Might we suggest that all good Canadians within range make an annual visitation to this asshole's grave, and piss on it as an expansionary excursion with a view to teaching your children how the world is full of people of similar ilk who lurk poised to destroy humanity for the sake of their own delusions.

Would be exactly the same in Finland too, i guess it's the annual cold and common sense. We wont let kids freeze, no matter what is the social status, child health is big priority here. Taking care of other peoples kids when needed is still very close to the culture.

The next thing that would've happened when heard he is 65km from home is to call the cops. They call the parents and provide temporary shelter. But then would've started the social worker round and that is not pleasant.. It's the one part of our 'nanny state' that often oversteps it's boundaries and that is really unfortunate.

Look, I provided a link to a peer-reviewed journal publication showing that Golden Rice is an extremely good source of vitamin A, with one cup providing 50% of the recommended daily amount. I can also provide other citations supporting this claim if you'd like. So, if you have references to actual peer-reviewed scientific research (rather than unfounded claims by anti-GM activists) refuting the efficacy of Golden Rice, let's see them.

As for your claim that the initially free distribution will be rescinded, that seems unlikely. The licenses under which Golden Rice is being distributed explicitly allow farmers to freely save, replant and sell the seeds from their crop for as long as their annual income remains under $10,000. Also, most of the patents relevant to the production of Golden Rice are not internationally valid, so they cannot be used to sue people in third world countries. And all the patents that are internationally valid have been explicitly waived by the patent holders. Is there still some remote possibility that poor farmers will end up getting screwed? I guess. But it seems bizarre to me to just hold up potentially life-saving technology because its possible (though highly unlikely) that it will be used to exploit farmers. Also, I should note that Monstanto does not own Golden Rice. They merely own one of the patents for a process involved in the creation of Golden Rice.

On your third point, Rachel explicitly says "You know that GMO’s actually don’t have higher yields either." It's in the video, at 5:45. Watch it again. So she is claiming quite clearly that they do not produce higher yield, which is false. And it is simply not true that all the research showing higher yield comes from corporations. For instance, see this paper published in Science. The authors do not claim affiliation with any major GM corporation. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There has been volumes of independent research on GMOs.

On your last claim, about monocultures, you are again mistaken. Golden Rice is not a single variety. The International Rice Research Institute (a non-profit, not owned by any major corporation) has created "Golden" versions of hundreds of different rice varieties, so potentially Golden Rice can be as diverse as regular rice. Also, if rice plants are separated by a few feet, then cross-pollination becomes extremely unlikely. Rice is typically self-pollinating. So as long as a small separation is maintained, GM and non-GM crops can be grown in the same location without any significant gene flow between them.

Anyway, gene flow is only a danger if the GM plant has a clear adaptive advantage in its environment (if its pest resistant, e.g.), but that is not the case with Golden Rice, so even with gene flow Golden Rice won't end up dominating non-GM rice evolutionarily.

Everything will be streamed and made available for download.

However, almost everything being discussed at the annual conference is of little interest to the public, Greenwald/Assange/O'Brian being the exception this year. There's also the matter of language, since about half the talks will be given in German, if not more.

Case in point, last year's keynote by Jake was the only talk I could see surpassing the magic 10 votes on the Sift...

It's been all the rage on Twitter, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Snowden and Poitras also recorded this year's Christmas message for Channel 4 -- and as Jeremy Scahill pointed out:

"Amazing how any time we actually hear from Snowden in his own words, it bears no resemblance to cartoonish depiction of him by commentariat."

I'll be at the 30C3 this weekend and the keynote speech will be held by Greenwald with focus on Snowden/NSA. Alexa O'Brian (carwinb) is scheduled for a talk about the trial of Chelsea Manning and Assange/Appelbaum are due for their annual call for a revolution -- the anticipation is killing me here.

And while we're at it: happy holidays!

