Rev Blair

Victoriavilles on the X axis and Sherwoods on the Y? (sorry, couldn't help myself...)

It was Canola. Monsanto has a place not far from here, we live in a windy city, and I assume it blew out of a truck. I, and my neighbour, were both away when the canola sprouted, which is why we lost our gardens completely. Those who suffered losses were home though. They were simply overwhelmed by the amount of canola that sprung up and, because of the timing, couldn't remove it completely from the rows without harming their garden plants. I was using Round Up (glyphosate) for spring and fall weed control at the time...garden vegetables are not resistant. Most, maybe all, of those affected did or still do the same. We aren't people with some moral objection to using the stuff, and it is useful in controlling weeds. I also know farmers who have lost a significant amount of wheat in similar scenarios. I no longer use Round Up in my garden because I was noticing an increase in glyphosate-resistant weeds. I'm in a prime area for that...glyphosates are over-used in agriculture here, have been for a couple of decades, and there are a lot of areas between arable fields that get minor doses from over-spray etc. Farmers here regularly use tank mixes to deal with the problem, but that's not really practical...or even possible...for a kitchen garden. Instead I'm switching to smaller raised beds, mulch (mostly grass clippings) and deep tillage. That's all pretty easy when growing veggies for two people and the food bank (if you have the room, ask your local food bank if they have a "grow a row" program...poor people need fresh vegetables), but is not practical for larger operations. Then I'd say we are facing a threat. It's pretty hard to deal with though because, again, it's not a direct threat from GM crops. I know cereal grain farmers who have faced similar problems with GM canola as I did with my garden. I know non-GM canola farmers who have run into similar problems (Google Percy Schmeiser for an idea about that, although I don't him). It's not really a problem with genetic engineering though, it's more a political problem and one of regulation. Mostly I'd say that it's a problem with massive ignorance on all sides.

Wow, that describes my day exactly. I even did the shopping part...I bought some random steel and some pulleys that might become something one day, and some beer to help me decide what they might become.

I'm Reverend Blair. In late 1999 my friend decided to get married and asked me to officiate at his wedding. I dutifully got ordained on the internet and performed the service. Somehow the name stuck, and I've been Reverend Blair ever since. What's an internet-ordained atheist reverend to do?

No...with the possible exception of the web of bizarrity (I'm inventing new words today, just go with it) woven by various fundamentalist religions in an attempt to discredit science.

I have no hole inside. I'm actually more satisfied than most people I know. Most of the atheists I know are less consumeristic than most of the theists I know. I haven't done a formal study or anything, but I have noticed that we tend to buy more used stuff, tend to repair or find other uses for worn or broken things, and tend to be more likely to recycle. I'm not sure if that got anything to do atheism, or whether it's related to most of the atheists I know being either scientists or artists of some type...a reflection on my peers...but it kind of calls into question the idea that capitalists have more influence among atheists than on theists.

Define "non-threatening to human health," though. I've had GM crops...the same ones I've seeded on the farm...take over my vegetable garden. My guess is they blew in from a truck on the highway. They able out to out-compete the usual weeds and ended up choking out the vegetables I planted. I know the plants themselves were non-threatening...if they were threatening, I'd be dead by now, but they wiped out my garden and my neighbour's garden, and reduced yield in at least three other gardens. It didn't really matter much...we can all afford to buy veggies around here. Transfer that same scenario to a region or country in the developing world though, say 1/5 of secondary crops lost to invasion by GM crops, and you are looking at a huge disaster. We need to be very careful with this stuff, and so far we haven't been.

If the purpose of ingesting the drugs is to induce irrationality, is that mis-use? Is a little, relatively controlled, irrationality necessarily a bad thing? Do drugs necessarily induce irrationality? A lot of writers, artists, musicians and even everyday people have produced some pretty amazing work while under the influence of one drug or another. Just to give an example that's blasting out of my stereo right now, Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in Cave and Grooving with a Pict." Okay, I don't how stoned they were when they made it, but it certainly didn't come from sitting around and drinking warm milk. The song has an infectious beat and an internal logic that kind of reaches out and slaps you in the face. For another example, read Hunter Thompson's work. He was a good writer, straight or stoned, but the stuff he wrote when he was stoned has a kind of beat to it that makes it flow a lot better. It's a little harder to read, a little less factual, often very dark, but in the end it hit the truth more often. That's another problem with these "non-drug" ways of inducing hallucinations...they take the art out of it.

