WEIRD: Oregon Ag Dept working to undermine Oregon Ag

The Willamette River Valley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)This is another example of how moneyed interests capture public agencies and bend them back and use them as weapons against the public interest instead of regulators on behalf of the public well-being.

Allowing genetically tampered crops loose in the Willamette Valley is unwise, unnecessary, and totally undesirable. There is no benefit to Oregonians from allowing the gene tampered foods to intermix in the Willamette Valley -- the only benefit is to the corporate interests who would be only too happy to despoil the Willamette Valley and destroy its status as a haven for organic producers.

The industrial "phood" that results from gene tampering is designed solely to allow corporate interests to capture the entire food supply and destroy peoples' ability to grow pure, real food.

Good afternoon ~

The Oregon Department of Agriculture has fast-tracked the approval of canola production in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. This would include Genetically Modified Canola.

This would mean that our crops that are related to canola (broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, etc) would be at risk for cross pollination and contamination by GM canola.

Many gardeners rely on seed grown in the Willamette Valley for their home gardens.
Please read the letter below from the Seed Ambassadors and act now to express your thoughts on this issue.

Please comment by THIS FRIDAY to prevent the Oregon Department of Agriculture's temporary rule permitting GM canola and thus, bypassing the public comment period.

It is up to us to protect the genetics of our food.
Thanks!
Marisha

Hello Everyone!

We here at the Seed Ambassadors Project haven't sent out any e-mails in a while, but are compelled to do so today: There is an immediate threat to our food supply because the Oregon Department of Agriculture has fast- tracked the approval of canola (including GM canola) production here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

As many of you may know the Willamette Valley is one of the top 5 places in the world for growing and supplying specialty seed and maintaining seed diversity. Seed grown here not only is sold by local Oregon companies, such as Adaptive Seeds, but is also bought by other seed companies such as Johnny's, Fedco, and lots of others both nationally and internationally. Basically, seed grown here supplies the world with food.

One of the specialty seeds that the Valley is perfect for is brassicas, which includes broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, rutabaga, turnip, radish, kale, cabbage, etc. Canola is also a brassica but spreads rampantly and cross pollinates with a lot of other brassicas with detrimental effects. Oregon State University has conducted research proving that canola will cross pollinate with many different crops including turnips, broccoli raab, some kales, rutabaga, and possibly radish and broccoli.

Meaning the presence of canola production in the Willamette Valley will definitely contaminate and destroy those other seed crops. Without doubt.

The Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) has previously maintained a canola exclusion zone in the Valley. However, in the past few months there have been a series of meetings held behind closed doors to change this zone to allow canola (including genetically modified canola) to be grown in the valley unchecked and with disregard to existing seed pinning map isolation guidelines.

ODA only just released a press release on Friday, August 3rd saying they will grant a temporary rule to allow canola this Friday, August 10th.
By issuing a temporary rule the ODA is avoiding the requirement for public comment and therefore behaving unilaterally with only special interests in mind. Not only does this decision harm seed growers but GM canola cross pollination will also potentially threaten the livelihood of any of the certified organic growers in the area. There are good reasons why canola has been banned in the Willamette Valley by ODA up to this point, and pressure on ODA to lift these bans needs to be countered.

Please contact the ODA and Governor Kitzhaber yourself and make your voice heard! It does not matter if you are not an Oregon resident, this decision effects everyone in a huge way and they need to be reminded of that.

And spread the word!

ODA phone number: (503) 986-4552
ODA Director Coba: KCoba@oda.state.or.us

Governor Kitzhaber: (503) 378-4582 ; or email

Remember, we only have until this Friday, August 10th to change this decision!


Check out the following links for more information:

Friends of Family Farmers: Willamette Valley Immediately Threatened by Canola

2006 OSU Special Report on Canola Outcrossing Potential in the Willamette Valley

GMOs At The Door, Wild Garden Seeds, Frank Morton

Willamette Valley Farmers Continue the Canola Debate, OregonLive.com

Thanks for your time and help!

Sarah Kleeger
Andrew Still

Visit Beaver State Permaculture

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Imagine helping people struggling with addiction instead of destroying them

The only thing accomplished by criminalizing drug addiction is ensuring that people like this won't seek help.

Schools vs. Education

I'm very interested in alternatives to traditional schooling such as this.   The one bright spot on the horizon as our economy continues to contract is that we will, sooner or later, be forced to admit that we cannot maintain anything at all like our current schools system.

Why am I so eager to see the end of schools?  It's not because I'm eager to dis-employ teachers, but because the factory school model is such an abysmal failure.


