Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (1686)	11/18/2004 7:38:11 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 361302

I wonder if any of those rural Americans who voted for Bush and the Congressional Republicans will suffer even a scintilla of cognitive dissonance over these two blows to the country's already staggering rural economy. Telling consumers where their meat, fruit and vegetables came from seemed such a good idea to U.S. ranchers and farmers in competition with imports that Congress two years ago ordered the food industry to do it. But meatpackers and food processors fought the law from the start, and newly emboldened Republicans now plan to repeal it before Thanksgiving... Food processors and other opponents of mandatory labeling say they are amenable to voluntary labels... The House Agriculture Committee approved legislation this year to substitute a voluntary system for the current law. The issue divides cattlemen and other livestock producers. Many of the bigger livestock and feedlot operations, as well as food processors, do not want mandatory labeling. Producers in favor of mandatory labels believe consumers will prefer U.S.-grown food over foreign imports. The law requires companies to put country-of-origin labels on meat, vegetables and fruit. One could conclude that it's just good economics to favor those agricultural producers who benefit from an economy of scale, thereby lowering the costs of bringing food to our tables. And voluntary labeling and self-regulation will provide for safe foods, right? Yeah, maybe, were it not for those pesky problems with industrialized food production like...oh, I don't know, the food processing industry's reluctance to accept regulations that would better protect against the spread of diseases that turn your brain into Swiss cheese: A second case of mad cow disease may have turned up in the United States but meat from the suspect animal has not entered the food chain, Agriculture Department officials said Thursday. The officials released few details and refused to say where the possibly diseased animal was found. They said it would be four to seven days before more could be confirmed, a delay that livestock industry representatives said would cause turmoil in the beef market. Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, attacks an animal's nervous system. People who eat food contaminated with BSE can contract a rare disease that is nearly always fatal, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease... The wait to find out more about this possible new case of BSE has "put the entire industry really in limbo," said John McBride, a spokesman for the Livestock Marketing Association, based in Kansas City, Mo. "With final results not being available for four to seven days, it's going to disrupt the livestock market. Buyers are going to be reluctant to buy, sellers are going to be reluctant to put their livestock on the market," he said. "The effect on the market could be profound... In the only confirmed U.S. case, a Canadian-born Holstein was found to have been infected, but just that one case caused Japan and more than three dozen other countries to refuse U.S. beef. That hurt U.S. export sales and the farm economy. Bush administration officials are now focused on trying to get those bans lifted and with establishing a national identification system for tracking livestock and poultry from birth through the production chain. Such a system has worried producers who prefer to keep their records confidential or run a voluntary ID clearinghouse that would provide government officials with limited access. So, Congress is going to renege on plans to require country-of-origin labels on food and rely on the food processing industry to police themselves with voluntary labels, while some of those same food processors are fighting mandatory tracking of a dangerous and highly contagious disease that could wipe out our livestock exports and spread a horrible disease to humans? [Also, notice that the reason that USDA even tests for the disease is because it's necessary for exporting livestock; we might avoid eating American-produced meat infected with BSE thanks to regulations the Japanese and EU countries imposed to protect their own citizens.] It's bad enough for the effect that problems with food have on us as consumers. But it's maddening that that so much of rural America, especially in livestock-producing states of the Plains and Rockies, still vote so heavily Republican. Let's see how good the Republicans look to people in Nebraska if they're exposed as having spent more time protecting rural Nebraska from non-threats like gay marriage and the supposed decadence of the Coasts, when the greatest threats to their way of life actually came from contagions in livestock herds and cheap foodstuffs imported from Chile and China. [Unfortunately it's probably asking too much for significant numbers of rural Republican voters to turn from a party uninterested in whether Americans should expect a disease-free chicken in every pot.] Oh, by the way, for those who slagged Tom Daschle and think we're better off with him out of Congress, ponder this: he's the food labeling bill's biggest supporter, but with his defeat, it no longer has a strong enough backer to prevent its demise. Keep that in mind the next time you're wondering whether those strawberries you're washing are from Mexico and whether they may contain e-coli. www.dailykos.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (1686)	11/18/2004 8:28:37 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 361302

