Pesticides in Potato

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There has been talks about possible presence of glyphosate and other pesticides in tubers such as potato.

I was informed by some that potato being grown some places in Canada might be desiccated by glyphosate prior to harvesting. But according to data received from CFIA, potato were not tested for glyphosate, and the word potato comes up sparingly in the items tested which were processed meals that contained potato. Potato might not have been the main ingredient in those products and the presence of glyphosate was not noted to be high or consistent. So I would say that the CFIA results were not conclusive that potato posed a serious threat to glyphosate poisoning to people.

Anyhow, I asked Anthony Samsel. This is what he said:

Tony,
Glyphosate causes DAMAGE to potato tubers…It is generally only used pre-plant and low levels do get into the tubers.. and cause reduced quality and yield.  The herbicides used pre-harvest to desiccate the vines are generally GLUFOSINATE, DIQUAT (Reglone) …..  
These are necrotic lesions caused by glyphosate in the soil…

necrotic lesions

(Above pictures, as well as the rest, are new to me. I have not seen such potato either in the store or in my backyard. I guess such items are removed before potatoes reach the store shelves. I might not have them because I do not use glyphosate or any industrial pesticide in my residence or garden.)

This is crippled shoot (at left) formation from the potato eyes called Cauliflower formation and is a telltale sign of glyphosate application to the field …

This is tuber cracking (at right) caused by glyphosate exposure from spray drift.

…. most potatoes have residues of herbicides and fungicides such as the fungicide Chlorothalonil… which never should have been allowed into the food supply.  This fungicide causes mammalian embryo fatalities and reductions in live fetuses…  Animal studies show that Chlorothalonil is a probable carcinogen…..
Anthony

The images and the text in blue are from scientist Anthony Samsel of USA. I have never seen such potato either but can understand why or how this might happen.

Meanwhile I did check the issue of Chlorthalonil in potato, among items tested by CFIA. There are more than 2,500 samples of potato tested by CFIA from 2008 till 2016 for presence of Chlorothalonil. Out of them all, only four samples had any chlorothalonil.

The above table shows some of the details available from the only samples that contained Chlorothalonil. For some reason, just one sample, the one on top, representing fresh potato from from the US contained over 3,700 ppb of Chlorothalonil and was in violation. The others contained less than 3 ppb, the last one was declared as organic.

The table is also the link to the full downloadable file of over 2,500 tests done on potato to find Chlorothalonil, by CFIA, between 2008 and 2016.

This is also included in the book Poison Foods of North America.

 

Glyphosate over forests

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Glyphosate over forests

I got a question from Kevin Proteau of BC, in relation to spraying of glyphosate over forests. I decided to tell my story directly into a Camera, for record.

BC has been using glyphosate over its forests for decades. I had made a freedom of information request to the BC government to let me know how much (by weight) glyphosate had been sprayed over BC forests by logging corporations from the beginning till date.

I learned that:

1) Glyphosate is routinely used, for many years

2) The details are neither completely held by ministry of forest management, nor the ministry of environment, but in bits and pieces here and there. As a result they could not give me any year upon year total (which I had asked) of amount of glyphosate sprayed over BC Forests.

3) The BC Government asked me if I was prepared to dole out several hundred dollars extra for the information since the request needs more man-hours than stipulated and would require the government to write to all the logging contractors, who might have better records, to furnish the information, to be tallied and tabulated by the Government, and then given to me.

I refused to pay several hundred dollars, but settled to get a small portion of the information that the BC Government had, sketchy and in a rather incomplete list for only a few years, for around $100.

And so, the answer is – two fold:

A) Yes, glyphosate is routinely sprayed over BC forests

B) Nobody knows how much of it has been sprayed. The Government is not keeping tab on it.

On a separate request to the BC Government, I asked to be shown what document it had seen that glyphosate was safe to be used over BC forests, from the point of view of forest ecosystem and wildlife. I got only a vague answer that the product was approved by Health Canada.

This answer indicates, to me that

C) Nobody in the BC Government has seen any evidence that glyphosate is safe to be sprayed over our forests.

D) Since Health Canada, far as I know, has never conducted nor sighted any test on effect of glyphosate on environment, and has only presumably seen tests of glyphosate in mammalian food, which it refuses to disclose to the people – that there has not been any tests seen by anybody in Canada, and as far as I can tell, anybody else anywhere else either, that glyphosate is at all safe to be sprayed over our forests, for sustainability of our biological diversity, our flora and fauna, our wildlife or out environment.

