Free Republic

Representatives of the international coalition No Patents on Seeds! from France, Germany and Spain have filed an opposition against a European patent held by Monsanto on conventionally bred tomatoes (EP1812575). The patent claims tomatoes with a natural resistance to a fungal disease called botrytis. The original tomatoes used for this patent came from the international gene bank in Gatersleben, Germany. It was already known that these plants had the desired resistance and they were simply crossed with other tomato plants. Monsanto then produced a cleverly worded patent in order to create the impression that genetic engineering had been used to...

Social media makes it easier and cheaper to build movements quickly – but bypassing the business of creating decision-making infrastructure means they can disappear just as fast.Where have all the chanters gone; the gospel-minded Christians and the denouncers of ‘banksters’ and tyrants; the homeless and the indebted and unemployed who filled our urban squares in 2011-12, crying out such slogans as "We are the 99 percent" and "The people want the end of the regime"? Where are the leaderless revolutionaries who turned cities around the world upside down? The simple answer is: they were dispersed. When the sometimes public parks...

Every. Damn. Time. Tucked away in their backstory of anti-social behavior, an inconvenient nugget of truth about the couple responsible for killing three people, including two police officers, in Las Vegas:

Big Business does some things that are utterly necessary in modern society. They build airplanes and cars. They run airlines, phone companies, credit card companies and banks. But there is not a person among us, including employees of big businesses, that has not withered with frustration from confronting these businesses with a problem and then receiving little or no results. Even though big businesses get the most attention, the vast majority of people in the U.S. work for small businesses. Small businesses by nature are more reactive and responsive to their customers. They are closer to the customer and more...

As the fallout from Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) stunning primary loss continues to settle, one of the many entrenched interests feeling suddenly insecure about their position in the American hierarchy is big business. For some, like the aviation giant Boeing, Cantor was a reliable friend. With his loss, that company’s prospects, along with its share price, have crumpled. “Mr. Cantor’s loss is much more than just symbolism,” the Times reported on Saturday. “He has been one of Wall Street’s most reliable benefactors in Congress. And Mr. Brat used that fact to deride the majority leader as someone who has rigged...

The world was a beautiful place as Bill de Blasio folded himself into the front passenger seat of a black SUV. The late-afternoon sun was shining on Park Slope, and a grand political breakthrough was within reach. Sure, it had been a complicated few weeks as Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Working Families Party, bitter codependents, tried to agree on a deal that would give Cuomo the WFP’s ballot line this fall in exchange for the governor’s publicly pledging to get behind a progressive policy agenda. Now, though, thanks in part to de Blasio’s mediation, a compromise was falling into...

The city has agreed to pay nearly $600,000 to settle allegations that police wrongfully arrested a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters, marking the largest settlement to date in a single Occupy-related civil rights case, the marchers' lawyers said Tuesday. The city didn't immediately comment. City lawyers had said in court papers this fall that the arrests were lawful and police "acted reasonably, properly, lawfully and in good faith." The individual protesters are receiving $5,000 to $20,000 apiece, and their lawyers $333,000 for fees and costs, the attorneys said. But to protester Jennifer Peat, 36, "the point was never the...

I was scrolling through the tele yesterday going from Fox News , then to MSNBC, then to FSTV, then AJAM (Aljazeera America), and the words "Occupy Kiev" were on TV. It was followed quickly by a reporter saying that the Maidan protesters won't do what the Kiev gov't told them yo do, and this was soon after Poroskenko was elected. They won't dismantle their large tent city, refuse to, and have drug out an old favorite - DRUMS - and on the TV....they were banging on them... McCain was there Dec. 2013 with them. Why not now, too? Same people,...

The occupy movement is circling back on itself with the announcement of the final prosecution of protester Cecily McMillian. Sentenced to three months for elbowing a police officer, those within and without the movement are wondering where they go from here and what it all means. The founders of the movement have moved from cities into the country, and are organizing to occupy the polls to rout out corruption. However, there are questions within the confines of the Electoral College as to how much change this focus can produce. One element of the occupy movement from its headquarters in Zuccotti...

