cannabisnews.com: Reefer Railway Eyed










  Reefer Railway Eyed

Posted by CN Staff on September 24, 2003 at 08:34:31 PT
By Sun Media 
Source: Winnipeg Sun  

Toronto -- Organizers of a Canadian pro-marijuana Web site say several Americans have filed refugee claims here because they're being persecuted by police for smoking dope in the U.S. But Canadian cops want a probe into the Underground Reefer Railway site, which they claim urges Americans to file frivolous refugee claims so they can stay in Canada and smoke pot where they won't be penalized as in the U.S.
The site urges Americans to illegally enter the country by using phony identification, hiding themselves in cargo or by paying smugglers, police say. The Yanks are also promised to be placed in safehouses once they arrive in Canada.  'SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS' "It is a sad state of affairs," said Bruce Miller, of the Police Association of Ontario. "People are being encouraged to come to Canada for drug vacations." Miller said the site should be investigated to determine if any Canadian laws are being broken. "We oppose anybody who gives information on how to break our laws," he said. Tony Cannavino, head of the Canadian Professional Police Association, said the site will lead to a flood of people coming to Canada to smoke pot. "We are very concerned about the message this sends," Cannavino said. "This is not the type of tourists we need." B.C. site operator David Malmo-Levine said U.S. surfers have thanked him for detailing how to make refugee claims. "The marijuana laws in the U.S. are draconian," Malmo-Levine said. "What people can get away with here is jail time in the U.S." Note: Web site invites tokers north as fake refugees; cops see red.Source: Winnipeg Sun (CN MB)Published:  Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Copyright: 2003 Canoe Limited Partnership Contact: editor wpgsun.com Website: http://www.fyiwinnipeg.com/winsun.shtmlRelated Article & Web Site:Underground Reefer Railwayhttp://www.undergroundrailway.ca/B.C. Web Site Advises 'Pot Refugees' from U.S. http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16832.shtmlCannabisNews -- Canada Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/Canada.shtml

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Comment #43 posted by goneposthole on September 25, 2003 at 19:23:16 PT
it wasn't that simplistic
DIXIE'S CENSORED SUBJECT
BLACK SLAVEOWNERSBy Robert M. Grooms© 1997In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.The majority of slaveholders, white and black, owned only one to five slaves. More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop. The few individuals who owned 50 or more slaves were confined to the top one percent, and have been defined as slave magnates.In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation. Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000 (3). That year, the mean wealth of southern white men was $3,978 (4).In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings (5). In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners (6).In 1860 William Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slaveowner. In Black Masters. A Free Family of Color in the Old South, authors Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak write a sympathetic account of Ellison's life. From Ellison's birth as a slave to his death at 71, the authors attempt to provide justification, based on their own speculation, as to why a former slave would become a magnate slave master.continued at:http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
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Comment #42 posted by E_Johnson on September 25, 2003 at 11:40:41 PT
Our economy has really changed
In early America in the time of Jefferson and Franklin they relied on slave labor and indentured servants for most of the workforce, and most of their jobs were manual labor. So of course they didn't have jobs that required a lot of education. So they could do just fine without a real school system. If you're a slave or an indentured servant, your boss or owner certainly doesn't want you to be able to read and write and definitely isn't going to pay for the honor of having you made literate.Home schooling works to the elite in an agricultural society but it won't work in a modern economy like the one we have now where education is mandated by the economy even more so than the government.
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Comment #41 posted by goneposthole on September 25, 2003 at 02:38:50 PT
schule
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
 
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
 
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
 
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
 
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. 
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
 
...
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
 
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
 
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. 2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one. 
  4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.  5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
 