Thank you
Tony Mitra

A book about Mother Teresa

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One of the books I intend to read shortly, from Christopher Hitchens. This provides a counter argument to the theory of service in the name of God and about how good or questionable might have Mother Teresa of Kolkata been.

I will not buy it from Amazon, nor buy a paperback or kindle version.
I shall instead buy an audible version and “listen” to it while working on something else.
Audio books are the preferred format for me, on non-fiction issues of social significance.

Chis Hitchens is one of the original thinkers of our time, and so his opinion might be worth checking. But there is more.

I don’t completely believe this is sensationalism or pushing fake news. I come from the same town she worked all her life in – Kolkata.
My mother personally met her. That is not to say she was against Mother Teresa, but rather, was ambivalent. I have met a few nuns that worked in her organization both in India and in the US. I found them rather earthly and interested in earthly issues, not unlike you and me. I am keeping an open mind here and intend to read the book first, before passing opinion.

Also, strictly speaking – this is not so much news per se, as it is a book of opinion, by Chris Hitchens.

Lastly, I have another instinctive, and somewhat knee-jerk, opinion that missionaries, of any religion, do more harm than good in poor countries. This is a feeling that will not go away easily, because of the weight of evidence across the globe, going several centuries and perhaps even millennia.

Direct Democracy?

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There is a news from Paris, where the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed that the French Parliament be trimmed by a third because it is too top heavy and has too much bureaucracy and has gotten slow and inefficient.

The article came up here.

This is an interesting idea – to cut the French Parliament of excess fat and trim it by a third.

I believe time is ripe for not just trimming the fat, but to radically overhaul our parliament and question the very need to have Members of Parliament at all.

IN the time gone by, there was a need for representative of the people to go to the Capital, and vote on bills, representing the wish of the constituents that elected the member.

Today, two things have happened that makes the job of the Member of Parliament redundant:

1) The elected public servant no more votes according to the wish of the people. Rather, he or she votes according either to the diktat of the party boss, or whoever funds her campaign, such as lobby groups and corporations. In short, the elected official has become a traitor to the constituents.

2) In todays world of internet and instant communication, it is not too difficult to set up system where each voter can either log in from home, or in a nearby Government kiosk, and vote once a week or once a month on a number of pending issues – or decide to abstain, thus exerting “direct democracy” instead of proxy democracy through middlemen that betray the people.

There is a case for direct democracy, and cut the fat much deeper.

Think about it, Mr. Macron of France and think about it, Canadians.

Many of these observations first came from me through social media such as Facebook. But I am storing them here as I believe some day they might deserve to be  part of a book of essays.

Democracy is not a free lunch: Bill C-291 on GMO labelling

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Bill C291 (Labelling of GMO)
What the people might do about it
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

This was the bill, for mandatory labelling of GMO, that was hugely defeated in the Canadian parliament recently, because most of the conservatives and liberals voted against it, while all of NDP, Bloc Québécois and a handful of Liberals voted for it.

The full list of who voted which way, is available on Govt. web site, and I have downloaded it, converted it to pdf and uploaded it in my website for reference.

Idea is to check how our elected representatives voted and challenge them when they voted against it – and encourage other people to do the same, because of a simple require of our constitution – the MPs were NOT supposed to vote according to their feelings or bias, but were SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT THE WISHES OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS.

In short, if they were unsure of public sentiment, (and polls say an overwhelming percentage of the people wanted GMO labelling), they were supposed to open a channel of communication to assess feelings of the voters of their riding and then vote on the bill accordingly.

My Liberal MP neither checked with the people (I got no notification from her that she was at all interested in my view) and went and voted against the bill.

So, here is one more example of where Canadians might write to their MPs and demand on know what right they had to make unilateral decision without without checking views of the people they represent. According to my understanding of the Canadian constitution, these MPs had absolutely no right to make either an unilateral decision, or to go with the party boss, or to be influenced by industry.

However, it is still our (citizen’s) duty to make this work, and to either force a change in the behaviour of our MPs, or to see that they soon become unemployed politicians.

If the citizens are not ready to take back control of politics of this nation – the citizens do not deserve a functioning democracy.

I shall be writing to my MP, for sure. I shall also be sharing it with the people.

