They certainly chose the most inane articles of her children's line to promote as an example didn't they? The Observers idea of rational discourse entails that one has embraced the spirit of the age.
Much faster than many realise. We are rapidly heading towards a totalitarian mind set that excludes the language of Christianity.
From 2018 to 2019 - a quick survey of a few trends, by The Saker - The Unz Review The year 2018 will go down in history as a turning point in the evolution of the geostrategic environment of our planet. There are many reasons for that and I won’t list them all, but here are some of the ones which I personally consider the most important ones: The Empire blinked. Several times This is probably the single most important development of the year: the AngloZionist Empire issued all sorts of scary threats, and took some even scarier actual steps, but eventually it had to back down. In fact, the Empire is in retreat on many fronts, but I will only list a few crucial ones: The DPRK: remember all the grandiose threats made by Trump and his Neocon handlers? The Administration went as far as announcing that it would send as many as THREE(!) nuclear aircraft carrier strike groups to the waters off the DRPK while Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea. Eventually, the South Koreans decided to take matters in their own hands, they opened a direct channel of communications with the North, and all the US sabre-rattling turned into nothing more than hot air. Syria in April: that was the time when the US, France and the UK decided to attack Syria with cruise missiles to “punish” the Syrians for allegedly using chemical weapons (a theory too stupid to be even worth discussing). Of 103 detected missiles, 71 were shot down by the Syrians. The White House and the Pentagon, along with their trusted Ziomedia, declared the strike a great success, but then, they also did that during the invasion of Grenada (one of the worst assault operation in military history) or after the humiliating defeat of Israel by Hezbollah in 2006, so this really means very little. The truth is that this operation was a total military failure and that it has not been followed up by anything (at least for now). The Ukraine: we spent almost all of 2018 waiting for an Ukronazi attack on the Donbass which never happened. Now, I am quite sure that some will argue that the Nazi junta in Kiev never had any such intentions, but anybody with even a basic knowledge of what took place in the Ukraine this year knows that this is pure bull: the junta did pretty much everything to execute an attack except the very last step: to actually order it. Putin’s open threat that any such attack would have “grave consequences for Ukraine’s statehood as such” probably played a key role in deterring the Empire. Oh sure, the Ukronazis might well attack in January or any time after that, but the fact is that in 2018 they did not dare do so. Yet again, the Empire (and its minions) had to back down. Syria in September: this time, it was the Israeli hypostasis of the Empire which triggered a massive crisis when the Israelis hid their strike aircraft behind a Russian Il-20 large turboprop airliner resulting in the loss of the aircraft and crew. After giving the Israelis a chance to come clean (which, predictably, they didn’t – they are, after all, Israelis), the Russians got fed up and delivered advanced air defense, electronic warfare and battle management systems to the Syrians. In response the Israelis (who had issued many threats about immediately destroying any S-300 delivered to the Syrians) had to basically stop their air strikes against Syria (well, not quite, they did execute two such strikes: one totally ineffective one and one in which the Zionist crazies again hid behind an aircraft, but in this case, no one but TWO civilian aircraft (more about this latest ziocrazy stunt further below). The Empire backed down again. Syria in December: apparently fed up with all the infighting amongst his advisors, Trump eventually ordered a full US withdrawal from Syria. Now, of course, since this is the US, we have to wait and see what actually happens. There is also a very complex kabuki dance being executed by Russia, Turkey, the US, Israel, Iran, the Kurds and the Syrians to stabilize the situation following a full US withdrawal. After all the years of huffing and puffing about how “Assad The Monster must go” it is quite amusing to see how the western powers are throwing in towels one after the other. This also begs the obvious question: if “The City On The Hill And Sole Superpower On The Planet, The Leader Of The Free World and the Indispensable Nation” can’t even deal with a weakened Syrian government and military, what can this military successfully do (besides provide Hollywood blockbusters to a gullible US public)? Various smaller defeats: too many to count, but they include the Khashoggi fiasco, the failure of the war in Yemen, the failure of the war in Afghanistan, the failure of the war in Iraq, the failure to remove Maduro from power in Venezuela, and the gradual loss of control over an increasing number of EU countries (Italy), Nikki Haley’s ridiculous antics at the UNSC, the inability to gather up the intellectual resources needed to have a real, productive, meeting with Vladimir Putin, the disastrous commercial war with China, etc. What all these events have in common is that they are a result of the inability of the US to get anything done, truly done. Far from being a real superpower, the US is in a full-spectrum decline and the main thing which still gives it its superpower status are its nuclear weapons, just like Russia in the 1990s...
