Prophecy Fulfilled -- Food Supply Threatened

This prophetic word was given to one who wishes to remain anonymous on Dec. 22, 2004. It was a followup word to the famous 1990 prophecy to the same man:

"The world is now seriously out of conformance with the Will of God and what He created and intended. There are those who would reconfigure the very creatures He has formed, and who meddle with the texture of life. For this reason, the Lord will allow a huge reorientation. If not for the action of Heaven, what God has created on earth will soon be damaged beyond recovery. A very dramatic effect already is in progress as regards the support structures of what man calls nature. Such cannot be allowed to take the final realization of total realignment when it comes to the very way elements and life forces interact."

Did you know that a great deal of the food products on store shelves today contain genetically modified ingredients? (For shorthand we will call them GM.)

Did you know that in some parts of the world the soil is becoming sterile because GM plants that produce their own weed killers and bug killers are also killing the helpful bacteria in the dirt in which they are planted? (The very definition of "Soil" includes the presence of living organisms.)

Author and webmaster Mike Brown today posts an eye-popping, fact-filled analysis of what is happening to our food supply. If you care about your health, and that of your family, you need to read this.

We have long wondered what that could be, and now are looking at a dramatic effect that indeed is in progress: the genetic alteration of our crops and food supply.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, scientists at some of the same chemical companies that gave us dangerous substances like dioxin and PCBs are now patenting and producing large volumes of genetically-altered seed, especially soy, corn, and cotton.

So widespread is genetically-modified food -- which does not have to be labeled as such -- that it is in much of the popcorn, soy sauce, and candy in the U.S

This is not food from hybrid plants; this is food from crops that have been fundamentally altered -- often with genes not only from other plants but from animals. The boundaries between what God created -- the species boundaries -- have been breached.

"With biotechnology, roses are no longer crossed with just roses," frets one natural food website. "They are mated with pigs, tomatoes with oak trees, fish with donkeys, butterflies with worms, orchids with snakes."

Read carefully.

Are we, as our president now proclaims, "restoring science to her rightful place," or are we elevating science to the rightful province that belongs to Nature's God alone?

Some bullet points:

-- In the span of one three-year period, according to a report, seventy million acres of American land were converted to raise genetically-altered crops. This was all occurring in the precise time period of the alleged prophecy (the evaluation went to 2005 -- a month after the alleged "word").

-- Ten corporations now control companies supplying 55 percent of the planet's commercial seeds.

-- genetically-altered pollen has wafted from significant distances, contaminating organic crops. Support structures indeed: 12,000 years of sustainable agriculture is on the brink of changing overnight.

-- According to the Grocery Manufacturers of America, between seventy and seventy-five percent of processed grocery products will soon have genetically-modified products. Anything derived from corn, canola, soy, or cottonseed is suspect.

"All you can say is that a lot of these processed foods are suspect," says Andrew Stocklinski --- Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry, former professor at the University of Georgia, former researcher for a major drug company and a self-made organic farmer, gesturing with a box of corn dogs. "There is no way any shopper can tell for certain whether genetically modified material is present in any of these products. There's nothing on the label to tell you, so all we can do is make an educated guess."

These are just the highlights of the article, and of the problem facing us. Forget global warming, the nationalization of the auto and health care industries, the takeover of the banking system. If our food system collapses because of big corporations and their scientists meddling for profit, you won't have to worry about any of the other.

What can you do? First, inform yourself. Then pray. Then get active.

This is an issue that transcends politics and party. There is no left and right when it comes to eating.

There is only right or wrong; survival or disaster.

A Scientific Goof in the South African Corn Crop

A big "oops!" in South Africa.

Monsanto GM corn harvest fails massively

South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds.The plants look lush and healthy from the outside. Monsanto has offered compensation.

Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces,on alleged 'under-fertilisation processes in the laboratory". Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems.

However environmental activist Marian Mayet, director of the Africa-centre for biosecurity in Johannesburg, demands an urgent government investigation and an immediate ban on all GM-foods, blaming the crop failure on Monsanto's genetically-manipulated technology.

One observer noted that you couldn't tell merely by looking whether the corn was defective or not.

"One can't see from the outside whether a plant is unseeded. One must open up the cob leaves to establish the problem,' he said. The seedless cobs show no sign of disease or any kind of fungus. They just have very few seeds, often none at all.

The South African supermarket-chain Woolworths already banned GM-foods from its shelves in 2000. However South African farmers have been producing GM-corn for years: they were among the first countries other than the United States to start using the Monsanto products.

The South African government does not require any labelling of GM-foods. Corn is the main staple food for South Africa's 48 million people.

Let's examine this problem by looking at foundational principles.