Without chemical aids? I guess about two days. With chemical aids? Four days. Six dozen beer. One car crash (I wasn't driving). A massive nosebleed, which would have gotten me pity sex, but I finally passed out.

I wish some real scientists would look into some kind of pill to cure the search for perpetual motion sickness. I mean, I'd love for it to work, but unless we discover Magik first, it ain't gonna.

Golden rice didn't really have much vitamin A in it though...not enough to do what it claimed to do...and there was a risk of it pushing out other kinds of rice. Lack of genetic variation is already becoming a problem with rice and corn, and people are rightly concerned as a result. That kind of monoculture leaves us open to world-wide crop failures. I don't think that's a reason to ban GE crops, but it does mean that they have to be carefully managed. Our present economic and political models simply aren't designed for that.

Thanks for starting this, SkepticLance. Yes. Yes. Maybe. Uh huh. Yes. Everywhere. Lots. You bet. I see chemicals kind of like nuclear energy...they aren't inherently good or bad, but we're kind of stupid as a species. I worked in photography and photo labs for years, I spent a lot of time on the farm as a kid. I worked construction, mostly building decks, fences and sun rooms and mostly out of pressure-treated lumber. I've been around chemicals forever. Something I would say is that the chemicals have become a lot more benign over the years. They've also become a lot more pervasive. If you look around your house, you'll find that almost everything is held together with formaldehyde glue. That pressure treated lumber that's all over the place is coated in chromium arsenic. That "new car smell" is chemical off-gassing. At the same time, we have less fresh air. Our houses are sealed up. Our cars are sealed up. We spend less time outside. It's a big topic...with way too many implications. I was talking about farming in the other thread. When I was a kid, the tractors didn't have cabs and the chemicals we used were a lot harsher. Now the tractors are sealed and air conditioned, so you breath in the off-gassing of chemicals in the cab, but are ostensibly protected from the chemicals you are spraying. Except that you still mix them, still crawl around equipment coated in them, still walk through fields covered in them, etc. Then you go back to your house, wash in well water that has high levels of pretty much everything in it, and watch TV in your sealed up house. Because of the nature of modern farming, you are just as likely as your urban friends to eat prepared food, and you aren't getting exercise the way farmers did in the past because of mechanization and specialization. So there are lots of factors that have little or nothing to do with farm chemicals that are also affecting you. We can't just turn off the chemical tap either. Again using farming as an example, we can't grown enough food without the chemicals and even if we could, the old methods weren't exactly environmentally sound either. Tillage leads to erosion and soil depletion. Natural fertilization still pollutes waterways and e coli becomes a concern. Proper crop rotation requires leaving fields fallow and tilling them, but we can't afford to leave fields fallow either financially for the farmers or production-wise because we are short of food. So what's the answer? I don't think there really is one, short of getting rid of a few billion people. Reduce the world's population to a billion and we can go back to tilling the hell out of everything using horses. Of course anybody who has worked with horses doesn't like that and you can't just make 5 or 6 billion people disappear. Something that gives me hope is that farmers who have been following proper zero-tillage, constant cropping methods are now able to reduce chemical usage. They still need to fertilize, mostly with chemical fertilizers, but they need fewer herbicides because the weeds can't get a foothold if something else is already growing there. Crop rotation also reduces the amount of fertilizer needed, since different plants play different roles in the carbon and nitrogen cycles. What fills me with a sense of impending doom is the number of farmers who have taken the worst of the old and the worst of the new methods and mixed them. They still till the land every year, but just once, so they use a ton more chemicals to control weeds. They base their crop rotations on prices or subsidies instead of what's best for the land, so they need more chemical fertilizers. It's bad farming, but a lot of them have been put in that position by economic realities...they want to move to the new methods, but can't afford the five years of reduced profits or losses. I think the solution to that is to change the subsidy regimes, especially in the US...it's about the worst in the world. After that, and this is going to be really unpopular with farmers, is regulate the hell out of everything. Tell them what crops they are planting and what methods they will use according to the science. The final thing is that I would force chemical and agribusiness out of the farming end of things. Cargill, Monsanto, Dupont, and all the rest have no business owning land to grow crops on. It distorts the market and encourages small farmers to follow bad practices in an attempt to compete.

