Author Archives: Lisa

Cloned Cattle Sales Way Up

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Sales of cloned cattle multiply
For the Associated Press (as published in the Houston Chronicle).

Cattle are quietly being cloned and sold for high prices as the livestock industry anticipates government approval for letting their offspring into the food chain, industry officials said.
Meat or milk derived from healthy cloned farm animals appears safe to eat, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday in its first attempt at assessing questions about the emerging technology.
The FDA is still trying to decide if cloned farm animals will require government approval before being sold as food. That decision is expected to take another year.
The cattle industry has voluntarily agreed to keep products from cloned animals out of the food supply. But in the meantime, there already are as many as 300 cloned bulls in existence, said Lisa Dryer of Biotechnology Industry Organization, a Washington lobbying group.
And an Austin-based biotech firm, ViaGen, said Friday that a cow cloned from a prodigious producing animal was auctioned for $170,000 in Iberia, Mo…
ViaGen President Scott Davis said “thousands and thousands” of units of frozen semen from hundreds of cloned bulls are being stockpiled around the country, ready for sale to cattle breeders when the FDA issues its new guidelines.
He said ViaGen is working with Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest hog processor and producer, to use cloning to create more productive and faster-growing pigs. Even if the company saves just a dollar or less per pig, “multiply that by 10 million,” he said.
And Scott Davis, not related to Ernie Davis, said cloning likely will become even more accessible and profitable in the future as the cost to clone an animal falls.

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International Readers: Please Participate In My Fellow Grad Student’s Research Study

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A fellow grad student buddy of mine, Whitney, has asked me to ask my international readers to participate in one of her assignments for her International Broadcasting class.
She needs you to cut and paste this questionnaire into an email, enter in your answers, and email it back to her at : Whitneykennett@aol.com. .
Thanks in advance to those of you choose to participate!

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Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: The War On Iraq And The War On Terror Are The Same

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Complete Video and Photos

Rumsfeld: The War On Iraq And The War On Terror Are The Same (Small – 3 MB)
Tim Russert:
“How do you respond to those who suggest that the War On Terror should have been focused on Al Queda and that the resources that are now applied to Iraq are misapplied. That Saddam was not the threat that he was presented as by the Administration, and that the war should have focused on Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Tim, we said from the outset that there are several terrorist networks that have global reach and that there were several countries that were harboring terrorists that have global reach. We weren’t going into Iraq when we were hit on September 11th, and the question is ‘well, what do you do about that?’ If you know there are terrorists and you know there’s terrorist states. Iraq’s been a terrorist state for decades. And you know there are countries harboring terrorists. We believe, correctly I think, that the only way to deal with it is (stops) You can’t just hunker down and hope they won’t hit you again. You simply have to take the battle to them. And we have been consistently working on the Al Queda network. We’ve captured a large number of those folks. Captured or killed. Just like we’ve now captured or killed a large number of the top 55 Saddam Hussein loyalists.”

Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: More On The WMD (Or Lack Thereof)

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Move along. Nothing to see here. (That you haven’t seen and heard before.)
This clip is just Rummy saying what he’s been saying about the WMD. That it’s unlikely he destroyed them, etc.
So if they can’t find them and Saddam didn’t destroy them. It makes all that much more sense that they never existed to begin with…
This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press. (
Complete Video and Photos)

Rumsfeld On The WMD (Or Lack Thereof) (Small – 3 MB)
Tim Russert:
“Could it be that the inspections in fact, did work. That the enforcement of the no-fly zone did work. And that Sadaam in fact no longer had a weapons of mass destruction capability?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“The theory that he took his weapons, destroyed them, or moved them to some other country. That argument. Is that possible? I suppose it’s possible that he could of hidden them, buried them, or moved them to another country or destroyed them. The “destroyed them” part of it’s the weakest argument. Why would he do that if by not allowing inspectors to see what he was doing and making an accurate instead of a fraudalent declaration? It makes no sense because he was forgoing billions and billions and billions of dollars that he could of had, had he acquiesced and allowed the inspectors into the country in an orderly way such that they could see really what was going on. Other countries have allowed inspectors in. South Africa did. Ukraine did. But he didn’t. He fought it and deceived them consistently. Why would he do that if in fact he was an innocent? Unlikely.”

Jessica Lynch Says: “They used me to symbolise all this stuff. It’s wrong.”

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Private Jessica says President is misusing her ‘heroism’
By Edward Helmore for the Guardian Unlimited.

