Oil of oregano fights harmful bacteria, cancer
(NaturalNews) A new report out of the University of Arizona (UofA) says that oil of oregano is a powerful nutrient for fighting harmful bacteria and preventing cancer. Sadhana Ravishankar, a food microbiologist at UofA, discovered that carvacrol, a phenol of oregano oil, exhibits powerful antioxidant and antimicrobial activity, not only when consumed but also when applied to foods.
Ravishankar's lab at UofA had previously identified oregano oil as a powerful antibacterial in lab testing, but she and her team decided to test the oil on food to see how it fared. They discovered that when applied ground beef, oregano oil actually prevented the formation of up to 78 percent of the cancer-causing molecules that normally come about when meat is cooked at high temperatures.
"The idea that something in a plant can inactivate all this bacteria is very fascinating to me," Ravishankar told reporters from The Arizona Daily Star.
Published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the findings have immense implications for food safety, as oregano oil could be applied to various food preparations to ward off the formation of dangerous microbes and other contaminants that threaten human health. Rather than resort to irradiation, chemicals or other unnatural interventions, oregano oil just might be a viable, natural alternative.
The team says that further testing is required to identify exactly how oregano oil performs its powerful work. But there is no questioning the fact that it does, and researchers hope that the breakthrough discovery will eventually result in improved food safety.
Oil of oregano is a powerful weapon against intestinal parasites and yeast overgrowth as well. One study found that 77 percent of enteric parasite patients who took oregano oil for six weeks ended up parasite-free. And oil of oregano also helps stave off Candida albicans, a yeast overgrowth that can severely debilitate quality of life (http://www.naturalnews.com/027333_o...).
Sources for this story include:
http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNew...
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030833_oil_of_Oregano_cancer.html#ixzz19GivCPpO
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Economics Is Simple … The Fat Cats Just Want You to Think It’s Complicated So That You Won’t Demand Change
Economics Is Simple … The Fat Cats Just Want You to Think It’s Complicated So That You Won’t Demand Change
Washington’s Blog
Friday, December 24, 2010
Economics and finance seem like complicated topics, and so many people “leave it to the experts”.
However, these topics are actually simple, and if people hear a clear explanation, they will be able to form an opinion about our current economy and the government’s response to economic challenges.
It will be easy to understand the economy if we think of money as water. Links showing that the analogy holds true with the economy are provided for convenience.
Let’s imagine that there is only a limited amount of fresh, drinkable water in the U.S. (which is true), and that a handful of say 5 big water companies control the rights to 90% of the water in the country.
Let’s further imagine that the water companies – wishing to make more money – expand beyond their traditional water business, into mining for oil and gas. Indeed, the oil and gas mining business becomes so lucrative that it soon dwarfs the size of their actual water business. They keep their traditional water business, but soon also become the largest polluters in the country.
They dig for oil and gas right around where the aquifiers are where they pump water. Unfortunately, they are greedy and cut corners, and end up polluting all of the aquifiers with toxic crude petroleum compounds.
The water companies loudly tell the government that this pollution was “unexpected” and simply a temporary “water-flow” problem. They jump up and down and yell that – unless the government “bails them out” by giving them more water – the entire water distribution system in the U.S. will fail, and Americans will suffer a water shortage and severe thirst.
Advocates for the American people argue that the big water companies should be forced to clean up the aquifiers. They point out that we will have a drastic water shortage unless these water supplies – which constitute the lion’s share of fresh water in the U.S. – are cleaned, and that the water companies must be forced to stop mining for oil and gas right next to the water supplies so that it won’t happen again. They also demand that the government distribute the water in its emergency strategic water supply directly to the people, as that will directly address the problem of thirst and water scarcity.
Economics Is Simple ... The Fat Cats Just Want You to Think Its Complicated So That You Wont Demand Change 101210banner4
They point out that drilling for oil is a wholly-separate business from pumping and selling drinking water, and demand that the water companies sell their petrol business.
They point out that if the costs of cleaning up the aquifier are honestly tallied, the water companies are bankrupt. They say this the problem is not a “temporary” water shortage, but that the big water companies are actually insolvent, and that their entire business model is flawed.
And they note that the big water companies are not as efficient at extracting water from aquifiers as smaller water companies, but that the big companies are getting so big that they re driving the smaller companies out of business.
The big water companies respond that they’re “too big to fail”, that they’re doing fine and only experiencing a very temporary “liquidity crisis” shortage of water, that they just need a little temporary help to get the water flowing to America again, and that they’ll drill safely for oil and gas and that so new rules are needed.
The White House and Congress (having received a lot of contributions from the big water companies), and the Federal Water Reserve – a quasi-governmental agency owned entirely by the big 5 water companies – decide not to crack down on the big 5 water companies. Instead, they exempt them from pollution laws by relaxing reporting requirements so that the companies don’t have to report how much oil and gas pollution has really gotten into the aquifiers. Indeed, the government let’s the big companies write the rules for a series of highly-publicized “stress tests” which are simply a P.R. ploy to reassure the public that the water is safe and the companies sound, even though neither is true.
The government and Federal Water Reserve also buy all of the polluted water in the aquifiers at 100% of the normal price for clean water (and used it for security for cheap loans to the big water companies), and that water is stockpiled in the bowels of the Federal Water Reserve building (even though the high petrol content makes the water highly flammable, and thus a fire hazard). So instead of the water companies having to pay for their toxic pollution problems themselves, the government takes care of it … at the taxpayers’ expense.
The government also taps into it’s emergency water supply, and gives all of the water to the big 5 companies to help them through their “temporary” water shortage. Americans are starting to get thirsty, but the big 5 don’t sell to average Americans. Instead, they use most of the water in their oil and gas mining operations (it takes a lot of water sprayed on the rocks being drilled to keep the dust down). The big 5 sell some of the water to fat cats who already have lots of fresh water in private ponds and storage tanks, and stockpile some of it. Somehow the water given to the big companies never trickles down to the public. The average American on “Main Street” gets thirstier and thirstier.
The government also props up the big water companies by giving them all sorts of subsidies, incentives and business opportunities which guarantee that they’ll make money. The government offers none of these to smaller water companies, and actually penalizes smaller water companies by charging them extra fees to pay for the misbehavior of the big companies.
The American people become thirstier and thirstier, and without water to grow crops, put in their cars’ radiators, or even wash their hands, America becomes poorer and living standards decline.
The big water companies try to make the situation seem extremely complicated, so that only the “experts” can understand it. By making things seem complex, the American people won’t feel competent to demand changes. Indeed, they even promote academics who are trained to ignore the real world and instead focus on highly complex – and unrealistic – models.
But the situation is actually simple. Things haven’t improved, and won’t improve until:
* The government gets back to the real system – that is, actually delivering water – instead of ignoring water and stressing the artificial paper profits or oil mining operations of the big water companies
* The big water companies are broken up, so that smaller water companies focusing just on H20 can step up to find clean water and sell it to normal Americans
* The big companies are forced to clean up the polluted water, and the illegal mining operations of the big companies are prosecuted
Simple, isn’t it?
Washington’s Blog
Friday, December 24, 2010
Economics and finance seem like complicated topics, and so many people “leave it to the experts”.
However, these topics are actually simple, and if people hear a clear explanation, they will be able to form an opinion about our current economy and the government’s response to economic challenges.
It will be easy to understand the economy if we think of money as water. Links showing that the analogy holds true with the economy are provided for convenience.
Let’s imagine that there is only a limited amount of fresh, drinkable water in the U.S. (which is true), and that a handful of say 5 big water companies control the rights to 90% of the water in the country.
Let’s further imagine that the water companies – wishing to make more money – expand beyond their traditional water business, into mining for oil and gas. Indeed, the oil and gas mining business becomes so lucrative that it soon dwarfs the size of their actual water business. They keep their traditional water business, but soon also become the largest polluters in the country.
They dig for oil and gas right around where the aquifiers are where they pump water. Unfortunately, they are greedy and cut corners, and end up polluting all of the aquifiers with toxic crude petroleum compounds.
The water companies loudly tell the government that this pollution was “unexpected” and simply a temporary “water-flow” problem. They jump up and down and yell that – unless the government “bails them out” by giving them more water – the entire water distribution system in the U.S. will fail, and Americans will suffer a water shortage and severe thirst.
Advocates for the American people argue that the big water companies should be forced to clean up the aquifiers. They point out that we will have a drastic water shortage unless these water supplies – which constitute the lion’s share of fresh water in the U.S. – are cleaned, and that the water companies must be forced to stop mining for oil and gas right next to the water supplies so that it won’t happen again. They also demand that the government distribute the water in its emergency strategic water supply directly to the people, as that will directly address the problem of thirst and water scarcity.
Economics Is Simple ... The Fat Cats Just Want You to Think Its Complicated So That You Wont Demand Change 101210banner4
They point out that drilling for oil is a wholly-separate business from pumping and selling drinking water, and demand that the water companies sell their petrol business.
They point out that if the costs of cleaning up the aquifier are honestly tallied, the water companies are bankrupt. They say this the problem is not a “temporary” water shortage, but that the big water companies are actually insolvent, and that their entire business model is flawed.
And they note that the big water companies are not as efficient at extracting water from aquifiers as smaller water companies, but that the big companies are getting so big that they re driving the smaller companies out of business.
