attrayant

Organic does not mean pesticide-free.  There is a long list of pesticides that are approved for use in organic farming.  The only requirement is that they be derived from natural sources.  This is a bald appeal to the naturalistic fallacy: that which is natural must also be healthful or at least not harmful, and that which is synthetic is not healthful and quite possibly harmful.  Of course neither is necessarily true.  There are plenty of toxic natural substances and safe synthetic ones.  If somebody tries to tell you that a substance is toxic or poisonous, without mentioning the exposure level that translates into actual harm, they are most likely trying to sell you something.

Statement from Dan Glickman, USDA Secretary at the time when organic standards were published:
 

“Let me be clear about one thing. The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.”

Organic food is the ultimate veblen commodity.  I generally oppose it because of its lower yields and increased negative environmental impact compared to conventional produce.

2 hours ago, Isaan sailor said:

Democrats want open borders, and free handouts.  American taxpayers do not.

Democrats are American taxpayers.  Try again.

16 minutes ago, PhonThong said:

The wall is being built. Not a lot so far. But, it is being built none the less.

No, it's not.

1 hour ago, Ozman52 said:

If a few weeks detention is equivalent to sexual molestation (your claim, not mine)

You're really anxious to distance yourself from that statement, aren't you?  Sorry no can do.  It's going to stick to you until you renounce the atrocities we're discussing.  

In any event, what I said was that the outcome (a lifetime of emotional scarring) is likely to be the same.  That's not my finding, it's from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which last week warned of long term trauma faced by immigrant children separated from parents or guardians under the Trump administration’s border policies.

And "a few weeks"?  Do you think it has been only a few weeks that this has been going on?  I understand that this phrasing helps put some meat on the bare bones of your argument, but let's try to be honest here. It's not "a few weeks" and we're not talking about "kissing illegal immigrant ass".  

1 hour ago, Ozman52 said:

can we expect that they will all turn out to be serial killers, paedophiles, rapists or drug dealers/addicts?

Perhaps it would be safer to deport them now?

Now you're echoing Trump "they're not sending their best..."    How about we just do the right thing and provide basic care.

51 minutes ago, Thainesss said:

Weve got millions that have fallen through the cracks and your beloved Democrats are too busy kissing illegal immigrant ass. 

 

If you think that providing a minimum standard of care for children is 'kissing their ass', then I hope you'll never be in charge of taking care of any children, anywhere.

And I see how you keep dragging in the specter of "illegal immigrants" even though that's now what we're talking about at all.

Just now, Thainesss said:

Weve got millions of actual citizens living in abject poverty and god knows how many that actually don’t have access to soap and toothpaste because there so poor and I don’t see any lib shedding any tears for them.

Which only proves that you're so disconnected and uninterested in humanitarian issues that you're not aware of the massive support systems and social safety nets that have been erected to help such people.

Just now, Thainesss said:

Don’t see any politicians grandstanding over them. 

 

Which should tell you how different the 'Kids in Cages" crisis is from regular, garden-variety poverty.

Whenever somebody defends child molesters by saying they don't really hurt the kids they molest, it is rightly pointed out that the harm manifests as a lifetime of emotional scarring.  That's what makes child molestation so monstrous.  How is this any different?

15 minutes ago, Thainesss said:

They are getting more care and support than millions of actual citizens. 

 

Actual citizens have access to soap and toothpaste.  Children of actual citizens don't draw pictures of themselves locked in cages.  Children of actual citizens aren't going to be scarred for a lifetime because of how they were treated.

"When they opened the door, the first thing that ... hit us was a smell. It was the smell of sweat, urine and feces," Goza said. "And I heard crinkling to my left and I looked over there and it was a sea of silver … there were young children, boys in there." Goza described a room full of silent children "and they had no expression on their faces, there was no laughing, there was no joking, no talking. I describe them almost like dog cages with people in each of them," she said. "And the silence was just hard to watch, hard to see."

15 minutes ago, Thainesss said:

LOL “horrendous” conditions.

 

It's sickening you can laugh at that.

What's with the big empty patches off to the sides?  I used to go down to the reflecting pool every 4th (I lived a few blocks away) and it was standing room only everywhere between Constitution and Independence Aves- not just along the reflecting pool as shown here.  

14 minutes ago, Ozman52 said:

Correct, you are compelled to come by your parents who see you as a valuable bargaining chip, should you survive the journey.

 

Alternatively, they can abandon you at the border, ensuring your entry and hoping you remember their bank a/c number. Good investment strategy.

Your post is a complete non-sequitur. Can you read my question again and try to address the questions raised?  How can you 'not come' if you're already in a place?

14 minutes ago, Benmart said:

Concentration camps? Please research.

Yeah that's what we should be upset about. The name for it. 

12 hours ago, Thainesss said:

Of youre not happy with it you're conditions, don't come.

If you're a 7 year old girl in a cage, how can you not come, or stay home?  You're already in the country.

1 hour ago, riclag said:

intended partly to raise civilian awareness of the military

 

Why do civilians need a heightened awareness of the military?

1 hour ago, riclag said:

Most importantly IMOP to install a sense of pride and patriotism the strongest and most powerful nation in the world has endured for over 200 plus years.

If you need to see a military parade to have a sense of pride in your country, there's something wrong with you.  There are so many other, better reasons to be proud of the USA.  You shouldn't need to see machines of war and death to feel pride.

