Bernie Sanders, the teflon candidate

I used to be, four, five years ago, a Bernie fan. I stopped after being offended by his capitulation to Hillary. Then I began to see tell tale signs of his character, and eventually came to my own conclusion, that Bernie is a teflon candidate, who will attempt to wriggle out of every challenge by greasing his comments and behaviour. He is not genuine.

I am fully aware that most of the so called liberal, progressive and left of centre folks support the Democratic Party and also Bernie Sanders. Even Donald Trump himself seems to lament how the establishment Democrats are working to kill Bernie’s nomination unfairly.

So, writing a critic of Bernie was not going to be popular. Nonetheless, I post what is my analysis – and not post what is popular. For the same reason, me blaming todays false liberals (pseudo-liberal is a good adjective) has not been a popular move. I have lost some fair weather friends through a process of polarisation. That too is part of life, I understand.

But I am a thinking person and not a rubber stamp. I am not here to get popular, since I do not aim to live off other people’s hard work, like most politicians do including Bernie Sanders.

Like Jim Hightower wrote – swim against the current. Even dead fish can go with the flow. And I am not a dead fish, with all due respect to the fish family. They are successful animals, cold blooded, and can be of various skeletal types – jawless, cartilaginous or bony fishes, most of whom sleep with eyes open as most lack eyelids.

But, back to Hightower, I am not a dead fish, and I do post my views and support them with the logic that bolsters my views, which are always flexible and will change if better information or introspection turns me to another direction.

The term “teflon politician” is not my invention. It has been around, and is lately being attached to Bernie. I find the term usable here, so am borrowing it.

A friend who was a Bernie supporter has recently said on social media, that the reason Bernie ended up supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 election was that going against Hillary and in favour of Trump would have been political suicide.

Well, well – that comment started a chain of thoughts in my mind. I contemplated it over the next several hours, went to sleep on it, and while preparing some free range Cornish hen carcass along with some root vegetables for my wife to cook into a stew, I thought about it some more, and decided I should come out with a post about Bernie being a teflon politician that would not be good for USA. He would be popular among the lefties, just like Obama was. But he would be just as disastrous for USA and the world.

Political suicide ?

Bernie is supposed to have avoided this political suicide, by not going against Hillary and for Trump. If this is true, then, in my thinking – Bernie would even support the very devil, just to keep his political future alive. USA can go to hell.

But hang on. Bernie did not need to support Trump. He could stand as an independent candidate and worked to splinter the Democratic Party as well as Hillary by taking voters away from them. Even if that resulted in Trump winning, it would have likely forced the Democrats to clean up their act and stop rigging the convention.

Most importantly, Bernie stabbed his own support base and voters, by supporting Hillary Clinton. This to me proves, voters are a mere temporary necessity for Bernie. He is essentially here for himself, and not for the voters and nor for the nation.

Consider in contrast – the case of Tulsi Gabbard. She resigned her high ranking chair in the Democratic Party early on, in order to support Bernie Sanders and go against the nomination of Hillary Clinton. She committed the same “political suicide” that my friend was talking about. Contrary to Bernie, Tulsi was willing to face potential political suicide, in order to support what she felt was the best for the nation.

See the contrast? Well, I do not suppose people would see the contrast, because many folks have hard wired views and would ignore evidence that do not tally with those views.

His rubbish comments about Russia is an exasperating example of how he has been, or became, a teflon politician. His duplicity with regard to Russia meddling in US elections is beyond dishonest. USA has a million times more funds and arsenals to interfere in other nations elections. USA has a million fold more solid examples of not only interfering, but actually toppling legitimate elected governments in endless list of countries. Post Soviet Russia has done none of that, and Bernie Sanders, the two faced liar – gives in to the propaganda, and blasts Russia – just to steal your vote.

If he had an ounce of honesty, he should have pledged that, as a president, he would stop once and for all, any and all US meddling in other nations elections, governments and policies. I am flabbergasted that Bernie Sanders fans fall for this kind of dishonest double talk.

Bernie Sanders voted in the senate, to uphold the impeachment because he though Trump abused his power but Joe Biden and his son did not. Without going into the details, that logic itself absolutely stinks. I have sufficient reason to believe that Bernie Sanders voted against Trump in the impeachment travesty, only because he wanted to enhance his own political future, and disregarded all other consequences including the fact that this act is not going to be forgotten nor forgiven, by the right of centre, Republican leaning voter base, and the fact that the impeachment was a sham act. There are dozens of real cases for which Trump could be impeached, but then in all those cases, many more Democrats too would fall prey.

More I think about all this, more I get convinced that I was wrong four years ago to think Bernie Sanders was the best candidate to lead USA. He is just a slippery guy with some charm, not unlike Barak Obama and in many ways, not unlike Hillary Clinton either. All in all, he is one more candidate that promises to be worse than previous presidents on a continual downward slide.

Bernie voted for all the wrong things, despite talking to the public in a way you would think otherwise.

His refusal to come clean on pardoning Julian Assange is, in my view, the deal breaker here, the last straw on the overloaded camel.

And then there is this shameful stand of supporting forced vaccination on people, to toe the line for big pharma and ensuring the citizens get sicker and sicker !!

He is an example of a teflon Candidate. And I am not surprised that the pseudo-liberals cannot see through all this. That is why they are pseudo-liberals.

In my second book, which is in the making, I am contemplating including these long posts as sub-chapters, explaining why the world gets to be as shitty as it is. Bernie is not at fault here. Neither are Trump, Obama or Hillary.

At fault are the citizens of the world. They suck. Its all related to that dead-fish thing.

Amartya Sen, Economic science & the un-Nobel Prize

I had taken a decision a while ago, to anchor most of my posts on socio-economic issues or my views on people, state of the planet, and various goings on – on my own wall on Facebook, or on my own blog, or as a chapter in my own books or booklets. I refrain from posting my views on someone else’s wall or intrude into someone else’s space.

Shyamantak Dutta tagged me on a long thread on Facebook, regarding what I might have said before about Amartya Sen’s grasp on economy.

It is interesting to note how much of a storm can be created over such a a trivial cup of tea – the Bank of Sweden prize on Economic Science that ended up wrongly being recognised as an authentic Nobel prize that Sen was awarded many years ago, presumably for contributing to “economic sciences” with his research work on Asian famines.

The long thread on Facebook is a good example of how the Bengali social media inhabitants can generate such a huge din with so little substance over a dead subject – a sign of the general degeneration of Bengali society. This extreme level of noise over an item of virtual zero relevance is a hall mark of Bengal. This includes people from Santiniketan, who get almost nothing of Tagore except blind following of meaningless symbolisms representing intellectual, cultural and social stagnation.

About Amartya Sen – until about the 1990s, I had acquired and read as many articles, essays and books authored by Amartya Sen as I could lay my hands on – spending considerable sums of my hard earned money. I would suspect that I might have read more of Sen than most folks reading Shyamantak’s post post and pontificating on it.

Many of those books are still on my shelf, collecting dust today as nobody else wishes to touch them. It took me over twenty years to rid myself of a blind adoration of Sen, and begin to question his contribution to the world of economics and same time – the very subject of economics itself. This issue – economics, appeared of increasing importance to me, with the backdrop of a world perhaps hurtling towards an socio-economic precipice sometime soon.

I was by then increasingly conscious that there was likely a fundamental problem with world economy and that the system being followed by western nations and being steamrolled across the rest of the planet, might be pushing the planet towards a major cataclysm that could result in an extinction of the living earth. Of course I was neither the first nor the last to come to this realisation.

Not being shy to approach experts, I had started writing to various economic experts including a few that got the same prize as Amartya Sen, but in more recent years and had written books raising questions on sustainability of the current economic system, primarily being spearheaded by the US and followed by everybody else – and the role of the World Bank, IMF, as well as later developments through the Doha meetings and the rest. I started getting some responses too.

