When the masses take action to protest their foods being poisoned by corporations...

[h3rm35]

Originally published November 15 2010
Votes opposing GMOs crash The Economist poll website
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Last week we published a story urging our readers to vote NO on the GMO / biotech survey being hosted by The Economist (http://www.naturalnews.com/030370_G...). Within two hours after our post went live and people started sharing it on Facebook and elsewhere, the Economist's poll servers crashed hard and stayed offline for the entire weekend.

Before this happened, we were winning the vote, of course. Word had spread among the natural health community, and we all began calling for people to vote. Right after we published our article, NO votes from readers all around the world started to flood in, and we saw the survey begin to shift even more strongly in our favor. Had The Economist's servers actually been able to handle the voting, I have no doubt the final vote would have been 70% against GMOs and 30% in favor.

But as it stood, with their servers offline, the voting was halted at 62% no and 38% yes. Still a victory against the idea of GMOs, of course, but nowhere near the numbers that should have been recorded.

The Economist explains their server problem
"We had a technical problem with our site," explains Tom Standage, the Digital Editor for the magazine.

"During the last few days of the debate the address of the staging server was circulated on a number of environmental mailing lists, and on Twitter. This caused a sudden flood of "no" votes on the staging server, causing the underlying database to collapse because it was not load-balanced. That's why we've been unable to announce the vote in the usual way.

Instead, we have taken the votes from both servers and have added them up to calculate the final tally: 38% yes, 62% no.

...Now you know what happened and why the voting tallies appeared to be behaving so oddly. We apologise for the confusion." (http://www.economist.com/blogs/news...)

When the masses revolt against biotech...
The interesting part about this is found in the observation of what happens when the masses take action to protest their foods and seeds being poisoned by corporations. This mass online uprising took down The Economist's servers in about two hours. (Most NaturalNews readers never even got a chance to vote.) And this was after many days of the so-called "science bloggers" trying desperately to win the vote even before we found out about it.

If you think an online survey crashing from the sheer weight of opposition to GMOs is bad, just wait until there's a global crop failure caused by the unintended consequences of GMOs and the people suffer mass starvation as a result. If that scenario unfolds, you might see a mass violent uprising that could very well involve people marching on Monsanto's headquarters and quite literally burning it down out of anger and frustration.

When you mess with nature and deprive people of their right to seeds, crops and food, you'd better be willing to face some rather serious consequences. When corporations like Monsanto are playing God with the food supply, they're also playing God with people's lives. And if something goes terribly wrong that leads to a collapse in one or more food crops, I have a feeling the public isn't going to be very forgiving. I wouldn't want to be a Monsanto executive in the aftermath of such a scenario, that's for sure...

The Economist
Despite the glitches, it's good to know the Economist wasn't engaged in outright cheating on this survey. We've seen lots of cheating before. There were times in the past when NaturalNews readers were actually winning a survey, and the outfit running the survey would simply take it down, remove all the votes they didn't like, and put it back online with wildly different numbers. (A lot of online surveys are rigged from the start, which is why we normally don't even participate in them.)

We've seen cases where the science bloggers actually tried to intentionally falsify votes in our favor in order to try to make it look like we were cheating, and then they would protest that we were cheating! Note to the desperate scientism flaks: We don't need to cheat. We already represent the majority opinion on these matters, and we reach millions of people who oppose GMOs, who oppose water fluoridation, who oppose mandatory vaccines and who value truth and knowledge over corporate-sponsored ignorance and quackery.

Today's "scientism" followers (the cult worshippers who call themselves "science bloggers") don't value life, knowledge or truth. For some astonishing reason, they pick the most evil side of every issue. On the issue of GMOs, for example, they automatically side with Monsanto and DuPont, calling for more biotech Frankenseed interventions that threaten the very future of life on our planet.

On the issue of Big Pharma and the mass-drugging of world citizens with patented synthetic chemicals, the science bloggers of course side with the drug companies! Big Pharma and the FDA can do no wrong in their eyes, and the solution to health is, they say, found in prescribing more chemicals to more people!

If these people were living back in the 1950's, they would no doubt side with Big Tobacco, because the "science" at that time said cigarettes were actually good for you! The Journal of the American Medical Association, by the way, actually used to run full-page advertisements for cigarettes. And they were endorsed by doctors and scientists, too. (http://www.naturalnews.com/index-Ba...)

Gee, no wonder they keep losing all the legitimate polls and surveys. Does anyone still believe that modern medicine is working? Does anyone really think that the answer to the problems facing human civilization is to be found in more chemicals, more genetic alterations, more playing God with nature and more corporate control over our food, medicine, genes and ideas? (The science bloggers, by the way, also support corporate ownership of human genes, 20% of which are right now patented by corporations and universities. This is an affront to natural law and a crime against humanity...)

