Search Results for: cancer

There’s nothing I can say about recent events in Florida that will cause you to think of things one way or the other. I will note that when Florida raised the bar on what constituted murder and passed their Stand Your Ground laws I wrote that something like this was bound to happen. Or, simply put, the number of murder cases has gone down but the number of people being killed with guns has steadily climbed each year. However, while thoughts about this will raise your blood pressure I’m not sure it’s a good thing. So, today, I am going to focus on healthy activities. More importantly, I am going to focus on healthy activities that you can participate in right now without needing a credit card or any gear at all. My friend Jacquilyn wrote me this morning about the greatest health news I’ve heard in years.

It turns out that being naked, and doing everything you normally do clothed while naked, is so good for your health that even ugly people should do it.

Hank Pellissier has the whole story.

Is clothing crushing us? Are we trapped in tomb-like textiles, exiling our flesh from experiencing the environment? Are we atrophying our epidermis, our senses, our neuro-intelligence?

If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm the skin starves for Vitamin D, the muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion, the nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids? We shroud our entire skin palette except for face, neck and hands – we obliterate symbiosis with the planet.

We hide in cocoons, when we could be free as butterflies.

History reveals many cultures that were not clothes-minded. Spartans were basically bare and their victories in pan-Hellenic sports competitions enticed all neighboring Greeks to exercise nude, creating the word “gymnasium” (Greekgymnos = naked). Romans mingled in magnificent bathhouses, enjoying dense communal nudity as they drank, dined, defecated, bathed, read books, argued politics, and watched theater.

Adamists — naked heretics — performed stripped-down church services in North Africa, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and England. Pre-Hitler Germans were avid adherents of Freikorperkultur (“Free Body Culture”) with 70,000 attending co-ed Nacktkultur schools.

There’s naked Japanese in hot springs, naked Finns in saunas, “sky-clad” Jain monks in India, plus millions of nudists worldwide going to “Nakation” camps, beaches, and resorts.

They’re still sporty as Spartans, eager to hike naked (“free bush rambling”), canoe naked (“canuding”), bicycle naked, ride horses naked, run naked, play volleyball, badminton, ping-pong and chess naked, swim naked, dance naked, do Naked Yoga, Naked Tai Chi, Naked Gardening, Naked Bowling, and of course, many of us, perhaps you and I, dear readers, are NIFOC — Naked In Front of Computers.

Many famous figures were bare-all aficionados; too many politicians to name, so I’ll just list sci-fi and scientists: Leonard Nimoy, Alexander Graham Bell,  Robert Heinlein, and seismologist Charles Richter. Nudism is prominent in Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books and John Varley’s Steel Beach. Celebrities? Many movie stars skinny-dip at the French Riviera, trying to elude paparazzi seeking pix of Bruce WIllis’ willy or Natalie Portman’s port side.

Here’s evidence suggesting that skin-only can be superior:

Born Free.  Pediatricians agree that infants thrive with a daily dose of “naked time” because the unhampered range of motion aids brain development, stimulating neuron growth. Recent discoveries reveal that the “plastic” brain changes and develops throughout our entire lives. Neuroplasticity pioneer Michael M. Merzenich believes,  “Everything that you can see happen in a young brain can happen in an older brain.” Doesn’t this imply that “naked time” is equally valuable for humans of any age, especially the elderly?

Weakened Bodies. A 2003 University of Reading study entitled “A Naked Ape Would Have Fewer Parasites” posits that “humans evolved hairlessness to reduce parasite loads, especially ectoparasites that may carry disease.” Unfortunately, the garments we wear can be a breeding ground for filthy fungi and bad bacterium, causing yeast infections, urinary tract infections, rotting toenails. Lyme Disease deer ticks can grab onto our sweaters and sea lice can sneak into our bathing suit crotches. Cinched-up belts, ties, and clothes impede breathing. Men’s snug pants raise testicle temperature, lowering sperm count and fertility.

Barefoot Medicine. Going shoeless is now recognized as an anti-Alzheimer’s, brain-boosting activity because the sole sensation entices your brain into growing extra, efficient neuron connections. Dr. Norman Doidge (author of The Brain That Changes Itself) believes skipping shoes increases brain flexibility and youthfulness, and many podiatrists now advise going barefoot as much as possible. Bare feet are today’s prescription. Will tomorrow’s elixir take the next step: Bare Body?