God is the Author of life, not Monsanto. (Our Founding Fathers would have said "Nature's God" but it is One and the Same.)

Should anyone be tampering with the genetic traits of food crops for profit? It is one thing to crossbreed crops to get hybrid varieties: that kind of science was popularized by Mendel, a green-thumbed religious monk. It is another to snip genes from insects and graft them onto corn in order to produce a trait that not only does not occur in nature and probably never would even with millions of years of opportunity.

But Monsanto, and a handful of other multi-national companies, goes Nature's God one trick better. God made food crops so that the prudent farmer could save some of his seed and grow another crop next year. What idiotic generosity! Monsanto makes sure that the seed from its crops is sterile; it will not reproduce, not next year or any other year. This way the hapless farmers are forced to come back to Monsanto for next year's seed.

If they're lucky, there won't be a lab screw-up, and something will actually grow.

Now you can call me old-fashioned, a religious zealot, a right-wing extremist, if you wish, but I believe with all my heart that if Nature's God wanted seeds to reproduce, year in and year out, without the helping hand of white-coated lab scientists involved, then anyone who bio-engineers them otherwise is anti-God. If we continue to allow them to do this, we are aiding and abetting un-Godly acts.

I'm not comfortable being in that position.

Furthermore, if Natural Law suggests that I should love my neighbor as myself, then why do I want to put him behind the GM 8-ball every planting season? It's a moral sin to do this, and it ought to be a crime.

Monsanto is responsible for the loss of crop production on 202,625 acres of South African land. That's 316 sections of land one mile square. Good corn can easily produce 130-140 bushels per acre, so we are looking at a loss of up to 28 million bushels. That's a lot of corn, and a lot of empty bellies on the world's most famine-prone continent. Oops, indeed!

This is just one of the unintended consequences of genetic modification. There are potentially many others.

What is Monsanto paying the South African farmers? Last year's corn crop in the U.S. brought $7 per bushel, although right now the price is about $4. Even at the low end, Monsanto ought to "shell out" $112 million, don't you think? Somehow I doubt that the reimbursement rate will be anything close to that.

I know this post is long, and somewhat technical, but I think it's important that as Americans we pay attention to what American-based corporations are doing in our name. I'm not anti-business or anti-profit -- far from it -- but I am pro-morality, and what is taking place is not moral.

Fantasy Road Trip: Flatbeds Across America

I know it isn't feasible, there is no lawful authority behind the idea, but I'd love to take a convoy of flatbed trucks, like the kind you used to haul those square hay bales, back in the day before they became round bales, fasten some wooden benches onto the frame, and then take a few dozen captive politicians and their science advisers on a little trip across America.

It would be a pretty long trip, so I'd have a couple of "comfort" vans trailing along to provide refreshments -- homemade sandwiches and potato salad, plus some freshly squeezed lemonade. And off we'd go, down the highways and byways of this great land. We'd have loudspeakers and play some great American music, some old, some new, some of it country, some of it blues.

The only rule would be that we would avoid all interstates and any towns over 10,000 people, and we'd only stay in the smallest of locally owned motels and hotels, when we weren't pitching tents and camping. I would want these people to see the real America, the flyover country that some of them, I swear, have never seen, judging by their comments and their actions.

We would do this in late spring or early summer. The tour would be designed to show these Washington, D.C., elites just how the rest of this beautiful country lives, or tries to. Specifically I want them to get an idea of how vast it is, and how little of it is occupied and/or being used in productive ways.

America could still feed and clothe the world, if we wanted to. We could do it with legacy seeds, American beef, poultry, swine and sheep. We could do it without polluting the waters or triggering massive erosion. All it would take is a sensible farm and land policy that would be centered on eliminating the massive subsidies of corporate agriculture, eliminating federal intervention in markets, and empowering free markets to do what they do best.

I know this isn't going to happen. Instead we have pending legislation (H.R. 875) that would create a whole new bureaucracy and regulatory regime to lock down production of every bit of food imaginable. We are going to create a new serfdom for anyone who even thinks twice about growing a garden or raising a few chickens to sell eggs. But instead of the baron over at the Castle Anthrax, it will be some cookie cutter bureaucrat with Health & Human Services who's never grown anything except a couple of marijuana plants back in college, telling you that you must either keep up your paperwork reports or plow under your tomato vines.

No, in Washington today we have elected officials getting ready to rubber stamp new power grab pieces of legislation designed by progressive apparatchiks who will tell us that in order to protect the food supply we must clamp down on irresponsible food production facility (farm) practices. These are the same type of people who think that we are already over-populated and need to reduce our numbers. With their proposals, we will. People will starve.