Then came Amartya Sen’s cruel and vicious attack on Madhusree Mukherjee regarding her book on Churchill’s involvement in the Bengal famine of 1943. She projected views that did not tally with Sen’s own work done decades ago. Sen did not have the weight of data that Mukherjee had access to since a lot of classified data from the world war era had later been declassified and placed in public domain. Madhusree used such declassified information that Sen did not get to see.

I am not writing this in support of Madhusree because she was a friend. Although she had stayed at my home in Vancouver once, she unfriended and blocked me on Facebook due to my constant attack, on my own wall, on the liberal class of India, and my view that the so called liberals and left wings are, in India and in North America, primarily fraudsters masquerading as liberals. My attack upset Madhusree, who considers herself to be a. liberal, but falls for the same trap that equates criticising Modi is the righteous path for all liberals. She, a resident of Germany, was offended by my criticism of liberals on my own wall. So she blocked me, and informed me about it.

Thats OK. I remain convinced to my core, that left leaning and liberals of Indian extract, both in India and living abroad, are frauds. I am not the only person with this realisation. But many others do not wish to publicly announce their view. They do  not like making enemies. Some wish to get help from others in one way or another. I do not on principle, want to take help from anybody. I do not care if folks disagree with my view. I shall not keep silent about my views on important issues that plagues the world. That is me. I am willing to lose friends like Madhusree Mukherjee, or anybody else reading this post, over my right to express my view todays socio-economics.

Criticising liberals does not come with pleasure. I myself have been identified as a liberal among liberals by many, mostly Americans. I am yet to fully understand what makes a liberal liberal. Vaguely, I guessed the liberals were supposed to be the beacon for the rest of mankind to follow – like a guiding light. If a nation’s liberals are gone, the nation is doomed. So I thought. It is because of this reason that I found it highly irritating that the world was running out of true liberals, being replaced by pseudo-liberals and fraudsters. In such a world, the only outcome would be social collapse, which was actually happening. I blame the false liberals for spoiling the party, much to my regret and chagrin.

Duke, Mita, Leena Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, Tan Lee, (Mr and Mrs Varghese ??), Tony Mitra

Back to Amartya Sen’s attack on Mukherjee’s book on Churchill and the Bengal famine – this showed that Amartya Sen can be petty, vicious and in my view, unacceptably mean minded and unacademic, when it comes to protecting what he considers to be his own turf.

Never mind the lives of several million Bengali peasants that died in the second world war through a man made famine. Sen’s study on Asian famines and the recognition he got from it, was perhaps more important to him than the real cause behind deaths of millions of Bengali peasants. Also, having made his bed with both USA and UK with regard to his earnings through tenures in academic institutions of the west, he appears most reluctant to criticise those nations. He would rather find an easier target – Narendra Modi, to pin the blame for the ills of the world on.

I did have a conversation with him more than ten years ago while having lunch with him in Vancouver, on invitation from Tan Lee da. He asked me to send him recordings of his sister, late Supurna Guha, who had spoken with me on record about her memory of Santiniketan. Amartya Sen despite being the elder brother, did not have such voice recordings or other memories of his then departed sister, and wished me to pass him what I had. I sent him what he wanted at his Harvard contact. This, to me, showed another side of Sen. Too much of a big shot, too little time to to be in touch with even his own sister.

I did ask him during the course of that lunch, about world economy. Was this practice of creating large sums of money out of thin air and without any backing (US dollar had been delinked from gold for three decades by then – and the dollar was well entrenched as the world’s reserve currency and the primary currency used in sale and purchase of oil across the world – while speculation was rife about an approaching Peak Oil). I asked if this limitless creation of money out of thin air  as a lubricant for a GDP addicted economic policy was not a prescription for an eventual collapse. Also what, scientifically or mathematically speaking, was the value of such instantly created virtual money ?

Sen grudgingly agreed, in a kind of shifty way, that my suspicion might be correct. Money no longer had any intrinsic base value. Continued creation of limitless money out of thin air ensured that eventually, financial collapse was a mathematical certainty. But he added that I need not worry too much since that collapse may not happen in my own lifetime. I found his entire response to be unacademic, unscientific, unsure, and most unsatisfactory.

Systemic collapse of the economy dove tails with simultaneous collapse of multiple systems. Many other scientists have been predicting it. Some calculate that this 21st is the last century when the world and human civilisation, followed a business as usual model for a while. Before this century comes to an end, all hell is very likely to break loose. Some predict a collapse of the human population, down to less than a percent of the current level to survive the end of this century. Many believe, myself included, that the only people to survive will be those, like the aborigines of the Andamans, or the Kalahari desert, that have no use for money.

Clearly, economists have a lot to explain, apart from environmentalists, ecologists and politicians. Some scientists are doing their bit already. Main stream western media, which no longer represents either free speech or journalism, and have become a copy of the old soviet style arm of propaganda, refuse to touch negative news such as possible collapse of the system in the next generation or two. Nobody likes a defeatist story that does not give hope, we are told. As a result, the public is being kept drugged, and unaware of the impending doom. That the living planet is facing am immediate doom right now, is accepted in scientific and academic world. The planet is facing its sixth mass extinction phase. The previous one, the fifth, happened sixty five million years ago, which put an end to the dinosaurs. That happened because of an extra terrestrial event – the earth was struck by an asteroid massive enough to cause irreversible and permanent alternation of the planets flora and fauna.

This time, the cause of the ongoing mass extinction is not extra terrestrial. This one is wholly and solely man made. Man has made is impossible for 99 percent of the rest of the living creatures, to survive. That man himself may not survive if 99 percent of the rest cannot, has not filtered down into the psyche of the so called intelligent creature called man – the singularly most toxic species to ever evolve out of the primordial soup.

And the bulk of the blooming economists, Amartya Sen included, has missed the bus on the real reason – that the primary economic theories, from the days of the rise of the Calvinists – are all bunkum. Those might have been viable for a planet of infinite mass and infinite resources. Unfortunately, no such planet exists.

Actually, Rabindranath Tagore, never claiming to be an expert in economics, did a much better job of identifying the root cause of an impending planetary doom where the world will be unlivable for all creatures including man. He identified the basic pillars of western civilisation based on manufactured public opinion through advertising and doctored media, reckless consumerism and war mongering for profit, to be the root causes for this super-destruction. Understandably, few western economist of philosophers were willing to bell their own cat. Western educated Indian born economists and wannabe philosophers such as Sen are the worst collaborators.They don’t have a clue.

Response on my questions on fundamental economic sustainability did come back from other economic stalwarts including those that also got the Swedish prize same as Sen, but more recently. They had, unlike Sen, studied the topic of global economy and creation of phoney money. They shared my view that creating money without a fall back value was same as counterfeiting. Only thing is – if we do it, its illegal. But Governments do it and allow some banks and financial institutions to do it – recklessly, but legally. Worse, nobody really had an accurate tally of how much of such money was floating around. Asking experts can result is a bewildering array of answers. Anywhere between twenty trillion to two hundred trillion dollars might be out there, and no one has a clue to the exact figure, or how much more is being pumped in every day. No government has a clue, including the US government, the main promoter and perpetrator of the current system.

These economic stalwarts that did respond to my questions, were by and large a lot more honest, direct, detailed and without beating around the bush. Some of them would write books about it, while others did not.

I took me some more time to come to the conclusion that Amartya Sen did not know much about economics. He was busy creating distance from the subject and trying to fashion himself as a philosopher that likes to comment on social justice, and in particular, criticise Narendra Modi. Yes, Modi was instrumental in getting him out of the newly formed Nalanda University in India. It is uncertain if Sen carries a grudge because of that. But having seen Sen’s reaction to Madhusree Mukherjee, I would suspect the reason Sen dislikes Modi is more personal, than political. Either way, Sen knows little about either Modi, or economic sustainability, or much else, in my own personal view. He is not even an honest leftist. 

see him as a fraud, unqualified to speak on economic trends. I started considering him to be an irrelevant economist, a second rate one, that can give no answer to todays or tomorrow’s problems.

