Russia Warns Obama: Monsanto

Russia Warns Obama: Monsanto
Posted: May 28th, 2013 ˑ Filled under: Top News ˑ 14 Comments



The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.

At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.

So grave has this situation become, the MNRE reports, the full European Commission (EC) this past week instituted a two-year precautionary ban (set to begin on 1 December 2013) on these“bee killing” pesticides following the lead of Switzerland, France, Italy, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine, all of whom had previously banned these most dangerous of genetically altered organisms from being used on the continent.

Two of the most feared neonicotinoids being banned are Actara and Cruiser made by the Swiss global bio-tech seed and pesticide giant Syngenta AG which employs over 26,000 people in over 90 countries and ranks third in total global sales in the commercial agricultural seeds market.

Important to note, this report says, is that Syngenta, along with bio-tech giants Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont, now control nearly 100% of the global market for genetically modified pesticides, plants and seeds.

Also to note about Syngenta, this report continues, is that in 2012 it was criminally charged in Germany for concealing the fact that its genetically modified corn killed cattle, and settled a class-action lawsuit in the US for $105 million after it was discovered they had contaminated the drinking supply of some 52 million Americans in more than 2,000 water districts with its “gender-bending” herbicide Atrazine.

To how staggeringly frightful this situation is, the MNRE says, can be seen in the report issued this past March by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) wherein they warned our whole planet is in danger, and as we can, in part, read:

“As part of a study on impacts from the world’s most widely used class of insecticides, nicotine-like chemicals called neonicotinoids, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has called for a ban on their use as seed treatments and for the suspension of all applications pending an independent review of the products’ effects on birds, terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife.



“It is clear that these chemicals have the potential to affect entire food chains. The environmental persistence of the neonicotinoids, their propensity for runoff and for groundwater infiltration, and their cumulative and largely irreversible mode of action in invertebrates raise significant environmental concerns,” said Cynthia Palmer, co-author of the report and Pesticides Program Manager for ABC, one of the nation’s leading bird conservation organizations.

ABC commissioned world renowned environmental toxicologist Dr. Pierre Mineau to conduct the research. The 100-page report, “The Impact of the Nation’s Most Widely Used Insecticides on Birds,” reviews 200 studies on neonicotinoids including industry research obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act. The report evaluates the toxicological risk to birds and aquatic systems and includes extensive comparisons with the older pesticides that the neonicotinoids have replaced. The assessment concludes that the neonicotinoids are lethal to birds and to the aquatic systems on which they depend.

“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” Palmer said. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid — called imidacloprid — can fatally poison a bird. And as little as 1/10th of a neonicotinoid-coated corn seed per day during egg-laying season is all that is needed to affect reproduction.”

The new report concludes that neonicotinoid contamination levels in both surface- and ground water in the United States and around the world are already beyond the threshold found to kill many aquatic invertebrates.”



Quickly following this damning report, the MRNE says, a large group of group of American beekeepers and environmentalists sued the Obama regime over the continued use of these neonicotinoids stating: “We are taking the EPA to court for its failure to protect bees from pesticides. Despite our best efforts to warn the agency about the problems posed by neonicotinoids, the EPA continued to ignore the clear warning signs of an agricultural system in trouble.”

And to how bad the world’s agricultural system has really become due to these genetically modified plants, pesticides and seeds, this report continues, can be seen by the EC’s proposal this past week, following their ban on neonicotinoids, in which they plan to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with the European Union, and as we can, in part, read:

“Europe is rushing towards the good ol days circa 1939, 40… A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”

It’s called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.”



This MRNE report points out that even though this EC action may appear draconian, it is nevertheless necessary in order to purge the continent from continued contamination of these genetically bred “seed monstrosities.”

Most perplexing in all of this, the MRNE says, and which led to Putin’s anger at the US, has been the Obama regimes efforts to protect pesticide-producer profits over the catastrophic damaging being done to the environment, and as the Guardian News Service detailed in their 2 May article titled “US rejects EU claim of insecticide as prime reason for bee colony collapse” and which, in part, says:

“The European Union voted this week for a two-year ban on a class of pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, that has been associated with the bees’ collapse. The US government report, in contrast, found multiple causes for the collapse of the honeybees.”