Among those is a woman named Nina Fedoroff, the science and tech adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (In fairness, she was Condi Rice's S&T gal, too.) Here's what she told the BBC:

"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing "wild lands", and in particular water supplies.

Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: "There are probably already too many people on the planet."

I would want "Dr. Death" Fedoroff to have a bench seat with a good view of our nation's farmland. I would also like to have her explain to us why we should run the risk of using genetically modified seeds when these may well be the cause of the death of modern civilization. Yeah, she's all for GM crops too.

A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods. [SNIP]

Dr Fedoroff, who wrote a book about GM Foods in 2004, believes critics of genetically modified maize, corn and rice are living in bygone times.

"We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production."

That last statement is false. It is only in the last 20 years that GM foods have entered into use, many of them engineered so that the big giant seed companies can force farmers to purchase their seed crop year after year, since the plants' genetic codes are programmed to produce sterile seed. There is now evidence that this gene is crossing over into non-GM fields and causing those seeds to become sterile. She is making a false analogy; there are many modern farming practices which do no harm. But we do not know all of the consequences of genetic modification. You would not go to your doctor and say, "Doc, experiment on me by re-sequencing my genetic structure to give me the strength of an ox." That would be the proper analogy.

But I suspect that the push for acceptance of GM crops is that the Malthusian elite know full well the truth behind the science. They want a world with fewer people, and one way or the other, they intend to see it happen.

By the way, if you want an eyeful of how India's cotton farmers are taking to GM seeds, just Google the phrase GM cotton seeds and see how many stories you find detailing the impact of (allegedly) unlawful GM experiments by a couple of multinational seed companies, including concerns that seeds modified to kill boll worms are killing the healthy bacteria in thousands of acres of once productive soil.

I know it's a long post, but it's as close as I will get to my long flatbed road trip. Please think about what kind of future you want to leave for your children and grandchildren, and their grandchildren. Will they have a future if we continue on the dangerous path advocated by the progressives in power?

Today's Meme: Science Against True Humanity

Have you picked up on today's Twilight Zone meme in the news cycle?

EUROPE: Scientists warn of nanotechnology threat

Morgellons: Terrifying New Disease Reaching Pandemic Status

Kids Made-to-Order: Science Gone Awry

The first two articles may be inadvertently related. Both are serious expositions of perceived public health threats brought on, in theory, by the commercial application of new technologies.

The third article reports on a retired bishop's reaction (on Vatican Radio) to a new fertility clinic in Los Angeles that promises "designer babies."

What nanotechnology threat?

European scientists are starting to identify tangible health concerns associated with the use of nanoparticles in consumer products. [SNIP]

In particular, the committee has focused on a common type of nanoparticle called nanotubes, noting that when they have "similar characteristics as some types of hazardous asbestos...similar inflammatory reactions can be induced by the nanotubes as asbestos."

This threat is serious because a wide range of industries - from food packagers to pharmaceutical companies, textile manufacturers and paint makers - have been examining the potential benefits of using tiny nanoparticles to improve the quality and physical characteristics of their products. Research in this area has been booming and the commercial spin-offs could be very profitable. However the fly in the ointment is health. [SNIP]

... nanotubes, a common form of nanoparticle, could be manufactured into "long thin fibrous forms (length >20 micrometre), rigidity, and non-degradability", in which case they really would resemble asbestos fibres.

If these were then inhaled - say in a factory manufacturing or processing nanoparticles - then a risk of mesothelioma (the cancer usually caused by asbestos) cannot be excluded, the committee paper noted.

Okay, don't breathe in the nanoparticles. Good safety tip. But the next story, on Morgellons, will make your skin crawl:

(NaturalNews) It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie. People report the sensation of creatures crawling under their skin, mysterious moving fibers appear, and finally bugs and worms pop out. Unfortunately, these terrifying symptoms are all too true. The people having them are experiencing Morgellons, the latest and scariest in the series of bizarre diseases appearing in the last few years, seemingly from nowhere. Morgellons is now reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. and abroad.

Morgellons starts with relentless itching, stinging or biting sensations. Cotton-like balls may appear on the body with no reasonable explanation. Soon skin rash develops along with lesions that will not heal. Many sufferers report string-like fibers of varying color popping out through the skin lesions. These fibers can be black, white, red or even iridescent blue. Others report black specks falling from their bodies that litter their sheets and bathrooms. Eventually a variety of bugs and worms begin to find their way out of the body through the lesions. Other accompanying symptoms include hair loss, debilitating and chronic fatigue, hard nodules beneath the skin, and joint pain. [SNIP]

Oakland A's player Billy Koch and his family all have Morgellons. They have been open about their disease and have made some attempt to educate others. Billy had to retire from his baseball career as a result of the disease. Singer Joni Mitchell also has Morgellons, and the disease has negatively impacted her career as well.

