The Attack on the Leopold Center and the Destruction of Science

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Power dictates what kind of science is done. Most often, research which could benefit humanity is never funded in the first place, and scientists are indoctrinated against seeking to perform such research. Of the potentially infinite number of lines of scientific inquiry, humans can choose only a tiny fraction to pursue. This choice is almost never made on rational/scientific grounds. On the contrary, the choice is made on political and economic grounds and according to political and economic goals. Especially in the modern era of scientific professionalization and specialization, this choice is almost always made by existing political/economic elites. The axiom, “In any era the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class”, is nowhere more true than where it comes to how technology and science are chosen. STEM education takes place within the framework that considers corporate control and corporate profiteering to be normative. This is the water in which it swims, and it’s a rare cadre who even becomes conscious, let alone asks questions.

 

Less commonly, the system does provide some resources for true scientific inquiry. By this I mean, research which is neutral from the point of view of whether its results will support or condemn capitalist activity. Of course this institutional support is never more than pennies compared to the billions of dollars of public money distributed for avowedly pro-corporate research, i.e. “science” as corporate welfare. But even this piddling amount, which nevertheless is consistently the best investment the establishment ever makes from any objective point of view, is always at great risk of assault by the representatives of corporate power. Today Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture is slated to be killed off by rerouting most of its funding.

 

The Iowa state legislature, owned by agribusiness and presiding over the complete destruction of the state’s communities, economy, soil, and environment, just voted to starve the Leopold Center this way. Advocates of sustainable agriculture and real advocates of science are now trying to get the governor to veto the bill.

 

The modest amount of legislated funding for the Center will instead be redirected to agribusiness interests. This is typical of the massively lopsided funding structure which is dominant everywhere. Few universities have anything remotely like a Leopold Center in the first place but have always been 100% pro-corporate in their funding and research. The Gates Foundation is typical of pro-corporate “philanthropy” in giving a measly few dollars for what are allegedly “sustainable agriculture” projects. It then touts these for propaganda purposes in order to make its actions look scientific and responsive to the public good even as the vast majority of its disbursements are for pro-corporate projects. In a typical example, in the form of Cornell University’s “Alliance for Science” corporate philanthropy and a corporatized university collaborate to set up a junk science propaganda bureau on behalf of the corporate product genre, GMOs. Much of the funding comes from the Gates Foundation. With such gambits they’re following the longstanding pattern of the US government’s foreign aid scams. Almost all USAID money and “food aid” policy goes to pro-corporate and pro-globalization initiatives. USAID funds cosmetically “sustainable” and “eco-friendly” projects only for propaganda purposes, and once they’re away from the media eye these projects are often scams and always come under agency pressure to conform to corporate norms. See Food First’s World Hunger for copious details of USAID’s chicanery.

 

What does all this mean? Monsanto and the other giants of agribusiness have extracted massive profits. Why do they need a cent of publicly funded R&D help, let alone such a monumental level of corporate welfare? What’s more, in recent years these corporations have been dismantling their own research programs. This is in fact an admission of the intellectual and scientific bankruptcy of the entire industrial agricultural endeavor. In every reality-based way corporate industrial agriculture is a complete failure at every good it promised to deliver, is obscenely wasteful, and is horrifically destructive of human communities, real economies, the environment, and the soil and genetic basis of all future agriculture.

 

The only thing propping up the whole destructive mess is the current regime of entrenched power. Governments and corporations have enough concentrated power to enforce the domination of corporate industrial agriculture through economic and physical brute force, and that’s all they have. Even this system of force keeps faltering, and the elites keep being forced to concentrate power even further in order to maintain their brute momentum.

 

Clearly the day has come where actual technological research has reached the point of total attenuation and diminished returns, while science long ago disavowed industrial agriculture as a destructive failure. The day has come where the elites of the system no longer have any use at all for actual science. When an Iowa legislator flippantly says that the Leopold Center “has completed its mission” he’s speaking far more broadly and profoundly than he knows. Indeed from the corporate point of view all of science has completed its mission. At the same time their use of the idea of “science” as a fraudulent theme for propaganda and organization is becoming increasingly critical. This corporate propaganda project goes with the attempts of the scientism religion to sustain and aggrandize itself. Here we see the core of how corporate power and pseudo-science fundamentalism increasingly find their interests and goals to be identical.

 

 

Since power dictates what kind of science is done, it also dictates how truly rational and rigorous the practices are, and how honest and forthcoming the practitioners are about the results. The result is the same age-old practice of power: Establishment “science”, having been chosen to protect and increase the power of elites, is also practiced in order to bring about the elites’ desired result, not the result that rationality in search of truth would attain. The result is then publicized, not in an open, honest, descriptive way, but as a form of political propaganda, with all the usual propaganda methods applied to it, from suppression to secrecy to cherry-picking to distortion to tendentious interpretation to flat-out lies.

 

Therefore the Cornell Alliance’s pseudo-science is far more typical of today’s corporate science establishment than is any legitimate scientific research. The astronomically lopsided funding imbalance reflects this, assaults on the few legitimate scientific institutions like the Leopold Center reflect this, and most of all the near-consensus among system types that there’s simply no science left to be done at all wherever corporate PR themes are normative reflects this. Cornell and Gates, and the cultist fanboys who sign on to the lists circulated by the Cornell website, are smug in their fundamentalist assurance that whatever the Monsanto PR department decrees is the essence of science, no more and no less.

 

This is also the religious faith of the pro-corporate cadres and fanboys who “marched for science”. Where are they when it comes time to fight for a beleaguered practitioner of science like the Leopold Center? They’re nowhere to be seen because they’re part of the corporate consensus which believes that science = money and money = science. They’re part of the corporate science paradigm which decrees: Science is nothing more or less than whatever the corporations say it is. By now all of corporate science, which means almost all institutional science, including all research programs, is nothing but propaganda, part of a massive lie machine.

 

We see the basic fact. Where it comes to agronomic and ecological science, at the very least they don’t want to know. The corporate-dominated system doesn’t want to know, the average scientist and “marcher for science” doesn’t want to know, the average voter doesn’t want to know. If they wanted to know, the Leopold Center wouldn’t be getting the axe. If they wanted to know, the Leopold Center would be far more lavishly funded, and there would be hundreds of university centers just like it. If they wanted to know, they wouldn’t be actively or tacitly supporting Big Ag’s publicly funded lie machine. And this leads us to the fact that the system goes far beyond not wanting to know. It actively, systematically suppresses truth and all legitimate inquiry which would seek truth. The corporate system and the scientific establishment which is its helpmate together comprise a complete culture of the lie.

 

 

Therefore it’s easy to see why the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture is so odious, not just to corrupt legislators but to the whole culture of scientism and corporate “science”. Its founding mission, as encoded in the 1987 Iowa Groundwater Protection Act, is triply scientific in the true sense of the term and therefore abhorrent to corporate science and those who are religiously committed the paradigm:

 

(1) Identify the negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts of existing agricultural practices, (2) research and assist the development of alternative, more sustainable agricultural practices, and (3) inform the agricultural community and general public of the Center’s findings. It is important to recognize that this mandate creates, by design, a dynamic tension between conventional and alternative forms of agriculture. This tension is a healthy part of the Center’s work; it does not indicate the Center is failing to fulfill its mission or communicate effectively. The Center has a particular responsibility to focus on the environmental problems of agriculture and their solution.