Science bloggers, by the way, do not actually represent science. They worship a cult called "scientism" that pushes a corporate agenda which seeks to concentrate power in the hands of the few while denying food, freedom and health to the people. This is the whole point about Monsanto being granted patents on seeds and even animals. It's also the whole point behind Senate Bill 510, which seeks to outlaw seed saving so that even a backyard gardener who tries to save her own seeds from a tomato plant could be arrested and imprisoned for doing so. (If you want to control the world, just control the seeds. That's what Monsanto is working towards, and the science bloggers are fully in support of this dark agenda...)

With issues like these, the future of our world is at stake. Sooner or later, the People are going to rise up and defend their futures against corporate domination and the Cult of Scientism. Today's poll results with The Economist are merely a small taste of things to come.

If you think overloading and (inadvertently) crashing one website survey is bad, just wait until the masses figure out how badly they've really been screwed by the corporate agenda to own and control their food, their seeds, their medicine and their futures. When the public wakes up to that, don't stand in their way.

[yeti]

Tom Standage, Digital Editor, The Economist Wrote:"During the last few days of the debate the address of the staging server was circulated on a number of environmental mailing lists, and on Twitter. This caused a sudden flood of "no" votes on the staging server, causing the underlying database to collapse because it was not load-balanced. That's why we've been unable to announce the vote in the usual way.

WTF?

Am I reading this right? Is he saying that they load balanced the servers based on which way people voted?

Anyone who does that is a fracking retard and needs to be fired. A database engine on a web site does not get balanced based on the data it stores. A database only records data, it is content agnostic. To balance servers, you just send each database transaction onto the next free server. You add more servers as the existing ones rise to their capacity. Too easy...

Obviously this clown knows nothing about servers, so he pulled this lame excuse out of his ass, and gave their game away in the process.

This incident supports my theory that most economists are a lot less intelligent than they think they are...

[rsol]

a little devils advocate.....

maybe he meant servers in a general term? perhaps what ever they had was too cpu intensive? some bad coders in the world....where did they get their web-space from? in house? may look shiny but could just be well kept crap.

[h3rm35]

Here's the full, original article from the economist website, including an update from today. I haven't read it, but it may clear up some issues. Personally, I think their "technical difficulties" are a bunch of bullshit, and they created them in order to kill off the momentum from people other than regular "Economist" readers. That being said, it's better to have all the info when looking into issues like this. Enjoy.

Quote:Biotechnology debate: The result

Nov 12th 2010, 16:48 by The Economist online

"This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory"

THE voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic modification in its current form—carried the day with 62% of the votes, against 38% for supporters of the motion.

This is a subject that arouses strong passions on both sides, as can clearly be seen in the comments, but I hope you still found the debate informative. I certainly did, in particular because of the comments from farmers themselves, on both sides of the argument. Neither a rapprochement between the two sides, nor a resolution of the arguments one way or another, seems likely any time soon. Thank you all for participating.

Moderator's note: The result is being announced in this rather unusual way (in the form of this blog post, rather than on the debate microsite) for an unusual reason; a reason that also explains why the voting tallies have appeared to leap around rather erratically during the debate. Several commenters pointed this out and suggested that this was evidence of foul play. In fact the explanation is much less exciting, and rather complicated: we had a technical problem with our site. Non-techies can stop reading here, but here are the full details for those who are interested.

Our debates are hosted at economist.com/debate, and we also have a "staging" server, where we prepare material for posting, at preview-debates.economist.com/debate/. This second server is only intended for internal use, but Google's crawlers managed to find it during the past few days and added it to Google's index.

As a result, people who searched for the debate were directed to one of two different versions of it. The staging server is set up identically to the main debate server, which means it also has its own voting mechanism. Votes were thus being tallied on two entirely separate servers; anyone who visited one, and then the other, would have seen different voting tallies. During the last few days of the debate the address of the staging server was circulated on a number of environmental mailing lists, and on Twitter. This caused a sudden flood of "no" votes on the staging server, causing the underlying database to collapse because it was not load-balanced. That's why we've been unable to announce the vote in the usual way.

Instead, we have taken the votes from both servers and have added them up to calculate the final tally: 38% yes, 62% no. (For completeness, the final tally on the main server was 46% yes, 54% no; on the staging server it was 35% yes, 65% no.) This technical problem has not affected the outcome, then (the motion was defeated); but now you know what happened and why the voting tallies appeared to be behaving so oddly. We apologise for the confusion.

Tom Standage
Digital editor, The Economist

Update Nov 17th: The debate server is now back up, and our technical team has combined the two sets of votes so that the voting tally displayed for this debate on the overview page is now correct.