My most profound meta-memory -- as someone who was always at the top of any class taught on the standard regurgitation-of-instructor-presented-content model, which was all my schooling (K-12, plus 4 years undergraduate, 3 year MS degree, 3 year law degree) -- was that this form of school is a criminal waste of time in that it mainly exists to teach a secret curriculum of conformity and obedience in the guise of educating young people about "subjects," which are nothing but arbitrary categories imposed on knowledge for the convenience of pedagogues.


I once struggled to explain this problem to someone on a beautiful spring day in Oregon, which meant that there were at least three different weather systems visible in various parts of the sky, producing a lovely variety of different clouds in view.  So I talked about how schools "teach" about clouds.

I said that what I remember of my "education" is that I would have been "taught" the proper scientific names of those clouds, and shown a picture of each one, and at some point been tested on my ability to match those cloud names to photos.  And I would have been terrific at it.  And completely ignorant.


That is, at no point would we have gone outside to look at clouds.  At no point would there have been any discussion of what sorts of clouds one might expect to see during different times of the year, how they form, how they move, or whether they're the same all over, or whether different places have different kinds of clouds.  We would never have made observations of clouds, or built histograms of clouds, or been encouraged to come up with better names that we could remember.  We would never have been invited to think up some questions about clouds or, heaven forbid, develop ways to investigate our questions. For sure we would never have been asked to wonder how clouds affected us.  Or whether they were a daytime thing, or if they were present at night (and how could we find out?)

Nope.  The only thing that would matter, the hallmark of learning, was being able to match the damn latin names with the standard textbook photos.  In nearly every subject, year after pointless year, my "education" consisted of being taught an empty vocabulary completely devoid of actual content.  Because my brain happens to be really good at thinking symbolically and in catching and manipulating words, I'm an educational superstar, always with a great GPA.  And knowing just about nothing useful from all that time wasted "getting an education."  Meanwhile, people much smarter than I, people whose minds insisted on having tangible content to match with the words, were labeled as "slow" or even "learning disabled" because they hadn't figured out that understanding didn't matter, school is just a word game.


This is why the move towards even greater standardized testing is so profoundly evil.   Ramping up the emphasis on standardization and competition (rankings/grading) in schools is only aggravating the worst of what makes our schools so dismal now. ADDENDUM: as so often happens, the cartoonist says in a few frames what I bury in a cloud of words: http://xkcd.com/803/. Most of my teachers oscillated between the lower two responses. And that was well before standardized tests ruled the earth.

How a school district blows $172,000 over Wi-Fi “hazards”

Fear is the mind-killer.  With so many very real threats to our well-being today, it's sad and scary that people obsess over phony threats like this -- and force others to respond to their delusions.

GRIM but important - ClubOrlov: Fragility and Collapse: Slowly at first, then all at once

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/06/fragility-and-collapse-slowly-at-first.html

I wish I could find obvious holes in this. Meanwhile, Salem is blowing millions planning for an absurd multi-hundred million dollar highway bridge to handle the traffic demand of the hypothetical future that exists only in dreams of business as usual with cheap gas and more suburban sprawl.

The Handmaids tale arrives in FL

Court-Ordered Care--A Complication of Pregnancy to Avoid

Julie D. Cantor, M.D., J.D.
N Engl J Med 2012; 366:2237-2240 June 14, 2012
 
 Samantha Burton was 25 weeks pregnant when her membranes ruptured. Burton's obstetrician admitted her to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital (TMH) and prescribed continuous inpatient bed rest. But with two young children and a job to consider, Burton found the prospect of a 3-month hospital stay overwhelming. She decided to go home. When she tried to leave, authorities barred her exit.

 Soon, the machinery of court-ordered care started rolling. TMH's outside counsel, deputized by the local state attorney to act on Florida's behalf, petitioned for judicial approval to force Burton to follow doctors' orders. Within hours, the court heard argument from the hospital, state attorney and testimony from the obstetrician, now considered the unborn child's attending physician.1 Burton testified by phone from the hospital, without counsel.

 The next day, the judge gave TMH, any attending health care provider, and members and employees of the original obstetrician's practice permission to administer any care they deemed necessary to preserve the fetus's life and health.1 He ordered Burton to comply and denied her request to change hospitals. Within days, doctors delivered a dead fetus by cesarean section. . . .

Moreover, the due-process considerations are profound. Because these cases are usually heard on an emergency basis, judicial decisions are made without full briefing on relevant law, medicine, and policy. Unlike alleged criminals, patients have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and they cannot instantaneously find expert witnesses to testify on their behalf.  And hospital lawyers acting as state attorneys have a clear conflict of interest: as even the Supreme Court of Florida has noted, it is inappropriate for a hospital to argue zealously against the wishes of its own patient, and it cannot act on behalf of the State to assert the state interests when a competent adult refuses care (Matter of Dubreuil).