 

According to the concept of the scientific method there is in fact supposed to be intense, thorough-going dynamic tension within the scientific community as everyone always works to see if they can falsify the work of everyone else. The fact that today’s corporate and scientific establishment and their parrots in the media and among techno-fanboys find such tension and falsification work to be intolerable is proof that there’s little left of legitimate science within the system framework. Within the limits of establishment research and publicity frameworks, we’re currently in a post-science and pre-science era where actual science has no room left. Only when the forces of human and ecological opposition become kinetic and destroy this destructive system will they open up the space for human innovation, including scientific innovation, to resume. But today we live in the time of the total bottleneck. The corporate system will do all it can to prevent every human and ecological attempt to restore the balance and resume human and evolutionary freedom.

 

 

Therefore, the Leopold Center is being targeted in part because it challenges the culture of lying and debunks the lies. It debunks the lies of industrial agriculture and exposes its failures and destructiveness. But we can’t stress enough that the Leopold Center’s primary activity is not this direct debunking. Rather, the Center assists and helps fund the rising community food sector which Big Ag rightly sees as its mortal enemy. The Center is targeted for assassination not because of its criticism, but because of its affirmative role toward the necessary great global transformation to agroecology.

 

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

Note on the Rising Ecological Science and Practice

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An example of the right idea and correct design.

 

 

In most cases where anyone talks about renewable energy it’s still completely in the service of the wrong idea: Extreme energy consumption toward general productionism and wasteful consumptionism. “Renewable energy” is merely supposed to replace (in reality, supplement) fossil fuels toward the goal of feeding the extreme consumption maw.

 

And then this wrong idea automatically drives bad design. Renewable energy is conceived in terms of concentrated solar panels and industrial wind farms, all of it of course under corporate control. (And all of it dependent on a foundation of continued fossil fuel extraction and burning.) Massive electricity production, massive electricity consumption, all to be used as wastefully and destructively as possible. They even want to continue with the personal car, even though this requires using the propaganda meme of “renewables” in the service of what are really fracking cars, coal cars, nuke cars. Social and engineering design doesn’t get more stupid and pernicious than wanting to use electricity to power such self-indulgent luxury transportation in the first place, and it was inevitable that the whole thing would be nothing but a pure fraud. A Prius is exactly the same product as a Hummer and exactly as ecologically and culturally destructive.

 

 

We know the corporate science paradigm generates only waste and destruction. What kind of science and engineering will be constructive for the human and ecological future? This goes with the question of what constitutes real science and in what way science can be restored to its proper, constructive role as a tool for the benefit of humanity and helpmate of human well-being.

 

Science and engineering must focus on the most constructive result within the framework of low energy consumption, low greenhouse gas emissions, low-maintenance technology, resiliency, robustness, and which does not destroy carbon sinks or in any other way harm the environment. Optimally, it’ll contribute to rebuilding sinks. This is the science which will be constructive and beneficial toward the necessary ecological human future.

 

These criteria are dictated by the finitude of fossil fuels, surging climate chaos, the acidification of the oceans, the mass eradication of biodiversity, the imminent collapse of the soils, and other looming environmental collapses. We must learn to live harmonious with the ecology or die. We’ve also learned that humanity cannot co-exist with corporations and therefore with any technological deployment which is inherently high-maintenance and hierarchical. Science and engineering which would benefit humanity would focus on inherently low-maintenance, decentralized, democratic technologies. As Auden wrote at the beginning of WWII, a war which never ended, “We must love another or die.”

 

Obviously these criteria rule out “hi-tech agriculture”, which is mutually exclusive with all of these, as well as any development or deployment of high-maintenance technology. It rules out anything which assumes globalization, since modern globalization is mutually exclusive with low energy consumption and low emissions, and as the most fully developed form of corporate domination it’s mutually exclusive with human innovation and freedom.

 

Agroecology is the gold standard for a fully developed science and set of practices which superbly fulfills all these necessary specifications.

 

 

I write about the future of agriculture and food as Peak Oil, climate chaos, environmental collapse, and extreme cultural and political volatility impend. Others must take up the corresponding tasks to propagate the necessary ideas for other essential sectors.

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

You Can’t Keep Scamming People Who Don’t Want to Be Scammed

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Corporations and reformers always come together for what matters most.

 

 

(This is just a short piece. It’s a foretaste of a longer treatment I have in the works dealing with the pathology of hankering for “more and better testing.”)

 

 

We see where the seemingly permanent rut of fetishizing “more data” and “more testing” gets one. After endless begging by people who aren’t capable of understanding what the EFSA’s cover-up means and going from there, the EFSA finally, grudgingly, released a portion of its hitherto “secret science” to a few carefully selected scientist and public advocate recipients. The result, according to Corporate Europe Observatory’s survey of the collaborating scientists:

 

“The data is very difficult to handle and cannot be used for publication, making it impossible for scientists to use.”

 

In other words it’s a scam which has found all too many voluntary collaborators and all too few intelligent and principled denouncers. This was predictable and predicted. Any scientist with integrity would boycott this fake “disclosure” and publicly denounce it as a scam, for the exact reasons detailed in this piece.

 

Here’s a brief description of the EFSA’s “disclosure”: The documents are image PDFs which cannot be machine-searched or used with other software; the documents are grossly redacted, including the summary, methodology and conclusions; the release came with a threat that any recipient who publishes any part of it might be sued by the industry for violating intellectual property law. “So we did not publish it for now…”

 

To correct the headline, this most definitely is not “better than nothing”, it is worse, nor “could [it] in principle allow limited scrutiny on the agency’s glyphosate assessment work, and some insights”. Why anyone would be willing to settle for “limited scrutiny” is beyond me, but at any rate we see how it doesn’t allow even that, but rather scrutiny skewed according to Monsanto’s specifications.

 

But instead of dealing with this as the self-evident fraud it is, the piece and the collaborating scientists treat it as some kind of brain teaser.

 

 

What’s truly disturbing about even the seemingly more honest and socially responsible scientists isn’t just their bottomless political naivete which allows them to be so easily manipulated this way, but the way incidents like this highlight how existentially corrupt even they are. Any true scientist automatically rejects “secret science” as inadmissible by definition and rejects anything short of 100% public disclosure as unacceptable. This is non-negotiable, and no true scientist or public advocate would collaborate in any kind of fraud which flouts this non-negotiable baseline. But here we see yet again how our “reformers” endorse secret science, consider its existence negotiable and acceptable, and merely decry some “excesses”. Many of them see themselves as part of the technocratic elite and merely want to be accepted by the corporate establishment. That’s why they’re willing to serve as specially selected recipients of otherwise still secret information instead of demanding full public release as non-negotiable. To use a metaphor commonly used by political traitors to describe themselves, they merely want “a seat at the table” and nothing more. This is yet another proof of wanting to make a deal to co-exist with Monsanto.

 

I’m not aware of any of the specially selected recipients who rejected the release on the grounds I cite here. Evidently Monsanto selected the recipients well.

 

And to repeat the obvious fact of rationality and political tactics, secret science and covering up the facts is strict automatic proof that whatever evidence the corporations and regulators have is adverse to the product. Therefore the very fact that Monsanto and the EFSA have felt the need to resort to secrecy is proof that they know or suspect glyphosate causes cancer. It’s a clear admission of guilt on their part.

 

The tactical implications are obvious for anyone who’s really serious about abolishing these poisons and not just blowing smoke. We relentlessly denounce the system for its secrecy and, as I just did here, emphasize how secret science in itself is proof of the harmfulness of the product. As a matter of course we demand complete publication and a complete end to the cover-up. But since we know from history that any concession from the regulator and/or corporation will be fraudulent, we pre-emptively reject, on principle, anything short of full, 100% uncensored public disclosure, and we refuse any cooperation with any such scam. On the contrary, we redouble the condemnation. The EFSA’s fake disclosure only proves further that whatever they’re hiding damns glyphosate.