He even had the audacity to call me a “reactionary” during that lunch in Vancouver. Not being familiar with communist vocabulary, I did not really know what exactly a “reactionary” was, and had to ask a lot of left wing Bengali intellectuals of the time to explain its meaning and relevance to me. Eventually I concluded that nobody really knew what being a reactionary implied, and how such as person was supposed to think or behave. The term was used as a a generic insult or an abuse targeting anybody the leftists did not like.

I have come to the conclusion years ago, that economics was not a science at all. Addressing the subject as “Economic science” was an oxymoron. Economics had more to do with speculation and voodoo, than any hard science.

I also find Sen to be not just a second rate economist, but also a third rate political or socio-economic analyst. I would have had a lot more respect for him if he decided to turn his focus on his adopted country of residence, USA, and analysed what the US was doing to the planet. The US civilisation is based on extreme and unsustainable exploitation of the rest of the world, permanently harming both human and natural resources globally and ushering in a planet wide ecocide or climatic collapse. Sen, if he wanted to be a socio-political analyst and a philosopher, should have focussed on the US’s behaviour and the survival prospects of mankind, instead of  being sanctimonious and picking on Modi.

But Sen would not touch the American Pandora’s box. Firstly I suspect him to be incapable of analysing it. Secondly, his bread is buttered on the US side. Damned if he will bite the hand that feeds him, opportunist that he is.

People like Sen are the small cogs that are used to keep the western destructive socio-economic wheel lubricated and turning. His left wing cover is an illusion, another example of a fraudster’s bag of tricks.

And yes, he got his prize because  the Rothschild family pushed for it. If you guys want to know more – study what the Rothschilds do across the planet. It would be a good education.

No self respecting leftist should touch a Rothschild with a ten foot pole. Cheers.

Village Panchal – microcosm of a vanishing India?

A world without bee eaters?

The golden age of Bengal is behind us. What is ahead of us – for Bengal, India and in fact the rest of the world – is uncertain bordering on gloomy. We are, without a doubt in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. Over 90 percent of living flora and fauna are on the way to extinction – thanks to human civilization and DGP growth.

I do not see hope in a horizon dominated by sky scrapers, our paths dominated by automobiles and our society sprinkled with politicians that betray their constituents and advanced nations ruled by warlords.

And yet, man learns to hope.

In the small periscope of my personal viewpoint as I tiptoe past edges of this planet, leaving near invisible tracks on the quicksands of time, I feel telltale sighs of man’s struggle against himself, trying to resist an ecological tsunami brought about by his own kind, couched as progress and development.

My story of addressing glyphosate at a personal level merges with groups of people very different from me and yet identical to me, across the world, each trying their best to push back against this civilizational catastrophe whose root cause might be man’s own destructive genes. Perhaps it is in the formula of evolutionary success.

Perhaps it is in the mitochondrial DNA that we might have inherited from the microbial world and could not genetically digest properly. Perhaps this is what the old sages meant – about creation being the flip side of destruction and that the universe is forever is a duel dance of creation and destruction.

I came to India, my birth place, to sell a property. As luck would have it, this took a lot of time. One thing led to another, and I ended up talking to people about my story about Glyphosate. This is a story of my consciousness about the ravages of human civilization. This realization was honed and focussed through help from a handful of North American scientists, and then partially fulfilled through my single handed efforts against almost a thousand elected politicians of Canada.

I had already turned a non-believer of raising awareness. I had lost faith in speaking with people. I had come to believe that – should there is a need to do something to help the society, one should try to do what one can by one’s own self, without ever expecting anybody to help. There is no value in trying to muster public support, or raising awareness. People thus made aware simply take selfie pictures with you, clap hands, and go back to sleep. Therefore, if I am driven by wanting to do something, I either do it myself, or it wont get done.

I was through talking to people and raising awareness. Been there, done that.

But then, I came to India – a world very different from Canada where I live, or USA where I used to live. This is a world where nature is still nature here and there. Where man is busy destroying gaia and gaisa is trying to wrench it back from man.

Earth walled farm house of Bhairab Saini

It is a world where, in pockets of rural India, cattle egrets still follow cattle. Grasshoppers still jump out of the ground, and the morning mist is not carrying particles of neonicotinoid insecticide. Sweet smell of death is not in the air.

A world where bee are still around, and one can still find a bee eater on a twig.

I have seen bee eaters often enough, but this may be the first time I am contemplating the possibility of a world without bee eaters – for the matter a world without tigers, rhinoceros, lions, giraffe, cheetah, gorilla, hyena, and yes – a world without man, the most catalytic biological weapon of mass destruction ever evolved out of this planet.

Cattle egret following cattle

I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I might one day write a book, let alone a reference book on glyphosate in food. I also never imagined I might write another in plain text, in a language that is not my mother-tongue, a tale of a lonely activist.

But here I am – part of small pockets of people, being washed away by the human civilizational tsunami, and yet pretending to dream of building a seawall to stop this ecological juggernaut whose root may be in my very genes.

I have decided to add a chapter in my book about this glimpse of rural India. I may use the title – Village Panchal, for this chapter. It should have room for the jewels of folk rice conservation – from Anupam Paul to Bhairab Saini and others that I came to know of and appreciate.

But it would also have room for the scaly breasted munia that landed on a piece of dried cow dung not far from me to allow me a few seconds to take a close up portrait. It would have room not only for the bee-eater in the forest, but also the white mushroom that the termites harvest in their termite hills, the civet cats that roam the land at night, and where domestic chicken range free all through the day, pecking at insects that have not gone extinct yet. There are some miniature chickens that move day and night around the ground, and at nightfall, they need not always return to their pen. They just go to the nearest bush and hunker down. They are often taken there by foxes, but that is there style. I saw a few moving around both in day time and at night under an electric light. I should be writing about all this – not just from this village, but also of other villages I visited, other efforts I saw, in other districts of Bengal.

Free range rooster – GMO free, antibiotic free an chemical free

I saw quite a few majestic looking roosters walking all over the place. Not a single one of them are fed industrial GMO feed, not a single capsule of injection of any antibiotic.

Bengal is not dead. Not yet at least. In fact, Bengal might be leading the nation in some ways relating to propagation organic of folk rice. This too might be a story that has not yet been told.

Home of a cow-owner and milk supplier. He has never heard of either bovine growth hormone, or synthetic milk to add and contaminate his milk. The cows, just like the chicken and goats, eat local foliage. Things are not 100% organic because some herbicides and pesticides are used by those that are not growing organic rice or organic vegetable. Effort is on – to change that.

I would mention the topic of farmers that are trying to bring back cultivation of heirloom folk rice varieties, grown without an ounce of industrial chemical of any kind, but are still not all saving their seeds nor exchanging them. I am increasingly conscious that seed corporations sell or pass around seed packages where neonicotinoids are used.

I have first hand information from fringe villages of tribal people that have not been taught to save their seeds and each starving family still spends several thousand Rupee every year to buy fresh rice seeds in paddy season.

All that brings me back to this bee-eater. Are we heading for a world without bee-eaters?

Villagers offer me an earthen cup of tea, welcoming me to Panchal, and refused to take money.

I saw in Panchal what I had been told by many, about conservation work in maintaining unique characters of various indigenous rice strains, without allowing the diversity from dilution through cross pollination. Rice flowers are air pollinated. What this means is, if one is trying to grow ten kinds of rice in a congested piece of land, then there is always the chance that one pollen from one kind of rice will pollinate another kind growing very near it, thus crossbreeding and losing the originality of the second kind. In order to prevent that, farmer use various techniques. Here we see one technique, where groups of plants flower at different times, so that when one is pollinating, nearby rice strains are not. Some farmers even wrap up some of the plants with some kind of shield so that the clusters self pollinate themselves but do not affect nearby varieties.

Examples of timed pollination, where one kind of producing getting ready to flower while nearby varieties are not yet ready.

Either way – I am likely to add a chapter – titled Village Panchal, in my book, and include the story not just of Panchal, but also of Northern Dinajpur and Purulia, covering the efforts and aspirations of small pockets of people trying to push back as this toxic juggernaut in a death-struggle with gaia, the living planet, like a serpent and a mongoose grabbing and tearing each other to pieces in a fight to the finish that ensure mutual destruction. The living planet will be finished. So will man.