Coerced care also devalues the inherent risks to maternal health and life. Cesarean sections and blood transfusions are not risk-free, and bed rest is neither benign nor evidence-based. Obstetricians aren't omniscient and may defer to culture over data. Forced care also ignores individuals' and families' values, reinforces inequality between the sexes, threatens to drive women from care, and condones a culture of coercion. And the notion that court-ordered care will insulate providers from litigation seems misguided -- courts should be unsympathetic to patients with refusal remorse, lest they eviscerate the concept of informed consent, and an informed refusal, unaccompanied by malpractice, should be a shield from civil and criminal liability. Of course, subjecting a patient to forced care, even court-ordered care, may lead to a lawsuit for violations of civil and constitutional rights.

Finally, there's the slippery slope. As a Florida Supreme Court justice explained, forced care that is designed to protect the health of the fetus creates its own universe of troubling questions. Should the State have the authority to prohibit a pregnant woman from smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol, both legal activities with recognized health risks to the unborn? (In re Guardianship of J.D.S.). Should pregnant women be prosecuted for adverse outcomes when they reject medical care? Should they be jailed until delivery? Such cases have already arisen. . . .

In 1976, a man dying of aplastic anemia sued his cousin, asking a court to order the forcible extraction of his potentially matching and lifesaving bone marrow. The court refused and explained, For our law to compel defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual and raise the spectre of the swastika and the Inquisition, reminiscent of the horrors this portends (McFall v. Shimp).
Those horrors are no less salient here. Forced interventions undermine the liberty, privacy, and equality of pregnant women. But they are far more insidious. Because they betray foundational legal principles of our free society, they endanger the liberty of us all.

Disaster in the Making: More Oregon parents not having kids vaccinated

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20120508/UPDATE/120508012/1001

The move among parents to resist vaccination for children is depressing on many levels.  The worst part is realizing how, given that all too soon we're going to have plenty of problems getting the tax revenue necessary for maintaining first-world levels of public health in the first place, some parents are voluntarily creating non-vaccination issues to boot.

There's no easy answer.  Our legal systems treat children as little more than pets, items of property.  Thus, the property owners (aka parents) can refuse vaccinations of their "property" without consequence to themselves, but with plenty of consequence to others, and sometimes to the non-vaccinated children.

For good reasons, we've got seatbelt laws, and laws that forbid letting kids ride in the back of open pickup trucks.  But the law makes it easy for parents to claim a religious scruple against vaccination of their children.  What's the difference?  There used to be lots of arguments about how seatbelts made certain crashes more dangerous.  Of course, those arguments are mostly bunk, like the arguments about vaccinations.  But if we let parents expose their kids to serious and occasionally fatal diseases through failure to vaccinate, why can't parents decide whether their kids should wear a seatbelt?

When did you first realize that the US lost the Cold War?

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/juan-cole-polish-pm-admits-they-tortu

     This story crystallized something that had been forming in my brain for some time, the sad realization that, contrary to popular image, the US had actually lost the Cold War, not Russia (then operating as the chief gangster in the gangster's USSR).

     Think about it:  since time immemorial, the definition of victory is that you get to impose your will on your defeated enemies in return for cessation of hostilities; they have to adopt your values and become like you, rather than the other way around.

     By that standard, then the US is the clear loser of the post-war period of paranoia and balance of terror called The Cold War, which is popularly misunderstood to have ended with the dissolution of the USSR.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gangsters in charge of the old Soviet Union no longer had to bear the crushing burden of maintaining a military all out of proportion to their needs; rather, they could immediately shrink their military dramatically, with no loss in security, and set about spending on themselves rather than trying to placate a loose confederation of historic tribal enemies and victims of Stalinist repression. 

    So while they don't seem much like the winner, they obviously are when compared to us, because, by the end of the Cold War, the US had adopted every last one of the values of the old Soviet system, from a gigantic secret political police bureau (KGB/CIA) operating without any oversight, from an insanely overmuscled military whose care and feeding required ever greater sacrifice from the proles at home, and finally to the willingness to completely obliterate individuals through torture, all in the name of "homeland security."  Like the Soviets, we insist on being able to listen to phone conversations of the natives, we force the populace to undergo random searches before engaging in internal travels, we greatly fear anyone crossing the borders and subject them to intensely political scrutiny, barring dissidents with strange ideas like "freedom."