... All the internal problems resulting from the infighting of the US elites (roughly: the Clinton gang vs Trump and his Deplorables) only make things worse. Just the apparently never ending sequence of resignations and/or firing from the Trump Administration is a very important sign of the advanced state of collapse of the US polity. Elites don’t fight each other when all goes well, they do so when everything goes south. The saying “victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan” reminds us that when a gang of thugs begins to lose control of a situation, it rapidly turns into an “every man for himself”, everybody blames everybody for the problems and nobody wants to stay anywhere near those who will go down in history as the pathetic losers who screwed everything up. As for the US armed forces, they have been tremendously successful in killing a very large amount of people, as always, mostly civilians, but they failed to get anything actually done, at least not if one understands that the purpose of war is not just to kill people, but is the “continuation of politics by other means“. Let’s compare and contrast what Russia and the US did in Syria. On October 11th, Putin declared the following in an interview with Vladimir Soloviev on the TV channel Russia 1: “Our objective is to stabilize the legitimate authority and create conditions for a political compromise“. That’s it. He did not say that Russia would single-handedly change the course of the war, much less so win the war. The (very small!) Russian task force in Syria achieved these original objectives in just a few months, something which the Axis-of-Kindness could not achieve in years (and the Russians did that with a small fraction of the military capabilities available to the US/NATO/EU/CENTCOM/Israel in the region. In fact, the Russians even had to quickly create a resupply system which they did not have because of the purely defensive Russian military posture (Russian power projection is mostly limited under 500-1000km from the Russian border). In comparison, the US has been fighting a so-called GWOT (Global War on Terror) since 2001 and all it can show is that the terrorists (of various demonstrations) only got stronger, took control of more land, murdered more people, and generally seemed to show a remarkable ability to survive and even grow in spite of (or thanks to) the GWOT. As Putin would say, what would you expect from “people who don’t know the difference between Austria and Australia“? Personally, I would expect them to take full credit for the victory and leave. Which is exactly what the US has done. At least that is what they are saying now. This could change 180 degree again. As for Afghanistan, the US spent more time there than the Soviets did. Does that no strongly suggest that the US leaders are *even more* incompetent than the “stagnation” era Soviet gerontocrats? The failure to subdue or even contain Russia Putin’s speech on March 1st to the Russian Federal Assembly was truly a historical moment: for the first time since the Empire decided to wage war on Russia (a war which is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic but which can turn 95% kinetic in one hour or so!) the Russians decided to openly warn the US that their strategy has been comprehensively defeated. You think that this is hyperbole? Think again. What is US military power based on? What are it’s main components? Airpower (air supremacy) Long-range standoff weapons (ballistic and air-breathing) Aircraft carriers Anti-missile defense (at least in theory!) 800-1000 (depends on how you count) bases worldwide The deployment of what are without any doubt the most sophisticated air-defense systems in the world supported what are also probably the most formidable electronic warfare (EW) capabilities currently in existence have now have now created what the US/NATO commanders refer to as a “Russia’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD)” capability which, so do these US/NATO commanders say, can pop-up over the Baltic Sea, over the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere (might show up on the La Orchila island in Venezuela in 2019). Furthermore, in qualitative terms Russian tactical airpower is newer and at least equal, if not superior, to anything in US or NATO tactical aircraft holdings. While the West in general, and especially the US, have a much larger number of aircraft, they are mostly of the older generations, and various encounters between Russian and US multirole aircraft in the Syrian skies have shown that US pilots prefer to leave when Russian Su-35S show up. The deployment (already in 2018!) of the Kinzhal hypersonic missile has basically made the entire US surface fleet useless for an attack against Russia. Be it the aircraft carriers or even various destroyers, cruisers, amphibious assault ships, (mostly ill-fated) littoral combat ships, transport ships, etc. – they now are all sitting ducks which the Russians can blow out of the water irrespective of any air-defenses these ships, or their escorts, might have. Likewise, the deployment of the super-heavy thermonuclear armed intercontinental ballistic like the Sarmat and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle have made all of the US anti-ballistic missile efforts completely useless. Let me repeat this: ALL of the US ABM efforts, including the billions spent on research and development, have now been rendered completely useless...
