sanitation is probably the single greatest factor in lowering infant mortality.

You've read too much into one paragraph I've written on one specific topic. It would have been better for you to ask me to elaborate, rather than jump to conclusions about topics of discussion I've not even alluded to. It goes without saying problems of unequal distribution of resources can be placed at the door of corrupt governments and multinational corporations. That, I think, should have been more than implicit to my point. In the meantime, however, population growth in the developing world will continue to sky rocket. Do you suggest we should produce less food? Or that we should not attempt to tackle the problem as immediately as possible? As a parallel issue, take Make Poverty History, for example. Given the anti-capitalist credentials you seem to wish to deny me, my argument had always been that it would be impossible to make poverty history within a global capitalist economy. However, should we sit around waiting for the revolution as some on the left argued? No, whatever small steps that can be taken, must be taken. Even if it is only a drop in the ocean, a drop to parched lips is a beginning. GM, controlled as it is by the same corporations who are responsible for the exploitation of the developing world in the first place, is not an answer to this question. However, I would ask ardent environmentalists to think outside the box. That something is natural does not, even if 99% of the time we might say that this is the case, inherently make something good, right or better. One should not have a knee-jerk reaction to it on a moral level, rather take a more rational perspective by exploring its positives and negatives scientifically. On that point, I was against the introduction of GM into the UK, specifically because the pesticides used with it were very harmful to species.

Anywhoo, man alive, welcome back and good to hear from you again. What you been up to?

 

Well, species have been genetically modified for thousands of years. Selective breeding is genetic modification. It is only that this new form of genetic modification is more precise. It is possible that the risks are greater than the rewards, though I would say it is equally possible that the reverse is true. I'm certainly no advocate of GM. I would simply say that we should a) not place nature on a holy pedestal for the sake of nature alone and b) not place new technology on a holy pedestal for the sake of new technology alone....

 

well first off sal im not the son off a millionaire dad as you put it, Since when did you begin believing mainstream entertainment tv??? on this basis alone i dont feel like getting into a discussion on the rest of the things, for the record my step mother is an alcoholic with epilesy and battered and bruised, my father is living next door at a another house, which incidently he cant to go atm as the courts say he isnt allowed near his wide, ive stood there watching him put padlocks on his bedroom door and office in the marital home so she cant enter, ive stood in front of her bleeding and bruised and stood by the bed in hospital with her, i ve stood in the hospital nect to my father as two policemen sit outside waiting to take him back to jail for the night. there is no money, like so many others in life is an false outward projection to convince us all its ok. WHILE PEOPLE ARE DYING.

GM food is WRONG ,, WRONG ,, WRONG.

no argument you can ever make can say otherwise.

When a spot appears on your face you can squeeze it, you can apply some cream, you hide your head in bag. But at the end of the day the problem isnt the spot but whats causing the spot, Maybe you can say its you diet. ok fair enough but lets go deeper why is your diet wrong? how are you feeling? why are you feeling that way? and so on till we come down to the real issue which so few are prepared to face. As it will affect our cosy existence. And maybe our comforts.

I am tired and dont wish to reply to your other points as its repeating the same thing over and over and i havent got time for it at the moment and it seems futile. Have you read Naom Chomsky? Have you read You are being lied to?

Im tired and will sleep now.

anyway im fine thanks sal and will be nice to meet up with you sometime and ill tell you then what ive been up to. take care

 

Well as I said, I'm no advocate of GM food, it may well be that it is wrong wrong wrong and I certainly am against its unfettered penetration of markets and diets - I simply think opposition to it should come on a rationally scientific level in terms of its effects, not on a black and white basis of nature good, technology bad, four legs good, two legs bad.

And yes, you're right, I shouldn't trust what a tv programme said about you to be true. Now we've both gone and made false assumptions about the other. And assumptions do, after all, make an ass of u and me....

 

I think much of the objection to GM comes from an intuitive kneejerk prejudice brought about by the way we instinctively think. We assume that all living things have some inner "essence" which comes from their environment, so if you alter a plant's genome artificially you are tainting its essence with that of an artificial environment and removing everything that's good and pure about it. This where the "Frankenstein food" fear comes from.

This is why much of the objection comes in the form of "it's wrong wrong wrong and nothing can convince me otherwise". People like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth say things like "this is not real food". But as Sal points out this is to commit 'the naturalistic fallacy' - the false assumption that everything in nature is good and pure and that anything 'artificial' is not. This kind of objection to GM is fundamentally irrational - it's practically a superstition. Even the possibility that such foods can be safe is unacceptable.

By all means criticise the companies who produce GM, their motives for doing so, the uneven and unfair distribution of food, technology and wealth throughout the world, the safety and benefits / drawbacks of any particular type of crop whether GM or not, but none of these matters impact on the matter of whether GM can be safe. It can, as many studies conducted over decades have demonstrated. GM food is fundamentally no different than 'natural' food which has been selectively modified over generations - in fact it may often be safer, as it has to be far more rigorously tested.

It can also be incredibly beneficial - see the example of Golden Rice engineered to alleviate Vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness in children and millions of deaths a year in Africa and SE Asia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27910.html