The biotech industry is willing to tamper with our food supply, our kids' minds and our basic consumer rights.I am not sure when it became a consumer right to buy seedless watermelons but I am not an irrational progressive blogger, so I have poor grasp of things I know nothing about, like what the Founding Fathers were thinking when they left that bit out. Yet I have to give this guy for knowing his audience. Anti-science hippies love their emotional verbage, especially when it sets out to disparage anyone who deviates from their world view. Eating a modern banana (clones!) will apparently give children brain damage or maybe make them susceptible to Big Ag mind control. Or something. I don't know, who can figure this dross out?
Some people are too smart for your own good.Tinker, huh? Tinkerers in America are a little different than they are in Europe, where they are basically gypsies ("pikeys") who wander around doing odd jobs, but one core meaning is the same; amateurs. That's what Jim Hightower, syndicated writer and radio talk show host, thinks of science. Seriously, the people behind Andy Capp, Wizard of Id and other fine cartoons pay this guy to write and the anti-science audience paying for that content is three times as large as this actual science site. Clearly, science media was a bad idea on my part, I missed out on the big money. Their site is chock full of anti-Republican and pro-Democrat ads, which tells you which party hates biologists and science the most. Nature, in all its glorious, randomly mutated awesomeness, is good and biologists are bad. No surprise, given his distaste for science and his fetish for 'natural' foods (which are decidedly unnatural, but he doesn't know enough science to know that) that we can guess how he will vote in November. He'll vote for the anti-science party all over the ads on that site.
Food geneticists, for example. These technicians have the smarts to tinker with the inner workings of Momma Nature's own good foods -- but not the smarts to leave well enough alone.
 |  |
He does concede - let's face it, you'd have to have the intelligence of a rock not to - that science has done some okay things. Presumably like ending lots of deaths due to diseases and feeding the world. He just wishes science would not do anything now. Like feed the world. You see, he is living in a fairytale Utopia, where organic food can feed the world. And no organic food has any genetic modification (unless it is random cosmic rays doing it) and we are all fat and happy and DDT-free. In other words, he is living in a food-rich country, basically part of the agricultural 1%, and wants children in other countries to die for his progressive experiment.
if you are parent you may be worried about the plethora of highly questionable bio-engineered organisms that the profiteers have quietly been slipping into everything from snack foods to school lunches.Whatever. You know what my father ate in his school lunches? Lard. On homemade bread, with some salt. I get that he (and AlterNet and their audience) despises science - science isn't perfect, it is done by people, and some people are flawed - but school lunches are a lot better than when I was a kid and my lunches were a lot better than my dad's. Thanks, farmers, for not listening to these people when I was young, and making food affordable.
I'm thrilled that the progressive 1% can afford to shop at Whole Foods, just alarmed at their ability for self-deception. Fully 25% of imported certified 'organic' food is just conventional food anyway, and since organic food need only be 95% organic and can have dozens of inorganic ingredients if they are deemed 'essential' - including GMOs - then I am proud I am not educated by advertising the way writers and readers at AlterNet.org are.
Hightower is anti-beer, anti-vaccine, anti-steak, anti-science and, most importantly, anti-Republican. That last one was once enough to get you a fat audience in science blogging 10 years ago but those days are gone. People increasingly recognize that the Holy Trinity of Anti-Science Positions espoused by Progressive Mullahs (human embryonic stem cells, evolution, global warming) is not the extent of anti-science positions at all; in reality, when it comes to the overwhelmingly majority of science issues, the right-wing people of Mississippi are far more accepting of science than the left-wing people of Seattle are.
As you might expect, his article about how stupid and/or evil scientists are is a segue into supporting warning labels on genetically modified foods. Sorry, it is supposed to be framed as the 'right to know' campaign, not warning labels. But voters will be convinced. The left are masters at public relations and the biggest public relations trick they ever pulled off was convincing anyone Monsanto is good at PR.
But what he does not know is that if a true 'right to know' law about food were passed, and not one specifically written to exempt the organic industry, there would be nothing left without a warning label - which makes warning labels pointless.
Comments