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
 
Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
 
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
 
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
 
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
 
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
 
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
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Comment #40 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 22:41:56 PT
Why I could not vote Libertarian
They are against public schools. Without public schools, we can forget science and technology in this country.The math in private schools can be very good -- some nuns teach good math -- but the science taught in private schools is generally substandard and underfunded and usually controlled by some religion that is against science anyways. The math and science available in home schooling is even worse. Most American parents are barely qualified to teach their kids the most basic math. Science is a collective activity so doing it home alone is missing the point.The best physicists in this country's history have come from public schools for a reason. Maybe one could argue that private and home schooling can accomplish things that public schooling cannot, but if we got rid of our public schooling -- we'd just end up having to hire scientists and mathematicians from countries that still had them.Which is happening more and more. America is having to rely more and more on scientists from countries with good public school systems and free public universities, because American public schools are in decline and that is where our top scientists have always come from.
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Comment #39 posted by The GCW on September 24, 2003 at 21:55:33 PT
military officer guy;Kaptinemo,#2;Sam Adams #9&15 
military officer guy; Kaptinemo, …#2; Sam Adams #9 & 15;military officer guyHow is the Libertarian Candidate better than Kucinich?What is the difference?420Kaptinemo,“…all sanctioned of course, by his own personal Jee-hee-zus.”We know which Jesus to accept. It’s the Jesus who 2,000, years ago requested that We keep His commandment for Us to love one another.
 We are told to test the spirits. Know the difference between Obedient Christians and disobedient Christians and then help the ignorant, toward the good Shepard.420Sin is one thing…Obeying Christ, is another thing!!! That is: Loving Your family and everyone is Our family, gets You a better relationship with Christ that the 12 Apostles had with Christ personally. Christ told Us to obey Him, and so knows We can do that to where He expects Us to lover Our brother!When government separates church and state, We think of them separating the sinfulness of church, because the sinfulness is evil. But what We should be thinking is that when it is clean, Our only commandment is to love Our brother, so when We separate what is the only part We are to do… to love… then We have a government which is able to do everything but love.Obedient church loves everyone!Good government must accept that demand and request also, for it is the most basic direction toward all truth. Gov. must never separate love by decree, or jargon.Sam Adams, #9.Realize again, there are only 2 kinds of people in the world… OBEDIENT CHRISTIANS and disobedient Christians…nobody can escape that fact… These are the disobedient= “the real goal of organized religion from day one: a cheap and self-funded way for the rich elite class to more efficiently exploit and control the dumber masses of society.”Sam Adams, #15.Again, You are right. The bunches of religious mouths in the past have preached something other than love Your brother. It is time to stop even referring to Christians as just Christians. Let Us now relate to disobedient Christians as just that: D I S O B E D I E N T  C H R I S T I A N S. Those who do not love their brother, are D I S O B E D I E N T  C H R I S T I A N S!How many of Us are Obedient Christians and love their brother?When it’s time for the actual government of Christ, it’s not time for a government of disobedient Christians.We’ve had many examples of government… still do… around the globe. We still haven’t tried Christ’s example and now it is time. The Obedient Christian example. It is unanimous; We are tired of disobedient Christian government.We want Obedient Christian government.
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Comment #38 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 20:58:07 PT
Hi military officer guy 
It's nice to see you!
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Comment #37 posted by military officer guy on September 24, 2003 at 20:25:05 PT
vote libertarian
since the libertarian word was used several times in this last posting, i thought i would plug a couple libertarians running for prez...Gary Nolan http://www.garynolan.com, and Micheal Badnarik http://www.badnarik.org/ 
i've met both of them and both are excellent speakers and both are extremely sharp...if you get the chance to hear them, don't miss out, they have a lot of great ideas for running this country...
vote libertarian, pass it on...
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Comment #36 posted by Arthropod on September 24, 2003 at 18:37:29 PT:
Aye Kapt.
We need more people like you. I would love to put you up on a stand against John P. or John A., if it wasn't for the fact that you would probably disappear a few days later for suspected terrorist activity. If I wasn't already thinking of emigrating, I would stand beside you in a fight against this tyranny. I just think I can do more damage from the outside than from inside, mainly because I would disappear in a heartbeat if I tried to dissent. 
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Comment #35 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 18:36:40 PT
operation hellish nightmare
 The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership.The Project for the New American Century intends, through issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world.William Kristol, Chairmanhttp://www.newamericancentury.org/'advocacy journalism' means 'propaganda'
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Comment #34 posted by kaptinemo on September 24, 2003 at 17:29:56 PT:
E_J, despite what you might think