The big water companies respond that they’re “too big to fail”, that they’re doing fine and only experiencing a very temporary “liquidity crisis” shortage of water, that they just need a little temporary help to get the water flowing to America again, and that they’ll drill safely for oil and gas and that so new rules are needed.
The White House and Congress (having received a lot of contributions from the big water companies), and the Federal Water Reserve – a quasi-governmental agency owned entirely by the big 5 water companies – decide not to crack down on the big 5 water companies. Instead, they exempt them from pollution laws by relaxing reporting requirements so that the companies don’t have to report how much oil and gas pollution has really gotten into the aquifiers. Indeed, the government let’s the big companies write the rules for a series of highly-publicized “stress tests” which are simply a P.R. ploy to reassure the public that the water is safe and the companies sound, even though neither is true.
The government and Federal Water Reserve also buy all of the polluted water in the aquifiers at 100% of the normal price for clean water (and used it for security for cheap loans to the big water companies), and that water is stockpiled in the bowels of the Federal Water Reserve building (even though the high petrol content makes the water highly flammable, and thus a fire hazard). So instead of the water companies having to pay for their toxic pollution problems themselves, the government takes care of it … at the taxpayers’ expense.
The government also taps into it’s emergency water supply, and gives all of the water to the big 5 companies to help them through their “temporary” water shortage. Americans are starting to get thirsty, but the big 5 don’t sell to average Americans. Instead, they use most of the water in their oil and gas mining operations (it takes a lot of water sprayed on the rocks being drilled to keep the dust down). The big 5 sell some of the water to fat cats who already have lots of fresh water in private ponds and storage tanks, and stockpile some of it. Somehow the water given to the big companies never trickles down to the public. The average American on “Main Street” gets thirstier and thirstier.
The government also props up the big water companies by giving them all sorts of subsidies, incentives and business opportunities which guarantee that they’ll make money. The government offers none of these to smaller water companies, and actually penalizes smaller water companies by charging them extra fees to pay for the misbehavior of the big companies.
The American people become thirstier and thirstier, and without water to grow crops, put in their cars’ radiators, or even wash their hands, America becomes poorer and living standards decline.
The big water companies try to make the situation seem extremely complicated, so that only the “experts” can understand it. By making things seem complex, the American people won’t feel competent to demand changes. Indeed, they even promote academics who are trained to ignore the real world and instead focus on highly complex – and unrealistic – models.
But the situation is actually simple. Things haven’t improved, and won’t improve until:
* The government gets back to the real system – that is, actually delivering water – instead of ignoring water and stressing the artificial paper profits or oil mining operations of the big water companies
* The big water companies are broken up, so that smaller water companies focusing just on H20 can step up to find clean water and sell it to normal Americans
* The big companies are forced to clean up the polluted water, and the illegal mining operations of the big companies are prosecuted
Simple, isn’t it?
Friday, December 24, 2010
U.S. congressman declares: Borders will be 'irrelevant'
U.S. congressman declares: Borders will be 'irrelevant'
U.S. congressman declares: Borders will be 'irrelevant'
Stunning statement from same lawmaker sworn in with hand on Quran, not Bible
A so-called spiritual conference at which Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called for the U.S. border to become an "irrelevancy" was led by a slew of extremists, including a Marxist who reportedly compared the tea-party movement to Hitler.
Conference speakers include radicals with deep ties to President Obama.
Yesterday, TheBlaze.com, founded by Fox News host Glenn Beck, posted a video from a conference led by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or NSP, in which Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, declared to about 400 attendees that "God willing," the U.S. border will become irrelevant.
Stated Ellison: "No security policy position can be premised on military might. ...The way it works is we are a country guided by ideals of equity, generosity and engagement in our relations with other nations and those philosophical ideals create safe borders … and, God willing, one day the border will become an irrelevancy."
Ellison continued, "And you know, the fact is, it's time for us to answer a critical question, and that is how are we going to shape a progressive foreign policy agenda that provides a platform for the U.S. government in the 21st century."
WND has learned the conference was led by a slew of extremists who have had close relationships with Obama.
One of the main speakers was avowed Marxist Michael Lerner, editor of the pro-Palestinian Tikkun Magazine. Lerner has been accused of using the magazine to justify Palestinian terror and has written articles in which he suggested the 9/11 attacks were a response to U.S. policies.
According to an account of the conference by Baltimore Sun columnist Marta Mossburg, who attended the two-day event, Lerner compared tea party activists to Hitler at least five times.
Mossburg wrote that Lerner used the conference to bolster support for Obama.
"We're here to support Obama. …We're here to help him to be the Obama Americans thought they elected," she quoted Lerner as saying.
Lerner said Obama attended Tikkun meetings in Chicago and used to read the magazine, according to conversations he had with Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Lerner identifies himself as an ordained rabbi. However, as Discover the Networks notes, Lerner received a controversial private rabbinic ordination by "Jewish Renewal" rabbis, whose ordinations are recognized only by those within the Jewish Renewal community and the out of mainstream Reconstructionist Judaism.
Orthodox Judaism, the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly all consider such ordinations invalid.
Lerner was an activist in the 1960s anti-war movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization splintered.
Meanwhile, a co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives conference at which Ellison made his remarks is Princeton professor Cornel West, an avowed Marxist and honorary member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Obama named West, whom he has called a personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential campaign. West was a key point man between Obama's campaign and the black community.
West served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a self-described personal friend of the Nation of Islam leader. West authored two books on race with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was at the center of the controversy last year in which Obama criticized Gates' treatment by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.
Another speaker at the Network of Spiritual Progressives event was Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, which teaches the community organizing tactics of radical Saul Alinsky.
WND was first to report that the Woods Fund, a Chicago nonprofit on which Obama served as paid director alongside Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, provided funding to Midwest Academy.
WND also broke the story that the executive director of Midwest Academy was part of the team that developed and delivered a group of volunteers for President Obama's 2008 campaign.
Also, in August 1998, Obama participated with Booth in a panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to life one of America's greatest community organizers."
Ellison's entry into Congress drew attention when he posed with his hand on a Quran instead of a Bible after taking his oath of office in January 2007. His campaign was bolstered by the work of staff members of the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations.
As WND reported last year, Ellison defended CAIR when members of Congress sought to investigate whether CAIR was placing interns with members of strategic security committees, as revealed in the book "Muslim Mafia" by Dave Gaubatz and Paul Sperry.
Ellison read a statement in Congress criticizing the call for an investigation.
"The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our founding fathers cherished so dearly," Ellison said.
"If anything, we should be encouraging all Americans to engage in the U.S. political process; to take part in, and to contribute to, the great democratic experiment that is America," he said.
U.S. prosecutors, however, believe CAIR, while claiming to be a civil-rights group, is actually a front group for Hamas and other terrorists. The Justice Department stated in September 2007 during its prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation in Dallas – the largest terror-financing case in history – that CAIR "has been identified by the government at trial as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization, a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew."
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=242993
U.S. congressman declares: Borders will be 'irrelevant'
Stunning statement from same lawmaker sworn in with hand on Quran, not Bible
A so-called spiritual conference at which Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called for the U.S. border to become an "irrelevancy" was led by a slew of extremists, including a Marxist who reportedly compared the tea-party movement to Hitler.
Conference speakers include radicals with deep ties to President Obama.
Yesterday, TheBlaze.com, founded by Fox News host Glenn Beck, posted a video from a conference led by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or NSP, in which Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, declared to about 400 attendees that "God willing," the U.S. border will become irrelevant.
Stated Ellison: "No security policy position can be premised on military might. ...The way it works is we are a country guided by ideals of equity, generosity and engagement in our relations with other nations and those philosophical ideals create safe borders … and, God willing, one day the border will become an irrelevancy."
Ellison continued, "And you know, the fact is, it's time for us to answer a critical question, and that is how are we going to shape a progressive foreign policy agenda that provides a platform for the U.S. government in the 21st century."
WND has learned the conference was led by a slew of extremists who have had close relationships with Obama.
One of the main speakers was avowed Marxist Michael Lerner, editor of the pro-Palestinian Tikkun Magazine. Lerner has been accused of using the magazine to justify Palestinian terror and has written articles in which he suggested the 9/11 attacks were a response to U.S. policies.
According to an account of the conference by Baltimore Sun columnist Marta Mossburg, who attended the two-day event, Lerner compared tea party activists to Hitler at least five times.
Mossburg wrote that Lerner used the conference to bolster support for Obama.
"We're here to support Obama. …We're here to help him to be the Obama Americans thought they elected," she quoted Lerner as saying.
Lerner said Obama attended Tikkun meetings in Chicago and used to read the magazine, according to conversations he had with Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Lerner identifies himself as an ordained rabbi. However, as Discover the Networks notes, Lerner received a controversial private rabbinic ordination by "Jewish Renewal" rabbis, whose ordinations are recognized only by those within the Jewish Renewal community and the out of mainstream Reconstructionist Judaism.
Orthodox Judaism, the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly all consider such ordinations invalid.
Lerner was an activist in the 1960s anti-war movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization splintered.
Meanwhile, a co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives conference at which Ellison made his remarks is Princeton professor Cornel West, an avowed Marxist and honorary member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Obama named West, whom he has called a personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential campaign. West was a key point man between Obama's campaign and the black community.