The story of the Dhoincha plant.


There are many stories within stories here. One such has to do with complimentary plants, recycling of soil nutrients, nitrogen fixing and the role of the “Dhoincha” (ধইঞ্চা or ধঞ্চে) plant, a member of the Sesbania family. I believe this family, or at least some species of this family, are considered to me leguminous and are able to “fix nitrogen” in the soil. They are also considered kind of complimentary to paddy. One neutralizes the effect of the other, and tries to leave the soil as close to original with regard to nutrient content and soil health, as possible.

Farmer Bhairab Saini, his kid son and his grown up nephew are keeping track of the folk rice, standing right next to a Dhoincha plant in the middle of his folk rice conservation field.

Debal Deb tells us the correct scientific name for the Doincha plant to be Sesbania cannabina. Some mere mortals believed its name could have been Sesbania aculeata. I personally don’t care if it is renamed Sesbania Dhutterika (শেষ বানিয়া ধুত্তেরিকা). What is interesting is that farmers that may not know of the existence of latin as a language, or the world’s decision to use latin words to describe every living thing on a scientific platform, might nonetheless have figured out by themselves that Dhoincha is a good complimentary plant to have with paddy. Some useful nutrients that rice pulls out of the ground –  are recycled back in the soil, by this Dhoincha. Its root systems, for some bio-molecular mystery I am personally not educated enough to explain, encourages symbiosis with groups of microbes that form tiny nodule-colonies along its roots, and helps do the nitrogen-fixing.

Sunrise – Panchal, Bankura. Myself with my laptop. Picture clicked by Rajib Mukherjee

What is nitrogen fixing anyway ? Well well. Nitrogen is plentiful and inert, in our atmosphere. A compound of nitrogen is ammonia. Ammonia and other compounds like these are the sources for construction of more important organic molecules that from the basic building blocks of all proteins, or all life forms on earth. Therefore, ammonia can be considered a key chemical element that needs to be in the correct form, in the soil, for plants to pick up. And once plants pick them up, presence of that form of nitrogen compound reduces in the soil. This also applies for all other nutrients that a plant picks up.

Checking rice conservation and identification details – Rajiv Mukherjee, Bhairab Saini, Arun Ram and Bhairab’s nephew.

Nitrogen-fixing means putting those compounds of nitrogen back into the soil after a particular agricultural crop has picked most of it up through its harvest. This nitrogen-fixing recycles the depleted nutrient back in the soil and prepares the ground for replanting of the same crop, again and again. If recycling of nutrient cannot be done naturally, then the soil becomes infertile. Industrial agriculture model then tries to sell synthetic fertilizer to pump select nutrients back in the soil, keeping the soil alive through life support, for a longer period.

Speaking before Panchal villagers about dangers of using glyphosate.

Dhoincha, through the microbial symbiosis, helps in nitrogen-fixing and by allowing it to rot back into the soil replaces some carbonaceous matter back as well.

By the Shiva Temple, villagers sit down to hear about glyphosate

The plant has other interesting features too. During the early phase of growing folk rice without pesticides or herbicides, the fields may get infested with insects wanting to eat some of the growing rice seedlings. These days, when killer chemicals are so readily used everywhere, the insect kingdom has a shrinking field where they can still exist. They too are parts of the great symbiosis of this living planet. So they naturally congregate towards those pockets, where killer chemicals are still absent. There may, as a result, be an overcrowding of rice seed eating insects.

Dhoincha plant provides convenient perch for insect eating birds like the drongo. This is a good way for balancing things out while supporting the biodiversity of the land. This is what the Dhoincha plant also does. However, there is.a down side to it too – as Abha Chakraborti informed me. Once the rice seeds begin to mature, serious seed eating finches such as the Baya or weaver bird might congregate and gorge themselves on rice. Providing them a perch from the Dhoincha plant might turn counter productive. Therefore, when the seeds start maturing, the right thing to do for the farmers is to uproot the Dhoincha, and lay it on the ground right in the middle of the paddy field, and let nature do its work. Next season, another Dhoincha is planted again. There is a way healthy clean food such as rice can be grown without killing everything off, and without poisoning us. These Bengal farmers are showing me how it is done.

Sunset at Panchal, Bankura, West Bengal, India.

Folk rice conserving jewels of bengal


There has to be a story inside a story inside a story – like the Mahabharata – epic of Indian mythology.

I have posted a version of this picture before – but believe it deserves some description.

At left is – Rajib Mukherjee. He travelled far, from Asansol. He planned to come all this way on his motorcycle, but it broke down I front of his home. Nonetheless, he came by changing buses. He said he was coming to see me, but I suspect he came to meet all of us, especially the organic folk rice growing legends. Rajib has a few distinctions. He reads a lot of interesting non-fiction. He had already read James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia. Then, while listening to me, he ordered 1) Poison Spring, by EG Vallianatos (about extreme corruption of US-EPA) and 2) Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel (about cost of environmental damage incurred by production of common industrially mass produced items like a hamburger). Clearly, he reads serious books, and that sets him apart from 99.9999% of the rest of humanity. There is another distinction for him. He also draws cartoons. I was wondering if he was going to draw this particular nava-ratna (nine jewels). Instead, he drew a cartoon involving me.

Glyphosate packets are complaining about me to their boss Mr. Monsanto, and imploring him to see to it that my property is sold pronto so that I can return to Canada and leave them (glyphosate packages) alone.

The story of the cartoon goes like this – I originally came to India to sell a property – which is taking time. As a result, I am using that time to talk about glyphosate. With that background, this cartoon is make, where a few characters called Glyphosate are calling their boss, a character called Monsanto, over the phone, and imploring the boss to personally see to it that Tony Mitra manages to sell the property soon – and leaves India. If needed, the boss should buy the damned property himself, to ensure Tony Mitra is gone. Else, life is going to get increasingly tough for glyphosate.

Pair of Indian silver bills

Next – Mr. Arun Ram.
He too has an unique distinction. He came upon the idea of using masks with large eyes, fixed at the back of the head, for those travelling inside tiger infested jungles, like the Sundarbans. Hunting animals such as a tiger instinctively attacks prey, including humans, from the back. So, when it sees a human and recognizes its front by his face and eyes, he will slink and skirt around behind the person before springing. But if the person has a human mask with large eyes at the back of the head – that throws the tiger off, confuses him, and makes him re-think the angle of attack, and often discourages him enough to let the guy go. Mr. Arun Ram claims to have come up with the idea first and tried out, successfully. But today, his idea is copied by commercial tourist organizations, and he is contemplating ways to either patent or register his idea so as to get some credit and financial compensation. Very interesting person. His knowledge of wildlife, I found, was exceptional. HE was describing various kinds of poisonous snakes and the kind of poison they make etc. Even he came here to meet with the rest of the nine-jewels and take part in discussing folk rice conservation and promotion.

Next- Rabin Banerjee. He is a non-farmer that is committed to spread organic rice farming and has roped in over a hundred farmers of Purulia , many of them women, to reject toxic cultivation and try out organic folk rice variety. He actually changed his regular job, downgrading it to a sort of part time job that paid less, but enough to support his family, so that he could devote more time with the farmers of Purulia. I consider people like Mr. Bannerjee to be rare blessings for India. Thank heavens there are people like these around.

I am tempted to say – someone needs to write about people like Rabin Banerjee – and his unique near single-handed effort to convert more than a hundred farmers of Purulia, many of whom are marginal, female and Rajwangshi (lower caste), into cultivation of organic folk rice. Who needs Bollywood characters when India has so many real life heroes?

But I know, nobody will be writing it and I need to do it myself. So I shall.

Rabin Banerjee and myself at Bhairab Saini’s vegetable patch.

Next – myself – a storyteller. I am doing my job here.