I DID get it.But one thing those emigres would all agree on: that you have to SURVIVE to be angry. And that, in the final analysis, is what drove many out of the USSR. They were all marked for eventual extinction, whether it be quick with a bullet or slowly starve by being shut out of work and unable to maintain yourself. And they could do worse things than kill you...Remember Andre Plyusch? I certainly do. They threw him in the loonie bin because of his 'anti-Soviet' behavior, f-d him over with all kinds of drugs, and he had to watch as those sadistic b*****ds turned humans into obediant animals. I doubt very seriously whether he had any reservations about leaving when they let him out to Paris.Do you think our own home-grown fascists, slavering and straining at the tie downs on their leashes, wouldn't love to emulate those Sov 'psychiatrists'? Look at the work of Straight, Inc and the Semblers. That Gulag happened right here in the good ol' US of A:http://www.fornits.com/anonanon/I repeat: the precedent for fascism in the US exists because in limited form, it has already happened, and few successful moves against it have been made. I've outlined what I believe to be the basic underpinning of the present regime's 'faith-based' ideology. It can be traced all through the domestic and foreign policy actions of the cabal that surrounds Dim Son. Given what could happen with the voting machines still being used, an honest election in 2004 appears unlikely. Dim Son and his goons stand a good chance of 'hitting the trifecta' again...and they are ready for dissidents. All those marchers for peace within the US, hundreds of thousands of them, scared the goons. They know they are unpopular with he minority of people who have a smidgen of education beyond what they received in public schools. They know that they can't expect to hold power except by eventual brute force as the economic situation worsens and the leaks and revelations concerning recent history begin to turn into rivers and floods in the foreign press. The word DOES get back here in the form of foreign news cable programs, but you may expect to start seeing 'technical difficulties' happen to those stations carrying those programs immediately after Dim Son takes his VICTORY stroll and lifts his leg on the Constitution for the last time before final lights out.These people are the ones who think that there's nothing wrong with ritual murder, on the spot, of anyone they disapprove of...because God personally told 'em to. They approve of slavery. Yes, slavery. If the Old Testament says it's okay, then it's "Gimme That Old Time Religion". Code of Hannurabi, Eye for a freakin' eye fetishists. They are bleedin' bughouse CRAZY. No better than those Phalangist nuts in Lebanon who played hot-potato games with live grenades.There's no reasoning with true fanatics. You either survive them or they survive you. And right now, the fanatics are in power, just itching to make people like us 'disappear' the good old fashioned way. I am all too aware that the mechanisms for fascism have all been cemented into place, waiting for the signal. Executive orders, black budgets concealing supposedly non-lethal weapons that could make active dissent against tyranny impossible, certain DoD ergulations that can make a city an unwitting target of weapons experimentation; in the past I've listed plenty of facts that few Americans are ever supposed to be aware of. Facts that point to the conclusion that the United States Federal government considers it's own citizens to be potential, eventual enemies...and has done so FOR DECADES.And the poor frightened sheeple will give up their tattered freedoms in a heartbeat. The PATRIOT Act is a perfect example. When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a citizen what kind of government had been formed, he said gravely, "A republic, if you can keep it". But what the people in charge want is EMPIRE. A crazed Fundie Christian Empire sweeping the planet. They've written as such. Pulled no punches.I imagine the rest of the planet might have something to say about that. We aren't the only nation with nukes, and we're giving even our long-time friends the jitters. One more reason to leave... If we see that Alfred E. Neuman clone once again sit in the Oval Office, the writing is on the wall. I won't wait for it to dry before I'm outta here. By then it might be too late...
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Comment #33 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 16:58:27 PT
oh, I didn't know
Thank you for correcting my misinformed 'information'. I must have misinformed myself while visiting a web page about the Greek play. shucks anyhow.However, It is difficult to accept the premise that all the women in Greece were relegated to a subservient role.It would remain to be proven that their bodies were under complete control by Greek men. I doubt that would have been the case. 
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Comment #32 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 16:34:42 PT
There was a big debate in Beijing on prostitution
During the Beijing Women's Conference back in 1995, there were two groups of women -- one group from rich countries and one group from poor countries -- who debated this topic quite strenuously without settling it.I think that if prostitutes are not empowered enough to form organizations and campaign for their own rights, then maybe they are victims and need to be treated like victims.But if they don't act like victims, and they do fight for their own rights, then eventually they will get them.
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Comment #31 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 16:14:29 PT
Another interesting detail about Penelope
So Ulyssess is missing and a bunch of really strong dominant guys think they should be the one to replace him.So why does any one of them think he has to marry Penelope to do that?In the Iliad, it is somehow implied that the women of the story have an inherent political power, and without these women, the men cannot be King.The men who are vying to become King in Ulysses' place can't do that unless they marry his assumed widow, because she holds the actual political power that goes along with the military power that the men represent as warriors.Some have theorized that Penelope was a High Priestess of Athena, the goddess credited with the giving invention of weaving to mankind, whose owl symbol is imprinted on all of the loom weights that women used in that era.
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Comment #30 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 15:44:46 PT
Greek fiction, women and memory