West served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a self-described personal friend of the Nation of Islam leader. West authored two books on race with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was at the center of the controversy last year in which Obama criticized Gates' treatment by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.
Another speaker at the Network of Spiritual Progressives event was Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, which teaches the community organizing tactics of radical Saul Alinsky.
WND was first to report that the Woods Fund, a Chicago nonprofit on which Obama served as paid director alongside Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, provided funding to Midwest Academy.
WND also broke the story that the executive director of Midwest Academy was part of the team that developed and delivered a group of volunteers for President Obama's 2008 campaign.
Also, in August 1998, Obama participated with Booth in a panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to life one of America's greatest community organizers."
Ellison's entry into Congress drew attention when he posed with his hand on a Quran instead of a Bible after taking his oath of office in January 2007. His campaign was bolstered by the work of staff members of the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations.
As WND reported last year, Ellison defended CAIR when members of Congress sought to investigate whether CAIR was placing interns with members of strategic security committees, as revealed in the book "Muslim Mafia" by Dave Gaubatz and Paul Sperry.
Ellison read a statement in Congress criticizing the call for an investigation.
"The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our founding fathers cherished so dearly," Ellison said.
"If anything, we should be encouraging all Americans to engage in the U.S. political process; to take part in, and to contribute to, the great democratic experiment that is America," he said.
U.S. prosecutors, however, believe CAIR, while claiming to be a civil-rights group, is actually a front group for Hamas and other terrorists. The Justice Department stated in September 2007 during its prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation in Dallas – the largest terror-financing case in history – that CAIR "has been identified by the government at trial as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization, a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew."
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=242993
Online petition against releasing GM mosquitoes
Online petition against releasing GM mosquitoes
By G Vinod
PETALING JAYA: Concerned citizens who are against the proposed release of genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes in certain parts of the country have started an online petition campaign to get their message across the nation.
The online petition, titled “No to the release of GM mosquitoes in Bentong and Alor Gajah”, was initiated by Cheah Hooi Giam from Penang and has so far garnered 290 signatories.
Calling on the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to reconsider its planned release, Cheah said that no independent scientific data or evidence had been produced to prove that GM mosquitoes would effectively combat the dengue menace.
“Besides, no developed country had allowed the release of GM mosquitoes so far. What is the rationale of Malaysia, with limited scientific resources, rushing to be among the first to use this untested and unknown biological control?
“The Malaysian government must not favour commercial interests at the expense of the welfare, health and safety of the public and the environment,” said Cheah.
She added that within the context of Malaysia's Biosafety Act (which governs the release of GM mosquitoes), the issues of redress and liability were clearly absent. This has raised public concerns over who would be responsible if anything detrimental to humans and the environment happened.
Based on a random check, most signatories echoed Cheah's concerns that no compelling evidence had been provided to the public on the plan's effectiveness and its long-term effects to the environment.
“Show us more convincing studies that tell us there is no impact on the environment,”says YP Wong of Cyberjaya.
Fearing that the mosquitoes may mutate, Grace Liew of Kuala Lumpur asked whether the government can guarantee that the GM mosquitoes or their larvae would not mutate into a new strain.
“Besides, has the government obtained the permission of the locals in Bentong and Alor Gajah before releasing the mosquitoes?” she asked.
Control rather than eradicate
Another signatory, Mok Shao Feng of Bentong proposed that the government study the Taiwan method of combating the Aedes menace – by controlling the mosquitoes rather than trying to eradicate them.
“We should not release them (GM mosquitoes) directly into wild, but rather release them into large controlled area for monitoring. We should perform this with extreme caution,”says Mok, who claimed to be a biotechnology student.
Another signatory, Cheay Lay Ping, sarcastically urged the authorities to release the mosquitoes at the minister's residence to allay public fears.
“Please release the GM mosquitoes at the houses of Najib Tun Razak (Prime Minister) and all the other ministers.... prove to us that it is safe; then only can you convince us that it would not harm us,”says Cheah.
On a more comical note, Khoo Soo Hay of Penang urged the ministry to provide evidence that the GM male mosquitoes will actually mate with the “right” gender upon release.
“Ask the patent owner to prove that the GM male mosquitoes will pick the 'right' gender when dusk falls,” said Khoo.
Malaysia's National Biosafety Board (NBB) plans to release between 3,000 and 4,000 of the GM male mosquitoes in Bentong, Pahang and Alor Gajah, Malacca soon in a trial to reduce the Aedes population.
The progeny of the GM male mosquitoes is expected to die before they can hatch, thus preventing the spread of the lethal dengue virus. However, the move by NBB has come under criticism by several concerned groups such as the Third World Network
By G Vinod
PETALING JAYA: Concerned citizens who are against the proposed release of genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes in certain parts of the country have started an online petition campaign to get their message across the nation.
The online petition, titled “No to the release of GM mosquitoes in Bentong and Alor Gajah”, was initiated by Cheah Hooi Giam from Penang and has so far garnered 290 signatories.
Calling on the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to reconsider its planned release, Cheah said that no independent scientific data or evidence had been produced to prove that GM mosquitoes would effectively combat the dengue menace.
“Besides, no developed country had allowed the release of GM mosquitoes so far. What is the rationale of Malaysia, with limited scientific resources, rushing to be among the first to use this untested and unknown biological control?
“The Malaysian government must not favour commercial interests at the expense of the welfare, health and safety of the public and the environment,” said Cheah.
She added that within the context of Malaysia's Biosafety Act (which governs the release of GM mosquitoes), the issues of redress and liability were clearly absent. This has raised public concerns over who would be responsible if anything detrimental to humans and the environment happened.
Based on a random check, most signatories echoed Cheah's concerns that no compelling evidence had been provided to the public on the plan's effectiveness and its long-term effects to the environment.
“Show us more convincing studies that tell us there is no impact on the environment,”says YP Wong of Cyberjaya.
Fearing that the mosquitoes may mutate, Grace Liew of Kuala Lumpur asked whether the government can guarantee that the GM mosquitoes or their larvae would not mutate into a new strain.
“Besides, has the government obtained the permission of the locals in Bentong and Alor Gajah before releasing the mosquitoes?” she asked.
Control rather than eradicate
Another signatory, Mok Shao Feng of Bentong proposed that the government study the Taiwan method of combating the Aedes menace – by controlling the mosquitoes rather than trying to eradicate them.
“We should not release them (GM mosquitoes) directly into wild, but rather release them into large controlled area for monitoring. We should perform this with extreme caution,”says Mok, who claimed to be a biotechnology student.
Another signatory, Cheay Lay Ping, sarcastically urged the authorities to release the mosquitoes at the minister's residence to allay public fears.
“Please release the GM mosquitoes at the houses of Najib Tun Razak (Prime Minister) and all the other ministers.... prove to us that it is safe; then only can you convince us that it would not harm us,”says Cheah.
On a more comical note, Khoo Soo Hay of Penang urged the ministry to provide evidence that the GM male mosquitoes will actually mate with the “right” gender upon release.
“Ask the patent owner to prove that the GM male mosquitoes will pick the 'right' gender when dusk falls,” said Khoo.
Malaysia's National Biosafety Board (NBB) plans to release between 3,000 and 4,000 of the GM male mosquitoes in Bentong, Pahang and Alor Gajah, Malacca soon in a trial to reduce the Aedes population.
The progeny of the GM male mosquitoes is expected to die before they can hatch, thus preventing the spread of the lethal dengue virus. However, the move by NBB has come under criticism by several concerned groups such as the Third World Network
Thursday, December 23, 2010
State Budget Crisis: Alabama Town’s Failed Pension Is a Warning - CNBC
State Budget Crisis: Alabama Town’s Failed Pension Is a Warning - CNBC
This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.
It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money.
Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension checks will follow.
So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases; retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up like Prichard.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40791768
This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.
It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money.
Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension checks will follow.
So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases; retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up like Prichard.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40791768
Wilderness rules restored for public lands EarthLink - U.S. News
Wilderness rules restored for public lands EarthLink - U.S. News
DENVER (AP) — The Obama administration plans to reverse a Bush-era policy and make millions of undeveloped acres of land once again eligible for federal wilderness protection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday.
The agency will replace the 2003 policy adopted under former Interior Secretary Gale Norton. That policy — derided by some as the "No More Wilderness" policy — stated that new areas could not be recommended for wilderness protection by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and it opened millions of acres to potential commercial development.
That policy "frankly never should have happened and was wrong in the first place," Salazar said Thursday.
Environmental activists have been pushing for the Obama administration to restore protections for potential wilderness areas.
Salazar said the agency will review some 220 million acres of BLM land that's not currently under wilderness protection to see which should be given a new "Wild Lands" designation — a new first step for land awaiting a wilderness decision. Congress would decide whether those lands should be permanently protected, Salazar said.
Congressional Republicans pounced on the "Wild Lands" announcement as an attempt by the Obama administration to close land to development without congressional approval.
"This backdoor approach is intended to circumvent both the people who will be directly affected and Congress," said Washington Rep. Doc Hastings, a Republican tapped to lead the House Natural Resources Committee when the GOP takes control of the House in January.
