The Free

Apr 18, 2022 https://off-guardian.org/2022/04/18/ by Colin Todhunter shared with thanks.

Former Monsanto Chairman and CEO Hugh Grant is currently in the news. He is trying to avoid appearing in court to be questioned by lawyers on behalf of a cancer patient in the case of Allan Shelton v Monsanto.

Shelton has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is one of the 100,000-plus people in the US claiming in lawsuits that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and its other brands containing the chemical glyphosate caused their cancer.

According to investigative journalist Carey Gillam, Shelton’s lawyers have argued that Grant was an active participant and decision maker in the company’s Roundup business and should be made to testify at the trial.

But Grant says in the court filings that the effort to put him on the stand in front of a jury is “wholly unnecessary and serves only to harass and burden” him.

His lawyers state that Grant does not have “any expertise in the studies and tests that have been done related to Roundup generally, including those related to Roundup safety”.

Gillam notes that the court filings state that Grant’s testimony “would be of little value” because he is not a toxicologist, an epidemiologist, or a regulatory expert and “did not work in the areas of toxicology or epidemiology while employed by Monsanto”.

Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and Grant received an estimated $77 million post-sale payoff. Bloomberg reported in 2017 that Monsanto had increased Grant’s salary to $19.5 million for that fiscal year.

Even by 2009, Roundup-related products, which include genetically modified seeds developed to withstand glyphosate-based applications, represented about half of Monsanto’s gross margin. It is reasonable to say that Roundup was integral to Monsanto’s business model and Grant’s enormous income and final payoff.

But the cancer lawsuits in the US are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage done by glyphosate-based products and many other biocides.

Silent killer

June 2022 marks 60 years since the publication of Rachel Carson’s iconic book Silent Spring. It was published just two years before her death at age 56.

Carson documented the adverse impacts on the environment of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, which she said were ‘biocides’, killing much more than the pests that were targeted. Silent Spring also described some of the deleterious effects of these chemicals on human health.

She accused the agrochemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting the industry’s marketing claims without question. An accusation that is still very much relevant today.

Date: April 18, 2022Author: Rick Rozoff 0 Comments

Global Times
April 18, 2022

A Ukraine armed by NATO

Russia-Ukraine conflict lays bare brutal divisions among European nations

10-year-war vow points to more uneasy direction of Russia-Ukraine conflict

mpr21 Guerra psicológica https://mpr21.info/autor/equipo-de-mpr/ April 17, 2022 shared with thanks

The United States Department of State has created the Office of Cyber ​​and Digital Policy, a unit dedicated to monitoring and controlling the flows of information that circulate through digital channels.

The Office will address issues related to national security, economic opportunity, and the impact of cyberspace, digital technologies, and policies on America’s values.

The place of this unit in the organization chart of the Department of State has not been definitively specified. There was talk of putting this office directly under the authority of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman rather than the Department of Homeland Security due to the broad, horizontal nature of the Office.

But the choice does not appear to be unanimous within the State Department, although it has the support of members of Congress and lobbyists representing private interests.

The Cyberspace Office consists of three departments. The first is International Communications and Information Policy, under the direction of Steven Anderson, who led the Office of Business and Economic Affairs, focusing on internet governance and digital privacy negotiations.

The second is International Cybersecurity, led by Michelle Markof, a veteran of UN cybersecurity negotiations.

The third is Digital Freedom, directed by the coordinator Blake Peterson, a specialist in human rights and digital management.

by Anarqxista Goldman Topics: anarcha-feminism, gender, sexuality Retrieved on 2022-04-17 from archive.org https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarqxista-goldman-what-is-anarchasexuality

What is Anarchasexuality?

It may not have totally passed you by that we live, at least here in the affluent and powerful West, now also called the Global North, in a time of sex and gender turmoil.

There is argument, and sometimes political and legal action, taking place over how people refer to themselves and perform their lives in the context of sex and gender activity and expression.

This is not a trivial matter for, in fact, [besides the many lives it harms or otherwise affects] it cuts to the very heart of the organisation and understanding of civilization — if by the term “civilization” we mean the organisation of people who live in close proximity to one another in variously connected communities and societies.

In recent centuries in this context diverse sexualities and gender expressions [homosexuality and transgenderism are obvious examples here] have been exposed to the light [but not to reality for it is my firm belief that they have always quite naturally existed — across numerous cultures — as expressions of a nature that exists in whatever way it is possible to do so] in ways not always, or even usually, emancipatory.

Diverse sexualities and gender expressions are, more often than not, either criminalised, pathologized as “deviant” or issues of mental ill health, or both.

Both sex and gender, as intellectual historians such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have demonstrated, have been subject to, and, in some senses, formulated by, authoritarian epistemologies of control which seek to dictate terms in order to politically coerce what is and is not allowed to exist or take place.

This has the obvious corollary of sex and gender-based oppressions stemming from patriarchal power operating according to a dynamic of domination and subordination along heteronormative and dimorphic lines.

An anarchist must respond to this.

An anarchist, I would argue, must in fact enter the fray and seek to define what an anarchist and emancipatory ethic of sex and gender might be [by living it out!]

This is what is going on below in what I have decided to term an expression of “anarchasexuality”.

This text, however, is not a dogma and will inevitably be subject both to change and to being surpassed as imagined new and better formulations emerge in interaction with others.

What this text is, then, is an always preliminary attempt to bring understanding, clarity and proposed anarchist virtues and values to a contested area of life whilst utilising an avowedly anarchist hermeneutic to do so.

All that said, therefore:

What is ANARCHASEXUALITY? I offer 13 suggestions:

1. The belief that sexuality and gender:

a. need not be fixed or stable;

b. manifests with more or less fixity and stability in differing people;

c. can, in some cases, be perceived as a choice;

d. is performatively reinforced and so is neither merely “genetic” or “biological”nor entirely “voluntary” or “environmental” and so is a coalition of biology and environmentally-conditioned behaviour, proclivity and disposition, choice and not choice;

f. is in all cases subject to social, cultural and epistemological coercion and constraint.

2. The anarchasexual is one who “sees through” the fictions of imposed sexualities and genders and regards such things as impositions of power/knowledge – especially in the case of its most obvious example, a heterosexual understanding of sex based on a sex binary imposed as a controlling and patriarchally-policed normativity.

This is to say that sex, gender and sexuality types are all regarded by the anarchasexual as FICTIVELY REAL and so as voluntary human categories of thought rather than as nature’s own blueprints.

For the anarchasexual, nature has no blueprints; it is a what can happen that will happen, a diversity engine, and therefore does not invite either moral or normative judgments as such, politics and culture notwithstanding.

3. Anarchasexuality recognises the reality of physical bodies of diverse kinds, each with their own physical possibilities and impossibilities [including especially intersex bodies].

e. is something that people can accept or reject as a matter of agency and affirmation;