The Healthy Home Economist has the article The Real Reason Wheat is Toxic (it’s not the gluten) | The Healthy Home Economist.

You’re going to want to sit down for this one. I’ve had some folks burst into tears in horror when I passed along this information before

If you can’t go to the article to read it, the answer will be revealed if you open the spoiler alert. Of course the article has many more details that you’ll want to read once you open the spoiler alert. It is more entertaining if you read the article without seeing the spoiler.

Thanks to Carol Peters for posting this on her Facebook page.

Facebook also presented this Examiner article for my consideration Bogus paper on Roundup saturates the Internet. This Examiner article casts aspersions on Dr. Stephanie Seneff of MIT who is one of the sources for the above paper.

So was this bizarre article peer-reviewed by actual biologists? No matter, neither Samsel nor Seneff are biologists either. Seneff is associated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Her homepage says she has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

I was just wondering how Facebook decided to show this related article to me. Was it chosen purely algorithmically by matching up certain keywords in the original post to keywords in the related article? Or has Monsanto paid Facebook to put up rebuttal articles to anything negative that is posted about Monsanto products?

So the debunking article isn’t being completely honest about Dr. Stephanie Seneff.

Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation.

Do your own Google search – roundup wheat harvest.

One article that I found was North Dakota farmers encouraged to use glyphosate-sprayed crops for feed, not seed.

Used properly, glyphosate is a terrific product. In recent years, however, our seed lab has seen an increase in samples with poor germination that has been attributed to the use of glyphosate as a harvest aid. We have seen numerous examples in many crops including wheat, durum, flax, lentils and field peas.

The wheat is too damaged to use as seed, so best to just eat it. Sounds logical to me.

The idea for this post was inspired by a post on Bernie Sanders’ Facebook page. Here is the graphic that went with the post.

Certain countries make a living being tax havens for corporations.  I imagine they charge companies a significant amount of money as far as the countries are concerned, but an insignificant amount compared to what the companies would pay if they incorporated in their home country or had an honest set of books that said where in the world they made their profits.

So I had an idea from my own little pointy head.

All non-tax haven countries should adopt a policy of applying their tax policies on the profits companies make in their own country and to all the profits those companies claim to make in tax haven countries.  That way, the companies would pay the normal rate to many countries  on profits they  claim they make in tax haven countries.  The only way a company could avoid this many multiples of taxation would be to declare their profits in a non-tax haven country.

The tax haven countries would be free to offer whatever they wanted to companies, but what they offered would be of little value.  Problem solved with no interference in the internal affairs of the tax haven country 🙂 – as if they aren’t interfering with our internal affairs.

It also allows the non-tax haven countries to make tax decisions without fear of corporate profit flight to tax havens.

Can anyone see any problems with this modest proposal except for a possible global war over the issue?

For people who like their political wisdom in cartoon form, The Daily Kos has the article Cartoon: Who’s looking out for Lucky Ducky? featuring this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon.

I am bound and determined to get this message across to the centrist Democrats who just don’t want to hear it.

The Daily Kos has the article and comment board Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges fires back at #pointergate scandal.  The article has a pointer to Mayor Betsy Hodges’ complete response to pointergate.

If the fourth option is correct, my commitment to this work means that the head of the police union or other detractors will pitch more stories that attempt to defame that work and its leaders to various media outlets. So be it. I know the charge that I have been given by the people of Minneapolis and by my own conscience. I will continue to follow that charge.

This mayor will not be bullied.  I wish Ferguson, Missouri  had a mayor like this.

Salon has the article Loretta Lynch’s Wall Street friends: What you should know about AG nominee’s finance past.

Despite all the unabashed punditry, relatively little is known by the country about Loretta Lynch, the low-profile U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, whom President Obama nominated on Saturday to replace Eric Holder as attorney general. We’ve heard about the cases Lynch has prosecuted for the government, from the police shooting of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima to public corruption cases against the likes of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.

But what’s less known is Lynch’s career in the private sector. After reviewing her record in this capacity, it’s not that she’s openly corrupted by the forces that increasingly rule our government, so much as she’s marinated in their worldview, in their cultural milieu. To ask her to take on powerful interests in finance would be like asking someone to rat out their friends.
.
.
.
Eventually, Lynch went back to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn for a second stint in 2010, serving there until her nomination for attorney general. But in between, she worked in corporate law and white-collar criminal defense at two mega-law firms for nearly two decades.
.
.
.
To take this out of the realm of theory, let’s look at some of Lynch’s recent corporate crime actions as a federal prosecutor. She was instrumental in two financial fraud settlements, which President Obama touted in announcing her as attorney general. One was the $7 billion mortgage-backed securities fraud case against Citigroup, part of a series of high-profile settlements that amounted to public relations vehicles for the Justice Department, so they could claim to have “gotten tough” on big banks. In reality, shareholders paid the fines, the perpetrators faced no jail time, investor victims received no compensation, and the public never got the full story on the extent of the wrongdoing.

Lynch’s other major financial fraud case was a $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement with HSBC for facilitating money laundering for terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations basically gift-wrapped this case for federal prosecutors in an extensive report, relating lurid tales of HSBC collaborating with some of the worst people on the planet for years. But nobody from the bank went to jail or paid any fines. Lynch’s office didn’t even force HSBC to plead guilty; the deferred prosecution agreement just imposes a fine and a monitoring process as an out-of-court settlement. As Matt Taibbi pointed out at the time, a kid caught with a few ounces of drugs will get thrown into jail for years, but a bank helping the criminals sell billions in drugs to those kids will have no trouble.

In my previous post Obama to nominate Loretta Lynch for attorney general, I voiced my suspicions based on Lynch’s employment history and her lack of record in criminal prosecutions of bank executives.  It is unfortunate, but no surprise, to see my suspicions confirmed in a more detailed look at her record.

Maybe the Democrats who stayed away from the election in droves, knew something that the few of you who voted did not know.

I  did know, or suspect this, but I voted anyway.  At least the Democrats I voted for did not directly refuse to prosecute executive crime on Wall Street as certain people, who were not directly on the ballot this time, did.

All the pretty numbers of how well the top 10% of  income earners have fared under Obama, does not cover up some ugly truths.  With this appointment, it appears that Obama is still deaf to the cries of the people he could not get to come out to vote for him.  What vote could they have cast to get his attention?