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From: His Highness the TibetanMonkey, ComandanteBanana and Chief of Quixotic Enterprises on 20 May 2010 10:46
As the wheel of history turns, things often remain the same. Such are
the conditions in the meat packing industry in 1906 when 'The Jungle'
was written and in 2010 when powerful corporations decide what's safe
for you and don't even inform you because you are 'too stupid' to make
an informed decision. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!

The Jungle

The novel’s title symbolizes the competitive nature of capitalism; the
world of Packingtown is like a Darwinian jungle, in which the strong
prey on the weak and all living things are engaged in a brutal, amoral
fight for survival. The title of the novel draws attention
specifically to the doctrine of Social Darwinism, an idea used by some
nineteenth-century thinkers to justify the abuses of wealthy
capitalists. This idea essentially held that society was designed to
reward the strongest, best people, while inferior people were kept
down at a suitable level. By relating the story of a group of honest,
hardworking immigrants who are destroyed by corruption and evil,
Sinclair tries to rebut the idea of Social Darwinism, implying that
those who succeed in the capitalist system are not the best of
humankind but rather the worst and most corrupt of all.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/jungle/themes.html

From: His Highness the TibetanMonkey, ComandanteBanana and Chief of Quixotic Enterprises on 20 May 2010 17:40
On May 20, 11:59 am, "Bob F" <bobnos...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Don Klipstein wrote:
> > In <17e357b9-7bf8-43c1-b880-916fcc3d4...(a)u7g2000vbq.googlegroups.com>,
> > His Highness the TibetanMonkey, ComandanteBanana wrote:
>
> > (In large part bashing genetically modified food)
>
> > For the past 450-plus million years, Nature has been genetically
> > modifying the genes of things that animals eat, fairly randomly.
>
> > I seem to think that genetic modifications done by scientists who
> > know somewhat what they're doing would have a lower rate of making
> > new toxic or dangerous strains of food plants than genetic
> > modifications done randomly by cosmic rays, carbon-14, potassium-40,
> > retroviruses, and random failures of chromosomes to replicate
> > perfectly. Along with mating between different species not being
> > completely free of producing fertile offspring (an example is the
> > savana cat, a hybrid between species of 2 different genera. And
> > plants can't be convicted of bestiality for their pollen landing on
> > the pistils of flowers of plants of other species.)
>
> > And I certainly think that few (probably none) of the food species
> > and strains we ate 50 or 5,000 years ago are free of unmodified genes.
>
> As long as the food is labeled as GM, and properly tested for health risks and
> nutrition, OK.
>
> We have hundreds of years of knowledge about the safety of non-GM varieties. Who
> knows what the long term effect of BT corn or Roundup treated GM crops will be?
> Shouldn't we at least have the option to not buy them if we choose?

Exactly. But they consider the sheep too stupid to know the
difference, and that some may actually be scared by it.

An internal memo of Monsanto says, "We can't afford to lose one
dollar."

The situation with the soybean seems particularly scary where they are
bombarded with more pesticides as the new strains have been developed
to resist pesticides. Milk is loaded too.

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