IIRC Kallas herself said the current political situation in Europe is driving her to drink.

I can’t wait to hear western liberals screeching about territorial integrity, rigged elections, little green men, illegal invasions, and wars of aggression.

Oh.

Technically none of the “Spitzenkandidaten” were voted for as such, but at least voters knew which party wanted which Commissioner. Until Germany denounced their very own Spitzenkandidat system after the election that is.

In summary, she’s the perfect figurehead for the western European political elite.

Maybe food production shouldn’t be profit driven.

Here is some background and sources. I would like to kindly reinforce that I did not say that glyphosate is not dangerous, rather that it is less dangerous than many other common pesticides. There are no certainties in risk assessment, only relative safety and acceptable vs unacceptable risks. Please also keep in mind that I will limit this response to discussing the carcinogenic angle. There are other reasons why we should be careful about pesticide usage, such as breeding resistance to them in target species and diminishing biodiversity, but I think those critiques apply to all pesticides and capitalist industrial farming practices in general rather than to one specific substance.

The current day activism, litigation, and legal bans surrounding glyphosate can be traced back to the 2015 report by the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer, a WHO agency) which classified glyphosate as a class 2B carcinogen, based on admittedly limited evidence (more on this classification system later). This report was scientifically questionable for many reasons (1, 2, 12, 13), such as cherry-picking source literature. It was also ethically inadmissible due to an obscene conflict of interest in the person of the Chair of the IARC committee which wrote the paper (3), yet that slight issue went completely unreported as the Chairperson himself never disclosed the fact that he was working on behalf of lawyers preparing to sue Monsanto (the original patent holder of glyphosate). That he has been an anti-pesticide activist his whole life was apparently not disqualifying enough. Of course, now that I mention Monsanto, it’s a really easy villain. Everyone loves to hate Monsanto. So why not find a modern product they make, find out how awful it is (or invent evidence thereof), and sue the living hell out of them (US$11B and counting).

Meanwhile the EU, German, US, and many other chemical regulatory agencies have for decades and sill do consider glyphosate safe for its intended purpose (4 - 6, 14). Hell, even the WHO itself considers it safe for its intended use (7)! Here is a unpaywalled and translated interview with the head of the pesticides department at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). Not only does he discuss glyphosate specifically but toxicology, risk assessment, and the regulatory process more broadly (8). As an addition, here is a chart which shows the toxic dose (LD50) of many everyday chemicals (9). I am personally interested to note that the vitamin D I have been giving my baby and taking myself has the same LD50 as cyanide.

And to return to the IARC categorizations, what we have is a very simple hazard classification relating specifically to causing cancer (10). Only Class 1 has sufficient evidence, whereas 2B, the class glyphosate was assigned, only requires limited evidence in humans and less than sufficient evidence in animals. Belonging to Class 1 are everyday things like sunlight, tobacco, and alcohol. It’s also important to draw the distinction between hazard and risk: simply, risk is the probability a hazard will cause harm, and how severe that harm could be. So even when we can prove that Substance X causes cancer in rats when we all but drown the rats in Substance X, it may very well still be safe enough to use for its intended purpose. This also ignores other factors such as the vector (is it by ingesting, inhaling, skin contact, etc.), or mode of action, where different biological factors in organisms determine what can be highly toxic for one species and unproblematic in others (dogs and chocolate being a common example). For these reasons and others, some toxicologists are calling for an end to the current IARC classification scheme and have proposed a more risk based model (11).

I will leave it at that for now, but I am happy to continue the discussion.

Edit: Added sources 12-14

Of course this will end up with a lot of negative consequences, but in principle I don’t disagree with being somewhat more permissive. European risk models with regards to chemicals have always been about absolute (ie. 100%) safety, which simply does not exist. Sometimes one must also weigh the risks of one chemical vs another, for example the pesticides used in “organic” farming are hundreds of times more dangerous to humans and the environment compared to relatively modern replacements such as glyphosate.

I mean at least it’s free from elections.

Gotta ensure that the NSA keeps their backdoors.

US government getting charged for supporting IS when?

The first thing you learn in business is to piss off your most important suppliers.

/s

It’s always telling when westerners view ethnically/culturally distinct parts (or even just geographically distant) of another country as “conquered territories that must be liberated from the central government.”

So Mainland, HK, and Taipei?

Wasn’t Germany the ones giving the accused a heads up when Polish authorities were about to arrest them?

Macron last week: “secret Russian bot armies are destroying European democracy”

Macron last month: Shows up in Moldova to campaign for the EU-chosen candidate

My living costs excluding rent have doubled, meanwhile my former employer had the nerve to call a one time 0.8% wage increase “inflation balancing”.

That perfectly explains why industry is being given an electricity tax reduction while the workers are not.

• Some member states have held referendums on proposed EU treaties. The people reject the treaty, yet it is ratified regardless (or renamed/written into other EU legislation).

• Member states must have a “private option” for health insurance, unless they had a single payer social system before joining the union.

• Maintains a central bank (ECB) which dictates monetary policy for Euro members supernationally. There can be no sovereign decision making vis a vis currency revaluation or floating of bonds. Economically weaker countries (basically all ex-Germany) are automatically exploited by the stronger countries (Germany) by virtue of having zero monetary sovereignty.

• The freedom of movement for people (citizens), goods, and most importantly capital locks in unequal exchange between periphery and core, regardless of the currencies in question.

• Laws ratified by the EU are not laws as such, for the EU doesn’t govern anything directly. Yet EU laws must be implemented in national law very quickly.

• To pacify France, Strasbourg is part-capital along with Brussels. The entire parliament moves once a month to do their work from Strasbourg for a week, wasting a huge amount of time and resources.

Intel Management Engine is already a back door, and US capital doesn’t need laws to agree to give the US government access to said back doors. They’re on the same side.

The cited part of the constitution in all these cases is Article 14, the right to private property. Since neither monarchists nor facists take issue with private property, there’s no conflict.

That being said this isn’t a legal ban, it’s just one state court’s decision. Other courts have ruled differently in similar cases. That’s not to say there isn’t a trend.