If one believes the backers of mandatory labeling initiatives in Colorado and Oregon, Tuesday’s vote is simple common sense: It’s about the “right to know” what’s in our food.

This is the beguiling message pushed by a myriad of activists linked to such organizations as Right to Know GMO, Label GMOs and Just Label It. It’s powerful and superficially persuasive.

As happened in both California and Washington state referendums in recent years, what seemed like an easy path to victory for supporters of a mandatory GMO labeling law in Oregon has turned into a dog fight as the voting nears, while voters in Colorado appear poised to soundly reject the measure.

During the 1920s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became immensely popular churning out cartoons that depicted devices that performed simple tasks in impossibly indirect and convoluted ways.

In 1931, the Merriam-Webster dictionary even adopted the word “Rube Goldberg” as an adjective describing making something that should be simple incredibly complicated.

Welcome to Vermont’s fumbled efforts at drafting the rules for its mandatory GMO labeling law.

Greenpeace is set to launch a series of attacks against crop biotechnology this week. It has scheduled a news conference for Friday titled “Ecological Agriculture, A Climate Resilient Model of Agriculture: The Way Forward,” which purportedly makes  its case against vitamin-enhanced Golden Rice.

As the death toll of Ebola continues to rise, especially in the hard-hit West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the need for a viable cure is growing more and more urgent. Even more concerning is the possibility that once approved, vaccines may not be widely available for several months.

As often happens in times of medical crises, fringe groups come out from hiding–in this instance, organic activists in the form of the most high profile organic lobby group in the United States.