For those that wish to check the link vote list for Bio C-291 – click on the above picture.

Remember Canadians :

Democracy is NOT A FREE LUNCH. We have to earn it.

And while you are at it, you might copy your letter to the MP that sponsored this bill, Pierre-Luc Dusseault of Sherbrooke, Quebec at Pierre-Luc.Dusseault@parl.gc.ca

Other pesticides in North American Foods

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Poison Foods of North America is mostly designed to help people avoid glyphosate from their daily foods, and is for those that consider glyphosate to be singularly the worst synthetic molecule to be in their food, as a long term agent of health hazard and disease.

But I have also received data on foods tested for other biocides. I am slowly converting parts of this huge database to the public in shorter Pdf files that contain all the raw data as received.

The attached pdf file gives all the samples that tested 2,4-D positive, and excludes all that tested negative. All readings are as originally received except one column. The pesticide level was originally measured in µg/g or in ppm. I have multiplied the readings a thousand fold and expressed the same in parts per billion, or ppb.

You can click the image to go to the pdf file which can be downloaded and expanded for study.

Tony Mitra

Glyphosate in chickpea, lentil and wheat bran

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Full set of test results from CFIA on glyphosate in chickpea, lentils and wheat bran, as well as the worst readings for any food groups, as received by self in December 2016, are placed here for reference.

Click on the images to go to the pdf file, which are free for download.

The lentil part is not too clear here since a lot of the processed food samples contained lentil but were described not as lentils but differently, such as this or that meal and snack etc. Those are not included in this list, which is purely what are described as lentils and lentil products by CFIA.

I personally believe that, as long as the Government hides safety test records and raw data involving tests on target animals under exposure to glyphosate and compared with identical animals not exposed, and their health parameters compared through the life span of the animals, its safety is unproven and therefore the people have a right to consider any level of glyphosate in food to be dangerous. The same applies to any and all safe limits (MRL) based on glyphosate.

Therefore, any glyphosate found in any food is essentially a violation of safety and aught to be removed from the stores.

I personally am not interested in discussing science behind either GMO or glyphosate, till such time the Government releases all safety test data on glyphosate for a start, and stop resorting to third party opinions on glyphosate safety. The Canadian government, just as the US and every other government, has been hiding these for over a generation now.

According to my understanding of the law, it is illegal to approve a product while hiding its safety record.

And lastly, here is a list of the worst samples as tested by CFIA where the readings showed presence of glyphosate above 1 ppm (1,000 ppb) and goes up to 12.5 ppm (12500 ppb).

Click on the image to go to the pdf file that can be downloaded and blown up.

The whole data from CFIA, totalling near 8,000 test records on foods collected in Canada and originating from 68 countries, with most samples from Canada and the US, have been analyzed, categorized, tabled, tabulated and charts made of, in detailed description in the book Poison Foods of North America. USA and Canada produces the most toxic of all foods on the planet when it comes to glyphosate contamination.

The book also gives details of other biocides found in foods b the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, involving poisons such as Atrazine, Chlorpyrifos, 2,4-D, Chlorothalonil etc, which are also shown in the same book.

The book contains about 400 such charts and tables. A few of those are shown here.

MIT scientist Stephanie Seneff wrote the following review of the book on Amazon:

This is a first of a kind book with detailed information about glyphosate contamination levels in foods from around the world, based on more than 7,000 records that Tony Mitra obtained from the Canadian government.

It is good to see that Canada is actually testing foods for glyphosate, unlike the US, who only tested soy and only in a single year, and found it in over 90% of the samples tested. The US only did this one test at the insistence of Anthony Samsel, a researcher/chemist who is extremely concerned about the toxicity of glyphosate, and who contributes material to this book.

Tony has painstakingly analyzed the data he received from the Canadian government, and packaged it up so that you as a reader can more easily obtain valuable information to help you figure out how to shop wisely so as to avoid chronic glyphosate poisoning as much as possible.

There are some big surprises in the book such as extremely high levels of glyphosate in Canadian legumes, such as lentils and chick peas, due to the widespread practice of spraying the crop right before harvest as a desiccant.

If you believe the governments when they say that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the pervasive herbicide, Roundup) is nontoxic to humans, then you will not need to read this book. But if, like me, you are passionate about avoiding glyphosate, this book is invaluable! It may help protect you from serious health care issues down the road.
Stephanie Seneff

Comments and suggestions welcome.
Tony Mitra

Can electric cars kill the oil industry & save the planet?

