MONSANTO GETS A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS IN THE EA

Readers of this site have at times been offended by my statement that watching David Miliband run DEFRA is like wathcing a paedophile run a kindergarden. Other readers have just been offended at the fact that DEFRA is such a failure. The July 2007 issue of The Ecologist reveals some facts about the related EA (Environment Agency) which back up my not so pleasant assertions.

Jon Huges and Pat Thomas write:

"The EA is within weeks of letting Monsanto escape its liability for knowingly dumping thousands of tonnes of cancer-causing chemicals - including all the ingredients of the DDT defoliant Agent Orange - in two quarries in Wales. Unless a claim and 'adversary action' is lodged with the US bankruptcy courts within around four weeks, the UK taxpayer faces picking up a bill for hundreds of millions of pounds to safeguard teh environment and public health. Yet for the past few months the Agency has stonewalled teh one remaining eyewitness to events as they unfolded in 1967 onwards, and who is prepared to speak out. This man, who now carries a panic button at all times, also has a dedicated police protection officer supervising protective devices installed at his house because of the threats he has received".

A comment I posted on their site listed the Parliament number of David Miliband, which is: 020 7219 3000. The more you complaing, the better service you get. If you let them do what they want, you are going to lose.

TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE

Albert Einstein gives Homo sapiens four years to live if the bees buzz off, and buzz off they may well be doing. A fellow blogger, Chris Sanders, writes on his schmoo site about them, with an image of one he took with his mobile phone...which item may be the cause of the bees' demise. Dangerous tools, even when not in the hands of Naomi Campbell.

Sanders writes from the vicinity of the Post Office Tower in London (which is as much as I can tell anyone about his secret location), and that edifice may itself be sending mixed signals to the hymonoptera...unless it was not a bee at all, but a guided drone sent to seek out the secret Schmoo HQ...

Conspiracy theories aside, there is a serious problem when beekeepers lose 23 out of 40 hives. As a good deal of our agriculture is pollinated by these nectiforous creatures, we could be down to four more years. America especially has a problem with loss of hives, and it has been thought that the problem there is due to the GM crops they cultivate without even warning the people who are eating them. It is hard to tell at this point whether it is GM crops, mobile phones, both of the above, or some other issue that is now threatening life on this planet. Just what is Defra doing about it? As this unfolds, David Miliband is fiddling...or at least his wife is, as he ponders whether or not to put his hat in the ring to be PM.

On a previous post there is mention of the role of hemp in the countryside, which is being turned over to crops such as rape, cotton and wheat. There is a monocrop culture going on that stifles diverstiy and allows for these problems to exist, but much of this is over the head of people like Miliband, who is not a farmer and does not have much experience with the soil. He is a politician and believes in doing something sometime. In the meantime, the bees have had enough.

HEMP IN PARLIAMENT SQUARE

Image below/right needs no introduction; it is the plant that could save the planet, with its long fibre, high cellullose content, edible seeds and leaves which containt medically important compounds. Image left is that of one of the men closest to Tony Blair on the planet. It is David Miliband, who is now Secretary for the Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. So, given his proximity to Blair, and thus his less than six degrees of seperation from Bush, we are not surprised to hear that hemp is not a priority with him. In fact, even though hemp could provide a replacement substance for wood pulp for paper and give us ethanol from its waste parts, there has not been much of an effort on Defra's part to do this. So what if a UK based paper industry and biofuel industry would provide jobs here in the UK? The Republican Party (formerly known as New Labour, formerly known as Labour) is spending a large amount of its time selling off UK defence companies for a fraction of their price to Bush...and drafting insulting legislation that would make UK citizens liable to Bush's laws, vulnerable for extradition and orange jump suits even when they have been law abiding citizens.

Watching this party handle Defra is like watching paedophiles teaching young kids. They smile a lot as they do, as anyone responsible cringes. The year started off with Miliband's gracious comments in the Guardian, (3/1/7), Society section, p. 6. In it Miliband opines that: "Environmental credibility will be a threshhold issue, alongside national security, economic policy and public service investment."

Those are encouraging words, and may well mean that the Republican party will be out of office soon. In fact, Miliaband, perhaps prophetically, asserts: "Flunk on any of these and you are unelectable."

The next day, that same newspaper reported a Miliband sighting in the countryside, where he was forced to admit that his party's policies had "brought woe to the industry" (speaking of farming). David Cameron, leader of the opposition party, pointed to present policies as ones which "ensure that farmers grow nothing but a crop of concrete."

But perhaps that is what Miliband would be happy with. One thing he was not too happy with was organic produce, which he said was a "lifestyle choice" a few days later; Matthew Fort, again in the Guardian, robustly rebutted him, closing his piece (8/1/7) p. 5 with the words: "He either knows very little about agricultural production, or he simply doesn't care about animal welfare or food produced to a price, not to a quality."

In the meantime, people here who are much more qualified that Miliband are working on increasing organic produce and biodiverstiy whilst decreasing the use of pesticides. Hemp is part of that overall agenda, especially as it is such an economically important crop. Businesses and politicians from other parties are working behind the scenes to bring this about. Ten years of hard labour have been wasted years in the 'great war for civilisation', but not all of it has gone to pot. Greater cooperation and the establishment of a British Isles hemp industries association this past year have pushed the campaign forward, and we look forward to seeing it bear much fruit in 2007. Maybe we can send Mr. Miliband some organic hemp seeds. In a moment of inspiration, he could plant them in Parliament Square.

HEMP FOR VICTORY IN 2007

The New Year rolled in as usual, lots of fireworks and then off to bed... and we all lived happily ever after, except for those of us who didn't, i.e., Saddam Hussein. The last day of 2006 he made the front of all the papers, and with him, so did hemp...as it was pointed out in the Times hemp was his undoing, coils of it placed around his neck, and he will not be able to dictate anymore. In days of yore they referred to the gallows as the hemp horse, and SH rode his last on the back of this beast. At least he kept his poise, but don't expect Elton John to rewrite "Candle in the Wind" for him. Oh well, someone else will be able to collect a few sixpacks from the coalition-of-the-silly as they appoint someone to preside over the land of car bombings and no running water. It was bad under SH, but not that bad, and killing him in such a cold-blooded way, on the holiest day of the Moslem year, the feast of forgiveness, whose bright idea was that? The video of it is now top-of-the-charts in the snuff movie world.

So here we are in the brave new year, sans SH, and at least we got to see hemp used for something. 2006 was the year another intelligent initiative in the US got snuffed out by the son-of-a-Nazi in the US, so the hemp bought and sold there will be mostly Chinese or Canadian in origin; unless people get on the ball and make it happen.

Here in the UK hemp at least grows, much of it made into cigarette paper or hemp oil. The government does not seem to be behind it, even though the environment secretary David Miliband moans now that environmental issues are key in politics. Just how much experience does he have in anything green anyway? We'll soon see, as one of my goals for this year is to get on the government's case about hemp, and hopefully there will be biofuel plants and paper plants all over the UK. The Lib Dems are definitely behind me on this, Baroness Jenny Tonge spent part of last year in support of this issue, making the effort to attend the Medical Cannabis presentation in a committee room in the Parliament buillding in May and asking a question about hemp in the House of Lords later in the year.

Paper and ethanol are but two of the many uses to which we could put hemp here. There is insulation, textiles, MDF boards, sails, building material, and of course, rope...in case they bring back the hemp horse.