... It is important to clarify something here: none of the new Russian weapon systems provide anymeans to protect Russian from a US nuclear (or conventional) strike. “All” they do is to make darn sure that the US leaders are never under the illusion they have been pursuing since Reagan’s “Star Wars”, i.e. that they could somehow escape a Russian 2nd-strike (counter-strike) retaliatory capability if it decided to strike Russia. In truth, even without the Sarmat or the Avanguard, Russia already had more than enough missiles (land, air and sea based) to wipe-out the US in case of a retaliatory counter-strike, but the US politicians and force planners began pursuing this pipe-dream of anti-ballistic missile defense in spite of the fact that it was rather clear that such a system could not work (a few “leakers” might be acceptable with conventional weapons, but a few “nuclear leakers” are more than enough to extract a terrible price from any attacker delusional enough to think that a 90% or even 98% effective “shield” is enough of a protection to risk attacking a nuclear superpower). So you could say that these new Russian capabilities (including the short(er) range Iskander tactical missiles) are a type of “delusion destroyer” or a “reality reminder” who will burst the bubble of US illusions about the risks of a war against Russia. Hopefully, they will never have any other use. Finally, the deployment of a new generation of advanced and very long range standoff missiles by Russia has given Russia the huge “reach” advantage of being able to strike any US target (be it a military force or a base) worldwide, including in the United States (which now is almost never mentioned in the western media). Now take a look at the list of key components of US military power above and see that it has all been transformed into, basically, junk. What we have here is a classical situation in which, on one side, one country’s force planners made fundamental, strategic miscalculations which directly defined what kind of military force the country would have for at least two, possibly three, decades, while, on the other side, the force planners made the correct decisions which allowed them to defeat a military force whose military budget is roughly ten times bigger. The most severe consequence of this state of affairs for the US is that it will now take at the very least a decade (or more!) to reformulate a new force planning strategy (modern weapons systems sometimes take decades to design, develop and deploy). The ill-fated Zumwalt, the F-35, the Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) aircraft carrier – these are all obscene examples on how to spend billions of dollars and be left with major weapon systems disasters which only further weaken the US armed forces. There is a simple reason why the US became a superpower in the 20th century: not only was the US mainland protected by huge oceans, all of WWI and WWII were fought far away from the US: all the potential competitors of the US had their national economies completely destroyed while the US did not even lose a single factory or research/design bureau. Then the US could use its immense industrial powerbase to basically provide a world-wide market with goods which only the US could built and deliver. And yet, in spite of such huge advantages, the US spend almost all its history beating up one defenseless country after another to ensure full submission and compliance with the demands of Uncle Shmuel (the AngloZionist variant of Uncle Sam). So much for being “indispensable” I suppose… Thanks to the globalists, the US industrial base is gone. Thanks to the Neocons and their arrogance, the US is in one form of conflict or another with most of the key countries on the planet (especially if we ignore the existence of US-supported and run comprador elites). The infinitely dumb and self-defeating submission of the US to Israel has now resulted in a situation where the US is losing control of the oil-rich Middle-East it used to run for decades. Finally, by choosing to try to submit both Russia and China to the will of the Empire, the Neocons have succeeded in pushing these two countries into a de-facto alliance (really a symbiotic relationship) which, far from isolating them, isolates the US from “where it is happening” in terms of economic, social and political developments (first and foremost, the Eurasian landmass and the OBOR project)...