 

To restate the basic fact: We have far more than enough evidence which rationally proves that glyphosate causes cancer. By the strict proof of the system’s cover-ups and secret science and systematic refusal to conduct legitimate safety studies we also have proof that governments and corporations know or believe that glyphosate causes cancer. We don’t need more evidence, we need much better and more relentless, disciplined, cumulative communication of the evidence we do have.

 

This is also true of all other pesticides, all of which are cancer agents. And it’s true of glyphosate’s many other health ravages. And it’s true of GMOs. In these cases as well, the rote call for “more testing”, “better testing”, is at best procrastination on the part of those who have no idea what to do. In many cases it’s worse than this, intentional delaying and gate-keeping tactics.

 

 

 

The only thing the EFSA’s fake disclosure accomplished was to provide yet another lesson in how lukewarm most critics of poisonism still are. The EFSA hopes it’ll also allay some of the weaker-minded criticism and reassure the public. Those who collaborate are trying to assist the EFSA and Monsanto in this.

 

I’ll close with the observation that this isn’t just about the abolition struggle. Anyone who cares about the integrity of science itself must regard the campaign of secret science as an abhorrent scourge. Here too one must be an abolitionist. At the very least, one must never be weak, wavering, willing to compromise and collaborate on such a fundamental point. This point on secret science is so fundamental that anyone who would compromise here certainly would compromise anywhere and has no firm principle at all. It’s clear, on both practical and principled grounds, that the one and only valid position on “secret science” is total rejection and refusal to countenance anything short of 100% public transparency.

 

Have I been too severe in this piece? Well, we’ll see if anyone learns a lesson from the incident and publicly expresses that lesson. But if they persist on their “more and better testing” co-existence course, we already know the truth. Persistence Proves Intent, always.

 

 

 

 

The Corporate Science Establishment Vs. the Scientific Method

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Conclusion first – experiment afterwards! In fact genetic engineering is nothing but mass non-consensual human experiment and religiously pre-determined “conclusion”, with zero concern for data which doesn’t fit the dogma. Nor is any hypothesis or scientific theory ever involved. There is no science of genetic engineering.

 

 

What is scientific method? Science is not qualitatively different from other belief systems, but is part of the same general complex as philosophy, political theory, and religion. Where actually practiced according to the theory of how it’s supposed to be practiced, science is a well-defined set of actions performed in accord with reason which attains a limited but reasonably reliable result. The rationality which prescribes the actions and the reliability of the result are sound within rationally circumscribed limits and as long as the practitioners and everyone else acknowledge these limits. Therefore science is a form of practical philosophy which is more applicable to physical objects and processes than most other kinds. According to the scientists themselves, as most fully elaborated by Karl Popper, explicator of “the scientific method”, what distinguishes science from other forms of philosophy is that its results must always be falsifiable. This means that at least in principle there must be an experiment which could generate data which disproves a scientific contention. If no such experiment can be conceived even in principle, a proposition automatically is supposed to be ruled out of science.

 

That’s how it’s supposed to work. Of course in reality people tend to conform, to seek agreement and consensus, and for several reasons STEM types are among the most congenitally conformist and authoritarian. So it was always dubious and indeed suspicious that the scientific fraternity exalted an ideal which is so uncongenial to human nature and especially to their own nature, this heroic notion of the eternal vigilance and critical nature of everyday science practitioners. The falsification ideal also goes against simple careerism. No rational person would expect eminent scientists with influence over research funding to prefer aspiring falsifiers of their work over aspiring conformists and reinforcements.

 

Any fraternity, especially one which combines such extremes of tribalism, arrogance, and persecution complex as the scientific fraternity does, generally seeks tribal compaction over assimilation to any idea which is more universal, or one which contradicts one of the tribe’s defining tenets. The Mafia calls this sticking up for Cosa Nostra, “Our Thing”. The average STEM cadre, as well as post-graduate types in general, is completely ignorant about genetic engineering and GMOs but does know that a hard core of the fraternity is fanatically in support of this campaign, and that’s all these authoritarian followers need to know: It’s Our Thing. So from the evidence of history we’d expect that, once the scientific fraternity has committed itself spiritually to the exaltation of genetic engineering, it would tend automatically to rally around the GMO rallying cry and to despise anyone with questions, criticisms or, most wickedly, falsifications.

 

Now we understand how the proposition that “GMOs are safe for human consumption”, while readily falsifiable in principle given sufficient research resources, became unfalsifiable in practice. What do we learn from the scientific establishment’s institutional obstructionism and refusal to fund whole genres of theoretically possible and morally imperative testing? This rationally implies that the obstructionists – corporations and governments – believe their theory is false and are using lies and obstructionism to shield it from the test of falsifiability.

 

The scientific establishment always has refused to perform scientific safety tests on GMOs. Instead:

 

1. They promulgated the religious dogma that GMOs are “substantially equivalent” to non-GM crops and foods. This is part of the prior religious Conclusion of genetic engineers and their cultists I cited above.

 

Of course this equivalence was always self-evidently a lie since plants suffused with herbicide and/or endemic Bt toxins automatically are very different from plants which are not poisonous in this way. And even according to the system’s own narrow, technical concept, the equivalence dogma has been disproven many times. But the scientific establishment continues to promulgate it as dogma.

 

2. The scientific establishment has systematically lied in representing industrial testing of such parameters as fast weight gain in CAFO inmates to be legitimate food safety tests relevant to human food safety. Corporations, governments, and the mainstream media then parrot these lies, but it’s the scientists themselves who design and initially propagate the lies.

 

3. They claim to possess evidence, e.g. that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, but say they cannot show it to us. This alleged evidence must remain secret, and the world must trust the corporate science establishment on faith. What would Popper say about that?

 

4. They’ve presented a united front in trying to suppress actual scientists who attempt falsification on their own.

 

 

It’s clear that establishment science systematically has evaded its obligation to test GMOs for safety, systematically has lied about its dereliction, and systematically has sought to obstruct science and repress real falsification-seeking scientists. This proves the general malignity of this establishment and its complete lack of scientific credibility, authority, and legitimacy.

 

To say a few more words about secret science, its purpose is to exalt the corporate-technocratic establishment as an authoritative priesthood. This means that it must prefer assertion and obfuscation over rational argument and the presentation of evidence, since no one who wants to be seen as an authoritarian command figure can afford to let the peasants question his authority, for example by demanding rational debate and evidence. This is a major reason why genetic engineers and their fanboys historically never were willing rationally to answer questions and objections to their endeavor, but rather resorted from day one to vague utopian rhetoric, epithets, and insults. The other reason was that rationality and the evidence have always been strongly against genetic engineering.

 

From this perspective we see that the proximate reason given for the secrecy, intellectual property, is more a pretext than a cause. Both the patenting and the secrecy that goes with it are important for profiteering, but they’re more important for power as such. One must never be distracted by the kind of idiot who would rationalize secret science by invoking IP privilege. IP is a pure fiction which has no reality-based purpose, but which is only a weapon of corporate and scientism cultist power.

 

And as we see, IP cannot co-exist with the scientific method. You can have one or the other, never both. The entire Western political and STEM class, as well as the voters, have chosen to exalt corporate intellectual property and to degrade science. This is part of the complete enclosure of all of “science” within the corporate science paradigm.

 

 

The scientific method dictates that even in principle we never reasonably can conclude that “GMOs are safe”. The genetic engineering process guarantees that each “event” will have unique chaotic effects since there’s so many random mutations from each transgenic insertion and each tissue culturing.

 

Random variation and its sometimes major real-world effects is the first premise of Darwinism. Since genetic engineering ideology lies about its precision and dogmatically decrees that it generates no significant mutations, we see how this pseudo-science is denialist, not just of evolution as such but specifically of Darwinism.

 

The radical overall evolution denialism of the genetic engineers and their religious following is part of their eugenics agenda. They despise natural evolution and intend to break out of all of its mechanisms and leap over all of its safeguards. Their campaign to deploy GM crops as universally over the globe as possible, as quickly as possible, with an ostentatious contempt for the effects of this, is extremely reckless and dangerous from any rational or scientific point of view.

 

But we must understand that from the religious crusading point of view of eugenic scientism, the recklessness and danger of this deployment is precisely why it should be done, on principle. The massive non-consensual human feeding experiment ultimately has eugenic goals. In the same way, the so far uncontrolled experiment of the vast-scale environmental release of GMOs ultimately has the goal of forcibly overriding evolution and imposing technocratic creationism over the entire globe. This is the richer significance of the malign experimentalism of the STEM establishment. Both of these experiments are being carried out with the most extreme, radical, reckless indifference to human and ecological well-being, precisely because the technocratic mentality does not recognize such well-being as a value at all and has nothing but contempt for it. This goes to the core of why technology in general so seldom works to make our lives better: Such a value has always meant nothing to the scientists and engineers. They seek nothing but control for the sake of control. Therefore they campaign to impose their vast uncontrolled experiments upon humanity and the Earth toward the goal of one day turning these into controlled experiments, and eventually being able to enforce total eugenic control. At that point they’ll completely have eradicated nature and history and replaced these with divinely willed creationism. As insane and physically impossible as it is, this is their goal. They’ve hijacked science to serve this goal.

 

 

Thus, where it comes to genetic engineering where would you even get started with “scientific method”? There’s no theory, and the engineers despise observation. Otherwise they’d reject the project as having no possible benefit, only risks and harms. Rather, they start with the experiment itself, for its own ultimately eugenic sake and for corporate profit. If one makes a prediction it’s nothing but wishful thinking and not part of scientific method at all, since they have no theory or evidence upon which to base it. Therefore what they really do is invent the religious conclusion that GMOs are beneficial, indeed utopian, then embark upon the experiment, accompanied with lies and corporate hype. This is another reason genetic engineers started out with such a belligerent, anti-rationalist attitude – they had no other option.

 

Of course the proposition that GMOs as such are safe and that genetic engineering never has harmful effects already has been falsified many times: The lethal Showa Denko epidemic, the StarLink allergenic outbreak, allergenic GM soy engineered with a gene from Brazil nuts, GM corn which has toxic liver and kidney effects, just to name a few.

 

Thus we see how according to the scientific method, which the science establishment, the scientism cult, academia and the mainstream media all claim is the method they practice and/or consider legitimate, genetic engineering is anti-science and anti-evolution. And yet all these institutions don’t just support GMOs but ardently exalt them. This proves that they lie when they claim to practice and respect the scientific method.

 

 

There are many proofs that the modern corporate science establishment is systematically anti-science and has no credibility and should be accorded no legitimacy by humanity. The best proof is the STEM establishment’s bizarre love affair with this backward, shoddy, failed technology which never had any real-world purpose but to help a few agrochemical corporations sell more poison. It’ll go down as one of history’s great marvels of depravity that science threw it all away for the sake of something so stupid, worthless, and mean.

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

De Jure Corruption is Just A Small Part of Systemic Corruption

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Get your microscope and we’ll search for the conflicts within.

 

 

A few weeks ago I commented on a new study which reviews the derelictions of the National Academy of Science regarding its cover-up of the conflicts of interest, these measured according to the system’s own standards, of six out of twenty panelists on its GMO review.

 

Initially the NAS rejected the criticisms of study authors Sheldon Krimsky and Tim Schwab. But now, as a result of this and similar pressure, they’re talking about some lukewarm reforms.

 

These lame promises don’t comprise even the most reasonable minimum by reform standards. For example, they say they’ll now include acknowledgements of conflict within the text of the published study instead of hidden somewhere on the NAS website. Big of them. But they say nothing about changing their policy that a panelist or researcher declare only “current” industry financial ties rather than relations over the past several years. In other words the NAS denies there’s any such thing as a revolving door.

 

But the squabbling over such reforms implies the much greater scope of the problem, a problem which cannot be confronted through such lukewarm reformism. The 6 of 20 panelists with de jure conflicts is a problem peripheral to the certain fact that all twenty panelists have a strong bias in favor of productionism, technocracy, capitalism, and corporate rule, and the mode of “science” which is dictated by this prior ideological commitment, the corporate science paradigm. It follows that all panelists, regardless of their formal corporate ties, agree that agriculture should be centralized, commodified, and that it should maximize deployment of high-maintenance technology and poisons. All this comprises an ideological commitment which automatically engenders a very strong pro-GMO bias, which comes prior to any scientific mode, and which dictates this mode. That’s the primary way such a panel is biased, rather than some additional de jure corruption.

 

The piece includes some of the original peer reviewers* of the NAS report defending it. But the same structural bias and corruption is endemic to peer review itself. Just like the careerist system of corporate science itself, a peer reviewer receives more or fewer invitations based on his willingness to review within the ideological/religious framework of the corporate science paradigm. Anyone who questions this framework is ostracized as a rogue, as “anti-science”. Indeed, from the corporate-technocratic perspective he is such a rogue, regardless of what Karl Popper would say.

 

The fact is that the entire scientific establishment is systemically corrupt from the point of view of true falsificationist science, especially ecology, as well as from any rational point of view. Everything we’re talking about here with de jure “conflicts” is only a squabble within the corporate science paradigm.

 

 

The PLOS One study points out that no panelists had any link to GMO-skeptic groups. This is a specific manifestation of the general fact that this panel, like almost all others, includes no critics of the extreme energy mode of civilization as such. If you accept that extreme energy consumption, productionism, technocracy, capitalism, and corporate rule are normative and dogmatically “right”, that these are beyond debate and that there’s no scientific debate to be had about them, then it’s only a small step further to accept what the pro-GMO activists claim, that “the debate is over” and that the alleged safety of GMOs should simply be accepted as science dogma without further ado, as the FDA and regulators worldwide did from the outset with their religious doctrine of “substantial equivalence”. The NAS panelists and peer reviewers all accept GMO benevolence as this kind of religious tenet, as a logical extension of their religious faith in technocracy, corporate rule, and corporate poisonism.

 

If this is all most people are arguing over – the pro-GMO activists, the GM critics, the NAS, the PLOS One authors – within an overall consensus on extreme energy consumption and technocracy, then isn’t this just a narcissism of small differences, just like all reformism?

 

By contrast, if your objection to GMOs and pesticides is primarily that they aggravate and escalate every pathology of corporate industrial agriculture and portend a resurrected eugenics campaign, then the anti-GMO fight is one part of the great struggle against corporate rule and technocracy itself, and the necessary goal is nothing less than the total abolition of GMOs and all other agricultural poisons.

 

In that case, our main objection to the NAS and the model of “science” practice it represents isn’t to the 6 of 20 de jure corrupt panelists, but to the systemic corruption of all twenty as well as their peer reviewers. In truth, our main enemy isn’t the consulting gigs of panelists and Monsanto’s donations to the NAS, but the fact that the NAS as such is a pillar of the corporate science establishment and a lead propagandist for the corporate science paradigm as such.

 

There’s not really a “conflict of interest” given the Kuhnian framework of the modern corporate-technocratic establishment and the mode of science it controls. The real conflict of interest is that of this establishment against humanity and the entire ecology of the Earth.

 

 

 

*Why, one might ask, is communications professor, frequent media pundit, and all-around pro-corporate ideologue Kathleen Hall Jamieson among the peer reviewers of what’s allegedly a scientific report dealing with such subjects as public health, human medicine, and ecology? In fact this indicates the real character and purpose of the NAS report: Pro-GMO propaganda, plain and simple, dressed up in pseudo-scientific garb. Thus they not only consulted a media professor on their “messaging” but actually made her part of “peer review”, trying to make their propaganda look more science-y.

 

Ironically, according to the standards of credentialism she’s far more qualified for the real purpose of this report than is the average scientist whenever he or she comments on GMOs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Age of the Earth

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The Earth is home. For all our human purposes the Earth is the universe. The Earth is our entire home, and our only home. All social ideas are grounded in this truth. All traditional religions agree upon this as well. Attempts to find the heavens in the “up there” are misreadings. The Bible is unequivocal: The New Jerusalem is supposed to descend to this physical Earth, and heaven is nowhere but upon this Earth. The same is true from every other point of view.

 

 

 

 

Among all religions only scientism consistently despises its home and provider the Earth. Thus, in addition to its many other evils and idiocies, scientism constitutes the most extreme and despicable ingratitude. All human beings agree this is the worst of sins and the most ominous of traits.

 

 

 

 

For the great majority of us home is a particular foodshed. Only a handful of people are born travelers. The vast majority of migrants are those cast adrift by corporate-driven economic coercion, or by the spiritual and cultural homelessness generated by the technocratic civilization. Part of the great and necessary ecological transformation is our return home to the Earth in the most spiritual sense of learning again to be part of our foodsheds. In the end communing with the Earth through our mode of food is the most direct form of our spiritual communion with the Earth and with ourselves as a whole. Only through the Earth can we become human again.

 

 

 

 

It’s a measure of the decadence of the alienated civilization that “Earth Day” is cordoned off as a discrete holiday. As if we all don’t live at the complete sufferance of the Earth every moment of our lives. As if all the grand towers and fortresses and mausoleums of our civilization, and all our technological self-deification, don’t exist at every moment in an ICU, hooked up and dependent upon every machine while we simultaneously do all we can to pull all the plugs.

 

This self-driven campaign, too, is part of the Earth’s kinesis.

 

 

 

 

Western myth begins with the image of a woman with child in the heavens, the Greek wisdom Sophia, fertility and wisdom. We find the great wisdom at the roots of creation where we say our God as well found it. Her child and the Earth come into being simultaneously along with various notions of an evil dragon. This monster often has been mistaken as Sophia’s misguided creation. This depicts the primordial vision of dialectical conflict unto creation.

 

Human history is the story of the preparation of the Earth for humanity and humanity for the Earth. Before this preparation is complete the Earth must undergo its time of tribulation, first the ravages of the kamikaze campaign of extreme energy consumption, then the unfathomable volatility and turbulence of this era’s collapse and self-immolation, as all the pent up potential, all the physical and spiritual heat and poison this kamikaze civilization has emitted, reaches Kinesis.

 

The time has reached such an extremity of alienation and confusion that few on Earth can read the signs in history and nature, and so humans have conjured religions to interpret the signs. Few have the vision to recover the lost wisdom of the woman who had to flee into the wilderness. But this wilderness is nothing but the fertile Earth, tending itself and waiting for humanity to end our destructive self-exile and come home to our creative work.

 

The visions of the woman Sophia spangle the heavens with the sun and moon and stars. We project these from Earth. As the final star descends, the morning star, its light shall gather all other cosmic lights in itself and glorify them as they continue to shine upon Earth.

 

Light and sight finally shall be liberated here, as we finally understand the mysteries. The new civilization shall prove with light that the only night was in the benighted minds of men. In the new city there shall no longer be the day vs. night of the mind. The sun and moon and stars shall shine on Earth as before. This shall be the final end of all artificial hate, greed, lusting for power and control, spiritual homelessness. All that’s ecological shall continue the cycle, now fully in harmony, transcending all distinction of natural and artificial, purging all that is anti-ecological and living as one amid the Earth’s now exalted ecology.

 

Thus the trial of perdition, the final judgement of the fossil-fueled technocratic derangement (veritably a malign ghost, a resurrected fossil of evil, a summoned demon), shall be complete, the mystery shall be solved, and from there all which is, was, and is to become, shall become, and shall be, and shall become forever more. The tree of life cycles forever through the twelve seasons, bearing its twelve fruits, and all human stewardship of Earth shall fruit in harmony. The water of life is a river which flows forever, and as Greek wisdom has it no one may step twice into the same stream and yet it remains always the same stream.

 

The great vision comes of the air at break of new day, and all creation sings its new song for the new city. There still must come tribulation from the air. The air of the day must gather and pressurize the power of the heated winds, heated by the oily bonfires of Babylon. When they shall be loosed, as the fossilized technocratic empire loses control, the Kinesis will rage while the vision of the temple and the ark ranges the sky forecasting the flesh and blood and stone of the new city which shall descend. This is the word from air to earth and sea. But there is a tiding of the thunders which shall remain untranslated until the final descent of the city, whence this too shall resolve to a rainbow.

 

Fire is the great inspiration, fire is the great symbol of tribulation raging as wildfire across the visions, fire is the destructive force Babylon’s bonfires unleash to scourge the world as the empire loses control. Fire shall consume Babylon itself. Fire is the symbol of the ultimate sundering of those who refuse the last call to come home. But as the new heaven will establish upon this earth, so all of hell has been on this earth and shall continue in the voids within the self-damned. Thus the ultimate fire has been in the minds of men, their raging violence, and so the future lake of fire shall be the soggy ashes in the dead souls of those who refused.

 

The creative fire is the new light of the new city. Earth has been cradle and romping ground and home for mind, and shall now resume as home for the soul.

 

The river of life leads the song now sung by all the creatures of creation. The river shall flow forever in the new city, and throughout the new heaven and earth. The ocean, primal residue on Earth of the primordial waters before life itself, shall be resumed into these waters. The river still flows on Earth, still flows to the seas that girdle the Earth. All soon shall be cleansed and purified to become as holy water, suffusing Earth as rain and river and sea. These shall bless our crops forever bounteous, shall redeem and restore the ecology of Earth, Garden of Eden, Gaia.

 

But first the age must undergo a great tribulation of water. Babylon sprawls upon many waters and its crimes and poisons surge forth. It shall be destroyed by literal and spiritual tsunami. Humanity must rise up to abolish the poisons and poisoners. The great ecological preparation requires this affirmative act of agency, and Earth shall not forgive passivity on this point.

 

And so humanity and Earth meld, as artist and material, material and artist, to establish a new heaven and a new earth on this very soil. This is the consummation of creation, its transformation. This is the revolution and restoration and Renaissance. Humanity and Earth plant the tree of life in this very soil, and secure the foundations of the walls of the new city upon this very rock, the rock of Earth beloved unto all time by all human gods, and our home of Humanity unto all time.

 

The only God is God of the Earth. And let it be blasphemy and the mark of evil to say this Holy Rock is not home, and that “we”, meaning a handful of mean and stupid boot-lickers and slave-drivers, still seek a new home somewhere beyond this earth.

 

Humanity has a mission throughout this trial. We must work to prepare the Earth and to start building our new city. This is our part in the transformation of creation. We must liberate the Earth, for this is preparation and transformation. We who are called to this mission must work and endure in harmony Earth’s power and the human will transmuted to God’s will which shall bring us through to victory.

 

Paradise is of this Earth. It now shall be established in the flesh and stone and spirit of the true civilization, the Ecotrinity of God and Humanity and Earth. We will finally know how to use mind and soul in harmony to work amid Gaia’s ecology in harmony. The greatest sin was to embrace the primal sundering, the alienation, the exile. This is what Jesus called the sin against the Holy Spirit. This is the sin that cannot be forgiven because only a willfully sundered soul, in all its the deluded depravity, can forbid itself to repent, forgive itself and come home. These who willingly bear the mark of the beast refuse to do so, and so cannot return, and must try to prevent all return by force. This is their main political, economic, ideological, and anti-ecological campaign today.

 

Paradise is of this earth. The Ecotrinity, and the ecological state of mind and soul which accompanies it, is the great and rising idea and spirit at this climax and tribulation of the modern fossil-fueled, corporate demon-ridden, propaganda-exhorted derangement. The false idea of “man vs. nature” is dead and dying, and the false “dominionist” religion, in both its traditional and secular forms, dies with it.

 

The tree of life shall extend its redemptive roots throughout the soil of the newly conceived Earth. Its twelve seasons of fruit shall symbolize the great prosperity of humanity and Earth in the new day. The waters of the river of life shall suffuse all the springs and rains and flows and deep blue seas of the new Earth. Our children and crops and all the plants and animals shall drink of these holy waters.

 

According to scripture the new city shall not contain a temple, for all Earth shall be a temple. And finally we shall understand what it means to say our bodies are temples. Finally we shall resume living as temples, no longer as coffins. And what we build shall be the bowers and wreaths of these temples, no longer tombs.

 

We shall resume our true heritage as our spirit spreads from the new city’s model point of light to embrace and combine with the light of the entire Earth. That’s the great promise and goal we aspire to on Earth Day. It commands us to make every day Earth Day, and then for this great aspiration simply to be the living work of each and every day.

 

This is the movement humanity must build. The Earth is calling us home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corporate Scientists “Mostly Say, Hooray for Our Side”

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It’s a space-age church, all right.

 

 

Yet another gang of corporate conformists will be out shrieking about nothing, this time holding a so-called “March for Science”. Their premise is that this administration is “anti-science” in a way previous administrations* were not.

 

This of course is a lie. There is perfect consensus among the US political class and both divisions of the Corporate One-Party that science is supposed to serve corporate imperatives. There is no significant dissent from this dogma within the system. Therefore according to the measure of the Popperian scientific method, all US political and economic institutions are anti-science. But more accurately, today’s Kuhnian “normal science” is the corporate science paradigm, which can be summed up as, “Science is whatever the corporate marketing department says it is, nothing more and nothing less.” As always, the only difference among the pro-corporate factions is cosmetic: Trump’s “science” has some superficial differences in tone from Obama’s “science”, no significant differences. The main cosmetic difference is in their respective modes of climate denial. Trump is reviving old-style de jure denial which had fallen into relative disuse, while Obama represented the full development of the de facto denialism of crying crocodile tears but insisting that nothing has to change. While liberals, leftists, and mainstream environmental groups shrilly invoke the specter of climate change, by their actions, from their continued personal jet-setting to their fraudulent corporate-aggrandizing policy prescriptions, they prove every day that they don’t really believe there’s a climate crisis. At any rate it’s a proven fact that they don’t want to do anything about it.

 

The climate crisis is very real, but those among the system political class who claim to believe in it and care about it are liars and con artists. Indeed, this mass political abdication and embrace of such cynicism is part of the political and cultural manifestation of the greater crisis, of which physical climate chaos (a deliberate corporate campaign), is itself a part.

 

Meanwhile from Obama to Trump there’s not even a cosmetic change in the “science” propaganda and deployment of agricultural poisons. How could there be: Where it comes to poisonism the Obama administration was the most aggressively anti-science, pro-corporate administration yet.

 

We see that the March for Science is a typically stupid misdirection ploy. As with every other version of this lie, the goal is to keep the people imprisoned with the chains of the corporate system’s ideas and the limits of its “politics”. In particular, the lie’s two main parts are:

 

1. Never question the overall status quo, which is permanent and never will change or can be changed.

 

2. Refer all questions to the conflict of Republican vs. Democrat, which encompasses all conflict.

 

These are both extremely stupid lies designed to keep the people stupid and comatose. But in reality the status quo is impossible and will collapse of its own physical limitations and self-destruction. And in reality there’s no difference between Republican and Democrat and they do not conflict in any significant way. On the contrary, as I said above they have perfect consensus: On corporate rule, and on the fundamentalist religion of the goodness and permanency of the extreme energy consumption model of civilization.

 

Where it comes to this latter faith, they are true believers. And when they preach their Republican/Democrat lie they are preaching to fellow believers among the people, who are the real constituency for this propaganda. They’re also trying to smother in the cradle any nascent awakening to the truth.

 

All system propaganda institutions, from political parties to regulatory agencies to NGOs to academia and the media to the scientific establishment, are working on this same role of reinforcing cult faith in extreme energy consumption and suppressing any new idea. The March for Science is the latest such gambit of the corporate science establishment.

 

 

Meanwhile why doesn’t someone organize a march to liberate science from corporate control? For starters, only about two people would show up. (Indeed, even the critics of corporate control of science are still system grinders who prefer to party with the cool kids.)

 

 

*If you’re wondering whether our political science class thought George Bush was anti-science, I refer you to their valedictorian and head cheerleader Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

 

Q: President George W. Bush named you to a pair of aerospace commissions, but how do you feel about Bush’s relationship with science?

A: People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

 

So Bush was OK. I also appreciate Tyson’s refreshing honesty in openly acknowledging that he and other scientists are for sale and will espouse whatever “science” they’re paid to espouse, especially if presidents also heap honors upon them. And that the March for Science is nothing but speeches and politics, about nothing but speeches and politics and money. Yes, all this is what Popper was talking about.

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

Destinies: Dependent and Independent of Corporate Domination

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All corporate security is the same.

 

 

This is true, spoken by an EU Green Parliament member against the European Food Safety Agency: “It is not your destiny to be independent. You rely on studies by industry. You have no means of commissioning independent studies….Stop pretending you are an independent institution.” That’s about the best we can expect from electoral representatives within the corporate system, from parties dedicated to “reforming”, i.e. preserving, the corporate system. In the end the goal of electoralism is the same as the goal of regulatory agencies, to ensure that all possible destinies remain within the bounds of corporate domination.

 

One of the tasks of the abolitionists, and of all who seek a human destiny free of corporate rule is to use such facts (the EFSA’s complete subservience to industry, as detailed for the millionth time in the piece linked above; here’s more) and such testimony to go one better and speak, not within the elitist framework as those already within it always do (the above quote is not packaged rhetorically for the people but was directed at the EFSA’s chief), but directly to the people, speaking the much greater truth: We must renounce and obliterate religious faith in agencies like the EFSA or EPA and the inherently pro-poison regulatory model upon which they’re founded.

 

 

Unfortunately, system NGOs have an opposed ideology. GMWatch testifies:

 

GMWatch and many other NGOs, however, advocate that regulatory and expert advisory bodies like EFSA should not rely on studies directly sponsored by industry – but they also insist that the public should not pay for them.

The groups have long advocated a system whereby money for safety studies is provided by the industry that wishes to bring a product to market. The money would be paid into a publicly administered fund, which would use it to commission independent laboratories to carry out safety studies.

All results would have to be published on the Internet before the product came to market, putting an end to the current system whereby the studies are the proprietary data of industry and are kept secret.

Both EU laws and international agreements reached under the auspices of the OECD would need to be changed to accommodate the new system. But it is the bare minimum of reform that is needed to restore public trust in the regulatory framework for risky substances such as pesticides and GMOs.

 

And I wish I had a billion dollars. Indeed this goes into the territory of infantile fantasy. Where has this ever been done? Where has there ever existed such a political campaign, which would be designed like these NGOs and share their ideology, but be rather more assertive in action. Here’s the traits of such an organization:

 

**Pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, wanting to co-exist with poison-based agriculture but wanting really to regulate it, wonkish, enamored of complex funding and assessment mechanisms which nevertheless would maintain integrity, believing in the essential goodness of people even within the framework of profit-seeking and “competition”, possessing the political and cultural skill to communicate all this coherently to enough people to muster broad, active political support for this system, and most of all having the organizational strength, relentlessness, ruthlessness, and force of will necessary to remain permanently vigilant and at a state of high alert against the attrition and corruption of this bureaucratic system.**

 

Most astounding of all, many who believe in this fantastic Millennium (which has been disproven by the facts over and over) then turn around and claim they’re being “practical” while abolitionism is “unrealistic”. Nowhere has the insanity of modern politics more profoundly turned truth upside down and forced words to mean the opposite of what they really mean than where liberal and reformist types invert the words “practical” and “pragmatic” to mean their exact opposite, the most extreme, impossible fantasies.

 

 

In fact such fantasy isn’t the real goal of these NGOs, but merely is religious cant they ritually recite. If you have any doubt about how NGOs like GMWatch consider their mission really to be propping up faith in the corporate system, Monsanto and all, whether they’re conscious of this or not, read again the final line in that quote: “[I]t is the bare minimum of reform that is needed to restore public trust in the regulatory framework for risky substances such as pesticides and GMOs.”

 

Quite a peculiar way of putting things, isn’t it? (And it’s not unusual; on the contrary it’s a desire they frequently express.) You might think the primary goal is the health of the people and environment, the safety of our food and water, with “the regulatory framework” being just one of many possible strategies toward this goal, to be assessed and used or not used depending upon whether or not it works. You might think “public trust in the regulatory framework” can be good or evil depending on what this framework really is and what it does, and must never be a goal in itself.

 

But this was not a mistaken formulation on their part. As the quote expresses, system NGOs truly do believe their primary goal is to keep the corporate project going, as I have written so many times in describing the corporate-technocratic regulatory template (most recently here). Therefore where it comes to regulation the number one priority of system NGOs is to prop up faith in the regulatory framework as such. Meanwhile the number one priority of the regulator is to ensure that the corporate project goes forward. The regulator may curb or more often only pretends to curb the worst “abuses”, while the NGO pretends to be vigilant in ensuring the regulator carries out its own pretense. Then both assure the public that everything is fine, the system is working as it should, corporate poisons are being deployed only in “safe” ways, and that everyone can go about their private lives and forget about public matters. Most of all, everyone can stop even thinking about politics. The regulator vouches for the corporation and, for the constituency among the people for whom the regulator’s word isn’t enough, the NGO vouches for the regulator. Thus the regulator is running a scam and the NGO is running a meta-scam, a scam squared. The goal is to ensure that all possible destinies remain within the corporate-normative paradigm.

 

We can go further. The system NGOs work to set up a technocratic, “expert”-brokered paradigm of “politics”, wherein the people are supposed to do nothing but assimilate the news as provided by the NGO, do politically only what the NGO tells them to do (usually sign petitions and sometimes “call your Congressman”), and of course keep sending money. The goal is to ensure that all possible political destinies remain within the corporate-normative framework.

 

 

We see how for system NGOs the regulatory model is the object of religious worship and its perpetuation the focus of all their activity. Thus, as GMWatch says here, the most important thing is to prop up public faith in the regulator at all costs and without reference to whether or not this system “works” toward any other goal. The formulation is clear: The regulatory system’s existence is the priority, what it actually does is of secondary importance at best. This follows perfectly the regulatory template I’ve discussed dozens of times. For recent discussions see here, here, and here.

 

And then this strain of the technocratic religion goes hand in hand with the religion of electoralism, “voting” as an object of religious worship rather than just a tactic toward a concrete goal. We see how in both cases the pseudo-political religion is ultimately opposed to abolitionism and to any movement which is honest, which has a concrete goal, and which embraces this goal as the non-negotiable priority, placing all else in the realm of tactics to be assessed in a purely practical, rational way.

 

We see the extreme difference and opposition between movements whose goal is concrete, and status quo religions like electoralism and regulator-ism whose non-negotiable goals are nothing but fog and diffusion: Voting as such, the regulatory model as such. For these the only real goal is to ensure that all possible political destinies remain within the corporate framework.

 

And then both of these cults are part of the broad infamy of neoliberalism, whose ideology is corporate-technocratic domination and whose strategy is to use the forms of democracy, not just to come to power in the first place as in the case of classical fascism, but to maintain power and become ever more totalitarian while using a minimum of direct, overt coercion and violence.

 

We see how electoralism turned out to be a world-historical mistake on humanity’s part. At least for the duration of the fossil-fuel era, we must understand that it can never be a value or goal in itself but only a tactic to be used or not according to circumstance.

 

As for the regulatory model, it always was transparently a fraud, and in any event the history of over a century is unequivocal. That’s especially true of the regulation of broadly deployed corporate poisons like agroechemicals. It’s been a long, long time since anyone could claim to be innocently mistaken about the likes of the EPA or EFSA. To still espouse faith in this model can only be terminal conformism, stupidity, and corruption. Most of all, it reveals that one is indelibly a technocracy believer and a believer in corporate rule. One believes only in destinies that are encompassed within the death zone of corporate dominion. That says it all, and whether or not one’s petty preference is then to attempt to “regulate” some “abuses” is just a minor detail, a consumerist lifestyle ornament. It has no political substance, and no relation to any reality-based, concrete, necessary goal such as the great need to abolish agricultural poisons. But only those who follow the paths of necessity can even envision a destiny independent of corporate domination and all its evils.

 

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

 

The Call to Justice is the Call to Build a Movement for Justice

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Only we the people can fight back and win.

 

 

The Monsanto Tribunal has rendered its verdict condemning Monsanto for crimes against humanity and the Earth. The verdict also criticizes the existing institutions of international law for their insufficiency against the great crisis we face. As the judges point out, the existing system is designed to maximize corporate power and action and gives short shrift to all other values. Implicitly the existing systems of politics and international law are designed, not to prevent and punish crimes against humanity and the Earth, but to abet them. This judgement is more profound and vast in its implications than the specific judgement against Monsanto, which is just one example of the vastly greater system of corporate organized crime and the crises caused by it.

 

 

The tribunal’s findings are clear and stark:

 

1. Monsanto systematically attacks the health of our food, human access to food, the health and robustness of the environment, human health and well-being in general. Monsanto systematically attacks and degrades the integrity of science and freedom of scientific research and works to suppress freedom of thought and expression in general. In these ways Monsanto violates existing international human rights law.

 

2. The tribunal finds that ecocide should be encoded in international law as a crime, and that if it were Monsanto’s anti-ecological campaigns would be formal crimes. This includes defining Monsanto’s propagation of Agent Orange and other herbicides as war crimes. (The tribunal punted on the war crime question relative to existing international law. But it’s clear that military use of herbicides in Vietnam, Colombia, Palestine and elsewhere comprises the use of chemical weapons. Going further, there’s never been a clear dividing line between chemical weapons in war, military use of herbicides, and their “civilian” use. Same personnel, same mindset, same ideology, ultimately the same goals. Only criminal hypocrisy would cherry-pick a few uses or alleged uses of chemical weapons but give a legal and moral pass to such vastly larger WMD deployments as the Vietnam Agent Orange deployment, or today’s massive intentional poisoning of human food, drinking water, ecosystems, and arable soil with pesticides.)

 

3. The tribunal makes special note of the tremendous imbalance between law and enforcement regarding human rights, vs. the enforcement of globalization “law” where it comes to corporate “rights”, which means lawless corporate prerogative and license. The tribunal holds that corporations should be held to the same standards of international law as government, political, and military cadres who are sanctioned by human rights tribunals.

 

 

In its ruling the Monsanto Tribunal has followed the premise and procedure of the 1946 Nuremburg Tribunal which dealt with similar criminals against humanity. The two tribunals conceive human rights the same way and condemn in the same way the crimes of those who assault humanity. The Monsanto Tribunal’s call to apply the rule of law to the crimes of corporations is the same as Nuremburg’s condemnation of the SS, Gestapo, and Nazi Party leadership as criminal organizations dedicated to committing crimes against humanity. This call applies even more profoundly to the very essence of a profit-seeking corporation, which is anti-human, anti-social, and a mode of organized crime in principle.

 

This judgement is nothing new but restates the truths of natural law, the moral and biological truth known to all of us, even those who sin against these truths. (The culture of the lie endemic to technocracy proves that the technocrats know deep down they are criminals and therefore are driven to lie about their crimes. They lie to the world and most of all to themselves.) This tribunal has only restated the eternal truth. What’s lacking is the will to exercise this truth in reality. One obvious problem is that the reason Nazi leaders or cherry-picked defendants like Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein were put on trial for their crimes is that they had run afoul of the US- and corporate-dominated globalization system. But multinational corporations like Monsanto comprise the core of this system, which is dedicated to aggrandizing these criminal organizations. So there’s an obvious contradiction in calling for Monsanto’s own lawyers, bagmen, and thugs to arrest and prosecute it. The same goes for corporate rule as such.

 

To apply law and order to the crimes of ecocide and to all crimes against humanity cannot be done within the framework of a civilization dedicated to exploitation, waste, and destruction. The laws of such a civilization and the way these laws are enforced always will follow from this underlying dedication. Even the Nuremburg Tribunal was lenient with corporate criminals and didn’t dare to ask whether particular corporations were criminal organizations. Even the break-up of the IG Farben cartel was done in a way assuring the continuation of its constituent companies including today’s agrochemical giants BASF and Bayer. The latter which currently is in the process of buying Monsanto. We see how the unfinished business of Nuremburg merges seamlessly with today’s business of the Monsanto Tribunal. Indeed a living holdover of the Nazi era (and of the general history of chemical warfare, in which IG Farben and Bayer as well as Monsanto play a big role) is now merging with Monsanto to formalize this historical continuity. WWII never ended but only was transposed temporarily to agriculture and genetic engineering.

 

 

To make the call to justice real requires the movement dedicated to realizing these truths and values. We cannot carry out the tasks of necessity and justice within the framework of a system dedicated to every anti-human and anti-ecological action and institution. We can do it only through the action of a movement dedicated to abolishing these crimes and abolishing their ideological and institutional basis. This means above all the total abolition of corporate industrial agriculture and all of its poisons. The Monsanto Tribunal, in its compilation and assessment of the evidence and the history, has only provided the latest demonstration that humanity and the Earth cannot “co-exist” with these poisons, and therefore cannot continue with a regulatory and legal model dedicated not just to this co-existence, but to co-existence on the basis of corporate profit as the great normative purpose. The Tribunal itself identifies this as the core of the crisis, even if it doesn’t draw the necessary strategic and organizational conclusions.

 

Morally, rationally, and legally the ruling of the Monsanto Tribunal is true and follows from the ruling of the Nuremburg Tribunal. The only difference so far is the force to put the truth into effect. Only the abolition movement can muster and organize the strength and the will to realize all the necessary truths. We have to begin.

 

 

 

 

Help propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

The System is Founded on “Rejected Energy”

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Here’s some suggestive flow charts depicting US energy production, consumption by broad sector, and how much of this consumption is purely wasted (“Rejected Energy”), as opposed to how much provides what the system calls energy services. (H/T Death by Car.) According to the US Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, well over two thirds of energy consumed in the US is simply lost into the environment as heat and pollution. The great bulk of rejected energy comes from electricity generation and transportation. So right there we see the fraudulence of anyone who talks about climate change or the environmental ravages of energy extraction but who does so within any framework which assumes: Licentious electricity consumerism, globalization, the personal car. Industrial energy consumption also wastes over 50% of what it consumes. (See here for the LLNL’s measures of carbon emissions, which correlate well with energy wastage.)

 

As insane as this level of waste is, it’s still merely the US government’s own public depiction of how wasteful and destructive the extreme energy system is and incorporates all the most optimistic and manipulative methods of measure. The real number no doubt is much worse. By one alternative measure the level of energy actually used serviceably is only 13%, with the rest being pure waste.

 

But it gets worse. Those compiling and measuring this data are themselves believers in the essential goodness of the corporate-technocratic system and define “energy services” according to metrics of the Mammon religion like GDP. This means, for example, that a rocket fired by the US military which blows up dozens of women and children celebrating a wedding is counted as having provided excellent energy service, while the rejected energy is only whatever proportion of the rocket fuel’s energy dissipated as stray heat instead of helping to power the missile, along with the waste embedded in extracting the fossil fuel for the rocket’s tank and generating the energy for the electrical systems. (The drone’s fuel energy wastage would be calculated separately.)

 

In the case of corporate industrial agriculture, the bulk of the rejected energy spews from its industrial processes and globalized commodity transportation (“food miles” as well as input miles; the global South is forced to import the vast bulk of the industrial seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery required to grow the commodity crops globalization has forced upon it), though Western-style retailing and end-consumer food preparation also uses a large amount of energy. All these processes also are dependent upon the electricity generated with such extreme wastefulness.

 

The astronomical amount of industrial agriculture’s rejected energy is all from a sector which in its so-called “services” as well is only inefficient, wasteful, and destructive.

 

(When we consider the massive contribution of corporate industrial agriculture to the climate crisis, as always we must add that in addition to being the number one emitter of greenhouse gases it is by far the worst destroyer of carbon sinks, and one of its primary political campaigns is to prevent the necessary massive rebuilding of carbon sinks. It’s a fact that there is one and only one solution to avert the worst of climate change: Greatly reduce emissions, completely stop destroying sinks, and rebuild sinks on a massive scale. Each of these three necessary elements requires, first and foremost, the abolition of corporate industrial agriculture and the global transformation to agroecology.)

 

These typical examples demonstrate how the measure of Rejected Energy only scratches the surface. This is the corporate globalization system itself admitting how grossly wasteful it is according to its own measure of what comprises a “service”: The same measure which values a death camp according to the construction work performed and the volume of Zyklon B sold, and values at zero the care a mother provides for her infant. As grotesque as the amount of the system’s officially acknowledged rejected energy is, the measure becomes even more profoundly abysmal when we ponder the “services” the non-rejected energy actually provides: According to any human measure, the great bulk of these as well are not just a waste, but deeply destructive of humanity and the Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

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