I have some experience with book and magazine publishers, and they generally follow, not lead. It's more likely that they woke up and said, "This stuff is selling, let's advertise," than, "We need more."

Understood, SkepticLance, although I find the implications of one are very much tied up with the other when it comes to agriculture.

I wouldn't recommend drug use to anybody, but I'm a little older than many here and I'm not going to pretend that I never experimented. I grew out of it, except for beer and nicotine. First of all, stay way from white powders. No coke, no heroin, no speed. I'd include MDMA and MDA (what gets called Ecstasy these days) in that. You don't even want to know what's in it besides the drug (rat poison, baby laxative, chalk), how it's made (you soak the opium or coca in gasoline, ether, various acids etc...), and the drugs themselves are addictive. The only chemical I'd say is okay is LSD (acid). As somebody else pointed out, it has been tested extensively. Make sure you know and trust whoever you get it from though...it's generally made in a basement or garage. Lots of people know how to make it, and make it properly, but there's a lot of clowns out there too. Second of all, stay away from those "non-drug" trips. Nutmeg will get you high, taking enough to so is basically poisoning yourself though. Satvia is a very rough high, and hard on your body. Again, to get the wanted effect you are basically poisoning yourself. The same goes for Jimson Weed. I don't know how true it is, but I read that some kids choke themselves to get high. Don't be an idiot. If you're that desperate to get high, go buy something. If you want to hallucinate, mushrooms are good. Not too hard on your body, not too weird, and relatively easy to control the dose on. Make sure the guy who picked them knew what he was doing, and you'll be okay. Mescaline is okay too. Kind of hard on the stomach though. Peyote is very hard on the stomach...you will almost certainly puke...but it's fairly safe and you'll see some very weird stuff. If you do any of these drugs, make sure you have a babysitter. Get somebody who is experienced with their effects and willing to remain straight themselves. Stay off the booze before taking them. One final thing...all of these drugs are illegal. If you get caught, you will end up with a criminal record. If you live in the US, the penalties are pretty damned harsh. If you live in a more enlightened country, the penalties are less harsh, but it can still affect future employment and travel.

I think there are a few factors at play. The biggest one is likely a push-back against the political influence of fundamentalist religion in the world. We kind of sat quietly while they stomped all over us, and now their doctrine has largely failed. It has also put us in a dangerous place...global warming being the big one (it's kind of hard to believe in the science behind that and a 6,000 year old earth at the same time), but also stem cell research etc. Then there's the "me too" factor. Dawkins, Harris, et al. started speaking out and people realized they weren't alone in their lack of belief. It's always easier when you aren't the only one. Then there's the role of Islamic fundamentalism. A lot of look at where that has led...and the Middle East was the most scientifically advanced area on the planet before it took hold...and see some very real parallels with fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism. More than that, we see how the more moderate in each of those religions have acted as enablers of the extremists by pushing the idea that you shouldn't criticize another's religious beliefs. So people began speaking out. I don't think it's going to end anytime soon.