... 2019 prospects for the Empire: problems, problems and even more problems Well, 2018 was an exceptionally nasty and dangerous year, but 2019 could prove even more dangerous for the following reasons: Unless the US changes political course and gives up on the suicidal russophobia of Obama and Trump, a military confrontation between Russia and the US is inevitable. Russia has retreated as far as she possibly can, there is nowhere else to retreat and she therefore won’t. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that if the US had actually targeted Russian units in Syria (which, apparently, Bolton wanted but Mattis, apparently, categorically rejected), the Russians would have counter-attacked not only against the US missiles, but also against their carriers (especially ships). I have it from a trusted source that on the night of the attack, the Russian MiG-31K with the Kinzhal missile were in the air ready to strike. Thank God (and, possibly, thank Mattis) this did not happen. But as I said in my article “Every click brings us closer to a bang!” each time WWIII does not happen following a US strike on Syria this emboldens the Neocons to try yet once more, especially since “Assad The Monster Must Go” remains in power in Damascus while one after the one each western politician which decreed that Assad must go, goes himself. It is pretty obvious that Israel has gone absolutely, terminally and, possibly, suicidally insane. Their little stunt with the Russian Il-20 was already a disaster of immense proportions which, in a normal country, would have resulted in the immediate resignation of the entire Cabinet. But not in Israel. After hiding behind a Russian military turboprop, they now decided to hide from the Syrian S-300 by hiding behind two civilian aircraft: Right now there is nobody in the US political class with any chance of being elected who would dare to do anything other that automatically worship anything Israeli (or Jewish, for that matter). The real motto of the US is not “In God we trust“, but “there is no light between the U.S. and Israel” (yet another reason why the US is not a real superpower: it is not even really sovereign!). The Empire has some major problems in Europe. First, should the Ukronazi protégés of the US ever find the courage (or despair) to attack the Donbass or Russia, the resulting chaos will flood the EU with even more refugees, many of whom will be most unsavory and outright dangerous characters. Furthermore, the anti-EU feelings are becoming very strong in Italy, Hungary and, for different reasons, even Poland. France is on the edge of a civil war (not this time around; my feeling is that the Gilets Jaunes will eventually run out of steam; but the next time around, which will happen sooner rather than later, the explosion will probably result in the overthrow of the French CRIF-run regime and a massive anti-US backlash. In Latin America, the Empire has been massively successful in overthrowing a series of patriotic, independent, leaders. But what is missing now is the ability to make these pro-US regimes successful by being economically or politically viable. Amazingly, and in spite of both a massive subversion campaign by the US and major political mistakes, the Maduro Administration has remained in power in Venezuela and is slowly but very resolutely trying to change course and keep Venezuela sovereign and independent from the US. The key problem of the US in Latin American is that the US has always ruled by using a local comprador elite. The US has been very successful in this effort. But the US has never succeeded in convincing the Latin American masses of people of its benevolence and this is why the word “Yankee” remains a slur in every Latin American country. In Asia, China is offering every US colony an alternative civilizational model which is becoming increasingly attractive as the PRC is becoming more economically powerful and economically successful. It turns out that the usual mix or arrogance, hubris and ignorance which allowed the Anglo countries to dominate Asia is now losing its power and that the people of Asia are looking for alternatives. Truth be told – the US has absolutely nothing to offer. The bottom line is this: not only is the US unable to impose its will on countries which are considered “US allies” (if the NorthStream ever happens – and I think that it will – then this will mark the first time that EU leaders told the US President to get lost, if not in so many words), but the US obviously lacks any kind of project to offer to other countries. Yes, “MAGA” is all fine and dandy, but it does not have much traction with other countries who really don’t care about MAGA… Conclusion in the form of a Russian saying There is a saying in Russian “better to have an horrible end (than to have to live through) a horror with no end” (лучше ужасный конец чем ужас без конца). There is very little doubt that the decline of the AngloZionist Empire will continue in 2019. What will not change, however, is the ability of the US to destroy Russia in a nuclear attack. Because, make no mistake, all that the new fancy Russian weapons provide is the capability to punish (retaliate against) the US for an attack on Russia, but not the capability to deny (prevent) such an attack. If the Neocons decide that a nuclear holocaust is preferable to a loss of power in the US, then there is nothing anybody can do to prevent them from playing out their own, sordid, version of Götterdämmerung. I have recently had to spend a few days in Boca Raton, were a lot of that new US “aristocracy” likes to spend time and I can tell you two things: life is good for them, and they sure ain’t giving up their privileged status as “leaders of the planet”. And if somebody tries to take it away, there is no doubt in my mind that these people will react with a vicious outburst of Samson-like despair-filled rage. So the only question remains this: will we (mankind) be able to take away the nuclear button from this class of parasites without giving them the chance to press it or not? I don’t know. So, will it be a horrible end or a horror with no end? I don’t know either. But what I know is that the Empire is cracking at all its seams and that its decline will only accelerate in 2019. https://www.unz.com/tsaker/from-2018-to-2019-a-quick-survey-of-a-few-trends/#comments