Superior Socialization. Self-actualization proponent Abraham Maslow believed “Nudism… is itself a kind of therapy.” Health benefits of social nudity include stress reduction, satiation of curiosity about the human body, reduction of porn addiction, a sense of full-body integration and developing a wholesome attitude about the opposite gender. Research at the University of Northern Iowa discovered that nudists have significantly higher body self-acceptance. Another study concluded that teens at a New York nudist camp were “extraordinarily well-adjusted, happy, and thoughtful.” It’s also excellent for children to grow up free of shame about the human body.

Tolerant Views.A University of Central Florida 2008 study of 384 participants concluded that pro-nudity students “were significantly more accepting of other religious groups and gays and lesbians” when compared to the anti-nudity students. They were also “less prejudiced towards ethnically dissimilar others.”

Soothe Away Your Crazies. Massage is recognized as a therapeutic treatment for mental health issues like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolarism, borderline personality disorder, learning difficulties, and low self-esteem. Theskin stimulation of massage — improving blood flow and detoxifying the lymph system — is duplicated by the warmth, freedom, and improved circulation generated in nakedness.

Soak Up The Rays Vitamin D deficiency is currently soaring, with up to 75% of USA teens and adults receiving insufficient amounts of the “sunshine vitamin.” Lack of this essential health aid is a factor in numerous ailments, including cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis and diabetes. Anyone who bares all outside as a “naturist” harvests larger amounts of Vitamin D in a quicker time span.

Financial Liberation. Clothes are a huge money and time-suck with shopping, laundry, closets, dressers, and gazillions of hours wasted wondering what so-and-so looks like with their garments removed. Theglobal markets for swimsuits alone is expected to reach $17.6 billion annually by 2015; our carbon footprint would shrink like a wool sweater if fabric was no longer manufactured.

Longevity (just joking!). Have you noticed that the furry Norway Rat only lives 2-3 years, while the Naked Mole Rat survives to be 28?

So… is the future going to be full frontal? Will the post-Singularity planet be stripped? Will everyone in a climate-controlled tomorrow choose to be nude, strutting around like the Nuba dancers and boxers of Leni Reifenstahl?

Trends point to an era where there won’t be a stitch to worry about. Many resort areas are are now offeringnudism to increase tourism, and American naturist clubs claim their enrollment is growing 20% annually. The German airline OssiUrlaub.de offered nude chartered flights to a Baltic sea resort, and today’s lengthy luggage searches at airports are steering travelers to destinations where they only need carry-on towels and sunblock. Twenty million Europeans already go to nude beaches and spas.

Getting goosebumps imagining it, are you?

So there you have it, naked people are happy people and happy people are healthy people and healthy people live longer.

Assuming they don’t get hit by a car when its driver is distracted by all the naked people on the sidewalk.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Surprise circumcision. Unexpected colonoscopy. Unanticipated splenectomy. Waking up to find your left lung attempting to crawl out your throat. I don’t mean the last one literally but it sure felt like it around 5 AM. I woke up coughing which, if logic still works, means I was coughing in my sleep. Which is very odd. Nevertheless, I managed to get myself upright and soon enough the wall and I agreed not to leave each other. When I could finally gulp air I staggered into the bathroom and coughed up a spongy Volvo. Four cylinder engine and transmission included. Anyway, as you can readily tell, there are some things which may not be considered pleasant when they arrive unknown or unbidden.

Saleh Hadri got a surprise when he tried to turn himself in for murder. The police told him they were closed and that he should go away. So he, and the reporter he was with, wandered around Sweden for a bit until they found a police station that was open and then he turned himself in. He claims he is innocent and wants to clear his name.

Read that again. A wanted murder suspect couldn’t even get a cop to escort him to an open jail. He had to find one himself. After all that I really hope he is innocent. As you might imagine, Swedish officials say this shouldn’t have happened and they are going to look into it. Eventually.

That is one mellow country.

