» 2008 » May

Bill C51 is being debated in the House of Commons; it’s passed first reading. This Bill blatantly serves only the interest of the Pharmaceutical Companies. Our MP’s have been successfully lobbied by Big Pharma. Their spin doctors are telling us it is all for our protection…it’s good for us. Their clever arguments and justifications are, of course, lies. It’s about MONEY.

Via Bill C51;

• Big Pharma will control and exclusively sell natural remedies, vitamins, supplements and herbs which are currently public domain.
• Big Pharma will have no competition from natural products for their expensive, patented, pharmaceutical inventions.
• Many public domain health products will simply become unavailable by any legal means in Canada.
• Our health will suffer and our rights will be eroded; the cost of these everyday health products will certainly rise.
• Our homes can be searched without warrant by Federal agents if we are suspected of having “non-approved” remedies.
• We can be jailed for using “non-approved” products or for giving them to our children.

This will be Big Pharma’s equivalent to George Bush’s Patriot Act.

Visit: www.stopc51.com

LS » When push comes to shove in our own lives most of will side with science and thus the pharmaceutical industry but Mother Nature is also a chemist and to make her products illegal at the expense of our health and for the benefit of corporations is asinine.  If you are a Canadian you might want to look further into this issue.

With the days of indiscriminate fish consumption long gone, food writer Taras Grescoe explains how to eat seafood ethically. (Hint: Order mussels; skip shrimp.)

On the subject of seafood, I’d always been well intentioned but underinformed. It’s not that I didn’t care, didn’t hear the dispatches about avoiding Chilean sea bass or the antibiotics in shrimp, but I felt overwhelmed by a stream of investigative reports and gloomy forecasts. Overwhelmed is how a lot of us feel these days, as food-related crises proliferate in the news — potentially contaminated beef from sick cows, possibly toxic crop spraying in California, food riots in Haiti. The bleak onslaught can make eating ethically seem like a daunting, if not impossible, goal. It was with this sense of doom that I began Taras Grescoe’s “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.” But by the time I was done, I found myself holding court in the canned fish aisle explaining to fellow shoppers the difference between skipjack and albacore tuna.

Grescoe, a Canadian nonfiction writer and respected food and travel journalist, takes us on an international tour of controversial cuisines — shark fin soup in China, whale sashimi in Japan, monkfish tail in New York City — meanwhile offering an overview of the corrupt practices that have put the oceans (and our health) in danger. The portrait he paints is grim: oceanic dead zones that, because of pollution and overfishing, can no longer support organic life; salmon farms polluted by pesticides and disease; ruthless bottom trawlers with nets that can destroy entire ecosystems.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » The kind of information laid out in this book should become common cultural knowledge asap.