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The Untold Story of How John Podesta Answered My Question About UFOs

by ShermanArkwooke Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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On April 2, 2015, I sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Nick Merill, asking for comment about UFOs, specifically about the idea that a Clinton presidency would be a boon to those in the UFO community. He replied that Clinton’s “non-campaign” (this was 10 days before the campaign officially launched) had “a strict policy of not commenting on extraterrestrial activity. BUT the Truth Is Out There.”

I found the response funny—anybody with even a vague knowledge of The X-Files would immediately recognize the line—and I quoted it in my story, “ETs for Hillary: Why UFO Activists Are Excited About Another Clinton Presidency,” which laid out why a Hillary Clinton presidency might be good news for those committed to finding out what’s going on with extraterrestrials’ interaction with the planet Earth.

This all came back up earlier this week in one of WikiLeaks’ daily releases of John Podesta’s stolen emails. WikiLeaks published the exchange, in which Merrill passed my query to Clinton campaign chairman Podesta. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Merrill wrote. He then asked if Podesta would prefer that Merrill politely decline to comment, “or say that our non-campaign has a strict policy of not commenting on extraterrestrial activity?” Podesta, to his everlasting credit, threw me a bone. “Go with the latter but add the truth is out there,” he wrote. I included his response at the end of my story.

As a self-described “curious skeptic,” Podesta has openly called for greater government transparency on UFO-related matters. In his forward to UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, a 2011 book by journalist Leslie Kean, he wrote, “It’s time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there. The American people—and people around the world—want to know, and they can handle the truth.”

This may be only the beginning of my appearances in Podesta’s email. I pestered him and the Clinton campaign for answers related to a profile I wrote about Stephen Bassett, America’s only registered lobbyist on UFO and extraterrestrial issues, with a mission to force the US government to come clean about human interactions with extraterrestrials. Key to Bassett’s plan is getting Clinton to address why she and her husband engaged with the late Laurance Rockefeller over the course of several years in the mid-1990s, as the philanthropist worked hard to force the US government to disclose “The Truth“ about extraterrestrials. At the time, John Podesta was a senior White House staffer and likely had a front-row seat to any Rockefeller-Clinton interaction that might have occurred.

Neither Podesta nor the Clinton campaign responded to questions for that story. But both Podesta and Clinton have spoken seriously about UFOs and extraterrestrials at several points during her campaign. In March, Clinton told Jimmy Kimmel that if elected president, she’d double down on her husband’s efforts to ferret out the truth about UFOs. That interview was four months after a previous Clinton appearance on Kimmel’s show, where she wished the UFO issue had come up, but it didn’t, according to a separate Podesta email. “He didn’t end up asking her about UFOs!” a campaign communications person emailed Podesta after the interview. “She was very disappointed. She practiced UAPs for 5 minutes beforehand.” (UAP stands for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the term used by the more scientific wing of UFO buffs and researchers.) Clearly Clinton was ready and willing to talk about UFOs in a serious way. She also told a New Hampshire reporter in December 2015 that she thinks “we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure.” She acknowledged that Podesta had made her pledge to get the information out as president.

The UFO-related material in Podesta’s email box has spawned dozens of stories, ranging from Podesta’s discussion with the late NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell about the reality of extraterrestrial life to former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge’s regular communication with Podesta about the topic. Podesta’s email box shows UFO talk going back to at least 2008, when Faiz Shakir, then the vice president of the Center for American Progress, emailed Podesta with the subject line “UFO questions coming up.” He linked to a couple of stories about his connection to the issue. Podesta’s response set the tone for his reactions to future UFO emails over the years: calm, confident, and forward-looking.

“The American people,” he wrote, “can handle the truth.”

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The Untold Story of How John Podesta Answered My Question About UFOs

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

by MikaylaU07 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.

5 Surprising GM Foods

“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”

If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.

After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.

The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)

Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.

Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.

That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.

If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”

To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.

Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.

According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).

Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.

But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

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Hillary Clinton Pledges to "Get to the Bottom" of UFOs and Aliens

by AllenFlora Posted on January 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The truth is out there for Hillary Clinton.

When Daymond Steer from the Conway Daily Sun recently asked her to weigh in on UFOs—a topic Steer says he broached with Clinton in 2007—the Democratic presidential candidate reportedly promised to “get to the bottom of it” if she were elected to the White House.

“I think we may have been visited already,” she added. “We don’t know for sure.”

Clinton’s comments are among the rare public statements she’s made on UFOs and possible government cover-ups—a familiar subject for both Hillary and Bill Clinton. As Mother Jones has reported, the couple’s interest in extraterrestrial activity reaches as far back as the 1990s, when Laurence Rockefeller began lobbying the Clinton administration for the release of government documents relating to UFOs—documents that many say reveal the extent of government research into the phenomena.

Additionally, Clinton’s current campaign chairman, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and an X-Files fan, has long expressed interest in the topic.

But these statements are Clinton’s first remarks on the subject during this campaign. They will likely strengthen her support among voters who happen to be UFO enthusiasts and are not supporting any extraterrestrial candidates in the Republican field.

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Hillary Clinton Pledges to "Get to the Bottom" of UFOs and Aliens

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Darrell Issa Investigation Benefits Ex-Aide

by TamieZweig Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) has accused House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) of inappropriately intervening in an ongoing Federal Trade Commission case against a company being represented by a legal group run by a former Issa staffer. Last month, Issa sent a letter to the FTC questioning testimony the agency had gathered for the case, which targets a medical testing company called LabMD. The firm allegedly exposed the personal data of almost 10,000 people. On Thursday morning, Issa’s committee held a hearing that featured LabMD CEO Michael Daugherty and focused on whether the FTC has overstepped its bounds by investigating companies that experience data breaches.