To the “truer” reason for the Obama regimes protection of these bio-tech giants destroying our world, the MRNE says, can be viewed in the report titled “How did Barack Obama become Monsanto’s man in Washington?” and which, in part, says:

“After his victory in the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA: At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center. As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.”

Even worse, after Russia suspended the import and use of an Monsanto genetically modified cornfollowing a study suggesting a link to breast cancer and organ damage this past September, theRussia Today News Service reported on the Obama regimes response:

“The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week – including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.

The rider, which is officially known as the Farmer Assurance Provision, has been derided by opponents of biotech lobbying as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” as it would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.

The provision, also decried as a “biotech rider,” should have gone through the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees for review. Instead, no hearings were held, and the piece was evidently unknown to most Democrats (who hold the majority in the Senate) prior to its approval as part of HR 993, the short-term funding bill that was approved to avoid a federal government shutdown.”

On 26 March, Obama quietly signed this “Monsanto Protection Act” into law thus ensuring the American people have no recourse against this bio-tech giant as they fall ill by the tens of millions, and many millions will surely end up dying in what this MRNE report calls the greatest agricultural apocalypse in human history as over 90% of feral (wild) bee population in the US has already died out, and up to 80% of domestic bees have died out too.

Source

Class of 2013: You Can’t Make a Living Just by Solving Problems

Class of 2013: You Can’t Make a Living Just by Solving Problems
May 21, 2013




It is now my great pleasure, graduates, to welcome you to the Real World – a world that is quite different from the Real World my own classmates and I first encountered a few decades ago.

When we graduated, finding a job and earning a salary was pretty much the only way to go. But today such jobs are no longer so easy to find. In fact, the data shows that by 2020 more people in the United States will be working for themselves than are drawing salaries, with most of the salaried employees being older, and most of the self-employed younger.

And then there are all the changes brought on by computerization. As highly interconnected and computerized as we are today, by the time you young graduates reach retirement age you'll be roughly a million times more interconnected and computerized. And what is it that computers do? They solve problems, that’s what. They solve any kind of technical or mechanical problem involved in creating the things that have economic value. So the more computer power we have – and we have twice as much of it every 18 months or so – the more problems computers will be capable of solving.

In fact, if you can state something as a technical problem that has a solution – a task to be completed – then eventually this problem can and will be solved by computer:
Finding a good restaurant in Topeka.
Running a cashier’s station at the grocery store.
Landing a plane.
Filing a sales and expense report.
Operating an assembly line.
Diagnosing a disease.
Making a profit through arbitraging a security or some other asset.
Driving a car.
Spotting a tax deduction.
Summarizing a news story or an academic article.

It shouldn’t be a mystery where all the salaried jobs have gone, because problem-solving jobs like these – jobs that pay perfectly good wages to human beings, or at least used to – are virtually all being automated away. It’s not a question of whether enough computer power will be available to solve these problems, only of when.

There are only two ways to “beat the clock” against the kind of galloping automation already consuming so many jobs. One way is to become very good at dealing with interpersonal issues – people skills. We are all much more interconnected, and our economic activities are more and more interdependent. So resolving the people-to-people issues that plague organizations and groups of cooperating people is a skill that is likely never to go out of style, and it's obviously beyond the capabilities of any conceivable computer.

The other way to beat the clock is not to focus on solving problems but on discovering them. Discovering new problems is something that computers can’t really do, and are unlikely to be able to do in your lifetime. Discovering new problems is otherwise known as “creativity.” Andcreativity, graduates, is one of the most important keys to generating economic value. By its very definition, creativity involves solving a problem that wasn’t there before.

Maintaining a creative and open-minded outlook and relating well with other people are likely to be extremely important skills in whatever career path you choose, bar none.
Launch a business on your own, even as a free-lancer, and you won’t be able to land a customer until you’ve discovered some problem you can solve better than a computer, and you have enough interpersonal skills to convince someone else that you can.
If you go into sales, your prospect will be able to use computer power to solve the problem of evaluating your product’s capabilities, but you’ll still be able to generate value if you can converse with her in such a way as to discover new problems to solve.
Go into finance, and your computer will solve the problem of making profitable trades based on trends and probabilities, but you can generate value yourself by thinking creatively about financial problems that haven’t yet been solved.
If you go into teaching, computers will take over more and more of the problem of basic instruction, but you’ll still be able to generate value as long as you can come up with new pedagogical perspectives, or you can creatively improve a student’s performance through your personal relationship.
Even if you’re graduating pre-med, you won’t be able to generate economic value for long simply by solving the problem of operating a scalpel or interpreting a CAT scan. Rather, you’ll need to discover new problems, perhaps by doing research, or perhaps simply by listening more creatively to a patient’s own description of her symptoms, human to human.