Salem's Disastrous Priorities: The Highway Lobby Runs Roughshod Over Librarians

Salem is busily undermining its library system, even as it is squandering the millions being poured into the hands of private contractors to engineer the environmental impact statement for the boondoggle on the Willamette, the third auto bridge that has no rationale other than lining the pockets of the road gang and proving that no amount of data on declining vehicle miles traveled and permanently higher gas prices will penetrate the dense fog of lies being generated to sell this monstrosity. 

Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay

Think you have the right to vote?

Richard Nixon and his co-conspirator cronies decided to make the GOP, once the party of Lincoln, into the racist party, making Lyndon Johnson's prophecy that signing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would cost the Democrats the South for 40 years.

The GOP took up race baiting with a vengeance, and it continues unabated today, as the party relentlessly tries to fabricate "voter fraud" fears, while busily proving again and again that stealing elections and wholesale election fraud is the province of elected and appointed officials, not voters.

What's amazing is that so few people realize just how pervasive the GOP's war to limit voters has become. Faced with a choice of (a) admitting that its racist ideology and tactics dooms it to irrelevance or (b) declaring war on voting by the poor and people of color and trying a host of tactics to suppress registration and and prevent voting by the growing non-white plurality (soon to be a non-white majority), the GOP has gone all-in for (b).

For Oregon farmers, oil-rich canola is either promise or peril | OregonLive.com

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/02/for_oregon_farmers_oil-rich_ca.html

Take action against this disastrously horrible idea. More effort to place the needs of rich auto drivers over humanity's need for real food. Growing rapeseed to make motor fuel in the Willamette Valley is like putting an oil refinery in the Vatican or the Louvre, only much more serious. Art can be recreated ... Getting those genes back out of the fields would be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube while on fire.

Is there no level too low for the biofuel-mad subsidy seekers? Apparently not.

Tell Oregon Dept of Ag to do their job, and protect the future of food in the Willamette Valley.

The unintentionally revealing lede

The lede that says it all explains why the Kroc Center will forever struggle. As the real estate cliche has it, Location, Location, Location. A fitness center located in a bike and pedestrian hellhole is like an AA meeting in a saloon.

"It was a healthy way to spend a part of the day, beginning with a healthy walk from the parking lot."

Unhappy birthday

On my birthday last fall, Common Dreams posted this painful but all-too-accurate article about the corporate assault on public schools by David Sirota.  Excerpt:

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.(Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock)

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change).   Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy.   That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important:  It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform." . . .

TUESDAY, PDX: Margaret Kripke Speaks on Environmentally Caused Cancers

Image by The Mayor of Worldwide Breast Cancer via FlickrThe Lund Report is a rare gem -- someone with a lot of knowledge about the medical-industrial complex doing the deep, hard work in the trenches to report on the whole gamut of issues that coalesce under the heading of health.

The editor, who funds this shoestring operation mainly out of her own pocket, consistently runs rings around the captive media outfits who dare not annoy advertisers, which include both the big hospitals and many polluters who would be happiest if we kept thinking that cancer is the fault of genetics or personal bad choices.  These people prefer it if we don't recognize that cancer is primarily an environmental illness.


Hat tip to Lund Report for bringing news of this:

Margaret Kripke, PhD, a co-author of that report, speaks in Portland next Tuesday, October 11 at an event sponsored by Rachel's Friends Breast Cancer Coalition in collaboration with the Oregon Environmental Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility. This free lecture takes place at 7 p.m. at Kaiser Town Hall located at 3704 N. Interstate.

According to the report, 'The incidence of some cancers, including those most common among children, is increasing for unexplained reasons,” while environmental cancers disproportionately affect women and members of disadvantaged social groups, who are more likely to be exposed to carcinogenic materials at work or who live in polluted environments.

Not only is more research needed into environmentally caused cancer, but environmental contaminants should be better regulated, and the methods of measuring such exposures improved, the report states. Currently such research is a low priority and receives inadequate funding, resulting in an inadequate number of environmental oncologists. Instead, most research emphasizes the genetic and molecular mechanisms in cancer.
The report is also critical of existing environmental cancer research, noting that most of that research investigates the effect of specific chemicals on adolescent laboratory animals – which doesn't really mirror real-world exposures to environmental contaminants. In addition, animals in these studies are exposed to doses substantially higher than those likely to be encountered by humans.

“These data – and the exposure limits extrapolated from them – fail to take into account harmful effects that may occur only at very low doses,” according to the report. “Further, chemicals typically are administered when laboratory animals are in their adolescence, a methodology that fails to assess the impact of in utero, childhood, and lifelong exposures. In addition, agents are tested singly, rather than in combination.”