Yeah, I was kind of surprised when I heard that organic farmers were using copper sulphate. I had some very limited experience with it back in my darkroom days, and it was generally considered about the most dangerous chemical in the darkroom. My concern with glyphosate, other than the political/economic one is it's overuse. Like I said, in some areas the well water stinks of it during spraying season. A lot of that is just bad farming...there are still a lot of farmers who rip up their land every few years, allowing the weeds back in. There are also some anecdotal things that aren't specific to glyphosates that concern me. It seems that everybody in rural areas has some kind of cancer now, for one thing. There are also a lot of respiratory problems. My own brother had his bowel spontaneously split and one of the questions they asked at the hospital was if he was around agricultural chemicals. He was. It was never mentioned again. It's not just Round Up though. A lot of farmers use tank mixes now because Round Up no longer kills everything. Which chemical they use depends on what kind of weeds the roundup isn't killing. We are very dependent on chemical fertilizers as well. Then there are the fuel additives, the off-gassing from the inside of trucks and tractors, the chemicals coming out of the building materials in the house etc... Hell, the number of decks made from pressure treated lumber, cedar, and redwood has skyrocketed in recent years. Each of those things carries its own health risks. How anybody could do a proper study to take this anecdotal evidence and discover which chemicals, or mixture of chemicals, are causing the problems kind of baffles me. Then how do you separate that from other things, like diet? I'm not a scientist, but it seems to me that designing an accurate study would be very difficult. I do think that studies need to be done though, because something is going on. The timing suggests GE crops and/or the chemicals that go with them, but a lot of other things changed at the same time.

I'm not convinced that these people are lying though. I think many of them (not all) actually believe the crap they tell us.

That doesn't really surprise me. it's kind of like summer fallowing. It's looked up fondly by the uninformed...much preferable to spraying. Of course we still sprayed back then, generally with much worse chemicals, and summer fallowing pounds the hell out of the soil. I do miss it though...sitting on a tractor in the hot sun, sipping beer and sweating a lot. 4 MPH with a deep tillage and a set of harrows all summer long. I used to wear cut-off jeans with work boots and a hat made from a single piece of string. A slight breeze and the dirt grew into your pores, a good wind and the farmer next door got all your best top soil. All very romantic and good fodder for a country song. Doesn't make it good farming, just the best science of the time, and it certainly wasn't chemical free. The guy my brother helps seed and harvest now started cutting his spraying a couple of years ago. He only sees his land maybe five or six times a year. Most of the weeds are gone because he never tills. Last year he mowed before the weeds could go to seed. We're learning, I think. Another century and we might get it right. My concerns are mostly economic/political. We'll never get it right if we let Monsanto, Dupont and Cargill dictate things. Instead we'll churn out some short term profits and end up on the sad end of a Woody Guthrie song. Woody never heard of glyphosates, and he'd be spinning in his grave at the mess we've made, but he understood the dynamic and implications of agriculture.

I'd say that most of the people who put these things forward are clinically insane, but they still get on TV. More disturbing still is that they get on allegedly educational shows on allegedly educational channels. Most of the von Danniken stuff has been on Discovery, for instance.

I know these things are true because I saw them on TV: Snow gets heavier when it melts. (CBC News) God was an alien. (von Danniken) The Bible should be taken as an historical document. (Various conArtists) The pyramids were built by aliens. Stonehenge was built by aliens or maybe Atlanteans. (Various conArtists) Giant inter-dimensional space lizards are controlling the world's governments. (Space, but it was a documentary) Atlanteans, or maybe aliens, are responsible for every advance mankind has ever made. (Various conArtists) Ghosts are real and it's ghosts that cause the cold spots in your house, not bad insulation and vapour barriering. (Various conArtists) Moses seven plagues really happened.(Various conArtists) Cheap lenses on cheap cameras prove the existence of ghosts, aliens, Sasquatch, and likely el Chupacabre.(Various conArtists) The Sphinx was built by a previously unknown civilization and holds the secrets of Atlantis in one of its paws. (Discovery Channel) Those are just a few of the things TV has tried to mis-teach me. Please feel free to add your own.

I saw a magician on TV (not sure who...might have been that Mindfreak guy) "levitating" several off the ground and wondered how he was doing it. He appeared to be just walking around Las Vegas and performing the illusion for live crowds. I have no doubt that it was a trick and the man billed himself as a magician, not a psychic or anything, but I was wondering where the wires were and how he kept them hidden from the onlookers. Having seen the balducci video, I'd like to see that show again so I could pay more attention to the camera angles. If he fooled the audience with a few inches and the television audience with a few well-chosen camera angles, that would explain it.

