GM Crops should be banned

I recently watched Dr. Vandana Shiva's speech in UCTV about "Genetically engineered crops" and I should say I am impressed by her speech and as concerned as she is. Since then I have been googling and learning about GM foods. I am very gravely concerned to read about how lax the approval process for GM foods are by FDA. Here is a quote from the article http://www.rense.com/general59/cchm.htm
....One thing that surprised us is that U.S. regulators rely almost exclusively on information provided by the biotech crop developer, and those data are not published in journals or subjected to peer review,” said co-author Schubert.

Added Freese: "In one case, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignored a published study by an Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientist suggesting that GM corn could cause food allergies, and instead asked Monsanto and Syngenta to essentially re-do FDA's analysis."

I have been coming across many such articles these days and nothing I learn from them is telling me that we really need genetically modified foods due to the lack of long term study on the effect on Humans and our eco system.

Agreed, pesticides use is bad as well but trading one evil for the other is unacceptable and unwise.

I shared my findings with my wife and we decided never to even buy any GM foods. At least one less consumer.

Is this the America I know? Why are people so stupid?

I have been running into a lot of articles and news bits lately about how rural America is going back to the dark ages. Here is one article I ran across today School board OKs challenges to evolution . I sometimes wonder how America is different compared to the so called radical muslim societies where religion overrides common sense. So many people are so stupid here I even wonder how this country got to where it is now!

I read the book "Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion" by Edward J. Larson long time ago which is an excellent read on this issue.

I don't mind people believe in creationism but teaching the kids that evolution is just a theory just simply is stupid and totally unacceptable to me. Grow up guys! No wonder Bush played the evangelical card and won the election and he continues to keep the status quo for his own benifits.

How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

Just finished reading the book
Overall, it was light reading and fun to read about the company I work for. It even had mention of few people I know!!. Though I knew most of the puzzles, some of them were new and had fun writing programs to solve some of them.

Free Culture

Last week I finished reading Professor Lessig's free culture. I respect him a lot and have been reading his blog for the last couple of months regularly. His blog is at http://www.lessig.org/blog

I am deeply concerned about the shrinking "Public Domain" and the ever increasing lobbying of corporations that makes us criminals for things we take it for granted. One that became very clear after reading the book was that today's corporations turn towards IP and Copyright to protect their interests instead of embracing change and trying to be competitive.