Gosh, I just wish I were your age! What a marvelous time it is to be alive, and to be joining an economic system that prizes originality over conformity, and relationships over transactions. It truly is a wonderful future you face, even though it will be radically different from the future my colleagues and I faced when we were your age.

There is one more extremely important piece of Real World advice I need to leave you with, however. Technology is advancing so rapidly that things have become a lot less predictable than they used to be. No matter how good you are at discovering new problems to solve and relating to people, there will be ups and downs, bonanzas and disasters, that you simply cannot anticipate. No one could.

So how do you prepare for such unpredictability? How do you increase your chances of success, and remain resilient in the face of the occasional reversal? There is only one sure-fire way to prepare for such a changing world, and it is one of the most time-tested, old-fashioned ideas known:

Always be trustworthy to others.

Live your life in such a way that others can trust you. Do this, and you’ll find that others will come to your defense when you need defending. Others will want you to succeed. It won't insulate you from failure, but it will make failures more tolerable, and recovery more achievable.

Technologies may come and go, problems to solve and the business models required to solve them may appear and disappear, but having the trust of your friends and colleagues – that is a genuinely timeless asset.

And, you’ll be happier. You can trust me on this.

Photo: Paper Boat Creative/Getty Images

The Art of Conversation

The Art of Conversation

by Meta Wagner / 10 April 2013 / for The Capital Grille

An hour cocktail party or two-hour business dinner can feel like a day dragging on if you aren’t silver-tongued or you wind up paired with someone who is less-than-outgoing. Even captivating public speakers or extroverted account executives can sometimes find themselves at a loss when the go-to topics (business, movies, weather, kids) are exhausted.

Fortunately, no matter where you are on the conversation comfort scale, there are techniques that can make any conversation engaging, meaningful, and memorable.
Banter like the Best Conversationalists

Conversation, as with any art from, has past masters that the rest of us can emulate. And, no group of gabbers is as renowned as the Algonquin Round Table. These writers, critics, actors and wits, including Dorothy Parker, met for lunch regularly at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 to 1929, producing linguistic gems that are still quoted to this day.

Not everyone can produce the perfect bon mot, but everyone has personal stories to share. And, storytelling, according to Paul Smith, author of Lead with a Story, is the basis for relationship building through conversation. This is especially true in the workplace, where, all too often, hallway chatter can seem predictable or even superficial.

Smith says that there are two types of stories you can tell that will be instant hits. “Be self-deprecating,” says Smith. “Everyone would love to hear about how you accidentally hit ‘Reply All’ to the company email and admitted something a little embarrassing to the entire organization.”

The other welcomed type of story is about when you learned something, or learned it in an unexpected way. “Talking about your medieval history class might only be interesting to other history buffs,” says Smith. “But if you tell a story about how you learned medieval history by watching Monty Python movies and cross-referencing the facts in Wikipedia, almost anyone will find that entertaining.”
Create a Genuine Connection

Storytelling can also take you beyond simple camaraderie and actually allow you to create a closer, more genuine bond with co-workers or clients. It all depends on how willing you are to be open and honest.

“The most effective stories are ones that create vulnerability by showing an insecurity, or describing a painful time in your life, or a costly failure,” says Smith. “They’re exactly the kind of stories people don’t want to tell to a bunch of strangers in the office—and that’s the point. It’s a vicious circle. We don’t tell our personal stories because we work with strangers. They remain strangers because we don’t tell our personal stories. You have to break the cycle. Tell your own stories and challenge other people to tell theirs, and you’ll never work with strangers again.”

Daniel Menaker, former editor at the New Yorker and Random House and the author of A Good Talk, agrees. “Take risks and confide in others,” he advises. “Those are the conversations that come from nowhere and develop into exchanges with more meaning.”
Treat Conversing Like a Task

Stimulating repartee, funny anecdotes, and personal disclosures are the stock in trade of a great conversationalist. But there are also times when you might feel shy or anxious about attending an upcoming dinner party or company outing. That’s where your project management skills will come in handy.