I think the whole thing is a false line, first of all. Every Holstein on earth has DNA from one Quebec bull, and that happened before genetic manipulation was possible. That bull has now been cloned and his "son" continues to contribute DNA to the herd. Now I don't think the level of "close breeding" done in purebred cattle herds is a good idea, but it has nothing to do with genetic engineering. There is real engineering, like that done by places like Monsanto for their Round Up ready canola etc. that I think is a really bad idea. Now don't get me wrong, I love Round Up. It's a miracle herbicide...or at least it was. Its overuse has led to resistance in other plants though, and the well water in some rural areas stinks of it during spraying season. Sure it breaks down quickly, but it doesn't break down immediately. That's kind of secondary...Round Up came before Round Up ready canola...but it was the genetic engineerin that really led to the overuse of the herbicide. In the same way, genetic engineering can lead to huge monocultures. I think everybody here understands how dangerous a lack of genetic diversity in any given species can be. So I don't hesitate to eat genetically engineered crops and have health concerns about genetically engineered meat...we're not all going to grow a third arm or anything...but I do worry about the secondary effects that various technologies can have.

I was thinking about this and it seems to me that genetics and environmental factors might play a role too. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for you to look at several generations of the same families and note what changes have taken place in their environments. For example, if you started with the youngest adult generation in my family, then worked back for as many generations as there were photographs for, expanding to include all of the family lines back to the late 1800's, you'd have one data-set. You could do that for a lot of people to develop several data sets. I think you'd find, having looked at a lot of old photographs, that people looked older faster through the period up to about the end of WWII. There's no real magic there...life was bloody hard for a lot of people and it showed on their faces. After WWII, things got easier in a lot of ways, but there were still environmental factors...everybody smoked everywhere all of the time, there was a lot of boozing, work conditions were dirty and dangerous, medical care was pretty iffy. A lot more people than will ever admit it in public drank rye whiskey in their morning coffee and experimented with a variety of drugs...illicit and prescription...that weren't very well considered. That carries on to about the 1970s. In the 1980s and 90s, people began thinking about their health and workplaces went through some drastic improvements. People quit smoking in their homes and workplaces. Cars started getting cleaner. The air started getting cleaner. Drinking and drugging continued, of course, but the drugs became a little better understood and their use concentrated into a narrower spectrum of society. By looking at the same families, you get at least a beginning of an understanding that some people just look younger than others and that trait can be passed down through families. By following the families through environmental shifts...and that gets into economics as well as people moving from rural areas to cities and blue collar to white collar jobs etc...you'd get an idea of what factors might be affecting aging. One other thing that should likely be taken into consideration is the ethnic backgrounds of the people being studied. I have kind of a vague idea that the more ethnically mixed they are, the prettier people tend to be. Given our measure of "pretty" that could well translate into youthful.

I'm not sure what you mean by "physically mature", cflsyndrome. Do you mean old, wrinkled and hairy? That'd make me physically mature (I was born in 1964) anyway. The thing is that young people have access to products that keep away some of the ravages of time. They have pimple cream that works, they wear sunscreen, they very likely spend less time outside than we did as kids. They don't smoke as much either. I'll bet not one person on your list ever went swathing on a 1966 Deutz on a day so cold and windy that they were leaning into the exhaust just to keep warm, for example. Your list is also not representative of the greater population. The people you are looking at are, by definition, the "beautiful people." My nieces and nephews, who are in the same age group as many on your list, are roughly as beat up as I was at their age. They work regular jobs and spend a lot of time outside either at work or in their leisure time or both. Since a lot of them spend their leisure time doing things like working on cars, farming, building things, drinking beer in a field, etc., they aren't wearing sunscreen to protect their complexions. I think you're likely just getting old, cflsyndrome. I know that's why I look like I do.