Tag Archives: Genetically modified organism

Joni Mitchell on Morgellons Disease

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Morgellons fibers embedded in skin. PHOTO: PLOS ONE

Morgellons fibers embedded in skin. PHOTO: PLOS ONE

Influential singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell just turned 70 last Thursday. In a retrospective piece about her career published by U-T San Diego, this particular line caught my attention:

She no longer performs because she has a rare medical condition, Morgellons syndrome, and because decades of chain-smoking have ravaged her once-angelic voice.

It’s a huge tragedy that someone of her talent can no longer sing, but what was truly surprising to me was the revelation that she has Morgellons syndrome. It’s truly courageous for someone as well-known and widely respected as Mitchell to go public about it because people suffering from Morgellons have often been dismissed by the medical establishment as being “delusional”. The issue is clouded by the fact that reported physical symptoms of Morgellons syndrome are indeed similar to delusional parasitosis and in some cases it may also have neurological symptoms (though in most reported cases the symptoms include brain fog, fear, depression, decreased coordination and personality changes rather than delusions).

Joni Mitchell related her personal experience with Morgellons in this excerpt from a 2010 LA Times interview:

LAT: You’ve come out in the media as a sufferer of a controversial condition known as Morgellons. How is your health currently?

JM: I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space, but my health’s the best it’s been in a while, Two nights ago, I went out for the first time since Dec. 23: I don’t look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Garbo and Dietrich hid away just because people became so upset watching them age, but this is worse. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I’ve been through another pandemic — I’m a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as “delusion of parasites,” and they send you to a psychiatrist. I’m actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that’s owed to them.

As disturbing as symptoms of Morgellons Syndrome are, just as frightening is the fact that we know so little about what it is, what causes it, hows it’s transmitted, and how to cure people who have it. However, in this article recently reposted at GlobalResearch, they uncovered the following information linking Morgellons to GMOs:

In the Sept. 15-21 issue of New Scientist magazine, Daniel Elkan describes a patient he calls “Steve Jackson,” who “for years” has “been finding tiny blue, red and black fibers growing in intensely itchy lesions on his skin.” He quotes Jackson as saying, “The fibers are like pliable plastic and can be several millimeters long. Under the skin, some are folded in a zigzag pattern. These can be as fine as spider silk, yet strong enough to distend the skin when you pull them, as if you were pulling on a hair.”

Doctors say that this type of disease could only be caused by a parasite, but anti-parasitic medications do not help. Psychologists insist that this is a new version of the well-known syndrome known as “delusional parasitosis.” While this is a “real” disease, it is not a physically-caused one.

But now there is physical evidence that Morgellons is NOT just psychological. When pharmacologist Randy Wymore offered to study some of these fibers if people sent them to him, he discovered that “fibers from different people looked remarkably similar to each other and yet seem to match no common environmental fibers.”

When they took them to a police forensic team, they said they were not from clothing, carpets or bedding. They have no idea what they are.

Researcher Ahmed Kilani says he was able to break down two fiber samples and extract their DNA. He found that they belonged to a fungus.

An even more provocative finding is that biochemist Vitaly Citovsky discovered that the fibers contain a substance called “Agrobacterium,” which, according to New Scientist, is “used commercially to produce genetically-modified plants.” Could GM plants be “causing a new human disease?”

To learn more about Morgellons Disease, visit the Charles E. Holman Foundation.

Lessons From Washington’s GMO Labeling Campaign

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As ballots in Washington state are still being counted, current results show that No votes for Ballot Initiative 522 (which would requiring labeling of foods containing GMOs) are leading the Yes votes 54.8% to 45.2%. Though at this point it’s still too close to call, no matter what the outcome there’s important lessons we can learn from the campaign.

Despite increasing awareness of the real dangers of GMOs, thanks largely to independent media and grass-roots organizations, huge influxes of corporate cash can cloud the issue and sway public opinion in an incredibly short period of time. As reported by Al Jazeera:

…in Washington, where television ads of varying levels of accuracy have been running since early September, pro-labeling sentiment has dropped roughly 41 percent in less than 60 days.

Obviously, biotech and processed food companies are extremely alarmed by the notion of people knowing what foods contain GMOs. They must realize there’s enough awareness of the dangers of GMOs for a significant percentage of the population to act on such information and hurt their profits. Why else would they spend a record amount of money in Washington state elections (over $21 million) to defeat I-522? The average donation against I-522 was more than 20,000 times larger than the average donation in support of it. Not surprisingly, the largest percentage was spent by Monsanto. Emma Goldman famously said: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”. There’s definitely some truth to that, but on the other hand if voting did nothing, corporations like Monsanto wouldn’t spend so much money to influence the outcome.

