Tom Philpott has written about the GMO labeling bill in Washington State for Mother Jones and I had the idea of contacting him by submitting a comment to his article on the subject. I registered with disqus and posted the comment (I've appended the comment I made below) The comment then appeared at the top of the comments and I logged out of the site to do other things. When I returned to the Mother Jones site the next day the comment I made had been removed. I was puzzled since the usual treatment at moderated sites is to hold off publication until the moderator can pass on suitability before the comment is published. Since then I have attempted to post this same information at the Business Week web site in the comment section for an article on some variety of GMO wheat that had escaped into the wild. Again I registered with disqus and the information was posted without apparent problem. I returned an hour later and the comment I made had been removed. As an experiment I returned to the Mother Jones web site and attempted to post a comment to a second article by Tom Philpott about GMOs. This time the comment I made simply disappeared -- it never appeared at all in the comment section. I suspect that disqus is the culprit here but, of course, I have no way of knowing. At the very least this does suggest that it is possible to manipulate on line discussions in a disturbing way.
The comment I posted on the Mother Jones and Business Week web sites was substantially:
I am writing to promote awareness of an article by Stephanie Seneff and Anthony Samsel on the toxic effects of glyphosate. The article can be found on the web at,
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416
The biochemistry in this paper is a bit intense and I would recommend viewing a video of Stephanie Seneff giving a lecture at Wellesley that can be found at,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqWwhggnbyw&feature=youtu.be#t=18m35s
The upshot of the article is that the Shikimate pathway that glyphosate interupts in plants to commit herbicide is also present in our beneficial gut bacteria. Exposure to glyphosate kills these bacteria and so prevents them from synthesizing aromatic amino acids that are essential for us and which we cannot synthesize without the help of these bacteria. Seneff and Samsel also detail biochemical mechanisms by which glyphosate may be a causal agent in a whole host of diseases that have reached epidemic proportions in the age of GMOs, including autism, obesity, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Because these diseases are not well understood, what Seneff and Samsel actually do is show that there are mechanisms through which glyphosate can account for numerous markers for these various diseases. These markers have been established in the large scientific literature on the diseases. If Seneff and Samsel are right Roundup should be banned and the whole GE project is called into question.