Shout out to Tyrone Hayes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrone_Hayes), frog scientist, who turned down piles of industry hush money to speak out against the dangers of atrazine and publish his research. He seems like a cool guy. I'd totally buy him a drink and talk about frogs.
Where can I find out more about him turning down piles of industry hush money? All I can see on wikipedia is he was beefing with some makers of atrazine.
I haven't seen him disclose a specific number but they basically offered to keep him very comfortably employed by them, however they wanted to manipulate his research and working for them meant that they could keep the results out of the public eye (They owned his research and he was under a confidentiality contract) so when they buried his work he left and continued his research independent of their funding so that he could publish.
I've seen far too many of his talks and interviews on youtube to recall which ones had him speaking about it himself, but here is his wife:
> "Tyrone was asked to be on a scientific panel to review the evidence about atrazine. When he discovered these results and reported it to them, they asked him to do some additional work to make sure that these things were really accurate. So he did some additional work and then they wanted him to do more and more and more and this is where Syngenta said basically we can fund you for a really long time if you'll just keep repeating this.
It could have been very easy just to take all the money they were offering and be set for life. It would have been like an endowment for life for him, for research." (https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-present...)
As a rule of thumb, the US just operates differently - spending much more effort on testing and inspection and labeling on the final product - whereas Europe has stricter, more precautionary scrutiny of ingredients, but operates with less oversight. (If you can remember the horse meat fiasco in Europe a decade ago, something like that could have never happened in the US.)
There are also some counter examples like Chlorpyrifos which is banned in the US but not the EU.
When you're contesting what the system considers "safe", citing metrics of which countries are "safe" according to the system isn't useful.
Someone can claim atrazine is in food and that's bad, while the system thinks that's fine. Then you can't cite a source that considers atrazine in food to be fine, to prove the food is actually fine.
13th in food security .. that's not a measure of food "safety" (from harmful toxins, etc) but of "security" in terms of can food be delivered year in year out despite drought, flooding, bad weather, supply chain disruption, etc.
Countries with a high measure of security aren't likely to quickly go hungry in the event of a neighbouring war, etc.
As recently as 2012, Atrazine was the second-most widely used weed killer in the United States, with more than 70 million pounds applied across the nation each year
75% of an exposed pop stop producing testosterone. 10% of the pop shift from male to female. These frogs still mate successfully with male frogs, and even produce male offspring — it turns the frogs trans :)
That’s a bit of twist: in fact amphibians, like humans, start out all female - atrazine just interferes with the development of male characteristics, making male frogs develop intersex or even completely female characteristics.
Can you elaborate on humans starting out all female ? Are you talking about the women's egg chromosomes ? I wouldn't call that a human.. an embryo has a strong claim to being a human, but an egg ?
I thought that would be considered intersex as there are some anatomical structures that do not rely on the testosterone to develop minimally, such as udecended (non/minimally functioning) testicles in an XY individual who has external femal genitalia.
If you would call that intersex, then go for it. I'm not here to argue the semantics. These are edge cases that are fairly complicated.
We're talking about a person with a uterus, vulva, vagina, etc. But without the widening of hips or development of breasts that happen in most women. No penis, no scrotum, no vas deferens, no testosterone. Nothing you would find in the majority of men.
The only thing they have are testes and the testes present in these individuals are basically inert. They're usually removed because they're more likely to develop testicular cancer.
With hormone therapy, they will develop the secondary sex characteristics of women.
But the overall point here is that atrazine would need to be administered in utero to have the effects claimed by Alex Jones. Frogs reproduce externally. They lay eggs that are then fertilized. These eggs can be contaminated with surface atrazine which would then affect their development as described earlier.
so we need to ensure that pregnant women avoid atrazine, from sources such as drinking water
Note: the claim was “they’re turning the frogs gay!!” which is quite inaccurate in several aspects (who’s “they?”). The general thrust is correct, however.
If someone is claiming that global climate change has melted all the arctic ice and created a Vulcan into spring up in lower Manhatten, they are a crackpot. But that doesn’t mean global climate change isn’t real or isn’t bad.