Not only do they not want the public to know what’s in their foods, they don’t want the public to know who’s spending the money to keep them in the dark. The Grocery Manufacturer’s Association refused to reveal the names of their anti-GMO labeling corporate donors until they were forced to by a lawsuit from the WA State Attorney General. Storylink.com published the following list with respective donation amounts and contact information links:

PepsiCo, Inc. – $1,620,899
Nestle USA Inc. – $1,052,743
The Coca-Cola Company – $1,047,332
General Mills Inc. – $598,819
ConAgra Foods – $285,281
Campbell Soup Company – $265,140
The Hershey Company – $248,305
The J.M. Smucker Company – $241,091
Kellogg Company – $221,852
Mondelez Global LLC – $144,895
Flowers Foods Inc. – $141,288
Abbott Nutrition – $127,459
Pinnacle Foods Group LLC – $120,846
Dean Foods Company – $120,245
McCormick & Company Inc – $102,208
Land O’Lakes, Inc. – $99,803
Cargill Inc. – $98,601
The Hillshire Brands Company – $97,398
Bunge North America, Inc. – $94,993
Bimbo Bakeries USA – $94,693
Del Monte Foods Company – $86,576
Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. – $55,313
Hormel Foods Corporation – $52,908
Bumble Bee Foods LLC – $36,073
Welch Foods, Inc. $28,859
Shearer’s Foods, Inc. $25,251
Rich Products Corporation – $24,049
Clement Pappas & Company Inc. – $21,043
Sunny Delight Beverages Company – $21,043
Bush Brothers & Company – $16,233
Knouse Foods Cooperative Inc. – $14,429
The Clorox Company – $12,024
Bruce Foods Corporation – $3,006
Moody Dunbar Inc. – $1,804

As can be deduced from this list, there’s probably a lot more GMOs in supermarkets than most people realize. With or without GMO labeling, if one is concerned for personal and planetary health it’d be best to get into the practice of avoiding all processed foods as much as possible and look specifically for foods labeled as “non-GMO”.

As an alternative to the GMO labeling movement, activists such as Jon Rappoport, Mike Adams and others have suggested organizing around banning GMOs as 26 countries have already done and the Los Angeles City Council has recently proposed.

On the lighter side, this should come as no surprise to anyone, but corporate assholes apparently don’t know how to throw a party. While they should’ve been celebrating last night, this is what Seattle’s weekly alternative paper The Stranger reported:

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MONSANTO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO THROW A PARTY
8:16 PM
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The No on GMO labeling campaign is supposedly hosting a party at the Westin Hotel. They have burned some serious bucks opposing Initiative 522, almost all of it coming from out of state. As for the party? No one is here. There is bottled water, Coca Cola, and cookies on a table. No real food. Seriously, three people in the room—one from Seattle Times. It’s all very strange.

THE MONSANTO MORGUE
8:58 PM

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This is what it must feel like to be in a conference room in the Death Star. No one has anything to do. No one is around. But those checking names at the door have to wait and wait like something might happen. Power functions with no one. Power does not need people. People are democracy.

Building Bridges: Top 10 Issues That 99% Can Agree On

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On a recent episode of PBS Newshour, Jeffrey Brown hosted a roundtable discussion exploring the dangers of polarized politics for American Governance. The guests were Eric Liu, Steven Hayward and Beverly Gage. Most of the discussion was an analysis of the recent government shutdown from a typical left vs. right perspective, but I thought their view of reactions of average citizens was interesting:

JEFFREY BROWN: And so, Eric Liu, let me ask you, because I know you’re very — you’re trying to engage people in the act of citizenship. What do you see the effect of all of this? Are they more engaged? Are they just more disgusted and turned off?

ERIC LIU: Well, I don’t think those are mutually exclusive. There is disgust.

(LAUGHTER)

ERIC LIU: But, because of the disgust, there’s actually more engagement.

And that’s true on both the left and the right. Look, I think the reality is, when Steven was speaking a moment ago about the kind of encroachment of ever-growing and ever-larger government, we can have reasonable debates in this country about what the proper size and scope of government ought to be, but we ought to regard those debates not as “on/off, yes/no, my way or we shut the whole thing down” kind of debates.

…so people from both left and right watching these last two weeks are ready for something different.

They’re ready to actually hear each other and see one another and not the caricatures of one another, and try to figure out, well, where is it that we can manage to agree on the role of government, and where we can’t agree, how can we recognize that to be a citizen isn’t just a single-shot sudden death game. It’s infinite repeat play, and you’re going to win some, and I’m going to win some.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, let me ask Steven Hayward to respond to this.

Do you see the result of this as people ready to work together or more divisions that ever more polarizes?