The Congressional Western Caucus, an all-Republican group, also blasted the decision. "This is little more than an early Christmas present to the far left extremists who oppose the multiple use of our nation's public lands," Utah Rep. Rob Bishop said in a statement.
BLM Director Bob Abbey said it hasn't been decided how many acres are expected to be designated as "Wild Lands" and whether those acres will be off-limits to motorized recreation or commercial development while under congressional review. It's also unclear whether there will be a time limit on how long acres can be managed as "Wild Lands" before a decision is made on their future.
The BLM has six months to submit a plan for those new wilderness evaluations.
These "Wild Lands" would be separate from Wilderness Study Areas that must be authorized by Congress. Wild Lands can be designated by the BLM after a public planning process and would be managed with protective measures detailed in a land use plan.
Ranchers, oil men and others have been suspicious of federal plans to lock up land in the West, worrying that taking the BLM land out of production would kill rural economies that rely on ranchers and the oil and gas business.
Their suspicions have been heightened since memos leaked in February revealed the Obama administration was considering 14 sites in nine states for possible presidential monument declarations.
That included 2.5 million acres of northeastern Montana prairie land proposed as a possible bison range, along with sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington.
The 2003 policy was an out-of-court deal struck between Norton and then-Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt to remove protections for some 2.6 million acres of public land in that state.
The policy allowed drilling, mining and other commercial uses on land under consideration as wilderness areas.
Salazar's reversal doesn't affect about 8.7 million acres already designated as wilderness areas.
Conservationists praised the reversal, though there has been grumbling that it took the Obama administration nearly two years to overturn the Bush-era policy.
"Washington D.C. always takes longer than you want, but we're glad we've gotten here," said Suzanne Jones, regional director for The Wilderness Society.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20101223/ef348800-f630-459b-866e-0a0f37657899
DENVER (AP) — The Obama administration plans to reverse a Bush-era policy and make millions of undeveloped acres of land once again eligible for federal wilderness protection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday.
The agency will replace the 2003 policy adopted under former Interior Secretary Gale Norton. That policy — derided by some as the "No More Wilderness" policy — stated that new areas could not be recommended for wilderness protection by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and it opened millions of acres to potential commercial development.
That policy "frankly never should have happened and was wrong in the first place," Salazar said Thursday.
Environmental activists have been pushing for the Obama administration to restore protections for potential wilderness areas.
Salazar said the agency will review some 220 million acres of BLM land that's not currently under wilderness protection to see which should be given a new "Wild Lands" designation — a new first step for land awaiting a wilderness decision. Congress would decide whether those lands should be permanently protected, Salazar said.
Congressional Republicans pounced on the "Wild Lands" announcement as an attempt by the Obama administration to close land to development without congressional approval.
"This backdoor approach is intended to circumvent both the people who will be directly affected and Congress," said Washington Rep. Doc Hastings, a Republican tapped to lead the House Natural Resources Committee when the GOP takes control of the House in January.
The Congressional Western Caucus, an all-Republican group, also blasted the decision. "This is little more than an early Christmas present to the far left extremists who oppose the multiple use of our nation's public lands," Utah Rep. Rob Bishop said in a statement.
BLM Director Bob Abbey said it hasn't been decided how many acres are expected to be designated as "Wild Lands" and whether those acres will be off-limits to motorized recreation or commercial development while under congressional review. It's also unclear whether there will be a time limit on how long acres can be managed as "Wild Lands" before a decision is made on their future.
The BLM has six months to submit a plan for those new wilderness evaluations.
These "Wild Lands" would be separate from Wilderness Study Areas that must be authorized by Congress. Wild Lands can be designated by the BLM after a public planning process and would be managed with protective measures detailed in a land use plan.
Ranchers, oil men and others have been suspicious of federal plans to lock up land in the West, worrying that taking the BLM land out of production would kill rural economies that rely on ranchers and the oil and gas business.
Their suspicions have been heightened since memos leaked in February revealed the Obama administration was considering 14 sites in nine states for possible presidential monument declarations.
That included 2.5 million acres of northeastern Montana prairie land proposed as a possible bison range, along with sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington.
The 2003 policy was an out-of-court deal struck between Norton and then-Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt to remove protections for some 2.6 million acres of public land in that state.
The policy allowed drilling, mining and other commercial uses on land under consideration as wilderness areas.
Salazar's reversal doesn't affect about 8.7 million acres already designated as wilderness areas.
Conservationists praised the reversal, though there has been grumbling that it took the Obama administration nearly two years to overturn the Bush-era policy.
"Washington D.C. always takes longer than you want, but we're glad we've gotten here," said Suzanne Jones, regional director for The Wilderness Society.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20101223/ef348800-f630-459b-866e-0a0f37657899
December 23, 1310: Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg, Supported by Dante, Arrived in Milan and Started the Process Leading to the Modern State – 700 Years Ago Today « TARPLEY.net
December 23, 1310: Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg, Supported by Dante, Arrived in Milan and Started the Process Leading to the Modern State – 700 Years Ago Today « TARPLEY.net
Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
December 23, 2010
Henry VII of LuxemburgToday, December 23, 2010, marks one of the most important world-historical anniversaries of all time. Seven hundred years ago this evening, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg passed through the city gates of Milan, Italy and set into motion the process leading to the most important political innovation of the past 2,000 years: the modern state.
Dante AlighieriHenry VII’s most vocal political supporter and advocate was the Florentine exile Dante Alighieri, by all odds the greatest man of the second millennium AD. Dante’s immediate goal was to end the fratricidal party strife between the Guelf (pro-papal) and Ghibelline (pro-imperial) factions by restoring imperial guidance to the northern Italian city states, which had been gripped by growing anarchy and incipient civil war since the death of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and the end of his southern Italian kingdom 60 years earlier. One of the victims of this anarchy had been Dante himself, who was driven out of Florence in 1303 by the ascendant Black Guelf party, acting with the encouragement of the simonist pope, Boniface VIII.
The Greyhound
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first sustained poetic effort in Italian and the first masterpiece in a modern language, was written as an ideological handbook and justification for Henry VII’s Italian expedition and the restoration of a balance between pope and emperor in northern and central Italy. In Canto I of the Inferno, when Dante is lost in the dark wood of error, his guide Vergil foretells the coming of “il veltro” — a greyhound who will destroy the wolf of avarice, the source of all depraved desires, thought by some to represent the banking power, especially its Venetian aspect. The greyhound is a figure for Henry VII. The entire “Divine Comedy” is full of references and prophecies about Henry VII, too many to be enumerated here.
In Milan, Henry VII’s modest retinue of a few thousand troops were awaited by the hostile but politically decrepit Guelf regime of the Torriani family, who had driven the Ghibelline opposition out of the city. Henry VII’s general policy was that political exiles should be allowed to return to their homes, and in the case of Milan this included Matteo Visconti and his followers, who had originally come from the Pavia area, between Milan and the Po River. Before long, the Ghibelline Matteo Visconti had ousted the Torriani family from power and established one of the most important family regimes in all of European history.
After being crowned King of Lombardy in the church of St. Ambrose in Milan on January 6, 1310, Henry VII attempted to reconcile the factions of other northern Italian cities. Ghibelline cities like Verona, Pisa, Arezzo, Modena, and Mantua welcomed Henry, but the more numerous Guelf rulers soon formed a league to resist him, including by waging war. The prime mover of this rebellion was Guelf Florence, controlled by Dante’s mortal enemies, the Black Guelfs. Henry VII, despite his inadequate forces, responded by besieging Florence, albeit unsuccessfully.
In Cantos 8 and 9 of the Inferno, Dante and Vergil are for a time prevented from passing through the walls that surround the lower hell or City of Dis by the largest and most aggressive assembly of demons the two wayfarers ever encounter in the underworld. This is a pandemonium of pagan and other monsters, featuring Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, the three furies of Greek lore, plus the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, which these infernal guards intend to use to turn Dante into stone. The demonic resistance cannot be put down by human reason as represented by Vergil, who must wait for an angel or heavenly messenger to quell the rebellion against the divine will, which wants Dante to see the lower hell and tell the world what he was seen. This is followed by an admonition to the reader to look below the surface meaning to understand the allegorical message Dante sought to impart. According to Pietrobono and some of the better commentators, the walls of lower hell are to be understood as a metaphor for the walls of Florence during Henry’s siege of that city, with the Black Guelfs as recalcitrant demons. Hell is a city much like Florence under the Black Guelfs, says Dante.
In addition to devoting so much of the Divine Comedy to Henry VII, Dante also wrote about his hopes for the new emperor in three of his few extant Latin letters. Letter V, probably written in the fall of 1310, proclaims the coming of Henry VII as the new Moses and bridegroom of long-suffering Italy. Letter VI is an emphatic prophecy of ruin for Henry VII’s enemies, who will see their cities destroyed as punishment for their resistance, despite their contemptible fortifications (ridiculo cuiquam vallo). Letter VII exhorts Henry VII to stop wasting time with the rebellions fomented in Brescia and other cities, and to strike directly at the heart of the insurrection by launching a new attack on Florence, the stinking vixen of the Arno. Finally, Dante’s treatise on politics and government, De Monarchia, is a theoretical expression of the idea that the temporal rule of the emperor is superior to the political authority of the Roman pope, who needs to focus on spiritual matters.