A little closer to home eleven year old Ireland Lane, an Oregon native, went to the doctor because she had an upset tummy. So the doctor gave her some anti-acids and she was fine.

Just kidding, she had cancer.

SURPRISE!

But God wasn’t done with her yet. She fell down and went boom and ended up back in the hospital with a bump on her head.

No, that’s not the reason I’m writing about her. I am writing about her because she cleaned her hands and then the hand sanitizer caught fire and nearly killed her. You can’t make this stuff up even if you try.

Eleven-year-old cancer patient Ireland Lane, who was in the hospital after she fell and hurt her head at school, is recuperating from third degree burns after her shirt lit on fire in her hospital room — and according to reports, hand sanitizer may have been to blame.

The Oregonian first reported on the incident, which occurred Feb. 2 at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. According to the newspaper’s report, Ireland’s father, Stephen, was sleeping in his daughter’s hospital room when he heard her screams. He found her in the hallway, her shirt on fire, and immediately took action to smother the flames.

His daughter still suffered third degree burns and is now recovering from those at the Legacy Oregon Burn Center, ABC News reported.

The Oregonian reports how hand sanitizer may have played a role in the whole incident:

Ireland was due to leave the hospital the day of the fire. The last thing she recalls that day is using sanitizer to clean the table that rolled over her bed, where she had painted a wooden box as a gift for her nurses. Ireland’s father recalls that before the fire, she was playing, making static electricity with the sheets on her bed. He’d never heard of that being a danger, let alone causing a fire.

Hand sanitizer and static electricity “are definitely part of the investigation,” Oregon State Fire Marshal spokesman Rich Hoover told NBC News.

“I’ve been in medicine going back 30 years now and never heard anything like this. And hopefully I never will again,” Dr. Stacy Nicholson, who is the assistant chief at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, told KATU.

Staff at Doernbecher, which is considered a Oregon Health & Science University facility, already follows strict fire safety procedures, the Oregonian reported. The maker of the hand sanitizer used by the hospital, called Avagard D, told the newspaper that its product is safe when used as directed.

According to NBC News, the alcohol content in the hand sanitizer used at the hospital is around 60 percent.

Hand sanitizers used for health care purposes are recommended to contain 60 to 95 percent ethanol or isopropanol in order to be effective, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends using alcohol-based hand sanitizers to clean hands if it’s not possible to wash up with soap and water.

Because of hand sanitizer’s high alcohol content, some state fire marshals even have guidelines in properly storing it. In Kansas, the fire marshal recommends that a maximum of 1.2 liters of hand sanitizer be stored in a dispenser in a health-care setting, and that there must be at least four feet between dispensers. And if the dispenser is installed on a wall over carpet, then there must be an automatic sprinkler system installed.

I have to admit that the amount of time I had spent thinking about hand sanitizers was akin to the amount of time I spent wondering what I’d look like dressed as Ru Paul. Maybe not even that much. Okay, let’s be honest, I never think about them.

I know that if healthy people use them too often they kill useful bacteria and leave themselves open to all sorts of deadly diseases. Which I’ve always thought of as evolution in action. And the people who do so, in the name of health they don’t understand, never see the irony of their lives. They will gleefully scarf up ounce and after ounce of live bacteria and swallow them whole. This is also known as yogurt. But these same people will scrub themselves so clean as to leave no protection when they are injured or sick.

Okay, back to the young lady. I’m not sure words can describe the horror she must have gone through. Follow up reports say that she is going to be okay and that she seems ahead of the game when it comes to her cancer. I hope so. That kid’s had enough surprises for one life.

Out Of A Forest from Tobias Gundorff Boesen on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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I’ve written before how plane trips used to be fun. As a traveler you were the revered customer. Within reason the airline would try to satisfy your every whim. Of course, back then, the overall standards were different than they are now. Still, it was safe and comfortable way to travel. I’ve also already discussed how discount fares have led to the steady decline of not only service but viable tourists. Back in the good old days people treated air travel like a trip to a church. They were on their best behavior. Children were advised to use their indoor voices and adults made sure to set a good example. Now you read about how travelers, forced to walk away from the in flight double feature, have to duct tape some idiot to his seat so they can travel in peace. And, when you read about his attempting to grope female passengers, claiming that the plane was going to crash and then getting ugly, you can understand their motivation. What’s sad is how common these events have become. There are even websites dedicated to how to deal with unruly passengers.