Next to me – Anupam Paul. He is another giant in the field of promoting organic folk rice cultivation in India. He is an agrologist, having done his PhD on the subject. He is employed by the Government of West Bengal, and runs one of the seven Agricultural Training Centre (ATC) in the state. What is unique about him is that six out of seven such ATC promote industrial, chemical dependent agriculture and influence/train local farmers accordingly, following the state policy on Agriculture. But Mr. Paul has the seventh ATC running in the opposite direction. He is involved in conserving over four hundred strains of heirloom folk rice, practices growing them organically without any chemical, and then trains as well as influences a growing number of local farmers, spread across 14 districts (counties) of West Bengal, in support of organic folk rice. He has enough data to prove that indigenous heirloom folk rice, grown completely organically, can match of beat hybrid varieties cultivated with recommended industrial fertilizer. In other words, the benefit of modern agriculture is more a myth than a fact. He is, in my view, another heaven-sent and one of the shiniest of the jewels in this group.

Then comes Shomik Bannerjee. He is a private consultant whose specialization is in Forest ecology and indigenous tribes. He is employed by others to visit various pockets of India, usually involved in people living in marginal conditions, to study and prepare report about them – for clients. He is a very keen observer of various plant species as well as other creatures that make up the biodiversity of our forest ecology. Extremely knowledgable and extremely humble – a very rare combination. From my point of view he has an added distinction – he bought my book – POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA – even before he met me. That makes him not only a rare breed – but perhaps an endangered species. He has also been involved in telling various people around the country – that they they need to consider listening to my story of glyphosate.

Those that need more details of Shouik Bannerjee – he did his graduation in chemistry, and double post graduations in Biotechnology and Forest Management. He has been a free lance researcher for 9 years, with special interest in indigenous seed conservation – in paddy, wheat, barley, oats, millets, maize cotton, Mustard-Rapeseed, flaxseed in Eastern India. As if that is not enough already, he also researches on uncultivated wild foods and forest ecosystems, and to round it off you may add agroecolgy and sustainable farming.
Yes I know. He is one of those.

He and Anupam Paul have been the primary forces behind the scene, to get me to far corners of India and alert people about glyphosate.

Next – Bhairab Saini – the host. He is a farmer from Bankura. We are standing in front of an earth walled farm house of his. Years ago, he was influenced by the rice conservation works of Debal Deb when Debal was working in Bankura. After Debal left for Odisha, Bhairab continued to a) conserve many strains of folk rice, d) encourage more farmers of his family and friends to join up in growing chemical free folk rice, and same time take up some organizational activity in promotion of folk rice in Bengal. He has received help and assistance from the rest, primarily from people like Anupam Paul. He is the one that organized the event in his village for me to speak about glyphosate. He invited me to stay at his farm house. He also helped get the rest of the jewels to congregate.

Black rice being bagged for shipment and sale in Delhi

He has one more distinction, in my mind. Slowly, he is managing to find a market for organic folk rice grown in his village, for sale in urban outlets at various far flung corners of India. He has already sold all the folk “Govindabhog” rice his group cultivated this year, but still has lots of Black Rice as well as Govindabhog derivatives such as rice flakes etc. So he has been busy bagging them. A group including his family and some friends are scheduled to haul nearly two tons of the stuff to Delhi, to join a village fair organized by the Ministry of Women’s affair, headed by Minister Ms Maneka Gandhi, where Bhairab will advertise his wares, hope to sell the rice and firm up more business for the future. If efforts like this catch on, it might influence more conventional farmers of his village to come over to organic cultivation of folk rice. If affluent India recognizes the need for healthy food and start supporting these grassroots efforts, then more and more farmers, of his village and others, are expected to follow the trend. I wish Bhairab’s efforts all success. He is not the only one in this effort, but he is so far the only one I have personally seen, who is engaged in both growing, and trying to bypass the middle man to directly sell organic rice in India to the consumer.

Next to Bhairab are Pradeep Nayak and Shakti Roy, both from Village Panchal, both friends of Bhairab, and both believers of organic rice cultivation. I think both of them will be going to Delhi with Bhairab trying to sell black rice and drum up more business. And we ate lots of organic banana that were ripened on the tree in Pradeep Nayak’s garden. Both of them also did the cooking for us. Mr. Nayak also offered a few rooms of his own home for some of us to stay, since Bhairab’s farm house had only two rooms besides the kitchen, and could not accommodate all of us.

Village girls returning from school

There is one more jewel that was supposed to come but could not due to personal issues – Abhra Chakrabarti.

Edible mushrooms in the forests of Bankura


Edible mushrooms collected from the forest by villagers of Panchal area, Bankura. The spores of these mushroom fungus are collected, stored,, cultivated and harvested by white ants (termites). These are kept inside their anthills in off-season. The on-season starts now, and these spores sprout, grow on stalks with white mushroom heads sticking out. Knowledgeable villagers go looking for them at the right time – around now, cut the stalks and bring them home.

These are usually cooked by light pan-frying in oil and then boiled and turned into some kind of curry with spices, and consumed with rice.

One couple that went looking for them at the beginning of the annual mushroom season found these. Other groups I met, returned empty handed. However, the month long season just started. The mushrooms grow only in certain patches of the forests. Some villagers have the keen eye to find them. Others do not.

You may ask – what does this mushroom have to do either with conservation of folk rice, or with the vanishing face of sustainable India. But, I guess you already know the answer.

Citizen activism against herbicide attack

Spent an evening at Richard Miller’s iconic home – a three story hillside home that once used to be a power plant and a railway station. Today, it borders a forested hill to the south where hummingbird families make nests, and agricultural flats to the north in Abbotsford.

Family of Robin Wesman of the East Kootenay had arrived to spend the night with them. I came with a pumpkin from my backyard. Richard would show me, another day, how to roast pumpkin seeds. But that was not the main reason we were there.

Richard spoke on the need of the hour, which might be to write multiple letters to the new Agriculture Minister of British Columbia. She is an NDP MLA and has a track record in the past for supporting organic farming and pushing back at industrial chemical dependent toxic farming. Now was the time to write to her, to encourage her in finding ways to push back at the use of glyphosate and reduce its presence in British Columbian agriculture. This was the time to show her the support – by the tens of thousands. His one minute talk on record was short, straight and direct.

Then it was Robin Wesman’s turn. He took two minutes to articulate his view, which is, to engage himself in a step by step process where the first step is to educate the people so they can see the picture about how our long term as well as short term health is affected by excess use of herbicides in our environment. The next step would be for the people to find ways to banish this practice of spraying herbicides in our environment. He covers his points in a two minute talk.

 

Tony explained two things from his own perspective. The first was how science has been hijacked by the industry and we do not have balanced neutral science available to judge agri-industry, GMO or herbicides any more. Science has lost its objectivity and neutrality and stopped being an unbiased tool to assess glyphosate. The second point is – it is not so much the industry such as Monsanto that is at fault. The party that ensured our environment is turned toxic is our politicians that control our government. But the root cause is not just corrupt politicians – but complacency of us, the people of Canada that refuse to perform their main task as citizens. His talk took four minutes.

I forgot to mention, Richard and Tracie made some lovely dinner for us all, with roasted chicken with unbelievably good flavour, along with quinoa and salad, that went with a glass of red wine. I also had a banana.


Received an interesting feedback from a reader on youtube:

I Macey
No I disagree the only people who can change this are the occultists who are in power glyphosate is part of ongoing eugenics and the only reason the e.u haven’t relicensed is because glyphosate is starting to effect themselves . My opinion of course

That’s it for the day. By the time I hit the road heading back to my home, light had disappeared from the sky, and there was a traffic jam due to an accident that turned my hour long drive into a two hour one, reaching back home at 10:30 PM. My wife was fast asleep by then. All in all – a good way to pass quality time, and talk about what we the people aught to do beyond eating, drinking and making money for ourselves. Do we have a responsibility towards the future of the society and the land, or don’t we?

Chlorothalonil in food and our disfunctional democracy

Was interviewed the other day by the US based USA Prepares Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8W5SjHRHVI)

They wanted to know if I am happy with either a one hour interview or a two hour.
I personally think anything over 10 minutes gets to be boring for the people, so agreed to a one hour.
 