Beneath the gloss of the US media and the machinations of an administration eager to show a ‘good news’ angle of the Iraq conflict against the reality of a rising body count, Lynch has become a metaphor not for the heroism of pretty young Americans captured by a devilish foreign enemy, but for the confusion that has marked Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom from the start.
Misgivings characterising Lynch’s story are coming to a head: last week she accused the administration of manipulating her story for propaganda, saying she was not a heroine at all; accusations that she’d been raped were disputed by appalled Iraqi doctors who first treated her, and the army was accused of insensitivity and racism for awarding Lynch a full disability pension while others from her ambushed maintenance company, including Shoshana Johnson, the black cook wounded and captured by Iraqis, will receive barely a third of Lynch’s discharge package.
While Johnson is living on $500 a month, Lynch stands to make millions from her book, I Am a Soldier, Too. She has been romanced as the media target of the moment, photographed by Annie Liebowitz for Vanity Fair, and stands to make millions more from a movie deal.
‘There is a double standard,’ said Johnson’s father, Claude. ‘I don’t know for sure that it was the Pentagon. All I know for sure is the media paid a lot of attention to Jessica.’…
Lynch says the circumstances of her rescue was dramatised and manipulated by the Pentagon. She was not rescued in a ‘blaze of gunfire’ as reported by Defence Department officials last April, but picked up from compliant Iraq doctors who had saved her life.
She was not raped, as the department said, and the Iraqi, Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, who was given US citizenship for his efforts, has written a book about how he risked his own life to win her freedom. Now he is described by his wife as overly influenced by John Wayne movies.
‘Lynch is basically saying the whole thing was made up, a fraud,’ said media critic Michael Wolff. ‘At the same time, the media is going on with this elaborate production effort to make her into a hero. It’s as if the size of the attention itself makes her a hero. Everyone is committed to making her the face of the war whereas the other story that this all a kind of scandal.’…
Lynch now questions why her rescue was filmed: ‘They used me to symbolise all this stuff. It’s wrong. I don’t know why they filmed it, or why they say these things.’

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Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: We Never Said Iraq Had Nuclear Weapons and We’ll Just Keep Interrogating People Until We Find The WMD

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Rumsfeld: We Never Said Iraq Had Nuclear Weapons and We’ll Just Keep Interrogating People Until We Find The WMD (Small – 6 Mb)
Tim Russert:
“Syria. Iran. North Korea. All harbor terrorists. We were told that Iraq was unique because they possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction. What if that has proven not to be true?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“It hasn’t proven not to be true. We’ve seen an interim report by David Kay, and uh it was a thoughtful report. There are some 1,300 Americans there working on the Weapons of Mass Destruction effort. He came back with an interim report that reported on the things he found thus far. It did not prove that there were (he stops) He did not come in a say “here are the weapons of mass destruction” nor did he come in and disprove the intelligence that we had had and that other countries had had before the war. Seems to me that the sensible thing to do is to let them continue their work and produce their final report and when they do, we’ll know.”
Tim Russert:
“But Mr. Secretary, you will acknowledge that there was an argument made by the Administration that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and could have been well on his way to reconstituting his nuclear program.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Um. Hmmm.”
Tim Russert:
“There doesn’t appear to be significant amounts of evidence to document that presentation that was made by the administration.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“This administration and the last administration and several other countries all agreed that they had chemical and biological weapons and that they had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that. It was believed then (stops) We know they did have them because they used chemical weapons against their own people. So it’s not like it was a surprise that those programs existed.”
“Furthermore, the debate in the United Nations wasn’t about whether or not Sadaam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. The debate in the United Nations was about whether or not he was willing to declare what he had and everyone agreed that that declaration was a fraudalent declaration. Even those that voted against the resolution agreed with that. So it seems to me that the thing to do is to wait, let the Iraq survey group, David Kay and his team, continue their work. You’re not going to find things by accident in a country the size of California. The only way you’re going to find them is by capturing people who know about them and interrogate them and find out what they think they know as to where these weapons are and what the programs were.”

Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: How The Casualties Are Worth Winning This War

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Rumsfeld: The Casualties Are Worth Winning This War (Small – 3 Mb)
Tim Russert:
“So far, we have lost 377 Americans in Iraq. 2,130 have been wounded or injured.
How would you explain to the American people this morning that it is worth that price for the war in Iraq.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Tim, the uh, battle we’re engaged in. The global war on terrorism. Is an important one. It is a different one than we’ve been in previously. Although terrorism’s not new. But the nature of terrorism is that its purpose is to terrorize. Its purpose is to alter people’s behavior. And to the extent free people end up behaving in a way that is different from the way free people behave, they’ve lost. And therefore, the only thing to do is do what the President has announced he’s doing, and that is to take the battle, the war on terrorism to the terrorists. Where they are. And that’s what we’re doing. We can win this war. We will win this war. And the President has every intention of staying after the terrorists and the countries that harbor terrorists until we have won this war.”

Meatrix Cartoon Explains How Factory Farming Affects Your Health

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I’d never even heard of “factory farming” until a few months ago, when a friend of mine who I meet for lunch a lot insisted on only eating at certain restaurants that serve organically-grown meat. It was horrific thinking about the stuff he was telling me, and I wanted to know more.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of scary stories about the FDA approving cloned animals for public consumption. It seems to me that there’s no way for the FDA to be sure of anything with regard to even the short term effects of humans eating cloned animals, much less the long term effects that, theoretically, would have to be explored in depth before such meat was allowed in to the open market.
So anyway, that’s why I’m starting a “Farming and Health” category. This shit’s getting pretty frightening, and enough is enough. I don’t know what we can really do about it yet, but I do feel that I have to help get the word out somehow.
Then, this morning, another friend sent me this wonderful animation that explains the factory farming situation in great detail. It’s funny as hell too.

The Meatrix
There’s a bunch of good information at the end about what you can do to help fight this stuff. More articles on this soon (and the relationship between factory farming and the cloning stuff).

Donald Rumsfeld On Meet The Press – Complete Video and Photos

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Highlights separated by subject on the way.
Somehow I had managed to forget to start a “Bye Bye Rummy” category. I’ll still have to go back and recategorize things properly for it.

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 1 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 2 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Part 3 of 3 (Small – 23 MB)

Rummy On Meet The Press – Complete (Small – 68 MB)









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