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This is just a rant, and a half hour or banging the keyboard because it is raining and not nice for going out to plant more seeds in my back yard.

I noticed a lively thread on social media where I had commented that I did not feel strongly that electric cars would kill the oil industry or the dependence on fossil fuels, mainly because electricity, by and large, will continue to come from fossil fuels, unless we consider nuclear energy, which has its own bag of issues. That generated a nice and healthy chain of comments from learned and well meaning folks. I did not wish to bother them with any more lengthy posts from my cantankerous self. But, it was raining outside, and I was stuck indoor for a while. The coffee was hot, and so here I am, on my own blog.

As to having a choice on what kind of electricity one gets may be relevant in very few spots on the planet. For a vast majority, on a global scale – there is no choice. What you get is what is on offer, and fossil fuel burning plants that produce electricity is the global norm right now. So, I do not see electric cars to bring a death knell to fossil fuel industry.

Of course, there are many many other issues far more relevant than a car, with regard to fossil fuel industry. Folks say, though I have not read the actual measurements, that a single flight by a single person on a cross Atlantic round trip in a year, as one passenger in a three hundred passenger carrying commercial plane, makes you responsible for a higher carbon footprint annually, than you driving around as a travelling salesman clocking 300 KM every day of the year.

So, perhaps one should talk about electric aircraft, rather than electric cars, or perhaps conscientious folks should start a movement to boycott air travel altogether to save the planet.

But, again, on a global scale, one can consider how much of the fossil fuel goes into industrial scale agriculture used in new world nations such as Canada, USA and Australia and compare it with fossil fuels used for on surface of air transportation, to get a perspective on our fossil fuel consumption.

This of course does not cover the non commercial flights such as cargo flights that bring goodies to our neighbourhood but was produced in China or Indonesia. It also does not cover our tax payers money used to fly bombers over Syria to drop bombs over civilians in the name of fighting terrorism.

Fossil fuel usually means hydro-carbon. This means a series of molecules, of a thousand different variety, that has carbon and/or hydrogen in bond. ON one end of the spectrum is pure carbon. Folks think coal is pure carbon, but it is actually not so. It has hydrogen too, but much less. As the percentage of hydrogen increases, the fossil fuel gets lighter and lighter, into liquid mode and eventually into gaseous mode.  Among the lightest that is still around on earth in plentiful quantity are gasses like natural gas or methane, Liquified petroleum ( a mix of propane and butane) etc.

They are all called fossil fuel because, billions of years ago, they along with carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour constituted our atmosphere. There was no oxygen at all. One could argue that the CO2 in our atmosphere back then came from burning up whatever oxygen was available at the time with too much hot carbon. Either way, the atmosphere was full of stuff that would not allow us to live even one minute.

Then came a long chain of slow reactions, thought to be triggered and engineered by tiny living creatures we generally identify as micro-organisms, or bacteria. They invented photosynthesis, used sunlight as a source of energy, started splitting CO2 to grab the carbon, pull hydrogen out of water vapour and other hydrogen containing molecules and started constructing biological molecules that would be the foundation for a whole plethora of life forms. In the process, it did a few interesting things. It removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, produced oxygen as a byproduct, sequestered excess carbon and hydrocarbons into the ground and away from the atmosphere, and made it possible for plant and animal kingdom to evolve. And all those sequestered hydro-carbons are today known as fossil fuels, handiworks of billions of years of industrious micro-organisms that changed the planet and made it habitable for us air breathing animals.

Up came man or man’s predecessors, found out how to make fire out of wood, and started a two million year process of reversing the four billion years of work done by the bacteria.

It took our ancestor hominids and modern humans around two million years to finish off easily available wood on the surface of the planet, so clear cutting of forests became the next major source of energy. Around five hundred years ago, Europe finished off most of its forests so no more wood was available for energy. Man had invented a thing called “technology”, so buried “fossil fuel” called coal, could be pulled out of the earth, and used in place of wood.

Steam engine got invented so water that flooded coal mines could be emptied without manual labour. The rest was an inexorable march of human “technology” to undo the work of the bacteria.

It took around 400 years or so, for man to run out of enough coal on a global scale, to satisfy its ever increasing greed. So, around the beginning of the 20th century, large deposits of the next best thing – oil, was discovered and technology developed to use it for energy production. Being liquid, it had its other advantages that could be exploited better.