Henry VII of Luxemburg died in August of 1313, just as he was preparing a new attack on Florence. He is likely to have been poisoned by political adversaries.
Dante’s detractors have never tired of deriding the failure of his attempt to restore civic peace in northern and central Italy with the help or a revivified Holy Roman Empire. But this ignores the two political powers that Henry VII helped to establish. One was Verona under the Scala family; Can Grande della Scala was one of Dante’s benefactors in exile, and for a time seemed likely to dominate northern Italy, perhaps including Venice. The other imperial vicars who became prominent were the Visconti.
By the end of 1313, the Visconti state controlled not just Milan, but also Lombard towns like Piacenza, Lodi, Bobbio, and Novara. In 1314, they added Como, Bergamo, and Tortona. In 1315, Pavia and Cremona were conquered, while Alessandria invited them in to escape the repressive rule of the French-backed Anjou overlords. In 1316, Parma and Vercelli joined the Visconti state. As the leading scholarly study of Henry VII by William M. Bowsky concludes, the Visconti power “owed its start, both militarily and legally, to Henry of Luxemburg.”
Giangaleazzo Visconti, c. 1400: Architect of the First Prototype of the Modern StateIt was a somewhat later Milanese ruler of this line, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who in the years around 1400 created a large northern Italian state which must be considered as the first prototype of the modern state. Giangaleazzo’s state included most of northern Italy, with the key exceptions of Venice and Tuscany. He ruled Verona, Cremona, Brescia, Belluno, Pieve di Cadore, Feltre, Pavia, Novara, Como, Lodi, Vercelli, Alba, Asti, Pontremoli, Tortona, Alessandria, Valenza, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Vicenza, and Vigevano. Another year and Florence would have appeared on the list, and shortly thereafter, probably Venice, making the Kingdom of Italy a viable reality.
Milan was traditionally the richest city in western Europe, and its only serious competitor for first place in Europe as a whole was Constantinople. Giangaleazzo’s political method featured two aspects which have remained indispensable to the modern state. The first was an economic recovery program favoring the middle class: when Giangaleazzo seized control of Milan, he implemented a tax amnesty, cancelling the debts owed by citizens to the tax collector. This would be the modern equivalent of a debt moratorium or cancellation.
Giangaleazzo’s other hallmark was the building of modern infrastructure. For Milan, that meant a very advanced system of canals in and around Milan, and reaching down to the Po and other rivers — the navigli, many of which still exist, covered over with more recent constructions. These canals enabled Giangaleazzo to make rapid progress on the Milanese Duomo, the most ambitious late Gothic cathedral in Europe, and to build the striking Charterhouse of Pavia (Certosa di Pavia), a Carthusian monastery.
Milan was also the European leader in key areas of advanced technology, especially in steel and other metallurgy. The Milanese arms and armor industry was in demand from both England and France, the antagonists in the Hundred Years War of 1337-1453.
By 1402 Giangaleazzo was thus well on his way to accomplishing the single most important thing needed to consolidate the gains of the Italian renaissance — unifying northern and central Italy into a powerful national state capable of preventing the country from becoming a battlefield between France and Spain, as happened in the years after 1494, with the most tragic consequences. But in 1402, just as Giangaleazzo was about to add Florence and Tuscany to his emerging nation, he died in September 1402 under mysterious circumstances, just like Henry VII in 1313 and Dante in 1321.
After 1402, Giangaleazzo’s new state quickly fell apart, but was largely re-assembled by his second oldest son, Filippo Maria Visconti. After Filippo Maria, the Milanese state passed under the control of Francesco Sforza, a military leader who had married Filippo Maria’s daughter. In this latter form it was closely studied and imitated by King Louis XI of France, who successfully created the world’s first modern state, no longer a prototype, during his reign of 1461-1483.
The importance and positive potential of the Visconti has been obscured for generations of readers by the profoundly misleading work of the late historian Hans Baron, who could only regard the Visconti as tyrants and precursors of Mussolini and Hitler — a total distortion. For Baron, the positive forces were the sleazy pols of the Florentine Guelf Party and their spokesmen, oligarchs who refused to write in Italian and reverted to Latin, lest the plebs gain insight into statecraft. Francesco Petrarca, Dante’s successor in the effort of promote a renaissance out of the shipwreck of late medieval Europe, did not agree with the pedantic Baron: Petrarch thought highly enough of the Visconti to go to work for them as a diplomat for five years during the 1350s.
The Holy Roman Empire (Sacro Romano Impero, or Heiliges Roemisches Reich Deutscher Nation) was the direct descendant of the empire assembled by Charlemagne around 800 AD. It was an amalgam of much of central Europe, including Germany, Bohemia, Holland and the Low Countries, northern and central Italy, and some adjacent areas. Holy Roman Emperors like Henry VII were chosen by an electoral college of seven members, including the King of Bohemia, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, plus the rulers of Saxony, the Palatinate along the Rhine, and Brandenburg-Prussia. The newly elected emperor was immediately declared King of the Romans, but he then was supposed to go to Italy to be crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy in Monza near Milan. He was then supposed to go on to Rome to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. This was the traditional itinerary which Henry VII was following, even as he tried to restore imperial authority south of the Alps. Matters were complicated by the fact that the pope in 1310 was the Gascon Clement V, a puppet of Philip the Fair of France (whom Dante called “the French disease”); Clement V lived in Avignon, and never came to Rome. Henry VII was crowned by a cardinal in St. John Lateran, which was controlled by the Ghibelline Colonna family, rather than in St. Peter’s, which was behind the lines of the Guelf Orsini clan.
From Thomas Carlyle and Francesco De Sanctis to the quackademics of today, modern oligarchs have mocked and reviled Dante’s efforts to restore legality to northern and central Italy with the help of Henry VII. The lesson of the story is that Dante failed in the narrow sense of restoring the empire, but succeeded in the larger project launching a process leading to the modern state, and with it modern civilization. Success does not always come in the form we expect, but we must welcome progress nevertheless.
Today, with the modern state under assault by nihilists, anarchists, and barbarians of the extreme left and the reactionary right, proponents of civilization and culture need to recommit themselves to the indispensable institution of the modern state, and to the world-historical geniuses and heroes, starting with Dante, who have worked to create it.
Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
December 23, 2010
Henry VII of LuxemburgToday, December 23, 2010, marks one of the most important world-historical anniversaries of all time. Seven hundred years ago this evening, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg passed through the city gates of Milan, Italy and set into motion the process leading to the most important political innovation of the past 2,000 years: the modern state.
Dante AlighieriHenry VII’s most vocal political supporter and advocate was the Florentine exile Dante Alighieri, by all odds the greatest man of the second millennium AD. Dante’s immediate goal was to end the fratricidal party strife between the Guelf (pro-papal) and Ghibelline (pro-imperial) factions by restoring imperial guidance to the northern Italian city states, which had been gripped by growing anarchy and incipient civil war since the death of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and the end of his southern Italian kingdom 60 years earlier. One of the victims of this anarchy had been Dante himself, who was driven out of Florence in 1303 by the ascendant Black Guelf party, acting with the encouragement of the simonist pope, Boniface VIII.
The Greyhound
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first sustained poetic effort in Italian and the first masterpiece in a modern language, was written as an ideological handbook and justification for Henry VII’s Italian expedition and the restoration of a balance between pope and emperor in northern and central Italy. In Canto I of the Inferno, when Dante is lost in the dark wood of error, his guide Vergil foretells the coming of “il veltro” — a greyhound who will destroy the wolf of avarice, the source of all depraved desires, thought by some to represent the banking power, especially its Venetian aspect. The greyhound is a figure for Henry VII. The entire “Divine Comedy” is full of references and prophecies about Henry VII, too many to be enumerated here.
In Milan, Henry VII’s modest retinue of a few thousand troops were awaited by the hostile but politically decrepit Guelf regime of the Torriani family, who had driven the Ghibelline opposition out of the city. Henry VII’s general policy was that political exiles should be allowed to return to their homes, and in the case of Milan this included Matteo Visconti and his followers, who had originally come from the Pavia area, between Milan and the Po River. Before long, the Ghibelline Matteo Visconti had ousted the Torriani family from power and established one of the most important family regimes in all of European history.
After being crowned King of Lombardy in the church of St. Ambrose in Milan on January 6, 1310, Henry VII attempted to reconcile the factions of other northern Italian cities. Ghibelline cities like Verona, Pisa, Arezzo, Modena, and Mantua welcomed Henry, but the more numerous Guelf rulers soon formed a league to resist him, including by waging war. The prime mover of this rebellion was Guelf Florence, controlled by Dante’s mortal enemies, the Black Guelfs. Henry VII, despite his inadequate forces, responded by besieging Florence, albeit unsuccessfully.
In Cantos 8 and 9 of the Inferno, Dante and Vergil are for a time prevented from passing through the walls that surround the lower hell or City of Dis by the largest and most aggressive assembly of demons the two wayfarers ever encounter in the underworld. This is a pandemonium of pagan and other monsters, featuring Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, the three furies of Greek lore, plus the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, which these infernal guards intend to use to turn Dante into stone. The demonic resistance cannot be put down by human reason as represented by Vergil, who must wait for an angel or heavenly messenger to quell the rebellion against the divine will, which wants Dante to see the lower hell and tell the world what he was seen. This is followed by an admonition to the reader to look below the surface meaning to understand the allegorical message Dante sought to impart. According to Pietrobono and some of the better commentators, the walls of lower hell are to be understood as a metaphor for the walls of Florence during Henry’s siege of that city, with the Black Guelfs as recalcitrant demons. Hell is a city much like Florence under the Black Guelfs, says Dante.
