Tester blasts GMOs, industrial agriculture

Organic farmer, Senator Jon Tester, sharing the stage with Prince Charles, addressed the Future of Food conference at Georgetown University. Tom Lutey at the Billings Gazette tells us:

"Over the past 100 years, we've seen far less diversity as far as crop rotations go and far less diversity and competition as far as marketing our crops," Tester said at the Future of Food conference. But Tester reserved his sharpest criticisms for patented, genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, which he said undermine plant diversity and take seed ownership from farmers for the first time in history.

In a post at indianz.com, Mark Trahant describes current events in the context of his latest chronicle, the 1977 appointment of Montana State University alum, Forrest J. Gerard, to the Carter Administration:

We just finished a brutal fight over cutting $100 billion from government spending. Imagine all of those cuts now being wiped out in a split-second because interest rates are ticking up. Last year the U.S. Treasury paid $413 billion in interest. To show the scale of that number, one percent of that is roughly what is spent for Indian health care programs.

NPR's Planet Money ran a piece refuting the notion that wealthy Americans are engaging in tax flight:

"Taxes [have] essentially no impact on causing people to leave a state," says Jeff Thompson, of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In a study tracking 18 years of migration between states in New England, Thompson found that people mostly move for job-related reasons. They go where the jobs are, regardless of whether it's low-tax New Hampshire or higher-tax Maine.

Retirees have been camped in the Spearditch City Campground then flee the brutal Lawrence County winters for 25 years that this blogger knows of, and have warped the fabric of that state's voting bloc in the negative. The people "camping" alongside the creek have a responsibility to ease the plight of tribes that left the Black Hills so those resource-guzzling machines can anchor an illegitimate residency.

Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Janet Barresi, is insisting that the state more vigorously promote Native languages in schools:

Quinton Roman Nose of Watonga, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and the president-elect of the National Indian Education Association, said only a few other states — including Montana, New Mexico, Arizona and Washington — have taken significant steps to incorporate tribal culture into the classroom.

Photographer Aaron Huey gives viewers a long, hard look at life in southwestern South Dakota:

The poverty and problems of Pine Ridge have been widely documented, yet Huey, who collaborates with publications including The National Geographic magazines, The New Yorker, and Harper's, is one of the few journalists who has returned to "The Rez" again and again.

Busted: This blogger confesses to cases that support the .308 Solution (North Korea, Myanmar, etc), but only in concert with the United Nations Security Council. The precedents in US history abound. Google the Dahlgren Affair. Ruby Ridge is why it should never happen here. So, redstaters, how many times IS the CIA allowed to get it wrong before it gets one right?

Wyoming Representative At-large Cynthia Lummox in the Trib:

People in Wyoming are ready for the truth. They know that our country is on an unsustainable path. They know that we must make meaningful reforms if we want our children and grandchildren to have the opportunities our parents gave us.