However, unlike wood that lasted us two million years, or coal that lasted about four hundred, mans ever increasing demand is finishing off oil is just over a hundred years. So we finished off solid fuel and liquid fuels and the last remaining frontier in fossil fuels is fuels that would be gaseous, but are somehow kept underground by those industrious micro-organisms as part liquid in strange conditions of pressure and temperature that is only possible deep underground or underwater.

So the next, and last, remaining source of “fossil fuel” appears to be natural gas and its other cousins such as LPG etc.

By now, demand for this gas, in places such as BC, Canada, is making the industry cut away last of the remaining forests, flood good agricultural lands, in order to make gigantic dams using the last of the meltwater fed rivers to produce hydro-electric power that can be used for hydraulically fracturing our stone foundations on an earth-quake prone continent, to get at the trapped natural gas, so that more “fossil fuels” can be extracted to power our ever more thirsty civilization.

How long would this natural gas last, compared to wood, coal and oil of the past? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is it would last far less than a hundred years. What the bacterial world achieved over 4 billion years, man will finish off in less than a hundred.

When hydro-carbons, or fossil fuel, is gone, what kind of energy is there in nearly inexhaustible quantity that man’s ever increasing greed is not likely to exhaust any time soon?

Far as I can see – it is nuclear fuel, and not wind power or solar or ocean waves etc all of which will remain as fringe. Nuclear fuel has kept the core of the earth hot, molten and magnetic ever since the planet formed and there is enough of it around.

However, just like burning fossil fuels have a nasty side effect. So has nuclear fuel. The reason mankind particularly chose Uranium for power generation and not one of the less dangerous nuclear fuels is because Uranium is a particularly good dual-technology fuel. It not only allows power generation, but it, and its synthetic derivative Plutonium also helps greatly in making atomic and eventually hydrogen bombs. Its great for warfare and weaponization.

So, in the long run, just as I do not believe electric cars are going to solve the planet’s environment on a global scale, I also do not see natural gas to solve it either, and do not see an end anytime soon, of an unending increase of nuclear power plants across the planet either. Till now, Uranium-Plutonium duo remains the most favoured technology which has allowed at least nine nations to develop nuclear bombs (USA, Russia, France, UK, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) and at least a few more merely months away from making one if needed.

Meanwhile, an equally increasing number of nations have now the capability of building rockets than could carry such bombs across continents and deliver it at your doorstep, raining death and destruction from the sky, all following the age old model of warfare designed to enhance someone’s economy.

There are, meanwhile, environmental scientists that are beginning to predict that the current business-as-usual model of world civilization is long past the point of no return and the planet has absolutely no chance of maintaining life forms as we know it now. We are already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction phase, which is not even a disputed argument any more. The last mass extinction happened 65 million years ago that make the dinosaurs go extinct. Today it is recognized to have happened because of a massive asteroid strike on planet earth. However, the current sixth mass extinction is not due to any extraterrestrial phenomenon. This one is wholly man made.

So, how much time does the planet have left. Again, your guess is as good as mine. But a rising group of scientists, mostly kept out of mainstream and out of public eye, are claiming that this century, the 21st will not end with the business as usual model still in place.

Some are predicting 95% of living animals we can now identify will be gone by the end of the century, along with 99% of human population. What will the earth look like – I have absolutely no idea, but cities as we know it will be gone, as would be civilization.

Maverick scientists like ex-Jet propulsion laboratory and NASA notable James Lovelock predicted some years ago through his gaia series works that world has less than thirty or so years left before all hell breaks lose. That was made a decade  ago, so perhaps today, by his calculation, we have less than ten years left. His advise at the time was – there is actually nothing one can do to reverse this cataclysm, so might as well put your feet on the table, have a coffee and enjoy life while it still lasts.

I do not know if Lovelock’s prediction and time table is correct, but instinctively, I believe him to be fully correct even if the time table is arguable, and the reason I believe this to be correct is not just on account of man using up fossil fuel alone, but on an increasing different ways including our economy, money creation, agriculture, ever increasing population, ever increasing material demand made by the so called ‘Developmentality’ of civilized humans etc etc etc. So, in my mind, we are the very last generation of living people that are seeing the world as a continuum and peaking of a specific trend of human civilizational evolution and planetary sustainability.