In ancient Greek culture when you see remnant signs of powerful women with their own sexuality, that is really a memory of pre-Hellenistic Greece, from the time of Homer and before.In Hellenistic Greek life, the wife was strictly a part of private life and had no public existence at all. In Athens they weren't even supposed to leave the house, period.Homer's work shows a lot of the transitions from the more sexually equal culture of pre-Hellenistic times amd the growing sexual segregation in Greek society.The best example of this in Homer is Penelope weaving on her loom to postpone her marriage to whomever of her suitors wins the battle to replace Ulysses.Penelope has the power to refuse marriage at that point, and that power is in some way signified by her loom. Greek culture had not yet replaced women by slaves in the textile industry. Penelope still had the power to determine her own sex partner.But after Homer's time this power went away. In terms of actual laws and social standards, urban Athenian culture was nothing at all like the culture that the women in the tales of Homer were shown living in.Another example is Homer's Hymn to Artemis, where he sings of this strong woman out hunting, and she is such a fierce huntress that even the fish deep in the sea tremble when she walks the hills above them.Then Artemis goes to the house of Apollo, and puts up her giant bow and puts on a dress and dances with all of the grace and charm in the universe.This poem remembers free Greek women, the ones of Homer's age that probably existed when the textile industry was run by women and provided women an economic role in society where they could use something other than their vaginas.The Greek women of urban Hellenistic times would never have been able to go hunting, it was out of the question. They existed to have babies and mind the house and if they didn't like that then it was prostitution.
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Comment #29 posted by Sam Adams on September 24, 2003 at 15:37:30 PT
More prostitutes
EJ, it's true the 3rd world is surely a different situation. But, I really think that anti-prostitution laws in the US punish only the prostitutes. I think it's a cruel form of persecution. You can open the yellow pages in any American city and find pages of "escort" ads. The laws aren't stopping anything.  They force the women to work for organized crime, and also to be at the absolute mercy of the police. Look at Vancouver, where 50 prostitutes were murdered, for an example of the system in action.The problem of removing the economic conditions that force some women to turn to prostitution should be addressed as a separate issue from the legality of it.  Why should we send a poor woman to work for a violent street pimp instead of a regulated, licensed, employer? I don't understand.
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Comment #28 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 15:30:59 PT
That was fiction dude
That was a play, it never really happened.It was so interesting to Greeks because of its implausibility.
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Comment #27 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 15:21:46 PT
free Greek women too
The men of Athens set out to war with the Spartans. Their wives holed up in the Parthenon and refused sex to them until they made peace with the Spartans. It worked.
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Comment #26 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 15:18:55 PT
And what other job was open?
So what economic opportunities were there for a woman in those times?Thanks to slave labor taking over the textile industry, which had been the tradition source of female employment since prehistory, in Greek society only three jobs were open to women:wife, concubine or prostituteIf you didn't want to work at one of those jobs, then you could just starve to death in the street, and nobody would care.In those circumstances, nobody can claim that their sexuality was based on consent.
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Comment #25 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 15:14:39 PT
Hellenistic culture was an abusive culture
Greek culture produced a lot of great things, but it was an unequal and abusive culture with no legal rights for anyone other than free Greek men.
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Comment #24 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 15:06:56 PT
click on the link and read the complete text
 "St Mary the Egyptian admits that she left her parents and her village at the age of twelve and went to Alexandria where she lost both her virginity and her honour by prostituting herself (and enjoying it - which in the eyes of prudish Byzantines was the ultimate sin)." 
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Comment #23 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 14:48:51 PT
Greek culture was a slave-based culture
It's kind of funny when we look back at ancient Greece, we are taught since school to see it as a place of intellectuals in elegant white robes thinking about science and democracy.But their clothing was all produced by slave labor, and the sexual partners were not really consensual.Being a Greek housewife was really not that much different from being a slave and the same thing goes for concubine and prostitute.These women really did not have enough power over their own lives for us to claim that the men who had sex with them were engaging in anything more elevated than socially sanctioned rape.
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Comment #22 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 14:39:13 PT
You're making my argument for me, thank you
"Graeco-Roman domestic sexuality rested on a triad: the wife, the concubine and the courtesan.
"How on Earth can you claim to preach freedom and then admire a sexual system built on gender based slavery?You choose here to equate human sexuality with male sexuality only. You're talking about women as if they had no sexuality of there own.Okay if we accept your premise that Greek-Roman sexuality was organized to utilize women as objects meant to satisfy men, and had no sexuality at all of their own, then I suppose that you agree with me that prostitution in this case was really slavery.You've left the world of consensual sex when you categorize sexuality uniquely by the sexuality of men and their categories of ownership over women.You basically support my assertion that in most situations, prostitution is the same as slavery.The only time when prostitution is not slavery is when the woman has the economic power to determine her own fate.That definitely does NOT apply to ancient Hellenistic Greece, which was a viciously women-hating society and as you point out, did categorize women according to how they filled male sexual needs.