The tentacles of world communism reach everywhere and by various insidious means....many by offering "conveniences" for living for the masses, as do the big tech controllers, until the masses become totally dependent upon such powers and their atheistic, materialistic world. This is where the REAL "Resist" Movement should be aimed. Chinese Govt. Is Using US Tech Giants Censorship of Conservative Americans as Model to Clamp Down on Its Own Citizens For years now US tech giants have been censoring conservative, patriotic and Christian content and eliminating conservative publishers online. The US tech giants believe only their viewpoints must be tolerated online. This is not an exaggeration. Just two weeks ago Facebook censored an image of Santa Claus kneeling before the Christ child. Just last week Facebook censored a post honoring slain California Officer Cpl. Ronil Singh. Singh was shot dead on Christmas night by an illegal alien. Stories like this are common today in the United States. Facebook eliminates conservative content, Twitter shadow-bans conservative users, Google hides links to conservative outlets and news, YouTube demonetizes conservative pages, Wikipedia litters conservative pages with smears, Amazon prevents advertising on conservative publications. *** In September The Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft testified to Congress on Facebook targeting of conservative publishers and content. The US tech giants have PERFECTED how to censor and deplatform opposing conservative voices in America and the West. They’re doing it for your own good. Now US tech giants are exporting this knowledge to the Chinese government. The highly inaccurate Washington Post pretends like this is something new. They know better. We all know better. Democrats LOVE censorship here in America. But now they are pretending they oppose this same technology in China. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...s-as-model-to-clamp-down-on-its-own-citizens/
Ireland to Begin Legal Abortions January 7 The Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) has confirmed it will begin performing abortions in Ireland on January 7. Abortion officially became legal in the Republic of Ireland on December 20, when President Michael D. Higgins signed new legislation into law. In May, a campaign to save the country’s Eighth Amendment – which banned abortion – overwhelmingly lost in a referendum vote. A pro-abortion rights campaign revealed by DCLeaks.com in 2017 to have been funded, in part, by billionaire investor George Soros and his Open Society Foundation proved successful as referendum exit polls suggested many voters relied on the abortion industry and left-wing media for their information about abortion. LifeSiteNews reported on the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill that was rushed into law in December: The new Irish abortion regime, which is in many ways even more extreme than the law in the UK, allows abortion on demand up until 12 weeks. As this analysis of the bill explains, a baby can also be aborted until viability (around 6 months) where there is a risk to the life, or of serious harm to the health, of the woman. The risk of “serious harm” to health is not defined, and is open to interpretation. Health as used here includes both physical and mental health. In the UK, the vast majority of abortions are carried out under the same mental health ground. Abortion is allowed up to birth in a medical emergency, and when the baby has a life limiting condition. Amendments introduced by pro-life TDs, including those aiming to ensure pain relief for the baby in late term abortions, to ban abortion for disability or gender, and to ensure dignified disposal of aborted babies’ remains, were all rejected. Chris Fitzpatrick, a consultant obstetrician and gynecologist at the Coombe hospital, wrote at the Irish Times that the push to start performing abortions is undermining clinical and safety concerns. “In an unprecedented departure from normal clinical practice, we may well have a situation in January in which those of us, who are not conscientious objectors, may find ourselves under pressure to undertake certain medical procedures for which we have received little or no training,” he wrote. “Healthcare managers and politicians appear to have little interest in this. And once the legislation is passed, well then it is over to the doctors”: Irish Examiner columnist Gerard Howlin observed welcoming the procedure that ends an unborn life is “the final nail in our old identity’s coffin,” asking, “Who are we now?” Howlin wrote that Ireland once “equated values with revealed religion” but now has “swapped all that for public opinion.” The Gaelic language and Catholicism, he continued, were lost in Ireland decades ago. “In shifting our identity, abortion is comparable to the loss of the Irish language after the Famine, and to the rejection of organised religion, as prescribed the Catholic Church, over the past 40 years,” he explained. “Ireland is as defined now by what it walked away from as what it stands for.” https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/01/05/ireland-begin-legal-abortions-january-7/ The new diabolically designed "language" being used .... even now in teaching children..... "terminating a pregnancy"...not a human being. Or "sucking out a pregnancy"!