These folks came to know about me from German born New Brunswick farmer Werner Bock, who has been screaming hoarse about Canadian government poisoning its agriculture, its forests and its meadows for more than three decades, to the point where the government started harassing him and even putting him temporarily in a loony bin claiming he was mentally disturbed. Apparently, Werner knows everybody in North America. He found out my phone number a few years ago and usually calls me up every few months. He is well known to the radio show people and apparently told them to find me.
 
I personally am not too sure if radio talks are fruitful.
 
I know articles written in online and printed papers have their value in raising awareness. I know blog posts and social media have their value in raising awareness. I know youtube video, audio podcasts and radio shows have their value in raising awareness. I know seminars, March against Monsanto, and mock tribunals all have their value in raising awareness.
 
And yet, I am coming to the conclusion that all these “raising awareness” is pretty much useless, when I consider what result it has achieved in the western hemisphere, especially in North America, which is faced with the worst of this avalanche of food poisoning.
 
At this rate, we shall have a highly raised level of awareness in a few more decades, while we shall also all be dead from poisons – highly aware people that died from poison but decided to do nothing, other than being “aware”.
 
The reason for this contradiction, in my analysis, is that the western world in general, and North America in particular, is too full of people that are little more than armchair activists, and people that are addicted to “raising awareness” to millions more armchair activists.
 
To me, it is clear as the open sky, that the root of all this problem is a dysfunctional democracy that has been hijacked into a full blows fascism, while the addicted population still believes writing an article, or clicking a like button, or hanging out with this or that talking head will bring them close to Nirvana.
 
If we have a full blown fascism and our democracy is nothing more than a make belief facade, then we have a problem that is political in nature and has to be solved, if at all, by political means.
 
I am not a politician by nature. I hate politicians and consider their professions to be among the lowest of the low, very close to anti-GMO talking heads in fact. They all are there to make a living out of whatever the hot topic of the day is. They are not here to solve anybody’s problems.
 
So, as an activist that is fed up with arm chair activism of my friends, fed up with raising awareness, and fed up with local politicians at the municipal, provincial and federal level – the only option appears to be to try and influence more citizens to stop the bullshit, and start targeting politicians, and try to pull their pants off in public. Time is well past when I can still be polite and ask  politician with folded hands to “please sir, please madam, please look at this or that issue, please see these reports and please disclose that hidden data and please, please please please please …”
 
I am dome with that shit. But, I am not a revolutionary and hate violence and bloodshed. I also hate being an elected politician or the compromises that one needs to make in order to gain political office. I am also a serious disbeliever of the political party system. To me, political parties should be banned and only independents allowed to stand for election. That way, theoretically, each elected official works only according to wishes of his or her constituents and not according to any party leader or party whip. The very notion of a political party is, to me, unconstitutional and anti-democratic. Anyhow, hating politics as a profession and refusing anything outside the law, and fed up with “raising awareness” to a comatose citizenry, my options are limited as an activist.
 
What we have here is a failure of democracy not because politicians are crooks, which they generally are, but because the citizens are in coma. In democracy, even in a failing democracy, every fault of the system lies at the feet of the citizens, no matter how much folks may like to blame politicians or Monsanto or the devil. It is always the fault of the people to allow things to come to whoever it has come. And our citizens, in North America, are are almost incapable of rational thinking. It is as if they are in a coma or has already gone autistic and are incapable of any rational thinking.
 
I want other citizens to grab their politicians by the scruff of their necks, metaphorically, and give them one issue options – “ban glyphosate or your rear end is mine to kick”.
Meanwhile, here is a chart about “Chlorothalonil in foods as tested by CFIA, consolidated from over 65,000 tests and plotted on a logarithmic scale. I have not had the time to look deeper into it, but Canada and USA ranks high in these along with a few others like Guatemala, Mexico and China etc. Some of the worst individual samples have over 50,000 ppb of Chlorothalonil, such as Chinese Cabbage grown in Canada.
 
I shall eventually have time to break these down by nations and food types better. All this would be in my book, which may bloat from the current 400 pages to either closer to 1,000 pages, or be split into volume two.
 
This chart is only covering food types that had chlorothalonil average contamination level of over 20 ppb, and shows both the average contamination and the percentage contamination. So, for items that have very low percentage contamination and yet rather high average contamination – those foods have only a few samples with extremely high levels of Chorothalonil while the rest where clean. Good examples of these might be Fine Herbs, Chinese Cabbage (this was make in Canada), Plum, Apricot and Beet. It would therefore make sense to check if those very high levels of contamination in a few few samples are an indication of where they were grown etc etc.
 
Other food items where the percentage contamination is also high, might be candidates that folks aught to consider rejecting, or growing themselves, or buying organic.
 
Incidentally, all items in this chart are conventional. Lots of organic food types were also tested by CFIA. They all had zero or negligible amounts of Chlorothalonil. So, in this particular case, going organic only is safer. All that will appear in my book eventually. Its a work in progress.
 
The green line represents the concentration in ppb, in descending order from left to right, with corresponding percentage contamination in blue for each of these food types.
 
All that will come in due course. Meanwhile I have to figure out how to kick some more political rear ends and how to goad them, shame them, insult them, till they start responding. 
 
There are some animals that turn over and play dead when in trouble. If you take a stick and turn the animal right side up, it immediately turns over belly up again, to convince you that it is really dead. Our politicians are a master of that act.
 
Some of these should end up in my blogs but I am having some malware issues with the wordpress platform and need to solve those first so that future blogs come out OK.
 
PS I hope to catch up with Anthony Samsel sometime to catch up on the implications of having much chlorothalonil in food, especially what we consider as vegetables.
 
Tony Mitra

Russia-China vetoes Aleppo ceasefire resolution

Well, the goings on in UNSC is perhaps an indication of geopolitical shift in the issue of regime toppling efforts by western interests.

The issue is the town of Aleppo in Syria. There is a multi-pronged warfare going on in much of the country. A lot of different groups are trying to topple the current government of Assad.

According to the US, the people fighting the government are local Syrians that wish to topple a brutal regime there.

According to other reports, the country is infiltrated by jihadists, ISIS, mercenaries etc, sent there specifically to start the next phase of the middle east war, and to topple the Assad government.

Assad

To complicate matters, there are also Kurdish resistance groups who wish to have a homeland of their own, and currently occupy strips of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and are treated as second class citizens most everywhere. I am not sure which side of the war they are on, but Turkey, who hates the Kurds (Because the Kurds in Turkey also want independence) would either like a piece of land carved out of Syria so all the Turkish Kurds could perhaps also go there and stop bothering Turkey, or perhaps hoping that all the Turkish Kurds would cross the border and join the fight in Syria, on whichever side, as long as they vacate Turkey.

Obama

These are reasons why the issue may be too complex to fully comprehend, and many folks have opinion based on one or another point of view.

There are other factors about Syria that might be relevant. Assad does not allow western banking and oil interests to benefit from Syria’s land or its assets.

Also, Syria, while Muslim, is largely secular and do not promote a sunni version of lifestyle. Women are not required to cover themselves or stay home.

There is also additional issues of two competing oil pipelines proposed to go through Syria. The US plan leads gulf oil from Qatar to reach the west via Turkey to the Mediterranean.

Putin

There is apparently another Russian plan to help Iran develop a pipeline going through Iraq and Syria and reach the west through a Syrian terminal facing the mediterranean.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US do not want Iran to benefit from pipelines, and do not want Syrian ports to benefit from the business, unless Assad regime is toppled and a pro-West, Pro-Saudi, Pro-Israeli group rules Syria.

IN the middle of all this, is the issue of the current legitimate government of Syria inviting Russia to come and help fight the opponents of the regime, who they claim are foreign terrorists being funded by Saudi, Israeli and US interests, and are using US weaponry. Russia accepted the offer.

Jinping

This pits Russian military in direct confrontation with US-Saudi-Israeli interests.

Things have reached a pitch where nothing USA says about Syria, including what comes out specifically from Obama and Hillary (before she lost the election) could be believed.