Of course all of this leads to obvious changes in how we view air travel. For example, airports tend to be named after heroes or favorite politicians. Now one is to be named for a famous drug addict and barely coherent rock singer.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Ozzie Osbourne International Airport.

When airport names come to mind, they are typically associated with former American presidents, heads of state and sometimes notable local figures. That’s to say, they’re a little stiff.

Enter an airport named after the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne.

The head of the record company that discovered Ozzy’s former band Black Sabbath is pushing for the Birmingham Airport to be renamed in his honor, reports Birmingham Mail.

“The message that would carry is instantly international, confident, powerful, unforgettable and says ‘Hey World, we are proud of our own,” Jim Simpson of Big Bear Music told the paper. “Ozzy might not always have been a paragon of virtue, but he is a genuine flesh and blood Brummie.”

According to the Mirror, locals will likely be keen on the idea of naming their airport after the star.

“It’s an interesting idea and I’ve got an open mind,” city Councillor Philip Parkin said to the paper. “We need to be making the most of the talent we have got and did have in this city.”

The UK also made airport headlines back in September when a proposal for a floating airport in the Thames estuary was revealed.

Ah yes, the floating airport in the middle of a heavily congested river that has real ships carrying goods to and fro in it.

I don’t know what they’re smoking over there but I do know who they’ve been sharing with. Antonio Vasquez is the self-proclaimed “Grand Warlock of Mexico.” He is self proclaimed as such since no one ever thought of needing one until he came along. With heavily dilated eyeballs and a pack of tarot cards he predicts the world’s future each year.

And, even though I have asked him to stop, he did it again this year.

Antonio Vazquez is a cherubic 72-year-old with twinkling eyes, a long white beard and a knack for predicting things that don’t actually happen.

For more than three decades, Mexico’s self-proclaimed “Grand Warlock” has been doing tarot card and horoscope readings to reveal what’s in store for the coming year. Among past predictions: Fidel Castro would die in 2008. Germany would win the 2006 World Cup. Barack Obama would lose to Mitt Romney.

Despite Vazquez’s consistently incorrect record of prognostication, dozens of journalists swarmed Mexico City’s press club on Friday for the Grand Warlock’s latest round of predictions in what has become one of this country’s most reliably strange and inexplicably popular New Year’s traditions.

On tap for 2013, according to the Grand Warlock: a new war in the Middle East, chaos in Venezuela and a tough year for Obama.

But it’s not all bad news. Vazquez said 2013 will be a great year for Mexico, a country that has struggled with drug violence and a slow economy.

“Mexico is going to have a relevant place in the world, economically speaking,” he said. “Mexico will place itself as a paradise for investors.”

The thick-browed warlock also said there will be a lot less people killed this year in Mexico. According to some statements by the current Mexican administration, at least 70,000 people were slain between 2006 and 2012 as the government of then President Felipe Calderon battled drug traffickers.

After reading some of his dozens of predictions, Vazquez took questions from reporters and said tarot cards showed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who is battling cancer, will make it to his inauguration but that he will be dead by April.

He also said cards showed him the death of Jenni Rivera, the Latin music superstar who was killed Dec. 8 in a plane crash, was not an accident.

“The plane would not have exploded the way it did if it hadn’t been carrying a bomb,” he said.

Investigators have not revealed any evidence the plane exploded in the air.

Regardless of his shortcomings, his readings get wide coverage in the local media. And there have been times when he has been spot-on.

In 2006, he predicted Calderon would win the Mexican presidency. Last January, the warlock accurately predicted that the world would not end in December, saying theories of doomsday in 2012 were “big fat lies.”

Here’s all you need to know about any alleged psychic. Any one of them could be a millionaire in a heartbeat and none of them are. Well, some are. Those with gullible rich clients. But they wouldn’t even have to work at it. Nope, all they need to do is pick up the phone and call James Randi.

He’s a professional illusionist and he offered a million dollars to any psychic who could prove that they were not a fake. That money has been sitting in an interest bearing account which is viewable by the public. The total he would hand over is currently $1.3 million dollars.