Two can be true. Atrazine can be bad, and Alex Jones claims about it can be outrageous unfounded conspiracy theories.
He does call out a lot of corruption, much of it prima facie. And given how much there is, who conspired with who else (or not) is neither here nor there.
Alex and the circa 2010 Occupy Wall Street crowd have a lot more in common with each other than the "other side", which would be the warmongering "Neocons". But this might be more than some will want to contend with cognitively. Easier to bamboozle someone than tell them they have been bamboozled, and all that.
The issue I think there is never the specific claim but the manner in which Jones makes these pronouncements linking a fact like this to broader conspiracies and politics. That somehow this shit is a left-wing / liberal conspiracy blah blah blah when it's just run of the mill (and far more insidious and systematic) corporate malfeasance in the search of profits.
He espouses a lot that much of the modern "left wing", or at least what is sold as "left wing" (but is not our typical progressive/liberal friend we know), comes right out of technocratic think tanks.
There's nothing new about that. That's the whole schtick the populist far right has had forever.
Look up Lyndon LaRouche, or hell Mussolini & Hitler. They start from what seems like legitimate concerns and often from what seems like a pro working class agenda, but ultimately the purpose is more power to the Market and more power to people themselves or people like themselves, and usually there's this huge socially regressive aspect to it especially attacking minorities, huge amounts of anti-Semitism, yada yada yada
Hitler has a whole part of Mein Kampf where he talks about a communist trade union protest and how his explicit goal is to capture that same anti-establishment anger and form of organizing but direct it in the service of the Nation and the Leader. Hence keeping around the "socialist" symbolism in the NAZI name and symbolism long after they murdered any actual "socialists" in the party.
It looks like it actually reverses sexual characteristics without reversing chromosomes, meaning the males that have reversed sexual characteristics are still technically genetically male.
"The resulting larvae were all male when raised to metamorphosis and sampled (n = 100), confirming that atrazine-induced females were, in fact, chromosomal males. Furthermore, atrazine-induced females lacked the DM-W further confirming that these atrazine-induced females were indeed chromosomal males (Fig. 2). These ZZ females expressed gonadal aromatase, as did true ZW females (n = 4, from our stock colony), but ZZ males (n = 8, control or treated) did not"
I was more commenting on the first line of your comment, where you said that they were changing sex, but I don't think intersex is accurate either, as intersex traits are present at birth. In the study, they raised the male frogs to maturity before exposing them to atrazine, after which 10% had their adult male characteristics reversed to that of a female.
Personally I also think something shown to have such effects on wildlife should be banned, and definitely should not be in our food. It is banned in some countries.
Other animals that observably have language and culture may have social identities that include how they feel about themselves as well. Perhaps.
But at any rate, I’m relatively sure frogs are not a part of that potential group lol.
Frogs are a bit smarter than I used to give them credit for, though.
I live on the edge of a jungle, and I’ve had to transport frogs out of my house. First 20 meters, came back.
(The frog in question had an identifiable scar or deformity)
Then 100 meters.
Then 250 meters to a nearby stream…. Back in my sink within a week lol.
That's the key element to effective conspiracy theories. A thread of truth, exaggerated, twisted and manipulated for maximum virality. Debunkers are met with links like the one you provided, and that's typically enough to discourage further debate because the truth is boring and a lot of hard work. And who wants to spend time trying to debunk when the believers don't want the truth!
Yes, and the blame is always placed on some cabal or minority group or political tendency that the conspiracy theorist dislikes... rather than looking at anything systematic.
Which actually has the ultimate effect of blunting change rather than fostering it.
His point was to keep the chemicals out of our food supply.
Argue about the details all you want, but nobody wants to consume this toxin and feed it to their children.
So yet again, Alex Jones was right.
The Trump admin repeatedly weakened regulations around atrazine imposed by the Obama admin[0][1], only for the Biden admin to reimpose them.[2][3] I suppose we're about to see them severely weakened again.