It was better to look for independent reports emerging from the ground in Syria, such as Canadian reporter Eva Bartlett

Now, the epicentre of the fight is concentrated around the city of Aleppo. It was completely in control of the rebels, and there were reports of horrific treatment of the civilians coming out from there too, including mass graves and using the people as human shields against Syrian forces trying to free the town.

Anyhow, now the rebels are apparently surrounded by the syrian forces who are also being supported (I am not too sure of the details) by Iraqi forces who also want ISIS and jihadists defeated, since they believe these people actually came from Iraq, and if they succeed in Syria, would turn and haunt Iraq again. Anyhow.

Maduro

Now the battle around Aleppo has apparently turned a decisive corner, and much of the town is liberated by the govt forces. The rebels, which are perhaps the concentrated mass of ISIS forces and mercenary soldiers on pay, are surrounded and cannot flee and regroup because their escape route through the desert is blocked by Russian missiles, fighters and bombers.

USA and its supporters have been pushing for a no-fly zone for a long time, specifically in areas where the rebels move around. But since the area is under control of the Russian air force intent on cutting off rebel movement, this pitches the US directly against the Russians. USA has not put their own airforce to enforce a no-fly zone here, presumably because US generals warned Obama that this move would trigger a direct war against Russia.

Hillary herself has spoken often about wanting a no-fly zone there, fully toting the Obama-military-industrial wish. Putin’s intensions are not very clear, but this much is accepted by most – Russia does not have a wish to control the assets of the region. Rather, Russia is more interested in ensuring the region does not become an US stooge and hostile to Russia.

So, now, three countries pressed a resolution in the UNSC to force the security council to adopt a 7 day stopping of bombings around Aleppo, in order to “pass humanitarian aid” to suffering residents of Aleppo.

What has happened today, is that Russia, China and Venezuela voted against it, and 11 other security council members (some non-permanent and some permanent) voted for it. Russia and China are permanent members with veto power.

In essence, this perhaps is the first time China has openly joined Russia in a veto about the war in Syria.

I take that as the beginning of a new phase of China. They are also, slowly, beginning to bring assistance to the Assad regime, in paramilitary and military sphere.

I believe one of the main reason for China to decide to help Syria and defeat the insurgency, even at the cost of openly opposing western commercial and military interests, is because China itself has a lot of boundary provinces with substantial muslim population, and it believes some of the Islamists and Jihadists are fomenting trouble in those Chinese provinces, hoping to start a revolt and turning those areas into an expanding Islamic state. China believes some of the mushrooming or budding terrorists from these regions have already been recruited and are right now being trained first hand in insurgency through the war in Syria.

Therefore, China would like the rebels to be defeated. It considers this mushrooming of Islamic terrorism that spreads from nation to nation, and is apparently supported by Saudi Money, Israeli political support and US weaponry, poses a threat to China’s own security and integrity. In other words, its not a joking matter for them.

Ohh.. well .. we are all living in interesting times..

Good bye, New York Times

Sorry New York Times, I do not buy this latest bout of crocodile tears.

The biggest political story of the US election did reach a dramatic climax but it was unexpected only because media such as yours tried your damnedest to fool the people with corporate and state pushed propaganda to tilt the playing field in favor of Hillary Clinton.

You stopped being neutral, and objective a long time ago. It was not Donald Trumps unconventionality that was the root cause – your corruption and lack of journalistic integrity was.

The election was divisive but the reason was far from what was projected by your media. It was divisive because one side was pushed by the entire corrupt establishment, of which you are a part and and the other side was those that stopped believing in you. Therefore everything you said was suspect. More you trashed Trump, more folks suspected there was something important about Trump that may be good for the people that the establishment does not like. More you ridiculed him, more he appeared a good candidate to those that stopped believing in you.

You should reflect on it all – but you are not going to continue to con past subscribers like me. I would not read you even if someone paid me to do so, forget about buying a subscription ever again.

You say you cannot deliver independent and original journalism without our support. The trouble is, you did not deliver those items even with our support.

Now, you claim you cannot do without us.
I for one, can and will do without you.

Good bye.

Tony Mitra

A blind and arrogant India

My puja greetings
___________________

India ranks 97th, near the bottom, of the 118 nation index of hunger. Indians do far worse than neighbours Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, China, or even Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Congo, Uganda etc.

But we can take pride that India is less hungry than Pakistan, and a very short list of unfortunate countries like Haiti, Zambia and Central African Republic etc.

When thinking this item through, I can identify as the root cause of this to be no other than the voting and upwardly mobile middle class of India – people like you and me.

In the age of virtual world and instant messaging and electronic media and TV channels by the dozens, I see no mention anywhere of the fact that half of India’s population cannot get a healthy meal a day, that nearly half of all children of India are malnourished, or that India, despite all the hoopla about progress, is among the poorest countries when it comes to basic minimum food requirement and access to health care.

For the educated people of India, the other half dose not exist. It is not in their TV, nor in their incessant messaging on whatsapp, Facebook, pinterest, instagram or whatever other platform a huge number of folks are spending millions of collective hours every day to catch up with each other. The endless plethora of soap opera on Indian channels never cover the story of the hungry and dying India.

We are ignorant despite education, and arrogant without any justification.

So, on this so called auspicious occasion when everyone with a laptop, a smart phone or a tablet is wishing everyone else seasons greetings and শুভ বিজয়া, I would write the last paragraph of Tagore’s poem “হে মোর দুর্ভাগা দেশ ”
—–

দেখিতে পাও না তুমি মৃত্যুদূত দাঁড়ায়েছে দ্বারে ,
অভিশাপ আঁকি দিল তোমার জাতির অহংকারে ।
সবারে না যদি ডাক ‘ ,
এখনো সরিয়া থাক ‘ ,
আপনারে বেঁধে রাখ ‘ চৌদিকে জড়ায়ে অভিমান —
মৃত্যুমাঝে হবে তবে চিতাভস্মে সবার সমান ।

Happy holidays – ignorant and arrogant Indian middle class.

Updates on Glyphosate Petition

Hello friends,

It has been an exhilarating time since I opened two separate channels for my Government, in Ottawa, Canada, to address the issue of rising use and presence of the weed killer RoundUp and in particular the chemical Glyphosate in our environment, and the fact that the people do not have either access to information on how much of the toxic chemical is in our food, water and soil, or access to the safety test that is supposed to prove that the chemical and the formulation is actually safe for people or for the environment.

This matter has now reached a turning point since Canada is now having a lot of labs accessible to the public that will test our food for Glyphosate, something that was not the case a few years ago, and something on which I had already butted head with the previous Government under Harper, and where my letter was carried by the then MP Mr. Atamanenko to the then Health Minister Ms Rona Ambrose, to respond to. This is a good sign that labs are now beginning to offer this service.

One of my current multi-channel dialogue with the Government included an application to Health Canada, which is Canada’s way of describing the Ministry of Health, to disclose to me if it actually has seen safety test data on Glyphosate, and if so, to disclose to me all such data and reports. This application was made through the official system known as “Access To Information” act of the Government of Canada. Similar acts are also known as “Freedom of Information” act or “Right to Information” act elsewhere, such as in Canadian provincial Governments or elsewhere in the world.

Another parallel effort was the creation of an online petition for Canadians to support a motion, for our Government to disclose all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate or RoundUp, to the Canadian people, so that people can independently verify if the product is safe and if the Canadian Government has been diligent in its study and analysis. Further, it is the right of the Canadian people to see such documents and it is in effect be illegal to deny public access to such data.

Why exhilarating? Well, first of all, the correspondence that generated from the “Access to information” act appeal, confirmed a few things,

  • that the Canadian Government has in fact seen a lot of safety test data and documents
  • that they are in possession of over 130,000 pages of such material
  • that I indeed have a right, as a citizen of Canada, to see such data

And in spite of that, the Government has unfortunately been dragging its feet, citing reasons why it needs more time to provide me with the information requested. One of the reason is that they need to cross check with the parties that conducted that safety test, if the details may be divulged to me and under what condition.