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Comment #21 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 14:27:15 PT
They emigrated
Exile is an expression. They emigrated. And they turned bitter. It's a fact.The embittered Soviet emigre -- if only you could have met a few, maybe you'd get it.We have a few emigres in this community who are starting to remind me of embittered Soviet emigres whom I have known in the past and that is why I bring this up.Once you leave a country to make a point -- there is the risk that the pain and anger from making this point will be the basis of your entire future life.I believe it is emotionally healthier to stay and tough it out until the end. I think history is on my side.
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Comment #20 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 14:25:41 PT
you just can't make this stuff up
Brothels, Baths and Babes
Prostitution in the Byzantine Holy Land
Claudine Dauphin
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
ParisGraeco-Roman domestic sexuality rested on a triad: the wife, the concubine and the courtesan. The fourth century BC Athenian orator Apollodoros made it very clear in his speech Against Neaira quoted by Demosthenes (59.122) that 'we have courtesans for pleasure, and concubines for the daily service of our bodies, but wives for the production of legitimate offspring and to have reliable guardians of our household property'. Whatever the reality of this domestic set-up in daily life in ancient Greece,[2] this peculiar type of 'ménage à trois' pursued its course unhindered into the Roman period: monogamy de jure appears to have been very much a façade for polygamy de facto.[3] The advent of Christianity upset this delicate equilibrium. By forbidding married men to have concubines on pain of corporal punishment, canon law elaborated at Church councils took away from this triangular system one of its three components.[4] Henceforth, there remained only the wife and the courtesan.If we are to believe the Lives of the holy monks of Byzantine Palestine, the Holy Land (in particular the Holy City of Jerusalem, the aim of pilgrimages at the very heart of Christianity) was replete with 'abodes of lust' and prostitutes tracked down the monks in their secluded caves near the River Jordan. Thus, we are faced with a paradox: the coexistence of holiness and debauchery, of Christian asceticism and lust. Lest we forget that virtue is meaningless without vice, that holiness cannot exist without lewdness, a fifth century AD Gnostic hymn from Nag-Hammadi in Middle Egypt proclaimed: 'I am She whom one honours and disdains. / I am the Saint and the prostitute. / I am the virgin and the wife. / I am knowledge and I am ignorance. / I am strength and I am fear. / I am Godless and I am the Greatness of God'.complete text at:http://www.ucd.ie/classics/96/Dauphin96.html
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Comment #19 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 14:18:04 PT
In theory, the prostitute is the victim
Most of the prostitutes in the world are not there to pay their college tuition, they are there because they have no other economic options, and they are often economically exploited by the men who control them. In rich countries like America there are sex workers who have enough power to argue for their own rights and claim it's about personal sexual freedom.In poor countries, prostituion is an existence trapped in slavery, not an assertion of personal sexual freedom.If we legalized it in America for the rich Americans expressing their personal sexual freedom, then that would be nice.But then what if the law of supply and demand fills the legal prostitution market not with empowered American sex workers but with enslaved women from poor countries who are kept in locked rooms when they aren't working and are beaten and threatened when they don't perform?Are American sexual consumers ethical enough to differentiate between cheaper enslaved prostitutes and more expensive empowered ones?I somehow doubt it.
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Comment #18 posted by kaptinemo on September 24, 2003 at 14:08:30 PT:
E_J, I hold it's exile when it's DONE to you.
It's emigration when you leave voluntarily. I paid my dues, gave my blood and back for this country, and it ruined me. So, yes, I admit to personal bias. But there's something else at work in this country, something evil, and when I'd done my best to warn people about what I thought was - and now, it seems, IS - coming down the pike, the most I received was polite silence, the worse, charges of insufficient patriotism and threats of violence.I suspect a great many Americans are contemplating emigration right now. They know instinctively, even if they can't articulate it, that the US may be (I say it IS) turning outright fascist. Cannabists aren't the only ones thinking about moving to a cooler (in many ways) climate. I've been an observer of Fundamentalism of all types since I first began to notice them, and many so-called 'Christian' Fundies have only one use for Jews: for them to return to Israel so it can be destroyed neatly in some cataclysmic planetary war, and bring on the Jubilee of Yeshua returning and smiting the REST of the 'bad people' (free translation: anyone not a Fundie). No matter their sect, that is a thread that runs through their entire sick eschatology.I imagine that there are quite a few Jews who don't want to live in a Republican owned and Fundie-controlled paradise where fervent psalm-singing is interspersed with cash register chimes and the shrieks of tortured heretics, non-believers, environmentalists, libertarians, and anyone who challenges the profit making and social control of the system. The smarter Jews know that the Fundies are mentally fitting them with targets; fear of US pogroms BY US JEWS are beginning to be expressed in various places:THE BANKRUPTCY BORDELLO, Part 6 
http://www.skolnicksreport.com/bankbord6.htmlfrom the article:*Some spend some time simply criticizing anti-Jew sentiments without bringing up any details which may be, in part, causing it. By the way, by the middle of the 20th Century, with the U.S. having been in a general prosperity, there were a growing number of non-Jews who came to the viewpoint that perhaps the Jews did not kill Jesus Christ after all. But now, because of growing financial hardships in the U.S., there is a sizeable element returning to the previous viewpoint. Something has to be done to spotlight the situation where a small number of *hohjuden*, are causing in some instances the entire Jewish population to be collectively condemned for what a small number are doing, with Jewish surnames, who may not even anymore be part of the religion.*A Jewish man wrote this, remember. And one who isn't wrote *this*...and it's scary at it's implications; take a look at this, from an 'immigration reform' website:Thinking About Neoconservatism