Since Americans are exposed to tens of thousands of foreign chemicals throughout their lifetimes, studies should be designed to look at the effects of specific groups on contaminants in the communities most likely to be affected.

The report also calls for stronger regulation of environmental contaminants, saying that U.S. regulation is rendered ineffective by inadequate funding, fragmented and overlapping authorities and uneven enforcement, excessive regulatory complexity, weak laws and regulations and undue industry influence: “Too often, these factors, either singly or in combination, result in agency dysfunction, and a lack of will to identify and remove hazards.”

The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation's productivity and devastate American lives.”
Kripke is currently serving her second three-year term on the President's Cancer Panel – comprised of three people including Lance Armstrong, and LaSalle D. Lefall, Jr., the report's co-author. The panel,  created by former President George W. Bush, advises the President on the status and needs of the cancer problem in America.

Kripke is a professor of immunology and executive vice president and chief academic officer to the University of Texas MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston. Her research focuses on the immunology of the skin and skin cancer, skin cancer's relationship to ultraviolet light, and how the immune system influences the development of skin cancers. She holds a PhD in immunology from the University of California at Berkeley.

When I am sad about the people I've known and lost to cancer, I give to only those groups that recognize that blaming the victims for their cancers lets the polluters off the hook.  The group that has been sounding the warning about the environmental roots of the cancer pandemic the longest:  Breast Cancer Action.

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Fordham Shuts Down Farm Program, Makes 'Catch-22' Demand for Catering Permit

Yikes.

Obliviousness in the face of peak oil, Salem airport style

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20110828/OPINION/108280373/1046

Think climate change is a hoax?

Sure wish you were right.

Ashland carsharing co-op folds

Image via WikipediaAlas, a great idea is not enough.

Sad, but well done

Image by GlenBledsoe via FlickrThe hardest thing, many organizations find, is knowing when to stop.

Many never figure it out and they struggle on, consuming resources and generating debts, until finally they flicker out, leaving unpaid debts, exhausted volunteers, and (often) unpaid staffers behind.

It's sad, in a way, that the Salem Community Concert Association has folded. On the other hand, good for their leadership for being able to read the handwriting on the wall and knowing enough not to plow on despite the warnings until the iceberg was hit (I don't know how many walls there are up in the frigid polar waters where the icebergs are, but mixing metaphors is at most a misdemeanor offense on the information highway, right?).

The Salem Community Concert Association, the oldest concert series in the area, is ending after 74 years.

The organization has canceled the five concerts planned for 2011-12 because lagging season-ticket sales would not cover expenses, board president Esther Ediger announced Tuesday.

"We had lots of projects, we had lots of hopes, and we had some promises, but not enough money in the bank," said Ediger. "We used up all our reserves."

The organization had sold just 140 season tickets for the coming season, far short of what it needed to make its budget of about $27,000.

Rather than go into debt, the board decided unanimously last week to dissolve. Volunteers planned to mail refunds to season-ticket buyers and donors on Tuesday.

In the series' heyday, concert-goers snapped up all 1,000 season tickets, guaranteeing financial success.

As a result, the concert association could attract world-famous musicians including classical guitarist Christopher Parkening, opera singer Roberta Peters and pianist Misha Dichter.

But in recent years, the concert association's loyal core has aged, said Ediger, and more events have competed for music lovers' money. Season-ticket sales slipped from 240 three years ago.

"We've seen changes in the way people do things, the way they buy tickets and the growth of Salem art associations," she said. "We wish everyone well, but there is so much to choose from." . . .

Good for them for having the courage to face the facts, for exiting with grace, and leaving the field to other, more vital groups, rather than dividing the shrinking pie up into ever smaller slices. The arts scene in Salem is better off for this decision, regrettable though it is. If you know any of the leadership of the SCCA, thank them for all that they offered through the years, and also for not trying to live on past what the community was willing to support.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

Image via WikipediaLooks like one of the urak-hai, the extra corrupt and nasty orcs, was working for Rupert Murdoch while also working both sides of the street in the much-ado-about-nothing "Climategate" "scandal".

That was the imbroglio manufactured by a credulous press that finds actual science all much too confusing and prefers something much simpler and more familiar: stealing emails and excerpting little bits in a carefully chosen order so as to make them appear to say something nefarious.

"Climategate" could safely be forgotten if it hadn't been carefully created just when needed to prevent global action on climate, and if it had not become an article of faith among the know-nothings in the GOP and their house organ, Faux News (another of Sauron's legions).