Many have tried, but when forced to succumb to scientific rigors, they either fail miserably or withdraw. None have come close to passing.

Electric Six – Psychic Visions from j lowe on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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If you’ve had the chance to visit a maternity ward in the last decade or so you noticed a new sign reminding people not to have conjugal relations in the prep room where the woman is being monitored to see when she will be ready to give birth. The reason these signs exist is because it had become a problem. “Aww, honey, your contractions are still five minutes apart, let’s slip one more in for old times sake.” Who said romance was dead? What I’m saying is that some rules are necessary, even if they are painfully obvious to others. They are put in place not by overly officious poltroons but by people who realize that there are those who walk among us who might not be as socially adept as the rest.

That being said, there are rules that seem to be the famous solutions in search of a problem. Like the Voter ID laws or cell phone banking. The former could disenfranchise 20,000,000 or more people to solve the horrible problem of the 10 people who have tried, and failed, to commit voter fraud this century. As to the latter, who really needs to pay a bill that fast? As it has turned out, almost no one.

Although, to be fair, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so dying people could easily record their will. He saw no other uses for the device. So, maybe these other ideas will find uses just as his did.

But …..

These next set of rules just baffle. IN an effort to keep our children safe governments around the country are drafting, and passing, reams of legislation that will have the desired effect. If the desired effect is to turn all children into self absorbed sociopaths with severe self esteem issues. TruTV has released the 14 dumbest laws out there right now.

No Hugs
Plain ol’ hugging is “inappropriate” according to school officials in New Jersey, who have banned the evil practice. Students need to be “focused on academics” (because hugging takes a lot of time, apparently.) Other schools have instituted “no hugging” policies, with punishments that include suspension.

Hand-Holding Is Too Sexy
For teens, hand-holding is just one step away from having sex. That is, according to Tennessee’s abstinence-based sexual education program, which includes warnings about “gateway sexual activity,” a.k.a. hand-holding. The legislation also prohibits teachers from demonstrating any “gateway sexual activity.” So, to recap: hand-holding can lead to sex, students must be warned that hand-holding can lead to sex, but teachers cannot demonstrate how hand-holding. Got that?

No More Bike Rides
For one school district in the South Bay Union School district of San Diego County, safety concerns outweigh any potential health benefits of bicycling; students are not permitted to ride bikes to school.

Banned Home Cooking
One Chicago school has banned all packed lunches from home, stating that school lunches are more nutritious and better quality. That not only gives the school unprecedented power over children’s nutrition, it also lines the pockets of the district caterer who now has a fixed and captive market.

Baggy Pants
If your pants are kinda baggy, they might violate a new school dress code in Chicago. If the school isn’t able to enforce the dress code, some city council members even want to instate citywide ordinance to control the pant problem.

The End Of Bake Sales
Massachusetts has been working to combat childhood obesity, removing vending machines from school hallways and potato chips from the lunch line. But banning bake sales? Currently, the state law prohibits junk food on school grounds during the day, but some are pushing to make the ban a 24/7 operation, which would prevent school groups from raising money (to fund healthy sports teams) by selling baked goods.

Spying On Lunchboxes
At preschools in North Carolina, children are required to have a balanced lunch consisting of one serving each of meat, dairy, and grain, plus two servings of fruits or vegetables. This regulation covers cafeteria lunches as well as those brought from home. In order to enforce this regulation, government employees actual travel to preschool and daycare centers to examine kids’ lunch boxes and force parents to pay to supplement their child’s “unhealthy” lunch.

Tight Or “Revealing” Clothes
In case baggy pants aren’t your thing, be careful that your pants are not too tight either. A school in Ohio banned yoga pants for being too revealing. In addition to tight skirts or low-cut tops — if comfy cotton pants are too tight, they might also be distracting. Students that wore the pants anyway in protest received in-school suspensions.

Dreads And Cornrows
Hampton University’s Business School and its high-ranking MBA program don’t permit cornrows and dreadlocks in class. The school claims they are preparing students for corporate life. When confronted with accusations of racism, the dean of the business school retorted: “When was it that cornrows and dreadlocks were a part of African American history?” Guess he hasn’t heard of Bob Marley.