Edit: to the people talking about RFK Jr., he's not going to be running the EPA; anti-regulation crusader and laissez-faire fan Lee Zeldin will be.[4]
You're overindexing on formal authority and prematurely discounting informal influence. RFK will be a prominent member of the administration. He'll have the ears of powerful people. He'll get some wins at the FDA (because it's blindingly obvious we're poisoning ourselves), and he'll be able to use these wins to drive changes at other agencies.
Is the next administration really likely to do, on purpose, anything that would affect earnings for large corps? It would absolutely blow my mind. I think RFK will do zilch unless it aligns with more profits for the right folks.
RFK was telling us he'd never support Trump, too, and here we are.
RFK has demonstrated repeatedly that he has absolutely no principles whatsoever, and he'll sell out if a soft breeze passes by. If the agribusiness sector tells Trump that banning this chemical will cost them 10% of their profits, Trump will tell RFK to get in line, and he'll give a slight whimper as he does so.
Trump was willing to build a coalition while Democrats were not. RFK, assuming he gets past the Senate, will be in a substantially better position to influence health policy than if he were to have snubbed Trump.
The game of politics makes enemies one day become allies the next. If you want real progress on an agenda, being dogmatic generally isn't the best way to accomplish it (imo).
I'm not American, but to me this looks like a preposterous take, when the Democrats had Cheney and a pile of other Republicans lined up in what looks more to me like a coalition than getting the endorsement of a bizarre personality-cult fringe candidate.
It depends on your perspective. Dick Cheney is generally considered persona non gratta due to his role in pushing the US into forever wars during the Bush Jr years. The Left hated him during the Bush and Obama years, the Right came around to hating him during the Obama and Trump years.
Trump Republicans very much dislike Liz Cheney for being completely against Trump during J6 investigations, and recent news implicates Liz Cheney in having tampered with lawyer relations for one the J6 testifiers [1,2]. Right-leaning commentary during the J6 investigations considered them sham investigations with the Republicans on the J6 committee often called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), as those Republicans were anti-Trump.
This is the perspective that makes the Chenys supporting Democrats seem ridiculous. Other republicans supporting the Democrats generally have pro-war big government views which are largely incompatible with the new Trump Republican base.
I'll disagree that this was just an "endorsement of bizzare personality-cult fringe candidate" as these individuals all have some political pull and have been given substantial positions in the upcoming administrations.
Cheney is just one person in a long list of republicans who endorsed Harris[1], and these people were part of a much longer list of republicans who opposed Trump[2].
Meanwhile The Trump-endorsing 'coalition' individuals in question are wildly unserious people, to the point that they're going to be laughed out of their senate confirmation hearings if they don't withdraw beforehand.
This is correct, there is an unfortunate acceptance of a lot of political mythology that I believe explains the results of the election (as we see above).
The GOP couldn't even form a coalition with itself, you saw a lot of people within the GOP who wouldn't endorse their candidate (the most stark example being the former VP). The democratic nominee coalition built to a fault. Many point to exactly this, and the failure to scorch the opposition to the degree warranted, as the reason for the loss.
RFK is your garden variety opportunist grifter, as are the entire confederacy of scammers and dunces (no offense, this is strictly a factual assessment) who are now on their way to positions of power based purely on their loyalty.
What are the actual vectors here, does it come thru the vegetables we eat, the meat from animals that eat the vegetables, or the ground water and do we measure this stuff?
It’s crazy that various chemicals like this or food dyes are banned elsewhere but legal in America. Is this due to the power and influence of corporate lobbyists or just a failure of a slow bureaucracy? Either way it is unacceptable
The last time I looked into this, at least one US pesticide* banned in the EU seemed to significantly disrupt oxytocin, notably the pesticide in question seems to be present on fruit, in the store, and can be absorbed through incidental contact. Oxytocin is most notably involved in empathy, giving people a nasal spray of oxytocin and testing them on empathy indicates higher response (in the one story it boiled down to roughly, "how much do you give a shit or relate to the suffering of other people who you do not know") after their oxytocin has been raised.
It does seem like there's room here for a study to see what the general oxytocin level is in the US versus other countries — if it's notably reduced, I wonder if that can help explain why all the US legislation around societal benefits and e.g. healthcare, feels not just apathetic towards, but particularly hostile and mean spirited to people who are suffering.
