deathtokoalas
i don't think you're looking at "protective hawks" in these videos. it seems to me as though the hawk is misinterpreting the drone as something it can eat. the way it comes in with the talons is hunting behaviour. if you compare it to a video of a hawk swooping in on a swallow...

probably a european swallow, btw.

some animals are pretty smart. birds, for the most part, really aren't.

kenmtb
hence the term "bird brain"

Indy The Great
Birds aren't smart? Crows, ravens and parrots are pretty much as smart as non-great apes and will do stuff as complex as dropping nuts in the street to let cars break the shells open then waiting for the traffic signal to change to retrieve the nut. They'll also make tools, completely understand human speech, solve multi-step problems, etc.

deathtokoalas
well, i said "for the most part". there's some counter-examples. but if you took an average intelligence of birds and compared it to an average intelligence of mammals, you're going to see the birds drop off rather considerably.

that doesn't mean birds are void of any kind of awareness - that's clearly not true. but they tend to be overdriven by a prey response, which sometimes gets them into trouble - eating old rusty cans and nails and cigarette butts and other shit that's just not good for them. mammals tend to operate on more of a curiosity response. like, if you put a rover out in the woods you can expect that a bear will trash it, but it will be out of trying to figure out what the fuck it is rather than trying to eat it.

and i think that hawk may have tried to take a bite out of that thing if it managed to catch it. because it's not a bright species.

deathtokoalas
while there are plenty of signs that these "interviews" are actually staged, my experience with this is that it's more or less accurate.

to begin with, we have to understand that we're actually really not being sold gmos in the first place, due largely to market demand against it. the two things that are modified are corn and soy, both for use in junk food. on top of that, several of the biggest junk food providers have refused to use them (because the kid eating the doritos really cares, right?). they're used more heavily in dog food and cow food. none of the fruits or vegetables at your grocery store are modified. i don't have any real opposition to labelling, but it's really only going to affect things that are sold as food but aren't really actually food in the first place. it's not difficult to avoid them by simply eating healthy in the first place.

apples? tomatoes? not gmo. the cereal you don't let your kids eat because it's pure sugar? that's gmo corn starch, probably. now, if your argument against eating lucky charms or count chocula is that it's genetically modified, or if you think that's the worst thing there is about eating it...

the next thing you have to understand is that the demand that it be tested before it's sold is bluntly impossible if you're interested in measuring long term effects across a large population. to carry out that study, you'd need thousands of people willing to carry out the experiment over several decades. the only way to do that is the "microsoft model", which is release it first and then fix the bugs after. worse, by the time that experiment finishes, we'll have moved on to recycling and drinking our own purified urine.

now, you also have to put that into context. they've done the short-term experiments - they're able to figure out that, according to chemistry, there's no reason why eating corn starch (that is, sugar, which has a chemical formula) derived from a genetically modified hunk of corn should be different than eating corn starch (that is, sugar - which has the same chemical formula) derived from an artificially selected hunk of corn. that wouldn't just defy science, which says that when you do the same thing over and over again you should get the same results, but it also defies basic reason. corn starch is corn starch. there's no comprehensible reason why it should matter what the source it was synthesized from was. well, what about eating the actual corn? there's two answers. the first is that while that's a more subtle question in terms of long term effects, it's not an important one - because you'll never find a stalk of corn for sale anywhere that is gmo. the other answer is that your stomach acids don't really care. you can try this experiment at home. take a jug of hcl, and drop gmo corn (if you can find it) and non-gmo corn into the jug of hcl and then analyze the contents. in both cases, you're going to have a dissolved mess of organic material broken down into it's building blocks. your body will then digest that with absolutely no fucks at all given about where it initially came from.

you have to wonder if people are thinking of it in some kind of broad pagan terms - this idea that if you eat the heart of your enemy you will gain their powers. if you accept that as true, it may follow that you will gain the altered dna from the modified corn and it will make you resistant to roundup. but, in fact, we know that you're just going to break it down and digest it, like you would any other nucleic acid. the enzymes in your stomach really don't care.

so, what about the long-term effects? well, we don't know, yet, but we can pretty confidently state that any long term effects are coincidental. which means what? well, it could turn out to be a little harder on your liver, not because it's gmo, per se, but because your body's reacting to it differently (that's a random example, don't ask for a study). it's possible, but not likely.

and, then what about the pesticides? (note that roundup is actually a herbicide, but i'll be colloquial). again: it would be great to reduce pesticide use. but, that's one of the arguments in favour of roundup. i mean, we can look at four possible ways to do this: absolutely no pesticides (and low crop yield, along with heavy starvation), organic pesticides (which are neither better nor worse than inorganic pesticides, just different), conventional pesticides (which are very problematic) or the roundup resistant and related approaches. we're not abandoning a no pesticide approach to move to roundup. we're moving from heavy, concentrated industrial era pesticide use to a much lighter pesticide use. there are studies that suggest that glyphosate may be carcinogenic - if you drink a glass of it with breakfast every morning. sure. but, when you compare it to, say, ddt, it comes off as relatively harmless.

that doesn't negate pesticides as a problem. pesticides remain a problem. but the gmos are a step to lessening the problem, not a step to worsening it. if we really want to be serious about that, we can start thinking about indoor roof growing with greenhouses and hydroponics. that eliminates the need for herbicides altogether. we will have to eventually move in this direction, as our population continues to grow. for now...

so, what's left, then? there's no logical reason to think they might be harmful; and, even if there was, you're probably not eating them anyway. i guess what's left is that it's a good distraction for fair trade and anti-war protests....

----

Stefanie Grow
GMO= Genetically Modified Organism. It is bad because it is generated from a bacteria that can survive living the effects of Roundup. Therefore the produce is Roundup ready. It is also spliced with fish genes, pig genes, you name it. Roundup is made by the people who brought you Agent Orange that was used in the Vietnam War. GMOs are linked to cause Autism, asthma, IBD and many other health issues. GMOs are responsible for the bee colony collapse. Do your research please!!

Alexey Scheglov
everything you eat was genetically modified in the past.

MrCoulurfull
Just wow .. the amount of bullshit you just spewed ..

Ben Steelz
There's a huge different between selective breeding and artificially splicing in different genes via genetic modification...

TwoFacedEar
Can't tell if trolling or just a sucker...

India
Yeah not sure if this is legit.... Any evidence for this?

Alexey Scheglov
meh. modern day recombination is a more precise and safe method than, say, mutagenesis or even selective breeding. yet, no selective breeding product (pretty much everything we eat) was a target of human ignorance.

deathtokoalas
you don't know that. there could have very well been protest movements at catal huyuk.