The Morgellons story has an Oklahoma tie: one of the first researchers, Randy Wymore, is associated with Oklahoma State University's Center for Health Science. He and others, including the forensics team for the Tulsa Police Department, have done scientific studies on Morgellons fibers.

The team identified the chemical structures of the fibers and compared them to their database of 800 fibers. They found no match, so they used gas chromatography to compare the fibers to their data on 90,000 organic compounds. The fibers did not match up with any of them. They concluded that the fibers were unknown, and not contaminants from clothing sticking to scabs on the lesions as had been thought by those so ready to dismiss what their patients were saying. Wymore and the forensic team concluded that the disease producing these fibers was very real and very frightening.

There's much more, and it's not only worth reading, but I think you owe it to yourself to be at the least aware of the existence of this disease. It's possible that this is the result of bio-weapons research gone awry, or it is the unfortunate result of genetically-modified crop usage.

What it is not is a figment of the imagination.

We mess around with God's created order to our great peril. That's also the theme of Bishop Elio Sgreccia's talk on Vatican Radio about the new fertility clinic:

... The Fertility Institutes, [gives] would-be parents the physical traits they want in their child -- green eyes, for example, or dark skin or blonde hair.

The process screens babies at the first stages of life -- applying technology already used to kill children for sex selection, or who have or could develop genetic defects -- and selects those embryos that meet the tastes of the buyer. The rest are eliminated. The price tag for the process is about $18,000. The Fertility Institutes claims to already have some half-dozen requests for the service. [SNIP]

"... it is about an ethically mistaken operation, and one that wounds the dignity of the offspring, since it is oriented toward manipulating the body, dominating it and transforming it according to one's tastes."

The bishop said that just as it is illicit for a child that has or could develop defects to be eliminated by negative selection, "it is also illicit to make a selection that obeys only the wishes of the parents."

"This is a typical example of science that is not placed at the service of the good, but rather at the desires of those who buy its services; meanwhile those who pay the price in this case are the children," he lamented. "When a norm of creation that is so delicate is violated, the law should take interest in this field."

Bishop Sgreccia said the situation points to the "instinct of manipulation," an instinct that can be detected in the times of Nazism "to a certain degree, since they didn't know everything that is known today." This instinct to manipulate, he affirmed, "continued beyond the abolition of the totalitarian regimes."

I think it could be argued that the eugenics movement came into being well before the Nazi regime, and never really went away. It just went into "deep research mode" and is reappearing, perhaps in time to help spawn new totalitarian regimes, since we are "putting science back into its rightful place."

Franken-Corn Genes Go Astray?

A bit of worrisome news from South of the Border: Scientists in Mexico have found that genetic strains of modified corn are migrating to traditional seed crops in that country.

Genes from genetically-engineered corn have been found in traditional crop strains in Mexico, according to a new study likely to reignite a bitter controversy over biotech maize. [SNIP]

A team led by Elena Alvarez-Buylla of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City looked at nearly 2,000 samples from 100 fields in the region from 2001 and 2004, and found that around one percent of the samples had genes that had jumped from GM [genetically modified] varieties.

"We confirmed that there was contamination in 2001 and also found contamination in 2004, which means that it either persisted in the local maize that we sampled or that it was reintroduced, which is less likely," Alvarez-Buylla told AFP.

She said the difference between previous studies and her research lay in the samples chosen for gene sequencing and in the molecular technique for decrypting the DNA.

The investigators looked for two specific genes that had escaped from biotech corn, and found them in some fields but not in others.

Alvarez-Buylla said the evidence shed stark light on the failure of efforts to shield Mexico from unauthorised GM corn.

The Mexican government banned GM seeds in 1998 in order to protect about 60 varieties of "legacy" corn, but apparently it isn't working.

Transgenic seeds are entering the country, most probably from the United States, and getting mixed with local seeds in trade among small farmers, Alvarez-Buylla believed.

"It is very hard to avoid gene flow from transgenic maize to non-transgenic maize in Mexico, even though there has been a moratorium," she said.

"It is really worrying that the government of Mexico has not been efficient enough in biosecurity monitoring," she said, accusing watchdogs of failing to establish rigorous molecular monitoring that was independent of data provided by biotech giants.

Of course the big seed companies contend that there is no human health threat from GM seeds.

I don't find that very reassuring.

Not so Splenda After All?

From the Oklahomily Dept. of Better Safe Than Sorry:

A warning is out for those who ingest Splenda, the artificial sweetener.

I'm not a scientist, so I don't have a clue as to the seriousness of the Duke University study, but I am a thinker. And I'm thinking that, just to be on the safe side, I'll use a little real sugar and a lot more treadmill.