“You are using heavy-handed, bullying tactics to undermine due process and to inappropriately assist the defendant LabMD,” Rockefeller wrote in a recent letter to Issa, which was obtained by Mother Jones. “The inappropriate timing and nature of your investigation are buttressed by the revelation that LabMD is being represented by a former member of your committee staff.” Rockefeller was referring to Daniel Epstein, who from January 2009 to August 2011 served as an oversight committee counsel. Epstein now heads a nonprofit legal advocacy group called Cause of Action, which is representing LabMD in the FTC matter.

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Darrell Issa Investigation Benefits Ex-Aide

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Oil companies would rather let trains explode than cooperate with feds

by JuliannHook Posted on April 9, 2014

Oil companies would rather let trains explode than cooperate with feds

By

PHMSA

As federal officials work frantically to reverse an uptick in explosions and oil spills from crude-hauling trains, the companies that are fracking the crude and transporting it by rail are responding with an unhelpful collective shrug.

Lawmakers and regulators want information from the oil companies about their rail shipments. The oil companies initially made helpful-sounding noises and pledged to cooperate. Now, however, it seems they’re more worried about keeping corporate secrets than protecting Americans from their explosive loads. From The Hill:

“Just last month before the Commerce Committee, the crude oil industry assured us they were focused on safety and willing to work on this issue,” [Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.)] said in a statement. “Since then, I’ve seen nothing to convince me this was more than just lip service.”…

Rockefeller said he and other legislators had received assurances from the American Petroleum Institute (API) that the crude industry was on board with the push to increase the safety of oil trains.

But the West Virginia senator said on Monday that Congress was still waiting to see the promised assistance.

Rockefeller’s frustrations mirror those of top rail regulators. As Reuters reported last week:

Cynthia Quarterman, chief of the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, specifically cited the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s top lobbying group, for not keeping its promise to share data about oil-by-rail shipments. …

“More than two months ago, we received assurances from industry that the safe transport of crude oil across the country was a top priority and, to that end, API would begin sharing important testing data,” she said in a statement.

“To date, that data has not been shared.”

The oil industry isn’t keeping its word? We’re shocked, shocked.


Source
Senate Dem: Oil industry paying ‘lip service’ to freight rail safety, The Hill
Oil industry balks at sharing crucial rail data, U.S. regulator says, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Hoboken Mayor: Christie Denied Me Sandy Relief Funds Unless I Played Ball

by Gina72Ebzwtxbe Posted on January 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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The mayor of Hoboken, who was apparently a big fan of Chris Christie for his first few years in office, went public today to say that Christie’s office told her last year that Hoboken wouldn’t get any Hurricane Sandy relief funds unless she approved a redevelopment project being managed by some pals of Christie:

The mayor, Dawn Zimmer, hasn’t approved the project, but she did request $127 million in hurricane relief for her city of Hoboken….On May 10, 2013 Zimmer got a call from the Lieutenant Governor, Kim Guadagno, who wanted to come to town to do an event at a ShopRite to spotlight businesses that had recovered from the storm.

On May 13, Guadagno and Zimmer met at the Hoboken ShopRite. That is where, Zimmer said, Guadagno delivered the first message about the relief aide.

Zimmer shared this diary entry which she said she wrote later that day. “At the end of a big tour of ShopRite and meeting, she pulls me aside with no one else around and says that I need to move forward with the Rockefeller project. It is very important to the governor. The word is that you are against it and you need to move forward or we are not going to be able to help you. I know it’s not right — these things should not be connected — but they are, she says, and if you tell anyone, I will deny it.”

The second warning, according to Zimmer, came four days later. She and Constable, who now led Christie’s department of community affairs, were seated together on stage for a for a NJTV public television special on Sandy Recovery.

Again, Zimmer provided this diary entry from May 17, which she said captured the incident.

“We are mic’ed up with other panelists all around us and probably the sound team is listening. And he says “I hear you are against the Rockefeller project”. I reply “I am not against the Rockefeller project; in fact I want more commercial development in Hoboken.” “Oh really? Everyone in the State House believes you are against it — the buzz is that you are against it. If you move that forward, the money would start flowing to you” he tells me.

Are Christie’s Democratic enemies helping orchestrate this? Of course they are. Does that matter? Not even slightly. All that matters is whether it’s true. If it is, I’d presume there should be two big pieces of evidence to support it:

Testimony from others confirming that Zimmer contemporaneously complained about the threats.
Records of how much Sandy aid Hoboken got, and how it compares to other comparably affected areas.

We’ll have to wait and see about these two things. In the meantime, the chum is in the water and the sharks are circling Christie. He’s obviously a guy who plays political hardball, and now that Bridgegate has weakened him, we can expect to see a lot more people telling stories like this one. In the past they wouldn’t have hurt him too much thanks to his carefully manicured reputation for being tough (but fair!) with people in order to get things done in a state that desperately needed someone unafraid to kick all the right asses. But Christie isn’t getting the benefit of the doubt anymore. If this story turns out to be true, it’s just one more nail in the presidential coffin.

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Hoboken Mayor: Christie Denied Me Sandy Relief Funds Unless I Played Ball

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