In addition to devoting so much of the Divine Comedy to Henry VII, Dante also wrote about his hopes for the new emperor in three of his few extant Latin letters. Letter V, probably written in the fall of 1310, proclaims the coming of Henry VII as the new Moses and bridegroom of long-suffering Italy. Letter VI is an emphatic prophecy of ruin for Henry VII’s enemies, who will see their cities destroyed as punishment for their resistance, despite their contemptible fortifications (ridiculo cuiquam vallo). Letter VII exhorts Henry VII to stop wasting time with the rebellions fomented in Brescia and other cities, and to strike directly at the heart of the insurrection by launching a new attack on Florence, the stinking vixen of the Arno. Finally, Dante’s treatise on politics and government, De Monarchia, is a theoretical expression of the idea that the temporal rule of the emperor is superior to the political authority of the Roman pope, who needs to focus on spiritual matters.
Henry VII of Luxemburg died in August of 1313, just as he was preparing a new attack on Florence. He is likely to have been poisoned by political adversaries.
Dante’s detractors have never tired of deriding the failure of his attempt to restore civic peace in northern and central Italy with the help or a revivified Holy Roman Empire. But this ignores the two political powers that Henry VII helped to establish. One was Verona under the Scala family; Can Grande della Scala was one of Dante’s benefactors in exile, and for a time seemed likely to dominate northern Italy, perhaps including Venice. The other imperial vicars who became prominent were the Visconti.
By the end of 1313, the Visconti state controlled not just Milan, but also Lombard towns like Piacenza, Lodi, Bobbio, and Novara. In 1314, they added Como, Bergamo, and Tortona. In 1315, Pavia and Cremona were conquered, while Alessandria invited them in to escape the repressive rule of the French-backed Anjou overlords. In 1316, Parma and Vercelli joined the Visconti state. As the leading scholarly study of Henry VII by William M. Bowsky concludes, the Visconti power “owed its start, both militarily and legally, to Henry of Luxemburg.”
Giangaleazzo Visconti, c. 1400: Architect of the First Prototype of the Modern StateIt was a somewhat later Milanese ruler of this line, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who in the years around 1400 created a large northern Italian state which must be considered as the first prototype of the modern state. Giangaleazzo’s state included most of northern Italy, with the key exceptions of Venice and Tuscany. He ruled Verona, Cremona, Brescia, Belluno, Pieve di Cadore, Feltre, Pavia, Novara, Como, Lodi, Vercelli, Alba, Asti, Pontremoli, Tortona, Alessandria, Valenza, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Vicenza, and Vigevano. Another year and Florence would have appeared on the list, and shortly thereafter, probably Venice, making the Kingdom of Italy a viable reality.
Milan was traditionally the richest city in western Europe, and its only serious competitor for first place in Europe as a whole was Constantinople. Giangaleazzo’s political method featured two aspects which have remained indispensable to the modern state. The first was an economic recovery program favoring the middle class: when Giangaleazzo seized control of Milan, he implemented a tax amnesty, cancelling the debts owed by citizens to the tax collector. This would be the modern equivalent of a debt moratorium or cancellation.
Giangaleazzo’s other hallmark was the building of modern infrastructure. For Milan, that meant a very advanced system of canals in and around Milan, and reaching down to the Po and other rivers — the navigli, many of which still exist, covered over with more recent constructions. These canals enabled Giangaleazzo to make rapid progress on the Milanese Duomo, the most ambitious late Gothic cathedral in Europe, and to build the striking Charterhouse of Pavia (Certosa di Pavia), a Carthusian monastery.
Milan was also the European leader in key areas of advanced technology, especially in steel and other metallurgy. The Milanese arms and armor industry was in demand from both England and France, the antagonists in the Hundred Years War of 1337-1453.
By 1402 Giangaleazzo was thus well on his way to accomplishing the single most important thing needed to consolidate the gains of the Italian renaissance — unifying northern and central Italy into a powerful national state capable of preventing the country from becoming a battlefield between France and Spain, as happened in the years after 1494, with the most tragic consequences. But in 1402, just as Giangaleazzo was about to add Florence and Tuscany to his emerging nation, he died in September 1402 under mysterious circumstances, just like Henry VII in 1313 and Dante in 1321.
After 1402, Giangaleazzo’s new state quickly fell apart, but was largely re-assembled by his second oldest son, Filippo Maria Visconti. After Filippo Maria, the Milanese state passed under the control of Francesco Sforza, a military leader who had married Filippo Maria’s daughter. In this latter form it was closely studied and imitated by King Louis XI of France, who successfully created the world’s first modern state, no longer a prototype, during his reign of 1461-1483.
The importance and positive potential of the Visconti has been obscured for generations of readers by the profoundly misleading work of the late historian Hans Baron, who could only regard the Visconti as tyrants and precursors of Mussolini and Hitler — a total distortion. For Baron, the positive forces were the sleazy pols of the Florentine Guelf Party and their spokesmen, oligarchs who refused to write in Italian and reverted to Latin, lest the plebs gain insight into statecraft. Francesco Petrarca, Dante’s successor in the effort of promote a renaissance out of the shipwreck of late medieval Europe, did not agree with the pedantic Baron: Petrarch thought highly enough of the Visconti to go to work for them as a diplomat for five years during the 1350s.
The Holy Roman Empire (Sacro Romano Impero, or Heiliges Roemisches Reich Deutscher Nation) was the direct descendant of the empire assembled by Charlemagne around 800 AD. It was an amalgam of much of central Europe, including Germany, Bohemia, Holland and the Low Countries, northern and central Italy, and some adjacent areas. Holy Roman Emperors like Henry VII were chosen by an electoral college of seven members, including the King of Bohemia, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, plus the rulers of Saxony, the Palatinate along the Rhine, and Brandenburg-Prussia. The newly elected emperor was immediately declared King of the Romans, but he then was supposed to go to Italy to be crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy in Monza near Milan. He was then supposed to go on to Rome to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. This was the traditional itinerary which Henry VII was following, even as he tried to restore imperial authority south of the Alps. Matters were complicated by the fact that the pope in 1310 was the Gascon Clement V, a puppet of Philip the Fair of France (whom Dante called “the French disease”); Clement V lived in Avignon, and never came to Rome. Henry VII was crowned by a cardinal in St. John Lateran, which was controlled by the Ghibelline Colonna family, rather than in St. Peter’s, which was behind the lines of the Guelf Orsini clan.
From Thomas Carlyle and Francesco De Sanctis to the quackademics of today, modern oligarchs have mocked and reviled Dante’s efforts to restore legality to northern and central Italy with the help of Henry VII. The lesson of the story is that Dante failed in the narrow sense of restoring the empire, but succeeded in the larger project launching a process leading to the modern state, and with it modern civilization. Success does not always come in the form we expect, but we must welcome progress nevertheless.
Today, with the modern state under assault by nihilists, anarchists, and barbarians of the extreme left and the reactionary right, proponents of civilization and culture need to recommit themselves to the indispensable institution of the modern state, and to the world-historical geniuses and heroes, starting with Dante, who have worked to create it.
Shocking moment Romanian man hurls himself from Parliament balcony in protest at austerity measures… and SURVIVES
Shocking moment Romanian man hurls himself from Parliament balcony in protest at austerity measures… and SURVIVES
Perched on the very edge of a balcony, he gestures wildly, shouting at the politicians in the chamber below.
Seconds later, television engineer Adrian Sobaru hurls himself from the parapet of Romania’s parliament.
Helpless observers can only watch in horror as the father-of-two, wearing a white T-shirt proclaiming ‘You’ve pierced us. You’ve killed our children’s future. Freedom,’ plummets 23ft the ground.
Footage of the incident recorded a loud thud as he hit the floor but, astonishingly, Sobaru was not seriously injured.
Perched on the very edge of a balcony, he gestures wildly, shouting at the politicians in the chamber below.
Seconds later, television engineer Adrian Sobaru hurls himself from the parapet of Romania’s parliament.
Helpless observers can only watch in horror as the father-of-two, wearing a white T-shirt proclaiming ‘You’ve pierced us. You’ve killed our children’s future. Freedom,’ plummets 23ft the ground.
Footage of the incident recorded a loud thud as he hit the floor but, astonishingly, Sobaru was not seriously injured.
Feds order farmer to destroy his own wheat crops: The shocking revelations of Wickard vs Filburn
Feds order farmer to destroy his own wheat crops: The shocking revelations of Wickard vs Filburn
(NaturalNews) In arguing for S.501, the "Food Safety Modernization Act," there are all sorts of attorneys, legislators and internet commentators who keep claiming, "The government won't try to control the food production of small farms." They say, "Your backyard garden is safe" and that the feds won't come knocking on your door to control your seeds or foods.
As usual, these pushers of Big Government are utterly ignorant of the history in their own country. Because as you'll learn right here, not only CAN the U.S. government control and dictate to single-family farms what they can grow in their own backyards; the government has already blatantly done so!