http://vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htmIt never comes out and says it, but it guides the reader, whom the author assumes is not a Zionist intellectual, to the conclusion that the neocons who run this country are de facto agents of Israel working against US interests and should be dealt with accordingly. This is the scariest bit I've seen on this matter. I suspect the author is a Fundie, as the website is heavily Fundie oriented.If people are writing openly about this kind of thing, and if I were a Jew, I'd get a passport, convert as much of my holdings to gold as I could, and get ready to 'beat feet'.We aren't the only minority who can see through the rose colored glasses most people in this country wear. The potential for outright, jackbooted fascism has always been here, whenever hard times strike. Look around; could any of this have happened when economic times were better? Hardly. But get most Americans scared about their futures, or their next meal, and you've got 'em by the cojones; they'll jump through almost any hoop and rationalize any injustice so long as they can still stuff their faces. For example: How many regular Joes stood up and said the AMERICANS of Japanese descent didn't belong in prison camps at Manzanar and other hell-holes during WW2 because of their heritage? Precious few. Many Americans just don't *care* about civil liberties.Another example: We almost had a military dictatorship spring up in the US in 1933-34, and had it not been for the REAL patriotism of a few individuals, Hilter might have had another nation join his 'Pact of Steel'. We cannabists have felt the hidden, heavy hand of fascism on our throats due to our choice of intoxicant for decades. We know how the system is geared to destroy us, who are in every respect, dissidents. Many of us have been shot dead without benefit of trial and not even a pretense of 'due process'. Certain anti-drug leaders like Darryl Gates and Billy Bennett advocated instant execution for us. The writing is on the wall...Feel any regrets at possibly leaving behind people who sold their birthright for security like sheep and wound up with neither? Who, when warned of the danger of playing with fascism's fire, sneered and kept striking it's matchbook? None, whatsoever. Sometimes, Baby has to burn himself to learn a lesson, despite the best efforts of all around him to keep him from harm. America is about to burn itself. The stupid brat won't listen. Fine. If I get the chance, I won't stay and watch... 
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Comment #17 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 14:02:16 PT
And what about organized atheism?
I'm surprised that libertarians hammer on organized religion so much, when the majority of the organized mass murder perpetrated in the 20th century came about through organized atheism.And Hitler sure wasn't a Christian.
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Comment #16 posted by Trekkie on September 24, 2003 at 13:32:51 PT
Kaptin, my Kaptin...
Good lord! I wanna party with you, sometime! Deep, concise and thought-provoking posts. Good work!
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Comment #15 posted by kaptinemo on September 24, 2003 at 12:35:34 PT:
Sometimes, I think Heinlein was a psychic
Heinlein was a big proponent of libertarianism before the word became popular, and I learned the basic precepts of it from reading his books. He wrote lots of them, and almost all of them are in print, to this day. In them, he teaches without teaching those ideas that made America what it once was: a free nation whose government stayed servile, not tyrannical.He had a dim view of organized religion, one which I began to share early on. From one of his novellas, this quote is ESPECIALLY true today, in light of who has the reins of government:*It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. [Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100]- the republished name of the story I mentioned, "If This Goes On..."In that story I mentioned, union between profit-greedy business people and the Religious Right, using mass psychology techniques derived from military and mercantile sources, bamboozle the electorate of the US (which, in this future period which he said would be around the year 2000, the country would be reeling due to a depression; look around, and tell me something similar isn't taking place) into voting into power a crooked Elmer Gantry type fanatic, who then suspends democracy and forms a crooked theocracy like the one running Iran right now, complete with high-tech torture chambers and the ritual murder of minorities (Jews, especially, but Catholics, Mormons, Masons, Hispanics, you name it, anyone who dissented) via stonings and evisceration, to mention a few nasty methods of execution. This Godawful rule in God's name lasts two generations.It takes a revolt led by former military personnel - one of which is the fictional hero and narrator of the story, who once was a True Believer type until his lady love is prostituted to serve the Prophet - to put down the theocratic abomination.I look at all that's happened to the US since the year 2000, and I can't help but recall, so long ago in junior high school, reading that story and wondering if it could ever happen here.And I can't help but recall in late 1979, watching Falwell on the Tube, beaming as he describes his desire for a THE-OCK-CRA-SEE (yes, he broke it up like that; probably too big a word to handle otherwise). He rolled it off his tongue as if it was so sweet, he wished it didn't have to leave his mouth. I knew right then this country was in deep doo-doo, as these guys had the ears of power.Lincoln was right, a long time ago: "No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide."These nuts in charge of the country are footing Lincoln's bill all too easily... 
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Comment #14 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 12:30:36 PT
A Small Note
I removed my comment because I shouldn't have asked that question. I should know better. There I feel better.
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Comment #13 posted by E_Johnson on September 24, 2003 at 12:05:50 PT