@ messenger-The solution lies in a combination of radical reform of policy, and that can only happen if people stop following the programming of the people who pay for elections firstly. Then, you educate the hell out of people at a grass-roots level of just how deep the rabbit hole goes i.e., the insidious cabal of those who would profit from incarcerating more and more people to prop-up their money-making scam of larger and stronger law enforcement infrastructure, the inhumane prison industry which is billions of dollars annually. Profiteers who breed future criminals in prisons, and ghettos. It takes people actually giving a fuck about their society instead of thinking that they are safe ans secure with more police.

YOU ARE NOT

Police are made-up of dangerous, self-loathing and damaged individuals who are recruited for the sole purpose of building the infrastructure I described with protecting and serving very, very low on their not-so-hidden agenda.

The power-keepers and their fanatical putsch should be glaringly obvious to anyone with a TV, the internet, and an I.Q. above 100.

"They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."-Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac.

Heed the words of a brilliant statesman and thinker, and of similar, modern contemporaries.

I don't have much hope for it, I have expatriation written all over my forehead in big red letters. Hardly a place to go anymore, the entire world is jumping on board to the 'occupy everything with police and military' route.

Cops are criminals, plain and simple. Continue to believe to the contrary and watch how fast the shit gets non-linear.

"The Sam Adams Award is given annually by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired CIA officers, to an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics. It is named after Samuel A. Adams, a CIA whistle-blower during the Vietnam War, and takes the physical form of a "corner-brightener candlestick". Many recipients have been whistle-blowers. The 2012 Award was *presented at a ceremony at the Oxford Union in January 2013." -WIKI

*To one, Thomas Fingar, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council

I was referring to the 1% of the west that was the target of the Occupy movement. If you want to point out the global wealth disparity then yes, we do enjoy our cheap Walmart crap. We then indeed come out far ahead of the poverty seen around the world, with the global 1% comprising people in USA, Canada, Japan and Brazil, etc. with an average annual income of just $34,000.

I think we can safely assume that the 1% talked about in this vid aren't worried about the international poor. The point is that they just want to keep the domestic disenfranchised out of their fantasy mansions (after the inevitable looting of Walmart is complete.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU

You realize when the world economy implodes and the 1% has to defend themselves, that 1% is nearly every living sole in western world, right? Anybody making $30k annually is already, on a global scale, criminally overpaid compared to the workers making the stuff the 1% buy at Walmart.

Jesus Christ and the gun-bashing bandwagon is leaving the station. My ramblings lost in the ether regardless of facts or fucking figures (death stats by firearms or violence), become mute when you consider that more Germans die of complications from their annual Bratwurst intake than from violent crimes. MY POINT was to pooh-pooh quadrophonic who turned the thread in the direction it went with a simple comment.

Then comes the bandwagon, which I attempted to derail, and now everyone wants to jump in and whine about their take on issues surrounding firearms in the United States, like they are some fucking problem. The problems' with criminals being created by a broken criminal justice system, the fear mongering fomented by news organizations and the cunts proposing legislation whenever some imbecile snaps, and the lackeys that feed on their output like pablum.

All stats, all anger directed at senseless crimes committed by the uncommitted with guns (mass shootings), and all dumb assess who feed on news organization's and their editorializing on sensible laws for guns (that we don't already have) in order to justify more laws become IRRELEVANT when you consider, that by design disarming partially or completely the average citizen is the goal of any fascist.

Most of you who UP-voted ASMO's comment without this explained context or with it, are pretty much the lay-down-and-fuck-me types who, should some fascist regime pop-in and tell them what and how to do things now, would enthusiastically succumb, especially if the offer were candy-coated and the statistics looked good, and you could keep things like groceries and your fucking car.
(and yeah, I up'ed quad's comment...I love to jump head-first into threads hi-jacked by passionate fools)

Or, you simply live in another paradigm (being in a country who has not systematically programmed their inhabitants with violence, fear, and race-tensions) and have no reference for the consternation of a sane, reasonable person surrounded by minions of dutiful robots.

Reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium? Then where is weapons grade plutonium made? I think you'll find that it's made in exactly the same reactors as there is no real distinction between a reactor used for power generation and weapons generation other than in name.

"Uranium ore contains only about 0.7% of the fissile isotope U235. In order to be suitable for use as a nuclear fuel for generating electricity it must be processed (by separation) to contain about 3% of U235 (this form is called Low Enriched Uranium - LEU). Weapons grade uranium has to be enriched to 90% of U235 (Highly Enriched Uranium or HEU), which can be done using the same enrichment equipment. There are about 38 working enrichment facilities in 16 countries"
http://www.cnduk.org/get-involved/parliamentary/item/579-the-links-between-nuclear-power-and-nuclear-weapons

The point is that continuation of current tech makes it a lot more economical to produce weapons tech, whether that be weapons grade plutonium or depleted uranium (DU). Reactors can cost upwards of ten billion dollars to build, why would a weapons manufacturer want to pay for one of those out of their own pocket when they can have the taxpayer's pay for nuclear power plants that can produce what they need?

"Every known route to bombs involves either nuclear power or materials and technology which are available, which exist in commerce, as a direct and essential consequence of nuclear power"
- Dr. Amory Lovins (from NEIS)

In terms of renewables:, the 'new' renewables only account for about 3% of total energy use, so if that's what he meant then he's not far off. Stats from IEA, however, state that wind has had an average growth rate of 25% over the past five years, while solar has averaged an annual growth rate of over 50% in the same period. So their impact is increasing fairly rapidly. So I'm not sure why he's so pessimistic about them when the IEA is not.

Have environmental groups specifically spoken out against the type of nuclear reactors he is talking about? Which ones?

I think that you will find reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium, rather, they produce a grade of plutonium known as reactor grade. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu239. Reactor grade plutonium is what is known as weapons usable, not weapons ready. This is because of the high contamination factor of Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. These heavier breads of Pu have both high spontaneous fission rates (bad for your fission weapon), and considerable heat, enough so to make weapons fabrication a problem (is it bad when your closed weapons device needs ventilation to not melt itself). While these problems are addressable in advanced weapons platforms, outside of well established nuclear weapons programs, making weapons from them is very challenging.

The main trouble, however, I think is economics, and nuclear is forced to internalize many of their impacts where as other solutions, mainly fossil fuels, do not. That is a pretty key competitive disadvantage.

Also note that electricity is only a fraction of total power, total power includes many non-electrical uses, most notably motor vehicles via liquid fuels. When you look at solar in this light, it represents a sub-fraction of a percent. So 5% of annual solar electrical generation is only a small part of a larger energy picture, and picture which also needs to be weighted against the rest of the world for which solar provides very little power. This isn't an attack on solar, it is a bringing to light of how vast the gulf is to address climate issues with any one technology.

So I think you will find that he isn't off by orders of magnitude, rather, he was being pretty generous to the total amount of energy produced by solar and wind world wide, and climate issues and emissions are world issues.

Key World Energy STATISTICS IEA:

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/kwes.pdf

(I trust the IEA's numbers)

But I share the sentiment that we need to reduce coal and gas to address climate concerns. The fact that German emissions have risen for 2 years in a row is troubling to say the least. I consider France and Sweden to be better models, lower CO2 per capita and electrical prices in both cases compared to Germany, and both heavy nuclear users...with Sweden using a fair deal more hydro power than France. Nuclear and hydro are the proven heavy lifters in the area of CO2 reductions, which is why I think his criticism of environmental groups in addressing climate issues is justified as they generally oppose both.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2012 IAEA:

http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/Pess/assets/12-44581_ccnp2012_web.pdf

The real reason for the chase: he's got a box of krispy kreme. What's this town's annual law enforcement budget anyway?

I found out last year that the Tor was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Lab. As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government. I never knew of Hemlis till you mentioned it. Thanks for the info.

Joe Kelly already wrote the perfect Superman/Batman story, just put that on film. I'd like to see a fun DC film for a change - there hasn't been one since Batman '66.