The very facts that the Canadian Government acknowledges it has the data, and that I have a right to it, are positive development. That I cannot see it yet unless third parties that provided the data agree to the arrangement – is in my view illegal. If such data cannot be shown to the people, then the product (Glyphosate) cannot be approved for use among the people either. That is how I read the law.

The second part – the petition, has 30 updates so far, has generated almost 23,000 support, over 98% of them being Canadian. This is far and away more support than I had anticipated. For a country with a very small population of 35 million, this is an unprecedented level of support on a subject not so easy to understand and one that has not been covered by the mainstream media at all. The sheer volume of support, I suspect, has influenced my MP Carla Qualtrough, who also happens to be a federal minister, to agree to see me on April 27th for 45 minutes, so I can hand over all the documentation on the petition, which runs to over 1,000 pages, to her in a CD or a flash drive, to be taken to Ottawa and handed over the Health minister.

I asked if I might bring a delegation of six other persons, to which the Minister Qualtrough’s office that I may. The petition itself can be visited by clicking on the image below.

It has many interesting updates. One of which is a comment by India’s noted supreme court advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who is representing petitioner Ms Aruna Rodrigues in her public interest litigation against the Government of India on account of GMO, where legal precedence is already set, that obliges the Government to disclose biosafety data of transgenic products to the people before the product is to be approved for release. In other words, intellectual property rights, or agreement on Confidentiality or or non-disclosure clauses cannot be used to trump public safety. Click below for that video.

My request to the Honourable minister is going to be in three parts, of which one would be to personally carry the petition documents to Ottawa and hand over same to Health Canada and to ask them to respond. The second is to have a personal talk with Prime Minister Trudeau, requesting him to drop in at the secretarial office of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, located in the same home turf of the Prime Minister, in Montreal, and to ask the staff in that office about how Canada is doing in comparison with the rest of the world with regard to Cartagena Protocol. The third is to look into ways to kick start testing of local foods in Delta, her constituency, for presence of Glyphosate.

[youtube d5TQHzroqDs]

 I have added information on a few UN platforms for Canadians in the latest update. These are:

There is also an effort on my part to convert a condensed form of the petition material and references into an interactive e-book on Apples’s iTune store and/or Amazon’s Kindle for around $3 in the next few weeks.

There are perhaps a few more updates that will go into the petition before it is closed. These might include:

  • A talk with the president of the Canadian Farmers Union
  • How to engage citizens into coaxing our Municipalities to start testing local food, water and soil, for presence of Glyphosate and to make the data public.
  • An update on the coming meeting with Minister Carla Qualtrough about this petition.

Stay tunes and feel free to add your comments below.

Thank you.

Tony

A letter to a mayor

Apr 2, 2016 — To: The Mayor Ms Luis Jackson,
Delta Corporation
April 1st, 2016 (not a prank)
Subject : Test Glyphosate in Delta’s water, soil and food.

Mayor Jackson,

Good day.

I write to you, yet again, regarding potential dangers linked with exposure  to Glyphosate for residents of Delta, and what the municipality could do.

Delta has fertile lowlands and farms. Glyphosate is the most used chemical in Canadian food production. Besides, since our town is actually in the delta of the Fraser river, and comprises of tidal mudflats and lowlands, most runoff from farms, as well as from the upland forests go through our midst. Both these regions use glyphosate, in agriculture by farmers and aerially in hilly forests by logging corporations.

In spite of being the most used toxin in Canada and the planet for a generation, safety test records and data of this weed killer are kept hidden from Canadians, possibly illegally, to protect commercial interest of the promoter.

Legal precedence is already being set in some countries, where supreme court has overruled federal Governments about keeping safety documents hidden from the people. Apparently, commercial confidentiality agreements and intellectual property rights cannot trump public safety. So, if a corporation cannot divulge safety records of its product to the public, the product itself may not be approved by the Government either.

I have two different channels of communication ongoing with the Ottawa Government about this. One of them is an online petition through change.org for the Government to disclose all safety test documents, based on which it is supposed to have approved Glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture and environment. Link : https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-health-canada-justin-trudeau-health-canada-prove-glyphosate-is-safe

The petition has generated a large number of follow up updates with input from scientists around the world and other notables, and has over 22,000 supporters, 98% from Canada. The volume of information on the petition has crossed a thousand pages, and MP Carla Qualtrough has agreed to see me so I can present all that to her and request her to hand deliver it to the minister in Health Canada, to either place the safety documents in public domain, or inform Canadians why they do not have a right to these safety documents, or perhaps arrange a debate on the floor of our parliament about if Canadian citizens have, or do not have, a right to see first hand, all safety test data on this herbicide that has been entering our food chain in ever increasing dose for a generation.

Meanwhile for the town of Delta, and perhaps many other towns where concerned Canadians have supported this petition, there are areas where our municipal governments could actively engage, at the bottom tier of our political system, to address this issue in the following manner:
1)
Start having our food, water, and soil, tested for concentration of Glyphosate. This could not even be done just a few years ago since labs did not offer such services, especially about testing our food for Glyphosate. But this can easily be done today. Increasing number of accredited labs are offering a high quality service. And some of the labs are nearby, such as in Burnaby. This testing is legal, and reasonably easy to do for a Municipal corporation. The reason so many labs are now scrambling to offer this service, is because our Government has started a massive effort to test our food, but behind closed doors, more or less from the time World Health Organization decided to reclassify Glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
2)
Start placing these test results online and available for any research student, scholar, scientist or concerned citizen to read, download and follow up on, should they so desire.

3)
Inform all parties, such as farmers, or loggers or nature park managers, that samples will be drawn from their areas after application of the herbicide, or when its concentration is noted to be highest, and also in off season, to get an idea of seasonal variation, and to start tracking the toxic load in regions within Delta.
4)
This data should be available to local hospitals and doctors, to check if reports of skin rashes, gastro-intestinal or auto-immune disorders, especially among children, seem to be following the rise and fall of prevalence of Glyphosate, in which case any research organization would now have some data to start working on, to investigate if some ailments might be linked to Glyphosate exposure. The municipality need not get involved in this research, but can easily and legally offer accumulated data. Why ? Because that aught to be our first line of defence against environment induced ill-health and it aught to be the duty of our town council to ensure the residents are protected from the most used and most controversial agriculture and environmental toxin in Canada.
5)
This data should also be available to wildlife research scientists that are investigating sudden population decline, unexpected mass death, skewring of sex ration in newborns, or disappearance of creatures starting from bees, birds, amphibians, herbivores and even whales.
6)
Invite volunteers to check if recommended limits of dose of glyphosate is followed by those authorized to use it, like farmers and loggers, or exceeded by anybody. I have reason to believe that application of Glyphosate is not supervised by anybody, even if the packaging warns that it is (or may be) relatively safe only if applied according to instructions and within the maximum recommended dosage limits. I believe a municipality has the right to allow citizen volunteers a right to check if such limits are maintained, even if the council cannot afford employing people to do so for them.

This is not the first time I have written to the Delta Corporation on Glyphosate and what I wished the town council to consider engaging in. This is unlikely to be my last. I wish the municipality would take this seriously.
This letter will likely be included in the petition asking Ottawa to place all safety data on Glyphosate in the public domain. The reason this letter, and others written to other politicians, will be included is that battling indiscriminate use of an untested (it remains untested as long as the tests are hidden from people) and potentially hazardous chemical will need to be challenged on multiple fronts and the people would need to engage in it directly, and apply pressure on the politicians. It is my hope that this update, which reaches all 22,000 supporters of the petition across Canada and beyond, will influence a few hundred others to also write to their respective town councils, MPs and MLAs. Even if a single politician or town ends up being the first in initiating a program to track our food, soil, water and environment for glyphosate concentration, that will amount to a kicking in of the door, a pathfinder, and a worthy achievement that others might follow.
Should Delta Corporation have an interest in discussing this further, I shall be more than happy to attend.
Looking forward to a positive response,
With good wishes
Tony Mitra, 10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada