The Abdication of Establishment Science

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1. As I wrote in my post on science, science is the action of the people engaged in our democratic work toward our individual and community health and prosperity. The most important science was preceded by the empirical work of the active labor field, usually by regular people without any formal, specifically scientific training. Science has built upon this foundation. Therefore true science, practical science, starts with experimentation which leads to empirical success. Meta-knowledge of empirically established truth can then follow. For science the preliminary induction leads the way, with science as the theory induced and the patterns of deduction then building upon that. All this must be in the service of the people. Even if one disputes the moral character of science, one cannot dispute its need to possess a truth value, and the impossibility of its doing so the moment it diverges from the public good and becomes the tool of capitalism or of any other tyrannical hierarchy.

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Whether one sees science this way or in the more minimal sense of the scientific method, either way establishment science has abdicated. This is because it has fully embraced an ideology and framework which are antithetical to all human values, all truth values, all objectivity, all integrity. This framework is the corporate “science” paradigm. The US and most other governments, the corporate media, a large majority of STEM professionals and professionals in general, even many self-alleged radicals, regard the corporate science framework simply as what science “is”. Wherever we see an official or establishment type talking about science, he’s probably not talking about anything we’ve been told about a quest for truth or a scientific method. He’s talking precisely about “science” as dictated and controlled by corporations. Governments claim to respect science and derive policy from it, the media claims to report upon it, “supporters” claim advocacy of it, but these all are really propagators of corporate scientism, which is first of all a political and economic ideology, and for many a religion.

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2. What is this paradigm? It has fastened its vise grip from above and “below” through two mutually reinforcing processes. Through lobbying for corporate welfare in the form of pro-corporate government funding and strategic deployment of their own money, the corporations have gained control of academic science programs. Their control of agricultural education is especially complete. They’ve imposed their own norms as normative for education as such. They’ve rooted out most ideas of public service careers. Career paths all point to the corporate track. Government service is consciously seen as corporate service. The corporation is explicitly seen as “the client”. The regulator sees himself as a corporate agent. Regulatory agencies and corporations increasingly engage in de jure collaborative projects. Where necessary legislation further encourages or mandates the pro-corporate ideology of the regulator. The executive branch always provides very aggressive pro-corporate impetus. The TTIP and TPP would systematize this entire coordination process in an even more total way. The “revolving door” is barely distinguishable any more, the lines between government and corporation are already so blurred. Classical bribery is still rampant in the form of no-show jobs and speaking junkets for suspiciously high emoluments.

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All this leaves very little room for doubt or even for conceiving an alternative. The vast majority of STEM types never question corporate domination for a moment. Once you completely assimilate the profit motive and its accessories such as patents, and once you see the corporate executives who run this system as embodiments of the Fuhrerprinzip (Leadership Principle), it follows automatically that whatever kind of scientific framework and result these Leaders want is Science as such.

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What follows is that almost all working scientists, and certainly all who aspire to high positions in the hierarchy, envision their entire endeavor in terms of producing the results the corporation wants. They choose their projects and methodologies for these projects accordingly. They interpret their data accordingly. Where they generate unwelcome data they directly censor and suppress it, tendentiously rule it out as irrelevant, or fraudulently claim it really supports their thesis.

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That’s a sketch of the top-down corporate seizure of control of all scientific institutions. From another direction, that of the technician rank and file, we have their historically characteristic mercenary mentality which is always ready to serve existing power. Same for their inherently elitist, misanthropic, anti-democratic bent, including their fierce hatred for any kind of democratic oversight. This contrasts completely with their meek submission to regimented control where this comes from an authoritarian bureaucracy. Thus we see the contradiction between STEM disdain for non-credentialed citizens who comment on matters related or allegedly related to science, vs. their groveling endorsement of commentary and directives dispensed by non-credentialed corporate executives and politicians. It boils down to a mindset which is, prior to all content, authoritarian and anti-democratic. From there the ideology seamlessly ramifies itself as the religion of scientism and the political ideology of technocracy. Technocracy is really just a front for direct corporate dictatorship.

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When I call scientism a religion this is not a metaphor or rhetoric. Historically, scientism and technophilia are rooted in Christian extremism, and often remained overtly so through much of the twentieth century. Even among today’s scienticians who call themselves “atheists”, their intense religiosity is clear to see. Cults like artificial intelligence or “the singularity” are explicitly religious, while cults of eugenic creationism via genetic engineering (along with its companion junk science of genetic determinism) or “getting off the rock”, the scientism version of the Rapture, conceal their religious character only with great difficulty.

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Indeed, the STEM fraternity displays all the classic traits of religious fundamentalism. They’re fanatical and aggressively intolerant in principle, yet in their day to day actions and words they have no sense of truth or consistency at all. Actual living makes no difference because the promised land is “there” somewhere in the future and beyond the clouds. Where it comes to STEM types this psychological and ideological way of being is often called instrumental reason. This term sums it up well: One exalts “Reason” (or “Science”) as a transcendent value, and also tries to use it to get a job done. But where life actually happens, in deciding what is to be done in the first place, reason, truth, evidence, let alone any human value, mean nothing at all. One just follows orders and cashes one’s paycheck. All morality is referred to the divine beyond.

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It’s clear how well the scientism religion/ideology melds with the corporate program of total control, and how these mutually reinforce one another.

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As for the few practicing scientists who dare to question corporate rule in principle, and/or who design experiments in accord with regular notions of the scientific method rather than seeking to reinforce the corporate propaganda line, and who therefore accept corporate-adverse evidence as the real scientific data instead of censoring it, these are viciously assaulted by the attack dogs of the fraternity. Their mafia-type attitude where it comes to their version of Our Thing betrays their lack of self-confidence about their endeavor and exposes their knowledge that unless their framework is constantly enforced with lies and persecution of dissent it’ll be unmasked and destroyed. It also demonstrates the fundamentalist character of their commitment to the paradigm, their religious cult faith that corporate “science” is Science itself, the god to which they’ve dedicated their being.

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And so as if crushed in a vise, institutionalized science (and professionalism in general) have surrendered completely. They’ve completely embraced the corporate science paradigm and function completely within it.

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3. We can briefly survey a few examples of how the corporate science paradigm manifests.

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*Peer review is increasingly turned upside down, with the reviewers now policing not truth-based scientific quality but faithfulness to corporate norms and needs. The more pro-corporate papers one has published, especially those done to order and paid for by the corporations, the more he’s invited to review subsequent papers. In this way corporate science reproduces and reinforces itself as more corporate science cadres become the reviewers and can more enforce the corporate line. In this way the rich get richer, metaphorically and literally. If from the perspective of the corporate science paradigm peer review “fails” in an important case, the practitioners can take more rigorous measures to “correct” the result. In an extremity even a duly peer reviewed study can be scrubbed from the record if subject to enough anti-scientific political pressure. This then puts a chill into researchers and funders, putting them on notice that the “scientific” establishment will not tolerate actual scientific studies on GMOs and other products critical for the corporations, only rigged ones.

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We still see the fetish of “peer review” cropping up often among GMO critics, but this is misguided. Peer review can’t be relied upon any more than any other institution of establishment “science”. In this radically corrupted environment we have to take any alleged piece of science on a case-by-case basis, judging according to its transparency (100% is required), methodology (for example, food safety research must be of a duration which encompasses the full life cycle of the animal subjects*; this rules out the most common fraudulent method), who performed the research, and who paid for it.

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At the same time the practitioners assert protocols for rationalizing corporate secrecy where it comes to adverse data. From any reality-based point of view there’s no such thing as “secret science”, and data which is kept secret is automatically ruled out of science. Those such as corporations and regulators who claim to base policy on secret science are openly proclaiming their contempt for science and truth, and openly broadcasting their character as liars and con men. We the people can reject all they say and assume the worst about what the secret data really indicates. This is a basic part of rational method. But among regulators, the corporate media, and evidently the vast majority of STEM types, the truth value of “secret science” is an article of religious faith. This is tantamount to a direct assertion that science is whatever the corporation says it is.

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The same goes for the practice, institutionalized under the corporate science paradigm, of the regulator letting the corporation police itself and accepting the corporation’s own account as the actual state of “science”. But this is fundamentally irrational in principle, since a rational person would never trust a sociopathic corporation to certify the safety of its own profitable actions. That’s irrational in theory, and then there’s the fact that corporations like Monsanto or Dow are historically proven to be systematic liars. We know as an empirically proven fact that anything a chemical corporation says about its product’s safety is a lie. Again, rational method would never trust an interested party to give its own unevidenced account, would never believe a proven liar, and would automatically reject anything the proven liar claims, where the evidence is not 100% transparent and public. The result of such an irrational, idiotic process can never have anything remotely to do with real science, and in fact comprises the radical rejection of all scientific standards.

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In these ways we can see how radically irrational the corporate science paradigm is in principle. Of course its practice is dictated by its contempt for reason or truth and its total commitment to authoritarian power and greed. Corporate “science” is simply the absolute corruption and abdication of all allegedly scientific institutions and the vast majority of so-called scientific practitioners. Under this framework science has gone completely through and beyond the looking glass, where the corporate Humpty Dumpty intones, “science is whatever I say it is.” The Big Lie = Truth.

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[*An upcoming post will discuss whether it’s worth sacrificing more animals to the quest to get a hearing from establishment “science”.]

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*Related to the doctrine of Secret Science, and also indicative of the scienticians’ disregard of day-to-day truth norms, is their belief that scientific claims can be made, and science-related policy formulated, by anonymous cadres, the “science” equivalent of hooded judges. In public debate as well, anonymous attacks on independent science are standard, whether these come from industry forums such as AgBioForum or from smears published by regulators.

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*Under corporate “science” we see bizarre terminological inversions. For example “skepticism”, which in regular English means not taking things on faith, especially obvious lies, now often is used in an Orwellian way to mean the exact opposite: “Blind faith in whatever the corporate PR office says.” As with other kinds of fundamentalists, the corporate science fundamentalists use words to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, or in ways which have no meaning at all. Perhaps this is why they can so easily keep regurgitating direct lies which were disproven many years ago, such as that GMOs reduce pesticide use or yield better than non-GM crops. It’s also why they consistently can talk about non-existent hoaxes like golden rice or the GM Kenyan sweet potato as if these fairy tales actually exist. Again, to a fundamentalist all “truth” is bound up in the religious idol which is removed to the realm of the ideal, while the actual day-to-day real world is merely the realm of Satan anyway. Therefore there’s no need to care about the difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies. The implication, which the corporate science practitioner vigorously exercises, is that there’s no reason not to lie relentlessly in the day-to-day world, in the service of the idol.

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Therefore it’s especially ironic that many of these pathologically lying religious fundamentalists pride themselves on their “atheism”.

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*Under constant pressure from reality, this cult has improvised the doctrine of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, as a further layer of insulation from truth. Now there’s to be regular evidence (that is, pro-corporate “evidence”, especially anything produced by hierarchical establishment “science”), and disenfranchised unevidence (anything which indicates against the corporate party line, especially where this comes from independent science). Now it’s demanded that the latter produce itself in an “extraordinary” quantity in order to get a hearing. Of course the extraordinary amount necessary is never quantified, and as we’ve already seen no amount would ever be enough. Real science has already amassed vastly more than enough actual evidence against agricultural poisons to convince any rational person.

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In truth, real science recognizes only one kind of evidence and judges it according to the methods by which it was gathered, in the same way that real justice would impartially assess the testimony of a homeless person and a billionaire who are in dispute. But as we see with the “extraordinariness” doctrine, the corporate science paradigm with its extreme pro-corporate bias exemplifies the kind of “justice” which has always favored billionaires.

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(Actually, if we take the extraordinariness doctrine at face value, then since there’s zero evidence in favor of GMOs, only dogma and lies, and vast agronomic evidence against them along with substantial evidence of their health dangers, it would follow that by now it must require extraordinary evidence for a pro-GM contention to get a hearing. Here, as with credentialism, I propose we hold the pro-GMO activists to their own proclaimed standard.)

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*Under the corporate science paradigm, this general bifurcation of science based on whether it is being practiced by the corporate establishment or by independent practitioners, by those who accept complete corporate oversight and control of their scientific practice vs. those who resist or reject such oversight, is extended to access to research materials themselves. From the beginning of the genetic engineering era the corporations have allowed access to research material only to those researchers who are willing to accept corporate control over their work. This is one of the main purposes of enclosing the materials by patents. The general acceptance of this intellectual property regime on the part of rank and file scientific practitioners and STEM types is in itself a strong barometer of their faithful adherence to the corporate “science” framework. According to traditional norms of science, such enclosure and prior restraint would have been considered outrageous and automatically non-scientific and anti-scientific. But today’s science establishment accepts and helps enforce this enclosure as an integral part of Science as such.

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*The extraordinariness doctrine is a manifestation of a more general phenomenon of propaganda and policy under corporate rule, where the more obviously malign or insane a policy is, the less it’s held to any kind of reality-based standards whatsoever. Corporate science cultists here exemplify the classical “I believe because it’s absurd.” Poison-based agriculture joins Wall Street and the energy extraction sector as a prime beneficiary of this forbearance.

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By contrast, system cultists demand 100% a priori theoretical perfection from any dissenter or advocate of any alternative to corporate rule.

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In science, this is typical of how rank and file practitioners and propagandists work under the dominant paradigm. Again we see how, for those within the framework, the truth or falsity of anything is irrelevant, only how faithfully it reinforces the corporate party line and assists the corporate prerogative on its way.

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*This is demonstrated by the complete fraudulence of their work where it comes to such harmful and shoddy, but profitable, products as GMOs. No government or corporation has ever performed a legitimate, full-length toxicity or cancer study, or an epidemiological study (in spite of requirements in Europe and elsewhere to do so), upon any GMO. They’ve done only short-term (“subchronic”) trials which measure only industrial parameters like fast weight gain. According to pro-GMO activists, smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer because the cancer rate among 14-year old smokers is negligible. These industry trials generally include fraudulent methodology like the use of “historical control groups” to drown out any toxicity or cancer data which does manifest. The researchers regularly engage in such fraudulent procedures as replacing animal subjects mid-study or obtaining leftover subject material from unrelated studies and pawning it off as new. They directly suppress adverse results or else define these away through such bogus classifications as “biological relevance” or “normal variation”, which are ideological measures meant to render as unevidence anything the corporation doesn’t like.

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Every compendium of so-called “studies” sponsored by the pro-GMO activists – the Snell report, the EU SAFOTEST report, the Nicolia survey, the “Trillion Meal Study”, GENERA, the “GMO Pundit” list, etc. ad nauseum – is nothing but another list of these same bogus industry trials.

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So the positive scientific evidence for the safety of GMOs is zero.

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Meanwhile we have the very strong implicit evidence of the self-evident fact that the only reason governments and corporations refuse to perform real full-length safety studies is that they’re terrified of what the results will be. This is proof that Monsanto and the US government believe the products of genetic engineering are dangerous to health.

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In all these ways we have a classical example of a dominant paradigm “science” regime which ruthlessly polices the day to day actions of its practitioners in order to obtain the result pre-determined according to ideological norms.

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*A particularly vile dereliction of corporate science is its massively criminal violation of the principle that scientific experimentation requires informed consent. Obviously the vast human feeding experiment GMOs are now undergoing never obtained consent from the billions of human beings it has turned into guinea pigs. Worse, the experimenters and their supporters in the professional and academic ranks want to withhold all the information they can by opposing real safety testing, suppressing adverse data from the inadequate tests which industry has done, slandering independent science, and opposing labeling.

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*An effective catch-22 is to render epidemiological study impossible by systematically keeping the presence of GMOs and other poisons in the food supply incalculable, though such suppression of data as refusing to label foods containing them. This anti-science obscurantism then sets up what are pure lies from a scientific as well as political point of view, where the pro-GMO activists claim to know that “people have been eating GMOs and aren’t getting sick”. What’s really happened is that with the system’s suppression of labeling information and subsequent briar-patch refusals to perform epidemiological study, science has been willfully and systematically driven out.

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*In general there’s been a complete ethical collapse among “scientists” in their rejection of the rational and human-oriented precautionary principle (rational in principle and in light of the historical record, as we noted above regarding the lack of trustworthiness and known psychopathy of the corporations, as well as for the purely scientific reasons Nassim Taleb recently discussed), their refusal to demand or exercise objectivity in discourse, or to disclose conflicts of interest. This collapse is simply the process of STEM types completely assimilating the values of their corporate masters. Indeed, from the perspective of the corporate science paradigm, there is no conflict of interest to disclose since the science interest = the corporate interest. The very concept of a “conflict” becomes meaningless, and those who still refer to such a thing are talking in a foreign language.

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*To sum these up as a few basics:

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– The refusal of the corporate “science” paradigm to perform legitimate safety tests is implicit proof that the corporations and governments know or believe that the true scientific evidence would be devastating for them, their system, and their products. The fact that in place of real science they build such a massive structure of fraud and lies confirms this proof. GMOs and other agricultural poisons are known by the government and corporations to have extremely bad effects on human and animal health, the environment, and on agronomy.

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– The corporation always lies, and we can and should reject out of hand anything it says unless it makes complete public disclosure of 100% of the evidence. Again, the fact that it resorts to Secret Science proves the corporation’s malign intent and how bad the evidence against the corporation must be.

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– There’s no such thing as Secret Science. Any appeal to it or claim that it can exist at all is automatic proof that we’ve left any realm of legitimate science and are dealing purely with ideological liars and con men who are perpetrating simple consumer fraud.

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– In their embrace of all these things the practitioners, publicists (including mainstream “journalism”, which adheres to a parallel corporate journalism paradigm; same for academia and the professions), and fanboys demonstrate their opportunistic and/or religious commitment to a purely ideological framework which has zero relationship to any traditional idea of science, and which represents the radical repudiation and destruction of all the things science is supposed to stand for. The lot of them are nothing more or less than corporate propagandists who through their words and other representations and actions are full participants in corporate crimes against humanity.

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4. We can apply our standard corporatism template to the corporate scienticians, as we’ve previously applied it to regulators and system NGOs:

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***1. The corporate prerogative is normative. The corporate project must go forward. Corporate power, corporate control, corporate rule are to be taken for granted as “the way of the world”, the best way or at any rate the only way.

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***2. Scientific institutions and research must be controlled by the corporations or by corporate-oriented regulators or educational institutions. They must be designed to serve corporate propaganda goals, produce corporate-friendly results, practitioners must be willing to practice their profession under corporate supervision and be subject to corporate censorship. Where political pressure forces it, such as in the case of weed and insect pest resistance, the corporations may loosen the reins a little, and in these enclaves the practitioners may have some tiny space to “do real science”, though even then they are subject to persecution from the scientism mob. Everyone must join the mob ranks to condemn bona fide independent science which deviates from the paradigm and produces results which firmly contradict the party line and which, if admitted as the state of science, would harm corporate profits.

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Through all this the “science” establishment must pretend to stand for real science and to be real scientists holding the system accountable. As much as anyone else the corporate scienticians claim that science is objective, rational, fact-based, impartial, and in the service of humanity. Therefore this pose is a systematic fraud which is only pretending to prevent or correct system “abuses”, let alone the depredations of organized crime. In practice a few stray studies don’t change anything. So far the WHO’s IARC finding that glyphosate causes cancer, for all the media noise including the mob howling against it, is having almost zero effect on the ideology or policy of Western governments, universities, or media.

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***3. Then put the imprimatur of “science” on the structure of fraud and lies and tell the people to go back to sleep. Tell them to trust the “experts”. Apply the meaningless but polemically potent “anti-science” epithet to any deviation.

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5. This is the current state of establishment “science”. This means that science as an established intellectual framework and collective endeavor, as something which is trustworthy, legitimate, and possessing any rational authority, has abdicated. All that is left of science, the true science, are some fugitive, persecuted independent scientists, as well as the vastly greater range of empirical practitioners who increasingly infuse their work with agroecological science, albeit with almost no help, and plenty of hindrance and harm, from establishment sources. And yet in spite of all this the evidence is clear and overwhelming: Across the board, in general and at every point of detail, science affirms and supports agroecology and Food Sovereignty and condemns the failures, poison, and destruction wrought by corporate agriculture.

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6. A de jure, self-conscious scientific movement won’t be identifiable until a new framework rises to challenge and overthrow the established dereliction. Likely wellsprings of this movement will be ecology, systems analysis, chaos theory and other disciplines at the vanguard of holistic thinking, most of all the thinkers and practitioners of agroecology, all of these infused with the spirit of science.

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7. My focus upon corporate agriculture is among other things a case study in this general war of ideas. Science and scholarship have been hijacked by corporate power. The ability of GMOs and pesticides to continue their march to world domination in spite of their complete practical failure and proven health detriments is the most extreme example of this modern evil. If we were to sum it all up in a single epitome, we can call it the final conflict of totalitarian eugenics vs. organic philosophy, science, and society. This is the basic status of the war of ideas and the war of actions.

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The abolition of GMOs and pesticides is necessary on health, environmental, biodiversity, and political/economic grounds. The same goes for corporate agriculture as such, and for corporate rule as such. Humanity’s future will depend upon, among other things, our will to take back our science and reason from these ideological criminals. Since the corporate scientific establishment refuses to police itself, we the people shall have to rescind our confidence in it and our tolerance of it, and we are doing so.

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With the rise of intense specialization in science and technical engineering, the only way it could work for society to invest any confidence, repose any faith, in technical personnel like scientists would be if each discipline were to be aggressively self-policing, since beyond some obvious basics we’ll discuss here, there’s no way anyone outside the discipline can police within it.

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We now know this self-policing did not happen, and given the economic authoritarianism of industrialism and its technical knowledge, it was probably impossible. Since we know the technicians cannot be trusted, our only option is to retract our confidence in their whole endeavor. Where it comes to them all we can do is empirically judge prospects and results. If a prospect and result are beneficial we can allow technicians to continue along a path. If prospect looks bad or a result is bad, we must not allow them to continue. In any case, decisions about technical education, provision of social resources for technological actions, and tolerance for any particular action, must be 100% in the hands of the people.

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Since the establishment has abdicated all responsibility and disavowed even the most basic standards of fidelity to scientific truth and simple human decency, where it comes to such dire threats to human health, we the people shall have to take back science from the hands of those who only abuse and repress it. We must expose corporate scientism for what it is and rout it from the earth. We must rebuild science from the soil up, as we, the true scientific practitioners, spent thousands of years doing in the first place.

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Fortunately, the great work of human science is still intact and at our service, as soon as we the people choose to regain control of it. This control, exercised as part of reclaiming our politics and our economies, is the only thing we really need to rebuild here. To do so all we need to do is rescind our confidence in the elitist technical establishment and revoke all political and economic support for it. This is part of fighting for the abolition of GMOs, and this abolitionism in turn is part of driving out the traitors to science and redeeming science as servant of the democratic people.

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Which brings us to our final point on science vs. corporate anti-science. Scientists, however much pride they take in their endeavor, are humble about the limits of this endeavor. The recognize the much greater uncertainty which encompasses whatever seems certain. Most of all, assuming they respect democracy, they recognize that all control belongs in the hands of the people. They see themselves as advisers of the people, helping to make political decisions.

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But where technicians side against the people, telling mercenary lies on behalf of corporate power, they abrogate the role of scientists and cast away any right to that name.

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But we still have real scientists, and we have this statement, as well as the great and ongoing work of independent researchers on GMOs, fracking, and the many other corporate assaults which are bolstered by the lies of junk “science”. We have the work of these scientists counteracting these lies, doing what they can to ensure that in the end science shall live up to its role as a servant of democracy and watchdog of human health and freedom.

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Plenty more fleshing all this out as we go.

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