Moderator: Bill Glasheen
gmattson wrote:But how can a former Monsanto lawyer be put in charge of FDA and responsible for what Monsanto is passing off as GMO testing?
gmattson wrote:Bill. . . after viewing the film, do you really believe Monsanto has acted responsibly in all this? And how about our government?
WSJ wrote:WINDSOR, N.C.—Loggers here are clear-cutting a wetland forest with decades-old trees.
Behind the move: an environmental push.
The push isn't in North Carolina but in Europe, where governments are trying to reduce fossil-fuel use and carbon-dioxide emissions. Under pressure, some of the Continent's coal-burning power plants are switching to wood.
But Europe doesn't have enough forests to chop for fuel, and in those it does have, many restrictions apply. So Europe's power plants are devouring wood from the U.S., where forests are bigger and restrictions fewer.
This dynamic is bringing jobs to some American communities hard hit by mill closures. It is also upsetting conservationists, who say cutting forests for power is hardly an environmental plus.
Valkenar wrote:Sure, in the long run you can claim cheaters always get caught, but that's meaningless if it's not changing behavior enough to stop these kinds of things from happening.
Bill Glasheen wrote:So you're going to blame the companies for this bad behavior? I think not. Stupid thinking and stupid rules begat stupid behavior.
Technically any purebred animal is genetically modified. The difference is that natural selection takes a lot of time, whereas gene manipulation can be done extremely quickly. The same happens with food. The companies which produce the seed are going to create superior products (high yield, high disease resistance) either slowly with natural selection or quicker with gene manipulation.
The DNA Genie is out of the bottle. Better get used to it
Glenn wrote:let us say I set a rule for one of my older kids that her responsibility is to not let the grass get too tall this summer. If she then chooses to maximize her free time by making a one-time application of Round-up to the entire yard, you better believe I am going to blame her for making that bad decision, even though it follows the letter of my rule and the resulting barren yard could be classified as an unintended consequence (which is a common concept and not the lingo of only fiscal conservatives).
Wikipedia wrote:The American chestnut, Castanea dentata, is a large, monoecious deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. Before the species was devastated by the chestnut blight, a fungal disease, it was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range. There are now very few mature specimens of the tree within its historical range, although many small sprouts of the former live trees remain. However, there are hundreds of large (2 to 5 ft diameter) trees outside its historical range, some in areas where less virulent strains of the pathogen are more common, such as the 600 to 800 large trees in northern lower Michigan.[1][2]
Wikipedia wrote:Several organizations are attempting to breed blight-resistant chestnut trees. One of these is the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation, which breeds surviving all-American chestnuts, which have shown some native resistance to blight. The Canadian Chestnut Council is an organization attempting to reintroduce the trees in Canada, primarily in Ontario. Another is The American Chestnut Foundation, which is backcrossing blight-resistant Chinese chestnut into American chestnut, to recover the American growth characteristics and genetic makeup, and then finally intercrossing the advanced backcross generations to eliminate genes for susceptibility to blight. The goal is eventually to restore the species to the eastern forests of North America.
Wikipedia wrote:The nuts were once an important economic resource in the US, being sold on the streets of towns and cities, as they sometimes still are during the Christmas season (usually "roasting on an open fire" so their smell is readily identifiable many blocks away). Chestnuts are edible raw or roasted, though typically preferably roasted. Nuts of the European sweet chestnut are now sold instead in many stores. One must peel the brown skin to access the yellowish-white edible portion. The unrelated horse-chestnut's "conkers" are poisonous without extensive preparation.
The wood is straight-grained, strong, and easy to saw and split, and it lacks the radial end grain found on most other hardwoods. The tree was particularly valuable commercially since it grew at a faster rate than oaks. Being rich in tannins, the wood was highly resistant to decay and therefore used for a variety of purposes, including furniture, split-rail fences, shingles, home construction, flooring, piers, plywood, paper pulp, and telephone poles. Tannins were also extracted from the bark for tanning leather. Although larger trees are no longer available for milling, much chestnut wood has been reclaimed from historic barns to be refashioned into furniture and other items. "Wormy" chestnut refers to a defective grade of wood that has insect damage, having been sawn from long-dead, blight-killed trees. This "wormy" wood has since become fashionable for its rustic character.
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