Now that is it is a known fact that Hillary Clinton through her Clinton Foundation inherited billions of $$$$ from the Russian's by Obama selling them 20% of the US Uranium, Putin doesn't need anything else from us and will send our Uranium back to the US via nuclear bombs. Its all to clear for anyone who has some IQ.
Anyone who has not seen internet censorship in action should try to watch Brother Nathanael's video series on YT titled Why I left Judaism. He is Orthodox but was raised Jewish. I believe that he follows the RO church but I am not positive. At any rate if you try to view the video it comes up with warnings and then simply will not play several of the videos in the playlist and skips over them. YT starts at video 2 and if you attempt to start the first video it will skip right over it and start at video 2 once again and then skips over several of the videos following them. He has his own website which is not linked to YT so it can be watched there also and is very good. He teaches some things about Judaism I never knew and some things that affect us in the US which very few are aware of like the hidden kosher tax on our foods. Which is on almost every food product sold. A very good reason to make the sign of the cross over every meal. http://brovids.com
Thanks for the link, Don. I will definitely watch some of these as the titles of his videos are provocative.
SNOW WEATHER CHAOS: Deadly Arctic blizzard threatens 'IMMINENT AVALANCHES' across Europe SNOW chaos has struck major European cities with killer blizzards and avalanche warnings amid concern of the Arctic freeze spreading to Britain next week. https://www.express.co.uk/news/weat...s-Arctic-blizzard-travel-disruption-avalanche
Abortions To Begin At Hospital Named After Lourdes? An anti-abortion protest is taking place outside Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, Co Louth, where there are unconfirmed reports that abortion services will begin at the hospital today. One of the protesters is Charles Byrne, who took an unsuccessful legal challenge to the outcome of the referendum on the Eighth Amendment. Mr Byrne said the group is one of concerned citizens and he is protesting because "I deeply and profoundly care about the right to life of every human being. "We are here because we believe hospitals need to be places of care through compassion." Mr Byrne said "it is a quiet protest, we are not going to leaflet people." The Health Service Executive said it would not be commenting. https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0107/1021749-drogheda-hospital/
This is very disturbing.....the state of the situation surrounding us is almost beyond anything people could have imagined. The darkness that is being hidden by those w/ the modern means of power over the helpless is being challenged by those shining lights and exposing the demons. Padraig can decide whether this video and what it exposes (many are already generally aware of this stuff but maybe without the details) is too much for some to take in....or not. What is being exposed and what the enemy is trying to pull off in order to defeat the exposure: THIS IS WHY THE GREAT AWAKENING TERRIFIES THEM...
It's like once you see it you can't un-see it. It IS a battle between the Light and th ed darkness. The evil is beyond our imagining and sadly --i haven't heard this you tube yet but I have looked into this for a w-hile now--church princes may be part of it.