Debra Fine, author of The Fine Art of Small Talk, says to approach these occasions as you would any other project. “Most of us are great at tasks,” she says. “That’s one reason why we’ve succeeded, professionally.”

First step is a little reconnaissance. Fine suggests getting hold of the guest list if you can and reviewing everyone’s names, especially partners and spouses, so you can try to recall what you know about each person and, if you’ve met before, what you talked about the last time you were together.

Next, prepare three “conversation starters” that are broad enough to appeal to nearly anyone and are designed to elicit specific, and hopefully interesting, responses. “Bring me up to date with that project you were telling me about last time” or “What’s been going on with work for you since the last time I saw you? “ Or, Fine’s favorite when you’re speaking to someone you don’t know well, “What keeps you busy outside of work?”

Finally, come to any social event equipped with short answers to questions you’ll probably be asked, like “How’s your year been?” or “How are the kids?”
Listen Intently

With so much focus on what to say, it can be easy to forget that talking is only half of a conversation. The other half, of course, is listening. “One thing most people enjoy is when other people pay attention to them,” says Smith. This includes listening closely to what others have to say, asking questions to get them to say more, and genuinely appreciating what was shared.

Alex Lickerman, M.D., physician and author of The Undefeated Mind, also believes that the value of being a good listener cannot be overstated. He says that shifting the attention away from yourself and toward others--genuinely caring about what they have to say--“will lead to an approach and tone that people will notice and warm to. And it will make you less fearful in engaging with others.”

The benefits of being a good listener do not end there. As Smith observes, one requirement for any great conversation is to have at least one good listener. “And if that’s you,” he says, “you will be the one in the group people like because you were largely responsible for ensuring that those speaking were having a good time.”

The best news about becoming a better listener? As Smith points out, “You don’t have to be a great talker to be a great conversationalist.”

Meta Wagner is the “Vox Pop” columnist for PopMatters, an online magazine of cultural criticism. Her articles and essays have appeared in Salon, The Boston Globe Magazine, Chicago Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor.

More At The Table…
Master Class: Achieving Wine’s Top Honor
Private Dining Trends: A Twist on Tradition
The Art of the Guest List
Command(ing) Performances: The Triumph of a Great Toast
Turning the Tables: The Technology Divide
← At the Table Home

5 Leadership Lessons: Leading Any Team to Succes

5 Leadership Lessons: Leading Any Team to Success

Fistitude is a fable about a basketball team at a small private high school that is struggling through a rough season. The coach must take a leave and it is up to the interim coach to try to turn things around.


Through Fistitude—each finger representing a success attitude—author Sean Glaze presents five lessons to build leaders and teamwork. Glaze illustrates that leadership is taking personal responsibility for what happens, holding yourself accountable and setting an example for others. Here, described in brief are five success attitudes:

Frustration is a symptom of higher aspirations. It’s a gift. It lets you know that you are wasting your time and need to change something. Millions of people just tread water day after day and year after year because they never decide on the paradise they want to row toward. Too many of your friends think they have to wait for something to happen to them—they think that they are supposed to graduate from school and go find themselves. And the truth is, you can’t find yourself. You create yourself. And you create yourself by choosing what island you will row to.

Words create your reality. Think about your mind as a fertile field. Every day, you plant seeds on that field—and those seeds are thoughts and those thoughts are the words and ideas that you choose to accept from yourself and others. Your life will be the harvest of the seeds you allow to grow there.

Nothing changes until you start something. Results aren’t determined by what you are capable of doing—they’re all about what you are willing to actually do. If you start doing something different, it will eventually inspire others to join you because they’ll see the change in you and want it for themselves.

You have to let others know you’re committed to something special and share your enthusiasm, your vision, your words, your plan of action. When you share your goals and dreams, two things happen. First, you begin to build support and gather enough talent and effort to make something happen that you could never accomplish by yourself, and second, you advertise everyone’s commitment to accomplishing the goal because you promise each other to row together.

Obstacles are sometimes put there to test us, to see how badly we want to fight for what lies behind them. When you try anything difficult, you will have to fail a few times before you become ready to achieve it. You will be tempted by convenience, by distractions, by criticism, and by doubt, but you must stay committed to what you began.
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