Exile is a bitter destiny
Russians who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the seventies and eighties ended up on the average more bitter and depressed than the Russians who stayed and toughed it out and watched the system collapse from the inside.They all had good reasons for emigrating. But while it gave them safety, it didn't give them peace. 
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Comment #11 posted by escapegoat on September 24, 2003 at 11:45:43 PT

Go David!
I take a little different angle at my site, as I only give general, *legal* Canadian immigration information, but David's site inspired me to put it up, and it's great that the police unions are mouthing off about it. It only draws more traffic. 
The deGaulle Project
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Comment #10 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 11:32:48 PT

Sam
It makes sense to me. Prostitution should be legal. It is a victimless crime. I know there could be a victim but that should be between the couple and shouldn't be a law issue.
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Comment #9 posted by Sam Adams on September 24, 2003 at 11:21:06 PT

churches
Let's get serious about the real goal of organized religion from day one: a cheap and self-funded way for the rich elite class to more efficiently exploit and control the dumber masses of society.You're working like a slave you whole miserable life to make someone else rich? No problem! Heaven awaits!I just read another National Geographic article, this time on modern slavery. Much of the article concerned forced prostitution. It pointed out that in every affected country, the government is heavily involved. Often most of the customers of the slave prostitutes are police or other government figures.If we really wanted to help end slavery, the US would use the U.N. to force every country in the world to legalize prostitution immediately. The female slave traders would be 100% gone with weeks. But then the government couldn't reward their organized crime friends, and the police couldn't get free sex. That's where the Church comes in. The governments needs their propaganda and control to keep prostitution laws on the books. Same with drug laws. How many covert US military missions are going on right now that are justified only by WOD? here's the National Geographic article, very interesting:http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0309/feature1/index.html
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Comment #8 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 11:07:53 PT

Church Logic
This is what I believe about why the church wants such political power. How does a church teach what is a sin?A sin is simply anything that is against the law.If cannabis wasn't against the law it wouldn't be a sin.See what I mean?That's church logic to me. Can't keep orderly churches without things being sins.
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Comment #7 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 10:59:29 PT

kaptinemo
I knew about what you posted. I watched Pat Robertson etc. back when they started getting heavily into politics. I knew it was wrong and stopped watching them. It's about sin and laws and keeping order and making the churches grow bigger and getting rid of those who won't believe or like doing their own thing.
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Comment #6 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 10:42:41 PT

"It is a sad state of affairs"
The irrational mad dog policies of the rabid prohibitionists are what 'is a sad state of affairs'.Not much to look forward to in the US Soviet states these days.Genug ist Genug.
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Comment #5 posted by Trekkie on September 24, 2003 at 10:19:45 PT

Kaptinemo...
Nice post!
I particalarly like the reference to Robert Heinlein.
You're absolutely right, the US is silently becoming a very scary place. I used to think I was just being paranoid, but like Dr. Johnny Fever said, "Paranioa is just safe thinking when they're out to get you."
Did anyone catch the ham-handed pitch Bu$h gave on Patriot Act (of enslavement) II, in his speech on the anniversary of 9-11? It was cheesy, low and manipulative - just like his cabinet...
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Comment #4 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 10:13:45 PT

Here's a Link To The Article
http://www.mtshastalive.com/story.asp?HDR=15&FragID=25447
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Comment #3 posted by FoM on September 24, 2003 at 10:09:59 PT

Just a Comment
This isn't really related to anything but I wanted to mention this for those who have Hepatitis C. The Veterans are the fastest growing group of people coming down with HepC. They have found the Jet Injectors appear to be the cause. The article I read said Veterans should get tested. The government isn't happy about the decision but they weren't happy about Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome either.
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Comment #2 posted by kaptinemo on September 24, 2003 at 09:46:04 PT:

And the sad part is, it could get much worse...
A lot worse. As more nations turn their backs on Uncle's international endeavors in 'fighting drugs' and return to their traditional (and usually more sensible) approaches, the antis here will become ever more incensed. Becoming ever more a matter of low humor than respect, their ideas publicly derided by other nations, their prestige in tatters, antis will turn even more vicious.And will take it out on us. I contend that we are already in the beginning of an inter-regnum, a break between an admittedly half-assed fascism and the institution of a tighter, leaner, more deadly version. All the 'signs and portents' are there. The Constitution and Bill of Rights have been effectively nullified by the PATRIOT Act; all that's needed is one more (suspiciously convenient) 'turrist ins-dint' before the gloves come off. Every tool a fascist needs to grab power has been put into place. The engines are running; all that's needed is the checkered flag to fall before the race to Facsist Hell begins.Unless this current crop of crazies is nullified in the next election, Canada will see plenty of undeniably legitimate requests for sanctuary taking place in the next 2 years. Because the top major appointed functionary in the Busch Mal-Adminsitration's Justice Department has the hots for enslavement, torture and murder...all sanctioned of course, by his own personal Jee-hee-zus. (No, I am not engaging in wild hyperbole; I am DEADLY serious. LOOK at this! THESE NUTS WANT TO SET UP A THEOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES, AND ANYONE NOT CONFORMING TO THEIR VIEWS OF CHRISTIANITY MAY NOT SURVIVE CONTACT WITH IT!)Christian Reconstructionism
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/ChRecon.htmland then remember Ashcroft's subscribes to it's tenets. Which do include such wonderfully quaint ideas as ritual killing by being struck with hurled rocks for such 'crimes' as cursing your mother or father.You can imagine what they'd do with us. I did say 'torture', remember? If it was good enough for the Inquisition, it's good enough for these guys.If the present regime is once again (s)elected into power, it will be the clearest sign that the US is doomed, and it's time to make as many Jews failed to do the last time: take their own advice and "Lech lecha!" - "Get out!"Robert Heinlein's classic "If This Goes On..." is becoming less of a literary matter and more of a sadly prescient one...
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Comment #1 posted by goneposthole on September 24, 2003 at 09:43:21 PT

Tomatoes once thought to be poisonous
Tuning up tomatoesMay 24, 2002 -- Once thought to be poisonous, tomatoes today are considered among the healthiest of foods. Lycopene, the compound that colors the plant red, is believed to prevent many types of cancer and "functional food" research is centering on improving the tomato's ability to deliver lycopene in human diets.Actually related to nightshade, tomatoes were also thought to be deadly in colonial America, Dr. Clare Hasler of the University of Illinois told a national Foods for Health conference in Minneapolis May 20, 2002. Not until the early 19th century did tomatoes come to be regarded as safe for human consumptionNow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, to be generally regarded as safe (GRAS), Hasler said. Food ingredients whose use is generally recognized as safe by qualified experts are not required by law to receive FDA approval before marketing.Epidemiological research has shown that lycopene, which gives tomatoes their bright-red color, may help reduce the risk of some cancers. In particular, its consumption has been associated with reduced incidence of cancers of the digestive tract and lower heart attack risk. Lycopene is also found in smaller amounts found in watermelon and pink grapefruit.But medical researchers have shown that the lycopene in processed tomato products - like spaghetti sauce - is absorbed to a greater extent than lycopene in the fresh fruit. But lycopene-ehanced tomatoes are on the horizon.While working with tomato tissue cultures, U.S. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) biologist Betty K. Ishida uncovered clues about ripening and lycopene formation.In one particular tomato, called VFNT cherry, low growing temperatures triggered ripening in nonfruit tissue, says Ishida. Because the fruit was very dark red, it was tested for lycopene content. It was 10 times the amount found in most commercial tomatoes.But the process doesn't work outside tissue culture. "Something else in the plant prevents this transformation into fruit," Ishida says.Ishida is on the trail to find the trigger that turns on the gene responsible for the increased lycopene. "When we find that, we can apply it to commercial varieties," she says.Majid Foolad, associate professor of plant genetics and breeding at Pennsylvania State University, has developed a soon-to-be released tomato hybrid that contains three times as much lycopene as other cultivated strains of tomatoes. The new tomato, tentatively called the Penn State Cherry Tomato, grows on plants that are resistant to diseases that typically ruin nearly a third of Pennsylvania's tomato crop.Foolad spent seven years developing the tomatoes. The resistance to blight and increased lycopene content were both found in wild tomato genotypes, which were painstakingly crossed and recrossed with cultivated tomato strains by Foolad and his associates to obtain desired qualities."We screened over 300 genotypes in the first few years," adds Foolad. "We evaluated for blight resistance, high lycopene content and other growth characteristics suitable for production in Pennsylvania."The Penn State Cherry Tomato will be "showcased" to growers, patented and released in the next year, Foolad says.ARS plant physiologist Autar K. Mattoo in Beltsville, MD, has developed new transgenic tomatoes have 2.5 times more lycopene than nontransgenic tomatoes. Not only are the transgenic tomatoes richer in lycopene, they're also more robust and more solid compared to traditional tomatoes.http://www.agjournal.com/story.cfm?story_id=1994
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