Dragonfruit lemonade (agua de pitahaya) is delicious!

Profit? What’s that? No no, that’s never a motive. We only want the world to be a better place thanks to our wonderful technology.

Yeah. Claims about potential health effects can be very persuasive.

It is a factual claim that something could go wrong, or that we have a gap in our understanding, and the outcome of that may be detrimental to our health. We can’t disprove this because it is true, and so what we need to do is to assess risks in a balanced manner. It is also a factual claim that a de-novo mutation could occur and produce a toxic strain, or maybe we do not understand something about a plant that we commonly eat and we later find out that it is carcinogenic. Our understanding evolves over time, and risks are everywhere.

But most politicians are not so concerned with painting a balanced picture. The claim “a risk exists” is always factual and that is good enough to push an agenda.

In my opinion this does not in itself mean that one political position is better than the other. Maybe the health claims are not a good argument, but there are many other valid reasons to want to stop GMO corn.

You can find the document submitted by Mexico here: https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/MexUSMCAInitialEng.pdf

On the point of transgenic varieties having a negative impact on local strain diversity, I think the concerns are valid. The introduction of high-yielding GMOs can lead to displacement of local varieties and ultimately decrease diversity.

I skimmed through the document to see if they make some good points about the health impact of GMOs. From what I can gather, the arguments are:

• Glyphosate herbicides are commonly used when farming GMO corn. There is no global consensus on the potential long-term health effects associated with exposure to glyphosates and formulations that contain it.

• Techniques to modify the genome are not perfect. Often, viruses are used, and some viral proteins could be inserted into the genome. Other things could go wrong. Ultimately, you may have an unexpected phenotype that turns out to make the plant toxic.

• They argue that the GMO corn has a worse nutritional profile than native varieties. This worse nutritional profile ultimately has a negative health impact.

Personally… Maybe the glyphosate claim I can get somewhat behind but the other two health claims I don’t find compelling. The risks over-stated, and their use of citations is not great.

I have an example of their use of citations that made me chuckle… They write:

Mexican corn, mainly native corn, has a better quality in nutritional terms, including compounds that prevent diseases and promote human health.⁷⁵

And the citation reads:

⁷⁵ In Mexico there are scientific compilations and files that bring together the aforementioned literature.

Ah, well, thank you for that 😅

You can take a lot of control by using search commands. Here is a list of commands for Google, for example: https://www.lifewire.com/advanced-google-search-3482174

By using commands like these you can narrow down your searches to the point that the impact of SEO is small. You give a much greater weight to the conditions that you have chosen.

It can be a bit of work to write a good search query, but the database that search engines search through is massive, so it makes sense that it would take some work to do this right.

Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.

Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.

Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.

Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.

I don’t have much of an opinion on this topic, I haven’t really looked into it.

But as soon as I saw this image, the El Al Flight 1862 which crashed in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam in 1992 immediately came to mind. The shape of the hole is very similar!

This image shows the likely position of the Bijlmer plane during the crash:

The image you posted of the Pentagon seems to me consistent with what I have seen of the Bijlmer accident, and so the shape of the hole and the absence of wings in the photo does not persuade me personally that no plane was involved.

You can set up a personalized RSS feed with Feeder. It will take a bit of effort to set up, but you can create a feed that is very well tailored to your interests. You can get news feeds but also subscribe to other kinds of content, like scientific publications and financial statements.

A botnet could have many unique accounts, and some could even appear like users. So I can’t rule it out. I also haven’t done a deeper dive into the accounts.

But when a post gets popular I would expect it to get at least a few downvotes, regardless of what it is.

There is one account that has a single comment from 5 months ago that is downvoting most posts and comments. That one is very suspicious

Other than that… No other accounts are as obvious. A few do have some reoccurrences but most of those votes do seem organic on first inspection.

Yes, you are right. If a mod wants I can send them the username and they can ban them from the community. I can see it as an admin from my instance but I can’t take action.