In this article, I'll share with you the full and true story of how Big Government has already run rampant over the rights of individuals to grow their own food -- I'll even cite the US Supreme Court decision that "legalized" this tyranny.
How the tyrants came after a farmer named Roscoe Filburn
It all starts with a farmer named Roscoe Filburn, a modest farmer who grew wheat in his own back yard in order to feed his chickens.
One day, a U.S. government official showed up at his farm. Noting that Filburn was growing a lot of wheat, this government official determined that Filburn was growing too much wheat and ordered Filburn to destroy his wheat crops and pay a large fine to the federal government.
The year was 1940, you see. And through a highly protectionist policy, the federal government had decided to artificially drive up the prices of wheat by limiting the amount of wheat that could be grown on any given acre. This is all part of Big Government's "infinite wisdom" of trying to somehow improve prosperity by destroying food and impairing economic productivity. (Be wary any time the government says it's going to "solve problems" for you.)
The federal government, of course, claims authority over all commerce (even when such claims are blatantly in violation of the limitations placed upon government by the Constitution). But Roscoe Filburn wasn't selling his wheat to anyone. Thus, he was not engaged in interstate commerce. He wasn't growing wheat as something to use for commerce at all, in fact. He was simply growing wheat in his back yard and feeding it to his chickens. That's not commerce. That's just growing your own food.
But get this: The government insisted he pay a fine and destroy his wheat, so Filburn took the government to court, arguing that the federal government had no right to tell a man to destroy his food crops just because they wanted to protect some sort of artificially high prices in the wheat market.
This case eventually went to the US Supreme Court. It's now known as Wickard v. Filburn, and it is one of the most famous US Supreme Court decisions ever rendered because it represents a gross expansion of the tyranny of the federal government.
The US Supreme Court sided with government tyranny
The US Supreme Court, you see, ruled that Roscoe Filburn's wheat could be regulated and destroyed by the federal government simply because Roscoe's wheat production might reduce the amount of wheat he bought from other wheat producers and therefore could impact interstate trade.
Now stay with me on this, because this is a really, really important point to understand.
The federal government claimed authority under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8), even though the Commerce Clause was originally written primarily to prevent states from erecting tariffs, not to allow the federal government to control interstate trade. But thanks to the twisted interpretation of the government -- and believe me, the government will twist every interpretation it can in an effort to assert more power over the population -- the feds claimed that Filburn's growing of his own wheat effectively reduced interstate commerce in wheat. Therefore, they reasoned, they could regulate his backyard wheat production (and order him to destroy his wheat).
Because of this US Supreme Court decision in 1942, it now means the federal government can order you to halt food production in your own back yard by arguing that when you grow your own food, the amount of food you purchase from other food providers is reduced, meaning that your food production impacts interstate trade and therefore can be fully controlled by the federal government.
In other words, the federal government claims the authority right now -- even without the Food Safety Modernization Act -- to knock on your door and order you at gunpoint to destroy all the food in your garden, your greenhouse or your farm. They can order you to destroy all seeds in your possession and all food harvested from your own garden. And they can do all this with the full protection of U.S. law by simply citing the precedent set in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 as ruled by the US Supreme Court.
Why the naysayers will probably starve
Still think you have the right to grow your own food? I've heard all sorts of naysayers claiming that S.510 -- the Food Safety Modernization Act -- is no threat to small growers and family farms. They say the fears about S.510 are overblown and that the government can't possibly shut down your backyard gardens or small, local vegetable farms. They say this with the kind of smug certainty you might typically hear from a doctor who thinks he knows everything about human health (but who actually knows nothing about nutrition).
These naysayers tend to operate out of an assumption that Big Government will never take away their rights and freedoms and that expanding the reach of agencies such as the TSA, FDA, DEA and FTC with even more power and more armed agents is a good thing because the government always takes care of the people. We need more protection from e.coli, they argue, so let's unleash 4,000 armed FDA agents instead to protect us from bacteria. But who will protect us from the FDA?
What these ignorant naysayers don't understand is that government is constantly trying to expand its power to the point of tyranny. As a current example of this, look at what just happened with Chavez in Venezuela. He has now been granted what are essentially dictatorial powers over the country (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...). Chavez is now the King of Venezuela, and whatever he says is now law. Venezuelan citizens are now slaves to his tyranny, and they must follow his orders or be executed.
The United States is moving in precisely the same direction. First, power gets stripped away from the People little by little. Then it gets concentrated in the hands of a few regulatory agencies who write their own laws and who stay in power year after year because none of their officials are elected. (Think the FDA commissioner is elected by the people? Think again...) And then, over time, a few powerful individuals concentrate power from those agencies into their own hands. Before long, the country is run by a handful of power-crazed tyrants who disregard all freedoms and rights of the People.
This is precisely what the FDA is doing with the Food Safety Modernization Act. Backed by yet more funding and a new army of agents, plus the Supreme Court ruling that says the federal government can order you to destroy the food you're growing in your own back yard, the FDA can now pillage the countryside, going from farm to farm and house to house, burning fields and ordering the citizenry to destroy their plants, seeds and crops. This is exactly what they've been doing to raw milk producers and food coops, by the way (http://www.naturalnews.com/030136_R...).
That is no exaggeration. It is a documented "legal" precedent established in Wickard vs Filburn, and it can be used at any moment to destroy the ability of people to grow their own food, thereby making these people totally dependent on dead processed food (which is always FDA approved if it's dead, of course) made in food factories that churn out nutritional deficiencies and death.
What will you eat when the government destroys your local food supply?
You see, under the argument that your backyard garden "impacts interstate commerce," the federal government can order you to simply spray Roundup on your entire garden in order to kill it.
What will you eat then? When the GMO crops suffer a mass catastrophic failure, and the monocultured wheat dies from a global viral infection called ug99 "rust" (http://theemergencyfoodsupply.com/a...), what will you eat?
If the government has its way, you won't eat at all. You'll starve to death under the "protection" of the food safety thugs at the FDA who don't believe any "live" food is safe in the first place (hence their war against raw milk).
Those people who have the foresight to grow their own gardens and protect their food sources from the tyranny of the federal government may actually have a chance at surviving. The rest will simply starve while waiting in government food lines where the feds hand out nutritionally worthless cheese and other depleted processed foods that Sesame Street absurdly thinks are "superfoods" (http://www.naturalnews.com/030626_m...).
Big Government declares war on the local food movement
Make no mistake, folks: the government is attempting to destroy the local food movement. They are trying to wipe out small, organic farms that compete with corporate agribiz in the same way the FDA has long plotted to destroy natural health supplement companies who compete with Big Pharma.
It's all about wiping out the little guys and protecting the monopoly markets of the largest and most influential corporations that are poisoning the earth and destroying your health. As Wickard vs Filburn clearly demonstrated, the government does not believe you have any natural right or Constitutional right to grow your own food. In fact, the government believes it has the right to order you to destroy your food at the time of its choosing.
Don't think this could happen to you? Filburn didn't either. The idea that his own government would show up at his door and order him to burn his field of wheat was simply unimaginable. Similarly, the idea that the FDA would tear across the countryside wiping out small family farms is unimaginable to many Americans today. But that's only because they don't know their own history and they put far too much faith in the flimsy idea that the government somehow, in some way, respects the rights and freedoms of the People.
The obvious falsehood of that idea is evident in the way we are all being treated by the TSA. Who would have thought, just two years ago, that we'd be subjected to government-enforced molestation at the hands of airport security screeners? That idea seems unthinkable at the time, much like the idea that the FDA could seize your garden seeds or order you to destroy your greenhouse crops. Yet such actions are already within the claimed power of the federal government... merely waiting to be invoked at the time of their choosing.
Traitors to freedom
All those who voted for S.510 -- which includes the entire U.S. Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike -- are traitors to the freedoms upon which America was founded. They have thrust our food supply into the hands of tyrants who are just waiting to exercise their control and "authority" over as many people as possible.
Five years ago, I joked that people might one day be arrested for smuggling broccoli across state lines. Today, that joke has become a sad reality. The mere act of growing food and selling it to your neighbor without government permission is about to become a criminal act. And no, small farms are not "exempt" from S.510. They must provide financial information and apply to the FDA to be granted exemption status. That sounds a lot like slaves begging for mercy from the king, doesn't it?
Keep the big picture in mind as you consider all this: When teens are poisoned by the aspartame in diet soda, the FDA does nothing. When children are given cancer by the sodium nitrite in hot dogs, the FDA does nothing. When countless thousands of Americans suffer heart attacks and cardiovascular disease each year from the partially-hydrogenated oils used throughout the food supply, the FDA does nothing. But when you grow fresh produce in your own back yard and carry it to your local farmer's market to sell it without government permission, you will be arrested by the FDA as a criminal.
Shame on all those who supported this bill. May history have mercy on their souls for the suffering and injustices they have unleashed upon us all.
Sources for this story include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickar...
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030799_food_freedom_Wickard_vs_Filburn.html#ixzz18uPJOraz
(NaturalNews) In arguing for S.501, the "Food Safety Modernization Act," there are all sorts of attorneys, legislators and internet commentators who keep claiming, "The government won't try to control the food production of small farms." They say, "Your backyard garden is safe" and that the feds won't come knocking on your door to control your seeds or foods.