* - When i originally penned this, I was under the assumption it was Atrazine, but it isn't and I can't find the pesticide in question and don't feel like sifting through a list of "1000 pesticides banned in the EU that the US loves to use" to find the one in question
edit, NB:
HNers that love to skim read and argue based on that, take note — the only claims made here are:
- At least one US pesticide that is banned in the EU disrupts oxytocin (plausible, if not cited)
- Oxytocin is directly connected to expression of empathy (incredibly well-founded)
- US legislation around societal benefits and healthcare feels apathetic and mean spirited (opinion, take it or leave it)
Note that I very carefully do not claim that a {pesicide contact -> reduced oxytocin-> reduced empathy -> mistreatment of the poor and sick} chain is actually the case (I leave that in speculation — "I wonder if"), I only say that it seems viable and worthy of investigation if and only if the first claim in the list above is true. I also do not claim it to be the only cause — that's why I say the words "can help explain". Thank you for reading.
Mm, I did take a quick look but the majority seem to be studying within the cow cervix, which... it seems kind of iffy to then expand that to the wider body, and then jump species from cows to humans. Too many links of indirection to make a reasonable claim about.
It is interesting: I have long wondered if recreational drugs that created long-term feelings of safety and contentment (rather than the anxiety, depression & fear of the current options, especially among uppers) could improve political outcomes.
On the other hand, given European's response to immigration has been to cut their social spending, it seems more likely that the difference in social support can be confidently attributed to racism.
As far as I know we haven't found any chemicals that either create or diminish racism, though it is an interesting direction for future research.
It may be a contributing factor. But reading that I remembered something about NSAIDs (most 'over the counter' pain killers) reducing empathy. First hit (from 2018) for 'NSAID' +'empathy' was https://www.spring.org.uk/2018/02/painkillers-emotions.php
Hey! Maybe microplastics and PFAS/PFOA/BPA do too? Whoo hoo hoo!
I'm no doctor, but if my understanding is correct oxytocin is also correlated with in-group out-group behavior. I think it's a bit reductionist to attribute election results to hormone imbalance. Culture and material conditions probably have a much greater impact on that.
> I think it's a bit reductionist to attribute election results to hormone imbalance.
I very carefully did not attribute election results solely to that cause :)
Russian funding and mass media covert ops are likely more to blame[1][2]
At the same time, I do think that there's room to explain why vast swathes of the US has a very "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude. This also seems to be somewhat recent, because "Universal right to food" was one of the things proposed in, I want to say the 40s-50s? as one of the basic fundamental rights. Which, outright couldn't happen now with the current state of American Politics.
[2]: idk there's a laundry list of news outlets confirming both of these points, if someone wants to argue about it then it's likely we'll never agree in the first place, as the evidence has been widely available for almost a decade now and is very clear in terms of evidence of Russian influence in voter manipulation, general public opinion manipulation, and outright paying off politicians and working to inflate the puritanical right wing.
Oh for sure, I agree with you on that. This reminds me that as far back as during the french revolution, in 1789, some "radical republicans" succeeded in putting a droit de subsistance, right to sustenance, in the very first constitution. That right would guarantee some form of food and shelter for everyone. It was removed in the second constitution by the bourgeoisie, of course.
Those ideas are far from new, and I'm afraid to never see them implemented in my lifetime, but I remain hopeful and will still advocate for them however I can.
My problem with what you're saying is that it relies on affirming the antecedent. Which not a proposition I believe to be correct, and in fact, view as denigration and slander of my countrymen. I do not look kindly on that.
> view as denigration and slander of my countrymen
The fact that you believe it to be incorrect also doesn't really make it incorrect, does it. Notably, I am also not saying that it is correct, but simply making a claim based on if it is correct — which may or may not be true.
I am sorry that you feel that I slandered and denigrated your countrymen but surely the bigger denigration against the american people here is the voting patterns of your countrymen — in repeatedly voting against social measures that would provide aid and care to the poor, sick, and disabled. I would look upon that as something to get insulted, deeply upset about, and use that feeling as a force to try to argue for and push for change politically, as opposed to a random comment on the internet.