STEVEN HAYWARD: Well, I think there’s two things to think about here.

One is, is we have divided government once again. The voters, God bless them, have a lot of cognitive dissonance. Right? In the last week, what you saw is people say, I don’t like Obamacare, but I don’t want the government shut down. I don’t want it to be a matter of a budget fight the way it’s become. And that’s why Republicans lost this proximate battle.

But if you look at some of the poll numbers right now, I think they ought to be very worrying for everybody, but I think more worrying ultimately for liberals, for this reason. You have seen record high numbers of people who now say — I think 65 percent in one poll — that government is a threat to their rights.

You have seen a long-term trend going back really to the 1960s of the number of people saying they have confidence that the federal government will do the right thing down in 15 percent, 20 percent, when it used to be in the ’50s up around 60 to 70 percent. And to the extent that if you’re liberal and that you believe in political solutions to our social problems or government engagement with our problems, you want the public to have confidence in the federal government’s capacities.

And so it seems to me that, as much as this might have been a train wreck for Republicans, the long-term effect of this might not necessarily play out that way.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Beverly, when you look back at political — what could be called political crises of the past, what does it — what happens in terms of public response to those?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, I think to some degree, Steven’s quite right, in that I would kind of like to subscribe to Eric’s view that we’re going to have a much more serious conversation, a much more bipartisan conversation.

But I think it’s equally possible that you’re actually going to see people throw their hands up and say, oh, it’s all such a mess. I don’t really want to make sense of it. I don’t want to deal with it. And, in that way, it sort of serves an anti-government message, and in some ways, even serves sort of the Tea Party message in ways that maybe were intended and maybe weren’t.

But I think there’s also a danger for the Republican Party in all of this, which is to say that these divisions that we’re seeing right now within the Republican Party between moderates and Tea Party conservatives and also between a sort of establishment business class, which is very, very alarmed about what’s happening, and this more right-wing part of the party, that actually may in fact spell destruction for the Republican Party.

Those are divisions that have been there for a long time. They have often been papered over. But when you’re on the brink of financial catastrophe in the way that we were, we may not see them be papered over, and we may in fact see some sort of political realignment coming out of this.

You can read the complete transcript here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec13/governing_10-17.html

All three guests made good points, though the views of conservatives and liberals are typically generalized in such discussions and I think issues of most concern to citizens on a grassroots level are often not the ones being debated enough in Washington D.C. There definitely needs to be more political discussion between left and right not just within government but among the general public. Increased communication and education is the best defense against “divide and conquer” tactics but of course this is easier said than done because politics has become a taboo subject for many, mainly due to fear of getting into heated arguments. But perhaps this fear is unwarranted because there’s many issues that the left and right can agree on (though motives and priorities may differ). These are just some of the more topical examples:

  1. End the Wars – As demonstrated by widespread negative reaction to war threats against Syria, people are perhaps becoming more aware of political trickery thus becoming harder to persuade. Also, as living standards drop for more people, the connection between costly foreign policy and the nation’s declining economy and infrastructure has never been more obvious.
  2. Stop the Surveillance State – Privacy is a universal human need. Mass spying on citizens is illegal and unethical whether online or through drones and informants.
  3. End Unjust Trade Agreements – Agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) hurt working people and endangers health and safety, the environment, and national sovereignty.
  4. End the Fed – We’ve endured 100 years of a “Federal” Reserve run by private bankers and all we have to show for it is a debt of tens of trillions of dollars. It will never be paid off as long as we continue to use interest-bearing federal reserve notes as currency.
  5. Create Affordable Health Care – It can be argued that Obamacare is an incremental improvement but everyone knows it’s not enough and is far more beneficial for greedy insurance companies than the poor.
  6. End the Drug War – We can all agree the Drug War is a colossal failure (when it comes to the stated purpose of reducing drug addiction). It has only increased incarceration rates while enriching the prison-industrial complex and drug cartels. We need to adopt policies that have proven to be effective such as legalization, decriminalization and harm-reduction.
  7. Stop GMOs – GMOs are unnecessary, physically and economically harmful to farmers, may have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystem, and only serves to increase profits for companies like Monsanto.
  8. End Obscene Economic Inequality – Complete economic equality might not be possible, but when economic inequality reaches absurd and unsustainable levels as they have today, obviously something needs to change.
  9. Protect Internet Freedom – Legislation such as the NDAA, SOPA and PIPA indicate that government and corporations are threatened by the internet. Attacks against internet freedom are attacks against freedom of speech, freedom of information and cognitive liberty.
  10. Ignore Corporate News – Another point of agreement between right and left is the corporate news media’s increasing irrelevancy and bias. Today it is not so much a liberal or conservative bias as it is a neoliberal and neoconservative bias.