As usual, these pushers of Big Government are utterly ignorant of the history in their own country. Because as you'll learn right here, not only CAN the U.S. government control and dictate to single-family farms what they can grow in their own backyards; the government has already blatantly done so!
In this article, I'll share with you the full and true story of how Big Government has already run rampant over the rights of individuals to grow their own food -- I'll even cite the US Supreme Court decision that "legalized" this tyranny.
How the tyrants came after a farmer named Roscoe Filburn
It all starts with a farmer named Roscoe Filburn, a modest farmer who grew wheat in his own back yard in order to feed his chickens.
One day, a U.S. government official showed up at his farm. Noting that Filburn was growing a lot of wheat, this government official determined that Filburn was growing too much wheat and ordered Filburn to destroy his wheat crops and pay a large fine to the federal government.
The year was 1940, you see. And through a highly protectionist policy, the federal government had decided to artificially drive up the prices of wheat by limiting the amount of wheat that could be grown on any given acre. This is all part of Big Government's "infinite wisdom" of trying to somehow improve prosperity by destroying food and impairing economic productivity. (Be wary any time the government says it's going to "solve problems" for you.)
The federal government, of course, claims authority over all commerce (even when such claims are blatantly in violation of the limitations placed upon government by the Constitution). But Roscoe Filburn wasn't selling his wheat to anyone. Thus, he was not engaged in interstate commerce. He wasn't growing wheat as something to use for commerce at all, in fact. He was simply growing wheat in his back yard and feeding it to his chickens. That's not commerce. That's just growing your own food.
But get this: The government insisted he pay a fine and destroy his wheat, so Filburn took the government to court, arguing that the federal government had no right to tell a man to destroy his food crops just because they wanted to protect some sort of artificially high prices in the wheat market.
This case eventually went to the US Supreme Court. It's now known as Wickard v. Filburn, and it is one of the most famous US Supreme Court decisions ever rendered because it represents a gross expansion of the tyranny of the federal government.
The US Supreme Court sided with government tyranny
The US Supreme Court, you see, ruled that Roscoe Filburn's wheat could be regulated and destroyed by the federal government simply because Roscoe's wheat production might reduce the amount of wheat he bought from other wheat producers and therefore could impact interstate trade.
Now stay with me on this, because this is a really, really important point to understand.
The federal government claimed authority under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8), even though the Commerce Clause was originally written primarily to prevent states from erecting tariffs, not to allow the federal government to control interstate trade. But thanks to the twisted interpretation of the government -- and believe me, the government will twist every interpretation it can in an effort to assert more power over the population -- the feds claimed that Filburn's growing of his own wheat effectively reduced interstate commerce in wheat. Therefore, they reasoned, they could regulate his backyard wheat production (and order him to destroy his wheat).
Because of this US Supreme Court decision in 1942, it now means the federal government can order you to halt food production in your own back yard by arguing that when you grow your own food, the amount of food you purchase from other food providers is reduced, meaning that your food production impacts interstate trade and therefore can be fully controlled by the federal government.
In other words, the federal government claims the authority right now -- even without the Food Safety Modernization Act -- to knock on your door and order you at gunpoint to destroy all the food in your garden, your greenhouse or your farm. They can order you to destroy all seeds in your possession and all food harvested from your own garden. And they can do all this with the full protection of U.S. law by simply citing the precedent set in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 as ruled by the US Supreme Court.
Why the naysayers will probably starve
Still think you have the right to grow your own food? I've heard all sorts of naysayers claiming that S.510 -- the Food Safety Modernization Act -- is no threat to small growers and family farms. They say the fears about S.510 are overblown and that the government can't possibly shut down your backyard gardens or small, local vegetable farms. They say this with the kind of smug certainty you might typically hear from a doctor who thinks he knows everything about human health (but who actually knows nothing about nutrition).
These naysayers tend to operate out of an assumption that Big Government will never take away their rights and freedoms and that expanding the reach of agencies such as the TSA, FDA, DEA and FTC with even more power and more armed agents is a good thing because the government always takes care of the people. We need more protection from e.coli, they argue, so let's unleash 4,000 armed FDA agents instead to protect us from bacteria. But who will protect us from the FDA?
What these ignorant naysayers don't understand is that government is constantly trying to expand its power to the point of tyranny. As a current example of this, look at what just happened with Chavez in Venezuela. He has now been granted what are essentially dictatorial powers over the country (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...). Chavez is now the King of Venezuela, and whatever he says is now law. Venezuelan citizens are now slaves to his tyranny, and they must follow his orders or be executed.
The United States is moving in precisely the same direction. First, power gets stripped away from the People little by little. Then it gets concentrated in the hands of a few regulatory agencies who write their own laws and who stay in power year after year because none of their officials are elected. (Think the FDA commissioner is elected by the people? Think again...) And then, over time, a few powerful individuals concentrate power from those agencies into their own hands. Before long, the country is run by a handful of power-crazed tyrants who disregard all freedoms and rights of the People.
This is precisely what the FDA is doing with the Food Safety Modernization Act. Backed by yet more funding and a new army of agents, plus the Supreme Court ruling that says the federal government can order you to destroy the food you're growing in your own back yard, the FDA can now pillage the countryside, going from farm to farm and house to house, burning fields and ordering the citizenry to destroy their plants, seeds and crops. This is exactly what they've been doing to raw milk producers and food coops, by the way (http://www.naturalnews.com/030136_R...).
That is no exaggeration. It is a documented "legal" precedent established in Wickard vs Filburn, and it can be used at any moment to destroy the ability of people to grow their own food, thereby making these people totally dependent on dead processed food (which is always FDA approved if it's dead, of course) made in food factories that churn out nutritional deficiencies and death.
What will you eat when the government destroys your local food supply?
You see, under the argument that your backyard garden "impacts interstate commerce," the federal government can order you to simply spray Roundup on your entire garden in order to kill it.
What will you eat then? When the GMO crops suffer a mass catastrophic failure, and the monocultured wheat dies from a global viral infection called ug99 "rust" (http://theemergencyfoodsupply.com/a...), what will you eat?
If the government has its way, you won't eat at all. You'll starve to death under the "protection" of the food safety thugs at the FDA who don't believe any "live" food is safe in the first place (hence their war against raw milk).
Those people who have the foresight to grow their own gardens and protect their food sources from the tyranny of the federal government may actually have a chance at surviving. The rest will simply starve while waiting in government food lines where the feds hand out nutritionally worthless cheese and other depleted processed foods that Sesame Street absurdly thinks are "superfoods" (http://www.naturalnews.com/030626_m...).
Big Government declares war on the local food movement
Make no mistake, folks: the government is attempting to destroy the local food movement. They are trying to wipe out small, organic farms that compete with corporate agribiz in the same way the FDA has long plotted to destroy natural health supplement companies who compete with Big Pharma.
It's all about wiping out the little guys and protecting the monopoly markets of the largest and most influential corporations that are poisoning the earth and destroying your health. As Wickard vs Filburn clearly demonstrated, the government does not believe you have any natural right or Constitutional right to grow your own food. In fact, the government believes it has the right to order you to destroy your food at the time of its choosing.
Don't think this could happen to you? Filburn didn't either. The idea that his own government would show up at his door and order him to burn his field of wheat was simply unimaginable. Similarly, the idea that the FDA would tear across the countryside wiping out small family farms is unimaginable to many Americans today. But that's only because they don't know their own history and they put far too much faith in the flimsy idea that the government somehow, in some way, respects the rights and freedoms of the People.
The obvious falsehood of that idea is evident in the way we are all being treated by the TSA. Who would have thought, just two years ago, that we'd be subjected to government-enforced molestation at the hands of airport security screeners? That idea seems unthinkable at the time, much like the idea that the FDA could seize your garden seeds or order you to destroy your greenhouse crops. Yet such actions are already within the claimed power of the federal government... merely waiting to be invoked at the time of their choosing.
Traitors to freedom
All those who voted for S.510 -- which includes the entire U.S. Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike -- are traitors to the freedoms upon which America was founded. They have thrust our food supply into the hands of tyrants who are just waiting to exercise their control and "authority" over as many people as possible.
Five years ago, I joked that people might one day be arrested for smuggling broccoli across state lines. Today, that joke has become a sad reality. The mere act of growing food and selling it to your neighbor without government permission is about to become a criminal act. And no, small farms are not "exempt" from S.510. They must provide financial information and apply to the FDA to be granted exemption status. That sounds a lot like slaves begging for mercy from the king, doesn't it?
Keep the big picture in mind as you consider all this: When teens are poisoned by the aspartame in diet soda, the FDA does nothing. When children are given cancer by the sodium nitrite in hot dogs, the FDA does nothing. When countless thousands of Americans suffer heart attacks and cardiovascular disease each year from the partially-hydrogenated oils used throughout the food supply, the FDA does nothing. But when you grow fresh produce in your own back yard and carry it to your local farmer's market to sell it without government permission, you will be arrested by the FDA as a criminal.
Shame on all those who supported this bill. May history have mercy on their souls for the suffering and injustices they have unleashed upon us all.
Sources for this story include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickar...
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030799_food_freedom_Wickard_vs_Filburn.html#ixzz18uPJOraz
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