Hey, amigo, been sitting on this one for you... Archaeologists put humans in North America 50,000 years ago By Marsha Walton and Michael Coren CNN Thursday, November 18, 2004 Posted: 5:12 PM EST (2212 GMT) (CNN) -- Archaeologists say a site in South Carolina may rewrite the history of how the Americas were settled by pushing back the date of human settlement thousands of years. But their interpretation is already igniting controversy among scientists. An archaeologist from the University of South Carolina on Wednesday announced radiocarbon tests that dated the first human settlement in North America to 50,000 years ago -- at least 25,000 years before other known human sites on the continent. "Topper is the oldest radiocarbon dated site in North America," said Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. If true, the find represents a revelation for scientists studying how humans migrated to the Americas. Many scientists thought humans first ventured into the New World across a land bridge from present-day Russia into Alaska about 13,000 years ago. This new discovery suggests humans may have crossed the land bridge into the Americas much earlier -- possibly during an ice age -- and rapidly colonized the two continents. "It poses some real problems trying to explain how you have people (arriving) in Central Asia almost at the same time as people in the Eastern United States," said Theodore Schurr, anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a curator at the school's museum. "You almost have to hope for instantaneous expansion ... We're talking about a very rapid movement of people around the globe." Schurr said that conclusive evidence of stone tools similar to those in Asia and uncontaminated radiocarbon dating samples are needed to verify that the Topper site is actually 50,000 years old. "If dating is confirmed, then it really does have a significant impact on our previous understanding of New World colonization," he said. But not all scientists are convinced that what Goodyear found is a human settlement. "He has a very old geologic formation, but I can't agree with his interpretation of those stones being man-made," said Michael Collins of the Texas Archeological Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Collins disputes that the stone shards at the site show signs of human manipulation. But whether the Topper site proves valid, Collins said most archeologists now believe people settled in America before 13,000 years ago, refuting a theory that has held sway for 75 years. Since the 1930s, archaeologists generally believed North America was settled by hunters following large game over the land bridge about 13,000 years ago. "That had been repeated so many times in textbooks and lectures it became part of the common lore," said Dennis Stanford, curator of archeology at the Smithsonian Institution. "People forgot it was only an unproven hypothesis." A growing body of evidence has prompted scientists to challenge that assumption. A scattering of sites from South America to Oklahoma have found evidence of a human presence before 13,000 years ago -- or the first Clovis sites -- since the discovery of human artifacts in a cave near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936. These discoveries are leading archaeologists to support alternative theories -- such as settlement by sea -- for the Americas. Worldwide, ideas about human origins have rapidly changed with groundbreaking discoveries that humans ranged farther and earlier than once believed. Fossils in Indonesia nearly 2 million years old suggest that protohumans left their African homeland hundreds of thousands of years earlier than first theorized. Modern humans, or homo sapiens, most likely emerged between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago in Africa. They quickly fanned out to Australia and Central Asia about 50,000 years ago and arrived in Europe only about 40,000 years ago. Ancestral humans -- hominids like australopithecines and Neanderthals -- have never been found in the New World. Goodyear plans to publish his work in a peer-reviewed scientific journal next year, which is the standard method by which scientists announce their findings. Until research is peer-reviewed, experts in the field may not have an opportunity to evaluate the scientist's methods, or weigh in on the validity of his conclusions. Archaeologists will meet in October of 2005 for a conference in Columbia, South Carolina, to discuss the earliest inhabitants of North America, including a visit to the Topper Site. Goodyear has been excavating the Topper dig site along the Savannah River since the 1980s. He recovered many of the artifacts and tools last May. Goodyear dug four meters (13 feet) deeper than the soil layer containing the earliest North American people and began uncovering a plethora of tools. Until recently, many archeologists did not dig below where Clovis artifacts were expected to be found. Scientists and volunteers at the site in Allendale have unearthed hundreds of possible implements, many appearing to be stone chisels and tools that could have been used to skin hides, butcher meat or carve antlers, wood and ivory. The tools were fashioned from a substance called chert, a flint-like stone found in the region. Goodyear and his colleagues began their dig at the Topper Site in the early 1980s with the goal of finding out more about the Clovis people. Goodyear thought it would also be a good place to look for earlier human settlers because of the resources along the Savannah River and the moderate climate. cnn.com