Recess Is Over
Remember those days of carefree running around the playground playing tag? Those days are over for schools in several states: tag might cause injuries — or worse, hurt feelings. One school allows kickball to be played, but only if the score is not kept. At least they get to play with balls: after a Toronto, Ontario parent was hit in the head with a soccer ball and suffered a concussion, the local school board banned the use of all hard balls on the playground.

Applying Sunscreen
If you do not have a doctor’s note, you cannot apply sunscreen at schools in New York and other states. A doctor’s note and a signed parental permission slip are required to apply sunscreen, since it is considered a medication by the FDA. Cough drops, Vaseline, Chapstick, and antibiotic ointment… all require sign-offs. However, after two girls were hospitalized for severe burns because the school refused to let them wear sunscreen, it seemed like the policy would be repealed.

No Boobies
Raising money for Breast Cancer is a noble cause, but not if the fundraiser includes a bracelet that says “I (heart) boobies!” In one Pennsylvania school district, students were told of this policy, which they claim violates their freedom of speech rights. District officials say that the word “boobies” is vulgar.

Got Milk?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently entertaining a proposal to ban milk in school. According to the proposal by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk is “high in sugar, high in fat and high in animal protein that is harmful to, rather than protective of, bone health.” They say instead that kids should just eat broccoli, tofu, or collard greens. So refreshing.

So this will be the result; your unloved, fashionalbly dressed, conservatively coiffed, future serial killer who has no clue how to show or receive afeection, will be set loose on the world as a shining example of what regulations have wrought.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, besides everything?

Do you remember the “don’t keep score” mania? It was so children would be spared the pain of losing. It also prevented them from knowing the joys of winning or a job well done. An entire generation for whom accomplishment was anathema. I worked for companies that were forced to hire those mutant spawn. It usually took about three months, on average, to beat that crap out of them and teach them to succeed.

Not how to be the next Trump, just how to set a goal, achieve it and move on.

No, I am not kidding. They had no clue.

On the plus side, none of them insisted on speaking French, which is a side effect of sociopathic behavior.

Or so I’ve heard.

Sociopathe – Marre (2011) from Wesh Conexion

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

I have written about bouncing eggs that can make men sterile (Thanks China!) and bouncing tomatoes that scare the heck out of me and so on. And I have noted that man’s track record when he plays in the fields of the Lord is abysmal. In fact, way back in February of 2011 the nice people at Farm Aid pointed out that genetically modified foods presented real, and traceable, dangers to humans. I should point out that Farm Aid is made up of farmers, those people we keep getting told love genetically modified foods because they make their lives, and our world, so much better. Monsantos’ slogan of “preserving more, conserving more, improving lives” (punctuation theirs) nicely sums up the basic take on this in the media. This kind of promotion becomes difficult to refute when French scientists use lies and distortions to try and scare the hell out of everyone. They claimed that rats fed Monsanto’s corn developed massive tumors. They neglected to point out that they exclusively fed the corn to rats who were designed to get tumors in the first place (for another type of cancer study). They also kind of, sort of, forgot to point out that in human terms you would need to eat about 50 pounds of genetically modified corn per day to come close to replicating the results, and then only if you were prone to tumors. There is a great, if lengthy, article at WebMD that takes a failry balanced look at genetically modifed foods and carefully points out its pros and cons.

More cons than pros, but that’s not shocking.

I should note that science has long known that Einstein was right; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This applies to everything. Farm Aid has a great example.

Take alfalfa, which is pollinated by bees. Bees can generally cover a five-mile range as they buzz from plant to plant, collecting and spreading pollen. Since bees don’t tend to observe property lines or fences, GE alfalfa pollen could, for example, be spread to and pollinate a non-GE alfalfa plant, in turn contaminating a neighboring field with GE genes.