For the next generation on – it is going to be a dog eat dog downward slide where it gets to be impossible for the bacterial world to keep maintaining the earth’s environment in a habitable range for air breathing animals in a manner that we humans of today can still relate to.

Time for a coffee ?

Glyphosate in Organic Chickpea

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There has been questions on chickpea and if one can get clean ones if one buys organic.

Well, there are opinions, there are speculations and there are observations from a handful of samples that were tested by CFIA to allow a partial glimpse on the subject.

It is my personal belief that there is no safe way to get hold of glyphosate free chickpea, if one lives in North America, until and unless there is a serious effort at testing locally sold foods at the county or municipal level, and disclosing all those results to the local public every month. That is the reason I had tried to kick start the globally relevant petition for pushing each municipal government to start setting up a budget and start testing local food.

Unfortunately, the world has more people willing to pontificate and less people willing to do something about it – hence petitions like that get no more than 1,400 signatures.

If one does selective testing of three or four organic chickpea grown in Canada, one can find zero glyphosate. But the problem is three fold.

First – CFIA does not disclose brand names of those samples which showed no glyphosate. This is the reason I wanted municipalities to start testing and disclosing all details including brand names and origins and stores that sell them, and for people to start banging their fists on municipal council doors till they cave in (https://www.change.org/p/let-our-government-test-food-for-glyphosate?).

Second – question has been asked, if the organic certification process only ensures that a crop is grown organically, and ignores how the crop is harvested. In other words, one can grow a crop without pesticides, get organic certification and still desiccate it with glyphosate before harvest. If this is true, then that can explain how North American organic chickpea are so extremely contaminated with glyphosate, and how organic certification means absolutely nothing, with regard to glyphosate contamination in some foods grown in North America such as chickpea.

Third – there is always this issue among the CFIA records, regarding ‘unknown’ as country of origin. I suspect some, if not most, of these may have originated in Canada or nearby sources such as the US. Therefore, there is a very high probability of organic chickpea grown anywhere in Canada or the United States will have more samples with glyphosate and less samples without. This further bolsters my belief that, for North Americans, there is no safe way unless each and every kind of food is tested for glyphosate. Someone with a shipload of cash can afford to test every spoonful of food (s)he eats for glyphosate. For the rest of us mere mortals, we either get our local governments to play ball and test the food we buy, or decide to cut chickpea off our menu, or agree to play Russian Roulette with the chickpea we eat.

For people living outside of North America – that’s a different planet, a different solar system, a different galaxy and a different constellation. Rules, observations and expectations therefore would be different for them. My findings, and subsequent writing of the book, is titled Poison Foods of North America. It deals primarily with North America, with some comparisons with foods that came from elsewhere and were sampled in Canada.

Readers will be well advised to be cautious and find their path through this nightmare crop.

Chlorothalonil in food and our disfunctional democracy

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Was interviewed the other day by the US based USA Prepares Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8W5SjHRHVI)

They wanted to know if I am happy with either a one hour interview or a two hour.
I personally think anything over 10 minutes gets to be boring for the people, so agreed to a one hour.
 
These folks came to know about me from German born New Brunswick farmer Werner Bock, who has been screaming hoarse about Canadian government poisoning its agriculture, its forests and its meadows for more than three decades, to the point where the government started harassing him and even putting him temporarily in a loony bin claiming he was mentally disturbed. Apparently, Werner knows everybody in North America. He found out my phone number a few years ago and usually calls me up every few months. He is well known to the radio show people and apparently told them to find me.
 
I personally am not too sure if radio talks are fruitful.
 
I know articles written in online and printed papers have their value in raising awareness. I know blog posts and social media have their value in raising awareness. I know youtube video, audio podcasts and radio shows have their value in raising awareness. I know seminars, March against Monsanto, and mock tribunals all have their value in raising awareness.
 
And yet, I am coming to the conclusion that all these “raising awareness” is pretty much useless, when I consider what result it has achieved in the western hemisphere, especially in North America, which is faced with the worst of this avalanche of food poisoning.
 
At this rate, we shall have a highly raised level of awareness in a few more decades, while we shall also all be dead from poisons – highly aware people that died from poison but decided to do nothing, other than being “aware”.
 
The reason for this contradiction, in my analysis, is that the western world in general, and North America in particular, is too full of people that are little more than armchair activists, and people that are addicted to “raising awareness” to millions more armchair activists.
 