1 hour ago, riclag said:

This is part of MAGA,values from the past .

 

Make America just like China or North Korea.  Way to go.

22 hours ago, icymanipulator82 said:

The total disrespect that some clowns show for their hosts is truly shocking. Being drunk is not an excuse. They should not have gotten off so lightly.

Not many people are excusing their actions.  Being drunk was the reason they did it, not an excuse.

I would no sooner trust PAN (in any country) to report about pesticides than I would trust PETA to accurately report on farm animal welfare or Andrew Wakefield to give us medically correct information about vaccines.  There is too much potential for conflict of interest.  PAN is heavily funded by the Organic Consumer's Association, which stands to benefit financially if it can convince more people to switch over to so-called "organic" produce. 

I've been through all this before with the Environmental Working Group and their ridiculous annual "dirty dozen" list.  Yes, a select few samples had residue traces over the MRL, but still well within the ADI.  And to actually reach the NOAEL and start to see health potential risks, you'd need to eat something like 15 thousand servings of strawberries a day.  It's utterly ridiculous to be concerned about such miniscule trace amounts; I don't care how much over the ADI they are.

I'd like to see the actual lab results, but PAN does not seem to have released them. Instead, they've "interpreted" them and provided their own analysis.  The one actual lab sample result they provided was for grapes which, as far as I can see, came out clean:

I would think that they would have shown a more worrying example if they really wanted to make their point.  The only good thing I can say about PAN is that their report may spur regulators into action.  However even if PAN's findings are correct, I am still not too concerned about such miniscule residue levels.  When residues start to approach or exceed the NOAEL... then I'll start to worry.

On 6/30/2019 at 9:56 AM, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

The Thai-PAN testing process and results are very clear about that. The "red" levels in their charts and percentages are those that exceed the regulatory levels, if any.

It's worth noting that regulatory levels are typically set many orders of magnitude below the lowest level at which an adverse effect has been detected.

Let's say that, for example, pesticide X has been confirmed to cause some detectable level of harm at a minimum concentration of 10 mg/kg.  This is called the "no observable adverse effect level", or NOAEL. Regulators will then set the maximum residue level one-one thousandth of the NOAEL to establish chronic toxicity, and call this the acceptable daily intake or ADI.  That means regulators don't want to see more than .01 mg/kg of residue (called the maximum residue level/limit, or MRL) for pesticide X.  

Then along comes an organization that is heavily funded by the Organic Consumer's Association.  They've apparently found levels of pesticide X at ten, twenty or even fifty times the MRL.  Oh noes, be alarmed!

No, stay calm.  Even at fifty or a hundred times over the maximum residue level, it's still WAY below the NOAEL which, if you recall, was set at 1/1000th of the level at which we might begin to see some adverse health effects.  Some people seem to think that as soon as the MRL is exceeded, people start dropping dead or start growing tumors.

Also remember that your body has a liver and kidneys which, if working properly, are constantly filtering this out of your system.  This is why we can take two acetaminophen tablets every four hours for a week, but if you take all those tablets at once you'll probably wake up dead.  The principle tenet of toxicology applies: the dose makes the poison.

Humans have adapted to a world where all kinds of plants have built-in pesticides, so our bodies have adapted alongside and become very good at getting rid of things that shouldn't be there.  Potatoes have all-natural solanine, cacao beans contain theobromine, some foods contain caffeine and some veggies contain a cocktail of alkaloids that are toxic to humans in sufficient dosage.  Mother nature perfected chemical warfare long before humans did.  From the American Council on Science and Health: 99.99% Of Pesticides We Eat Are Produced By Plants Themselves:

According to Dr. Ames’s team, every plant produces roughly a few dozen toxins, some of which (at a high enough dose) would be toxic to humans. Cabbage produces at least 49 known pesticides. Given the ubiquity of natural pesticides, Dr. Ames estimates that “Americans eat about 1.5 g of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than they eat of synthetic pesticide residues.”

Furthermore, Dr. Ames estimates that we consume 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides every day, many of which cause cancer when tested in lab animals. 

One of the points made by this article is that our concern is often seriously misplaced, thanks in this case to an activist anti-pesticide group that is bent on the total elimination of all pesticides.  People lose sleep over 20 parts per billion (0.000002%) of copper sulfate (used as a pesticide on grapes) in their wine, while ignoring the fact that they are gulping down 130 million parts per billion (13%) of an actual proven class-1 carcinogen (ethanol).

Having said all that, I do agree that the safety of our food supply is so important that we need to be constantly checking for contaminants like pesticides and pathogens like listeria & salmonella.  I'd like to have more faith in government regulators to report detailed findings, but I'm not sure how misplaced that faith would be in Thailand since pesticide applicators don't need to be licensed and may have little or no useful knowledge about the levels of chemical inputs on their farm.

What you should NOT do is reduce your intake of fruits and veggies out of misplaced fear of scary-sounding chemicals.  Taking produce out of your diet will surely increase your health risks more than consuming a few micrograms of any pesticide could.

5 hours ago, rumak said:

snake ID if possible

Yep; that's a snake.

I guess skeeball lanes are next, and when those are banned it'll be ring toss followed by get-the-coin-in-the-bottle and basketball shoot and then all the other carney games until, one by one, all the amusement parks will have to shut down.

39 minutes ago, phantomfiddler said:

Geography !

Wait - that's the reason Mexico is going to pay for the wall!  Can we just use that whenever we want?