This cross-fertilization would be especially disastrous for organic farmers. If organic fields are contaminated, an organic farmer’s certification is at risk, since the use of GE crops is prohibited under the organic label. Losing organic certification would mean his or her goods can no longer be sold for the premium price that helps cover the higher costs of growing organically. Organic livestock farmers would face similar consequences if their cattle consumed contaminated alfalfa, and the organic industry as a whole could suffer from severe supply problems if organic alfalfa can’t be maintained with integrity. Canada’s organic canola industry suffered this fate, and is virtually extinct due to contamination from GE canola

And, gosh kids, isn’t it fun to remember that I just wrote about the death of civilization due to the extinction of bees? Not that there’s anything important to see there or anything like that.

But now NBC news is reporting that genetically modified foods are spawning genetically modified weeds which refuse to die. Which means farmers are, legally or not, using modified pesticides to try and kill these freaks of Franken-nature.

U.S. farmers are using more hazardous pesticides to fight weeds and insects due largely to heavy adoption of genetically modified crop technologies that are sparking a rise of “superweeds” and hard-to-kill insects, according to a newly released study.

Genetically engineered crops have led to a 404 million pounds increase in overall pesticide use by from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011, according to the report by Charles Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.

Of that total, herbicide use increased over the 16-year period by 527 million pounds while insecticide use decreased by 123 million pounds.

Benbrook’s paper — published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe over the weekend and announced on Monday — undermines the value of both herbicide-tolerant crops and insect-protected crops, which were aimed at making it easier for farmers to kill weeds in their fields and protect crops from harmful pests, said Benbrook.

‘Major problem’

Herbicide-tolerant crops were the first genetically modified crops introduced to world, rolled out by Monsanto Co. in 1996, first in “Roundup Ready” soybeans and then in corn, cotton and other crops. Roundup Ready crops are engineered through transgenic modification to tolerate dousings of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

The crops were a hit with farmers who found they could easily kill weed populations without damaging their crops. But in recent years, more than two dozen weed species have become resistant to Roundup’s chief ingredient glyphosate, causing farmers to use increasing amounts both of glyphosate and other weed-killing chemicals to try to control the so-called “superweeds.”

“Resistant weeds have become a major problem for many farmers reliant on GE crops, and are now driving up the volume of herbicide needed each year by about 25 percent,” Benbrook said.

Could genetically modified seeds be a drought solution?

Monsanto officials had no immediate comment.

“We’re looking at this. Our experts haven’t been able to access the supporting data as yet,” said Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher.

Benbrook said the annual increase in the herbicides required to deal with tougher-to-control weeds on cropland planted to genetically modified crops has grown from 1.5 million pounds in 1999 to about 90 million pounds in 2011.

Similarly, the introduction of genetically modified “Bt” corn and cotton crops engineered to be toxic to certain insects is triggering the rise of insects resistant to the crop toxin, according to Benbrook.

‘Best year ever’ for some farmers outside drought region

Insecticide use did drop substantially – 28 percent from 1996 to 2011 – but is now on the rise, he said.

“The relatively recent emergence and spread of insect populations resistant to the Bt toxins expressed in Bt corn and cotton has started to increase insecticide use, and will continue to do so,” he said.

Herbicide-tolerant and Bt-transgenic crops now dominate U.S. agriculture, accounting for about one in every two acres of harvested cropland, and around 95 percent of soybean and cotton acres, and over 85 percent of corn acres.

“Things are getting worse, fast,” said Benbrook in an interview. “In order to deal with rapidly spreading resistant weeds, farmers are being forced to expand use of older, higher-risk herbicides. To stop corn and cotton insects from developing resistance to Bt, farmers planting Bt crops are being asked to spray the insecticides that Bt corn and cotton were designed to displace.”

Okay, follow along; the genetically modified plants did not all end up in food. Some end up as fertilizer for the ground where they grew up. Storm damage or a million other reasons cause them to get plowed back into the ground where their genetically modified cells mix with old fashioned regular cells to create some sort of third kind of cell that no one knows what to do with. And those third kind of cells create weeds and plants that can’t be killed and insects that appear to be super bugs.

Oh, and yes, Monsanto knew that would happen. They just considered it a justifiable risk. Like sky diving without a parachute. 99% of the trip is fine, it’s only that 1% stop with the ground that causes problems. Therefor skydiving without a parachute is safe 99% of the time.

Yes, that’s how they think.

And, yes, you should remember that. It will help you make sense of the crap you read.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.