To me, it is clear as the open sky, that the root of all this problem is a dysfunctional democracy that has been hijacked into a full blows fascism, while the addicted population still believes writing an article, or clicking a like button, or hanging out with this or that talking head will bring them close to Nirvana.
 
If we have a full blown fascism and our democracy is nothing more than a make belief facade, then we have a problem that is political in nature and has to be solved, if at all, by political means.
 
I am not a politician by nature. I hate politicians and consider their professions to be among the lowest of the low, very close to anti-GMO talking heads in fact. They all are there to make a living out of whatever the hot topic of the day is. They are not here to solve anybody’s problems.
 
So, as an activist that is fed up with arm chair activism of my friends, fed up with raising awareness, and fed up with local politicians at the municipal, provincial and federal level – the only option appears to be to try and influence more citizens to stop the bullshit, and start targeting politicians, and try to pull their pants off in public. Time is well past when I can still be polite and ask  politician with folded hands to “please sir, please madam, please look at this or that issue, please see these reports and please disclose that hidden data and please, please please please please …”
 
I am dome with that shit. But, I am not a revolutionary and hate violence and bloodshed. I also hate being an elected politician or the compromises that one needs to make in order to gain political office. I am also a serious disbeliever of the political party system. To me, political parties should be banned and only independents allowed to stand for election. That way, theoretically, each elected official works only according to wishes of his or her constituents and not according to any party leader or party whip. The very notion of a political party is, to me, unconstitutional and anti-democratic. Anyhow, hating politics as a profession and refusing anything outside the law, and fed up with “raising awareness” to a comatose citizenry, my options are limited as an activist.
 
What we have here is a failure of democracy not because politicians are crooks, which they generally are, but because the citizens are in coma. In democracy, even in a failing democracy, every fault of the system lies at the feet of the citizens, no matter how much folks may like to blame politicians or Monsanto or the devil. It is always the fault of the people to allow things to come to whoever it has come. And our citizens, in North America, are are almost incapable of rational thinking. It is as if they are in a coma or has already gone autistic and are incapable of any rational thinking.
 
I want other citizens to grab their politicians by the scruff of their necks, metaphorically, and give them one issue options – “ban glyphosate or your rear end is mine to kick”.
Meanwhile, here is a chart about “Chlorothalonil” in foods as tested by CFIA, consolidated from over 65,000 tests and plotted on a logarithmic scale. I have not had the time to look deeper into it, but Canada and USA ranks high in these along with a few others like Guatemala, Mexico and China etc. Some of the worst individual samples have over 50,000 ppb of Chlorothalonil, such as Chinese Cabbage grown in Canada.
 
I shall eventually have time to break these down by nations and food types better. All this would be in my book, which may bloat from the current 400 pages to either closer to 1,000 pages, or be split into volume two.
 
This chart is only covering food types that had chlorothalonil average contamination level of over 20 ppb, and shows both the average contamination and the percentage contamination. So, for items that have very low percentage contamination and yet rather high average contamination – those foods have only a few samples with extremely high levels of Chorothalonil while the rest where clean. Good examples of these might be Fine Herbs, Chinese Cabbage (this was make in Canada), Plum, Apricot and Beet. It would therefore make sense to check if those very high levels of contamination in a few few samples are an indication of where they were grown etc etc.
 
Other food items where the percentage contamination is also high, might be candidates that folks aught to consider rejecting, or growing themselves, or buying organic.
 
Incidentally, all items in this chart are conventional. Lots of organic food types were also tested by CFIA. They all had zero or negligible amounts of Chlorothalonil. So, in this particular case, going organic only is safer. All that will appear in my book eventually. Its a work in progress.
 
The green line represents the concentration in ppb, in descending order from left to right, with corresponding percentage contamination in blue for each of these food types.
 
All that will come in due course. Meanwhile I have to figure out how to kick some more political rear ends and how to goad them, shame them, insult them, till they start responding. 
 
There are some animals that turn over and play dead when in trouble. If you take a stick and turn the animal right side up, it immediately turns over belly up again, to convince you that it is really dead. Our politicians are a master of that act.
 
Some of these should end up in my blogs but I am having some malware issues with the wordpress platform and need to solve those first so that future blogs come out OK.
 
PS I hope to catch up with Anthony Samsel sometime to catch up on the implications of having much chlorothalonil in food, especially what we consider as vegetables.
 
Tony Mitra