RIKERS ISLAND, New York — Two members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot visited Rikers Island, New York City's main jail complex, to meet with an inmate who is a hero of Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy protestor, 25-year-old Cecily McMillan, was arrested in March 2012 after she elbowed a police officer in the eye. She faces seven years behind bars after a jury found her guilty on May 5, but McMillan and her supporters say she should never have been convicted in the first place. Pussy Riot members Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova and Maria "Masha" Alyokhina entered Rikers around...

The Fox News host grills a member of the militia movement on why it's OK for Bundy to break the law but not OWS.To a significant degree, American politics is a story of insiders vs. outsiders, so it’s inevitable that people among the latter group would be lumped together, even if they’re quite different by any other measure. Still, it’s probably fair to say that when most people think of Nevada renegade rancher Cliven Bundy, the Zuccotti Park protesters of Occupy Wall Street don’t immediately — or eventually — come to mind. Yet on the Tuesday night edition of his...

Monday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes used an essay on Slate about the Bundy Ranch standoff and race as a jumping off point to discuss how this story would be different if rancher Cliven Bundy’s armed supporters were black. “When is it that people take up arms against the federal or state government, point their arms at federal agents and face no consequence for it?” Hayes asked. “The answer is to that is hardly ever.” Hayes went on to imagine how Fox News react to the New Black Panthers if they decided to “greet law enforcement with long guns.” Or what...

The cattle-ranch protest in Nevada was an armed insurrection by the Tea Party. One thousand Tea Party, so-called “patriots,” came to Bunkerville, NV, brandished weapons and the government backed down. Other mass protests in America have either ended in arrests or violent clashes between authorities and protesters. There is an obvious double standard here because the government relented and turned away. Why did the government do this? The main difference between many other mass protests and the cattle-ranch protest is that the cattle-ranch protesters were armed with handguns and assault rifles. Is American in such a state where the new...

The controversy over a Nevada rancher’s decades-long use of public land without paying federal grazing fees has quickly become a national issue — one that Glenn Beck on Monday urged Americans to fully understand before taking a side on. “We did some research online with PsyID today, and found that there’s about 10 or 15 percent of the people who are talking about this online that are truly frightening,” Beck said on his television program. “They don’t care what the facts are. They just want a fight.” Beck said there are many “decent, small-government proponents from groups like the Tea...

It is the most important question being asked of dozens of New Yorkers lined up as potential jurors for the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street activist accused of assaulting a police officer: what do you think of her protest movement? Unfortunately for those keen on the swift procession of justice, a series of Manhattan residents who presented themselves at the criminal courthouse this week declared that they strongly disagreed with it – and could not promise to be impartial about one of its members. “I’m involved in Wall Street things. I’m on the Wall Street side, not...

Springtime is here. The birds are singing, temperatures are on the rise and the Occupy movement is emerging from winter hibernation, calling for a worldwide “wave of action” Friday to re-launch anti-capitalism protests. Occupiers have been instructed by the movement’s official Twitter feed to congregate at Zuccotti Plaza in New York City Friday morning. The plan is to march to nearby Federal Plaza. Zuccotti was the stronghold of Occupy Wall Street the last two years. An associated Facebook page announced a protest against the “regressive 1% agenda of Governor Andrew Cuomo and for a truly progressive one that includes the...

One of the co-founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement has called on Barack Obama to resign as president, and “appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America”.

Traditional American distrust of the centralized state is based on some lessons learned the hard way.Russia’s takeover of Crimea is already so complete that commercial flights to Kiev from the region’s main airport, located outside Simferopol, the regional capital 50 miles from Sevastopol, now leave from the international terminal instead of the domestic one as they did until last week. The shift suggests that Kiev and the rest of Ukraine are now classified as foreign territory. New York Times, March 6, 2014 There is no one who can be trusted with political power. Lord Acton’s famous epigram — “Power corrupts,...

Hey, makes about as much sense as anything else they've been doing since 2009.

(CNSNews.com) - Speaking with reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month, Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said she was “so relieved when [Obama] won,” and would give Obama an ‘A’ in his second term if he would “just occupy the spot.” When asked by a reporter to give a progress report on Obama’s second term and to grade him, Moore declined to at first saying, “I'm not going to give Obama a grade. I’m glad he’s there. A Grade compared to what? Compared to Mitt Romney being there?” She then compared Obama’s second term to what would have happened...