https://sustainablepulse.com/2018/1...eals-the-dangerous-truth-exclusive-interview/ The Creator of GMO Potatoes Reveals The Dangerous Truth – Exclusive Interview Posted on Oct 9 2018 - 11:24am by Sustainable Pulse The Ex-Director of J.R. Simplot and team leader at Monsanto, Caius Rommens, has revealed the hidden dangers of the GMO potatoes he created, in a wide ranging interview for Sustainable Pulse, on the same day that his book ‘Pandora’s Potatoes: The Worst GMOs’ was released on Amazon. How many years did you spend working on creating GM potatoes? Was this all lab-based work or did you get out to see the farms that were growing the potatoes? During my 26 years as a genetic engineer, I created hundreds of thousands of different GM potatoes at a direct cost of about $50 million. I started my work at universities in Amsterdam and Berkeley, continued at Monsanto, and then worked for many years at J. R. Simplot Company, which is one of the largest potato processors in the world. I had my potatoes tested in greenhouses or the field, but I rarely left the laboratory to visit the farms or experimental stations. Indeed, I believed that my theoretical knowledge about potatoes was sufficient to improve potatoes. This was one of my biggest mistakes. Have the GM potatoes you helped create been approved by the FDA and EPA in the U.S. or indeed elsewhere in the world? It is amazing that the USDA and FDA approved the GM potatoes by only evaluating our own data. How can the regulatory agencies assume there is no bias? When I was at J.R. Simplot, I truly believed that my GM potatoes were perfect, just like a parent believes his or her children are perfect. I was biased and all genetic engineers are biased. It is not just an emotional bias. We need the GM crops to be approved. There is a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed, to justify our existence by developing modifications that create hundreds of millions of dollars in value. We test our GM crops to confirm their safety, not to question their safety. The regulatory petitions for deregulation are full with meaningless data but hardly include any attempts to reveal the unintended effects. For instance, the petitions describe the insertion site of the transgene, but they don’t mention the numerous random mutations that occurred during the tissue culture manipulations. And the petitions provide data on compounds that are safe and don’t matter, such as the regular amino acids and sugars, but hardly give any measurements on the levels of potential toxins or allergens. The Canadian and Japanese agencies approved our GMO potatoes as well, and approvals are currently considered in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, and the Philippines. What was your role at Monsanto and J.R. Simplot? I led a small team of 15 scientists at Monsanto, and I directed the entire biotech R&D effort at Simplot (up to 50 scientists). My initial focus was on disease control but I eventually considered all traits with commercial value. I published hundreds of patents and scientific studies on the various aspects of my work. Why did you leave firstly Monsanto and then later J.R. Simplot? I left Monsanto to start an independent biotech program at J.R. Simplot, and I left J.R. Simplot when my ‘pro-biotech’ filter was wearing thin and began to shatter; when I discovered the first mistakes. These first mistakes were minor but made me feel uncomfortable. I realized there had to be bigger mistakes still hidden from my view. Why have you decided to reveal information about the failings of GM potatoes after spending many years creating them? I dedicated many years of my life to the creation of GMO potatoes, and I initially believed that my potatoes were perfect but then I began to doubt. It again took me many years to take a step back from my work, reconsider it, and discover the mistakes. Looking back at myself and my colleagues, I believe now that we were all brainwashed; that we all brainwashed ourselves. We believed that the essence of life was a dead molecule, DNA, and that we could improve life by changing this molecule in the lab. We also assumed that theoretical knowledge was all we needed to succeed, and that a single genetic change would always have one intentional effect only. We were supposed to understand DNA and to make valuable modifications, but the fact of the matter was that we knew as little about DNA as the average American knows about the Sanskrit version of the Bhagavad Gita. We just knew enough to be dangerous, especially when combined with our bias and narrowmindedness. We focused on short-term benefits (in the laboratory) without considering the long-term deficits (in the field). It was the same kind of thinking that produced DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, recombinant bovine growth hormone, and so on. I believe that it is important for people to understand how little genetic engineers know, how biased they are, and how wrong they can be. My story is just an example. Will GM potatoes not lead to larger yields and bigger tubers? I somehow managed to ignore the almost daily experience that GM potatoes were not as healthy as normal potatoes. They were often misshapen, stunted, chlorotic, necrotic, and sterile, and many GM plants often died quickly. One of the reasons for this genetic inferiority is that GM potatoes are derived from ‘somatic’ cells, which are meant to live for only one season (to support a stem or leaf structure). These cells don’t have the genetic integrity to create new plants (like pollen cells and egg cells). So, by transforming somatic cells, we created GM potatoes that contained hundreds of genetic mutations, and these mutations compromised yield. Additionally, the genetic modifications often have ‘unintended’ effects that negatively affect both the agronomic performance and nutritional quality of a crop. Contd..
